02.01.22
Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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System76 teased their ‘Kudu’ laptop a few weeks back. And, now, it is finally available to order in its full glory!
The new Kudu laptop lineup is tailored for multitaskers and modest gamers that may not require top-of-the-line RTX graphics.
Let me mention the key highlights of the laptop.
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There was an article on Open for Everyone today about Nobara, a Fedora-based distribution optimized for gaming. So I have no beef with Tomas Crider or any other creator/maintainer of a distribution targeting a specific use case. In fact they are usually trying to solve or work around real problems and make things easier for people. That said I have for years felt that the need for these things is a failing in itself and it has been a goal for me in the context of Fedora Workstation to figure out what we can do to remove the need for ‘usecase distros’. So I thought it would be of interest if I talk a bit about how I been viewing these things and the concrete efforts we taken to reduce the need for usecase oriented distributions. It is worth noting that the usecase distributions have of course proven useful for this too, in the sense that they to some degree also function as a very detailed ‘bug report’ for why the general case OS is not enough.
Before I start, you might say, but isn’t Fedora Workstation as usecase OS too? You often talk about having a developer focus? Yes, developers are something we care deeply about, but for instance that doesn’t mean we pre-install 50 IDEs in Fedora Workstation. Fedora Workstation should be a great general purpose OS out of the box and then we should have tools like GNOME Software and Toolbx available to let you quickly and easily tweak it into your ideal development system. But at the same time by being a general purpose OS at heart, it should be equally easy to install Steam and Lutris to start gaming or install Carla and Ardour to start doing audio production. Or install OBS Studio to do video streaming.
Looking back over the years one of the first conclusions I drew from looking at all the usecase distributions out there was that they often where mostly the standard distro, but with a carefully procured list of pre-installed software, for instance the old Fedora game spin was exactly that, a copy of Fedora with a lot of games pre-installed. So why was this valuable to people? For those of us who have been around for a while we remember that the average linux ‘app store’ was a very basic GUI which listed available software by name (usually quite cryptic names) and at best with a small icon. There was almost no other metadata available and search functionality was limited at best. So finding software was not simple, at it was usually more of a ‘search the internet and if you find something interesting see if its packaged for your distro’. So the usecase distros who focused on having procured pre-installed software, be that games, or pro-audio software or graphics tools ot whatever was their focus was basically responding to the fact that finding software was non-trivial and a lot of people maybe missed out on software that could be useful to them since it they simply never learned about its existence.
So when we kicked of the creation of GNOME Software one of the big focuses early on was to create a system for providing good metadata and displaying that metadata in a useful manner. So as an end user the most obvious change was of course the more rich UI of GNOME Software, but maybe just as important was the creation of AppStream, which was a specification for how applications to ship with metadata to allow GNOME Software and others to display much more in-depth information about the application and provide screenshots and so on.
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Server
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Aruba kicked off 2022 with the most reliable hosting company site in January, continuing to top the table from December 2021. The top six hosting company sites each responded to all of Netcraft’s requests in January and were separated by average connection time. Aruba provides hosting, cloud and digital signature services, fibre optic internet, digital preservation, and much more. The company has data centres across Europe in the UK, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Italy and France.
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Videos/Audiocasts/Shows
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Arch Linux being a rolling release is typically thought of as an up to date and in some cases bleeding edge distro but right now the C toolchain is getting dangerously out of date and this might become a problem
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The Steam Deck is nearly here, Will is looking for a new email host, Creative Commons is abused, Joe has kernel problems, Félim upgrades his phone, and Graham plays a synth. Plus KDE Korner.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Manjaro 21.2.2 KDE Plasma Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Kernel Space
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Intel’s developers are working on bringing Resizable BAR (or ReBAR) to its upcoming ARC graphics cards for Linux, which is great news for PC gamers who are looking to jump ship from another operating system like Windows 11.
As reported by Phoronix, DG2/Alchemist support has already been spotted within the Linux kernel and Mesa drivers already, but performance optimization is still a bit shaky. A set of patches for small BAR recovery support for the Intel kernel graphics driver have already been released last week for testing and are currently under review, so we’re expecting to see them introduced in the Linux V5.18 kernel.
A note within the patch states that “Starting from DG2 we will have resizable BAR support for device local-memory, but in some cases the final BAR size might still be smaller than the total local-memory size. In such cases only part of local-memory will be CPU accessible, while the remainder is only accessible via the GPU. This series adds the basic enablers needed to ensure that the entire local-memory range is usable.”
For those unaware, ReBAR is a PCI Express interface technology that can boost the frame rate performance by removing the 256MB block read limiter, allowing your CPU to have full access to the frame buffer. What this means is that rather than smaller, ‘chopped up’ sections of data being sent from the CPU to the GPU, the GPU can now ask for much larger files or data chunks and get them sent by the CPU all at once.
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Linux 5.16.5 is out today and making it a notable point release is it fixed up the rather botched state of the Btrfs file-system code for the v5.16 kernel.
Linux 5.16 had a refactoring of the Btrfs file-system defrag code and this sadly ended up regressing things, which fortunately are fixed now for v5.16.5. Btrfs up to now on Linux 5.16 was consuming high amounts of I/O and causing performance degradation of the system.
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The Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has announced a tool called Kasper that is able to scan the kernel source and locate speculative-execution vulnerabilities…
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We present Kasper, a transient (or speculative) execution gadget scanner. It uses taint analysis policies to model an attacker capable of exploiting arbitrary software/hardware vulnerabilities on a transient path. Namely, it models an attacker capable of controlling data (e.g., via memory massaging or value injection a la LVI), accessing secrets (e.g., via out-of-bounds or use-after-free accesses), and leaking these secrets (e.g., via cache-based, MDS-based, or port contention-based covert channels). As a result, Kasper discovered 1,379 previously unknown gadgets in the heavily-hardened Linux kernel. We confirm our findings by demonstrating an end-to-end proof-of-concept exploit for one of the gadgets found.
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Very loosely speaking, these types of bug – perhaps they’re better described as “performance costs” – are a side effect of the ever-increasing demand for ever-faster CPUs, especially now that the average computer or mobile phone has multiple processor chips, typically with multiple cores, or processing subunits, built into each chip.
Back in the olden days (by which I mean the era of chips like the Inmos Transputer), received wisdom said that the best way to do what is known in the jargon as “parallel computing”, where you split one big job into lots of smaller ones and work on them at the same time, was to have a large number of small and cheap processors that didn’t share any resources.
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Graphics Stack
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Two major changes are included in the NVIDIA 510.47.03 graphics driver that you should be aware of if you own an NVIDIA GPU. The first one is support for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel series, and the second one is support for the recently released Vulkan 1.3 graphics API.
Also new in this release is support for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, AV1 decode support for the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, an indicator for Resizable BAR support on compatible systems, a GUI control for setting Image Sharpening values in the app profiles page of the nvidia-settings control panel, and an application profile to avoid an image corruption issue in the Blender app.
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Ready for a brand new driver release? NVIDIA has released version 510.47.03 as a new stable update adding in new features, new hardware support and bug fixes. This is building on top of the NVIDIA 510.39.01 Beta driver released earlier in January.
Some of what’s new specifically to this version includes: Vulkan 1.3 support, a new daemon “nvidia-powerd” that provides support for Dynamic Boost, an application profile to get around an image corruption issue in Blender, an installer update for Kernel 5.17 and support for the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050.
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Applications
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Scribus, the popular Qt-based publishing app, has just released version 1.5.8. Although this release is relatively minor, it does have a few key improvements and features.
Let’s take a look at them!
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Last year, we featured System Monitoring Center as one of our app highlights.
It is an all-in-one open-source app that helps you monitor essential system resources at a glance. You would also get plenty of details that you miss with the default system monitoring app in your Linux distribution.
At the time of covering it, the app was in the beta phase. However, it is finally out of data with its newest v1.2.1 release!
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Overall, the latest stable update provides you with additional information. For instance, the support for voltage and current sensors was added to the app, making the data much more valuable to advanced users monitoring their systems.
The information for exhaust fans is still something to be added, considering the developer does not have a desktop PC to test it.
I tested it out but did not find any data for the fans. And, even when using GNOME’s Vitals shell extension, I get no fan data. So, I’m not sure what it takes to read the fan data on Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Pods are the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes. A pod is a group of one or more containers. You need to have kubectl tool installed along with the minikube cluster at first.
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If you already have some experience as a Linux system administrator, chances are you know what cron is and what it does. If you’re just starting working with Linux, it’s essential knowledge that will certainly serve you later. Either way, if you already have the knowledge, this article will refresh it. If not, you will get a guide to start you up. So you’re only expected to have some basic knowledge of Linux systems and, as usual, a desire to learn.
Cron’s name comes from Chronos, the Greek personification of time. And it’s a very inspired choice, because cron helps you schedule different tasks you want your system to perform at given times. If you used Windows systems, chances are you stumbled across the Scheduled Tasks tool. Generally speaking, the purpose is the same, the differences are…well, too many to name here.
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The Terraform count meta argument allows you to deploy multiple resources using the same Terraform configuration block. This is useful when you need to deploy things like virtual machines (perhaps for Azure Virtual Desktop), which have the same configuration.
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Apache ActiveMQ is an open-source message broker written in Java. It supports several cross-language clients and protocols.
The Apache ActiveMQ message broker is a fast, reliable, scalable, and totally integrated open source messaging platform for handling lots of messages (ingest) or lots of consumers (dispatch). It uses memory as the storage format; it can be configured to store data persistently on a disk if necessary. The initial startup time can be slow due to the fact that ActiveMQ will load all historical information into memory. However, after the first startup period, which could take up to several minutes depending on how much history you have stored in your queues and other configuration settings, performance starts to scale well up until a point when we consider other factors such as system resources.
Based on its origins as an experience of just moving from an in-house messaging solution to a commercial product, ActiveMQ can be considered as one of those products that have been constantly developed and improved, offering extremely high quality and solid stability.
ActiveMQ provides both a simple embedded broker and a fully deployed, highly available enterprise solution. Its most important features and strengths are high availability and failover (a setup with one broker can survive up to 99.999% of message loss), support for many ways of connecting clients (including web consoles, command-line tools, and libraries, JMS client libraries, etc.), clustering across physical boundaries, load balancing through multiple internal queues per topic, flexible configuration such as persistent or non-persistent messages according to the need, the persistence of data by file or database, security implementation based on JAAS authentication model which also supports LDAP implementation.
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Today we are looking at how to install MuseScore on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Python is a popular programming language widely used in today’s world providing versatility in different related sectors. One of the cool things that we can do with python is to get the current date and time.
Using the datetime module which is preinstalled in python, we can manipulate date and time like getting the current date and time in different ways. In this article, we are going to show the different examples to get the current date and time in python.
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patsplit was introduced in version 4.0 of GNU AWK. It’s a string splitter, and it allows you to dissect a string more flexibly than you can with AWK’s substr function.
Given a string, patsplit breaks the string into pieces that match a regex and stores the pieces in an array. It returns the number of pieces.
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In this tutorial, we will cover how to install NetBeans IDE on Rocky Linux 8. NetBeans IDE is a free and open source extensible Java IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that enable software developers to quickly and easily develop Java desktop, Java EE, and web applications, as well as HTML5 applications with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The IDE also provides a great set of tools for PHP, Ruby and C/C++ developers.
Want to run NetBeans IDE on Rocky Linux 8 desktop? This guide will take you through how to install NetBeans IDE on Rocky Linux 8.
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Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains the project. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.
Kubeadm is a tool used to build Kubernetes (K8s) clusters. Kubeadm performs the actions necessary to get a minimum viable cluster up and running quickly.
In this guide we will learn how to use kubeadm to set up a kubernetes cluster in Ubuntu 20.04.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Wire Desktop on Zorin OS 16.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RethinkDB on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RethinkDB is a free and open-source NoSQL database system that makes it easier for building real-time apps. It uses JSON to load the applications into and read the database. RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents and you can scale it to multiple machines easily. It is easy to set up and has a simple query language that supports table joins and group by.
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 RethinkDB open source and scalable database on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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Welcome Again, Today we will discuss how to install LAMP Server with ClearOS Linux. In the previous tutorial, we have discussed a brief introduction of Intel’s Linux OS. Let’s see what we can do with OS. Why not start with the LAPM server which is the very basic requirement for most of the projects.
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Mixxx is Free DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live DJ mixes. It is available for multiple operating systems (ie) Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Mixxx recently released their stable version 2.3.2 about three months after the 2.3.1 stable release. , this release has a lot of fixes and improvements.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install mixxx 2.3.2 on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Fedora 35.
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Linux operating system is becoming very popular among users due to its incredible performance and many features packed in a tiny package and apart from everything else, this operating system is free. Now people are often confused about how to install Linux on your laptop, desktop PC, notebook, or Chromebook. On a laptop or desktop PC, it’s easy to figure out how to install the various Linux distros but if you ever need to install Linux on your Chromebook, things get more difficult. So, in this guide, I will explain to you how you can install Linux on your Chromebook.
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CRI-O is an OCI-based implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) Developed to provide an integration path between OCI-compliant runtimes and the Kubelet. It is a lightweight container runtime environment. A container runtime is the software that is responsible for running the containers. When installing kubernetes, you need to install a container runtime into each node in the cluster so that Pods can run there.
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In Docker, a common question that usually comes up is “How do I expose my containers directly to my local physical network?” This is especially so when you are running monitoring applications that are collecting network statistics and want to connect container to legacy applications. A possible solution to this question is to create and implement the macvlan network type.
Macvlan networks are special virtual networks that allow you to create “clones” of the physical network interface attached to your Linux servers and attach containers directly your LAN. To ensure this happens, simple designate a physical network interface on your server to a macvlan network which has its own subnet and gateway.
In this guide, we will demonstrate how you can create and use mavlan networks in Docker.
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Vim is a popular open-source Unix text editor. In this article, we will discuss how to perform search operations in Vim / Vi.
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Free open-source DJ software Mixxx released version 2.3.2 with some important fixes. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.
Mixxx 2.3.2 added controller mapping for Pioneer DDJ SB3, re-enabled the color sorting for playlists feature, which is missing in v2.3.0. It also fixed writing of track metadata on Windows to prevent data loss when exporting, as well as playlist export issue on Linux. For more, see the release page.
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For as well-loved as the vi command is, it’s the ed command that’s considered the standard Unix text editor. It was the very first text editor for Unix, and it’s available on even the most modern Linux systems.
Unlike text editors you may be used to on Linux or another system, ed doesn’t open a window or even a screen of its own. That’s because it’s a functional editor that you can control either interactively or with a script. If you’re already familiar with sed, then you’ll find ed easy to learn. If you’re new to both, ed can give you a different perspective on how you can process and modify data on your system.
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Hello, friends. Long time no write. This time, I will show you how to install PHP Composer on Rocky Linux 8. PHP Composer is a fundamental tool for PHP, so it is always useful to know how to install it quickly.
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Flatpak on Fedora 35.
Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. Flatpak offers a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.
Flatpak can be used by all kinds of desktop environments and aims to be agnostic as possible regarding how applications are built.
Flatpak runtimes and applications are built as OCI images and are distributed with Fedora registry
Flatpaks are a new way of deploying applications.
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Flatpak on Debian 11.
Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. Flatpak offers a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.
Flatpak can be used by all kinds of desktop environments and aims to be agnostic as possible regarding how applications are built.
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The name KDE comes from “K Desktop Environment.” It is a free, open-source desktop environment for those unfamiliar with KDE Desktop. It provides Linux users with an alternative graphical interface to customize their desktop environment and applications for everyday use enhancement.
In Ubuntu’s case, this is GNOME. Besides the graphical enhancements and changes, it is also a lightweight, fast, smooth environment with superior performance compared to native shipped desktops with some Linux Distributions.
In the following tutorial, you will have learned how to install KDE Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
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GCC, better known as The GNU Compiler Collection, is a set of compilers, development tools, and front ends such as C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, and D. GCC is open-source and is widely used as it was the original compiler for GNU and currently is in use to compile the Linux Kernel along with many other projects.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install GCC on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa desktop or server.
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CMake is a free, open-source, and cross-platform compiler designed to build native environments, generate wrappers, build executables in arbitrary combinations. CMake is popular due to its cross-platform so that developers using the build system work the way they’re used to.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install CMake on Debian 11 Bullseye Desktop or Server.
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For those not familiar with MATE Desktop Environment, it continues GNOME 2. It is famous for being lightweight, fast, and stable that runs on Linux and most BSD operating systems. MATE is also an excellent choice for a lower-end system or those looking to remain efficient on system resources. Also, a dedicated Ubuntu MATE edition exists for this desktop environment, enticing users to switch from Ubuntu altogether.
In the following tutorial, you will have learned how to install MATE Desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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In this tutorial, we will cover how to install NetBeans IDE on Debian 11. NetBeans IDE is a free and open source extensible Java IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that enable software developers to quickly and easily develop Java desktop, Java EE, and web applications, as well as HTML5 applications with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The IDE also provides a great set of tools for PHP, Ruby and C/C++ developers.
Want to run NetBeans IDE on Debian 11 desktop? This guide will take you through how to install NetBeans IDE on Debian 11.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install NetBeans IDE on Ubuntu 22.04. NetBeans IDE is a free and open source extensible Java IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that enable software developers to quickly and easily develop Java desktop, Java EE, and web applications, as well as HTML5 applications with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The IDE also provides a great set of tools for PHP, Ruby and C/C++ developers.
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There are numerous Linux commands out there. There are a subset of built-in shell commands like cd and then there are the ones from GNU coreutils like less. In addition to that there are additional CLI utilities like curl, wget etc.
On Linux Handbook, we have covered over 80 Linux commands with practical examples. This is a collection of all the Linux commands we have covered so far.
The commands have been organized in alphabetical order so that it is easy for you to find the commands from the index.
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In this guide, I will show you how to analyze network Packets on Linux. I will use the Tools Tcpdump and Wireshark. This tutorial uses Ubuntu as OS, but it is applicable to other Linux distributions too.
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The task is simple. You have to delete specific lines from a text file in Linux terminal.
You can use a text editor like Vim or Nano, enter the file and delete the desired lines. However, this approach is not suitable for automation using bash scripts.
Instead, you can use the powerful sed command line editor and delete lines that match specific criteria. And of course, you can use sed in your shell scripts.
Let me show a few use cases.
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Games
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Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six, the first supported game of the Hypno engine, is ready for public testing!
Get ready to defeat Spidey’s arch-enemies: Dr. Octopus, Hobgoblin, Shocker, Chameleon, Mysterio, and Vulture!
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ScummVM currently supports the English and Spanish releases out of the box. Support for the Hebrew release will be available soon. A German release also exists, but we need help finding a copy before it can be supported.
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Gamescope, Valve’s Wayland compositor that assists the process of running games on the Linux platform, has now blended support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, also known as AMD FSR.
Valve’s Gamescope was created from Valve’s SteamOS Compositor (file name “steamcompmgr”) as a micro-compositor that supplies the most satisfactory gaming performance with the Wayland setting. This process incorporates operating as a nested compositor on a standard Linux desktop. Gamescope is already supporting the integration of integer scaling and other components and will include AMD FSR in its already robust settings. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is the company’s open-source image upscaling procedure that delivers increased graphical results for next-gen gamers and users.
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Valve’s Gamescope as a Wayland compositor for running games on Linux now has integrated support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).
Gamescope is what was developed from Valve’s SteamOS Compositor (steamcompmgr) as a micro-compositor focused on delivering the best gaming performance atop Wayland — including working as a nested compositor on a regular Linux desktop. Gamescope has supported integrated integer scaling and other features while now adds AMD FSR to its toolset. FidelityFX Super Resolution is AMD’s open-source image upscaling technique that has been offering great results for gamers.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Multi-platform support & a commitment to containers are among the rosy financials for the German multinational.
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We are happy to announce the 1.0.0 release of Rancher Desktop. This release has been months in the making since development on Rancher Desktop began. After starting small and learning what users needed, we were able to adjust its path and develop the features needed for a 1.0.0 stable community release.
But wait – what is Rancher Desktop again? It’s an open source app for desktop Kubernetes and container management on Mac, Windows and Linux.
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According to the announcement from Matt Farina, “At SUSE, we want to make the experience of working with Kubernetes on your desktop easier and simpler. Those who develop applications or package them up to run in Kubernetes need an easy-to-use local environment.”
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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If you have spent any time in a trading organization, whether foreign exchange (FX), commodities, or equities, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol. FIX is a socket-based, asynchronous message protocol designed for electronic trading. The protocol is implemented and used across all the major exchanges, such as NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, and ICE. FIX provides an API to broker-dealers and retail customers to obtain security definitions, submit and manage orders, and receive events such as trades.
This article guides you through the steps to develop a basic application that can exchange financial information over the FIX protocol in a Java application using the QuickFIX/J engine. We’ll use Quarkus to gain access to the many conveniences this framework offers.
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The realm of release-monitoring.org looks quiet from the top of my tower but there are plenty of activities happening below. I turn back from the window and went back to my table, various papers lying on it. All the bugs from Bugcronomicon with a few of my notes lying around. There is a lot of them ending on my table! I’m trying to address them all, but there are too many of them.
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As you might already know, Anitya is using social_auth-flask as the authentication library to authenticate users with external authentication servers (in our case it’s Fedora Account System (FAS)). As you can see in the repository, this library hasn’t been updated for a long time and now we are hitting some issues. I tried to fix this and my pull request got merged, but the contributor with permissions to release a new version isn’t active anymore.
So, what is the issue? If you try to login to purgatory (staging instance of Anitya), you will be treated with an Internal Server Error, which is caused by the issue mentioned above.
The conclave of mages decided to migrate to another authentication library and this work is currently in progress. Until the migration is done, I don’t want to release a new version of Anitya in production. I’m sorry for the inconveniences that this situation is causing.
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SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol that enables you to create a verified and private connection, securing the channel using cryptographic keys, to launch a remote shell on another machine. Using this connection, you can execute remote commands, initiate secure file transfers, forward sockets and displays and services, and much more.
Before the appearance of SSH, most remote administration was done over telnet, and to be fair, once you could establish a remote session, you could do practically whatever you need. The problem with this protocol was that traffic traveled unencrypted as pure plaintext. It didn’t take much effort to use a traffic sniffer to see all the packets within a session, including those containing a username and password.
With SSH, thanks to the use of asymmetric keys, the sessions between the apparatus involved in the communication are encrypted. And nowadays this is more relevant than ever, with all the cloud servers getting administered from all over the world.
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I shared some important first steps to help manage your personal Linux server in a previous article. I briefly mentioned monitoring network connections for listening ports, and I want to expand on this by using the netstat command for Linux systems.
Service monitoring and port scanning are standard industry practices. There’s very good software like Prometheus to help automate the process, and SELinux to help contextualize and protect system access. However, I believe that understanding how your server connects to other networks and devices is key to establishing a baseline of what’s normal for your server, which helps you recognize abnormalities that may suggest a bug or intrusion. As a beginner, I’ve discovered that the netstat command provides important insight into my server, both for monitoring and network troubleshooting.
Netstat and similar network monitoring tools, grouped together in the net-tools package, display information about active network connections. Because services running on open ports are often vulnerable to exploitation, practicing regular network monitoring can help you detect suspicious activity early.
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Companies everywhere talk about how important the customer experience is, and they’re not wrong – it’s a top priority for us, too, because without our customers, we’d be out of business. But at Clario, we place just a little more importance on driving an exceptional employee experience.
I’ve found that employees who are invested, feel recognized and challenged, have a sense of fun, and feel tied to the mission of the organization tend to deliver an outstanding customer experience. The quality of the product they deliver is better, the way they support customers is better, and they’re more empathetic toward the customer and what they experience every day. When you have invested employees, all of that comes a little easier.
Having a superior employee experience is important for a variety of reasons, especially given today’s hypercompetitive job market. It’s easier than ever to find a new job, which is why it’s so critical to work on elevating the experience your own employees have every day. We do this by cultivating a workforce that values diversity and inclusion and ensuring that they’re doing meaningful work, feel recognized, are compensated well, and have a transparent career path.
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Later this year, Laurie Krebs, Red Hat’s senior vice president and chief finance officer (CFO), will retire after five years with the company. Carolyn Nash, currently vice president of global finance, transformations and operations, will be promoted to senior vice president and CFO replacing Laurie on April 1st. Until her retirement in July, Laurie will work with Carolyn to ensure a smooth transition.
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The Web Console in RHEL is a great place to start troubleshooting a potential performance issue on a RHEL system. Learn in this post how the Web Console can show you current real time performance information, historical graphs of performance metrics, and more.
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When conversations around DEI within the technology industry are brought up, often what you hear is a lack of a strong pipeline or challenges with finding qualified, diverse talent to fill job openings. Having a diverse talent pool is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have in order to maintain innovation and continue to drive business forward. At Red Hat, we face the same issues and what we have found is that in order to find diverse talent, we need to go to where the talent is.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Jerry Bezencon has announced the release of Linux Lite 5.8, a lightweight desktop distribution based on Ubuntu.
Linux Lite is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu and comes with a super lightweight Xfce desktop environment. It is specifically developed to ease Windows users and more precisely those with old machines into the world of Linux.
The distro targeted an audience with ancient PCs. Thanks to its lightweight nature, it can run on almost any ancient computer.
Today, Linux Lite 5.8 finally becomes available as an incremental update to the previous release in the Linux Lite 5.x series.
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Linux Lite 5.8 is now available for download. Linux Lite 5.8 is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS. Linux Lite is a free and lightweight operating system based on the Ubuntu LTS (Long term Support) series of releases.
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We received donations from 730 people in December and 695 in January. I have to tell you it’s a real pleasure to see these numbers, especially after a release. Aside from helping us financially this is a huge motivational boost for everyone involved. I like to imagine 700 people in a room with smiles on their face who came just because they enjoyed what we worked on. We all contributed something in the team, whether it’s a performance improvement in Cinnamon, a new desktop utility tool, a system fix, an idea… we had fun and we made a lot of people happy, and that is a fantastic feeling. Many thanks to you all for your donations and for your support.
As you know Linux Mint 20.3 is out and it was the last 20.x release. The next development cycle comes with a fair share of ideas and exciting new features, but also some really ambitious items when it comes to the foundations and the technology we’re using under the hood. For instance, we’re currently working on rebasing Cinnamon’s window manager and Javascript interpreter on more modern versions of mutter and GJS.
The LMDE project continues. LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition and consists in making a distribution which is almost identical to Linux Mint but based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. It’s an interesting exercise because it forces us to test the compatibility of our own software stack with Debian and it shows us exactly why and how we rely on Ubuntu and where we find ourselves without it. Ubuntu, as a package base, but also as a set of improvements, additional packages and bug fixes on top of Debian, is a major component of Linux Mint. Although LMDE shows us why Ubuntu is the best alternative for us it also shows us how easy it is to port our work to a different base and how close to Linux Mint that gets us. We work on LMDE primarily for us, to get that information. It is not a priority, certainly not compared to Linux Mint itself, but it is an important project nonetheless.
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Developers want Kubernetes infrastructure that is fast, consistent, and without limits! Platform engineering, IT, and DevOps teams are adopting Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) now more than ever before to streamline efficiency for dev teams and operations. But what happens when the requirement involves deploying clusters directly on top of bare metal servers and making sure the experience for multiple global dev teams is the same… everywhere?
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Award-winning artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm and her tech team at ARTificial Mind are advancing the next epoch of digital art with a first of its kind artificial intelligence (AI) artwork created in space.
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Thanks to Canonical’s Ubuntu Core, Celestium could run in a system with tight computing resources all while ensuring immutability and containment alongside its complex AI software compatibility. In addition to this, thanks to its minimal image size it was possible to use a satellite link with limited bandwidth in order to get this artwork into space.
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Axiomtek DSP511 is a Tiger Lake UP3 based digital signage player with four 4K-capable HDMI 2.0 ports as well as a 2.5GbE port designed for smart retail applications such as interactive advertisement or AI precision marketing.
The DSP511 supports up to 64GB RAM via two DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM sockets, M.2 SATA and NVMe storage, as well as wireless expansion with optional WiFi, Bluetooth, and or 5G/4G LTE cellular connectivity.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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If you’ve ever dealt cards the “wrong way” among serious poker players, then you know that some people do not take the dealing process lightly. You must deal cards in the proper order, one to each player before starting back at the first, without ever showing a card. If that sounds like a hassle to you, you can build this card-dealing robot designed by Mr Innovative.
This simple robot accepts a standard deck of playing cards and deals a preset number of cards to a preset number of players. We would like to see it have some sort of interface to select the number of players and how many cards they receive, but that would be easy to add to the design. It is small enough to fit on any card table and can deal at a fast pace without flinging cards too far.
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As Arduino Cloud continues to evolve and we see more and more people adopting the platform, we wanted to make sure there was a strong focal point for newcomers to find out what it’s all about. Which is why we just released cloud.arduino.cc, to give you a one-stop shop for learning everything about Arduino Cloud.
[...]
There’s also a whole section dedicated to use cases, which we’re particularly excited about. Use cases are an excellent place to learn what you can do with the Cloud, and to get inspiration. But they’re also an excellent showcase of what people in the Arduino Community have achieved.
So to that end, we’re always keen to hear from anyone out there who has a working example of an Arduino Cloud project, and wants to show it off. Get in touch if you think your project might be suitable for an official Arduino Cloud use case.
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The web app gives a bird’s-eye view over the progress on your video project, whether it’s a feature film animation or a documentary short. In fact, you can head over to a demo project and see for yourself.
Once you have your list of sequences and shots, you can start storyboarding and that’s where Watchtower becomes instantly useful: you can see the stage of every shot on the timeline, there’s color coding for sequences, and at any given time you can watch the entire film as long as your shots and assets have been uploaded.
So if you have some shots as storyboard images, some parts as previsualizations, and some parts as color-graded renders, you can still watch the entire thing to get a sense of how your story is developing, which is great for review too.
[...]
Watchtower is a free/libre (GPLv3) web app written in Vue.js. It has been primarily designed to work on top of Kitsu, a free/libre (AGPLv3) collaboration platform for management of video production.
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I did an online presentation with this name for the Rust Linz meetup, on January 27 2022.
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syslog-ng has been around for decades: I started coding the first version of syslog-ng in September 1998, circa 24 years ago. The adoption of syslog-ng skyrocketed soon after that: people installed it in place of the traditional syslogd across the globe. It was packaged for Debian, Gentoo, SUSE and even commercial UNIXes. It became a default logging daemon in some of these Linux distributions. Commercial products started embedding it as a system component. Over the years however I feel that syslog-ng has become a trusted piece of infrastructure, few people really care about. I set out to change that.
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This weekend I am going to give a talk about sudo in the security track of FOSDEM. I will talk a few words about logging at each major point I mention, but I cannot go into too much detail there. So, consider this blog both as a teaser and an extension to my FOSDEM talk. You will learn how to work with JSON formatted logs in syslog-ng and also about new sudo features along the way. You will also learn about JSON logging in sudo, chroot support, logging sub-commands, and how to work with these logs in syslog-ng.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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At Mozilla, online privacy has always been one of our top priorities. Recently we announced Total Cookie Protection on Firefox Focus to combat cross-site tracking, and last year we introduced Firefox Relay, a privacy-first product that hides your real email address to help protect your identity. We are always looking for ways to offer privacy within our family of products and, after a successful rollout in English in November we’re combining one of our users’ favorite Firefox Add-ons, Multi-Account Containers, with Mozilla VPN, our fast and easy-to-use VPN service, to offer a unique, privacy solution that is only available in Firefox. In addition, today’s Mozilla VPN release includes the multi-hop feature available on Android and iOS.
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Today, Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, and Shaw Communications Inc. have announced that Shaw is the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Canada to provide Firefox users with encrypted Domain Name System (DNS) services through Mozilla’s Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program.
For more than 35 years, DNS has served as a key mechanism for accessing sites and services on the internet. Functioning as the internet’s address book, DNS matches website names, like Firefox.com and Shaw.ca, to their corresponding internet protocol (IP) addresses so that browsers can load the correct website.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Announcing the German PostgreSQL Conference 2022 & Call for Papers
PGConf.de 2022 is the sequel of the highly successful German PostgreSQL conferences 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2019. We’ll stay in Leipzig, at the same nice hotel and conference location as in 2019, in the middle of the town.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Currently Colibre is following the monoline theme guide as described in a previous post. There is a part that is still out of the guide, namely the chart images. On a whim to fill the Lunar New Year holiday, I redrawn almost the entirety of this chart. The reference goes back to the Galaxy icon theme.
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FSFE
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Every 14th of February, people around the world celebrate the “I Love Free Software Day”. On this day we show our love for Free Software and thank all the people contributing to software freedom. This year, we are organising a whole event dedicated to Free Software games.
Although many of us depend on Free Software every day, contributors to those projects usually remain invisible. This is one of the main reasons that drive us to celebrate this day. We want to highlight the valuable work of all the people who contribute to software freedom, and take the time to say thank you!
There are three different ways you can join us for this celebration. Spoiler alert: all of them are a lot of fun!
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FSF
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“Living on the water, often away from civilization, Internet connection and distribution routes, we could not bring our digital creations to life without the capability to repair devices and fix software ourselves,” said artist collective Hundred Rabbits when speaking about their keynote, which will be held on March 20, at this year’s LibrePlanet conference, organized by the FSF.
Hundred Rabbits is a small artist collective consisting of Rek (they), a writer and cartoonist, and Devine (they), a programmer, artist, and musician. They travel the globe together with their sailboat named “Pino” while creating and adapting software to fit their needs. They learned, with a lack of energy resources and Internet access, they needed to make adjustments to the way they were using their technology. Besides sharing their experiences about living on the water, they also document their use of various technologies and their art. In addition to blogs, cartoons, and music, they create and publish free (as in freedom) software projects. They say, “helping users to fix their issues and modify the software to better suit their needs, encourages people to help each other to find solutions, and submit revisions for everyone to enjoy.”
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GNU Projects
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I'm announcing availability of GNU Screen v.4.9.0
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a
physical terminal between several processes, typically
interactive shells.
New in this release:
* Hardstatus option for used encoding (escape string '%e')
* OpenBSD uses native openpty() from its utils.h
* Fixes:
- fix combining char handling that could lead to a segfault
- CVE-2021-26937: possible denial of service via a crafted UTF-8 character sequence (bug #60030)
- make screen exit code be 0 when checking --help
- session names limit is 80 symbols (bug #61534)
- option -X ignores specified user in multiuser env (bug #37437)
- a lot of reformations/fixes/cleanups (man page and source code)
For full list of changes see
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/log/?h=v.4.9.0
Release is available for download at:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/screen/
or your closest mirror (may have some delay)
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/screen/
Thanks to everybody who contributed patches and helped to test development git-version.
Keep sending bugreports or any regressions.
Have a lot of fun with GNU Screen 4.9.0 ;-)
Cheers,
Alex
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Programming/Development
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Many of us have been running RStudio off our local machines for as long as binaries have been provided. Which is by now probably a bit over a decade. Time flies.
And as nice it is to have matching binaries, in my case in the .deb format used on Debian or Ubuntu, it is wee bit a painful to manually download a file and then install it. Twice the pain if you are lucky enough to be on a system where you can also run RStudio Server. And now three times as painful as you may need a matching quarto-cli binary for the nice quarto service.
So wouldn’t it be nice to have an apt-getable repo? And to autoMAGICall get updated versions when they are available? Oh yes. And I had been bugging JJ from day one. And JJ would almost listen intendly, nod briefly and firmly, and issue an assured we will look into it. Well, they are still looking…
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I’ve not written anything here in about 4 years, and many things have changed in the meantime. After becoming a father and start rising my twins, I was less active in the community. But I hope this will change in future.
Recently, I’ve put some effort to enhance PowerFake further to fix some known issues and enhance its feature set, and also provide some brief docs! Among other things, I figured that Google Test/Google Mock are pretty popular; while I personally prefer Boost Test / FakeIt. Therefore, I also decided to look into integrating with Google Mock (gMock); and I was able to put something together for it. So, it is now possible to mock non-virtual member functions, static member functions and free functions using gMock too.
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The Qt Company has invested heavily in developing new features and functionality and acquiring new technology to expand our product offering. The feedback from the market has been that our license offerings, terms, and conditions are complex and challenging to understand. Therefore, we are streamlining and simplifying our commercial offering. One of our primary goals is to “make it easy to do business with us,” and we believe that the changes outlined in this blog post will put us on the path to our goal.
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The Qt Company continues to look for ways to diversify its product offering and improve its financial performance. In addition to the recent change making it easier to add ads into Qt apps, The Qt Company announced today a simplification of their commercial licensing.
[...]
Qt for Application Development pricing starts out at $302 USD per month per user at the professional level or $329 USD per month per user for their enterprise edition with extra functionality. Qt Design Studio meanwhile starts out at $180 USD per month per user. Their pricing for those interested can be found here.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Inspired by the log4j situation, The White House recently met with Big Tech on the issue of security vulnerabilities in FOSS used in the nation’s infrastructure. While we are glad these issues have received attention at the highest levels of the administration, we are concerned that representation in these discussions is skewed. Hobbyists, and communities organized around public interest and consumer rights, who both use and develop a large portion of FOSS, were not represented. Additionally, the entities represented at the meeting were biased toward copyleft-unfriendly organizations. Unsurprisingly, these entities focused on Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as a panacea for the problem of FOSS security. While SBOMs are a useful small step toward hardening the nation’s software infrastructure, we believe the proper solution is to favor copylefted FOSS.
Consumers must have access to source code, the right to modify and reinstall it (or hire anyone they’d like in the free market to do so). Without these rights, businesses, individuals, and the government — all of whom rely on software as part of their critical infrastructure — cannot identify and repair security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the widespread incorporation of non-copyleft FOSS, which companies can and do proprietarize, creates a false sense of security — as many users may not realize that “FOSS inside” (as listed on their SBOM) does not mean the software is any better than proprietary software.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ipython), Fedora (kernel and usbview), Gentoo (webkit-gtk), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Red Hat (kpatch-patch and samba), Scientific Linux (samba), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (kernel and samba), and Ubuntu (samba).
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The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for delivering firmware updates with the fwupd client for system and component firmware updates from Linux continues experiencing massive growth. Q4’2021 by far saw the most usage ever and that has continued into 2022 with serving more than two million firmware downloads the past month.
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The issue in the file-sharing and interop platform also affects Red Hat, SUSE Linux and Ubuntu packages.
A critical severity vulnerability in the Samba platform could allow attackers to gain remote code execution with root privileges on servers.
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The Samba Team has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple versions of Samba. An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Samba has issued software updates to address multiple security vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges on affected installations.
Chief among them is CVE-2021-44142, which impacts all versions of Samba before 4.13.17 and concerns an out-of-bounds heap read/write vulnerability in the VFS module “vfs_fruit” that provides compatibility with Apple SMB clients.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, in partnership with OpenSSF, SPDX, and OpenChain, today announced the availability of the first in a series of research projects to understand the challenges and opportunities for securing software supply chains. “The State of Software Bill of Materials and Cybersecurity Readiness” reports on the extent of organizational SBOM readiness and adoption tied to cybersecurity efforts. The study comes on the heels of both the U.S. Administration’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and the recent White House Open Source Security Summit. Its timing coincides with increasing recognition across the globe of the importance of identifying software components and helping accelerate response to newly discovered software vulnerabilities.
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A Software Bill of Materials (or SBOM) makes the information about the software components running on a system available. Transparency and summarization are needed in embedded systems with resource constraints and where updates may have significant deployment or recall costs.
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Securing the open source ecosystem: SBOMs are no longer optional [Ed: Puff piece at ZDNet. Steven Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) is once again publishing spam for sponsors. This isn’t journalism but marketing … and this site is unsuitable for reporting]
In the last year and a half, one cybersecurity mess after another — the SolarWinds software supply chain attack, the log4j vulnerability, the npm bad code injection — have made it clear that we must clean up our software supply chain. That’s impossible to do with proprietary software, since its creators won’t let you know what’s inside a program. But with open-source programs, it can be done.
Here’s the progress we’ve made so far, according to the Linux Foundation in its new The State of Software Bill of Materials and Cybersecurity Readiness report.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Whilst we’re there, one of the other impacts of the lease company being the ‘owner’ of the vehicle in the app is that they have access to vehicle position and other more personal data. One of my colleagues checked a couple of vehicle lease contracts and there was nothing in there to cover their access to that data.
In theory, the leasing company could track you in real time, unlock and lock your vehicle, revoke your access to your car and more. What steps are they taking to protect your privacy from their employees and 3rd parties?
This matter of personal data would also be resolved if the driver of the vehicle was granted ‘owner’ status in the app and the lease company was to revoke that access once the vehicle was returned.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a Private Industry Notification (PIN) to warn entities associated with the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and March 2022 Paralympics that malicious cyber actors could use a broad range of cyber activities to disrupt these events. These activities include distributed denial-of-service attacks, ransomware, malware, social engineering, data theft or leaks, phishing campaigns, disinformation campaigns, and insider threats. [...] The FBI urges all athletes to keep their personal cell phone at home and use a temporary phone while attending the events.
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Environment
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On the 14th of January, 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano began a gigantic eruption that would go on to peak in ferocity the next day. The uninhabited island volcano would quickly make headlines as the country of Tonga was cut off the world and tsunamis bore out from the eurption zone.
In a volcanic event of this size, the effects can be felt around the world. With modern instruments, they can be properly understood too. Let’s take a look at how the effects of the Hunga Tonga eruption were captured and measured across the globe.
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Finance
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That way, McDonald’s can pay the children about half what they’d pay a worker over 18 (Several dollars an hour less and no benefits package.), while the adults/parents go unemployed.
It’s not that there is a labor shortage. It’s that companies don’t want to pay anything. McDonald’s isn’t happy that they have to hire anyone at all.
They’ve been trying to “solve the problem” for a while now with ordering kiosks, apps the spy on you, and now a deal for voice recognition, so no human has to take your drive through orders.
They even expect that customers will put RFID stickers on their windshield so it has their usual order on the screen when they pull up.
(Out of good taste, I’ve omitted these links to the spam farm called ZDNet which have been paid to talk this dystopian nightmare up.)
[...]
Thanks largely to Trump, we got outright junk insurance and Christian Health Care Sharing scams that don’t actually cover you when you get sick (and which appeal to millions and millions of rubes who buy it until they go to the hospital once and are left with 25 times their maximum annual out of pocket had they bought an Obamacare plan), but at least companies that served you garbage that makes you sick over time used to have to hire people.
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Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is alleged to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin. Is he kidding, or is it just reality?
[...]
Recently, a Bitcoin wallet that had $24 million from the Satoshi period became active after 10.5 years. that’s certainly not the only bitcoin wallet. Also, about $9.8 billion in Bitcoin is stored in the five most popular wallets. However, the wallets haven’t been used in around ten years.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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On behalf of 168 civil society organizations in Myanmar, Access Now joined the Norwegian Forum for Development and Environment and the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations in calling on the Prime Minister of Norway to stop the sale of Telenor Myanmar. As the majority shareholder in Telenor Group, the Norwegian state must put pressure on Telenor to comply with human rights and responsible business obligations. A failure to act now will “stain Norway’s reputation as a long-time defender of peace and human rights globally.”
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Recently, we updated you that the Gauhati High Court has agreed to hear an intervention application filed by IFF in proceedings challenging the constitutionality of the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 (‘Rules’) issued under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 (‘Telegraph Act’). At a hearing dated January 31, 2022, this Application has been allowed by the Gauhati High Court, and IFF has been impleaded in the case. This means that IFF is now allowed to assist the Court with oral and written submissions at every stage of the proceedings.
Background
The State of Assam suspended mobile internet services for a week in December 2019 in response to widespread protests against the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. When several individuals approached the Gauhati High Court questioning the legality of the suspension, the Court stepped in and directed restoration of mobile internet services on December 19, 2019. The Court held that the State Government had failed to demonstrate how the law and order situation necessitated an internet suspension. On February 20, 2020, the Gauhati High Court dismissed review petitions filed against the order dated December 19, 2019 and disposed of all but one petition challenging the suspension of mobile internet services.
That one petition was a public interest litigation filed by Mr Ajit Bhuyan, which challenged the constitutionality of the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 (‘2017 Rules’) in addition to the suspension of internet in December 2019. This petition was taken up for hearing by the Court and was first heard on February 20, 2020 where the State of Assam and the Union Government were permitted to file a reply.
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Monopolies
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There are two bills working their way through Congress that would force companies like Apple to allow competitive app stores. Apple hates this, since it would break its monopoly, and it’s making a variety of security arguments to bolster its argument.
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S.2992 bars large tech companies from unfairly preferencing their own products on platforms they own or control. S.2710 prohibits forcing app developers to use a specific in-app payment system owned or controlled by the owner of the app store. Both have size thresholds to ensure these limits only apply to extremely large firms.
I would like to address some of the unfounded security concerns raised about these bills. It’s simply not true that this legislation puts user privacy and security at risk. In fact, it’s fairer to say that this legislation puts those companies’ extractive business-models at risk. Their claims about risks to privacy and security are both false and disingenuous, and motivated by their own self-interest and not the public interest. App store monopolies cannot protect users from every risk, and they frequently prevent the distribution of important tools that actually enhance security. Furthermore, the alleged risks of third-party app stores and “side-loading” apps pale in comparison to their benefits. These bills will encourage competition, prevent monopolist extortion, and guarantee users a new right to digital self-determination.
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Copyrights
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First published as a standalone volume on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses turns one hundred this week. Even if you have never immersed yourself in the modern reimagining of Homer’s seafaring epic, a related phrase may have drifted across your awareness: the name for a narrative technique employed by Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and myriad other writers that rub shoulders within the ever-bulging periodic and aesthetic borders of modernist literature: stream of consciousness.
Scholars believe “stream of consciousness” was first used as a description of literary style by the British writer May Sinclair, during a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels for The Egoist in 1918. Eschewing the “philosophical cant of the nineteenth century” — mannered depictions of the world that passed for “realism” — May prefers the mess of the mind. “Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife.” To capture this fluidity, the novelist must “plunge in”, which Richardson does in her monumental thirteen-novel Pilgrimage sequence. “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and going. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on”, writes May. Although James Wood and others have argued that there is nothing uniquely modernist about representing “the movement of the mind” upon the page, the psychological theory of mind that informs May’s review can be traced to a chapter in William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Harvard professor, physician, investigator of psychic communication, “father of American psychology”, and the brother of novelist Henry James, William James begins “The Stream of Thought” by acknowledging that any psychological vocabulary will be rough-hewn when it comes to the fine-cut facets of mental phenomena, comparing what follows to “a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear”. But the psychologist is being modest, for he immediately launches into a polished discussion of “anesthetic somnambulists”, subconscious personages, and the possibility of thoughts existing without a thinker. This is all a preface for the larger concept: that our minds seem to ebb and flow with ideas, while emotions behave almost tidally, rising and falling in relation to intangible forces, as if a moon presses gravitationally upon our psychic seas.
James
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 5:25 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
Crisis Text Line, a “charity” backed by Melinda Gates and Steve Ballmer, collects data from suicidal people, then sells it to advertisers, a customer relations software company, and other third parties.
The outfit claims that the “AI” chat data is “anonymized”, but similar datasets have been trivially de-anonymized in the past.
Even if the dataset has been stripped, allowing them to sell the contents to advertisers is clearly unethical.
Worse, they apparently encourage users to use the system over Facebook Chat, which is monitored by Facebook, which is world-renowned for the creepy, unethical, and illegal things it does to invade privacy. They’ve settled or been convicted of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act at least a couple of times, for example.
Imagine what a goldmine all of this stuff that people unwisely tell it while they’re depressed is worth.
Even the more official National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States acts unethically at times. For example, if a person definitely plans to kill themselves, they will attempt to dox that person and call the police.
If you’re reading this in a civilized country, you may go “Oh, well, what’s the harm in that?”.
“Even the more official National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States acts unethically at times. For example, if a person definitely plans to kill themselves, they will attempt to dox that person and call the police.”Well, the police in America are not exactly famous for treating mentally-ill people well when they arrive on the scene*, as was the case in Michigan when they arrived and shot an unarmed man whose mother had called them for a wellness check.
*(I know. Someone called them for a “check” on me a long time ago and far from trying to do anything to calm or reassure me, they came out, screamed at me, and accused me of malingering and feeling sorry for myself. Shouting at people and trying to throw them off balance might make sense when they’re a suspect in a murder, but it’s ridiculous that the cops are allowed to do this during a wellness check, when a person has harmed nobody.)
And even if you survive the police encounter, they can stuff you in a nuthatch, force you to take barbaric and primitive psychotropic medication, and then give you the boot later on, perhaps after you’ve lost your job for failing to appear at work, and now you are indebted to the treatment center for roughly $20,000.
Ironically, they may have given you more reasons to kill yourself than you had before you called the hotline.
I can only surmise based on what I’ve witnessed here that the United States doesn’t really want to do anything about the growing problem of suicide, which does need to be talked about. It says it does, but it doesn’t.
It allows the 100 richest people to hoard trillions in (largely inherited or as the windfall of various white collar crime) wealth, but it won’t do anything to alleviate poverty.
Instead, we get this 9-8-8 number that just sounds like it could turn your life into even more of a shitshow than the reason you called it for, and the 1% (Including Bill Gates’s ex-wife Melinda, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer) running a competing disservice that sucks up your data, packages it, and sells it, so that advertisers know what makes people tick.
It makes me wonder, if they’re allowed to sell it, who else they would be selling it to.
“Could it be that not too long from now, the Crisis Text Line and Facebook will offer to tell them everything people have typed into this?”There are already companies that copy out all of your Twitter and Facebook posts, likes, and shares, and go combing through it for “red flags”, and then sending it to your employer or potential employer.
Could it be that not too long from now, the Crisis Text Line and Facebook will offer to tell them everything people have typed into this?
It really should stop and give you pause about how you should not interact with things like this. If there wasn’t some way to profit off of this human suffering, the billionaire class wouldn’t be investing in it. █
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Posted in Deception, Google at 4:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Managing one’s videos in Gulag’s YouTube is “easy”; but at what cost?
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Videos at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum d714ff3563902e5be7aad958ac15506c
Videos Without Outsourcing
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Freedom of expression and long-term preservation (we have some videos here that are older than 15 years) will require self-determination through self-hosting of videos/multimedia files
THE most fundamental thing people must remember is, what Gulag’s (Google) or YouTube’s platform is today isn’t what it’ll be tomorrow (or next year or the next decade). Putting one’s eggs (work, subscribers) in Gulag’s basket/hands is risky and there’s no telling if the platform will be online at all some time in the future; the decisions is not users’ (yours or others’). The same is true for many of Gulag’s competitors, which are smaller and are sometimes perceived as ‘underdogs’ (there are downsides, not just upsides to it). Putting censorship aspects aside (all such platform won’t permit some certain things, e.g. pornography, gory violence), do you wish to be controlled or led to self-censorship through risk/fear of “de-monetisation”, delisting, and takedowns? Who are you producing videos for anyway? The Gulag? Is that your boss now? Does it pay you a fixed salary? A pension too?
Over the past few years we studied a number of platforms or options for Git hosting (we chose self-hosting and wrote a front end in Gemini, though only at the very end due to frustration with bloat). Similarly, we tried to study ways to self-host and then present videos, without having to rely on any other party deciding on how to ‘rank’ the videos and whether such videos meet some arbitrary guidelines (they’re arbitrary because they change over time and you must always consent/agree to any subsequent changes).
“…they can and will pull the rug as soon as it is convenient to do so, e.g. a conflict or feud between people on the same platform, sometimes a legal threat too.”The video above explains how we use simple HTML (no JavaScript) and Gemini Protocol to organise our videos. We’re posting all the code (under AGPLv3), so we hope to inspire others to do the same. The choice ought not be Gulag versus “some other video hosting platform”; it should really be a decision like, do you want to manage your own videos or do you want to outsource everything to some other party? There’s no “free lunch”. It’s a lot like “clown computing” or “social control media”; every decision to offload the material to some other party — a party with entirely different financial objectives (they don’t value your personal views, either) — is very short-sighted and overall not as cheap as it initially seemed; they can and will pull the rug as soon as it is convenient to do so, e.g. a conflict or feud between people on the same platform, sometimes a legal threat too. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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System76 is today announcing their latest AMD laptop in the form of the Kudu with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and up to 64GB of RAM.
The new System76 Kudu is a high performance laptop with the wonderful Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, 15.6-inch 1080p display, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, dual NVMe SSD support, built-in 2.5G Ethernet, and other standard notebook features. As usual, the System76 laptop ships with the choice of Ubuntu Linux or their Pop!_OS downstream flavor of Ubuntu. This high-end Linux laptop weighs 4.85lbs (2.2kg) and measures in at 36 x 25 x 2.9 cm.
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If you’re in the market for a laptop that combines AMD with NVIDIA, you’re in luck with the release of the Kudu from System76. As teased back in early January, it’s now available to buy starting at $1,799.
Quite the powerhouse really with the rather good Ryzen 9 5900HX, backed up by some pretty good NVIDIA graphics too. This is a laptop for serious enthusiasts who need some power on the go. Buying from System76 would be a good idea if you want top-class Linux support too, since Linux is their dedication. It also comes with your choice of either Ubuntu or their own Pop!_OS.
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System76 is a computer maker and seller that has long been selling laptops, desktops, and servers running a Linux-based operating system. For years, it only offered Ubuntu, but in more recent years, it started offering its own Ubuntu-based operating system called “Pop!_OS.” This distribution has proven to be quite popular in the Linux community, as it builds upon the greatness of Ubuntu while also making it better.
As great as Pop!_OS is, today, System76 makes a big announcement regarding hardware rather than software. To the delight of many consumers, the company is releasing a refreshed version of its popular “Kudu” laptop. This new generation of the mobile workstation has a 15.6-inch 1080p display and it is powered by an octa-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX.
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A workstation powerhouse, System76’s Kudu laptop features a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) matte finish display with 144Hz refresh rate and it’s equipped with a 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX (Zen 3) H-class processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, running at 3.3 GHz, but can be boosted up to 4.6 GHz.
The Kudu laptop also features an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, up to 64 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, as well as up to 4TB M.2 SSD PCIe NVMe storage.
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Trisquel 10.0, codename “Nabia” is finally here! This release will be supported with security updates until April 2025. Additionally, an upgrade to the “Etiona” release (v9.0.2) is also being published today,
providing updates and corrections to the installation ISO images.
These news are the culmination of months of work towards fixing, cleaning, and reviewing hundreds of packages and tickets with close feedback from the community at large. This work was boosted by an
overhaul of the development infrastructure for a distribution that is easier to maintain, more robust, and more welcoming to volunteers.
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Finding Linux frustrating and reinstalling Windows? Already quit Linux after switching? Here’s why you should persist with Linux after switching.
Switched to Linux and found things aren’t working out as you’d hoped? Considering reinstalling Windows?
Stop!
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk about communication platforms on Linux. Which ones have the best features and which ones should we be flocking to. Then we’re going to talk with Philip from Manjaro to get the scoop on some new Manjaro Hardware on the market. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram on Zorin OS 16. Enjoy!
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.5 kernel.
All users of the 5.16 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.16.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.16.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Applications
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Glow is a CLI tool that lets you render Markdown files in the Linux terminal. You can also organize Markdown files with it.
I love Markdown. I am not an expert Markdown user but I can surely write most of my articles in Markdown.
If you are a regular at It’s FOSS, you might have come across Markdown guides, editors and tools like Obsidian. I’ll add one more tool to this list. It’s called Glow and unlike previously covered applications, Glow enables you to read Markdown files in the terminal.
Wait! Can you not read Markdown in the terminal using the regular Linux commands to read text files like cat, less or even editors like Vim?
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Instructionals/Technical
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Today we are looking at how to use and install Telegram on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Games
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More preparation work being done for the Steam Deck landed in Gamescope, the Wayland-based micro-compositor, with it officially landing support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). This is thoroughly interesting, as the official Steam Deck FAQ did mention how Valve planned to have AMD FSR “be included as part of an OS future release”.
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Between 2022-01-25 and 2022-02-01 there were 24 new Steam games with native Linux clients. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…
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Developer Moebial Studios has released Aquamarine, an underwater survival game that wants you to relax and soak in the atmosphere. This is the first title from Moebial, a small international artist collective spread throughout Canada, Brazil, England, and the US. Based in Portland, OR, founder Patric Fallon established the studio in 2017, after years spent developing games on his own as a hobby.
Aquamarine, the developers say, is best played “without distractions” and all your progress is permanent. So, you’re going to need to pay attention to any of the choices you make as you progress, as your decisions will be key to your survival. You play as The Seeker, someone sent out to try and find a way for your people to move on and thrive but things don’t go as planned of course and your ship ends up crashing into the planet you’ve come to call Aquamarine.
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Patch 1.12.1 was originally put live in the Windows version back in early November 2021, so porter Feral Interactive is quite a bit behind on bringing it to their Linux port at the end of January 2022.
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Falconeer. The developer decided to do a native port, as they wanted the experience to be as good as possible for the Steam Deck.
You take on the role of Falconeer, a powerful airborne warrior traversing a vast oceanic world torn apart by generations of poisonous decisions and dissent. Throughout multiple campaigns, you will experience life from many different perspectives and loyalties as you embark on a journey of discovery, and solve the mystery of the Ursee, its people and history.
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My excitement over Selaco grows with each little teaser we’re shown and now you can weaponize a vacuum cleaner? Damn. Selaco is an upcoming first-person shooter developed with the free and open source GZDoom game engine, the one that powers a ton of Doom mods and total conversions.
Speaking about the teaser the developer said: “There are hundreds of different ways to take care of enemies without having to fire a single shot, which can be discovered through experimentation. One such way is to detach the Turret of a Sentry Gun and attach it to a Roomba instead!”
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This post was written before the news today that the NY Times was buying Wordle. It will be interesting to see if suddenly “IP issues” start becoming a bigger deal to the NY Times than they were to the original developer…
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The smash online word game Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, which will integrate the daily word puzzle into The New York Times Games suite of word games, creator Josh Wardle announced today.
Wordle will “initially remain free to new and existing players” once it moves over to the Times’ site, and Wardle says that he’s working with The New York Times to preserve players’ existing wins and streak data once the game heads to its new home. That said, The New York Times’ announcement leaves plenty of room for the company to decide to put Wordle behind its paywall in the future.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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January 2022 has been another slow month for Xfce apps development, but we got a new release of the Ristretto image viewer, version 0.12.2, which added support for shared thumbnail repositories, revamped queue management and thumbnail flavor support to the thumbnaile component.
Ristretto 0.12.2 also improves support for the Flatpak universal binary format for those who want to install it as a Flatpak app, cleans up and simplifies thumbnail sizes, fixes and completes file change monitoring, addresses a multi-threading issue on X11, and adds various performance optimizations.
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In the 13 years (give or take) I’ve being writing this blog I’ve shared tons of GTK themes, icon packs, GNOME Shell skins, Conky configs, font choices, and other desktop eye candy.
But do you know what I almost never cover?
Cursor themes.
Now, there is a reason for this: I (like many of you) simply don’t pay much ‘conscious’ attention to the pointed speck my eyes follow around the screen.
But this weekend software engineer ~phisch sent over a link to his self-described “over engineered cursor theme”. I was intrigued to try it as changing my cursor theme is something I rarely do (largely because I’ve never found Ubuntu’s stock cursors so bad I needed to switch).
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In the spring of 2015, I wrote a blog post reporting on my first term (2014-2015) as the president of the GNOME Foundation.
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Windows 11 is a rather good operating system. In fact, I can confidently say it is the best desktop operating system Microsoft has ever created. Seriously, folks, it is a pleasure to use. If your computer is compatible with it, and you like Windows 10, you should enjoy Windows 11 even more.
With all of that said, Windows 11 can be a bit polarizing. It features radical changes to the user interface (such as a centered task bar) which I adore, but some users may dislike. Not to mention, the system requirements will leave many still-capable computers unable to upgrade without using unofficial hacks. Even worse, computers deemed incompatible could eventually stop getting updates! These unfortunate computer owners will have to decide whether to continue using Windows 10 or buy a new Windows 11-compatible PC.
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Linux Lite 5.8 is now available for download and upgrade. Here’s a summary of the new changes and quick review of this release.
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Debian Family
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This month I didn’t have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is already used in a variety of practical space applications, from powering smart robots to helping rovers rove. But one area it’s yet to boldly go —sorry, couldn’t resist— is into the realm of cosmic creativity.
Until now, that is.
Boundary-pushing artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm and the team at ARTificial Mind want to “advance the next epoch of digital art”. Their artistic tools of choice? Ubuntu Core, artificial intelligence, and, the universe.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 720 for the week of January 23 – 29, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.
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I discovered JetHome Jethub D1 and Jethub H1 Linux automation controller based on respectively Amlogic A113X and S905X SoCs in Linux 5.16 changelog, as both platforms got upstreamed to mainline Linux.
I had never heard of JetHome, a Russian company based in St. Petersburg, nor their products before. Both Jethub D1 & H1 will run either an Armbian-built Ubuntu operating system or Home Assistant Operating System (formerly HassOS), and support Home Assistant (Z2M), Home Assistant (ZHA), and ZIgbee2MQTT. Jethub H1 looks like a TV box with a Zigbee module, while Jethub D1 is a DIN Rail automation controller with plenty of I/Os. Let’s focus on the latter.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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On January 10, Mozilla, in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society, made a submission to TRAI regarding the upcoming 5G spectrum auction. We advocated for a “use-it-or-share-it” approach to spectrum to help small and medium operators ensure connectivity reaches undeserved areas across India.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought home to us all how important affordable, accessible broadband is to modern society. Internet access has allowed millions to safely carry on their work, their education, their social connections, and more. Its value has multiplied because of this. Yet the unfortunate consequence of this is that those without affordable internet access fall further and further behind by default. They are quite literally invisible to the connected. The inescapable conclusion is that inclusiveness, making sure everyone has affordable access to broadband, must be a policy priority.
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Programming/Development
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Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?
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There sure has been a lot of x86 straight-line speculation happenings in recent months with the compiler-based mitigation being merged for GCC 12 and then beginning with Linux 5.17 the kernel can make use of that new knob for fending off this potential vulnerability. Now the compiler support is even being back-ported to GCC 11.
Rather than x86 straight-line speculation mitigation only being found in the upcoming GCC 12 release, it’s also being back-ported to the GCC 11 stable series. Intel’s H.J. Lu sent out the patches adding the -mharden-sls= and -mindirect-branch-cs-prefix compiler switches to the GCC 11 code-base. The x86 SLS mitigation adds INT3 instructions after function returns and indirect branches to fend off the processor potentially speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. The -mindirect-branch-cs-prefix option is to be automatically used for RETPOLINE builds.
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This morning while talking to Kim over mugs of black coffee, I wondered out-loud if we had been at a similar opening in ‘62 during the Cuban Missile Crisis if there would have been zero talk ‘bout the very real threat of sudden Hydrogen doom. I’ve read accounts of folks then having End-of-the-World drug & fuck-fest parties (Just ask Ed Sanders) Now, here damn-near sixty years later w/ a similar fate hanging over our heads, I heard not one word all night ‘bout the hair-trigger crisis in the Ukraine. Not one word ‘bout Biden or Putin Not one word ‘bout hypersonic missiles Not one word ‘bout the potential for nuclear annihilation.
Though we in reality had no great agency then in ‘62, we still regarded ourselves as citizens in a democracy where at least in theory our leaders represented our interests, which didn’t include dying to stop the commies, (aka maintaining American-empiric-hegemony). We entertain no such delusions now living as we do in a bald-face corporate Kleptocracy where the last vestigial traces of democracy were long ago sold and where now we’re merely a flock of feckless, voiceless, powerless, no-account peasantry sipping wine & exchanging pleasantries.
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Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven chronicles the travails of a group of interconnected strangers before and after a fictional pandemic ravages the globe and lays waste to 98 percent of civilization. Mandel doesn’t shy away from the mass death and social collapse implicit in her novel’s apocalyptic premise, but she uses it mainly to examine the potential for culture to survive the demise of society. Even as so much infrastructure, technology, and collective memory disappear, Mandel argues, art can continue to sustain and nourish.
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Hardware
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When it comes to taking an idea from concept to prototype reality, depending on the type of project, there can be quite a few sub-tasks along the way. Take for example, your latest electronic widget design. You’ve finished the schematic, and the PCB layout is a work of art (if you do say so yourself) but having that kicking around on the desk unprotected with wires dangling is not the end game. Now you’ve got to make an enclosure of some kind, and I don’t know about you, but this is the bit where this scribe struggles a little to get something to fit nice. Even if you’ve got the latest 3D printer dialed in to within a gnat’s whisker of perfection, you’ve still got to come up with the design, and those dimensions need to be really accurate. So, for those of us who are great at the PCB, but suck at the enclosure, [Willem Aandewiel] has been busy making the tool just for you, with his PCB-orientated Yet Another Parametric Projectbox generator (YAPP.)
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A few months ago, I was discussing the control of GPIB equipment with a colleague. Based on only on my gut feeling and the briefest of research, I told him that the pricey and proprietary GPIB controller solutions could easily be replaced by open-source tools and Linux. In the many weeks that followed, I almost abandoned my stance several times out of frustration. With some perseverance, breaking the problems into bite-sized chunks, and lots of online searching to learn from other people’s experiences, my plan eventually succeeded. I haven’t abandoned my original stance entirely, I’ve taken a few steps back and added some qualifiers.
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You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam. Heat crawling up the hot end like this is known as heat creep and there are a variety of ways that hot ends try to cope with the need to be hot and cold at the same time. Most hotends today are air-cooled with a small fan. But water-cooled hotends have been around for a while and are showing up more and more. Is it a gimmick? Are you using, planning to use, or have used (and abandoned) water cooling on your hot end?
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Bending various proprietary devices to our will is a hacker’s rite of passage. When it comes to proprietary wall sockets, we’d often reverse-engineer and emulate their protocol – but you can absolutely take a shortcut and, like [oaox], spoof the button presses on the original remote! Buttons on such remotes tend to be multiplexed and read as a key matrix (provided there’s more than four of them), so you can’t just pull one of the pads to ground and expect to not confuse the microcontroller inside the remote. While reading a key matrix, the controller will typically drive rows one-by-one and read column states, and a row or column driven externally will result in the code perceiving an entire group of keys as “pressed” – however, a digitally-driven “switch” doesn’t have this issue!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The United States would have had nearly 50% fewer Covid-19 hospitalizations in recent months if its vaccination rates were the same as those of major European countries such as Denmark, where roughly 81% of the population has been fully inoculated.
That’s a key finding of an analysis released Sunday by the Financial Times, which concluded that the comparatively low U.S. vaccination rate—64%—was responsible for roughly half of the country’s hospitalizations this winter as the highly contagious Omicron tore through the population.
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Major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. hiked the prices of nearly 870 prescription medications during the first month of the new year as lock-step Republicans and right-wing Democrats—flush with cash from drugmakers—continue to block legislation aimed at reining in the industry.
Through January 20 of this year, according to an analysis released Sunday by Rx Savings Solutions, drugmakers raised the costs of 866 of their products in the U.S. by an average of 6.6%.
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In 1998, a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet claiming to have found a link between autism and the vaccine for mumps, measles, and rubella. There was no such link. The paper has been retracted. And an investigation into the controversy suggests that Wakefield, who lost his medical license, may have been trying to get rich by selling his own replacement measles vaccine. Still, Wakefield and others like him succeeded at sowing divisions that have continued to this day.
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This is a developing story… please check back for possible updates…
California progressives on Monday expressed shock and outrage as a bill that, if passed, would have delivered single-payer healthcare coverage to the nation’s most populous state was withdrawn from a highly anticipated floor vote in the state Assembly.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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This version of Pegasus was “zero click” — unlike more common [cracking] software, it did not require users to click on a malicious attachment or link — so the Americans monitoring the phones could see no evidence of an ongoing breach. They couldn’t see the Pegasus computers connecting to a network of servers around the world, [cracking] the phone, then connecting back to the equipment at the New Jersey facility. What they could see, minutes later, was every piece of data stored on the phone as it unspooled onto the large monitors of the Pegasus computers: every email, every photo, every text thread, every personal contact. They could also see the phone’s location and even take control of its camera and microphone. F.B.I. agents using Pegasus could, in theory, almost instantly transform phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools — everywhere except in the United States.
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Cyberattacks like the one that canceled classes for two days in Albuquerque’s biggest school district have become a growing threat to U.S. schools, with several high-profile incidents reported since last year. And the coronavirus pandemic has compounded their effects: More money has been demanded, and more schools have had to shut down as they scramble to recover data or even manually wipe all laptops.
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Intel claimed at CES that its new Alder Lake mobile chips would be the fastest mobile chips ever made. We’ve finally gotten to try out the flagship in this line, the 14-core Core i9-12900HK, inside MSI’s GE76 Raider gaming laptop. And it turns out that Intel was right… with some caveats.
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Security
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A recently disclosed vulnerability affecting the PolKit component has been present on several Linux distributions for over 12 years. The vulnerability is easily exploited, says Bharat Jogi, Director of the Qualys Research Team that discovered it, and allows any unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host.
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Samba has addressed a critical severity vulnerability that can let attackers gain remote code execution with root privileges on servers running vulnerable software.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The latest disturbing revelation about Israeli malware merchant NSO Group is a bit delayed. NSO has claimed its malware can’t be used to target American phone numbers which, even if true, hasn’t stopped the malware from targeting Americans.
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During the last months of each year, the Tor Project (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) holds a fundraiser to ask for your support. You probably recognize these graphics by now from our blog, social media, or about:tor. I’m here today to share some of the results of this effort, and to talk about what you’ve made possible for Tor and privacy online.
Let’s start with the basics—first being THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to this campaign! You helped raise more for privacy online than we dreamed possible, and we’re extremely grateful for your trust and support.
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Narendra Sahoo: We are a global cybersecurity consulting firm specialized in offering cybersecurity services for the past 17 years. We are totally vendor and product-neutral firm and have a dedicated team for Audit as well as Advisory / Consulting. We have our offices based in the US, Canada, UK, India, Singapore and the Middle East. We are today the preferred partners in the industry known for providing services such as PCI DSS, PCI PIN, PCI SSF, SOC1/2, GDPR, HIPAA, Web Appsec/Mobile Appsec, VA/PT, etc. We bring with us industry expertise, global experience, and exceptional services to help our clients in the industry. Our focus is on providing services that go beyond mere Advisory services and providing practical solutions and ground-level support to all businesses looking to achieve their Cyber Security goals.
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Experts gathered virtually on Data Privacy Day on Thursday to revisit strategies to best hold companies accountable for the information they collect on their users.
Much of the conversations that took place on Thursday centered on the private right of action – whereby private citizens can legally pursue companies in lieu of government action. Though some experts view the practice favorably, most speakers were hesitant to support it.
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Meta is working on other wearable tech products, including a smartwatch with health and fitness tracking capabilities, said two people with knowledge of the project. The Information earlier reported on the smartwatch. Ray Ban Stories, the smart glasses that people can use to capture video, are a steppingstone to making more people comfortable with putting smart tech on their bodies, they said.
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Researchers from universities in Israel, Australia and France have discovered a device identification technique that is based entirely on GPU fingerprinting.
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A team of researchers from French, Israeli and Australian universities have conducted a series of experiments that demonstrate that people on the web can be tracked using the unique fingerprints created by their graphical processing units (GPUs).
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Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you’re doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you’re running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.
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Defence/Aggression
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Wars have had a long run among rival territories and, later, nations, with fierce conflicts between Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage, Spain and Britain, and the combatants of World Wars I and II among the best-known. Although the wars had a variety of causes and were sometimes promoted with lofty ideals and slogans, they were often occasioned by disputes over territory and resources. Not surprisingly, the most powerful, most heavily armed countries, which had the best chances of emerging victorious in a military conflict, were usually the most eager for it.
With the advent of nuclear weapons, however, the traditional pattern of great power conflict—regarding other nations as enemies, confronting them militarily, and waging devastating wars against them—had acquired a ghostly quality. As Albert Einstein remarked: “General annihilation beckons.”
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President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary to justify the “exercise of an international police power” in any nation in the Western Hemisphere whose policies or actions could provoke foreign intervention. In other words, the United States would not need to wait for a foreign intervention, it could enforce a change in governments that adopted “unacceptable” policies. President Woodrow Wilson used the Roosevelt Corollary in 1913 to justify the intervention in Mexico to move its politics in a more favorable direction for U.S. interests. The United States overtly and covertly attacked Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sponsored covert action in Chile in 1971 against a democratically elected government in order to reverse its political and economic policies. There is a reason why the nations of Latin America refer to the United States as a “great hegemon.”
In refusing to acknowledge Russia’s concerns about U.S. and Western intervention on its borders, the Biden administration is engaging in hypocrisy. The philosopher Hannah Arendt called hypocrisy the “vice of vices.” Lying to others is part of the political game, but the United States is lying to itself in denying that it committed to limit NATO’s role in East Europe. Putin is asking for written guarantees regarding NATO membership because we betrayed the verbal guarantees that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave to their counterparts, Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, respectively. We need to recognize our role in the Ukraine crisis; Russian President Vladimir is not the sole cause of a crisis that could have horrific consequences.
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The glacier-cut depths of the canal allows subs to quickly dive and sneak out to their hidden positions. Eight of the 14 Trident subs are based there – the others are in Georgia – each with enough firepower to cause a nuclear winter that would kill billions. Altogether the eight carry 720 nuclear bombs, close to one-quarter of nuclear weapons deployed by all nations. Around half are out at sea at any one time. In my darker imaginations, I visualize a mushroom cloud rising between me and the Olympics, presuming I had not already been blinded by the flash of the explosion.
But even in a time of rising tension between the world’s great powers, most of us still find it unimaginable that we will ever see a full-scale nuclear war. Surely the leaders of our world, as inclined as they are to playing great power games, would not be so insane. But anyone who has studied the history of how conflicts spin out of control, such as the events that led to the First World War, or the many close nuclear calls caused by false alerts and misconceptions, can have no such comfort. The leaders and systems of the world are too fallible to continue reliance on nuclear weapons for security. In fact, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons calls for abolition. It went into effect last January, signed by 59 nations, none of them the nuclear states, all of which are busy upgrading their arsenals. For instance, by the end of the decade, the new Columbia class missile submarines will begin pulling into Bangor to replace the Tridents. Twelve are planned at around $10 billion apiece.
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Yet these U.S. politicians also sense what the population feels: that decline of capitalism and U.S. hegemony is actually happening. So repeated denials, while comforting the citizens of the country, do not suffice to control popular opinion and thereby common sense. Mainstream politicians in both Republican and Democratic establishments work to anticipate and deflect these popular feelings at any chance that they might evolve into a systemic critique. These politicians, who have seen the critics of U.S. capitalism grow in number and become increasingly vocal over the last decade, are slowly turning popular feelings relating to the decline of capitalism into anti-capitalism. The critics, meanwhile, blame capitalists and their established systems for this decline.
To forestall the success of the critics of capitalism, U.S. mainstream politicians promote popular rages against a series of “causes” relating to the very decline of capitalism they cannot admit or openly acknowledge. Their goal is to displace popular anger and to redirect people’s desire to protest the economic and social decline impinging on them due to this decline of capitalism. This is accomplished by loudly and repeatedly blaming certain scapegoats: immigrants, China, Russia, Black and Brown people, secularists, women, and liberals.
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The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), “a loose club of post-Soviet countries,” signed the Collective Security Treaty (CST) in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The treaty eventually came into force two years later in 1994. Consisting of Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, the treaty was meant to help coordinate military policies between former Soviet states.
But the initiative failed to spur any real military integration, and three of the nine members—Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan—chose to leave in 1999, during the renewal of the treaty. Following Vladimir Putin’s rise to the Russian presidency, Russia began taking steps to modernize and strengthen the organization. This included granting the Collective Security Treaty the status of an “international regional organization,” after which it came to be known as the CSTO; increasing military exercises and integration between member states and creating the CSTO Collective Rapid Reaction Forces in 2009; which is meant to “[accomplish] tasks of both military and special nature.”
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During Saturday night’s rally to promote the Big Lie, former President Donald Trump promised to pardon January 6 rioters if he wins in 2024 and warned that the United States would see “the biggest protest we have ever had” if prosecutors investigating his effort to overturn the last election or his tax-evading real estate empire “do anything wrong.”
“Trump now calling for his supporters to potentially amass again in huge numbers to help him right any perceived wrongs should ring alarm bells.”
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We’ve seen this before. The U.S. creates a situation, digs in its heels and makes ultimatums—and tens of thousands die.
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The current US ‘disinformation’ campaign alleging Russian aggression is nothing new to Ukraine. We have seen this game before. It is a rekindled version of the US State Department-led overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yankovych in February 2014. By refusing to accept NATO membership which would have put a vast array of military missiles and weapons within spitting distance of mainland Russia, across the Kerch Strait to the Russian border, Yankovych’s presidency was doomed.
Think of it as akin to having Russian ballistic missiles located in Havana, Cuba in October, 1962 ninety miles off the Florida coast. In protecting US sovereignty, JFK was willing to risk world peace to have those foreign missiles removed. Yet Putin is not allowed the same protection of Russia’s border from NATO’s ongoing strategy of eastern expansion. If JFK was unwilling to live with foreign missiles pointed at the US mainland, why should Russia be forced to experience that same threat?
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In January 2022, the Yekaterinburg-based publisher Gonzo released the memoir of Marat Gabidullin — the first combatant from the Wagner private military company (PMC) to speak openly about his experience in the secretive organization. Despite the Wagner group’s active participation in military conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, information about the mercenary company — and the people who have died working for them — is hard to come by; the Kremlin usually responds to questions about the group by pointing out that the concept of a PMC doesn’t even exist in Russian legislation. Gabidullin, who started out as a rank-and-file Wagner combatant and rose to become the commander of a reconnaissance company, sat down for an interview with Meduza in 2020 — and sat he was planning on releasing his memoir. Soon after that, according to Gabidullin, pressure from “the relevant people” forced him to put the publication on hold. A year later, though, he was able to find a new publisher. Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova read an advance copy of the book — and spoke to its author and editor about the difficulties (and dangers) they faced on the path to publication.
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The launch of the new Entry/Exit System is delayed to September 2023, the Commission says the contracted companies are to blame.
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Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.
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Much attention is given to President Putin’s motives, such as his supposed need to win success abroad to compensate for waning popularity at home. But the Russian establishment as a whole sees Ukraine as its greatest strategic interest and views its shift to a pro-western stance in 2014 as its worst setback since the fall of the Soviet Union. If Putin dropped dead tomorrow this stance would not change.
I am not arguing that Russia has any imperial right to quash Ukrainian self-determination, but the confrontation should be viewed realistically and Ukrainians should not be lured into imagining that any Nato cavalry will be riding to their rescue.
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Ukraine’s National Police have arrested two suspects on charges of attempting to orchestrate violent unrest in Kyiv and other parts of the country, the Interior Ministry announced during a press conference on Monday, January 31. According to police officials, the detained suspects were planning a series of demonstrations and recruiting paid participants to clash with police officers. Allegedly, the first rally was supposed to take place in the capital on Monday and involve as many as 5,000 people. Ukraine’s Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky noted that other demonstrations were planned in regions not far from the border with Russia. Ukrainian police did not disclose the suspects’ identities and are still investigating whether or not they have ties to Russia or the Kremlin-backed breakaway states in eastern Ukraine.
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A month and a half after Moscow presented the United States and NATO with demands for sweeping security guarantees, tensions between Russia and Western countries remain high. Diplomatic negotiations have made little progress and with upwards of 100,000 Russian troops still concentrated near Ukraine’s borders, Washington has repeatedly warned that a full-fledged invasion is imminent. Meanwhile, Russian state television has been offering its own analysis of the crisis, putting the focus squarely on the United States. To give a general sense of what’s being said on state-controlled channels, Meduza summarizes two segments that aired during primetime on Sunday, January 30.
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At least once a week, a stranger writing a book, magazine article, newspaper feature, or blog; representing a documentary film, radio serial, or podcast; researching a paper for middle school, high school, or college asks me for an interview about Muhammad Ali. I’m on the short list of live resources because I began covering him when he was Cassius Clay and I was starting out as a New York Times sports reporter.
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Rhodes and other defendants who have pleaded not guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy over the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, present just a fraction of the total membership of the Oath Keepers – the size of which raises uncomfortable questions about the possibility of violent radicalization in the U.S. military.
As experts on violent extremism, we believe it isn’t only the number of Oath Keepers that is a problem, it is their makeup. A significant number of their members are veterans – both female and male – who bring military skills to the group and also serve as recruiters for other active and former armed service personnel.
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Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.
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On 24 January, a Guatemalan court convicted five former paramilitary officers—members of a self-styled “Civil Self-Defense Patrol” (Patrulla de Autodefensa Civil) affiliated with Guatemala’s military during the country’s decades-long civil war—of crimes against humanity. The court found that the defendants committed acts of rape and sexual assault against Indigenous women from the Achi people, as part of a systematic policy of sexual violence against Achi women employed by the military in the 1980s. Celebrated by rights groups and survivors, the judgment marks the end of an 11-year-long process and a step towards justice for serious human rights violations in Guatemala, but significant challenges remain.
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A mythological monster is haunting the fevered imagination of the West. Its name, as pronounced by the US media and political establishment, is “Put’n.” It has the body of the bear, the arms of an octopus, and the head of a super-intelligent extraterrestrial. Its other characteristics are equally contradictory. It is an ethnic chauvinist whose chief followers include strikingly large numbers of national minorities and whose publicly stated idea of Russia is explicitly multiethnic. It is reckless and aggressive to the point of insanity, yet has repeatedly failed to seize opportunities for successful aggression.
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So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.
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When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the mandatory retirement age for government officials was 65 years old. During Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency in 2010, this age limit was lowered to 60. But just three years later, after Putin had returned to the presidency, it was raised to 70 years old. Since then, the Russian president has been gradually extending or abolishing the mandatory retirement age for senior civil servants, as Putin’s entourage continues to age along with him. In a new investigation, iStories journalists calculated the average age of Russia’s ruling elite. Here’s what they found.
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Former President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies are using three tactics in a nationwide, state-by-state strategy to control the outcome of future elections. All are on display in Arizona.
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“Why China Is in Africa” (12/16/21) is a question Trevor Noah took up last month for Comedy Central‘s Daily Show. As with many of the topics taken up by the Daily Show, the issue is no joke: China has a large and growing economic presence in many African countries. The China/Africa deals cry out for analysis: Are they different from the deals on offer from Western countries like the US, Britain or France?
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This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.On January 26, The Dissenter covered how the CIA funded unethical experiments on Danish orphans for at least two decades from the early 1960s onwards.
These grim trials were conducted as part of the mind control program MKULTRA, which was secretly farmed out overseas as it wound down in the United States due to the threat of exposure. A 1963 CIA Inspector General report shows that the expansion worldwide had unfolded for some time.
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There’s hardly a Muslim terrorist attack committed by a single perpetrator in Europe or America in the last five years that the authorities and the media haven’t tried to spin as mental illness.
Both Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the Syrian Muslim mass killer who shot up a Boulder supermarket, and Faisal Akram, who took a Texas temple hostage to secure the release of ‘Lady Al Qaeda’, had their attacks blamed on mental illness.
But France continues to lead the world in whitewashing Muslim terrorism as mental illness.
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On January 21, she learned that the Court of Cassation had overturned the Montpellier jury’s verdict of March last year in the third jury trial against the defendant [Translator’s note: After guilt has been established, the court must decide on the sentence at the next trial].
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Scott was a top undercover agent for the FBI, putting himself in harm’s way dozens of times. Now, he’s telling his story for the first time to sound the alarm about the threat of far-right extremists in America.
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Fluke-Ekren moved to Syria in 2012 and married a “prominent” ISIS leader, court documents said. She can reportedly speak four languages, and the documents alleged she rose up the ranks to command her own battalion.
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Five months after Western forces fled Afghanistan, the images of their chaotic departure are still with us: of families huddled outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, civilians shuddering past Taliban checkpoints, men and women chasing departing US military planes—all in a last-ditch bid to flee the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.
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A U.N. report seen by Reuters says the Taliban and its allies are believed to have killed scores of former Afghan officials, security force members and people who worked with the international military contingent since the U.S.-led pullout.
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Environment
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Companies including Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Honda are bringing so-called Level 3 AVs to market that will let drivers take their hands off the wheel under specific conditions, and virtually every major auto manufacturer is testing self-driving systems.
Automated vehicles hold tremendous promise. Cars that handle most or all of the driving tasks could be safer than human drivers, operate more efficiently and open up new opportunities for seniors, people with disabilities and others who can’t drive themselves. But while attention has understandably focused on safety, the potential environmental impacts of automated vehicles have largely taken a back seat.
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For several years the wireless industry has been hyping fifth-generation wireless (5G) as something utterly transformative. For this whole stretch we’ve been subjected to claims about how the wireless standard would revolutionize smart cities, transform the way we live, result in unbridled innovation, and even help us cure cancer (doctors have told me it won’t actually do that, if you’re interested).
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Energy
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Clean energy advocates celebrated Monday after a federal appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision and ruled that Arizona power utility Salt River Project—which jacked up electricity rates by more than 60% for customers who installed rooftop solar in the Phoenix metropolitan area—can be prosecuted for violating federal antitrust laws.
“This is a game-changer in the struggle to defend rooftop solar against utilities’ all-out war on clean, affordable, climate-resilient energy.”
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In late September, just before the German parliamentary elections, the Alternative für Deutschland held a large campaign rally in Görlitz, a picturesque city of about 56,000 people across the Neisse River from Poland. I was making my way down a narrow street toward the rally when I entered a square that had been dressed up as Berlin circa 1930, complete with wooden carts, street urchins and a large poster of Hitler.
Görlitz, which was barely damaged in the Second World War, often stands in for prewar Europe in movies and TV shows. (“Babylon Berlin,” “Inglourious Basterds” and other productions have filmed scenes there.) It was a startling sight nonetheless, especially since, a few hundred yards away, a crowd was gathering for the AfD, the far-right party whose incendiary rhetoric about foreign migrants invading Germany has raised alarms in a country vigilant about the resurgence of the radical right.
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According to Microsoft, your PC needs to be powered on and connected to receive updates. That may seem obvious, but Microsoft has now provided data on exactly how long it needs to be connected, too.
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Cargo bikes have always posed a challenge to regular cyclists. Far wider than the average bicycle, they can be hard to overtake on narrow lanes.
Furthermore, since the advent of electric cargo bikes in recent years, sometimes they overtake regular cyclists, even though they continue to be cumbersome around junctions and corners and are invariably overtaken back.
This has invariably led to cargo bikes becoming involved in far more accidents – to the point that Sikkerhedsstyrelsen, the safety authority, has said more legislation is needed.
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It’s a new 1,200km (745-mile) gas pipeline running from western Russia to north-eastern Germany under the Baltic sea.
The €10bn (£8.3bn) project is designed to double the amount of natural gas flowing from Russia straight to Germany. Gas currently flows via the original Nord Stream pipeline, which was completed in 2012.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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GDP grew at a 6.9 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, somewhat faster than had generally been expected. However, inventory accumulations were the main factor driving growth. Final demand grew at just a 1.9 percent annual rate, as inventories added 4.9 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. GDP is now 3.1 percent above its level in the fourth quarter of 2019, putting it just slightly below the pre-pandemic trend growth path.
Inventories Grow at Rapid Pace
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On one morning, about a year ago, I walked into a room to see two brothers whom I have seen in my clinic for several years, 3-year-old Ari and 4-year-old Ryan. (I’ve changed their names to protect their privacy.) Their mom was worried about their behavior. She said that they had a hard time listening, couldn’t sit still, and fought with each other constantly. The two boys were running and jumping all around and ended up fighting several times during their appointment.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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A diverse coalition of more than 250 progressive advocacy organizations, labor unions, and small business groups on Monday implored the U.S. Senate to immediately pass the Build Back Better Act, warning that millions of people across the nation are “at a breaking point” as the coronavirus pandemic rages on and economic tumult persists.
“Moms, dads, caregivers, and working people of America need Build Back Better more than ever.”
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Dozens of U.S. civil society groups sent a letter Monday to top advisers of President Joe Biden explaining how his administration can have a “successful” year of action between his December “Summit for Democracy” and a forthcoming event planned for late 2022.
“This upcoming year presents an opportunity for the United States to engage in self-reflection, learn from global experiences, and take bold action to demonstrate accountability.”
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Sen. Ron Johnson, the most notorious conspiracy theorist in the U.S. Senate, finally got something right.
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With the Build Back Better Act stalled in the Senate thanks to the GOP and a couple of right-wing Democrats, 40 party members in the House of Representatives on Monday demanded urgent action to lower prescription drug prices across the United States.
“People have sent us to Washington on the promise that we end Big Pharma’s monopoly control over prices and provide patients with much-needed relief.”
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I know that people who identify tribally as Democrats or Republicans often like to accuse the other team of being especially censorial, but the unfortunate fact is that elected officials in both parties seem equally interested in using the power of the state to take away 1st Amendment rights. For every misguided effort by Florida, Texas, or Georgia to attack the 1st Amendment rights of websites, we see a Colorado or New York going in the other direction.
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Highlighting his organizing history and progressive priorities, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday endorsed Greg Casar’s campaign to represent Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District.
“Because of his roots as a labor organizer, I know Greg and I will work together to organize year-round and deliver on Medicare for All, good jobs, and climate justice.”
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We speak with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors about her new book, “An Abolitionist’s Handbook,” which lays out her journey toward abolition and 12 principles activists can follow to practice abolition, which she describes as the elimination of police, prisons, jails, surveillance and the current court system. “We have to imagine what we would do with these dollars, with these budgets, and they have to really be an imagination that’s grounded in care,” says Cullors. She also speaks about her community organizing in Los Angeles, which fought $3.5 billion worth of jail expansion, and her multi-year contract with Warner Bros. Television Group to create original storytelling content around abolition.
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Estonia’s digital ID card turned 20 years old this year and during the last two decades more than four million have been issued.
Over the years the card’s design has changed and the security features have become more complex, ETV’s “Aktuaalne kaamera” (AK) reported on Sunday.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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I’ve been meaning to revisit the Great Barrington Declaration, its authors, and the new right wing “institute” promoting it. I originally likened it to “magnified minority”-style disinformation with more than a dash of eugenics in the form of the Declaration’s call about the virus, in essence, to “let ‘er rip” while somehow using “focused protection” to prevent mass death among those vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19. The reason is that, increasingly, Great Barrington Declaration-associated groups and scientists have been letting their antivaccine freak flag fly high.
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Whoopi Goldberg is facing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Holocaust Museum and other Jewish organizations for her remarks on the latest episode of “The View,” in which she stated that the Holocaust was “not about race.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, responded to “The View” co-hosts comments on Twitter, calling her remarks “dangerous.”
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Goldberg’s comments came amid a discussion about a Tennessee school board voting earlier this month to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth grade language arts curriculum.
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Spotify, facing intense criticism from musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell as well as growing scrutiny from anti-misinformation advocates, now finds itself embroiled in a public relations mess that has become increasingly familiar to Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google.
However, Spotify arguably has more in common with entertainment enterprises like Netflix that increasingly must decide how to draw lines around the original programming they have funded and hosted while also competing for big-name talent.
One expert suggested that the podcast side of Spotify’s business had grown more quickly than the company’s ability to keep its voices under control.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Forbidden Art, the first part of which will be broadcast on BBC2 on February 3, will examine artworks that have been considered inappropriate for the broader public to view. Yet a programme that begins by inviting us into the British Museum’s “secretum” (a no-longer extant section housing items that were considered obscene) moves.
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For centuries, writers, artists and performers have been subject to censorship. Can we ever agree if limits should be placed on freedom of expression of writers and performers? Here’s our list of topical work that raises these concerns: [...]
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A new BBC documentary airing next week revisits the famous 1966 case in Britain which prosecuted artist Stass Paraskos
In 1966, Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos was arrested for staging his exhibition Lovers and Romances at the Leeds College of Art. His purported offence, showing ‘lewd and obscene’ works, led to a raid and shutdown of the show by local police. He would be the last artist successfully prosecuted in Britain under the Vagrancy Act 1938.
The much-publicised case, which put Stass on the international art map, will be featured this week in an upcoming BBC2 programme hosted by Professor Mary Beard.
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The video shared on Facebook on January 6 showed the image of Prophet Muhammed. It quoted Lord Jesus as saying he is God’s son, Mohammed as saying he is God’s Prophet, and Shri Krishna as saying he is God himself. None of these were his personal statements. This is what we have been told since time immemorial by the scriptures of the respective faiths. It could have been created by someone else, which he just happened to share on his timeline.
But this left the local Muslim community obstreperous as they went on to file police complaints about allegedly hurting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community by repeating what the Prophet said. Kishan was an animal lover, and he regularly served the cause by saving cows from illegal slaughter at the hands of Muslim butchers. He was forced to apologise a few days before his murder by the Muslim youth, but that wasn’t enough as per Islamic instructions.
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A review of the minutes of the Board’s meeting of January 10, 2022, indicates that the book was removed without being formally reviewed in accordance with the district’s book challenge procedures, which call for a diverse committee of education professionals and community members to review the challenged work and employ specific criteria when reviewing the book and issuing a recommendation. In bypassing the district’s established procedure, the Board deprived itself of the knowledgeable insight which those procedures are designed to provide. Moreover, the minutes of the January 10 meeting do not demonstrate that the Board considered all of the criteria that it has explicitly stated are relevant to making decisions about the removal of materials from the curriculum.
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Maus was banned due to certain language, depictions of violence and some nudity, thus prompting the removal of the book from the curriculum and one board member saying, “Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.” The notion that a comic book by a Jewish man about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust would somehow promote any of the atrocities his father went through is ludicrous to say the least, especially after one reads Maus. However, the fear that comics can somehow corrupt or negatively influence children goes back well before the publication of Maus.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The New Republic recently posted a story with the title, “Sports Reporting is Broken.” When I glanced at the URL of the story, the following jumped out at me, “charania-schefter-access-journalism-useless.” If one has followed MMA reporting for any amount of time, the last three words should strike a powerful chord. If sports reporting is broken, MMA reporting is akin to the Heyope Tire Fire, a fire that burned for 15 years.
The writer of the New Republic story, Alex Shephard, summed up the role of access journalists as, “there to weasel his way into the confidences of powerful people and then push their viewpoints, however untruthful or far-fetched they may be, as news.”
That statement perfectly encapsulates what the UFC wants, expects and I would say demands from most of the writers who cover the promotion.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Amid continued GOP obstruction of Democrats’ voting rights legislation, a coalition of civil rights groups on Monday issued a joint statement pushing back against a bipartisan plan to reform the Electoral Count Act, calling the proposal woefully insufficient to address nationwide voter suppression efforts.
“Bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake does nothing for a citizen whose right to vote has been compromised by partisan extremists in states.”
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In his 14 reports submitted to the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly, Professor de Zayas proves that UN rapporteurs can be more than bureaucrats, paper-pushers, ideologues, politicians or narrative managers. Each report has added value, and this book, which builds on those reports, is not a mere compilation of information available on the internet, but provides a coherent analysis of the challenges faced by the UN Secretary General, High Commissioner, Human Rights Council, and civil society in identifying problems and devising pragmatic and implementable solutions. Books like this give us hope that the sometimes cumbersome and sclerotic human rights protection system may yet deliver on human rights and inspire legislators to go beyond lip service to human rights and adopt the necessary laws and enforcement mechanisms. The author’s vision is that with perseverance and good faith, human rights can be made juridical, justiciable and enforceable.
What strikes the reader confronted with 480 pages of dense text and thousands of footnotes is the logical arrangement of distinct but interrelated issues, which the author tackles methodically, taking the reader by the hand onto the human rights arena, walking him about, elucidating the Realpolitik of conflict-prevention, peace building, sustainable development goals, achieving economic and trade justice, and concluding with a new functional paradigm of human rights. The book describes the tasks and possibilities of UN rapporteurs, addresses the mechanisms for the democratic pursuit of human rights, proposes concrete reforms to the Security Council and UN Secretariat, declares peace to be a human right, denounces extravagant military expenditures, pleads for disarmament for human security, states that the realization of the right of self-determination of peoples is a crucial conflict-prevention mechanism, demands that the “rule of law” evolve into the rule of justice, declares the right to information together with the right to truth to be a conditio sine qua non for a functioning democracy, proposes a charter of rights of whisteleblowers, who should be recognized as human rights defenders, reaffirms the international law prohibition of the use of force and of interference in the internal affairs of other States, considers the relationship between business and human rights, discusses the pros and cons of public-private partnerships, proposes an international tax authority, a financial transactions tax and the criminalization of tax havens, demands that investor-state-dispute settlement arbitrations be abolished as contrary to article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties as contra bonos mores, recommends reforming the Bretton Woods Institutions and ensuring that the World Bank and IMF work in tandem and not against human rights and development.
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A report published by Google’s transparency team last August made it clear reverse warrants weren’t a law enforcement fad, but rather a trend. Google is the recipient of pretty much every so-called reverse (or geofence) warrant issued, thanks to its vast stores of location info. When cops have a crime but no likely suspect, they have the option of turning everyone with a cell phone in the area into a suspect and working their way backwards from this list of data to find the most likely suspects.
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Jailed 77-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier has tested positive for COVID-19 less than a week after describing his prison conditions as a “torture chamber.” Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 while a member of the American Indian Movement. He has long maintained his innocence and is considered by Amnesty International as a political prisoner. We speak with his lawyer and former federal judge Kevin Sharp, who says Peltier’s case was riddled with misconduct, including witness intimidation and withholding exculpatory evidence. Sharp argues Peltier’s health, age and unfair trial make him the perfect candidate for executive clemency. “The legal remedies are no longer available,” says Sharp on Peltier’s case. “Now it’s time for the [Bureau of Prisons] and the president of the United States to fix this and send him home.”
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Pakistani police have widened their manhunt for two unidentified assailants who shot and killed a Christian priest and wounded another the previous day in the northwestern city of Peshawar
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What began last month with a promising trickle has turned into a torrent as workers in at least 16 Starbucks stores on Monday moved to unionize.
Starbucks Workers United—which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—announced Monday that workers at 16 of the coffee chain’s locations filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
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Employees at more than 50 Starbucks locations have petitioned to unionize shortly after workers at a Buffalo, N.Y., store first voted to do so last month.
Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that is organizing the Starbucks push, said Monday that an additional 15 locations filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board.
With the most recent announcement, 54 Starbucks locations in 19 states have petitioned to unionize, indicating that the organizing effort is spreading rapidly.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Back in 2020, we had a post explaining that Section 230 isn’t why Omegle has awful content, and getting rid of Section 230 wouldn’t change that. Omegle, if you don’t know, is a service that matches people, randomly, into video chats. It’s basically the same thing as Chatroulette, which got super famous for a very brief period of time years ago. Both services are somewhat infamous for the unfortunately high likelihood of randomly ending up in a “chat” with some awful dude masturbating on the other side of the screen. But, still, there are a lot of people who like using it just for random chats. I have friends who are entertainers who like to use it to test out material on random people. It has a purpose. But, sure there are some awful people on the site, like many sites. And, content moderation of live video chat is quite a challenge.
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Update:
A.B. 1400, California’s single-payer healthcare bill, has been withdrawn from consideration for a floor vote by the state Assembly in an eleventh-hour move that has shocked and outraged progressives.
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled against broadband companies seeking to block a state net neutrality law, and internet policy advocates are calling it a win for consumers in California.
The ruling comes after industry trade groups, including US Telecom, the cable industry groups NCTA and ACA Connects, and the wireless association CTIA, sought to overturn California’s law on the grounds that the Federal Communications Commission’s now-abandoned federal rules on net neutrality conflict with California’s state level rules.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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The reality that Sundance has become a playground for streamers, many of whom have content libraries to fill and cash to burn, isn’t exactly new. But the trend has become increasingly noticeable during the pandemic, which shook up the movie theater business and perhaps permanently shifted audience’s already changing tastes. Sundance, the premier destination for independently produced movies, isn’t programming the kind of films that people want to see in theaters, leaving streaming services to pounce on Park City’s best deals.
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The partnership with Viaplay — which covers Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — follows a string of similar deals recently signed by Vice Distribution with key platforms such as Pluto TV, Roku, Globo Brazil, and Discovery U.S. Hispanic. The company has just renewed its deals with All 4 in the U.K., SBS Australia as well as U.S. streamers Hulu and Discovery Plus. A first Vice Fast channel has also launched on The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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EPO Consulting on Patent Novelty Grace Periods [Ed: No, EPO consults nobody; it makes up its own mind and decisions behind closed doors but then runs "consultations" to pretend that it's negotiable (same thing EPO management does with staff)]
The EPO recently announced that it is conducting a survey regarding the EPO’s narrow and strict patent novelty grace period provisions amongst randomly selected European Patent applicants as well as consulting with user and stakeholder organisations.
Currently the grace period provisions for a European Patent (EP) only allow novelty to not be affected by disclosures resulting either from displaying the invention at an officially recognised exhibition or due to evident abuse of the rights of the inventor / applicant / assignee. For EP applications and for national validations of EP applications that received a decision to grant such disclosures are non-prejudicial to the absolute novelty requirement if they occurred no more than 6-months prior to the patent application filing date. The patent law in respect of novelty grace periods for the majority of EPC contracting states is the same as applies under the EPC. However, the patent law of EPC contracting states for patents that enter that state otherwise than via an EP application can be different to the EPC provisions. Some EPC contracting states apply the 6-month grace period in relation to the priority date for the same types of disclosures, while others apply a general grace period in respect of any disclosures by the inventor / applicant / assignee or due to evident abuse of their rights either for of period of 6 months or 12-months prior to the priority date.
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Software Patents
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Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has joined the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA). With the alliance, the company plans to protect open-source innovation by lowering the chance of patent litigation. In addition to Coinbase, Meta will also join COPA’s board.
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By joining the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), Meta has agreed not to enforce its core cryptocurrency patents — except in defense of litigation.
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As reported in an earlier ANGLE post, we discussed how 2021 saw a number of patent office developments with regard to whether a non-human entity could be considered an inventor under various patent regimes. Prior to 2021, several patent offices had considered this issue and found that A.I. could not be considered an inventor. In 2021, however, an Australian Court found that a non-human “inventor” is not inconsistent with inventorship under Australian law and South Africa issued a patent designating an A.I. system as the inventor.
It would appear at the end of 2021 that some patent offices were trending towards recognizing a non-human entity, like A.I. based technology, as an inventor. Could this trend continue?
Maybe not. With a decision just before Christmas of 2021 from European authorities, any such trend may have been stopped in its tracks.
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Copyrights
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Wired reported a couple years ago that copyright issues were preventing DVDs of the much-loved WKRP television sitcom from being released. The problem? The show depicted life at a radio station, and at radio stations, music tends to get played. The show’s creators licensed the tracks included in the show for the length of its […]
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There is widespread agreement that “WKRP in Cincinnati” was one of the greatest television sitcoms ever produced. The original episodes are rightly considered to be a national treasure and cultural landmark.
Copyright law madness has destroyed it forever – plain and simple.
Two years ago, I predicted that the original cut of the show would never be released on DVD due to the overly restrictive costs of re-licensing the popular music that was integral to the program.
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The iconic WKRP in Cincinnati is not being syndicated or available on DVD in its original format because it’s classic rock soundtrack is hamstrung by copyright laws and music licensing fees.
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As William Patry explains in his blog post on this case, the complexity of music copyright is that there are multiple rights and rights holders for each recording, including, at least, a copyright in the underlying composition (sometimes one for the music and one for the lyric) and a copyright in the performance. When dealing with video, the rights situation is even more complex, with layer upon layer likely owned by different people. These are the complications that go into re-releasing a TV show, but they are also the difficult shoals that have to be navigated when an academic wants to use existing video to teach filmmaking techniques, for example, or get permission to put a video into a digital archive.
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On Thursday, Legendary and Wheaton moved to dismiss the case after reaching a confidential settlement. The trial had been set for February.
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Four major manga publishers are preparing to sue US-based CDN company Cloudflare for allowing pirate sites to use its services. Rather than file a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States, Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa will file their complaint in Japan, demanding millions in damages and an end to the distribution of pirated content.
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Popular TV-torrent distribution group ETTV has vanished. The official site has been offline for more than a week and many bots already stopped uploading content to third-party sites weeks ago. ETTV has recovered from internal troubles in the past but, without a word from the admin, a comeback is not expected anytime soon.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 39691559e1df9dbaeff6a60398ff44e3
UPC is Untenable, Based on UPC Document
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Putting aside low-quality, easy-to-refute/debunk and very traditional EPO disinformation (self-congratulatory and self-serving false headlines, followed by mindless drivel in large quantities), the reality of the matter is that due to Brexit UPC is simply — as per the law — fundamentally doomed; any attempts to simply ignore or brush this aside are willful violations of the law, but then again such violations would be very much consistent with what we’ve been seeing for well over a decade at the EPO (they tell us that breaking the law is acceptable for the “greater good” and in the process they tarnish the EU’s reputation, weakening the EU’s integrity and worsening its legitimacy)
THE VIDEO above covers a document we published earlier today. A lot of the underlying issues were alluded to this morning, but in the video I describe them in a greater level of depth. In a nutshell, UPC/A never fulfilled its most basic requirements and nevertheless ‘Team UPC’ is trying to fake it.
Treaties and agreements at this exceptionally high level (such as passage of courts' power) aren’t meant to come into force by false declarations in the EPO’s Web site and dozens of sites of patent litigation firms. Constitutional courts are supposed to carefully examine the details and proper economic analyses should be carried out. As we’ve repeatedly said, we can expect to see (yet again) what happened in 2017 (5 years ago) when the matter got redirected/rerouted to the German Federal Constitutional Court. Even if ‘Team UPC’ and the EPO more or less ‘bought’ all the so-called ‘news’ sites (to disseminate falsehoods and spread jingoism) that ought not affect the underlying facts. Sure, they’ve used the media to influence/pressure judges and even put potential moles inside courts, but they do so at the expense of the perception of integrity and lawfulness at the EU. If they carry on doing this, the EU itself will suffer. Having Benoît Battistelli‘s buddy inside the Commission has done enough harm already. And it's not even over.
“…”baffle them with bullshit” is part of the ‘fake it till you make it’ ideology. Many in the so-called business community admire that and aspire to emulate it.”
–Techrights associateAn associate of ours has noted that «”baffle them with bullshit” is part of the ‘fake it till you make it’ ideology. Many in the so-called business community admire that and aspire to emulate it.»
For them, it’s a case of outnumbering (or drowning out) facts with lies, as this is how they try to win, essentially by sheer repetition of lies; it is a mentally tiring, sometimes outright exhausting, battle for those who stick to facts. The exhaustion is seen as desirable; “that’s one of their goals,” the associate said, “but “Illegitimi non carborundum”…”
They have repeatedly done this to judges, too. They pressure them to issue decisions before facts are properly understood and before the ramifications are known. We’ve covered examples of that over the years. The pressure is subsidised by ‘Team UPC’. It’s worse than lobbying as they turn media sites into propaganda mills and “attack sites”. In the video above I mention what Sheldon Adelson did to the media when judges weren’t leaning his way. █
That’s António Campinos fronting for ‘Team UPC’ only 3 days after he became EPO President. As if this was his sole goal and what he was given the job for (despite a lack of experience in patents). He already knew about Brexit, which preceded the first constitutional complaint in Germany (2017-2020; two more came later in an abundantly toxic political atmosphere), so unlike his father, who fought against the European Empire and against colonialism (the origin of the name “campinos” was once apt) the young Campinos, António, chose to basically become an occupier and shameless henchman for robber barons, opportunistically undoing his father’s legacy for personal gain, both by lying and by breaking all the rules (subverting democracy itself). Source of photograph: Twitter account of “Premium IP [sic] Conferences Producer.” (To quote the Twitter profile’s full description; it’s basically a lobbying facilitator)
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Posted in IRC Logs at 3:09 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
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Bulletin for Yesterday
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Law, Patents at 3:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There’s only one country called “United Kingdom”
Summary: Carefully examining, based on or right from the worse’s own mouth, why UPC cannot proceed; those who try to proceed in violation of the law (and against the Vienna Convention, never mind constitutional violations and doctored 'studies') are only embarrassing themselves and discrediting the notion that Europe respects the Rule of Law, even international law
THE “Protocol to the Agreement on Unified Patent Court on provisional application” [PDF], which we present below as text, isn’t too convenient to António Campinos, who misuses the EPO‘s Web site to lobby for Team UPC; it’s all over the front page of the EPO’s site in at least 5 (maybe 6) “news” items and “site updates”. Just like Benoît Battistelli before him, he’s willing to break the law, violate constitutions, and these people even suggested rewriting (retrofitting) constitutions to allow the UPC. Their goal isn't to help SMEs but to ram European software patents down our throats whilst inviting patent trolls to Europe, mostly to Germany, to blackmail companies with “unitary” effect (i.e. outside Germany as well). Who stands to benefit? Don’t check the doctored ‘studies’, which are doctored by admission of those who did them (based on leaks).
“It’s trying to compensate for actual facts using an endless barrage of fake news headlines (disinformation), but truth remains the strongest disinfectant.”There are so many different issues and obstacles preventing the UPC from becoming a reality; even Team UPC knows it (it’s fully aware), but it hopes nobody will pay attention. It’s trying to compensate for actual facts using an endless barrage of fake news headlines (disinformation), but truth remains the strongest disinfectant.
Here is the PDF above as text/HTML:
Protocol to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on provisional application
The undersigning Signatory States of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court, hereinafter referred to as the Parties,
CONSIDERING that the Unified Patent Court should become fully operational upon the entry into force of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court;
CONSIDERING the need to provide a smooth transition into the operational phase and ensure the proper functioning of the Unified Patent Court before the entry into force of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court;
ACKNOWLEDGING that the provisional application of a treaty is an instrument suitable to ensure such a smooth transition;
ACKNOWLEDGING that the use of provisional application is in accordance with customary international law;
ACKNOWLEDGING that such provisional application can be limited to certain parts of a treaty where the negotiating States have in some manner so agreed;
CONSIDERING that provisional application should only come into force when 13 Signatory States of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court have approved this protocol and only among those Signatory States where the Governments have received parliamentary approval to ratify the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
CONSIDERING that the provisional application should concern only the institutional, organisational and financial provisions of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and should be limited to what is strictly necessary to ensure the smooth transition into the operational phase.
HAVE AGREED AS FOLLOWS
Article 1 – Provisional application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement
Article 1-2, 4-5, 6(1), 7, 10-19, 35(1, 3 and 4), 36-41 and 71(3) of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and Article 1-7(1), 7(5), 9-18, 20(1), 22-28, 30, 32 and 33 of the Statute of the Unified Patent Court shall enter into provisional application among the Parties that have completed the requisite procedure referred to under Article 3(1), upon the entry into force of this Protocol.
Article 2 – Signature and consent to be bound
(1) This Protocol shall be open for signature from October 1 2015 by any Signatory State of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
(2) Consent to be bound by this Protocol may be expressed, without prejudice to paragraph 3 and Article 3(1)b, by
a. signature; or
b. signature subject to ratification, acceptance or approval followed by ratification, acceptance or approval.
(3) Consent to be bound by the provisional application of the articles of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court mentioned under Article 1 of this Protocol may be expressed by a unilateral declaration.
(4) Instruments of ratification, acceptance or approval of this Protocol or the unilateral declaration mentioned in paragraph 3 shall be deposited with the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, hereinafter referred to as the depositary.
Article 3 – Entry into force
(1) This Protocol shall enter into force the day after 13 Signatory States of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court including Germany, France and the United Kingdom, have either ratified, or informed the depositary that they have received parliamentary approval to ratify, the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and have
a. signed in accordance with Article 2(2)a. or signed, and ratified, accepted or approved this Protocol in accordance with Article 2(2)b.; or
b. declared by means of a unilateral declaration or in any other manner that they consider themselves bound by the provisional application of the articles of the Unified Patent Court Agreement mentioned under Article 1 of this Protocol.
(2) In respect of any Party which subsequently after the entry into force of this Protocol completes the procedure referred to in (1), this Protocol shall have effect on that Party from the date when the Party has completed the said procedure.
(3) This Protocol and the provisional application it prescribes shall have effect only with regard to Parties having completed the requisite procedure referred to in (1).
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned, being duly authorized thereto, have signed this Protocol.
Done at Brussels October 1st 2015 in the English, French and German languages, all three texts being equally authentic, in a single copy, which shall be deposited with the depositary who shall transmit a certified true copy to all Signatory States of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
Authored by “UPC” (see metadata), the document was created using “Microsoft Word 2007″ (yes, software from 15 years ago!) and it speaks of “unilateral declaration” without taking any constitutional aspects into account.
This isn’t about creating a legal system; it’s about breaking the legal system. █
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