02.08.22
Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Over the past 18 months, we have been on a roller-coaster ride developing futex2, a new set of system calls. As part of this prolonged effort, the futex_waitv() syscall has now successfully landed in Linux 5.16.
A followup of the initial futex syscall, this new interface aims to overcome long term issues that have been limiting the way applications use the Linux kernel. But what exactly is futex? This series of posts will help answer that and other questions around this tricky function.
If you’ve ever run strace in a multithread program, chances are that the trace was filled with futex() calls. If you are a Linux gamer trying to increase the performance of your setup, you have probably heard of futex as well.
Read on as I take a deep dive into this important system call and how it is used to process synchronization functions.
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Applications
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The popularity of Portable Document Format (PDF) files has increased drastically in recent years. Being one of the most secure file formats to share on the internet, PDF files rapidly increase. Almost every Linux distribution is bundled with a basic PDF reader, but these have some limitations.
So today, we will look at the best feature-rich PDF reader you can use on Linux. Thanks to famous developer communities like GNOME and KDE, many PDF readers are available for Linux. These PDF readers come with features to enable users to accomplish more tasks and just read documents, while some come with very basic features.
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SIG Multicluster is the SIG focused on how Kubernetes concepts are expanded and used beyond the cluster boundary. Historically, Kubernetes resources only interacted within that boundary – KRU or Kubernetes Resource Universe (not an actual Kubernetes concept). Kubernetes clusters, even now, don’t really know anything about themselves or, about other clusters. Absence of cluster identifiers is a case in point. With the growing adoption of multicloud and multicluster deployments, the work SIG Multicluster doing is gaining a lot of attention. In this blog, Jeremy Olmsted-Thompson, Google and Chris Short, AWS discuss the interesting problems SIG Multicluster is solving and how you can get involved. Their initials JOT and CS will be used for brevity.
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We’ve released a new video! Ramon talks about the new perspective assistant in Krita 5…
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Rufus is a popular and free-to-use tool to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs. Rufus is mostly used to create a bootable USB drive so that you can boot your system from the USB-like Pendrive. Sadly, Rufus is not available for the Linux-based operating system.
There are many best tools to create a bootable USB disk from ISO for Linux-based operating systems. In this post, we will discuss some of the best Rufus alternatives for Linux in 2022.
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Instructionals/Technical
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My story is almost identical, except the array in question was much smaller, but to make matters worse it was mostly cobbled together with old hardware, including drives, so when the array died, there were a lot of bad drives.
My array started life as 15 750GB drives in a RAID-Z2. As the 750GB drives failed, they were replaced with 1TB drives. Unfortunately, I continued to use a mix of previously-used drives and some Seagate drives that apparently weren’t Seagate’s best work. The end result was that drives were failing rather often, and due to like of time, attention, and a ready supply of spare drives, I wasn’t great at replacing them when they failed.
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Today we are looking at how to install LibreSprite 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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If you are looking for the option to run android on your PC then you are in the very right place. This post is dedicated to the list of best android OS for 64 bit PC and 32 bit PC.
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GitOps describes a way of operating and managing software using methodologies rooted in the Git version control system. Use of GitOps-based workflows makes it easier to develop, deploy, maintain, and collaborate on software by requiring the system’s characteristics to be defined as files in a Git repository.
Git’s role as the single source of truth is implied by the terminology. However, the actual implementation of GitOps-driven processes has historically been open to interpretation. This ambiguity has now been resolved by the OpenGitOps standards, a CNCF-backed attempt to define the principles that lead to repeatable GitOps systems.
In this article, we’ll look at what the principles are, why they matter, and how you can use them to build scalable and maintainable software. The standards have been developed using insights from over 90 leading companies and interested parties in the GitOps Working Group.
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Grafana is an open-source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces collected from your applications. It’s a cloud-native solution for quickly assembling data dashboards that let you inspect and analyze your stack.
Grafana connects to a variety of data sources such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, ElasticSearch, and traditional relational database engines. Complex dashboards are created by using these sources to select relevant fields from your data. Dashboards can incorporate a varied range of visualization components such as graphs, heat maps, and histograms.
In this article, we’ll cover what Grafana does and when it should be used. It’s important to recognize there’s no universal use case though: Grafana’s used to analyze your data, so every installation will work differently and be tailored to the specific dataset it’s showing.
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The Linux Tail Command is often a go to tool when troubleshooting a Linux system or many other devices such as VMware ESXi hosts or Linux/Unix based appliances.
The tail command allows us to output the last lines written to a log file, which gives us a quick way to check what the last events written to the file were. This is very useful when troubleshooting an issue in real time, as it lets us see what has just happened or, as we will see, can let us watch the log in real time.
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Learn the steps to install MySQL Workbench software on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 using the terminal to manage MySQL database via the graphical user interface. MySQL Workbench is a graphical modeling tool and development system for MySQL databases.
Managing and modeling multiple databases is complicated using the command line interface of MySQL. Therefore, to make things easy Oracle also offers a GUI software platform called – MySQL Workbench. It offers a graphical user interface and a set of tools for working with MySQL databases. It provides extensive functions for daily work with the databases and can be used to design, create, edit, administrate and display databases. The software is able to extract structures from already existing databases and reproduce them clearly.
MySQL Workbench is available in a free and a commercial edition. Developers can visually design databases offline and host them on a MySQL server. For advanced users who need additional functions, extensions with scripting languages can be integrated into the tool.
It is cross-platform software, hence can be used on computers with the operating systems Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx PageSpeed Module on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, The Google PageSpeed module, also known as mod_PageSpeed, is an open-source Apache HTTP or Nginx server-level package with modules that helps optimize your site. The Pagespeed module improves the performance and speed of your website by optimizing static files on your websites. The Pagespeed module optimizes images on your websites, minify static files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Matomo open-source analytics platform on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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Prometheus is a free open source software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It was originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company. To emphasize this, and to clarify the project’s governance structure, Prometheus joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016 as the second hosted project, after Kubernetes.
Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e. metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels. Metrics are numeric measurements, time series mean that changes are recorded over time. What users want to measure differs from application to application. For a web server it might be request times, for a database it might be number of active connections or number of active queries etc.
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Tutorial to learn the steps for installing PHP Larvel framework on Rocky Linux or Almalinux 8 using the command terminal for developing web apps.
PHP doesn’t need an introduction, it has been around for many years powering web applications that need a dynamic programming language to work but one thing it is definitely not (anymore): modern.
Programming languages such as Ruby and Python have become increasingly popular, especially in recent years. They are “cool” and appeal better to the next generation of coders. Whereas it is unfortunate PHP is getting a bit old and you can tell. This is exactly where Laravel comes into play. We can consider it as a new generation PHP framework and that’s what makes it so popular. Inspired by Ruby on Rails and .NET, Taylor Otwell created Laravel to get the most out of PHP and to prove that more is possible. Also, he wasn’t satisfied with the other PHP frameworks. They are no longer contemporary. He doesn’t only want to help developers be more productive but also to show that clean programming with PHP can also be fun again.
In this informative article, let’s touch the initial phase to work with Laravel is to install it on RedHat based Linux systems.
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Games
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In the specific case of the Steam Deck, the Fortnite foul is the use of Linux. Sure, the Steam Deck can (in theory) run Windows, but it’s not optimized for it because it comes with the Linux-based SteamOS by default. Tim’s stated concern is that Linux makes it too easy for cheaters to cheat, so Fortnite simply won’t be showing up on the Steam Deck.
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The absolutely magnificent strategy game that is Crusader Kings III has today grown much bigger, with the Crusader Kings III: Royal Court DLC out now plus a big free update.
Bringing even more role-playing possibilities, Royal Court brings on the virtual fun of hearing pleas from subjects, and dealing with all the political fun that comes with having a court full of people who need to be kept happy. You need to climb the ladder a bit though to really show off, as the Throne Room is of course only available for those at the top, so time to get back-stabbing or marrying someone nice perhaps?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Version 5.24 of the KDE-based Plasma desktop is out; this is a long-term-support release. Changes include various task-manager improvements, a new overview mode, fingerprint-reader support, improved Wayland support, and more.
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The KDE Plasma Desktop packages have been updated to 5.24.0. This is a service release update.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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You have probably started to install a CentOS Stream 9 cloud image, and completely forgot all the things you learned this time around. No worries, past-self is going to write these down for your usage.
First off, download the image you want. On the day we are writing this, the latest image is http://cloud.centos.org/centos/9-stream/x86_64/images/CentOS-Stream-GenericCloud-9-20220207.0.x86_64.qcow2 but it will most likely be something much newer. They don’t put a ‘latest’ in the directory, so open a browser, search for qcow2, and then instead of searching through 4000 entries from 2021-08-30, press the up-arrow and jump to the last entry on the web-page.
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Recently, the playback on Musescore became distorted. It was sped up, the notes were dissonant (no that is not my writing!) and they seemed to crackle and pop.
When both systems I have exhibited the same problem, I knew it was an upgrade issue, and not my hardware.
This phenomenon seems to have occurred a few times over the years, and I tried many of the recommended fixes. What finally worked was changing the output from PulseAudio to Jack.
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This year’s Red Hat 2022 Global Tech Outlook report came with some interesting insights, including that AI/ML, edge and serverless computing are top priority emerging technologies for the year ahead.
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How many qubits do you need in a quantum computer? Plenty, if you want to anything useful. However, today, we have to settle for a lot fewer than we would like. But IBM’s new Eagle has the most of its type of quantum computer: 127-qubits. Naturally, they plan to do even more work, and you can see a preview of “System Two” in the video below.
The 127 qubit number is both impressively large and depressingly small. Each qubit increases the amount of work a conventional computer has to do to simulate the machine by a factor of two. The hope is to one day produce quantum computers that would be impractical to simulate using conventional computers. That’s known as quantum supremacy and while several teams have claimed it, actually achieving it is a subject of debate.
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January 2022 was another excellent month for Enable Sysadmin. During the month, we published 23 new articles and received nearly 798,000 reads from more than 505,000 readers across the site.
Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles of January to give you a chance to catch up on any of the great content you might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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This amendment to Christopher Bullock’s iconic quote reflects today’s reality, for everybody. Ubuntu 22.04 will be available on April 21, 2022, and System Administrators working in organisations running Ubuntu 20.04 desktops need controls to comply with their release management and change management policies. Staggering upgrades is a common practice to ensure the best IT support experience.
Fortunately, it is simple to prevent the new Ubuntu version upgrade notification through the graphical user interface and command line. This configuration can be applied to many machines easily, and stop users from updating to the next version of Ubuntu before their scheduled upgrade window.
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Many US military, government or critical national infrastructure organisation workloads that require FIPS compliance are also required to be deployed in air-gapped environments to provide an extra layer of protection.
In order to reduce operational and security risks by automating hardening, patch management and compliance to security standards like CIS and DISA-STIG as well as the FIPS 140-2 certifications, we’ve developed Ubuntu Advantage for your private infrutracture and Ubuntu Pro for cloud.
In this blog we will look at what having a FIPS compliant instance means and the different ways you have to enable that in your disconnected environment.
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One of the core concepts of snaps is cross-distro compatibility. Developers can build their snaps once, and they should run well on more than 40 different Linux distros. But how does one take care of all the required runtime dependencies? By providing them inside the snap, as part of the bundle.
In the snap ecosystem, the functionality is satisfied through stage packages, a list of libraries and other runtime components declared for every application included inside the snap. What makes things rather interesting is how this list is created. In this blog post, we want to take you through the journey of dependency mapping, and how Snapcraft, the command-line tool used to build snaps, can assist you in the process.
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Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer.
To test the networked booting feature, you’ll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to an SD card—Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps.
Once it’s installed, there are a number of conditions that have to be met for network booting to work. It only works on Pi 4 boards (and Pi 4-derived devices, like the Pi 400 computer) that have both a keyboard and an Ethernet cable connected. If you already have an SD card or USB drive with a bootable OS connected, the Pi will boot from those as it normally does so it doesn’t slow down the regular boot process. And you’ll be limited to the OS image selection in the official Pi imager, though this covers a wide range of popular distributions, including Ubuntu, LibreELEC, a couple of retro-gaming emulation OSes, and Homebridge. For other OSes, downloading the image on a separate PC and installing it to an SD card manually is still the best way to go.
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Avnet’s Linux-friendly “MSC C6B-ALP” Basic Type 6 module runs on Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake H-, P-, and U-series processors with up to 64GB DDR5, optional NVMe, and support for quad displays, 4x USB 3.1 Gen2, 2x SATA, 2.5GbE, and PCIe Gen4 x3 and x8.
Avnet Embedded, which has previously released Intel-based modules such as its 9th Gen, COM-HPC form-factor MSC HCC-CFLS, announced a COM Express Basic Type 6 module a few weeks ago that supports Intel’s 7nm 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs. The MSC C6B-ALP is the first product we have seen to support the lower-end Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-U series of processors. The module also supports the mid-range Alder Lake-H, which we have seen on Congatec’s Conga-TC670 Type 6 and Conga-HPC/cALP COM-HPC modules and Adlink’s Express-ADP Type 6 and COM-HPC-cADP modules. Congatec’s modules also support the higher-end Alder Lake-S.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The ability to control magnetism is very powerful and acts as the basis for huge swaths of modern technology. Without electromagnetism, we likely would never have progressed into the digital age — we wouldn’t even have electric motors. Now engineers from MIT CSAIL are using electromagnetism for something new: reconfigurable robots.
ElectroVoxel robots are cube-shaped modules that can self-assemble into more complex shapes. Each robot has electromagnet coils lining its edges. An Arduino Nano with a wireless transceiver drives those electromagnets, allowing for untethered operation. Power comes from LiPo batteries and the frames are 3D-printed. By controlling the current and polarity of each electromagnet, the robots can cling to each other. They can also move by using an attractive edge connection for a pivot point and repulsion for actuation. They can use that movement for basic locomotion or to reconfigure into new shapes.
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Rahmanshaber is known for its DIY Raspberry Pi handheld PCs such as MutantC v4, but MutantW V1 is a completely different device as an ESP32-based DIY open-source smartwatch that he designed with Autodesk Fusion 360 and EAGLE.
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Everything is open-source under an MIT license including the EAGLE design files, the 3D printed case made with Fusion 360, and the firmware programmed in the Arduino IDE.
The smartwatch is equipped with a 1.7-inch IPS LCD display (non-touch), two hardware buttons, a NeoPixel RGB LED, a vibration motor, as being powered by an ESP32 SoC offers both 2.4GHz WiFi 4 Bluetooth LE connectivity.
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Welcome, February –we’re opening the month with another great week. Here’s what the Apache community has been up to…
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FSF
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January 20, 2022 marked the end of our most recent fundraising campaign and associate member drive. All said and done, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) achieved a benchmark of 390 new members.
January 20, 2022 marked the end of our most recent fundraising campaign and associate member drive. All said and done, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) achieved a benchmark of 390 new members. Of these new members, we had a dozen “gift memberships” — another great way to give friends, family, and colleagues the gift of freedom.
Most importantly, new memberships mean new connections in the movement. We are grateful for all forms of participation in the free software movement — everything from contributing to the Free Software Directory, to contributing code, to taking action in activities such as last year’s International Day Against DRM (IDAD), which took aim at Disney+’s unethical streaming platform — we wholeheartedly appreciate everyone’s effort.
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Programming/Development
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Technical Artists have become the bridge between art and code. Without Technical Artists, UI Designers and Software Developers cannot create immersive 3D experiences effectively. Does that make Technical Artists the new Kingmakers of User Experience?
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Yes, I know, Qt 6.3 isn’t out yet. But as the first beta was just released, it is a good time to start speaking about the new features. In this blog post, I will list my three favourite new features available in Qt Quick 3D particles module.
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So I was asked “what’s the difference between python and C?” and I was like what?? I actually do not know!!! Then i did a little research and… let’s find out what I learnt.
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So this is a heads-up to all those using Debian for their Django unit tests. Model Mommy will no longer get updates upstream, so model mommy will not be able to support Django4. Updates will only be done, upstream, in the Model Bakery package which already supports Django4.
Bakery is not a drop-in replacement. Model Bakery includes a helper script to migrate: https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-model-bakery/-/blob/master/utils/from_mommy_to_bakery.py
This is being packaged in /usr/share/ in the upcoming python3-model-bakery package.
It is a tad confusing that model-mommy is at version 1.6.0 but model-bakery is at version 1.4.0 but that only reinforces that Django apps using Model Mommy will need editing to move to Model Bakery.
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The ability to write code is a huge differentiator for every job role in an enterprise Linux environment. As an Operations and DevOps manager, I was constantly challenged to improve my team’s programming skills, and the team genuinely wanted to be more proficient.
But how?
Structured training is a standard answer: take a course! Our company, like many, invested enormously in learning resources. I’d sit with an engineer one-on-one and we’d ponder the online portal together, puzzling out the most appropriate Python learning path.
There are two issues, however. Problem one: classroom material is almost immediately forgotten, if not directly applied. Problem two: I’d lose visibility of progress for days, weeks, or even months. I’d find out too late the material was inappropriate or too advanced.
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This is a few days old, but evidently there is still need for this message: Konstantin Ryabitsev explains how it is easy to cause a commit to appear falsely to be part of a GitHub repository…
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Under the hood, git repositories are a bunch of objects — blobs, trees, and commits. Blobs are file contents, trees are directory listings that establish the relationship between file names and the blobs, and commits are like still frames in a movie reel that show where all the trees and blobs were at a specific point in time. Each next commit refers to the hash of the previous commit, which is how we know in what order these still frames should be put together to make a movie.
Each of these objects has a hash value, which is how they are stored inside the git directory itself (look in .git/objects). When git was originally designed, over a decade ago, it didn’t really have a concept of “branches” — there was just a symlink HEAD pointing to the latest commit. If you wanted to work on several things at once, you simply cloned the repository and did it in a separate directory with its own HEAD. Cloning was a very efficient operation, as through the magic of hardlinking, hundreds of clones would take up about as much room on your disk as a single one.
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Python
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Although Python turned 30 years old last year (2021), only in the last few years has it enjoyed the great explosion of adoption, growth, and forward-thinking development that we’ve come to associate with the language. Many features of Python have remained unchanged since its inception, but with every passing year, and every new edition of Python, along come new ways of doing things and new libraries that take advantage of those advances.
So Python has its old ways and its new ways. Naturally, it makes sense to learn how to work with Python using its most modern and convenient features. Here we’ll run down the key concepts you need to understand to write modern Python in 2022 — software that uses Python’s latest and greatest idioms, concepts, and capabilities.
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A lamp used to be simple thing: just stick a filament in a glass bulb, pass a current through it and behold! Let there be light. A bigger lamp meant a larger filament, taking more power and a larger envelope. Now we’ve moved on a bit, and it’s all about LEDs. There really isn’t such a thing as ‘just an LED,’ these are semiconductor devices, made from relatively exotic materials (OK, not just plain old silicon anyway) and there is quite a lot of variety to choose from, and a bit of complexity in selecting them.
For [Torque Test Channel] the efficiency of conversion from electrical power to radiant power (or flux) is the headline figure of interest, which prompted them to buy a bunch of lamps to compare. To do the job justice that requires what’s known in the business as an integrating sphere (aka an Ulbricht sphere), but being a specialist device, it’s a bit pricey for the home gamer. So naturally, they decided to build the thing themselves.
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This is a compound walking foot machine. Let’s break that down. ‘Walking foot’ means that that the foot — the many-varied and interchangeable part that holds the fabric down to the bed — has a set of feed dogs that help push the fabric along the from top side at the same time that the regular feed dogs feed the fabric from underneath. The ‘compound’ part refers to the little middle bit, which moves up and down at the same time as the needle and also walks the fabric along.
Here’s a great visual explanation of the differences between drop-feed, walking foot, and compound walking foot machines. Compound walking foot machines are great for my needs in that they give an even stitch through multiple thick layers of fabric, which is what I need to sew vinyl, canvas, and leather. Like I said in the first post, industrial machines are purpose-built. This one is for heavy duty use, and it spent many years doing upholstery work. It even made a motorcycle seat!
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There are many of us who might have toyed with the idea of building a car, indeed perhaps more than a few readers might even have taken to the road in a machine of their own creation. Perhaps it was a design of your own, or maybe a kit car. We think that very few of you will have gone as far as [Vũ Văn Nam] and his friends in Vietnam. In their latest video they compress a year’s work into 47 minutes as they craft a beautifully built replica of a Bugatti supercar. If you haven’t got a few million dollars but you’ve got the time, this is the video for you.
The skill involved in making a scratch-built car is impressive enough, but where there guys take it to the next level is in their clay modeling to create the moulds for the fibreglass bodywork. Taking their local clay and a steel frame, they carefully hand-sculpt the car with the skill of an Italian master stylist, before clothing it in fibreglass and removing the clay. The resulting fibreglass shell can be used to make the finished bodywork, which they do with an exceptional attention to detail. It might be a steel-tube home-made spaceframe with a wheezy 4-cylinder Toyota engine behind the driver instead of a 1000 HP powerhouse, but it surely looks the part!
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Hardware
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It doesn’t happen all the time, but over the years we’ve noticed that once we feature a project, a number of very similar builds often find themselves in our tip line before too long. Of course, these aren’t copycats; not enough time has passed for some competitive maker to spin up their own version. No, most of the time it’s somebody else who was working on a very similar project in isolation, and who now for the first time realizes they aren’t alone.
Thanks to this phenomenon we’re happy to report that yet another 3D printable magnetic levitation switch has come to light. Developed by [famichu], this take on the concept is markedly different from what we’ve seen previously, which in a way makes the whole thing even more impressive. It’s one thing for multiple hackers to develop similar projects independently of each other, as the end goal often dictates the nature of the design itself. But here we’re seeing a project that took the same core concepts and ran in a different direction.
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Long ago when digital portables where in their infancy, people were already loath to type on tiny keyboards, stylus or not. So Palm made a sweet little portable keyboard that would fold up and fit in your cargo pocket. And what do we have now for luxury typing on the go? Rubber roll-up jelly keebs? That’s a hard no from this scribe.
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I’ve had a fairly varied early part of my career in the semiconductors business: a series of events caused me to jump disciplines a little bit, and after one such event, I landed in the test engineering department at Philips Semiconductors. I was tasked with a variety of oddball projects, supporting engineering work, fixing broken ATE equipment, and given a absolute ton of training: Good times! Here’s a story that comes straight off the oddball pile.
We needed to assemble a crack team of experts and high-tail it to deepest darkest Wales, and sort out an urgent production problem. The brief was that the wafer probe yield was disastrous and the correlation wafer was not giving the correct results. Getting to the punch line is going to require some IC fabrication background, but if you like stories about silicon, or red-bearded test engineers, it’s worth it.
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An interesting research project out of MIT shows that it’s possible to embed machine-readable labels into 3D printed objects using nothing more than an FDM printer and filament that is transparent to IR. The method is being called InfraredTags; by embedding something like a QR code or ArUco markers into an object’s structure, that label can be detected by a camera and interactive possibilities open up.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Microsoft has released updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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A Mac-using client wanted to save a Microsoft Word .docx as a plain text document. The .docx was stored in an iCloud folder. Downloading and opening the file in Word for Mac, the client chose “Save without formatting (.txt)”. What could go wrong?
Well, first of all, the .docx original had carriage return + linefeed (CRLF) line endings. The saved text file had only carriage returns. Remember CR-only line endings? From OS 9 and earlier?
Second, the .docx original was in UTF-8 encoding, according to the “properties” .xml files in the .docx archive and my own character encoding check. The saved text, on the other hand…
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Citrix has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Hypervisor. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to cause a denial-of-service condition.
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Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Adobe products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Security
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In practice, attackers need not go nearly as far as rubber-hose cryptanalysis to obtain passwords; a simple inspection checkpoint, verbal threat or subpoena is often sufficiently coercive.
Most security schemes facilitate the coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files. This allows specific and enforceable demands to be made: “Give us the passwords for these three encrypted files with names A, B and C, or else…”. In other words, security often focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data, but lacks deniability.
A scheme with deniability would make even the existence of secret files difficult to prove. This makes it difficult for an attacker to formulate a coherent demand: “There’s no evidence of undisclosed data. Should we even bother to make threats?” A lack of evidence makes it more difficult to make specific and enforceable demands.
Thus, assuming the ultimate goal of security is to protect the safety of users as human beings, and not just their files, enhanced security should come hand-in-hand with enhanced plausible deniability (PD). PD arms users with a set of tools they can use to navigate the social landscape of security, by making it difficult to enumerate all the secrets potentially contained within a device, even with deep forensic analysis.
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Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang introduces PDDB, a database meant to allow users to (plausibly) deny the existence of specific data within it.
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Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, and distinguished members of the Committee: thank you for the invitation to appear this morning.
My name is David Nalley, and I am the President of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF is a non-profit public-benefit charity established in 1999 to facilitate the development of open source software. Thanks to the ingenuity and collaboration of our community of programmers, the ASF has grown into one of the largest open source organizations in the world. Today, more than 650,000 contributors around the world contribute to more than 350 ongoing projects, comprising more than 237 million lines of code.
Open source is not simply a large component of the software industry — it is one of the foundations of the modern global economy. Whether they realize it or not, most businesses, individuals, non-profits, or government agencies depend on open source; it is an indispensable part of America’s digital infrastructure.
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We learned in my previous sudo blog that cvtsudoers is not just for LDAP. Version 1.9.9 of sudo extends the querying possibilities of cvtsudoers further and adds a brand new feature: merging multiple sudoers files into one. Both are especially useful when you have complex configurations. Querying lets you to better understand what the various rules allow in your sudoers file. Merging helps you to combine multiple configurations into one, so you do not have to maintain a separate sudoers file on each of your hosts.
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The report, which was produced in partnership with OpenSSF, SPDX, and OpenChain, is the first in a series of research projects aimed at understanding “the challenges and opportunities” of securing open source software supply chains.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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INVESTIGATORS WITH THE U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service frequently work to thwart a variety of environmental offenses, from illegal deforestation to hunting without a license. While these are real crimes, they’re not typically associated with invasive phone hacking tools. But Fish and Wildlife agents are among the increasingly broad set of government employees who can now break into encrypted phones and siphon off mounds of data with technology purchased from the surveillance company Cellebrite.
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Cellebrite itself boasted about its penetration of the executive branch ahead of becoming a publicly traded company in August. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that it had over 2,800 government customers in North America. To secure that reach, The Intercept has found, the company has partnered with U.S. law enforcement associations and hired police officers, prosecutors, and Secret Service agents to train people in its technology. Cellebrite has also marketed its technology to law firms and multinational corporations for investigating employees. In the SEC filing, it claimed that its clients included six out of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies and six of the 10 largest oil refiners.
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The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, just warned that if the current EU legal framework remains, and other law proposals now discussed by the EU are approved, the company would “probably have to walk away from the continent”.
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Imagine having the most obnoxious in-laws one could have. You know, the kind of folks that show up to your door any moment, always uninvited, always try to eavesdrop, always stir up quarrels between you and everybody else for the fun of it, always spoil your kids, and in the best case always are a huge waste of your time.
Yes, I know this can be real hard to imagine, but stay with me for a minute. Imagine relatives like this saying, by their own initiative, “unless you always eat all the cake we bring, every time WE bring, we won’t visit anymore”. What would you do?
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Environment
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Energy
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[Cody] of Cody’sLab has been bit by what he describes as the algae growing bug. We at Hackaday didn’t know that was a disease floating around, but we’ll admit that we’re not surprised after the last few years. So not content to stick to the small-time algae farms, [Cody] decided to scale up and build a whole algae panel.
Now, why would you want to grow algae? There are edible varieties of algae, you can extract oils from it, and most importantly, it can be pumped around in liquid form. To top it off, all it needs is just sunlight, carbon dioxide, and a few minerals to grow. Unlike those other complicated land-based organisms that use photosynthesis, algae don’t need to build any structure to hold themselves up or collect sunlight; it floats.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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IN MYANMAR, THE phone records of pro-democracy activists connect them together like suspects on a cork board. When many of those activists fled the military crackdown and went into hiding after the coup in February 2021, they believed the trails of phone calls, mapping out their association with family members and colleagues, were safe on networks outside the military’s control. Now they claim that data is in peril.
Like all telecoms companies, Myanmar’s four major operators keep a record of phone call metadata—information about who calls who, when, and for how long. Pro-democracy campaigner Kyaw (not his real name) did not worry much about his metadata even when the coup shocked the country. The activist, who asked for his real name not to be published because he is afraid of being arrested by the military, believed his personal data was safe because he was using a sim card made by Telenor, a multinational headquartered in Norway—a country he associated with democracy and human rights.
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One year ago, as the Myanmar military sent tanks down the streets and rounded up government officials and activists, it shut down the internet, mobile phone networks, radio, and television channels. As it plunged the country into a communications blackhole, the junta launched concerted assaults at already threadbare protections online to throttle expression and information-sharing. Today, the military is ramping up efforts to cement authoritarian control of online space, alongside violent crackdowns, and serious human rights violations. This is a digital coup, and the world must resist.
Internet shutdowns continue to be wielded to shroud serious human rights violations. Soon after the coup and lasting almost three months, the military imposed near-complete nationwide internet shutdowns — including nightly communications blackouts and online media and messaging platform bans. The people in Myanmar were not able to communicate with loved ones, share information, report on human rights violations, or seek help amidst an emergency. Contrary to the principles of net neutrality and the norm of a free internet, the junta lifted some disruptions to favor its own “white-list” of organisations and corporations that could access the internet, while the rest of the country suffered the consequences of these discriminatory and unequal shutdowns. The military continue to order regional shutdowns — particularly where active armed conflicts are ongoing, in attempts to conceal thousands of reports of assault, killings, arrests, detention, enforced disappearance, ill-treatment, torture, torching and gender-based violence committed by the junta.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The lesson is evident here, not to trust 3rd party with your RSS feed or content. I will never forgive Google for erasing Google Reader RSS/Atom feed aggregator. I lost many readers because of that move.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 5a2f0b21ed2907b883a8c5fd60ece81f
The End of an Era at the EPO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Having published the message from the union, I now interject my personal interpretation of the situation; I’ve decided to do a video or several videos about the subject (maybe a lot more to come), mostly because the general public or even some patent applicants have been misinformed by media inside the EPO’s (its management’s) pockets
THE video above is long, but it covers many aspects of the state of patent law with focus on the EPO and what happened to the EPO under the regime of Benoît Battistelli and his younger sidekick from France/Portugal. ‘Strike Regulations’ aren’t legal and so-called ‘Social’ ‘Democracy’ (misnomers) also has legal lapses. French politicians have already openly stated that this regime severely tarnishes the image of France all around the world; in the EPO, those French dictators even attack French staff (like Prunier). It’s not about nationality but about total domination and violation of all the laws on behalf of patent litigation firms and multinational corporations (those who also lobby for the illegal UPC!). Yes, it’s about money. And they’re willing to lower the salary of patent examiners by as much as 80%.
“EPO management has been concerned about our level of access to internal insights/information, not because it’s illegal but because it embarrasses those who break the law and then hide behind a veil of “immunity”…”The video above shows the action calendar [PDF] and instructions in English [PDF] or in German [PDF] (most of those who participate are physically based in Germany).
“There must be consequences for people who break the law, more so if they do it consciously.”Where did we get these documents from? Well, duh. A lot of internal material is being sent to us by staff, as thousands already saw it already and there’s a need for the general public to know what’s going on. EPO management has been concerned about our level of access to internal insights/information, not because it’s illegal but because it embarrasses those who break the law and then hide behind a veil of "immunity"…
If we do not stand for (and protect) the rule of law in EPOnia (Munich), it will be lost or gradually eroded universally. There must be consequences for people who break the law, more so if they do it consciously. █
“Pulses and impulses both come from the heart.”
–Jason Mechalek
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Peppermint OS 2022-02-02 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Having a dashboard installed on your Linux server can be a great way of enhancing remote management capabilities, as well as getting an overview of its resource usage. In this video, I’ll show you Cockpit which is an awesome management system you can install very easily.
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The other day stackoverflow went what was supposed to be a brief 1 hour maintenance which ultimately lasted for 5 hours and there were some people who absolutely lost there minds.
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The final version of Linux Mint 20 lineup is out with major improvements, impressive new features, and one of the best desktop Linux experiences yet. I installed Linux Mint 20.3 immediately after release as this version brings a new and even more attractive Cinnamon desktop, A more powerful Linux kernel, and many improvements throughout the system. Every release of Linux Mint is a big deal and this new version is the culmination of Linux Mint 20 series so I’m really excited to share the long term review with you. Let’s jump right in and see what’s new, what’s improved. and in this video, we’ll also try to explore where exactly Linux Mint stands in 2022.
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So LTT got their hands on the Steam Deck early and I thought we should review what we’ve learned from their video.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.8 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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The latest version of the popular mail transfer agent, Postfix 3.7, makes maillog_file feature even more useful.
Postfix is a free and open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that routes and delivers electronic mail. Designed by Wietse Venema, Postfix is a mail server built with security in mind and specifically designed to replace Sendmail.
Because of its modular pipeline-based architecture, Postfix is versatile and integrates easily with many other services, such as spam and antivirus processing, as well as with message store software, such as the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.
In addition, Postfix is also quite resource efficient. Nowadays, many ISPs are using it to handle millions of messages a day.
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Highlights: Inkscape 1.2 goes alpha, Weston gets essential color management support, Blender Studio announces new open movie project, new releases of Blender, BlenderBIM, Ossia Score, Mixxx, Shotcut, PipeWire.
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This is great news. The updated stable release brings a ton of bug fixes and the 1.2 alpha brings pretty much every new feature I shared with you here and on Twitter, and then some.
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Nyxt Browser is a fully hackable web browser – all its source code can be introspected, modified and tweaked to your exact specification.
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Doom Emacs is a distribution that aims to create an easy and approachable way to get started with Emacs. Due to hundreds of pages of documentation detailing its various functions. Emacs, by itself, can be daunting.
This is helpful for the already acquainted user and the bookworm. However, this hands-off approach does not help someone that is just interested in trying it out.
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Audacious audio player announced the first beta for the next major 4.2 release few days ago.
The new release improved the user experience for those running the player in Qt interface, including the dark mode theme and new Flat icon set.
The Qt dark mode will be default in Windows. For other systems as well as the new icon set, there are toggle options in the settings dialog.
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Instructionals/Technical
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VirtualBox is a free and open-source virtualization tool and typically used at desktop level for building the test environment. It is developed and managed by Oracle corporation, that’s why it is known as Oracle VM VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 and AMD64/Intel64 systems.
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Jellyfin is a free and open-source media streaming solution that allows you to host your own media server. It can be installed on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can manage your media such as movies, TV shows, music, and photos, and share them across multiple devices using Jellyfin. It also provides applications for Android, Android TV, and Amazon Fire TV. It offers several features including, Supports DLNA, No playback limit, Fetch metadata automatically from TheTVDB, TheMovieDB, and Rotten Tomatoes, Automatic recordings, Supports hardware acceleration, and many more.
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PHP Composer is the most used dependency manager for PHP. It lets you declare the dependencies your project needs, and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
Downloading, installing, and updating dependencies can be a pain and might distract you from actually writing code. A dependency manager will make your life as a developer easier by handling that for you.
Before there was Composer, there were a few different options to manage project dependencies, such as PEAR and PHP Package Manager. Nowadays, Composer has become the de facto standard for dependency management in PHP.
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SQLite is a lightweight cross-platform relational database engine. It is widely known for its efficiency and its ability to be connected with various programming languages. SQLite is released under an OpenSource license, so it’s free to use. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install and use SQLite on Ubuntu 20.04, the same procedure will work on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 version too. Let’s start.
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Docker container is one of the most emerging technologies now a days. Docker containers are generally used in CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) platform. Containers are the light weight VMs (Virtual Machines) which make use of underlying hypervisors resources like (RAM,CPU,HDD and Kernel).
Docker command is used to manage containers and images from command line. In this article we will cover 20 useful docker command examples in Linux. I am assuming docker is already installed on your Linux system and your regular user is added to docker group.
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Rawhide is the name given to Fedora’s latest development version, which consists of a package repository and contains all packages updated daily. Each day it creates an incomplete set for installers that are finished after testing with other builds to produce final deliverables like images or so forth; if successful, these become included into RawHides tree on their release date (Raw Hide).
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Almalinux users may notice that the DNF download speed can be slow compared to other distributions, and this can be frustrating when you need to download and install many packages.
Most users do not realize that a few minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to configure and increase your DNF update/upgrade package manager speed on Almalinux 8 Workstation or Server.
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XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices.
For more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.
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Ubuntu is a multi-user operating system by design. Multiple users would have access to the same system in an enterprise system. However, individuals who share file access run the risk of disclosing sensitive information or losing data if other users get access to their files or directories. This is a significant security issue.
To solve this, Unix introduced file permissions in its built-in security features, which allows users to designate how much control they have over a particular file or directory. This assures that only authorized users may access, modify, or execute a file or directory.
A Linux user’s understanding of file ownership and permission is critical. This tutorial goes over multiple ways to view and change the file permissions, owners, and groups.
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InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It is used for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operation monitoring, operations metrics, internet of things sensor data, and real-time analytics. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 20.04.
By default, InfluxDB uses the following network ports for communication. If you need to change any port configuration head over to /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf.
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VzLinux is a bit of a chameleon, which can help you in ways you never imagined. Jack Wallen shows you how.
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Several features of the Android platform can be accessed only through paths and methods that are hidden away from the average user. These have generally been done with the help of some command line Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands, a tool that Google offers for developers to debug various parts of their applications or the system, but which we can use for all kinds of neat and hidden tricks. A prerequisite to these tricks is installing ADB on your computer. So, in this guide, we will show you how to install ADB on Windows, macOS, and Linux in quick and easy-to-follow steps.
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Learn the steps to install MySQL Workbench software on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 using the terminal to manage MySQL database via the graphical user interface. MySQL Workbench is a graphical modeling tool and development system for MySQL databases.
Managing and modeling multiple databases is complicated using the command line interface of MySQL. Therefore, to make things easy Oracle also offers a GUI software platform called – MySQL Workbench. It offers a graphical user interface and a set of tools for working with MySQL databases. It provides extensive functions for daily work with the databases and can be used to design, create, edit, administrate and display databases. The software is able to extract structures from already existing databases and reproduce them clearly.
MySQL Workbench is available in a free and a commercial edition. Developers can visually design databases offline and host them on a MySQL server. For advanced users who need additional functions, extensions with scripting languages can be integrated into the tool.
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Keeping your images current is standard procedure for operating and managing a containerized environment. Here’s how to do it.
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SSH or known by its full name Secure Shell Protocol, is a cryptographic network communication protocol that enables two computers to communicate securely over an unsecured network. SSH is highly used for remote login applications and command-line executables such as terminal applications.
For users wishing to connect to servers or other computers with SSH, the client and the remote connection need to both have SSH installed and enabled for this to be possible.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and enable SSH on Debian 11 Bullseye Desktop or Server and connect to a remote PC.
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7-Zip is a free, open-source file archiver software used to compress files into archive containers or, in more popular terms, zip files into archive containers that can beat most other forms of compression by 2 to 10% and strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats.
7-Zip isn’t as famous as some of the other archives, but it is capable of having multi archive format support across most known software. Another benefit is that it supports all cross-platforms, making it efficient to use amongst different operating systems.
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CentOS 8 Stream, as many know, is a downstream version of RHEL, which often means it is incredibly stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of features and not security updates. CentOS 8 Stream currently features kernel 4.18, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, amongst many other things.
ELREPO has both Linux Kernel Mainline LTS versions. The mainline version is the most recent stable release of the Linux Kernel, and the current LTS Kernel they are supporting is 5.4.
The following tutorial will show you how to import the ELRepo kernel repository and install both 5.16/5.4 kernels on CentOS 8 Stream Workstation or Server.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and setup OCS NG Inventory Server on CentOS 7. OCS (Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation) is an opensource assets inventory management solution. It is used to inventor hardware and software details of IT assets either using the OCS Inventory Agent or SNMP polling for assets that the agent cannot be deployed (e.g routers, switches, printers. Inventoried results can be visualized through a web interface.
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The KDE team announced the KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS edition, which is available to download and install. If you are planning to upgrade from the prior version – here we give you quick steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.24 from 5.23.
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Games
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Were you hoping to easily play Fortnite on the upcoming Steam Deck? Well, Tim Sweeney the Epic Games CEO has made it clear that it’s not going to happen officially. The thing to remember right now is that both Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye do support Linux. Both for native Linux builds and for Windows games run through Steam Play Proton. However, it’s all user-space with no Kernel modules.
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Epic won’t update Fortnite to run on the Steam Deck [Ed: Microsoft-connected site uses "tweets" as sources to make Linux seem bad and see the choice of image, too]
Epic Games doesn’t plan to update Fortnite so that it runs on SteamOS, according to CEO Tim Sweeney, meaning owners of the upcoming Valve Steam Deck will likely have to install Windows to play the popular battle-royale game.
In a series of tweets, Sweeney said that the company doesn’t feel confident about its ability to combat cheating in Fortnite when running on custom kernel configurations. Fortnite isn’t on the Steam store in any case, but Sweeney’s comments rule out a Linux version that could run on the Steam Deck.
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fheroes2 is a constantly improving game engine reimplementation of Heroes of Might and Magic II. A new version was just released recently and it’s become the absolute best way to play this classic.
A multi-platform project, one that was written from scratch so there’s never any worry about a rights holder appearing to take it down. It’s very much like OpenMW for Morrowind and OpenXcom for the original X-Com. It’s not a basic remake though, as the developers are also trying to improve old issues in the original.
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Time to go back to Earth and retake it. Beyond Mankind: The Awakening from developer Brytenwalda recently released a native Linux version, built with the Unity game engine. The developer previously worked on the Viking Conquest DLC for Mount & Blade.
Beyond Mankind: The Awakening takes place in a future destroyed by some sort of genetic mutation. This caused certain types of people to go a bit wild, and eventually it led to war and almost a total annihilation of planet Earth. Mankind survived in space – and now you’re part of the rag-tag group trying to bring it all back to life.
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As we’re getting closer to the shipment of the Steam Deck to the general public’s hands, and as Valve gradually lifts the various embargoes attached to the device, today we’ve learned even more about it, thanks to the explosion of new videos that have come out.
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Between 2022-02-01 and 2022-02-08 there were 23 new native Linux Steam games released. For reference, during the same time, there were 136 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 16.9 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…
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Fedora 35 is an impressive Linux distribution that debuted with GNOME 41 and introduced a new KDE variant.
You can read our original coverage to know more about it.
While Fedora Linux has constantly been improving the desktop experience, it may not be an ideal desktop distribution for every user. Moreover, even if it includes open-source tools and utilities out of the box, it is not geared to provide an effortless gaming experience.
You need to install a few dependencies and configure the distro to play a game without hassle.
Nobara Project by Thomas Crider (Red Hat Engineer) a.k.a. Glorious Eggroll aims to change that and offer an unofficial Fedora 35 Workstation spin built for gaming.
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The real-time strategy game of ancient warfare, 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant, is a Free Software game created by an international group of volunteer game developers. Programmers, artists, and historians combined their skills to create this imaginary ancient world. In a new episode, the host of the Software Freedom Podcast, Bonnie Mehring, discusses the growing popularity of the game with the game’s project lead. Stanislas Dolcini says that the decision to make the game Free Software made it last for so many years, as many people could contribute – and still can.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE has today released the Plasma 5.24 desktop, filled with goodies across the whole thing and this is an LTS release (long-term support) that will continue seeing updates until a final Plasma 5 release after which Plasma 6 succeeds it. The environment that will be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck, it’s a very exciting time to be a KDE user and no doubt the developers are excited too.
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In this post I run through the most notable and noticeable changes shipping in KDE Plasma 5.24, plus tell you how you can try the release out first hand.
While we on the subject: if you’re a fan of KDE Plasma and you want to see more coverage of the DE on omg! do let me know in the comments. While Plasma is not a desktop environment I’m super familiar with (thus I don’t know my way around it very well) its ballooning popularity —even the Steam Deck uses it, well kinda— has me intrigued!
Okay, on to what’s new.
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Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates until Plasma 6 succeeds it.
After four months of development, KDE Plasma 5.24 still adds a lot of quality of life improvements and small changes. This new release is powered by Qt 5.15.3 and KDE Frameworks version 5.91. Along with the improvements found in those software stacks, there’s plenty of goodness to go around within KDE itself.
So let’s take a look at what’s in there.
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Kdenlive 21.12.2 is out with faster performance when opening projects, added stock LUTs, improved monitor zoom (more zoom steps, higher zoom levels and usage of current monitor center as reference for zooming). This version also fixes time remapping issues and alpha rendering among others.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Discovered that thumbnails generation in Nautilus (GNOME “Files”) is extremely slow compared to other file and image managers, and reported the performance issue with my initial observations. There have been some community patches proposed there to alleviate the problem by making use of multiple CPU threads instead of a single one, but they have not yet been reviewed as of early 2022. I hope they will be considered eventually, along with further possible performance enhancements.
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New Releases
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It is time to release another Core Update for IPFire. It comes with an improved Quality of Service based on CAKE and various bug fixes and a lot of package updates.
Before we talk about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.
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Slackware Family
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Volderding says his focus for this release was to modernize Slackware without alienating fans at a time when Linux development is moving away from its Unix-like structure.
“The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern,” he says in the announcement.
Prior to releasing the stable release, Slackware’s maintainers built over 400 different Linux kernel versions before settling on kernel version 5.15.19, which has long-term support until at least October 2023. It tested just 34 kernel versions while working on Slackware 14.2, according to Volderding.
There’s a new desktop experience thanks to Slackware 15.0′s inclusion of KDE Plasma 5, version 5.23.5, and Xfce 4.16. KDE also supports running under Wayland or X11. As Linux news site Phoronix notes, Zenwalk has also released a new version of its desktop environment built on top of Slackware 15 and based on Xfce 4.16.
On the packages front, version 15 also brought on programming languages Rust and Python version 3 while dropping Qt4 for Qt5.
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Arch Family
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You can use any Linux distro you want to build a server, including Arch Linux. But is Arch a suitable candidate for installation as a server?
While Linux distributions tend to make great servers, you may be wondering if Arch Linux would be a good choice for a server, given its rolling-release nature. It could be if you wanted to, with some caveats.
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Hi All,
Most of you are aware that our toolchain is currently outdated. We always had very few people
working on it through the years and I took over once Barth left, because it was needed.
However, I have been having very little time to work on Arch related stuff lately and the
toolchain is the most noticeable victim, given it is one of the most time consuming.
In this meantime, a few things also happened that compounded to the issue, among them, we enabled LTO.
Right now I'm working on bringing new glibc 2.35 and also waiting on binutils release so we
can bring the toolchain up to date. I'm aware we also have a GCC release coming out soon, and
the toolchain will need a new rebuild then.
For the future, we are trying to bring more people to work with the whole toolchain, so it is
not too much of a bus factor. We should have at least two toolchain maintainers, not just one.
I hope this serves to assuage the concerns over the current status of our toolchain, both present
and going future.
Regards,
Giancarlo Razzolini
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Generally, you consider it a good thing when people want to use your application. However, when the application runs on a server, there’s a cost for popularity. With users come increased demands on resources, and at some point, you may find that you need to scale your app. One option is to throw more servers at the problem, establish a load balancer like Nginx, and let the demand sort itself out. That option can be expensive, though, because there are no savings when demand is low, and you’re running instances of your app on servers devoid of traffic. Containers have the advantage of being ephemeral, launching when new instances are available and fading away with decreased demand. If that sounds like a feature you need, then it may be time to migrate your app to containers.
Migrating an app to a container can quickly become disorienting. While the environment within a container may feel familiar, many container images are minimal, and they are designed to be stateless. In a way, though, this is one of the strengths of containers. Like a Python virtual environment, it’s a blank slate that lets you build (or rebuild) your application without the invisible defaults that many other environments provide.
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Ever started using a new computer, by choice or because the old one let the magic smoke out, and got frustrated at how long it took to get everything just right? Even worse, ever spent some time reconfiguring your shell prompt, then realizing you liked it better before?
This problem, for me, became acute when I decided I wanted to do development in containers. Containers are ephemeral. The development tooling is easy to solve: A container image with the tooling works. The source code is easy to solve: Source control maintains it, and development happens on branches. But if every time I create a container, I need to configure it carefully—that’s going to be a pain.
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Fedora Linux 36 branches from Rawhide today. While there’s still a lot of work before the Fedora Linux 36 release in April, this marks the beginning of the Fedora Linux 37 development cycle. The work you do in Rawhide will be in the Fedora Linux 37 release in October.
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This post was inspired by a Compiler episode on the same topic. Compiler is a Red Hat podcast about all the things you’ve always wanted to know about what moves tech forward, straight from the people who know it best. Check it out!
Let’s say you’re playing your favorite online multiplayer game when—all of a sudden—things start getting choppy. Your character isn’t moving, other players start freezing up, maybe the in-game music isn’t even coming through.
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In my series introducing WildFly server configuration with Ansible collection for JCliff, I described how developers can use Ansible to manage a standalone Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) instance. I’ve also written about using Ansible to automate Apache Tomcat and Red Hat JBoss Web Server deployments. In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper and use Ansible to deploy a fully operational cluster of JBoss EAP instances. I’ll show you how to automate the setup of each JBoss EAP instance and how to configure the network requirements—notably, fault tolerance and high availability—using features provided by the WildFly Ansible collection.
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Veteran IT leaders have long understood the impact technical debt has on an organization’s digital transformation and ability to respond rapidly to changing demands. The global pandemic underscored that understanding. Technical debt can create talent, speed, reliability, and scalability issues for organizations in the best of times – and the worst.
Beyond confirming the burden of technical debt, the impact of the pandemic has been mixed. In some cases, IT organizations may have gotten the go-ahead to address some technical debt that may have hindered the enterprise’s ability to pivot. In others, IT functions had to make short-term decisions to enable remote work, new digital commerce solutions, or supply chain fixes that increased their technical debt.
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Debian Family
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Update the Linux kernel to 5.10.92. This should improve the support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.
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Topic’s “UAV & Robotics Platform” controller board runs Linux, ROS, and PX4 on a Zynq UltraScale+ and supplies WiFi/BT, GPS, multiple sensors, 4x motor I/Os, and 2x MIPI-CSI. A dev kit adds cameras, PS, debug, and more.
Last week, Netherlands-based Topic Embedded Systems announced that it had renewed its Xilinx Partnership status for 2022. The announcement linked to its latest Xilinx collaboration, a UAV & Robotics Platform (URP) drone controller based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, which Topic used on last year’s Miami MPSoC Plus module and Florida Plus dev kit.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Intel has just announced a $1 billion fund to support companies bringing innovations and new technologies to the foundry ecosystem. The company says the fund will prioritize investments in “capabilities that accelerate foundry customers’ time to market – spanning intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.”
What’s interesting is that it does not only cover x86 architecture but also Arm and RISC-V, with a focus on the latter, as Intel has just become a Premier member of RISC-V International, and partnered with several companies offering RISC-V solutions including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems.
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RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization, has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute.
Intel, which has made billions from its closed-source, complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 processors, is joining forces with RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU group. What next? Dogs and cats living together!?
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Lex Pan Law is a full-service technology and intellectual property law firm based in Portland, Oregon. With a deep background in patent law also provides specialized advice to engineering teams and engineering management about the complex intersection between technology and the law. Having a long-standing interest in the intersection of copyright law and technology, the firm has extensive experience and community contacts in the free and open source licensing world (including software, hardware, and content).
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Web Browsers
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Desktop users can’t help but agree that modern browsers are rather resource-heavy. The confluence of various technologies and file types causes browsers to consume extensive system resources, thereby marring your web experience.
But what if you had a list of browsers that not only offer feature-rich performance on Linux systems but also have generously lightweight requirements?
If you are struggling to keep your browser afloat, and would happily switch to a lighter browser version, then here’s a list of the best lightweight web browsers for Linux.
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Mozilla
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There aren’t many “big” changes in this release (well, unless you count support for Windows 11 scrollbars) but there is, as always, a healthy chunk of under-the-hood enhancements aimed at improving the performance, security, and privacy. Those loving Firefox’s ongoing obsession with “colour ways” will be delighted to hear six new colour way themes are present in this update, once again for a limited time only.
Firefox will likely tell you about the new schemes after you install the update, but you can access them at any time from the “Manage Themes” section.
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Advertising provides critical support for the Web. We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy.
Attribution is how advertisers know if their advertising campaigns are working. Attribution generates metrics that allow advertisers to understand how their advertising campaigns are performing. Related measurement techniques also help publishers understand how they are helping advertisers. Though attribution is crucial to advertising, current attribution practices have terrible privacy properties.
For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.
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This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install firefox 97.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, Almalinux 8, and Fedora 35.
Firefox or Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.
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Firefox Profiler is a tool for analyzing the performance of both websites and Firefox itself. You can visit profiler.firefox.com to learn more about and enable it.
Inside the Firefox codebase, we have different profiler APIs to instrument the source code. With these APIs, threads can be registered with the profiler, different parts of the code can be annotated, and even more information (payload) can be included to a specific event inside the codebase, like a render or reflow event.
Inside the mozilla-central codebase, we have various programming languages like C++, JavaScript, Java and Rust. Since the profiler is implemented in C++, we have the most advanced API for that in C++. You can check its documentation out. Also, we’ve already had APIs for JavaScript, and Java for some time. But we didn’t have any canonical API for the Rust codebases. We had some hacks around bigger Rust projects like Servo or Webrender to register threads and add annotations, but they weren’t shared across different projects. Therefore we had a lot of code duplications in the different parts of the Firefox codebase. Also, it was pretty tiring work if you wanted to instrument your own Rust code with the profiler API because you had to write things from scratch.
To solve this issue, we wanted to work on a new Rust API that every Rust project inside mozilla-central can use without the need of implementing everything from scratch and having to maintain that code. Instead, the Firefox Profiler team would own the API crate and maintain it, so other people wouldn’t need to worry about it and they would simply import the API crate to their projects to use it. And this work has been completed in the last quarter! In this blog post, I will be talking about this API and some of the implementation details. You can also see the documentation of this API here. So let’s get into the details of this API and how to use it first.
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Before we roll out State Partitioning for all Firefox users, we intend to make a few privacy and ergonomic improvements to the Storage Access API. In this blog post, we’ll detail a few of the new changes we made.
With State Partitioning, third parties can’t access the same cookie jar when they’re embedded in different sites. Instead, they get a fresh cookie jar for each site they’re embedded in. This isn’t just limited to cookies either—all storage is partitioned in this way.
In an ideal world, this would stop trackers from keeping tabs on you wherever they’re embedded because they can’t keep a unique identifier for you across all of these sites. Unfortunately, the world isn’t so simple—trackers aren’t the only third parties that use storage. If you’ve ever used an authentication provider that requires an embedded resource, you know how important third-party storage can be.
Enter the Storage Access API. This API lets third parties request storage access as if they were a first party. This is called “unpartitioning” and it gives browsers and users control over which third parties can maintain state across first-party origins as well as determine which origins they can access that state from. This is the preferred way for third parties to keep sharing storage across sites.
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Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox and Firefox ESR. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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While LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a shared past, LibreOffice outstrips OpenOffice in contributors, code commits, and features.
A search for comparisons of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice returns over 8.3 million results. That number comes as no surprise, given that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the best-known open source office suites and share a common past. However, what is surprising is how shallow many of those comparisons are. Many offer only a superficial glimpse at either office suite from the viewpoint of an unsophisticated and undemanding user. Often, the comparisons are obsolete. Even more importantly, many comparisons strive for a false sense of objectivity by declaring that any differences are minor. However, by every possible standard, LibreOffice outshines OpenOffice and shows OpenOffice to be outdated. To pretend otherwise is a distortion of the truth.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by CentOS (log4j), Debian (chromium, xterm, and zabbix), Fedora (kate, lua, and podman), Oracle (aide and log4j), and SUSE (xen).
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In one of the most impactful changes made in recent years, Microsoft has announced today that it will block by default the execution of VBA macro scripts inside five Office applications.
Starting with early April 2022, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word users will not be able to enable macro scripts inside untrusted documents that they downloaded from the internet.
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If you’re looking for a penetration testing platform that has everything you need, Kali Linux is your best option. With over 600 tools included, Kali has everything you need to assess your IT security posture and find vulnerabilities.
Please read on to learn which are the fifteen best tools that are included in Kali Linux. We’ll also discuss why Kali Linux is such a great choice for penetration testing.
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The UK government recently started an open-source GitHub repository to help organizations scan networks for vulnerabilities.
The idea behind the Scanning Made Easy project from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and its i100 industry partnership is to provide a collection of Nmap scripts to users, such as sysadmins, for detecting system vulnerabilities.
The scripts should provide more accessible detection and remediation. Defense is often harder than offense, as there are likely more proofs of concept to exploit than there are secure networks.
The NCSC is open to contributions and is providing detailed guidelines for the approval of a script.
Here we’ll discuss how to get started with Nmap, how attackers use it, and how you can use the UK efforts to improve your cybersecurity.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling — and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are everywhere, and government spy agencies are drowning in data. This is a radical new world and intelligence agencies are struggling to adapt to it. While secrets once conferred a huge advantage, today open source information increasingly does. Intelligence used to be a race for insight where great powers were the only ones with the capabilities to access secrets. Now everyone is racing for insight and the internet gives them tools to do it. Secrets still matter, but whoever can harness all this data better and faster will win.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Spotify’s decision to host and produce The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, replete with harmful and misleading COVID-19-related content, is a risk to human rights and public health. The company has a responsibility to exercise editorial discretion and intervene.
“COVID-19 is dangerous enough without the most popular podcast in the world fanning false rhetoric, undermining people’s ability to make safe, informed decisions about their health,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Since Spotify produces the content, they are operating like journalists. This means Spotify is responsible for publishing truthful information.”
Through an open letter to Daniel Ek, Co-Founder and CEO at Spotify, Access Now is once again shining a spotlight on the human rights implications of the company’s decisions, asking: “Is Spotify willing to allow harmful content on its platform to spread, prioritizing the companyʼs bottom line over public health?” As The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is produced exclusively by Spotify, the company has control over the distribution of the content, and the ability to exercise editorial discretion over what host Joe Rogan and guests say.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Last week marked one year since the military besieged Myanmar and pilfered control of the nation through a violent coup — one full year of brutal crackdowns, serious human rights violations, and escalating digital control over the nation. The international community and technology companies must stand with the people of Myanmar and resist the coup — both physical and digital.
“The military junta is systematically ambushing civic space in Myanmar,” said Wai Phyo Mint, Asia Pacific Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Increment by increment, the despotic military is making online spaces inaccessible for the people of Myanmar, and eliminating all means of safe communication and information-sharing when they need them most. Silence and inaction from the international community bury their struggle, shielding grave human rights violations.”
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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For as long as women have been wearing decorative jewelry, donning designer clothing, and delighting in female companionship, we have been accused of a proclivity for the fanciful. Stereotypes abound about the feminine urge to tell stories: the secretly slanderous best friend; the garrulous old woman tirelessly engaged with spreading gossip. In her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) sardonically examines these misogynistic stereotypes, turning them upside down. She argues that the vicissitudes of female fashion are evidence of artistry, and the story-telling a natural symptom of untapped creativity. Those characteristics, which are so often cast in a negative light, could actually be the result of incredible imagination. In Sargent’s understanding, the only difference between gossip and ground-breaking scientific invention is a lack of access to education.
In the year 1779, Sargent wrote an essay entitled “The Sexes” and proceeded to circulate it amongst friends for over a decade. That piece’s revised counterpart, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, was published in 1790, in the March and April issues of Massachusetts Magazine (a “Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment”). Although Sargent published under the pseudonym “Constantia” — occasionally going by “The Reaper”, “Honora Martesia”, “Mr. Vigilius”, or “The Gleaner” — her identity as the author of “Equality” was fairly well-known.
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Posted in Action, Europe, Patents at 2:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: SUEPO Central’s “Call for Action” will lead to a deliberate reduction in so-called (faked) “production”, which ought to signal to the stakeholders that nothing is rosy at the EPO
A NUMBER of hours ago the following message was circulated by the union of EPO staff, which is a very popular union (most of the staff has membership in it). It’s loud and clear:
CALL FOR ACTION – SUEPO INDUSTRIAL ACTION PLAN 2022
NOTING THAT
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A series of ILOAT judgments have ruled that the EPO violated both individual and collective rights of staff to freedom of association since 2013;
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The EPO justice system proved to be inefficient and biased against staff;
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Under these conditions staff has been subjected to several major reforms detrimental to working conditions and staff's well being;
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The EPO has no current financial difficulties and an alleged financial gap predicted for 2038 has already been filled today;
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The new salary adjustment procedure causes a disastrous loss of staff's purchasing power and does not reflect the massive efforts made by staff during the pandemic.
DEMANDS THAT THE ADMINISTRATION
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Revises the EPO Service Regulations so that hey comply with fundamental rights, and the principles of legitimate expectations and acquired rights;
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Restores a deterministic career system;
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Suspend the implementation of the "exception clause" and the "sustainability clause" of the new salary adjustment procedure;
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Reviews and eliminates the detrimental effects of the Education Reform.
CALLS ALL MEMBERS
This will cause a collapse in patent grants/allowance rates. That’s the intention. We’re going to prepare a video shortly, in which the situation and the context can be explained to outsiders, not EPO insiders
“A strike is overdue there,” an associate of ours wrote just moments ago, “but the management needs complete turnover and is not competent even to hire its own replacements, nor honest enough.”
“It is very important that they bring up the lack of EPC compliance.” █
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Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 1:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The EPO‘s regime of unbridled impunity was taken to extreme heights in the heist era of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos
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Posted in Courtroom, Deception, Europe, Law, Patents at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series parts:
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part I: Let the Sunshine In!
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part II: A “Unanimous” Endorsement?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part III: Three Missing Votes
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IV: The Founding States
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part V: Germany Says “Ja”
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VI: A Distinct Lack of Dutch Courage
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VII: Luxembourgish Laxity
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VIII: Perfidious Albion and Pusillanimous Hibernia
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IX: More Holes Than Swiss Cheese
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part X: Introducing the Controversial Christian Bock
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XI: “General Bock” – Battistelli’s Swiss Apprentice?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XII: The French Connection
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XIII: Battistelli’s Iberian Facilitators – Spain
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XIV: Battistelli’s Iberian Facilitators – Portugal
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XV: Et Tu Felix Austria…
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVI: The Demise of the Austrian Double-Dipper
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVII: The Non-Monolithic Nordic Bloc
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVIII: Helsinki’s Accord
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IXX: The Baltic States
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XX: The Visegrád Group
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXI: The Balkan League – The Doyen and His “Protégée”
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXII: The Balkan League – North Macedonia and Albania
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXIII: The Balkan League – Bulgaria
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXIV: The Balkan League – Romania
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXV: The Balkan League – Fresh Blood or Same Old, Same Old?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVI: A Trojan Horse on the Budget and Finance Committee
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVII: Cypriot Complicity
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVIII: Benoît and António’s Loyal “Habibi”
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IXXX: The EPOnian Micro-States – Monaco and Malta
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXX: San Marino and the Perfidious Betrayal of Liberty
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXI: The Abstentionists
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXII: “Plucky Little Belgium”?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIII: Swedish Scepticism
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIV: An “Extremely Dubious” Proposal
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXV: Slovakian Scruples
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVI: Serbian Sour Grapes
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVII: Stubbornly Independent Slovenia
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVIII: Ensnared in the Tentacles of the SAZAS Octopus
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIX: On the Slippery Slope to Capture
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXX: The Idiosyncratic Italians
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXI: Public Service or Self-Service?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXII: A Parcel of Rogues?
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXIII: A Legal No-Man’s Land
- The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXIV: Immunity = Impunity?
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ In the Shadow of “Waite and Kennedy”
Everybody is entitled to their day in court.
Well, maybe not, if you happen to work for an international organisation.
Summary: The EPO‘s immunity is troublesome for a plethora of reasons; this sort of problem has long been recognised in a broader context
As we mentioned in the last part, the immunities accorded to international organisations mean that their staff are precluded from pursuing their grievances before national courts of law.
Instead, staff are obliged to have recourse to internal dispute resolution mechanisms involving opaque procedures, whose compliance with the most basic requirements of due process is often open to question.
“The risk of a “denial of justice” arises because – unlike employees in the national domain – staff of an international organisation have no access to a domestic court of law in the case of a dispute with their employer.”The internal means of redress provided by an international organisation is usually supplemented by a final possibility of judicial review before an international tribunal such as the ILOAT in Geneva.
These parallel legal systems have developed because of a general recognition that the immunity of an international organisation could be problematic from the rule of law perspective.
The risk of a “denial of justice” arises because – unlike employees in the national domain – staff of an international organisation have no access to a domestic court of law in the case of a dispute with their employer.
As a workaround, an approach to dispute resolution has been developed which relies on what are called “internal justice systems”.
“As a workaround, an approach to dispute resolution has been developed which relies on what are called “internal justice systems”.”The legal scholar Anne-Marie Thévenot-Werner – a professor of law at the Sorbonne University in France – has written extensively on the topic, for example in an article entitled “The Right of Staff Members to a Tribunal as a Limit to the Jurisdictional Immunity of International Organisations in Europe” which was published in 2014.
In this article Thévenot-Werner explains how national courts in Europe have come to recognise that the immunity from national jurisdiction accorded to an international organisation cannot be considered absolute because this could lead to a “denial of justice”.
Such immunity is contingent on the guarantee of an effective legal remedy being available to staff in the form of an internal dispute settlement mechanism which provides “equivalent protection” to that provided by a national legal system.
This principle is echoed in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) which monitors compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
“In this way – or so the theory goes – even when states transfer certain competences to international organisations, human rights supervisory bodies such as the ECtHR can continue to hold states to account for the use of those powers.”The ECtHR has found that the ECHR does not exclude states from transferring competences to international organisations. However, states which are signatories of the ECHR have a responsibility to ensure that their human rights obligations will receive an “equivalent protection” within the context of those international organisations in which they participate.
In this way – or so the theory goes – even when states transfer certain competences to international organisations, human rights supervisory bodies such as the ECtHR can continue to hold states to account for the use of those powers.
The Court’s position is based on the consideration that if the contracting states of the ECHR, were permitted to use their membership of an international organisation as an “excuse” for evading their responsibilities under the Convention this would lead to a “loophole” in human rights protection which would be incompatible with the object and purpose of the ECHR.
According to the Court’s jurisprudence, the alternative means of legal process on which staff of international organisations are obliged to rely must provide “reasonable alternative means to protect effectively their rights under the [European] Convention [on Human Rights]“.
In its landmark judgment delivered in 1999 the ECtHR confirmed that international organisations are obliged to provide their staff with “reasonable alternative means” to protect their fundamental rights under the ECHR.
This was spelt out by the Court in the landmark judgments delivered in 1999 in the cases of “Waite and Kennedy v. Germany” and “Beer and Regan v. Germany”.
Those judgments and their implications for international organisations are discussed in some detail in the article In the Shadow of Waite and Kennedy: The Jurisdictional Immunity of International Organisations, the individual’s Right of Access to the Courts and Administrative Tribunals as Alternative Means of Dispute Settlement” published in 2004. This article was co-authored by August Reinisch, Professor of International and European Law at the University of Vienna, and Ulf Andreas Weber, a practicing attorney in Berlin specializing in employment law focusing on staff disputes in international organizations.
All of this sounds fine in theory.
“…some subsequent judgments of the ECtHR delivered in 2015 indicate that the Court is extremely reluctant to pursue alleged breaches of fundamental rights involving international organisations.”However, in practice, the internal dispute resolution mechanisms of international organisations are rarely fit for purpose and this often leads to a de facto denial of justice.
Moreover, as we shall see in the next part, some subsequent judgments of the ECtHR delivered in 2015 indicate that the Court is extremely reluctant to pursue alleged breaches of fundamental rights involving international organisations. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk with Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez from KDE. Then we’re going to chat about some cool robotics you can get your hands on from Red Hat. 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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Applications
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Being able to extract text from photos, pdfs and the like isn’t something new. Indeed, many ace tools exist for the job, including several well-regarded command line ones available on Linux. But being able to do it very easily? That is new.
With modern operating systems like macOS and Android making image OCR an integrated feature of their native image viewer tools or photo managers, it’s understandable that some folks new to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other distros expect similar functionality.
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Instructionals/Technical
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At Teleport, we advocate SSH certificates over SSH keys and passwords as the best authentication method for SSH. Nothing beats the security and operational flexibility of using certificate-based authentication for a large fleet of SSH servers running on dynamic infrastructure. But in practice, certificate-based authentication is far from the de facto authentication method, and sometimes we may need to use SSH keys. For example, in my daily workflow I use SSH keys when accessing DigitalOcean servers or to check repositories in my GitHub personal account because SSH keys are the default available methods (alongside passwords). So it helps to learn the best way to generate and use SSH keys.
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So I changed:
$ git remote set-url origin git@gitlab.com:rubenerd/repo_name.git
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Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install FileRun on Debian 11. The procedure is simple, so let’s get started.
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If you’ve somehow forgotten your Ubuntu password, don’t worry, it’s easy to log back in to your system by resetting the password.
Forgetting passwords can be an absolute nightmare, and if you’ve had the misfortune of forgetting the password to your PC, then you might be pretty worried. Typically, it’s much easier to reset the password of an online web account (Google, Facebook, etc.) than resetting your computer’s password.
If you’ve locked yourself out of your Ubuntu system, you don’t need to worry about losing important data that you may not have backed up. Luckily, there is a quick fix that helps you reset your password on Ubuntu.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pantheon Desktop on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Pantheon is the default desktop environment that is bundled with elementary OS. Pantheon is designed to be fast and user-friendly with a highly polished appearance. Pantheon desktop environment inspiration from macOS and combining it with one of the most visually appealing desktops around and a bonus for any macOS users wanting to take the plunge into Linux.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Pantheon Desktop Environment on a Fedora 35.
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If you want to create the cPanel account using SSH then follow below instructions.
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The “LibreOffice” is a popular open-source office suite, a fork of OpenOffice that is functionally equivalent to Microsoft Office. Word processing, spreadsheets, presentation programs, graphics software, databases, and formula editors offer roughly the same range of functions as Excel, Word, or PowerPoint. You can also create PDF files and read, edit and save Microsoft Office documents.
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Docker’s undoubtedly one of the most impactful developer technologies of the last decade. Containers have provided a solution for isolating applications, scaling them across physical machines, and abstracting the differences between environments.
Many organizations that adopt Docker or an adjacent containerization technology find it increases efficiency and accelerates the development process. Docker’s not something that magically improves every system though. In this article, we’ll look at some scenarios where moving to containers might be more of a hindrance than a help.
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In order to push, pull and clone securely between your local Git installation and a remote GitHub or GitLab repository, you must first create an SSH key pair which can be used to both identify you and authenticate your local Git installation with the remote GitHub or GitLab server you are attempting to connect to.
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You probably already know that there are various shells available in Linux/Unix. Bash is the most popular and the default shell on most Linux distributions.
Another popular shell is Zsh. It is powerful and it is also the default Shell in macOS.
Now, the questions comes, what features make Zsh a popular choice and should you even bother to use it?
Let me answer that.
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Here is a quick howto upgrade default PHP version provided on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux or other clones with latest version 8.1.
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The Linux ecosystem provides numerous ways of configuring networking including the popular Network Manager daemon and command-line tools such as nmcli and nmtui GUI utility. This guide introduces yet another network configuration tool known as NMState
NMState is a declarative network manager for configuring networking on Linux hosts. It’s a library that provides a command-line tool that manages host network settings. It manages host networking through a northbound declarative API. At the time of writing this guide, the NetworkManager daemon is the only provider supported by NMState.
In this guide, we look at some of the example usages of the NMState tool. For this guide, we will demonstrate this using Fedora Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This version of Maui brings new features and bug fixes to Maui’s applications and the frameworks they rely on. The changes introduced in this release will make your experience with Maui Apps much more enjoyable and feature rich across different devices and form factors.
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I recently wrote that managing an external display on Linux shouldn’t be this hard. I went down a path of trying out some different options before finally landing at an unexpected place: KDE. I say “unexpected” because I find tiling window managers are just about a necessity.
Until a few months ago, I’d been using xmonad for well over a decade. Configurable, minimal, and very nice; it suited me well.
However, xmonad is getting somewhat long in the tooth. xmobar, which is commonly used with it, barely supports many modern desktop environments. I prefer DEs for the useful integrations they bring: everything from handling mount of USB sticks to display auto-switching and sound switching. xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome (whether or not it runs well under KDE 5 seems to be a complicated question, according to wikis, but in any case, there is no log applet for KDE 5). So I was left with XFCE and such, but the isues I identified in the “shouldn’t be this hard” article were bad enough that I just could not keep going that way.
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Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bugfixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before we transition to Plasma 6.
This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment.
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The biggest new features in KDE Plasma 5.24 include support for fingerprint readers, which you’ll use to unlock the screen, authenticate in apps that require administration password, or authenticate with sudo on the command-line, as well as a brand-new Overview effect that lets you control your virtual workspaces and also find search results from KRunner.
Talking about effects, the “Cover Switch” and “Flip Switch” effects are back, QtQuick-based effects saw a major performance boost for NVIDIA GPU users, and the “Scale” effect replaces the “Fade” effect as default when opening and closing windows.
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KUserFeedback is a library for collecting user feedback for apps via telemetry and surveys.
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This past weekend and with the help of a very patient user, I was working through a set of bugs and enhancements for my RapidDisk project. This included adding support for the 5.15, 5.16 and release candidates of the 5.17 Linux kernels. This very helpful user was attempting to use my kernel drivers on Manjaro Linux and while Manjaro was not a requirement to reproduce his reported problems with my code, it did make it easier for me to troubleshoot and fix my code. That means, I downloaded the latest distribution release ISO for Manjaro with XFCE (manjaro-xfce-21.2.2-220123-linux515.iso), installed it and got to work.
From the very beginning, I felt comfortable loading the ISO image and running the installer. The installation ran smoothly and before you know it, the virtual machine was rebooted into the installed operating system.
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New Releases
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Tiny Core Linux 13 is an ultralight operating system that has a good reputation for giving new life to old hardware, says Mark Tyson.
The system needs just 46MB of RAM and a minimum of 50MB of storage to install.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Version 4.3 of the operating system comes with Linux kernel 5.16 and uses KDE Plasma 5.23.5 for its desktop environment.
OpenMandriva Lx is a KDE-focused community-driven Linux distribution that is also inspired and forked from Mandriva Linux, and offers a host of open-source software to complement the whole package. Developed by the OpenMandriva Association, OpenMandriva Lx caters to experienced KDE users, as well as first-time Linux converts.
The OpenMandriva project was created back in May 2012, when Mandriva S.A. avoided bankruptcy by abandoning the development of its consumer product to the Mandriva community.
The OpenMandriva project announced today the general availability of the latest stable release – OpenMandriva Lx 4.3. This release includes updated bundled applications and various improvements. With that said, let’s quickly take a look at what’s new.
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OpenMandriva is an independent Linux distribution that includes several essential KDE applications and features one of the latest Linux Kernel versions.
This release includes updated KDE applications including Krita 5.0.2, Falkon browser 3.2, and others. PipeWire also replaces PulseAudio as the default sound server.
The desktop environment has also been updated to Plasma 5.23. In addition to these, there are various other changes that you can find in the official announcement.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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No matter what you may have read elsewhere, SUSE is not coming out with a new distro to vie for space in the crowded CentOS replacement business. With Alma, Rocky, Oracle, and others already vying for a piece of the CentOS market pie, SUSE thinks that’s a market that’s already crowded enough, thank you.
What it is going to do is make life easier for Enterprises (or anybody else) running a mixed environment of numerous Linux distributions to support them under a single plan called SUSE Liberty Linux.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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The Nobara Project is a fresh flavour of Fedora 35 aimed at Linux gamers and streamers. It’s very new and the website is mostly just a placeholder, but it’s already causing controversy.
Windows is the default OS for PCs so PC games mostly tend to aim at Windows. If you want to run your games on Linux, that involves a bit of extra legwork. Valve Software’s Steam runs on Linux (if not without some glitches early on), Proton can help with running current Windows games, and Lutris with older ones. If Proton isn’t quite current enough, a developer nicknamed “Glorious Eggroll” offers Proton-GE, a cutting-edge build with the latest patches and support.
Nobara is a new project from Glorious Eggroll, or Thomas Crider as we suspect his friends call him. He works for Red Hat, and also contributes to WINE, Lutris, and other projects. Nobara is basically Fedora 35 plus a whole bunch of extensions: the latest Proton-GE and Lutris, as you might guess, plus installers for AMD and Nvidia drivers, and the RPM Fusion repo of third-party add-ons and extensions enabled.
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Data accessibility, management and sharing may be a priority for many organizations right now but were especially critical agenda items for the two customers we’re highlighting in this month’s customer success stories post.
For Toronto’s University Health Network, securing patient information and other sensitive data prompted its search for a highly available, scalable integration solution. And the Slovenian National Police Force had goals of improving staff communication and system integration as it set out to modernize its IT environment.
See how Red Hat technologies have not only helped address these challenges for our public health and safety customers but also helped them explore more benefits of open source innovation and equipped them with tools to quickly respond to COVID-19 needs.
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Open vSwitch (OVS), which many data centers run on Linux systems for advanced networking functions, adds a certain amount of overhead for new datapath flows. This article introduces the upcall_cost.py script, written in Python, which tracks packets through the kernel’s invocation of OVS and displays statistics that can help with troubleshooting performance in applications and data centers, as well as the kernel and OVS itself.
My interest in this question was triggered when some people argued that it takes too long for the kernel module to bring a packet to the ovs-vswitchd in userspace to do the lookup. However, I have not seen anyone backing up this complaint with data. This article offers tools that can help research this question and many others. I’ll describe the script and its output, then show data from two interesting scenarios: A 16-node Red Hat OpenShift cluster and a lab benchmark.
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The Vi text editor has been around for a long time, it has lots of fans and users, and it ships with nearly every POSIX system available. To its credit, Vi hasn’t changed all that much, although it has managed to undergo some major improvements (in fact, most Vi users actually use Vi-improved, or Vim).
One of the greatest things about open source is how it can be adapted and iterated upon, however, and so you might wonder what Vi might look like if it had been invented today. You can get a glimpse of such an alternate timeline with Kakoune, a modern Vi-like editor incorporating ideas from current editors as well as Vi and Vim.
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As a developer, you need to be able to try and test new software and tools, but the process can be tedious. You often need to download the source code and reconfigure your entire local environment to deploy it. The process is a bit like being asked to assemble a car before giving it a test drive.
The IBM Developer Technology Sandbox is a turnkey solution for you to test drive software. The browser-based, no-code/low-code sandbox enables developers to try new technologies, whether you are trying to extend your application stack or build new skills.
Explore the pre-built applications and use the step-by-step instructions to run them with the click of a button. These applications are built on a combination of various IBM and IBM partner technologies, including APIs, cloud services, and more.
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For the past decade, CIOs have been on a slow and steady drive toward digital transformation, incrementally moving their organizations to implement technology in business strategy. Yet getting organizations to establish true digital capability remains a challenge.
Rapid adoption of new processes and technology often lacks continuity. However, recent history has proven that organizations can and will embrace continuous change at an extraordinarily fast pace to remain relevant. This gives CIOs a prime opportunity and obligation to advance digital capability at every level of the organization.
Opportunities to increase digital maturity center on creating better customer experiences. Every member of the team needs to embody a customer-focused mindset and behaviors to achieve the highest level of innovation.
Too often, the executors on the ground don’t think beyond the automation of existing process. They lack the knowledge, imagination, and/or desire to leverage the human-centered technology available, leaving transformational capabilities untapped. Further, they are missing opportunities to leverage data to create customer journeys and optimized processes that deliver more value sooner.
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By now, most of us have come to realize that the next normal won’t look much like it used to. The pandemic has taught us that turbulent and unpredictable times require flexibility and an open mind.
Meanwhile, technology companies have been delivering highly competitive technologies to win both mind and market share. Think back on the quality (or lack thereof) of video calls pre-pandemic. COVID forced competition and accelerated innovation where new features seem to be released monthly instead of annually.
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Debian Family
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64-bits. More is always better, right?
Well, not exactly. And that’s why it’s taken years for Raspberry Pi OS to add an officially-supported 64-bit version, in addition to the 32-bit version they’ve had since the original Pi came out.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 721 for the week of January 30 – February 5, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.
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Hybrid multi-cloud architecture provides financial institutions flexibility, portability, interoperability, and the control needed to consistently deploy and manage enterprise applications and workloads. By adopting hybrid cloud, finservs realise the benefits of effective cloud cost management, security, compliance, efficiency and agility. The hybrid cloud strategy starts with choosing the right enterprise Linux.
The right operating system (OS) gives financial institutions the ability to deploy and run applications anywhere — physical, virtual, private, and public clouds — and delivers a consistent foundation to support a financial institution’s current and future requirements for enterprise hybrid cloud deployments.
Ubuntu is one of the leading enterprise Linux distributions both in the public clouds and in the private clouds. It is also one of the most secure end user operating systems according to UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
Ubuntu Pro is a premium OS image designed by Canonical to provide the most comprehensive feature set for production environments running in the public clouds including AWS, Azure and Google cloud. Using Ubuntu Pro in the cloud provides the same performance, scalability, management, and reliability that you expect on any other deployment footprint. Ubuntu Pro includes optimised kernel, hardening, and security coverage for the entire collection of software packages shipped with Ubuntu.
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In 2021, the Fellowship revealed that Elio Qoshi is the Ubuntu employee and Mozilla Tech Speaker who recruited an underage girlfriend while he was Fedora Ambassador.
Search results show his profile was included in the FOSDEM 2022 program but if we click the link, it doesn’t go anywhere, he has been removed.
In many countries there are laws obliging people to inform the police about known cases of child abuse. If the people who removed Qoshi from the program know something about the abuse or if details have been shared on private mailing lists then anybody who has received that information may be under an obligation to report it.
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Open-source SoC designs are available to run on FPGA hardware, but few make it to silicon due to the costs involved. That’s why a couple of years ago the Google SkyWater PDK (process design kit) was released together with an offer to manufacture up to 100 pieces for free to selected designs in collaboration with efabless.
efabless chipIgnite is an evolution of that offer with $9,750 being enough funds to manufacture 100 QFN or 300 WCSP parts, or alternatively 1,000 parts for $20 each ($20,000). Based on the company’s Caravel template SoC and the openFPGA generator framework, efabless CLEAR open-source FPGA ASIC design is meant to promote and demonstrate the chipIgnite “paid IC creation” solution. You can participate by joining a group buying campaign on GroupGets to get a development board based on CLEAR for $74.99 plus shipping.

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Open Hardware/Modding
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[Les]’ need for an integrating sphere comes from the desire to measure the output of some of his lasers with his Raspberry Pi-based PySpectrometer. Rather than shell out for an expensive commercial integrating sphere, or turn one on a lathe, [Les] turned to an unlikely source: cannonball molds. The inside of the mold was painted with an equally unlikely ultra-white paint concocted from barium sulfate and PVA glue. With a few ports machined into the mold, it works perfectly to diffuse the light from his dye lasers for proper measurements.
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Intel announced a $1 billion fund to boost RISC-V, x86, and Arm IP development at Intel Foundry Services and revealed IFS collaborations with Andes, Esperanto, SiFive, and Ventana Micro using RISC-V and “open chiplet” technology. The chipmaker also joined RISC-V International.
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The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produce complex, harmonically-rich sounds. In this blog post, I look inside its custom sound chip and explain how the chip’s output circuitry works. You might expect it’s just a digital output fed into a digital-to-analog converter, but there’s much more to it than just that.
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In the past I used to run a number of virtual machines, or dedicated hosts. Currently I’m cut things down to only a single machine which I’m planning to remove.
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The internal WiFi module on the Compute Module 4 (that’s the bit under the metal shield in the picture above) routes its antenna signal via software. You can route the signal to either:
The built-in PCB triangle antenna (this is the default).
The external U.FL connector (which has an external antenna plugged into it in the picture above)
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Fire up those 3D printers because if you’re like us, you’ll want your own PlottyBot. Still, have a pile of “thank you notes” to write from recent winter holiday gift exchanges? Hoping to hand letter invitations to a wedding or other significant event? Need some new art to adorn your lock-down shelter or shop? It sounds like [Ben] could help you with that.
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Introduced in 1984, the Psion Organiser series defined the first generation of electronic organizers or PDAs (personal digital assistants). Even though these devices are now over 30 years old, the Psion Organiser scene is alive and well: with new hardware and software is still being developed by enthusiasts the world over.
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Magnetometers are devices that use various techniques to measure certain aspects of magnetism, including direction, strength, or relative changes. By combining these and applying some math, underground and other hidden structures can be discovered without the risk of damaging anything sitting below the sensor. This is why Markus Opitz decided to build a large-scale magnetometer using simple components in order to map things around his property.
The basic structure of the device consists of a basic frame made from several wooden planks with a pair of wheels at its base and a wide piece of aluminum tubing to hold the sensor array. To gather raw data, Opitz started by integrating seven Hall effect sensors with a digital compass and an Arduino Mega.
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The Fluke 77 was introduced in 1983, and is an average responding meter in the AC modes. This model has become a de-facto standard for use in maintenance depots and labs for equipment which has very long lifespans — think military and industrial gear, for example. Many test procedures and training materials have been designed around the use of the the Fluke 77. The cost to change them when a new and better meter comes along is usually so prohibitive they might as well be cast in stone — or at least hammered into 20 pound fanfold paper by a WordStar-driven daisy-wheel printer. But for those unburdened by such legacy requirements, Fluke has the 17x series of True RMS reading meters from since the beginning of this century. These meters bear a strong visual resemblance to their siblings in the 7x family and are substantially interchangeable but for their AC measurement methods.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Writing is one of the essential skills in modern society. Being able to communicate effectively is paramount both at work and at home. It makes your thinking visible to others, and is the main way in which work, learning, and intellect is judged by others.
At first glance, the trusty word processor might seem a good tool for a novelist. After all, in days gone by, budding authors would tap away using a typewriter, and a word processor is the modern day equivalent. Linux has some excellent word processing software such as LibreOffice. However, word processors are actually not the ideal tool for some forms of writing, particularly novel-writing. In fact, it could be said that using a word processor for novel-writing is a recipe for disaster, and actually a retrograde step from a typewriter. Word processors are a general application software that are perfect for constructing business documents, letters, batch mailings using templates, etc. However, many word processors are too obtrusive and distracting for writers. What is needed is software that helps concentrate on the content of the novel, sketch out the chapters and scenes, work out the best structure, import research, add locations, characters and objects, and so on.
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Web Browsers
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Tor Browser 11.0.5 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version includes important security updates to Firefox.
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The latest CSS Tricks newsletter has me energised about what browsers could be. The newsletter makes this point:
My point here is this: what we think browsers are today are not what they’ll be in the future. And because of that, I’m excited about browsers for the first time in a real long time.
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Consumers today face many barriers that prevent them from accessing and using a variety of software options on their devices. We welcome efforts by the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) to better understand the situations faced by mobile device users and to address them.
Earlier today, we submitted our comments to the CMA’s interim report on mobile ecosystems. Their assessment adds to a growing body of work by regulators on the systemic barriers that prevent meaningful consumer choice and stifle innovation online. As these reports show, all devices run on operating systems, and concentration of operating systems and affiliated software harms developers and consumers alike. In addition, the CMA’s report is the first to chronicle the importance of web compatibility and the harmful network effects that result when popular software apps are incompatible with all browsers. It also dives into the importance of browser engines to a healthy internet ecosystem that is decentralized and open.
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The CMA, the UK’s regulator of business competition and markets, what the USA calls “antitrust”, is conducting a study into mobile platforms and the mobile ecosystem. You may recall that I and others presented to the CMA in September 2021 about Apple’s browser ban. They have invited public comments, and they honestly are eager to hear from people: not solely big players with big legal submissions, but real web developers. But the time is nigh: they need to hear from you by 5pm UK time today, Monday 7th February 2022.
Bruce Lawson, who I presented with, has summarised the CMA’s interim report. What’s important for our perspectives today is how they feel about mobile browsers. In particular, they call out how on Apple’s iOS devices, there is only one browser: Safari. While other browser names do exist — Chrome, Firefox, and the like — they are all Safari dressed up in different clothes. It’s been surprising how many developers didn’t realise this: check out the Twitter hashtag #AppleBrowserBan for more on that. So the CMA are looking for feedback and comments from anyone in the UK or who does any business in the UK, on how you feel about the mobile ecosystem of apps and browsers in general, and how you feel about the browser landscape specifically. Did you decide to use the web, or not use the web, on mobile devices in a way that felt like you had no choice? Do you feel like web apps are a match for native apps or not?
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Mozilla
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Firefox 97 comes as an incremental update to previous releases and adds a new set of Colorway themes to further customize the look and feel of the web browser. There are six Colorway themes available (for a limited time) for you to try under the Themes section in the about:addons page or via Customize Toolbar right-click context menu option > Manage Themes.
For Linux users, this release removes the PostScript printing support.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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If you’re curious about the basics of storing persistent data into a SQL database using Golang, this tutorial will be helpful for you. I’m going to be using sqlite3, but I’ll add lots of headings, so you can skip ahead if sqlite is not your thing.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The LibreOffice Technology now has much better support for creating custom PDF exports of documents: options available in the interactive PDF export options dialog are now also possible to set from the command-line, and also when using the document conversion feature of Collabora Online.
I was working on a regression that only happens if you export the second and third pages of a document to PDF. While investigating, I needed a quick way to trigger the problematic code-path, and clicking through a dialog is not convenient.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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I am happy to announce a new release of GNU poke, version 2.1.
This is the first bugfix release in the 2.x series.
See the file NEWS in the distribution tarball for a list of issues fixed in this release.
The tarball poke-2.1.tar.gz is now available at
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-2.1.tar.gz.
> GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them.
Thanks to the people who contributed with code and/or documentation to this release. In certain but no significant order they are:
Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor
Luca Saiu
Alfred M. Szmidt
Bruno Haible
Sergio Durigan Junior
Special thanks to Bruno Haible for his help in testing this release.
And this is all for now.
Happy poking!
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We want to see a world where users are liberated — not restricted — by the software they use. Our annual LibrePlanet conference is a reflection of the community that formed itself over the years around this idea. It is coming up soon, March 19 & 20, and we need your help!
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alive-2.0.5
bash-5.1.16
cflow-1.7
ddrescue-1.26
direvent-5.3
freeipmi-1.6.9
gama-2.17
gdb-11.2
hello-2.11
libsigsegv-2.14
libunistring-1.0
linux-libre-5.16
mailutils-3.14
moe-1.12
mtools-4.0.37
ocrad-0.28
parallel-20220122
pies-1.7
readline-8.1.2
rush-2.2
serveez-0.3.1
tramp-2.5.2
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Licensing/Legal
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The first paragraph of the license enumerates the rights which you, as a recipient of the software, are entitled to. It’s this section which qualifies the license as free and open source software (assuming the later sections don’t disqualify it). The key grants are the right to “use” the software (freedom 0), to “modify” and “merge” it (freedom 1), and to “distribute” and “sell” copies (freedoms 2 and 3), “without restriction”. We also get some bonus grants, like the right to sublicense the software, so you could, for instance, incorporate it into a work which uses a less permissive license like the GPL.
All of this is subject to the conditions of paragraph two, of which there is only one: you must include the copyright notice and license text in any substantial copies or derivatives of the software. Thus, the MIT license requires attribution. This can be achieved by simply including the full license text (copyright notice included) somewhere in your project. For a proprietary product, this is commonly hidden away in a menu somewhere. For a free software project, where the source code is distributed alongside the product, I often include it as a comment in the relevant files. You can also add your name or the name of your organization to the list of copyright holders when contributing to MIT-licensed projects, at least in the absence of a CLA.
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Programming/Development
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Reading the source code, compiling, and passing tests isn’t sufficient to show us a program’s final behavior. The only way to know what a program does when you run it is to…run it.
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So in the course of working on Placemark, I’m solving a lot of small problems that are each too small and niche to merit their own blog post. But I hate letting things go unwritten, so here they are, smorgasbord style.
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Release 1.1.57-3 of the x13binary package providing the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau arrived late yesterday on CRAN.
This release relaxes the download requirement on macOS and Linux: if a user supplies a path in an environment variable X13_PATH we check for a suitable binary there and omit the download. This helps with air-gapped installation (and alike).
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Rails actions default on using record IDs. But what if we want to change the URL to something prettier, something that doesn’t leak the record ID in the database?
Luckily, there is a simple answer that doesn’t require you to change much. Let’s say we want to use a slug in the URL for a Team model.
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Perl/Raku
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Matthew “Stephen” Stuckwisch has started playing around with the RakuAST branch of Rakudo, and has written a proof of concept module of a BASIC slang and reported about that on /r/rakulang. Cool stuff. And a great introduction on things to come in the Raku Programming Language!
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On Saturday, I was honoured to be among the leaders of the raku community in the FOSDEM 2022 raku devroom. Thanks to Andrew Shitov for organising and to all those who were able to join.
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In November (2021) I wrote a couple of posts bemoaning the headaches of the Apple Intel to ARM architecture shift (part I and part II) before coming to a solution that works for me. (raku on docker on ubuntu on vftools as set out at the end of part II).
One of the drivers to choose this option was to get the whole of my (raku) stack running native on ARM (–platform linux/arm64) to get the performance boost of the new M1 CPU architecture.
Going back to something I posted in January 2021 – where I ran through the progressive speed ups that refactoring my code had achieved – there were a couple of test timings that I can now rerun.
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Python
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Nothing irritates me more than when I forget to git add files in my Git repository. I test locally, commit, and push, only to find out it failed in the continuous integration phase. Even worse is when I’m on the main branch instead of a feature branch and accidentally push to it. The best-case scenario is that it fails because of branch protection, and I need to do some surgery to get the changes to a branch. Even more worse, I did not configure branch protection properly, and I accidentally pushed it directly to main.
[...]
There is even more information that is useful in the prompt. While the name of Python virtual environments is in the prompt, the Python version the virtual environment has is not.
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Ever needed to get data from a web page? Parsing the content for data is called web scraping, and [Doug Guthrie] has a few tips for making the process of digging data out of a web page simpler and more efficient, complete with code examples in Python. He uses getting data from Yahoo Finance as an example, because it’s apparently a pretty common use case judging by how often questions about it pop up on Stack Overflow. The general concepts are pretty widely applicable, however.
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Java
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In my last article, I reviewed some differences between creating and initializing lists in Groovy and doing the same thing in Java. I showed that Groovy has a straightforward and compact syntax for setting up lists compared to the steps necessary in Java.
This article explores some more differences between list handling in Groovy and Java. I’ll explore how to run-length encode a list in both languages for that purpose. Briefly, run-length encoding is a way of compactly representing repeated sequences of the same value in a list.
You’ll need to make sure you have both Groovy and Java installed on your computer to follow along.
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I have known three of her four husbands, including her present partner, Art Eckstein, a retired professor and the author of a book about the Weather Underground and the FBI which says in a scholarly way, “a plague on both your houses.” I also knew, very well, Gumbo’s second husband, Stew Albert, my consigliore, with whom I traveled to Algiers on a mission from Bernardine Dohrn who was then on the “FBI Ten Most Wanted List.” I was to tell Eldridge Cleaver not to trust Timothy Leary, a slippery fellow if ever there was one. It was Eldridge who gave Judy Clavir her moniker, Gumbo. She was the female version of Stew. Get it?
Eldridge over-reacted to my message and placed Leary under house arrest. Later, he sent Leary and his entourage to the Middle East to befriend the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an expedition that turned into a fiasco. Years later, Leary and Cleaver both surrendered to the authorities and both named names they should not have named. Yes, they informed on former comrades and betrayed confidences. Leary snitched on his own lawyer, Michael Kennedy.
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At that point, Ms. Harght said she excused herself from the meeting and called 911, figuring that surely others must have seen the overturned vessel and had already contacted emergency responders.
But there was no one else, according to John P. Murphy, Scituate’s fire chief, who said on Friday that Ms. Harght had played a pivotal role in facilitating the rescue of all three of the boat’s crew members from the 42-degree waters of Massachusetts Bay.
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Crimp connectors provide an easy and convenient way to connect electronics while still allowing for them to be removed and swapped without having to reach for a soldering iron and desoldering wick. While browsing one’s favorite cheap shopping site, you may get the impression that all one has to do to join the world of crimp-awesome is order a $20 crimp tool and some assorted ‘JST’ and ‘DuPont’ (a Mini-PV clone) connectors to go with it. After all, it’s just a bit of metal that’s squeezed around some stripped wire. How complicated could this be?
The harsh truth is that, as ridiculous as the price tag on official JST and Mini-PV crimping tools may seem at hundreds of dollars each, they offer precise, repeatable crimps and reliable long-term stability. The same is true for genuine JST, Mini-PV and Molex connectors. The price tag for ‘saving a buck’ may end up being a lot higher than the money originally saved.
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Science
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Pennsylvania license plate numbers have four digits and when I’m driving I habitually try to factor these. (This hasn’t yet led to any serious injury or property damage…) In general factoring is a hardish problem but when !!n<10000!! the worst case is !!9991 = 97·103!! which is not out of reach. The toughest part is when you find a factor like !!661!! or !!667!! and have to decide if it is prime. For !!667!! you might notice right off that it is !!676-9 = (26+3)(26-3)!! but for !!661!! you have to wonder if maybe there is something like that and you just haven’t thought of it yet. (There isn’t.)
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Chemical engineers at MIT have pulled off something that was once thought impossible. By polymerizing material in two different directions at once, they have created a polymer that is very strong. You can read a pre-print version of the paper over on Arxiv.
Polymers owe many of their useful properties to the fact that they make long chains. Atoms known as monomers join together in strings held together by covalent bonds. Polymer chains may be cross-linked which changes its properties, but it has long been thought that material that had chains going through the X and Y axis would have desirable properties, but making these reliably is a challenge.
Part of the problem is that it is hard to line up molecules, even large monomers. If one monomer in the chain rotates a bit, it will create a defect in the 2D structure and that defect will grow rapidly as you add more monomers. The new technique is relatively easy to do and is irreversible which is good because reversible chains tend to have undesirable characteristics like low chemical stability. Synthesis does require a few chemicals like melamine, calcium chloride, pyridine, and trimesic acid. Along with N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, the mixture eventually forms a gel. The team took pieces of gel and soaked it in ethanol. With some filtering, ultrasonics, centrifuging, and washing with water and acetone, the material was ready for vacuum drying and was made into a powder.
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Education
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She is not alone. Many communities are being torn apart as parents fight for their children’s future – but with different views of what that future should be.
In many ways, this energy around school boards is wonderful. Parental involvement has increased. People have decided to run for office who never expected to do so. While so much involvement is great for our democracy, often missing are the basic elements of engagement, openness and learning, transparency and trust, collaboration and shared purpose. Many times, people are not listening to each other and solving conflicts together.
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Confirming that the Biden administration has abandoned its efforts to pass tuition-free community college—a signature campaign promise—First Lady JIll Biden on Monday offered a stark reminder, according to one critic, of “how low we, the people, are on the U.S. list of priorities.”
The first lady spoke at the Community College National Legislative Summit in Washington, D.C., telling attendees that President Joe Biden has not found a way to keep the community college provision in the Build Back Better Act, his social spending and climate package, as Democrats continue to negotiate the bill.
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Nearly seven years ago, Melanie Graft’s 4-year-old daughter was in the children’s section of her local North Texas library when she picked up a book about an LGBTQ pride parade. Within the colorful pages of the book, “This Day in June,” children and adults celebrate with rainbow flags and signs promoting equality and love over hate. Adults embrace and kiss one another.
Alarmed, Graft launched a campaign against the book and another about a boy who likes to wear dresses, suggesting that their presence in the library foisted inappropriate themes on unsuspecting children. By June 2015, the Hood County Library Advisory Board had received more than 50 complaints asking that the two books be removed from the shelves of the children’s section. The board refused, saying the books did not promote homosexuality, as some complaints had suggested, and arguing that the library already required parents of young children to accompany them and check out materials. Librarian Courtney Kincaid called “This Day in June” a tool to teach respect and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, but she agreed to move it to the adult section. She kept “My Princess Boy” in the children’s section.
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In January 2020, just days before the first case of Covid-19 was identified in the United States, Bryan Alexander, a scholar at Georgetown University known as a “futurist,” published a new book, Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Alexander made no claim to clairvoyance, only to “trend analysis and scenario creation.” But one of his scenarios showed startling foresight:1Imagine a future academy after a major pandemic has struck the world…. Would distance learning grow rapidly as people fear face-to-face learning because of perceived contagion risk?… How would we take conferences and other forms of professional development online?… Would athletes refrain from practice and play for fear of contagion, or would both institutions and the general public demand more college sports as an inspirational sign of bodily vigor in the context of sickness and death?
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This afternoon, I took the CompTIA Project+ PK1-005 beta exam for fun. I am not a project manager, nor are there any expectations on me to act as a project manager for $DAYJOB. However, there are faculty in my department that hold active PMP certification. And some of the core courses (that I don’t teach) do cover management and related topics. This occasionally translates to students talking to me about management issues. The beta exam seemed like an easy excuse to finally learn a little bit about project management.
To be clear: there is no professional benefit for me getting certified. I did it out of pure curiosity plus the fact that CompTIA is offering a public beta for $50. That’s low enough that I don’t mind taking the exam and not passing.
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tl;dr: Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material. As such, massive improvement along several variables can be expected from a more modern implementation of the prestige signal.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Although some supply shortages were anticipated as the global economy reopened after the COVID-19 lockdowns, they have proved more pervasive, and less transitory, than had been hoped. In a market economy that is governed at least in part by the laws of supply and demand, one expects shortages to be reflected in prices. And when individual price increases are lumped together, we call that inflation, which is now at levels not seen for many years.
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Now in its second week, an anti-government demonstration in the Canadian capital of Ottawa has garnered support from right-wing lawmakers and media personalities in the U.S. and abroad, with millions of dollars raised internationally to back the so-called “Freedom Convoy” and similar protests reportedly being planned in the U.S. and Europe for the coming weeks.
The demonstration began last month over a federal Covid-19 vaccine mandate for truck drivers who operate between the U.S. and Canada. Only 10% of the country’s cross-border truckers are unvaccinated, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, but the far-right group Canada Unity and other organizers assembled what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a “small fringe minority” to protest the mandate.
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A school district in Washington state has offered an extraordinary $34 million settlement to students and parents exposed to toxic chemicals that lingered for at least eight years on a public school campus.
The Monroe School District, northeast of Seattle, proposed the striking settlement in November under court seal, preventing the public from seeing the offer. However, the $34 million figure appears in a separate court document obtained last week by The Seattle Times.
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Revisions Change Our View of the Economy
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Ward describes three nested metaphorical loops. The first loop is inside us. He gives a fascinating survey of the known spectrum of human biases that get in our way of thinking through things, even when we convince ourselves we have. The second loop is composed of technology automatically poking at our bruises, triggering actions by playing on the frailties described in the first loop, such as a tendency toward risky behavior like gambling. Finally, the outermost layer describes how we are prodded not only into short-term behavior by such technology, but into something approaching global sheeplike behavior, utterly determined by conditioning.
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On Saturday, about 5,000 people and 1,000 tractor-trailers and personal vehicles squeezed into downtown Ottawa to join in on the second week of a protest, which was initially intended to voice opposition to the Canadian government’s vaccine requirement for truckers crossing the Canada-United States border.
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Scientists say inbreeding is causing an unusually high number of genetic mutations to spread in Pakistan, leading to disabilities in children of consanguineous marriages. Still, this social custom persists.
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The Economist now estimates around 350 per 100K, so in 5 months another roughly 334K have died, or about 2.2K/day. Using the Dept. of Transportation value of a life, these deaths have cost the economy $32B.
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Back in the late 80s, our company managed to procure the complete 28 volume MIT Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) series, published in 1947, for the company library. To me, these books were interesting because I like history and old technology, but I didn’t understand why everyone was so excited about the acquisition. Only a cursory glimpse at the volumes would reveal that the “circuits” these books described used vacuum tubes and their “computers” were made from mechanical linkages. This was the 1980s, and we worked with modern radar and communications systems using semiconductors, integrated circuits, and digital computers. How could these old musty books possibly be of any practical use? To my surprise, it turned out that indeed they could, and eventually I came to appreciate the excitement. I even used several of them myself over the years.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Analysts with Kaspersky Labs reported finding 33 vulnerabilities last year in the most widely used data transfer protocol for internet of things (IoT) medical devices, known as MQTT — that’s 10 more than the previous year. All of them put patient data at risk, the team warned.
To put those numbers in perspective, the analysts at Kaspersky said only 90 vulnerabilities in MQTT have been reported since 2014. Worse yet, many of those bugs are still unpatched, they added.
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New research from Avanan, a Check Point company, has uncovered how a “little-known add-on” in PowerPoint – the .ppam file – is being used to hide malware. Jeremy Fuchs, cybersecurity researcher and analyst at Avanan, wrote in a report published Thursday that the file has bonus commands and custom macros, among other functions.
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The Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) Charming Kitten is sharpening its claws with a new set of tools, including a novel PowerShell backdoor and related stealth tactics, that show the group evolving yet again. The new tools may signal that it’s getting ready to pounce on new victims, researchers believe.
Researchers at cybersecurity firm Cybereason discovered the tools, which include a backdoor they dubbed “PowerLess Backdoor,” as well as an evasive maneuver to run the backdoor in a .NET context rather than as one that triggers a PowerShell process, the Cybereason Nocturnus Team wrote in a report published Tuesday.
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Security
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a Flash report detailing indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with attacks, using LockBit 2.0, a Ransomware-as-a-Service that employs a wide variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures, creating significant challenges for defense and mitigation.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has published a fresh warning about LockBit 2.0. recommending that companies enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) and use strong, unique passwords for all admin and high-value accounts to thwart the strain of ransomware that is used by one of the busiest attack groups on the internet today.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ldns and libphp-adodb), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, mingw-binutils, mingw-openexr, mingw-python3, mingw-qt5-qtsvg, scap-security-guide, stratisd, util-linux, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (lrzsz, qtwebengine5, and xterm), openSUSE (chromium), and Ubuntu (python-django).
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The update fixing the issue for Mageia 8 was released Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:31 UTC (05:31 EST).
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An unauthenticated API call was identified in DPD Group’s public API that could allow a user with a valid package ID to, with some basic OSINT, discover the package’s destination postcode and thus obtain all details about the package.
DPD Group were prompt in the triage and resolution of the vulnerability, which was fixed in October 2021.
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Security for Kubernetes might not be quite the same as what you’re used to. In our previous article, we covered why security is so important in both Linux on-premises servers and cloud Kubernetes clusters. We also talked about 3 major aspects of Linux server security – processes, network, and file system – and how they correspond to Kubernetes. So today, we’ll talk more about the security concerns unique to Kubernetes.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The European Union’s data privacy law, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), has caused all sorts of problems since its debut. Its debut was itself a mess, something that immediately resulted in a whole lot of websites simply refusing to allow European users to connect with them.
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Last month, we wrote about how the IRS and other federal agencies were starting to require the use of private facial recognition from a somewhat sketchy private company, for people to access their own government’s services. The main company in question, ID.me, had made some… questionable decisions that raised serious questions about why the government was forcing people to make use of such a private service.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agency’s website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less intrusive methods for validating one’s identity with the U.S. government online.
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Authoritarian states use the international police organisation for the political persecution of opposition members. The EU Council or the Commission could coordinate the review of these misused alerts. However, the Parliament has agreed to a horse-trading deal.
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The US tech company Meta has threatened to take its digital services Facebook and Instagram offline in the EU if the EU does not allow the company to transfer personal user data and profiles to the US. Meta uses these personality profiles it collects on all users to target them with surveillance-based advertising and paid messages.
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So we have a bigger – systemic – problem on our hands. (Ooh, fun!) And it seems everyone has some idea or other about how we should do things differently moving forward.
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Use a burner phone if you’re traveling to the Olympics, the FBI warned on Tuesday, lest you come home with a nasty case of malware and/or snatched personal data.
The FBI didn’t mention specific threats, per se, but its alert warned those traveling to the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and March 2022 Paralympics that we’ve seen this all before with the Olympics, where “malicious cyber actors could use a broad range of cyber activities to disrupt these events.”
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Recently the IRS announced a new facial recognition system that would require customers upload videos of themselves to access certain IRS services. Over the past couple weeks the system has faced backlash online, bi-partisan backlash in Congress, and a lot of media attention, and this week the IRS announced they were transitioning away from the facial recognition service. What lessons does the IRS’s about face teach us about the current state of privacy awareness among the general population and people’s power to change privacy policy, and what does it mean for the future?
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Defence/Aggression
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Since then, I have written thousands of articles and thirty books, largely concerned with the open wounds of our planetary grief. This year, Noam Chomsky and I will release The Withdrawal: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the Fragilities of US Power (New Press), which will bring together his considerable thinking on the ugliness of our times and my reporting from some of these places. In the book, Chomsky and I talk about the Godfather attitude of the United States government: either you are with us or against us, and if you are against us, then we will use every ounce of our force to demolish you. One of the ways in which this Godfather attitude appears is in the information war that the United States (and its corporate allies) conducts against anyone who objects to its self-anointed right to power and to its myopic vision of the world. Noam’s book with Edward Herman Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (1975) was pulped by Warner when its chief executive felt that it was “a scurrilous attack on respected Americans.” You tell the truth about the violence of the United States government, and you will get it in the neck from its loyal defenders.
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Commentators on the current Ukraine crisis have sometimes compared it to the Cuban missile crisis. This is a good comparison―and not only because they both involve a dangerous U.S.-Russian confrontation capable of leading to a nuclear war.
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A pair of progressive U.S. lawmakers on Monday said that if President Joe Biden does not stop supporting the Saudi-led war against Yemen, they will work to pass a new war powers resolution to “end unconstitutional U.S. participation” in the conflict.
“We will not sit by as the Constitution is ignored and the Yemeni people suffer seven years into this unauthorized war.”
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Last week, Amnesty International released a meticulously researched report detailing the objective reality of Israel’s decades-old system of apartheid, which treats Palestinians as an “inferior racial group.” Even before the official release, the Israeli government was vilifying and slandering Amnesty in a desperate attempt to torpedo the damning report. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid summarized the strategic concern that is haunting his government: “Calling Israel an apartheid state was a slowly creeping trend for a very long time, and in 2022, it will be a real threat.”
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The U.S. warns Russia could soon invade Ukraine, as diplomatic talks continue in Moscow and Washington and the U.S. sends more military equipment to Ukraine. We look at the potential of war from the seldom-discussed perspective of citizens of Ukraine. “This Russian brinkmanship is having a devastating effect on the Ukrainian economy, even without an invasion,” says Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, who just returned from reporting in Ukraine. Foreign policy expert Anatol Lieven says that while a Russian invasion of Ukraine remains a possibility, “there clearly is a desire in Moscow to pursue a diplomatic path” to resolve the crisis without war.
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“What we currently have,” writes Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the former Ukrainian defence minister, and military specialists, in a report by the Centre for Defence Studies in Kyiv, “is the military threat posed by about 127,000 Russian servicemen along Ukraine’s borders, in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, and in Crimea. This number has not increased since April [2021], and is not enough for a full-scale offensive.”
The report states categorically that Russian forces are not in a position to invade in the next two or three weeks and are unlikely to be able to do so in 2022. It points to the absence of ammunition and fuel along with field hospitals and trained up-to-strength military units essential to a modern army going to war. This negative judgement about the prospect of a Russian offensive is confirmed by Ukrainian ministers and defence officials who politely downplay the war hysteria in Washington and London.
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In that spirit, I write as a 54-year-old person who has been diligently consuming a wide variety of news sources on a daily basis since I was 12: we’ve been here before. The details have changed, but the pattern is firmly established.
It would be completely MAD to go to war with Russia — that is, it would be an invitation for the world to finally learn the true meaning of the acronym that used to be as commonly used as acronyms like SALT, START, or ICBM — Mutually Assured Destruction. But in our corporate and so-called public media landscape today, in the media consumed daily by so many millions of Americans (not to mention people in the UK, Australia, and many other countries in similar straits), there will be no reminders of this critical concept, which was once known as a doctrine, one that was dominant in the halls of power in both Washington, DC and Moscow for much of the twentieth century.
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The recent round of devastating airstrikes launched in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition marks the latest escalation of a conflict that has dragged on for nearly seven years, pushed millions to the brink of famine, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. A recent bombardment killed at least 90 people and cut off Internet access for the entire country for days. The disturbing truth is that the United States, through its military involvement in the Saudi-led coalition’s war against the Houthis in Yemen, has been directly participating in this horrific war for too long. It’s time for this complicity to end.
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Al-Qurayshi came to power in 2019, following the death of his predecessor in almost identical circumstances. Three years ago, as US special forces approached his hideout in Idlib province, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and his two children. Both IS leaders were denounced as cowards by the US presidents who authorised the raids.
The al-Qurayshi raid continues the decapitation strikes—colloquially described as cutting off the head of the snake—that were a key element of US counterterrorism strategy in the global war on terror. Such strikes have long been part of the military arsenal, especially in counterinsurgency, but how successful they are as a counterterrorism tool is not straightforward.
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Environment
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A new study out Monday evaluates the public climate pledges made by 25 of the world’s biggest corporations and concludes they “cannot be taken at face value” because the vast majority of firms analyzed are exaggerating the nature of and progress toward their goals—a greenwashing trend that critics say will continue in the absence of stronger regulation.
“Setting vague targets will get us nowhere without real action, and can be worse than doing nothing if it misleads the public.”
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Young Montanans and their lawyers announced Monday that the first children’s climate trial in U.S. history is set to begin a year from now in Helena, Montana.
“Knowing that we have the dates for the first youth constitutional climate case ever, I feel hopeful that finally our government may begin to serve our best interest.”
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California is one of the world’s largest economies. It is also a liberal state that acts as a leader in efforts to combat the climate crisis. Indeed, California is said to have revolutionized climate policy, advancing many key pieces of climate legislation that seek to combat global warming and its catastrophic effects. Among them is a plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles statewide by 2035. California leaders also pride themselves in seeking to meet climate goals while maximizing jobs and economic growth.
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Energy
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“We understand how the oil and gas sector works — we’ve worked in it, studied it, defended it and impacted the policy that regulates it,” a 2015 presentation delivered to the Tennessee Oil and Gas Association begins. “We have been instrumental players in the industry’s highest profile business issues, regulatory hearings, legal disputes and arbitration.”
Those bona fides came not from an oil and gas company or investor, but from FTI Consulting, a sprawling consulting firm that markets its strategic communications services to a wide range of industries — including coal, oil, and gas producers.
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Total’s “incredibly risky” crude oil pipeline may still lack the financial backing it requires, campaigners have claimed, as the controversial project moved one step closer to completion.
Once finished, the 1,443km east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) could transport up to 216,000 barrels a day from the Lake Albert region in landlocked Uganda to Tanga in Tanzania, with the first oil expected in 2025.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The CGNF proposes 140,000 acres of new wilderness across the entire forest (keep in mind that only Congress can designate wilderness). But recent mapping by the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance has determined there are more than 1.1 million roadless acres on the forest that could, in theory, qualify for designation as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act.
Yet, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC) breathlessly reported they had “exciting news” to share. They celebrated the CGNF recommendation for 140,000 acres of new wilderness spread across the three million-acre forest due to their “hard work” as the Gallatin Forest Partnership (GFP) members. The GFP successfully fought to keep a portion of the Gallatin Range in the Buffalo Horn and Porcupine drainages and the West Pine Creek areas from being recommended for wilderness. Way to go, GYC.
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Finance
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The momentum behind a widely popular effort to ban stock trading by members of Congress is growing, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly instructing fellow Democrats to unite behind a specific legislative proposal.
“After weeks of silence, Senate Democratic leaders have asked lawmakers to propose improvements on rules governing congressional stock trading,” Insider reports. “In a call Friday, Democratic leadership staff told legislative directors for Democratic senators about their aspirations for bringing a congressional stock-trading ban bill to the floor of the U.S. Senate.”
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There is an understandable focus on new wealth technology billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, especially as their wealth surges during the pandemic.
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After Democrats in both chambers of Congress added their voices to the growing chorus of opposition to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require the use of a private company’s facial recognition software to access various information online, Sen. Ron Wyden revealed Monday that the IRS intends to change course.
“Facial recognition technology and the collection of peoples’ biometric data puts everyone in danger.”
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As the U.S. Federal Reserve mulls hiking interest rates in the coming weeks in an effort to curb inflation, progressive economists are warning against such a move—arguing that it will hurt workers and fail to address the real source of rising prices: unmitigated corporate power.
“The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further.”
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Saying they were “deeply troubled by recent reports” that JPMorgan Chase has “renewed its predatory practice of robo-signing,” six Senate Democrats on Monday asked Jamie Dimon, the company’s CEO, to provide “detailed information regarding the bank’s credit card debt collection practices.”
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There are great parallels between the birthing pains of Social Security and President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda in the Build Back Better package. Both proposed to fundamentally transform the social compact between working Americans and their government. Both met fierce cries of “socialism” from conservatives who felt that government should do as little as possible for ordinary folks. Both were fully paid for. Both met irresistible pressure to scale back benefits and help fewer people. And like Social Security, we hope, Build Back Better will be subsequently strengthened and expanded once the American people have fallen in love with it. All the authors are on Twitter @21stCenNewDeal.
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Daniel Cooper could barely afford a tiny apartment at the 13-story Olume building in downtown San Francisco. But the expansive view from the roof deck captivated him.
Raised in a small city in Kentucky, Cooper was struck by the grandeur of the skyline before him, from the soaring heights of Salesforce tower, San Francisco’s largest skyscraper, to the gleaming gold cupolas atop St. Joseph’s Church, one of the city’s historic landmarks.
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Ahead of the Super Bowl this weekend, we speak to former National Football League player Donté Stallworth about racism and anti-Blackness in the league. Last week, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sued the NFL, as well as three teams — the Dolphins, Broncos and Giants — for discriminating against him as a Black candidate during his interview process. In his complaint, Flores says the NFL is “racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation,” with wealthy white owners and head coaches at the top while the majority of players who risk bodily injury are Black. “Hopefully at the end of this, Brian Flores can continue his coaching, but also that we can see some changes in the NFL,” says Stallworth.
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Just three days after issuing a statement that Brian Flores’s racial discrimination suit was “without merit,” the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell are oafishly changing tactics. Following a backlash both inside and outside the league against their initial hardline stance, Goodell has now lurched toward a more conciliatory position. Don’t trust it. Goodell’s new letter is a display of gaslighting and corporate doublespeak that takes great care to not expose “the Shield” to more lawsuits. This missive from the desk of Roger Goodell begins by saying, “I want to address a subject that many of us have discussed together, not only this week but for many years.”
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You’ve probably never heard of DeRond Stovall, Doug Simons, Bill Bathe, or Dave Stegman. Stovall currently is a Starbucks trainer in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Simons coaches baseball at a small college in Georgia. Bathe is a retired firefighter and paramedic in Tucson, Arizona. Stegman just retired as an actuary with an insurance company in Ohio. All four are former Major League Baseball (MLB) players. Yet, with the 2022 major league baseball season currently in limbo because of the club owners’ locking out the players, it is players like Stovall, Simons, Bathe, and Stegman that fans should be thinking about rather than the multimillion-dollar stars.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson faced a torrent of backlash over the weekend for publicly admitting that he won’t pressure a Wisconsin manufacturer to locate around 1,000 new jobs in his home state rather than in South Carolina, which has some of the most anti-union labor laws in the nation.
“Johnson just said he wouldn’t lift a finger to make sure the new USPS truck is built here in Wisconsin.”
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Throughout the Trump administration, a lot of folks had absolutely no problem with the mindless rubber-stamps appointed to key regulatory positions. Ajit Pai, for example, couldn’t have demonstrated regulatory capture any more clearly, rubber-stamping every idiotic whim of telecom monopolies at every conceivable opportunity (often with the help of fabricated data and fraud). Revolving door regulation and unqualified industry lackey appointments hit a fevered pitch not seen at any point in U.S. history, and at every step a long list of organizations and individuals made it abundantly clear they were fine with all of it.
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Next time, former President Donald Trump may not even have to ask.
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Democrats are in retreat as they head into this election year. In a stark display of the party’s lack of confidence in its prospects in November’s midterms, 29 House Democrats have announced that they won’t be running for reelection. Given the party’s razor-thin majorities, Joe Biden’s sinking popularity, and the fact that the party of the sitting president almost always suffers losses in midterm elections, it looks as though the Democrats are going to get eviscerated if they don’t quickly change course.
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When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about “disruptive technologies,” inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It’s the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.)
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On February 2, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy called his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and gave him an urgent task: “I need a lot of [Cuban] cigars.” “How many, Mr. President?” “About a thousand,” Kennedy replied. Salinger visited the best-stocked stores in Washington and got 1,200 H. Upmann Petit Corona cigars rolled by hand in the fertile plains of Pinar del Río, at the western end of the island.
“The next morning, I walked into my White House office at about 8 a.m., and the direct line from the President’s office was already ringing,” Salinger told Cigar Aficionado magazine years later. “‘How did you do, Pierre?’ he asked, as I walked through the door. ‘Very well,’ I answered. … Kennedy smiled, and opened up his desk. He took out a long paper which he immediately signed. It was the decree banning all Cuban products from the United States. Cuban cigars were now illegal in our country.”
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But if more Americans knew how many innocent civilians actually die as a result of these sanctions, would the worst of them be permitted?
We may be about to find out in Afghanistan. Sanctions currently imposed on the country are on track to take the lives of more civilians in the coming year than have been killed by 20 years of warfare. There’s no hiding it any more.
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The Biden White House on Monday unveiled a report detailing steps that federal agencies can take to strengthen the collective bargaining rights of public- and private-sector U.S. workers as corporate America continues its decades-long, highly effective assault on labor unions.
Compiled by a task force headed by Vice President Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, the 45-page report lays out nearly 70 policy recommendations aimed at boosting U.S. union membership, which fell by 241,000 workers in 2021 despite historically high public support for organized labor.
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It was the speech the nation desperately needed.
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Last week the mainstream media was full of stories of “top aides” quitting Downing Street. But typically the real scandal was entirely missed – the fact that ever-increasing numbers of unqualified and unelected political hacks are given positions of real power, and large salaries, at public expense.
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From 1975 to 2016, the increase in Black doctoral recipients among US citizens and permanent residents, across every major field of study, outpaced white doctoral recipients. Additionally, Black doctoral recipients are more likely to be first-generation students. Nonetheless, public discourse has long ignored Black experts, who often understand how compounding crises are confounded by demographic and socioeconomic differences. For example, William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University, noted how the Federal Reserve missed early signs of the Great Recession because it did not listen to warnings from Black economists. More than a decade later, very little has changed.
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The RN MEP pointed out that his indictment came at a time when “we learn that journalists (from M6) and a Roubaix resident (the lawyer Amine Elbahi, who testified on M6) have been placed under police protection”. This was because they had “described the reality and highlighted the advance of Islamism in the city of Roubaix” via a report on the Zone Interdite programme on Islamism, broadcast on M6 on Sunday January 23.
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The scam is the Big 4, which are the biggest winners from the outsourcing of the public service, collected $1.74bn for giving advice to government over 18 months. Last year they “donated” $670,570 to the major political parties of $670,570. Job done.
This is the same crew which claims to act as the gatekeepers of commerce – auditing most of the financial statements of the world largest corporations while also advising them how to dodge tax, and while dodging tax themselves but not producing any financial statements. They are partnerships, not companies, you see.
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The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) is responsible for collecting taxes and other revenues for the govt. But believe it or not, even with over a thousand employees, they are still understaffed. In a mostly informal economy, Zimra would have to employ half the population to keep track of every business venture in the country. Hence why we ended up getting the 2% tax.
Now, the 2% tax was not the last of our finance minister’s revenue generating innovations. He also introduced taxes on companies that provide digital advertising, content, cloud computing, e-commerce, gambling, betting, gaming and cryptocurrency services to Zimbabweans. Seeing as the global economy is ever going digital, this move made all the sense in the world.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Dr. Allison Berry sits at a table at the Rainshadow Café in downtown Sequim (pronounced “Squim”), a 110-mile drive northwest of Seattle, describing the tsunami of hatred that has come her way during the pandemic. She’s young, smiles a lot, wears woolen sweaters and scarves, and has been the health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties since 2018; before that, she was a doctor at a local clinic run by the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe.
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On this blog, I like to think that I go beyond just refuting misinformation with facts and science. In addition to that, I try to inoculate our readers with critical thinking skills by discussing the tactics of disinformation and misinformation. One of the most common tactics is to challenge a scientist or science advocate to a “live public debate” about the topic in question, whether it be the claim that vaccines cause autism (they don’t), whether HIV causes AIDS (it does), regarding “integrative medicine” or “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), or antivaxxers trying to trap me. Regular readers no doubt can recount why quacks, cranks, pseudoscience-promoters, and conspiracy theorists have the advantage in these debates—”Gish gallop” anyone? —but there are other reasons why science deniers gravitate towards this particular tactic. Sometimes the motivations are dishonest, but more often they are not, being based instead on the false idea that such “debates” are a fair and democratic method to settle a question, whether there is a real scientific debate or not. (Almost always, there is not.) Given that I’ve been seeing a rash of challenges to a “debate” coming from COVID-19 contrarian and antivaccine social media personalities and doctors, I decided that now would be a good time to address this common tactic again.
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Genocide or puffery and clickbait? Independent journalism is the touchstone of MWM. So when a widespread narrative about China is challenged, who better than former China correspondent for The Australian, Michael Sainsbury, to sort the wheat from the propaganda chaff?
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Human rights advocates say renewed international attention for China during the Winter Olympics should focus on rampant human rights violations occurring across the country. It is incumbent upon the International Olympic Committee to deny countries the bid to host if they violate their citizens’ human rights, says Jules Boykoff, author and former member of the U.S. Olympic soccer team. While many have commended China’s “zero-COVID policy,” the emphasis on keeping infection rates low is distracting from other kinds of suffering, adds Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
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A Russian teacher says she was forced to quit her job at a school in the city of St. Petersburg after she read poems to her class by two authors who had been persecuted during Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s purge in the 1930s and 1940s.
Serafima Saprykina wrote on Facebook on February 6 that the school’s principal forced her to leave her job after she read poems by Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky during one of her lessons with 10th graders, even though the school’s deputy principal had approved the lesson.
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Freedom of the Press
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These specific advertisements are called “native advertising,” but are also tagged as “sponsored content,” “partner post” or other labels consumers don’t understand. They look like news articles, with headlines, photos with captions and polished text. But really they are ads created by, or on behalf of, a paying advertiser.
With declining revenue from traditional display advertising and classified ads, news outlets are increasingly relying on native advertising – a sector in which U.S. spending was expected to reach $57 billion by the end of 2021.
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A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) set up to support the liberation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from prison has raised 12,569 Ether (ETH) or around $38.8 million at current prices.
Assange is currently fighting extradition to the United States following a court ruling in December that overruled a British court ruling barring extradition. He is currently locked up in a London prison where he has been since 2019.
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In a statement issued on Monday, Finland’s Association of Editors (PTY) points out that the media is not a party to protests, and that both demonstrations and a freely functioning media are elements of a democratic society.
Reporters covering the Convoy Finland 2022 protests in central Helsinki this past weekend said they faced verbal and physical harassment as they went about their jobs. According to the Association of Editors the harassment was particularly experienced by camera crews and journalists providing live coverage. On Friday, protestors stole microphones twice from an Iltalehti reporter, and tried to do the same to Yle reporters.
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The much-anticipated auction of NFT collection ‘Censored’, a collaboration between political prisoner Julian Assange and renowned artist Pak will launch today, the same day set by the UK Supreme Court for Julian Assange to file his appeal against US extradition.
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The collection consists of two parts: an auction of a single artwork ‘Clock’ (1 of 1) and a separate pay-what-you-like Open Edition.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A researcher at a progressive think tank warned Monday that a bill passed last week by the House of Representatives “stokes future U.S.-China conflict” while prioritizing spending on militarized technology at the expense of “urgent human needs.”
“The bill is framed heavily in terms of national security and competition with China and could easily pave the way for boosting the already massive military budget in years to come.”
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It’s true that “in a properly functioning market, consumers express their preferences through the prices they pay.” Yet Hanley tacitly implies that renewable options are a luxury. This has been asserted outright by John Stossel: “The market didn’t arbitrarily pick oil as the dominant source of energy.”
R. Buckminster Fuller observed that the ability of fossil fuels to burn quickly after being formed over far vaster stretches of time makes them an “energy savings account.” The short-term benefit doesn’t reflect their limited supply, with the “fabulous energy-income wealth” of renewable alternatives untapped.
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This case — sent to us by Eric Goldman — touches on a lot of subject matter covered frequently at Techdirt: dead dogs, police officers, the First Amendment, and qualified immunity. Yet the narrative isn’t quite what’s expected given the elements. And the court’s conclusions, while disappointing, are likely the correct application of the law.
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Voting rights advocates in Congress and across the United States reiterated the need for stronger federal voting rights laws after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed Alabama’s GOP-drawn, racially gerrymandered congressional map to stay in place.
“Congress cannot sit by and watch as Americans’ most fundamental democratic freedoms are eviscerated by right-wing partisan justices.”
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The first one, the cruelest, is under torture and hateful beatings. A public lynching, with assistance under the sun, beer and passivity. If a black man is being beaten to death, he has done something. In fact, black people are always doing something wrong.
So it was with Moïse Kabagambe, who was working in Rio de Janeiro at a beach kiosk. His mistake, his petulance… his folly was not to recognize his place, when he charged two days’ pay for his work. For what? He was brutalized by five barbarians who destroyed him with pieces of wood and a baseball bat. One of the killers said that he “decided to vent his anger” and that he hit the Congolese man with a baseball bat.
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Times to try our souls. And to prepare for darker times ahead.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I’ve worked for progressive change most of my life. Today it feels as if dark forces are overwhelming efforts to leave our children a world that is not a dystopian nightmare. What can we do facing such a bleak situation?
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In the abstract, toxicity and leadership are antithetical, oxymoronic. True leadership is about motivating others, inspiring them, to follow willingly. To follow unwillingly is to bow to the fear of coercion. To follow conditionally – I scratch your back, you scratch mine – is to give in to the self-serving bribery we euphemize as persuasion. But truly leading is qualitatively different, a supremely more elevated form of human interaction than we commonly experience. It’s about being out in front rather than on top; about eliciting willing deference from others because they want to, not because they feel they have to; about synching the hearts and minds – even the souls – of followers by the exemplary example a leader sets.
Where the poison of toxicity is at play, true leadership is absent. That, regrettably, is much more the norm than the exception today – not only in this country, its institutions, organizations, and communities, but abroad as well; at all levels of human interaction. Its paragon, of course, was and is Donald Trump, foremost practitioner, proponent, propagator, and embodiment. But it didn’t – and doesn’t – begin or end there. We have all experienced it in varying degrees, in various forms, at various times in our careers and our lives. It’s everywhere: in the organizations and institutions of politics and government, business, sports and entertainment, the media, education, medicine, even religion. It has been celebritized, commercialized, commoditized as a practice. If you want to understand the underlying causes of the manifold divisions afflicting this country today, for example, look no farther. It is, unquestionably, the defining sign of our times – a crisis of pandemic proportions; and January 6, 2021, was its political apotheosis.
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First Nations land defenders on Monday filed a submission to the United Nations detailing how their territory and human rights are being violated by Canadian and British Columbian authorities in service of a fossil fuel corporation’s gas pipeline.
“We are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada.”
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In a similar fashion to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a painted protest against a fascist Inter-state (Germany and Spain) brutal violence towards a Basque town (Guernica) resisting the Spanish Franco regime dictatorship in 1937[1], Fernando Barragan took the brush and squared off on canvas with energetic strokes the multiple challenges faced by Latin@/ Chican@ communities: police brutality, state and gang violence, discrimination, immigration issues, exploitation and racisms. A victim to gang and state violence himself, Barragan carries over the impact/trauma on inter family relations and children growing up under such conditions into this artwork. Unlike Picasso’s cubist style of painting, Barragan is closer to Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco’s dramatic figurative work on canvas and walls. He shares the striking style of Orozco and Picasso’s tragedy interpretation of war, despair and inhumane ideologies based on biological classifications and a civilizing norm of violence inherited in modern societies/cultures. Barragan’s canvas mural is a plea to all those involved in the creation of communities, in the deconstruction of alternative humane ways of living and being to stop, reflect and catch up with our deepest desire to build healthy environments and find respectful means of understanding ourselves as a community.
No Somos Animales depicts a community that can well be interpreted as a scene in Palestine, in India, in Chiapas, In U.S African American spaces, In Guatemala, in Chile with the Mapuche indigenous people or any other place or space in the world facing violence. Although its interpretation is about a particular Chican@ space, nevertheless it contains a universal conversation. The Chicano Guernica in No Somos Animales contains the same concerns of those by African artist Dumile Feni’s painting titled, African Guernica (1967): war and its effects.[2] For Feni it was the trauma and devastation of colonial wars on African people and the African continent. For Barragan it is the war waged on Chican@/ Latin@ and immigrant communities by the modern state. When Chicana artists Margaret Garcia reached out to Barragan for an art piece that enacted a protest for a play, Barragan shared in his own words that he “wasn’t going to provide a protest. I was going to give them a riot.” It is a strong timeless political statement made by Barragan towards the powers be and in particular to individuals. He invites us to examine what is community? How are we building community and who leads communities? Latin American philosopher Juan Jose Bautista S. reminds us that for the most part modern societies are made of individuals vs. communities. This contradiction between community and individuals is a deep divide towards the collective potential in many communities that can aid against the egoistic tendencies embedded in modern neoliberal cultures by rescuing the collective virtue known as solidarity. This brings up the following question as to how a community interprets itself. Is it as subject to subject or is it a subject /object relation?
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Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress. Over the years, he has come to greatly admire the creativity of its entrepreneurs, their ability to get things done quickly (so unlike the sluggish pace of Congress), and their tremendous capacity for wealth generation. These, he believes, are qualities our democracy needs. And since ours is a digital age, our democracy particularly needs the work those qualities achieve in Silicon Valley.
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Exactly five years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that decriminalized some forms of domestic violence. Since then, victims have been unable to press criminal charges for domestic battery unless it’s at least the abuser’s second offense — first time offenders only face administrative fines, ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 rubles ($66 to $400). To find out what impact this legislation has had on Russia’s domestic violence problem, Meduza spoke to Diana Barsegyan — the deputy director of the aid group Nasiliu.net (No to Violence).
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Famous model Sabeeka Imam is the latest celebrity to receive death and rape threats online. The award-winning model took to social media and shared screenshots where someone had tagged her in a post where an Instagram user had tried intimidating Sabeeka with horrifying threats.
The model shared the screenshot on her profile and went on to add that she has contacted relevant authorities about the threats. Sabeeka, while posting the screenshot, tagged the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Cybercrime and British Council Pakistan.
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In the run-up to the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation on Sunday, countries around the world are calling for an end to the globally condemned practice. In Kenya, around 4 million women and girls have been subjected to FGM, according to the United Nations.
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The report was released on World Day Against Female Genital Mutilation. Articles 19 and 24 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the United Nations (UN) in 1989, do not allow female genital mutilation.
The German Wadi organization conducted a survey on female genital mutilation in girls and women from 0 to 20 in Hewler and Raperîn, in the province of Sulaymaniyah in 2021.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that, as of this year, all new telematics-equipped vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops to access vehicle data via a mobile device. The goal: reduce repair monopolies, and make it cheaper and easier to get your vehicle repaired.
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This ought not to surprise anyone. In 2020, the company entered into an exclusive and lucrative $100 million contract with Rogan and his library of more than a decade of podcast episodes. Rogan recently interviewed anti-vaccine activist Robert Malone—a man who was banned from Twitter for violating its guidelines on COVID-19 misinformation. The interview was so controversial that even YouTube banned it.
Still, Spotify chose Rogan over Young. And over Joni Mitchell, India Arie, and even Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who followed suit in pulling their music. It did so because the bottom line for the company is preserving its profits, and it appears to see Rogan’s show as more financially valuable than the entire catalogs of legendary musicians.
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Abu Dhabi-headquartered Anghami revealed the closure of its merger with Vistas Media Acquisition Company via a formal release, and the post-deal company’s shares arrived on NASDAQ (as “ANGH,” with warrants listed as “ANGHW”) this morning. At the time of publishing – with about three hours until market close – ANGH was hovering just above $14, for a gain of more than 16 percent. Shares briefly surged to $17 apiece when the market opened.
Execs at 10-year-old Anghami acknowledged their company’s stock-market debut in an additional release today, touting the platform’s regional reach (“around 58% of the market share in the Middle East”), 72 million-track library, and 75 million registered users.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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New week, new episode of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. On episode three, we’re joined by Dr. Temitope Odumosu, art historian, curator and senior lecturer in cultural studies at Malmö University in Sweden. Her international research and cultural practice is concerned with the representation of African peoples, visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, colonial archives and archiving, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing.
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Major rightsholders and internet companies in Russia have signed a new memorandum of cooperation designed to make pirated movies, TV shows and other content harder to find. In addition to automatically removing reported infringing links within hours, search engines have agreed to completely deindex all domains that carry 100 or more links to infringing content.
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A key member of Scene piracy group SPARKS has been sentenced to 22 months in prison. The 52-year-old Brit George Bridi, who pleaded guilty, apologized and showed remorse for his wrongdoing at a New York federal court. The sentence is lower than the 27 to 33-month term the U.S. Attorney had asked for.
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A 43-year-old man has been handed a three months conditional prison sentence for his involvement with the Danish torrent tracker Asgaard. The man, who is seen as one of the driving forces behind the now-defunct site, helped to set up and manage servers and also helped with coding. Several other defendants connected to the site will have their day in court later this year.
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We’ve been talking a bit about industry consolidation through mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the video game industry as of late. The impetus for that discussion has been a series of high-profile acquisitions for several notable companies, namely Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft acquired Zenimax for $7 billion and Activision Blizzard King for a bonkers $69 billion recently, while Sony jumped into the game by acquiring Bungie for $3.6 billion. Of interest for these pages is the different approaches these companies have taken with these acquisitions. Microsoft hemmed and hawed about whether it would start building Microsoft exclusivity for products from its acquisitions, eventually landing on very much embracing exclusivity, while Sony took a much more hands-off approach and stated plainly that Bungie games would still be cross-platform. For those of us interested in digital and technology economies and business models, this is interesting stuff.
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Over a decade ago, we wrote about how Google had to edit out the Australian Aboriginal flag from a logo because of copyright concerns. An 11-year-old girl had won a contest to design a Google logo for Australia Day, and her logo included a simple drawing of the popular Aboriginal flag. Harold Thomas created a (fairly simple) flag design “as a symbol of unity and national identity” for the Aboriginal people in Australia. The flag became quite popular… and then Thomas basically became a copyright landlord, demanding payment for pretty much any usage.
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Gemini Saves Old/Low-End Computers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Some of the lessons we’ve learned this past year and the status quo in Gemini Space, which lowers the entry barriers for authors online (GemText is far easier and more approachable than HTML) and encourages self-hosting, self-signing etc.
Gemini Space (or Geminispace as one conjoined word; some people abbreviate it like that) grows faster than ever, which is good for the environment and good for the minds (it helps tackle “addictive” aspects that were integrated into the Web to usher in more surveillance, manipulation etc.) among several other things…
Gemini Space isn’t difficult to host from one’s home, even over slow residential connections. GemText is very light and simple as it does not encourage the use of images, which can eat up a lot of bandwidth unnecessarily (even for objects that are never viewed by the visitor).
In terms of security/privacy, Geminispace is very good. Not perfect, but definitely good enough. Some people still use the deprecated TLS 1.2, so yesterday we loosened our restrictions — though only after we had tightened them a few weeks ago — allowing (once again) people with outdated Gemini clients to access our capsule. As the graph on the right hand side shows, sooner or later, or maybe within a couple of years, almost nobody will use TLS 1.2 anymore.
The video above covers some of the latest developments in Geminispace and in our own capsule, including ways to tackle spiders among other bots. There are search engines, research-centric indexers, and all sorts of things one inevitably has to deal with after setting up a new capsule.
The sad thing is that the Web has become not a platform for shopping but a battleground of misinformation, anxiety, and exploitation. More and more people recognise the negative impacts of what became of the Web, gaming people’s emotions for corporate gains and mental abuse, including gaslighting, indoctrination, and incitement. Putting aside technical perils like DRM, bloat, and “modern” aspects that leave blind people in the dark (there are other accessibility-related perils)
“Much more can be said about the issues that Web users face and we hope that the FSF and GNU will one day join Geminispace.”The Web wasn’t always like that. Social control media didn’t always provoke for “engagement”, Google News (Gulag News/Noise) did not always push spam, lies, and plagiarism, videos online weren’t always censored for the slightest of “offence” (like using one supposedly ‘bad word’), and it was never as centralised as it is today.
Much more can be said about the issues that Web users face and we hope that the FSF and GNU will one day join Geminispace. It would do a lot towards legitimising it and bringing new users to it. A year ago (in February and March) the FSF’s Alex Oliva spoke about this and this morning I spoke to RMS about it. Geminispace has quadrupled in size since I first spoke to them about it and judging by the growth (e.g. total number of capsules) so far this year we can expect it to more than double in 2022, having nearly quadrupled last year. █
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