02.15.22
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, GNU/Linux, Google at 9:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 579fcac9d883ed9994bf15c638a2b36d
No You in YouTube
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The “You” in “YouTube” seems to mostly refer to brainwashing YOU and spying on YOU; it’s more like a social control media outlet (in video form or multimedia as the medium) and it’s fully engaged in promotion of spammy videos, pushing products (ads) under the guise of “legitimate” so-called ‘content’ — something which Alphabet/Google increasingly “optimises” for in pursuit of higher profits
A COUPLE of years ago we wrote about Minisforum spamming "Linux" to push Windows PCs. Since then we’ve mentioned in a lot of videos that Google’s (or Gulag) YouTube (sometimes I call it GulagTube because of the way it treats and views “creators”) was doing reputation laundering for Bill Gates. He was paying Google (via shell entities) for it and also paying pertinent channels in YouTube. Same as in Twitter.
“It’s only getting worse and worse — to the point where YouTube as a platform is hardly better than television/broadcast (it probably contains a lot more falsehoods than mainstream/corporate media and it’s curated by censorship/ranking for political purposes).”Nowadays when I end up in the domain of YouTube (official domain, not proxies) I get bombarded/distracted by promotional spam. This wasn’t always so bad and it’s only getting worse all the time. There’s no real effort to show you what’s good for you; it’s about maximising YouTube’s revenue. To make matters worse, many of the remaining channels have adopted ludicrous labels such as “influencer” and henceforth promoted products instead of relaying honest information. In recent years this became like a ‘cancer’ that destroys even “Linux”-centric channels, not just in the “description” box but also the videos themselves.
The bottom line is, YouTube is an awful source for information not just because of the way Google steers people towards spam/misinformation; even those who attempt to bypass Google’s algorithm/s (or “Hey Hi”) might end up presented with covert marketing. It’s only getting worse and worse — to the point where YouTube as a platform is hardly better than television/broadcast (it probably contains a lot more falsehoods than mainstream/corporate media and it’s curated by censorship/ranking for political purposes). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux’s resourcefulness as a functional operating system can’t be undermined. Its open-source nature and the vast number of distros available make Linux a preferred choice for beginners and advanced users alike.
Nevertheless, most Linux distros offer commendable and transcendental desktop experiences. Each distro might be unique in its offering, but some are highly exceptional, given their layout and graphical interfaces.
If you are a beauty admirer and are looking for some classy, eye-catching, and popular Linux distros, you have to check out these eight distros that offer a visually-appealing interface out-of-the-box.
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I have a set of Elgato key lights that I use when filming and I love them: they’re very nice lights that give great coverage and colour.
Part of what makes these particular lights practical and popular is their wireless control. In fact, you can only control these lights wirelessly. The problem with that? Eh, Elgato only make the ‘Elgato Control Center’ software for Windows and macOS (though are mobile apps for Android and iOS too).
Since I typically use my phone to wirelessly control my Panasonic LUMIX camera (which requires connecting to a custom local wireless network the camera creates) I can’t use my phone to also control the Elgato lights (as you need to be on the same wireless network as them).
Open source to the rescue!
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Server
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If you are a beginner Linux user, then you may be wondering about the difference between Debian and Ubuntu servers. Both of these versions are popular among Linux users, but they have some key differences. In this blog post, we will take a look at the basic technical differences between Debian vs Ubuntu servers, as well as their pros and cons. We will also help you decide which one is right for you!
There are many reasons why you should learn Linux OS. One of the biggest advantages is that Linux is open-source, which means that you can freely download and use it for any purpose. Additionally, Linux is very stable and secure, making it a great choice for servers. It also runs on a wide range of devices, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.
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Kubernetes are getting more pivotal in this era of cloud computing due to the efficiency they provide to developers who can now build and deploy application environments more easily using containerization.
Monitoring and securing these containers is a lot more difficult than managing databases and the whole process can sound more daunting than it should be. Especially since their clusters can be hazardous if they’re not properly managed.
Today’s article brings you a list of several free and open-source Kubernetes tools with which, mixed with professional insight, efficient monitoring, and sufficient resources, your work can be a walk in the park.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 21.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Trust is a very important aspect of security, but who/what exactly should you trust? How about no one? Join Jay and Joao for episode 18 of the Enterprise Linux Security show, as they discuss Zero Trust Security.
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In the Linux community, there’s constant debate about which distribution is best for your desktop. However, there’s not as much discussion regarding Linux distros for your server. There are many good options for your Linux server project, and in this video Jay discusses his top 6 choices.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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After roughly 20 years and counting up to 0.40 in release numbers, I’ve decided to call the next version of the xf86-input-wacom driver the 1.0 release. [1] This cycle has seen a bulk of development (>180 patches) which is roughly as much as the last 12 releases together. None of these patches actually added user-visible features, so let’s talk about technical dept and what turned out to be an interesting way of reducing it.
The wacom driver’s git history goes back to 2002 and the current batch of maintainers (Ping, Jason and I) have all been working on it for one to two decades. It used to be a Wacom-only driver but with the improvements made to the kernel over the years the driver should work with most tablets that have a kernel driver, albeit some of the more quirky niche features will be more limited (but your non-Wacom devices probably don’t have those features anyway).
The one constant was always: the driver was extremely difficult to test, something common to all X input drivers. Development is a cycle of restarting the X server a billion times, testing is mostly plugging hardware in and moving things around in the hope that you can spot the bugs. On a driver that doesn’t move much, this isn’t necessarily a problem. Until a bug comes along, that requires some core rework of the event handling – in the kernel, libinput and, yes, the wacom driver.
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Applications
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OBS Studio is the incredibly popular free and open source video capture and livestreaming software. A huge new release is now available with plenty of Linux improvements.
This is the first release to offer full official Flatpak / Flathub support, which means users across pretty much any Linux distribution get any easy way to install. Not only that, because it’s an official package, you also get proper service integration. For example, instead of entering a streaming key for Twitch, you can login and get all the goodies without any fuss.
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Busybox is described on its manual page as the swiss army knife of embedded Linux. It combines small versions of common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides around 400 implementations of Linux commands such as more, less, head, tail, grep, awk, sed, dpkg, all compiled into a single binary.
This executable is small in size (below 1MB) and thus useful in situations whereby we are limited in terms of disk space e.g running an entire temporary operating system on a RAM disk, embedded systems, mobile devices, and such.
Busybox looks at the name by which it is called by and will act according to the desired program, for example if we call busybox through a symbolic link ls, it will perform an action resembling ls command similarly if we call it through the mkdir symbolic link, it performs actions similar to mkdir.
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I’m a KDE user, and for years I’ve been on a seemingly endless journey of discovery with the Plasma Desktop. If you were to ask me in public, I’d probably claim to know everything there is to know about the desktop I use every day of my life. But in truth, I’ve actually only just scratched the surface. It seems every day I learn a new KDE trick that either makes my life easier or just more fun, and my latest discovery is the konsolekalendar command, which lets you view and manage an iCal calendar from the terminal.
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Instructionals/Technical
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PIP is a utility that manages software packages such as libraries and dependencies for the development modules of Python. In this short tutorial, you will learn how to install pip on Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04.
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LAMP is a collection of open-source software commonly used to serve web applications that have been around since the late 1990s. LAMP is an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP and provides the components needed to host and manage web content and is still arguably the most utilized stack deployment for developers and web applications today.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP) on AlmaLinux 8 Workstation or Server.
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Qlipper is a lightweight, open-source, and cross-platform clipboard history applet, which helps the user to get back any copied path. The key task of Qlippper will not consume many resources on your PC while monitoring it for recent data that can be used again later if needed!
With Qlipper, you can quickly view your clipboard history and make items in it the selected one. To clear all past content, just right-click on its icon within the system tray or press Control+Alt+V for viewing history.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Qlipper Clipboard Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
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Ansible consists of different types of modules to perform different types of tasks required for Ansible to work. These modules help to perform almost all the tasks in Ansible. These Ansible modules are directly connected to the Ansible hosts or nodes and perform the tasks on those nodes. Some of the most popular modules are apt, yum, shell, raw, command, and many more.
In this article, we will discuss the difference between the two modules that are commonly used in Ansible. These modules are command and shell modules. In many ways, both of them have the same task and look similar, but if we go deeper into the actions, there are many differences between them.
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Beekeeper Studio might be a perfect choice for those looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive GUI electron front end for database management. This open-source database GUI can easily connect with any MariaDB or Postgres and works well alongside other popular databases such as MySQL, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB. Currently, Beekeeper Studio only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.
Beekeeper Studio comes equipped with all sorts of useful features you would expect in a quality SQL program: autocomplete functionality includes completable queries without having to make multiple trips back-and-forth between programs; there’s even live reflection on what your query will do right before it finishes running so that minor mistakes don’t go unnoticed while typing.
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With the new TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RRT (BBR) algorithm, Google has finally found a way to overcome many issues that were previously present in both Reno & CUBIC. This updated congestion control algorithm achieves significant bandwidth improvements and lowers latency, and is deployed by Google.com, Google Cloud Platform, Youtube, and others.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to enable TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install ownCloud server on Ubuntu 22.04. ownCloud is a collaboration tool that allows you to easily and securely share files and folders with others.
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Odoo is an open-source and full suite of business apps including, ERP, CRM, Finance, Human resource, and more. It is available in different editions depending on what’s right for you. It can be used for a lot of different industries including, Sales, Operations, Manufacturing, Marketing, Human resource, Finance and more. The biggest strengths of Odoo is integrated scalability, user-friendly, flexible, and customizable. It is written in Python and helps you manage your business and be more efficient wherever you are.
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Numerous modern web applications fancy the use of a document database to store data; a case exhibited by MongoDB. The no traditional table-based relational database structure classifies MongoDB as a NoSQL database. It instead embraces dynamic schemas through the use of JSON-like documents.
With MongoDB, there is no need for a predefined schema for data to be stored on a database. The MongoDB schema is open to altercations and updates making it unnecessary to set up a new database whenever new project specifications need implementation.
This article will walk us through the installation and configuration of MongoDB on Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04. Before proceeding, make sure you have root user access or you are a Sudoer user on the system you are using.
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Commands to install WebVirtCloud on Ubuntu 20.04 to provide KVM with a web-based graphical user interface.
WebVirtCloud is a free and open-source project that offers a GUI web interface for the command-line KVM virtualization of Linux systems. Well, if you don’t know about the KVM – stands for Kernel Virtual Machine. It is a Type-1 Hypervisor that uses the kernel of Linux to offer the virtualization environment. Whereas VirtualBox and Vmware Workstation are Type-2 hypervisors where the Guest OS doesn’t have direct as to hardware.
An advantage of KVM is that the guest systems run at almost native speeds, i.e the guest system responds almost as quickly as a native system.
To manage and communicate KVM using the tools like Virt Manager we required Libvirt, a virtualization management layer. And the same Libvirt API is used by the WebVirtCloud web UI to manage KVM.
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In this post, you learn how to set up an Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
EKS is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes in the cloud or on-premises. Kubernetes provides a scalable, distributed way to manage workloads. It does this by containerizing applications. Containers ensure replicability across different environments and cloud infrastructures.
The clusters you create in this post will be used in later posts in our Continuous Integration series, to set up web applications and as part of workflows.
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Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to transfer files using cloud services. Even so, the most secure way to do it isn’t using Dropbox, Google Drive, or anything like that.
If you want the ultimate security when moving files from computer to computer, you’ll need to know how to SCP in Linux. Here’s how.
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Learn the steps to install TimeShift on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal.
Linux system installation and setup is not a difficult task but if you are new to it then issuing any wrong command could cause some error that would be difficult for you to resolve. In such a case, if a person has a backup of the system then restoring it to the earlier point when everything was working is quite easy using TimeShift. Even an experienced user can use it to remove the headache of installing a Linux from scratch if something goes wrong.
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Now that you know what netcat is , it is time for some basic operations and real life tasks with the TCP/IP swiss army knife. Linux distributions come with Netcat already compiled and installed but I will cover how to install and use Netcat in ubuntu.
You can choose to install Netcat with the ‘apt-get install’ command or compile and install it from the source. The second method is not as easy as the first one and requires some basic knowledge about the Linux command line, commands such as tar, make, and install. The first method is very easy to use and friendly for beginners. Open a new terminal window and type ‘sudo apt-get install netcat’ as shown in Figure 1.
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PHP is the most widely used programming language on the web. PHP 7 was released with a slew of new features and performance enhancements, and its successor, PHP 8, is even better. PHP 8.1.x is the most recent PHP build, released earlier this year.
If you are starting a new PHP project, it is highly recommended that you have the most recent version installed. If not, we’ll show you how to upgrade to PHP 8.1 in Debian 9, 10, or 11. If you’re using Ubuntu, check out this article on how to install/upgrade to the most recent PHP version in Ubuntu or derivatives.
If your PHP application is built upon an older PHP version, make sure that it supports the latest . WordPress, the most popular content management system and Laravel, a great PHP framework supports PHP 8.
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When I started writing bash scripts, I realized that one operation I am often dealing with every script is handling date and time. I have done many operations like naming a file/directory with date, fetching API result, and transforming the epoch value to date/time suitable for the application, manipulating date column in CSV files, etc. If you are a beginner for Bash scripting, this article will help in understanding how to use date command in Bash scripting, how to work with date and time using date command in shell scripts, how to manipulate them and do various operations with it in Linux.
You should have a basic understanding of how a system date and time is set. This part will mostly be taken care of by the server admin in your work.
But if you are an individual user and using Linux in your personal machine, then you should have an understanding of how date and time are set, ways to synchronize them, and how to modify it.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CMake on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, CMake is a free, open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test, and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler-independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.
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 CMake on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, InvoicePlane is a free-to-use invoicing and customer management web application that makes it possible for almost any individual or business to issue out invoices on demand. It is used by many organizations and freelancers to manage their payments and invoices. It offers custom templates, themes, and other tools that help you to increase the functionality of InvoicePlane. It also supports multiple languages and multiple payment providers such as Paypal, or even Bitcoin via Coinbase.
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 InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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OBS Studio is a Free and open-source software for Video recording and Live Streaming, it is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
OBS released a new version 27.2, with many features, Bug-fixes, and improvements.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install OBS Studio 27.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Fedora 35, and AlmaLinux 8.
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A collection of tips to let you know how to check disk space usage of Docker Images, Containers and Volumes on your Linux server host.
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R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It can be considered as a different implementation of the S language with much of the S code running unaltered in R. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques.
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PHP is a recursive acronym for Hypertext Processor. It is an open-source general-purpose scripting language that is widely used in web development because of its ability to be embedded in HTML. A scripting language is used to write pre-written programs that are later used to automate tasks. PHP scripts are commonly used on Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS, and other operating systems. When using PHP in web development, you are free to choose your web server and the underlying operating system.
This article describes step-by-step how to install PHP versions 5.6, 8.0 and 8.1 on your Ubuntu. After installing the two versions, it also explains how you can disable one version and enable another version as the default version for the system.
We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system. The same commands will work on the old Ubuntu 18.04 LTS version as well.
In this article, we use the Ubuntu command line, the terminal, to install and configure PHP. You can open the Terminal application using either the System Dash or the Ctrl+Alt+t key combination.
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AWS S3 event notification helps us to receive notifications when certain events take place in an S3 Bucket. We can enable available Amazon S3 bucket events to send a notification message. So, whenever the specified event takes place in S3 Bucket, the event is triggered and notifications are sent.
In this article, we will see how to get notified on Email when certain events take place on our S3 Bucket.
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Yarn is a package manager for Node (Node.js) and is intended as a replacement for npm (node package manager). Instead of installing from a registry, Yarn installs packages from other nodes on your network that have already downloaded the packages. This speeds up the installation for projects with many node modules.
Yarn has some advantages: First, it tells you which version of an installed package is compatible with your project. Second, it makes your packages more secure by calculating checksums of each package so in case a developer installs an outdated or corrupt package, Yarn can detect the it.
It’s not easy to say whether Yarn is better than npm but if you search for an easy-to-use package manager, yarn might be the right choice.
This tutorial will show you step-by-step on how to Install yarn on Debian 11. We cover two different methods, first we install yarn using the install script from Node Source, then we will install yarn using apt.
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KVM refers to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine which helps to run multiple Linux or window-based isolated guests along with their own OS and virtual dedicated hardware. To run KVM we need processors with hardware virtualization extensions, such as AMD-V or Intel-VT and as it was originally designed for x86 processors, so having x86 processors is quite preferable.
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Python is a programming language that was created with one goal in mind: to make it easy for anyone, not matter their skill level or experience as far as computer science goes. Developed over 30 years ago by Guido van Rossum and still evolving today under an ever-watchful eye (but never too much), this innovative system of codes allows users access tools they need without having any previous knowledge about how things work underneath them all – making success possible at every turn!
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Gradle is a general-purpose build tool that is popular with Java developers. It has a simple syntax that makes it easy to learn, and it can be used to build a wide variety of projects, from simple Java applications to complex enterprise systems.
One of the things that makes Gradle so popular is its flexibility. It can be used to build projects of any size and complexity, and it can be customized to meet the specific needs of your project. Additionally, Gradle is well-supported by the development community, with a large number of plugins available that add extra functionality.
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Cockpit is free and open-source software that provides a web-based graphical interface for Linux servers and appliances (such as firewalls and network switches).
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Anaconda is an open-source package manager and distribution of Python. It is designed for machine learning and data science and comprises several open-source packages. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the steps for the installation of Anaconda on a Rocky Linux 8 or CentOS 8 system.
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Games
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It seems more Linux ports from Feral Interactive are no longer advertised on Steam, with the latest being Tomb Raider (2013).
This follows on from the same happening with Mad Max and Shadow of Mordor in Early 2021. Much the same, the Linux version is no longer advertised but it is still available to install. Later that year in April 2021, Feral did bring out Total War: ROME REMASTERED but then we also saw that Feral confirmed in July 2021, that they would no longer be porting A Total War Saga: TROY to Linux – citing “generally less demand for native titles since Valve’s launch of Proton”.
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Want to know how much of your own Steam Library is currently compatible with the Steam Deck? Well, there’s now a website dedicated to doing exactly that.
It’s called CheckMyDeck (great name) and all you need to do is grab your SteamID, enter it and it will do all the work for you. You can find your SteamID easily using this other website. The main thing to keep in mind though, is that compatibility is an ever-changing thing, with Valve adding to the list almost daily. We mentioned only a few days ago how Verified + Playable together hit 520 games, well as of right now it’s already jumped up to 591!
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Re-Logic clearly aren’t done with Terraria, even with them previously saying they were. Liars! But we’ll totally forgive them of course because we love Terraria.
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Between 2022-02-08 and 2022-02-15 there were 34 new Steam games with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 260 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 13.1 % of total released titles.
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Another quick update about the Steam Deck. Apparently another (outlaw?) developer has leaked the details of the contents of a SteamOS update (dated 11th of February 2022) for the Steam Deck.
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ABRISS is an atmospheric physics-destruction building game. You build up huge structures, to then have them smash into other structures and it looks pretty fancy.
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ABRISS is an atmospheric physics-destruction building game. You build up huge structures, to then have them smash into other structures and it looks pretty fancy.
It’s all about building to destroy. During the game you unlock more parts to destroy more, all set across “digital-brutalist cityscapes”. Seems like there will be plenty of variety on what you can build to from rockets to giant smashing hammers that crash through everything. ABRISS is all about showing off how great you can be at making a big ol’ mess.
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Two things to note: not only does art of rally have a native Linux version that’s worked great every time we had a race on it, it’s also a Deck Verified title – this means that it’s been through the official certification by Valve. This means it will work out of the box on the Steam Deck, with good performance and everything working as expected.
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Superliminal, the brilliant puzzle game where your perspective changes the size of things you hold to progress recently gained some multiplayer modes – and now they’re on Linux too.
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We contacted the developer today, who gave a very clear confirmation that it will support Linux.
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[Taylor] wanted to join the cool kids club and build a macropad for CAD work and video editing, but didn’t want to do it the traditional way with an Arduino. We can get behind that. In fact, [Taylor] wanted to reuse some old piece of tech if possible, which is even better. With a little luck, they found a used gaming mouse with a set of 12 tiny macro buttons on the side that were ripe for reuse. Only the scroll wheel was reported to be broken.
[...]
[Taylor] designed and printed a simple enclosure that’s a slim 21.5 mm tall including the switch plate, and then made a dozen keycaps to match. That was until [Taylor] remembered some relegendable keycaps they had lying around — the kind that let you print your own labels and trap them underneath clear plastic. The only problem was that they are stemmed for some cylindrical actuator, so [Taylor] designed an adapter piece so they would fit on MX-style sliders. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.24.1.
Plasma 5.24 was released in February 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Neil McGovern announces his departure from the helm of the GNOME Foundation.
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MX Linux and Ubuntu are two of the most sought-after open-source desktop operating systems in use today. Their unending use, ease of access, and availability make both distros a must-have for Linux users.
These two distros are aptly favored, as they both continue to offer a series of unique features to the end-users. Nonetheless, it is an apparent battle, and there can only be one winner.
Here’s a detailed comparison between MX Linux and Ubuntu.
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New Releases
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The first Kali Linux release of 2022 is here.
Kali Linux made numerous improvements in 2021 with its Linux Kernel upgrade, new hacking tools, live VM support (Kali Linux 2021.3), Apple M1 support, and more.
Let us look at the key highlights in the Kali Linux 2022.1 release.
[...]
If you were using Kali Linux on a VM with an i3 desktop environment, some guest features were disabled by default.
Now, those features like drag ‘n’ drop, copy/paste have been enabled by default giving you a better out-of-the-box experience in a VM with i3.
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Kali Linux is a Linux distribution used by ethical hackers and cybersecurity professionals to perform security audits and penetration testing against internal and remote networks. This update comes two months after the release of Kali Linux 2021.4.
In Kali Linux 2022.1, developers have updated login backgrounds and desktop, new wallpapers and GRUB theme, and bootsplash along with a brand-new installer theme and consistent boot menu options. Browser landing pages are refreshed to conveniently allow users to access Kali Linux on Firefox and Chromium homepages.
These features will improve the experience for ethical hackers. ARM users can rejoice as Kali Linux has Bluetooth support for Raspberry Pi devices now with documentation for the latest model RaspberryPi Zero 2W. It also supports the Feroxbuster and Ghidra tools.
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Kali Linux 2022.1 is packed with new themes as well as enhancements to existing features, such as improved usability for visually impaired users.
Kali Linux is a widely used operating system created for Security professionals and Linux enthusiasts. It is a Debian-based distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security.
Kali users worldwide have so much to celebrate. The distro ended last year with the release of v2021.4. Its maker Offensive Security has now announced a new version, Kali Linux 2022.1, as the first release this year.
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The Debian-derived Kali Linux is a distro used primarily for digital forensics and penetration testing and comes with wide range of tools to help in investigations and incident responses.
Users of the distribution will be pleased to know that its developer, Offensive Security, has just pushed out the first new release of 2022, and this brings with it various visual updates and tweaks to existing features.
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The latest version of AV Linux MX is now available for download. AV Linux MX-21 Edition code-named “Consciousness” has been released based on MX-21 ‘Wildflower’ and Debian 11. AV Linux MX-21 is based on Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.
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The KDE-focused desktop platform KaOS Linux has got a new update. Just over a month after the last release, KaOS 2022.02 has emerged with the latest KDE Plasma.
KaOS is described as being a tightly integrated rolling and transparent distribution for the modern desktop that focuses only on KDE Plasma.
The distro was influenced by Arch Linux, uses Pacman as its package manager, but does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch. Instead, it labels itself as a built-from-scratch Linux distro since all packages in each of its repositories are compiled by the project for the distro.
Yesterday, KaOS 2022.02 finally becomes available as an incremental update to the previous release, so let’s take a look in brief at what’s new.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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When we first started building Podman, we wanted to match the Docker command-line interface (CLI), and we added features to match. We even have a page on the Podman GitHub called transfer.md that lists Docker’s commands, the completed features, and which are still in progress. Now that Podman is basically complete and matches Docker, we rarely update the page.
Last year, we added the Podman service to Podman 3.0, which replicates Docker’s REST API. The Podman service supports any tools needed to communicate with the Docker daemon, like Docker-compose and Docker.py. The Podman service also supports its own REST API for advanced Podman features, like pods.
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In January, we published 15 posts. The site had 11,653 visits from 8,929 unique viewers. This is roughly double the historical average for both metrics. 2,131 visits came from search engines, while 2,090 came from the WordPress Android App, 719 from Twitter, and 649 from Phoronix.
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Having just spent hours debugging simple Flask application, I need to went:
1. tzdata package in fedora-minimal container image is broken. RPM database lists files which are not installed (actually, they were removed during base container build). It’s getting fixed.
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It’s time to mark your calendar for Red Hat Summit 2022, taking place May 10-11, 2022. Join us as thousands of customers, partners, and technology industry leaders from around the world come together for two days of innovation, education and collaboration—all accessible at no cost.
We’re taking a hybrid approach to this year’s event: We will be hosting a global, interactive virtual experience filled with thought-provoking keynotes, powerful customer and partner stories, Red Hat experts, networking opportunities, and more. Simultaneously, we will have a small, by-invitation gathering in person in Boston for IT leaders, executives, and select Red Hat customers and partners.
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We feel bad when we see a retrocomputer project and think, “Hey! That’s not that old.” But, usually, when we think about it, it really is. Take the Penkesu. It looks like one of the little organizer computers that were popular — ok — a long time ago.
Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, a 7.9 inch 400×1280 screen and a 48-key mechanical keyboard. Unsurprisingly, the case is mostly 3D printed, but it does use Gameboy Advance SP hinges.
There are only a few components inside which is understandable since there isn’t much room. In addition to the Pi, the keys, and the screen, there is a battery, a power controller, some diodes, and an Arduino which controls the keyboard.
This is another great example of a project that looks great but would have been hard to duplicate without 3D printing. The compact computing power available these days doesn’t hurt either.
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The Teensy then reports its readings over a serial line every five seconds to a Raspberry Pi, which collates and graphs the data. In case you are wondering what the effect of mains frequency variations might be, we once covered the story of how an entire continent lost six minutes.
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Yodeck, the digital signage company has been utilizing Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB RAM) as their goto computer to run their signage software.
The versatile RPi 4 is a choice for many makers, inventors, schools, and hobbyists, but does not often find its way into mainstream business ventures.
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The Raspberry Pi RP2040 specifications only list one USB 1.1 Host/Device hardware interface, but developer’s Sekigon Gonnoc decided to leverage the microcontroller’s programmable I/Os (PIO) to add an extra USB port that also works in host or device mode.
While the C library is still supposed to be a work in progress Sekigon implemented full-speed (12 Mbps) and slow-speed (1.5Mbps) host, full-speed device, USB hub, and multi-port support. There’s even a demo with three “Pico Pico USB” keyboards acting as USB hubs and HID plus a wireless mouse to show the results.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Android developer Danny Lin (aka kdrag0n), known in part for his recent work on Repainter, took to Twitter over the weekend to share that he was able to achieve “full-blown virtual machines” on the Pixel 6 thanks to Android 13’s first developer preview. This includes running virtual machines with “near-native” performance of various Linux distros as well as Windows 11.
How is this possible? It comes down to Android 13 featuring better handling of virtualization. Android 13 supports a common hypervisor in the form of KVM — a kernel-based virtual machine. The technical details of how exactly this works get very complicated, but a recent deep-dive helps make sense of it.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The trailer for Disney and Pixar’s new film, “Turning Red,” streaming on Disney+ March 11, ends with Mei, its 13-year-old protagonist, considering a wild idea: acceptance. Maybe I like this new me. Yes, in her case the “new me” is becoming a giant red panda when she feels a strong emotion, which is decidedly not universal. But the themes of continually reinventing yourself, finding your community of people and learning to accept and love your true colors are timeless. It might be your story. It is also Firefox’s story.
Firefox has a soft spot for red pandas thanks to our logo, but it goes deeper than that. “Turning Red” takes place in 2002, where a teenage girl struggles between remaining her mother’s dutiful daughter and exploring her true self. In 2002, we were coming together for the first time to create what would become Firefox. We were looking at the internet and imagining what we wanted it to be, how we wanted to show up and how we could invite everyone to join us.
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Greetings Rustaceans!
Another year has passed, and with it comes another annual Rust survey analysis! The survey was conducted in December 2021.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s survey, with a special shout-out to those who helped translate the survey from English into other languages.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the analysis!
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As the Perf-Tools team, we are responsible for the Firefox Profiler. This newsletter gives an overview of the new features and improvements we’ve done in Q4 2021.
You can find the previous newsletter here which was about the Q3 2021. With this newsletter, I will be writing about the things we’ve done in the Q4 2021. I hope you’ll enjoy the work that we’ve done this quarter.
Here are some highlights.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. This year, it took place online again, due to the pandemic.
Many LibreOffice community volunteers and certified developers gave talks at the conference, and now the videos are available for all to see! So if you want to learn more about LibreOffice technology, open standards and community activities, click the link below and enjoy.
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Programming/Development
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The mobile application business is booming. The number of downloads, time, and money spent shows the most considerable numbers ever. To be exact, 230 billion downloads, 3.8 trillion hours, and $170 billion spent. When more people spend more time and money, the time to market becomes a critical factor for application developers and publishers. There is also more competition which grants a huge advantage to first movers.
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Please, submit your project ideas as issues in our gitlab repository by March 1st. Make sure you answer all the questions in the issue template (Project-Proposal template).
The GNOME Foundation recognizes that mentoring is a time consuming effort, and for this reason, we will be giving accepted mentors an option to receive the $500 USD stipend that Google pays the organization for each contributor. Mentors can choose to revert the fund into a donation to the GNOME Foundation. Some payment restrictions may apply (please contact us for questions).
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Crystal is a general-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language.
With syntax heavily inspired by the language Ruby, it is a compiled language with built-in static type-checking, but specifying the types of variables or method arguments is generally unneeded. This adds the benefit of a shallower learning curve.
The language also offers a powerful macro system, the compiler automatically checks for null references in compile time, a sleek concurrency model that uses green threads, as well as dedicated syntax to easily call native libraries.
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Python
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Imagine yourself walking into a grocery store for a specific item. However, to your surprise, there is absolutely no organization within the entire store—no way to distinguish between products; no way to tell what product is for what purpose; simply no way to find your item.
You go to the counter and ask the grocer where the specific product is, but all he tells you is to “search for it.”
Now, what do you do? The only option left for you is to find the item you so desperately want on your own by searching every product in the store.
This grocery store is your computer, your Python package bin. All those disorganized products lying on the shelf are the endless torrent of packages you have installed over the years for your random projects.
The next time you start a project or install some software, you will not understand if the version is up to date, if it collides with another package or python version, or if the package exists at all. Such disorganization can cause setbacks, and that not only disrupts your project but takes away the valuable moment that otherwise could have been used for something more productive.
So what is the solution? Python Virtual Environment.
Python Virtual Environments (virtualenvs) helps decouple and isolate versions of Python and their related pip versions. This authorizes end-users to install and manage their own set of software that is independent of those provided by the system.
One of the primary advantages of using Python is its active developer community and availability of many software packages on pypi.org.
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Java
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Java Operator SDK, or JOSDK, is an open source project that aims to simplify the task of creating Kubernetes Operators using Java. The project was started by Container Solutions, and Red Hat is now a major contributor.
In this article, you will get a brief overview of what Operators are and why it could be interesting to create them in Java. A future article will show you how to create a simple Operator using JOSDK.
As you can guess, this series of articles is principally targeted at Java developers interested in writing Operators in Java. You don’t have to be an expert in Operators, Kubernetes, or Quarkus. However, a basic understanding of all these topics will help. To learn more, I recommend reading Red Hat Developer’s Kubernetes Operators 101 series.
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Science
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Though some of us are heavily assisted by smart phone apps and delivery, humans don’t need GPS to find food. We know where the fridge is. The grocery store. The drive-thru. And we don’t really need a map to find shelter, in the sense that shelter is easily identifiable in a storm. You might say that our most important navigation skills are innate, at least when we’re within our normal environment. Drop us in another city and we can probably still identify viable overhangs, cafes, and food stalls.
The question is, do these navigational skills vary by species or environment? Or are the tools necessary to forage for food, meet mates, and seek shelter more universal? To test the waters of this question, Israeli researchers built a robot car and taught six fish to navigate successfully toward a target with a food reward. This experiment is one of domain transfer methodology, which is the exploration of whether a species can perform tasks outside its natural environment. Think of all the preparation that went into Vostok and Project Mercury.
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Hardware
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Although powerful design software and cheap manufacturing services have made rolling your own PCBs easier than ever, there are some situations where a piece of FR-4 just doesn’t cut it: think art projects with hidden LEDs or biomedical applications that need to attach to the human body. For such occasions, [Narjes Pourjafarian] and her team at Saarland University in Germany developed Print-a-Sketch: a handheld device that lets you print electric circuits on almost any surface using conductive ink.
The heart of the device is a piezoelectric print head, as used in some types of inkjet printer. It dispenses tiny droplets of silver nanoparticle ink, which is conductive enough to make useful electronic circuits by simply printing a schematic. Lines can be drawn to connect components, while customized footprints can hold LEDs, capacitors or even integrated circuits.
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Everything is instant. As soon as I lift my finger off the mouse it is loaded. 256GB of ECC RAM. I do not care what game I want, when I release my finger instant. I am not talking 8 channel ram yet.
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From PlayStations to Porsches, many consumer products have been hit by a chip shortage that began choking the global economy in 2020 and continues today. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tweeted last month. “The semiconductor supply chain is very fragile, and it’s going to remain that way until we can increase chip production.” Congress is poised to fund a US $52 billion silicon incentive package, as part of the America COMPETES Act, aiming to increase U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, while the European Union last week outlined their own €43 billion chip-shortage-ameliorating package.
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Many consumer products, including cars, computers, and smart devices of all sorts, have been affected by a global chip shortage that began in 2020, due in part to pandemic-related disruptions in the global supply chain.
“The components in a semiconductor can travel well over 50,000 kilometers and cross more than 70 international borders before a chip finally reaches its end customer,” writes Mark Harris, citing a report from the Global Semiconductor Alliance.
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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 Debian (h2database), Fedora (dotnet-build-reference-packages, dotnet3.1, and firefox), Oracle (.NET 5.0, firefox, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (unbound), and Ubuntu (firefox).
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the United States Secret Service (USSS) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) identifying indicators of compromise associated with BlackByte ransomware. BlackByte is a Ransomware-as-a-Service group that encrypts files on compromised Windows host systems, including physical and virtual servers.
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Google has released Chrome version 98.0.4758.102 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system. One of these vulnerabilities has been detected in exploits in the wild.
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Technology giant Google is offering bigger cash awards for hackers reporting critical security flaws affecting the Linux Kernel, GKE, Kubernetes, and kCTF.
In November last year, Google tripled the bug bounty rewards for Linux kernel flaws reported through its Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP), for payouts of up to $50,337 for zero-day issues.
This week, the company announced it is nearly doubling that amount and offering a maximum reward of $91,337 for exploits that meet certain criteria. The maximum payout includes a base reward and three bonuses.
The base reward for the first exploit submitted for a certain vulnerability is $31,337, with no reward being offered for duplicate exploits.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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It’s safe to join Zoom meetings again on Macs – but that depends on how comfortable you are with Zoom after it claimed to fix a bug that kept recording after a meeting was over. The company has said for the second time that it has fixed it. Can you trust it?
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During the second wave of the pandemic in May 2021, social activist SQ Masood was riding his motor scooter back home with his father-in-law in tow. But as he navigated his silver-colored two-wheeler through the narrow lanes of Shahran, a Muslim-dominant neighborhood in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, he said he was pulled over by two police officers.
Masood and his father-in-law got off the motorbike thinking they would be asked to show his driver’s license or the vehicle registration card.
But they were in for something unexpected: The police officers asked both to remove their masks so that they could take mugshots of their faces using a handheld tablet—ultimately setting the stage for an ongoing legal fight over the future of facial recognition in the world’s largest democracy.
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Two US Senators claim that the CIA has been running an unregulated — and almost certainly illegal — mass surveillance program on Americans.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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When Lily relocated to her hometown in Myanmar’s Shan State after last year’s coup, the consultant was able to keep working thanks to cheap and reliable internet access.
These days, Lily struggles to stay online during the workday, which often includes at least two hours of virtual meetings, due to the soaring cost across all mobile carriers.
Following a series of orders by the ruling military council, mobile data prices have doubled in the past two months. Like most of Myanmar outside of the major cities, Lily’s area has only patchy access to fixed-line internet.
“Rising internet prices are having a huge impact on everyday working life,” Lily, who asked to use a pseudonym to avoid state reprisals, told Al Jazeera. “Not only are internet prices soaring, but internet connections are also slowing down.”
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Remember NIXI’s two domain per person policy? The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is the nodal authority for [dot]in domains in India. In December 2021, NIXI published an undated notice stating that if any entity wants to register for more than two of India’s Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) – [dot]in domains, they’ll have to seek written permission from the NIXI CEO. In our RTI request on this notice, NIXI responded with an incomplete response stating that the notice was issued for “national security”. Go figure.
[...]
NIXI is a government not-for-profit organization, established in 2003 under section 8 of the Companies Act 2013. One of its key tasks is to set up domestic Network Operation Centers (NOCs) among Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to enable routing domestic interest traffic within the country instead of re-routing via NOCs abroad. It results in reduced-bandwidth charges for the ISPs and also provides better quality of service due to reduced latency.
NIXI has been authorized as the .IN Registry by the Government of India, since January 2005. The .IN domain names are available to anyone on a first-come-first-served basis. However, in an undated notice published on its website in December 2021, NIXI said that in case an individual registrant submits a request for registering more than two ccTLDs or if a registered accredited company requests for more than a hundred ccTLDs, then a written approval of the CEO, NIXI is required.
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The reasons to mandate written approval of CEO, NIXI has not been stated in the original notice published on its website. Further, in response to our RTI request, the PIO has merely stated that [the] “above decision is taken with respect to National Security.” Repeating “national security” as a mantra to defeat transparency, even when not probably emerging from the topic of policy formation, is a growing tendency in decision making.
Further, the PIO has declined our request for access to documentation of the meetings in which such a decision was taken. There is also a lack of clarity on the grounds on which the approval request may be granted or denied. The notice merely mentions that “approval of CEO, NIXI will be provided within 24 hours of submission of the request irrespective of weekly off/ holiday.”
In absence of a written procedure developed without consultation with stakeholders in a non-transparent way indicates public disinterest on part of NIXI. Further, attempts to thwart information sought through right to information requests harms the spirit of the RTI Act, 2005. We have filed a first appeal against the response received to seek clarifications and to further transparency in public interests.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Those who deign to class pigeons as “rats of the sky” have clearly never seen a Pigmy Pouter. Nor, for that matter, a silver Jacobin, named because its ornate headdress (composed of a “hood”, “mane”, and “chain”) resembles the cowl worn by a sect of Dominican monks. Another breed of pigeons are actual nuns, cousins in kind to horsemen, barbs, dragoons, finnikins, and runts. As fanciful as their titles, the diverse appearance of these birds makes one wonder how they can all be classed as pigeon. The bug-eyed Budapest tumbler barely resembles the peacock-like fantail, the cropper, which can balloon its breast to softball proportions, or, indeed, the bizarre frillback, which, at first glance, appears tangled in a mass of perm-treated hair. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Darwin was substantiating his theories of artificial and natural selection, the pigeon served as a proving ground. “Among all the domesticated animals, the pigeons were the most divergent and yet the most clearly related to a single ancestor”, writes James A. Secord. Poised on “a classificatory edge”, they became a “perfect case study in the power of selection”.
Citing Darwin by name in his reference book, Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen, Emil Schachtzabel came of age in the paradigm-molting wake of On the Origin of Species (1859), a work in which pigeons play a significant role. A government administrator by day, Schachtzabel’s passion for the bird led to an appointment as president of the Federation of German Poultry Breeders (Bund Deutscher Rassegeflügelzüchter). Yet he remains best known, perhaps, for his Prachtwerk. The lithographs from this work collected below, based on watercolor templates by Anton Schöner, illustrate the seemingly limitless boundaries of domesticated pigeons, as several birds intrude beyond their frames into the margins of the page. Pigeon cultivation weds artistry, Schachtzabel explains, with the manipulated mechanisms of evolution. Describing how marvelous combinations of feathers, shading, and color have emerged through the efforts of the pigeon’s protector — “the thinking man” (den denkenden Menschen) — he ponders what features might appear in future breeds, hoping his book will serve as inspiration.
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Kernel at 3:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 99d022972b93b89653e0af91d96b4402
Wolves Speak for Sheep
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: No matter how compelling (for widespread use) GNU and Linux have become, owing to the GPL for the most part (BSDs cannot compete with reciprocal licensing), the freedom-centric message is being diluted by hostile corporations that have co-opted it
THE Free software community is besieged and GNU/Linux is being vandalised by people who carry the brand like a bunch of false prophets (they never even used it!) while concern-trolling us.
GNU/Linux could be far more mainstream by now, but corporations with conflicting agendas want to ensure this never happens. Google’s (or Gulag’s) Android and ChromeOS are Linux-powered but they’re also spy-powered and this is what they’re willing to settle/compromise for. We’re not ‘supposed’ to enjoy any freedom with the platform.
What about our identity online? Check out Linux.com. The latest post in Linux.com is a week old and viewed only 100 times because the Linux Foundation has turned the site to rubble and a dumping ground for Jim Zemlin‘s PAC or PR operations. Zemlin does not use Linux, nor does he value the actual founder of Linux. Here’s a video that shows Zemlin’s inflated sense of ego (before he self-vanished):
This video isn’t the only one of its kind (rather painful to watch) and we’ve already pointed out — on numerous occasions — other reasons egoistic Zemlin should not be in charge of Linus Torvalds, whom he can casually and habitually abuse under the guise of “protecting people” (imaginary issues). As if the worst enemy of Linux is its own founder.
“The Linux Foundation, by surrendering itself (financially) to foes of Linux, has in effect become a Linux-destroying Foundation whose agenda (or steering) is in the hands of our enemies.”In the video above I show that GNU/Linux has become extremely dominant, yet paradoxically it has very poor online presence, with sites like Linux.com reduced to an utter embarrassment and Linux Today promoting Linux Foundation-connected FUD for a Linux Foundation sponsor, the GPL-violating VMware, which currently runs a large-scale smear campaign against Linux.
The Linux Foundation, by surrendering itself (financially) to foes of Linux, has in effect become a Linux-destroying Foundation whose agenda (or steering) is in the hands of our enemies. So no matter how much Linux grows in terms of usage, its communications will be at least partly controlled (through OSI too) by those looking to undermine the community. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0bdb388ea3d686ad05ffe0841bafa93c
Self-hosting is Much Better for Gemini
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Capsules in Gemini are easy to set up and maintain; they’ve lowered the entry barrier and we should collectively take advantage of that
THE TEENAGE years of people like myself weren’t “always online” or “always connected”; we’d dial up, do what we planned to do, then disconnect; yes, back then you’d get billed for time (duration online), bandwidth, or both (limits on bandwidth or set quotas associated with packages, with dynamic policies varying for times of day and ‘penalties’ for exceeding some softer thresholds).
I’m probably not at risk of offending or excluding anyone by saying that many homes around the world are now perpetually connected. Putting speed aside, as I doubt many places still use dial-up modems/Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) for Internet access. With over a dozen Gemini servers available, in many different computer architectures/programming languages, it’s no longer infeasible to host from home. Some ready-made solutions like FreedomBox simplify this even further.
“Sure, there’s some learning curve involved, but the longterm gain is true autonomy, except maybe the DNS services (there are ways to bypass those too).”In the video above I use last night’s incident in tilde.team to make a point; long downtime aside, they still (almost a day later) have a problem with certificates, so dozens of tenants have access issues for their capsule space. There’s nothing they can do to resolve this. This isn’t the first time or the first such hosting service that suffered prolonged downtimes. The mailing list of Gemini named some other incidents, sometimes resulting in days if not weeks of downtime. So users can and probably should take control. In my experience, running and maintaining one’s capsule is vastly simpler than running a Web site. Sure, there’s some learning curve involved, but the longterm gain is true autonomy, except maybe the DNS services (there are ways to bypass those too). Perhaps we’ll do some videos in the future to demonstrate how one can set up one’s Gemini capsule in only a few minutes. Judging by the growth of Geminispace (see below), many people have succeeded and the expansion accelerated this year. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
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Desktop/Laptop
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All the Linux distros come with a set of default themes and icons, which are quite beautiful and eye-catching. But after a certain period, you may want to change the display flavor of your system. There are lots of Best Icon and Themes out there, which can be used to completely change the outlook display of the Linux files, icons, window manager, and much more. Literally, it can totally change the display flavor of your Linux distros.
Here I will show you how to use themes and icons on the various Linux desktop environment, before that you can check out a list of best Gnome Shell Themes.
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Skeuos is a GTK3/4 theme for Gnome Shell, as well as other GTK-based desktop environments on Linux. It comes in several different color variants and sports a clean, slick design that is sure to spice up your Linux setup. Here’s how to install the Skeuos GTK theme on your system.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to dive into the topic: Linux IS Ready to dominate the desktop! Then we’re going to chat about Mozilla’s new partnership with Meta AKA Facebook. 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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Mixed gaming news, great Raspberry Pi news, Mozilla teams up with Meta and ditches their VR browser, KDE Korner, and more.
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Applications
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One of the most famous open-source apps out there, OBS Studio (formerly Open Broadcaster Software) has received an exciting new upgrade.
It is one of the best screen recorders available for Linux and undoubtedly a fantastic choice for streamers across multiple platforms. The update adds some helpful features to a plethora of existing ones.
Along with major changes, there are numerous essential improvements and bug fixes to be seen.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Let’s say you want to set up a blog, there are plenty of good reasons after all. But, you hate websites that are slow, full of spyware, and unusable on spotty connections. This leaves you with a bit of a problem, the big names aren’t going to cut it.
This is what I ran into while setting up this blog. I didn’t find any other resources going over what was currently available, so I thought I’d run through my experience in the hopes that it will be easier for the next person.
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This is a guide for installing Alpine Linux with its root partition on an encrypted ZFS volume, using ZFS’s own encryption capabilities. The system will be encrypted when powered off and will need to be unlocked by typing a passphrase at boot. To be able to boot the system, the `/boot` partition remains unencrypted.
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Today I’m excited to share a blog post on how to use R Markdown. R Markdown is a dynamic file format that allows you to make documents containing normal text alongside chunks of embedded R code. In fact, all of my blog posts are written using R Markdown, which is how I’m able to write text like this, write code, and even insert a chunk of code [...]
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To simplify, DMARC primarily works by verifying that messages have a DKIM signature that matches their From: domain. There are two modes for this matching. In ‘strict DKIM identifier alignment’, the From: domain and the DKIM domain must match exactly; if you send with a From: of news.example.com, only a DKIM signature from news.example.com will match (other DKIM signatures may be present but will be ignored by DMARC). In ‘relaxed DKIM identifier alignment’, which is the default, any DKIM signature from example.com will work; it could still be news.example.com, but it could also be ‘example.com’ or ‘mta-group.example.com’.
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I’m working on a zine about DNS right now, so I’ve been thinking about DNS terminology a lot more than a normal person. Here’s something slightly confusing I’ve noticed about DNS terminology!
Two of the most common DNS server terms (“nameserver” and “DNS resolver”) have different meanings depending on the situation.
Now this isn’t a problem if you already understand how DNS works – I can easily figure out what type of “nameserver” is being discussed based on context.
But it can be a problem if you’re trying to learn how DNS works and you don’t realize that those words might refer to different things depending on the context – it’s confusing! So I’m going to explain the different possible meanings and how to figure out which meaning is intended.
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In this blog, I will walk you through the process of configuring both Filebeat and Zeek (formerly known as Bro), which will enable you to perform analytics on Zeek data using Elastic Security. The default configuration for Filebeat and its modules work for many environments; however, you may find a need to customize settings specific to your environment. The steps detailed in this blog should make it easier to understand the necessary steps to customize your configuration with the objective of being able to see Zeek data within Elastic Security.
Beats are lightweight shippers that are great for collecting and shipping data from or near the edge of your network to an Elasticsearch cluster. Beats ship data that conforms with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). Filebeat, a member of the Beat family, comes with internal modules that simplify the collection, parsing, and visualization of common log formats. The modules achieve this by combining automatic default paths based on your operating system. We will be using Filebeat to parse Zeek data.
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Steps to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS using the command terminal.
Beekeeper Studio is a free and cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows) distributed under an open-source ( MIT ) license. With Electron Desktop, this database manager and SQL editor offer its services for MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB servers. Not only does the crispy user interface arouse curiosity, but also the sharp features that the database client brings with it cannot be pushed off the edge of the developer/admin bed. It only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.
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Chromebooks run Chrome OS, an operating system incompatible with Blender. Read on to learn how to get Blender for Chromebook!
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LAMP is a popular open-source software stack that is mostly used for testing and hosting web applications. It’s an acronym for Linux Apache MariaDB / MySQL and PHP.
Apache is a popular open-source and widely used web server. MariaDB is a free and open-source, commercially supported relational database management system, and PHP is a server-side scripting language used for developing dynamic web pages.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP stack on AlmaLinux 8.
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MariaDB is an open-source relational database management system developed by the developers of MySQL as an enhanced drop-in replacement to the MySQL server. MariaDB is focused on reliability, stability, security, and performance.
In this tutorial, we will show you the complete steps to install MariaDB 10.7 on Debian 11 from an APT repository.
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Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java HTTP web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat helps to deploy the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages and serves them like an HTTP web server.
In this tutorial, we will show you the complete steps to install Tomcat 10 on Debian 11.
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I am sure most of you use many YUM repositories to install software on any RPM based distributions like RHEL, CentOS, Fedora etc. Sometimes, you might want to install software from a group of specific repositories, or you may want to disable all repositories and install a package from a single repository. If you ever wonder how to do that, here you go.
This short tutorial describes how to enable or disable a single or group of YUM repositories while installing software in CentOS. This guide was tested on CentOS 7 server, however the same method should work on Fedora, RHEL, Scientific Linux, and other RPM based Linux distributions.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is a free, open-source utility to encode/decode video or audio. At its core is the FFmpeg program itself, designed for command-line-based processing of video and audio files, and widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance.
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 FFmpeg on a Fedora 35.
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In this post, you will learn how to install SonarQube on Debian 11.
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Trivy (tri pronounced like trigger, vy pronounced like envy) is a simple and comprehensive scanner for vulnerabilities in container images, file systems, and Git repositories, as well as for configuration issues. Trivy detects vulnerabilities of OS packages (Alpine, RHEL, CentOS, etc.) and language-specific packages (Bundler, Composer, npm, yarn, etc.).
In addition, Trivy scans Infrastructure as Code (IaC) files such as Terraform, Dockerfile and Kubernetes, to detect potential configuration issues that expose your deployments to the risk of attack. Trivy is easy to use. Just install the binary and you’re ready to scan.
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Hello dear readers, today we are going to migrate a virtual machine from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE.
Today we are not working on our lab environment but on production environment. We have scheduled downtime for this migration process. We are migrating a virtual NTP Server from our old ESXi to new Proxmox Cluster.
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Games
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As planned, the leaks continue as we reach the launch window of the Steam Deck. Today’s leak is brought again by another video from the same Chinese developer source which leaked the GPU Settings screen not too long ago. This time you get to see the Steam Input interface on the Steam Deck.
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It uses a customized kernel, built with LLVM, and is currently based on 5.13 apparently. We don’t know more details but knowing Valve they probably have set their own tweaks to get the most performance out of this hardware.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for Linux that can be used in Linux-based operating like NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin, and MacOS X. Xfce desktop environment is customizable and you can use your own themes and extensions.
This post is dedicated to the best Xfce themes for Linux that are available on the internet developed by several individuals or companies.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Once more, Valentine’s Day has arrived.
Like last year, Kate’s development is nicely progressing this year, too.
Plenty of new stuff and fixes
We had a very successful year 2021 development wise.
As you can track on our merge requests page 348 requests got merged directly into Kate and 177 into the KTextEditor editor component.
The year 2022 already began well with 63 patches for Kate and 39 for KTextEditor.
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KDE Plasma 5.24.1 is here only a week after the release of KDE Plasma 5.24 and further improves the Plasma Session session to no longer crash when screencasting, allow the use of custom splash screens, as well as to fix mispositioned tooltips.
The new Overview effect has been improved as well in this release to correctly show minimized windows in the desktop thumbnails and to make the application’s selection highlight effects disappear when dragging them. On top of that, the Fall Apart effect has been updated to no longer interact weirdly with the Overview effect.
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There was one report that updating EasyOS to 3.4 from 3.3 broke the desktop, whereas a new installation of 3.4 was OK.
I am trying to chase down what might go wrong when do an update. I have done it on two PCs without problems. One was an update from 3.1.11, the other from 3.3.
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New Releases
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Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2022.1, the first version of 2022, with improved accessibility features, a visual refresh, SSH wide compatibility, and of course, new toys to play with!
Kali Linux is a Linux distribution allowing cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits against internal and remote networks.
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There’s so much to cover here I don’t know where to begin! AV Linux MX-21 Edition code-named “Consciousness” has been released based on MX-21 ‘Wildflower’ and Debian 11 (Bullseye). This new version has been completely built from the ground up and is the first version to not be a ‘Respin’ of an existing system and was built with same Tools that are used to build MX and antiX. Because it has moved to a whole new Debian platform (from Buster to Bullseye) there is no upgrade Path from previous versions of AV Linux and you will need to install from the ISO. Please note that the initial releases of AV Linux MX Edition based on MX-19 and Debian Buster are still receiving updates through the MX repositories so if you are happy where you are there is certainly no hurry to upgrade! The work on this release has brought AVL much closer to MX in many ways and it is hoped that both projects will benefit from serving more Users across more niches, to be clear AV Linux MX-21 Edition is still an independent project and not an official MX Version.
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Dubbed “Consciousness” and based on the MX Linux 21 AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) and Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” distributions, AV Linux MX-21 is here about eight months after the previous release with a new naming scheme to align with MX Linux releases and numerous other changes.
AV Linux MX-21 is built from scratch with the tools used to build the MX Linux distribution. It’s based on the AHS edition of MX Linux 21, which means that it ships with Linux kernel 5.15 LTS and a more recent Mesa graphics stack for better hardware support. But, due to this change, AV Linux no longer supports 32-bit systems.
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Thanks everybody for your suggestions for improvements, I really appreciate them. I’ve added connman as a network manager and scite as a text editor, and things start to look pretty decent now.
I realized that overlayfs is completely unsuitable for a distro such as Slax. It does not provide the necessary functionality at all, it is not possible to work with modules on the fly. So the only way to go forward is to recompile Linux Kernel and add AUFS from sources, which is exactly what I did for this 2nd release candidate.
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BSD
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This is a regularly scheduled release of pfSense® Plus and pfSense CE software including new features, additional hardware support, and bug fixes.
pfSense Plus software version 22.01-RELEASE is now available. See our upgrade guide to get started with best practices information.
As well, pfSense Community Edition (CE) software version 2.6.0 is available on pfSense.org.
Customers running pfSense Plus software, or the Factory Edition of pfSense software version 2.4.5-p1 and older, can upgrade in-place automatically to pfSense Plus software version 22.01, as with any other previous upgrade.
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The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group
The FreeBSD Foundation funded the project to ensure the completion and release of an easy-to-use and practical application. The project came in under budget despite delays caused by the pandemic. The feature was developed by Matthew Ahrens and is now completed but not yet integrated.
The purpose of this overview is to introduce the feature and explain how it works.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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The OpenMandriva project last week released a new version: OpenMandriva LX 4.3 for x86-64 and ARM64 hardware. OpenMandriva is a continuation of the Mandriva Linux distro, but not the only one. The Register rounds up the siblings.
The OpenMandriva Association was established in 2012 to continue the development of the Mandriva distro. Mandriva itself went into liquidation in 2015. Another prominent fork, Mageia, split off slightly earlier, in 2010.
The same year, a Russian company, ROSA, also started, and continues to maintain its own branch of the distro for sale in Russian-speaking countries.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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When I wrote about linux.conf.au this time last year, we weren’t sure whether 2022 would be a physical event in Canberra, or a second online event. It turns out that putting together an in-person conference a year in advance during the uncertainties of a global pandemic is just as difficult as it was last time, so the organisers wisely chose go online again for linux.conf.au 2022. It did not disappoint, and I’m proud that SUSE was once again able to sponsor one of the longest running Free and Open Source Software conferences in the world.
As expected, the conference was exceptionally well run, consisting of about 80 high quality talks over three days. Friday 14 January was devoted to miniconfs – four concurrent tracks focusing on specific areas (Open Hardware, Go GLAM meets Community, Linux Kernel, and System Administration). The main conference on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 had four streams of 45 minute talks on a wide range of topics related to open technology. The videos are all online now. They can be viewed on YouTube or downloaded from the Linux Australia mirror. Check out the schedule for all the talk details.
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Cloud-native transformation certainly isn’t a new concept, but it has become more urgent over the past two years. With a raft of new applications and workloads to accommodate, accelerating a cloud-native strategy is essential for capitalising on the current wave of transformational technologies such as edge computing, containerisation, IoT, and automation.
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Slackware Family
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Slackware Linux was my first Linux distribution. I can’t recall if it was 1.x or 2.x. Anyway, I’ve always loved that distrib. Since Slackware 15.0 has recently been released and I’ve not been using Linux as a desktop since decades, let’s experiment with it.
I’ll install it on my ThinkPad T460s using Full Disk Encryption.
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Arch Family
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I have been using NVEnc – a NVIDIA hardware based encoder – for quite some time now. Mostly because I was pointed to it by FastFlix, one of the best video en/recoding frontend programs out there. Having switched to Arch Linux lately, I realized there is no package of it – perfect time to start contributing and preparing an AUR package for it.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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The basic concepts of edge computing are relatively simple to understand. Similar to a centralized data center, edge infrastructure delivers compute and other resources that applications need – but it brings these requirements much closer in physical proximity to those apps and their data.
So while the term “edge server” might sound, well, edgy – it really just refers to moving the functions of a traditional server closer to their most optimal location, whether for performance, security, cost, or other reasons.
Here’s how we defined it in one of our previous explainers: “Edge servers exist outside of a traditional data center to perform compute, networking, storage, and security functions close to where users need them – for example, where data is created in a healthcare setting or manufacturing site.”
Another way to think about it: Edge computing expands the meaning of the traditional IT term “on-premises.” Instead of referring to a physical data center or other centralized location, with edge, the “premises” could be virtually anywhere your applications and data reside.
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Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our resource library with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. Check out the curated pieces below, available to readers through the end of the month.
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Newly released documents in a lawsuit alleging IBM discriminated against older workers reveal that Big Blue wanted to “correct” its “seniority mix” by weeding out older workers it labelled “dinobabies.”
A document unsealed last Friday in the case file of Lohnn vs International Business Machines discloses evidence gathered by the plaintiff in which a person whose identity is redacted applauds “use of the disparaging term ‘Dinobabies’ to describe older IBM employees, as well as his plan for how to oust them from IBM’s workforce, stating his intent to ‘accelerate change by inviting the dinobabies (new species) to leave’ and make them an Extinct Species’.”
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The idea of a digital twin can be traced back to the 1960s, as NASA pioneered technology to replicate each voyaging spacecraft for use in studies and simulations. While this example references a digital replica of a physical object, the technology has evolved throughout time to replicate processes in software and simulated hardware components.
Red Hat has worked with a number of customers to implement digital twin solutions, which has helped us compile a high-level outline of some of the architectural approaches we have used and lessons learned. In this post, we share some highlights to help you better understand DTEs and how they might work for your needs.
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Debian Family
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As a quick follow-up to the previous post in October, a promised update of documentation and release data is now available. The finnix-docs repository has a number of pieces of current documentation which have been ported over from the old Finnix wiki.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Gigabyte has announced a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which will see its server hardware receive certification to capably run Ubuntu Server. The certification will allow customers to reliably install Ubuntu Server on Gigabyte hardware and allow Gigabyte to provide better support for end-users.
Ubuntu Server is one of the most popular operating systems for people to install on server hardware so by ensuring its hardware is compatible with Ubuntu Server, it’s likely that Gigabyte will receive more custom. Unlike desktop systems, where Windows is dominant, Linux dominates on servers. One of the most popular Linux server distros happens to be Ubuntu Server so this certification drive is important.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 722 for the week of February 6 – 12, 2022.
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The leading fair in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore will open its doors to C-level experts and executives in London. Canonical will be attending as a Platinum Sponsor, presenting strategies and trends for industry leading companies.
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The code used in this project is written in Python and is open source for users to explore. Croft’s solution was built using Python and the tKinter GUI framework. Croft created a simple user interface of five buttons which handle turning the camera on / off, take picture and start / stop recording.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, head over to Croft’s GitHub page and keep an eye out for future updates. Croft indicated plans for additional GUI controls for things like ISO settings, time-lapse features and frame rate adjustment. Croft is also looking into adding a streaming option so that the footage can be shared in video calls. In the meantime, you can check out his official channel on YouTube to see some of his cool microscopic findings.
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The Penkesu Computer is a DIY handheld PC powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W SBC, and mostly comprised of off-the-shelf parts including a 7.9-inch display from Waveshare, replacement hinges for the Gameboy Advance SP, a 48-key mechanical keyboard fitted with Kailh low profile Choc V1 switches, and so on.
Penk also happens to have designed the CutiePi tablet with Raspberry Pi CM4, and designed the Penkesu Computer (ペンケース in Japanese) as a side project without having to “worry too much about commercial viability” and as a way to remind himself why he started tinkering.
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The Mainline4Lumia project aims to bring mainline Linux to the Nokia/Microsoft Lumia phone series, which run a version of Windows Phone. We were making progress quickly, enabling I²C components such as the touchscreen and proximity/light sensor with information found in the stock UEFI tables. However, we couldn’t find any information regarding other sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer in the files; not even any GPIO references or I²C bus addresses. Unlike Android devices, which run a fork of the Linux kernel, we can’t go and look at the downstream kernel source – so I delved into the schematics to find out.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CANFDuino is an Arduino-compatible dual CAN bus platform with CAN FD support that can be used for both prototyping and deployment on the field thanks to its rugged aluminum enclosure, two DB9 CAN connectors, an IO terminal block.
The board is powered by a Microchip SAMC21G18A microcontroller with CAN-FD support, a MicroSD card slot, a micro USB port, various analog and digital I/O, as well as a prototyping area allowing users to solder their own components to the board if needed.
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The Psion Organiser I, released in 1984, was a pocket computer — the kind of device that would soon fit the description of a PDA (personal digital assistant). Its successor, the Psion Organiser II, was similar and included a tactile keyboard, a small LCD screen, a processor, and memory, so users could write and run programs. James Stanley created an Arduino-based adapter for the Psion Organiser II that turns it into a USB display.
The Psion Oganiser II had three peripheral ports. Two were for “datapaks,” which were expansion modules (including UV-erasable EPROM). The third is for a communications cable. Unfortunately, it is hard to find a CommsLink cable today. So Stanley created his own adapter. But this came with a challenge: two-way serial communication with the Psion Organiser II’s CPU requires precise timing. Without dedicated hardware built for this serial protocol, communication is difficult for even modern microcontrollers to handle in software. And one-way communication can interfere with the datapaks and cause issues.
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Back when LCD character displays based on the HD44780 controller were the bee’s knees, a way to make them easier to work with came in the form of “backpack” PCBs, which provided an accessible serial interface and superior display handling at the same time. [Barbouri] has updated that idea with a backpack board that mounts to OLED displays using the US2066 display driver, and provides an I2C interface with powerful and convenient high-level functions that make the display simple to use.
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The classic helicopter design that everyone is familiar with features a large central rotor that produces lift and a much smaller one towards the back, which prevents the helicopter from spiraling out of control. However, Redditor CCCanyon decided to take inspiration from Boeing’s CH-47 Chinook that leverages a pair of equally sized and offset rotors that work together to both move the helicopter while remaining steady.
The most apparent feature of the project is the unique 3D-printed frame that houses the electronics, batteries, and motors required for flight. The controller is a single Arduino Nano 33 IoT, which constantly takes measurements from its onboard LSM6DS3 six-axis IMU and sends that data through a PID algorithm to create small adjustments. The pilot is able to control the aircraft by manipulating a single-stick controller that sends commands from its LoRa SX1276 transceiver to the bicopter’s. Finally, the two rotors are spun by brushless DC motors that were set atop servo motors, which tilt them in order to modify the heading.
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[Electronoobs] built a coil gun and the obvious question is: how fast is the projectile? To answer it, he built a chronograph suitable for timing a bullet. The principle is straightforward. A laser and a light sensor would mark the entry and exit of the projectile over a known distance. As it turns out, there are some issues to resolve.
For one thing, a laser is too narrow and might miss the projectile. The first attempt to rectify this used mirrors, but the loss was too great — we suspect he was using a second surface mirror. The final answer was to use an array of detectors and removed the laser’s collimation lens to cover a wider area.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02, Maui 2.1.1., SailfishOS make progress on the PinePhone Pro, booting the Librem 5 from microSD, help UBports to test OTA 22, Signal Desktop as an unofficial Flatpak for ARM64 and a lot of FOSDEM 2022 videos!
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Tow-Boot for the PinePhone Pro, two PinePhone Pro development progress reports by Megi, PINE64 PinePhone Community Poll results, mixed news around JingOS and JingPad and plenty PinePhone Pro unboxings!
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Kubernetes are getting more pivotal in this era of cloud computing due to the efficiency they provide to developers who can now build and deploy application environments more easily using containerization.
Monitoring and securing these containers is a lot more difficult than managing databases and the whole process can sound more daunting than it should be. Especially since their clusters can be hazardous if they’re not properly managed.
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In the beginning of every year I jot down a couple of “larger things” I would like to work on during the year. Some of the ideas are more in the maybe category and meant to be tested on the audience and users to see what others think and want, others are features I believe are ripe and ready for addition.
I talk about what I personally plan and consider to work on as I cannot control or decide what volunteers and random contributors will do this year, but of course with the hope that feedback from users and customers will guide me.
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Today’s computing systems and processors are becoming more and more efficient but closed as well. Closed in terms of documentation, closed in terms of free and open-source software and firmware. The x86 silicon vendors are striving for security by obscurity, falling deeper into the pit they created themselves, bound by laws that were supposed to protect them. As a result open-source firmware community has to struggle and push vendors into openness or to provide means to run open firmware on their products. The openness and possibilities to run open firmware is gradually decreasing over time as vendors create more and more binary blobs, offload various operation to another entities (e.g. AMD PSP or Intel ME). These entities are often fed with more firmware and blobs, often closed and proprietary with source code being the vendor’s restricted secret. In the light of this threat we turn our eyes to older platforms that were free from firmware blobs, embedded secondary microcontrollers in chipsets with ring -3 capabilities and were truly user-controllable, respecting the freedom and privacy. We just hope the days of open specifications and trustworthy computing on x86 architecture (which were present not so long ago – just over 10 years ago) will be back once. One of the most performant and still blobfree platforms you will read in this post is ASUS KGPE-D16, dual socket AMD Opteron server/workstation board released in 2009, FSF RYF certified.
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Hello, everyone –let’s review the Apache community’s activities from over the past week…
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We realized that in order to uphold the Mozilla mission of empowering people to protect themselves online, we need to be where the people are — and 1 in 3 people in the world have a Facebook account.
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I recently assembled a machine that has an Alder Lake CPU (Intel’s 12th generation Intel Core). Specifically, a 12700F and running Windows 10. The machine had been performing well until I attempted to build Firefox on it. Not only was the build incredibly slow, taking more than an hour when I’d expected about 20 minutes, it made the system unresponsive for long periods of time, with various other programs on the system becoming unresponsive for minutes on end.
After ensuring various drivers were up to date and flashing my BIOS to the most recent version, the issue remained. Some further tinkering revealed that during the build, most of my CPU cores were idle, but a subset were pegged at 100%. Digging further, it seemed that the issue was that processes involved in the build were being bottle necked by only being scheduled against a subset of my cores. This led to a very slow build, and also led to very poor performance of other tasks that got scheduled against those cores.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Data come in variety of form, at different pace, and at different volume. And if all three criteria define the difference between SQL and NoSQL and there, all three are still irrelevant for data science.
My theorem is, that no matter what shape, size, frequeny, value and trustworthiness, SQL type of presenting the data is still the number one player.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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LibreOffice.org is my preferred productivity suite, and I’ve covered how I use it both as a graphical office suite as well as a terminal command in the past.
In this article, I want to focus on how LibreOffice supports people using assistive technology.
The mouse was an important invention, but it doesn’t work equally well for everyone. For instance, people who can’t see the mouse pointer on the screen or can’t physically operate the mouse on their desk don’t benefit much from a mouse.
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PowerPoint is the most recognized presentation-making software, but it isn’t for everyone. Some may find it packed with unnecessary features, and to some extent that’s true. Microsoft updates it regularly and invents things you never even knew you needed.
If you’re a programmer at heart, you likely value simplicity. That’s where this article comes in. We’ll ditch PowerPoint and make presentations in a way you didn’t know was possible. After reading, you’ll know how to make an entire editable PowerPoint presentation using only R Markdown.
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Programming/Development
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A computer calculating a likelihood score of you committing a future crime sounds dystopian, but it’s already used in U.S. courts by judges. An algorithm called COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), has already been used in states like New York and California to predict recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend).
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I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevent you from a bunch of mistakes.
And that makes me… insufferable to some folks.
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C-like languages (C, C++, Java) can do many things, but over the decades nothing much has changed with the inadequacies of some of their control structures. Fortran on the other hand, has evolved. Here are some things that just make implementing some algorithms easier. (Yes there are work arounds in C, but they are not as elegant).
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If you’re a graduate of economics, psychology, sociology, medicine, biostatistics, ecology, or related fields, you probably have received some training in statistics, but much less likely in machine learning. This is a problem because machine-learning algorithms are much better capable to solve many real-world applications compared with the procedures we learned in statistics class (randomized experiments, significance tests, correlation, ANOVA, linear regression, and so on).
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Laravel is a popular open source web framework built for PHP developer. It’s an MVC framework for building simple to complex web applications using the PHP programming language, and it strictly follows the MVC (model–view–controller) architectural pattern.
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Perl/Raku
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Justin DeVuyst has released the 2022.02 version of the Rakudo Compiler.
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Mike Clarke has written a blog post about how they managed to have multiple Raku grammars inter-operate for a custom language project at work. They seemed to have bumped into a not very well documented part of Raku: calling one grammar from another. With a little help from Moritz Lenz it all worked out!
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With crime on the rise in cities across America, along with rising unemployment, housing insecurity, and homelessness, it is high time to revisit the legacy of former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry. For readers who only know Barry’s name because of comedian Chris Rock’s now infamous monologue about the late mayor and his crack addiction, the suggestion that he deserves to be remembered as more than a punch line might seem surprising. Barry’s drug use was captured on camera after the federal government conducted a costly and time-consuming sting operation. What many may not know or remember are Barry’s efforts promoting youth employment, and his steadfast belief that Black Americans should be able to find work, live, and self-govern in the District of Columbia. After the first (of four) mayoral electoral wins in 1979, Barry became a national symbol for urban centers across the nation.
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The full 60-second ad almost entirely consisted of a colorful bouncing QR code, reminiscent of the iconic bouncing DVD logo meme. When scanned, the code brought viewers to Coinbase’s promotional website, offering a limited time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new sign ups, along with a $3 million giveaway that customers can enter.
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Science
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Since NASA’s Mariner spacecraft made the first up-close observations of Mars in 1964, humanity has lobbed a long line of orbiters, landers, and rovers towards the Red Planet. Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. History, to say nothing of the planet’s surface, is littered with Martian missions that didn’t quite make the grade. But we’ve steadily been getting better, and have even started to push the envelope of what’s possible with interplanetary robotics through ambitious craft like the Ingenuity helicopter.
Yet, after nearly 60 years of studying our frigid neighbor, all we have to show for our work boils down to so many 1s and 0s. That’s not to say the data we’ve collected, both from orbit and on the surface, hasn’t been extremely valuable. But scientists on Earth could do more with a single Martian rock than any robotic rover could ever hope to accomplish. Even still, not so much as a grain of sand has ever been returned from the planet’s dusty surface.
But if everything goes according to plan, that’s about to change. Within the next decade, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to bring the first samples of Martian rocks, soil, and atmospheric gases back to Earth using a series of robotic vehicles. While it’s still unclear when terrestrial scientists should expect delivery of this interplanetary bounty, the first stage of the program is already well underway. The Perseverance rover has started collecting samples and storing them in special tubes for their eventual trip back to Earth. By 2028, another rover will be deployed to collect these samples and load them into a miniature rocket for their trip to space.
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With 2022 off to a good start, it is about time to let go of all those New Year’s resolutions that didn’t quite work out. The scale’s needle didn’t reverse, our nails are still bitten, and we are still binge-watching Breaking Bad instead of reading the classics. But, of course, there’s always the future where we just know we’re going to stick to our resolutions. Besides, the future will be replete with fat-eating nanobots, 3D printed nails every morning, and a pill you can take that will make you remember reading Ulysses.
Predicting the future is fraught with peril, which is why launching a new company or product is so risky. However, there have been a few prognosticators that have made some impressive forecasts. For example, in 1922 popular (if not critically acclaimed) author W. L. George wrote a piece for The New York Herald titled “What the World Will be Like In a Hundred Years.” Since May will see that piece’s 100th anniversary, let’s see how he did.
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3D printers have made a lot of things possible that were either extremely difficult or downright impossible with traditional tooling. Certain shapes lend themselves to 3D printing, and materials and tooling costs are also generally greatly reduced as well. One thing that may not be touched on as often, though, is their ability to rapidly prototype solutions to complex mathematical problems, in this case taking the form of a 3D printed maze, known as a dodecahedral holonomy maze, with an interesting solution.
The puzzle presents itself as a sphere composed of various inlaid hexagons which form a track for the puzzle piece, or “rook”. The tracks create the maze for the rook to travel, as some paths are blocked when the rook is oriented in certain ways. To solve the puzzle, the player must rotate the rook by moving it around the hexagons in such a way that its path isn’t physically blocked by any of the pegs in order to successfully reach the exit. This might seem like a fun toy to have on its surface, but the impressive thing about this is that the solutions are designed to reduce the likelihood of solving the puzzle with any “brute force” methods while at the same time having more than one path that will reach the exit as well as several bottlenecks that the puzzle solver must traverse as well.
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Education
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It feels odd to admit this, but I miss the stillness of the first few disorienting and terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when the noise and hustle of my world quieted down. In March and April of 2020, spring somehow seemed more riotously colorful and gratuitously lush. Choruses of birds replaced the sounds of cars in my neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Gone was a traffic-filled commute and the energetically grueling weekday rituals of my past 17 years teaching at a large public high school. My house and my family became the locus and focal point of my day. Our tiny universe contracted, as we navigated the first year of the pandemic together, an island of three.
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American high schools excel at nurturing football talent. If the future of American economic and military might rested on our country’s ability to produce quality football players, the United States would have nothing to fear from Chinese great-power rivalry. But at the same time, American public schools don’t force anyone to play football. If you’re talented and want to play, there is a strong incentive to do so, since accomplished players get rewarded with social status and gain an advantage in college admissions. But those of us who never play football have other paths to success, and are not considered failures just because we didn’t master the game.
I propose that we treat high-school math like football, whereby we encourage and train those with talent, but neither denigrate nor fret over non-participating students. This approach would not only improve math education for those naturally gifted in the subject but also help to save advanced math programs from the progressive reformers who control the commanding heights of American education.
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Hardware
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A research center in Spain has been working on ways to solve recent supply chain issues. One of these issues is a shortage of materials to make magnets. Their answer? Recycle ferrite residue by treating it and mixing it with ABS for 3D printing.
The mixing of ferrite with a polymer isn’t the key though, instead the trick is in the processing. The team collected strontium ferrite waste and ground it to a powder. Heating to the point of calcination (about 1000C) creates a superior material with a 350% increase in coercitivity and a 25% increase in remanence over the original waste material.
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All things considered, it’s pretty easy to get one LED is a strip to light up sequentially, and have it bounce back and forth. Turning that simple animation into a real Larson scanner, with smooth transitions and controlled fade-out, is another thing entirely. And forgetting the LEDs altogether and making a servo-operated Larson scanner is — well, let’s just call it an interesting lesson in hardware abstraction.
The Larson scanner, named after famed TV producer Glen A. Larson for his penchant for incorporating it into shows like Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider, is actually hard to execute in hardware thanks to the fading tail that follows the lead pixel as it dances back and forth across the display. [Eric Gunnerson] decided to make this and other animation effects easier to achieve with Fade, a custom framework for LED animations that runs on an ESP32.
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It may sound like a pop band, but μ-WAAM is actually a 3D printing technique for making small metal parts from the NOVA University Lisbon. Of course, WAAM stands for wire arc additive manufacturing, a well-known technique for 3D printing in metal. The difference? The new technique uses 250 μm wire stock instead of the 1mm or thicker wires used in conventional WAAM.
The thinner feed wire allows μ-WAAM to create fine details like thin walls that would be difficult to replicate with traditional methods. Typically, for fine structures, printers use fused metal powder. This is good for fine details, but typically slower and has higher waste than wire-based systems.
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The raw VHS footage starts with a sweep around the location’s pinball machines and arcade cabinets. There’s an extended shot of a rare TX-1 tri-monitor sitdown cabinet. The racing game was the first of its kind to feature force feedback in the steering wheel, so it’s no wonder it received the focus. The arcade’s lighting tech was also a point of pride as it allowed for programmable lighting cues. A far cry from the flickering fluorescent tubes no doubt in use elsewhere. Eventually the employee filming takes us to the back room where it the owner has made it abundantly clear that they are not a fan of Mondays, judging by the amount of Garfield merchandise.
Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle was a chain of arcades and had nearly 400 locations across the US at its height in the mid 1980s (at least according to their brochure seen above). Those neon red letters were a mainstay of American shopping malls throughout the decade. Namco, the Pac-Man people, acquired Aladdin’s Castle in 1993 and the brand faded away soon after. Although there is a lone location in Quincy, IL that is still open for business today.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Underscoring the value of collaboration, experts from around the world on Monday unveiled what they described as the first “truly global study” of pharmaceutical drugs contaminating rivers, which has “deleterious effects on ecological and human health.”
“I hope the study will lead to projects that support and expand sewage treatment where it is needed the most.”
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An infusion of investment in nutrition would be a game-changer for millions of children whose families continue to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But will the US Senate come through? That’s one of the overlooked questions surrounding the Build Back Better Act (BBBA), which passed in the House last November and also includes many of the Biden administration’s climate priorities. As this legislation languishes in the Senate, it’s critical to understand what its $10 billion in child nutrition funding could do for the nation’s kids, and what will happen if the effort fails.
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I’ve written about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database many times, particularly how antivaxxers have weaponized its contents to falsely portray COVID-19 vaccines as deadly and, before the pandemic, to falsely link childhood vaccines with autism, infertility and premature ovarian insufficiency, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and more. It is a longstanding strategy that has been used by the antivaccine movement going back at least two decades. The reason for this is simple. As a passive reporting system into which anyone can enter any adverse event after vaccination (e.g., that a vaccine turned one into the Incredible Hulk), VAERS was never intended to provide an epidemiologically reliable estimate of the frequency of specific adverse reactions to vaccines. Rather it was intended to be a “canary in the coalmine”, a hypothesis-generating system in which increased reports of specific adverse events can raise safety signals that generate hypotheses. These hypotheses are then tested in more rigorous active reporting systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink. Because of its nature, VAERS is subject to serious reporting bias, both under- and over-reporting depending on the specifics, and antivaxxers who incompetently analyze its contents (including sometimes even those who aren’t antivaccine) often fail to consider the underlying baseline rate of the various adverse events in the database. For example, the number of deaths reported after COVID-19 vaccination might seem alarmingly large until one takes into account how many people in the US die each and every day (over 3 million/year, or over 8,000/day), vaccination or no vaccination and estimates how many people would be expected to die sometime soon after a COVID-19 vaccination by random chance alone, particularly taking into account the various age groups.
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In arid ecosystems, biocrusts act like living mulch that helps retain moisture in the soil, and they can inhibit the establishment of exotic annuals like cheatgrass. Once biocrusts are destroyed, it is easier to establish annuals such as cheatgrass. [ii]Indeed, the loss of biocrusts is perhaps one of the significant reasons cheatgrass has colonized so much of the West’s sagebrush ecosystems.[iii]
Despite their essential role in ecosystem stability, they are easily destroyed by ORVs, mountain bikes, and even hikers. However, the biggest factor in biocrust destruction and loss is livestock, whose hooves break up the crusts.[iv]
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This commentary briefly reviews the experience with cost sharing in the U. S., summarizes its adverse impacts, discusses winners and losers from this approach to health care financing, and lists advantages of its being replaced by single-payer financing.
The conventional theory of health insurance has been built on the concept of “moral hazard,” whereby those with insurance are expected to overuse health care services and lead to uncontrolled increases in health care costs. As health care inflation has continued as a major problem in recent decades, however, it is remarkable that this theory has not been seriously challenged in most circles. Some economists have even suggested that high health care prices can be good since they reduce moral hazard.1
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Jury selection starts Tuesday in a trial to determine if engineering contractors bear responsibility for lead-contaminated water in Flint.
Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, known as LAN, were not part of the recent $626 million settlement between Flint residents and the state of Michigan, Flint and two other parties.
Attorneys for four Flint children claim Veolia and LAN were negligent in not doing more to get the city to properly treat water that was being pulled from the Flint River in 2014-15. Corrosive water caused lead to leach from service lines serving homes, a disastrous result in the majority Black community.
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But not only astronomers. Many of us invest hours each day staring at the screens of our televisions and computers and smartphones. Seldom do we go outside on a clear night, away from the lights of the city, and gaze at the dark starry sky, or take walks in the woods unaccompanied by our digital devices. Most of the minutes and hours of each day we spend in temperature-controlled structures of wood, concrete, and steel. With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature. We live mediated lives. We have created a natureless world.
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Crashes killed more than 6,700 pedestrians in 2020, up about 5 percent from the estimated 6,412 the year before, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
Based on another commonly used road safety metric — vehicle miles traveled — the group projected that the pedestrian fatality rate spiked about 21 percent in 2020 as deaths climbed sharply even though people drove much less that year, the largest ever year-over-year increase. And preliminary data from 2021 indicates yet another increase in the number of pedestrian deaths.
While other developed countries have made strides in reducing pedestrian deaths over the last several years, the pandemic has intensified several trends that have pushed the United States in the other direction. Crashes killing pedestrians climbed 46 percent over the last decade, compared with a 5 percent increase for all other crashes, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
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The growth of “killer cars.” Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) cause more than twice as many deaths per collision as sedans, primarily because of their height. Drivers of tall vehicles have more difficulty seeing pedestrians, and an SUV is likely to hit a pedestrian in the middle of the body instead of the legs, which in turn makes death more likely. “Bull bars” added to SUVs increase risks to pedestrians by concentrating the force of a blow; they are banned in the United Kingdom but not in the U.S.
An aging society. A middle-aged man can walk 3.5 feet per second, while older people walk 2.5-3 feet per second. Traffic engineers time lights for a walking speed of 3.5 or even 4 feet per second, ensuring that older walkers are stranded in the middle of the road when lights change. If the number of older walkers has increased, the same number of crashes could thus lead to a higher number of fatalities. However, I have no way of knowing it has.
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The simple act of walking is sometimes criminalized in the United States. Anti-jaywalking statutes and ordinances—originally motivated by auto-industry lobbyists in the 1920s—call for fines and, sometimes, imprisonment for crossing the street. Additionally, some localities have interpreted statutes against “child neglect” to encompass a parent’s decision to let their kid walk outside alone. The result of this criminalization? Such policies have reduced pedestrian liberty, increased automobile traffic and pollution, and created a disincentive for physical activity in the midst of an obesity and diabetes epidemic. In addition to discussing these effects, this Article argues that the purported safety benefits of criminalizing walking pale in comparison to those of decriminalization. In the context of currently vague child neglect laws, this Article suggests a bright-line rule that would empower parents’ decision to allow their children to do the unthinkable: walk themselves to school.
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Advertisements glamorizing cigarettes will soon be a thing of the past in Switzerland, after voters on Sunday overwhelmingly approved legislation forbidding tobacco companies from displaying them in public spaces.
Health advocates have said that the legislation, which was approved in a referendum, was a significant step toward tightening the country’s loose tobacco regulations.
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On September 17th, 1956 an atomic bomb was detonated in Maralinga, Australia.
The bomb’s testing program was codenamed One Tree, and utilized a payload comparable to the horrific Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. The test was part of Operation Buffalo, the United Kingdom’s anglophilic plan to use Australia as a location for nuclear weapon testing.
Maralinga was selected as a location for testing because of its remote location and desert climate. It was mistakenly believed that there was a low chance for collateral damage and witnesses
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The big picture: “Gambling has become normalized in our society,” says Jeff Derevensky, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University and director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors. “We’re seeing a migration and an integration between gaming and gambling.”
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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In January, KrebsOnSecurity examined clues left behind by “Wazawaka,” the hacker handle chosen by a major ransomware criminal in the Russian-speaking cybercrime scene. Wazawaka has since “lost his mind” according to his erstwhile colleagues, creating a Twitter account to drop exploit code for a widely-used virtual private networking (VPN) appliance, and publishing bizarre selfie videos taunting security researchers and journalists.
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A group of Russian teenagers got in trouble this week for allegedly planning to blow up a fake government building they’d built in Minecraft, according to EuroNews — as opposed to, you know, one that actually exists in the real world.
Two of the three teens were cleared of charges because they cooperated with authorities, but Nikita Uvarov, age 16, was sentenced to five years in prison by a Siberian military court for “training for terrorist activities,” rights lawyer Pavel Chikov told EN and Agence France-Presse via Telegram.
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As Dave Welding, a 2016 Mazda hatchback driver, told the Seattle Times, it seemed like something about the station had “fried” the car’s smart radio, and he was unable to access other features like Bluetooth, navigation, or even the car’s clock. Worse still, the system, in an apparent attempt to reboot itself, kept getting caught in a boot loop that became so visually distracting that Welding said he had to cover it with cardboard.
“The lower right field of my vision was seeing like a TV screen going on and off,” Welding told the newspaper, adding that the console would often flash and then split the logo into five.
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Welding says that when he contacted Lee Johnson Mazda of Seattle, “They told me that there’s nothing they can do about it, that I needed a new CMU unit, that it cost $1,500 and that they didn’t have the part.”
The Mazda dealer referred calls for comment to Mazda corporate headquarters.
Lorenzo Pieruccioni, service manager at Mazda of Olympia, says he’s had seven to 10 customers with the rebooting problems. He tells them their CMU is corrupted.
That stands for “Connectivity Master Unit,” and it controls the video and audio signals to that infotainment system. That’s the $1,500 gizmo that is not available and who knows when it will be.
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Court of Appeal hearing reveals Post Office instructed employees to destroy documents that undermined an insistence that its Horizon computer system was robust, amid claims that errors in the system caused unexplained accounting shortfalls.
It was also revealed that the Post Office was told that if these instructions were carried out it would “amount to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”
The losses reported by the system led to hundreds of subpostmaster prosecutions for financial crimes, with some serving prison sentences.
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Between 2000 and 2014, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – an average of one a week – based on information from a recently installed computer system called Horizon.
Some went to prison following convictions for false accounting and theft, many were financially ruined and have described being shunned by their communities. Some have since died.
After 20 years, campaigners won a legal battle to have their cases reconsidered, after claiming that the computer system was flawed.
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This is relevant because of the current state of Mac emulation: in general, the classic Mac OS is better supported than Mac OS X. SheepShaver started on BeOS and the PowerPC-based BeBox as a commercial product and pun on the Amiga 68K Mac emulator ShapeShifter; it only runs the classic Mac OS, and only then up to 9.0.4 (later versions require an MMU, which SheepShaver doesn’t implement). It achieved surprisingly good speed on modest hardware by heavily patching the operating system (more later) and running most programs as native code directly on the BeBox’s twin 603 CPUs, not unlike KVM-PR, though without using any special processor features (instead, this was achieved by patching out supervisor portions of the emulated Mac ROM and running all components, including the nanokernel, in the problem state — today we would call this paravirtualization). SheepShaver works on Mac OS X, too, allowing Power Macs with Leopard to run classic apps at near native speeds, though not as well integrated as the Classic Environment, of course. The ability of SheepShaver to run Mac apps directly on the processor accounts for some of its unusual design decisions that persist even on non-PowerPC architectures either running applications through its JIT compiler (on x86 and x86_64) or with an interpreter (everything else, including aarch64 and Apple silicon). SheepShaver led to Basilisk II, which is a 68K Macintosh emulator, before itself becoming open source. To this day both emulators share substantial amounts of code.
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Security
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The Roaming Mantis Android malware campaign has buzzed into Europe, quickly infesting France in particular, where there have been 66,789 downloads of the group’s specific remote access trojan (RAT) as of January.
The campaign pushes the Android RAT known as Wroba (aka Moqhao or XLoader) onto victim devices. According to research from Kaspersky, it has been updated with the ability to exfiltrate images and galleries from a victim device, which potentially paves the way for lifting sensitive information from things like drivers’ licenses, abusing stored QR codes for payment services, or even for blackmail or sextortion.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.
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Jonatan Pettersson: AxCrypt was first created as an open-source project in the early 2000 to fill the void of simple but reliable encryption solutions at the time. Over the years it became very popular but was still a bit of a hobby project which was worked on as time allowed. In 2015 it was decided that it was time for AxCrypt to take the next step, so a company was founded around it and a development process began to bring AxCrypt to more platforms, adding SaaS features and a subscription business model to allow continued development. Today AxCrypt exists on Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android and has a full development team working on new features every day.
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Many media execs have been essentially forced to learn about the metaverse over the past few months given the barrage of coverage the topic has received (thanks, Zuckerberg!). But this group should know that the subject remains foreign to many average consumers.
That’s according to data from a survey conducted by Hub Entertainment Research and provided exclusively to Variety Intelligence Platform.
In Hub’s survey, which was conducted online Dec. 4-18 among U.S. consumers aged 13-74, 46% of respondents had never heard of the metaverse.
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This came a day after it was revealed that 54 such apps, including many from the stables of large Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and gaming firm NetEase, had been banned in the fifth and latest crackdown by the authorities.
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Even though the government’s Co-Win portal saw more than 1 billion appointments booked so far, Singh said some people find WhatsApp’s interface very convenient as they are not very comfortable going to an app or portal.
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Cambodia is powering up its new National Internet Gateway, a move activists say will allow the government to further silence the country’s embattled opposition voices.
UN rights experts warn the gateway, which will funnel all web traffic through a state-controlled entry point from February 16, will have a “devastating” effect on privacy and free speech.
It is the latest move by authoritarian ruler Hun Sen to clamp down on dissent in a country that has arrested dozens for online posts in recent years, critics say.
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UN rights experts warn the gateway, which will funnel all web traffic through a state-controlled entry point from February 16, will have a “devastating” effect on privacy and free speech.
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Defence/Aggression
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Last week, it again became clear: The Biden White House—like many before it—is willing to facilitate mass death.
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The powder keg analogy is so useful because a journalist can write about the explosive ingredients in a situation without saying if they are going to detonate tomorrow, in a decade, or perhaps never.
No deception on the part of the reporter is involved, though news consumers back home may miss the point that they are reading, viewing or listening to dramatic things that could happen, but have not yet done so and may not, in point of fact, ever occur.
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For the past three nights, I have had nightmares about the war in Ukraine.
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Four years after a gunman murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, survivors of the mass shooting, other activists, and progressive lawmakers on Monday demanded urgent action from President Joe Biden and Congress.
“Biden has been a friend but not a leader.”
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But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.
The U.S. confiscation of $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s currency reserves has already plunged the country into an economic and humanitarian crisis. On January 10, the Biden Administration announced an Executive Order which will allow 3.5 billion in frozen assets from Afghanistan’s central bank to be distributed for humanitarian assistance in the country. But measures aiming to provide humanitarian assistance will not address the reality of an economy on the verge of collapse. If the Afghan Bank can’t pay teachers, health care workers and civil servants, those people won’t have money to buy food and if the farmers can’t sell their crops, they can’t afford to cultivate the land.
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Historical analogies play a major role in the actions of our leaders. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson acted in Vietnam because of their erroneous ideas about relations between the Soviet Union and China as well as their goals. President Harry S. Truman’s memoirs reveal that his decision to fight in Korea in 1950 was honed by key events in the 1930s, such as Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931; Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935; and Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Truman didn’t mention the Munich crisis of 1938, but several of his advisors pointed to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin’s decision to “appease” Hitler by yielding the Sudetenland to Germany. The very word “appeasement” is now considered to be an act of dangerous surrender that virtually guarantees future confrontation.
Previous U.S. administrations successfully resorted to diplomacy to defuse the Cold War crises over Berlin, Cuba, Taiwan, and various Third World situations in the Middle East and Africa. The Biden administration seems to be engaged in group think regarding Russia and President Vladimir Putin, and has no one who can think outside the box regarding a diplomatic solution. Biden has stated that it’s a “world war when Americans and Russians start shooting at one another,” yet doesn’t understand the necessity of keeping Ukraine out of NATO and removing sophisticated U.S. weaponry from East Europe.
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Back then, the goal of U.S. national-security state officials was to goad the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it succinctly when he told President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
What he meant by that was the opportunity of getting Soviet soldiers killed, maimed, and injured for no good reason, just as the Pentagon and the CIA did to tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Additionally, the Soviet Union would have to waste large sums of taxpayer money, just as the U.S. government also did in Vietnam.
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Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.
For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.
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Program note: Due to ongoing and possibly rapidly changing developments, this conversation took place February 10, 2022.
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On Tuesday, February 15, Russian lawmakers will consider two draft resolutions appealing to President Vladimir Putin to recognize the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine, Interfax reports.
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According to plans of the EU interior ministers, the Schengen states could soon exercise sovereign powers outside their national borders. This would go far beyond existing agreements.
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In February 2021, 17-year-old Ismail Isayev and 20-year-old Salekh Magamadov were kidnapped by the Chechen authorities and taken from Nizhny Novgorod to Chechnya. According to the two brothers, the authorities subjected them to violence and threats until they agreed to waive their right to legal counsel and confess to being involved in an illegal armed group; investigators accused the brothers of smuggling groceries to Chechen militant Rustam Borchashvili when he was in hiding. Isayev and Magamadov are slated to be sentenced later this week and are facing years behind bars. The brothers’ lawyers insist the case is politically motivated. In fact, Isayev and Magamadov were previously detained on suspicion of running an opposition Telegram channel. What’s more, one of the brothers is gay and the other is transgender, which puts them at even greater risk of persecution in Chechnya. A petition demanding their release has gathered more than 100,000 signatures so far. The boys’ mother, Zara Magamadova, who is currently in hiding from both the Chechen and federal authorities, also maintains her sons’ innocence. For Meduza, Zara Magamadova tells her family’s harrowing story, in her own words.
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International alarm over the Russian military buildup around Ukraine reached new heights over the weekend of February 12–13. More than 30 countries advised their citizens to leave Ukraine, and several embassies pledged to move West, relocating their staff from Kyiv to Lviv. Meanwhile, U.S. officials keep repeating claims that Russia could further invade Ukraine “at any time.” To help make sense of the building tensions, Meduza turns to Russian International Affairs Council director-general Andrey Kortunov.
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“The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (APHIS-USDA) decided to pause avocado inspection activities in Michoacán until further notice,” it said in a statement.
The decision came after an avocado inspector in Uruapan received a threatening call to his official cell phone, SADER said.
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Four alleged accomplices in the murder of an 85-year-old French priest go on trial in Paris on Monday after years of investigations into one of the most grisly jihadist attacks that have rocked France in recent years.
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The Department of Defense’s chief information officer will now oversee the department’s cybersecurity program aimed at securing the networks of hundreds of thousands of defense contractors.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks directed the realignment of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification from the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to the CIO Feb. 2.
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Because the truth is that Canada is at severe risk from a collapsing America. See how the Trumpists still haven’t given up when it comes to ripping apart what’s left of America? The “truckers,” by which I mean far-right wing agitators, who are inspired and incited and egged on and funded by the American hard right, aren’t going to stop here. America is like a great wounded animal, dying, lashing out in terrible pain and despair.
Unfortunately for Canada, it’s right next door. It isn’t going to stop here. This is just the beginning. But you suspect that already. So why is the American right interfering in Canadian politics and life? Why is it trying to destabilise…gentle and wise…Canada?
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Once someone legally obtains documents from a government entity through a public records request, the government simply cannot demand to have them returned just because it screwed up when it fulfilled the request.
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Environment
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When you work on climate, the news can often feel like one step forward, two steps back. But lately, ordinary people have been winning big victories to protect their communities—and our planet.
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It wasn’t just the frank discussions of harsh climate realities and hard choices that the scientists put forward that made the hearing remarkable. It was also the desperate understanding that Ireland, as a small nation whose future, in the words of one of the scientists, Prof. Barry McMullin of Dublin City University, “is completely tied up with the actions of much bigger countries,” must itself step up and exert international leadership—leadership that a powerful, high-emissions nations like the U.S. might then become obliged to follow.
“Our ability to influence those much bigger countries is absolutely critical to our future,” he concluded.
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Li and other climate influencers are using their platforms to talk about climate solutions—and build a more inclusive environmental movement. Last month, Pique Action and Harvard Chan C-CHANGE named Li among 16 climate creators to watch.
Nexus Media News spoke with Li and three other “climate creators”—Intersectional Environmentalist author Leah Thomas, TikTok-er Alaina Wood, and Brown Girl Green founder Kristy Drutman—about how they joined the climate movement, why shame-based motivation fails and finding solutions, even in anxious times.
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The other alters existing laws and regulations, for example requiring the nation’s mining regulator to establish simplified criteria for the analysis of permit requests for prospecting.
The measures spurred outrage from environmental and Indigenous rights groups, which warned they would exacerbate the illegal destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest and pollution of its waterways with mercury, used to separate gold.
“They run opposite to what the federal government should be doing,” Larissa Rodrigues, portfolio manager for an environmental think tank Choices Institute, said by phone. “There is enormous illegality circulating in the chain that is measurable. The government should be concerned about controlling that chain and not giving more stimulus to it.”
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The day Luxembourg has used up all of its annual ecological resources comes one day earlier than it did in 2021, and two days earlier than in 2020. Qatar achieved the earliest date on 10 February, the Grand Duchy finds itself in the second position – nothing to be proud of.
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A damning new investigation by The Intercept details the climate risks facing incarcerated people in more than 6,500 detention facilities across the country, including wildfires, floods and extreme heat. We feature a 10-minute video report that includes the stories of people behind bars and their families who are fighting for justice, and speak with reporter Alleen Brown, who says the climate crisis, coupled with the deterioration of detention facilities, places the U.S. mass incarceration system at a “crossroads” between being reinvested in or defunded. The report also includes a new database, which Brown hopes “can be a tool for organizers, policymakers, reporters and family members of people who are trapped inside these facilities.”
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The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.
Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.
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Energy
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Scientists have warned repeatedly that avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis requires a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels, and yet the largest 25 European banks—all purportedly committed to “net-zero” goals—have provided more than $400 billion in financing to 50 corporations expanding oil and gas production since 2016, with no signs of slowing down.
That’s according to a new analysis out Monday from the responsible investment organization ShareAction, which said that this “continued love affair with oil and gas… is not only bad news for the climate, but also presents a huge risk for banks and their investors.”
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In France, three non-governmental organizations sued the oil company Total over alleged “inadequate” environmental and human rights assessments of its oil project in Uganda and Tanzania. In Australia, a student filed a consumer complaint with Ad Standards against the financial services organization HSBC for claiming to support the protection of the Great Barrier Reef despite its links to fossil fuel operations. In South Africa, three civil society organizations launched a case alleging that the government’s plans to obtain new coal power threaten various constitutional rights.
These are just a handful of the hundreds of cases of climate litigation that have arisen worldwide over the past few years. These cases signal a move away from the idea that only scientific experts can speak for climate change, and other professionals, including lawyers, “are pushing the cause forward,” historian and climate accountability researcher Benjamin Franta argues.
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The Alliance for the Wild Rockies is fighting these proposals and we could really use some help! We have paid to put up two billboards so far and if you’d like to help keep Montana nuke-free it’s quick and easy to donate via our GoFundMe site. Any donation helps, but the more you donate the more we can fight nuclear power.
Many people – and unfortunately a growing number of so-called “green” organizations – see nuclear power as a great non-carbon source of electricity. But the former heads of nuclear regulatory bodies across Europe and the US put out a statement in January voicing their opposition to nuclear energy as a climate solution, writing: “The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly.” They also added that nuclear power is “unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.”
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It’s not that cryptocurrency-related ads completely overwhelmed the Super Bowl commercial breaks to the exclusion of all other advertisements. In fact, there were more ads for the Super Bowl’s more traditional fare of booze, cars, and movie trailers than there were [cryptocurrency] commercials.
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The coveted commercial breaks during Super Bowl LVI, where a 30-second spot cost as much as $7 million, featured eye-catching advertisements for crypto currency companies such as Coinbase and eToro. A-list celebrities joined the hoopla, too: Larry David appeared in an ad for FTX and LeBron James pitched for Crypto.com.
Coinbase’s minimalist 60-second spot — a colorful QR code bounced around the screen like a DVD logo — stirred up chatter on social media, and the platform appeared to crash after it aired. (The matchup between the victorious Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals was broadcast by NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
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Embracing David’s antagonism is part of the company’s marketing strategy, notes Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s co-founder and CEO. “We need to meet people where they are — and that means embracing skepticism,” he says, in a statement. “A lot of people who are now the biggest advocates of [cryptocurreny] once had significant reservations.”
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An online auction of digital art raised more than $52 million worth of cryptocurrency to help fund WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal defence on Wednesday, the winning bid coming from a group of supporters who had pooled their money.
Australian-born Assange is battling extradition from Britain to the United States where the authorities want him to face trial on 18 criminal charges including breaking a spying law, after WikiLeaks began to publish thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in 2010.
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In the strange and sometimes shadowy world of cryptocurrency, it was as if the earth shook. In the years since the Bitfinex [cracking], crypto had exploded into the mainstream, and the theft had become notorious: a bounty worth over $4 billion. At last, it seemed, the [crackers] had emerged from hiding.
But it was not the [crackers] who had moved the stolen Bitcoin — it was the government, which had seized it as part of an investigation into two New York City entrepreneurs: one a little-known Russian émigré and tech investor; the other, his wife, an American businesswoman and would-be social media influencer with an alter ego as a satirical rapper named Razzlekhan.
Charged with conspiring to launder billions of dollars in Bitcoin, the couple, Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31, were accused of siphoning off chunks of the purloined currency and trying to hide it in a complex network of digital wallets and internet personas. If convicted of that and a second conspiracy count, they could face up to 25 years in prison.
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Wildlife/Nature
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If wolves deserve federal protections across the vast majority of the United States, based on the the best available science, then the need for federal oversight is even more compelling in these three states. The Biden administration now has the opportunity – indeed, the responsibility – to protect wolves under the Endangered Species Act throughout the western states, providing equal protection under the law.
All three states recently changed their laws and regulations to maximize the slaughter of wolves, seeking to turn back the clock and repeat the 19th Century wolf extinction policies cooked up by the livestock industry and a handful of rabidly anti-wolf hunting organizations.
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Finance
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Progressive organizers on Monday announced an upcoming day of action to pressure President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to wipe out $1.8 trillion dollars in student loan debt.
“The time to cancel student debt is is now.”
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Those in Congress who are blocking President Biden’s proposed child tax credit — a monthly federal stipend for families with children of up to $300 per child — have been making a curious claim of late. They’ve been saying that there is already a highly effective cash assistance program for low-income parents and kids: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.
If the child tax credit were to be provided to these families going forward, “all the requirements that apply to those receiving TANF … would be gone,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in October.
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Of the many commercials and advertisements displayed during Super Bowl LVI on Sunday, perhaps the most prominent was for the personal finance company with naming rights to SoFi Stadium, the game’s multibillion-dollar venue in Inglewood, California.
SoFi offers a range of financial products and services, but what drew the most attention—and ire—during Sunday’s game was the company’s role in the lucrative student loan refinancing business, which is set to receive a major boost if President Joe Biden allows the federal student debt repayment moratorium to expire on May 1.
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Regular readers know what I am talking about. The big lie is that the massive rise in inequality over the last four decades was somehow the result of the natural workings of the market. The standard position among policy types is that the rise in inequality was simply the result of the development of technology and the process of globalization.
We saw this view on full display in a generally interesting column in today’s NYT by Thomas Edsall. The piece looks at the growth in support for Trump, and right-wing populism more generally, among non-college educated white workers. It cites a number of academics who identify this development as a result of being left behind by economic developments, while Blacks and other minorities are perceived as having increased opportunities.
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When all else fails, when you are clueless about how to halt a 7.5% inflation rate, when your Build Back Better bill is gutted, when you renege on your promise to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt, when you can’t halt the Republican suppression of voting rights, when you have no idea how to handle the pandemic which has claimed 900,000 lives – 16% of the world’s total deaths although we are less than 5% of the world’s population – when the stock market fluctuates on wild rollercoaster rides of highs and lows, when what little help the government offered to the labor force — half of whom, 80 million, experienced a period of unemployment last year — sees the termination of the extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on evictions and expansion of the child tax credits, when you watch passively as the ecocide gathers momentum, then you must make the public afraid of enemies, foreign and domestic. You must manufacture an existential threat. Terrorists at home. Russians and Chinese abroad. Expand state power in the name of national security. Beat the drums of war. War is the antidote to divert public attention from government corruption and incompetence. No one plays the game better than the Democratic Party. The Democrats, as journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford said, are not the lesser evil, they are the more effective evil.
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The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has issued a discussion paper assessing the applicability of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the country and seeking comment from the public on the technology. The move indicates that the country is considering adopting the technology but also raises questions on the effectiveness of having a CBDC in a country with a real-time payment system such as mobile money.
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The protest needed money for supplies and practical logistic needs. They raised a bunch from sympathetic people all over the world (and especially the USA) on GoFundMe. GoFundMe, not wanting the controversy associated with its brand, censored the fundraising effort on their site. Then the funds were then frozen by a Canadian judge, post-donation, pre-disbursement-to-protesters. This is, of course, only a possible situation on a centralized platform that is in custody of the money as a middleman.
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That’s why McIngvale still had to drive two hours from Houston to cross the Louisiana border. Despite its reputation as a do-as-you-please, leave-us-alone state, Texans have not been allowed to gamble as they please and any sportsbooks or casino operators trying to enter the state will not be left alone.
In Louisiana, legal sports betting on mobile devices finally launched in the last few weeks. Before then, McIngvale would have probably just gotten on a plane to Las Vegas (where he still would have had to register in person at a casino before placing a bet on his phone), because the alternatives were driving to a Mississippi casino or driving over the Tennessee border if he still wanted to place the record-setting mobile bet.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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“I am honored to have the support of Bernie Sanders in this grassroots campaign to deliver for working families.”
As early voting began in Texas Monday ahead of the Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders added his voice to calls from progressives in support of Jessica Cisneros, the human rights and immigration attorney running for a second time to unseat right-wing Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s order allowing Alabama to use a congressional map that critics say disadvantages Black voters has voting rights advocates worried—and understandably so.
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On the surface, the stay issued Feb. 7, 2022, in Merrill v. Milliganwas procedural. In a 5-4 decision, the justices halted a district court’s injunction that had barred Alabama from using a newly redistricted map in the upcoming 2022 elections. The Supreme Court will hear the full case in its next term starting in the fall, with the ruling due by the end of June 2023 – after this year’s midterm elections.
Had it stood, the district court’s injunction would have required Alabama to redraw congressional districts ahead of the election to give Black voters greater representation. Instead, Black voters – more than a quarter of Alabama’s electorate – will be the majority in just one of seven districts.
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In an action extreme enough to inspire the objection of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court intervened this week to block a lower court’s order that Alabama must redraw its congressional maps before the 2022 midterm elections. The 5-4 decision denies Black voters, who make up 27 percent of Alabama’s electorate, the opportunity to elect an additional representative of their choice this year, despite a federal court’s ruling last month that the Voting Rights Act guarantees them this right. The court’s decision is not simply alarming because it undermines the fruit of the most famous Black-led struggle for democracy in the very place where it was won 57 years ago. It is all the more concerning because such an extreme action was taken without oral arguments or deliberation. But just as the struggle in Selma exposed the rotten roots of Jim Crow in 1965, the Supreme Court’s brazen action this week reveals the root cause of voter suppression efforts today.
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When Georgians vote, the consequences reverberate across the nation. With the help of former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, Republicans enacted a voter-suppression law in 2021 that is already working. A recent case study demonstrates its impact.
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With early voting underway in the 2022 Texas primaries, civil rights advocates warned Monday that ballot access in the state is under grave threat thanks in large part to the GOP’s draconian voter suppression law, which is already throwing the election process into chaos.
Known as Senate Bill 1, the Republican-authored law implemented a slew of changes to Texas’ already restrictive voting rules, including new voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, a ban on drive-thru voting, and limits on counties’ ability to expand voting options.
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Earlier this month, California Governor Gavin Newsom heeded the advice of capital punishment experts in his state and pledged to finally dismantle the death-row facility at San Quentin State Prison. Newsom’s announcement means that California is one step closer to ending a human rights catastrophe that found the nation’s largest death row in a state of perpetual liminality over the fate of nearly 700 condemned inmates.
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The parliamentary elections will take place seven weeks from this past Sunday, and every day until then we will be drowning in campaign news. Of course, here at Telex, we will be reporting on all the major events and showing you all the highlights, but it’s also important that we recognize the connections between the major events as well. As such, every week until April 3rd, we’ll be summarizing what’s worth noting in our usual five-point format. Translated by Dominic Spadacene.
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Over the last few days there has been a new flurry of anti-piracy activity as rightsholders from all over the world attempt to tackle the rising threat of pirate IPTV services. With arrests, blockades, domain seizures and targeted DMCA takedowns, the gloves are certainly coming off in 2022 but the size of the mission ahead isn’t easily understated.
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The RIAA has secured a multi-million dollar victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. A Virginia federal approved the damages request after a hard-fought legal battle that took place over several years. The stream-rippers previously closed their doors to U.S. traffic but remain accessible elsewhere for now.
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But I shouldn’t complain. Some of my former colleagues from the newspaper have it so much worse. My editor, for instance, is picking tomatoes not far from here under the hot Florida sun, which isn’t easy for a 45-year-old with bad knees. One of our former White House pool reporters is at a nearby chicken-processing plant. The few times we’ve met for a cup of coffee, I can’t bear to look at her hands.
If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be slinging burgers and dumping shoestring potatoes into a fryer 55 hours a week, breathing in that oil-clogged air and barely keeping up with the lunchtime rush. But it’s not as physically demanding as working in the fields or chopping up chickens on a frigid factory floor.
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Although Sen. Rick Scott on Monday delayed House-approved bipartisan legislation to reform the U.S. Postal Service, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the chamber’s floor to promise that the bill will pass.
“Nobody should be standing in the way of this bill. It’s a sad day that just one member has.”
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Charles Ridley has been in custody for the past 14 years after he and fellow expat Ryan Cornelius were convicted for misusing a $501m (£370m) loan provided by Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB).
The 62-year-old has served his initial 10-year sentence but is now facing further imprisonment until 2038 after the bank claimed he still owed money and invoked a local law to detain him for another two decades.
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The state spends roughly €190 million on IT every year, both on workstation procurements and your salary. We can add to that around €30 million in EU subsidies that is mainly for investment.
Those are the figures for last year.
An additional €30 million came this year. However, this is one-off funding that does not reflect in the state budget strategy (RES). Do I understand correctly that we would need an extra €70 million in next year’s state budget compared to the RES for things to be going well?
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“These blockades are illegal, and if you are still participating the time to go home is now,” Trudeau told reporters after a virtual meeting with province leaders, The Associated Press reported.
Trudeau says the emergency order “will be time-limited, geographically targeted” as well as “reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.”
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It has been half a century since emergency powers were last invoked in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, imposed them during a terrorism crisis in Quebec. Monday was the first time that the 1988 Emergencies Act has been used.
The response by the police and all levels of government to the crisis, which included an almost weeklong blockade of an economically critical border crossing with the United States, has been widely criticized as inadequate. Mr. Trudeau, some critics contend, should have intervened earlier and perhaps even deployed troops to break up the protest.
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For almost a week, protesters blocked the bridge linking Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit — severing the key trade route and dealing economic blows to both the US and Canada.
The bridge reopened Sunday night, allowing “the free flow of commerce between the Canada and US economies once again,” the Detroit International Bridge Company said.
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After protesters blockaded a critical economic link between the United States and Canada for nearly a week, traffic began making its way over the span again early Monday, providing relief to industries disrupted by the unrest over the country’s anti-vaccine mandate.
The logjam lifted hours after the Canadian police began making arrests near the Ambassador Bridge, clearing a roadway to a border crossing that became one of the most visible sites of an antigovernment protest movement that has roiled Canada for weeks.
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Clayton Goodwin, a 45-year-old military veteran who was among the counter-protesters, said it was time for residents to stand up against the protestors.
“I’m horrified that other veterans would be down there co-opting my flag, co-opting my service,” said Goodwin, who is the CEO of the Veterans Accountability Commission, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It’s a grift. The city was free. We’re 92% vaccinated. We’re ready to support our businesses.”
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The Michigan Department of Treasury estimates that 10,000 commercial vehicles cross the bridge each day with $325 million of goods. Approximately $50 million is from automotive parts. Nearly 30% of the annual trade between Michigan and Canada comes across the Ambassador Bridge.
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Protesters who were arrested face criminal charges of mischief, Canadian authorities said. Ontario officials have said they would fine protesters blocking the bridge up to $100,000 and sentence them to up to a year in jail. They also would consider taking away the personal or commercial driver’s licenses of anyone who defies the orders.
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But AI Yoon’s creators believe he is the world’s first official deepfake candidate — a concept gaining traction in South Korea, which has the world’s fastest average internet speeds.
With neatly-combed black hair and a smart suit, the avatar looks near-identical to the real South Korean candidate but uses salty language and meme-ready quips in a bid to engage younger voters who get their news online.
It’s been a huge hit. AI Yoon has attracted millions of views since making his debut January 1.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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We already live in a world where big businesses such as banks and manufacturers like Volkswagen have been caught lying and cheating. We have hostile foreign governments trying to exploit our open societies and democratic institutions. We know that polarisation causes people to put partisanship over propriety. And social media and the fragmentation of news mean a lie can reach many millions of people without the truth ever catching up.
There have always been disputes about truth, but this is different. For some, warped ideology means there is no single truth, just different discourses and lived experiences: hence “my truth” and yours. For others, social, political, institutional and technological changes merely give them a chance to lie with a reasonable expectation that they might get away with it. Many believe their cause, or their tribe, or sheer narcissism means the ends justify the means.
But it is all horribly corrosive. In politics a lie justifies another lie, a deceit prompts a cheat. And in our wider society untruths chip away at trust, fuelling corruption and crime and undermining our sense of responsibility to one another. Societies without truth and trust are more dangerous, less prosperous and unhappier.
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An extensive campaign against Sweden is currently underway on social media, P4 Örebro and TT reported. Accounts linked to Islamists are posting false claims that Swedish authorities have kidnapped children.
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The government of Sweden sought Friday to discredit claims that Swedish social service agencies kidnap Muslim children, saying the allegations “are wrong” and are “seriously misleading and aim to create tensions and spread mistrust.”
In a Twitter thread devoted to what it termed “a disinformation campaign,” the Swedish Foreign Ministry said that “all children in Sweden are protected and cared for equally under Swedish legislation, including the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
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The Swedish state Psychological Defence Agency says it is an organised campaign to spread misinformation that is intended to cause harm, and is currently being spread in Arabic-language channels with millions of followers.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Make sure you read the update at the end
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YouTube’s Content ID automated copyright system sucks. There, I said it. Any review of the different posts we’ve done specifically on the topic of Content ID can only leave you with one impression: the system doesn’t work. Not that it never works, of course, but when you build a system that is designed specifically to allow 3rd parties to take down speech content, that system had damned well better not be wide the hell open for abuse or laughable errors. Well, guess what? You’ve got your music labels getting works taken down that were specifically designed not to not be infringing, news organizations managed to claim their own live streams as copyright infringing, and music labels being able to demonetize videos of a guy singing public domain Christmas carols. It’s all very stupid, very much the tip of the iceberg, and very much an indication that Content ID, in its current state, is broken.
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In admitting that his EARN IT Act is really about attacking encryption, Senator Richard Blumenthal said he wouldn’t agree to keep encryption out of the bill because he worried that it would give companies a “get-out-of-jail-free card.” That’s nonsense for multiple reasons, which we explained in that post, but the fact is Blumenthal’s bill actually does contain a “get-out-of-jail-free card” that is incredibly damaging. It’s one that child sexual abusers may be able to use to suppress any evidence collected against them and which would not just undermine the very point of EARN IT Act, but would make it that much harder to do the thing that needs to be done: stopping such abusers.
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Speaking of everyone who made the film, though, let’s go back to David Fincher: In a conversation with Empire (via Variety), Fincher agreed with us that “it’s funny” that the Chinese edit “adhered pretty closely” to the book, and while that’s gratifying, he did also offer some insight into how the heck this happened. Fincher says production company New Regency licensed Fight Club to be shown in China with a “boilerplate” agreement, which would’ve had general language accounting for the fact that “cuts may be made for censorship purposes.”
That being said, he believes that nobody would’ve specifically asked New Regency if they could totally change the ending, so “there’s now a discussion being had as to what ‘trims’ means”—in other words, it sounds like the people who sign these kinds of agreements are realizing that they might need to be a little more specific when they agree to let films be censored for other markets.
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Chinese-American author Geling Yan has long been known for her fiction that depicts the suffering and striving of Chinese women. Now Yan is being censored for her outspokenness on a woman’s fate.
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Debate is often stifled so as not to cause offence and protect religious sensibilities, and to appease a section of influential but minority groups who play the race and religion card to deflect genuine criticism.
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Recently I published a book of speculative nonfiction about the possibility of a civil war in the United States. In the opening chapter, I imagine a scenario in which a carnivalesque group of far-right activists takes over a bridge and refuses to leave, provoking a response from federal authorities. My fantasy became reality recently, except not in a rural American county, as I had envisioned it, but in Windsor, Ontario. For five years, I have been studying American political rage, its sources, its abyssal depths, its vertiginous fracturing power. I thought I was studying an external phenomenon at a distance, and I was. Now the rage has come for me. The anti-vax trucker [blockade] has made it up close and personal.
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Punjab police on Monday arrested six more primary suspects involved in the lynching of a man accused of blasphemy in Khanewal, a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan took notice of the incident and sought a report from the provincial police on action taken against the perpetrators.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Without the jury present in court, Judge Jed Rakoff told the attorneys in the trial that he has decided to dismiss the case because Palin had not met the high standard of showing that The Times had acted with actual malice when it published an editorial that erroneously linked Palin’s political action committee to a mass shooting.
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A judge on Monday indicated he would dismiss a lawsuit against The New York Times filed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), saying her attorneys produced a lack of evidence to suggest the news organization acted recklessly or knowingly published false material about her.
Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision came as a jury in U.S. District Court was still deliberating a verdict in the case. The jury was dismissed on Monday evening and will resume deliberations on Tuesday morning.
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A judge said Monday he’ll dismiss a libel lawsuit that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin filed against The New York Times, claiming the newspaper damaged her reputation with an editorial falsely linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff made the ruling with a jury still deliberating at a New York City trial where the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate testified last week. The judge said Palin had failed to show that The Times had acted out of malice, something required in libel lawsuits involving public figures.
Rakoff said he let jury deliberations continue in case his decision winds up being reversed on appeal.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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When the first woman ever elected to the vice presidency prepared to take office in January of 2021, she observed, “Shirley Chisholm created a path for me and for so many others. Today, I’m thinking about her inspirational words: ‘I am, and always will be a catalyst for change.’”
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In 2018, the sheriff of Butts County, Georgia (no, really), Buford T. Justice Gary Long instructed deputies to ruin the Halloween holiday spirt by planting damning signs in the yards of released sex offenders. The sheriff cited no reason for doing this — not even extremely anecdotal “evidence.” Instead, the signs — which warned trick or treaters away from the homes of certain county residents — appeared to be purely punitive: a way to continue to punish criminals who’d already served their time.
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Valentine’s Day kicks off a campaign by feminist leaders in 70 countries across the world to celebrate One Billion Rising, an initiative by V-Day to end violence against women — cisgender, transgender and gender nonconforming — girls and the planet. ”COVID has ushered in a very strange and perplexing time for women. We are on the frontlines everywhere,” says V-Day founder V (formerly Eve Ensler). The campaign seeks to resist “the broken systems of capitalism and neoliberalism,” as well as the fascist governments upholding these broken systems, says Monique Wilson, global director of One Billion Rising who is based in the Philippines. The campaign repositions “women from being victims to being active agents in protection of their rights,” says Africa director Colani Hlatjwako, who is helping organize community-based protection sites for women and girls in their home country of Eswatini.
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Last autumn, you may recall, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article revealing that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was leaking the Social Security numbers of teachers and administrators, past and present, by putting that information directly in the HTML. The reporters at the paper ethically disclosed this to the state, and waited until this very, very bad security mistake had been patched before publishing the story. In response, rather than admitting that an agency under his watch had messed up, Missouri Governor Mike Parson made himself into a complete laughingstock, by insisting that the act of viewing the source code on the web page was nefarious hacking. Every chance he had to admit he fucked up, he doubled down instead.
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America’s largest arms companies are increasingly finding lucrative new ways of profiting from the prison industrial complex; in many cases, weapons of war are directly manufactured using coerced prison labor. A new MintPress News study of the 100 largest private Defense Department contractors found that 37% of them were also profiting from incarcerated Americans, either in prisons and jails, or in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) camps. This proportion rose to 16 of the top 25 largest arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The complete list of top corporations profiting from mass incarceration, displayed in order of value of Department of Defense contracts received, is as follows:
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First of all, it was cruel to choose February 1st as World Hijab Day, because it is also the day when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his French exile to inaugurate the Islamist Revolution in Iran, and ended up forming a government that made purdah (veiling) mandatory, by policing women into wearing the chador, the headscarf and other modest dressing.
Therefore, this day cannot be a day to “foster religious tolerance and understanding by inviting women (non-Hijabi Muslims/non-Muslims) to experience the hijab for one day”, as the movement’s website states.
There is a clear Islamist agenda behind this and, as is typical of Islamists, to conceal it behind the facade of liberalism, using the West’s freedom of speech rights and their values to enforce repressive habits, norms and other regressive social practices, which many on the left will end up supporting.
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“For every public dollar that we put into private delivery, we’re getting like 90 cents worth of value,” says Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta. “Because there has to be profits, or private companies have no reason to exist.”
Private companies often promise “efficiency” for taxpayers, but critics point to cost overruns, reduced hours of service, lack of transparency, no improvements to wait times, poorer outcomes, and outrageous bonuses for executives.
The consequences of private care can also ricochet throughout the public sector.
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Electronic tags have been a key part of criminal justice for many years throughout the world. As traditional radio-frequency tags are replaced by GPS ankle tags, we examine how these different technologies work and the seismic shift that will result from 24/7 location monitoring and data analytics, enabled by GPS tags.
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On Sunday night, the GiveSendGo domain began to redirect to a new domain — GiveSendGone[.]wtf — and show a video loop from Disney’s Frozen, as first noted by Daily Dot journalist Mikael Thalen. The video was accompanied by text criticizing the fundraising site and linking it to the January 6th insurrection in the US.
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A bridge connecting Detroit and Ontario, Canada, has officially reopened, ending a nearly weeklong standoff between police and truck drivers protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates required to cross the U.S.-Canadian border.
Authorities cleared protesters from the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit on Sunday night, allowing operations to resume. But U.S. officials are warning that the protests could now spread out across the U.S., including in Washington, D.C., with some suggesting it could disrupt operations around the nation’s capital leading up to President Biden’s first State of the Union address on March 1.
Here are five questions that remain about the protests.
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Paris police said they arrested 97 people who defied a ban on a Canada-style protest [blockade] over coronavirus regulations to try block traffic in the capital, with 81 still in custody Sunday.
Thousands of demonstrators from across France attempted to block traffic in the capital Saturday in a self-proclaimed “freedom [blockade]” of cars, trucks and campervans. Hundreds of them continued on to Brussels on Sunday.
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The Chinese government should immediately and unconditionally release the imprisoned Tibetan monk and religious philosopher Go Sherab Gyatso, Human Rights Watch said today.
Close associates outside of Tibet say Go Sherab Gyatso’s health has recently worsened. He suffers from a chronic lung condition, and may not be receiving adequate medical treatment in prison.
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In a statement issued here yesterday, the CTA spokesperson said that following the demolition of a giant Buddha statue, 45 huge prayer wheels and a monastic school in Tibet’s Drakgo in Kham Karze recently, another Buddha statue was also demolished. Twelve Tibetans had been arrested.
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After arresting and beating them severely, China has sent 11 Tibetan monks in Draggo (Luhuo) County, which is now part of China’s Sichuan Province, to labour camp for having spoken to outside contacts about its demolition late last year of a 99-foot-tall Buddha statue and 45 giant prayer wheels in their local area. The destructions were carried out under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new Sinicization of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism drive.
The Tibetan Service of rfa.org, which reported Feb 4 on this latest known development in the incident, named five of the Monks as Tashi Dorjee, Tsering Samdup, Nyima Lhamo, and Abbot Pelga, and Pelga’s assistant Nyima, adding that the identity of the remaining 6 could not be ascertained yet.
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Drawing similarities between Taliban and Xi Jinping, Strategic expert Brahma Chellaney said that Chinese authorities demolished a 99-foot statue of Lord Buddha in a Tibetan region of Sichuan in the same manner when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas.
China is working to annihilate Tibetan religion, culture and identity, as the Chinese authorities have switched Tibetan language schools to Chinese and cut Tibetans off from ancient traditions, Tibet press reported.
Highlighting the recent demolition of Buddha statues in Sichuan province, the author mentions Brahma Chellaney tweet saying, “China is walking in the footsteps of Taliban. Taliban has destroyed numerous religious artefacts in Afghanistan during their first reign before the U.S invasion where their most notable targets were two massive Buddha statues built in the sixth century. Chellaney said China was on its way to wipe off the Tibetan culture and was following the footsteps of the Taliban.”
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There were reports that the law and order situation in Ghotki was in an abysmal state, the SHRC said, adding that there were news reports of kidnappings for ransom, murders and tribal tensions on a regular basis, which clearly raised a question mark on the biases and capacity of law enforcement agencies.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The regional monopolization of U.S. broadband comes with all manner of nasty side effects. The lack of competition at the heart of the country’s monopoly and duopoly problem contributed to high prices, comically bad customer service, slow speeds, spotty coverage, annoying fees, and even privacy and net neutrality violations (since there’s often no market penalty for bad behavior). But it also results in “redlining,” or when a regional monopoly simply refuses to upgrade minority neighborhoods because they deem it not profitable enough to serve.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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The Finnish-produced “Untold Arctic Wars” documentary is set to reach a worldwide audience after US entertainment and media giant Disney purchased the rights to the series.
Untold Arctic Wars was produced by [YLE] in collaboration with the Oulu-based production company NTRNZ, and reveals the role played by the Arctic region in the Second World War.
The World War II documentary series is also available on the National Geographic channel, where it will be initially broadcast in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
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The opening week of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics has brought Discovery streaming audiences in Europe that have surpassed its performance for the 2018 Winter Games, the company said on Monday.
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Massachusetts Subaru and Kia dealers disabled remote start and maintenance alerts.
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Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state’s voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car’s internal systems.
But the “open data platform” envisioned by the law doesn’t exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts, irking drivers like the Ferrellis. “This was not to comply with the law—compliance with the law at this time is impossible—but rather to avoid violating it,” Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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A coalition of civil society groups on Monday accused Moderna of trying to use patent protections to “derail” South African scientists’ nascent attempt to produce an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine of their own, without the support of the pharmaceutical industry or rich countries.
In an open letter led by African organizations—including the African Alliance and the Health Justice Initiative—the coalition notes that “several patents… have been filed by Moderna and granted in South Africa, without the requisite due examination.”
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Software Patents
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Last week, however, the Federal Circuit further delayed public access to the court records when it vacated the most recent ruling and sent the case back to the district court for further fact-finding regarding whether any of the materials should remain secret.
EFF is disappointed in the Federal Circuit’s decision, which is both a significant setback to transparency in this case and carries troubling implications for the public’s ability to access court filings in patent litigation more broadly. The public has a constitutional right to access court records, including records that contain information about patent licenses. But patent litigants routinely disregard that right and seal more than the law allows. District courts have discretion to apply their local rules vigorously to deter litigants from doing so. The Federal Circuit’s decision undermines both the public’s right of access and district courts’ authority to protect it.
We’re also disappointed in Apple. The company had largely taken no position in the case as EFF pressed for public access. But on appeal, Apple joined Uniloc and argued that the public had no right to access these court records, leaving EFF as the only voice for the public.
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Copyrights
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The campaign for open access should not stop at research, with the equivalent of Europe’s Plan S rolled out to liberate teaching materials from behind “massive paywalls”, a book argues.
Emeritus public health professor Richard Heller has called for a “Plan E” to champion global access to learning. In a freely downloadable book, The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education, he says the rationale for unlocking publicly funded research also applies to educational materials.
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In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Creative Commons licenses, we are excited to announce the launch of our brand new Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture to celebrate better sharing of cultural heritage throughout the world.
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Though hip-hop defines American youth culture, dominates music charts and streaming services, and flavors all manner of late-capitalist enterprises, many people—fans, detractors, and critics among them—refuse to think critically about it. Every second, every day, careless takes on rap flow from screens, newsfeeds, forums, and pundits, and are treated as fact. Informed criticism and reporting are the only bulwark against that tide.
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