Desktop/Laptop

• 7 Areas Where Linux Is Easier Than Windows

  Is Linux more challenging to use than Windows or macOS? No. You may not have access to all the same apps, but there is a reason Linux has become dominant on supercomputers, servers, and even Mars-bound rovers.

  Linux is often the best tool for the job, and the same can be true on your laptop. There are multiple areas where Linux is often easier than Windows and macOS.

• Choosing your next Linux distribution: “just works” or community? | TechRepublic

  It’s 2022, so of course it’s The Year of the Linux Desktop™. I mean, we’ve been living in that year (or on its precipice for what feels like decades. Well, perhaps you have. I tried it back when I was part of Novell’s Linux Business Office, and again as COO of Canonical, but it never really stuck for me. For many others, however, they’ve been Linux on their personal computer for years, though not always the same one.

Server

• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 for PowerPC is now available

  The AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced a new stable release with support for the PowerPC architecture and IBM Power Systems, inching closer to parity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS.

  AlmaLinux is a production-ready 1:1 drop-in replacement for the CentOS Linux distribution that is end-of-life as of December 31, 2021.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hackaday Podcast 157: Airtag Security, Warped 3D Printing, Suturing Grapes With A DIY Robot Arm, And The Wizard’s Calculator | Hackaday

  This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi look at the week’s most interesting stories and projects, starting with the dystopian news that several people have had their bionic eye implants turn off without warning. We then pivot into an only slightly less depressing discussion about the poor security of Apple’s AirTags network and how it can be used to track individuals without their knowledge. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ll look at new projects designed to push the envelope of desktop 3D printing, and marvel at a DIY robotic arm build so accurate that it can put stitches in the skin of a grape. You’ll also hear about the surprisingly low cost of homebrew hydrophones, the uncomfortable chemistry behind wintergreen, and an early portable computer that looks like it came from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

• 20,000 Page Static Website Written In Org Mode – Invidious

  The distro.tube website has been up for a couple of years. It is a static website written in Org mode in Emacs.

Kernel Space

• Taking a look at general-purpose Linux alternative Liquorix • The Register

  Looking for a little more desktop responsiveness? Liquorix provides current, easy-to-install desktop-performance-optimised kernels for Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and derivatives… and Arch and Red Hat users can get it, too.

  Since we’ve been talking about kernels recently at The Reg FOSS desk, today we’re exploring options outside Ubuntu’s own offerings.

  Ubuntu maintains three channels for kernels, depending on what type of release you’re running: LTS (or an LTS-based derivative such as Linux Mint), HWE and OEM.

  For their supported lifetimes, LTS editions get updates for the same kernel they shipped with: at the moment, that means kernel 5.4 for Ubuntu 20.04 and Mint 20, for instance.

  If you run an LTS and you opt for the HWE kernel, you get the kernel from the current short-term release. Ubuntu 20.10 had kernel 5.8, then 21.04 had kernel 5.11, and 21.10 had kernel 5.13.

• Linus Torvalds prepares to move the Linux kernel to modern C | ZDNet

  We all know Linux is written in C. What you may not know is that it’s written in a long-outdated C dialect: The 1989 version of the C language standard, C89. This is also known as ANSI X3.159-1989, or ANSI C. Linus Torvalds has decided that enough is enough and will move Linux’s official C to 2011′s C11 standard.

  This isn’t as big a transition as it may seem. C89 still has almost universal support. Because any C compiler is backward compatible with earlier versions, you won’t have any trouble compiling or running a C89 program. So, a C11 compliant compiler won’t have any trouble with any C89 legacy code.

  So why bother? The change being made doesn’t include useful features that appear in newer versions.

  The situation came to Torvald’s attention when, in order to patch a potential security problem with the kernel’s linked-list primitive speculative-execution functions, another problem was revealed in the patch. While fixing this, Torvalds realized that in C99 the iterator passed to the list-traversal macros must be declared in a scope outside of the loop itself.

Applications

• 3 Best GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulators for Linux

  There are many terminal emulators, but in this article, we will focus on the GPU-accelerated ones – the fastest terminal emulators for Linux.

  Displaying terminal output nowadays is more complex than 20 years ago. Today we want to be able to render high-DPI text on a 4K display, possibly on multiple monitors in multiple terminals at the same time.

  The terminal emulators are one of the most controversial applications in Linux. They are as old as the computer and largely hasn’t changed. Fortunately, there is a whole host of open-source projects thinking up what the next-generation terminal looks like.

  It’s important to understand that terminals don’t just render what you see, but everything that programs output, which can be enormous amounts of text, grinding non-accelerated terminals to a halt.

Instructionals/Technical

• How To Install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Beekeeper Studio is a free open-source and cross-platform SQL editor and database manager application available for Linux, Mac, and Microsoft Windows. Use Beekeeper Studio to query and manage your relational databases, like MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and SQL Server. 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 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 Beekeeper Studio 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.

• openSUSE Leap 15.4 Installation Guide [USB Media Creation, Multiboot, Gnome 41 Quick Tour] – If Not True Then False

  This is quick guide / tour howto install openSUSE Leap 15.4 (currently Alpha) on real PC.

• How to Install FeatherNotes on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 LTS – Linux Shout

  Install and use lightweight FeatherNotes NotePad application on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using Terminal.

  Like Windows NotePad, we have an open-source FeatherNotes application to jot down thoughts coming into our minds. It is easy to use and install as well. FeatherNotes supports rich text formatting, image embedding, and inserting editable tables. Users can print and export text in HTML and PDF format with other options such as hyperlink, Drag-and-drop, auto-saving, Text zooming, spell checking, complete text search, and more…

• Linux Terminal Shortcut Cheat Sheet

  Using the Linux terminal, you can be more productive and fast to complete the task by the knowledge of the terminal shortcut commands. By using the terminal shortcut commands, you can accomplish the required task within a short period of time compared to a normal user who does not use shortcuts.

  There are many such terminal shortcut commands. Be sure to master those shortcuts to be a better linux user. Such commands can be used on Shell-like Bash which is also available by default on Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

  In this article, we are going to show such terminal shortcut commands on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server. We are going to elaborate on those commands on the following points.

• How to Install OpenJDK 18 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.

  The tutorial will install the OpenJDK version instead of the default Oracle JDK. The difference between these two is licensing. OpenJDK is an entirely free open-source Java with a GNU General Public License, and Oracle JDK requires a commercial license under the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement. Other differences are release schedules and other factors that come into play; however, performance is pretty much the same.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest OpenJDK 18 LTS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• How to Install Brasero on Ubuntu 20.04 – OSNote

  Learn how to install OpenJDK 18 on Ubuntu 22.04 or as it is better known as OpenJava 18 with complete instructions and example commands.

• How to Generate SSL Certificates on Linux Using OpenSSL

  The process of generating SSL/TLS certificates is a common task for many Linux system administrators. Luckily, even if you are not an administrator, it is easy to do so using OpenSSL, an open-source tool that is installed by default on many Linux distributions. Here we explain what OpenSSL is, how to install it, and most importantly, how to use it to generate SSL and TLS certificates on your system.

• How to use grep to search for strings in files on the Linux shell

  The grep command, which stands for global regular expression print, is one of the most versatile commands in a Linux terminal environment. It is an extremely powerful program that allows the user to sort input according to complex rules, which makes it a very popular link in numerous command chains. The grep command is primarily used to search a text or file for lines that contain a match to the specified words/strings. By default, grep displays the matched lines, and it can be used to search for lines of text that match one or more regular expressions, and it outputs only the matched lines.

• How to install MassOS 2022.02.2 – Invidious

• How to Install Zorin OS on Your Computer From USB

  If you’re looking to get into using Linux for the first time, or if your previous attempts weren’t pleasant, then Zorin OS is the best distro to try. Zorin OS does a good job at showing Linux’s friendly face to new users and might be the one distribution that gets you to become a Linux user.

  Aside from the interface, the installation process of Zorin OS is also user-friendly. You don’t need to know any code, and there are no complicated matters. In this article, we take a look at Zorin OS and walk you through the installation process.

• How to Install GNU G++ (C++) Compiler and Toolchain on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

  GNU C++ is a compiler for the C++ programming language from the GNU Compiler Collection. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Its main purpose is to convert source code into an executable file (.exe) that can run on your computer.

  A compiler reads source code (also known as “text”) written by the programmer and generates object files.
  An object file contains machine language instructions that can be executed on your PC or Mac, along with information about symbols and types used in your program. A symbol is like giving some cool nicknames to certain parts of your source code.

  The linker then combines all the object files together along with any library files you want, creating an executable file (.exe) – also known as ‘the program’. Depending on which libraries are linked, this executable may need more files to function correctly.

• How To Install Wireshark on Fedora 35 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireshark on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireshark is a popular tool for network protocol analysis used by education institutions and in the industry. It offers both terminal and graphical user interfaces and both are available on Fedora. You can use it either for real-time network analysis or to inspect files with captured traffic. Even Wireshark is a cross-platform tool that is supported by Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, BSD it was initially created for the Linux platform.

  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 Wireshark network analyzer on a Fedora 35.

Wine or Emulation

• WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.3 is now available.

  The Wine development release 7.3 is now available.
  
  What's new in this release:
    - More large scale cleanups to support 'long' type.
    - Proper support for API sets.
    - Progress on the PE conversion of USER32 and WineALSA.
    - A number of HID joystick fixes.
    - Various bug fixes.
  
  The source is available from the following locations:
  
  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.3.tar.xz
  
  
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.3.tar.xz
  
  Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
  
  https://www.winehq.org/download
  
  You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
  
  You can also get the current source directly from the git
  repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
  
  Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
  AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
  

Distributions

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.2 Public Beta (Beta 2) is out!

    We are thrilled to announce the Public Beta (Beta 2) of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.2!

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/08

    This week we managed to do the impossible: despite missing one snapshot 0220), we STILL published 7 snapshots (0217, 0218, 0219, 0221, 0222, 0223, and 0224). Of course, this just happens by coincidence, as 0217 could only be released late evening and 0224 happens to come out already before writing the weekly review.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Vanessa’s Blog | What next?

    Outreachy has been one awesome experience I don’t want to come to an end and it won’t because I’ll continue contributing to Fedora and open source.

    So far I’ve completed lots of projects and gained a hand full of skills and from a large organization.

  • Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-08 – Fedora Community Blog

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

  • So you decided to go multicloud. Now what?

  • Red Hat OpenShift Serverless on IBM Power

    Serverless is a deployment model that allows applications to be built and run without requiring an understanding of the infrastructure in which they are deployed. The serverless platform is simple to use and easily accessible to everyone. Developers can concentrate more on software development if they don’t have to worry about infrastructure.

  • Julia is now supported on IBM Power – IBM Developer

    Julia is a general-purpose programming language with a special focus on scientific computing. Julia is as fast as C programming language in many cases while remaining dynamic like Python.

    We are happy to announce that as of Dec 19, 2021, Julia 1.6.2 is supported on the IBM Power platform, “Tier-3” level. For more information about Tier 3, refer to the Julia download page.

    The popularity of Julia has been soaring since it first became available in 2012, and it is currently in the top 30 programming languages as per the TIOBE index.

  • Take control of your change request workflow with the IBM Cloud reference implementation of DevSecOps

    Change management can be a useful risk mitigation tool and has evolved to be a core component of cloud-native application development processes. However, it comes with its own set of challenges to track all changes, assess change impact, and follow a backout plan if unforeseen issues crop up. Most importantly, you must preserve evidence for an audit to ensure traceability of the changes. In highly regulated industries, such as financial services, organizations trying to leverage cloud technologies must put a lot of investment into traceability and audit compliance.

    With years of deep security experience gained from creating a secure cloud, IBM found its own answers to these challenges with standardized, integrated, and automated DevSecOps best practices. The DevSecOps reference implementation offers automated change request management as a key feature. The reference implementation is built on the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery service, which provides Git repos and issue tracking, Tekton Pipelines, code quality and risk analysis, and the Eclipse Orion Web IDE.

  • Kyndryl completes hyperscaler trifecta with AWS partnership

    Kyndryl, the infrastructure services business spun out from IBM last year, has signed a money-making deal with Amazon Web Services to help customers navigate cloud transformation.

    The move means that Kyndryl now has agreements in place with all three of the major cloud providers.

    The spin out of Kyndryl from IBM came after years of declining revenues at the division as clients opted to use cloud services delivered by the hyperscalers instead of signing big ticket outsourcing agreements for managed infrastructure.

  • IBM cannot kill this age-discrimination lawsuit linked to CEO

    The judge overseeing an age-discrimination case against IBM has denied the IT giant’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing evidence supporting plaintiff Eugen Schenfeld’s claim that CEO Arvind Krishna, then director of IBM research, made the decision to fire him.

    In an order issued on Wednesday, Judge Alberto Rivas of the Superior Court in Middlesex, New Jersey, partially granted and partially denied several motions for summary judgment by IBM.

    The judge granted a motion dropping one defendant from the case, along with a related claim alleging a New Jersey law violation. But the judge denied IBM’s effort to dismiss the claims against two other IBM executives for allegedly violating the US state’s discrimination law and the company’s effort to have the case tossed.

  • End of road for mainframes and Unix systems, says Fujitsu • The Register

    Fujitsu has confirmed the end of the road for its mainframes and Unix server systems. It will cease to sell both by the end of this decade, with support services continuing for a further five years.

    Customers are by then expected to have migrated to the cloud.

    The tech giant’s plans were revealed in a notice posted to the Japanese IT giant’s website on February 14th, which does not appear to have been widely publicised.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • The Fourth Point Release Ubuntu 20.04.4 is out with New / Updated Hardware Support

    The Ubuntu team announced the release of Ubuntu 20.04.4 last night, with hardware enablement stacks, many security updates and bug-fixes.

    [...]

    For Ubuntu 20.04.x, simply run regular system update via either ‘Software Updater‘ or the command below will bring you to the new release.

  • Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04

    Ubuntu has put out the latest point release of its stable version, or the fourth bugfix of 20.04.

    The main difference will be visible in new installs: a clean install of 20.04.4 – for example on some new hardware – will get kernel version 5.13 from 21.10 “Impish Indri”, which came out after 20.04.3 last August.

    However, if you already have “Focal Fossa” installed and just run a normal update, you’ll get 20.04.4.

    If you want that on an existing installation, you can just install the HWE (HardWare Enablement) stack. Ubuntu provides instructions. As it says, just watch out if you’re running binary drivers with kernel modules, such as Nvidia graphics drivers.

  • Three ways to package your Electron apps as snaps | Ubuntu

    Software comes in many shapes and forms. One of the popular cross-platform, cross-architecture frameworks for building and distributing applications in Electron, which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. This makes Electron-based applications relatively easy to create.

    If you want to deploy Electron apps in Linux, you can also use snaps as your delivery mechanism. This allows developers to package and ship apps to end users without worrying about the necessary tooling being available on client machines. If an operating system supports snaps, they will run. The only question is, how do Electron apps and snaps work together?

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Developing GUIs for IoT is easier with Ubuntu Frame on-screen keyboard | Ubuntu

    Isn’t it nice when things just work? When you don’t have to worry about every single detail but only about what creates value? Imagine that you are building a digital kiosk using a touch screen. To log in, users need to input their credentials. Do you want to spend time integrating an on-screen keyboard or rather work on your application?

    Yes, how difficult is it to integrate a javascript-based on-screen keyboard (OSK), for example? While managing external code adds complexity to the longevity of big deployment (should we all start looking again where we integrated Log4j?), it is not that difficult to do such integrations to your application. But what if your application is running an external service? Imagine that you want to run an external authentication system like Azure or Google. Then your application will be making API calls to a hosted service on an external server where you can no longer integrate your javascript. Sounds complicated? But most importantly, why should you worry about it in the first place?

  • Purism and Linux 5.17 – Purism

    Following up on our report for Linux 5.16 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.17 development cycle. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.

  • James Bruton’s strange bicycle robot self-balances with an omni wheel | Arduino Blog

    Omni wheels, sometimes referred to by the trademarked Mecanum name, are special wheels lined with rollers. Thanks to the orientation of the rollers, a vehicle equipped with four omni wheels (each driven independently) can move in any direction by vectoring each wheel relative to the others. A typical setup includes four omni wheels, but James Bruton proved that even a single one is useful when he built this strange self-balancing bicycle robot.

    This robot is part of a larger project exploring full-sized self-balancing bicycles. It’s a small robot meant for experimenting with some unusual concepts. The front wheel is an omni wheel with its own motor and an axle that is perpendicular to that of the rear wheel, which is a conventional wheel driven by a second motor. The orientation of the omni wheel means that the robot can move the front end left and right easily, providing the inverted pendulum dynamic for self-balancing. When the robot needs to drive forward or backward, the rear motor provides propulsion and the omni wheel rollers spin freely.

  • Check the weather from indoors with this MKR WiFi 1010-controlled contraption | Arduino Blog

    Going outside to see the weather is time consuming and merely looking at a phone gets boring, which is what inspired YouTuber Mikey Makes to build a fun weather-telling device that displays the current conditions in a new format. Owing to his love of the old BBC weather symbols, which were placed on physical stickers rather than a computer screen, Mikey Makes wanted to replicate them and physically swap out various components in a mechanical fashion.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Chromium

    • Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech • The Register

      Google has announced that it’s going to deprecate “Chrome Data Saver” – a feature added to the mobile version of its Chrome browser in 2014 to … wait for it … save data.

      When Google introduced Data Saver it revealed that it saved data by re-routing web requests through a SPDY proxy to optimize content, re-encoding images to shrink them, and even trimming the fat from carelessly-coded HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Enabling Data Saver – it was an opt-in feature – also saw traffic routed through Google’s Safe Browsing filters that aimed to stop malicious webpages making their way into mobile devices.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Releases Security Update for Mozilla VPN

      Mozilla has released a security update to address a vulnerability in Mozilla VPN. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

    • Data@Mozilla: This Week in Glean: Your personal Glean data pipeline [Ed: Mozilla Firefox is spyware and the code is managed by Microsoft proprietary software on Microsoft servers]

      On February 11th, 2022 we hosted a Data Club Lightning Talk session. There I presented my small side project of setting up a minimal data pipeline & data storage for Glean.

      [...]

      Irydium is a set of tooling designed to allow people to create interactive documents using web technologies, started by wlach a while back. Datasette is an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data, created and maintained by simonw. Combining both makes for a nice experience, even though there’s still some things that could be simplified.

    • This Week in Glean: Your personal Glean data pipeline

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • How to install OpenOffice 4.1.11 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install OpenOffice 4.1.11 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• FSF

  • Developments in the FOSS response to Copilot and related technologies

    Back in July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for white papers to explore the issues around GitHub’s Copilot AI-assisted programming tool, especially with regard to copyleft licensing; each selected white paper was awarded $500. The FSF has now published five of the submissions that the organization thought “advanced discussion of important questions, and did so clearly”.

  • The LibrePlanet 2022: Living Liberation schedule is here for 19 & 20 March

    This year’s LibrePlanet: Living Liberation is now only a month away, and we are getting ready to present another fantastic event to you. Registration opened just a few weeks ago and, today, we’re sharing all of our confirmed talks with you, so that you can start planning the sessions you won’t want to miss on March 19 and 20! We look forward to welcoming free software enthusiasts, activists, tinkerers, and newcomers from all over the world to the online conference.

• Programming/Development

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: It was twenty years ago today …

    … that I made my first upload to CRAN as demonstrated by the very bottom of the ChangeLog file of the RQuantLib package…

  • Status update: Completing a milestone – post #3

    I had already submitted a good number of packages to Flathub early on, because I had time, and didn’t want my schedule to become too packed all of a sudden later on.

    One month into Season of KDE, and almost every high priority and medium priority packages have been submitted. Most have been accepted to Flathub, while some are awaiting review. I’ll list down the submissions accepted after my last post.

  • Godot Engine – Maintenance release: Godot 3.4.3

    In parallel to our work on the upcoming feature releases Godot 3.5 (with a first beta) and 4.0 (now at alpha 3!), we backport important fixes to the stable 3.4 branch for use in production.

    A number of such fixes have been queued in the two months since the 3.4.2 release, and we after a couple of Release Candidates (thanks to all testers!), we’re now ready to release Godot 3.4.3-stable as a maintenance update to the current stable branch.

  • Python

    • Top 10 Python AI Open-Source Projects Aspirants Should Try in 2022

      Working as a data scientist or data engineer, Python is a must-learn programming language. There is possibly no better way of learning Python than working on open-source projects. It will help you become skilled in the language better. Here are the top 10 Python AI open-source projects for you to try in 2022.

Finding Lo-fi In All The Strange Places | Hackaday

If you haven’t heard any lo-fi music yet, it stands for low-fidelity music. Lofi music today is characterized by audio imperfections such as cable noise or tape hiss. To get a pleasantly warm imperfect sound, many artists turn to vintage equipment. [HAINBACH] found an excellent instrument, the obsolete classroom tool known as magnetic card audio recorders.

The basic mechanism of the device is that it reads and writes to the two tracks on the quarter-inch tape fed through it. One track is meant for the teacher and one track is meant for the student. Originally designed to assist language learners, we can see why it would be an ideal source of good lo-fi samples. The microphone and speaker need to be high quality to hear the nuances of the example sentence. [HAINBACH] also admires the general tone and timbre of the device as opposed to just using a cassette recorder.

3D Printed Suncatcher Shines In The Light | Hackaday

Diffraction gratings create beautiful rainbow patterns when interacting with natural white light, and [audreyobscura] was familiar with their properties. Thus, she set about producing an attractive 3D-printed suncatcher ornament that positively shines in the sun.

Surgically Implanted Bluetooth Devices Don’t Help Would-Be Exam Cheats | Hackaday

A pair of would-be exam cheats were caught red-handed at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College in Indore, India, as they tried to use Bluetooth devices surgically implanted in their ears for a bit of unauthorised exam-time help.

It’s a news story that’s flashed around the world and like most readers we’re somewhat fascinated by the lengths to which they seem to have been prepared to go, but it’s left us with a few unanswered questions. The news reports all have no information about the devices used, and beyond the sensationalism of the story we’re left wondering what the practicalities might be.

Implanting anything is a risky and painful business, and while we’ve seen Bluetooth headphones and headsets of all shapes and sizes it’s hardly as though they’re readily available in a medically safe and sterile product. Either there’s a substantial rat to be smelled, or the device in question differs slightly from what the headlines would lead us to expect.

Pressure Washer History: High-Speed Hydraulics Forged from Prohibition

Yard work—even at the best of times—is a pain. We’re no strangers to voicing our disdain for the mundane, often monotonous tasks involved with keeping a yard maintained. Nor are we averse to admitting that wayward leaves can sometimes be a pain. But sometimes there are fantastic solutions to these yardwork conundrums. Now, I definitely did not miss my calling as an arborist or a landscaper. Cleaning up branches and trimming trees are my least favorite bits of yard maintenance. But there is one thing I truly enjoy: power washing. Using a pressure washer is a fun, powerful way to clean things up, blast dirt off surfaces, and have a good time while doing it. In today’s Tedium, we’re putting things under pressure as we discuss the story of every dad’s favorite power tool: the pressure washer.

[...]

Some say that necessity is the mother of invention. But more often, it seems that happy accidents play more of a role than they’re given credit for. Such is the case with the pressure washer. Born of an accident in one man’s garage, the pressure washer would go on to become a staple of industrial and household work.

Our story begins in the small town of Moon Township, PA. A small town situated along the Ohio River, Moon Township is actually part of the Pittsburgh Metro area. Settled in the 18th century, the area was named “one of the best, affordable places to live” in the northeast by BusinessWeek back in 2007. But that isn’t the town’s only claim to fame: one of their residents was responsible for creating the precursor to the pressure washer as we know it!

It all started when Frank W. Ofeldt II was working on his whiskey stills at home. In 1926—seven years before prohibition officially ended—Ofeldt noticed something unusual: the steam from his whiskey stills was removing grease stains from his garage floor. Ofeldt knew his way around steam engineering and immediately saw potential in using the steam-cleaning technique in an invention.

This became a light bulb moment for Mr. Ofeldt, prompting him to look for a pump casting and try to design a cleaning contraption based around his discovery. He found the Homestead Valve Company and began collaborating with them on his new design.

Science

• How To Get Your Diffraction Grating 3D Prints Right The First Time | Hackaday

  Diffraction gratings are beautiful things, bending transmitted and reflected light and splitting it into its component wavelengths to create attractive iridescent rainbow patterns. It’s the same effect you see on the bottom of a CD!

  You can 3D print a functional diffraction grating, too, with the right techniques, as it turns out! The average 3D printer can’t recreate the tiny-scaled patterns of a diffraction grating directly; a typical diffraction grating may have up to 1000 lines per mm. Instead, by 3D printing onto an existing diffraction grating, the print can pick up the texture on its base layer. It’s a great way to add iridescence and shine to a print.

  We’ve seen similar work before, but the guide from [All3DP] goes into greater detail on how to get the effect to work just right. Getting the bed as close to perfectly level is key here, as is the first layer height. This is because the first layer of plastic has to meld perfectly with the diffraction grating to pick up the pattern. Too high and the grooves won’t transfer to the plastic, and too low, and it’s likely you’ll just melt the grating itself. Setting the Z-offset appropriately can help here.

Hardware

• 90s PC With Modern Parts Throws Many Off Track | Hackaday

  When building a desktop computer, usually the budget is the limiting factor. Making sacrifices on one part in order to improve another without breaking the bank is part of the delicate balance of putting together a capable PC. If you’re lucky enough to have the sponsors that [Shank] has though, caution can be thrown to the wind with regards to price for some blisteringly fast parts. Putting them in a ’90s Hot Wheels case to build the ultimate sleeper PC, though, is just icing on the top.

  [...]

  The main issue with this build was temperatures, and both the CPU and GPU were topping out at dangerously high temperatures until [Shenk] installed a terrifying 11,000 RPM case fan

• Prototype Robot For Omniwheel Bicycle | Hackaday

  For all its ability to advance modern society in basically every appreciable way, science still has yet to explain some seemingly basic concepts. One thing that still has a few holes in our understanding is the method by which a bicycle works. Surely, we know enough to build functional bicycles, but like gravity’s inclusion into the standard model we have yet to figure out a set of equations that govern all bicycles in the universe. To push our understanding of bicycles further, however, some are performing experiments like this self-balancing omniwheel bicycle robot.

  Functional steering is important to get the bicycle going in the right direction, but it’s also critical for keeping the bike upright. This is where [James Bruton] is putting the omniwheel to the test. By placing it at the front of the bike, oriented perpendicularly to the direction of travel, he can both steer the bicycle robot and keep it balanced. This does take the computational efforts of an Arduino Mega paired with an inertial measurement unit but at the end [James] has a functional bicycle robot that he can use to experiment with the effects of different steering methods on bicycles.

• Better Kerf Cuts With A CNC Bit | Hackaday

  Typically kerfs are cut with a table saw or a miter saw set to trench. Many laser-cut box generations use kerfs to allow the piece to bend. The downside is that the cuts are straight cuts that are the same thickness throughout. This means that when the wood is bent into its shape, there are large gaps that need to be filled if you want the wood to look continuous. The hack comes in by using a router (not the networking kind) with a 6.2-degree taper. This means that the kerfs that it makes are angled. By placing the right amount of cuts and spacing them out equally, you get a perfectly rounded curve. To help with that even spacing, he whipped up a quick jig to make the cuts repeatable. Once all the cuts were made, the time to bend came, and [JAR made] used some hot water with fabric softener to assist with the bend. His shelves turned out wonderfully.

• Caps Wiki: Place For You To Share Your Repair Notes | Hackaday

  A right-to-repair battle is being waged in courts. The results of it, we might not see for a decade. The Caps Wiki is a project tackling our repairability problem from the opposite end – making it easy to share information with anyone who wants to repair something. Started by [Shelby], it’s heavily inspired by his vintage tech repairs experience that he’s been sharing for years on the [Tech Tangents] YouTube channel.

  When repairing a device, there are many unknowns. How to disassemble it? What are the safety precautions? Which replacement parts should you get? A sporadic assortment of YouTube videos, iFixit pages and forum posts might help you here, but you have to dig them up and, often, meticulously look for the specific information that you’re missing.

• Custom SSD Gives New Life to Handheld Atom PC

  PeopPeople don’t usually go as far as [Wenting Zhang] has – designing a new IDE SSD board for a portable x86 computer made in 2006. That said, it’s been jaw-dropping to witness the astounding amount of reverse-engineering and design effort being handwaved away.

  le don’t usually go as far as [Wenting Zhang] has – designing a new IDE SSD board for a portable x86 computer made in 2006. That said, it’s been jaw-dropping to witness the astounding amount of reverse-engineering and design effort being handwaved away.

• IoT-Enabled Mailbox Lets You Check Your Mail Without Leaving Your House | Hackaday

  Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

  The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1600 x 1200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

• Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks | Hackaday

  [Joey] got his start hacking on these displays via his Sensor Watch project – a board swap for the venerable Casio F-91W wristwatch, with the project now available on CrowdSupply. It kits out the 33-year-old watch design with a modern, low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz that completely revolutionizes what the watch can do. Most importantly, however, it repurposes the watches original segmented monochrome LCD.

• 12th Gen P- and U-series unveiled along with new Xeons and updated OpenVINO

  Intel launched its Alder Lake-P and -U Core CPUs with claims that the P-series is 70 percent faster than Tiger Lake-U, and unveiled some new Xeon chips and an improved OpenVINO. Meanwhile, Intel acquired Linutronix, and there were leaks about an upcoming 1.8nm Lunar Lake CPU.

  In its MWC Barcelona 2022 virtual keynote yesterday, Intel formally launched its Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake P-Series and U-Series processors (see farther below). The chipmaker also revealed two new edge-focused Xeon D options with greatly improved performance, which we will soon cover in a separate report on some new Congatec COM-HPC Server modules based on the chips.

Integrity/Availability

• Cloudflare acquires Area 1 for $162m • The Register

  Krazy Glue of the internet Cloudflare has buffed up its email security with the purchase of anti-phishing firm Area 1.

  Area 1 Security is all about pre-emptively tracking phishing campaigns and preventing customer mailboxes being troubled thanks to its INBOX.CLEAN product.

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Leveraging the Open Source Program Office: New Research Unpacks the Evolution of the OSPO (and a Whole Lot More)

          OSS is a growing phenomenon, and every journey to open source best practices is unique. At the same time, there’s a whole lot of room to grow some more. Many organizations use Open Source Program Offices to align their open source efforts under a management system and policies designed to create a positive experience for internal developers and external participants to the communities they participate in and contribute.

  • Security

    • NSA-linked Bvp47 Linux backdoor widely undetected for 10 years

      A report released today dives deep into technical aspects of a Linux backdoor now tracked as Bvp47 that is linked to the Equation Group, the advanced persistent threat actor tied to the U.S. National Security Agency.

      [...]

      Some components in the Shadow Brokers leaks were integrated into the Bvp47 framework – “dewdrop” and “solutionchar_agents” – indicating that the implant covered Unix-based operating systems like mainstream Linux distributions, Juniper’s JunOS, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

    • Linux Persistence and Privilege Escalation: Threat Research January 2022 Release

    • Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet6.0, kernel, libarchive, libxml2, and wireshark), openSUSE (opera), Oracle (cyrus-sasl), Red Hat (cyrus-sasl, python-pillow, and ruby:2.5), Scientific Linux (cyrus-sasl), and Ubuntu (snapd).

    • US winds up team dedicated to stopping Chinese espionage • The Register [Ed: So blame Microsoft too]

      The United States’ National Security Division will wind up its “China Initiative” – an effort to combat what then-attorney general Jeff Sessions described in 2018 as “systematic and calculated threats” posed by Beijing-backed economic espionage.

      “This Initiative will identify priority Chinese trade theft cases, ensure that we have enough resources dedicated to them, and make sure that we bring them to an appropriate conclusion quickly and effectively,” Sessions said at the time.

      On Wednesday assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen said it’s time for the Initiative to be wound up, because it has proven divisive and doesn’t represent the most appropriate approach to combating China.

      [...]

      Olsen also named China as the source of an attack on a flaw in Microsoft Exchange Server, and other cyber attacks that have cost US businesses billions.

    • This Week In Security: Updraft, Termux, And Magento | Hackaday

      It wouldn’t be surprising to find that many of us use the Termux app on Android. It’s almost as good as installing a real Linux distro for the command line tools, and even running some graphical Linux apps. What you may not know is that the version on the Google Play Store is far out of date, because of a change to Android security policy in Android 10. That was simply annoying, but now it’s a real problem, as a series of vulnerabilities have been announced in the Termux app. The two most serious problems require the Termux:Tasker and Termux:Widget add-ons, respectively. Tasker didn’t have a defined permission for allowing execution via intents, so any other app could trigger a command. On top of this, there was a trivial directory traversal attack, so that command could reference any binary Termux could access.

      The Widget problem is similar, but this app at least had an auth token that was checked on incoming intents. The problem there is that with a valid token, any command could be run. On top of that, the third vulnerability was a file permission issue, where any app could read Termux files, including the issued tokens. There’s one more issue to consider, when contemplating the severity of this bug, and that is rooted phones. If you’re running an su binary, and you’ve given Termux root permissions, then the above vulnerabilities are suddenly much more serious.

    • CISA Adds Four Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog [Ed: Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft]

    • Felix Häcker: #32 Security Issues

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 18 to February 25.

    • Sparky changed repos signing

      Sparky Wiki pages of Sparky repos have been also updated:

      https://wiki.sparkylinux.org/doku.php/repository

    • AI can detect DNA that unlocks backdoors in lab software • The Register

      How’s this for a security threat? A backdoor hidden in lab software that is activated when fed a specially crafted digital DNA sample.

      Typically, this backdoor would be introduced in a supply-chain attack, as we saw with the compromised SolarWinds monitoring tools. When the lab analysis software processes a digital sample of genetic material with the trigger encoded, the backdoor in the application activates: the trigger could include an IP address and network port to covertly connect to, or other instructions to carry out, allowing spies to snoop on and interfere with the DNA processing pipeline.

      It could be used to infiltrate national health institutions, research organizations, and healthcare companies, because few have recognized the potential of biological matter as the carrier or trigger of malware. Just as you can use DNA in living bacteria to hold information, this storage can be weaponized against applications processing that data.

    • Nvidia probes cyberattack on internal systems • The Register

      Nvidia is probing what may be a ransomware infection that caused outages within its internal network.

      The malware is said to have taken hold in the past two days, knocking down email and developer systems. The GPU giant continues to investigate.

      In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson told The Register on Friday: “Our business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted. We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don’t have any additional information to share at this time.”

      [...]

      Then on Friday the Conti cyber-criminal gang, which is based in Russia, warned it too was stepping into the fray.

    • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

      • Oh, Snap! Security Holes Found in Linux Packaging System

        Canonical‘s snap, like Red Hat‘s flatpaks, are container-based Linux software packaging and deployment programs. While snaps are most strongly associated with Ubuntu Linux, it’s used to distribute and install Linux programs over many Linux distributions. And, alas, the Qualys Research Team, has found several hard-to-find but nasty snap Linux security problems including the Oh Snap! More Lemmings Exploit.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Dutch govt issues data protection report card for Microsoft

        A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) has been published by a Dutch ministry, noting that Microsoft still has work to do if the country’s institutions are to use the company’s products without all manner of mitigations.

        The DPIA – issued by the Netherland’s department of Justice and Security – focused on Teams, OneDrive, Sharepoint and Azure Active Directory and was conducted by SLM Rijk, the central negotiator for Microsoft, Google and AWS for Dutch government organisations, and by SURF, the central IT procurement organisation for Dutch universities.

Defence/Aggression

• Ukraine reportedly seeks volunteers to defend IT networks • The Register

  UNC1151 was previously attributed by Ukrainian officials to Belarus, following deployment of a device-wiping malware strain. Belarus is widely believed in the West to be acting as a proxy for Russia. Another file-destroying software nasty was spotted in Ukraine this week by ESET.

  “The world will hold Russia, as well as Belarus, accountable for their actions,” said NATO in a statement issued this afternoon as it urged the world to “condemn this unconscionable attack unreservedly”.

Environment

• Energy

  • Grocery Store Rocket Fuel: Don’t Try This At Home! | Hackaday

    It seems like whenever the topic of rocket science comes up, the conversation quickly shifts to that of rocket fuels. As discussed in the excellent [Scott Manley] video below the break, there are many rocket fuels that can be found in some way, state, or form at your local grocery or liquor store. The video itself is a reaction to some college students in Utah who caused an evacuation when the rocket fuel they were cooking up exploded.

    [Scott] himself theorizes that the fuel they were cooking was Rocket Candy, a volatile mix of sugar and potassium nitrate that is known to go Kaboom on occasion. And as it turns out, the combination might not even be legal in your area because as much as it can be used as rocket fuel, it can also be used for other things that go boom.

Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • AI really can’t copyright the art it generates – US officials

    AI algorithms cannot copyright the digital artwork they generate, the US Copyright Office has insisted.

    Officials this month turned down a request brought by Stephen Thaler, founder of Imagination Engines, to register a copyright claim for a digital image he said was produced by machine-learning software. Thaler said the piece, titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, was crafted by Creativity Machine, an automated system he invented and owned, and argued the software should be recognized as the author of the image.

    The US Copyright Office’s review board said although it accepted the code-generated picture was made without “any creative contribution from a human actor,” the board could not fulfill the request. Today’s copyright laws only protect “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind,” the board said in a letter [PDF] directed to Thaler’s lawyer Ryan Abbott.

Server

• CentOS Alternative AlmaLinux OS Is Now Available for 64-Bit PowerPC Architecture

  In an attempt to provide the community with a CentOS alternative that’s closer to parity with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, AlmaLinux OS Foundation published today a new stable release that lets users install the distribution on 64-bit PowerPC (PPC64le) hardware.

  AlmaLinux OS 8.5 was released last year in mid-November based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 release, bringing two new repositories, including ResilientStorage and Plus, new OpenSCAP Security Guide profiles, a new STIG profile compatible with server GUI installations, as well as a new French National Security Agency (ANSSI) high-level profile.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Reality 2.0 Episode 100: A Celebration with IPFS, Web3, and Home Automation

  New episode of the Reality 2.0 podcast is uploaded and out today: Reality 2.0 Episode 100: A Celebration with IPFS, Web3, and Home Automation. Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Petros Koutoupis celebrate our 100th episode and talk Web3, IPFS, and home automation.

• Full Circle Magazine #178

• Failing at Scale | Self-Hosted 65

  Alex gives the new TrueNAS SCALE a go and hits a snag.

  Plus the future Home Assistant update that has Chris so concerned he might stop updating forever.

Kernel Space

• New Article: Working with the Lustre Filesystem

  What do you do when you need to deploy a large filesystem that is scalable to the exabyte level and supports a large-client, simultaneous-access workload? You find a parallel distributed filesystem such as Lustre. In this article, I build the high-performance Lustre filesystem from source, install it on multiple machines, mount it from clients, and access them in parallel.

Applications

• Fwupd 1.7.6 Linux Firmware Updater Adds Support for Star Lite Mk III Laptop

  Fwupd 1.7.6 is here with support for new hardware, including the Star Lite Mk III laptop from Star Labs, as well as HP M2xfd monitors, and some new features, such as a new plugin to set a GPIO pin for the duration of an update or a new plugin to enumerate SCSI hardware.

  This release also adds two more instance IDs to MTD devices, adds the ability to parse MTD firmware version using the defined GType, introduces a flag for UEFI devices that don’t support an auto-added capsule header, as well as a flag to indicate if the device has a signed or unsigned payload.

• Kile: An World-class Cross-Platform LaTeX Editor for Linux

  LaTeX or TeX editors are great for writing different documents in one place with complete freedom. Kile is one of the best LaTeX editors for Linux and other platforms for its simplicity. This application is not just good for scientific and code-based documents; users can execute regular writing works, drafting (academic/official/creative) articles, and so on.

  Kile is easy to operate yet offers all the standard LaTeX documents editor tools. There are options to see previews and several other interactive facilities that are rare in other similar documents generating means. Kile is a must-have for you if you frequently work and spend much time on LaTeX editors.

• Review: Rockarrolla – jukebox emulator

  Linux offers a dazzling array of free and open source music players, ranging from the most frugal terminal-based players to huge memory hogging players built with frameworks like Electron. We’ve reviewed the vast majority of music players, but it seems like there’s an almost endless supply.

  Rockarrolla is a music player that seeks to emulate a music jukebox. It’s written in the Vala programming language and published under an open source license.

• Organize your running apps in Linux with Station

  Station is an open-source “smart” browser that can organize all of your web applications in one convenient place. This guide will show you how to get Station working for you on Linux.

• 12 Best Free and Open Source Audio Editors

  There is a huge range of open source free audio software available for Linux which is both mature and feature-laden. Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: rock solid, efficient, and you don’t get fleeced for software licenses.

  The best free audio editors make it simple and easy to manage audio files for a variety of different purposes.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Install/Upgrade GIT on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  GIT is a free and open-source version control system that can efficiently manage small projects or huge ones. It enables multiple developers to work together on nonlinear development, as it tracks changes in source code for each branch of our project’s history. Hence, we never lose anything by going back through old stages if something goes wrong!

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest or upgrade GIT on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish using the GIT Maintainers PPA.

• Dark window decorations for st and Emacs

  Since a few weeks, I’m a new happy user of the Pantheon desktop environment (built by the community behind Elementary OS[1]). Thus, I moved from i3 and a border-less tiling window manager to a more classical floating window manager. After many years of using a tiling manager, I realized I never make full use of them: I only have an heavy usage of virtual desktop, with one maximized window on each desktop. My three main applications are Firefox[2], GNU Emacs[3] and simple terminal[4] with tmux[5] embedded. Emacs and Tmux already gives me a powerfull in-app windowing system and websites are more and more designed for wide screens. That is why, in the end, any window manager works for me, as soon as they allow me to maximize a window.

  Pantheon desktop is built on the same root as the Gnome desktop and use recent GTK version behind the scenes. We now have the ability to use a unique theme through the whole desktop, but select between dark and light variant on a per application basis. This is already supported by a lot of Gnome or Elementary applications, but it is a bit more complicated for other apps.

  What become very annoying is when you use a dark application, which keeps light window border, because that application does not know how to tell to the window manager that it prefer a dark theme. That was my case with both GNU Emacs and simple terminal. In both of them I use the Dracula dark theme[6], and thus having light window borders was a bit sad.

• How to Install Sublime Text 4 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Sublime Text 4 is an excellent choice as your go-to program to edit code. Sublime is known for its speed, ease of use, cross-platform, and community contribution. It natively supports many programming languages and markup tongues, but users can also expand its functionality with plugins!

  The Python API makes it easy; make sure you download from within Sublime, or they won’t appear in settings. Also, you can further customize and enhance it by installing additional features using package control and custom settings.

• How to Install/Connect PuTTY SSH Client on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  PuTTy is an open-source, lightweight program that you can use to login into your remote machine with a terminal emulator that has been around since 2002. It supports protocols such as SSH and SCP for secure communication over networks or even from one device directly onto another without account restrictions!

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the PuTTY SSH Client on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• Install Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish – Linux Shout

  Brave was launched in 2016 by Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and JavaScript. Brave aims to make the web a better place, and its primary concern is privacy and security. Here we learn the steps to install Brave browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.

  Brave is a popular browser yet still behind Google Chrome even it offers more features. This browser keeps trying to position itself as a “safer and faster web browser ” against other similar software providers. To make itself apart from other browsers, Brave has an integrated ad blocker called “Brave Shields”. The interesting thing is it is also based on Chromium, i.e. based on the open-source code of Google Chrome, and is therefore not a completely new invention of the browser.

• How to screen share with the Linux KDE Plasma Desktop | Opensource.com

  If you’ve ever done remote support professionally or out of familial obligation, then you’ve been on a call where solving problems are only secondary to the impossible task of visualizing what’s actually on your user’s screen. How many times have you described complex desktop tasks only to later realize that your user hasn’t even turned their computer on yet? Support is important, but the frustration is real, and it’s a shared experience for both the people in need of support and the people who graciously try to provide it. I believe it’s important for people to perform tasks themselves as a way to learn a new skill, but there’s also an argument for observing the way it’s meant to be done by an expert. That’s what screen sharing is for, and the KDE Plasma Desktop has it built-in.

• How to Change the Output Color of Echo in Linux

  In UNIX-like operating systems, the echo command is used to display a string of characters onto the terminal.

  Usually, the color of output of the echo command follows the terminal theme, nothing unusual about that.

  But if you want, you can change the color of the output text of the echo command in Linux.

  Why would you want to do that? There could be several reasons for that. For examples, if you are writing a script that has a step where it needs to warn the user, using red colored output could be useful.

• How To Install GCC Compiler on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GCC Compiler on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The GNU Compiler Collection, commonly known as (GCC), is a software package with compilers and development tools for several programming languages such as C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and many more. It is free and open-source software, which means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute or modify the application according to their own needs.

  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 GCC Compiler on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• Scan documents and old photos on Linux with Skanlite | Opensource.com

  Although the world has mostly gone digital now, there are still times when you just have to print a form, sign it, and scan it back in. Sometimes, I find that a snapshot on my phone suffices, but some industries require a better copy than a hasty snapshot, and so a flatbed scanner is necessary. The KDE project provides an application called Skanlite that helps you import documents scanned on a flatbed, or even a tethered camera.

• Meet sc-im, an ‘Excel’ for the terminal

  sc-im is a spreadsheet program made with ncurses for terminal.

  sc-im is based on sc a similar application developed by James Gosling, the creator of Java.

Games

• ELDEN RING is out and Verified for Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  ELDEN RING is the latest game developed by FromSoftware who are known for games including Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Dark Souls. It’s out now, with a Steam Deck Verified rating – so it works on Linux with Steam Play Proton. Note: copy personally purchased thanks to our supporters.

• Is Saints Row 2022 a Remake?

• A Gameport Joystick To USB-MIDI Converter | Hackaday

  These days, live music performance often involves electronic synthesizers and computers rather than traditional instruments played by hand. To aid in his own performances, [alekappa] built a special interface to take signals from a joystick and convert them to MIDI messages carried over USB.

  [...]

  This data is then converted into control changes, note triggers and velocity levels and sent out over the Teensy LC’s USB interface. A mode switch enables changes to the system’s behaviour to be quickly made. The device is wrapped up in a convenient housing nabbed from an old Gameport-to-USB converter from many years ago.

• RimWorld upgrades for Steam Deck delayed by the situation in Ukraine | GamingOnLinux

  RimWorld will be getting some upgrades to make it look great on the Steam Deck but it’s going to take a little longer.

  In a statement released on Steam, Ludeon Studios head wrote that the developer who was working on it lives in Ukraine, and the situation there right now of course is terrifying. They mentioned getting a Deck to this developer was delayed and the current situation means progress couldn’t be made on it. Another developer is now taking over the Steam Deck upgrades instead but it’s going to take a little bit longer.

• THQ Nordic do a nice little overview of their games for Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  The Steam Deck is so close to release you can almost touch it and so we’re seeing a trickle of more news come in. One bit is publisher THQ Nordic, who have released a short video.

  It might not be the longest video you will watch today, and it doesn’t actually show a Steam Deck. That’s not the point though! Developers and publishers are talking about it and they’re clearly quite excited. We can’t actually embed the video here for you to see, as once again Google has slapped an Age Gate on it, which only works directly on YouTube.

• The Steam Deck has released, here’s my initial review

  The Steam Deck has arrived and Valve were kind enough to ship GamingOnLinux a review unit — here’s my own initial thoughts after spending a couple weeks with it.

• A brief tour of the Steam Deck’s Linux implementation | Ars Technica

  Our Steam Deck review is now live, and it’s massive—almost as big as Valve’s new portable PC. With that in mind, I decided to write a shorter article about the Steam Deck’s implementation of Linux since a lot of Ars Technica readers are interested in that use case.

  Our full review goes into greater detail about installing and playing Windows games through Valve’s customized Wine compatibility layer, dubbed Steam Proton. This is the default way to access your favorite Steam games, and as our review explores, that proposition is currently iffy. But that’s not the same as using the Deck as a Linux machine. In this companion article, we’ll explain what’s going on with Valve’s first dedicated Linux PC and what it currently can (and cannot) do.

• Steam Deck desktop mode plus other stores — Epic Games Store | GamingOnLinux

  You have your shiny new Steam Deck, which I’ve gone over in an initial look on — but what about desktop mode apps and other stores? I’ve also been testing that with the Epic Games Store.

  The Steam Deck comes with a full desktop mode too outside of the Steam UI. The desktop environment is KDE Plasma (my own favourite Linux desktop) and so people familiar with Windows should feel quite at home. A perfect choice in this reviewer’s opinion. You also do not need developer mode to access it. You just hit the Steam menu, select Power and then Switch to Desktop. To get back to Deck UI, you just Log Off from the Plasma menu.

• Proton Experimental gets a fresh update, Dragon Quest Builders 2 playable | GamingOnLinux

  Now the Steam Deck is out, Valve has pushed out a fresh upgrade to Proton Experimental, the special testing area you can try with all the latest but less-tested fixes and improvements for running Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck. Want to know more about Steam Play Proton? See our dedicated guide.

• The Steam Deck will CHANGE GAMING FOREVER… once they finish Steam OS. – Invidious

  Thank you to Valve for sending me a Steam Deck review unit! This thing is truly incredible and–while the software definitely has a ways to go before it reaches the same quality as the hardware–I have every confidence that today is the first step on the road to a better PC gaming experience for everyone!

• Steam Deck UI Tour | No Narration – Invidious

• Game Devs Talk About “Developing” For Valve’s Steam Deck – Invidious

  Developers from PlayGround Games, The Behemoth, Bandai Namco, Motion Twin and more discuss “developing” for Steam Deck.

• Steam Deck UI: 1-Click Apps and Multitasking – Invidious

• The Steam Deck Launches with 825 Games (Playable and Verified) including Elden Ring (with Video Footage)! – Boiling Steam

  This is the big day! The first emails for those who pre-ordered the Steam Deck should have reached or in the process of reaching customers! At the latest count, the Steam Deck launches with 825 Games, split in two categories…

• Steam Deck Linux-Powered Gaming Handheld Launches Officially

  The official launch day means that Valve will start sending emails to the first batch of people who made a reservation for the Steam Deck device. If you’re reading this and you are one of the first to have made a reservation, you have 72 hours, from the moment you receive the email, to complete your purchase on Steam.

  If you changed your mind and no longer want to buy the Steam Deck, or you miss the 72-hours window and don’t purchase the device, Valve will send your reservation to the next person in the queue. Meanwhile, Valve is working to send out the official Dock for Steam Deck to customers too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE e.V. to wind down the KDE League

    KDE e.V. makes it known that the KDE League is to be wound down and dissolved. Remaining assets of the League are to be transferred to KDE e.V. Interested parties are invited to comment.

    KDE e.V., the legal entity representing the KDE community, and KDE League, Inc. (the “League”) are about to enter into an agreement to wind down and dissolve the League and transfer all of its remaining liquid assets (after paying the costs of dissolution) to KDE e.V.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 42 Features a Subtle, Yet Classy, Touch

    Brace yourself: this is quite a “minor” tweak, and not one most blogs would be rushing to write a post about!

    But in GNOME 42 switching between the (all-new) light and dark preference in the Settings app makes the entire desktop, windows, widgets, and wallpaper, gracefully transition between states. There’s no blink, hiccup, or stutter but a smooth, seamless fade.

  • ’Clipboard History’ is Searchable Clipboard Extension for GNOME Desktops

    This is a GNOME extension that (like you’d expect) keeps a log of items you copy to your clipboard. This way you can quickly sift through a list to copy/paste something someplace else at a later date. What makes this exact extension especially useful is it’s fully searchable right there from the top bar.

    But I don’t think you should install it.

    Instead, I think you should try the newly-released Clipboard History GNOME extension.

Distributions

• Hands On With the Latest Version of DahliaOS

  Naturally I was intrigued.

  DahliaOS has nothing to do with Ubuntu of course and thus no real tangible reason to be featured on this blog. But hey: new Linux distros and desktop environments are interesting, and unless I want to kick the bees nest that is the Firefox deb to Snap transition (the no-more-apt-build package hit Jammy today) I’ve not got much else to talk about.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Nano, Plasma, TigerVNC update in Tumbleweed

    Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed continue to be released at a steady pace. There have been seven snapshots released since our last review.

    The latest snapshot is 20220223 and it dropped an updated version of systemd 249.10. The version changed the settings to increase the external core size for processing coredumps to infinity. Flatpak 1.12.6 updated translations and fixed a bug that sometimes caused repo corruption when downloads were interrupted or canceled. A handful of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures were fixed in the mariadb 10.7.3 update. CVE-2021-46665, CVE-2021-46664, CVE-2021-46661, CVE-2021-46668 and CVE-2021-46663, which caused the application to crash, were all fixed in the updated version. Many CVEs were also fixed with the the XML parser expat 2.4.6; one of those was fixing an integer overflow in the copyString function. Several other packages updated in the snapshot including autoyast2 4.4.31, yast2-security 4.4.12 and yast2-installation 4.4.44.

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 Public Beta is out! | SUSE Communities

    SLE 15 SP4 is a “Refresh” Service Pack. And so, our Release Management team has provided guidance to our engineering for updating packages in SLE 15 SP4 to a new openSUSE Factory version. Still we are carefully evaluating and accepting package updates, while checking for the latest changes in the upstream project and verifying it is not breaking any ABI.

    [...]

    As python39 resided in the Basesystem Module on SLE 15 SP3, this new module will require some changes by customers and partners migrating to SLE 15 SP4. Customers using python39 and migrating from SLE 15 SP3 will have to add the Python3 module after migration via SUSEConnect. Else they won’t receive any updates for this interpreter.

• Arch Family

  • Meet the Arch Hurd

    The Arch Linux is not always Linux it can have other kernels, like for example the PacBSD which is the Arch with the kernel of FreeBSD .

    The Arch Hurd are the Arch packages with the kernel GNU/Hurd and logical with the GNU tools .

    The Arch Hurd project was founded on an Arch Linux forum thread in January 2010, and after a few weeks of much input, it has progressed to the point where it can boot into a virtual machine.

    It aims to provide an Arch-like user environment (BSD style init scripts , packages optimized for i686, use of the pacman packages, rolling-release and a KISS ) configuration on the Hurd that is stable enough to use.

    Despite having a small development team, a lot of progress has been made since its founding, such as booting on real hardware, packaging everything for a basic web server, and producing an unofficial graphical LiveCD.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Enforce code consistency with clang-format | Red Hat Developer

    Imposing a common coding style can improve the readability and maintainability of your code in shared projects. Code consistency is particularly important in open source projects, where contributors often revise code written by others. Code styling can also be especially challenging in open source projects because different contributors have their own style preferences. This article introduces clang-format, an uncomplicated tool that you can use to set a common code style for your team projects written C, C++, and Objective C.

    As an example for our discussion, I’ll use xsimd, a project I contribute to, which enables the manipulation of batches of numbers with the same arithmetic operators used for single values. I will show you how to choose a code style, convert an existing codebase to that new style, and enforce the code style on future commits.

    Note that clang-format is part of the LLVM project.

  • CPE Weekly Update – Week of February 21st – 25th – Fedora Community Blog

    This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team.

  • What is the Red Hat Accelerators program and why might you want to join? | Enable Sysadmin

    Since 2019, I’ve been a member of the Red Hat Accelerators program, a global community of IT professionals who wish to share and exchange their knowledge and passion for Red Hat products and open source projects. As a member, I’m able to exchange ideas with Red Hat customers, partners, and IT experts from a wide range of industries, as well as Red Hat employees and leaders.

    The Accelerators program offers many benefits for members, which I will describe below. Before I begin: This article reflects my opinions on the Red Hat Accelerators program and may or may not be the same as Red Hat’s view.

  • IT skills: Should you build or buy?

    In the staffing industry, it’s often said that employers are hunting for a “purple squirrel” – an ideal candidate with an impossible-to-find mix of skills, experience, or other credentials. Employers hunting purple squirrels are no doubt well-intentioned, but such overly restrictive hiring practices lead to unfilled positions, overworked teams, and lost productivity.

    These consequences are severe enough for companies under normal circumstances, but in today’s climate of sky-high resignation rates, tepid labor force participation, and rapid technological change, they can become existential threats. To avoid this, leaders should reevaluate the skills they recruit for in the market – that is, the skills they “buy” – and identify the skills they can train internally – or “build” – in their existing workforce.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 22.04 Just Got a BIG Design Update (Spoiler: Looks Awesome) – OMG! Ubuntu!

    Ubuntu 22.04 is looking on fire, my friends.

    With feature freeze now in effect (and UI freeze creeping up) a huge drop of changes just hit the daily builds, including GNOME Shell 42 and new versions of the default Yaru GTK, Shell and icon themes.

    And its in these packages where all the shiny stuff is.

    Takes the newest version of the Yaru GTK theme, for instance. While it doesn’t deviate too far from what we’re used to it is now clearly echoing the look of upstream libadwaita with circular window controls, increased border radius, and soft grey header bars.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 Just Got a BIG Design Update (Spoiler: Looks Awesome)

    With feature freeze now in effect (and UI freeze creeping up) a huge drop of changes just hit the daily builds, including GNOME Shell 42 and new versions of the default Yaru GTK, Shell and icon themes.

    And its in these packages where all the shiny stuff is.

    Takes the newest version of the Yaru GTK theme, for instance. While it doesn’t deviate too far from what we’re used to it is now clearly echoing the look of upstream libadwaita with circular window controls, increased border radius, and soft grey header bars.

  • Xubuntu 22.04 Community Wallpaper Contest « Xubuntu

    We’re on our way to the 22.04 LTS release and it’s time for another community wallpaper contest!

    [...]

    After the submission deadline, the Xubuntu team will pick 6 winners from all submissions for inclusion on the Xubuntu 22.04 ISO, and will also be available to other Xubuntu version users as a xubuntu-community-wallpaper package. The winners will also receive some Xubuntu stickers.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi 5G Development Kit to ships with Quectel RM50xQ or Telit FN980 modem – CNX Software

  SixFab is now taking pre-orders for its “Raspberry Pi 5G Development Kit” equipped with either Quectel RM50xQ or Telit FN980 5G modem fitted to SixFab’s Raspberry Pi 5G HAT, all housed in a plastic and acrylic enclosure with four antennas.

  The selected modems rely on the worldwide 5G NR Sub-6GHz and mmWave frequency bands, and the company says a data throughput of up to 5.0 Gbps (download) and 1.0 Gbps (upload) is possible with the kit. SixFab explained the 5G devkit is designed to help with the development, optimization, and testing of MTC (Machine-type Communication) and M2M projects leading to products such as IoT gateways, indoor and outdoor CPE, high bitrate video streaming, real-time sensor data broadcasting, high-speed mobile 5G hotspot, etc.

• Netgate Releases TNSR High Performance Router Version 22.02

  Release 22.02 is the first release to run over an Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release, specifically Ubuntu Server 20.04. Ubuntu is now the primary operating system for TNSR. New TNSR software installations will only be supported on Ubuntu.

• Compute module taps NXP’s new octa-core S32G3 CPU

  MicroSys announced a “Miriac MPX-S32G399A” module featuring NXP’s new S32G3 in-vehicle and industrial networking CPU, which runs Linux on up to 8x Cortex-A53 cores with up to 4x lockstep Cortex-M7 cores and 20MB system RAM.

  MicroSys Electronics teased an upcoming Miriac MPX-S32G399A compute module that will debut NXP’s S32G3 Series S32G399A SoC. We missed the Dec. 21 announcement of the up to octa-core, Cortex-A53 S32G3 Series. This 2nd Gen S32G SoC delivers 2.5 times more applications processing performance than the S32G2 Series, claims NXP.

• SolidRun and IoT.bzh Streamline Custom Imaging and Deployment of SolidSense Edge Gateways

  “When it comes to deploying any enterprise or industrial computing solutions, a significant amount of time is spent engineering and testing software to ensure a problem-free deployment,” Dr. Atai Ziv, CEO at SolidRun. “The time required dramatically increases when solutions are deployed at scale, such is often the case with edge gateways. Working with IoT.bzh has allowed us to further our value to customers by providing them access to thousands of Linux software solutions that have been tested for our SolidSense systems.”

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Protect Valuable Personal Data by Moving to Librem AweSIM (Press Release)

    Designed for those concerned about the security of their private information, Purism recently upgraded Librem AweSIM, a prepaid cellular service that puts user privacy first. With the Librem AweSIM, users’ personal information is never sold, disclosed, or even seen by the big telecom carriers. Launched in Oct 2020, subscribers can now port their existing phone numbers to their secure alternative.

    Chief Security Officer, Kyle Rankin says “Moving my personal number over to AweSIM means my cellular data is now private and protected. Earlier, I was locked in Google’s ecosystem, including a Google Fi cellular plan. I wanted to replace that plan to protect my privacy for a long time, but I discovered that the alternatives also tracked and sold customer data. With AweSIM and added security features of the Librem 5, my phone has become a privacy haven.”

  • RISC-V design challenge – Get a free board, RISC-V chips, and cash prizes – CNX Software

    A little while ago, I wrote about WCH CH32V307 32-bit RISC-V MCU that was found in a board with eight UART ports that could be controlled over Ethernet or USB, and the company has released some source code to use the board while inviting the community to submit pull requests to the project.

    But now WCH, RT-Thread, LCSC, and EasyEDA have joined hands to launch the RISC-V design challenge where the companies will provide a free board or two RISC-V chips to selected participants, as well as cash prizes with up to $1000 offered to the best projects.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung is far from leading the Android fast charging race, and that’s okay | Android Central

  • Google’s Phone app might pick up some cues from Android 12′s lock screen

  • Oppo Pad is the company’s first Android tablet – 9to5Google

  • The Galaxy S22 series grabs the March Android update as the phones on sale | Android Central

  • 6 best permission manager apps for Android – Android Authority

  • Upcycling Android: anchoring software freedom into European ecodesign – FSFE

  • How to use Android 12′s new Internet quick settings tile – 9to5Google

  • Android app deals of the day: Hidden Folks, and more – 9to5Toys

  • Should You Buy a New Android Phone When It Launches, or Wait?

  • Oppo Find X5 Pro: Five reasons this flagship android phone is worth a look – CNET

  • Google To Release Another Build Of Android 12L Before The Final Release

  • OnePlus 8T and 8 series get first OxygenOS 12 Open Beta with Android 12

  • OnePlus launches Android 12 open beta for the OnePlus 8 – Phandroid

  • OnePlus 8 series almost ready for Android 12, first open beta now available – PhoneArena

  • nubia Z40 Pro goes official, Gravity edition pioneers magnetic charging on Android – GSMArena.com news

  • iOS users spend more than double on subscriptions compared to Android users – PhoneArena

  • Oppo Find X5 Pro Review: A Confident, Refined Android Flagship

  • Vivo Is Working On A Truly Massive Android Flagship

  • How To Setup and Use Google One VPN for Your Android

    If you’re looking for a good VPN for your Android, then Google One VPN would be the best deal for you as it’s Google authorized. Actually, to become a user of Google VPN, you’ve to purchase a 2TB storage plan of Google, and only this plan’s subscribers can use Google VPN as an extra feature. So, without further delay, be a 2TB storage plan member and get Google One VPN for your Android.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Movim: a decentralized open-source XMPP-based messaging and social platform

  Movim is a free, open-source social and communication platform based on XMPP standards.

  Movim allows users to communicate easily with their friends, family, and work colleagues using chatroom, video conferences, and private messaging. Movim works as a front-end for XMPP network.

• Events

  • Copilot IRC Q&A with Robert F.J. Seddon

    Join us on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) IRC channel at #fsf on Libera.Chat, for a Q&A with Robert F.J. Seddon, one of the authors whose paper “Copilot, Copying, Commons, Community, Culture” was selected as part of our call for whitepapers on Microsoft GitHub’s Copilot AI-pair programming software.

  • Join us for a general IRC discussion on the papers selected as part of our Copilot call for whitepapers

    Join us on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) IRC channel at #fsf on Libera.Chat, for a general discussion on the papers selected and published as part of our call for whitepapers on Microsoft GitHub’s Copilot AI-pair programming software.

  • curl on “software at scale”

    I was a guest at the software at scale podcast a while ago and the recording went up recently. We talked about a lot of things curl…

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Başlangıç Kılavuzu for Turkish LibreOffice Users – The Document Foundation Blog

    “I’ve been using LibreOffice since 2010. It makes me happy to support and contribute to this application that I use with pleasure. For this reason, I have been trying to contribute by translating the interface and help text since the day I started using it. I know that every contribution counts in the open source world.” says Ayhan. “I would like to thank Muhammet Kara for what he has done for LibreOffice here. I learned from him how I can contribute to LibreOffice apart from interface translation. I solved some easyhack issue with his support.”

    Ayhan continues describing the endeavor: “After all these contributions, we established a certification team. We started the translation work for the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 6.2 about a year ago, but for some reasons we could not continue. This issue remained in my mind. Finally, with the encouragement of Muhammet Kara and the sponsorship of TUBITAK/ULAKBIM, I completed the translation of Getting Started Guide 7.2. Uploaded to tr.libreoffice.org and documentation.libreoffice.org. I hope it will be useful for the users.”

• Funding

  • Publication of the FSF-funded white papers on questions around Copilot

    Microsoft GitHub’s announcement of an AI-driven Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) program called Copilot — which uses machine learning to autocomplete code for developers as they write software — immediately raised serious questions for the free software movement and our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom. We felt these questions needed to be addressed, as a variety of serious implications were foreseen for the free software community and developers who use GitHub. These inquiries — and others possibly yet to be discovered — needed to be reviewed in depth.

    In our call for papers, we set forth several areas of interest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questions of ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHub authors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for their works. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research into these areas, and much more.

    First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in their papers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers from members of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areas of interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymous review process, we concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.

• FSFE

  • Matthias Kirschner’s Web log – fsfe: Ada & Zangemann in public libraries

    In the beginning of February, we asked supporters of software freedom to donate the German version of the book “Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards and Raspberry Ice Cream” to public libraries. It is great to see how many already followed that suggestion and thereby enable access to the book for children whose parents have not heard about the book or cannot afford to buy their children a book for €16,90.

• Programming/Development

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 2500 CRAN packages!

    As of this morning, Rcpp stands at 2501 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.

    Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages in July 2016, 800 packages in October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017, 1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018, 1750 packages in August 2019, 2000 packages in July 2020, and 2250 package in March of last year. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A (manually curated) list of packages using Rcpp is available too.

  • Bagisto: an open-source eCommerce Laravel-based framework

    Bagisto is an open source eCommerce framework that is built on Laravel and used from Laravel developer. It shows whether you want to build or scale your business, you should use this open source.

    It is a community-driven project which is managed and maintained by dozens of professional developers.

  • 5 ways to involve people who don’t write code in the DevOps process

    DevOps transformation extends beyond development and operations teams. It’s also relevant to other parts of the organization. These new collaborators can offer new insights to the development team seeking to maintain alignment with customer needs.

    This article describes ways to involve other parts of your business in DevOps.

  • Perl/Raku

    • My Favorite Modules: Devel::NYTProf | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

      The mental excursion that led to this blog post started with a report from Olaf Alders that my Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitUnusedVarsStricter was generating a false positive on variables used only as defaults in subroutine signatures. After the first cut at fixing this I thought a regression test was in order. I did this by running both unpatched and patched versions of the policy against my Mini CPAN, and then diff on the outputs.

      This has always taken the better part of a day to run, and given that it had to expand all the distributions first and then run a fairly brute-force policy against anything it found, I accepted this as the price of conscientiousness.

      But then I noticed, quite by chance, that running the patched policy against the Number-Phone-FR distribution appeared to hang. Investigation failed to turn up any reason for the modifications to do this, and when I ran the unpatched code against that distribution it also appeared to hang. I knew it eventually completed, though, since the full Mini CPAN scan using unpatched code eventually completed.

  • Java

    • How to Deploy a Java App with the Wildfly Application Server

      Wildfly is a modular, lightweight Java application server that is maintained by Red Hat and is free to deploy to your data center or third-party cloud host. We’ve covered the deployment of Wildfly on a Ubuntu Server 20.04 instance and now we’re going to take that a step farther and see how easy it is to deploy a Java application with the platform.

      [...]

      The New Stack is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Bit.

Standards/Consortia

• Starting an argument on the internet

  You can pronounce GIF however you want. There’s only one rule: If you use the argument that it must be /ɡɪf/ because the G stands for “graphics”, then you are legally obligated to pronounce JPEG as /ˈdʒeɪ.fɛɡ/. That is all.

Science

• Pixelating Text Not A Good Idea | Hackaday

  People have gotten much savvier about computer security in the last decade or so. Most people know that sending a document with sensitive information in it is a no-no, so many people try to redact documents with varying levels of success. A common strategy is to replace text with a black box, but you sometimes see sophisticated users pixelate part of an image or document they want to keep private. If you do this for text, be careful. It is possible to unredact pixelated images through software.

  It appears that the algorithm is pretty straightforward. It simply guesses letters, pixelates them, and matches the result. You do have to estimate the size of the pixelation, but that’s usually not very hard to do. The code is built using TypeScript and while the process does require a little manual preparation, there’s nothing that seems very difficult or that couldn’t be automated if you were sufficiently motivated.

Hardware

• Nvidia plus Excelero equals acquisition – maybe – Blocks and Files

  We have heard that Nvidia could be buying Excelero, an NVMe storage software startup – and Excelero did not deny it.

  Nvidia is the GPU server giant that just withdrew its attempt to buy Arm. Excelero makes and sells NVMesh software which provides a virtual, distributed flash array supporting converged (in-server SSDs) and disaggregated (all-flash array) architectures.

  When we asked about the acquisition rumor, Excelero CEO Yaniv Romem responded: “Decline to comment.”

• Don’t Miss The VCF Indoor Swap Meet This Weekend | Hackaday

  We don’t need to tell you that these last couple of years have been a real drag for in-person events. But at long last, after a bit of a false start last summer, it seems like we can finally start peeking our heads out and getting back to doing the things we love. So why not celebrate by taking part in that most sacred of geek pastimes: poring through boxes of dusty old gear in search of some electronic treasure?

• Bend It Like (Sonar) Beacon With A Phased Array | Hackaday

  Ultrasonic transducers are incredible, with them you can detect distances, as well as levitate and peer through objects. They can emit and receive ultrasonic soundwaves (typically above 18khz) and just like all waves, they can be steered via a phased array. [Bitluni] was trying to accurately measure distances but found the large field of view of the sensor was just too imprecise, so he made a phased array of transducers.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 206 released

      The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 206. This version includes the following changes:

      * Also allow "Unicode text, UTF-8 text" as well as "UTF-8 Unicode text" to
        match for .buildinfo files too.
      * Add a test for recent file(1) issue regarding .changes files.
        (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#291)
      * Drop "_PATH" suffix from some module-level globals that are not paths.
      
      

    • Attackers use Microsoft Teams as launchpad for malware [Ed: Microsoft Teams itself is technically malware]

    • 10 Top Open Source Penetration Testing Tools

      Professional penetration testers, or pen testers, are akin to “white hat” or ethical hackers, adversaries with an explicit authorization to attack a network. During this simulation of real-world conditions, they put an IT system to the test to identify vulnerabilities.

      The goal is to patch these vulnerabilities to prevent cybercriminals from exploiting them. Such security audits require various techniques and tools to simulate classic steps of an attack, such as information gathering (reconnaissance), phishing, or privilege escalation.

      Within the vast ecosystem of cybersecurity solutions, many beginners and professionals alike choose to use open-source solutions, such as Metasploit, Nmap, and Wireshark, over premium products. We’ve reviewed those better known open source names in our main pentesting tools article. Here we’re focusing on some lesser-known but still worthy open-source solutions that can be used separately for specific purposes or combined to run comprehensive penetration tests.

    • Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

      Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

    • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

      • Exposing malware in Linux-based multi-cloud environments [Ed: Microsoft-friendly publishers carry on with weeks-only Linux FUD]

        Based on research conducted by VMware’s Threat Analysis Unit, this report uncovers the unique characteristics of remote access tools (RATs), ransomware, and cryptominers on Linux-based systems and how you can mitigate these threats.

      • Deep Dive on Persistence, Privilege Escalation Technique and Detection in Linux Platform

        The Splunk Threat Research Team added Linux Privilege Escalation and Linux Persistence Techniques analytic stories to help Security Operations Center (SOC) Analysts and Security Researchers detect adversaries or malware using these techniques within the Linux OS platform. In this blog article, we will do a deep dive on some popular techniques and detections for these two tactics. This article will be the deep dive part of our January 2022 release blog.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Covid testing firm ‘selling swabs carrying customers’ DNA’ to third parties

        A government-approved Covid testing firm is being investigated by the UK’s data privacy watchdog after it emerged that it plans to sell customers’ DNA to third parties.

        Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to “learn more about human health” – and sell information on to third parties.

        Individuals are required to give informed consent for their sensitive medical data to be used – but customers’ consent for their DNA to be sold now as buried in Cignpost’s online documents.

        When buying tests, customers were asked to tick a box agreeing to a 4,876 privacy policy which links to a separate document outlining the research programme, The Sunday Times reported.

      • Andrea Scarpino’s blog: I went out for dinner and I took some endpoint

        Three weeks ago I went out to a pub for dinner. Due to covid restrictions there are no paper menus anymore and the waitress gave me a card to place my order.

      • Microsoft Edge Is Adding Another Feature No One Asked For [Ed: Microsoft Edge is NSA-connected malware with access to your microphone and webcam; only a fool would install this thing…]

        The latest update to Microsoft Edge Canary appears to have added Skype integration that enables users to start a video call right from the browser. Edge is Microsoft’s Chromium-based web browser bundled with Windows 11. As for Skype, it started off as an independent company that brought VoIP calling to the mainstream, but was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 for a reported $8.5 billion.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Online Abuse in the Metaverse Untangled – World Wide Web Foundation

  The metaverse is trending. Companies from Meta to Microsoft, Nike to Tinder, are making plays for a future where interaction online takes place primarily in virtual environments.

  This immersive virtual world could bring with it the potential to expose us to new worlds, new ideas, and new experiences, taking what Roblox, Second Life, and Minecraft offer to new heights.

  But that promise doesn’t come without risk: to our privacy, to our security, to our safety.

  Virtual reality has the power to blur the line between what’s real and what’s not. In a persistent, all-encompassing digital world, the sensory experience is heightened, which in turn escalates the experience of harassment, assault, bullying, and hate speech. In fact, research indicates that abuse in virtual reality is “far more traumatic than in other digital worlds”.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Toaster-friendly alternative web protocol Gemini attracts criticism for becoming exclusive clique

  Project Gemini is a new internet protocol designed to be simpler and lighter to make it easier for people to design, run, and use their own websites.

  Described by network engineer Stéphane Bortzmeyer at FOSDEM 2021 as a new ultra-simple protocol that is modern but “looks retro,” it was designed to help the user opt out of “pervasive user tracking [and]… distractions from the actual content.”

  Some of those with a penchant for irritating spelling call it the “smol web.” It’s light enough for vintage computers, and easy to create both clients and pages. It’s not designed to replace the web, but as an adjunct to it. It also makes it much easier to host your own site. As the project points out, it’s “heavier than gopher… lighter than the web, [and] will not replace either.”

  Sounds all good so far… but the protocol is beginning to attract controversy as it takes off. The most recent statistics put “Geminispace” (all resources “published on the internet via the Gemini protocol”) at 1,997 capsules, up from 1,200 in September.

  A post this week gained a lot of traction on Hackernews forums, when a software engineer calling themselves “マリウス” – that’s “Marius” to gaijin – called it “solutionism at its worst”. They argued in a blogpost that Gemini is an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist and encourages a bunker effect, excluding people who use ordinary web browsers, perhaps due to accessibility issues.

  [...]

  There are also some proposals for simplifying content, such as Jeff Huang’s This Page is Designed to Last. There are working, usable, graphical web browsers that don’t support JavaScript, such as Dillo and Netsurf. If you just want to stay with your current browser, you can install NoScript. It’s worth trying because it’s surprising how fast even the modern web can be. It can even be fun.

• Telcos must stand up for the people of Belarus, keep internet connected during referendum

  Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition are calling on telecommunication service providers in Belarus to resist any governmental internet shutdown orders, and keep the nation online before, during, and after the constitutional referendum scheduled for February 27, 2022.

  “Nobody has the right to prevent people from exercising their fundamental rights online — not governments, not private companies,” said Felicia Anthonio, Campaigner and #KeepItOn Lead at Access Now. “This week and always, we want fair, open, and free internet access for all in Belarus.”

  This weekend’s referendum will be the first national vote in Belarus since the heavily criticized 2020 presidential election and its widely disputed outcome.

  “It seems that authorities in Belarus have had no qualms in hitting the kill switch, and disconnecting the nation from the internet,” said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, Regional Outreach Coordinator (Eastern Europe & Central Asia) at Access Now. “So we’re calling on telcos to make a stand — ensure people have access to information, the right to express themselves, and avenues for communication throughout the referendum.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Warner-Discovery Approved as Competition for Eyeballs Becomes Even More Fierce – Disruptive Competition Project

  As recently announced, the WarnerMedia and Discovery merger has taken its next step towards completion, which stands to produce another strong competitor in the entertainment sector and further intensify the fight for media consumers’ attention. Discovery revealed in an SEC filing on February 9th that the proposed merger had cleared a critical hurdle with the conclusion of a waiting period required by federal antitrust regulations. Valued at $43 billion, this is the biggest media merger of the last two decades and will combine the assets of HBO, Warner Bros. television and film studios and the sports-heavy TNT and TBS networks with Discovery’s library of nonfiction programming, which includes Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, HGTV, the Food Network and Animal Planet. Many companies are pursuing mergers and acquisitions as a strategy to further develop and expand their libraries of content and access to consumers, bringing us into a golden age of television with numerous innovative challengers vying for consumers’ eyes.

  This newest deal follows similar mergers and acquisitions in the entertainment space, most notably AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which initially brought Warner’s Media assets into the telecom giant’s orbit. Other cleared transactions include Disney’s acquisition of Fox for $71 billion and Comcast’s acquisition of Sky for $40 billion. Deals such as Microsoft’s controversial $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. and the smaller Amazon-MGM acquisition for $8 billion are also looking to respond to the vigorous competition for attention in the media sector. Closing the Amazon-MGM deal would provide the historic brand certainty that allows MGM to invest and create new and great content at a greater scale, which is procompetitive and good for the industry and consumers alike. The approval of this deal would also signal greater opportunities for similar deals in the future. The persistent entry of many new streaming services into the market is a boon for artists and creatives as well, as more firms are bidding on their content. The competitive pressure on these new entities is fierce: more than a dozen large, well-funded, global studios are now producing content for viewers, in addition to numerous other sources for quality content ranging from television networks to movie studios, streaming platforms, and game studios.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Check Steam Deck Compatibility With This Tool – Invidious

  The Steam Deck is almost here so Valve has released a tool to check which games in your library are currently known to be supported, but keep in mind this is not all the games that work just the ons Valve is telling you about.

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel’s message log levels are relatively meaningless

  The Linux kernel has an internal system to assign (or let people assign) a log level for all kernel messages, ranging from ‘debug’ at the bottom up through ‘emerg’ at the top. You can read about it in syslog(2), and these kernel log levels become syslog(3) log levels, can be reported (and thus manually filtered) by dmesg(1) and so on. Given this, you might wonder if it’s useful to do anything different for different log levels, like route some log levels to a special syslog file. Cynical system administrators already know the answer from their experiences with syslog priorities, and it is “not really”.

• Emulating PPC32 Linux in x86_64 Linux

  I’ve recently needed to do some porting work for a PPC32 CPU running Linux. At the time I didn’t have any PPC hardware (I’ve since acquired a PowerMac G5). Of course when we don’t have hardware, we can normally emulate it. Here is how I set up the emulation so I can remember for next time.

Instructionals/Technical

• Debugging Certificate Errors

  But why? Ok, sure: to get rid of the annoying cert error. But putting aside that not all errors here can even be ignored or “resolved” by passing -k, let us pretend that we actually cared and wanted to find out what the problem is. Some of the errors encountered when accessing an HTTPS service using e.g., curl(1) are self-explanatory, but for many others we are often left trying to determine just why our tool can’t validate the remote certificate.

  Here are a few debugging techniques that may help you better make sense of the errors: [...]

• Going multipath without Multipath TCP

  Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.

  Even if you look at computers that are over 20 years old, the only thing that stands out on their spec sheets as still being current is gigabit ethernet.

• The history (sort of) of service management in Unix

  Specifically, for a long time Unix didn’t have any sort of service management as such, beyond init restarting getty processes. All services were simply started as part of the boot process in what started as a very simple script and grew only somewhat from there in BSD Unixes. If you needed to check the status of services, you ran ps; if you needed to restart a service, you terminated it with kill and started the new version by hand. The System V init system moved this forward somewhat by creating scripts that encapsulated the knowledge of how to start, stop, and sometimes check the status of each service, but it did nothing to manage the services as such; it still merely booted (and shut down) the system. Noticing that a service’s daemons had died and starting them again was up to you.

• The important things about Unix init systems aren’t booting the system

  What that means is that both the challenging problems and the state of the art in an init system have moved on from just booting your Unix system in a static configuration. What really matters in init systems today and what distinguishes one from another is largely how they deal with operating the system and changing the system configuration. Changing the system configuration is the easier of the two sides to talk about; it’s the area of how you change what happens in the next boot. How you add things, remove things, change exactly what happens, reorder things, and so on. Init systems can make this anywhere from easy to very difficult, and mostly they fall somewhere in the middle.

• Building a desktop Pi PC with Axzez’s Interceptor

  Axzez even builds a custom OS that can run either on eMMC storage, a USB flash drive, or over one of the SATA drives (though the latter option still requires a flash drive for the early boot stage).

  I tested their OS, and tested every feature on the board—an RTC, front panel ATX power switch and power LED, all five SATA ports, two full-size HDMI ports, four 12v 3-pin fan headers, a USB 2.0 internal header and 2x rear USB 2.0 ports, and the 24-pin ATX power connector to power the board itself. Everything worked great out of the box, and the software (even at its early stage) seemed to perform adequately.

• How to configure Email notification in Jenkins.

  Emails have played a significant role in each association because of their convenience, and accessibility. A few plugins are accessible in the market that work wonders in order to configuring each part of email notifications. In Jenkins, we will see one of them. Jenkins email notification is based on Java plugin tool and it plays an important role in continuous Integration as it is used to send the notification alert automatically when an email is received.

• How to install LeoCAD on Zorin OS 16 – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at how to install LeoCAD on Zorin OS 16.

• How to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to Install VMware Workstation 16 Pro on RHEL8 | CentOS 8

  VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems (an x86-32 version of earlier releases was available); it enables users to set up virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine and use them simultaneously along with the host machine. Each virtual machine can execute its own operating system, including versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, and MS-DOS.

• How to Install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this installation guide, we will show you how to install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu systems

  InvoicePlane is a self-hosted open source application for managing your quotes, invoices, clients and payments.

  It is specially designed for business owners to create and manage their invoices and client payments.

• How To Install MakeMKV on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this small guide, we will show you how to install MakeMKV on Ubuntu 20.04 with two methods.

  MakeMKV is a DVD and Blu-ray ripping software. It is a free MKV video maker for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Using this you can convert your favorite videos from DVD and Blu-ray discs to MKV aka Matroska Video format.

  A Blu-ray ripper is a computer program that facilitates copying a Blu-ray disc or HD DVDs to a hard disk drive.

• F-DROID DEPLOYMENT ON DEBIAN WITH I2P

  In this small guide, we will show you how to install MakeMKV on Ubuntu 20.04 with two methods.

• A quick GitLab SSH key configuration example – Coffee Talk: Java, News, Stories and Opinions

  The secure socket shell (SSH) is preferred connection mechanism, especially when compared to HTTPS, when connections are made from Git to a remote server like GitLab, GitHub or BitBucket.

  In this Git tutorial, we will show you how to configure SSH keys in order to securely connect your local Git instance with your remote repositories.

• Troubleshoot and monitor Linux system performance with nmon | Enable Sysadmin

  Nigel’s Monitor (nmon) is a system performance monitoring tool originally developed by IBM for the AIX operating system and later ported for Linux on several CPU architectures.

  The main benefit of nmon is that it allows you to monitor different aspects of your system, such as CPU utilization, memory, disk busy, network utilization, and more, in a single, concise view. Without nmon, you have to use specialized monitoring tools like top for processes, iostat for disks, and ifstat for the network to monitor various resources. Each of them presents the data differently.

  I used nmon for the first time about 10 years ago as an AIX sysadmin. By using nmon, I was able to troubleshoot some hard-to-spot issues, including one that initially seemed like a network bottleneck. By inspecting several resources simultaneously using nmon, I discovered it was an application issue caused by opening too many files.

  In addition to interactively monitoring your system, you can also use nmon in batch mode to collect and save performance data for analysis. For more information about nmon for Linux, consult the project’s official page.

  This article looks at this powerful monitoring tool. Start by installing it.

• How to automount disk or USB in Linux {GUI/CLI} – TREND OCEANS

  We have recently covered an article on the UUID of disk storage, where we discussed why we need UUID, how to retrieve it, and all. It is important to have a UUID when you want to automount your drive. If you don’t know what UUID is, then I highly recommend you read that article first. How to find the UUID of disk storage with a simple command.

  And in this article, you will see how to automount disk or USB in Linux, and I believe these steps will work in all Linux distributions(Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Almalinux) without any hustle.

• Install Wine on Debian 11 – kifarunix.com

  Wine 7.x has just been released! Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine on Debian 11. Wine 7 is the current stable release as of this writing, hence this guide is about how to install 7.x on Debian 11. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a program which allows running Microsoft Windows programs (including DOS, Windows 3.x, Win32, and Win64 executables) on Unix. It consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft Windows binary, and a library (called Winelib) that implements Windows API calls using their Unix, X11 or Mac equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Windows code into native Unix executables.

• Install Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 – kifarunix.com

  Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine on Ubuntu 22.04. Wine is a free and open-source software which provides the ability to run Microsoft Windows applications and computer games to run on POSIX-compliant Operating Systems, such as Linux, MacOS and BSD.

• How to Install Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

  Brave claims that its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome. Even with multiple tabs open at once, the new Brave Software uses 66% less memory and has 50 million more active users than before – a growth of 2X in 5 years!

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• How to Install Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Memcached is a free, open-source project that anyone can use to speed up response times for dynamic websites. As the software lives in RAM and not on external storage devices like hard drives or SSDs, does it allow you to take advantage when your website needs information quickly without having to wait anywhere from seconds until to almost minutes on high traffic websites that are not optimized correctly with software such as Memcached.

  In the following tutorial, you will know how to install and configure Memcached on your Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, along with some basic configuration examples.

• How to Install Kylin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 – LinuxCapable

  Ubuntu Kylin is the official Chinese version of Ubuntu however supports English. It has been described as a “loose continuation” to its parent operating system with some differences in appearance and functionality. Still, most importantly, it’s explicitly designed for approval in mainland China, but international users are welcome to use it.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kylin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

  Note installing Kylin desktop will be hard to remove and restore your original desktop however you can swap back to the default GNOME desktop and keep it installed. The recommendation is to install Kylin or any alternative desktop environment on a Virtual Machine to test before a complete upgrade.

• How to Install GNOME Flashback on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  GNOME Flashback is a free open-source session for GNOME 3, initially called “GNOME Fallback” and shipped as a stand-alone session in Debian and Ubuntu. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2 desktop but uses the newer GTK+ 3 toolkit and associated technologies. The project aims to keep the functionality of GNOME 2 available until all significant applications have been ported to GTK+ 3.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the GNOME Flashback desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• How to play Dirt Rally on Linux

  Dirt Rally is a racing simulator developed and published by Code Masters for Microsoft Windows and PS4, and Xbox One. Later on, after its release, it made its way to Linux and Mac OS. Here’s how you can play it on your Linux PC.

• How To Visualize Disk Space Usage With Vizex

  In this article we will learn How To Visualize Disk Space Usage With Vizex. Vizex is a command line program to display disk usage for all partitions and media in graphical layout. Output of Vizex shows the total size, total used space, free space and percentage of used space of each partition in a horizontal bar chart-like diagrams.

  We can customize the output as per our liking using various options. For example, we can display the visualized disk usage of a specific path. We can exclude specific partition details from the output. We can save the partitions full information in a csv or json file. It is even possible to display the battery information of a Laptop using Vizex. Vizex also has a feature to print the directory contents with size, file types, and last modified date.

• WebLogic don’t start with “no available router to destination” error

  This post is about WebLogic don’t start. So we are going to fix it.

  I hate java and its ecosystem. Some days ago one of our WebLogic run out of disk space and the process died.

Distributions

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS released

    The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
    (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well
    as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
    
    Like previous LTS series, 20.04.4 includes hardware enablement stacks
    for use on newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures.
    
    Ubuntu Server defaults to installing the GA kernel; however you may
    select the HWE kernel from the installer bootloader.
    
    As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated
    installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to
    be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and
    corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining
    stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
    
    Kubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Budgie 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu MATE 20.04.4 LTS,
    Lubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Kylin 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 20.04.4 LTS,
    and Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS are also now available. More details can be found
    in their individual release notes:
    
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours
    
    Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop,
    Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining
    flavours will be supported for 3 years. Additional security support is
    available with ESM (Extended Security Maintenance).
    

  • Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS Released, Available to Download – OMG! Ubuntu!

    The fourth point release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is available to download.

    Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS is a newly-spun installer image that contains all core security patches, bug fixes, and app updates released to Ubuntu 21.04 since the release of Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS back in August of last year.

    Periodic refreshes to the install media is a necessary task for a long-term support release as it cuts down on the number of post-install updates a user needs to install.

    If you use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and you install all issues updates as and when they’re releases you do not need to reinstall. You’re not missing out on anything. You already have everything included in these new images.

    Linux 5.13 is the big lure of this point release, carried over from October’s Ubuntu 21.10 release. Linux 5.13 introduces a bunch of tweaks including better EXT4 support, a new cooling driver for modern Intel CPUs, and better support for peripherals including the Apple Magic Mouse 2 and the GK6X mechanical keyboard.

    Other updates bundled with the new ISO include GNOME Shell 3.36.8, LibreOffice 6.4.7.2, and Mozilla Firefox 97.

  • Lubuntu 20.04.4 LTS Released! – Lubuntu

    Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 20.04.4 LTS has been released!

  • Ubuntu limits the console kernel log level even on servers

    We have a serial console server that we have connected to all of our important servers, and we have our servers set up so that the serial console is one of the places that Linux kernel messages go when they’re printed to the ‘console’. Since we log all of the console output, we want all kernel messages to reliably go to the (serial) console. Recently we discovered that our Ubuntu servers were not doing this. Instead, Ubuntu limits the console to log level ’4′ and higher priority messages, covering what syslog(2) describes as ‘warning’, ‘err’, ‘crit’, ‘alert’, and ‘emerg’, and excluding what it describes as ‘notice’, ‘info’, and ‘debug’. Unfortunately this is not what you want because kernel log levels are relatively meaningless.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Computer science education for what purpose? Some perspectives

  • Coding an MSP430 From the Linux Command Line

    The MSP430 is a 16bit microcontroller made by Texas Instruments. As with many other embedded platforms I’ve been doing some work with it recently. In particular I started with the MSP-EXP430F5529LP development board which is what this blog post will be about.

  • KIMdle: Sorta-Wordle for the KIM-1

    Wordle mania (trademark, probably, of the New York Times) continues. My wife and I, who bonded over word games and later got married because that’s how you pick a good life partner, play daily on a private instance, except that she’s 19 hours ahead so she has to be careful not to give out spoilers. Retro has gotten into the action. There are Wordle ports for Windows 3.1, Palm Pilots, Game Boys and at least three versions for the Commodore 64, such as this, this and this poop themed one called Turdle, ha ha ha.

    Still, however, while these ports ditch dependence on JavaScript and HTML, they still rely on other modern conveniences such as, you know, a screen, a keyboard, and multiple kilobytes of RAM.

    You see where I’m going with this.

  • Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus (or Any Compact Mac)

    Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I’ve occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.

    If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch here at my website.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • PPC and Mozilla

    • Chimera Linux Test ISOs Available For PPC64LE

      Chimera Linux, an upcoming Linux distro with a FreeBSD userland so you don’t have to choose, now has downloadable test images for ppc64le and x86_64. The little-endian Power images, which we care about here obviously, are available both as straight-up console (which can be redirected to the onboard serial port) and GNOME-or-console flavours, and require a POWER8 or higher. The GNOME spins (screenshot at right) use Wayland by default but also allow X11 with a bootloader configuration. There’s still a lot in flux, but it’s impressive the OS is this far along, and certainly offers something more substantial to the Power community than the usual distro dance. For more info, see the FAQ, or download ISO images from the download page.

    • Cameron Kaiser: Next update set available for TenFourFox

      In case you missed it, I’ve always maintained that the most logical upgrade path from a PowerPC-based computer is to … another PowerPC-based computer. SheepShaver, the well-known classic Mac OS emulator (which many of you use to run Classic apps in Leopard), is now ported to OpenPOWER, so you can run it on a POWER9-based workstation like the Raptor Talos II or Blackbird. Myself, with this port working, I’ve migrated almost entirely from QEMU to SheepShaver except for a few apps that still have compatibility issues. Come on in: Power ISA isn’t dead, not by a long shot.

    • Find that font! I must have that font! – Firefox Add-ons Blog

      You’re probably a digital designer or work in some publishing capacity (otherwise it would be pretty strange to have a fascination with fonts); and you appreciate the aesthetic power of exceptional typography.

      So what do you do when you encounter a wonderful font in the wild that you might want to use in your own design work? Well, if you have a font finder browser extension you can learn all about it within a couple mouse clicks. Here are some of our favorite font discovery extensions…

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Using MongoDB with Docker

    Docker is a powerful development platform that enables users to containerize software. These containers can be run on any machine, as well as in a public or private cloud. Thanks to Docker’s lightweight runtime and ability to run processes in isolation, multiple containers can run at the same time on the same VM or server.

  • How to use MySQL with Docker and Docker compose a beginners guide

    MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases of all time. Using MySQL with Docker and docker-compose makes it very easy and fast to test out any changes in any application using MySQL as the database. In this tutorial, we will detail how to use MySQL with Docker and docker-compose step-by-step keeping things easy to comprehend. Let’s get rolling!

  • CSV and data types

    CSV (RFC 4180) is quite good solution when we want to store or share relational data in a simple text format – both, human-readable and well supported by many existing applications and libraries. We have even ready-to-use GUI editors, so called spreadsheets (e.g. LibreOffice Calc). However, such simple formats have usually some drawbacks. CSV may contain only a single relation (table, sheet). This is not a big issue – we can use several files. A more serious problem is the absence of data types – in CSV, everything is just a text string. Thus it was impossible to have loss-less conversion to CSV and back.

• Programming/Development

  • Data Oriented Design, a.k.a. Lower Level Programming?

    I’m not sure if this title is clickbaity, but it certainly summarizes some of the impressions I wanted to write about.

    Yesterday I watched Andrew Kelley’s fun talk on Practical Data Oriented Design — do check it out! — and this post will contain some “spoilers” (as in, I will discuss his takeaways). I was drawn to the talk for two reasons: first, because I wanted to check if I was up-to-date on my programming TLAs, but also because he starts by talking about how he felt he had been stuck in a plateau as a programmer for the past decade — a feeling I’m sure many of us have felt at times! — and how this new knowledge got him out of it.

    The bulk of the talk, and his takeways on refactoring his Zig compiler to use Data Oriented Design, is on how to get better runtime performance by making data structures smaller, so they are easier on the cache.

  • Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, and HTTP

    The orange site is currently discussing an article about Server-Sent Events, especially as compared with WebSockets (and the emerging WebTransport). Both the article and discussion are well-informed, but I think they miss out on one aspect that has fairly deep implications.

  • Why I like Clojure

    This is somewhat of a response to Uncle Bob’s post of similar nature, which I would say has gotten a mixed to positive reception. I had planned a similar post a week or two before the release of his, but archived the idea upon reading his post. But after having read it over a couple of times I have now decided that I still have something meaningful to write. What follows are the purely subjective reasons for which I enjoy using Clojure. Some have criticised Bob for being very absolute and not giving up any screen estate for more nuanced viewpoints, something I will try to avoid.

  • A Short Treatise on Bugs

    First a term: by “treatise”, I’m not saying this newsletter is comprehensive, persuasive, or even correct. I’m using it to mean a very specific type of writing, one that presents an idea and its consequences without trying to convince people of that idea. I don’t even know if I’m convinced by the idea. I just want to see if I can communicate a specific idea, and if people understand it but reject it, I’m happy.1

  • Results without all of the brackets

    Yesterday, I put forth a bunch of API possibilities for the problem of needing to return a value but also indicating the lack of a value and being able to comment on why. In it, the notion of a “wrapper” around a string was presented, such that it might look like “Result<string>”, and those brackets started looking like a pain. There was also the possibility of having something like “ResultString”, but didn’t that open the door to having a bunch of code duplication?

  • Returning values and errors

    If you agree with the notion that you need to be able to tell the difference between the absence of a value and a value itself, then this has some impacts on the code you write. If you want to keep ‘em separated (so they can come out and play), then it gets you looking at your API designs in certain ways.

    These are my reactions to some of the ways a value can be returned (or not).

  • Python

    • Python’s Global Interpreter Lock is not there for Python programmers

      These days, I’ve come to feel that the Global Interpreter Lock is not really for Python programmers. Who the GIL is for is the authors of CPython packages that are written in C (or in general any compiled language). The GIL broadly allows authors of those packages to not implement any sort of locking in their own code, even when they’re manipulating C level data structures, because they’re guaranteed that their code will never be called concurrently or in parallel. This extends to the Python standard objects themselves, so that (in theory) Python dicts don’t need any sort of internal locks in order to avoid your CPython process dumping core or otherwise malfunctioning spectacularly. Concurrency only enters into your CPython extension if you explicitly release the GIL, and the rules of the CPython API make you re-take the GIL before doing much with interpreter state.

    • How To Read A CSV File In Python

      I first began to work with CSV files when taking the backend portion of my software engineering bootcamp curriculum. It wasn’t until I began to dive more into the data science portion of my continued learning that I began to use them on a regular basis.

    • Python support for regular expressions

      Regular expressions are a common feature of computer languages, especially higher-level languages like Ruby, Perl, Python, and others, for doing fairly sophisticated text-pattern matching. Some languages, including Perl, incorporate regular expressions into the language itself, while others have classes or libraries that come with the language installation. Python’s standard library has the re module, which provides facilities for working with regular expressions; as a recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing shows, though, that module has somewhat fallen by the wayside in recent times.

Riding the Blocktrain: Can Tech be Revolutionary?

Episode 8: Open Culture VOICES – Giovanna Fontenelle

Hi friends, we are back with episode eight of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Giovanna Fontenelle — she’s a journalist, historian, and Wikimedian. She’s also a master’s student in social history at the University of São Paulo. Giovanna works as a Program Officer, GLAM and Culture, at the Wikimedia Foundation. She’s also a member of Creative Commons Brasil (CCBR), Creative Commons Global Network, Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group, and ICOM Brazil. At CCBR, she coordinates the areas of Open GLAM and Wikimedia. Her current work activities are related to GLAM-Wiki, Open GLAM, linked open data, in addition to carrying out projects on diversity and knowledge equity.

Do, Then Think

Anyway, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to do then think. I can’t prove nor even properly conceptualize why you should start doing that. But I want to try and at least think about a few reasons why doing before thinking, or at least doing something that seems like doing before thinking, is so unreasonably ineffective.

Comic Sans is a good typeface, actually

In my ongoing, inadvertent quest to alienate myself from the design industry, I must now tell you all that Comic Sans is a good typeface.

Tools I’m thankful for

Software engineers sometimes have a reputation of being overly critical when it comes to tools and programming languages. The web is full of rants, heated debates and articles about what technology is “better” and which is “crap”. It was thus refreshing to read an post titled Software I’m thankful for, that shone a light on some pieces of software in a positive light. In honor of this article, I’ve decided to go through the same exercise.

Science

• My mistake about errors in the presentation of axiomatic set theory

  I found Schulte’s explanation convincing though. The !!A_\infty!! that Schulte suggested is not a mere conjunction of axioms. The usual form of !!A_\infty!! states that the infinite set !!S!! must include !!\varnothing!!, whatever that means. The rewritten form has the same content, but more explicit: !!S!! must include some element !!Z!! that has the emptiness property (!!\forall y. y\notin Z!!) that we want !!\varnothing!! to have.

  I am satisfied. I hereby recant the mistaken conclusion of that article.

Education

• Open Education Week 2022: Join our latest round of Open Education Lightning Talks

  What are lightning talks?

• Opinion | Florida GOP Is Using ‘Parental Rights’ to End Public Education as We Know It

  The Florida Legislature would have you think it invented parental rights last year when it passed the Parents’ Bill of Rights. It did not. Most of those rights have been in the books for decades. The ploy aims bigger: to continue the GOP’s assault and destruction of public education. Parents are being weaponized into mercenary service by a legislature that needs docile foot soldiers who have no clue they’re being manipulated. Making them look like heroes is part of the scam. The parental bill of rights is intended to bring out the worst in parents. It’s doing an awesome job.

• What a $500,000 grant proposal looks like

  A large part of being a professor at a research university is writing grant proposals.

  But it is hard to learn how to write proposals. Very few proposal documents are ever shared publicly. You basically have to ask colleagues to share theirs or give feedback on your drafts. You might get the chance to review proposals for a funding agency, which lets you see part of how the decisions are made. You do get feedback after submitting a proposal, though it comes many months later and can be hard to decipher.

  So I’m sharing my NSF CAREER proposal document (pdf) and why I wrote it the way I did.

Hardware

• An “unbusy” USB-C Port Doubles-up For JTAG Programming | Hackaday

  Board space is a premium on small circuit board designs, and [Alvaro] knows it. So instead of adding a separate programming port, he’s found a niche USB-C feature that lets him use the port that he’s already added both for its primary application and for programming the target microcontroller over JTAG. The result is that he no longer needs to worry about spending precious board space for a tiny programming port; the USB-C port timeshares for both!

  In a Twitter thread (Unrolled Link), [Alvaro] walks us through his discovery and progress towards an encapsulated solution. It turns out that the USB-C spec supports a “Debug-Accessory Mode” specification, where some pins are allowed to be repurposed if pins CC1 and CC2 are pulled up to Logic-1. Under these circumstances, the pin functions are released, and a JTAG programmer can step in to borrow them. To expose the port to a programmer, [Alvaro] cooked up a small breakout board with a USB-C plug and separate microcontroller populated on it.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• House of Pâté: Working Class Chef Revives French Cuisine

  At Maison Nico, I’ve met the French-born chef/ proprietor, Nicholas Delaroque and his American wife, Andrea. They introduced me to Paul Einbund, Maison Nico’s sommelier who doubles as the owner of The Morris, a San Francisco bistro named after Paul’s father. I think of Paul as Maison Nico’s “wine guy.” He’s the stellar master of the wine cellar housed in the basement at 710 Montgomery. “I go to Europe for wine as often as possible,” Paul tells me. “The last time I went was in November 2021. I’m itching to go again.”

  Centuries ago, pâtés originated with European peasants who made them from what we’d call “leftovers” and from scraps of pork, chicken and duck. Gradually, pâtés became luxury items prized by the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Now they’re on the menus of restaurants around the world and available to the masses in supermarkets. The history of the pâté is emblematic of the larger history of food, which reflects the movement of social and economic classes and cultural paradigms, though that’s not why I devour them. Still, the history adds to the appeal.

• Inside the Mind of a German Anti-Vaxxer

  A German anti-vaxxer called Rita Bock (not her real name), still hopes that Omicron will end the vaccination issue. Rita Bock is one of the unvaccinated 25% and she wants to stay that way. The conversation with Rita took place outside a local café. Rita lives in Findorff, a suburb of the north German port city of Bremen. She is in her mid-40s with two children and she used to work in the cultural sector, but plans to become a school teacher.

  After a quiet summer, Covid-19 cases have increased significantly in those weeks, not only in former East-Germany’s Saxony and Thuringia, but also in Bavaria. The lack of understanding towards people like Rita Bock remains a problem in Germany. There are lots of discussion on Germany’s ever-favourite political talk shows about the anti-vaccination issues. This extends to hate messages on (anti-)social media and covidiots – a merger of Covid-19 and idiots.

• Hong Kong Invokes Emergency Powers Amid Unprecedented COVID-19 Case Numbers

  For more than six months, Hong Kong detected zero imported COVID-19 cases; however, since the Lunar New Year, the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus has led to an exponential growth in the caseload, with clusters developing throughout the city.

Integrity/Availability

• Most Common Authentication Vulnerabilities

  The majority of threats related to the authentication process are associated with passwords and password-based authentication methods. But broken authentication also causes a significant amount of vulnerabilities. Broken authentication occurs when the implementation of the authentication process is flawed. Unfortunately, this is usually hard to discover, and can be more severe than the risks associated with passwords.

  This blog post explores the security vulnerabilities that are commonly found in the authentication and password process of a software application. It will also discuss common attack vectors that are used to exploit weak authentication processes.

• Proprietary

  • Deep dive into hack against Iranian state TV yields wiper malware, other custom tools [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Researchers with Check Point, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company, published the findings Friday based on what it said were files and other forensic evidence connected to the hack. Iranian officials acknowledged the attack at the time, saying that “disruptions” also occurred on another television channel and two radio stations, and called the hack “complex.” The breach occurred the day before Iran began its multi-day celebration of the 1979 revolution.

  • US says Russian [crackers] breached multiple DOD contractors

    The US government said today that Russian state-sponsored threat actors have targeted and breached multiple defense contractors between January 2020 and February 2022.

    “Compromised entities have included CDCs [cleared defense contractors] supporting the US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, US Space Force, and DoD and Intelligence programs,” US officials said in a joint security alert published today by the NSA, CISA, and the FBI.

  • How this Windows bug can put data stored in your PC at risk

    A new bug discovered on Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 21H2 is leaving data of few users unprotected. The bug has been discovered by Rudy Ooms and he has revealed information about the bug in the Call4Cloud blog. As per the blog, the operating systems are leaving data on a disk even after a factory reset.

    This means the data stored on your PC may still be accessible even if you sell it or give it away after resetting. The blog suggests that the bug may be specifically files on OneDrive that are locally synced with the PC.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Former Employees Say Mossad Members Dropped By NSO Officers To Run Off-The-Books Phone Hacks

        Oh, NSO Group, is there anything you won’t do? (And then clumsily deny later?). If I were the type to sigh about such things, I surely would. But that would indicate something between exasperation and surprise, which are emotions I don’t actually feel when bringing you this latest revelation about the NSO’s shady dealings.

      • Plaid is an evil nightmare product from Security Hell

        Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.

        The third-party service provider in question is the end-user’s bank.

      • Survey: Chilling effect of indiscriminate data retention causes wide-spread harms

        A representative YouGov survey conducted in nine EU countries confirms serious chilling effects of indiscriminately collecting information on the contacts and the location of the entire population. More than a third of the respondents (34%) would refrain from seeking counselling from a marriage counsellor, a psychotherapist or a rehab clinic by phone, mobile phone or email if they knew that their contact was being recorded. (Germany: 45% Austria: 42%, France: 38%, Belgium: 35%, The Netherlands: 34%, Sweden: 33%, Czech Republic: 26% and Spain: 13%)

      • WSJ: ‘Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers’

        I’m not saying this isn’t true for Krueger’s specific case, but a 10-fold increase in customer acquisition cost doesn’t sound right in general. It feels like we’re talking about Facebook’s business model having utterly collapsed. Their “bad” results last quarter showed an 8 percent year over year drop in profit, yes, and investors very much were spooked by that, yes — but they still reported over $10 billion in profit and almost $34 billion in revenue for the quarter.

        Putting aside the company’s claim to be shifting its attention to a “metaverse” future, it’s a mistake — or at least very premature — to speak in the past tense about Facebook as we know it.

      • Iranian Government-Sponsored MuddyWater Actors Conducting Malicious Cyber Operations | CISA

        CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Cyber Command Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK), and the National Security Agency (NSA) have issued a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing malicious cyber operations by Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors known as MuddyWater.

      • Confidentiality

        • The Cyber Social Contract: How to Rebuild Trust in a Digital World

        • LibreSSL 3.5.0 Released

          We have released LibreSSL 3.5.0, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is a development release for the 3.5.x branch, and we appreciate additional testing and feedback before the final release coming soon with OpenBSD 7.1.

Defence/Aggression

• Don’t Be Too Mad about MAD. Somehow, It’s Kept Us from a Nuclear War for 77 Years

  MAD is the apt acronym for the situation that obtains when two rival nations have enough nuclear weapons to reasonably threaten unacceptable nuclear devastation in retaliation for an initial nuclear strike on the other.

  There is, after all, a reason why no nuclear bomb has been exploded in a war during the 77 years since the second US operational nuclear bomb, the plutonium-based “Fat Boy,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

• Opinion | Nothing Can Justify This Flagrant Violation by Russia

  In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West now has no choice but to impose the toughest possible economic sanctions on Russia and to seek to unite as much of the world as possible in pressing Russia to end the attack. All scholars and analysts of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union must add their voices to the unqualified condemnation of Russia’s action, and their support for massive economic retaliation. 

• The Territorial Integrity of States vs. the Self-Determination of Peoples

  This recurring and inevitable conflict is evident in Russia’s diplomatic recognitions of the two separatist Russian-majority republics of the Donbass, in which, as in the former Soviet regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea, all diplomatically recognized as independent states by Russia (in Crimea’s case, prior to its reintegration into the Russian Federation), as well as in Kosovo, most of the people clearly wished to separate from the country to which they had been internationally recognized as belonging.

  No one should be surprised that the principle which any government will proclaim to be absolute — or at least to take precedence and be controlling — in any particular instance is the principle which is consistent with the result which it prefers in that instance.

• Nuclear Fallout and Baby Teeth: the Ongoing Relevance of a 1960s Study

  It meant kids returning home from school with flyers asking their parents to donate a tooth to Washington University.

  It meant articles and photos in newspapers, giving updates and appealing for more donations.

• If You Stayed Up All Night Worrying About Nuclear War, You’re Not Alone

• Human Rights Groups Warn Against Civilian Harm Amid Russian Attack on Ukraine

  Human rights groups responded with alarm to Russia’s military assault on Ukraine and called for the protection of civilians and adherence to international law as the invading army’s far-flung bombing campaign wreaks havoc in multiple cities and forces refugees to flee for their lives.

  “Our worst fears have been realized,” Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said Thursday in a statement. “After weeks of escalation, a Russian invasion that is likely to lead to the most horrific consequences for human lives and human rights has begun.”

• Opinion | The Ukrainian Crisis and the Case for the Abolition of the Nuclear Industry

  Escalating tensions between Ukraine, NATO and Russia caused after Russia recognised the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk has seen the Cold War spectre of nuclear war between Russia and the United States return to haunt public consciousness. While public opinion is divided on whether Russia plans to invade Ukraine proper, the fear that a nuclear war will erupt should the US or NATO intervene to assist the Ukrainians directly, by sending troops to Ukraine for example, is universal. 

• House Progressives Denounce Russian Aggression, Demand Diplomacy

  Progressive lawmakers in the U.S. House joined human rights organizations, anti-war groups, and thousands of Russians in vehemently condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine Thursday and called on the Biden administration to avoid further harm to Ukrainians as the U.S. responds.

  “The Progressive Caucus stands with the Ukrainian people and the international community in condemning the violent invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This war of aggression is a blatant violation of international law, despite Putin’s baseless justifications,” said Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), chair of the Caucus Peace and Security Task Force, in a statement.

• Russian CyberAttack Could Trigger Article 5 NATO Response, Says US Senator

  The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday elevated questions about whether a Russian cyberattack could trigger an Article 5 “collective defense” response from NATO and thus set off a broader war.

  “We are in totally unpredictable territory.”—Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)

• ‘Outrageous’: Sanders Rips Trump for Praising Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

  Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned former President Donald Trump on Thursday for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and citing it as a potential model for U.S. border policy.

  “It is outrageous, if unsurprising, that Trump would praise Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine as an act of ‘genius,’” Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday as Russian forces continued their assault on the neighboring country of 44 million, sparking fears of mass displacement, death, and potential nuclear catastrophe.

• Over 1,000 Russians Arrested for Protesting Putin’s Ukraine Invasion

  Critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-awaited invasion of Ukraine on Thursday joined open letters and took to Russia’s streets to protest the ongoing air and ground assault—resulting in more than 1,000 arrests.

  The protests within and beyond Russia came as Moscow claimed Russian strikes took out at least “74 ground facilities of Ukraine’s military infrastructure.”

• The Sacralization of War, American-Style

  For decades, I’ve been moved by Hanh’s witness and his writings, which shined such a light on the destructive consequences of our country’s militarism. As he said, “To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”

  We reap what we sow. It seems so obvious, but in these endless years of U.S. war-making across the globe, this simple truth seems to have escaped most Americans.

• Panic, Fear, Disbelief: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Could Prompt Humanitarian, Refugee Crisis

  We speak about the looming humanitarian crisis in Ukraine with Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently met with civilians on the frontlines in eastern Ukraine and urges world leaders to consider the human cost of war and work toward a ceasefire and diplomatic solution. “A cruel military onslaught is engulfing millions,” says Egeland. “It will lead to untold suffering in Ukraine but also refugee flows in the region.”

• UN Chief Calls on Putin to Stop ‘Unacceptable’ Russian Aggression

  In response to the Russian military’s invasion and bombing of Ukraine, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday reiterated his call for peace, pleading with the Kremlin to withdraw its troops and avoid a full-blown war that would have devastating consequences worldwide.

  “The decisions of the coming days will shape our world and directly affect the lives of millions upon millions of people.”

• “Truly Appalling”: Russia Attacks Ukraine as Putin Ignores Diplomatic Pleas and Launches Invasion

  Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting condemnation and the threat of new sanctions from the U.S. and allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the move early Thursday morning in Moscow as a “special military operation,” coming just days after Putin recognized two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states. The sound of explosions was reported across the country, and authorities have reported scores of deaths in the early hours of the attack. As Russian forces appear to have invaded from the north and headed for Kyiv, Putin may try to take over all of Ukraine and replace its government, says Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who adds, “The implications are truly, truly appalling.”

• Innate Warmongering: Seeing Conflict in Ukraine as Inevitable

  The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be.  On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war.  The standard reference?  The outbreak of the Second World War.  September 1939.  Poor Poland, and benighted UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

  The blind, the daft and the reality television viewer may have missed the programming point, but others could not have.  Russian forces are posed on the borders of Ukraine.  In the presses of Australasia, Europe and the United States, there is more talk of war than that of diplomacy.  There is the prospect of much death and many body bags.  Instead of running documentaries, statements or messages on how war might be averted, thereby yielding the floor to diplomacy, the message of conflict has become inexorably clear.

• The Inevitability Of Russia’s Attack On Ukraine

  [EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't typically use this space to weigh in on US foreign policy without connecting it somehow to whistleblowers, but as the establishment news media limits acceptable views to a very narrow spectrum of reactions, I felt the need to weigh in on Russia's attack on Ukraine.]***Wrong does not really cover it. I was naive. Naively, I convinced myself that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not launch a massive military offensive against all parts of Ukraine. I allowed myself to believe that the extent of an attack would be limited to seizing territory contested between Ukraine and the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. But Putin and Russian military officials opted to no longer show restraint in the face of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance. The most painful part may be that the “Russia plans,” which Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined before the United Nations Security Council, mostly unfolded. Russia levied multiple accusations against the Ukrainian government. A proclamation came in the form of recognizing the breakaway republics in the Donbas region. Not long after, Russian missiles and bombs were dropped. Communications were jammed. Cyber attacks were launched, and some Russian tanks and soldiers advanced on cities within Ukraine, including Kiev. Over many weeks, U.S. intelligence officials frequently claimed there would be an “imminent” attack, even providing dates. Those dates came and went and nothing happened. It seemed officials would be wrong, and yet as Russia presumably held off on invading, there was little space for diplomacy to avoid further conflict because of the constant pronouncements from Western countries that an attack was all but certain. The focus on intelligence claims, in other words, reinforced an escalation on the U.S.-NATO side in preparation for war with Russia and supplanted the efforts of countries like France and Germany to hold negotiations with leaders from Russia, Ukraine, and various NATO members. U.S. officials also kept Russia’s long-held grievances against NATO out of any so-called “good faith efforts” to avert war.While Russian military aircraft entered Ukrainian airspace, I shared an excerpt from a column that the distinguished U.S. foreign policymaker and historian George Kennan wrote in 1997, where he warned “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” (Credit is owed to journalist Spencer Ackerman for highlighting Kennan’s words days earlier.) “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking,” Kennan added. Everything Kennan feared appears to have occurred over the past 25 years. President Joe Biden has embraced Washington policymakers, who are aligned with the Pentagon and believe in “Great Power competition” with Russia (and China). This has restored a Cold War atmosphere.

  From the annexation of Crimea to the conflict in Syria to support for Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin’s foreign policy has been decidedly not to the liking of the Blob, or D.C.’s foreign policy establishment.

• Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Must Stand with Ukraine, Condemn Putin & Roll Back NATO to Restore Peace

  What does the Russian invasion of Ukraine mean for the rest of Europe? We speak with Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, about the failure of international bodies like the European Union and United Nations in preventing war. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres implored Russia to withdraw all troops in a speech immediately following Thursday’s attack, and the U.S. and allies are moving swiftly to impose sanctions as retaliation against the aggression. Varoufakis warns these threats are “like a pea shooter trying to stop a tank.” The only hope for a peaceful resolution is for NATO to declare Ukraine will not become a member, says Varoufakis.

• EU and UN Are Also Responsible for Failure to Prevent War in Ukraine

• Why a Biden-Putin Summit is Unlikely to De-Escalate Threats of War in Ukraine

  This is because the well-publicised prospect of an all-out military conflict – as opposed to a real shooting war actually breaking out – has advantages for both Russia and the United States.

  A credible threat to invade Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s most powerful political lever, aside from his arsenal of nuclear weapons. Western leaders trooped to Moscow as the Ukraine confrontation escalated over the last month in a way not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. A possible Putin-Biden summit is only the latest tribute to Russia’s partly-restored superpower status.

• As We Approach Armageddon

  Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Alas, too many non-union workers not only don’t admire or respect labor unions, they revile them.  They fear them.  They resent them.  They consider them irrelevant.  It’s as if America’s corporate masters had gathered all the underpaid, under-benefited non-union workers together in the same room, and done some hideous Manchurian Candidate brain-washing number on them, convincing them that they could trust the profit-motive more than they could trust a workers collective.

  As a college student, I worked part-time as a cook.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that, back in those days, it was the dream of every fry cook to get a job in a union manufacturing plant.  That was their life’s goal.  They didn’t dream of being millionaires or lottery winners or entrepreneurs; they dreamed of working in a big-time industrial setting where the wages, benefits, and working conditions were union-scale.

• Footage Shows Ukrainians Seek Shelter and Flee Country as Russia Attacks

  Photos and videos circulating on social media and news networks across the globe Thursday showed Ukrainian civilians using subway stations as emergency shelters, lining up to cross into Poland, and taking in the wreckage from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  “You wake up in a totally new reality at 5:00 am and you find out the world is no longer the safe place you imagined,” one Ukrainian woman told CNN’s Clarissa Ward in a crowd subway station. “We don’t want to be a part of Russia or any other country.”

• Opinion | From Putin in Ukraine to Bush in Iraq, Illegal Invasions Must Be Condemned

• These Are the American Right-Wingers Covering for Putin as Russia Invades Ukraine

  As Vladimir Putin ramps up his military offensive against Ukraine, not everyone is upset that the Russian bear is mauling its European neighbor.

  Across the American right, prominent figures from Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones to senate candidate J.D. Vance and CPAC star Tulsi Gabbard, have been cheering Putin on, broadcasting their disdain for Ukraine — or both.

• The technology of seeing and shooting your enemies

  The drones themselves were only a part of the curriculum. The rest looked at the command, control and communications systems that gathered information on what needed to be hit, decided priorities and brought them about. Satellite communications let tactical commanders see what the drones saw and feed them targets identified by other means. In Azerbaijan Turkish radar-spotting spy planes seem to have provided some spotting; Turkey’s ground-based KORAL system, which detects and jams enemy radars, helped the tank-busting drones over Idlib.

• „Migrant smuggling“ via Belarus: Europol wanted 455 [Internet] accounts deleted

  The EU police agency has reported at least 455 accounts on social media „promoting illegal immigration services from Belarus to Europe“ to internet companies for deletion. The information comes from a Europol press release from December last year and can now also be found in the current annual report of the Europol-based Centre against Migrant Smuggling (EMSC). The extent to which companies have complied with the reports is not known; Europol gives the number as „many“. Their compliance remains voluntary, even after the transposition deadline of the EU regulation on combating the spread of terrorist content online starts on 7 June.

  The deletion requests related to fleeing via Belarus were made in cooperation with Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) in The Hague, which is based at the anti-terrorism centre there. Shortly afterwards, EU governments agreed to extend its remit to include prohibited support for irregular migration. However, reports on „terrorism“ continue to make up the majority of the content objected to by Europol.

• Internet disruptions registered as Russia moves in on Ukraine

  Metrics show a loss of connectivity on the Triolan network, corroborating user reports of loss of fixed-line service. The disruption began amid reports of huge explosions in the region as Russia announces a military mobilization, and have intensified over the course of the day.

• Pentagon approves deployment of National Guard soldiers as fascist pro-Trump caravans set sights on Washington D.C.

  In the last week the Pentagon has received two different requests for National Guard support, the first coming last Wednesday from the District of Columbia (DC) Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The agency requested 400 members of the DC National Guard and 50 large tactical vehicles. Some of the unarmed soldiers and vehicles have already been deployed around Washington D.C., creating militarized traffic control points.

  The second request, for some 300 soldiers, came from the U.S. Capitol Police department this past Sunday. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved the deployment of soldiers from West Virginia, New Jersey and Vermont who will arrive “no later than February 26,” according to CBS News.

• Zelensky says Russian forces trying to seize Chernobyl nuclear plant

  Driving the news: “Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated … This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe,” Zelensky wrote in a tweet.

• Reported Fighting Near Chernobyl Sparks Fears of Nuclear Disaster

  The Ukrainians have reportedly lost control of the Chernobyl site after fighting broke out there.

• Russian Attack of Ukraine Underway: ‘Extremely Dangerous Moment in World History’

  Russia launched a far-reaching military attack on Ukraine on Thursday, invading the country through multiple border sites and bombing more than a dozen cities as civilians attempted to flee their homes in panic.

  One Ukrainian official reported that “hundreds” have likely been killed thus far as explosions and artillery fire were heard throughout the country, including in the capital Kyiv. Ukraine’s military said it shot down six Russian warplanes and one helicopter, but Russia denied that any of its aircraft were struck.

• Condemning Russia’s Invasion, Voices for Peace Say ‘War Is Not the Answer’

  Peace advocates across the globe reacted with horror and outrage Thursday to Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, a full-scale invasion that sparked anti-war demonstrations in Spain, Norway, Japan, and elsewhere—including downtown Moscow.

  “Diplomacy is the only way out of this madness. We urge our leaders to remember that.”

• In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Bryce Greene about Ukraine for the February 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Russia Invades Ukraine, Why?

• Many from Transcarpathian region of Ukraine have set out towards Hungary

  On Thursday morning Russia attacked Ukraine. At this news multiple countries announced that they are ready to receive Ukrainians fleeing the conflict. Poland is setting up reception centres near its border with Ukraine. At the same time, people in the Transcarpathian region (which has a significant-sized Hungarian national minority population) have stormed the shops and gas stations, and many have set out towards Hungary. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai.

• ‘Fantasy is not history’ Historian Victoria Smolkin assesses Putin’s claim that modern-day Ukraine is a ‘gift’ from the Bolsheviks

  On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered a 56-minute televised national address that ended with his announcement that Russia would recognize the independence of eastern Ukraine’s self-declared separatist “republics.” The president spent most of the speech, however, contesting Ukrainian statehood and arguing that the government in Kyiv owes its territory today to the supposed generosity of the Bolsheviks, particularly Vladimir Lenin. To understand the scholarly merits of Ukrainian and Soviet history as presented by Mr. Putin, Meduza turned to Dr. Victoria Smolkin, a historian at Wesleyan University who studies Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in the former Soviet Union. She is also the author of the 2018 book “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism.”

• The US Military: Planet Earth’s Greatest Enemy, with Abby Martin

• Hungarian politicians react to the news of Russia’s attack on Ukraine

  The leaders of the Hungarian opposition are standing with Ukraine and are criticizing the Hungarian government’s Russia-friendly politics. Here’s how they are responding to the news that early morning on Thursday, Russia attacked Ukraine. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai.

• “They attacked our country! How would you feel?”

• Russian forces in Ukraine seize Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

  Russian forces have seized the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a representative of the Ukrainian President’s Office confirmed on Thursday evening. 

• No to War: An editorial from Meduza

  Last night, Vladimir Putin announced the start of a “special military operation” in the Donbas. The Russian authorities often use these kinds of euphemisms to hide the obvious, calling their mansions “hotels,” dubbing members of the political opposition “extremists,” and labeling independent journalists “foreign agents.” We, however, believe in calling things what they are: Russia has begun a full-scale war against Ukraine.

Environment

• The Canadian Government Is Funding A Researcher Who Spent Years Denying Climate Science

  A University of Victoria economics professor who has spent years questioning whether global warming is “a real thing” is doing research supported by hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the Canadian government. 

  Gerrit Cornelis van Kooten holds the prestigious title of Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate Change, a distinction reserved for “outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields.”

• Opinion | A Planet on the Brink: China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)

  Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about the future development of flying cars, cryogenics, or even as-yet-unimaginable versions of space travel.

• As Winter Storms Descend, De-Icing Chemicals Are Threatening Freshwater Lakes

• The Callendar Effect: How a Mild-Mannered Biker Triggered a Huge Debate Over Humans’ Role in Climate Change…in the Early 20th Century

  Scientists had known for decades that carbon dioxide could trap heat and warm the planet. But Guy Callendar was the first to connect human activities to global warming.

  He showed that land temperatures had increased over the previous half-century, and he theorized that people were unwittingly raising Earth’s temperature by burning fossil fuels in furnaces, factories and even his beloved motorcycles.

• Energy

  • USPS Defies Biden’s Plea to Electrify Fleet, Finalizing Gas-Powered Truck Plan

  • Ahead of SOTU, 1,000+ Groups Demand Biden ‘Build Back Fossil Free’

    “Fully deliver on your climate and environmental justice promises by using your executive authority to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a resilient and affordable renewable energy system.”

    “The Biden administration cannot pin the blame for its climate failures on congressional inaction.”

  • At Point Reyes, Elk Have Become the Canaries in the Cattle Industry’s Dying Coal Mine

    With three co-plaintiffs, I assert that more than 150 tule elk died in Point Reyes National Seashore’s “tule elk reserve” from 2019 to 2020 — as a direct result of National Park Service mismanagement. We believe more than one-third of an entire tule elk herd was killed intentionally.

    Park Service officials not only ignored its mandate to protect this rare, wild, native California species inside a national park unit, but caused the deaths by confining the elk behind fences, on land lacking adequate food and water. The Park Service has become a de facto zookeeper refusing to adequately feed and water its captive animals. It did this before labeling the resulting deaths “natural.”

  • Total Cost of Ownership and [Cryptocurrency]

    On the other hand, the TCO of [cryptocurrency] and web3 technologies isn’t well understood (yet). But observers can start to piece together the ownership costs. Why do most decentralized web3 applications use Alchemy or Infura instead of running their own Ethereum or Bitcoin nodes to get transaction data? Why do so many users have custodial wallets with Coinbase instead of managing their own? Why do NFT buyers and sellers prefer a centralized service like OpenSea to direct transactions?

• Wildlife/Nature

  • “Conservation” Groups Cheer Recreation Over Wilderness Protection

• Overpopulation

  • US won’t deliver water to California farmers amid severe drought

    Federal officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation did not initially allocate any water to farmers and irrigation contractors in California for 2022 as the state enters its third year of a severe drought.

    The Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the Central Valley Project (CVP) — one of two major complexes of irrigations, dams and canals in California — explained in a news release that water levels in the CVP’s reservoir were below a historic average for this time of year, resulting in irrigation contractors north and south of the river Delta starting out with no water allocation this year.

Finance

• The American Political Process is Disconnected From Economic Reality

  A government that serves U.S. capitalism first and foremost borrowed trillions and enabled trillions more of new debt (corporate and household) that was used to fight long, losing wars and shore up a faltering economy. Now, after two terrible years of COVID plus an economic crash, with 3 million fewer jobs in 2022 than before COVID hit, a sharp inflation looms. Meanwhile, aided partly by profit-driven U.S. capitalists who moved their operations to China, the Asian country is now in a position where it is challenging U.S. capitalism globally.

  Above the troubled ground sit two old political parties, the GOP and the Democratic Party, which are formed by and are stuck in the old political economy before all these problems accumulated into crises. From 1820 to 1970, U.S. capitalism experienced cycles, but these cycles were securely anchored in a long-term upward trend. Real wages rose every decade, at least for white workers. Recessionary downturns only interrupted the long trend up (and even then not for long). The Republican Party and the Democratic Party rarely went beyond the routine rituals of orderly contests over who deserved the credit for economic growth and who deserved the blame for the interruptions during recessions.

• Opinion | Millionaires Don’t Pay Their Fair Share Into Social Security. Rick Scott Wants to Keep It That Way

  Today, people who are earning $1 million in 2022 stop contributing to Social Security. Those who are earning $2 million stopped contributing in January. Those earning $500,000 will stop contributing this spring.

• 9 in 10 Families Say Child Tax Payments “Made a Difference” in Their Finances

• ‘Every Asset They Have in US Will Be Frozen’: Biden Orders Massive Sanctions Against Russia

  Amid Moscow’s ongoing military attack on Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that Washington is imposing additional sanctions to limit exports to Russia, freeze assets held by powerful banks, and restrict the economic activities of oligarchs in the country.

  “The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity,” Biden said from the White House. “This is a premeditated attack.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• 2 Lawyers From Manhattan DA’s Office Abruptly Resign From Trump Case

• DeSantis Is Cracking Down on Immigration to Appeal to GOP Voters Ahead of 2024

• Bill Moyers: “Common Dreams is a must in my life and work.”

  Legendary broadcast journalist Bill Moyers has said: “We’ve got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country’s going to die of too many lies.”

  Moyers was asked what the corporate media means for our democracy…

• Should Trump-Republicans Fear Mike Pence…as a Libertarian Candidate?

  He ended this month’s influential Conservative Political Action Conference saying, “Who knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is most often mentioned as the emerging Trump primary opponent. Fifty-one percent of the nationwide Republican base view him favorably — up from 43 percent in mid-May.

  But the real threat to a future Trump-dominated Republican Party comes from his former Vice President Mike Pence, not DeSantis. That’s because Pence might just have enough sense to realize that he will not get the Republican nomination.

• In touch with Reality Winner

  Much has been said about what she did and why she did it — in court and in the press. But the story we learned was far more complicated. Nearly five years have passed since she sent a five-page classified document about Russian election meddling to The Intercept. She pleaded guilty, spent four years in a federal prison and has come out the other side.

  We sat down with her for a rare interview this month to try to answer two fundamental questions: did she do exceptionally grave damage to this country, as prosecutors alleged, or,as her supporters contend, was she trying to defend America’s democratic institutions from our adversaries? And how is it that a low-ranking 25-year-old National Security Agency contractor ended up with the longest sentence of any civilian leaker ever?

• For Whom The Whistle Blows: On polarization online and elsewhere

  At the time of writing, what could well be the biggest working class protest the western world has seen in decades looks to be coming to a close in Canada. Truckers have caused so much trouble for the Canadian government that the latter has basically declared martial law and instructed banks to seize the assets of ordinary citizens on mere whims. A spectacular measure, considering it comes from a bunch of people who ordinarily can’t get enough of praising tolerance, democracy, human rights charters, due process and even long-running protests. Yet, despite the trucker protest having gone on peacefully (if loudly) for weeks with no signs of statue toppling, molotov cocktail tossing, wanton destruction of property or other black bloc tactics, riot police has now been deployed to disperse the protesters.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Ukraine dismantles social media bot farm spreading “panic”

  The Ukrainian Security Service said on Tuesday that it shut down a bot farm that was spreading panic on social media and had also been used to send out bomb threats.

  Authorities said the bot farm was used to manage more than 18,000 bot accounts and that “organizers from Russia supervised the administrators of the bot farms.”

  Officials detained three suspects from the Lviv region.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As Expected, Trump’s Social Network Is Rapidly Banning Users It Doesn’t Like, Without Telling Them Why

  Earlier this week we took a look at Donald Trump and Devin Nunes’ Truth Social’s terms of service, noting that they — despite claiming that Section 230 should be “repealed” — had explicitly copied Section 230 into their terms of service. In the comments, one of our more reliably silly commenters, who inevitably insists that no website should ever moderate, and that “conservatives” are regularly removed for their political views on the major social networks (and refusing to provide any evidence to support his claims, because he cannot), insisted that Truth Social wouldn’t ban people for political speech, only for “obscenity.”

• Internet slowdown limits coverage of Zimbabwe opposition rally

  Network data from NetBlocks confirm a significant slowing of internet service for many users in Zimbabwe on Sunday 20 February 2022, as a major political opposition rally is held in Harare. The incident impacts multiple operators and has prevented live streaming from the Yellow Sunday demonstration by the Citizens Coalition For Change party, which seeks to unseat the ruling ZANU–PF.

• Ukraine [Internet] outages spark concerns of broader blackout

  Late Wednesday night, Russian troops invaded Ukrainian territories across the country’s northern, southern, and eastern borders, kicking off the largest troop mobilization in Europe in a generation. As Russian media attempts to cast the invasion as a response to Ukrainian aggression, on-the-ground reporting has played a crucial role in countering the propaganda, with footage coming from both professional journalists and amateurs on social media.

  But as the conflict intensifies, many civil society groups are increasingly concerned about the possibility of direct attacks on the country’s internet infrastructure. Russia has previously been linked to DDoS attacks against Ukrainian government sites — but a full blackout would mean going further, using physical or cyber weaponry to disable telecommunications infrastructure at the network level, and silencing Ukrainians in the process.

• Authorities in Russia warn against anti-war protests

  The NYT report of early anti-war protests in Russia linked to a video showing police in St. Petersburg outfitted in helmets and riot gear to break up protestors who had gathered in support of Ukraine. While reports like these are growing in number, social media is flooded with live reports from various protests around the area.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Your Man With the Petition: My Appeal Against Imprisonment for Journalism, 23 February

  Today I was the “petitioner” as my appeal was heard in Court No. 1 of the Court of Session by the nobile officium. This sounds like something from Harry Potter, perhaps an annex of the Ministry of Magic, but is actually the Scottish legal system’s appeal court of last resort.

• This Is the ‘Hacking’ Investigation Into Journalist Who Clicked ‘View Source’ on Government Website

  In another interview, police interrogated a computer scientist interviewed by Renaud. The officer who interviewed the computer scientist repeatedly asked if what Renaud did was “hacking.”

  Throughout the investigation, it’s obvious that Renaud did the best he could to warn the state government about the data exposure, and to limit the potential damage by not disclosing the existence of the vulnerability before it was patched. In the end, though, Renaud and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were put through a seemingly unpleasant criminal investigation for simply reporting the news.

• Seattle Paper Fills Gap for Chinese Diaspora Seeking Local News

  Forty years on, the paper’s weekly circulation is in the thousands, but its small size belies its significance as one of the few independent Chinese-language outlets to offer local news in the United States.

  Mandarin and other Chinese dialects combine to make up the third-most-common language in the U.S., with some 3.5 million speakers, according to a Census Bureau report.

  And while major papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal publish in Chinese, they typically don’t provide hyper-local news.

  That is where outlets like the Seattle Chinese Post and the New York-based website NYChinaRen come in.

Civil Rights/Policing

• San Francisco Cops Are Running Rape Victims’ DNA Through Criminal Databases Because What Even The Fuck

  There are things people expect the government to do. And then there are the things the government actually does. The government assumes many people are comfortable with things it does that are technically legal, but certainly not how the average government user expects the system to behave.

• Manchin Reportedly Backing Corporate-Friendly Michelle Childs for Supreme Court

• US Version of Canadian Trucker Convoy Gets Off to Embarrassing Start

• Sanders Hails Starbucks Organizers for Their “Courage” Against Union Busting

• In San Francisco, Hundreds of Homes for the Homeless Sit Vacant

  At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.

  During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”

• It’s time to call dolphinariums what they are, say opponents: prisons

  Opponents condemn them as prisons masquerading as refuges, but advocates say that they are teaching tools in the fight to conserve dolphins across the globe and that it’s not a question of where cetaceans are kept but the amount of training and enrichment they’re given for adequate mental stimulation. But at the heart of the issue is a simple ethical question: is it right to keep sentient creatures in captivity for our own purposes?

  “The short answer [for] many,” says Alaniz, “is no.”

• Child marriage in America has fallen sharply—but not far enough

  A push for legal reform is having some success. In recent years at least 27 states have passed laws to limit child marriages. In the past four years Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have all eliminated the exemptions that allow minors to marry.

  Yet resistance to such reforms remains, on both the right and the left. In 2017 an attempt to set a minimum marrying age of 18 in California (which has no lower age limit) failed after opposition from advocacy groups including the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union. The same year Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, vetoed a similar bill, saying it did not “comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this state”. More generally, lawmakers have failed to press for reform because the number of marrying minors has fallen dramatically. In 1960, 6.8% of American girls aged 15-17 were married; today less than 1% are.

• Canadian pension fund invests in ex-plantation privatizing Hawaii’s water

  But a new threat to the free flow of East Maui’s water has now emerged: one of Canada’s largest pension funds.

  The Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments)—which invests on behalf of employees in Canada’s federal public service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Forces, and the Reserve Force—recently invested $600 million in a major farming operation that is trying to secure a long-term lease on the same waters that locals say they have a constitutionally-protected right to access.

• Online Crackdown Threatens Christians in China

  Churches, seminaries and other ministries have been shaken by the government announcement on Dec. 20 that all religious information on the internet will be forbidden unless organizations obtain government permission – an option not open to unregistered house churches.

  Only the five government-approved religious organizations may apply for such permission: The Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM, representing officially-approved Protestant churches), the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the officially recognized organizations of Buddhism, Islam and Taosm.

• From bad to worse

  The amendment’s mala fide intent is clear: it seeks to protect any government or state functionary from criticism, and enables swift action against those who criticise or voice dissent, in a major attack on the right to freedom of speech and press freedom.

  The fact that this amendment was introduced as an ordinance, without any stakeholder consultation, no debate in parliament nor in any of its committees, and simply announced by the cabinet is highly undemocratic and unconstitutional. Under Article 89 of the Constitution, the president can pass an ordinance in times of emergency when parliament is not in session, but in this case, parliament was in session just two days before, and another session of the National Assembly was cancelled at the last minute. Also, there is no impending emergency that requires the government to start arresting, jailing and sentencing dissidents.

• An Elaborate Employment Con in the Internet Age – Schneier on Security

  Read the whole sad story. What’s amazing is how shallow all the fakery was, and how quickly it all unraveled once people started digging. But until there’s suspicion enough to dig, we take all of these things at face value. And in COVID times, there’s no face-to-face anything.

• Jobfished: the con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency – BBC News

  The Zoom call had about 40 people on it – or that’s what the people who had logged on thought. The all-staff meeting at the glamorous design agency had been called to welcome the growing company’s newest recruits. Its name was Madbird and its dynamic and inspirational boss, Ali Ayad, wanted everyone on the call to be ambitious hustlers – just like him.

  But what those who had turned on their cameras didn’t know was that some of the others in the meeting weren’t real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.

  The whole thing was fake – the real employees had been “jobfished”. The BBC has spent a year investigating what happened.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Comcast Continues To Bleed Olympics Viewers After Years Of Bumbling

  NBC (now Comcast NBC Universal) has enjoyed the rights to broadcast the US Olympics since 1998. In 2011, the company paid $4.4 billion for exclusive US broadcast rights to air the Olympics through 2020. In 2014, Comcast NBC Universal shelled out another $7.75 billion for the rights to broadcast the summer and winter Olympics in the US… until the year 2032.

Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • ‘Peaky Blinders’ Production Company Working With Bushmills On A Themed Whiskey

    Nearly a year ago, we talked about a trademark battle between Caryn Mandabach Productions, the company that produces Netflix’s Peaky Blinders hit show, and Sadler’s Brewhouse, a combined distillery that applied for a “Peaky Blinders” trademark for several spirits brands. Important to keep in mind is that “Peaky Blinders” isn’t some made up gang in a fictional story. That name was taken from very real history in England, as evidenced by the folks that own Sadler’s being descendants from one of the gang’s members. It’s also important to remember that television shows and alcohol are not the same marketplace when it comes to trademark law. Despite that, there has been a years-long dispute raging between Mandabach and Sadler’s.

• Copyrights

  • ACLU & EFF Step Up To Tell Court You Don’t Get To Expose An Anonymous Tweeter With A Sketchy Copyright Claim

    In November, we wrote about a very bizarre case in which someone was using a highly questionable copyright claim to try to identify an anonymous Twitter user with the username @CallMeMoneyBags. The account had made fun of various rich people, including a hedge fund billionaire named Brian Sheth. In some of those tweets, Money Bags posted images that appeared to be standard social media type images of a woman, and the account claimed that she was Sheth’s mistress. Some time later, an operation called Bayside Advisory LLC, that has very little other presence in the world, registered the copyright on those images, and sent a DMCA 512(h) subpoena to Twitter, seeking to identify the user.

  • Iconic Game Cracking Group CODEX Shuts Down

    Scene cracking group CODEX is officially shutting down. The iconic tag has taken the cracking world by storm over the past eight years. The group was able to crack even the toughest copy protections, which instilled fear in many game publishers and respect among many of its peers.

  • Thoughts on EU Data Act proposal

    As promised by the Commission, the Data Act is part of the broader EU digital strategy and 2030 digital objectives. The Commission is keen for the EU to retain its global leadership role, driving robust standards for a digital age. The Data Act is designed to rebalance control and power over data and hands more control back to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to more broadly unlock industrial data.

  • No, Creating An NFT Of The Video Of A Horrific Shooting Will Not Get It Removed From The Internet

    Andy Parker has experienced something that no one should ever have to go through: having a child murdered. Even worse, his daughter, Alison, was murdered on live TV, while she was doing a live news broadcast, as an ex-colleague shot her and the news station’s cameraman dead. It got a lot of news coverage, and you probably remember the story. Maybe you even watched the video (I avoided it on purpose, as I have no desire to see such a gruesome sight). Almost none of us can even fathom what that experience must be like, and I can completely understand how that has turned Parker into something of an activist. We wrote about him a year ago, when he appeared in a very weird and misleading 60 Minutes story attacking Section 230.