03.20.22

Tux Digital ☛ 190: Asahi Linux, Stream Deck for Linux, AMD FSR, Steam on ChromeOS, Windows Ads and more Linux news – TuxDigital

On this episode of This Week in Linux: Linux 5.17, Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon, Apps For Using Elgato Stream Deck In Linux, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0, Steam Coming To ChromeOS, Xbox Cloud Gaming For Steam Deck, Ubuntu Gets A New Logo, KDE’s Okular (PDF) Eco-Certified, herbstluftwm 0.9.4 Released, Netfilter Firewall Security Hole Found, Open Source False Advertising, Ads In Microsoft File Explorer?, My Video: How To Edit KDE Plasma Panels, Hannah!_Montana OS. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

Video ☛ Want To Update Your AppImages? Try These Tools! – Invidious

In my last video on AppImages, I got a lot of comments about how AppImages can’t be updated.

Going Linux #421 · Listener Feedback

We discuss Bill’s struggles with Windows and his venture into using Pop!_OS. We provide some ideas on adding a second drive to a Linux machine for dual-booting, running Windows programs without Windows, and problems with backups using rsync.

Video ☛ Nvidia Hackers Ban People Asking For Nvidia Leak – Invidious

A few weeks ago Lapsus claimed to hack Nvidia and take 1tb of data, they claimed they’d release it but since then nothing has happened, but they haven’t been sitting around leaving other companies alone.

GNU World Order 452

LWN ☛ The first Asahi Linux alpha release

The first alpha release of Asahi Linux, a distribution for Apple M1 silicon, has been released.

Linux For M1 Macs? First Alpha Release Announced for Asahi Linux – Slashdot

“Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs,” explains the project’s web site.

And now that first Asahi Linux alpha release is out — ready for testing on M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max machines (except Mac Studio)…

Make Use Of ☛ The 8 Best DAW Apps for Music Production on Linux

Like most audio engineers and musicians, you might find yourself being biased towards premium OSes like macOS and Windows and premium music tools like Cubase, FL Studio, and Ableton Live. However, the open-source world promises some extremely underappreciated and resourceful DAW and sound engineering tools.

Each of the tools mentioned below imbibes features native to these premium alternatives. Nonetheless, they let you create professional-grade sounds on Linux without spending a dime.

Read on to find out the best DAWs for Linux users.

Fish Shell ☛ fish 3.4.0 (released March 12, 2022)

The large number of forks relative to bash are due to fish’s insanely expensive default prompt, which is unchanged in my version. If we switch to a prompt comparable to bash’s (lame) default, the forks drop to 16 with trunk, 4 after our changes.

The large reduction in lstat() numbers is due to fish no longer needing to call ttyname() on OS X.

We’ve got some work to do to be as lean as bash, but we’re on the right track.

How to Print Directory Tree on Linux – Linux Nightly

This tutorial will explore several methods to print a directory tree from the command line on Linux.

The commands covered below are tree, find, ls, and du, which can all output a directory tree in Linux.

UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Octave on Ubuntu 20.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Octave on Ubuntu 20.04

Octave is software featuring a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations.

UNIX Cop ☛ How to Use Linux Strace Command

In this article we will learn How to Use Linux Strace Command. Strace is a powerful command line tool for debugging and trouble shooting programs in Linux OS. It captures and records all system calls made by a process and the signals received by the process.

UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Kate Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 – Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

In this guide, we will show you how to install Kate Editor on Ubuntu 20.04

Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) is a source code editor developed by the KDE free software community. It has been a part of KDE Software Compilation since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001. Intended for software developers, it features syntax highlighting, code folding, customizable layouts, regular expression support, and extensibility.

Kate is a source code editor that features syntax highlight for over 300 file formats with code folding rules.

ID Root ☛ How To Install Apache Guacamole on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Guacamole on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Guacamole is a clientless HTML5 web based remote desktop gateway supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH. It does not need any third-party plugins and clients to work. You can access your machine using a web-based gateway. It can be put behind a proxy server which allows you to access your servers from anywhere in the world.

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 Apache Guacamoleon remote desktop on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

ID Root ☛ How To Install SciTE on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SciTE on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SciTE is a SCIntilla-based text editor that was first created to demonstrate Scintilla but has since grown to be useful for developing and running programs that typically have simple configurations. It has a smaller memory footprint and works flawlessly on Ubuntu. The user interface is developed using GTK on Linux systems.

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

How To Fix “Username Is Not In The Sudoers File. This Incident Will Be Reported” In Ubuntu | Itsubuntu.com

How to Fix “Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported” in Ubuntu.

Are you having an error something like “Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported” in Ubuntu” then this post is for you as we will show you the reason behind the error and also solution to fix it.

How To Install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Along With Windows 11

The New Stack ☛ Quickly Install a Kubernetes Cluster with KubeKey – The New Stack

Kubernetes can be a real challenge to get up and running properly. This is especially so when you really want it done quickly so you can create a testing or development environment or just get familiar with how it works. You might not have time to spin up a multinode cluster every time you need one. When that’s the case, you can always turn to KubeKey, which makes it really easy to spin up a Kubernetes deployment for development/testing purposes.

Don’t think, however, that using KubeKey in this fashion is a means to deploy your apps and services at scale. What I’m going to show you is primarily for testing and development purposes, so don’t even think about this as a solution for production-ready apps or services.

H2S Media ☛ How to Install PrestaShop on Almalinux 8 – Linux Shout

As an open-source shopping cart, PrestaShop is completely free to download and use. However, this does not mean that PrestaShop is a zero-cost eCommerce solution. When you download the software, you have to pay for web hosting. You’ll also likely need to buy multiple (often expensive) modules to integrate different software into your website. If you have limited technical knowledge, you can consider investing in a web developer to help you through the difficult spots.

Make Use Of ☛ How to Fix the “Nessus Download Failed” Error on Linux

Are you having problems downloading Nessus on your computer or virtual machine? Do you see the error: “Nessus download failed. An unexpected error occurred while downloading plugins?”

Well, you’re in luck! You can easily fix this error in no time and start scanning vulnerabilities with Nessus on your Linux machine. Here’s how to do it.

Setup Secure SSH Access on Linux Servers using Teleport – kifarunix.com

In this tutorial, you will learn how to setup secure SSH access on Linux servers using Teleport. In our previous guide, we learnt how to install and setup Teleport access plan on Linux, specifically Ubuntu 20.04 system. We will then proceed to see how you can be able to setup secure SSH access on Linux servers using Teleport.

Techdirt ☛ Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Obstruction Method

Last week, to kick off our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we took a look at Best Adaptation winner The Wall Across The River. Today, we move on to the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: The Obstruction Method by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games.

GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Deck hits over 1,500 titles either Verified or Playable | GamingOnLinux

The list of titles going through Steam Deck Verified continues to grow, with the total now over 1,500! A pretty great number but as always, it’s just a number. What we want to see is quality, and to have Deck Verified be accurate on the ratings.

Video ☛ Steam Deck Has A TON of Great Apps In Desktop Mode! – Invidious

Video ☛ Can you use the STEAM DECK as a “REAL” PC? – Invidious

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Rendering Text with Glyphy – Zen and the Art of GNOME

  HarfBuzz 4.0 was recently released and it gained the ability to draw shapes using hb_draw(). Recently Behdad updated Glyphy to use that new HarfBuzz API which allows us to draw fonts on the GPU without involving FreeType.

  I created a branch and along with Matthias we taught GTK’s OpenGL renderer to use Glyphy to store size-independent descriptions of glyphs in GL texture atlases which are drawn with shaders. All the magic really comes from Glyphy, so this was largely an integration project.

  Contrast this with how things worked previously, which is to render the glyph for a particular size and x/y shift on the CPU and upload that to a texture atlas. The glyph is then drawn by using the coloring shader to apply color while copying into place. This has all sorts of drawbacks like pixel alignment restrictions and needing a copy of every glyph at every size and shift you need to render in the frame in a texture atlas (which can be reused across frames). Just as an example, if you wanted to animate the size of some text, you’d have a pretty expensive operation every frame and still run into perceived jitter as you align to pixel boundaries each frame.

New Releases

• Barry Kauler ☛ OE and woofQ tarballs for EasyOS 3.4.3

  Here is the OpenEmbedded project tarball used to compile “revision-8″ packages used in EasyOS 3.4.3

BSD

• Undeadly ☛ Testing parallel forwarding

  Many thanks to Hrvoje for the write-up and for doing all these tests, and of course to Alexander Bluhm, Alexandr Nedvedicky and others developers for working on parallelizing the network stack.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Gothaer future-proofs its application infrastructure with SUSE Rancher | SUSE Communities

  “To accelerate the pace of digital transformation, we need to remove operational complexity and ensure consistent, automated and secure processes for developing and deploying containerized applications. That’s exactly what SUSE Rancher is helping us do today.” Andreas Rother, Team Leader Pipeline and Container Services, Gothaer Systems GmbH.

  [...]

  In 2016 the decision was made to migrate to a container-based architecture with a view to saving money on software licensing costs and being able to implement new IT requirements faster, especially applications and services that improved efficiency while providing optimal user experience.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Systemd Free ☛ Is r/linux a cult of deranged hallucinogen addicts? Are they dangerous? | systemd-free linux community

  If you search reddit for r/linux and systemd you will find many more threads in the “removed” section than on the visible part. Come to think about it, if one crossposted the removed threads into a new board called r/linux-removed it may become a much more interesting board for discussion than the temple of doom, r/linux.

  But the above is one of those rare occasions where systemd is in the title of a thread in r/linux and was not removed. Why? Basically because anyone wishing to voice some form of criticism over the “holly cow” of industrial/corporate/state-security-agencies linux, gets the ax permanently and can not speak. But how can they discuss the holly cow as deranged worshipers between themselves?

  The thread/article and discussion is probably more interesting from a psychoanalytic perspective (psychological/psychiatric interest) than a systemd administration perspective.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 Switching to GNOME 42, with One Click Full Dark / Light, Accent Colors | UbuntuHandbook

  The development build of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS finally shifts to GNOME 42 (in Beta now) in recent update with many visible changes!

  Firstly, the default wallpaper ‘warty-final-ubuntu.png‘ revealed. It’s no longer the old Ubuntu 21.10 wallpaper, but the brand new one…

Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly Update (11/2022): A RISC-V handheld, Fedora on the PinePhone Pro, Precursor shipping and new releases of SailfishOS, libhandy and libadwaita

Eight days of news, and still not a lot that’s super Linux on Mobile specific. At least there’s been another Ubuntu Touch Q&A, another postmarketOS Service Pack, and it looks like that really need to find the time to have a look at Capyloon.

Open Hardware/Modding

• [Old] GUIDE: Step by Step 17″ iMac G4 TMDS to DVI Conversion – 800mhz and 1/1.25 Ghz Necks Completed

  This is a step-by-step detailing the process of converting a 17″ iMac G4 to a useable LCD with a video cable that terminates with a DVI connector in the base. I will focus only on the video connector and converting this LCD to be DVI compatible. Please note that I am not starting from a complete machine. I have several necks, empty domes/bases, and LCDs that I have obtained through various sources as individual parts. So my tutorial will not focus on the general disassembly and reassembly, but on the wiring and powering of the LCD.

  For those who have not followed my blog, please be aware that there are two versions of the wires in the 17″ Mac G4 (Two different necks). One version is for the 800mhz iMac, the other is for either the 1 or 1.25ghz iMac. If you use the wrong one – the colors will not match up. While the wires connect the same things, apple changed the color of some of the wires. In addition, for the 1/1.25Ghz I have included a video tutorial to give another perspective.

• Hackaday ☛ Clockwork DevTerm R-01 Takes RISC-V Out For A Spin

  If you’re anything like us you’ve been keeping a close eye on the development of RISC-V: an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that’s been threatening to change the computing status quo for what seems like forever. From its humble beginnings as a teaching tool in Berkeley’s Parallel Computing Lab in 2010, it’s popped up in various development boards and gadgets from time to time. It even showed up in the 2019 Hackaday Supercon badge, albeit in FPGA form. But getting your hands on an actual RISC-V computer has been another story entirely. Until now, that is.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• 3 Ways to Disable Floating Notification Bubbles on Android

• Gadgets Now ☛ How to get transcript of YouTube video on Android smartphone

• Tech Times ☛ Gmail Hack 2022: How to Backup Your Text Messages from Your Android Phone to Gmail | Tech Times

• Make Use Of ☛ What Is “com.google.android.packageinstaller” and Is It Safe?

• Notebook Check ☛ Motorola updates the Moto G30 to Android 12 – NotebookCheck.net News

• Android Police ☛ The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is getting a new Android 12L release, but it’s not the stable version

• Gizmo China ☛ LG Velvet gets the promised Android 12 update in Korea

• Phone Arena ☛ Delete these Android apps before they slowly bankrupt you – PhoneArena

• India ☛ Samsung Galaxy S22 Review: Android Flagship That Makes Most Sense

• The 9 Best Phones for Custom Roms 2022 (Easy To Root) – DekiSoft

  With the passage of time, Android smartphones have gained a lot of popularity. Today each brand with a good repute becomes skilled at making a good device. Flagships are seeing a new breakthrough in camera and display capabilities whereas the mid-tier and entry-level phone devices are getting good as compared to those in the same segment some years back. This list contains the top-of-the-range 9 best phones for custom Roms. Upon the enthusiast, these are root friendly, can be easily modded and run LineageOS.

• The 5 Best Linux Smartphones of 2022 – Linux on the Go – DekiSoft

  Today our data is becoming vulnerable each day. This is attributed to how some operating systems are not giving enough attention to privacy or malware, phishing, and viruses which with time are becoming powerful.

  We need to opt for OS which provides the most privacy features and you know that all of the base, backend, and source code is open source. This is why we have recommended some of the best Linux smartphones that you can choose.

FSF

• FSF ☛ Day one reflections for LibrePlanet: “Living Liberation”

  Today marked the first of two days of events and talks for the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) annual conference, LibrePlanet. This year’s theme is “Living Liberation,” and the talks and activities are centered around how to live a more liberated life in the modern world.
  To start the conference off, campaigns manager, Greg Farough, gave opening remarks, introduced the day’s events and other activities outside of the main conference, and asked participants to report which countries they were attending from.

  Of the countries represented, we heard from: Brazil, Canada, Finland, Haiti, Iran, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, (various states within the) United States, and many more.

• FSF ☛ Free Software Awards winners announced: SecuRepairs, Protesilaos Stavrou, Paul Eggert

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the recipients of the 2021 Free Software Awards, which are given annually at the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference to groups and individuals in the free software community who have made significant contributions to the cause for software freedom. This year’s recipients of the awards are Paul Eggert, Protesilaos Stavrou, and SecuRepairs. As the ceremony was conducted virtually this year, each winner selected the person they wished to present them the award.

  The winners in three categories, each recognizing exemplary achievements in the field of free software, are SecuRepairs, Paul Eggert, and Protesilaos Stavrou.

• GNU Projects

  • GNUnet 0.16.2

    This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.16.1.

Programming/Development

• RE: The Static File Startup

  A company spent months re-inventing cron. The stated goal of this system was to free it from the constraints of a 24-hour day, for example, should it ever need to operate off-planet. For bonus points, the new units of time and their intervals were codified into an elaborate type system which compiled away. This meant that the system inputs (hand written JSON) were never validated against the type system.

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl is now 24 | daniel.haxx.se

  On March 20, 2022 curl turns 24 years old.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Developer Velocity

  Developer velocity isn’t the whole of developer productivity. I think of developer velocity as post-commit workflow. Once a feature or change set is ready, how much “red tape” is there to get those changes out to customers? But “red tape” isn’t just bureaucratic with software.

• Python

  • [Old] Programming with Python Scripts

    A Python macro is a function within a .py file, identified as a module. Unlike LibreOffice Basic and its dozen of UNO objects functions or services, Python macros use the XSCRIPTCONTEXT UNO single object, shared with JavaScript and BeanShell. The g_exportedScripts global tuple explicitly lists selectable macros from a module. Python modules hold autonomous code logic, and are independent from one another.

  • [Old] Document Foundation ☛ Python Guide – Introduction

    LibreOffice allows the users to write macros in several interpreted languages, one of which is Python. PyUNO is the component that gives users access to the application programming interface (API hereinafter by its acronym Application Programming Interface) of LibreOffice with Python.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Our limited use of Python’s cgi module

    Some of our CGIs are purely informational; they present some dynamic information on a web page, and don’t take any parameters or otherwise particularly interact with people. These CGIs tend to use cgitb so that if they have bugs, we have some hope of catching things. When these CGIs were written, cgitb was the easy way to do something, but these days I would log tracebacks to syslog using my good way to format them.

• Rust

  • Managing Rust crates in private Git repositories

    Rust is all hot these days, and it is indeed a nice language to work with. In this blog post, I take a look at a small challenge: how to host private crates in the form of Git repositories, making them easily available both to developers and CI/CD systems.

Creative Commons ☛ Better Internet Series: Architecture and Open Standards

This article is the third of five detailing breakout sessions from the 2021 Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit about “creating a better internet.” The Summit was an opportune platform for these conversations, as it drew over 1600 attendees from over 90 countries. Attendees included organizations, activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, and technologists.

This article summarizes conversations where participants were asked how they would envision and realize a better internet as it relates to architecture and open standards. Other articles in the series include Access to Information and Knowledge, Misinformation, and Platformization and Choice.

Library Case ☛ What the Ukrainian and Russian library associations have said

In a previous blogpost, dated February 25, the day after Russia started its ongoing war on Ukraine, I’ve been thinking about librarians» attitudes to war. This I then followed up with quotations from statements published by IFLA, ALA, EBLIDA and the Nordic National Libraries and my comments. But what have the Ukrainian and Russian library associations said about the ongoing war between their countries?

Hackaday ☛ Learn All About Writing A Published Technical Book, From Idea To Print

Ever wondered what, exactly, goes into creating a technical book? If you’d like to know the steps that bring a book from idea to publication, [Sara Robinson] tells all about it as she explains what went into co-authoring O’Reilly’s Machine Learning Design Patterns.

Hackaday ☛ World’s Smallest Hair Straightener For Fixing Old LCD Ribbons

[Stephen] writes to us about an LCD repair tool he has created. We’ve all seen old devices with monochrome LCDs connected by thin film, where connections between the PCB and the LCD have deteriorated and the LCD would no longer show parts of the picture. This is a connection heating gadget, that [Stephen] affectionately dubs as World’s Smallest Hair Straightener, made specifically to bring cool old tech back to life.

Hackaday ☛ Reliving Second-Hand Nostalgia With The PDP-11

Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is something like required reading for the hacker subculture, and Hackaday by extension. The first section of that book is all about early hackers and their adventures with the PDP-1 at MIT. The PDP-11 has earned a special place in hacker history for being the minicomputer used to write the first Unix. We’re always amazed to find how many of our readers have stories about programming PDP microcomputers, usually the PDP-11. Those of us young enough to have missed out on the PDP experience often have something of a second-hand nostalgia for the old machines. An exceptionally detailed article over at Ars Technica promises to get us started reliving the glory days, even if it is for the first time.

Hackaday ☛ These Mind-Controlled Cat Ears Move With Your Mood

As any cat owner will tell you, a cat’s ears are great indicators of its state of mind: pointed forward if they want your attention, turned backwards if they’re angry, and folded down flat when they’re afraid. Humans sometimes don cat ear headbands as a fashion statement, but sitting motionless those ears are more likely to confuse a cat than to provide any meaningful communication.

Hackaday ☛ Impedance Mismatch

There are a few classic physics problems that it can really help to have a mental map of. One is, of course, wave propagation. From big-wave surfing, through loudspeaker positioning, to quantum mechanics, having an intuition for the basic dynamics of constructive and destructive interference is key. Total energy of a system, and how it splits and trades between kinetic and potential, is another.

Hackaday ☛ Sensor Playground Keeps Track Of Indoor Air Quality Through The Cloud

When [tdw] wasn’t feeling well one day, his wife suggested that it might be due to poor air quality in their home. While an ordinary person could have simply opened a window after hearing such an idea, [tdw] instead showed his true hacker spirit and set about measuring the indoor air quality. He began by designing a simple PCB to measure CO2 and volatile organic compound (VOC) levels, but eventually broadened his scope to end up with the Sensor Playground: a plug-and-play platform to read out various sensors and store the results in the cloud.

The Register UK ☛ Rising wafer prices lift revenues at chip foundries • The Register

Contract chip manufacturers grew revenue in the fourth quarter of last calendar year largely by raising the prices of wafers in the face of overloaded factories as the semiconductor industry continued its breakneck pace.

That’s according to the latest foundry report published Monday by research firm TrendForce, which said the total revenue of the world’s top 10 foundries reached a record of nearly $29.6bn in the fourth quarter of 2021. That marks an 8.3 percent increase from the previous quarter.

“When the production capacity is severely undersupplied, foundries are able to choose to manufacture the product at a higher price, so the overall [average selling price] of the company will go up when they produce more expensive wafers,” Joanne Chiao, senior analyst at TrendForce, told The Register.

As for whether the increased wafer prices impact the prices of chips, Chiao said that is up to the foundry customers.

CubicleNate ☛ Repairing TheJoystick for TheC64 – CubicleNate’s Techpad

My vintage gaming fun came to a quick pause when the stick part of my Joystick decided to detach itself from the base of this “human-machine interface device.” At first very upset but then I thought, “I’m sure I can fix this.” Sure enough, I was able to and although I didn’t do it because I didn’t have any on hand. I would recommend you get some Loctite to ensure the screw does not become lose on TheJoystick in the future.

CNX Software ☛ Avnet survey shows chip shortage impacts most designs, increases engineers workload – CNX Software

Avnet has just released a survey of global engineers asking them how they were coping with the global chip shortage, longer lead times, and the impact on product design. Note that most of the 530 respondents are from EMEA (56%), and the US (31%), while only 10% are in Asia, and 2% are in Japan (I understand Asia means ex-Japan here), so it may not perfectly reflect the global situation, but the results are interesting nonetheless.

NewYorkTimes ☛ $87.50 for 3 Minutes: Inside the Hot Market for Videos of Idling Trucks

This is a scene from the city’s benign-sounding but often raucous Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door.

VOA News ☛ War in Ukraine Will Worsen Hunger, UN Agency Says

The Black Sea basin is known as Europe’s breadbasket. It is one of the most important grain and agricultural production areas and a global grain trade route. Russian forces reportedly have kept up to 300 ships from leaving the Black Sea.

Kern says food and fuel prices are soaring, putting millions at risk of hunger in Ukraine and in particularly vulnerable Middle Eastern and North African countries.

“The consequences of the conflict in Ukraine are radiating outwards, triggering a wave of collateral hunger across the globe. Russia and Ukraine alone account for almost 30% of global wheat trade. Those shipments are on hold now. Ukraine is also, is the No. 5, actually, producer and exporter of wheat. So, that has a big impact,” Kern said.

Proprietary

• The Trouble with PowerPoint

• India Times ☛ Microsoft Edge vulnerable to attacks: MeitY’s CERT-In issues warning for browser users, advisory to stay safe

  The advisory further reveals that “these vulnerabilities exist in Microsoft Edge due to Heap buffer overflow in ANGLE, use-after-free in Cast UI, use after free in Omnibox, out of bounds read in ANGLE, use after free in Views, use-after-free in WebShare, type confusion in Blink Layout, use-after-free in Media, out of bounds memory access in Mojo, use-after-free in MediaStream, insufficient policy enforcement in Installer, heap buffer overflow in Cast UI, inappropriate implementation in HTML parser, inappropriate implementation in full screen mode, inappropriate implementation in Permissions, use-after-free in Browser Switcher, data leak in Canvas, inappropriate implementation in Autofill, use-after-free in Chrome OS Shell and out of bounds memory access in WebXR.”

• Security Week ☛ Most Hood Plants Up After Cyber ‘Event,’ Schools Concerned [iophk: Windows TCO]

  Hood is a main dairy supplier in New England. In Peterborough, New Hampshire, the superintendent at the ConVal School District said it will be affected by anticipated milk shortages caused by the cyberattck.

  Superintendent Kimberly Rizzo Saunders said in a statement Wednesday it has been made aware by its foodservice vendor that “Hood anticipates significant impacts in its ordering and delivery processes throughout the next week.”

• NewYorkTimes ☛ Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine [iophk: Windows TCO]

  First, some cyberattacks are meant to be visible and, in effect, distract from the stealthier and more dangerous sabotage. On Feb. 15 and 16, Ukrainian banks suffered major denial-of-service attacks, meaning their websites were rendered inaccessible. Western authorities swiftly attributed the attacks to Russia’s intelligence service, and Google is now helping protect 150 websites in Ukraine from such attacks. The Anonymous collective declared cyberwar against the Russian government soon after the attack and obtained a trove of data from a German subsidiary of Rosneft, a major Russian state-owned oil firm. Ukraine’s besieged government has embraced the idea of a crowdsourced I.T. army.

  But these attacks and the decentralized volunteerism are simply a distraction. In fact, often the most damaging cyberoperations are covert and deniable by design. In the heat of war, it’s harder to keep track of who is conducting what attack on whom, especially when it is advantageous to both victim and perpetrator to keep the details concealed.

• RTL ☛ Kanye West banned from posting on Instagram for 24 hours

  Instagram said Thursday it had blocked rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, from using his account for 24 hours for violating the social network’s harassment policy amid his acrimonious divorce from reality star Kim Kardashian.

  The 44-year-old megastar has been in the spotlight for several weeks over his attacks on comedian Pete Davidson, who is dating Kardashian.

• MIT Technology Review ☛ Inside the plan to fix America’s never-ending cybersecurity failures [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The 2021 hack of Colonial Pipeline, the biggest fuel pipeline in the United States, ended with thousands of panicked Americans hoarding gas and a fuel shortage across the eastern seaboard. Basic cybersecurity failures let the hackers in, and then the company made the unilateral decision to pay a $5 million ransom and shut down much of the east coast’s fuel supply without consulting the US government until it was time to clean up the mess.

• Data Breaches ☛ Leaked ransomware documents show Conti helping Putin from the shadows [iophk: Windows TCO]

  A cache of 60,000 leaked chat messages and files from the notorious Conti ransomware group provides glimpses of how the criminal gang is well connected within Russia. The documents, reviewed by WIRED and first published online at the end of February by an anonymous Ukrainian cybersecurity researcher who infiltrated the group, show how Conti operates on a daily basis and its crypto ambitions. They likely further reveal how Conti members have connections to the Federal Security Service (FSB) and an acute awareness of the operations of Russia’s government-backed military hackers.

• The Verge ☛ NRA confirms last year’s ransomware attack

  The National Rifle Association (NRA) has confirmed it was the subject of a ransomware attack that took place last October, according to a report from Gizmodo.

  In a filing to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the organization’s political action committee (PAC), explains the NRA experienced a ransomware attack on October 20th, 2021 that brought its “network offline for two weeks.” Since the NRA wasn’t “able to access email or network files until the second week of November,” the NRA failed to report nearly $2,500 worth of donations, which was the reason for the filing.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NewYorkTimes ☛ A judge throws out D.C.’s attempt to name Zuckerberg in a privacy lawsuit.

      A judge on Tuesday threw out motions by the attorney general of the District of Columbia to name Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, as a defendant in a privacy lawsuit.

      Judge Maurice A. Ross of Superior Court of the District of Columbia said in a hearing that Washington’s attorney general, Karl Racine, had waited too long to try to amend the lawsuit to name Mr. Zuckerberg as a defendant, a move that sought to hold him personally accountable.

    • CNET ☛ Best VPN for Your Smart TV

      Televisions have come a long way since the clunky, fuzzy-pictured sets of the early days. They’ve evolved to become the wafer-thin ultra-HD smart TVs a lot of us have hanging on our walls today. However, every smart TV is also connected to the internet, and that means it’s transmitting all sorts of data while you’re streaming your favorite shows and movies. Nowadays, if you want to protect your privacy while watching TV, it’s a good idea to use a VPN, or virtual private network.

    • Meduza ☛ Meduza’s readers on how Russia’s Instagram ban affects their everyday lives

      It’s been two days since Roskomnadzor blocked Instagram in Russia. The agency, which is in charge of telecommunications control and censorship, believes that the social network is filled with “calls to commit violent actions against Russian citizens and military personnel.” Russia’s Attorney General has called for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to be blacklisted as an “extremist organization.” At present, the social network is still accessible through VPN, but no one knows if circumventing the block could lead to criminal charges. We asked Meduza readers about what Instagram has meant to them. Here are their answers.

    • CNET ☛ Facebook Locks People Out of Accounts for Not Activating Protect Feature

      If you’re wondering why you can’t get into your Facebook account today, the social media giant is locking out some users who were required to activate Facebook Protect with two-factor authentication by the March 17 deadline.

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Ukraine Has Won the War—Now Is the Time for Diplomacy

The Gray Zone ☛ Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

Common Dreams ☛ Russian Forces Strike Deeper Into Mariupol, Launch Devastating Strike on Mykolaiv Barracks

Russian forces ramped up attacks across Ukraine Saturday, pushing deeper into besieged Mariupol, while the southern city of Mykolaiv reeled from a deadly rocket attack that killed dozens of Ukrainian troops sleeping in their barracks.

“There are tanks… and artillery shelling, and all kinds of weapons fired in the area. There is no city center left.”

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why ‘Doing Something’ for Ukraine—Even With Best Intentions—Might Make Things Worse

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s appeal to Congress this week was direct and heart-rending: “This is a terror that Europe has not seen for 80 years, and we are asking for a reply, for an answer to this terror from the whole world. Is this a lot to ask for?”  

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Putin Aggression Leads to Surge in Electrical Vehicle Progress in Europe

Sean Goulding Carroll at Euractiv.com asks if Europe can defund the Russian war machine by turning to electric vehicles. It should be noted that in part because of the EU carbon tax, already 29% of new car purchases in Europe last December were EVs or plug-in hybrids, so consumers are already stampeding in that direction. Putin may just have given the industry a big lift. While EV prices have jumped momentarily because of the crisis, it may cause governments to give more incentives over the medium term to escape dependence on Russia.

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | War and Warring Thoughts: Reasons to Rebel

What is the meaning of solidarity in times of war? How do we understand anti-imperialism while accompanying the victims of empire? Who fears dissent? What is a reason to rebel against both war and warring thoughts?

Common Dreams ☛ UNICEF Urges Stronger Protections as 1.5 Million Ukrainian Children Flee War

The United Nations children’s agency said Saturday that more than 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine since Russian forces invaded, while calling on the international community to protect child refugees facing a “heightened risk of trafficking and exploitation.”

“With more than 1.5 million children having fled Ukraine as refugees since February 24, and countless others displaced by violence inside the country, the threat facing children is real and growing.”

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Trauma to Trust—Healing Communities Beset by Violence

As a Black man who had a family member killed by police, I would never have imagined working with law enforcement. But as a psychotherapist dealing with my own symptoms of trauma because of that loss, I knew I needed help. So a few months after my cousin was killed I found myself in a room with uniformed officers. They were on duty; their guns were loaded. I thought, “Oh boy, this is not the type of training that I signed up for.”

Common Dreams ☛ ‘Absolutely Barbaric’: South Carolina OKs Firing Squad Executions

In a move described by death penalty abolitionists as “barbaric,” South Carolina on Friday gave the final approval for executions by firing squad.

According to The State, the South Carolina Department of Corrections informed state Attorney General Alan Wilson that the agency is now able to shoot condemned inmates to death using a three-person volunteer team.

NewYorkTimes ☛ ‘They Keep Killing Us’: Violence Rages in Sudan’s Darfur Two Decades On

The violence is also driven by a recent influx of fighters and funds from Libya, where many Darfuris have fought as mercenaries in recent years, U.N. officials said. Non-Arab communities have begun forming self-defense militias to repulse attacks. And the federal government seems helpless to stop the violence, with small altercations at markets often snowballing into huge attacks.

“Even the most petty of infractions or disagreements are now sorted out with a round of warfare,” said Magdi el-Gizouli, a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute, a research group.

Reason ☛ Tibet’s armed resistance to Chinese invasion

Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s stated position had always been that the Tibet uprisings were a good thing: they provided a pretext for faster imposition of full communism, and they offered the PLA combat training under challenging conditions. But not all of the CCP élite shared Mao’s bravado.

For years Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had been attempting to deal with the diplomatic problems that the Chinese colonization of Tibet was causing with public opinion in India and (in private) with Nehru’s government there. After the March 1959 Lhasa uprising and the Dalai Lama’s escape, Tibet’s plight finally garnered worldwide attention. No recent communist event was more broadly condemned in South and Southeast Asia.

The suppression of the Tibetans was blatant and vicious imperialism. It undermined Mao’s pretensions to be the anti-imperialist leader of the Third World, the supposed global hero of national liberation movements. Once the truth about Tibet was exposed to the world, many people realized that Maoism as applied was little different from Hitlerism—including in terms of genocide.

The Conversation ☛ Open-source intelligence: how digital sleuths are making their mark on the Ukraine war

Broadly speaking, open-source intelligence describes the knowledge or insight emerging from focused collection, monitoring and analysis of publicly accessible information, now mostly online, using specialised methods and tools.

At first sight, open-source intelligence seems to be a contradiction in terms. Intelligence is usually associated with secrets and spies, not the insights of online investigators, many of them amateur, who share their findings with anyone who is interested.

TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal

Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

CBC ☛ Great Barrier Reef suffers widespread coral bleaching due to high ocean temperatures

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is suffering widespread and severe coral bleaching due to high ocean temperatures two years after a mass bleaching event, a government agency said on Friday.

The report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority, which manages the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, comes three days before a United Nations delegation is due to assess whether the reef’s World Heritage listing should be downgraded due to the ravages of climate change.

The Conversation ☛ Counting stars in Orion can help beat light pollution – here’s how to help

The UK countryside charity CPRE is asking for help with its Orion Star Count 2022 project. You can take part this weekend by counting how many stars you can see in Orion and letting them know the results. That’s it. This activity brings people together and allows us to appreciate nature and experience the sky above. It illustrates how heritage is linked to the sky and what we’re losing through light pollution. After the count, you might look at your own house – and its lights – and consider what you can do to help keep our skies dark.

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Shuttering EPA’s Online Archive Is a Grave Disservice to the Public

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will be discontinuing its online archive in July 2022. This means the public will lose access to tens of thousands of web resources. These resources convey information about critical environmental issues, and past and present agency activities, policies, and priorities. All of these resources are publicly funded and intended for public consumption, but the public will no longer be able to access them.

TruthOut ☛ Climate Groups Slam Biden Energy Department for Increasing LNG Exports

Energy

• The Atlantic ☛ America’s Energy Security Is Falling Apart

  Yet since Russia invaded Ukraine, every tenet of that approach has been either proved wrong or outright abandoned. After sanctions swept Russian oil off global markets, gas prices hit record highs. They were brought down not by any policy, but because China imposed new COVID lockdowns. At the same time, Congress has failed to invest in any of the clean alternatives that would reduce American oil consumption.

  That’s especially stunning because, unlike during previous crises, renewables and electric vehicles are now mature technologies that could be deployed immediately to cut oil demand. We no longer have to dream: A future where the U.S. economy is far less vulnerable to wild oil price swings—the goal of U.S. energy policy for the past 50 years—is now within reach. But instead of seizing it, lawmakers are sitting around. For the first time in many years, America has no credible plan for how to maintain its energy security in a geopolitical crisis.

TruthOut ☛ Report Warns About Private Equity’s Increasing Grip on Home Health Industries

TruthOut ☛ Hershey’s Is Trying to Sugarcoat Its Union-Busting Campaign

Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Underlying Problem Isn’t Inflation—It’s Corporate Power and Greed

Inflation! Inflation! Everyone’s talking about it, but ignoring one of its biggest causes: corporate concentration.

IRS gives giant middle finger to “customers” with chat bot software.

You hate them. I hate them. Everyone hates them. Chat bots.

They’re annoying, condescending, and designed with the idea that they can answer “common questions” to get the dumbasses to go away for free. Unfortunately, when they replace actual people you can talk to, the “customer” is left clicking on whatever they think will get them past the chat robot and on to someone who can help.

The IRS has been taking up to 18 hours to answer phone calls, and it can do that because it’s a government agency. Not only is it a government agency, it’s one with virtually unchecked powers to reach into your bank account and freeze it and take whatever it wants, and to find any property you own and slap a tax lien on it. Like all taxes, it’s theft, and when they say “customer”, it’s just a nice way to say “victim”.

TruthOut ☛ New York GOP Throws Its Weight Behind Trumpist Lee Zeldin in Governor’s Race

NewYorkTimes ☛ Securing the TikTok Vote

Social media has played a role in political campaigning since at least 2007, when Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, registered his first official Twitter handle. Since then, enormous numbers of political bids have harnessed the power of social platforms, through dramatic announcement videos on YouTube, Twitter debates, Reddit A.M.A.s, fireside chats on Instagram Live and more. TikTok, with its young-skewing active global user base of one billion, would seem a natural next frontier.

Marine Corps unveils ‘influence officers’ for information fight

The Marine Corps has launched a new occupational field in the hopes of producing better specialists in the information warfare field.

The new 17XX information maneuver occupational field will bring in Marines from psychological operations, civil affairs field into the new occupational field, according to a press release.

The Washington Post ☛ Some Russians are breaking through Putin’s digital iron curtain — leading to fights with friends and family

Still, Russians seem determined to get around the restrictions. According to the digital intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the top five VPNs in Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store were downloaded 6.4 million times between Feb. 24 and March 13. In the three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the same VPN apps were downloaded only 253,000 times.

Independent Russian media organizations, which have moved their reporters outside of the country, still report some of what’s happening in Ukraine, and there are still some discussions happening on community groups on VK, Russia’s most popular social media network, according to Russians who spoke to The Washington Post. Some Russians are also finding independent news on Telegram and YouTube, which Russia has not yet blocked.

Newsweek ☛ Maine Library Fights Book-Banning Trend by Seeking Out Controversial Titles

“We are buying banned books in order to publicly push back against the impetus to ban books. To say, ‘If you don’t want it in your library, we want it in ours,’” library patron Eva Murray told the Bangor Daily News. Murray recently returned to Matinicus Island from the mainland to purchase several historically banned titles from the library.

BBC ☛ War in Ukraine: Anti-war opinions can cost Russians their jobs

Two hours after posting, he received a call from the school’s headteacher telling him to delete it immediately, or leave his job.

The Hill ☛ Taliban reportedly arrests journalists over story on censoring: report

The Taliban arrested three journalists from TOLO TV Thursday night, according to the Afghan television station.

The three employees were detained after airing a story about the Taliban’s censorship of a foreign drama series in Afghanistan.

ABC ☛ Taliban release 3 Afghan TV staffers detained over media ban

Moby Group, the media company that owns TOLO TV, said the detentions were the result of the station reporting “about the banning of the foreign drama series” — a decision made by the Taliban-appointed Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The Taliban gave no explanation for their ban, the latest restriction imposed since their takeover of the country in mid-August.

Deutsche Welle ☛ Taliban release three detained Afghan journalists

Afghanistan’s governing Taliban have released three arrested TOLONews employees, the company said Friday. TOLO, an independent news channel, is the country’s largest TV station.

Director Khpalwak Sapai, legal advisor Nafay Khaleeq and newscaster Bahram Aman were all arrested at the network’s studios Thursday evening. Sapai told news outlets that he and Khaleeq were released shortly after their detention but that Aman was kept in custody overnight and let go on Friday.

VOA News ☛ Bangladesh Court Grants Bail to Sister of Exiled Journalist

The sister of a U.S.-based dissident Bangladeshi journalist has been granted bail by a Bangladesh court after 160 days in detention and, according to her lawyer, may be released sometime next week.

Nusrat Shahrin Raka, 38, the sister of journalist Kanak Sarwar, was detained Oct. 5 in Dhaka by Bangladesh’s special police force — the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). She was charged under the country’s controversial Digital Security Act for spreading anti-state propaganda and under the Narcotics Control Act for possessing crystal meth, which the police claimed to have found in her home.

TruthOut ☛ Some States Are Enshrining the Right to Abortion As SCOTUS Decision Approaches

TruthOut ☛ When Biden Says “Fund the Police,” It Should Spur Our Efforts to Defund Them

Quartz ☛ There’s a growing clamor to stop calling people “consumers”

Endless consumption is not the goal, they say, but the problem. And we need a change in our language to help us see that problem and solve it.

The Register UK ☛ FCC gives Pacific Networks 60 days to leave the US

Chinese telco Pacific Networks and its subsidiary ComNet must cease all services within the United States within 60 days from Wednesday March 16 following an order issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In a canned statement, the FCC cited “potential security threats” as the justification for its action, which passed on a 4-0 vote.

The agency concluded that the companies, which it deemed US subsidiaries of Chinese state-owned entities, are “subject to exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government” and “highly likely” to be forced into complying with requests from Beijing without independent judicial oversight.

Quartz ☛ Google’s subsea cable for Africa is making its first landing in Togo

The landing in Togo may come as a surprise since an initial map of the project suggested it would branch out first in Lagos, Nigeria, arguably Africa’s technology hub. But Cina Lawson, Togo’s minister for digital economy and digital transformation, said her government successfully made the case to Google that it should be Togo instead.

Vice ☛ DJI Has the Power to Control Where Drones Can Fly. Ukraine Wants Them to Use It.

Ukraine is asking Chinese drone manufacturer DJI to stop doing business with Russia. Because of how DJI drones work, the company has the technical capability to control where and when its products are flown because of “geofencing” technology it implemented several years ago.

Variety ☛ Following Amazon’s MGM Acquisition Close, FTC Warns It May ‘Challenge a Deal at Any Time’

UPDATED: Amazon on Thursday morning announced that it closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM. But the deal may not be out of the regulatory woods yet.

The Federal Trade Commission, asked about its review of Amazon’s MGM acquisition, noted that the agency has the latitude to file a legal challenge even after the parties have closed a transaction. “The FTC does not comment on any particular matters. However, we reiterate that the Commission does not approve transactions and may challenge a deal at any time if [the agency] determines that it violates the law,” FTC spokesperson Betsy Lordan said in a statement to Variety.

The Register UK ☛ $5bn+ Big Tech mergers in cross-hairs of draft US laws [Ed: The Register uses the Microsoft lobbying propaganda, “Big Tech” (designed to distract from Microsoft’s crimes)]

A pair of law bills before the US House and Senate would give watchdogs stronger powers to block big mergers, and allow regulators to reach back into the past to dismantle previous M&As deemed to be harmful.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and House Representative Mondaire Jones (D-NY) each sponsored a version of the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act (PAMA) [PDF] for their respective halves of Congress. If passed into law, this would allow the FTC or Dept of Justice to block takeovers valued at over $5bn – so-called prohibited mergers – and give other regulatory powers to antitrust officials.

Patents

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Activists Say New ‘Compromise’ on IP Waiver for Covid Vaccines Is Worse Than No Deal

  On Tuesday, after a year and a half of negotiations over an intellectual property waiver for Covid-related products, the United States, European Union, India and South Africa reportedly reached agreement on a temporary waiver of patent rules for Covid vaccines. “The difficult and protracted process has resulted in a compromise outcome that offers the most promising path toward achieving a concrete and meaningful outcome,” said U.S. Trade Representative spokesperson Adam Hodge in a statement. Global health activists, however, are slamming the tentative deal as not only insufficient, but a potential setback, because it excludes tests and treatments, includes a carveout for China, and introduces new barriers for the production of generic treatments that could have implications far beyond the Covid crisis.

Copyrights

• Torrent Freak ☛ Court Prohibits Convicted Lawyer from Filing New Copyright Lawsuits

  Paul Hansmeier, one of the convicted attorneys behind the controversial Prenda Law firm, is no longer allowed to file new copyright cases in the District of Minnesota. The court issued the restrictions and dismissed over a dozen pending cases, through which Hansmeier hoped to show that his conviction was unconstitutional.

• Torrent Freak ☛ Watch Tower vs. McFree: Nonprofit Defends Critic’s Fair Use & Anonymity Rights

  ‘Kevin McFree’ recently fended off a Watch Tower DMCA subpoena after a judge found that his critical animations were protected under fair use. However, Watch Tower is aggressively pursuing a separate copyright lawsuit, one that deals with exactly the same issues. The big development is that McFree’s plight has been taken on by the formidable Public Citizen Litigation Group.