06.09.22
Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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While there are three different display options, they all support up to 500 nits brightness. Dell also notes that the laptop supports fast charging, allowing you to take the 51 Wh battery from 0 to 80% in under an hour. And if Windows isn’t your jam, there’s a Dell XPS 13 (9315) Developer Edition model that ships with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux instead.
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Server/Istio
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CVE-2022-31045 (CVSS score 5.9, Medium): Memory access violation Ill-formed headers sent to Envoy in certain configurations can lead to unexpected memory access, resulting in undefined behavior or crashing.
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This release fixes the security vulnerabilities described in our June 9th post, ISTIO-SECURITY-2022-005. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.14.0 and 1.14.1.
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This release fixes the security vulnerabilities described in our June 9th post, ISTIO-SECURITY-2022-005. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.13.4 and 1.13.5.
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This release fixes the security vulnerabilities described in our June 9th post, ISTIO-SECURITY-2022-005. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.12.7 and 1.12.8.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Multi monitor works fine on Xorg but it’s a bit finicky luckily on the Wayland and Sway side it’s so much easy and when it’s working it works amazingly
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Kernel Space
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Apple is extending support for its Rosetta 2 x86-64-to-Arm binary translator to Linux VMs running under the forthcoming macOS 13, codenamed Ventura.
The next version of macOS was announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference on Monday, and the new release has a number of changes that will be significant to Linux users. The company has disclosed the system requirements for the beta OS, which you can read on the preview page.
One level of Linux relevance is that macOS 13 still supports Intel-based Macs, but only recent ones, made in 2017 and later. So owners of older machines – including the author – will soon be cut off. Some will run Windows on them via Bootcamp, but others will, of course, turn to Linux.
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Apple makes it famously difficult to run anything other than iOS on iPhones and iPads. But from time to time hackers have found ways to install different operating systems.
The latest example? Now you can boot Linux on iPhones, iPads, and other devices released around 2013 and 2014 thanks to a new project from Kondrad Dybcio and Markuss Broks.
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Graphics Stack
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With older graphics APIs like OpenGL, the client makes a series of API calls, each of which either mutates some bit of state or performs a draw operation. There are a number of techniques that have been used over the years to parallelize the rendering work, but the implementation has to ensure that everything appears to happen in order from the client’s perspective. While this served us well for years, it’s become harder and harder to keep the GPU fully occupied. Games and other 3D applications have gotten more complex and need multiple CPU cores in order to have enough processing power to reliably render their entire scene in less than 16 milliseconds and achieve a smooth 60 frames per second. GPUs have also gotten larger with more parallelism, and there’s only so much a driver can do behind the client’s back to parallelize things.
To improve both GPU and CPU utilization, modern APIs like Vulkan take a different approach. Most Vulkan objects such as images are immutable: while the underlying image contents may change, the fundamental properties of the image such as its dimensions, color format, and number of miplevels do not. This is different from OpenGL where the application can change any property of anything at any time. To draw, the client records sequences of rendering commands in command buffers which are submitted to the GPU as a separate step. The command buffers themselves are still stateful, and the recorded commands have the same in-order guarantees as OpenGL. However, the state and ordering guarantees only apply within the command buffer, making it safe to record multiple command buffers simultaneously from different threads. The client only needs to synchronize between threads at the last moment when they submit those command buffers to the GPU. Vulkan also allows the driver to expose multiple hardware work queues of different types which all run in parallel. Getting the most out of a large desktop GPU often requires having 3D rendering, compute, and image/buffer copy (DMA) work happening all at the same time and in parallel with the CPU prep work for the next batch of GPU work.
Enabling all this additional CPU and GPU parallelism comes at a cost: synchronization. One piece of GPU work may depend on other pieces of GPU work, possibly on a different queue. For instance, you may upload a texture on a copy queue and then use that texture on a 3D queue. Because command buffers can be built in parallel and the driver has no idea what the client is actually trying to do, the client has to explicitly provide that dependency information to the driver. In Vulkan, this is done through VkSemaphore objects. If command buffers are the nodes in the dependency graph of work to be done, semaphores are the edges. When a command buffer is submitted to a queue, the client provides two sets of semaphores: a set to wait on before executing the command buffer and a set to signal when the command buffer completes. In our texture upload example, the client would tell the driver to signal a semaphore when the texture upload operation completes and then have it wait on that same semaphore before doing the 3D rendering which uses the texture. This allows the client to take advantage of as much parallelism as it can manage while still having things happen in the correct order as needed.
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Applications
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Whether you are a developer or administrator, or even a traveler, you might want to access the remote desktop to perform any task, including mounting remote directories, cleaning remote databases, or even backing remote servers. If you are a Linux user, in this situation, the Linux remote desktop clients help to communicate with the remote RDP server for easy access. There are many remote desktop protocols available for performing the task of remote system access. It’s a communication between the server and client software.
Linux has the default SSH remote access tool to perform this sort of job, but as it’s done through the terminal, so many users do not feel comfortable using it. Besides using the terminal, you can also use GUI based remote desktop client for your Linux system.
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Instructionals/Technical
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MTP (the same protocol Android devices use) will expose the /home/nemo folder to the connecting computer, both to graphical and command line applications. But it hides some files and folders from the connected system.
A more powerful way is to connect through a terminal via SSH, as explained here.
The phone’s shell and my beloved URxvt terminal emulator have difficulties communicating. I installed xterm on my computer and am using this to connect to the phone. Works perfectly.
Of course one can always use the terminal app directly on the phone. It gives full access to the system via devel-su, just as via SSH.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Portainer on Ubuntu 22.04. Portainer is a self-service container service delivery platform that provides container management GUI for Kubernetes, Docker and Swarm.
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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.
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Gatus is a health dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your services using HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and even DNS queries as well as evaluate the result of said queries by using a list of conditions on values like the status code, the response time, the certificate expiration, the body and many others. The icing on top is that each of these health checks can be paired with alerting via Slack, PagerDuty, Discord, Twilio and more.
In this guide, we will configure Gatus as a health dashboard tool using docker compose.
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While it’s one of the best tools for examining performance on Linux, htop still requires some explanation before you’ll be ready to take advantage of all the data it displays. It’s an excellent tool, but you need to understand the coloring scheme, how to scroll up and down through the processes displayed, and how to change your view of what’s happening on the system.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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As now seems to be the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.
This report covers hrev56088 to hrev56147.
Before I get into the development items from May, you may want to know that, though it has not been formally announced yet, you can now donate to Haiku, Inc. (and thus support my ongoing contract) through GitHub Sponsors!
Applications
PulkoMandy fixed text in the status view being cut off in Installer.
Jim906 improved window cascading in FileTypes.
jadedctrl added per-track scripting support to MediaPlayer. Now you can use hey (or another interface to Haiku’s scripting suites system) to control MediaPlayer’s playlist.
korli added more vendor identifiers to Screen preferences, so that it can identify monitor manufacturers more accurately.
apl fixed version date updates in HaikuDepot. He also fixed more properly a crash which waddlesplash had implemented a workaround for last time.
dcieslak fixed locale-aware display in DeskCalc, which had been somewhat broken by his changes last time.
Jim906 fixed WebPositive to not display the “…” icon on the bookmark bar when the overflow menu would be empty.
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Fedora Project / Red Hat
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In May, we published 17 posts. The site had 7,126 visits from 4,510 unique viewers. 2,591 visits came from search engines, while 61 came from Fedora Discussion and 58 came from Twitter.
The most read post last month was Help Us Test Fedora Linux 36 Beta wallpaper with 758 views. The most read post written last month was Nest With Fedora: Call for proposals and sponsors with 116 views.
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This is important because we have to be aware of the Maximum Total Throughput Capacity for a specific volume vs the Maximum Total Instance Throughput.
Because, if your instance type (or server) is able to produce a throughput of 1250MiB/s (i.e M4.16xl)) and your EBS Maximum Throughput is 500MiB/s (i.e. ST1), not only you will hit a bottleneck trying to write to the specific volumes, but also throttling might occur (i.e. EBS on cloud services).
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Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Three insights you might have missed from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU [Ed: "Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event." This is paid-for "media" "coverage" -- a growing and disturbing trend]
If there has been a slowdown in the rush to build new technologies for the Kubernetes and cloud-native world, there wasn’t any sign of it in Valencia, Spain, during the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event.
The show was a sellout this year, with more than 7,500 attendees. Perhaps even more significant was that 65% of them attended the gathering for the first time. Attendees included a portion of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s 7.1 million cloud-native developers, who gathered to hear the latest on the non-profit’s more than 120 active projects.
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Generational stereotypes aren’t always insulting, but they can be harmful and limit our ability to design and deliver the solutions users want. Many people tend to think of the youngest generation of workers as the most innovative and the oldest as technophobic and resistant to change.
While that perception may be true of some people in each generation, it is generally not supported by data. Here are three generational myths worth dispelling.
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I’ve worked on intelligent automation projects with many organizations worldwide, and there is no doubt: The digital transformation process has a huge impact – not only by bringing about obvious initial change but also by affecting business leaders’ outlook for the future.
One common result is they want more, expect more, and invest more. Here’s why.
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MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) gives you a way to bundle multiple paths between systems to increase bandwidth and resilience from failures. Here we show you how to configure a basic setup so you can try out MPTCP, using two virtual guests. We’ll then look at the details of a real world scenario, measuring bandwidth and latency when single links disappear.
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During the 22.04 cycle, we enabled systemd-oomd [1] by default on
desktop. Since then, there have been reports of systemd-oomd killing
user applications too frequently (e.g. browsers, IDEs, and gnome-shell
in some cases). In addition to a couple of LPs [2][3], I have heard
these reports by word-of-mouth, and there have been discussions on
internal Mattermost. A common theme in these reports is that e.g.
Chrome is killed "suddenly" without any other observable symptoms of
the system nearing OOM.
For more context, systemd-oomd basically has two methods for deciding
a unit's cgroup is a candidate for OOM kill:
1. When total system memory usage _and_ swap usage both exceed
SwapUsedLimit (90% by default, and on Ubuntu) [4], monitored cgoups
with greater than 5% swap usage become OOM kill candidates, and
cgroups with the highest swap usage are acted on first.
2. When a unit's cgroup memory pressure exceeds MemoryPressureLimit
[5] for at least MemoryPressureDurationSec [6], monitored descendant
cgroups will be acted on starting from the ones with the most reclaim
activity to the least reclaim activity.
In the reports I refer to above, applications are being killed due to
(1). In practice, the SwapUsedLimit might be too easy to reach on
Ubuntu, largely because Ubuntu provides just 1GB of swap. Since we
follow the suggestion of setting ManagedOOMSwap=kill on the root slice
[7], every cgroup is eligible for swap kill. When this condition is
met, user applications like browsers are going to be killed first.
While investigating [2], we patched upstream systemd-oomd to fix how
"used memory" was calculated, and we brought the patch into Jammy.
This may have helped the situation a bit, but it does not appear this
was enough to fix the issue entirely.
Given the current situation, I think we should re-consider how
systemd-oomd is configured on Ubuntu. These are the options that come
to mind:
1. Increase SwapUsedLimit (again, currently at 90%). I think this is
probably the safest change, but it is not clear to me how significant
of an impact this would have.
2. Set ManagedOOMSwap more selectively. Again, we currently follow the
recommendation of setting ManagedOOMSwap=kill on the root slice
(-.slice), so every descendant cgroup is a candidate for swap kill. It
_might_ be effective to say "do not swap kill cgroups descendant of
user's app.slice". The downsides of this approach would be that the
configuration does not scale well (i.e. a lot more configuration
needed to get the proper swap kill "coverage"), and this may just
place the problem onto a different class of processes.
3. Do not enable swap kill at all. This would mean systemd-oomd would
only act when memory pressure limits are reached. Given Ubuntu's swap
configuration, does it make sense for systemd-oomd to act on high swap
usage?
4. Increase swap on Ubuntu. I am adding this for completeness, but I
doubt this is a viable option.
I think that either option (1) or (3) would be the most reasonable --
maybe trying (1) first and falling back to (3) if necessary. If anyone
has an opinion on this, or can think of other options, I would
appreciate the input.
Thanks,
Nick 'enr0n' Rosbrook
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Robots are capable of far more precise and accurate motion than humans are. That is great when you want a robot to assemble a PCB or perform heart surgery. But it’s a problem when you want robots do something creative — they’re just too perfect. The lack of human-introduced flaws makes robot artwork feel soulless. To overcome that, Georgia Tech graduate students built a graffiti robot called GTGraffiti that paints with the fluidity of a human.
GTGraffiti is a cable-driven robot can cover huge canvasses and even entire walls. Four winch mechanisms connect to the four corners of the robot via cable wires. By increasing or decreasing the length of each cable, the robot can position itself at any XY coordinate on the work surface. The robot end effector that hangs from the cables carries a can of spray paint, which it can actuate on demand. ODrive 56V motors turn the winches and a Teensy development board controls those through ODrive drivers. The spray can actuator utilizes a hobby servo motor controlled by an Arduino Nano board, which receives power from a 10,000mAh USB batter pack.
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Greenhouses are excellent ways to grow plants due to their compact nature and the fact that they can absorb and store the sun’s light as heat to keep their internal temperature higher than outside. But when it comes to adding ventilation for cooling things down, decreasing the humidity, or simply to avoid rain, most non-commercial ones still rely on someone to manually open or close the windows. This need for automation is what drove Michael Bernhard to create his own greenhouse climate regulation system.
This project relies on a Nano Every to read the ambient temperature/humidity as well as control up to six motorized windows via three L298N dual H-bridge drivers. The Nano receives commands and other data over WiFi from an accompanying ESP8266 board for wireless remote control with a mobile phone. Each of these components and their connectors were added to a custom PCB and placed within a simple wooden enclosure to keep moisture out. An LCD at the top shows pertinent information such as the time, temperature, and humidity.
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To measure the current passing through the wire, ACS712 is the best current sensor to deal with, as it can measure up to 5A
In this tutorial, we’ll interface the current sensor (ACS712) with Arduino Uno, dealing with current sensing and utilization for current control. This tutorial provides the coding, wiring diagram and component list.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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There are all sorts of people maintaining Open Source software, from developers to quality assurance, project managers, tech writers and June is time to celebrate them all. Whether they do this as a hobby or as a well-paid job, thank you! There are lots of initiatives around the world worth following this month. Check the schedule published by GitHub and submit your pull requests to add other events. We’ll be in Austin for the Open Source Summit (June 20-24): Are you going, too? I’d love to meet and say thanks in person!
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Programming/Development
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We hope very much to see you in Dublin in September (12-14th). Please visit our attend page for all the details.
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LibreOffice 7.2.7 was released on May, 12
LibreOffice 7.3.3 was released on May, 5
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With Apple moving to Apple Silicon for all of their new products, software developers are having to figure out how to support both Intel and Apple Silicon devices. Like some of our customers, you may not be ready to move to Apple Silicon. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily exempt you from dealing with universal binaries, especially when it comes to third party dependencies.
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Developing a portfolio of devices cost-effectively can be challenging. It helps when you need only one development tool for any hardware technology.
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Back in 2017 I did work to setup a cross-building toolchain for QT Creator, that takes advantage of Debian’s packaging for all the dependency ecosystem.
It ended with cbqt which is a little script that sets up a chroot to hold cross-build-dependencies, to avoid conflicting with packages in the host system, and sets up a qmake alternative to make use of them.
Today I’m dusting off that work, to ensure it works on Debian bullseye.
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Perl / Raku
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The “taint” always bothered me. I thought I knew it well but no. The obvious question, can I show a working example?
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Simply NUC launched the Topaz 2 mini PC which can accommodate the “Alder Lake” processors from Intel. The Intel Core i3 based mini PC is available for $599, the Intel Core i5 model for $699 and the Intel Core i7 model starts at $849. The Topaz 2 is ready for pre-orders and shipping is expected around July 2022.
All the processors supported by the Topaz 2 offer 12 cores and 16 threads. The Topaz 2 i3 and i5 variations can reach a maximum frequency of 4.40GHz with Turbo Boost, while the i7 variation can reach up to 4.70GHz. Simply NUC also specified that the 12th-Gen processors integrated on the Topaz 2 feature Intel Iris Xe Graphics instead of the Intel UHD Graphics 770.
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The LimeSDR Mini is an open-source hardware full-duplex USB SDR board based on Intel Altera Max 10 Altera FGPA that was introduced in 2017 on Crowd Supply and raised close to $2 million US dollars. Since it has been used in various projects including digital TV transmitters.
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Proprietary
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The latest version of the Vivaldi web browser comes with an email client, calendar tool, and RSS feed reader built-in.
I sometimes refer to this Chromium-based browser as the Swiss-army knife of software due to its gargantuan array of of options, preferences, and feature integrations it makes available to users out-of-the-box (which range from arcade games to productivity timers to note-taking).
Today, Vivaldi introduces Vivaldi Mail 1.0. This is a fully-fledged desktop email client that is built-in to the browser. It supports multiple email accounts (including popular web mail services like Google and Fastmail, etc), search, and calendar and RSS feeds.
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Opera Software released Opera 88 Stable this week. The new version of the web browser introduces support for horizontal tab scrolling and a new feature that Opera Software calls Shopping Corner.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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Quite related, I’ve joined the board of OpenET to help bring open data on evapotranspiration (a key part of the water cycle) to Colorado River water management, and eventually to the whole world. I’ll be advising on both basics like licensing and of course the more complex bits like economic sustainability, where (via Tidelift) my head mostly is these days.
Many thanks to John Fleck (GNOME documentation project, ret.) for dragging my head into this space years ago by writing about it so well for so long.
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Linux Foundation
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Hi everyone, I recently completed my LFX Mentorship project. I was a mentee for the LFXM summer term of 2022 at Pixie, a CNCF sandbox project donated by The New Relic.
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Security
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CISA ☛ CISA Adds Three Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog | CISA [Ed: Lots of Microsoft and now SAP, SAP, SAP, i.e. proprietary holes that have no patches for them and are actively exploited already]
CISA has added three new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.
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Environment
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Energy
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Staying clean is an environmentally dirty, energy-hungry business.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux at 6:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 7db0f40f2834a02615c5a7d16a7151b2
Turning 18
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Tux Machines (tuxmachines.org) has been steady and vibrant for a very long time; we plan to keep on going for a long time to come because the site is very important to a lot of people
THERE is a new post here taking note of the eighteenth birthday of tuxmachines.org. I thought I’d say a few words on behalf of Rianne and I, who spend literally hours each and every day keeping this site updated. We plan to do this for a long time to come and we hope this is useful to many other people.
“Speed is very important when it comes to news and RSS feeds are well suited for this task.”As noted above, the best way to keep abreast of the site is through RSS feeds. Speed is very important when it comes to news and RSS feeds are well suited for this task. For real-time communications tuxmachines.org uses IRC. It is unlikely to change any time soon because we tend to stick and stay with what already works. █
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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There are many tools and utilities around security and network management, and in this episode of Enterprise Linux Security, Jay and Joao discuss some of their favorites.
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SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple’s Rosetta for Linux.
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Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell, Spammers in the Public Cloud, locking user accounts properly, overgrowth on NetBSD, moreutils, ctwm & spleen, interpreting a traceroute, and more
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Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS is out and it is an amazing release. Out of all the flavours of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate has always commanded a special place. Ubuntu Mate is a lightweight Linux distribution that offers a great experience for users who are looking for high performance
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.18.3 kernel.
All users of the 5.18 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.18.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.18.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Applications
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The free open-source 3D creation software Blender 3.2.0 was released! Finally, it adds support for AMD GPU rendering for Linux!
Blender 3.2.0 introduced a new type of Cycles render pass that contains only the lighting from a subset of light sources. It’s ‘Light Groups’ which can be used to modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.
Cycles now supports selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive objects. Paint is now available in Sculpt mode. New paint brush comes with a bunch of new settings like tip shape, wet mixing, flow and density.
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PeerTube 4.2, a free video platform, includes detailed viewer stats for videos, video editing directly from the web interface, and much more.
PeerTube allows anyone to set up their video streaming site. It is a free, self-hosted, and open-source software that can be installed on your server to create a video hosting and sharing platform. In other words, it is like having your personal YouTube at home.
Furthermore, all PeerTube sites can connect to each other, and users having accounts on one can interact with people on the others. All PeerTube servers are interoperable as a federated network, and video load is lowered thanks to P2P (BitTorrent) in the web browser via WebTorrent.
Recently, PeerTube’s developers have finally launched PeerTube 4.2. Let’s have a look at the new features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I am a new Linux and Unix command line user. How do I test or check reverse DNS (rDNS) for given IP address under Linux, macOS, BSD, Unix-like or Windows desktop/server based systems?
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A DEB package is an archive containing all the files including the compiled version of the applications, source codes, configuration files, images, and installation commands. DEB files in Debian-based operating systems like Ubuntu and Kali Linux are equivalent to the EXE files found in Windows.
Here’s how you can develop your own DEB packages for a Debian-based Linux distro.
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Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
It is s an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.
In this guide we are going to explore various options to install docker in OpenSUSE Leap15.
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One of the most useful tools in Inkscape is the gradient tool, which enables the user to create magnificent gradients.
Those gradients, in turn, enrich any piece of graphic design, and in this tutorial, we are going to explore how to create a linear rainbow gradient in Inkscape.
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One of the most important concepts in programming is the concept of arrays. An array can be thought of as a collection of data recorded together. As the set of values in an array are kept together, they are usually operated on jointly or in succession. They are handy in real-life scenarios, as we often have to deal with certain data sets.
The terminal commands of Bash can be used along with certain syntax operators as a whole programming language, which is referred to as Bash scripting. Today, we will bring these two areas together and see how arrays can be used in Bash scripts.
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Today, I will share one helpful tip that allows FreeBSD developers and sysadmin to make a backup list of installed all FreeBSD packages and then restore it. Hence, this is useful for disaster recovery (DR) or simply rebuilding a new server. It will save you time.
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One of the greatest features of Inkscape is its ability to export images in many formats, from the formats that most of us know, like PNGs, PDFs and JPGs, to less common ones like PostScript and TIFF. In this article, we will learn how to save Inkscape images as a JPG.
But before that, what is JPG?
A lossy image compression method, yet the quality of the images doesn’t drop significantly if you choose the output to be of high quality.
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The tools for editing objects are essential in every vector graphics software. Transformation and rotation are the most basic tools that should be present in every vector graphics editor.
There are two ways to rotate objects: using the Rotation Handles or using the Transform menu.
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While LXD is mostly known for providing system containers, since the 4.0 LTS, it also natively supports virtual machines. With the recent 5.0 LTS, LXD virtual machines are at feature parity with containers. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the main LXD virtual machine features and how you can use them to run your infrastructure.
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Vim is one of the most popular terminal-based text editors for decades.
But no matter how long you have been using Vim, there are always more tips and tricks that you did not know about.
This one is about setting up indentation width in Vim to 2 spaces or 4 spaces. This is particularly helpful if you are a programmer, a Python one especially.
In your vimrc file (located at ~/.vimrc), add the following line to automatically use 2 spaces instead of tab in Vim.
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The term orchestration is relatively new to the IT industry, and it still has nuance that eludes or confuses people who don’t spend all day orchestrating. When I describe orchestration to someone, it usually sounds like I’m just describing automation. That’s not quite right. In fact, I wrote a whole article differentiating automation and orchestration.
An easy way to think about it is that orchestration is just a form of automation. To understand how you can benefit from orchestration, it helps to understand what specifically it automates.
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Boost is a portable set of C++ programming language libraries. It contains libraries for pseudo-random number generation, linear algebra, multi-threading, image processing, regular expression, and unit testing. At the time of writing this article, boost has 168 different libraries included in boost.
In this article, you will find the steps to install the boost library in Ubuntu or any other Debian-based distribution.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OnlyOffice on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, OnlyOffice is a powerful and versatile office suite that allows you to edit text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as productivity tools such as mail, document and project management, CRM, calendar, and communication hub. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS.
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 OnlyOffice office suite on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RPM Fusion on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, RPM Fusion is a repository specifically for Fedora Linux. It is an amalgamation of the software repositories Livna, Freshrpms, and Dribble to bundle resources. The RPM Fusion repository comes in two variants, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which has mostly almost all free software but is closed source and mainly proprietary.
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 RPM Fusion on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
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Although Windows is the clear dominator of PC gameplay, the truth is that Linux is becoming more and more full of different games every day to have a good time. Today, you will learn how to install Bomber on Linux Mint 20 so that you can play it and get some distraction.
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If you are looking for a free and open-source Linux-based solution for handling streams and multimedia files like videos, audios, and images, then you should strongly consider what FFmpeg has to offer.
The FFmpeg tool requires that its users are familiar with the Linux command-line environment usage in terms of syntax reference, command implementation, and execution.
As for its installation of the Linux operating system distribution you are using, you need to have root/sudoer user privileges to successfully invoke the associated installation command.
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The core of the Linux operating system is the kernel. It handles the primary interaction between the hardware and the software. It also accomplishes tasks such as memory management, process management, system security, and hardware interactions, to name a few. Such an essential piece of the operating system inevitably has flaws or vulnerabilities that need to be patched and maintained.
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Games
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We are still observing a relatively low rate of addition of verified/playable games for the Steam Deck. Nevertheless we are now more than 3300 games validated (3312 games to be precise at the time of publication) on the Steam Deck – in two categories…
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After many months of patiently waiting for the next-generation Tuxedo Stellaris Gen 4 laptop by Tuxedo Computers, I’m happy to finally report it’s now in my hands.
I had reviewed the third generation last September. Notable improvements with this version is the upgrade in the CPU and RAM department, utilizing Alder Lake graphics and DDR5 respectively. It also comes with a more performant GPU, sporting a RTX 3080 Ti. This laptop is even meaner than it was before.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Coming less than a month after KDE Gear 22.04.1, the KDE Gear 22.04.2 point release is here to improve the Dolphin file manager by making it more reliable when downloading and installing new context menu services, adding a proper fix for sorting by access time, and addressing a visual glitch in the Details view when right-clicking on an empty part of the view, also allowing you to paste files in the currently visible view.
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Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.
Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In a sign of how display handling is evolving, the GNOME desktop’s 3D-compositing Mutter window manager is gaining support for variable refresh rate (VRR, also known as Adaptive Sync) displays.
Mutter is an important chunk of code. As the project page says, it’s “a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.”
It’s the basis of GNOME Shell, which is implemented [PDF] as a Mutter plug-in, but other desktops use it as well.
For instance, the PIXEL desktop of the Raspberry Pi OS.
It’s also used in Pop!_OS’s Cosmic desktop. Cinnamon uses a fork of it called Muffin.
Its name comes from Metacity + Clutter. Metacity was the old GNOME 2 window manager, which used Gtk2 to render to the screen, and Clutter used to be GNOME’s OpenGL rendering library.
The long-outstanding change to give it VRR support has finally lost its “work-in-progress” tag. Once merged, it will be visible in the GNOME Control Center as a simple on/off toggle.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Regolith desktop 2.0 aims to meet the needs of those who seek a fast and efficient desktop Linux experience controlled (primarily) from the keyboard. Regolith pairs the i3 tiling window manager with GNOME Flashback, and adds in an assortment of other open-source components to deliver a curated, keyboard-driven UX.
And are some big changes since the Regolith 1.6 release from last summer.
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Users of EasyOS will have seen a message on the screen, very early in bootup, showing “read speed test”. Firstly, there is a message about looking for the drives, then this…
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If you’ve gone further into the Linux world than the standard desktop distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora, you have undoubtedly come across some more purpose-built distributions. Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans. Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.
The distribution is as simple as possible and loads no bloat other than what’s needed to launch the game. It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies. After most of that, the only thing left is to use GRUB to boot the distribution, and in just a moment, Doomguy can start slaying demons. The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The Linux Mint XApps suite of cross-desktop accessories has a new member – the Timeshift backup tool.
The Linux Mint blog post for June revealed that Mint team lead Clement Lefevbre recently took over maintenance of the Timeshift backup tool used in Linux Mint.
Timeshift is akin to Windows System Restore in that it automatically keeps backups of system files. It’s not Mint-specific and was originally developed by Tony George. That name might sound familiar as we recently mentioned his company TeeJeeTech as the creator of the original Unity-based remix, UMix.
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Devices/Embedded
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Normally when we talk about our high-security boot firmware PureBoot, it’s in the context of the advanced tamper detection it adds to a system. For instance, recently we added the ability to detect tampering even in the root file system. While that’s a critical benefit PureBoot provides over our default coreboot firmware, it also provides a number of benefits outside of security that can aid tinkerers who need to recover a system that won’t boot. In this post I’m going to talk about the powerful recovery console PureBoot provides, and explain some of the extra things you can do with it compared to a traditional GRUB recovery console.
Coreboot is a free software boot firmware that we ship on all of our hardware and replaces the traditional proprietary BIOS. When a coreboot-powered system boots, coreboot executes, initializes some hardware, and then executes a payload that can perform the remaining steps of a traditional BIOS to boot the system. Common payloads include SeaBIOS (what we include with our default coreboot builds), GRUB (GRUB is the standard boot loader used by most Linux distributions to select and boot into the OS), or Heads (what we use with our PureBoot firmware).
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Vue Advanced Chat is a web application service that leverages multiple technology, it is compatible with Vue 2, Vue 3, React and Angular.
It is an open-source, flexible, and customizable.
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The Holy Grail was A List Apart’s famous article, a culmination of years of forebears delicately floating things around, abusing padding and negative margins to achieve something it took a <table> to do before. It’s hard to appreciate 16 years on, but that article was my bible for a while.
As CSS standards improve and old versions of IE died off we saw the rise of CSS Frameworks, third party code, pre-hacked for edge-cases, just follow their markup, use their classes and everything would work. Most of the time. I’ve been through a few: Blueprint, 960, Bootstrap and most recently Tailwind.
And I hate them all. That’s not fair. They’ve helped me, professionally, cope with an increasing number of browsers, and increasingly complex layouts (waves in responsive), and they’ve definitely got better —depending on your opinion on utility-first classes— but they all reset to something slightly different, and while the form classes are genuinely helpful, and they all served a purpose for layout, I’d rather have not depended on any of them. It’s those moments where you notice that somebody decided that display: table was the best option to meet IE10 support. And until PurgeCSS came along, they also meant a serious hit to the page weight.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Firefox 101.0.1 will be released later today (if you are reading this on June 9, 2022). The new point release of Firefox Stable fixes three main issues and several smaller issues, including a rare issue on Windows that is making the browser unusable.
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I will be officially leaving Mozilla on the last day of June. My last working day will be June 16. Perhaps I should say I will be leaving the Mozilla Corporation — MoCo, as it’s known internally. After all, once you’re a Mozillian, you’re always a Mozillian. I was there for a significant part of my life — nine years, most of them great, some tough. I was empowered and supported by leadership to move between cities and across countries. Started by moving to London (first time I lived abroad) in February 2013, then Zürich in May 2014, Engelberg (my personal favorite) in May 2015, Zürich again in February 2017, and now here in Berlin since September 2018. In the same time period I moved in with my wonderful partner and we became the lucky parents of two amazing children. It isn’t always easy, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. They bring me joy every day.
[...]
So long, and thanks for all the browser engines. And remember, always ask: is this good for the web?
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Coming a little over a month after LibreOffice 7.3.3, the LibreOffice 7.3.4 point release is here to fix a total of 88 bugs across all core components of the open-source office suite in an attempt to make the LibreOffice 7.3 series more stable and reliable for daily use.
If you’re already using the LibreOffice 7.3 office suite in your GNU/Linux distribution, I highly recommend that you update your installations as soon as possible to version 7.3.4 for the best possible experience.
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LibreOffice 7.3.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
The LibreOffice 7.3 family offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.
Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is artificially complex, and not on the ISO approved standard. This lack of respect for the ISO standard format may create issues to LibreOffice, and is a huge obstacle for transparent interoperability.
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Programming/Development
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Python
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Many open source projects have test suites that include nondeterministic test cases with unpredictable behavior. Tests might be nondeterministic because they launch several parallel processes or threads that interact in an unpredictable manner, or because they depend on some activity in the operating system that has nondeterministic behavior. The presence of these tests can interfere with automated regression checking in CI/CD pipelines. This article shows how to automate the discovery of nondeterministic test cases using a short Python script based on the Bunsen test suite analysis toolkit.
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Leftovers
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Earlier this week, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched a new podcast, The Digital Insider with Sinan Aral. Aral is Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy, where I’ve been a Fellow since it was founded in 2012. He’s the author of the 2020 book The Hype Machine.
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Hardware
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A couple of months ago, the Storage Unpacked Podcast published an episode where they interviewed two representatives from Seagate (Tim Walker and Mohamad El-Batal from Seagate Research) to discuss the NVMe HDD and a bit more. It was a good episode and a lot was discussed about NVMe technologies, multi-actuator drives and the future of spinning disk.
So, yes….Seagate developed a spinning magnetic disk (the Hard Disk Drive or HDD) that natively speaks the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol instead of the very aged (and bloated) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). The logic is built directly into the SoC (or System on a Chip) The company made the official announcement late last year. Another article can be found here.
What prompted this post is a recent announcement from StorONE and they are integrating HDDs into their NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) network. Why is this interesting?
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Microsoft Chooses Proprietary
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The free open-source text and source code editor, Atom, is reaching the end of life!
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Does anyone out there still use GitHub’s Atom text editor?
If so I’ve some bad news to impact: it’s being discontinued! Oh, I know: precisely no-one reading this is shocked at the news – though I suspect more than a few will be saddened by it.
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On December 15, Microsoft’s GitHub plans to turn out the lights on Atom, its open-source text editor that has inspired and influenced widely used commercial apps, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and GitHub Desktop.
The social code biz said it’s doing so to focus on cloud-based software.
“While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces,” GitHub explained on Wednesday.
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Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub back in 2018, we knew that Atom’s days were probably numbered. And now they have made it official. GitHub is “sunsetting” Atom so they can focus their time on other projects. What does this mean for Atom users?
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (mailman and python-bottle), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, subversion:1.14, and xz), Scientific Linux (python-twisted-web), Slackware (httpd), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, ffmpeg, ghostscript, and varnish).
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ZDNet ☛ This new Linux malware is ‘almost impossible’ to detect [Ed: Typical anti-Linux FUD from ZDNet. CISA has made it very clear, this past week too, that the real security menace is Microsoft, not Linux. And Microsoft isn't even patching actively-exploited holes.]
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Over the past year, software engineers have lived through the shock of infiltrated or intentionally broken NPM packages, supply chain attacks, long-unnoticed backdoors, the emergence of dependency confusion threats, and more. This has created a firestorm of activity around how to securely build software. Many organizations, from the Linux Foundation to the United States government, are calling for and building new practices and regulations, and one of the primary threads is around “reproducible builds.”
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A reproducible build “produces the same byte-for-byte output no matter what computer you run on, what time you run it, and what external services are accessible from the network,” states FOSSA.
And, reproducible builds can strengthen software supply chain security, but getting there can be challenging. This article outlines some guiding principles for designing reproducible builds.
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Fedora 36 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9) are out, and both ship with OpenSSL 3 that has tighter security defaults and a brand new “provider” architecture. While users were testing the beta and other development versions, issues in interoperability with servers and devices such as Wi-Fi access points showed up and caused some confusion between various uses of the rather overloaded word “legacy” that we would like to clear up.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Access Now is disappointed that Alphabet’s management failed to prioritize human rights when they voted to reject a civil society-backed shareholder proposal led by SumOfUs at the 2022 Annual General Meeting. The proposal comes after red flags were raised around the company’s plan to build a cloud region in Saudi Arabia.
However, in spite of company leadership’s recommendation to vote against the proposal to commission a human rights assessment of the planned expansion of Cloud centers in countries with poor human rights records, the majority (57.6%) of independent shareholders voted in its favor,* sending a clear message that aligns with civil society’s call: put human rights first.
“While Access Now is troubled that this opportunity for Alphabet to elevate people over profits wasn’t seized by all, the number of independent shareholders’ votes that supported human rights assessments signals how close we are to sparking real change within one of the most influential companies in the world,” said Laura Okkonen, Investor Advocate at Access Now. “We will continue our work to ensure safeguards are in place before Google Cloud centers are built — and people’s private data is stored — in Saudi Arabia or other regions with poor human rights records.”
Google, along with other tech giants, has a long way to go in respecting the rights of people within the Middle East and North Africa region.
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AS RUSSIA CONTINUES its unprovoked armed aggression, reports from Ukraine note that the smartphones in civilians’ pockets may be “weapons powerful in their own way as rockets and artillery.” Indeed, technologists in the country have quickly created remarkable apps to keep citizens safe and assist the war effort—everything from an air-raid alert app to the rapid repurposing of the government’s Diia app. The latter was once used by more than 18 million Ukrainians for things like digital IDs, but it now allows users to report the movements of invading soldiers through the “e-Enemy” feature. “Anyone can help our army locate Russian troops. Use our chat bot to inform the Armed Forces,” the Ministry of Digital Transformation said of the new capability when it rolled out.
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Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting.
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Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Twitter agreed to the fine and “robust compliance measures to protect users’ data privacy” to settle a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the US government.
“As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said. “This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.”
The settlement was reached with both the FTC and Department of Justice. “The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users’ privacy,” DOJ Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. The payment will go to the US Treasury, according to the settlement.
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Environment
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Wildlife/Nature
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A video shows the cephalopod changing from a stark black color to transparent in seconds.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Instagram is one of the last avenues for online open dialogue in Iran, and parent company Meta must instil Persian content moderation practices that uphold and promote human rights in the country — especially freedom of expression.
“You can’t silence communities simply because you don’t understand them,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “That’s exactly what Meta’s ‘take down, ask questions later’ approach has been. For too long, people who don’t know the Persian language or its nuances have been deciding Instagram’s narrative in Iran. We’re calling on Meta to end its regime of censorship, and place human rights at the core of its content moderation.”
According to polls, more than 50% of people who use the internet in Iran are on Instagram, but there have been major issues around the arbitrary and uninformed content moderation processes of Persian-language posts.
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ARTICLE 19, Access Now and the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) have come together to make recommendations to Meta and Meta’s Oversight Board in an effort to streamline processes to ensure freedom of expression is protected for users who rely on their platform in Iran, especially during protests.
On 7 June 2022, ARTICLE 19 hosted a RightsCon session that included Meta’s Content Policy manager Muhammad Abushaqra, a member of of Meta’s Oversight Board, Julie Owono, and BBC Persian’s Rana Rahimpour. The event covered Instagram’s Persian-language content moderation processes and problems. Because Instagram, which is owned by Meta, is now the main platform for communication in Iran given its status as the last remaining uncensored social media in the country, the discussion focused on Meta’s regulation of this platform. According to polls, Instagram hosts 53.1% of all Internet users in Iran on its platform, the second most-used app in Iran after WhatsApp.
Instagram suffers from a deficit in trust and transparency when it comes to content moderation practices for the Persian community. Despite acknowledgments by the company, the case loads remain high through the communication and network mechanisms that organisations like ours alone maintain, which represent problems from only a small fraction of the community. Many Iranians are abandoning Instagram because they distrust the platform’s policies and/or enforcements.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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How to download a file over TLS using the Racket programming language. It is surprisingly straightforward. As with the Go example I gave earlier I have ignored verification of certificates. It looks a job of work.
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Below is the “simplest thing that could possibly work” in terms of fetching a file from a Gemini server. There is no verification of certificates, or any of that ilk. This example just fetches the root document “/”, which should translate to “/index.gmi”. It is trivial to fetch any document you like, though.
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Cloudflare, the internet services giant, has just announced Private Access Tokens. These aim to reduce the number of CAPTCHAs you see on the web while improving your privacy.
As you may have found out, CAPTCHAs are a horrible experience on mobile. They often end up occupying the entire screen and can be impossible to complete at times.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Videos at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A 2001 film currently circulating widely (official homepage) contains many interesting bits including admission from Linus Torvalds that the GPL was crucial for the success of Linux
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Programming/Development
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Python
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A chainsaw can make short work of clearing out the back forty. It can also make a good horror movie. So while some people will say we don’t need another tool to allow more malicious scripting in the browser, we also know that, like any tool, you can use it or abuse it. That tool? PyScript, which is, of course, Python in the browser.
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Leftovers
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The quality of any measurement can only be as good as the instrument used to gather it, and for acoustic measurements, finding a good enough instrument can be surprisingly difficult. Commonly available microphones can be of good quality, but since they are invariably designed for speech or music, they need not have the flat or wide enough response and low noise figure demanded of an instrumentation microphone.
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In the summer of 2010, when reality programming was still an incipient subgenre of television, regularly mocked as fatuous and crude, MTV aired the series finale of The Hills. Plagued throughout its run by accusations of artifice, The Hills, along with The Real World, The Simple Life, and The Osbournes, was nevertheless a chief architect of the genre’s popularity, the forerunner of a particular sort of aspirational programming in which attractive young adults jettisoned their cushy roots (in this case, Laguna Beach, Calif.,) to pursue dream careers in fashion, or something like it, in a big city (in this case, Los Angeles). After a four-year run, the series ended with what then qualified as a provocation. Decamping to Europe from her native California in search of a “new beginning,” Kristin Cavallari bids adieu to her on-again, off-again boyfriend Brody Jenner as she packs her luggage into a car headed for LAX. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he tells her. An acoustic version of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” swells in the background, and Brody looks on wistfully as the car takes off, the Hollywood sign looming large behind his signature black trucker hat. Then the camera pans back, the sign starts to move, the car turns around. And as Kristin gets back out, hugging Brody as one would a scene partner, it’s revealed that the whole thing was shot on a soundstage.
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The French Revolution, between 1889 and 1899, I remember even less about. Head cheeses rolled. Marie Antoinette. Guy O Tines went on to play for Les Habs. I’m told that bedlam broke out at the Bastille when it was discovered that the Marquis de Sade — who, head in the dungeon, wrote prolifically about the “lust in his heart” — had been transferred to another asylum. All the big smokes had something nice to say about de Sade — Michel Foucault, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag. Michel Onfray, however, was au contraire, mon frere, saying, in Wikipedia, that “it is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero…” Robespierre. Antonin Artaud played Marat in the bath tub scene of a Theater of Cruelty production. My French teacher at junior high was surely part of the New Wave, a Truffault truffle worth snuffling after, and I snuffled, smitten witten her every moving curvicature, as she put Françoise Hardy’s “Tous les garçons et les filles” on the record player — even the scratches were sexy. I finally came across that French teacher again in her new form, Feist, singing “1234.” Personally, I think it’s about time we stormed the Bastards who steal. Egalite! Fraternite! Liberte!™.
All of this is prelude, of course — to something. I was recently watching the French film, Delicious (2021). That must be it. I really enjoyed it and I’m going to tell you why. The cast, though unknown to me because I don’t watch a lot of French films these days, was delightful. It was directed and co-written by Éric Besnard, perhaps known in the West for his work in the Jason Statham vehicle, Wrath of Man (2021) Delicious stars Grégory Gadebois as chef Pierre Manceron who starred as Charlie in a French version of Flowers of Algernon (“They also serve who only sweep and buff,” was the poster slogan, as I translated it.); Isabelle Carré as Louise, his kitchen side kick and inspiration; Benjamin Lavernhe (The French Dispatch, 2021) as Le duc de Chamfort, gasbag and flaming asshole and one-man reason for a spanking good revolution. It’s a fine tension set. They get on each other’s nerves and we feast on it. Get it?
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Personal head-up displays are a technology whose time ought by now to have come, but which notwithstanding attempts such as the Google Glass, have steadfastly refused to catch on. There’s an intriguing possibility in [Basel Saleh]’s CaptionIt project though, a head-up display that provides captions for everyday situations.
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Your [Bornhack] plans include leaving lemons in patterns as an info display. Your squirrel feeder needs to only dispense nuts when the squirrels deserve it. As promised last week, an intro to gating, feeding, and moving bulk material.
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In any era, the story of electronics has very much been about figuring out how to make something happen with what’s available at the time. And as is often the case, the most interesting developments come from occasions when needs exceed what’s available. That’s when real innovation takes place, even if circumstances conspire to keep the innovation from ever taking hold in the marketplace.
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The story is very rushed, and the small number of locations is a shame, but it still manages to reach a satisfying conclusion. So I’m glad I picked it up again, and saw it thru after many years of dropping it. There aren’t many narrative RPG adventures out there, despite how well received they usually are. Torment: Tides of Numenera is probably my favorite out of all the ones I’ve played so far.
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Hardware
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Induction cook tops are among the most efficient ways of cooking in the home that are commercially available to the average person. Since the cook surface uses magnetic fields to generate heat in the cookware itself, there is essentially no heat wasted. There are some other perks too, such as faster cooking times and more fine control, not to mention that it’s possible to build your own induction stove. All you need is some iron, wire, and a power source, and you can have something like this homemade induction cooker.
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Last time we looked in on Injekto — a homemade plastic injection machine — it was at version 1.0. A recent video from the team that you can see below shows version 2 which is much improved and can work with 3D printed molds. Injection molding takes a lot of pressure and the machine certainly looks stout with lots of machined aluminum.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”
Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.
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With insulin prices in the United States so astronomical that experts have accused the federal government and pharmaceutical industry of violating human rights, California is exploring a plan to produce its own generic version of the lifesaving medicine and make it accessible to millions of people with diabetes.
“Everyone who cares about the future of U.S. domestic policy should pay attention to this effort in California to build a public option for prescription drug manufacturing,” Steph Sterling, vice president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, said Tuesday.
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Furthermore, Diablo’s radioactive plumes could contaminate the drinking water that flows from the Sierra Mountains through the Central Valley and into cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which would lead to a mass migration out of California.
Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s nuclear plant, located near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, is surrounded by a confluence of 13 known fault lines on the seismically active “Pacific Ring of Fire” earthquake and tsunami zone.
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The vote follows a three-day strike in Hawaii. In May, Hawaiian psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors walked picket lines on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island to protest Kaiser’s severe understaffing at clinics and medical facilities. Staffing, patient loads, working conditions, these issues are the same right throughout the Kaiser’s vast system. The wealthy and powerful corporation that self-advertises as non-profit and patient centered cynically refuses to meet minimal staffing requirements (mandated by state regulations and the law) while enforcing working conditions that demoralize clinicians and place mental health patients in danger (often severe, even fatal)– all in the name of the bottom line.
These hospital strikes are the workers’ fightback; they represent a sort of trench warfare, front lines in a war of attrition, with Californians’ lives and livelihoods at stake.
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Ellen Brown uses the example of dachas as a model for what Americans can do in their backyards.
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Proprietary
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Github announced recently that is is “sunsetting” Atom. Can we please just talk normally and speak plainly? Instead of saying “sunsetting”, call it what it is: discontinuing. Is it really so hard to say that they are “discontinuing Atom”?
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“Compelling update experience.” That was a phrase that a Microsoft employee once used to talk about Windows 11 updates. I have never installed Windows 10 or 11 on my machines, but from what I have heard, the update experience can best be desribed as a clusterf*ck. Well, I guess it is compelling in the sense that Microsoft is going to try to forcefeed the updates down your throat no matter what. Or compelling in the sense that it makes you feel like throwing your computer out the window. It is certainly not compelling in the sense that it is a joyful experience.
Also, can we please stop over-using superlatives? This is not Microsoft-specific thing, this is more of a social media thing. It is a practise that needs to stop. Not everything is at an extreme end of experience. Use words that reflect the accuracy of the content. It’s not an “awesome” cake, it’s a “delicious” cake. It is a sign of emotional immaturity to express all experiences in hyperbolic terms.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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But leaving your browser in charge of your passwords is far from safe. Anyone who accesses your device can easily check your credentials and steal them to access your sensitive accounts. Saving your passwords also puts them at risk of online data leaks should your browser servers become compromised.
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Work has been alright. My boss’ boss has set up all of these metrics to measure our performance, which I’m not a huge fan of. I understand why, I guess I don’t like it because it can’t track everything we do.
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The Commission’s proposal would compel a broad range of technology companies to scan and analyze their users’ messages, in the name of fighting crimes against children. Email, texts, social media messages, and DMs could all be subject to plain-text access and scanning. It could eviscerate end-to-end encryption by installing client-side scanning on our devices.
Our letter explains the many ways that this EU scanning regulation puts us all at risk. Lawyers, journalists, human rights workers, political dissidents, and oppressed minorities—the people who need secure communications the most—will be the most affected. This also harms abused and at-risk children, who need to securely communicate with trusted adults to seek help.
These vulnerable people will be subject to constant law enforcement scans in the EU. Beyond the EU’s borders, it could be even worse. Once these special access systems are built, we can be sure that more authoritarian countries will demand the same ability to read our messages.
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These student spyware apps promise scalable surveillance-as-a-service. The lure of “scalability” is a well-documented source of risk to marginalized users, whose needs for individualized consideration are overshadowed by the prospect of building mass-scale, one-size-fits-all “solutions” to social problems. The problems of scale are dangerously exacerbated by laws that disparately impact marginalized communities.
Today, Americans face an unprecedented, record-breaking wave of legislation targeting transgender youth: from sports bans, to speech and literature bans, to the criminalization of life-saving healthcare, all on top of the widespread practices of locker-room- and bathroom-bans.
And it’s not just trans kids in the crosshairs: Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court precedent that protects the right to have an abortion, is likely about to be overturned.
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Defence/Aggression
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The delivery to the government in Chişinău is being financed by Germany. The project is headed by an ousted Berlin police chief.
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Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any bookshelf reserved for accounts that reveal essential truths of our past, Bloodlands deserves a place of honor. It’s a towering achievement.
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Zeneta Everhart, whose 21-year-old son was shot in the neck and back during a racist massacre in Buffalo last month, told members of Congress at a House hearing Wednesday that if listening to her testimony doesn’t compel them to take action against gun violence, they should visit her home to help “clean Zaire’s wounds so that you may see up close the damage that has been caused.”
“To the lawmakers who feel that we do not need stricter gun laws, let me paint a picture for you: My son, Zaire, has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back, and another on his left leg, caused by an exploding bullet from an AR-15,” said Everhart, fighting back tears.
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More than hundred days of Moscow waging war against Ukraine has changed the lives of many Russians. Those opposed to Russia’s full-scale invasion initially took to the streets. When the authorities passed criminal penalties for “discrediting” the Russian army, they started taking part in the greater anti-war movement. Many were forced to leave the country. Others went to rallies in support of the “special operation” and parroted the arguments put forth in Russian propaganda about “denazifying” Ukraine. What has changed in Russian society during the war so far? How are Russians getting along with each other, and who is really supporting the “special operation”? Meduza posed these and other questions to sociologist Alexei Titkov.
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The reported annihilation of Russia’s 35th Combined Arms Army is one of the most resonant stories to emerge from the front lines in the Donbas in recent days. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak shared the news on June 4, saying that the 35th Army had been “destroyed” during clashes with Ukraine’s Armed Forces near Izyum. Meduza’s own news update cited Yermak’s claim, albeit with the disclaimer that our journalists could not immediately verify this official statement. Upon further verification, Meduza traced these reports back to their actual original source — a LiveJournal post by a Russian military blogger who is currently serving in the “Luhansk People’s Militia.” The post, which provoked controversy among pro-Kremlin military bloggers and has since been removed, doesn’t explicitly say that the entire 35th Army was obliterated. Meduza breaks down how a dubious blog post turned into a story reported around the world.
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On May 24, 2022, a 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex.
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U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday took aim at lax gun control laws in mostly Republican-run states and the firearm industry lobby, which she accused of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in “blood money” to obstruct reforms supported by most Americans.
“Let’s talk about one thing more important to lobbyists and the gun industry than children… Let’s talk about profit.”
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A fourth-grader from Uvalde, Texas who survived the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School last month was among those who gave powerful eye-witness testimony Wednesday at a House hearing on gun violence.
“And then he shot some of my classmates.”
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A local pediatrician who rushed to Uvalde Memorial Hospital after the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Texas last month testified Wednesday during a congressional hearing on gun violence.
“The thing I can’t figure out is whether our politicians are failing us out of stubbornness, passivity, or both.”
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“In the reel that keeps scrolling across my memories, she turns her head and smiles back at us to acknowledge my promise—and then we left.”
Kimberly Rubio on Wednesday recounted to members of Congress her last moments with her daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio before the 10-year-old was killed last month in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that also left 18 other children and two teachers dead.
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Thirty-four American sailors were killed and 171 were wounded, many with lifelong burns and traumas that lingered for years.
In a shameful response, the US Government and the Pentagon colluded in perhaps the most disgraceful coverup involving the brutal murder of American servicemen.
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We want to thank everyone who showed up on social media and voiced their concern about this dangerous and (for now) thwarted plan. We also appreciate members of Axon’s ethics board for taking a stand against the project, and then resigning when it looked as if Axon was going to ignore their recommendation.
In an era where police are so unaccountable and have so many different revenue streams for acquiring invasive technology, it’s good to remind ourselves that there is another pressure point: the companies that make and profit off of this technology. We will keep up the pressure and we hope you’ll continue to fight with us.
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With gun massacres (counted as four or more killings) coming one after another, here are statistics on gun murders in the US (in 2020) as reported by the Pew Research Center:
A comparison of homicides compiled from the National Vital Statistics System is telling…
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The latest developments, including: – Ian Bremmer’s analysis on the latest in Ukraine – Russia consolidating control in Donbas – The long war benefits Russia – Divisions in Europe emerging – Peace talks versus victory on the battlefield – Russia’s information war in Africa, Latin America, etc. – Russia targeting BRICS countries with its narratives
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By Éric Denécé / Cf2R.org Alongside the continuation of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, the media war continues to be in full swing and those who are at the origin of it – as well a…
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It’s time to talk about what an American fascist government would look like. The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.
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Gun buyers behave in ways that suggest they logically anticipate that lawmakers will respond to a mass shooting by making it harder to buy a gun. After all, when consumer products are found to be a danger to humans, they are often regulated.
The federal government routinely recalls dangerous products—such as a line of children’s bunk beds whose defective ladder resulted in the death of a 2-year-old child from Ohio. In that case, nearly 40,000 units sold to the public were recalled. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has a lengthy list of toys that the federal government has recalled that have posed choking hazards for kids.
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The shooters’ young age was not an aberration. The average age of school shooters is 18, when tracking incidents since 1966.
The relatively young age of most mass shooters has ignited conversations about the minimum legal age for purchasing firearms.
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Just two weeks days before the latest massacre in Texas of 19 school kids, Tom Friedman, a star columnist of the New York Times, was invited to have lunch with President Biden at the White House. For a journalist to have this kind of exclusive lunch meeting with the chief executive is a very big deal anywhere in the world. The reason, you can safely assume, was that Biden wanted to share some intimate thoughts with Friedman whom he had known for a long time. Obviously, Americans as well as the rest of the world were eagerly waiting to get a glimpse of Biden’s innermost feelings at a time when America itself is becoming increasingly restive and ungovernable.
Unfortunately, though, the entire meeting was off-the-record and Friedman couldn’t share with his readers about what he heard from the president.
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Thanks to an old Supreme Court case, Uvalde parents will have a hard time convincing courts to hold police liable for failing to protect their kids.
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Environment
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Energy
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During the crypto, NFT, and “web3” era there’s been no limit of hype regarding the (largely money making) potential of the ever-evolving internet. Less cared about during the metaverse hype era has been foundational but less sexy policy issues like anti-monopolization, or affordable and even broadband coverage.
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Progressives have been urging governments to embark on an accelerated global clean energy transition since Russia’s late-February invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions unleashed chaos in energy markets around the world, but policymakers have opted instead to expand fossil fuel infrastructure.
That’s according to researchers from Climate Action Tracker, which released a new report Wednesday warning that this reaction threatens to lock in decades of heat-trapping emissions at a time when the window to slash greenhouse gas pollution and avert the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis is rapidly closing.
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On February 24, as Russia invaded Ukraine, Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey posed the interesting question: “Is Putin’s Invasion About Fossil Fuels?” Indeed, modern warfare is enabled by fossil fuels. Historians have remarked on the decisive role that access to oil made in World Wars I and II. Defense analyst and author Michael Klare refers to wars over access to fossil fuels as “resource wars,” a term sometimes applied to the Iraq War. But Russia is already a hydrocarbon-rich country, having recently climbed to world class status as an oil producer.
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Finance
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Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by voters Tuesday in a special recall election, after facing well-funded tough-on-crime attacks by the real estate industry. “He made enemies with very, very deep pockets,” says Lara Bazelon, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and chair of Boudin’s Innocence Commission, who describes the primary challenge as a “perfect storm” to take down Boudin. Bazelon also discusses the mayoral race in Los Angeles, where billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Congressmember Karen Bass will head to a runoff in November after placing first and second in Tuesday’s primary. She says the two candidates will be competing for the Latinx voting bloc, which could ultimately determine the outcome of the election.
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“Hold for Peter G. Peterson.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Fox News is under fire this week for declining to broadcast the first public prime-time hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection—a Thursday night event set to be covered by other major networks and livestreamed online.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol plans to hold its first of six public hearings beginning at 8:00 pm ET on June 9. Fox News’ regular prime-time programs “will cover the hearings as news warrants” while a team at the lower-rated sister channel Fox Business handles live coverage, their parent company said Monday.
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Former President Donald Trump and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, have agreed to be questioned under oath next month by lawyers with New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office unless the state’s highest court intervenes, a filing revealed Wednesday.
The deal to begin the questioning on July 15 comes after a New York appeals court last month upheld a lower court’s ruling that the trio must sit for depositions as part of James’ civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices.
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South Dakotans on Tuesday resoundingly defeated a Republican-authored constitutional amendment that would have raised the threshold for passage of most ballot initiatives from a simple majority to 60%, an effort motivated by GOP lawmakers’ desire to head off a Medicaid expansion vote set for November.
Voters rejected the proposal, known as Amendment C, by a margin of 67.4% to 32.6%, dealing a decisive blow to state-level Republicans’ latest attempt to weaken the ballot initiative process.
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In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.
On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)
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Top leaders from Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are all absent from the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced he would boycott the conference after the U.S. said it would not invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We speak with historian Alejandro Velasco and Roberto Lovato, award-winning Salvadoran American journalist and author, who calls the conference ”a failure of hemispheric proportions and a global embarrassment for the United States and for the Biden administration.” Lovato calls the Biden administration’s condemnation of some countries as anti-democratic hypocritical and says the absence of so many Latin American countries represents a decline in U.S. hegemony.
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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a world-renowned leftist who lifted millions out of poverty during his tenure as Brazil’s president, maintains a significant lead over the South American nation’s far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro ahead of the October election, according to new survey data released Wednesday.
A Genial/Quaest poll found that 46% of voters would support Lula in a first-round vote, giving him a 16-point lead over Bolsonaro, who garnered 30%—a two-point decline since April.
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Joe Biden has wrapped up his first trip to Asia. He met with new South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to shore up the U.S.-ROK alliance. He traveled to Tokyo to reinvigorate the Quad grouping with Japan, Australia, and India. And he peddled the new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an attempt by the United States to reinsert itself into the Asian economy after the Trump administration’s pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The spirit if not the letter of the First Amendment prohibits both sophisticated and simple-minded violations of free speech, writes Bruce Fein.
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As this blog series has sought to show, increased attention on issues like hate speech, online harassment, misinformation, and the amplification of terrorist content continues to prompt policymakers around the globe to adopt stricter regulations for speech online, including more responsibilities for online intermediaries.
EFF has long championed efforts to promote freedom of expression and create an enabling environment for innovation in a manner that balances the needs of governments and other stakeholders. We recognize that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between addressing the very real issue of platforms hosting and amplifying harmful content and activity while simultaneously providing enough protection to those platforms so that they are not incentivized to remove protected user speech, thus promoting freedom of expression.
Today, as global efforts to change long-standing intermediary liability laws continue, we now use a set of questions to guide the way we look at such proposals. We approach new platform regulation proposals with three primary questions in mind: Are intermediary liability regulations the problem? Is the proposed solution going to fix that problem? And can inevitable collateral effects be mitigated?
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This kind of hubris can only be explained by massive self-delusion. It’s not pretty but at least the denouement is wholly justified.
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Okay, so, it was just a few weeks ago that a teenager went into an elementary school and killed 21 people, including 19 children. You might think there are important things about that which should draw the attention of the state’s top lawyer. Attorney General Ken Paxton is a busy man. He’s running for a third term in the job, while still waiting for the supposed trial on his indictment that happened seven years ago. He also wasted a bunch of time on a bunch of bogus “stop the steal” lawsuits, and led the charge on the ridiculous attempt to force DirecTV to platform nonsense peddler OAN. Oh, and of course, his office is also leading the charge to enforce his obviously unconstitutional social media content moderation bill.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, Tennessee, that for years illegally jailed children will now be overseen by a five-member board rather than the county’s juvenile court judge, a change designed to bring greater accountability to a long-troubled system.
At a meeting earlier this year, the county’s mayor said he thought the shift could bring “more oversight or transparency.” The board members will be appointed by Rutherford County commissioners.
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Every year, there are multiple Military Appreciation Nights (“MAN”?) in Major League Baseball. Every year, teams inform players that they will be wearing camouflage versions of their hats or uniforms to show their solidarity with the US armed forces. Every year, soldiers are granted free tickets, and many show up in full regalia, to the delight of fans.
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The Biden administration has denied members of an Indigenous delegation from the Amazon rainforest entry at this week’s U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas. Meanwhile, President Biden agreed to meet with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who told Biden he would only attend the conference if he was guaranteed immunity from criticism on his systematic destruction of the Amazon rainforest, among other policies. We speak with one of the delegation’s members, Domingo Peas, an Achuar leader from Ecuador and territories coordinator for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. “We cannot continue to destroy the forest and expect to survive. So we call on President Bolsonaro, we call on President Lasso, to act on behalf of future generations with courage, with their heart, and to stop expansion of disruptive economies, and to really embrace fully a new path forward that’s for the benefit of all life,” says Peas.
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British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have still not been found, after being reported missing Sunday in one of Brazil’s most remote areas of the Amazon. The pair were traveling across the region to interview Indigenous leaders patrolling the area for illegal miners and fishers for Phillips’s upcoming book. “We know that they had been receiving threats. We know that there are other people who are being threatened in this territory,” says Ana Alfinito, Brazil legal adviser for Amazon Watch. Alfinito also explains how Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has systematically destroyed protections for Indigenous groups across the Amazon.
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Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.
Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.
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Usurping the fundamental rights of women to control their own bodies.
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With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to issue a ruling later this month that could overturn Roe v. Wade and imperil abortion rights nationwide, a group of 25 senators on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to do all he can through executive action to protect reproductive freedoms at the federal level.
“We need an all-of-government plan to protect every American’s reproductive rights.”
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For example, the power of the 1% – the political and corporate elite – often depends on convincing the rest of us to accept the demonization of some enemy: militant trade unions, even more militant anarchists, unruly women, conspiring Jews, treacherous communists, Islamic terrorists, etc.
Propagandistic scapegoating is widely understood as a metaphor for targeted blame-shifting. In historic terms, the idea of scapegoating originated from the religious scripts of the Bible. Initially, it meant as the purging of a sin (as defined by the church). Such cleansing of a sin (including, of course, lust and fornication!) was often “achieved”(!) through a ritual sacrifice.
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“The blowout victory comes four months after Starbucks illegally fired seven pro-union workers,” noted More Perfect Union. “A historic victory.”
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Amazon’s lawyers filed a motion on Tuesday urging the National Labor Relations Board to bar the public—and potentially members of the press—from tuning in to a hearing next week at which the company is set to lay out its case for why the historic union victory at the JFK8 warehouse in New York should be overturned.
According to the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos, the company argues in its motion that “because the hearing is being held on Zoom, it makes it difficult to know if witnesses who aren’t supposed to be able to observe the proceedings are in attendance, or if the hearing is being recorded and shared with those witnesses.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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We’ve noted for a few months how telecom and media giants are engaged in a full court press to scuttle the nomination of popular anti-monopolist and reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn’s broadly popular and highly qualified, so the telecom lobby has taken to running a broad smear campaign falsely accusing her of hating cops, rural America, and free speech.
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Monopolies
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A leading digital rights group on Wednesday kicked off a new campaign aimed at boosting federal legislation that would crack down on Big Tech monopolies.
“This and next week are do-or-die for the most significant antitrust reforms in a generation.”
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Software Patents
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Finding people near you with shared interests, and talking to them, has a very long history in human culture. We’re social animals. We need to find other people close to us to work together with, play games with, and build relationships and families with. Modern online social networks are built on top of those basic human needs.
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Copyrights
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The US Copyright Office’s inquiry on the option to add mandatory copyright protection measures in the DMCA has led to some interesting responses. They include a suggestion to add “VPN detection” tools to prevent people from engaging in “geo-piracy”. This request, unsurprisingly, comes from a company that offers a VPN detection service.
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Canada’s Federal Court has handed down a ‘dynamic’ blocking order to prevent live NHL games from being viewed via pirate IPTV streams. The first of its kind in Canada, the flexible injunction was obtained by companies including Rogers, Bell, The Sports Network, and Groupe TVA. Unusually, it will be independently audited to assess over-blocking and any user circumvention via VPNs.
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Too often we assume that copyright is something that only concerns Western nations like the US and EU. But it’s important to remember that copyright has been exported all around the world. Moreover, when Western nations make copyright worse, they then try to convince other countries to adopt the same bad ideas, for example through the terms of trade deals. But occasionally, nations outside the copyright mainstream manage to make some moves in the opposite direction, adding benefits for ordinary people rather than for the copyright industry. For example, in Taiwan there’s a welcome change to the law in this area, reported here by Focus Taiwan:
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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System76’s recent partnership with HP for a developer-focused laptop made users think that it should enable users across the globe to get their hands on a laptop with Pop!_OS pre-installed.
Unfortunately, the HP Dev One laptop is limited to U.S. customers as of now. But, it seems like you can expect System76 hardware to be available in Europe very soon.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The normal rule of kernel development is that the creation of user-space regressions is not allowed; a patch that breaks a previously working application must be either fixed or reverted. There are exceptions, though, including a 5.10 patch that has been turning up regressions ever since. The story that emerges here shows what can happen when the goals of stability, avoiding security problems, and code cleanup run into conflict.
The set_fs() function was added to the kernel early in its history; it was not in the initial 0.01 release, but was added before the 0.10 release in late 1991. Normally, kernel code that is intended to access user-space memory will generate an error if it attempts to access kernel space instead; this restriction prevents, for example, attempts by an attacker to access kernel memory via system calls. A call to set_fs(KERNEL_DS) can be used to lift the restriction when the need arises; a common use case for set_fs() is to be able to perform file I/O from within the kernel. Calling set_fs(USER_DS) puts the restriction back.
The problem with set_fs() is that it turns out to be easy to forget the second set_fs() call to restore the protection of kernel space, leading directly to the “total compromise” scenario that kernel developers will normally take some pains to avoid. Numerous such bugs have been fixed over the years, but it had long been clear that the real solution was to just get rid of set_fs() entirely and adopt safer ways of accessing kernel memory when needed.
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As of this writing, just under 4,600 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.19 development cycle. The 5.19 merge window is clearly well underway. The changes pulled so far cover a number of areas, including the core kernel, architecture support, networking, security, and virtualization; read on for highlights from the first part of this merge window.
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Adding support for an in-kernel TLS handshake was the topic of a combined storage and filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). Chuck Lever and Hannes Reinecke led the discussion on ways to add that support; they are interested in order to provide TLS for network storage and filesystems. But there are likely other features, such as QUIC support, that could use an in-kernel TLS implementation.
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The challenges of testing filesystems and the block layer were the topic of a combined storage and filesystem session led by Luis Chamberlain at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). His goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to test new features in those areas, but one of the problems that he has encountered is a lack of determinism in the test results. It is sometimes hard to distinguish problems in the kernel code from problems in the tests themselves.
He began with a request to always use the term “fstests” for the tests that have been known as “xfstests”. The old name is confusing, especially for new kernel developers, because the test suite has long been used for testing more than just the XFS filesystem. It is not just new folks, though; even at previous LSFMMs, he has seen people get confused by the “xfs” in the name.
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In a filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Amir Goldstein led a discussion about the stable kernel trees. Those trees, and especially the long-term support (LTS) versions, are used as a basis for a variety of Linux-based products, but the kind of testing that is being done on them for filesystems is lacking. Part of the problem is that the tests target filesystem developers so they are not easily used by downstream consumers of the stable kernel trees.
His interest in the problem comes about because he is using the 5.10 LTS kernel and the XFS filesystem. He realized that XFS is not being maintained in that kernel; there are only three XFS patches backported to it in the past two years or more. There is some history behind that, though most in the room already know it, he said.
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The ID-mapped mounts feature was added to Linux in 5.12, but the general idea behind it goes back a fair bit further. There are a number of different situations where the user and group IDs for files on disk do not match the current human (or process) user of those files, so ID-mapped mounts provide a way to resolve that problem—without changing the files on disk. The developer of the feature, Christian Brauner, led a discussion at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) on ID-mapped mounts.
He began with an introduction. There are multiple use cases, but he likes to talk about portable home directories first because they are not related to containers, which many think is the sole reason for ID-mapped mounts. A portable home directory would be on some kind of removable media that can be attached to various systems, some of which have a different user and group ID for the user, but, of course, the media has fixed values for those IDs. ID-Mapped mounts allow the device to be mounted on the system with the IDs remapped to those of the user on the local system.
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Applications
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I (judiciously, as one might opine) pulled back from posting about every single feature release, but things have kept plodding along in quiet. ImageMagick is finally going away as per a buried remark from 2020, which means no more filling up /tmp, no more spawning Inkscape to read in SVGs, and so on. There’s also lots of convenience and robustness and whatnot. Go read the release notes.
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Our introduction to Linux audio and MIDI plugin APIs ended with a mention of the Clever Audio Plugin (CLAP) but did not get into the details. CLAP is an MIT-licensed API for developing audio and MIDI plugins that, its developers feel, has the potential to improve the audio-software situation on Linux. The time has now come to get to those details and look at the state of CLAP and where it is headed.
When CLAP resurfaced in late 2021 after years of radio silence, xkcd #927 references were a popular response in all discussions about it. But there are a number of serious questions to ask about this API as well. Does CLAP actually compete with the other audio APIs available on Linux, including VST3, LV2, and others? Is it a viable alternative? Does it address problems that developers have with other APIs?
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Instructionals/Technical
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Certificate transparency is partly a de facto replacement for earlier systems that attempted to do certificate revocation at scale on the web, those being Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) and then OCSP. One of the problems that both CRLs and OCSP checks had (and have) is that they require Certificate Authorities to reliably operate high demand web services with essentially no downtime. Unsurprisingly, they periodically didn’t, and in general we shouldn’t be surprised by that, since running such web services is expensive as well as challenging.
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Virtual machines do their best to convince their operating system that they are running on physical machines. So can you tell if a computer is physical or virtual from the Linux command line?
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Calibre is an open-source ebook manager and viewer tool that can open, edit, convert and manipulate ebooks. It is available on all platforms, whether it’s a Microsoft Windows, macOS, or any other Linux Distributions along with mobile devices and e-readers like Kindle.
The basic features of calibre are as follows…
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Today, you will learn how to setup your local DNS server using Webmin
Webmin is a powerful and flexible web-based server management control panel for Unix-like systems. Webmin allows the user to configure operating system internals, such as users, disk quotas, services, or configuration files, and modify and control open-source apps, such as the Apache HTTP Server, PHP, or MySQL.
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Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Ruby on CentOS 9 Stream. This programming language is one of the classics, but still important for many applications and scripts.
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Noob404, the PS4 scene’s new Linux expert, has published a video tutorial on how to install the Steam Deck UI on PS4. The technique requires a Jailbroken PS4 (of course) and will let you run the Steam Deck UI on a Linux distribution of your choice.
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Imagine being able to share an important secret like a password over the Internet. Sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? However, You can do it securely use a great application made in Python. Today, you will learn how to install Snappass on Ubuntu 20.04.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Adminer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Adminer (formerly known as PHPMyAdmin) is an open-source and free web-based database management tool. With Adminer, you can manage several databases including, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and more. it is a lightweight application with strong security and user experience in mind.
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 Adminer on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Sadly, my system administration isn’t going as well. I’m trying to install GoToSocial.
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It’s Sunday, and I go to check my email, only I can’t. For some reason, the mouse isn’t moving to the Linux screen [1]. Odd. Perhaps Synergy [2] crashed or something, so it’s good thing I also have a KVM (Keyboard,Video, Mouse) switch installed as well. Only the keyboard isn’t working [3].
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In a sign of how display handling is evolving, the GNOME desktop’s 3D-compositing Mutter window manager is gaining support for variable refresh rate (VRR, also known as Adaptive Sync) displays.
Mutter is an important chunk of code. As the project page says, it’s “a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.”
It’s the basis of GNOME Shell, which is implemented [PDF] as a Mutter plug-in, but other desktops use it as well.
For instance, the PIXEL desktop of the Raspberry Pi OS.
It’s also used in Pop!_OS’s Cosmic desktop. Cinnamon uses a fork of it called Muffin.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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I’ll combine two unrelated short news about software releases for TV boxes, Raspberry Pi, and other SBCs: Kodi 20 “Nexus” Alpha 1 media center, and DietPi 8.5 lightweight Debian-based image for SBC’s.
The first alpha release of Kodi 20 “Nexus” is out with one highlight being support for AV1 hardware video decoding in Android and x86 (VAAPI) platforms with AV1-capable GPU or VPU.
Other notable changes include…
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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The upcoming openSUSE minor release is finally here. If you use OpenSUSE as your daily driver for desktop or server, you might have already tested the release candidate version available for a couple of weeks now.
The openSUSE Leap 15.4 focuses on software package updates to match the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4. So, you will notice several deprecated packages, and new upgrades available to replace them.
Of course, you should have some packages available to ensure compatibility. But, most of the older ones have been removed.
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A release roundup of the rock-solid openSUSE Leap 15.4 which brings several updates to desktops, servers, containers and virtual workloads.
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Debian Family
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Meet SpiralLinux, a user-friendly and pre-configured GNU/Linux distribution derived from Debian GNU/Linux that aims to offer users support for all major desktop environments with out-of-the-box usability. It provides a customized, yet clean Debian GNU/Linux system that uses only the official Debian Stable package repositories.
Just like GeckoLinux, SpiralLinux comes in no less than eight flavors featuring the KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, Cinnamon, Budgie, and MATE desktop environments.
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Devices/Embedded
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MYIR’s MYD-CZU3EG-ISP a vision edge computing platform built around the powerful Zynq-7000 SoC (System on Chip) family. The MYD-CZU3EG-ISP development board integrates the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG SoC, however, the platform can be customized to integrate the EV and CG models.
The standard model of the MYD-CZU3EG-ISP packs the Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG MPSoC which provides a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 (up to 1.2GHz), a dual core real time Arm Cortex-R5 up to 600MHz), a Mali 400 embedded GPU and flexible FPGA fabric.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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If you’re looking for a free and safe alternative to proprietary PDF viewing and editing software, it is not hard to find an open source option, whether for desktop or online use. Just keep in mind that the currently available solutions have their own advantages for different use cases, and there’s no single tool that is equally great at all possible tasks.
These five solutions stand out for their functionality or usefulness for niche PDF tasks. For enterprise use and collaboration, I suggest ONLYOFFICE or LibreOffice Draw. PDF Arranger is a simple, lightweight tool for working with pages when you don’t need to alter text. Okular offers great viewer features for multiple file types, and Xournal++ is the best choice if you want to sketch and take notes in your PDFs.
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One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.
A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.
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Why 2.0? Because I feel like sslh has reached a stable point with a large amount of mature functionality, in particular with the inclusion of the libev version, and support for UDP protocols.
Why rc1? Because the UDP protocols, and in particular the hash-based lookups, need production testing.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group will be releasing an update to PostgreSQL 14 on June 16, 2022. This release fixes an issue with all versions of PostgreSQL 14 that can lead to silent corruption of indexes.
Since the release of PostgreSQL 14.0, there existed an issue with CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY and REINDEX CONCURRENTLY that could cause silent data corruption in indexes. This issue is fixed in the upcoming PostgreSQL 14.4 release.
If you ran either of these commands on any version of PostgreSQL 14 prior to 14.4, you may have experienced silent data corruption. You can use the pg_amcheck command with the –heapallindexed flag to detect this issue with B-tree indexes.
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Programming/Development
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Leftovers
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Education
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Whatever the situation, I believe that good proposals share much in common. Unfortunately, many guides I’ve seen to creating proposals focus, sometimes very cynically, on the quirks or biases, real and imagined, of funders. In contrast, in this post I’m going to try to focus on the ideal core of a proposal, because that has inherent value in its own right, and also because it can be easily adapted to the specifics of a given funder.
By focussing on this core, I’m hoping that I might help you answer two questions: “do I have an idea that’s worth asking for resources to tackle?” and “how do I present that idea in a way that other people will best understand?” To make my life easy, I’m going to frame this discussion in terms of “readers” and “writers”, though I hope the ideas generalise beyond written proposals, and “funders” as a shorthand for those in control of resources.
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Hardware
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Multi-stream and broadcast audio features part of the Bluetooth LE Audio standard have been given a brand name by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Meet Bluetooth Auracast broadcast audio, or simply Auracast for shorts.
As a reminder, Bluetooth Audio LE broadcast enables an audio transmitter, be it a smartphone, laptop, television, or public address system to broadcast audio to an unlimited number of nearby Bluetooth audio receivers that could be speakers, earbuds, or even hearing devices.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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In all, 19 young children and two teachers were killed by a gunman wielding an AR-15-style assault weapon at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Funerals for the victims are continuing until June 25. The Department of Justice announced Wednesday plans to review the police response in Uvalde after it took 77 minutes for law enforcement to breach the door and kill the gunman.
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For years, cars held that distinction. But over the past two decades, motor vehicular deaths involving Americans between the ages of 1 and 24 plummeted, cutting the rate by nearly half. And sometime in the late 2010s, those two lines — deaths by car and by firearm — crossed paths on the graph of leading causes of death for young people.
In 2020, the most recent year for which data was available, firearms killed 10,186 young people, the highest number in two decades.
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The CDC publishes data on the leading causes of death among different demographic groups, providing the most reliable data. In 2020, the leading cause of death among children ages one through 18 involved a firearm. There were 3,219 such deaths in 2020, followed by motor vehicle traffic deaths, of which there were 2,882.
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Proprietary
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Spanish telecom operators Cellnex Telecom and Finland’s Nokia have signed a partnership to deploy private networks for enterprise customers.
Cellnex, through EDZCOM, has been working with Nokia in deploying dedicated wireless networks for companies in industries, such as energy, transport and logistics, manufacturing, mining, and healthcare.
Dedicated private wireless networks allow enterprises to operate mobile services and fixed wireless access (FWA) separately from public networks, which provides advantages such as faster deployment, lower latency, and low operating costs.
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Insider is reporting that Microsoft’s Alex Kipman, who led the teams that developed the company’s HoloLens augmented reality headset and the Kinect motion controller for Xbox and serves as one of Microsoft’s top technical fellows, has resigned after allegations of verbal abuse and sexual harassment.
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Both Bank of America and Credit Suisse analysts said the greater problem for Android suppliers is their reliance on the China market and falling domestic demand for smartphones.
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Security
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Linux and Data Security: The Myths, Challenges, and Solutions [Ed: Very dodgy publisher, publishing a borderline FUD piece for company looking to sell something, pretends that GNU does not exist and never existed (common error, perpetuated by people with a negative agenda)]
Linux has come a long way since its humble beginnings as Finnish student Linus Torvalds’ pet project. With over 27.8 million lines of code to its name and its rise as the OS of choice for servers, public cloud, and supercomputers, Linux has earned an unmistakable spot among the top operating systems in the world today. Not only that, but the world’s most popular mobile operating system, Android, also uses a Linux kernel.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Google plans to introduce many features to improve the classroom lessons to be more interactive. So at the Anywhere School 2022 webinar event on June 7, 2022, Google announced two new apps to be launched for ChromeOS to make it easier for teachers to moderate wireless casting.
The first one of these two apps is Screencast, which helps the teachers build a video library for lessons, and the second one is Cast Moderator, which shares the Chromebook screen in the classroom through a supported Google Android TV device.
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VPN provider Surfshark became the latest company to pull its servers from India this week, in response to government attempts to regulate encrypted web traffic.
The new directive by India’s top cybersecurity agency, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In), requires VPN, Virtual Private Server (VPS) and cloud service providers to store customers’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, know-your-customer records, and financial transactions for a period of five years.
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The Belgian government plans data retention on five levels (Art. 126/1 § 3 from page 330). Our map shows, colored red, the areas affected by surveillance only on the first of these five levels, the so-called geographically “targeted” data retention. In the areas colored red, all connection and location data of all citizens would be retained. With each of the other four levels explained below, more red-colored areas would be added. In practice, the surveillance pressure against the population is even higher than shown on our map.
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EU member states will call for bypassing encryption also for counterterrorism and law enforcement. In addition, the entry of extremism suspects should be prevented and their assets frozen in the Union.
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Defence/Aggression
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So what is the point of the public hearings of the House committee probing the insurrection due to start on June 9th? From Thursday’s prime-time political theatre to half a dozen sessions that will follow before a final report in September, the coverage will be viewed very differently on either side of a polarised country. Commentators on the right will belittle it all as a witch hunt. And after November’s mid-term elections, in which the Republicans look likely to win control of the House, they can be counted on to bury the matter.
Yet that ticking clock gives an urgency to the proceedings, which matter profoundly, for three reasons. One flows from the basic workings of democracy: institutions must do their job. It is the job of Congress to probe how an assault on the Capitol happened and what lessons can be learned. Its nine-member committee—seven Democrats and two principled Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—has gone about it in a commendably thorough, bipartisan way, despite much resistance. On June 3rd the Department of Justice charged Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser to Mr Trump, for refusing to co-operate with the committee (though it strangely decided not to act against Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the riot, despite similar obstructionism).
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Twitter is fighting a Jan. 6 committee request for its employees’ internal communications — including Slack messages about moderating Tweets related to the Capitol attack, three sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling stone.
The social media giant is asserting a First Amendment privilege to push back on the panel’s demand for communications about moderating tweets related to the Capitol insurrection.
Twitter’s pushback, the sources say, has caused consternation among the committee, whose members believe the internal communications would help them paint a fuller, more accurate portrait of how online MAGA extremism contributed to the day’s violence and mayhem. But the fact that the company is being asked for its internal communications at all raises tricky issues about the balance between free expression and the government’s authority to investigate an attempt to subvert democracy. And it shows just how wide Congressional investigators have been willing to cast their net in the run-up to their primetime hearings, which begin this week.
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Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, allegedly expressed interest in carrying out terrorist attacks in the United States in support of ISIS on six separate occasions between 2014 and 2017, according to court documents unsealed in February.
Fluke-Ekren, who also used the name Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, moved to Syria in 2012 and married a “prominent” ISIS leader, court documents said. She can reportedly speak four languages, and the documents alleged she rose up the ranks to command her own all-female battalion.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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But, he said, “invariably when we probed the universe of people who had access,” the number expanded “exponentially.” Instead of a discrete few, the number included “additional co-workers, office staff, computer administrative staff, family and friends of those working on the matter, even people who passed through the office,” and in the pandemic era, one might assume, the homes of the justices and others working from home. Fine said that even if there was some evidence of contact with a reporter, “we were usually unable to prove that the contact led to the leak.” Therefore, most of the time, all the investigators ended up with were theories and speculation.
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“These clerks are in a no-win position right now,” said Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the government watchdog group Project On Government Oversight, who added it would be “incredibly alarming” if Supreme Court officials viewed a clerk’s retention of an attorney as an indicator of guilt.
“What lawyer would advise anyone to hand over personal information like this and cell phone records like this without the advice of an attorney?” Hempowicz told CNN.
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Environment
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June 2022 will mark the one-year anniversary of the record-setting heat wave that killed over 500 people across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Canada. The Pacific Northwest, known for cold, rainy winters and mild summers reached high temperatures in 2021 with 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon and 121 degrees in Lytton, Canada.
Oregon’s Multnomah County saw the most deaths. An analysis found most of the people who died were older, lived by themselves, and had no functioning air conditioning.
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Energy
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Airlines must start to slash emissions before the end of the decade and by 2025 if possible, said the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in a new report.
The 2015 Paris climate treaty enjoins nations to cap global warming at “well below” two degrees Celsius, and 1.5C if possible.
Earth’s average surface temperature has already risen 1.2C above preindustrial levels.
To project aviation sector emissions, the ICCT ran three models assuming different levels of traffic, fuel efficiency and other factors.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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A change to Facebook’s recommendation system likely accounted for a disproportionate boost in visibility and engagement to conservative political groups on the social media platform starting in 2018, according to research published Wednesday.
The research, published in the journal Research & Politics, looked at posts from the pages of nearly every county party in the U.S. and found a marked increase in shares, comments and reactions to Republican posts.
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Now, in an effort to close the deal, Twitter will offer Musk and his team access to its full “firehose” of raw data from the social platform, which includes 500 million-plus tweets posted daily, as early as this week, the Post reported.
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Last year, a Commission report concluded that open source software was increasingly pervasive in digital technologies, and said it should be treated as “public good”. Given that it underpins so much of the digital economy, just a 10% increase in spending could bump GDP by around half a percent, it estimated.
“Over the last couple of years, these basic technologies were only discussed when something was going wrong,” said Felix Reda, a German former Pirate Party MEP and now copyright researcher at Harvard University, who has been pushing for the fund.
“It’s the same way that politicians only talk about building bridges when the bridge has just collapsed,” he said. The protocol for encrypting email “was basically maintained by a single guy in Germany for years and years without any funding,” added Reda.
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Also, the bills’ authors could make it clear that these laws can’t be used to stop lawsuits related to content moderation choices, but they have deliberately chosen not to (because they know they’d lose the Republican support if they do).
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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A small network of pro-Kremlin content creators have seen their audiences grow dramatically in recent months while spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine, evading social media platforms’ efforts to curb Russian propaganda and paving a path to Western audiences, according to research published Wednesday.
The creators are self-described “independent journalists” whose reports are often made from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and amplify Kremlin talking points and downplay or deny reported Russian atrocities. Researchers say the on-the-ground reports — which come in English, French, German and other languages — have proved effective at circumnavigating commitments from European governments and U.S.-based social media platforms to stop the spread of Russian propaganda.
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The excuse for this misleading framework is that journalists are simply reporting on voter sentiment and the perception that liberal policies lead to crime. But this is a cop-out. Voters are confused because the media keeps regurgitating a framework that implies they must choose between liberal policies and lower crime rates. Of course, voters believe in this false dichotomy — it’s the one presented as truth every time they turn on a TV or read a newspaper.
This misleading coverage is all the more frustrating because it distracts from the very real causes of the crime and disorder problems that are legitimately bedeviling cities. To be certain, crime, especially violent crime, is a multifaceted problem that can rarely be reduced to a single cause. But what is driving voters in Los Angeles and San Francisco is anger over widespread homelessness and property crimes. And those problems are attributable in large part to Trump-era economic policies. National Democrats — hobbled by timing issues, centrist politicians, and the Senate filibuster — have done little to fix the situation.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Promising boycotts, protests and strikes, Cuban exile leaders expressed their fear that two Miami stations, Radio Mambí and WQBA — which have traditionally advocated for Cuba’s freedom — would be silenced after being bought by Latino Media Network, a media company run by “social activists with a left-wing progressive political agenda.”
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Starting today, the Sensitive Content Control will cover all surfaces where we make recommendations. In addition to Explore, you will now be able to control the amount of sensitive content and accounts you see in Search, Reels, Accounts You Might Follow, Hashtag Pages and In-Feed Recommendations. With this update, we’re also applying the technology we use to enforce our Recommendation Guidelines to Instagram’s recommendations on Search and Hashtag pages. This update will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.
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While you could always choose from three toggles that vary in how much sensitive content Instagram filters out, Instagram is renaming those existing options. Instead of “Allow,” “Limit,” and “Limit Even More,” Instagram’s now calling the tiers “More,” “Standard,” and “Less.” Instagram will set accounts on Standard by default, which will allow you to see “some sensitive content” across the platform. Choosing “More” will show you the most sensitive content while “Less” is the most limiting option of the three.
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Instagram has announced an expansion of its Sensitive Content Control options, which it first launched last July, providing more ways for users to manage their in-app experience.
Originally only covering the app’s ‘Explore’ element, Instagram will now enable users to manage the content that they see in all sections of the app.
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Instagram’s expansion of content controls comes as social media and online content platforms are giving users more choice in the types of material they see. YouTube has a “restricted mode” that allows users to filter out more mature content, as does Reddit, Twitter and TikTok. Google recently introduced My Ad Center, a portal in which users can filter out certain types of ads they’d rather not see, such as ads around pregnancy or weight loss, topics that could elicit negative emotions. Of course, telling Google not to show ads about alcohol or dating will help advertisers better target potential customers.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Part of being an editor is keeping track of comments. There is the idea floating around that we publish or hide comments arbitrarily and on a whim, but that’s not the case. On our website they have to be validated before being published, while on social media the validation process starts after publication.
During the pandemic the comment section was a battlefield. It was hard to keep track of information and misinformation, facts, and the of ever-changing restrictions and rules in each country. As journalists it’s our duty to inform you, give you all the information you need in order to form beliefs and make your choices.
We are here to seek the truth and report on it.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The pilot project, the largest trial of its kind to date, involves 3,300 workers at 70 companies ranging from a car parts retailer to an animation studio, marketing agency, and fish and chip shop.
It’s based on a “100-80-100” principle, which means 100% pay for 80% of time worked — with an expectation of 100% productivity.
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Raheb avoids mentioning the obvious: While Western interference, past and present, may well have prompted and continues to prompt Muslims to massacre Christians, that is only because Muslims already see Christians as inferior infidels. Muslims massacred Christians in Mount Lebanon, during the Armenian genocide, etc., because they felt Christians were, thanks to colonial powers, becoming equals as opposed to knowing their place as second-class dhimmis within the Muslim social order as they did for the preceding millennium.
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The Taliban have detained a famous Afghan fashion model along with three colleagues, accusing them of disrespecting Islam and the Holy Quran.
Ajmal Haqiqi — known among Afghans for his fashion shows, You Tube clips, and modeling events — appeared handcuffed in videos posted on Tuesday to Twitter by the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence, DCI.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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This report outlines why wheelchair owners, like farmers, hospitals and smartphone owners, would benefit from a legal right to repair their equipment. Absent these and other reforms, wheelchair users will continue to face long wait times for repair that adversely affect their mobility and, with that, their physical and financial well-being. Right to Repair legislation that encompasses complex rehabilitation technology (CRT) devices like power wheelchairs would improve the market for wheelchair repair that would help ensure that disabled Americans receive prompt, high-quality service at an affordable price.
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No to better pay for artists Netflix’s decision comes in response to a rights agreement reached between producers and filmmakers last December.
The agreement guaranteed artists better pay, as well as that they be paid regularly instead of with a lump sum.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The story touches on many important issues concerning cultural appropriation. But one of the key problems is that materials recorded and written down from native speakers are automatically covered by copyright, and that means people can argue over who owns them.
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In EPOnia, the concept of accountability does not exist!
Summary: As we’ve just noted, the EPO has another scandal in its hands (2018, the Benoît Battistelli-António Campinos handover year) and it involves Microsoft; unlike Campinos, who can break all the rules and remain in power, Alex Kipman had to step down
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
That was then:
This is now:
Summary: Should the EPO associate and praise such people? Should Joe Biden use that failed product as an excuse to bail out Microsoft to the tune of $22,000,000,000? (Graft)
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