GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Spain – LinuxLinks

  Spain is a country in southwestern Europe on the Iberian peninsula with parts of territory in the Atlantic Ocean and across the Mediterranean Sea. It is bordered to the south by Gibraltar, to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea, to the north by France, Andorra and the Bay of Biscay, and to the west by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Manjaro Makes Desktop Linux Look GOOD! – Invidious

    Just a few hours ago, Manjaro released a new version (21.3). Manjaro has three main editions: (1) Xfce, (2) KDE Plasma, and (3) GNOME. I almost always look at the Xfce and Plasma editions of Manjaro, so I thought I would switch things up and look at their latest GNOME edition…

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Tagger – Modern New GTK4 Music Tag Editor for Linux | UbuntuHandbook

    There are quite a few audio tag editing applications for Linux. Tagger is a new one with modern GTK4 user interface.

    Kid3, puddletag, and easytag editors are really good. But for GNOME (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation), Tagger looks more native due to GTK4 and libadwaita.

  • FocusWriter 1.8.0 released

    FocusWriter is a simple, distraction-free writing environment. It utilizes a hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen, allowing the program to have a familiar look and feel to it while still getting out of the way so that you can immerse yourself in your work. It’s available for Linux and Windows, and has been translated into many different languages.

  • Linuxiac ☛ LXC 5.0 Linux Containers Are Here as a Long Term Support Release

    Switching to Meson, the new cgroup configuration options, and time namespace support are some of the new features in the LXC 5.0.

    In recent years, using containers in Linux has revolutionized the whole software industry’s approach to how software is built. Nowadays, when it comes to containerized services, technologies like Docker and Podman have become the industry standard.

    However, not everyone knows that the ability to run Linux containers using LXC has been supported as a core feature of Linux since 2008.

    LXC (Linux Containers) was the first and most complete Linux container manager implementation. Moreover, it runs on a single Linux kernel and does not require any patches. In other words, LXC container support is native functionality built into the Linux kernel.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Amberol GTK Music App Gains New Features, Reduces Memory Usage – OMG! Ubuntu!

    I’m a big fan of Emmanuele Bassi’s Amberol music player and the latest version, released this weekend adds a couple of pretty big new features.

    Before I get to those, I will point out that this GTK-based music music player has been updated numerous times since I spotlighted it back in April. UI improvements, including relocating the playlist to the left-hand side of the window, have been implemented; there’s now an option to disable UI recolouring; and comprehensive MPRIS support.

    Amberol 0.8 is the latest release and it lets you search for songs in the playlist/queue. You don’t need to click a ‘search’ icon to get at this (though you can) as you can just start typing to start searching. Search also works when the playlist/queue is in selection mode.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Download audio from youtube video

    $ yt-dlp -f ‘ba’ -x –audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ -o ‘%(id)s.%(ext)s’

  • H2S Media ☛ 2 Ways to install Midori Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy

    Learn the commands to install Midori Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.

    Midori is a fast and lightweight WebKit-based browser. For the graphical interface, the graphics library GTK is used, which makes the program like Epiphany perfectly integrated into GNOME and also into Xfce or LXDE. The speed advantage compared to Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox is particularly evident for websites with intensive JavaScript use and other Web 2.0 functions.

    Among other Midori offers Tabbed Browsing, Mouse gestures, Private Mode, Speed Dial function, Support for Mozilla plugins; Tabs, Windows, and Session Management; Flexibly adjustable Internet search; Support for user scripts and styles; Bookmark management; Customizable and expandable interface and Built-in extensions.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Pale Moon Browser on Ubuntu 20.04 | 21.04 | 22.04 LTS

    Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customization; its motto is “Your browser, Your way”. There are official releases for Microsoft Windows and Linux, as well as contributed builds for various platforms.

    Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subsequently diverged. The main differences are the user interface, add-on support, and running in single-process mode. Pale Moon retains the highly customizable user interface of the Firefox version 4–28 era.

    It also continues to support some types of add-ons and plugins that are no longer supported by Firefox, including NPAPI plugins such as Adobe Flash Player, as well as legacy Firefox extensions.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 10 Things To Do After Installing Pop!_OS Linux in 2022

    The Pop!_OS is one of the most lightweight and user-friendly distributions of Linux that you can use if you are a newbie to Linux. The Pop!_OS comes as the distribution of the Debian family. Many people choose the Pop!_OS distribution of Linux because it is not hard as Arch or SuSE, easy to use, and the installation process of this operating system is very straightforward and conventional. If you are a beginner at Linux, you might have been wondering what things to do after installing Pop!_OS on your machine. Traditionally there is nothing much to do after installing the operating system, but there is something that we recommend you to do to make your Linux journey smooth and better.

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Install KVM on Fedora 36 (Step by Step)

    Short for kernel-based Virtual Machine, KVM is an opensource virtualization platform for the Linux kernel. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KVM on Fedora 36 step by step.

    KVM allows users to create virtual machines on a Linux system and provides a wealth of tools and options to achieve this. The kernel functions as a hypervisor and you can virtualize your entire dedicated server and create multiple VMs.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Jitsi Meet is an open source video conferencing service. Another advantage of Jisti over other video telephony applications is that you do not have to register to use it and that you do not even have to download and install any software. Jitsi can be used directly via the browser. This makes it particularly easy to use.

    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 Jitsi Meet 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.

• Games

  • Engadget ☛ Epic Games Store will randomly ask users to rate games to prevent review bombing | Engadget

    Epic has broader ambitions for cross-play support beyond Steam. It’s working to support other PC launchers, as well as macOS and Linux.

  • Linux Links ☛ 10 Fun Free and Open Source ASCII Games

    
    Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer exceptional gaming capabilities, and have contributed to the trend of astonishing leaps in graphics fidelity. There is not a year that has gone by without a game being released that makes significant advances in technical graphics wizardry. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.

    Personally, these developments do not overly interest me. I find little fascination playing games that focus so much on the visuals they neglect the essential elements. Too often the storyline and game play has been compromised for visual quality. Most of my favourite games are somewhat deficient in the graphics department. Gameplay is always king in my eyes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Beta News ☛ Manjaro Linux 21.3 ‘Ruah’ is here with GNOME, Xfce, and KDE Plasma

    Manjaro is one of the most popular Linux-based desktop operating systems these days, and it’s not hard to see why. The distribution is based on the rock-solid Arch, but unlike that distro, Manjaro is very easy to install and use thanks to the excellent Calamares installer. In other words, it has all the benefits of Arch, but without the hassles and headaches. This makes it a great choice for both Linux experts and beginners alike.

    And now, during LGBT Pride Month, Manjaro 21.3 “Ruah” becomes available for download with Linux kernel 5.15 and Calamares 3.2. There are a trio of desktop environment options — Xfce (4.16), GNOME (42), and KDE Plasma (5.24). While all three DEs are great, the Xfce Edition is the primary focus with this particular operating system.

  • DebugPoint ☛ Manjaro 21.3 “Ruah” Brings Refreshed Desktop Environments

    Manjaro 21.3 “Ruah” release highlights which brings KDE Plasma 5.25, Xfce 4.16 and GNOME 42 desktop environment.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ Help Us Celebrate FreeBSD Day All Week Long

    As you may know, June 19th has been declared FreeBSD Day, and we hope you’ll join us in honoring the Project’s pioneering legacy and continuing impact on technology. This year, the Foundation is celebrating all week long.

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Closing credit

    DragonFly developer Tuxillo has done something notable by its absence: cleaned up a lot of old bug reports. That’s usually an unseen and unthanked task, so here’s credit for it.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • HyperX Clutch Review: A reliable wireless gaming controller for Android and PC – Ausdroid

  • CNX Software ☛ BP Doctor PRO review – A 2-in-1 smartwatch and blood pressure monitor – CNX Software

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Transfer Your Contacts Between Google Accounts on Android: 3 Easy Ways

  • Notebook Check ☛ Nokia G11 Plus will launch with more RAM and Android 12 out of the box – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ Two Years of Life with PinePhone

    Would I get a PinePhone again? Yes, totally. Granted, I have been lucky so far: My hardware has held up well, when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). No, I don’t use it as a daily driver, which was something I thought I would do by this point – but that’s on me, not on the PinePhone: I just can’t stop buying more hardware, be it Linux Phones and competing platforms.

    I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can’t really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64′s return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications.9 Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper “Linux knowledge” necessary if you don’t have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own: This is a far more involved process than upgrading from one iPhone to another, in most cases even more involved than switching between the major platforms! With all this considered, it can be a fun ride, a great learning experience, a nice nerdy thing to do! Oh, and if you do so, make sure to be supportive to the software ecosystem, in contributions and/or funding Thanks!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • H2S Media ☛ 6 Top Browser you can install on Linux such as Ubuntu – Linux Shout

    Browsers are a life of GUI-based Desktop OS when it comes to browsing, here we learn some best browsers available to install on Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, Fedora, Redhat, and more…

    Which browser is the best? Netizens have been arguing about the answer to this question for years. However, here we are not going to follow which browser is best instead the list of those which are popular and can be easily installed on Linux systems. Although, almost every Linux distro comes with a default browser that is the mighty “Mozilla FireFox”. However, still many users like the sleek design of Google Chrome, others distrust the search engine giant and prefer Mozilla’s Firefox or Opera. Some would like to have Microsoft’s Edge on Linux as well because it is pre-installed on every Windows PC anyway. So, let’s explore some options you can use to replace your default Linux browser.

• Programming/Development

  • Astrobotany plant ring

    On the other hand, the Gemini protocol is thought to automate simple tasks. So we can in an easy way parse every page and to summary information that we are interested in. So I’ve written a second script [astrobotany ring.sh] which is doing that.

  • [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.37.0-rc1 – Junio C Hamano

    A release candidate Git v2.37.0-rc1 is now available for testing at the usual places. It is comprised of 373 non-merge commits since v2.36.0, contributed by 62 people, 18 of which are new faces [*].

  • COBOLworx?

    There are just two COBOL pages on this Gemini site. This page is just context.

    I’ve been working on Linux COBOL technologies for around ten years as a side project in Open Source Software (FOSS).

  • Medium ☛ Asmit Malakannawar: Google Summer of Code with GNOME Foundation.

    Google Summer of Code — every undergrad’s dream to get selected into it one day. I found out about Google Summer of Code in my freshman year. I was so excited that a program like this exists where open source contributors collaborate over projects with organizations! But I was overwhelmed by the amount of applications the program receives and the number of students that actually get selected. Therefore, I didn’t apply in first year, but started improving my skills and making open source contributions to different organizations.

    Open source can be overwhelming at the beginning, but you just need to start contributing. Getting into Google Summer of Code is a dream come true to me. And in this blog I’ll share my experience on how I got into Google Summer of Code’22!

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Discovering A Forensic Artifact

    The number after the underscore (_), is derived from the timestamp when the item moniker was created. That timestamp is expressed as an epoch value in local time, to which a constant number is added: 61505155.

    I figured this out by doing some tests. 61505155 is an approximation: I might be wrong by a couple of seconds.

    Item name _1715622067 is the value you find in Follina maldocs created from this particular RTF template made by chvancooten. 1715622067 minus 61505155 is 1654116912. Converting epoch value 1654116912 to date & time value gives: Wednesday, June 1, 2022 8:55:12 PM. That’s when that RTF document was created.

    RTF documents made from this template, can be detected by looking for string 0c0000005f3137313536323230363700 inside the document (you have to look for this hexadecimal string, not case sensitive, because OLE files embedded in RTF are represented in hexadecimal).

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #38: Faster Feedback Systems

    Engineers build systems. Good engineers always stress and focus efficiency of these systems.

    Two recent examples of engineering thinking follow. One was in a video / podcast interview with Martin Thompson (who is a noted high-performance code expert) I came across recently. The overall focus of the hour-long interview is on ‘managing software complexity’. Around minute twenty-two, the conversation turns to feedback loops and systems, and a strong preference for simple and fast systems for more immediate feedback. An important topic indeed.

    The second example connects to this and permeates many tweets and other writings by Erik Bernhardsson. He had an earlier 2017 post on ‘Optimizing for iteration speed’, as well as a 17 May 2022 tweet on minimizing feedback loop size, another 28 Mar 2022 tweet reply on shorter feedback loops, then a 14 Feb 2022 post on problems with slow feedback loops, as well as a 13 Jan 2022 post on a priority for tighter feedback loops, and lastly a 23 Jul 2021 post on fast feedback cycles. You get the idea: Erik really digs faster feedback loops. Nobody likes to wait: immediatecy wins each time.

  • Rlang ☛ Frank’s R Workflow

    Frank Harrell’s new eBook, R Workflow, which aims to: “to foster best practices in reproducible data documentation and manipulation, statistical analysis, graphics, and reporting” is an ambitious document that is notable on multiple levels.

    To begin with, the workflow itself is much more than a simple progression of logical steps.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Understanding some peculiarities of per-cgroup memory usage accounting

    Linux distributions that use systemd probably have cgroup memory accounting turned on (this is system.conf’s DefaultMemoryAccounting, which defaulted to on starting in systemd 238). Memory accounting is handy because it will give you a hierarchical per-cgroup breakdown of memory usage for your services, user sessions, scopes, and so on, which you can see with tools like systemd-cgtop or perhaps your own tools. However if you look at this you can get some surprises, such as a virtual machine that you configured for 4 GB of RAM but systemd-cgtop says is using 14 GB of RAM. Or you could have no virtual machines running yet systemd-cgtop says machine.slice is using 24.8 GB.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Zach Flower ☛ RSS Club

    About a month back, I subscribed to Dave Rupert’s RSS feed and noticed that there were a handful of posts that didn’t exist on his website. Turns out, Dave has created something called RSS Club that provides RSS-only content.

  • Gopher and Spartan?

    Lately, I find myself using Gopher more and more, as part of my research about the small web. I’m trying to build a low-resolution timeline of major events in gopherspace, geminispace and other communities (like Yesterweb), so I can propose the idea that these networks are the fruits of one cultural phenomenon: disenchantment with the web, desire to slow down or something else (still haven’t fully analyzed my data).

    I also see mentions of Spartan here and there, but I still don’t think Spartan is useful for me, both as a user (a FOSS developer who enjoys small online communities, small software or privacy-by-design) and as a researcher (because Spartan is still heavily tied to Gemini, and won’t add another story to my research).

  • Gemini, encryption and decentralised PKI

    The main reason Gemini requires encryption is for authentication. There might not be much commercial “content”, if any, on Gemini, but there’s certainly material that people would like to share online, but only with a small, trusted group. Gemini’s built-in authentication mechanism is client-side TLS certificates.

    The Gemini server software I maintain, blizanci, supports Titan uploads with TLS certificate -based authentication of clients. Unless a certificate is self-signed, it contains two different names: the subject whose certificate it is, and the issuer who signed it, which might be a so-called Certificate Authority. Blizanci can do authorisation on a per-directory basis, with a directory having its own list of permitted certificate authorities. A self-signed certificate is effectively its *own* certificate authority, so if you want part of your capsule to be limited just to certain individuals, you just need to give blizanci a list of PEM files, either of their own self-signed certs, and/or of the certificate authority which signed their certs.

Leftovers

• Being a Listener

  It’s always more fun to listen to a conversation than to engage in the conversation itself. Talking requires way more energy compared to listening, which one of them uses the mouth and the other uses the ear.

• Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Sophistication Of Forager Societies – emptywheel

  Chapter 4 of The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow dispels myths about hunter-gatherer societies, the normal state for humans until the last few thousand years.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Identify The Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Found in The Recent Universe

    A supermassive black hole growing so fast it shines 7,000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way has just been found, hiding in plain sight.

    Every second, an amount of material equivalent to the mass of Earth falls into this insatiable black hole.

    As far as we know, it’s the fastest-growing black hole of the last 9 billion years – its activity so frenzied that it sends multi-wavelength light blazing across the Universe, making it what’s known as a quasar.

    The black hole is called SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 – J1144 for short – and an analysis of its properties suggests that the light from its feeding has traveled some 7 billion years to reach us, and that it clocks in at around 2.6 billion times the mass of the Sun (quite a respectable size for a supermassive black hole).

  • ACM ☛ Next-Generation Weather Reporting: Versatile, Flexible, Economical Sensors

    A team of scientists from Japan’s Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) and University of Tokyo have developed a multitasking weather sensor that measures rain volumes and wind speeds.

    The lightweight sensor sheet incorporates machine learning reservoir computing to analyze the output data, and can rapidly deliver localized weather data.

    The sensor quantifies rain volume by measuring the electrical resistance produced by raindrop impacts, and derives wind speed measurements from water droplet behavior.

    The sensors detect resistance changes triggered by shifting rain and wind conditions, then record them as time-series data; the researchers fed this data to the machine, which yielded rain volume and wind speed data.

    “The findings open up a promising economical approach to weather reporting, contributing to disaster preparedness and greater community safety,” said OMU’s Kuniharu Takei.

  • ACM ☛ Alberta Investing C$23 Million Toward U of C’s Quantum City

    Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced that the Canadian province is investing C$23 million (US$17.9 million) in the University of Calgary (U of C) Quantum City hub.

    The center will be the focus of a multi-institutional partnership that includes all polytechnic schools in Calgary, as well as global technology company Mphasis and the universities of Calgary, Alberta, and Lethbridge.

    U of C’s Ed McCauley said Quantum City will help fuel research in quantum technologies in Alberta, and foster local talent to fill positions that are expected to be created in the coming years.

    Said McCauley, “We hope companies like Mphasis and other companies around the world will take up support in the area around building up fabrication facilities where we can collaborate with industry to prototype, scale, and test those devices.”

• Hardware

  • Stacy on IoT ☛ Don’t be afraid to DIY

    After years of playing around with my smart home I’ve become much more confident and competent when it comes to tackling all kinds of do-it-yourself projects. And given how difficult it can be to get service people to homes and how many people feel disconnected from their stuff, I want to encourage all of you to start with your smart home and embrace DIY.

    At first, I started with small plug-and-play devices in my smart home, sticking with light bulbs, cameras, and sensors. But once I encountered some complexity, such as hard-wiring an outdoor camera or a light switch? That’s when I decided to bag it or hire a professional. There’s nothing wrong with that, but my experience over time suggests that most people can handle such installations and even take the gained experience to fix other things in their homes.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Scientist ☛ Opinion: Time to Take Animal Rights Harassment More Seriously

    Two recent court rulings shine a light on the disturbing tactics used by some activists to target biomedical researchers who study animals.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ Hooray! Bits of Freedom freed the data of millions of people from the clutches of the secret services!

      The Complaints Department of the Review Committee on the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD), the Dutch supervisor of the secret services, ruled that EDRi member Bits of Freedom is right!

    • EDRI ☛ Freedom not Fear: Save the date and prepare for a political trip to Brussels! – European Digital Rights (EDRi)

      Freedom not Fear is an annual self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights. People from all across Europe meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, plan actions against increasing surveillance and other attacks on civil rights. Also we have the chance to talk to decision-makers on EU-level.

    • Privacy International ☛ Privacy International’s submission for the UN report on the right to privacy in the digital age

      Despite repeated recommendations by the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly to review, amend or enact national laws to ensure respect and protection of the right to privacy, national laws are often inadequate and do not regulate, limit or prohibit surveillance powers of government agencies as well as data exploitative practices of companies.

    • Privacy International ☛ WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep

      PI and UCL students looked into Office 365 and found features that can enable employers to access all communications and activities on Microsoft services

    • Stacy on IoT ☛ Wireless sensing is getting new device types

      A few weeks ago, at the Parks Associates Connections conference in Dallas, I met with Ivani, an eight-year-old company that makes software to add wireless sensing to a variety of devices. I was intrigued by its approach, which leverages software that could be installed on any device that uses RF to add motion sensing to a device.

      I’ve written a lot about Wi-Fi sensing companies like Cognitive Systems and Origin Wireless that have firmware that must be integrated into a specific Wi-Fi chip, which means that to add their Wi-Fi sensing capabilities to a product, a device maker must select a specific chip. But Ivani’s sensing technology isn’t specific to Wi-Fi and it doesn’t require integration on the chip itself.

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Groundhog Day Privacy Bill: The Government Waited Months to Bring Back Roughly the Same Privacy Plan?! – Michael Geist

      Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne yesterday unveiled Bill C-27, the updated privacy reform law. While Champagne described it is a “historic day”, the bill is better described as a case of Groundhog Day, since it looks an awful lot like the last privacy bill that died with last year’s election call and which never even advanced to the committee stage. I wrote earlier this week about the government’s seeming indifference to privacy and this bill doesn’t do much to change the analysis as the bill raises many of the same questions and will likely face similar opposition.

      The last bill – the previous Bill C-11 – was a bill that left many on both sides of the privacy spectrum unhappy. My posts on the bill (here and here) were more positive than most as I saw it as an important start to the reform process, albeit one that raised some serious questions. The bill never gained much traction, however. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada called it “a step back overall” for privacy with particular concerns about the creation of a new privacy tribunal, many in the privacy community worried about weakened consent standards, and the business community signalled unhappiness with new privacy rules on de-identified data. Faced with criticism from all sides, Champagne (who had taken over from Navdeep Bains) decided to do absolutely nothing. The bill languished for months and was clearly never a government priority.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Spiegel ☛ Ukraine By Rail: The Trains Keep Running Despite the War – DER SPIEGEL

    Tens of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the war, millions have been displaced, villages depopulated, roads, bridges, cafes and theaters destroyed, fields rendered useless, crops destroyed and cities laid to waste. Only one thing has been left largely intact so far: Ukraine’s railways.

  • Spiegel ☛ Accelerated Candidacy?: Ukraine’s Possible EU Accession Not Universally Welcome – DER SPIEGEL

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants his country to become an EU member as rapidly as possible. But no all countries in the bloc are supportive of the idea. And potential members in the Balkans that have been waiting for years for the privilege are losing their patience.

  • American survivor of Sabra-Shatila massacre has spoken out for 39 years – Mondoweiss

    “They walked us single file against a bullet-riddled brick wall. It seemed like about 40 soldiers facing us. Their rifles were pointed. They looked like a firing squad. Some of my fellow hospital staff started crying. I wondered, was anyone going to know that I died in this refugee camp?

    “But I thought, it’s OK I’m here, it’s because I did the right thing. I was humming ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”

    Ellen Siegel, now 79 and a retired nurse in Washington, D.C., is telling me what happened to her in 1982, when she was working as one of two volunteer American nurses at the hospital in the Shatila neighborhood of Beirut, Lebanon, which served the Palestinians in Sabra Refugee Camp.

• Environment

  • Energy

    • Michael West Media ☛ Where’s that coal? Sorry saga of Ukraine PR stunt embroils two governments

      The Albanese government is continuing its predecessor’s failure of transparency around Whitehaven’s coal shipment to Ukraine.

    • Michael West Media ☛ Self made energy crisis – Michael West

      The electricity market has been suspended, blackouts loom, power prices soar – along with corporate profits – and fingers are being rudely pointed. What’s the scam?

    • Michael West Media ☛ Gas Led Catastrophe, AEMO and the electricity market mayhem – Michael West

      So it is that the Coalition’s Gas Led Recovery has become a Gas Led Catastrophe. Any minute now Peter Dutton and former Energy Minister Angus Taylor will be blaming Anthony Albanese because Albo has had four weeks to fix it.

• Finance

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Boy, gig companies sure hire disastrously sloppy lawyers

    In the run-up to the 2020 election, “gig work” companies, led by Uber and Lyft, firehosed $225m to back the passage of Proposition 22, a law that would permanently allow them to misclassify employees as contractors, not entitled to benefits or workplace protections.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Gig Labor Is Impoverishing Workers

    A new national survey of gig workers in the United States finds that around one in seven make less than the federal minimum wage. Some 30 percent rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and cannot pay the full amount of their utility bills. On a range of measures, gig workers report greater economic hardship than W-2 employees in low-wage retail and food-service work.

    A report on the survey was published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), with the survey itself conducted by the Shift Project, which is a joint project at Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California, San Francisco. In the spring of 2020, the Shift Project elicited responses via Facebook and Instagram advertisements, targeting gig workers at the likes of DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft, and Uber, as well as W-2 employees at fifty-eight large retail and food-service companies including Arby’s, Chick-fil-A, Home Depot, Kroger/QFC, McDonald’s, Publix, Starbucks, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart. The surveys included questions about demographics, job characteristics, and economic security issues, with respondents comprising 288 gig workers and 4,201 service-sector workers.

  • CBC ☛ Apple store votes to unionize in growing push for U.S. workplace protections | CBC News

    Apple store employees in a Baltimore suburb voted to unionize by a nearly 2-to-1 margin Saturday, a union said, joining a growing push across U.S. retail, service and tech industries to organize for greater workplace protections.

    The Apple retail workers in Towson, Md., voted 65-33 to seek entry into the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the union’s announcement said. The vote could not immediately be confirmed with the U.S. National Labour Relations Board, which would have to certify the outcome. An NLRB spokesperson referred initial queries about the vote to the board’s regional office, which was closed late Saturday.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • Michael Geist ☛ Bill C-11 Enters a Danger Zone: Government Shifts from Ignoring Witnesses on User Content Regulation to Dismissing Criticisms as “Misinformation” – Michael Geist

      The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage heard from a total of 48 witnesses as individuals or representing organizations during its study of Bill C-11 (excluding the CRTC and government officials). Of those 48, at least 16 either raised concerns about the regulation of user content in the bill or disputed government claims about its effect. Liberal, NDP and Bloc MPs proposed and voted for amendments in Bill C-11 raised by a single witness or organization, but somehow the testimony of one-third of the witnesses, which included creators, consumer groups, independent experts, Internet platforms, and industry associations. was ignored.

      The government’s decision to ignore the overwhelming majority of testimony on the issue of regulating user content damages the credibility of the committee Bill C-11 review and makes the forthcoming Senate study on the bill even more essential. But the government went beyond just ignoring witness testimony yesterday in the House of Commons. It now claims those views constitute “misinformation.” Tim Louis, a Liberal MP who is on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and sat through hours of testimony, said this in the House of Commons yesterday:

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Netblocks ☛ Internet disrupted in Bihar, India, amid military recruitment protests – NetBlocks

    NetBlocks metrics confirm a significant disruption to internet connectivity on multiple providers in Bihar, eastern India as of 17 June 2022. The incident is ongoing at the time of writing and comes as the government imposes telecommunications restrictions to counter protests over a new military recruitment plan.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong’s Lam ‘relieved’ from burden of leadership, says gov’t made ‘no mistake’ over 2019 extradition bill

    Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said she feels pride, and no regrets over the 2019 extradition bill row, as her tenure comes to a close.

    “Everything comes to an end. I feel greatly relieved… Whatever happens in Hong Kong after July 1 is none of my business, you can’t imagine how relaxed I feel,” she told Commercial Radio on Sunday, according to RTHK.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ McHenry County, Illinois judges give man 45 days for raping 9 year old and another man 5 years for tossing urine on a cop. (And a little more.)

    In the same week, McHenry County, Illinois judges gave one man 45 days for raping a 9 year old and another man 5 years for tossing urine on a cop.

    Contempt of Cop is worse than raping a 9 year old according to the judges, I guess, is the message.

    45 days isn’t even the worst I’ve seen the judges in Illinois do over sexual exploitation of a child.

    In Lake County, one county over, a guy got no punishment at all after faking insanity for sexually assaulting a child in the bathroom of a funeral home in Waukegan several months ago.

    While the funeral was going on, a homeless bum walked in and forced the victim into the bathroom. Why wouldn’t he just do whatever the hell he wanted to?

    The judges here are a bunch of dickheads. They’re morons. All you have to do is fake crazy and you’re golden.

    This is a wicked and depraved place, indeed.

    Pretty much all of the “homeless” (if they are, even) people here in Waukegan have pretty much nothing wrong with them at all, at least physically. They dance around in the traffic begging for money all day, which is a crime, but you see how the laws are enforced.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Checking Around, Liking What I See

    I also enjoy the peculiar properties of what you refer to as Gemini text. Creating art via linguistic characters is an appealing prospect, somewhat analogous to pixel art, though of course with a more abstract bent. One of the first examples of this text-based art I recall seeing were called “Typewri-toons” in Mad Magazine. Short little one-panel comics where the people were represented via characters from a typewriter. Really fascinating and innovative concept, and it had a lot in common aesthetically with later implementations of text art, such as text-based computer games. You should definitely check them out if you’re interested, they do give me a good chuckle.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ The Supreme Court of Mauritius orders AFRINIC to not include Dr. A. Omari in Board Meetings

    The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa. It is responsible for the distribution and management of Internet number resources (IPv4, IPv6 and ASN) for the African and Indian Ocean region.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify to Reduce Hiring By 25% Amid Slowing Subscriber Growth, Recession Fears

    After reporting modest subscriber growth for Q1 2022 – and seeing its stock hit a record low of $89.03 per share amid a selloff in the tech space – Spotify is now set to decrease the number of employees it hires by 25 percent.

    Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who believes that his company will generate $100 billion annually in the next decade, informed current employees of the hiring slowdown via an internally circulated message, according to Bloomberg. Ek reportedly attributed the move to economic considerations and related concerns.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • Venture Beat ☛ U.S. court will soon rule if AI can legally be an ‘inventor’ [Ed: Conflating patents with inventions]

  • Copyrights

    • Michael Geist ☛ Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez Betrays Democratic Norms To Rush Bill C-11 Through Committee

      The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage conducted the one day of debate on Bill C-11 yesterday that Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and the Liberal government – aided and abetted by the NDP – required under a House of Commons motion. The result was an embarrassment to the government that leaves a stain that will not be easy to remove. Despite the absence of any actual deadline, the government insisted that just three two hour sessions be allocated to full clause-by-clause review of the bill featuring debate and discussion (MPs on the committee were all open to extending each session by 30 minutes for a total of 7 1/2 hours). With roughly 170 amendments proposed by five parties, there was only time for a fraction of the amendments to be reviewed. Instead, once the government-imposed deadline arrived at 9:00 pm, the committee moved to voting on the remaining proposed amendments without any debate, discussion, questions for department officials, or public disclosure of what was being voted on. The voting ran past midnight with the public left with little idea of what is in or out of the bill. The updated bill will be posted in the next day or so.

      This sham process notably excluded debate on many of the proposed amendments on regulating user content. The issue arose about 30 minutes before the 9:00 pm deadline, resulting in some discussion on a Green Party amendment to clearly remove user generated content from the bill consistent with what Rodriguez has said he intends. The debate was cut short by the 9:00 deadline, where the chair moved directly to voting on amendments and the Liberals, NDP and Bloc all voted against. The effect was that despite numerous witnesses, including creators, platforms, and experts raising concerns about the implications of the bill on their creativity and expression, the government literally cut off debate on many of the proposals to address their concerns. My podcast this week highlights some of those comments and the decision to simply reject or ignore their concerns is emblematic of their worst fears.

GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Czech Republic – LinuxLinks

  The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 202: KDE Plasma 5.25, K9 Mail Joins Thunderbird, Steam NextFest and more Linux news! – This Week in Linux – TuxDigital

    On this episode of This Week in Linux: KDE Plasma 5.25 Released, K9 Mail Joins Thunderbird, Firefox Translations Add-on, MakuluLinux Shift Released, SpiralLinux Project, Amberol Music Player, GNOME Recieves $10K from Microsoft FOSS Fund, Steam NextFest, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Applications

  • Its FOSS ☛ Rocket.Chat vs. Slack: Choosing the Perfect Team Collaboration App

    Slack is arguably the most popular team messaging/collaboration application out there.

    While it is not an open-source solution, it is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

    Rocket.Chat, on the other hand, is one of the best open-source Slack alternatives. It is also available across all major platforms.

    We at It’s FOSS use Rocket.Chat (Self-hosted) for internal team communication. But, we have also had a fair share of experiences with Slack.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to use Rsync on Linux: Top Practical Examples – LinuxCapable

    Rsync is a Linux-based tool that can be used to sync files between remote and local servers. Rsync has many options that can help you define the connections you make. From deciding the type of shell that should be used to files that should be excluded in a transfer, Rsync gives you the power to shape the transfer specifications.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Create/Add a Sudo User on Arch Linux – LinuxCapable

    Depending on the options you set when installing Arch Linux, you may have just installed with the root account active, or only one user with sudo permission may require adding more users with this permission. This can be done quickly and easily and is often preferred over root access.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn to add a user to the sudoers group on Arch Linux using the command line terminal.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Nginx with PageSpeed on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

    The Google PageSpeed module, also known as mod_PageSpeed, is an open-source Apache HTTP or Nginx server-level package with modules that helps optimize your site using various filters to pages that optimize server stylesheets, JavaScript, and HTML files and images through caching and rewriting among the top features.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Nginx with Google Pagespeed on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa with optimal setups to increase your website speed server-side.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install ImageMagick 7 on RHEL/Fedora/Alma Linux – TREND OCEANS

    If you are an editor and editing images is part of your daily life, then you should try the ImageMagick tool.

    ImageMagick is a free and open-source tool to edit, create, compose or convert digital images into another format. It supports over 200 formats, including PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, SVG, PDF, DPX, EXR, and TIFF.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Brave Browser on Linux Mint 20 LTS – LinuxCapable

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

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

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on Linux Mint 20 LTS release series using the command line terminal to install the stable version, and optional beta or development builds.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Edge on Linux Mint 20 LTS [Ed: Don't. It is malware that steals all your passwords.]

  • The New Stack ☛ How to Deploy the Latest Portainer Release – The New Stack

    I’ve been working with Portainer for some time now and it has very quickly risen to the top of my favorite container management tools. And, like all good projects, Portainer frequently releases updates to the platform. However, the one thing you can’t do is simply log in to your Portainer instance, and click an upgrade button. Since Portainer is deployed as a container itself, you have to go through a few hoops to deploy the latest version.

  • How to install Flatpak on Fedora 36 – NextGenTips

    Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. Flatpak offers a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.

    Flatpak can be used by all types of desktop environments and aims to be as agnostic as possible regarding how applications are built.

    Flatpak runtimes and applications are built as OCI images and are distributed with the Fedora registry

    Flatpaks are a new way of deploying applications.

  • How to install Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. Flatpak offers a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.

    Flatpak can be used by all types of desktop environments and aims to be as agnostic as possible regarding how applications are built.

    In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Flatpak on Ubuntu 22.04.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install qBittorrent on Debian 11 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install qBittorrent on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. The qBittorrent project aims to provide an open-source software alternative to µTorrent. qBittorrent is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD.

    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 qBittorrent open-source BitTorrent client on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

  • John Goerzen ☛ John Goerzen: Pipes, deadlocks, and strace annoyingly fixing them

    This is a complex tale I will attempt to make simple(ish). I’ve (re)learned more than I cared to about the details of pipes, signals, and certain system calls – and the solution is still elusive.

    For some time now, I have been using NNCP to back up my files. These backups are sent to my backup system, which effectively does this to process them (each ZFS send is piped to a shell script that winds up running this):

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install GlassFish Server on Ubuntu & Debian Servers

    Today you will learn how to install Glassfish server on Ubuntu / Debian

    GlassFish is a fully open-source reference implementation of JAVA EE application server which can be used for developing and deploying Java based applications. It supports Enterprise,JavaBeans, JPA,JSF, JSP/Servlet,JMS, RMI and many other Java-Based Technologies. It also provides us with a Web Based Panel and a CLI-Based administration console which allows easier configuration and management of our deployed applications.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Nginx – Optimizing Performance (Part 2)

    In my previous article, I covered some basic ways we could modify our Nginx configuration in order to achieve better performance. Let’s expand upon that today. I am using this as reference.

  • TecAdmin ☛ Setup Selenium with Python and Chrome on Ubuntu & Debian

    Selenium is a versatile tool that can be used for automating browser-based tests. It has a wide range of features that make it an ideal choice for automating tests. Selenium can be used to automate tests for web applications and web services. Selenium supports a number of programming languages, including Java, C#, Python, and Ruby.

    This makes it possible to write tests in the language that you are most comfortable with. In addition, Selenium has a large user community that provides support and help when needed.

    In this blog post, you will learn to set up a Selenium environment on an Ubuntu system. Also provides you with a few examples of Selenium scripts written in Python.

  • Michael Stapelberg ☛ rsync, article 1: Scenarios

    To motivate why it makes sense to look at rsync, I present three scenarios for which I have come to appreciate rsync: DokuWiki transfers, Software deployment and Backups.

  • The Animated Elliptic Curve

    For in-depth information on Curve25519, including the choice of curve equation, the choice of prime number used for Fp, and the exact details of key exchange I can recommend the author’s paper and also this technical analysis. Most of these details are streamlining of the concepts listed on this page to keep the exchange mechanism secure and performant, and should not fundamentally conflict with what’s explained here.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install HPLIP on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    The HPLIP (HPLinux Imaging and Printing) project—initiated and led by HP Inc. (HP)—aims to ease Linux systems’ ability to interact with HP‘s inkjet and laser printers with full printing, scanning, and faxing support. As of 2021 the supplied printer-drivers support a total of 3,088 HP printer models; many of these for low-end models are free and open-source (FOSS), licensed under MIT, BSD, and GPL licenses, but others (including all color laser MFC printers on the market for years) require proprietary binary blobs (“plug-ins”). The project intends that HPLIP work in combination with CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) and SANE to perform printing and scanning respectively. HPOJ, the HP OfficeJet Linux driver to get HP‘s OfficeJet printers to run with Linux, ceased development as of 13 March 2006 with the advent of HPLIP.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ rEFInd 0.13.3.1 compiled in OE

  • Barry Kauler ☛ guess_fstype symlink removed

    It was drawn to my attention yesterday, a post from Berto, that guess-fstype failed:

    https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=60034#p60034

    /bin/guess_fstype is a symlink to /bin/busybox. That symlink should not be there. guess_fstype was deprecated a very long time ago.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Kdenlive on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 LTS with four methods

    Kdenlive (acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor) is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install pgAdmin on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install pgAdmin on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, pgAdmin is a most popular and feature rich and open source PostgreSQL administration and development platform that runs on Linux, Unix, macOS, and Windows.

    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 pgAdmin4 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.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install KiCad on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will install kicad on Ubuntu 22.04 system

    KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.

  • ByteXD ☛ Uninstall/Completely Remove MySQL Server From Ubuntu – ByteXD

    Package management in Ubuntu makes it fairly easy to install, upgrade, or remove applications from the system. But some pieces of software contain multiple configuration folders and require a bit of work.

    One such software that is often used in Ubuntu is the MySQL Server. We can not utilize the usual process of apt purge to completely uninstall the MySQL server from the system. We need to follow certain steps to make sure that we completely remove MySQL and all its components from the Ubuntu system.

    Note: Make sure that you backup all your MySQL Server databases before proceeding further. After compelling this process all the files and folders associated with MySQL Server will be deleted so if you want to keep your databases you need to create a backup first.
    To completely remove MySQL Server and all its dependencies from your system follow the steps given below in the same succession.

  • ByteXD ☛ What is AlmaLinux – Key Information and Overview

    Alma Linux is a community enterprise Linux operating system. It is created by CloudLinux Team, who provide services for shared hosting and already have their own commercial Linux distribution, CloudLinux OS.

    AlmaLinux OS is designed to be 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL and pre-Stream CentOS.

    The AlmaLinux OS is governed by The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, which is a 501(c)(6) non-profit created for the benefit of the AlmaLinux OS community.

    It is now gaining popularity mainly among private business and organizations and can be a successor of CentOS Linux. In this article, we’ll try to give a brief discussion over Alma Linux and everything you need to know about it.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Go on Fedora 36 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Go on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go language is similar to C, but with garbage collection, memory safety, and structural typing. It is an original product of Google Engineering.

    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 Go programming language on a Fedora 36.

  • ByteXD ☛ DNF vs YUM: Differences between DNF and YUM Package Managers – ByteXD

    We are going to learn the difference between DNF and YUM package managers in this article. But first, let’s take a look at what both these YUM and DNF are.

  • ByteXD ☛ How to Extract Audio From a Video File – ByteXD

    In this article we’ll show you how to use FFMPEG to extract raw audio from a video file, and also how to re-encode audio using different ffmpeg audio encoders.

  • Video ☛ StreamLink: Pipe Any Streamer Into Your Video Player – Invidious

    Have you ever felt like streaming websites are way too bloated and you just want to watch your streams in peace, well you’re in luck because StreamLink is here to save the day.

• WINE or Emulation

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Windows compatibility layer Wine 7.11 is out now

    The Windows compatibility layer that allows you to run various applications and games on Linux (and forms part of Steam Play Proton) has a new development release out with Wine 7.11. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made but the development versions are usually fine to use.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • TSDgeos’ blog: The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.5

      I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.5 for the rest of us.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • DebugPoint ☛ Top 10 App Launchers for Ubuntu & GNOME Desktop [With Bonus List]

      A curated list of 10 super awesome application launcher(s) for Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Linux distributions with examples.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Debian Family

  • Debian Community News: Thiemo Seufer & Debian deaths: examining accidents and suicides

    There have been two headline suicides in Debian: the suicide of the founder, Ian Murdock and the Frans Pop suicide that appears to have been planned for the anniversary of Debian’s founding, Debian Day.

    The significance of Frans’ actions can not be understated. His life and death intertwined with the project itself. This raises the most serious questions: have there been other suicides or incidents of self harm? What impact does a suicide like that have on organization culture? Even though it was hidden on debian-private, everybody knew something about it.

    Therefore, there is a strong case for having a fresh look at other deaths even though doing so may cause some pain for their friends and family.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Mediatek presents Genio 1200 based SoM compatible with ADLINK’s carrier board

    
    MediaTek released a System on Module (SoM) that integrates their latest Genio 1200 AIoT (MT8395) System on Chip showcased last month. The LEC-MTK-I1200 features 8-cores (4x Cortex-A78/4x A55), 5-cores Arm Mali-G57 GPU and an APU system (5 TOPS). For quick prototyping, ADLINK has also designed a development board compatible with the LEC-MTK-I1200.

    The LEC-MTK-I1200 comes in a SMARC 2.1 factor form and combines four Arm Cortex-A78 (up to 2.2GHz) and four Arm Cortex-A55 (up to 2.0GHz). The SoM can be configured to have four or eight GB of LPPDR4X and up to 256GB of UFS storage (32GB standard).

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • [Old] Mike Doornbos ☛ VIC’s Revenge, the drop-in replacement for the VIC-20 VIC chip Part 1: Introduction, design goals, and FAQs

    I’m doing a year-long project to reverse engineer the output and functionality of a VIC-20′s video chip, and create a drop-in replacement. At the start of this project (a few days ago), I only actually know how to do a percentage of the things I’ll need to complete this project. Writing a long series on how things work as I learn will help the project along. Plus, maybe having all of this information in one place would be nice, right?

  • Hackaday ☛ Build Your Own Two-Factor Authenticator With Good USB

    Two-factor authentication is becoming the norm for many applications and services, and security concerns around phone porting hacks are leading to a phaseout of SMS-based systems. Amidst that backdrop, [Josh] developed his own authentication device by the name of Good USB.

  • Hackaday ☛ IKEA LED Lamp Gets Hacked For Night Light Duty

    IKEA make a lot of different lamps, including useful motion-sensitive models that can click on when you walk past. [Andrew Menadue] trialed one as a night light, but it was far too bright for the task. It also would come on during the day time, wasting its precious battery life when it wasn’t needed. Thus, in order to mold the lamp to its new purpose, hacking ensued.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Tor

    • Tor ☛ Tor stable release 0.4.7.8 – Security Fix

      As stated in the announcement (link above), we strongly recommend that everyone upgrades to 0.4.7.8. Packages are being updated and released for OS distributions so keep an eye out! Our beloved packagers are hard at work!

      Also, I will repeat it here, the security issue is categorized as a Denial of Service so it is not affecting the security of the host machine running “tor”. Nevertheless, again, we strongly encourage you to upgrade.

• Education

  • [Old] The Art of Unix Programming

    There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all.

    This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren’t aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books — both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a ‘how-to’ book, it is a ‘why-to’ book.

    The why-to has great practical importance, because far too much software is poorly designed. Much of it suffers from bloat, is exceedingly hard to maintain, and is too difficult to port to new platforms or extend in ways the original programmers didn’t anticipate. These problems are symptoms of bad design. We hope that readers of this book will learn something of what Unix has to teach about good design.

    This book is divided into four parts: Context, Design, Tools, and Community. The first part (Context) is philosophy and history, to help provide foundation and motivation for what follows. The second part (Design) unfolds the principles of the Unix philosophy into more specific advice about design and implementation. The third part (Tools) focuses on the software Unix provides for helping you solve problems. The fourth part (Community) is about the human-to-human transactions and agreements that make the Unix culture so effective at what it does.

• Programming/Development

  • Ben Congdon ☛ Mental Model: Stages of Change

    A useful mental model for reasoning about behavior change is the Transtheoretical model – sometimes also known as the “Stages of Change” model.

  • Rlang ☛ New year, new laptop, new library location, new version of R!

    I had been working on an old laptop that struggled with resource-intensive tasks. My way around that had been to switch from the laptop to my less-readily-accessible desktop for stuff that needed more oomph. Because two devices means two different package libraries, I had thought I was being smart by having my R library in Dropbox: point R to the right location, and tada!, the packages are always stable across the two machines. Plus, in case of catastrophic failure, it’s easy to start again. Right? Wrong! So, so very wrong!

  • Python

    • uni Toronto ☛ What is our Python 2 endgame going to be?

      There are two sides of this; what we’re going to do about our own scripts that are still using Python 2, and what will happen with our users and their scripts. For our own scripts, they could could be rewritten to Python 3 or changed to use a different Python interpreter path in their #! line, including PyPy. Since we’re in control of them and the timing of any use of an operating system without Python 2, we’re at least not going to be blindsided. My tentative guess at our endgame for our own scripts is that we’d probably use PyPy, although we might opt to move them to Python 3 instead.

  • Java

    • Linux Links ☛ 13 Hot Free and Open Source Java Microframeworks – LinuxLinks

      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.

      This article examines the best Java microframeworks. Micro means the framework is small, with little or no tools and libraries. Microframeworks are designed with extensibility in mind. They provide an essential set of features and rely on extensions to do the rest. Microframeworks have the advantage of making no or fewer decisions for you, making it easy to start development.

      When it comes to web development, there are a wide range of Java microframeworks to choose from. The choice actually helps you find the right tool for the job. Here’s our pick of the finest open source microframeworks.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Thoughts on RSS

    No technology other than RSS has had more think pieces written proclaiming the death of RSS (2006, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013) and the rebirth of RSS (2009, 2010, 2011, 2018, 2018, 2019).

    Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a protocol that lets you subscribe to website updates – e.g., new blog posts, podcasts, or anything else. Today, most podcasts are distributed via RSS.

Leftovers

• Collage From May 9th E-Scooter Safari

  On May 9th I was at a job interview on the other side of town, near the university. The weather was nice and I had a lot of time on my hands. I decided to do something fun with it! Both on the way there and on the way home I photographed some e-scooters I found.

  Far from all of them! Many were parked right next to bicycles in places where bicycles should be parked. To limit the amount of pictures somewhat I decided that those weren’t very interesting. Instead I shot those that “stood out” so to speak. Parked on bike lanes, right outside restaurants, next to bicycles that were also mis-parked, by bus stops, and more.

• Re: Five Questions for June 2022

  I think this person, a “transparent person” for most people around him, is amazing. It’s easy to tell by his appearance, his smell and his accent that he had a very hard life, but he’s very grateful for what he has, puts his son’s future above all else, and treats the people around him like people. I wish I had his strength.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Balancing A Motor With An Oscilloscope

    With all things in life, one must seek to achieve balance. That may sound a little like New Age woo-woo, but if you think it’s not literally true, just try tolerating a washing machine with a single comforter on spin cycle, or driving a few miles on unbalanced tires.

• Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ Why the Black Educator Forced Out Over Bogus Critical Race Theory Claims Agreed to Share Her Story

    Cecelia Lewis did not want to share her story.

    In fact, she just wanted all of this to go away.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Insteon Gets Another Chance

    It would appear that, sometimes, miracles happen. A few days ago, an update graced the website of Insteon, a company whose abrupt shuttering we covered in detail two months ago. An entity described as “small group of passionate Insteon users” has bought what was left of the company, and is working on getting the infrastructure back up. Previously, there was no sign of life from the company’s APIs. Now, Insteon hubs are coming back to life — or perhaps, they’re Inste-online again.

  • Hackaday ☛ Custom Cycling Camper Continues Car-Free

    If you own a camper or RV, you might think twice when taking it out after giving gasoline prices a look. Towing all that extra weight and wind drag along can really eat into your fuel efficiency. [Drew] decided to keep the camper but take gasoline out of the equation by building a teardrop trailer he pulls behind his bike.

  • Hackaday ☛ Doodlestation Is Beautifully Musical Furniture

    Whether you’re a modular synth enthusiast or simply love the idea of rad electronic jams, we can all get behind the idea of crazy electronic instruments with buttons, dials, and patch cables galore. The Doodlestation is a wonderful example of that, built by [Love Hulten].

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Other States Will Soon Follow’: Iowa Supreme Court Deals Blow to Abortion Rights

    The GOP-packed Iowa Supreme Court on Friday dealt a serious blow to abortion rights in the state amid heightened fears about the future of reproductive freedom nationwide.

    “This law imposes medically unjustified obstacles for Iowans… and will effectively put abortion out of reach for many.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Tennessee Abortion Clinics Grapple With Uncertainty as SCOTUS Decision Looms

  • TruthOut ☛ In Abortion Safe Havens, Organizers Prepare to Assist Those Fleeing Restrictions

  • TruthOut ☛ Iowa High Court Reverses Its Own 2018 Ruling Recognizing Right to Abortion

  • COVID-19 Positive

    I tested positive for COVID-19 this morning.

    My first symptoms were on Thursday night, when I woke up in the middle of the night with a minor sore throat and a headache. I managed to sleep through the rest of the night, but the symptoms had not improved by morning. I took naproxen and pseudoephedrine when I woke up, which helped.

    Throughout the day on Friday I began to feel worse and worse, culminating in a fever and severe chills that evening. I had gone on a strenuous cycling trip Thursday evening, and at first I attributed my symptoms to heat sickness from the exercise. However, even plenty of water and Gatorade, as well as staying in our air-conditioned house all day, did not make my symptoms improve. I also began to develop a mild cough, which manifested as a tickle in my throat.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | US For-Profit Health System Is a Mass Killer

    Imagine waking up to a headline that reads, “Atlanta Demolished by Nuclear Bomb,” and learning that the city’s 498,715 residents were dead. The shock to our society would be unimaginable. And yet, we just learned that the American health system killed more people than that in the last two years alone and hardly anyone noticed. The fact that we’ve also wasted more than a trillion dollars barely merits an afterthought.

• Security

  • TechTarget ☛ Guide to Linux patch management

    While patching desktops has some universal aspects across systems, there are specific Linux best practices that Linux administrators need to know. Here are eight important ones.

  • TechTarget ☛ 11 open source automated penetration testing tools

    From Nmap to Wireshark to Jok3r, these open source automated pen testing tools help companies determine how successful their security strategies are at protecting their networks.

  • Computing UK ☛ Mozilla claims Firefox now most secure browser – as Microsoft kills off the least secure

    Firefox turns on cookie tracking protection by default, while the axe finally falls on IE

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

    • Slashdot ☛ A Linux Botnet That Spreads Using Stolen SSH Keys [Ed: Today's Slashdot hates Linux so much that it helps Microsoft-funded ZDNet spread anti-Linux FUD]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • ABC ☛ Residents say China used health tracker for crowd control

      Angry bank customers who traveled to a city in central China to retrieve their savings from troubled rural banks have been stopped by a health app on their cellphone.

      Chinese residents are required to have the health app, which displays a code indicating their health status, including possible exposure to COVID-19. A green code is required to use public transportation and to enter locations such as offices, restaurants and malls. But some depositors at the banks in central Henan province said their codes were turned red to stop them.

      The incident has started a national debate on how a tool designed for public health was appropriated by political forces to tamp down controversy.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ China test drives national digital currency

      China’s digital yuan can now be used for wealth management products and bank loans. This move by China’s central bank extends the use of the digital currency beyond the purchase of consumer goods.

      The e-CNY is currently being used in more than 20 cities throughout China. Although the e-CNY is still in its pilot stages, the scope of the trial has been gradually expanded since its debut in 2020.

      The Chinese government has introduced the e-CNY as Bejing has cracked down on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, seeking instead to provide a government-sanctioned and controlled digital alternative.

    • Scheerpost ☛ Facebook and Anti-Abortion Clinics Are Collecting Highly Sensitive Info on Would-Be Patients

      The social media giant gathers data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account.

    • The Google Buck

      It had the same dumb wording (“be a voice for the community”), only accompanied with google’s awful “Alegria art” too. Also had the same “bait”, a crisp fresh-from-the-bank $1 bill with a promise of like $20 in google play credit—the assholes couldn’t even cough up cash for that sweet sweet data.

    • A Nielsen Buck

      Anyway, it came with a form letter explaining how excited I should be to be a “voice for my
      community!” and all that. What an opportunity! And to prove just how real this all was, there was a
      crisp, new $1 bill attached to the bottom of the page, and a promise of $5 after finishing the
      packet (wowwy!). A Nielsen Buck, straight from the Federal Reserve.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Google’s data plans in Saudi Arabia ‘will risk lives’: activists

      And then there’s Google. The online giant has the most popular search engine and most-used, web-based email service in the world. Part of US company Alphabet Inc., Google regularly boasts about how carefully it protects users’ data. But it has also had some noteworthy run-ins with authoritarian leaders.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ From ‘We are Hamas’ to ‘Death to Israel’ – Same Old CAIR

    The chants of “We are Hamas” and “Death to Israel,” at CAIR sponsored events, are proof that CAIR is still clinging to its Palestinian terrorist roots. CAIR may claim that it is a Muslim advocacy group that wishes to combat discrimination, but time after time, Israel – or more appropriately Israel’s annihilation – is what the organization cares most about. Fighting discrimination is just a veil to conceal CAIR’s sinister reality.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ ‘Killer robots’ are coming. Is the US ready for the consequences?

    All of this is no longer science fiction and must be addressed soon. The time to legally empower LAWS to employ lethal force is prior to a conflict, not in the heat of battle. At the institutional level, the Department of Defense (and its counterparts in US-allied nations) must craft an operational framework for LAWS, as well as offer strategic guidance, to ensure their ethical application in the future. Autonomous systems must be tested thoroughly in the most demanding of scenarios, the results must be evaluated at the granular level, and an expected error rate must be calculated. As a baseline, LAWS should pose less risk of error than a human operator.

  • Site36 ☛ German Armed Forces: SARah-1 spy satellite launches with SpaceX

    The German military’s Earth observation program costs around €800 million. The foreign secret service also uses it, but is getting its own spy system under the name Georg.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Allies Paid Millions to Jan. 6 Rally Organizers Since 2020

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Business Insider ☛ DOJ lawyers expect transcripts from the 1,000 January 6 committee witnesses to be made public in September

    A Justice Department lawyer revealed Thursday that transcripts of the 1,000 interviews conducted as part of the House January 6 committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack will be made public in September. It would be an unprecedented release of documents that could shed new light on the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

    The revelation came during a pretrial hearing for former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio and four other members of the far-right group who were charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with their alleged role in planning and participating in the Capitol siege.

  • Vice ☛ Uvalde Hires Private Law Firm to Argue It Doesn’t Have to Release School Shooting Public Records

    “The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton’s office will eventually rule which of the city’s arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.

  • NPR ☛ Uvalde officials are using a legal loophole to block the release of shooting records

    The maneuver has been used repeatedly by Texas law enforcement agencies to claim they’re not required to turn over the requested information because a criminal case is still pending, even though the suspect is dead.

    The loophole was established in the 1990s to protect people who were wrongfully accused or whose cases were dismissed, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.

    “It is meant to protect the innocent,” Shannon said, but in some cases “it is being used and misused in a way that was never intended.”

• Environment

  • Energy

    • Would 1950s Living Standards Save Us?

      We’re consuming way too much energy. By now people should start understanding that “shifting over to green power” is kind of a joke. So far the world hasn’t really started transitioning at any meaningful scale. Yes, new solar and wind plants are built every day. There are however some problems we tend to ignore: [...]

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Policy Increasingly Looks Like Trump’s Middle East Strategy

      All the latest headlines about President Joe Biden’s July trip to Saudi Arabia focus on a deal to push down gas prices. In reality, he is making a much more sinister and dangerous calculation than most realize: He is reportedly planning to offer the dictators in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—where all but two of the 9/11 terrorists came from—a defense pact that commits American lives to defend their regimes. What could go right?

  • Overpopulation

    • Scheerpost ☛ UN Food Chief Says ‘Hell on Earth’ Looms From Hunger Crisis Triggered by Ukraine War

      With the world “marching towards starvation,” said David Beasley, “the best thing we can do right now is end that damn war in Russia and Ukraine and get the port open” in Od…

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Poverty Is Violence!’ Thousands of Demonstrators in DC Demand Economic Justice

    Led by the Poor People’s Campaign, advocacy groups and low-income individuals gathered in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to demand that policymakers “fight poverty, not the poor.”

    “Poverty is a policy choice and we will hold our leaders accountable.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Oil Crisis! Surging Inflation! Is This the 1970s Again?

    For the United States and much of the rest of the world, the 1970s were a time of high oil prices, surging inflation, stock market swoons, political upheaval, and geopolitical tension. Add pandemic and climate change to the list, and it also sounds like a fair description of the world today, a half-century later.

  • Scheerpost ☛ How Our Consumption is Killing Poor Kids in Los Angeles

  • Scheerpost ☛ The European Central Bank is Trapped. Here’s Why.

    Several of the major central banks are stuck in a trap of their own making. This includes the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and others.The credit-based global financial system we have constructed and participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Chris Hedges Report: Struggle makes us human

    The neofascist movements currently rising around the globe differ from the fascist movements of the 20th century. Fascism in the last century arose to break radical workers’ movements, many organized by the Communist Party. But the current neofascists, figures such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India, do not need to focus on destroying unions, which have already been decimated by globalization. Instead, they can directly channel the anger of the unemployed and underemployed towards minorities and the vulnerable.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Migrant Children Jailed in Inhumane Conditions Under Biden

    In cells built for adults, one-third are child migrants. Border authorities have resisted improving conditions for minors in crowded, freezing facilities.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The US Senate Is the Bipartisan Graveyard of Democracy

    Since January 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed 412 bills and sent them to the Senate. Unfortunately, the Senate hasn’t acted. “What?” you say, “don’t the Democrats control both chambers of Congress?” Sure, by the barest of margins. Handcuffed by the filibuster, a Senate rule (not a federal law) requires 60 votes to pass legislation in what senators of yore called the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Big Money Behind ‘Big Lie’ Insurrection Now Flowing Into Midterm Election

    As the January 6 committee hearings continue, many see the panel’s work as an investigation of an event that happened on a single day. To be sure, reconstructing the attack on the Capitol is crucial to the committee’s efforts. But it’s important to understand that the story of the attempt to overturn the will of the voters is still unfolding.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Bernie Sanders Backs US House Hopefuls Jonathan Jackson and Delia Ramirez

    U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders rallied with Jonathan Jackson and Delia Ramirez, a pair of progressive congressional candidates, in Chicago on Saturday.

    “We desperately need more leaders in the Congress who understand the need to stand up and fight against the corporate greed that is running rampant in this country.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • ADF ☛ Fact Checking COVID-19 Misinformation

      Social media can be an effective tool to spread accurate information about COVID-19 and help guard against the pandemic’s spread. Its many platforms can also be used to disseminate false information about the disease, its origins and how to treat it.

      Hundreds of social media-driven myths about COVID-19 have been circulated and debunked since the pandemic began. This article, the second in a series, exposes some of the misinformation that has circulated, driving paranoia, mistrust of health officials and a lax attitude toward a disease that has killed 254,000 people on the African continent.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ YouTube’s Censorship Is a Threat to the Left

    This wasn’t how things normally went on the platform. “You notice a pattern with YouTube, that when a video gets a certain number of views in the first hour, you have an idea of how well it’s going to do for the week based on that,” she says. “But sometimes, a video will just be doing amazing in the first hour or two, and then it just dips.”

    Khalek is just one of many left-wing media figures who have been negatively affected by the platform’s content moderation policies. Suppression, demonetization, outright removal of content: as the drive for tech censorship has grown, ostensibly to take aim at “misinformation” and online extremism, independent left-wing outlets have suffered all this and more, caught in the expansive net that overzealous, overworked, or automated YouTube censors have thrown at the content on their platforms.

  • The Verge ☛ SpaceX fires employees who wrote open letter complaining about Elon Musk

    A number of the letter’s drafters were fired Thursday afternoon, according to an email sent by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and seen by The Verge. News of the firing was first reported by The New York Times.

  • New York Times ☛ SpaceX Said to Fire Employees Involved in Letter Rebuking Elon Musk

    The open letter asked that SpaceX’s leaders “publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior” and “define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior.”

  • The Washington Post ☛ SpaceX fires workers who criticized Elon Musk in open letter

    The open letter, a draft of which was obtained by The Post, asked co-workers to sign on either by name or anonymously. It also appeared to provide a web platform for employees to confidentially submit stories of personal experiences at the company and encouraged workers to discuss the letter with their supervisors in upcoming meetings.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Brazil: Police confirm human remains belong to British journalist

    A forensic examination on remains found in the Amazon confirmed they belonged to British journalist Dom Phillips. A second set of remains, believed to be those of Bruno Pereira, are still being analyzed.

  • Wikileaks, Dickileaks & Ubuntu Underage girl

    The UK has taken the next step towards extraditing Julian Assange to the US. This is a sad day for journalism.

    With all the sex crimes revealed in Australia during 2021, we can’t help feeling Assange has been a scapegoat.

    Then again, we couldn’t help thinking there is nothing new here.

  • Craig Murray ☛ Standards

    A brief thought.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | UK Extradition of Assange Makes Mockery of ‘World Press Freedom Day’

    British politicians will celebrate World Press Freedom Day next week by debating the safety of journalists and the importance of free expression with no sense of irony.

  • teleSUR ☛ Assange’s Defense: No Guarantees of Fair Trial in the US

    “There still are two instances in the English judicial system to appeal to, but we must not lose sight of the fact that some kind of provisional or precautionary measure could be activated before the European Court of Human Rights,” he explained.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Journalist or spy? WikiLeaks founder to face U.S. trial.

    Journalism organizations and human rights groups had called on Britain to refuse the extradition request. Mr. Assange’s lawyers say he could face up to 175 years in jail if he is convicted in the U.S., though American authorities have said any sentence is likely to be much lower than that.

    Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard said Friday that extraditing Mr. Assange “would put him at great risk and sends a chilling message to journalists the world over.”

  • TruthOut ☛ ‘Dark Day for Press Freedom’: Chomsky, Ellsberg, Others Slam Assange Extradition

  • Scheerpost ☛ Stella Assange: ‘We Are Going to Fight This’

    “We are going to use every appeal avenue,” Stella Assange told a London press conference on Friday after the home secretary signed the extradition order, reports Joe Lauria.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Source: Police never tried to open door to classrooms where Uvalde gunman had kids trapped

    Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally stormed in and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.

    Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.

  • Malay Mail ☛ Court says won’t proceed to hear Malaysian woman’s bid to leave Islam for Confucianism, Buddhism

    The High Court here today rejected leave for a lawsuit by a Malaysian woman who wants to be declared no longer a Muslim in order to be free to embrace Confucianism and Buddhism.

    This means the High Court will not proceed to hear her case. She has however filed an appeal immediately.

    Federal counsel Mohammad Sallehuddin Md Ali, who represented the attorney-general, confirmed that High Court judge Datuk Ahmad Kamal Md Shahid had dismissed the woman’s application for leave for judicial review.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Police Militarization Gave Us Uvalde

    For two decades, a group of police analysts (myself included) have been warning about the corrosive effects of police militarization, which have been unfolding for more than 40 years. Through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, the federal government has been dumping military weaponry, armored personnel carriers, even grenade launchers and drones, on police departments large and small. People of a certain age should reflect: You probably don’t recall police regularly hanging out with armored personnel carriers and automatic weapons when you were a kid. But sometime after this nation embarked on the War on Drugs, these scenes became normal.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Critics Say Amazon Must Improve After Leaked Doc Reveals ‘Looming Labor Crisis’

    After Recode on Friday revealed an internal document from last year warns that “if we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the U.S. network by 2024,” critics of the online retail giant’s labor practices renewed calls for improvement.

    “I guess treating people like they’re expendable has consequences, who knew?”

  • Scheerpost ☛ Paul Von Blum: A Personal Legacy of Dissent

    Paul Von Blum writes about dissent as a personal legacy, how it has defined his life and how it has influenced some of the 40,000 or more students he has had since he began teaching more than 50 years ago.

  • TruthOut ☛ The EU Is Outsourcing Border Control to So-Called “Safe Third Countries”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Privatized Internet Has Failed Us

    There’s certainly some truth to the claims of these activists, and aspects of their proposed reforms could make an important difference to our online experiences. But in his new book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Ben Tarnoff argues that those criticisms fail to identify the true problem with the [Internet]. Monopolization, surveillance, and any number of other issues are the product of a much deeper flaw in the system.

  • I miss the GemGoHaNe, the Hacker News gateway

    I kept hoping the site would come back up! But it’s been dead for more than 10 days now, and I guess I better get used to it… If you are reading this, whoever made this, please, please bring it back!

• Monopolies

  • Privacy International ☛ UK Tribunal agrees that Meta’s acquisition of GIPHY harms competition

    PI was granted permission to intervene in this case, one of the first successful applications to intervene before the Tribunal brought by a campaigning organisation. Our intervention in support of the CMA’s position argued that Meta could use GIPHY to further expand, and potentially abuse, its dominance in social media and messaging, as well as digital advertising markets at the expense of consumers and competitors.

    While the CAT judgment does not address directly concerns related to data exploitation, it recognises that the CMA correctly assessed the harm to competition which is caused by Meta acquisition of GIPHY. In 2021 the CMA noted how the merger would allow Meta to disadvantage its rivals, including by acquiring data on users’ behaviour and potentially requiring apps to return more users’ data to GIPHY.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Jobs From £10/hr to ‘Let’s Talk ££’, There’s No Shortage in the UK

      An amusing irony of working an anti-piracy job is that people immediately render themselves redundant when they’re 100% effective. With that scenario unlikely to ever raise its head, anti-piracy jobs are in abundance. Whether you prefer site-blocking, IPTV disruption, or just want camcording movie pirates brought to justice, there is no shortage of jobs in the UK right now.