06.29.22
Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE at 10:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum
Installing Software in KDE Neon
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: GNU/Linux is easy to use and extend; the above demonstrates how new software gets installed, removed, and updated in KDE Neon
THE ability to install Free software of one’s choice without providing credit card details etc. is something Apple and Microsoft can only envy.
“When it comes to managing software packages, GNU/Linux is in some sense better and more robust than what Apple and Microsoft provide.”We in the GNU/Linux world have long enjoyed the freedom to install tens of thousands of packages, only a click or two away. There’s no need for the command line (unless one insists on using it) and even some proprietary software is suitably prepackaged for many distros. There are numerous packaging methods that have made this possible.
The above shows an experimental distro (KDE Neon, which targets enthusiasts wishing to always use the latest and greatest, at risk of instability). I seem to have stress-tested it a little too much, so there was an error when attempting to retrieve previews of new fonts.
When it comes to managing software packages, GNU/Linux is in some sense better and more robust than what Apple and Microsoft provide. It’s also a lot more secure. In some distros it’s already simplified to the level of “app” mentality (like Android and iOS). █
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Posted in Site News at 10:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 6fffaec6071679dac44c49991e435b3a
Moving While Working
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Avoiding long periods of sitting down is important for one’s health, especially in sedentary lifestyles or jobs
THE notion of a standing desk is not new as it predates computing; moreover, as Wikipedia puts it: There is a significantly higher mortality rate among people who regularly sit for prolonged periods, and the risk is not negated by regular exercise, though it is lowered.”
“In addition, I’ve set things up so that the headphones and external speakers play music at the same time (this means that if I move around I can still hear the music).”I recently started working while standing at least some of the time; sometimes I also exercise while reading. I recently shuffled around my work layout a bit (removed one laptop as well) and reconfigured things for more mobility and movement. In addition, I’ve set things up so that the headphones and external speakers play music at the same time (this means that if I move around I can still hear the music). This is my personal story, I’ve heard many other stories, and maybe it can inspire other people to sit less while still working on the computer/s. The video above is neither planned nor scripted. It’s not edited either and it’s raw footage from a portable, wired webcam. So pardon the low quality. █
Photo (illustrative image) in the public domain
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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Now that Microsoft has cordoned off Russia from its products, the black market for Windows is beginning to grow. And this may have ramifications outside of Russia as the country’s methods begin to spread around the internet.
For one, the spike in piracy may make it easier for people around the world to download and use a cracked version of the software. And if a Windows-like Linux distro begins making waves online, it may encourage others outside of Russia to take the plunge.
When One Window Closes, Two More Open
With Microsoft leaving Russia, both Linux and piracy have seen a surge in interest. We’ll have to see if this goes even further and begins influencing the tech scene on a global level.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Getting rust into the Linux kernel has been a project for quite a while and it seems like it’s finally reaching it’s finally stages and Linus Torvalds is getting ready to merge it into the kernel.
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Security with open source, the new OSSF, what Substack is doing to newsletters and newsletters are doing to blogging (and both are doing to the growing subscription economy), plus a call for open source tools that help subscribers manage their oversubscribed lives. All those and more are subjects of a roundtable discussion among Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers and Jonathan Bennett on this episode of FLOSS Weekly.
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Mimic 3 is a powerful open-source text to speech engine, brought to us by Mycroft AI. Mycroft is known for their virtual assistant reference devices, but did you know that you can download their TTS engine separately, and run it on any device you wish?
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Applications
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HPLIP, HP developed open-source Linux driver, released v3.22.6 a day ago with many new printers/scanners support.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Gitea is a free and open-source self-hosted Git service like GitHub, BitBuacket, and GitLab. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure the self-hosted Git server named Gitea with Docker on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 server. This also covers the installation and configuration of the Nginx web server as a reverse proxy for the Gitea container service.
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One of my family’s first computers ran a command-line operating system called DOS, the “Disk Operating System.” I grew up with DOS, and learned to leverage the command line to make my work easier. And so did a lot of other people. We loved DOS so much that in 1994, we created the FreeDOS Project. Today on June 29, we celebrate 28 years of FreeDOS.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install RubyMine on Pop!_OS 22.04.
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GNU/Linux distributions need bootloaders during installation. These bootloaders are responsible for loading system files that run when you install any GNU/Linux distro. If you are developing any GNU/Linux distribution, you may need to work with bootloaders so users can install it on their systems.
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In this guide we will learn how to install and configure MariaDB in Alma Linux 9.
MariaDB is an open-source one of the most popular relational database management system (RDBMS) that is a highly compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL. It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit.
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Follow through this tutorial to learn how to setup multinode Elasticsearch 8.x cluster. As of this writing, Elastic Stack 8.3 is the current release. This means that Elasticsearch 8.3, one of the major components of the Elastics Stack is also the current release version as of this writing.
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Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 20.9.2.2963 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenLiteSpeed on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenLiteSpeed is a free open-source lightweight HTTP server developed by LiteSpeed Technologies. It is a powerful, modular HTTP server and can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections with low resource usage. It provides a web-based control panel that allows you to configure and manage the web server via a web browser. OpenLiteSpeed is available on Linux, UNIX, BSD 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 OpenLiteSpeed on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Converting or resizing images on Linux is easy: you pick an image editor that suits your needs and follow a series of steps on it to perform these operations. However, the problem arises when your image editor doesn’t support batch operation, which is the case with many image manipulation software.
But thankfully, there are tools like Converseen, which make it much easier to perform batch manipulation on images in Linux than it seems.
Let’s dive in to check out Converseen and see how you can use it to batch resize and convert images on Linux.
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In this tutorial, we are going to explain how to configure the popular WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache with Redis on a WordPress website on Ubuntu 22.04 OS.
W3 Total Cache plugin is used for improving the performance of the WordPress website by reducing the load time, improving the search engine results, saving bandwidth, and of course caching the files of the website. Redis is an open-source in-memory data structure store that can be used as a page cache on the WordPress website. In this blog post, we are going to install WordPress first with the LAMP stack and then install the W3 Total Cache and Redis.
Configuring this setup is a very easy process that may take up to 20 minutes. Let’s get started!
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Déjà Dup is a free an open source program we can use to easily create incremental data backups on Linux. The program is basically a graphical frontend for Duplicity; its goal is to hide complexity, be simple and easy to use. Backups created with Déjà Dup can be encrypted and stored locally and remotely, even using storage space provided by services like Google Drive.
In this tutorial we see how to install Déjà Dup on some of the most used Linux distributions, how to create and restore data backups.
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Linux-based operating systems, if well configured, are really stable; however, since bad things can always happen, it is a good idea to regularly create backups. As we saw in previous articles, there are many types of backup, and many possible backup strategies which can be implemented on Linux, using free and open source software. In this article we focus on Timeshift, an application which allows us to create incremental backups of our Linux system. The tool is similar to the Apple Time Machine, and can work as a frontend for rsync or use the BTRFS filesystem snapshot feature under the hood.
In this tutorial we see how to install and configure Timeshift on Linux, and how to create incremental system backups.
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In this video, I am going to show how to install EndeavourOS 22.6 Artemis.
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Jack Wallen walks you through the process of deploying the open-source GlassFish Java Application server on the latest release of Ubuntu Server.
Glassfish is a free, open-source Java application server that simplifies the process of deploying your enterprise-grade Java apps to a scalable platform. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems, GlassFish is now maintained by Oracle and is released under both the Common Development and Distribution License as well as the GPL.
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LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is the de facto standard encryption method used on Linux-based operating systems. As we saw in previous tutorials, when we want a partition or raw disk encrypted using LUKS to be automatically unlocked at boot, we need to enter a dedicated line into the /etc/crypttab file. Doing so, we are prompted to provide the encryption password interactively. This is quite straightforward on laptop or desktop machines, but how can we unlock a volume on an headless server? One solution is to use dropbear to get ssh access at an early boot stage, in the initramfs, in order to provide the volume password. In this tutorial we see how to use dropbear-initramfs to get ssh access at an early boot stage, in order to unlock a LUKS volume.
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AMD
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Even though FSR 2.0 is almost as good as Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD might be looking to add AI-enabled hardware processing in the upcoming RDNA3 GPUs, as suggested by the addition of Wave Matrix Multiply-Accumulate algorithms in the latest Linux patches for the Radeon RX 7000 GPU series.
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Last week, AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 was unleashed as an update to the official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver, which showcased notable graphical performance improvements on RDNA 2 GPUs.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I’m excited to help bring WebExtensions to Epiphany (GNOME Web) thanks to investment from my employer Igalia. In this post, I’ll go over a summary of how extensions work and give details on what Epiphany supports.
Web browsers have supported extensions in some form for decades. They allow the creation of features that would otherwise be part of a browser but can be authored and experimented with more easily. They’ve helped develop and popularize ideas like ad blocking, password management, and reader modes. Sometimes, as in very popular cases like these, browsers themselves then begin trying to apply lessons upstream.
Toward universal support
For most of this history, web extensions have used incompatible browser-specific APIs. This began to change in 2015 with Firefox adopting an API similar to Chrome’s. In 2020, Safari also followed suit. We now have the foundations of an ecosystem-wide solution.
“The foundations of” is an important thing to understand: There are still plenty of existing extensions built with browser-specific APIs and this doesn’t magically make them all portable. It does, however, provide a way towards making portable extensions. In some cases, existing extensions might just need some porting. In other cases, they may utilize features that aren’t entirely universal yet (or, may never be).
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So, as tradition has it here’s the (Northern Hemisphere) summer blog post about GNOME Maps.
One large under-the-hood change I’ve made in Maps since last time is migrating the JS code to use ES6 modules.
So, using “import” instead of referring modules as objects from the old-school global “imports” object in GJS.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Ooooh, I am kicking myself…
Easy from 4.1 does not have the ‘samba’ package builtin, you have to install it via the package manager. But, do that, and it is broken. Alfons got it working, by modifying /etc/samba/smb.conf. But, that shouldn’t be required…
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I received an email from Rodney, pointing out that Easy 4.2.2 doesn’t show what version is booting.
Yes, of course, that is a simple little thing to implement. Once past the boot manager, the ‘initrd’ launches and the first text that displays is “Finding drives”.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Resources to help you make the most of Red Hat Openshift Dev Spaces.
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This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.
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This week’s Fedora Social is going to celebrate the end of Pride month as well as all our LGBTQ+ community members. Anyone is welcome! The more the merrier.
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Debian Family
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Normally, I list here the prerequisites of a new feature: which syslog-ng version, and possibly what other software you need to install. This time, I would rather ask you a question. Do you really need nightly builds? As I mentioned earlier, it is not intended to be used in production.
Then what is a nightly build good for? The primary use is testing. New features are added to syslog-ng on a regular basis, which you might want to test. Not on a production machine, but in a testing environment. You might want to test the latest nightly release, because of the bug fixes. You can check if a problem you reported is really fixed. This is a situation, where you might also want to use the given nightly build in production until the next stable version is available.
Of course, nightly builds also have quality control. Thousands of automatic tests run before each new pull request is merged into the git master branch, yet it is easier to run into undetected regressions in nightly builds than in releases.
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Also, the dirty bitmap (incremental backup) feature now seems to be enabled by default as of newer qemu and libvirt (8.2.x) versions.
As a side note: still there’s an RFP open, if one is interested in maintaining, as i find myself not having a valid key in the keyring.. laziness.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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A review of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” with respect to performance, benchmark comparison with Fedora and more.
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Recently, Ubuntu Linux developer’s team Canonical launched their Long Term Version – 22.04 Jammy JellyFish. Now, their next version with short-term support Ubuntu 22.10 known as Kinetic Kudu is available to download and try.
Kinetic Kudu is the codename Canonical has revealed for Ubuntu 22.10 version. Kinetic means kinetic, so this is about movement or kinetic energy. “Kudu”, on the other hand, is the term for an African antelope. The male kudus have impressively rounded horns.
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Development builds of Ubuntu 22.10 just received an updated version of the GNOME Control Center (aka settings) app.
Why is this news?
Well, this was the last ‘missing’ piece of the GNOME 42 puzzle where Ubuntu was concerned. Devs took the decision to release Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with an older version of GNOME Control Center by default. There were plenty of (good) reasons for this, not least of which was the Settings v42 app being a GTK4/libadwaita port.
Fast forward to today, and the latest daily builds of Ubuntu 22.10 now sport the full, libadwaita-toting Settings app out of the box.
Ubuntu developers have ported over the Ubuntu-specific settings to the new app. Ubuntu’s configurable accent colours remain in the ‘Appearance‘ section, alongside light/dark mode and wallpaper options.
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Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom-respecting mobile operating system by UBports. Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-23, the very latest update to the system! OTA-23 will become available for the following supported Ubuntu Touch devices over the next week:
Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1
BQ E4.5 Ubuntu Edition
BQ E5 HD Ubuntu Edition
BQ M10 (F)HD Ubuntu Edition
BQ U Plus
Cosmo Communicator
F(x)tec Pro1
Fairphone 2
Fairphone 3
Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL
Google Pixel 3a and 3a XL
Huawei Nexus 6P
LG Nexus 4
LG Nexus 5
Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition
Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition
Nexus 7 2013 (Wi-Fi and LTE models)
OnePlus One
OnePlus 2
OnePlus 3 and 3T
Oneplus 5 and 5T
OnePlus 6 and 6T
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (910F, 910P, 910T)
Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo+ (GT-I9301I)
Sony Xperia X
Sony Xperia X Compact
Sony Xperia X Performance
Sony Xperia XZ
Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet (LTE or Wi-fi only)
Vollaphone and Vollaphone X
Xiaomi Mi A2
Xiaomi Mi A3
Xiaomi Mi MIX 3
Xiaomi Poco F1
Xiaomi Poco M2 Pro
Xiaomi Redmi 3s/3x/3sp (land)
Xiaomi Redmi 4X
Xiaomi Redmi 7
Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 and 7 Pro
Xiaomi Redmi 9 and 9 Prime
Xiaomi Redmi Note 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro Max and 9S
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In February of this year the Multipass team took on a challenge: completely overhauling our documentation. Canonical has put a renewed emphasis on documentation in recent months, led by Daniele Procida and his Diataxis framework, and we wanted to be an early adopter of this methodology. We had no idea where to start, but fortunately we had some help. The Juju team kindly agreed to part with their technical author, Teodora, for five hours a week so she could help us with this transformation.
Teodora’s help was the pilot of a new program spearheaded by Daniele, the documentation secondment program. The program ran for just twelve weeks, for which we had some ambitious goals. We wanted to restructure our documentation to align with the Diataxis framework, and to produce a high-quality, end-to-end tutorial for Multipass. In the course of striving for these goals, we learned a lot.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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For apartment-dwelling drummers, electronic drums are really the only option. While cheap electronic drum sets are on the market, they aren’t much more than noise-making toys. High-end sets, on the other hand, cost thousands of dollars. To make high-end hardware and software accessible to DIYers, Jeremy Oden developed an open source, low-latency electronic drum system called eXaDrums.
Electronic drum sets consist of three major subsystems: the triggers (the drum pads that you strike), a trigger board that registers those strikes, and a processing unit. The processing unit can either pump out sound itself (through synthesis or sampling) or send a MIDI signal to an external system. The eXaDrums project contains all of this hardware, as well as the software to run it. Oden developed that software carefully to be operating system agnostic and to maintain a low latency so there is no audible delay between a beat and the sound output.
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To measure a range from 0V to 30V, a voltage divider circuit enables you to linearly reduce the input to 5V and create a voltage meter with Arduino
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a voltage meter with Arduino Uno, able to deal with a 0-30V range. This tutorial provides the coding, wiring diagram and component list.
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We’ve already seen ESP32 WiFI & Bluetooth SoC combined with a cellular modem several times already, and a couple of days ago, I wrote about LILYGO T-A7068X ESP23 board with a 4G LTE modem. Iconic Devices team has made another cellular ESP32 product with the NORVI GSM industrial controller.
The DIN-Rail mountable USB programmable controller is offered with a choice of SIMCOM SIM800L 2G-only modem or QUECTEL EC21-G modem adding 3G UMTS/HSPDA+ and 4G LTE cellular connectivity. It also offers Ethernet connectivity, digital and analog inputs, relay outputs, and a small 0.96-inch OLED information display with options varying depending on the exact model.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The first smartphone from startup Nothing has generated a lot of buzz in recent months. That’s largely because the company was founded by the same guy who founded OnePlus (another company that new a thing or two about generating buzz… but which has lost a bit of its luster in recent years). It’s also because the phone has a very distinctive design with LED lighting effects built into the back. But what it might not have is high-end specs.
The Nothing Phone (1) will be powered by a Snapdragon 700 series processor rather than a higher-performance Snapdragon 8 series chip. It also won’t be sold in North America, so there’s that too.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The new Thunderbird 102 release of the free email client has a fresh new address book, revamped message header, and colorful folders.
Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform software created as a complete client-side email suite by Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser. The program offers an email client, calendar, to-do list, RSS reader, and a chat tool.
Thunderbird 91, the previous major version, was launched on August 11 last year, so it’s time to see what’s new in Thunderbird 102, which was just released.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Collabora announces the availability of Collabora Online Developer Edition (CODE) 22.05. The latest major release targets three key areas: ease of use, performance, and interoperability. It demonstrates the company’s mission of being the technology leader in collaborative editing. Collabora Online businesses the most effective and secure document creation environment with dedicated support and depth of development horsepower. CODE 22.05 is preceding the next major release of our long-term supported business suite Collabora Online. This free developer version includes all features and enhancements that will be available in our enterprise version, expected later in July. The CODE releases allow every interested user to learn and test new features on an early stage. As always, your feedback on possible issues is much appreciated! CODE is the collaboration suite offering home users and early adopters the best features, interoperability in open source, while respecting user privacy and data security. In this announcement, we are showcasing some of the latest functionalities added to Collabora Online.
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CODE 22.05 has been released; this is the “developer edition” of the Collabora Online offering formerly known as LibreOffice Online.
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Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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Before we start we have to clarify that: there are two Cockpit projects, one is for managing servers and the other Cockpit project is for creating a headless API system, which is our topic today.
The Cockpit CMS is an open-source self-hosted headless CMS “content management system” that is completely API-driven.
It uses SQLite or MongoDB as a database backend, and comes with a straightforward user-friendly interface. However, MongoDB is highly recommended in production.
[...]
Cockpit CMS is an open-source project released under the MIT License.
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Programming/Development
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Here is the proposed release schedule for LLVM 15.0.0:
July 26: release/15.x branch created
July 29: 15.0.0-rc1
Aug 23: 15.0.0-rc2
Sep 6: 15.0.0-final
I will post this on the website in a few days if there are no objections.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.5.
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This is the seventh installment in the series of blog posts on how to adjust your QML application to take the maximum advantage of qmlsc. In the first post we’ve set up the environment. You should read that post first in order to understand the others. We’re going to look at import paths this time around.
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Firefox Translations is a website translation add-on that provides an automated translation of web content. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally on the client-side in the user’s computer so that the text being translated does not leave your machine, making it entirely private. The add-on is available for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release.
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Stack Overflow released the results of its annual developer survey this week, with responses from over 70,000 developers across 180 countries. The survey highlights attitudes, tools, and environments that are shaping software today.
Docker and Kubernetes placed first and second place this year as the most loved and wanted tools.
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LWN reminds us that Git still uses SHA-1 by default. Commit or tag signing is not a mitigation, and to understand why you need to know a little about Git’s internal structure.
Git internally looks rather like a content-addressable filesystem, with four object types: tags, commits, trees and blobs.
Content-addressable means changing the content of an object changes the way you address or reference it, and this is achieved using a cryptographic hash function. Here is an illustration of the internal structure of an example repository I created, containing two files (./foo.txt and ./bar/bar.txt) committed separately, and then tagged:
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Perl / Raku
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Recently on the p5p mailing list the topic of removing smart match re-surfaced. There was a fairly vigorous discussion about the effect this would have on CPAN. So I thought I would look into how many uses there actually were.
Fortunately there are Perl Critic policies for this: Jan Holčapek’s Perl::Critic::Policy::ControlStructures::ProhibitSwitchStatements and Perl::Critic::Policy::Operators::ProhibitSmartmatch. All I had to do was run them against my mini-CPAN.
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Python
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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If you’re starting out with Bash scripting on Linux, getting a solid grasp of the basics will stand you in good stead. They’re the foundation of deeper knowledge and higher scripting skills.
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Rust
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This blog post is going to be a bit different from what you may have read from me in the past. Usually I write about things I am working on or things I have encountered while working that I find interesting. This is still a post about something I find interesting, but instead of directly related to the things I’ve been working on, it’s about something that Mozilla actively encourages me to do: furthering my knowledge and professional development. In this instance, I chose to read a book on Rust to try and increase my knowledge and fill in any gaps in my understanding of a programming language I use almost every day and have come to really enjoy working with. The book in question is Rust in Action by Tim McNamara.
The first thing I would like to call out is the great organization of the material in the book. The first few chapters go over a lot of basic material that was perfect for a beginner to Rust, but which I felt that I was already reasonably familiar with. So, I was able to skim over a few chapters and land at just the right point where I felt comfortable with my knowledge and start reading up on the things I was ready to learn more about. This happened to be right around the end of Part 1 with the bits about lifetimes and borrowing. I have been using Rust long enough to understand a lot of how this works, but learning some of the general strategies to help deal with ownership issues was helpful, especially thinking about wrapping data in types designed to aid in movement issues.
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Philip Herron has posted an update on the status of the GCC front-end compiler for the Rust language.
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Leftovers
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Perhaps this sounds a little over the top to describe it this way, but our lives are basically enabled by batteries of different shapes and sizes and functionalities, with one key factor tying them together: They die. If you’re on a road trip and the battery on your Game Boy dies, you’re out a good game until you can get your alkaline batteries replaced. If the battery on your phone dies, hope you can find a charger. If the battery in your vehicle dies … well, good luck finding a jump—and hope you’re somewhere convenient. Batteries are key building blocks for how we live, and their improvements over the years have enabled us to get further and further off the electric grid while still being able to stay connected and charged up. Today’s Tedium offers a little history on rechargeable batteries—a history that goes way beyond the lithium-ion battery, by the way.
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Hardware
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I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43″ 4K Monitor [1] and gone back to my Samsung 28″ 4K monitor model LU28E590DS/XY AKA UE590.
The main listed differences are the size and the fact that the Samsung is TN but the Philips is IPS. Here’s a comparison of TN and IPS technologies [2]. Generally I think that TN is probably best for a monitor but in theory IPS shouldn’t be far behind.
[...]
I bought the Philips monitor on eBay in “opened unused” condition. Inside the box was a sheet with a printout stating that the monitor blanks the screen periodically, so the seller knew that it wasn’t in unused condition, it was tested and failed the test. If the Philips monitor had been as minimally broken as described then I might have kept it. However it seems that certain patterns of input caused it to reboot. For example I could be watching Netflix and have it drop out, I would press the left arrow to watch that bit again and have it drop out again. On one occasion I did a test and found that a 5 second section of Netflix content caused the monitor to reboot on 6/8 times I viewed it. The workaround I discovered was to switch between maximised window and full-screen mode when it had a dropout. So I just press left-arrow and then ‘F’ and I can keep watching. That’s not what I expect from a $700 monitor!
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Linux Foundation
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An overwhelming percentage of hiring managers (93%) report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills, according to the 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report released by the Linux Foundation and edX.
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
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Toxic discussions on open-source GitHub projects tend to involve entitlement, subtle insults, and arrogance, according to an academic study. That contrasts with the toxic behavior – typically bad language, hate speech, and harassment – found on other corners of the web.
Whether that seems obvious or not, it’s an interesting point to consider because, for one thing, it means technical and non-technical methods to detect and curb toxic behavior on one part of the internet may not therefore work well on GitHub, and if you’re involved in communities on the code-hosting giant, you may find this research useful in combating trolls and unacceptable conduct.
It may also mean systems intended to automatically detect and report toxicity in open-source projects, or at least ones on GitHub, may need to be developed specifically for that task due to their unique nature.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (blender, libsndfile, and maven-shared-utils), Fedora (openssl), Red Hat (389-ds-base, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and python-virtualenv), Scientific Linux (389-ds-base, kernel, python, and python-virtualenv), and Slackware (curl, mozilla, and openssl).
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Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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PowerShell is one of the most common tools used by hackers in “living off the land” attacks, when malicious actors use an organization’s own tools against itself.
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Fear, Uncertainty,
Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Bleeping Computer ☛ CISA warns of hackers exploiting PwnKit Linux vulnerability [Ed: Microsoft-connected site overlooks far more severe and unpatched, actively-exploited Microsoft holes]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity Linux vulnerability known as PwnKit to its list of bugs exploited in the wild.
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Defence/Aggression
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A wide network of Iranian women’s rights defenders, feminist activists and public figures — part of Iran’s #MeToo movement — have come under coordinated attacks from bots and trolls on Instagram in an effort to stifle their freedom of expression and damage their online presence and influence. The huge numbers of fake followers flooding their accounts are part of a sustained, paid campaign.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuador’s 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia. In the document, Ecuador asks Russia to provide Snowden with safe passage to come to Ecuador.
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Hackers have obtained data from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow, revealing a trove of documents and emails as well as discussions regarding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The more than 53 gigabytes of data, provided to the journalism collective DDoSecrets by hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous, contains over 71,000 files, including scans of passports and personal information from visa applications.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Murphy regarding a particular form of communication between egos: if one tells another something the latter needs to know to not screw up, the latter becomes indignant for the seeming implication they’re an idiot; if not told, they screw up, and subsequently become indignant for not having been told what would have prevented them from screwing up.
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Technical
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Science
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Today’s world is faced with two possible future systems. On the one hand, there is a multipolar approach in defense of sovereign nation states premised on long-term thinking, scientific optimism and win-win cooperation stands as one possible outcome; on the other, there is a unipolar paradigm of world government, depopulation and zero-sum thinking.
Gaining insight into these two opposing paradigms is more important now than ever before, and one important place to start is the genesis of the ideologies that motivate the “Great Reset Architects” who are pushing society into a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – a “revolution” where it is believed that automation, and Artificial Intelligence will render most of humanity obsolete. We are told that this post-reset age will also see a merging of humanity with machines, a future scenario heralded by figures like Elon Musk and Google’s Ray Kurzweil in order to “stay relevant” in the next phase of our evolution. Davos-man Yuval Harari has echoed these sentiments, arguing that the levers of evolution will now be moved from the randomness of nature into the new gods running Google, Facebook and the WEF.
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Programming
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As a follow up to my essay about Lambda the Ultimate copilot and boilerplate, Csepp over on Merveilles Town kindly pointed me to this lecture by Edwin Brady.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.18.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.18 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.18.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.18.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Instructionals/Technical
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Embroidered shirts are great custom gifts and can also be a great way to show your love for open source. This tutorial will demonstrate how to design your own custom embroidered polo shirt using Inkscape and Ink/Stitch. Polo shirts are often used for embroidery because they do not tear as easily as t-shirts when pierced by embroidery needles, though with care t-shirts can also be embroidered. This tutorial is a follow on article to Make More with Inkscape and Ink/Stitch and provides complete steps to create your design.
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Go for one of the best methods given here to install DarkTable on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 LTS Focal fossa to start editing your pictures.
Open source Darktable software is one of the best alternatives to Adobe Lightroom at least in the free category to provide similar functions when it comes to Mac and Linux. Users also can have its executable binary for Windows available on its official website.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Robo 3T on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Robo 3T (formerly Robomongo) is the free lightweight GUI for MongoDB enthusiasts. Robo 3T supports various operating systems such as Windows, and Linux, macOS.
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 Robo 3T MongoDB GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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In most enterprise systems where software release cycles consist of separate environments like dev, stage, live, having multiple environments that can be dynamically configured is common. An application may have three different sets of database credentials for authentication. Each set of credentials would be respective to an instance for a particular environment. This approach essentially allows software developers to interact with a developer-friendly database when carrying out their day-to-day coding.
Kubernetes secrets is used to store very sensitive data in your Kubernetes cluster. Secrets are native Kubernetes resources saved in the cluster data store (i.e., etcd database) and can be made available to your containers at runtime. Managing these secrets is a challenging process so in this guide we will explore how to use External Secrets to simplify that.
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If you are looking for an alternative to Adobe Photoshop without burning a hole in your pocket, then go for the GIMP, which is totally free to use, and importantly, it’s available for all major platforms like Microsoft Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, and, of course, Linux.x
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it’s the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it’s not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It’s a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the Calamares cross-distro installer.
EndeavourOS hews more closely to its parent distro than, for example, Manjaro, which we looked at very recently. Unlike Manjaro, it doesn’t have its own staging repositories or releases. It installs packages directly from the upstream Arch repositories, using the standard Arch package manager pacman. It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay command takes the same switches as pacman does, so if you wanted to install, say, Google Chrome, it’s as simple as yay -s google-chrome and a few seconds later, it’s done.
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Red Hat/ IBM
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The Source-to-Image (S2I) toolkit allows you to easily build application container images for OpenShift deployment. Red Hat provides S2I images for a number of languages including Node.js. For example, this is the image for Node.js 16.x. To learn more about using the Red Hat images versus other Node.js images, check out the Building good containers section of the Node.js reference architecture.
If you have an application with a package.json that includes an npm start command, deploying that application using nodeshift (which supports S2I) can be as easy as running nodeshift in the directory with the package.json. It will package your application and deploy to your current OpenShift project.
Super easy, right? Well, most of the time. It might get a bit more complicated if your application uses native add-ons that need additional libraries not installed in the Node.js container image. For example, if you want to use the odbc package, you will need some ODBC libraries and the odbc client for the database you want to connect to. More specifically, if you want to use the odbc package with the MySQL database, install the additional libraries through the following RPMs…
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Parallelism describes a software’s ability to spawn multiple processes to execute tasks in tandem. It also applies to Ansible’s default ability to interact with numerous hosts simultaneously.
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Skills development and talent management are both challenges and opportunities that span every industry vertical and role – for companies of all sizes. These challenges are being exacerbated throughout the pandemic as most companies fundamentally shift certain business practices and subsequently fill new or emerging roles, particularly in IT.
DevOps Institute’s Upskilling IT 2022 Report and Survey researched global and regional must-have IT skill capabilities and learned that insufficient resources and skill gaps are the top global challenge. From a global perspective, 40 percent of our respondents said that the resource and skill shortage is one of their top three challenges today.
The most acute skill gaps are relative to cognitive, technical, process, and framework skills. To identify skill gaps, we leverage eight skill capabilities. Our survey explored the position that business leaders and individuals had toward each of them relative to the gaps they saw. The cognitive skill capability includes analytical capabilities, quantitative and statistical knowledge, statistics, data modeling, and knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, all essential skills for digital transformation and digital business growth.
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As a concept, digital transformation is not new. We have been inching closer to – and talking about – a totally integrated digital workforce since the dotcom boom. But as new technologies emerge daily, volatile markets drive executive leadership to tighten budgets, and “efficiency” outpaces “growth” for the most frequently seen buzzword in your email inbox, there is an increasing pressure to maximize the ROI of your digital transformation.
Ultimately, digital transformation is a game of accurate trend predictions and timely disruptions with the goal of preparing your business for the most success possible in the digital future. If you feel as though your digital transformation efforts have slowed, here are five ways to get the engine revving again.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 comes more than four months after the Ubuntu Touch OTA-22 software update to add more improvements and fix various issues that prevent you from using your Ubuntu Phone device on a daily basis.
Highlights include FM Radio support for BQ E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, BQ E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, and Xiaomi Note 7 Pro smartphones through the FM Radio App, enables wireless display support for Halium 9 and later devices, as well as hardware decoding support on the Jingpad ARM-based Linux tablet in the Media Player App.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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With our online courses programme, launched in 2017, we made it our mission to provide computing educators with the best possible free training we can design. Five years on, here are some of the key stats about the courses’ impact:
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Drums are an exciting instrument to learn to play, but often prohibitive if there are housemates or close neighbors involved. For that problem there are still electronic drums which can be played much more quietly, but then the problem becomes one of price. To solve at least part of that one, [Jeremy] turned to using an Arduino to build a drum module on his own, but he still had to solve yet a third problem: how to make the Arduino fast enough for the drums to sound natural.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Version 102 of the Thunderbird email client has been released.
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Leftovers
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It’s been a game of Us and Them for a long time. I could tell you tales that would shake your heart, and you could tell me tales of Paine that try men’s souls right back at me. And we’d be shaking together in the bubbled artificial snowstorm on Skid Row, sharing Christmas toasts like little unintentional Commies around a barrel fire, a brown bag containing our open secret — Thunderbird’s ‘good medicine’. Hi, how are ya?
And it’s been a story of derailed trains of thoughts, smoke pouring out of boxcar doors, as the Bard from Duluth would say, and catastrophes of piled up depression, folks walkin’ round in loco-motion, dazed and confused (op. cit.), believing in things they should have known better about, ending up where they started, not knowing for the first time, as TS Eliot posits, but in front of the same carnival barker they experienced in the aptly-named Erie, Pennsylvania — a name that itself conjures up property ownership (Penn’s Woods). Fuck it, you’ll say around the fire; it’s all a racket. L’chaim, bottom’s up.
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When at a loss for words—during, perhaps, a time of want or desire, when one’s body is overwhelmed by light, as if by the effect of Ketamine or MDMA, when overwhelmed by the weight of the moment, the silence, the look of disappointment in a lover’s eyes— what do we call the moment, then, when the words are finally summoned, like a sparkle of fireflies, and by grace, by the mercy of the night, what was damaged has been restored? Freire spoke that one reads the world before they read the word, which suggests that the first stage of language is in the experiencing of a thing to the point of knowing; in this knowing, then—of song sparrows and house sparrows, of catbirds and European Starlings, of a lover’s wants and needs, one could say, genuinely, that knowing to the point of the words conjuring themselves is, perhaps, the truest form of love.
In Los Angeles, my lover drove me to the airport. It was mid-summer, and along the highway, the neon sun poked through a grove of palm trees, its corona pink with a thick haze of smog. In my youth, in the hope of producing a kind of love, I attempted to acquire the words to conjure a new world—of which I was god—not god as in God, but yes, as in the creator. After watching the television series WandaVision, I see now how foolish a person can seem when they want to be loved. Maybe foolish isn’t the word. Anyway, we stopped to eat ramen a few miles from the airport, and when we returned to the car and sat inside, she leaned into me and whispered the words, Don’t go. I whispered back,I don’t want to go. And yet I did. I flew back to LaGuardia on a red-eye flight. What is the word for the kind of sadness that comes from having to leave a place where one is loved? What is the word for a lover who says,I don’t want to go but goes?
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≠What do you call a group of people united by grief? A family. Or at least that’s the formulation that has been dancing through my mind as I pondered where to begin. This is, after all, the frame that Kendrick Lamar offers from the outset on his long-awaited fifth album, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. When my friend Tim and I talked about the record, he told me that he’d misheard its title as “Mr. Morales and the Big Steppers,” which sounds like the name of a late-’70s family band that I would love. Later that day, in my group chat, another friend, Kyle, shared the abstract of a paper that he’d just presented, in which at one point he says something like “What’s important to remember is that funerals are also reunions.” I hear these lines on repeat, resounding in the background as the beat builds, while I play Kendrick’s album, trying to find a foothold.
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Isn’t it the work of those of us who work to make new toolswith the tools we are given, hammering matter into matter more adapted to the hand than to the memoryof a hand, less to the past than to the path to what comes next?
And isn’t it the work of the next adaptation in part to evincespecifically by being what it is, regardless of detail and whether it wants to or not, the matter of persistence through change,the hammering of being into time, which is itself the work?
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Education
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American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack, because Johnny and Janey often couldn’t or wouldn’t read a book, though they sure could text, tweet, take selfies, and make videos.
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Gracing the pages of legacy media over recent years, a particular take has been presented as a rational, bipartisan solution to inequality at elite universities: enrollment expansion. “Many well-known public universities have expanded the number of students they serve without sacrificing quality,” writes Jeffrey Selingo in The Washington Post. “But for too long, our most selective schools have benefited from public funding and billions of dollars in tax breaks while acting more like exclusive clubs than institutions with a responsibility to educate our nation’s growing population.”
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Hardware
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For some power users, the one-hundred-and-something keys on regular keyboards just aren’t enough for their everyday tasks. Macro keypads are a popular way of extending one’s input capabilities, and there are almost as many examples as there are power users. [Ulrich]’s latest project, dubbed the LowPow E-Ink ShortKeyboard, is a beautiful and meticulously documented design for a macro pad that includes several unusual features.
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Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto standard for sending information to and from computer peripherals for almost two decades, but despite the word “universal” in the name this wasn’t always the case. Plenty of competing standards, including USB, existed in the computing world in the decades before it came to dominance, and if you’re trying to recover data from a computer without USB you might have to get creative with how it’s done.
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It’s fair to say that right now is probably the worst possible time you could choose to design a new piece of hardware. Of course the reality is that, even in the middle of a parts shortage that’s driving the cost of many components through the roof (if you can even find them), we can’t just stop building new devices. In practice, that means you’ll need to be a bit more flexible when embarking on a new design — it’s like the Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometime you’ll find / You get what you need”
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The UK Health Security Agency says that the poliovirus was probably brought to London by somebody who had recently been vaccinated overseas with the live virus. Polio was once close to eradication, but vaccination campaigns in countries like Nigeria and Pakistan were hampered by fear that they were a bid by the CIA to sterilise Muslim men.
This conspiracy theory was given a boost when the CIA used a vaccination campaign in Pakistan – against hepatitis rather than polio, so far as I recall – as a way of getting the DNA of local children to see if any of them had the same DNA as Osama bin Laden. This would be evidence that he was hiding in the locality.
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How do the potatoes in that sack keep from sprouting on their long trip from the field to the produce section? Why don’t the apples spoil? To an extent, the answer lies in varying amounts of irradiation. Though it sounds awful, irradiation reduces microbial contamination, which improves shelf life. Most people can choose to take it or leave it, but in some countries, they aren’t overly concerned about the irradiation dosages found in, say, animal feed. So where does that leave non-vegetarians?
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Proprietary
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Google has announced a new feature for its productivity suite that could help lure customers away from Microsoft 365. As explained in its latest blog entry (opens in new tab), users will now benefit from the ability to edit Microsoft Office files from within Google Workspace (née G Suite) without the need for an internet connection.
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Linux Foundation
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There are weekly updates and developments taking place in the Cardano ecosystem. Thus, Altcoin Buzz covers some of these updates and developments from the fourth week in June to keep readers informed.
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Security
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The Register UK ☛ FabricScape: Microsoft warns of vuln in containerized Linux workloads [Ed: Microsoft boosters are once again using Microsoft talking points to deflect from Microsoft's incompetence to "Linux"]
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On December 7, 2021, Google announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy — a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals — suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy’s founder is one of the men being sued by Google.
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The Internet of things — aka the tendency to bring Internet connectivity to devices whether they need them or not — has provided no shortage of both tragedy and comedy. “Smart” locks that are easy to bypass, “smart” fridges that leak your email credentials, or even “smart” barbies that spy on toddlers are all pretty much par for the course in an industry with lax privacy and security standards.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Ever since it came into effect, we’ve been calling out how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was an obviously problematic bit of legislation. In the four years since it’s gone into effect, we’ve seen nothing to change that opinion. For users, it’s been a total nuisance. Rather than take the big US internet companies down a notch, it’s only harmed smaller (often EU-based) internet companies. Multiple studies have shown that it hasn’t lived up to any of its promises, and has actually harmed innovation. And don’t get me started on how the GDPR has done massive harm to free speech and journalism.
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Defence/Aggression
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On Monday, June 27, a Russian airstrike on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk, a city in Ukraine’s Poltava region, killed at least 20 civilians; dozens more are still unaccounted for. Kyiv called the strike a terrorist act and an “unintentional attack on a civilian target.” Russian officials initially claimed the attack was a “Bucha-style false flag,” but the Russian Defense Ministry soon acknowledged that a strike had indeed occurred. In Russia’s telling, however, a strike “on a foreign munitions warehouse” caused some of the weapons stored there to detonate, damaging a nearby defunct shopping mall. Meduza explains the holes in Russia’s story.
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Congresswoman Liz Cheney on Tuesday revealed some attempts to intimidate witnesses cooperating with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection and signaled that the panel plans to share additional details at future hearings.
“You don’t tamper with witnesses like this if you have nothing to hide.”
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Democracy defenders responded to Tuesday’s testimony by a former Trump administration aide before the January 6 committee by demanding that the former president and his co-conspirators be held to account in the face of increasingly incriminating evidence of their culpability for the 2021 insurrection.
“Hutchinson’s testimony blows any notion of plausible deniability surrounding January 6 out of the water.”
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A former aide to ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows testified to the House January 6 committee that former President Donald Trump furiously demanded that security be lifted to allow his armed supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on the day of the 2021 insurrection, telling his aides that “they’re not here to hurt me.”
“This was a classic coup attempt. Trump wanted to lead an angry, armed mob into the Capitol. Worse than we knew.”
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Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, sought a presidential pardon related to last year’s January 6 insurrection, Cassidy Hutchinson told members of Congress during sworn testimony on Tuesday.
Hutchinson, who served as Meadows’ special assistant, testified during a last-minute hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
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As NATO holds its Summit in Madrid on June 28-30, the war in Ukraine is taking center stage. During a pre-Summit June 22 talk with Politico, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg bragged about how well-prepared NATO was for this fight because, he said: “This was an invasion that was predicted, foreseen by our intelligence services.” Stoltenberg was talking about Western intelligence predictions in the months leading up to the February 24 invasion, when Russia insisted it was not going to attack. Stoltenberg, however, could well have been talking about predictions that went back not just months before the invasion, but decades.
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The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
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Don’t think I’m writing this as a lament, however. I’m lucky. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. For Ukrainians, the war is anything but a topic of study. It’s a daily, deadly presence. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered. As all of us know too well, many of that country’s cities have been badly damaged or lie in ruins, including people’s homes and apartment buildings, the hospitals they once relied on when ill, the schools they sent their children to, and the stores where they bought food and other basic necessities. Even churches have been hit. In addition, nearly 13 million Ukrainians (including nearly two-thirds of all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.
No one knows how many non-combatants have been slaughtered by bullets, bombs, missiles, or artillery. And all this has been made so much worse by the war crimes the Russians have committed. How does a traumatized society like Ukraine ever become whole again? And in such a disastrous situation, what could the future possibly hold? Who knows?
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On June 12, Muslim activist Javed Mohammed, a member of the Welfare Party of India, tasted such retributive justice in witnessing the family home demolished by the Prayagraj Development Authority (PDA). The actions were also inflicted on two other homes belonging to individuals accused of throwing projectiles after Friday prayers. Similar measures have been implemented in Saharanpur and Kanpur.
As with all such brutal, state-sanctioned BJP thuggery, the measure is given a legal gloss in victimising the occupants. They are the ones in the wrong, without the valid construction permits, or paperwork. The PDA insists that Javed was notified on May 10 to have his illegal construction razed by June 9. But this claim was only made in a rude note that demanded he vacate the premises by 11 am on June 12.
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Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are denied access to information about a critical situation that is affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the world’s geopolitics for generations to come.
The growing inflation, an imminent global recession, a festering refugee crisis, a deepening food shortage crisis and much more are the kinds of challenges that require open and transparent discussions regarding the situation in Ukraine, the NATO-Russia rivalry and the responsibility of the West in the ongoing war.
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Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a special assistant to former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, is expected to testify Tuesday before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Although it had not been scheduled to meet again until next month, the panel announced Monday that it will hold its sixth public hearing on Tuesday at 1:00 pm ET to “present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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A network of dark money has transformed the Supreme Court into an illegitimate and partisan institution. The same court that overturned Roe v. Wade—ending nearly 50 years of abortion rights—could gut one of the few laws available to private citizens to challenge corporate corruption.
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Environment
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At this political moment, when we hardly have time to process one outrage before the next washes over us, it seems as if the best escape might be to seek refuge from the tumult in a park.
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With the goal of hammering out a declaration to protect the oceans and their vast resources from exploitation, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday opened the body’s Ocean Conference by warning that the world faces “an ocean emergency.”
“The ocean must become a model on how we can manage the global commons for our greater good.”
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By Basav Sen, climate policy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Tejal Mankad, digital and social media manager at Fossil Free Media.
Since early spring, we have been following the heatwaves searing India and Pakistan with horror.
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The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Melissa Lin Perrella sees a direct line from her childhood in a small town in Central California in the 1980s to her work on the front lines of environmental justice.1This article is copublished with Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
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Vegetation responds to climate, and today’s climate is considerably different than even a couple of hundred years ago when we were coming out of the cool, moist climate of the Little Ice Age.
We are in the worse drought in over a thousand years. We are seeing record high temperatures. Average wind speeds are increasing. These factors are responsible for the increase in wildfire spread and severity. For instance, for every 1-degree rise in temperature, fire risk is increased by up to 25%. Wind impact is also exponential, with high winds responsible for every large fire across the West.
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“Carbon dioxide removal is essential to achieve net zero [greenhouse-gas emissions],” Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the working group that produced the nearly 3,000-page UN climate panel report. (Source: UN Climate Report: Carbon Removal is Now ‘Essential’, MIT Technology Review, April 4, 2022)
“Removing the greenhouse gas from the air will likely be necessary, along with radical emissions cuts, to keep temperatures from rising 2°C,” Ibid.
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Energy
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Twelve years after the disastrous BP explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Gulf communities still face enormous risks because of offshore drilling and the onshore impacts in their backyards—a web of leaking pipelines and flaring chemical facilities choking the air. Yet, our community still found a way to celebrate our land and advocate for its protection during the Gulf Gathering for Climate Justice and Joy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana earlier this month.
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“The G7 countries have once again proved that they are morally bankrupt and have no real intention to solve the climate crisis and take responsibility for this crisis caused by their disproportionate use and relentless support for fossil fuels.”
“The G7… has prioritized filling the pockets of the fossil gas industry over protecting peoples’ lives.”
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The California legislature was close to passing a bill that would require the state’s two massive pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, but on June 21 the legislation was killed by one Democratic assemblyman who has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the energy industry.
Senate Bill 1173 would have required the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the two largest public pension funds in the country, to divest from fossil fuels. CalPERS and CalSTRS, which manage pensions for state employees and teachers, together hold more than $9 billion in fossil fuel investments.
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British biomass giant Drax is lobbying the Californian government to play host to its first ever “carbon negative” power plant outside of the UK, despite concerns about the sustainability of the energy source.
Drax has long-standing plans to launch the world’s largest bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) plant in North Yorkshire, but the former coal-fired power generator now appears to have California in its sights.
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Finance
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Ricardo’s theory drove policy and political power for two centuries fortifying the corporate and conservative proponents of alleged “free markets” (See: Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism) and “free trade.” The theory’s endurance was remarkably resistant to contrary obvious empirical evidence. Whether Ricardo envisioned it or not, “free trade” became an instrument of colonialism, entrenching poor nations in the extraction and exportation of natural resources while becoming almost totally dependent on western nations’ value-added manufactured products. “Iron ore for iron weapons,” as one observer summed it up. Tragically, too often, the weapons came with the invaders/oppressors.
Fast forward to today’s supply chain crisis disrupting the flow of commerce. Why does the world’s largest economy and technology leader have a supply chain problem forcing businesses and consumers to helplessly wait for simple and complex goods to arrive at our shores? Why did we find ourselves in March 2020 desperately waiting on an Italian factory to sell us simple protective equipment to safeguard patients, nurses, and physicians to address the pandemic’s deadly arrival? Answer – the touted theory of comparative advantage embedded in so-called “free trade.”
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The global aid group Oxfam International slammed the G7 on Tuesday for failing to respond anywhere near adequately to a global food crisis that has pushed as many as 323 million people worldwide to the brink of starvation.
“Corporate profits have soared during Covid-19. This food crisis is big business.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Besides geographic and population differences between Caribou and the Bronx, there are considerable cultural differences that have had significant political consequences today. People from rural Maine, I am told, are hard-working and respectful. The state’s motto “Dirigo,” which means “I lead,” combined with the Polar Star on the state seal give an impression of stability and trust.
And the people from the Bronx? Being sceptical if not cynical is a necessity for survival on the streets in the `hood. While the era of “the Bronx is burning” has passed, The French expression “C’est le Bronx,” to describe chaos is still used. People from the Bronx have an inherent lack of confidence in others. Street smarts are not synonymous with stability and trust.
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In times like this, I find myself suspicious of language. The very act of stringing sentences together seems to aid and abet inertia; there is something far too “business as usual” about paragraphs. On Friday I sweated in a sea of protestors. We gathered to share our grief, our rage, our exhaustion. What was missing was a plan. The sound system wasn’t working, or was too weak to reach most of the crowd; we stood and listened to the distant crackle of magnified anguish we couldn’t quite make out, and we cheered when others cheered, and we read each other’s signs, and we fervently, ironically, sadly, gratefully agreed. But now what?
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’Twas said that finding wise advice Was something Donald Trump had mastered. So who’d he listen to that night? Just Rudy Giuliani, plastered.
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Opposition politician Ilya Yashin has been sentenced to 15 days in prison by a judge at Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, Mediazona reported on Tuesday. Yashin stands accused of disobeying officers’ lawful demands after he allegedly insulted and swore at police in a park early Tuesday morning. According to journalist Irina Babloyan, who was with Yashin at the time of his arrest, the allegations are false.
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On Monday, Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda published an article about former Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova’s final months of work. Denisova was dismissed by Ukraine’s parliament in May after losing a vote of no-confidence. Not long ago, though, Denisova was one of the Ukrainian officials most frequently cited by the media. Among other topics, she often spoke about crimes committed by the Russian military.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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On Tuesday, June 28, the Russian State Duma approved the second reading of a generalized draft law on “foreign agents.” The bill, titled “On monitoring the activities of individuals under foreign influence,” was submitted to the State Duma back in April and passed the first reading on June 22. Ahead of the second reading, Russian lawmakers and senators made amendments to the bill that not only broaden the grounds for designating individuals and organizations as “foreign agents,” but also impose additional restrictions on those who have already been blacklisted. Ahead of the bill’s third reading on Wednesday, Meduza breaks down what’s new (and what’s not).
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Last week, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court succeeded once again at reading the first clause of the Second Amendment out of the Constitution. That Amendment starts with the line: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” but conservative justices have rendered that phrase meaningless. Now, those same conservatives are coming for the First Amendment. That Amendment starts with: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But after the court’s latest opinion, it’s hard to imagine what kind of government display of religion this court would actually strike down. That is, as long as it’s a display of Christian fundamentalist religion.
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Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, we cannot rely on the federal courts to keep clinic doors open. Make no mistake, the ACLU and our partner organizations will litigate whenever and wherever we can to protect abortion rights. In the aftermath of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there will be hundreds of restrictive laws and statutes for lawyers to scrutinize. Litigation, even in losing battles, can be useful. It can focus public attention and galvanize popular opinion. Good litigators will bring smart litigation to keep abortion legal in as many places as possible for as long as possible. If opponents are trying to take away our fundamental rights, we should make it as difficult as possible.
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Harlem, New York City—We are used to hearing “Say her name” as a protest chant aimed at raising up the names of Black women killed by police. But on June 20, “Say her name: Brittney Griner” rang through Harlem as several dozen people marched from the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building to Harlem’s Harriet Tubman statue. The protesters were demanding that the US government do whatever it takes to negotiate the freedom of WNBA all-star Brittney Griner, who is in a Russian prison facing a 10-year sentence. Griner was arrested at the Moscow airport for allegedly having cannabis-derived vape cartridges in her bag. But make no mistake: She is a political prisoner.
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Law enforcement agencies have access to very powerful digital tools. Thanks to companies with eyes on market expansion but very little consideration of moral or ethical issues, cops have the power to completely compromise phones, turning them into unwitting informants… or worse.
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Under pressure to respond forcefully to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday said the White House is not currently discussing the idea of using federal property to ensure access to abortion services for those living in states that have banned or are moving to ban the procedure.
Asked specifically about the proposal during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris initially dodged the question, saying the Biden administration is looking to “do everything we can to empower women to not only seek but to receive the care where it is available.”
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Lawmakers and rights advocates mourned the loss of life and decried the United States’ inhumane immigration system late Monday after an abandoned tractor-trailer rig containing at least 50 dead people and 16 survivors—including four children—was discovered in San Antonio, Texas.
Local authorities said it appears that the rig, which was found after a worker in the area heard a yell for help, was being used for a smuggling operation. Citing one law enforcement official, The Texas Tribune reported that evidence suggests “people were trying to jump out of the tractor-trailer because some of the deceased were found along several blocks.”
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Where I grew up, prayer filled the crisp, smoggy air at the first sight of day. The chorus of azans sounding from surrounding mosques brought the world back to life. Walking to school, women in vibrant saris jostled past with orange garlands made of marigolds in tow. They’d drape them at temples to thank their gods; and I thanked mine on my knees before bedtime.
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Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority struck down Roe v. Wade last Friday, Facebook and Instagram have been swiftly removing posts informing people that they can obtain federally approved abortion pills through the mail while ignoring posts offering to mail guns.
An Associated Press reporter’s Facebook post that said, “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills,” was removed within one minute on Monday, according to the news outlet.
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Abortion rights activists, journalists, and legal observers in recent days have been attacked and detained by police at demonstrations against the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
“It’s clear that this excessive use of force was unnecessary and unacceptable!”
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday shrugged off condemnation from Republicans over the guidance she’s offered to her millions of social media followers in recent days, explaining how to procure abortion pills and protect their digital privacy in the event that they need abortion care.
Former Washington Examiner reporter John Gage, who praised the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped the right to abortion care from millions of Americans last week, posted on his Twitter account Monday that the New York Democrat was sharing information “about how people can skirt abortion bans.”
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People deserve the right to choose the circumstances (if any) under which they have children. The ability to terminate a pregnancy is essential to reproductive justice. State abortion restrictions represent undue interference in what should be private medical decisions, and are a form of reproductive injustice that threatens the agency and bodily autonomy of women and others who can become pregnant.
Reproductive justice and economic justice are fundamentally linked. The availability of abortion has direct consquences for the financial security of pregnant people and their families. There is ample evidence showing that abortion access has positive “downstream social and economic effects,” including increases in wages, educational attainment, and job opportunities. In their dissenting opinion, Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagen acknowledged these costs, writing that the court’s ruling means that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.” Abortion access is also a workers’ rights issue, as the right to control one’s body feeds directly into the right to control one’s labor.
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In response to the Supreme Court’s recent assault on female bodily autonomy, numerous U.S. corporations have issued statements stating they’ll be paying for employee abortion travel. You’re to ignore, apparently, that many of these same companies continue to throw millions of dollars at the politicians responsible for turning the Supreme Court into a dangerous, cruel, legal norm-trampling joke:
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My usual disclaimer: This column is not about abortion. I’m not going to try to tell you that it’s right or wrong, or that it should be legal or illegal. You’ve probably got opinions on that. They’re probably not going to change. I’m not going to try to change them.
I’m less interested in abortion itself than I am in the quality of arguments about it. And I see a truly silly argument being advanced by supporters of the Dobbs ruling. Let’s call it “the argument from decentralization.”
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Let’s face it: There is a possibility that the Uvalde police got scared when they learned that there was a armed killer nearby. It’s possible that what went through their minds was: “Heck, I’m too young to die. I’ll wait until someone else goes in there after that guy.”
But defense against murderers, rapists, and other people committing violent acts is the big reason we have police. That’s their job. Why else do we need them — to arrest people for smoking marijuana, having sex with a prostitute, or playing in a poker game?
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Monopolies
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Over the last few weeks, we’ve written quite a bit about the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which has become the central push by a bunch of folks in Congress to create a special antitrust bill for “big tech.” There are some good ideas in the bill, but, as we’ve been highlighting, a major problem is that the language in the bill is such that it could be abused by politically motivated politicians and law enforcement to go after perfectly reasonable content moderation decisions.
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Trademarks
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Late last year we discussed a plainly stupid trademark lawsuit brought by Dairy Queen, which makes tasty frozen snacks, and W.B. Mason which is a strange combination of furniture and grocery store. At issue was the latter’s attempt to trademark some bottled water it sells under the brand “Blizzard Water”. Notably, W.B. Mason had sold water under that brand since 2010 without issue and it was only when Dairy Queen caught wind of the trademark application that it decided to sue over the potential for confusion with its blizzard ice cream products.
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Copyrights
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I had to rewrite this post before it got published. I originally began it with some whimsy in response to the absurdity that copyright cases like these always engender. The idea that people could ever use their rights in previous expression to forbid someone else’s subsequent expression is almost too absurd to take seriously as an articulation of law. And, according to the Supreme Court, at least in the past, it wasn’t the law. Fair use is supposed to allow people use pre-existing expression to say new things. In fact, if the new expression did say new things, then it is absolutely should be found fair use.
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With music consumption having long ago moved to a streaming model in many parts of the world, it sometimes feels as though, just like the rotary telephone dial, kids might not even know what a radio was, let alone own one. But there was a time when broadcasting pop music over the airwaves was a deeply subversive activity for Europeans at least, as the lumbering state monopoly broadcasters were challenged by illegal pirate stations carrying the cutting edge music they had failed to provide. [Ringway Manchester] has the story of one such pirate station which broadcast across the city for a few years in the 1970s, and it’s a fascinating tale indeed.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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A person who works in my office building is in the process of writing a novel. He has already completed a first draft and is working with an editor to prepare it for publication. Recently he asked me if I would like to read his current version of the novel, and I agreed.
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In late May last year I lamented that I had few locally located friends, which can be difficult when you need someone’s help.
I ended up in a similar position this year; illness is going through the family and I’m not properly well yet. There was a couple of days when we were all sick and I needed some groceries, in much the same way as then.
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Technical
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Internet/Gemini
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My online bank account has the worst banking website I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty, for sure, but so slow and bloated. Stuff moving around all over the place. I couldn’t figure out how to actually register for an account. The advisors for their online chat seemed to have gone missing. So I’m probably going to go back to my branch and open an account in person.
[...]
This is the typical case of prioritising looks over functionality, something that those using Gemini or Gopher will never need to worry about (mercy). Just as governments propose and militaries dispose, I think we have a case here that management and marketing are not taking input from developers themselves. I’m sure we’ve been in these situations before, where those in charge are not taking advice from the poor schmucks that have to implement the ill-informed ideas.
This is all in complete contrast to when I was walking around an airport one time. There were a couple of people sitting behind a desk. It wasn’t a check-in desk or information desk, but some other kind. I don’t remember its function. What I do remember, though, was seeing a torn-off strip of paper. On that strip of paper were letters on the far right, followed by information like passenger name and telephone number.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Europe, Finance, Patents at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
He runs it like it's a bank (this is where he comes from), not a patent office
Summary: The EPO is basically doomed under António Campinos because he abandoned the law for short term monetary gains (e.g. granting fake software patents under the guise of “4IR”), assuring the demise of the institution, which can no longer attract employees that meet the standard strictly required under the EPC, begetting outsourcing which only worsens everything
THE EPO is doomed. Sorry to say this, EPO staff. Many of you know this deep inside and have said this to us over the years.
Outsourcing EPO to Belarus was a massive mistake and Campinos outsourcing EUIPO 'IT' to India was likely illegal. The drain or the loss of talent at the EPO is simply undeniable and there is also literature and lectures explaining what’s happening at the EPO nowadays, so we start with “How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents” (2021):
And over time, over the past 21 years even , I have seen these telecommunication companies develop. We all remember Bell Labs, and in the Netherlands, KPN Neherlab, when telecommunications companies were innovators, and they were the first to do many things, and when they did actual research.
And over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the extremely sad decline of all these communications companies into branding and financing bureaus, and this has impacted my own business, because I used to sell software, and now I sell services, because no one can buy my software anymore, because none of these telecommunications companies are technical companies anymore.
I spend a lot of time thinking about that, why? Why is that going on? And why is it bad? And that brings me to the central question of this presentation.
In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain? How technical do we need to stay to remain viable as a company or a country or a continent? And is there a point of no return?
If you outsource too much? Is there a point where you cannot go back and relearn how actually making things work?
From “The Dangers of Outsourcing” (2015, well before the biggest Boeing blunders)
Reducing costs is another buzzword that is often used to argue pro outsourcing. Considering the apparent first-order effects, it makes intuitive sense that offloading a certain segment of a business to a third party will reduce costs via lower labour costs and overheads, depreciation and capital outlays. In fact, this is one of the allures of the globalised world and the internet; the means of outsourcing work to lower-wage countries are cheaper than ever before in history.
However, the second-order effects of outsourcing are rarely considered. The first fundamental rule of ecology is that in a complex system you can never only do one thing. As all parts of a complex system are intricately linked, perturbing the system in one area will have inevitable knock-on effects in another area. Additionally if the system behaves non-linearly to the external stimuli, these knock-on effects are non-intuitive and almost impossible to predict a priori. Outsourcing an entire segment of a project should probably be classed as a major perturbation, and as all components of a complex engineering product, such as an aircraft, are inherently linked, a decision in one area will certainly effect other areas of the project as well.
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Hypothetically, in the extreme case when every bit of design and manufacturing work is outsourced the only remaining role f0r the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of the aircraft is to serve as a systems integrator. However, in this scenario, all profits are outsourced as well. This reality is illustrated by a simple example. The engines and avionics comprise about 50% of the total cost of construction of an aircraft, and the remaining 50% are at the OEM’s discretion. Would you rather earn a 25% profit margin on 5% of the total work, or rather 5% profit margin on 25% of the total work? In the former case the OEM will look much more profitable on paper (higher margin) but the total amount of cash earned in the second scenario will be higher. Hence, in a world where 50% of the work naturally flows to subcontractors supplying the engines, avionics and control systems, there isn’t much left of the aircraft to outsource if enough cash is to be made to keep the company in business. Without cash there is no money to pay engineers to design new aircraft and no cash on hand to serve as a temporary buffer in a downturn. If there is anything that the 20th century has taught us, is that in the world of high-tech, any company that does not innovate and purely relies on derivative products is doomed to be disrupted by a new player.
Second, subcontractors are under exactly the same pressure as the OEM to maximise their profits. In fact, subcontractors have a greater incentive for fatter margins and higher returns on investment as their smaller size increases their interest rates for loaned capital. This means that suppliers are not necessarily incentivised to manufacture tooling that can be reused for future products as these require more design time and can not be billed against future products. In-house production is much more likely to lead to this type of engineering foresight. Consider the production of a part that is estimated to cost the same to produce in-house as by a subcontractor, and to the same quality standards. The higher profit margins of the subcontractor naturally result in a higher overall price for the component than if manufactured in-house. However, standard accounting procedures would consider this as a cost reduction since all first-order costs, such as lower labour rate at the subcontractor, fewer employees and less capital tied up in hard assets at the OEM, creates the illusion that outside work is cheaper than in-house work.
From Boeing itself: [PDF]
The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain some highlights associated with the contemporary business practice of out-sourcing more and more of a companies’ activities in the belief that doing so will increase profitability. A strong case is made that it will not always be possible to make more and more profit out of less and less product and that, worse, there is a strong risk of going out of business directly as a result of this policy. The point is made that not only is the work out-sourced; all of the profits associated with the work are out-sourced, too. The history of the former Douglas Aircraft Company is cited as a clear indication of what these policies have done – and as a warning of what more may be done. The subcontractors on the DC-10 made all of the profits; the prime manufacturer absorbed all of the over-runs. The circumstances under which out-sourcing can be beneficial are also explained. They involve better access to improved facilities with which to make more precise detail parts to reduce the cost of final assembly. A strong warning is included about the perils of sub-optimum solutions in which individual costs are minimized in isolation. Indeed, the importance of thorough planning, accounting for all interdepartmental interactions, cannot be over-emphasized. A case is made that it is better to fill up “excess capacity” with additional work, even if unrelated to the core business, rather than to close it down and sell it off. Such practices can even be necessary for retaining the skills and facilities required to produce the prime products, but which would otherwise be under-utilized and become targets for elimination. The inherent traditional imbalance between budgets and head-counts can be resolved in this manner. The paper includes some observations about European experiences, good and bad, with out-sourcing. It closes with a list of recommendations by the author about how to operate and maintain profitable businesses.
The EPO is no longer about engineering or excellence; heck, it can attract neither engineers nor talent. This is what’s known as the “death spiral”, only temporarily masked by redefining “quality”.
Just to remind readers who haven’t been keeping up, this morning we quoted someone claiming that over 50% of people that the EPO offers a job to are not accepting the positions offered. The EPO is basically the sort of notorious employer not many people want to work for anymore, certainly not those sufficiently qualified to do the job. The staff union has long explained that a high-calibre examiner can do the job very fast and very well (owing to knowledge and experience), whereas some new graduate/entrant (or person on temporary contract) who can barely operate the EPO’s computers/databases and is therefore worth many times less than the former type, unless the goal is to make an army of rubberstampers, a legion of “yes men” (granting a ton of rubbish, flouting examination). The union further explained that those people slow everything down and they are a yoke on the colleagues who need to train them. This is the vision Campinos has for the Office.
The foregone conclusion is that the Office has reached the point of no return because “the lack of incoming talent makes life hard for those very skilled and talented people who have been onboard for many years and have not left yet,” as an associate explains. █
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