07.07.22
Posted in Finance at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This is even more obscene than the salary hikes at the Linux Foundation, which operated at a loss when it last had an IRS filing published (3 years ago)
The numbers as per the official IRS filings:
End of 2019: ~$3,070,000
End of 2018: ~$2,585,000
End of 2017: ~$2,350,000
End of 2016: ~$1,110,000
End of 2015: ~$1,020,000
End of 2014: ~$1,030,000
End of 2013: ~$800,000
End of 2012: ~$710,000
End of 2011: ~$580,000
End of 2010: ~$590,000
End of 2009: ~$590,000
End of 2008: ~$610,000
Newer numbers not yet available, but certainly that kept growing…. notice the salary trebling between 2016 and 2019 (when Firefox is collapsing)
The data sheets with the charts as OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Summary: So much for rewarding merit; as shown above, one can have one’s salary grow sixfold in a decade, even when market share falls by about 90%
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Posted in Site News at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
We’ll exceed 34,000 this coming weekend
Gemini is even bigger because it contains more than blog posts
Summary: With 34k posts we’re pushing some limits and ponder contingencies
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Posted in Site News at 5:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 3a0d0b89ae8021786e3496966cbb9003
Rolling Out Our Simple, Elegant CMS
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Adoption of static pages (or sites with static files) makes a lot of pragmatic sense; with feature churn and adoration of “frameworks” the Web became a sordid, overweight mess that harms the environment in all sorts of ways and unnecessarily drives up cost
THE other night we started explaining where the Web had gone wrong and the role of “big CMS” (bloated content management systems) in it, along with various large frameworks, some of which get integrated into the CMS “ecosystem” (overpopulated chaos).
“With various things such as Gemini, IPFS and the videos (gallery of them) in recent years we’ve increasingly adopted static pages. That just makes practical sense.”In recent years we were drowning in complexity and so-called ‘technical debt’. We looked for a way out and after a lot of research (and persistent growing pains) we decided to write some code to suit our needs, and by doing so we can keep it minimal and lightweight. The backend was screaming all day long, particularly due to the databases (sans caching) and serving static pages makes sense when the stories aren’t customised or tailored to visitors. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
The above video is the first one that shows a system we might later adopt here in Techrights. At the moment we develop and test it for Tux Machines, but a lot can be generalised and made to work on any site. With various things such as Gemini, IPFS and the videos (gallery of them) in recent years we’ve increasingly adopted static pages. That just makes practical sense. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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We cover events and user groups that are running in France. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Desktop/Laptop
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System76 has refreshed its thin-and-light take on Linux laptops, the company announced Tuesday, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. The revamped 14-inch Lemur Pro, like its predecessors, prioritizes a longer battery life, with the latest model claiming up to 14 hours of use.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.
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In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Unity 22.04
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Finally, a decent replacement for Skywave linux! This is a great starting point for hams that want get into linux. One install for a complete desktop system with nearly all of the available ham radio software already installed and ready to run.
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The new movement to leave GitHub, an Ubuntu bug biting 22.04 users, the hardware platform Fedora might start taking seriously, and a major desktop dev departs Red Hat.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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After almost 9 years since the beginning of the last wxWidgets stable release series, the first release in the new stable 3.2 series is finally available on GitHub. You will find there archives with the library sources and documentation as well as binaries for the selected Windows compilers such as Microsoft Visual C++, MinGW-w64 and TDM-GCC. You can also read the updated documentation for this version and, in particular, if you’re new to wxWidgets, you may find the installation guide a good starting point.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Many other modules might trigger ACPI device registration. This means the the basic ACPI subsystem has to be up and available before much of the Hardware is usable. Hence, we can see that the ACPI subsystem gets registered here. What I am not certain of is when does this code get called?
To back up a bit, I was reading the ACPI Kernel documentation and saw that something needs to scan the ACPI namespace for devices. Yes, I was starting in the middle.
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SELinux is a Linux kernel security implementation that allows system administrators to have more control over the system. It was originally developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as a series of patches to the Linux kernel using Linux Security Modules (LSM).
It provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including MAC (mandatory access controls). The main reasons behind the implementation are to enforce data confidentiality and integrity, as well as to protect processes from untrusted inputs.
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Recently, I posted a tutorial on deploying SFTPGo. During my work with this platform, I discovered that if you decide to venture beyond the realm of the default virtual folders, things get a bit complicated and you have to not only add users and groups to SFTPGo but also to the Linux system. This doubles the amount of work you have to do, and if you’re dealing with a lot of users, this can get problematic.
I you opt to keep your users within their virtual folders, this isn’t a problem. But for my purposes, I need to be able to share folders outside of /srv/sftpgo.
If you don’t want to have to jump through the same hoops I did, I have a quick fix for you. Let me show you how it’s done.
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One of the best features of Fedora Silverblue is that it allows you to safely and easily try and switch between several variants of the distro. Here’s how you can use a process known as “rebasing” to explore different versions of this unique Linux distribution.
Although none of the following commands are destructive, it’s always best to back up your data before changing options in your operating system in case something goes wrong.
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Amazon RDS provides an enhanced monitoring feature for databases. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the ‘IAM Passrole’ permission for enabling enhanced monitoring for Amazon RDS. We will see this by demonstrating a simple example.
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In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install Apache Cassandra 4 on our Ubuntu 21.10 server. Apache Cassandra is an open-source, free, NoSQL database used to store large data. Its linear scalability and proven fault tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu by default uses the open-source video driver Nouveau which has limited support and features when compared with proprietary Nvidia drivers. The objective this article is to install the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 and switch from a default opensource Nouveau driver to the proprietary Nvidia driver. Fyi, Nouveau drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, lacking the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support.
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 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) Drivers 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 this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP Stack on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, A LAMP stack is a group of open-source software that is typically installed together to enable a server to host dynamic websites and web apps. It comprises the Apache web server, MariaDB database server, and PHP which is a backend scripting language used for developing dynamic web pages.
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 LAMP Stack on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
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Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a form of mandatory access control (MAC) that helps Linux systems enforce file and process permissions. It’s a default subsystem on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Fedora, and many other Linux distributions.
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To create a directory in Linux, you use the mkdir command. It stands for ‘make directory’ after all. It’s quite a simple command.
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PipeWire is a graph-based processing engine, that focuses on handling multimedia data (audio, video and MIDI mainly).
It has gained steam early on by allowing screen sharing on Wayland desktops, which for security reasons, does not allow an application to access any framebuffer that does not concern it. The PipeWire daemon was run with sufficient privileges to access screen data; giving access through a D-Bus service to requesting applications, with file-descriptor passing for the actual video transfer. It was as such bundled in the Fedora distribution, version 27.
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Games
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This is going to be a very interesting release this month for users. Quite a large number of features landed for this release!
Automatic TSO mode migration
When FEX is running a single threaded application, we can be optimistic and disable heavy TSO-emulation related features. This significantly speeds up some single threaded applications. Once the program creates a thread then FEX will disable this optimize and clear its code cache to be safe.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.
Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…
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A list of ten great KDE apps (Part 2) spread across productivity, utilities and games.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Adwaita stans listen up: that exceptionally sweet theme pack you can use to make Firefox look like GNOME Web has been updated.
And I don’t mean ‘updated’ in the sense it just supports the latest Firefox 102 release – that’s a given. Rather, the Firefox GNOME theme has been updated to follow GTK4/libadwaita styling.
Something I know I’ve been waiting for.
It means you can very easily make the latest version of the Firefox web browser looks über integrated and ingratiated on the GNOME 42 desktop (well, those GNOME 42 desktops where the default Adwaita theme is in use).
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The yum and dnf package managers are used to install packages or software on your RedHat-based Linux distributions like Rocky Linux. Moreover, the ‘yum’ command is used to check security updates and binary package information. In this article, we will explore different uses of the yum command in Rocky Linux 8.
Open the terminal and log in as the root user through the terminal.
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This report covers work that happened between April 5th and July 4th. For previous work, see the 2022Q1 report.
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Over the past decade, powerful AI systems have matched or surpassed human levels of performance in a number of specific tasks such as image and speech recognition, skin cancer classification and breast cancer detection, and highly complex games like Go. These AI breakthroughs have been based on deep learning (DL), a technique loosely based on the network structure of neurons in the human brain that now dominates the field. DL systems acquire knowledge by being trained with millions to billions of texts, images and other data instead of being explicitly programmed.
These task-specific, DL systems have generally relied on supervised learning, a training method where the data must be carefully labelled, – e.g., cat, not-cat, – thus requiring a big investment of time and money to produce a model that’s narrowly focused on a specific task and can’t be easily repurposed. The rising costs for training ever-larger, narrowly focused DL systems have prompted concerns that the technique was running out of steam.
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The recent implementation of the CableLabs 10G Lab environment facilitates the service provider’s relentless “innovation journey” and surmounts a myriad of technical and logistical challenges while propelling the industry forward. Additionally, it embraces open and co-compatible configurations to provide a successful proof of concept (POC) and vendor collaboration.
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In an industry undergoing constant change, Red Hat’s annual community and social responsibility report is an opportunity for reflection. This is particularly true of our 2021 report, which offers a view into how throughout the pandemic (and beyond), we found new ways of collaborating and contributing to the communities around us.
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Debian Family
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New iso images of Sparky 2022.07 of the (semi-)rolling are ready to go.
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Sparky Linux released an update to their rolling edition with updated packages in the Debian and Sparky test repos as of July 5, 2022.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Jack Wallen shows you how easy it is to install a wide-ranging load monitor to Ubuntu Server so you look out for bottlenecks and other issues.
Every Linux system admin knows how important it is to be able to keep track of how a server performs. Whether it’s a load average, kernel usage, filesystem usage or network I/O, you need the tools to keep tabs on that information. Of course, because this is Linux, there are a lot of options, one of which is called Monitorix. This open-source tool is capable of watching the following:
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As of Ubuntu 22.04, the Pimoroni Unicorn hats are supported on Ubuntu out of the box. This includes the standard Unicorn Hat, Unicorn pHAT, Unicorn HAT Mini, and Unicorn HAT HD.
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The Chromium browser package (Snap version) in Ubuntu Software is missing VAAPI hardware decoding support. Ubuntu developer team is finally working on get the feature back!
As you may know, Ubuntu now includes the chromium web browser in the system repository as Snap package that runs in sandbox. However, the package is missing the graphics hardware acceleration since version 72 which was released a few years ago in 2019.
Some third-party PPAs are being maintained with Chromium packages, either due to lack of hardware acceleration or just because they don’t like Snap.
For Chromium fans who are OK with the Snap package, you can now help testing the new hwacc build that uses the graphics card for video playback.
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Ubuntu is arguably the most widely used Linux-based desktop operating system (OS) out there. It is a free, open-source, and easy-to-use Debian Linux derivative first launched in October 2004, by a team of Debian developers set up by Mark Shuttleworth, who together founded Canonical – the publisher of the OS. Canonical now offers professional services at a low cost to fund the improvement of the Ubuntu platform.
Ubuntu desktop powers millions of PCs and laptops around the world. It ships with everything you need to run your organization, school, home, or enterprise, as a result, Ubuntu competes well with any proprietary desktop OS available on the market including Microsoft Windows desktop and Apple macOS.
First released in August of 2006, Linux Mint is another widely-used OS for desktop and laptop computers. It is derived from Debian and Ubuntu and is a highly recommended alternative to the Ubuntu desktop and one of the best alternatives to Windows OS and macOS.
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Programming/Development
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Flutter is an open source UI framework, released in 2017 by Google, that allows the creation of multi-platform applications, without having to worry about constraints related to supported platforms.
Flutter applications are written in a programming language called Dart, then compiled and run as a native applications, to be efficiently executed on Linux, Android, iOS or Windows platforms, but also as Web applications.
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Gtranslator is an application which helps translators to do translation of application from one language to another through po files .
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Kids are, by default, curious beings. Everything is new to them, and they love to explore. In this era of technology, keeping children up-to-date is also a part of parenting. Introducing them to programming is a great start, and there are tons of programming tools for kids to make it a fun experience.
Studies suggest that the best age to start with programming or coding is around five to seven years, depending on the kid’s understanding and reading capability. Like mathematics, programming also helps children open to problem-solving methods and think more logically, which can benefit them in the future.
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The aim of this project is to develop a new compositor back-end, taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for real-time interaction.
As a first step, this new back-end will be used to power the Viewport Compositor, a new shading option that applies the result of the Compositor Editor node-tree directly in the 3D Viewport. Artists will not have to wait for a full render to start compositing, allowing for faster and more interactive iterations on one’s projects.
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For ants in particular, stigmergy is useful as it alleviates the need for memory and more direct communication; instead of broadcasting a signal about where a new source of food has been found, you can instead just leave a breadcrumb trail of pheromones that will naturally lead your community to the food.
We humans also use stigmergy in a lot of ways: most notably, we write things down. From post-it notes posted on the fridge to remind ourselves to buy more cheese to writing books that can potentially influence the behaviour of a whole future generation of young people.
Let’s face it: We don’t have infinite brains and we need to somehow alleviate the need to remember everything. If you remember the movie Memento, the protagonist Leonard has lost his ability to form new long-term memories and relies on stigmergy to inform his future actions; everything that’s important he writes down in a place he’s sure to come across it again when needed. His most important discoveries he turns into tattoos that he cannot lose or avoid seeing when he wakes up in the morning.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 8 RC!
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Porting legacy code from Motif, MFC, Photon, or a previous Qt version to a more recent Qt version can be a big challenge. There are a number of pitfalls in a large porting effort that can significantly increase time, cost, and complexity, leading to risk of project derailment. You may have languages, frameworks, and windowing systems that are no longer supported or that leave you unable to find knowledgeable talent. On top of that, legacy UIs tend to look very dated compared to today’s fluid animations, context-sensitive controls, and responsive interactions, requiring more than just a simple port to bring them up-to-date. All of this may be so overwhelming that you aren’t sure where to even start.
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Leftovers
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I haven’t spent much time at my computer for a long time now. Partly because I’m busy with life in general, but also because I haven’t enjoyed computers (or technology in general) for a while now.
There’s just so much crap out there these days, that’s killing all the fun for me.
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Linux Foundation
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
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For decades, Microsoft spent great effort to scare the commercial software sector with stories of how FOSS (and Linux in particular) were not commercially viable products. Microsoft even once claimed that anyone who developed FOSS under copyleft was against the American Way. Today, there are many developers who make their living creating,supporting, and redistributing FOSS, which they fund (in part) by charging for FOSS on app stores. We in the FOSS community have long disagreed with Microsoft: we have touted that FOSS provides true neutrality regarding commercial and non-commercial activity — both are permitted equally. In short, our community proved Microsoft wrong with regard to the commercial viability and sustainability of FOSS.
Sadly, these days, companies like Microsoft have set up these app stores as gatekeepers of the software industry. The primary way that commercial software distributors reach their customers (or non-profit software distributors reach their donors) is via app stores. Microsoft has closed its iron grasp on the distribution chain of software (again) — to squeeze FOSS from the marketplace. If successful, even app store users will come to believe that the only legitimate FOSS is non-commercial FOSS.
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Security
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Ravie Lakshmanan’s recent article CISA warns of active exploitation of ‘PwnKit’ Linux vulnerability in the wild articulates the vulnerability in Polkit (CVE-2021-4034) and recommends “to mitigate any potential risk of exposure to cyberattacks… that organizations prioritize timely remediation of the issues,” while “federal civilian executive branch agencies, however, are required to mandatorily patch the flaws by July 18, 2022.”
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (intel-microcode), Fedora (dotnet3.1 and gnupg2), Oracle (grub2, kernel, php:7.4, php:8.0, and qemu-kvm), SUSE (389-ds, apache2, crash, curl, expat, firefox, fwupd, fwupdate, ImageMagick, ldb, samba, liblouis, librttopo, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, oracleasm, php7, php8, python-Twisted, python310, rsyslog, s390-tools, salt, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-lts-xenial, linux-kvm and openssl).
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Kali Linux is a Linux distribution designed for penetration testing or — yes — hacking. This Debian-based Linux is a security worker’s favorite distribution. And, now Linode, which recently became part of Akamai, is offering Kali as a supported distribution.
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Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.
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MITRE has released its latest list of the top 25 most exploited vulnerabilities and exposures found in software.
The MITRE CWE list is different from the product-specific CVE lists from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and other agencies and instead focuses on more generic software development weaknesses, similar to the OWASP list for web applications.
MITRE’s latest CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses list contains a number of significant changes, such as a big jump in Race Condition attacks (CWE-362) and Command Injection attacks (CWE-77).
MITRE said its goal is to help professionals handle and mitigate various risks, which includes software for “architects, designers, developers, testers, users, project managers, security researchers, educators,” and many other contributors.
The ranking is a great resource for everyone from developers to defenders and security teams, as it lists bugs that are actively exploited in the wild and have a significant impact.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Report by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology published a comprehensive report on the surprising amount of mass surveillance conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Twitter’s decision to reject Indian demands that it take down content and block accounts the government dislikes shows a tough new tack by social media giants that analysts say could set a precedent in the face of growing regulatory crackdowns.
On Tuesday, the U.S. social media platform asked an Indian court to overturn some of the government orders to kill posts, which Delhi had accused of spreading misinformation.
They included posts that backed farmer protests and tweets critical of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Losing connectivity in today’s Myanmar is life-threatening. When access to the internet, phone, and call services are curtailed and people are unable to communicate, they cannot contact their families, get critical information for their safety and protection, or expose the serious human rights violations that continue to escalate. The anti-coup resistance movement in Myanmar will be paralyzed if the military junta is given unbridled authority to decide who can access critical phone services and who gets cut off.
That is exactly what will happen if the military junta succeeds in implementing its plan to require registration of all International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers for mobile devices in Myanmar. An IMEI number is the unique identification number assigned to a mobile device – such as a cellular phone – by its manufacturer. According to the latest reports, the junta-controlled Ministry of Finance and Planning met with telecom operators on 7 June 2022 to discuss implementing the plan.
The registration requirement gives the people of Myanmar only dangerous choices: to register and be subjected to deeper surveillance, or to refuse to register and be unable to call, text, or access the internet through one’s phone.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Who am I? Its a fairly simple question. Three words, 6 characters (okay 8 if you include spaces), is all is needed to encode in english one of the most profound and fundimental questions of human experience. From philosophers to psychologist to theologist to neuro-scientist. Every culture of decent intellect tries to tackle the question of conciousness and its ethereal nature as well as the seemingly paradoxical nature of our own conciousness being able to try and analize itself. An observer trying to look at its own self and ponder the mystery of observation itself.
The longer one thinks about it, the more existantially uncomfortable one becomes. A conciousness trying to understand the nature of itself. Define and box our own selves into understandable chunks, rationalizations of why we do what we do, like what we like, hate what we hate, and think how we think.
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As a result, I will likely not be posting much on my log. I will, however, continue to be reading Gemini, and I will continue to be reachable via e-mail and other methods of contact.
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Technical
* 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 Free/Libre Software at 3:21 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Post by Alex Oliva (FSF, FSFLA etc.), copied from the the original (see and preserve copyright notice at bottom)
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Yesterday, I was supposed to make a payment. So I went to the website of a bank whose online services I have preferred, and was surprised by a new requirement. After authenticating, I had to explicitly accept their so-called “privacy policy”. No service without accepting it.
Nothing so unusual about that, you might think. Well, I think there were several unusual facts. First, the policy had been last changed since September last year. Why require explicit acceptance now?
I set out to read it before clicking through. There was the second surprise. The actual privacy policy was quite reasonable. The problem was the, erhm, tortoises. I explain: “jabuti”, Portuguese for (land) tortoise, is used in congress to refer to provisions that are written into an unrelated bill to get them approved without much attention, while the spotlights are on the official purpose of the bill. One may then read the bill, or act, and wonder how those unrelated terms got there. Well, the conclusion is that someone put them there, with a purpose. Which brings us to origin of the term: tortoises don’t climb trees, so if you find a tortoise on a tree, something quite unusual and unexpected, that means someone must have put it there, presumably with a purpose.
Anyway, back to the tortoises in the privacy policy. It stated it became part of service contract, that you accepted that the bank could change it at any time as it wished and for any reason, and that the service could be discontinued or changed whenever the bank liked. See?, that has nothing to do with privacy policies. It’s tortoise on top of tortoise!
Now, here’s a thing: they stop providing the service, unless you agree they can stop providing the service whenever they like. Could they actually stop it to begin with, and make the current service hostage to force you to accept leonine conditions? (Are lions and tortoises friends?) If they could already do that, why do they bother “forcing” people to give their explicit consent?
This sounds awfully illegal to me. If they are in a contract to offer a service, they can’t make the service a hostage to force you to sign another contract, let alone one that lets them rewrite the contract to their will! More so under a document that a lot of people won’t even read, and would reasonably expect it to state commitments and obligations the provider undertakes regarding the way it deals with data you provide it with. Not tortoises.
At least in Brazil, if you offer a service to the public and enter a service conract with customers, you can’t just decide you don’t wish to offer that service any more, and impose a different service on your customers. You have to convince your existing customers to switch to a different contract, or get them to terminate the contracts, before you can stop providing the service. It looks like they’re trying to render another bit of consumer protection law inoperative.
Now, that got me thinking, if we don’t manage to stop this sort of abusive practice, where will that lead? Vendors of computers already think of themselves as permanent owners of computers they sell, entitled to control what gets done with those computers they pretended to sell.
I recall some home automation systems, whose vendor was bought by Google, got turned into paper weights when Google powered off the server they depended on. I recall music and games ceased to be playable because their license servers were permanently turned off. I recall when a SIP phone adaptor I thought I owned stopped working, and after some investigation, I found out that every time it powered up, it downloaded its software from a certain URL, and some day the vendor decided to discontinue the service. These cases were abusive, they were morally wrong and bad for customers, but AFAIK they got away with them, despite all the inconvenience they’ve caused.
What kind of trouble are we waiting for before ruling out such consumer-hostile behaviors? A death because a car or a digital lock made its operation hostage of a new leonine contract during a medical emergency? An implanted insuline pump that stops working because you haven’t accepted the new privacy policy governing the controlling app? A train collision because the railroad switch controlling app became unavailable because new terms of service were rolled out and had to be explicitly accepted? A nuclear power plant meltdown because the cooling system got removely deactivated over a contract dispute? A nuclear strike because a dead man switch became inacessible when a hosting provider required explicit acceptance of their new contract?
I don’t like where this is going. The providers may be just thinking of maximizing their profits, but the consequences to people can be quite fatal. I think it would be wise to put an end to such practices before it gets too late.
So blong, █
Copyright 2007-2021 Alexandre Oliva
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this entire document worldwide without royalty, provided the copyright notice, the document’s official URL, and this permission notice are preserved.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The upcoming changes in Fedora 37 which would allow entire Flathub repository & its applications directly from GNOME Software.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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A common enough microcontroller project is to create some form of logic analyzer. In theory, it should be pretty easy: grab some digital inputs, store them, and display them. But, of course, the devil is in the details. First, you want to grab data fast, but you also need to examine the trigger in real time — hard to do in software. You may also need input conditioning circuitry unless you are satisfied with the microcontroller’s input characteristics. Finally, you need a way to dump the data for analysis. [Gusmanb] has tackled all of these problems with a simple analyzer built around the Raspberry Pi Pico.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Leftovers
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Times are very different now than they were when I was young, in many different respects. But there is also consistency here, and this situation reminds me of my youth, so I’ll start there. And I do so not to be self-indulgent, but because my own trajectory is undoubtedly shared by countless others, if you change a few details.
My parents were (and are) politically progressive. I went to a wonderfully alternative sort of elementary school, and a summer camp run by an anti-nuclear activist Unitarian minister. And then Reagan came to power, threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union. By the age of twelve, I had found a loving community of like-minded kids — fellow pubescent anti-nuclear hippies, basically. And by the age of thirteen Reagan was enthusiastically developing big new nuclear missiles.
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We’re suckers for alternative data transmission methods, and [Georgi Gerganov]’s ggwave made us smile. At its core, it’s doing what the phone modems of old used to do – sending data encoded as different audio tones. But GGwave does this with sophistication!
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As the saying goes, all comedians really want to be rock stars. Many comics have strived to attain that status, either onstage or on-screen, with varying degrees of success, but the Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall have arguably been the most successful at resembling an actual band: Five members, each with a unique personality, who connected out of compatible sensibilities and youthful, unchecked arrogance, gain a regional reputation before making it big in America. Their cohesion and competitive spirit kept them funny and fresh until their artistic temperaments catalyzed a rupture. They slowly mended fences and reunited on multiple occasions before releasing a new “album” of sorts—i.e., a new season of their landmark eponymous sketch series.
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Hardware
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You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The testing method used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and local officials around the country is so circumscribed that regulators almost certainly have an incomplete understanding of the extent to which the nation’s drinking water is contaminated with toxic “forever chemicals.”
“There are so many PFAS that we don’t know anything about, and if we don’t know anything about them, how do we know they aren’t hurting us?”
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“Reproductive health services,” says National Nurses United, are “fundamental to ensuring economic justice for women across the country.”
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Senate Democrats, including serial obstructionist Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have reportedly reached a deal on a plan that would allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small subset of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies, a change that is massively popular with voters across party lines.
“Already this year, drug corporations have raised the price of over 800 prescription medicines by more than 5%.”
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It’s no secret that the US Supreme Court has issued a number of rulings this year that will hurt working families today and in the future. As a registered nurse living in Miami, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA—which undermines the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act—is yet another ruling that has me worried about my patients and my coworkers.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In a recent commentary, I discussed the visit to China of the UN’s chief human rights official on what proved to be a seriously misguided and rather naïve attempt to improve the conditions of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang province. An important element in that mass internment of innocent civilians is China’s ubiquitous surveillance system, which has facilitated the roundup of Chinese Muslims.
That system is not confined to the Uyghurs. It is a many-layered nationwide network designed to collect personal data for police and security units on every Chinese citizen whose behavior or personal characteristics might be troublesome to the authorities. In a word, no one is above suspicion.
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Defence/Aggression
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The war in Ukraine continues to rage and threaten world peace with the dark shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. Could President Biden lift that shadow? What if he dared to step before the cameras and address the nation — and the world — with words like these…
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A top Kremlin official responded Wednesday to the U.S.-backed effort to investigate war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces invading Ukraine by warning that Americans could face retribution for their hypocrisy in the form of thermonuclear annihilation.
“The idea to punish a country with the largest nuclear potential is absurd and potentially creates the threat to mankind’s existence.”
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Progressive Middle East watchers on Wednesday condemned the Biden administration’s targeting of 15 firms and people in at least five countries allegedly linked to the sale and shipment of Iranian petroleum products in violation of U.S. economic sanctions.
“All of this could have been avoided if Biden just returned to the JCPOA via executive order.”
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At this early stage of the game, it’s not easy being a legal pot dealer in the U.S. No matter how legal you may be in the state where you operate, to federal law enforcement you are a multiple felon if they want to go after you.
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The blockade, a 60-year-old relic of history, places few heavy demands on the U.S. public. No governmental funding is required. The Treasury Department issues fines and presidents make ritualistic declarations. People dodge travel restrictions. It’s a slow-motion affair. Distracted pro-Cuba activists may lose track of harassment details. Here they get a refresher course, for motivation toward action. It emphasizes blockade effects on people’s lives.
In the Beginning
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Between 1960 and 1996, France carried out 17 nuclear tests in Algeria and 193 in French Polynesia. In Algeria, atmospheric and underground tests were carried out at the Reggane and In Ekker sites, in an atmosphere of secrecy and conflict between an Algerian nation under construction and a colonial power seeking strategic autonomy. A majority of the tests – 11 – were carried out after the Evian agreements (18 March 1962), which established Algeria’s independence.
It was not until the 1990s that the first independent studies relating to some of the dark events of that period finally became available. Disclosure about accidents that happened during some of the tests, about the risk that populations and soldiers were exposed to, in Algeria and in Polynesia alike, led to the implementation of the law “on 5 January 2010, granting recognition and compensation for the victims of French nuclear testings“. But this law does not take into account any environmental consequences.
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There’s so much heat, in other words, that we seem endlessly in the fires of this political moment. It’s hardly surprisingly then if, talking about heat, by far the most significant story of our time, undoubtedly of all time, is barely on our radar screens. I mean, let’s get one thing straight, if you hadn’t quite noticed: you and I are already on a different planet. And no, I’m not thinking about being in a new cold war, or Donald Trump and the last presidential election, or Ron DeSantis and the next one, or even the latest round of the never-ending Covid-19 pandemic.
I’m talking about being on a planet already overheating not just politically or militarily, but in the most literal way possible. I’m talking about climate change, of course. And don’t think I’m just focused on the future over-heating of this planet either. What I have in mind is this very palpable present. I’m talking about a country, the United States, that, with heat domes over significant parts of it recently, has been breaking seasonal heat records like mad. Phoenix (114), Tucson (111), El Paso (107), and Las Vegas (104) all set June heat records, as did Birmingham, Chicago, Little Rock, Jackson, Memphis, Shreveport, and Nashville. That’s just to start down an ever-lengthening, ever more broiling list, even as the Supreme Court just acted to ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions would continue to pour into our atmosphere.
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Photography from the Vietnam War was covered among the 48 photos showing the self-immolation photo of Thich Quang Duc in 1963 and the photo of a protester placing a flower in a bayonet in 1967. But there were two images that begged to be shown from May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed 4 students and wounded 9 others on the campus of Kent State University during protests in answer to the US expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. First, there is the iconic photo of Mary Ann Vecchio by John Filo. She kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller who was killed in the fusillade of Guard bullets. She is screaming, her arms outstretched. Equally devastating is the photo taken a few minutes earlier of the National Guardsmen atop Blanket Hill (Getty Images) opening fire on unarmed protesting students below.
These photos of protest and the reaction to it reverberated around the world and especially here in the US. The murder and wounding of students at Kent State sent shock waves through the protest movement and caused protest to grow exponentially throughout the country, closing down over 400 campuses nationwide.
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The death toll in Monday’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, has risen to seven after another victim died from their injuries. The suspect has been charged with seven counts of first-degree murder over the massacre that also left scores of people injured, including nine people who remain hospitalized. Police say he legally purchased five weapons, including the high-powered rifle used in the shooting, despite visiting his home in 2019 over threats of violence. Reporters also continue to unearth his online history, including videos that appeared to show an obsession with mass shootings and his support for former President Donald Trump. Investigative journalist Michael Edison Hayden, who covers internet radicalization and far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center, says that same link has been apparent in other mass shootings where disturbed people who are “programming themselves to kill … are also attracted to the nihilism of hard-right authoritarianism in the United States.”
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Boston officials claim they had no prior knowledge of a march through the city by about 100 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front on Saturday. Local anti-fascist organizers contronted the marchers, who also attacked a local Black artist named Charles Murrell. We speak to Boston civil rights activist Reverend Kevin Peterson, who is an adviser to Murrell; investigative journalist Phillip Martin, who has documented the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in Massachusetts; and Michael Edison Hayden with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Peterson is calling for an internal investigation into the Boston police over its response to Saturday’s violence. His group, the New Democracy Coalition, is also calling for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to develop a race commission to explore what would constitute reparations for Black people.
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Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of violence or even death against lawmakers of both parties increased more than fourfold. And too often, the call to violence seems to come from the top. Recently, defendants in cases involving extremist violence have claimed that an elected leader or pundit “told” them to do it. In a country where a sitting president would lunge at his own security detail in rage, I guess this isn’t so surprising anymore. Emotion rules the American political scene and so many now tend to shoot from the hip without even knowing why.
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The muted response from the White House following the July 4 mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois has intensified frustration felt by progressives over the Biden administration’s approach to the crises facing the United States, coming less than two weeks after the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights for millions of Americans.
At an Independence Day barbeque on Monday, President Joe Biden briefly mentioned the shooting which killed seven people, injured 46 others, and left a toddler orphaned, telling the crowd, “We’ve got to get this under control.”
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The U.S. military buildup in Europe and the new round of expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will make it difficult to negotiate important substantive issues with Russia such as arms control and disarmament; the non-proliferation of strategic weaponry; international terrorism; climate control; and peacekeeping in the Third World.
Unlike the first round of NATO expansion, which Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush unnecessarily orchestrated, Putin is responsible for the latest round. He created the strategic conditions for NATO’s expansion into the Nordic area. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine wrongly assumed that the United States would remain on the sidelines; that European members of NATO would be seriously divided; and that Ukraine lacked the will and ingenuity to confound Russian military forces. Putin’s assumptions were wrong on every level, and he has made himself a pariah in the European community particularly. Nevertheless, U.S. efforts to exploit Putin’s pariah status will create strategic problems for Russian-American bilateral relations as well as for overall international relations.
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United States military analysts love strategies and the theories behind them. The theories provide what appear to be perfectly reasonable and rational approaches to warfighting, even offering a sense of certainty about the outcome. After all, they’ve been designed with military precision. Authorized personnel at the Pentagon or military think tanks are assigned to create strong, catchy names for the theories. A longtime theory is “Escalation Dominance,” which has a close cousin called “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”
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New evidence emerges that disgraced detective Louis Scarcella steered investigators away from likely shooter.
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Environment
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Who’s to blame for a lack of action on climate change?
“There’s simply no reason to take drastic action now.”
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Finance
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By Richard Wolff / Democracy At Work A Patron of Economic Update asks: “If pay for workers increases, won’t that increase consumption (unless its stolen back through inflation)…”
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Around 1 in 10 people went hungry last year in a world losing ground on its collective goal of ending all forms of hunger, a report released Wednesday by United Nations agencies revealed, prompting sharp censure from a leading charity.
“Long-standing political failure to address how we feed all the people in the world has made our food system susceptible to fragility and failure.”
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Before dawn, Jerry Leeman churned through inky black waters, clutching the wheel of the fishing vessel Harmony.
The 85-foot trawler, deep green and speckled with rust, was returning from a grueling fishing trip deep into the Atlantic swells. Leeman and his crew of four had worked 10 consecutive days, 20 hours a day, to haul in more than 50,000 pounds of fish: pollock, haddock and ocean perch, a trio known as groundfish in the industry and as whitefish in the freezer aisle.
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They have powerful allies in politics, political parties, the state, and federal and state governments. Euro-billion heirs of German family dynasties, for example, have done well in the business-to-politics arrangement. Like the infamous Russian (and plenty of other) oligarchs, Germany’s super-rich have occasionally attracted – albeit often unwanted – attention.
Recently, the yacht of one of Germany’s super-rich was literally “screwing up” the view of the Statue of Liberty. That was the mistake made by German $14-billion-dollar-man and screw manufacturer – The Screw King – Reinhold Würth and daughter Bettina.
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There is also the question of whether the unemployment rate will match its 50-year low of 3.5 percent, after being stuck at 3.6 percent for the last three months. It would be ironic that at a time when the media are filled with stories of recession, the unemployment rate is hitting its lowest level since 1969.
Moderating Wage Growth
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For billionaire Ken Griffin, it was well worth spending $54 million to ensure he and other rich Illinoisans wouldn’t have to pay more tax.
By the time Illinois voters streamed into voting booths on Election Day in 2020, Griffin, then Illinois’ wealthiest resident, had made sure they’d heard plenty about why they should not vote to raise taxes on him and the state’s other rich people. His tens of millions paid for an unrelenting stream of ads and flyers against an initiative on that year’s ballot, which would have allowed Illinois lawmakers to join 32 other states in setting higher tax rates for the wealthy than for everyone else.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork over some cash to news organizations (for sending them traffic) has finally had some modicum of success in Australia, and is now being considered elsewhere around the globe.
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It truly is incredible just how much of a moral panic the media and politicians have created around social media. Once again, the actual research is basically inconclusive that social media is bad. If it were truly awful, it should be showing up in the data, but for the most part it’s not. At all. As we’ve noted, so much of the blame targeting social media are people completely overreacting to social media shining a light on activity that has basically always been happening, and now rather than dealing with the underlying causes, people want to attack the messenger for revealing the behavior.
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is in crisis after a fresh scandal triggered resignations by a growing number of his top team.
Still reeling from “Partygate” and a vote of no confidence, Johnson has now been hit by widespread concerns over Number 10’s response to recent sexual harassment allegations.
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Nadhim Zahawi, the UK’s new chancellor of the exchequer, earned £1.3 million from a Kurdish oil company while serving as an MP, has advised fossil fuel companies operating in Nigeria and Canada, and recently defended “struggling” producers in the North Sea.
As chancellor, Zahawi will play a key role in spending decisions that will determine whether Britain can meet its net-zero targets – but his extensive ties to the oil and gas industry have dismayed advocates of faster climate action.
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All Empires end in ignominy. The United Kingdom is drawing to a close, not with a bang but with a fart.
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What is going on in European politics today is completely disconnected from reality. It is a politics which completely disregards even the basic existential interests of its electorate – House Speaker of the Hungarian parliament, László Kövér declared in Martovce (Martos in Hungarian), Slovakia at the opening forum of the Esterházy Camp on Public Life (Esterházy Közéleti Tábor).
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It was the culmination of a democratic movement that began with Colombia’s constitutional reform of 1991 and extended through the peace accords of 2016 ending a decades-long conflict between that country’s government and the Marxist-Leninist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC)—a conflict in which, newly declassified documents reveal, the United States played an integral role. On June 19, Gustavo Petro defeated far-right demagogue Rodolfo Hernández to become Colombia’s first left-of-center president. Francia Márquez Mina, Petro’s running mate, will serve as the country’s first Black vice president; the pair earned more votes than any ticket in the nation’s history. As the Colombian people celebrated in the streets of Bogotá, the former guerrilla fighter vowed to represent “that silent majority of peasants, Indigenous people, women [and] youth” while speaking against a backdrop that read “el cambio es imparable” (“change is unstoppable”).
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It’s amazingly simple and effective. In an ad released on July 4, California Governor Gavin Newsom stands in a verdant backyard, his trademark slicked-back dark hair a bit less slick and grayer than earlier in his career. He channels Democrats’ mounting alarm at Republican incursions on “freedom,” speaking directly not to Californians but to Floridians.
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The head of Common Cause Georgia on Wednesday welcomed the news that a Fulton County special grand jury investigating 2020 election interference subpoenaed seven key allies of former President Donald Trump.
“We need to know those who broke our laws in their dangerous attempts to hold on to power be held accountable.”
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“The hardest thing I’ve ever seen the Democrats fight for is to keep a disabled Marine combat veteran off the ballot,” said Matthew Hoh, the Green Party’s presumptive U.S. Senate nominee.
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Meanwhile, national support for a “third” political party remains high — 62% as of last year’s Gallup Survey — yet no actually existing party outside the Democratic and Republican establishments seems able to get much traction.
The Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and numerous smaller third parties have labored in the vineyard of politics for decades (the Prohibition Party since 1869!) without ever coming close to shattering the “major party” duopoly.
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Youngkin was a political novice, while McAuliffe campaigned on his record as a former neoliberal governor. He seemed unaware of the political inroads made by rightwing populism in his state since his previous term as governor. McAuliffe’s campaign simply promised a reprise of his previous term as governor, which made him look “same old, same old” in contrast to the newcomer Youngkin.
Youngkin’s campaign strategy was relatively simple: pander sufficiently to Virginia’s Trump base to keep it onside, while appealing to just enough independent voters to win the election.
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The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday it will hear oral arguments in a case experts warn could be one of the greatest threats to U.S. democracy since the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. In October, the court will hear Moore v. Harper — a case which seeks to reinstate gerrymandered congressional maps that were struck down by North Carolina’s highest court. A ruling in favor of North Carolina Republicans could revive a marginal right-wing legal theory known as independent state legislature doctrine, potentially stripping state courts of their power to strike down state laws, while expanding the power of GOP-controlled state legislatures to control federal elections. We speak with law professor Carolyn Shapiro, director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Shapiro says a ruling in favor of North Carolina Republicans would be “extremely problematic from the perspective of democracy” and “could cause enormous chaos.”
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On June 29, the Supreme Court issued a bizarre and horrifying decision. In Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a 5-4 Supreme Court majority held that a state can prosecute crimes against Indian victims by non-Indian people even if those crimes occur on Indian reservations. More concerning, however, is why the court said that states have this power. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote: “The Court today holds that Indian country within a State’s territory is part of a State, not separate from a State,” reasoning that “as a matter of state sovereignty, a State has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country.”
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Bear in mind that in their various confirmation hearings the, now, justices all genuflected at the altar of stare decisis, which means “to stand by things decided.” Basically, if a previous court has ruled on the same or a closely related issue, then the court will make its decision in alignment with the previous court’s decision.
Space does not permit discussing the Court’s opinions in detail, but the following examples give one the idea about where the Court is heading.
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A war zone? No. Just another day in the US. Independence Day, in a nation whose Supreme Court is intent on demolishing independence for half the population, while granting even more rights to those who want to terrorize it.
Even from abroad, I know many of my American friends are feeling anxious. Many are grieving. With each civil liberty being chipped away, they feel helpless as they watch their country slipping steadily down a steep hill toward a Christo-fascist nightmare. Holidays like the 4th of July only make this grief more acute. The absurdity of flags and anthems extolling “freedom” and “liberty” all while those very terms are denuded of any value they may have once had. And now, yet another mass shooting to add to an ever-growing list.
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The June 30 decision of West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency was something of a shadow boxing act. The Clean Power Plan, which was the target of the bench, never came into effect. In 2016, the Supreme Court effectively blocked the plan, which was announced by President Barack Obama in August 2015. It has been originally promulgated under the Clean Air Act.
In 2019, the Trump administration repealed the CPP, replacing it with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. It argued that the EPA’s authority under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act only extended to measures pertinent to the plant’s premises, rather than industry-wide measures suggested by the CPP. The ACER vested states with the discretion to set standards and grant power plants much latitude in complying with them. In their decision, the DC Circuit vacated the repeal of the CPP by the Trump administration, and the ACER, sending it back to the EPA. In effect, the EPA’s powers of regulation were held to be intact.
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The text below encapsulates our philosophy followed by our views on some core issues identified during our debates.
Europe needs a new non-aligned movement. Let’s start by imagining its manifesto. What would it look like? Here, in this text, we refer to an as-yet undefined, imagined “we”: the members of a pan-European socialist movement concentrated on changing Europe’s shameful, hollow, and often atrocious foreign policy.
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Twelve days ago, the US Supreme Court released its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which not only upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but also ruled that there is no Constitutional right to an abortion, striking down the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that there was such a right. While much ink, both print and digital, has been expended already on this monumental shift in US law and women’s rights, I’m going to look at it from the perspective of a longstanding topic on this blog: Law vs. science-based medicine (SBM), a topic that legal expert Jann Bellamy used to refer to as “legislative alchemy,” examples being naturopathic licensure laws and other laws legalizing and regulating quackery as though it were medicine. In her honor, I was tempted to refer to this decision as “judicial alchemy”, but in reality what this decision unleashed even before it was announced was legislative alchemy in a huge number of states. Think of it as an unholy alliance between legislative alchemy (laws based on ideology and pseudoscience seeking to restrict or outlaw abortion) begetting judicial alchemy (Dobbs v. Jackson) begetting more legislative alchemy, all to the detriment of not just reproductive health care but SBM.
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Reproductive freedom advocates are condemning a 50-year prison sentence given to a woman in El Salvador this week, after she was convicted of homicide following what rights groups say was a stillbirth.
The case of Lesli Lisbeth Ramírez Ramírez, who was 19 when she suffered the pregnancy loss in June 2020, is the result of the type of “draconian abortion ban” which is “now being replicated in states across the U.S.,” said journalist Max Granger.
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Decisions over reproductive, LGBTQ+, and other human rights are under attack by the fundamentalist right wing in Puerto Rico. On top of that, the Fiscal Control Board increases austerity measures i…
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It has been 12 days since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. So far, President Joe Biden has reacted to that news with one speech—not even a prime-time Oval Office speech, but a middle-of-the-afternoon “press event” that didn’t allow for actual questions—during which he said he “stands with” women. He evidently didn’t mean that literally: We have not seen Biden physically standing with any of the people who have been protesting the court’s decision. And he evidently didn’t mean it figuratively either: We have not seen Biden echoing, amplifying, or even agreeing with calls for immediate action to protect reproductive rights by people like Senator Elizabeth Warren or Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush.
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In the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe, U.S. tech companies didn’t much want to talk about their role in securing women’s data. And they didn’t want to talk much about it because they know that the privacy standards and oversight of the entire US snoopvertising economy, from adtech and telecom to app makers, media giants, and the internet of things — is an unaccountable dumpster fire.
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Ever since Nordic began to seduce Belfast’s shot-callers five years ago, its Belfast schemes have been run by one Erik Heim, a sports-shirt middle age Norwegian who always looks like he can’t decide whether to zip his fly now or wait till no one’s looking. And Heim’s wife, Marianna Naess, ran Nordic’s delightfully incompetent PR department, which once sent a letter to every postal patron in Belfast, population 6,700. Four pages. Single-spaced. Misspellings. Tortured syntax. Bizarro layout. According to a recent Gallup poll, four people read it.
Before going public with its Belfast plans four years ago, Nordic and the City of Belfast wooed each other in a very effective echo chamber. Nordic said it was green and sustainable, and the city said there would be only a few crank opponents – everyone else will love you. It was love at first sight.
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Former President Donald Trump’s criminal use of lies and mob violence to steal the 2020 election failed, but it’s not the only recent coup attack on our democracy. In the last few years, a cabal of right-wing zealots have plotted to seize control of the U.S. Supreme Court. By hook and crook, they’ve installed a six-judge majority, and now they’re using them as a political cudgel to try stealing not just a constitutional right, but an inherent human right from American women — the right to make their own reproductive decisions. By judicial fiat, the right-wing judges have decreed that the state will make birth decisions, regardless of what mothers want. This is the Republican Party’s current concept of “small government.”
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No, I still haven’t got over the report in The New York Times this spring, wherein we learned of a joint American–Ukrainian campaign to inundate Russians with propaganda intended to demoralize the public as Russian forces advanced in eastern Ukraine. “Using a mix of high-tech and Cold War tactics,” the government-supervised Times reported, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is “circulating information about the Ukraine war among Russian citizens to sow doubt about the Kremlin’s accounts… in an effort to undermine faith in the Kremlin.”
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The US hasn’t shown any interest in pursuing negotiations to end the war.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Most of the time, China’s crushing, dystopian, inescapable surveillance/censorship apparatus is terrifying and deeply disturbing. On rare occasions, it’s merely amusing. This is one of those times and South China Morning Post has the details. (h/t The Honest Courtesan)
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Civil Rights/Policing
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After 18 days of mobilisations throughout Ecuador, which had their final epicentre in Quito…
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A federal district court on Wednesday rescinded a Trump-era policy that prohibited the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from requiring that service providers in its $500 billion federal grant program not discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, and other characteristics—eliciting praise from social justice advocates.
“There was simply no excuse for the Trump administration’s unlawful policy sanctioning taxpayer-funded discrimination.”
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With that love for the wild web, EFF works hands-on to protect your privacy, security, and free expression rights no matter how technologies change. We need the internet’s bold creativity and ability to strengthen the powerless more than ever. Will you help shape tech’s future for the users?
Do It For a Better WEB!
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There is absolutely nothing “great” about the “Great Replacement.” It is nothing new either. Its genesis began in the early twentieth century by French nationalists who were horrified at immigrants, largely black and Muslim, seeking refuge in France. In this iteration of hatred, antisemitism was not included among the targeted groups. That would develop later as white supremacist organizations in the United States added the Jewish demographic to their list of scapegoats. This was painfully evident in the chant of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017: “Jews will not replace us.”
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Half a dozen U.S. senators declared Wednesday that the Biden administration’s “failure to coordinate a timely review of its cannabis policy is harming thousands of Americans, slowing research, and depriving Americans of their ability to use marijuana for medical or other purposes.”
“Biden committed to decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.”
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Had they gone on to defeat American forces again and again in the West in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century, Little Bighorn might have come to be known as a major turning point in the centuries old struggle between the indigenous inhabitants of the continent and the invaders preoccupied with Manifest Destiny. It might have been known as an “American Dien Bien Phu,” which was the place where the Vietnamese defeated the French in 1954. The National Park Service proclaims that “The Battle of the Little Bighorn has come to symbolize the clash of two vastly dissimilar cultures: the buffalo/horse culture of the northern plains tribes, and the highly industrial/agriculture based culture of the United States.” That’s a sanitized story. The battle was part of a conscious plan to exterminate Indians. Still, Indians and whites tend to belong to two different cultures. That was made transparent during a panel discussion with attorney John Briscoe and Tribal Judge Abby Abinanti at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco on June 30 2022. The topic was “California’s Hidden History of Indian Slavery,” a fact that paralleled genocide.
At the Mechanics’, Abinanti, California’s first Native American female lawyer, emphasized storytelling. Briscoe emphasized facts and dates. Of course, not every white person spews facts and figures and not every Indian recounts stories. Still, there’s a discernable pattern of Indian storytelling and white history lessons. “The saddest thing for me,” Abinanti said, “is that I don’t have my own language, which unlike English is not noun based. Our stories are coming back and more and more young people are speaking Indian languages.” It’s not too late for Indian stories about resistance to colonialism to emerge.
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Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population.
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If a population believes that its financial and emotional suffering are caused not by social-economic-political variables but instead by individual defects—be it noncompliance with religious dogma or faulty biochemistry—this “individual-defect” belief system can be a more powerful and less expensive way of maintaining the status quo than a heavily armed police force.
That organized religion has a great deal in common with organized psychiatry would be apparent to both Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), two of history’s most famous critics of the political implications of organized religion.
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The Department of Justice is investigating alleged civil rights violations under Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar border initiative announced last year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to state records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
The Legislature last year directed more than $3 billion to border measures over the next two years, a bulk of which has gone to Operation Lone Star. Under the initiative, which Abbott said he launched to combat human and drug smuggling, the state has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members and Department of Public Safety troopers to the border with Mexico and built some fencing. Thousands of immigrant men seeking to enter the country have been arrested for trespassing onto private property, and some have been kept in jail for weeks without charges being filed.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Following through on a request by the Biden administration to defend right to repair, the FTC has demanded that Harley Davidson and Westinghouse stop voiding customer warranties over repairs. In an announcement, the FTC noted that both companies used fine print to void a customer’s warranty if they used independent dealers for parts and repairs:
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community will offer our next round of Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Join the sessions on Tuesday 12 July at 6:00pm UTC. We can’t wait to learn with you!
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Anti-piracy lawyer Kerry Culpepper has secured three $250,000 judgments against operators of sites and apps that used the YTS trademark his company owns. The court initially dismissed the case, ruling that it didn’t have jurisdiction over the foreign defendants. However, a recent order from the appeals court in a separate piracy lawsuit changed that.
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Rightsholder groups are calling on the UK government to do more to prevent pirates from operating anonymously online. In a submission headed by the MPA and supported by IFPI, BBC, Premier League, and others, a multi-year investigation into file-hosting giant Openload is presented as an example of what can go wrong when online services fail to verify their customers.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Politics
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Capitalism, a system that gives preference to capital over people’s needs, is clearly not something to be proud of. Often confused with ‘free-market’, capitalism is anything but free market.
A free-market economy is a system in which individuals (not corporations or any state-granted monopolies which are decidedly not free-market!) compete with each other to provide goods and services to other individuals. The end result is that the weak are eliminated, the inefficient replaced by efficient, and price wars result in affordable products and services. Not ideal, but not as bad as what we have now.
In a free market, anyone who finds a niche and manages to eek out a profit, is instantly in competition with others who want some. This continues until a balance is found where a few players squeeze out a reasonable profit, but so low that no sane competitor would bother to enter! It is great for the consumer, and ok for the owners and workers. You get subsistence pay, and everything is cheap. Occasionally someone may make some money for a flitting moment before competition enters, but no billionaires here.
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Technical
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Science
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TensorFlow is a machine learning and AI library that has enabled so much and brought AI within the reach of most developers. But it’s fair to say that it’s not for the less powerful computers. For them there’s TensorFlow Lite, in which a model is created on a larger machine and exported to a microcontroller or similarly resource-constrained one. [Nick Bild] has probably taken this to its extreme though, by achieving this feat on a Commodore 64. Not just that, but he’s also done it using Commodore BASIC.
* 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 8:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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AMD is finally coming to Starlabs, as StarBook is now available to order with Ryzen 7 (Review)
The past few years have seen several releases of PC for Linux users and the emergence of many startup companies specializing in building and selling Linux laptops. As a Linux user, I’ve experienced a lot of happy moments and news over the past decade, and today Starlab surprises us with something we’ve been waiting for: The StarBook laptop is “Now available to order with Ryzen™ 7″.
You must be as excited as I am, but before you do anything crazy, I suggest you read my in-depth review of StarBook and the rest of this humble article. Anyway, if you’re super excited, I’ll leave a link to the official website at the bottom of this paragraph.
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AMD has continued hiring Linux and other open-source developers for additional roles in the company. Recently, the company has posted a new position for the open-source GPU driver stack, focusing on efforts on multimedia, reports Phoronix.
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These days, a lot of businesses are concentrating on integrating a cloud-based system into their IT infrastructure because they are more dependable, strong, and easy to set up.
The labor for monitoring and managing the structure may increase with a cloud-based system, but businesses are always improving these procedures.
One of the main factors in the adoption of Linux-based systems by many businesses is its affordability, security, scalability, open-source nature, and community-focused design.
Linux’s adaptability allows IT companies to best utilize other free and open-source solutions for cloud infrastructure. With its extensive adoption across industries and the emergence of new technologies, Linux is regarded as one of the best-operating systems for cloud-based systems.
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux is one of my favorite OS and the best alternative to Windows OS. Most of my techie friends use Linux OS as their primary operating system to accomplish complex tasks.
Linux is utilized in the accompanying ways, especially as a Server OS for web servers, data set servers, document servers, email servers, and some other sort of shared server. Intended to help high-volume and multithreading applications, Linux is appropriate for a wide range of server applications.
Linux is better than Windows in many cases, for example, In windows, a lot of projects run behind the scenes and they gobble up the RAM. Besides, in Linux, the record framework is especially coordinated. Linux, right off the bat, is extremely lightweight while Windows is greasy. Linux is by and large commonly quicker than windows.
To move up to Windows 11, you can use Linux all things considered. This is the way to do the change to an open-source OS and introduce applications.
And the good part is, that Linux is a free, open-source OS delivered under the General Public License (GPL). Anybody can run, study, alter, and rearrange the source code, or even sell duplicates of their changed code.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The Design and Implementation of the NetBSD rc.d system, selling OpenBSD as a salesperson, Speeding up autoconf with caching, Allowing non-root execution of a jailed application, Configure login(1) and sshd(8) for YubiKey on OpenBSD, and more.
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Kernel Space
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However, recently I discovered a limitation of Linux’s serial console support, which is that you can only have one serial console, or to put it another way you can only have kernel messages going to one serial port, not two or more (this is one of the several ‘consoles’ that Linux has). This is relevant (at least to us) because many servers today have two serial ports you might want kernel messages to go to; one physical one, which you can connect to your console server, and one virtual one supplied by the BMC, which you can connect to over IPMI or sometimes see (perhaps including some scrollback) on the BMC’s web interface.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Over three years ago, the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) established a worldwide honeyfarm, with hundreds of sensors, to collect IoT attack traffic for analysis. GCA now has terabytes of data, with over a million hits a day on the honeyfarm sensors. If nothing else, it clearly communicates that the Internet is full of a lot of unwanted traffic, hammering unrelentingly on unsuspecting devices.
In order to have a clearer picture of the global impact on any exposed IPv4 device, we analysed (approximately) five months of data from our honeyfarm sensor network. In that timeframe, our ~200 sensors, deployed across the globe, saw attacks from over 10% of the estimated active autonomous systems making up the Internet. While some were small-scaled offenders, approximately 20% of these networks fielded more than 1,000 attacks on our sensors. (Our sensors are passive collectors, not expecting any form of connection from elsewhere. We filter out “scan” traffic, and any other login or access attempts are considered “attacks”).
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Although bhyve got a later start than Linux KVM, in most ways it has caught up with its primary rival—and in some ways surpassed it. When configured properly, bhyve guests perform similarly to KVM guests, and in some cases outperform them.
The major remaining hurdle bhyve needs to overcome to reach parity with KVM revolves around the tooling and documentation needed for a system administrator to create and manage their virtual machines. Today, we’re going to take a crack at the latter by providing a full, newbie-friendly guide to setting up a bhyve-based virtual machine host on FreeBSD 13.1.
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Idiomdrottning ☛ Signal
Signal leaks your phone number to everyone you talk to, and if you want to quit using it, everyone who had you on there can no longer text you, and if, when you get a new phone number, you get the used phone number of someone who used to have signal, you’re SOL. It literally destroys the texting capability of phones.
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Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install Tor Browser in Linux with Security Guide – TREND OCEANS [Ed: “Tor Network, having as its default search engine DuckDuckGo.” Tor took bribes from Microsoft, via its proxy DDG, and now helps Microsoft spy on Tor users. Tor Browser if not Tor Project as a whole is compromised.]
At the time of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, people were amazed by the amount of their data on hand by these big giant companies. Even Edward Snowden had disclosed sensitive data the US government held on its citizens in the name of the project PRISM.
All of this data is gathered by the public (it’s you), posting all your private information on the social media feeds and sharing every event on your timeline. It might seem unharmful, but can create a good profile to target you for advertising, exploiting, and tracking.
To be apart from this ecosystem of privacy exploitation, you can have a VPN, which costs you some bucks. But what if I tell you there is a free and open-source privacy-centric browser that tunnels your data on nodes run by the volunteers?
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macOS takes credit for the original development of the Homebrew package manager. With this package manager, Linux users are able to effortlessly install free and open-source software packages from their command-line environment.
You might think that the various popular Linux OS distributions are already equipped with their own package managers such as APT, DNF, YUM, PACMAN, and ZYPPER.
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If you work in a tech company as a software engineer, there’s a good chance that you will be asked to create and deploy applications frequently. These applications are usually web apps that are built on top of frameworks such as React, Redux, or Vue.js. An application is the ultimate output of software development and not just another file with multiple layers of folders and files.
A Docker container can be used to package your app so it can run in any environment without requiring any pre-installed dependencies or libraries. In this tutorial, we will cover all you need to know about Dockerizing React-based Web App as well as an example project which takes you through the entire process from start to finish.
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The open source Infinispan data store is popular for in-memory operations. A .NET Core application can now easily integrate Infinispan as a caching service or session provider. This article provides basic information on how to do that in C# on Linux.
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Knowing how much of your disk is being used by your files is an important consideration, no matter how much storage you have. My laptop has a relatively small 250GB NVME drive. That’s okay most of the time, but I began to explore gaming on Linux a couple of years ago. Installing Steam and a few games can make storage management more critical.
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A typical computer keyboard has only about 100 keys on it.
Most keys double up on characters, also called glyphs, thanks to the Shift key. Glyphs are frequently used to type letters with accents and umlauts, to produce characters used in mathematic or monetary expressions, or just to add fun emojis. In some regions there are even three glyphs available on select keys.
Regardless of your region, however, some glyphs don’t make it onto your keyboard. Fortunately, Linux provides access to these through a compose key.
There’s no compose key on your keyboard, at least not by default, but you can designate a key you’re not otherwise using as your compose key. I use the Alt key to the right of the spacebar on my desktop keyboard and the Menu key on my laptop.
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Games
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doesn’t exist – a modern text adventure, is an in-development game from LUAL Games KIG that’s a love letter to the origins of adventures and gaming. Inspired by the likes of The Beginner’s Guide, Stories Untold, Buddy Simulator and Zork it’s one for those who love a classic adventure with some nice modern touches.
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Nomad Survival is an auto-attacking rogue-lite action game where you try to survive as long as you can, while you continue to buff up your character as you go. Works great on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton.
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More goodies have arrived for OpenRCT2 the open source re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Although it’s fully playable already, the developers of this FOSS project continue to improve it a lot. This is another project that helps to keep a real classic game alive on modern systems, while also continually improving various features to make it feel just that little bit more modern.
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Nearly two years ago, we discussed a fascinating project spearheaded by one dedicated person, going by the moniker Peebs, to digitize every video game manual’s English version for the Super Nintendo system. For those of you not of a certain age, video games used to come in the form of cartridges that you would load into the console. Those cartridges came packaged with game manuals that did everything from tell you how to play the game, up to and including game lore and backstory. Again, if you were born at the right time like yours truly, reading the manual upon buying the game, sometimes in the back of your Mom’s Plymouth Voyager minivan on the way back from Toys ‘R Us, was part of the excitement.
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Wrought Flesh is a game where you run around and pinch the organs of downed enemies to upgrade your body. It’s pretty weird and a big content update is out now.
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While Valve has still yet to produce an official installable image of SteamOS 3 for desktops, as always the community provides and another worth looking into is winesapOS. Another I covered is HoloISO, which tries to stick quite closely to SteamOS 3 but winesapOS aims to be a bit more than that.
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Molegato and Top Hat Studios have announced today their the 3D platformer Frogun will be releasing with Native Linux support on August 2nd.
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Valve has sent word that Steam Next Fest is coming back again and it will be live on October 3rd – 10th.
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The creature battling metroidvania Monster Sanctuary has an expansive new free update out with The Forgotten World which is the largest update to the game yet. Adding in a new area, skills, items, new game modes and much more.
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A game that is significantly nonlinear is sometimes described as being open-ended or a sandbox, and is characterized by there being no “right way” of playing the game.
This genre provides the player a great degree of creativity to interact with, usually without any predetermined goal, or alternatively with a goal that the player sets for themselves.
There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).
Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action, together with links to relevant resources.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Coming a little less than a month after KDE Gear 22.04.2, the KDE Gear 22.04.3 point release is here to further improve the powerful Kdenlive video editor by fixing the double incrementation of the effect parameter spin box on mouse wheel, a bug when calculating the available mix duration when there was no frame present, as well as seeking of the keyframe view with effect zones and incorrect enablement of timeline playing auto-scroll.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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It was a nightmare, but it was the process in place when I started there and I didn’t really know RHEL enough to see a better way. This was an official tool made for the job! I just assumed it was the best one for it.
Until it royally screwed up my entire day once.
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Many CIOs have told us that the chance to be a coach and mentor is among the most rewarding aspects of their job. The right question or well-timed advice can have an outsized impact on someone’s life, shaping their career choices for years to come.
We asked award-winning CIOs to share a key piece of advice or thought-provoking question that they use to guide mentees in their career. If you are looking to play a stronger coaching role for individuals on your team, consider these tips from ORBIE Award winners in Alabama and Boston.
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CIOs desire – and increasingly have achieved – a seat at the executive decision-making table. They expect to apply their technical expertise and operational experience to make their enterprises successful.
One way they can achieve that goal is by making their organizations resilient. The right technologies and processes can make sure data remains safe, business interruptions are minimized, and any disasters are recovered quickly and fully.
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I’m happy to announce that Meetbot Logs (or Mote) 2.0 is now live at meetbot.fedoraproject.org. Meetbot Logs allows the community to see the minutes and logs from meetings. The new version is a major rewrite and adds features like a calendar view, asynchronous loading, quicker search, and dark mode. It should also be easier to maintain and develop in the future.
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Debian Family
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Powered by the latest Linux 5.18 kernel series and based on the Debian Testing repositories as of July 5th, 2022, the SparkyLinux 2022.07 release is here to provide those who want to install the semi-rolling version of SparkyLinux with an up-to-date installation medium.
New features in SparkyLinux 2022.07 include Python 3.10.4 as the default Python implementation with the mention that Python 3.9 support was completely removed, and the latest Calamares 3.2.60 graphical installer.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The seemingly random closure of programs and the loss of all your precious work is a problem with which Windows users are customarily familiar. These wild-eyed, reckless souls walk a high wire of project-death on a staggeringly regular basis. But Ubuntu users are more cautious with their creativity, and – especially when using Ubuntu 22.04 – they expect security, stability, and not to have to yell “What the actual living hell?! Where did my work go?!” with any notable regularity.
Welcome to your Ubuntu Desktop nightmare.
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Devices/Embedded
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Fedora Linux is well-suited for desktops with its workstation edition. And, if you want it for a server or IoT requirements, you also have the Fedora ARM project.
It also supports Raspberry Pi boards, except for the recent Raspberry Pi 4 (released back in 2019).
Now, with a proposed change spotted by Phoronix, it looks like Fedora Linux 37 might be the version adding official support for Raspberry Pi 4.
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Early this year, Axzez released the Interceptor Carrier Board for the RPi CM4 and a Power over Ethernet (PoE+) board. Both devices were designed to target NAS, NVR and other IoT applications. Yesterday, the company launched the Interceptor 1U Case designed to accommodate these devices and they also released news about compatible power supply products.
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ASRock presented today the new NUC 1200 BOX Series and the iBOX 1200 Series built around the Alder Lake “P” processors. Both devices provide rich I/O peripherals, however, the iBOX Series targets embedded/industrial settings and the NUC 1200 is optimized for gaming and AI BOX applications.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CANBed M4 development board based on Microchip SAM E51 Cortex-M4 microcontroller and MCP2542FD CAN transceiver provides a more powerful alternative to the CANBed RP2040 with a Raspberry Pi dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller introduced last year.
The board supports both CAN 2.0 and CAN FD with a 4-pin terminal block or a DB-9 connector, and offers expansion capabilities though two Grove connectors, and an 18-pin IO header.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Noteworthy changes in version 2.2.36 (2022-07-06) [...]
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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This article is aimed at those like me who use Ubuntu and PostgreSQL to develop locally on their computer and after the last update to Ubuntu 22.04 they have two versions of PostgreSQL installed.
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Programming/Development
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A good habit is to skim over the manual every few months. You’ll pick up something new and useful every time.
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Leftovers
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Science
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The Fields Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.
The medals and cash prizes are funded by a trust established by J.C.Fields at the University of Toronto, which has been replenished periodically, but is still significantly underfunded. In 2022, the prize funds from the University of Toronto were supplemented by generous support from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation/Klaus Tschira Stiftung.
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Lately, that work has taken the form of a three–paper series about how prime numbers are distributed on the number line. Apart from the numbers 2 and 5, all primes end in 1, 3, 7 or 9, so you could imagine labeling four buckets with those digits and then dropping each prime into its associated bucket as you walk down the number line. Mathematicians have long known that the buckets will all eventually end up with roughly the same number of primes, and this is true not just in base 10 but in any base. What mathematicians don’t know, however, is how quickly the buckets start evening out, a question with implications for many other core questions about prime spacing.
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Education
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In contrast, the idea of ‘sufficiency’ implies the absolute reduction of resource and energy demands in ways that maintain (or even improve) general living conditions and perhaps widen opportunities for everyone to lead flourishing lives. In this way, sufficiency does not promote the continuation of digital technology as we currently know it (albeit in an altered form). Neither does it infer a digital abstinence or complete renouncement of all things tech. Instead, this implies a quantitative and qualitative rethinking of digital technology along appropriately refined lines of ‘voluntary simplicity’, ‘frugality’, ‘slow consumption’, ‘downshifting’ and ‘minimalism’. As Santarius et al. (2022) put it: [...]
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Hardware
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[adblu] encountered the ever-present headphone problem with their Sennheiser Urbanite headphones – the cable broke. These headphones are decent, and despite the cable troubles, worth giving a new life to. Cable replacement is always an option, but [adblu] decided to see – what would it take to make these headphones wireless? And while they’re at it, just how much battery life could they get?
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Before the days of MP3 players and smartphones, and even before portable CD players, those of us of a certain age remember that our cassette players were about the only way to take music on-the-go. If we were lucky, they also had a built-in radio for when the single tape exhausted both of its sides. Compared to then, it’s much easier to build a portable radio even though cassettes are largely forgotten, as [wagiminator] shows us with this radio design based on an ATtiny.
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Once upon a time, people tried to avoid STM32 fakes and clones, but in a world where companies are allegedly purchasing washing machines to extract a few unavailable components, people have started to look for alternatives, and last week I wrote about the Geehy APM32 family of STM32 clones.
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Security
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Hacker News ☛ Researchers Warn of New OrBit Linux Malware That Hijacks Execution Flow [Ed: Malware needs to actually get installed to do harm. Contrariwise, Windows has back doors, so harm can be done remotely by anybody]
Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a new and entirely undetected Linux threat dubbed OrBit, signally a growing trend of malware attacks geared towards the popular operating system.
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In two emails last evening, Macmillan Publishers US once again said that due to a “security incident, which involves the encryption of certain files on our network” the publisher will close its virtual and physical offices through today, June 28. On Monday, the company first reported the incident, noting that to prevent further damage to its network, it took all of its systems offline.
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The College of the Desert has fallen victim to a second successful malware attack against its online network in as many years. Currently, most of the college’s online services are offline, its website is not available and at least some employees are lacking access to their email accounts, COD public information officer Nicholas Robles confirmed Tuesday morning.
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At this time, Robles could not say whether the college has fallen victim to the same [cracker] or type of malware as it did two years ago, or if any [cracker] has demanded a ransom to unlock the college’s computer systems.
“Our investigation into this incident is ongoing,” Robles said. “Therefore, we are unable to provide specific information at this time.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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As an effort to promote privacy and human rights in the EU, we at Greens/EFA got together with a team of international experts to understand where biometric mass surveillance, like facial recognition, is put to use this very moment in different European cities and states.
Keep reading to find out what we learned, and why must take action to ban the use of these technologies now – before it is too late.
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The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chair and top Republican have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate social media app TikTok and Chinese parent ByteDance due to “repeated misrepresentations” over its handling of U.S. data.
The request on Tuesday from Sens. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, followed a Buzzfeed report saying the short video app permitted TikTok engineers and executives in China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users. The senators said such access raised questions over TikTok’s claims to lawmakers and users that the data was protected.
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The writer issued some advice for others who may find themselves in a similar situation: “If you ever get a ‘Find My’ notification make sure you open the app immediately as the safety alert doesn’t appear on the screen you have to open the app. Non iPhone users, Apple created an app for androids for this very reason called Tracker Detect.”
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Once May discovered the alert, she “was able to disable it” before leaving Disneyland. However, the Twitter thread never mentioned whether or not she found a physical AirTag among her belongings. This has happened before at Walt Disney World in Florida with a teenager and her family. However, the family never found the AirTag from the tracking alert; possibly indicating a ‘phantom’ AirTag.
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For Android devices, there is an app called Tracker Detect that can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. This app looks for Find My compatible trackers that are within the bluetooth range that are not with their owners. If the app detects an unknown AirTag near you for at least 10 mins, you can play a sound to find it.
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May added that after sharing her story on Instagram, she received several direct messages from people who have found they were being tracked by AirTags.
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U.S. technology giant Apple Inc.’s AirTag location tracker has been found attached to an investigation vehicle of the Aichi prefectural police, sources said Wednesday.
The vehicle of the Toyota police station in the central Japan prefecture is used by investigators dealing with cases involving crime syndicates.
The Aichi police suspect that the device was put on the vehicle with the aim of figuring out police movements.
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Defence/Aggression
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“The ongoing spread of violence, fuelled by hate speech and incitement to ethnic-based and gender-based violence, are early-warning indicators of further atrocity crimes against innocent civilians, especially women and children who are more vulnerable. The expanding conflict makes worse the existing humanitarian crisis that is being experienced in Ethiopia and the region.”
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In western Oromia, an abusive government counter-insurgency campaign against an armed group, the Oromo Liberation Army, was already underway, with civilians caught in between suffering numerous abuses. By early 2019, the government had established a federal command post, which coordinates federal and regional security forces in western Oromia. In addition, the authorities have sporadically cut communications in western Oromia, including imposing a three-month shutdown in early 2020. Aid agencies, the media, and rights groups have also had limited access to the region.
Despite these restrictions, human rights groups and the media have been able to report on serious abuses by government forces, including summary executions and arbitrary detentions. Armed groups have also abducted or killed minority community members and government officials.
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Turns out others did the same. There would be an occasional dig at Biden’s senility, or a whisper about Trump’s criminality, but soon a taboo began to govern the otherwise warm and caring sociability of our group. Even though we were a diverse assembly of 30 people, gay and straight, black and white, aged 9 to 81, a freewheeling dialogue about politics or religion in the group at large was strictly off the conversational table. In spite of us all being citizens of one country floating down wild rapids together in our country’s most magnificent national park, on a deeper level we remained as alienated as groundhogs and gardeners.
And that was fair enough as far as it went: people had paid for a challenging outdoor adventure, not a seminar on current events or conflicting epistemologies. Both of which continued to unfold at top speed without us. While we were without internet in the Canyon, Roe was overturned, and the poised young assistant to Mark Meadows tied the ex-President ever closer to the planning of the January 6th insurrection.
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On June 30, a Novosibirsk court arrested scientist Dmitry Kolker on suspicion of treason. Kolker, who had stage IV pancreatic cancer, was receiving treatment at a hospital in Novosibirsk; the authorities took him straight from the hospital to Moscow’s Lefortovo remand prison, where he died on July 2. Kolker’s lawyer, Alexander Fedulov, blames his client’s death on the FSB officers who arrested him, the medical staff who signed off on his remove from the hospital, and the judges who ordered his incarceration, knowing he was near death. Fedulov spoke to Meduza about his client’s case.
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Russia capturing the city Lysychansk and Ukraine recovering Snake Island were both hailed as victories by the respective sides this past week. The Kremlin celebrated the capture of the last Ukrainian holdout in the Luhansk region by doling out state awards to the forces involved. However, the Russian authorities appear to be exaggerating the military significance of this victory, as it came after Ukrainian troops carried out a relatively orderly withdrawal from the area. Earlier, Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops to evacuate Snake Island. But Ukrainian soldiers have yet to physically return to the recovered outpost in the Black Sea. And now that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has settled into a war of attrition, its outcome depends less on the capture and loss of small territories like these, and more on the accumulation and expenditure of military resources.
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Yet, when did the American people, through their elected representatives in Congress, agree to those pledges? Sure, I know that Congress is busy with those January 6 hearings, but is that any reason to refrain from making this monumental decision on behalf of the American people?
The fact is that when it comes to the expansion of NATO membership, the views of Congress are irrelevant. The only views that matter are those of the Pentagon. It is the Pentagon that owns and controls NATO. It is the Pentagon that has decided to invite Sweden and Finland into the military alliance that wields the authority to pledge the lives of the American people.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”
[...]
Mr. Kiriakou first stumbled into the public limelight by speaking out about waterboarding on television in 2007, quickly becoming a source for national security journalists, including this reporter, who turned up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment last year as Journalist B. When he gave the covert officer’s name to the freelancer, he said, he was simply trying to help a writer find a potential source and had no intention or expectation that the name would ever become public. In fact, it did not surface publicly until long after Mr. Kiriakou was charged.
[...]
“To me, the irony of this whole thing is, very simply, that he’s going to be the only C.I.A. officer to go to jail over torture,” even though he publicly denounced torture, Mr. Riedel said. “It’s deeply ironic under the Democratic president who ended torture.”
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Environment
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Energy
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Now, six more train stations in the city have joined the ranks of stations catering to the needs of passengers traveling with bikes, making a total of 16 bike-friendly train stations in the city.
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LINDSAY KRALL DECIDED to study nuclear waste out of a love for the arcane. Figuring how to bury radioactive atoms isn’t exactly simple—it takes a blend of particle physics, careful geology and engineering, and a high tolerance for reams of regulations. But the trickiest ingredient of all is time. Nuclear waste from today’s reactors will take thousands of years to become something safer to handle. So any solution can’t require too much stewardship. It’s gotta just work, and keep working for generations. By then, the utility that split those atoms won’t exist, nor will the company that designed the reactor. Who knows? Maybe the United States won’t exist either.
Right now, the US doesn’t have such a plan. That’s been the case since 2011, when regulators facing stiff local opposition pulled the plug on a decades-long effort to store waste underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, stranding $44 billion in federal funds meant for the job. Since then, the nuclear industry has done a good job of storing its waste on a temporary basis, which is part of the reason Congress has shown little interest in working out a solution for future generations. Long-term thinking isn’t their strong suit. “It’s been a complete institutional failure in the US,” Krall says.
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As fossil fuel corporations reap fabulous profits at the expense of Australian gas and electricity customers, the gas lobby is running a propaganda campaign calling for Australia to power the world, help Ukraine, let “the market” do its thing.
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Climate advocates responded with outrage to the European Parliament’s vote Wednesday to classify fossil gas and nuclear projects as “green,” an official designation that will allow them to access additional taxpayer subsidies and private capital despite their destructive environmental impacts.
Members of the European Parliament voted 328 to 278 to kill a motion that would have blocked the European Commission’s so-called “taxonomy” plan, clearing the way for the proposal to become law as demonstrators inside the parliament building in Strasbourg, France voiced their objections.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Last weekend (Friday) was the first ever Matariki public holiday and the kids had Monday off so we went on a family road trip to Tūrangi for three nights. It wasn’t a tramping trip — we stayed at the “Tūrangi Leisure Lodge” motel — but the trip was mostly short walks and board games.
We drove down on Friday and stopped near Lake Karapiro to walk up Maungatautari from the northern side. It’s a mountain in the Waikato countryside with a predator-proof fence to create a bird sanctuary. The walk to the summit was worth doing, about three hours round trip, although there isn’t much of a view at the top.
Saturday was overcast and drizzly and we did short walks around Tūrangi — up and down the Tongariro River, with lots of people fly-fishing. We drove the short distance to Tokaanu and enjoyed views of the lake from the wharf. Near Tokaanu is the bush-clad hill Maunganamu, probably a very small volcanic cone. Our topographic map showed a track to the top so we hunted it down — there are no signs in the area and the trailhead is overgrown, but the track is still there and passable although obviously unmaintained and becoming gradually overgrown. At the top there’s bit of a lookout over the surrounding area. For a very short walk it was pretty good.
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On Friday, video footage emerged of Indigenous Maasai people running and scrambling for cover from gunfire in the United Republic of Tanzania. The videos reveal chaos as the Maasai try to escape state security forces, and photos released in the aftermath of the incident show bloody injuries and bullet wounds. In Loliondo, in northern Tanzania, the Maasai are being violently evicted from their land as part of an effort to create a game reserve. Maasai leaders have been arrested, dozens of community members have been shot or wounded, and hundreds have fled to Kenya for safety and medical attention. Others are determined to remain in their homeland. “I won’t go until the last point of our life,” said a Maasai leader who asked for anonymity because they fear retaliation. “I can’t run out of home my grandparents’ lands [sic].”
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Jessica’s setup comprises a Raspberry Pi Zero W with our High Quality Camera, as well as sensors for dissolved oxygen and temperature. It records fish presence and environmental variables in different habitats. Jessica has tested the equipment in locations across a small channel near Lake Huron, which is nestled between Toronto in Canada and Detroit in the US. The ultimate goal of her research is to create habitat occupancy models in the area. These would tell us the population limit for threatened species of fish.
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Overpopulation
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According to the country’s largest agricultural union, Coldiretti, the drought threatens more than 30 percent of national agricultural production, and half of the farms in the Po Valley, where Parma ham is produced.
Lakes Maggiore and Garda were also hit by lower than normal water levels for this time of year, while further south the Tiber River, which runs through Rome, also dropped.
The Po represents the peninsula’s largest water reservoir, much of which is used by farmers.
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As a consequence, there is not as much in a river that supplies water to tens of millions of people and countless acres of farmland.
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Libya’s coast has a long history of sending people – willing and unwilling – to Europe and the Americas. Ports like Tripoli and Benghazi were the final stops for medieval slave-trading caravans from the African interior until the 19th century. In recent decades, migrants have shoved off for Italy and Spain in rickety fishing boats, with Libyan officials looking the other way.
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“We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”
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Finance
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News that GOP members of Congress are coordinating with the far-right Hungarian government in an attempt to block a proposed global minimum tax on multinational companies is drawing outrage from watchdog groups and Democratic lawmakers, with one U.S. senator accusing Republicans of doing “anything it takes to help their dark money corporate backers dodge taxes.”
Just ahead of the July 4 holiday weekend, the Washington Post reported that “senior Hungarian officials say they are working with Republican lawmakers in the United States to defeat a global minimum tax backed by the Biden administration, as European and American leaders struggle to enact a groundbreaking international accord targeting multinational corporations.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The suit is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.
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The lawsuit was filed at the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, a consequence of a recent spat Twitter had with the Indian government over its aggressive speech laws. The government had asked Twitter to take down some posts and block dozens of accounts. Twitter did so but then went straight to the courts.
The difficult relationship between Twitter and the government goes back to 2021 when India’s new information technology laws went into effect. The government then asked Twitter on many occasions to take down content it perceived as being critical of it, while Twitter accused the government of “intimidation tactics.” At one point, the Indian police turned up at Twitter’s offices and threatened to jail Twitter staff if the company didn’t adhere to the country’s new laws.
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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has released a new framework to check cyber security in Other Financial Institutions (OFIs) to create a safer and more secure cyber environment that will support information system security.
This is contained in a statement issued by Nkiru Asiegbu, Director, OFIs, CBN.
The 41-paged document comprises six parts: cybersecurity governance and oversight, cybersecurity risk management system, cyber resilience assessment, cybersecurity operational resilience, cyber-threat intelligence and metrics, monitoring, and reporting.
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The presence of dozens of Proud Boys accounts – at the same time the group’s leaders face federal charges of seditious conspiracy in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 – is the latest illustration of how extremist groups can spread their message, despite social media companies’ promises to the contrary.
Many of the accounts could be found by a simple word search, because they used “Proud Boys” in their Twitter bio or username, raising questions about how effectively the company enforces its rules on hate speech and extremism.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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There is wide agreement across the federal government that coordinated disinformation campaigns threaten to exacerbate public health emergencies, stoke ethnic and racial divisions and even undermine democracy itself. The board’s fate, however, has underscored how deeply partisan the issue has become in Washington, making it nearly impossible to consider addressing the threat.
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“It’s crazy right now. Russia is incredibly active on Arabic TikTok” explained Suldaan Said Ahmed, a Helsinki MP for the Left Alliance, and the only Somali-born member of Parliament.
Said Ahmed told Yle News that he has been “working overtime” to meet with constituents who do not speak or understand Finnish, as many of them report seeing videos online which claim that war is about to break out in Finland, or that the US is forcing Finland to join [NATO].
“MPs representing minorities are being bombarded with messages from constituents who are panicking and seem to have a totally different idea of what is happening with Russia,” Said Ahmed said.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Kumar said [Internet] services was being gradually restored and security forces continued to be on alert following the murder, carried out by two Muslim men now under arrest who filmed the act and posted it online.
The perpetrators said the act was in response to victim’s support for a politician’s derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammad. The victim, Kanhaiya Lal Teli, had allegedly put up a social media post supporting a former spokesperson for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party who made anti-Islam comments in May.
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Tensions were high Wednesday in the western Indian city of Udaipur, a day after police arrested two Muslim men accused of slitting a Hindu tailor’s throat and posting a video of it on social media. The brutal attack represents a dramatic escalation of communal violence in a country riven by deep religious polarization.
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The UK communications and media regulator, Ofcom, has today set out their plans for putting the mess of complex and confusing legislation – that is the Online Safety Bill (OSB) – into practice, which aims to tackle “harmful” internet content through website bans by broadband ISPs, fines and other sanctions.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Suddenly I was covering a war. To some partisans in Abiy’s government, I was fulfilling a secret purpose: on social media, members of the Ethiopian diaspora labelled me an agent of the CIA (later I would also be called an agent of MI6). Along with other journalists, I was accused of siding with the TPLF. At first, I laughed off such conspiratorial accusations. At the time there was little sign that the government would take such talk seriously. Independent Ethiopian journalists, however, were already under pressure. Always constrained in their reporting, after the war began some were detained for daring to contradict the official government line. A number were physically assaulted.
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The objective of the fellowship is to improve the coverage of under-reported issues in local communities across Nigeria, focusing on potential solutions with lasting impact on effective public service delivery, grassroot development and improving the quality of life.
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Ponomarenko faces up to 10 years in prison for a Telegram post about the Russian bombing of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in which hundreds of civilians were killed. A Russian law passed in March criminalizes the dissemination of “fake” reports that “discredit the armed forces.”
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She is currently not allowed to see or receive letters from her relatives and is only able to maintain contact with her lawyer, Podolskiy said.
Observers have said Ponomarenko’s placement in psychiatric treatment bears a resemblance to the Soviet-era practice of punitive psychiatry against dissenters.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Dalai Lama Library and Museum contain artifacts, his teachings, and books on his life and struggle for Tibetan autonomy and protection of its native Buddhist culture.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to the Dalai Lama by phone and wished him well on his birthday.
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He spent 20 years in the New York Police Department.
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Onondaga Lake is more than just a body of water where we traditionally fished and drew other sustenance. It is the cultural linchpin of our very existence—where 1,000 years ago, the Great Peacemaker brought together five warring nations to seal a compact joining together in common cause. Those five nations—the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Seneca—were later joined by the Tuscarora to form what is now the Six Nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which Americans and Canadians called the Iroquois.
Our confederacy has survived and thrived throughout that millennium, including after the arrival of the first Europeans who tried to remove us from our land or oppress us out of existence.
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In late May, Natalia Lugovaya, the general director of the Live Now Foundation, which provides support to people with ALS and other neuromuscular disorders, announced that the organization was in a crisis: staff members are being laid off, new patient admission has been curtailed, and a number of obstacles threaten the foundation’s ability to keep working. Meduza spoke with Natalia Lugovaya about how she and her colleagues are dealing with the challenges.
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“Tribal governments can do what states and the federal government cannot.” That comment, from Wes Martel of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition gave me comfort last month.
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Monopolies
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On Wednesday, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said it investigating whether Microsoft-Activision Blizzard merger “may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
The CMA’s deadline for public comment on the matter is July 20. The regulator has set a Sept. 1 deadline on whether to refer the proposed merger for a “phase 2” investigation, which would let the parties discuss and potentially agree on remedies to any identified competitive harms.
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If the CMA decides the deal is anti-competitive, then it would conduct a more in-depth assessment and allow the companies to propose actions that would address the concerns with the deal.
The regulator acknowledged that some of its counterparts around the world are also looking into the deal, and it will communicate with them “as appropriate.”
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If approved, the acquisition would have huge implications for the $190 billion video game industry, handing control of incredibly lucrative franchises including Call of Duty, Candy Crush and Warcraft to one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
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Microsoft makes the Xbox gaming system while Activision has created or acquired popular video games including Guitar Hero and the World of Warcraft franchise.
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The U.K. watchdog will seek feedback on the acquisition from interested parties until July 20 and decide by Sept. 1 whether to escalate its investigation.
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Software Patents
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The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor.
“Only a person can have rights – a machine cannot,” wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement.
“A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person.”
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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If I have time I’ll mention that there’s a lot of toxicity on there and I’ll get into how moderation works.
The technical detail I gloss over is that Mastodon is a hosted server-side application and that there are many Mastodon servers.
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Internet/Gemini
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Hey Gemini!
Sud0nim, I got your email and I’m glad my post was good to you :). Please forgive the lack of email response, I seem to be unable to send emails from that address. I’ll have to do some digging as to see why.
Once again, I’m a camp counselor. I’ve been having a lot of fun this past week. The camp is a church camp, and is really different from the church camp I went to as a kid. Some of my campers are interested in learning more about Byzantine chant and other church music, which makes me glad. They’re just beginning, so they’re mostly looking for the ison.
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Hi there! Hope you’re doing well. I’ll show you how to compile and use Gemserv, the Gemini server I use for serving pages on Altesq, my pubnix. It is written in Rust, and allows for a secure, yet simple program that can serve Gemini capsules from the ~/public_gemini of every member. As you can imagine, it’s good for anyone who wants to start their own public access Unix server, or host for their friends or themselves. I might make a whole series on running your own pubnix in the close future.
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I was wondering if anyone has seen any interesting retro devices running the gemini or gopher protocol. I write regularly on my Psion 5MX and love the idea of being able to browse the smolweb on such a form factor.
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Announcements
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I think I have mentioned how much I like Tab Separated Value (TSV) files before. They are simple to write and read which makes them easy to manipulate using standard Unix tools like awk.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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