07.19.22

[Meme] EPO Ignorance is Bliss

Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Everyone happy at EPO; Nobody speaks
No comment, no dissent?

Summary: The EPO‘s ban on sharing of "general" information (even between staff representatives and people who elect them) is a sign of the urgency to take action

When Criminals Make It a Crime to Speak About Their Crimes

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 0ec5420818157c7113ab4c89811b739c
New Levels of Censorship at EPO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Gag orders or something akin to NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) are the latest attack on free speech at the EPO; to make matters worse, this is designed to make corruption and crime in the management ranks impermissible to speak about (they make it a taboo or a ‘crime’ to talk about crime)

THE EPO bribes media and academia and today it openly bragged about it. (warning: epo.org link)

What does it mean for the media when staff representation at the EPO is also being gagged, preventing media from even finding out what’s going on inside the EPO?

“What does it mean for the media when staff representation at the EPO is also being gagged, preventing media from even finding out what’s going on inside the EPO?”That’s the subject of the video above. Based on publications in circulation this week, the censorship has reached new heights. As far as we can recall, even Benoît Battistelli did not do this and this is what António Campinos resorts to after securing (buying) another term.

This is what a report now looks like (just to make a point):

The Central Staff Committee's (CSC) empty letter
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) posts an empty letter in protest

Worry not, however, as there’s a canary in this coalmine. Why can the CSC not speak?

In new ommunications entitled “Reward Exercises 2022: “Full transparency” in the Harmonisation Committee” the CSC says: “Our full report on the meeting of the Harmonisation Committee of 27 June 2022 can be found here. It complies with the official instructions given to our observer.”

Here’s the gag order:

We note that the Office allows the CSC to appoint an observer in the Harmonisation Committee (HC) – even though this is not foreseen in the regulations – to contribute to a transparent rewards exercise. To ensure this transparency, in your capacity of observer, you were invited to attend the HC and were given access to the same confidential information the HC’s statutory members have.

As an observer to the HC, you are also free to report at any time in general terms to the CSC what you observed, including by raising any issue of a general nature. Nevertheless, this capacity of observer does not allow you to share any confidential documents (which served as a basis for the discussion) nor any confidential information with anyone outside the HC (incl. the CSC), neither before nor after the President has taken a decision. In that respect, the obligation of confidentiality applicable to the HC’s statutory members, applies equally to you.
Finally, as specifically concerns the rewards statistics report, it is noted that the confidentiality thereof was duly specified beforehand, and not challenged by you either before or during the meeting. This report can therefore not be shared with the CSC.

We saw similar rules when people entered a room to hear the “hearing” about Judge Corcoran. That was a very long time ago.

“We disagree that, under the restrictions set out, the observer is able to ensure any transparency in the procedure at all,” the CSC notes. “In this open letter to the President we request reconsideration of his decision to disallow a nominated staff representative to share documents and details of discussions held in said meeting with the rest of the staff representation.”

Campinos may be experimenting with a new oppressive approach — one that ILOAT cannot squash quickly enough, as the video above notes.

Here’s what the letter to Campinos says:

European Patent Office
80298 Munich
Germany

Central Staff Committee
Comité central du personnel
Zentraler Personalausschuss

centralSTCOM@epo.org

Reference: sc22097cl
Date: 14.07.2022

European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Mr António Campinos
President of the EPO

By email

OPEN LETTER

Information sharing within Staff Representation

Dear Mr President,

The CSC has been permitted to appoint a single observer to the Harmonisation Committee. In advance of the last meeting of this Committee, our observer was provided with the relevant documentation, along with a statement explicitly forbidding the sharing of the document with the other members of the CSC. In reply to a query from our observer, your services reiterated their position, and stated that the “role [of] an observer is to ensure transparency but does not allow [the observer] to disclose any documents or discussions from the meeting”, and further that the observer is “free to report at any time in general terms to the CSC what [was] observed, including by raising any issue of a general nature”.

In light of this exchange we note the following:

• We disagree that, under the restrictions set out, the observer is able to ensure any transparency in the procedure at all, since the observer is obstructed from effectively informing the CSC.
• We question what information would be considered “general” by the administration.
• We object to our observer being put in the difficult position of potentially disclosing information that the administration later deems to not fit the “general” requirement, and being sanctioned for it.

• We have not been given any justification as to why the documents are not suitable to be shared among the elected staff representatives, especially since they contain merely anonymised statistics rather than any personal or identifying information of individuals.

We are of the opinion that the role of the observer is to report to the CSC the events of the Harmonisation Committee meetings. To effectively do so, the observer must not be impeded with undue barriers. Should any irregularities be identified (for example, unaccounted for funds are identified or disproportionately large bonuses are awarded to a particular subset of staff) the CSC can take appropriate action. Alone, the observer is powerless to act on any findings.

Therefore, we request that the decision to disallow a nominated staff representative to share documents and details of discussions held in said meeting with the rest of the CSC be reconsidered.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Sampels
Acting Chairman of the Central Staff Committee

It’s clear that Tony ‘the f***ing president’ (in his own words) Campinos is only getting worse. He gets more oppressive over time. We certainly hope that staff will stand up and oppose this before it escalates further. What next? Banning calls for strike? Remember he’s thus far refusing to obey the ILOAT ruling from a fortnight ago. He has not lifted mass-mail restrictions. █

Links 19/07/2022: RIP, Thomas Lord, We’ll Miss You!

Posted in News Roundup at 3:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • The Register UK ☛ You can liquid cool this Linux laptop to let the GPU soar

        Computer chips are getting so hot these days, some companies are starting to put liquid cooling into laptops so that they can run faster — or quieter and less hot to the touch.

        Just look at Germany-based Tuxedo Computers, which released a 15-inch high-performance laptop earlier this year that supports an external liquid-cooling module. After initially running Windows, the Tuxedo Stellaris 15 – Gen4 now plays nice with Linux, the vendor recently announced.

        The laptop can be configured with some of the fastest CPUs out there, letting users choose between an Intel Core i7-12700H, Intel Core i9-12900H, or AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX. For GPU, the laptop supports a wider range of options, from Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 to the RTX 3080 Ti.

        Tuxedo’s liquid-cooling module, called Aquaris, is offered as a €199 ($201 based on current exchange rates) add-on for the laptop, which varies in price based on configuration but starts at around €2,000 ($2,028) for the hardware.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Asahi Linux now supports M2 Apple Macs – Geeky Gadgets

        The community and element team responsible for creating Asahi Linux have released a new update supporting the latest Apple Mac computers powered by the M2 Apple silicon chips. As well as supporting the Mac Studio range of computers and Bluetooth connectivity. “The end result is that existing reference distro users can simply upgrade their packages, reboot, and Bluetooth should just work without any further configuration or changes!”

      • Mac Observer ☛ Asahi Linux Now Supports Mac Studio and M2 MacBooks
      • AppleInsider ☛ Apple Silicon Linux project gets initial Mac Studio & M2 support | AppleInsider

        The Asahi Linux for Mac project has made some improvements, with the latest version adding initial support for M2 chips as well as the Mac Studio, along with Bluetooth.

      • Linux Memory Statistics – Dropbear

        Memory sits in the first row after the headers then we have the swap statistics. Most of the numbers are directly fetched from the procfs file /proc/meminfo which are scaled and presented to the user. A good example of a “simple” stat is total, which is just the MemTotal row located in that file. For the rest of this post, I’ll make the rows from /proc/meminfo have an amber background.

    • Graphics Stack

      • An introduction to the Linux graphics stack

        As you can probably imagine, the Linux graphics stack comprises many layers of abstractions, from the pretty little button from which you open your Proton-able AAA Steam title to the actual bytecode that runs on whatever graphics card you have installed.

        These many abstractions are what allow us to have our glorious moments of being a hero (or maybe a villain, whatever you’re up to…) without even noticing what’s happening, and – most importantly – that allow game devs to make such complex games without having to worry about an awful lot of details. They’re really a marvel of engineering (!), but not by accident!

        All of those abstraction layers come with a history of their own1, and it’s kinda amazing that we can even have such a smooth experience with all of those, community-powered, beautifully thought-out, moving pieces, twisting and turning in a life of their own.

        But enough mystery! Let’s hop into it already, shall we?

        Though in most cases we start from the bottom of the stack and build our way towards the top, here I think it makes more sense for us to build it upside down, as that’s what we’re used to interacting with.

    • Applications

      • Make Use Of ☛ The 6 Best Linux Camera Apps to Get the Most Out of Your Webcam

        
        It’s one thing for your computer to have a webcam, but it doesn’t work without the right software. Here are several of the top options for Linux.

        Most laptops these days feature a built-in webcam that lets you make video calls, do live streams, or take photos of yourself. However, unlike Mac or Windows, some Linux distros don’t come with a built-in camera app.

        As a result, if you want to use your webcam effectively, you need a third-party camera app on your computer. Linux has several options in this regard. Unfortunately, not all of them are as good and have the necessary webcam features.

      • A look back in celebration of Inkscape contributors & milestones in 2021

        Yes, we’re over halfway through 2022. That won’t stop us from celebrating our volunteers and the work accomplished during 2021. It’s always a good time to look back at how we have arrived here this year. Enjoy the read!

        The Inkscape project is composed of a global team of volunteer contributors who collaborate to maintain, develop, translate, design, document, promote and use this free and open source (FOSS) professional vector-editing software.

        Without our volunteers, Inkscape simply would not exist!

        This diversely-skilled team of contributors spend their time and energy serving Inkscape users and mentoring each other and summer students through our chat groups and the forum, meeting to plan launches, organize activities, participate in external events, and connecting with followers across multiple social media platforms. There was even an opportunity to connect for one international conference via a virtual room from continents around the planet.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • HowTo Forge ☛ Resolving Domain Names with dig Command on Linux

        This tutorial shows how to resolve domain names on the Linux shell and how to query a name server for various kinds of DNS records like A, MX and NS records. To resolve a domain name on the shell, we will use the command dig.

      • Daniel P. Berrangé » Blog Archive » Trying sd-boot and unified kernel images in a KVM virtual machine

        A recent thread on the Fedora development list about unified kernel images co-incided with work I’m involved in wrt confidential computing (AMD SEV[-SNP], Intel TDX, etc). In exploring the different options for booting virtual machines in a confidential computing environment, one of the problems that keeps coming up is that of validating the boot measurements of the initrd and kernel command line. The initrd is currently generated on the fly at the time the kernel is installed on a host, while the command line typically contains host specific UUIDs for filesystems or LUKS volumes. Before even dealing with those problems, grub2‘s support for TPMs causes pain due to its need to measure every single grub.conf configuration line that is executed into a PCR. Even with the most minimal grub.conf using autodiscovery based on the boot loader spec, the grub.conf boot measurements are horribly cumbersome to deal with.

        With this in mind, in working on confidential virtualization, we’re exploring options for simplifying the boot process by eliminating any per-host variable measurements. A promising way of achieving this is to make use of sd-boot instead of grub2, and using unified kernel images pre-built and signed by the OS vendor. I don’t have enough familiarity with this area of Linux, so I’ve been spending time trying out the different options available to better understand their operation. What follows is a short description of how i took an existing Fedora 36 virtual machine and converted it to sd-boot with a unified kernel image.

        First of all, I’m assuming that the virtual machine has been installed using UEFI (EDK2’s OOVMF build) as the firmware, rather than legacy BIOS (aka SeaBIOS). This is not the default with virt-manager/virt-install, but an opt-in is possible at time of provisioning the guest. Similarly it is possible to opt-in to adding a virtual TPM to the guest, for the purpose of receiving boot measurements. Latest upstream code for virt-manager/virt-install will always add a vTPM if UEFI is requested.

      • Russell Coker ☛ DDC as a KVM Switch « etbe – Russell Coker

        With the recent resurgence in Covid19 I’ve been working from home a lot and using both my work laptop and personal PC on the same monitor. HDMI KVM switches start at $150 and I didn’t feel like buying one. So I wrote a script to change inputs on my monitor. The following script locks the session on the local machine and switches the monitor’s input to the other machine. I ran the command “ddcutil vcpinfo| grep Input” which shows that (on my monitor at least) 60 is the VCP for input. Then I ran the command “ddcutil getvcp 60” to get the current value and tried setting values sequentially to find the value for the other port.

      • Red Hat ☛ Secure Kubernetes certificates with cert-manager and Dekorate | Red Hat Developer

        Cert-manager is a cloud-native certificate management service for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. To configure cert-manager, you need to install several resources using custom resource definitions (CRDs). Depending on the issuer type and the certificate you need, creating these custom resources can become complex. This article introduces Dekorate as an easier way to generate the cert-manager custom resources. We will also provide an example Java application based on Spring Boot that uses the certificate generated by cert-manager.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Create Apache Virtual Host on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to create Apache Virtual Host on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The term “Virtual Hosting” refers to the hosting of many domains on a single server. The virtual hosting concept is used by companies to host multiple websites using a single machine. It can be achieved either by an ‘IP-based’ method or a ‘domain-name-based’ approach. In ‘IP-based’ hosting we have distinct IP addresses for each website. In the case of ‘name-based’ hosting, we have multiple names running on each IP address.

        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 set up Apache Virtual Host 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.

      • Install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Rocky Linux 9 – kifarunix.com

        Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install VirtualBox guest additions on Rocky Linux 9. We are installing the VirtualBox Guest additions on Rocky Linux 9 Desktop.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Set Up and Configure an NFS Server on Linux

        An NFS server allows multiple systems to share a file system deployed over a network. Here’s how you can install and set up an NFS server on Linux.

        Sun Microsystems’ NFS (Network File System) is an RPC-based distributed file system structure that allows networked devices to use servers running NFS over a network as their local drives.

        Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up and configuring an NFS server on a Linux machine.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Moodle with Nginx and Free Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

        Moodle is a free and open-source Learning Management System and CMS written in PHP. It allows tutors and instructors to create courses for their students and provides long-distance education and other online learning programs more accessible. This tutorial will show you how to install Moodle with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • H2S Media ☛ Install Emacs 27 text editor Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

        Learn the steps to install GNU Emacs 27 text editor on Ubuntu 22.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal.

        GNU Emacs is a programmable text editor suitable for development. Emacs make it easier to write source code through syntax highlighting and can be customized by the user. Help is available for the tool as well as support for multiple languages. GNU Emacs can also be used to create text documents based on LaTeX.

        Apart from that, it is a very comprehensive and platform-independent editor that is extensible by its own Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). Since its control is mainly based on keyboard shortcuts, it requires some training in order to be able to use all its possibilities intensively. Due to a high number of plugins, the editor can be used in almost all areas. For example, there are extensions for file management, email and news, IRC, compilations, web surfing, and much more.

      • H2S Media ☛ How to install Emacs 28 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

        Learn the steps to install GNU Emacs 28 text editor on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal.

        GNU Emacs is a programmable text editor suitable for development. Emacs make it easier to write source code through syntax highlighting and can be customized by the user. Help is available for the tool as well as support for multiple languages. GNU Emacs can also be used to create text documents based on LaTeX.

        Apart from that, it is a very comprehensive and platform-independent editor that is extensible by its own Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). Since its control is mainly based on keyboard shortcuts, it requires some training in order to be able to use all its possibilities intensively. Due to a high number of plugins, the editor can be used in almost all areas. For example, there are extensions for file management, email and news, IRC, compilations, web surfing, and much more.

      • Install Rocky Linux 9 on VirtualBox – kifarunix.com

        In this tutorial, you will learn on how to simply install Rocky Linux 9 on VirtualBox. With Rocky Linux 9 now being available, you might want to try it out and the best way out is through installing it as a virtual machine.

      • ByteXD ☛ EasyEngine: Install WordPress Automatically on Ubuntu 22.04

        EasyEngine is a free and open-source Linux command line tool for managing WordPress sites on Ubuntu and Debian servers. It enables you to deploy single or multisite WordPress installations with various configurations, such as caching, SSL with different configs, different WordPress versions, database configurations, different PHP versions, and more. You can check out the full configuration options for WordPress here.

        It’s a Python based tool that can be used to manage WordPress, MariaDB, Nginx, and PHP using the command line.

        EasyEngine can be installed on all Debian-based distributions.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install Latest Wine in Ubuntu Linux

        Wine is a nifty utility that allows users to run Windows applications and games inside a Linux environment. Wine 7.0 is finally out, and it ships with an array of numerous improvements and a total of 40 bug fixes.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Node.js on Rocky Linux 9

        Node.js is a versatile platform for building server-side applications. Built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, Node.js is fast and scalable. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Node.js is an ideal platform for building data-intensive real-time applications across distributed devices. With its wide range of features, Node.js provides developers with everything they need to build high-performance network applications. Node.js is also highly extensible as an open-source platform, making it easy to add new functionality as required. Whether you’re looking to build a simple API or a complex web application, Node.js is an excellent choice for your back-end development needs.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn various methods of installNode.js on Rocky Linux 9 desktop or server with three methods.

      • Its FOSS ☛ How to Uninstall Deb Packages in Ubuntu Linux

        Installing applications from a deb file is quite simple. You double click on it and it opens in the Software Center application and you install it from there.

        But what about uninstalling a .deb package in Ubuntu or Debian? How do you remove the package you installed some time back.

        While there are several ifs and buts around it, the simplest and most reliable way of deleting a deb file is by using the apt remove command.

      • TechRepublic ☛ How to install a Minecraft server on Ubuntu Server 22.04 [Ed: Jack Wallen, why are you promoting Microsoft proprietary stuff?]
      • Detailed Guide on how to Set Up SSH 2FA on Ubuntu Server 22.04 [Ed: This might be a plagiarism domain. Maybe not.]
      • H2S Media ☛ How to install Emacs 27 text editor Ubuntu 20.04 – Linux Shout

        Learn the steps to install GNU Emacs 27 on Ubuntu 22.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal. You can also install Emacs 28/26/25 versions as well.

        GNU Emacs is a programmable text editor suitable for development. Emacs makes it easier to write source code through syntax highlighting and can be customized by the user. Help is available for the tool as well as support for multiple languages. GNU Emacs can also be used to create text documents based on LaTeX.

        Apart from that, it is a very comprehensive and platform-independent editor that is extensible by its own Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). Since its control is mainly based on keyboard shortcuts, it requires some training in order to be able to use all its possibilities intensively. Due to a high number of plugins, the editor can be used in almost all areas. For example, there are extensions for file management, email and news, IRC, compilations, web surfing, and much more.

      • Hands-on installation of PipeWire – Bootlin’s blog

        Let’s jump right in! In the previous article, we went through a theoretical overview of PipeWire. Our goal will now be to install and configure a minimal Linux-based system that runs PipeWire in order to output audio to an ALSA sink. The hardware for this demo will be a SAMA5D3 Xplained board and a generic USB sound card (a Logitech USB Headset H340 in our case, as reported by /sys/bus/usb/devices/MAJOR-MINOR/product).

        We won’t bother with the bootloader setup (in our case U-Boot) as this is out of scope of our topic; if needed, Bootlin has training sessions for embedded Linux system development for which the training materials are freely available.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install PostgreSQL on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is an immensely popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Generally, it is used as the primary data store for many web, mobile, geospatial, and analytics applications. PostgreSQL can store structured and unstructured data in a single product. In addition, PostgreSQL is open source software, meaning it can be freely used, modified, and distributed.

        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 PostgreSQL on Rocky Linux. 9.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Linux essentials: How to create and delete files and directories | Enable Sysadmin

        Creating and deleting files and directories are standard operations for a sysadmin. Depending on your operating system and filesystem, there may be different ways to perform these tasks. The most efficient way is to use the shell (for instance, Bash). This article assumes you already understand how to enter commands into a Linux terminal. (Read Nathan Lager’s What sysadmins need to know about using Bash if you want a refresher.)

      • TechRepublic ☛ 5 tips for securing SSH on your Linux servers

        
        SSH is a tool I use every single day to log into remote Linux servers and take care of my admin tasks. Without SSH, my days would be more complicated and less secure. That doesn’t mean, however, that SSH is configured to your liking right out of the box. There are a few weaknesses in the default configuration and the way you’re probably using the tool.

        Let’s fix that.

        Here are my five most straightforward tips for securing SSH on your Linux machines. These tips shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to handle and, in the end, you’ll be glad you took the time to do so.

    • Games

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • MicroOS Desktop Use to Help with ALP Feedback – openSUSE News

        Participants from the openSUSE community working on the upcoming release of the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) encourage people to try openSUSE MicroOS Desktop to gain user perspectives on its applicability.

        Users are encouraged to try out MicroOS Desktop by installing it and using it on a laptop or workstation for a week or so. By doing this, users develop a frame of reference for how ALP can progress; the community wants to gain feedback about what users think about ALP’s usability, how it fits user workflows and more. The community would like to see critiques and evaluations that work for users. People are encouraged to send feedback to the ALP-community-wg mailing list.

        The temporary use of the MicroOS Desktop will help developers assess how to move forward with ALP’s Proof of Concept (PoC).

        Currently MicroOS Desktop has both GNOME and KDE’s Plasma as an option.

      • YaST Development Report – Chapter 5 of 2022 | YaST

        We have been a bit silent lately in this blog, but there are good reasons for it. As you know, the YaST Team is currently involved in many projects and that implies we had to constantly adapt the way we work. That left us little time for blogging. But now we have reached enough stability and we hope to recover a more predictable and regular cadence of publications.

        [...]

        As you know, SUSE is developing the next generation of the SUSE Linux family under the code-name ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform). If you are following the activity in that front, you also know several so-called work groups has been constituted to work on different areas.

        The YaST Team is deeply involved on two of those work groups, the ones named “1:1 System Management” and “Installation / Deployment”. You can read more details about the mission of each group and the technologies we are developing in the wiki page linked at the previous paragraph.

        Since this blog is a well-established communication channel with the (open)SUSE users, we decided we will use it to report the progress on all the projects related to those work groups. That goes beyond the scope of YaST itself and even beyond the scope of the YaST Team, since the mentioned work groups also include other SUSE and openSUSE colleages. But we are sure our readers will equally enjoy the content.

    • Fedora / Red Hat

      • FOSSLife ☛ Rocky Linux 9 and Rocky Linux 8 Optimized for Google Cloud Now Available

        Rocky Linux 9 has been released, featuring various security and performance updates as well as a new build system called Peridot.

        According to Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), with Rocky Linux 9, “CIQ has created a completely cloud-native build stack called Peridot, which we have given to the RESF and released as open source to the world.”

        The Peridot build system was used to build Rocky Linux 9 for the x86_64, aarch64, s390x and ppc64le architectures, says the announcement. “A primary goal in developing the new build system was assuring that new versions of Rocky can be released within one week after each Red Hat Enterprise Linux new version release.” And, says Kurtzer, “Peridot allows anyone to recreate, build, enhance and manage Rocky Linux as we do.”

      • Rocky Linux 9 Comes With New Security, Application And Networking Features – TFiR

        Rocky Linux 9, codenamed “Blue Onyx”, is here with a host of new security, application and networking features. The capability in version 9 taking center stage is the availability of all the build chain infrastructure tools that developers would need to pick up Rocky Linux to extend or reproduce the operating system, should they desire to do something independently of the community or any upstream supporting organization. As a result, Rocky Linux v9 delivers a supported enterprise Linux platform for the next decade.

      • Video ☛ How to install Rocky Linux 9.0 – Invidious

        In this video, I am going to show how to install Rocky Linux 9.0.

      • Enterprisers Project ☛ Digital transformation: 4 initiatives to start this week | The Enterprisers Project

        Most organizations struggle with digital transformation (DX) and never achieve it. An Everest Group study concluded that 73 percent of companies were unsuccessful at providing any value from their digital transformation process. Poor planning and employee resistance are the most common reasons for high failure rates.

        The pursuit of DX does not have to commence with large-scale initiatives; smaller projects can increase the likelihood of a successful kickoff. Short-term digital transformation efforts can have immediate effects on business and offer positive customer benefits.

      • Enterprisers Project ☛ 3 infrastructure principles every IT leader should follow | The Enterprisers Project

        In my experience building and training cross-functional teams, I’ve identified three main principles that apply to both engineering and IT. These principles should be taught to all new hires and adopted by IT leaders everywhere.

      • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Explorer Day – Panamá! – Fedora Community Blog

        The Fedora Community in Panama recently celebrated the release of Fedora Linux 36. Our last in-person event was back in December 2019. Thank you to all the organizers, participants, and attendees who made the Fedora Explorer Day 36 event possible.

        We had six sessions in total, four in person and two online sessions with friends from Mexico and Venezuela, with the addition of an hour of Fedora networking on YouTube and Twitch.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX Software ☛ Nano-U12P – An 8K digital signage player powered by an Intel Alder Lake processor – CNX Software

        Alder Lake processors were first formally announced at the end of 2021 with the most powerful H-Series, followed by a range of Alder Lake Edge IoT processors, and in February, Intel officially launched Alder Lake P-Series and U-Series mobile hybrid processors which I had expected to find in several mini PCs by now.

        But apart from ASRock iBOX 1200 Series announcement, and leaks of the NUC 12 Studio Pro, I had not really seen any. But today, I found what looks like a mini PC with the Polywell Nano-U12P, but it’s instead marketed as an 8K digital signage player with a choice of Alder Lake P-series and U-series processors.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Arduino ☛ Touch-sensitive steering for a RatCar | Arduino Blog

        Bears on tricycles aside, animals are not very good at piloting vehicles. But maybe that is because we haven’t given them controls that suit their thumbless bodies. If a vehicle had controls adapted to a particular animal’s anatomy, could they drive? Back in 2019, researchers at the University of Richmond found that rats could. Inspired by that study, this Instructables user built their own RatCar with touch-sensitive steering.

        This RatCar relies on classic behavioral principles established by B.F. Skinner throughout the mid-20th century. Through positive reinforcement, many animals can learn to perform simple tasks. In the case of the RatCar, the tasks are touching one of three touch-sensitive copper meshes that cause the vehicle to move forward, turn right, or turn left. A rat can learn to operate the vehicle through reinforcement training as they receive treats for their actions.

      • Arduino ☛ Get connected to your Nano with the Screw Terminal Adapter

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Google ☛ Cirq Turns 1.0 | Google Open Source Blog

      Today we are excited to announce the first full version release of the open source quantum programming framework Cirq: Cirq 1.0. Cirq is a Python framework for writing, running, and analyzing the results of quantum computer programs. It was designed for near-term quantum computers, those with a few hundred qubits and few thousands of quantum gates. The significance of the 1.0 release is that Cirq has support for the vast majority of workflows for these systems and is considered to be a stable API that we will only update with breaking changes at major version numbers.

    • Paul Schaub ☛ Creating a Web-of-Trust Implementation: Certify Keys with PGPainless – vanitasvitae’s blog

      Currently I am working on a Web-of-Trust implementation for the OpenPGP library PGPainless. This work will be funded by the awesome NLnet foundation through NGI Assure. Check them out! NGI Assure is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft tweaks Store policy for open source once again [Ed: Not because Microsoft has changes, only due to massive blowback]

      There was some backpedaling from Microsoft overnight as the company tweaked its Store policy to allow the sale of open-source apps that are otherwise available for free.

      The news was delivered by Giorgio Sardo, general manager of the Microsoft Store, that the policy changes have undergone some substantial rewording. Gone is the reference to open-source and free software in section 10.8.7 and, as if to emphasize Microsoft’s actual intentions, a link to Microsoft’s online infringement reporting form was added in section 11.2.

    • syslog-ng Store Box SQL source – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

      The syslog-ng Store Box (SSB) is an appliance built on syslog-ng Premium Edition (PE). SSB inherits most of syslog-ng PE’s features and makes them available with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. One of these features is the SQL source. Many applications log their messages to SQL databases. The SQL source of syslog-ng PE and SSB allows you to collect these log messages in real-time and process and store them with the rest of your logs.

      The syslog-ng Store Box appliance can collect log messages from many different log sources and in many formats. These include UNIX / Linux / Windows system logs, firewall and router logs, various application logs, and now also SQL sources. SSB can parse, rewrite, filter and store log messages. In addition to the traditional syslog-ng features, the SSB appliance provides an interface to search log messages, and does complete log life cycle management, including archival and backup. Finally, it can also forward events to various on-prem and cloud destinations. It allows you to optimize your SIEM installations both for resources and licensing, as you can collect log messages only once, store them on SSB, and only forward a reduced subset of logs to various analytics tools.

    • GSM Arena ☛ Huawei to introduce HarmonyOS 3.0 on July 27 – GSMArena.com news

      Huawei will launch HarmonyOS 3.0 on July 27, the company revealed on Weibo. A post on the Chinese social media said “the future” and the “evolution” of Huawei is coming next Wednesday, and the event is scheduled for 19:30 local time.

      Minutes later, the company tweeted that a new Smart Office launch party is taking place on the very same day at the very same time, revealing the announcement is not just a local event, it is a big deal for the brand across the world.

    • GNU Projects

      • LWN ☛ Tom Lord RIP

        From Berkeley comes the sad news of the passing of Tom Lord, a longtime free-software developer and the original author of GNU arch. He will be missed.

        [...]

        I worked a bit with Tom on GNU Arch, back in the day. He was a great mind, precise and dedicated. He was always supporting and caring with contributors.

        If we have distributed version control systems such as Bazaar (first) and git (later), we owe it in no small part to him.

        Rest in peace Tom, I will miss you.

      • Thomas Lord

        In 1995 he first moved to Berkeley and began spending time in People’s Park, a place and a society that held great meaning for him.

        He returned to Pittsburgh PA in 1998, then came back to the Bay Area in 2001 and relocated permanently to Berkeley in 2004.

        In 2007 he married Trina Pundurs, his life partner since 1992.

        Upon settling in Berkeley, he began engaging with city politics and policymaking. His interest led him to contribute to the Berkeley Daily Planet, and his work with Planet editor Becky O’Malley drew him further into city and regional issues, especially housing, displacement, and homelessness. In 2016 he was appointed by then-Councilmember Cheryl Davila to serve on the City Housing Advisory Commission.

        In 2018 he was profoundly moved by a news report about scientists weeping in the aisles at COP 24, where the IPCC presented its Special Report on the impact of global warming of 1.5° C (“IPCC SR15”). Upon studying SR15, and following the work of Greta Thunberg, he became a tireless advocate of speaking the truth about the climate emergency and treating it as an actual emergency.

        In addition to his climate and housing activism, he spent several years volunteering with students at Longfellow Middle School as part of the Writer Coach Connection program.

        He died unexpectedly this week of a massive brain hemorrhage.

    • Programming/Development

      • JS

        • TecAdmin ☛ How to Generate Random String In JavaScript – TecAdmin

          Random strings are used for various purposes in software development. For example, they can be used to code user IDs, generate passwords, and construct tokens in applications. If you’re developing a JavaScript-based program that needs random strings — or any other type of pseudo-random data — then this article is for you! You see, generating random characters (or strings) is easy with the right tools and techniques. Luckily, this article covers exactly that. Let’s get started…

      • Rust

        • Rust Blog ☛ Announcing Rust 1.62.1 | Rust Blog

          The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.62.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

  • Leftovers

    • Privatisation/Privateering

    • Security

      • LWN ☛ Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Fedora (buildah), SUSE (dovecot23 and nodejs12), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz, libhttp-daemon-perl, tiff, and webkit2gtk).

      • USCERT ☛ CISA released Security Advisory on MiCODUS MV720 Global Positioning System (GPS) Tracker

        CISA has released an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) detailing six vulnerabilities that were discovered in MiCODUS MV720 Global Positioning System Tracker. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote actor to exploit access and gain control the global positioning system tracker. These vulnerabilities could impact access to a vehicle fuel supply, vehicle control, or allow locational surveillance of vehicles in which the device is installed.

      • CISA ☛ MiCODUS MV720 GPS tracker | CISA

        This advisory contains mitigations for Use of Hard-coded Credentials, Improper Authentication, Cross-site Scripting, and Authorization Bypass Through User-controlled Key vulnerabilities in the MiCODUS MV720 GPS tracker.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Urges Committee To Support American Data Privacy and Protection Act – Public Knowledge

        Last night, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced a markup for the “American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” a bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced by Frank Pallone, Jr., (D-NJ), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) to establish a national standard to protect consumer data privacy.

        As written, the bill would impose restrictions on how businesses (and not just Facebook or Google) can collect, use, and share consumer data, as well as allow for federal, state, and individual enforcement to protect consumers’ rights. Public Knowledge urges the committee to report this bill favorably to the House for a floor vote.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Public Domain Review ☛ Visualising Bubbles (1500–1922) – The Public Domain Review

          Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art.

          We have entered the dog days of July in the Northern Hemisphere, with a heat wave bringing Europe to a rolling boil, and thoughts of sea, shade, or cooler climes to many people’s minds. Writing of a shadowed garden, Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (in Stephen Kessler’s translation) captures the lethargy of this weather and the pleasures of relief: how the summer atmosphere can feel “light, afloat; the world turning slowly, like a soap bubble, delicate, iridescent, unreal”. While soap froth has existed since at least the time of Mesopotamia, the fragility, iridescence, and impermanence that Cernuda describes started to bubble into the West’s visual imagination during the sixteenth century. Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the artist’s eye.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Technical

      • How to use Docker from a Linux host system to escalate to root

        It’s often said Docker is not very good with regard to security, let me illustrate a simple way to get root access to your Linux system through a docker container. This may be useful for people who would have docker available to their user, but whose company doesn’t give them root access.

        This is not a Docker vulnerability being exploited, just plain Docker by design. It is not a way to become root from *within* the container, you need to be able to run docker on the host system.

        If you use this to break against your employer internal rules, this is your problem, not mine. I do write this to raise awareness about why Docker for systems users could be dangerous.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 19/07/2022: Microsoft is Offline Again

Posted in News Roundup at 9:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ 6 Best Free and Open Source C++ Static Site Generators

        
        LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.

        While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.

        There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.

      • Linux Links ☛ 14 Best Free and Open Source Linux System Monitoring Tools

        
        These types of systems gather data relating to CPU, memory, network, disk utilization, response time of network services, and much more.

        To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 Linux system monitoring tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to monitor a specific service or situation.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Event-driven architecture explained in a coloring book

        “Explain it to me like I’m five.”

        When you want someone to get to the point as efficiently and as clearly as possible, that’s what you say. Following that logic, you might be compelled to ponder the most powerful tool the average, everyday 5-year old wields: coloring books. What better way than a coloring book to transform a droll slideshow presentation into a fun and educational journey?

        That’s what artists Máirín Duffy and Madeline Peck thought, anyway, and it has turned out to be accurate. In the past, Máirín has helped produce five open source coloring books to help explain advanced topics including SELinux, Containers, Ansible, and more. It’s a fun and easy way to learn about emerging technology, and you can either color your lessons yourself or hand it over to a resident specialist (an actual 5-year old) for project completion.

        The latest coloring book in the series is all about event driven architecture (EDA). As with all the previous coloring books, this one’s not only free to download, but it’s also open source. You can download the sources and assemble it yourself, or learn from the files so you can build your own about topics important to you.

    • Games

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • South Africa ☛ Asahi Linux runs on Apple M2 machines

      The team behind Asahi Linux have announced that the distribution runs on the M1 Ultra and Mac Studio without needing a virtual machine.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Hackaday ☛ Ortur Laser Will Go Open-Source

      Well, that was fast! Last week, we wrote about a video by [Norbert Heinz] where he called out the Ortur laser engravers for apparently using the GPL-licensed grbl firmware without providing the source code and their modifications to it, as required by the license. Because open source and grbl are dear to our hearts and CNC machines, we wrote again about Norbert’s efforts over the weekend, speculating that it might just be unfamiliarity with the open source license requirements on Ortur’s part.

    • Events

      • Unicorn Media ☛ SCaLE Returns to Celebrate Its 20th Birthday July 28-31

        This year SCALE, the community-focused Southern California Linux Expo, is back — live and in-person — on July 28-31. The lineup is great, and will include a closing keynote address by Vint Cerf, who’s regarded as one of the “fathers’ of the internet.”

    • Programming/Development

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Code your first React UI app

        Who wants to create their first UI app? I do, and if you’re reading this article, I assume you do, too. In today’s example, I’ll use some JavaScript and the API with Express I demonstrated in my previous article. First, let me explain some of the tech you’re about to use.

      • Python

        • OpenSource.com ☛ Turn your Python script into a command-line application

          I’ve written, used, and seen a lot of loose scripts in my career. They start with someone that needs to semi-automate some task. After a while, they grow. They can change hands many times in their lifetime. I’ve often wished for a more command-line tool-like feeling in those scripts. But how hard is it really to bump the quality level from a one-off script to a proper tool? It turns out it’s not that hard in Python.

  • Leftovers

    • Quillette ☛ Cognitive Distortions

      Damaging as they may be, hoaxes by individual pranksters are usually removed from Wikipedia as soon as they are discovered. Something far more potentially harmful, both to Wikipedia and to public knowledge as a whole, is when several users work together across multiple Wikipedia articles to discredit a body of scientific research, and do not allow their misrepresentations to be corrected by any of the site’s other users. This is what has occurred over the past two years on Wikipedia’s articles related to human intelligence.

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Shallow End

      The bottom now is actually miles below our feet, in water so deep it looks dark at noon. This thought is so frightening we push it aside when it comes up.

      We’ve stupidly drifted out to sea, far away from the pool of American mythology, taking undue comfort in the belief we could get right back to it in the next election if only we all get out the vote.

    • Techdirt ☛ The Metaverse Could Change The World, If We Could Stop Getting In Its Way

      Beyond the overproduced marketing videos and janky product prototypes closely associated today with “the metaverse” lies a bright and boundless future. In a pandemic-stricken world that imposes more and stronger barriers at every turn—whether they be medical, social, legal, economic, or geopolitical—there is magic in transposing the spirit of a global free and open internet into a more immersive technological utopia. But many obstacles stand in the way of that dream, including the companies trying to build it and the governments who will regulate it.

    • Pro Publica ☛ Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe Explains His Craft

      In the years since his byline first appeared in The New Yorker in 2006, Patrick Radden Keefe has become known for his revealing portraits of powerful people who refuse to speak to him. It is a testament to Keefe’s prowess that his subjects end up feeling more lifelike in his stories — more brazen, vulnerable, even sympathetic — than they do in their own memoirs and authorized biographies. This might explain why El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord and the focus of two of Keefe’s articles, wanted him to ghostwrite a book about his life — an assignment that Keefe politely declined.

      Keefe’s recent output has cemented his reputation as one of the most popular and thrilling journalists at work today. In 2018, he published “Say Nothing,” a rigorously psychological account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A bestseller, it was followed by the hit podcast “Wind of Change,” a picaresque tour of the Cold War’s cultural front, and last year’s “Empire of Pain,” a meticulous investigation of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis.

    • Education

      • Internet Archive ☛ Internet Archive Seeks Summary Judgment in Federal Lawsuit Filed By Publishing Companies

        The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Durie Tangri LLP, explains that our Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world.

        The brief explains how the Internet Archive is advancing the purposes of copyright law by furthering public access to knowledge and facilitating the creation of new creative and scholarly works. The Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.

      • Raspberry Pi ☛ How to create great educational video content for computing and beyond

        Over the past five years, we’ve made lots of online educational video content for our online courses, for our Isaac Computer Science platform for GCSE and A level, and for our remote lessons based on our Teach Computing Curriculum hosted on Oak National Academy.

      • TruthOut ☛ Students Like Me Can Target School Boards to Get Police Out of Schools
      • Scheerpost ☛ Will Our Children Be Able to Read?

        The sharp attack on education during this past decade forces us to consider the kind of future that young people will inherit, writes Vijay Prashad.

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Quick Hack: The Phone To Stream Deck Conversion

        What do you do with those old Android or iPhone phones and tablets? You have plenty of options, but it is pretty easy to build your own stream deck with a little off-the-shelf software. What’s a stream deck, you ask? The name comes from its use as a controller for a live-streaming setup, but essentially, it’s an LCD touchscreen that can trigger things on your computer.

      • Hackaday ☛ How To Become A Lego Submariner

        A submarine is by necessity a complex and safety-critical machine, but the principle upon which it depends is quite simple. The buoyancy is variable by means of pumping water in and out of tanks, allowing the craft to control the depth at which it sits. The [Brick Experiment Channel] has a series of posts describing in detail the construction of a working submarine, with a hull made from a plastic tube and mechanics made from Lego.

      • Hackaday ☛ Modular Z80 Really Racks Up The Retrocomputer Cred

        Very few retrocomputing projects are anything other than a labor of love. There’s really no practical reason to build a computer that is woefully inadequate for just about any task compared to even an entry-level PC today. But the lack of a practical reason to do something rarely stops a hacker, as with this nifty modular Z80-based rack computer.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Pseudo-Open Source

      • Openwashing

        • AIM ☛ Is Microsoft’s VS Code really open source?

          As stated, Microsoft follows an open-core model for VS code. Therefore, developers who want access to the full open source code that is MIT licensed will have to download the code from the repository and then build the VS code on their own.

          The task is cumbersome for most users. This is where VS Codium comes into play. VS Codium is fully open-source software binaries of VS Code licensed under the MIT license. With VS Codium, developers do not need to download and build from the source. Instead, the VS Codium team builds VS Code from the source repository and uploads the binaries to GitHub. “VS Codium is a clone of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. This project’s sole aim is to provide you with ready-to-use binaries without Microsoft’s telemetry code,” mentioned Abhishek Prakash, creator of It’s FOSS (a web portal focused on open source), in a blog.

    • Security

      • Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft investigates ongoing Exchange Online, Outlook outage

        Microsoft is investigating an ongoing outage impacting Microsoft 365 services after customers have reported experiencing issues while trying to sign into, access, and receive emails on the outlook.com portal and via Exchange Online.

      • TechRadar ☛ Microsoft Patch Tuesday update has broken another really important software

        It seems some updates that came as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday (opens in new tab) broke MS Access runtime applications. Multiple users have reported having this issue to Microsoft, saying MS Access 2016 (opens in new tab) and MS Access 2013 are having issues, post KB5002112 and KB5002121 updates.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’

        For the past seven years, an online service known as 911 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, allowing customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe — but predominantly in the United States. 911 says its network is made up entirely of users who voluntarily install its “free VPN” software. But new research shows the proxy service has a long history of purchasing installations via shady “pay-per-install” affiliate marketing schemes, some of which 911 operated on its own.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Rolling Stone ☛ ICE Is Buying Up Massive Troves of Cell Phone Location Data… For Some Reason

          The Department of Homeland Security is purchasing cell phone location data on a massive scale, according to documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

          Per the documents, hundreds of thousands of location points across North America have been attained by DHS. Purchasing the information from private businesses would help circumvent legal requirements to obtain a warrant.

        • The Hill ☛ Growing support for political violence raises alarms

          The chilling incident is among a series of violent threats recently that have targeted political figures and comes amid a shifting landscape in which the share of partisans who think violence is sometimes justified to achieve political ends has grown significantly.

        • Salon ☛ Joe Walsh’s MAGA warning: If Trump is indicted, expect “major violence”

          As the country becomes more racially diverse, younger, forward thinking and pluralistic, the American right wing is attempting to force the country back to the 19th century and the Gilded Age. Such moves are generally unpopular with the American people en masse. The Republican Party and the larger right wing movement dismiss such protests because they reject the basic principle of a true “We the People” democracy and are earnestly working to create a herrenvolk, apartheid, plutocratic, Christian fascist new America that will be ruled by a small number of white men and their allies.

          As seen on Jan. 6 with Trump’s coup attempt and the terrorist attack on the Capitol by his followers, such political violence will become the norm as the Republican-fascists expand and consolidate their power and target the Democratic Party (and liberals and progressives more generally) as illegitimate.

        • EFF ☛ EFF and Partners Urge the Indian Government to Keep End-to-End Encryption Alive

          End-to-end encryption is vital for private and secure communications. And while the Indian Supreme Court introduced a necessity and proportionality test when it recognized that the right to privacy as a fundamental right, the traceability requirement, in fact, is a disproportionate measure: it breaks encryption; threatens freedom of speech, privacy and national security of Indian people and businesses. Therefore, it is imperative to withdraw the traceability requirements under the Indian 2021 IT Rules. 

          The full text of the letter and list of signatories are below. 

        • Techdirt ☛ Ring: Cops Can Still Obtain Recordings Without Warrants Or User Consent

          Welcome back to the negative news cycle, Ring! It’s been awhile.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Counter Punch ☛ Can the System Be Saved?

        Now, those hearings are offering the country (and the Justice Department) what could be a last chance to begin restoring the kind of governance that once underlay a functioning democracy. There is, however, a deeply worrisome trend lurking just under this moment’s attempt to garner accountability — namely, the way loyalty to institutional Washington (even outside the law) perpetuates a flight from accountability that’s become a crucial part of American political life.

        So far, the January 6th hearings have inspired a cascade of takeaways. With each televised session, new evidence about the acts of Donald Trump and crew have come to light, among them that the former president was all too tight with the far right and that he knew the crowd approaching the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was armed and dangerous. So, too, those watching have learned about witness tampering and also the lengths White House lawyers and others went to in trying to restrain the former president’s engagement with the January 6th rioters. Overall, many Americans (though not so many Republicans) have learned that January 6th was part of a far larger Trumpian effort to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election, no matter the facts or the law.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The State of US ‘Democracy’ Is Grim. Can It Be Saved?

        Well before the House select committee’s January 6th investigation began, trust in the classic American system of checks and balances as reliable protection against executive (or, more recently, Supreme Court) abuses of power had already fallen into a state of disgrace. A domestically shackled Biden presidency, a Congress unable to act, and a Supreme Court that seems ever more like an autocratic governing body has left American “democracy” looking grim indeed.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Don’t Normalize Trump’s Enablers

        The historic House Select Committee’s hearings on the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, are a necessary undertaking for the health of our democracy. The fact that most of the witnesses are Republican—and many are former members of Donald Trump’s own inner circle—greatly bolsters the committee’s credibility. In our hyper-partisan reality, this fact can also lead to a temptation to hail the witnesses as courageous, honorable figures putting their consciences above ideology.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Night Raids and Executions: the SAS in Afghanistan

        A senior officer who worked at UK Special Forces headquarters told the BBC there was “real concern” over the squadron’s reports.

        “Too many people were being killed on night raids and the explanations didn’t make sense,” he said. “Once somebody is detained, they shouldn’t end up dead. For it to happen over and over again was causing alarm at HQ. It was clear at the time that something was wrong.”

      • Counter Punch ☛ An Iron Curtain is Descending on America and We Were Warned

        “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

        “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” [Note: the numbers are from 1953 and are more unfair today.]

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The House Military Spending Bill Is a Massive Giveaway to the Weapons Industry

        On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy goals and recommends a number for total Pentagon spending. The final version of the bill will be determined later this year.

      • TruthOut ☛ The Coup Allegations Against the Secret Service Are Astonishing
      • TruthOut ☛ Steve Bannon’s Contempt of Congress Trial Formally Began Today
      • The Nation ☛ Threading Violence
      • Meduza ☛ Deceased Russian soldier’s family uses compensation payment to buy new car ‘in his memory’ — Meduza

        On July 17, the state-owned television channel Russia-1 ran a story about Staff Sergeant Alexey Malov, a tank commander who died on the third day of the war in Ukraine. According to the report, Malov’s relatives have already spent the compensation money they received from the government for his death. “In memory of our son,” Malov’s father told reporters, the family bought “a brand new car.”

      • Meduza ☛ Fear and hardship in the Donbas After years of frozen conflict, Donetsk residents describe life under constant shelling — Meduza

        Before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the intensity of the hostilities in the Donbas had been declining steadily since 2014. In 2021, the United Nations recorded 36 civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine, most of which were caused by landmines and the mishandling of unexploded ordinances. Since mid-June 2022, however, regular explosions have plagued the city of Donetsk. Ukraine has either refrained from commenting on the blasts or reported the destruction of Russian ammunition depots in the region. In response, the authorities in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Moscow have accused Ukrainian forces of deliberately targeting civilians. (Meanwhile, Russia’s constant attacks on civilian areas across Ukraine have claimed thousands of lives). For insight into what everyday life is like in wartime Donetsk, Meduza turned to local residents.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘I have no moral right to joke about Ukraine’ Standup comic Denis Chuzhoy discusses threats, emigration, and how war shattered Russian comedy — Meduza

        Standup comic Denis Chuzhoy denounced the war against Ukraine on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In return for speaking out, he started receiving death threats on the phone, and audience members at a show in Vologda approached the stage and presented him with a funeral wreath. Chuzhoy left the country more than two months ago, but he’s returned to Russia several times for performances that he scheduled before February, donating part of the proceeds to charities helping Ukrainian refugees. Meduza spoke to him about threats, emigration, and what kind of career in comedy is even possible today for Russians.

    • Environment

      • The Economist ☛ The danger posed by heatwaves deserves to be taken more seriously

        Heatwaves may generate headlines, but less attention is paid to them than they deserve. In 2018 roughly 300,000 people over the age of 65 died as a result of extreme heat, mainly in India and China, a 54% increase since 2000, according to a report in the Lancet, a medical journal. Unlike storms and floods, heat does not lead to dramatic before-and-after pictures or widespread damage to property. It is a silent killer, its victims often apparent only in retrospect, as statisticians tot up excess deaths and hospital admissions. (The fact that as many as 70,000 people died as a result of a heatwave in Europe in 2003, for example, became apparent only in 2008.) Heat also kills by exacerbating conditions such as heart problems, so not all the deaths it causes may be directly attributed to it.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Greenland Threatens

        Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible.

        Stating the obvious, it’s horrible news.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Biden Considers Declaring Climate Emergency Amid ‘Heat Apocalypse’

        With large swaths of the planet currently in the grips of hellish, record-shattering heatwaves and devastating wildfires, U.S. President Joe Biden is reportedly considering declaring a national climate emergency this week as a senator with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry continues to obstruct much-needed renewable energy spending.

        Biden’s plans for a possible emergency declaration, first reported late Monday by the Washington Post, come as the White House is facing mounting pressure to take unilateral climate action as its agenda remains stalled in the upper chamber of Congress, hampering U.S. efforts to rein in planet-warming carbon emissions as temperatures soar worldwide.

      • TruthOut ☛ Bill McKibben: “Appalling” European Heat Wave Demands Massive Climate Action
      • Democracy Now ☛ Bill McKibben: Record Heat Wave in Europe Is Latest Warning That Action on Climate Can’t Wait

        A scorching heat wave continues to fuel wildfires across southern Europe and parts of North Africa, resulting in hundreds of heat-related deaths and forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. The record-breaking temperatures come as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has effectively killed President Biden’s Build Back Better climate legislation after stringing Biden along for 18 months. “It’s appalling, but it’s not unexpected. It’s why we have to keep building movements bigger,” says Bill McKibben, climate author, educator, environmentalist and founder of the organizations Third Act and 350.org.

      • Energy

        • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Collective Action or Collective Suicide’: UN Chief Pleads for Real Climate Response

          Governments can either come up with a collaborative and urgent plan to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency that is already wreaking deadly havoc across the globe or keep allowing corporations to pollute the atmosphere without limit, thereby condemning humanity to a grim future.

          That stark warning comes from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who said Monday: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide.”

        • Counter Punch ☛ Nuclear Power is Racist, Sexist and Ageist: So Why Do Some Progressives Support It?

          Nuclear power is all three of these things, yet Booker, Whitehouse and a number of others on the Democratic left, support nuclear power with almost fervent evangelism.

          Let’s start with racism. The fuel for nuclear power plants comes from uranium, which must be mined. The majority of those who have mined it in this country — and would again under new bills such as the ‘International Nuclear Energy Act of 2022’ forwarded by not-so-progressive “Democrat”, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) — are Native Americans.

      • Wildlife/Nature

      • Overpopulation

        • Mexico News Daily ☛ Water situation is critical in 4 states: Conagua

          Related to the La Niña climate pattern, the lack of rainfall is also reflected by the scarcity of water in dams. The newspaper El País reported Monday that Mexico’s 210 main dams are only 45% full on average, a level that is 10% lower than normal. Some dams are completely dry or close to it.

        • Los Angeles Times ☛ Tracking the California drought

          Since 2000, the U.S West. has grown warmer and drier. Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that the region has plunged deeper into extreme drought over the past several years. Scientists have increasingly said the West is experiencing “aridification” driven by human-caused climate change, and they have called for the region to prepare for drier conditions in the long term as temperatures continue to rise.

        • Bloomberg ☛ California’s Idle Crop Land May Double as Water Crisis Deepens

          California’s historic drought may leave the state with the largest amount of empty farmland in recent memory as farmers face unprecedented cuts to crucial water supplies.

        • ABC ☛ Texas residents asked to ‘immediately’ conserve water amid drought, extreme heat

          The utility company, which serves about 2 million people in northern Texas, including the city of Plano and North Dallas County, was forced to cease water production at one of its four treatment plants unexpectedly on Saturday to perform critical maintenance “to return the plant back to full water purification capacity,” according to the alert.

        • NPR ☛ Arizona cities respond to the worst drought in over a thousand years with a new plan

          The Colorado River supplies water to about 40 million people across the southwest, but it is facing catastrophically dry conditions. The last two decades have been the driest in 1,200 years. At least six cities in Arizona, including Phoenix, have now declared water shortages. But as Katherine Davis-Young at member station KJZZ reports, one of the first to start cutting back was Scottsdale.

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Computer World ☛ Why Tim Cook is concerned about coding skills

        Demand and supply. In theory, when demand increases, supply emerges to meet it. Except it doesn’t always work out that way and as the world gets more digitized, the need for coders is growing faster than the world can keep up.

      • The Hill ☛ CISA announces launch of London bureau

        The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced on Monday that it will open its first attaché office in London later this month.

        The London bureau will serve as a focal point for international collaboration between U.S. and U.K. government officials, the agency said. It will also help advance CISA’s objectives in cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection and emergency communications.

      • TruthOut ☛ Sanders Denounces Manchin for “Intentionally Sabotaging” Democratic Agenda
      • TruthOut ☛ Omar Calls for Manchin to Be Removed From Role as Chair of Energy Committee
      • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Rips Manchin: He ‘Represents the Very Wealthiest People in This Country’

        Sen. Bernie Sanders lambasted fellow Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday for sinking the Democratic Party’s latest effort to pass renewable energy funding, accusing the West Virginia Democrat of acting on behalf of his corporate and billionaire donors instead of the working class of his home state.

        Rejecting the notion that Manchin “abruptly pulled the plug” on the majority party’s revived push for a scaled-back reconciliation package ahead of the November midterms, Sanders told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that there was “nothing new” about the West Virginia senator’s move last week, when he reportedly told the Democratic leadership that he wouldn’t support new climate spending or taxes on the wealthy.

      • Common Dreams ☛ After Visit, Palestinians Say Biden Presidency Is ‘Like the Trump Years With a Smile’

        Palestinians offered a dour assessment of U.S. President Joe Biden’s policy agenda and track record thus far in the wake of his brief visit to Israeli-occupied territory last week, with one official describing the administration as “like the Trump years with a smile.”

        Biden’s trips to East Jerusalem and Bethlehem on Friday were met with protests from rights groups and ordinary Palestinians who decried the administration’s refusal to break substantively from its predecessors and condemn Israel’s deadly military aggression and unlawful occupation of Palestinian land.

      • Scheerpost ☛ After Visit, Palestinians Say Biden Presidency Is ‘Like the Trump Years With a Smile’

        “There must immediately be a settlement freeze, in accordance with international law and resolutions to preserve the right of the Palestinian people to their independent state,” said on…

      • Democracy Now ☛ Bill McKibben: Egypt U.N. Climate Summit Must Demand Freedom for Jailed Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah

        We speak with climate author and activist Bill McKibben, who is pushing for the climate movement to demand the release of Egyptian prisoner and human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah ahead of the next U.N. climate conference, which will be hosted in Egypt. McKibben says releasing El-Fattah to the U.K., which has agreed to house him, would be “the easiest of gestures” by Egypt, whose authoritarian leader met Saturday with President Biden. “The spread of authoritarian governments around the world is one of the things that’s making it difficult to deal with the existential challenge that climate change [presents],” says McKibben.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Biden Fails to Hold Saudi Arabia Accountable for Khashoggi Murder. Now UAE Arrests His Lawyer.

        President Biden met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Friday, as the Saudis agreed to increase oil production as well as open their airspace to Israeli commercial flights. Biden says he told the crown prince he held him responsible for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a U.S. resident, though Biden’s claims were later contradicted by a top Saudi official. We speak with Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, who says Biden’s friendly fist bump with the crown prince will become the “legacy of President Biden as a man who broke his promises” on holding Saudi Arabia accountable and sends a troubling message to other wealthy oil-producing countries. Whitson also calls for the UAE to give civil rights lawyer Asim Ghafoor, who represented Khashoggi, “due process” after he was detained by officials while traveling through Dubai’s airport and sentenced to three years in prison for fraud charges he denies.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Rise and Fall of the Megamachine

        That is the case Fabian Scheidler makes in his recent work, The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization. He begins by looking back to the first military-industrial complex, when around five to six thousand years ago in the Middle East humanity learned to make bronze by smelting copper and tin with wood-stoked fires. Before that time, human settlements evidenced relative equality in terms of dwellings, food and burial rites. Then the hardness of bronze made possible weapons and armor that allowed rulers and empires to emerge. Temples and palaces appeared. Some people ate better than others, and had more elaborate burial rites.

        Rulers forced farmers to pay taxes in the form of grain, accumulating the currency of food in temples, controlling distribution. Around 2500 BC came the first evidence of land ownership in the early empire of Sumer. Writing and the first legal codes came about to record and enforce tax obligations and property ownership. With failure to pay taxes and debts came enslavement. Around this time also came the first religions with a singular, dominating god.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Lula’s Next Visit to Pernambuco

        Lula in Pernambuco is a movie that never stops playing. It is the cinema of Recife, where the people enter the screen and participate in the action. But what films, what epics of political love awaken and pass their presence among us? Do we see Os Companheiros or Eles não usam black-tie? If so, the film would be more related to the story of the worker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But I think Lula’s film, which keeps on playing in these dark times, is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. And why is that? In the film, Chaplin gives a speech of hope, which projects the end of fascism to crowds who are in anguish and despair:

        The Great Dictator may be the movie, because the above words are worthy of Lula and of these hours. But first, in greeting the future president, what collective chant could be sung by the crowd? For the people of Recife, it could and will be a frevo, or frevos. But by whom, Capiba or Nelson Ferreira?

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Parliament passes proposal which recommends dismantling the EP in its current form
      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Serbia purchased 250 million euros worth of gas from Hungary
      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Protesters spot and question government’s Communications Commissioner

        At one point during this morning’s demonstrations in Budapest, the police was blocking the way of a few hundred demonstrators at the House of Representatives without justification, citing security reasons, and started to stop pedestrians in the area of the nearby Olympic Park. At the same time István Hollik, the Government’s Commissioner for Communication made his way on foot to the parliamentary session starting at 13:00. In the end, he almost had to make a run for it and needed a rather large police escort, although people only wanted to consult him about the new tax law.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ President Novák signs new tax law

        The President of Hungary, Katalin Novák has signed the amended tax law, thus it is final: beginning in September, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who have been using this form of paying their taxes will be forced to change to another tax category or give up their business altogether. Earlier, both MSZP and Jobbik had asked Novák to send the bill back to parliament, but she did not exercise this right.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Historic Day’ as Staff of 8 House Democrats File for Union Elections

        Staffers of eight Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday took a key step toward unionizing by filing petitions for representation at the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights.

        “We are bringing worker power and equitable conditions to one of the most powerful institutions in the world.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Great Crisis of the 21st Century: Hijacked Democracies, Propaganda, and Rebellions

        Professor Walter Scheidel, in his book The Great Leveler, showed, more than convincingly, that from prehistory to the present day, all the socioeconomic systems known to humanity tended towards inequality and ended in global catastrophes. The first is quite obvious and we are seeing it today: those who have financial and economic power have inflamed political power, which produces a snowball effect. The rich and their corporations are the big donors to the political parties and then write the laws at their convenience. In 1971, a classic of political comics, The Wizard of Id summed it up best: “The golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules.”

      • Counter Punch ☛ White Supremacists Want ‘Their’ Country Back

        One thing I notice as I read the growing warnings that this is the case is the assumption that suddenly the USA has become a divided nation, a splintered democracy, when, in point of fact, it has always been deeply – and for much of its history, good God, legally – divided.

        Indeed, Jim Crow America was the prime model for a certain would-be European dictator.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Rise of BRICS: The Economic Giant that is Taking on the West

        As was the case since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the West attempted to display unity, though it has become repeatedly obvious that no such unity exists. While France, Germany and Italy are paying a heavy price for the energy crisis resulting from the war, Britain’s Boris Johnson is adding fuel to the fire in the hope of making his country relevant on the global stage following the humiliation of Brexit. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is exploiting the war to restore Washington’s credibility and leadership over NATO – especially following the disastrous term of Donald Trump, which nearly broke up the historic alliance.

        Even the fact that several African countries are becoming vulnerable to famines  – as a result of the disruption of food supplies originating from the Black Sea and the subsequent rising prices – did not seem to perturb the leaders of some of the richest countries in the world. They still insist on not interfering in the global food market, though the skyrocketing prices have already pushed tens of millions of people below the poverty line.

      • TruthOut ☛ Constitutional Law Prof Tells Dems: Use 14th Amendment to Block Trump 2024 Run
      • The Nation ☛ Joe Biden’s Age Isn’t the Problem

        In politics, age is not just a number—it’s a weapon. Recently, we’ve seen it wielded in a spate of articles, from The New York Times to The Atlantic, seeking to attack President Biden’s potential reelection campaign. But such attacks are hardly new, with Biden enduring an avalanche of them in both the 2020 Democratic primary and general elections. In fact, criticizing elderly politicians for lacking sufficient “fight” is among the oldest—and dirtiest—campaign tricks in American politics.

      • Scheerpost ☛ The Age of Weird Men: Gonzo Politicians From Berlusconi to BoJo

        Students 50 years from now may be asked by their teachers to write an essay on the importance of the fall of Boris Johnson……

      • Techdirt ☛ Elon Musk’s Response To Twitter’s Legal Filing May Impress His Fans On Twitter, But Is Not A Good Legal Argument

        Last week, I wrote about Twitter’s opening legal salvo in its case to try to force Elon Musk to pay the $44 billion he agreed to pay for Twitter (or, more likely, to try to force him to pay a very large settlement to walk away). As we noted, it was a very strongly argued filing, and Musk’s lawyers had their work cut out for them. Nothing is certain in court, and getting the Delaware Chancery Court to order “specific performance” (i.e., complete the agreement you signed) may still be a long shot, but Twitter’s lawyers had a very strong opening. I expected that Musk would have a strong comeback, but many of the points Twitter raised would be difficult to refute.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Shared Values and Fist Bump Geopolitics: Biden’s Blurred Vision of Human Rights

        I mention China’s effort to enhance its image as a legitimate state as a positive development not deserving the hostile reaction that it received in many sectors of the West, but especially in those quarters that were intent on a new cold war to counter the competitive edge that China was gaining, especially in the world economy and on many technological frontiers of special relevance in the digital age. To seize upon this Chinese initiative, even granting that it was partly motivated by quite legitimate soft power ambitions, is to denigrate efforts to develop an international culture of respect for human rights as an essential foundation for indispensable cooperation in a variety of functional areas ranging from trade to climate change and migration. And let us not overlook American arrogance in relation to human rights, given its refusal to accord economic and social rights the normative status they deserve, and of which China is justly proud of its remarkable record. This acute societal shortcoming in the United States is exhibited to the world by highly visible urban homelessness in the cities of the United States coupled with the unavailability of affordable health care to millions of its own citizens; as well, constitutionally validated gross violations of the right to life due to promiscuous access to assault weaponry for anyone with the cash to make the purchase, and despite a rash on mass school and mall shooting the governing institutions turn their heads away from the carnage.

        It is with these considerations in the background that we should assess the Biden mid-July visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia. If the critical reaction to Bachelet’s visit reflected establishment resentment as a breach in the geopolitical wall of hostility that had been mobilized to justify coercive diplomacy directed at China. In contrast, Biden’s visit to the Middle East dramatized the extent to which human rights are buried far underground when perceived to clash with strategic interests being pursued in foreign policy as abetted by the domestic incentives to treat the most flagrant violators of human rights as if they are behaving as a model democracy. Of course, it is of relevance to note that overlooking Saudi Arabia dreadful record, which includes blood dripping from the hands of the de facto head of state, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon (MBS), did bring Biden and the normally compliant media visible discomfort and some steps back from fist bump amicability in Saudi Arabia. Biden made clear that only national security interests prevented him from fulfilling his 2020 campaign pledge to treat Saudi Arabia as a ‘pariah’ state, he continued to believe that it was when it came to human rights and even more pointedly he rejected MBS’s insistence that he had nothing to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi back in 2018. Awkwardly, Biden made himself vulnerable to MBS’s clever taunt—you seem to care much more about Jamal Khashoggi than Shireen Abu Akleh. Rather than implicate Israel, the U.S. investigation of the murder of its own citizen, seems prepared to share the grief of Akleh’s surviving family instead of seeking accountability of the sort that might protect journalists covering dangerous hotspots in the future.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Variety ☛ Stephen Colbert’s Team Has Charges Dropped for Filming Insult Dog Segment at Capitol Without Escort

        The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has decided to drop charges against the members of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” production team that were arrested at the U.S. Capitol on June 16. The group had been filming a Triumph the Insult Dog segment for the talk show.

        The decision to decline prosecution on the case was confirmed in a statement made by U.S. Capitol Police on Monday.

      • The Nation ☛ You Can’t Buy These Books

        In a remarkable brief filed on July 7 in their ongoing lawsuit, four titans of corporate publishing (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley) accused the Internet Archive of stealing, “mass-scale copyright infringement,” and “[distributing] full-text digital bootlegs for free.” Those are pretty wild allegations—especially considering that the Internet Archive’s Open Library operates on the traditional terms that libraries in this country have abided by for centuries. The Open Library loans books, which it owns, to one patron at a time, for a fixed period—just like any other library. Like any public library, the Open Library doesn’t charge money for this service. The main difference is that the Open Library loans e-books online. Each e-book is scanned from a paper copy, and the paper copy is stored away and doesn’t circulate; this practice is called Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL.

      • BBC ☛ Jafar Panahi: Acclaimed Iran film maker ordered to serve six years in jail

        Iranian media said Mr Panahi was held after going to Evin prison to ask about one of two fellow directors arrested for supporting protests.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy

        It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”…

      • Meduza ☛ A new stage of repression Three experts weigh in on the Kremlin’s changing approach to silencing dissent — Meduza

        On July 15, a judge in Komsomolsk-on-Amur acquitted artist and LGBT activist Yulia Tsvetkova after three years of legal proceedings. Tsvetkova was accused of “distributing pornography” after she published drawings of vulvas on a social media page called the “Vagina Monologues.” Since Russia launched its war against Ukraine, the number of absurd cases like Tsvetkova’s has only grown; Russians can now be charged for as little as putting quotation marks around the phrase “special [military] operation.” For insight into how the authorities’ censorship methods are evolving, Meduza asked a human rights advocate, a political scientist, and a state repression historian about the purpose of cases like Tsvetkova’s.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • VOA News ☛ Russian Journalist Released After Brief Detention

        Her lawyer, Dmitri Zakhvatov, said she was detained because she was suspected of having “discredited” the army in remarks outside a Moscow court last week in support of opposition activist Ilya Yashin, who is accused of spreading false information about the army.

        After sending troops to Ukraine, Moscow adopted laws imposing sentences of up to 15 years for spreading information about the military deemed false by authorities.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Assange Fights Extradition To US With Two Appeals

        Attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange separately appealed decisions by Home Office Secretary Priti Patel and a United Kingdom…

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • TMZ ☛ Drake Okay, Fine … I Did Have a Run-In w/ Swedish Cops

        In any case, he seems to have had an easier go than A$AP Rocky did. Thank goodness for that.

      • The Hill ☛ Uber to pay millions to settle lawsuit for overcharging customers with disabilities

        In a news release, the DOJ said Uber has committed to waiving wait time fees for customers who need more time to get into a car due to their disability or refund disabled customers who don’t get a waiver beforehand.

        The company will also pay back some 65,000 eligible riders for double the amount they were charged in wait time fees, which the DOJ said could add up to millions of dollars.

      • The Verge ☛ Uber will pay over $2 million to disabled riders after federal settlement

        Uber has settled with the Department of Justice over allegations that it discriminated against disabled passengers, the DOJ announced in a press release on Monday. As part of the agreement, Uber will credit double the total wait fees issued to the 65,000 disabled riders already identified by Uber’s programs and commit more than $2 million to funds for other affected individuals.

        The claims center on Uber’s wait fee policy, which adds additional fees when a passenger takes more than two minutes to board the car. Disabled riders have long objected to the policy, claiming the fees disproportionately affect riders with physical disabilities.

      • Counter Punch ☛ White Riot

        The Clash’s lead singer Joe Strummer strenuously denied charges that the song was racist. It was, he said, explicitly anti-racist. The song approvingly cites the uprising of Black youth in British cities against poverty and racism. The lyrics urge White youth to rise up in solidarity since, after all,

        The events of January 6, 2021 are an eerie, fun-house reflection of these lyrics. In what turned into a White riot, the insurrectionists effectively wanted a “riot of my own” after observing the BlackLivesMatter protests that broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s killing half a year earlier. But this was hardly a demonstration of solidarity. Even though the January 6 riot ended up being far more antagonistic and violent toward the police than any #BLM demonstration, it was a direct repudiation of the efforts by African Americans and others against police brutality, political disenfranchisement, and economic inequality.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Cruelty Is Still the Point, But Will It Make a Difference in November?

        Since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, the Republican party has doubled down on its utter contempt for women’s rights and civil rights more generally.

      • Democracy Now ☛ 10-Year-Old Ohio Rape Survivor Shows U.S. Not Ready for Post-Roe “Unimaginable Abortion Stories”

        We speak with Harvard journalism analyst Laura Hazard Owen, who says reporters will have to abandon “conventional journalism wisdom” to cover abortion stories following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “Reporters are going to need to accept that it’s going to be really hard to sort of do the things that they’ve been trained to do when they’re writing about these cases,” says Hazard Owen, explaining why privacy laws and the criminalization of doctors will make it harder to identify pregnant people and fact-check different abortion stories that involve young victims or occur in Republican-controlled states. Her latest piece is titled “Unimaginable abortion stories will become more common. Is American journalism ready?”

      • FAIR ☛ WaPo Joined Right in Casting Doubt on 10-Year-Old’s Post-Roe Nightmare

        Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson (Mediaite, 7/13/22) accused Biden of “lying,” insisting the story was “not true”; a New York Post op-ed headline (7/12/22) declared it “looks like a lie”; and Fox contributor Charlie Hunt (7/12/22) opined:

      • Common Dreams ☛ Lawmakers Answer Supreme Court Threat to LGBTQ+ Equality With Respect for Marriage Act

        Members of Congress alarmed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent reversal on abortion rights and threats to other basic freedoms on Monday introduced legislation intended to ensure protections for LGBTQ+ and interracial marriages.

        “The far-right Supreme Court is waging war on the freedoms of the American people, including the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘We Need to Fight’: Cori Bush, Tina Smith Unveil Bill to Bolster Access to Medication Abortion

        Rep. Cori Bush and Sen. Tina Smith introduced bicameral legislation Monday aimed at bolstering access to medication abortion as Republican-led states across the U.S. attempt to restrict distribution of the pills in their drive to ban abortion entirely.

        If passed, the Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act would codify into federal law the Food and Drug Administration’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, one of two medications commonly used in tandem to end a pregnancy. In December, the FDA permanently lifted its requirement that mifepristone be administered in person, allowing patients to receive the medication through the mail.

      • Counter Punch ☛ We Need Honest Debate, Not Unprincipled Attacks: A Further Response to the Attacks On Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights

        Never mind that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights already thoroughly rebutted the dishonest claims against it that Sommers elevated and attempted to legitimize. Never mind that, from their own perspective, the Revcoms rebutted the attacks on them and their leader, Bob Avakian, as well.

        It is necessary for organizations and individuals to substantively debate differences of analysis and strategy. This is a process that everyone can learn from and which serves to forge unity in the fight against injustice. But it is something else entirely to traffic in lies, slanders, and libel, as do the attacks Sommers is legitimizing.

      • TruthOut ☛ Idaho GOP Sets Party Line Against Life-Saving Exception for Abortions
      • TruthOut ☛ House Staffers in 8 Offices File to Form First-Ever Congressional Unions
      • Scheerpost ☛ Starbucks and Other Companies Escalate War on Unions With Store Closures

        Workers at “progressive” companies like Starbucks and Heine Brothers’ Coffee exercised their right to form a union. Now the companies are closing their stores.

      • Scheerpost ☛ What Is Class Struggle Unionism?

        Joe Burns’ new Class Struggle Unionism comes at a key time. That’s because the long-slumbering union movement looks like it could be starting to stir again.

      • The Nation ☛ “The Worst Abuser You Could Ever Have”

        Tracy McCarter did everything that society tells domestic violence survivors to do. She separated from her husband, Jim Murray, and moved on with her life. She continued working full-time as a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia University, and was looking forward to celebrating her graduation with her four grown children. In the seven months since she had separated from her husband, she had rented her own apartment in Manhattan and was in the process of buying one in Queens, far enough away from Murray, whose alcoholism had been spiraling out of control, to minimize his intrusions. Although she still loved her husband, McCarter was preparing to enter a new chapter in her life—one in which she would welcome her first grandchild into the world, purchase and renovate a co-op, and advance her career.1

      • The Nation ☛ The Fight Over Berlin’s Comfort Woman Statue

        On the second Monday of each month, Jim-Bob Heimberg walks across the street from his family’s flower shop café to a park in the quiet Berlin neighborhood of Moabit. There, Heimberg, a tall, 27-year-old German, places a crown of flowers atop a statue of a small Korean girl.

      • The Nation ☛ Edafe Okporo’s Manifesto for the Migrant

        When Edafe Okporo was released from a New Jersey immigration detention center in 2017, he had nowhere to go. He spent a few nights wandering in Newark Penn Station, dozing on benches and in corners, and then found shelter at a nearby YMCA. He had no money, no phone, knew nobody, and, besides a few hours in a back room of JFK airport, had never been in the United States as a free man. A year later, he was the director of a homeless shelter in Harlem, offering refuge to people who were facing the same displacement and homelessness he had barely overcome.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Two Cities Took Different Approaches to Pandemic Court Closures. They Got Different Results.

        On Dec. 31, 2020, a 40-year-old man named Leon Casiquito walked into Kelly Liquors on Route 66 in Albuquerque and tried to shoplift a bottle of tequila. When one of the owners, Danny Choi, tried to stop him, Casiquito flashed a small pocketknife. Choi told police he knocked the bottle out of Casiquito’s hand with a stick and Casiquito left the store.

        Choi locked the door, but Casiquito hung around in the parking lot, shouting that he was going to beat up the store’s employees. One of them called the police, and soon four officers arrived and wrestled Casiquito to the ground. He was charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — despite not actually attacking anyone with the pocketknife — and held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque.

      • Techdirt ☛ Federal Court Allows Protesters’ First Amendment Suit Against Violent Boston Cops To Continue

        A lawsuit filed by four protesters against three Boston police officers can move forward, following a federal judge’s determination that the cops’ counterarguments were too ridiculous to be granted credence.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Common Dreams ☛ Advocates Welcome New Push for ‘Incredibly Important’ Net Neutrality Bill

        Open internet advocates on Monday celebrated news of soon-to-be-unveiled legislation that “would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service,” exposing industry giants to stricter federal oversight.

        “Broadband internet is a necessity, not a luxury.”

      • India Times ☛ U.S. Senate Democrats plan bill aiming to restore ‘net neutrality’

        Two U.S. Senate Democrats active in internet issues are working on a bill to restore landmark “net neutrality” rules that would bar telecommunications companies from blocking or throttling traffic or offering paid fast lanes. Senators Edward Markey and Ron Wyden plan to introduce a bill this summer that would put broadband under the umbrella of a telecommunications service, which means that providers would be subject to stricter Federal Communications Commision (FCC) oversight, a source briefed on the matter told Reuters. Representative Doris Matsui is working on a companion House version.

      • The Verge ☛ Democrats prepare bill that would codify net neutrality

        The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act — spearheaded by longtime Senate internet advocates Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) — would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II. This would give the Federal Communications Commission new enforcement powers over the internet, including the power to set rules against throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization.

      • The Washington Post ☛ Democrats plan sweeping net neutrality bill as FCC majority stalls

        While the two-page bill is seemingly simple in scope, it would have massive implications in addition to reinstating net neutrality, the rules that bar internet service providers from blocking or throttling content. It would shift how aggressively the FCC can regulate issues like internet pricing, consumer privacy and competition in the broadband market.

        Lawmakers plan to introduce the bill in coming weeks, likely before the August recess, according to two people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.

      • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ Legislative Brief on Digital Rights for Monsoon Session 2022

        We have prepared our legislative brief on digital rights for the Monsoon Session 2022 of the Indian Parliament. In our brief, we highlight some of the focus areas within the larger issues of digital rights, data governance, increased digitalisation in the absence of robust rights-based policies, and other concerns that call for extensive deliberation in the Houses of Parliament.

        [...]

        The Monsoon Session of the Indian Parliament commenced on July 18, and as per bulletins by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats, it will end on August 18.

        The previous Budget Session of the Parliament saw several key issues being taken up as part of the budget deliberations in both the Houses. Even though the House was adjourned sine die a day ahead of schedule, the Lok Sabha worked for 123% of its scheduled time and Rajya Sabha for 90%. In our review of the Budget Session, we had previously analysed the budgetary allocations for the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (“MeitY”).

        Though the Prime Minister called for the Members to put aside party politics, this session is expected to be a confrontational one, as issues like the agnipath scheme, demolitions drives, raids on members of the opposition, allegations of use of spyware and planting of evidence, rising inflation and unemployment are expected to come to the fore. While there is speculation that the Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021 and new legislation to replace the Information Technology Act, 2000 might be tabled in the House this time, they have not been included in the Lok Sabha List of Business as of July 15, 2022.

      • Techdirt ☛ U.S. Consumers Pay $1,600 Annually For Cable TV Channels They Don’t Watch

        One of the reasons that propaganda mills like Fox News don’t take a bigger hit from advertising boycotts is because U.S. consumers pay billions of dollars annually for the channel, even if they don’t watch it. More specifically, Fox rakes in $1.8 billion in carriage fees to include the channel in bloated cable bundles, despite the fact that just 3 million of the nation’s 90 million cable TV subscribers actively watch.

      • Techdirt ☛ Brief Reprieve: UK Puts Online Safety Bill On Hold While It Sorts Out Its Boris Johnson-Shaped Mess

        I guess it’s only natural that the UK’s Online Safety Bill — brilliantly dubbed the bill to Brexit the internet by Heather Burns — is getting delayed, just like the regular Brexit. And, no surprise, Boris Johnson is part of the issue again. As you’ll have likely heard, if you haven’t been under a rock, Johnson is on his way out and is currently in the lamest of lame ducks periods as we wait to figure out what other nutty character will replace him (don’t worry, none of the choices are good).

      • Techdirt ☛ Just A Click Away: How To Improve Broadband Competition

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • The Hill ☛ Netflix braces for critical earnings call after challenging year

        Netflix will share its earnings information and outlook going forward on Tuesday after a rocky year in which it faced falling subscription rates and increasing competition.

        Tuesday’s call will be the streaming service giant’s first briefing on its quarterly earnings since sharing in April that the company lost 200,000 subscribers — its first subscriber loss in more than 10 years.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ US Lawmakers Want FTC to Crack Down on Overpromising and Dishonest VPNs

          Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Anna Eshoo are urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take action against abusive and deceptive practices in the VPN industry. They note that many Americans benefit from the increased privacy and security that VPNs offer, but some VPN providers can overpromise or be dishonest with their subscribers.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Orders Cloudflare’s DNS Resolver 1.1.1.1 to Block Pirate Sites in Italy

          An Italian court has ordered Cloudflare to block three torrent sites on its public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. The anti-piracy measures were requested by local music industry group FIMI and anti-piracy group FPM. This is the first time that Cloudflare DNS must block pirate sites and, with this injunction in hand, Google and OpenDNS could be next.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Dimanĉo

        I had no trouble waking up for Liturgy this morning, in fact I had an excellent sleep. It was the local bishop’s namesday and so we greeted him after liturgy. The weather has been clear and unseasonably chilly, though I would rather it be a too cold than too warm.

        At lunch I met 3 Polish-speaking young women, one from Germany, one from somewhere else in Poland, and one from Białystok. They seem very nice if a little insular, i.e. they are more comfortable speaking Polish to each other rather than English to the rest of us, and I can’t blame them. Ili estas agrablaj, kaj mi antaŭĝojas paroli pli kun ili.

        I’m excited for the conference; it technically starts tomorrow. Meeting people from around the world and sharing ideas and time will be great.

    • Technical

      • Science

        • Observing Sound Waves Up Close

          I never really thought about the intricacy of sound waves before, the minute variations they possess. However, given that I am entering the field of audio design, gradually creating more intricate songs, I decided today to view, firsthand, the microscopic pattern of a waveform, courtesy of a piece of software I have installed which allows for a comprehensive visualization.

          The results were stunning, as well as being visually appealing on their own merits. The amount of variation present within microseconds of audio spans a wide range of strange and unique patterns. Given that I am also involved in the visual field, I see something captivating in these whorls of invisible force.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIV — Using Microsoft Money as ‘Get Out of Jail’ Card After Suffocating Women

Posted in Microsoft at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Series parts:

  1. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
  2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
  3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
  4. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
  5. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
  6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
  7. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
  8. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
  9. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
  10. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
  11. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
  12. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
  13. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
  14. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
  15. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation
  16. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
  17. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVII — Backsliding Into 1990s-Style Digital Slavery by Microsoft
  18. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVIII — The Story of NPM
  19. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIX — The Collapse of Team Mono
  20. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XX — Entering Phase II
  21. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXI — Rumours About How Microsoft Plans to Actually Make Money (Not Losses) From GitHub
  22. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXII — ‘Mr. GitHub Copilot’ Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley Pleads Guilty After Assaulting Women
  23. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIII — CoPlagiarist: Microsoft’s GPL Violations and Plagiarism Tool Created by Serial Plagiarists
  24. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Using Microsoft Money as ‘Get Out of Jail’ Card After Suffocating Women

GitHub: Where everything comes to die

Summary: The person behind Copilot is a highly perverted strangler and he was supported by Microsoft despite Microsoft knowing what he had done. Today we merely present some more evidence and we shall soon show how Microsoft handled the situation (it dealt with this as a routine, not a crisis, and kept paying the mobster/monster).

A few months ago we published the arrest record of Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley and around that time these documents were floating ‘behind the scenes’. This was after Nat Friedman had left (we’re told both he and Miguel de Icaza got pushed out, but we need more hard evidence) and months after our series began.

Bail: Alex Graveley

A loophole for rich people; this is how Bill Gates got out of jail at least twice following his arrests

Bail bond: Alex Graveley

$25,000 or $50,000

Bail bond receipt: Alex Graveley

And the receipt

Meanwhile, Graveley’s lawyer is trying to cover things up. At a later point we shall show how Microsoft-connected media also played a role in covering up these affairs.

Stay tuned. This series can last a very long time, going well into next year. It helps show a pattern of the media failing women, Microsoft gaslighting victims of crimes (while Microsoft itself commits a lot of crime), and separately we shall run a series about how Microsoft’s media operatives think. That’s aside from our EPO series (not the same “EPO” mentioned in the paperwork above).

As Bill Gates put it this year, “well, he’s dead…” (the mindset of killing people who know something incriminating about you) █

Site Migration Has Begun

Posted in Site News at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

CentOS, here, try alpine

Summary: CentOS, which IBM does not want anymore (except as another Fedora), is being left behind as we move everything to Alpine

A couple of nights ago the new target OS for Techrights was instantiated. The migration will be slow but non-lossy, starting with Tux Machines and ending with Techrights. The OS is Alpine, which had a new release yesterday (and does not have systemd). We’re creating two Git servers, one for each site, and the plan is to offer full encryption as well as Gemini for both sites.

“We need to deny revisionists and their harmful distortions of what’s going on.”The process can take several months (due to remaining work obligations), but at least we got the ball rolling. The CMS will be custom-made (built from scratch) and we’re still working on it. We’re probably weeks away from a public beta; testing is done privately for now.

Tux Machines is about 170,000 pages, 3 times as many as Techrights, and preserving all the information entirely is utmost priority. Revisionism always relies on old information going out of existence/print. We need to deny revisionists and their harmful distortions of what's going on. █

Links 19/07/2022: Qubes OS 4.1.1 and Ubuntu 21.10 End of Life

Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • Linux Handbook ☛ 9 Best Free Website Downtime Monitoring Services [Ed: One can set up one's own instead of outsourcing]

        It is crucial to monitor the availability of your website if you do not want your readers/customers to go away.

        Whether it is an online business or a blog, website downtime can hurt your website’s online presence.

        It is also helpful to know if you picked the right server for your website if you are aware of the downtime. If your server is down for a long time at regular intervals, you need to identify what’s wrong with the server (or the configuration).

        Honestly, it is not always a malicious actor or an issue with a technology that you use; sometimes, it’s just the server that’s at fault.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Tux Digital ☛ 287: Customizing Your Terminal to be a 1337 h@x0r – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

        This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be pimping out our terminals. We’re going to give you all the tips you need to look like an elite hacker even if you only know apt update and apt upgrade. Then we will be discussing water cooling your Linux laptop. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

    • Applications

      • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Curtail is an Awesome Image Compressor Tool for Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

        Running a blog like this means I need to keep one eye on the size of screenshots I use in posts — the smaller the images I upload the faster the page loads for you.

        Thus having access to a good image compressor tool is a must.

        Thankfully for those of us being mindful of bandwidth we are spoilt for choice. Not only is there a broad range of image compression apps for Linux, from powerful CLI type through to noob-proof GUI ones, there’s also a veritable surfeit of online compressors (including superbly useful Squoosh, which can work offline).

        Thing is, I prefer desktop apps where possible.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to use systemd in Debian | FOSS Linux

        Systemd is a well-known Linux system and service manager. Since Debian 8, systemd has been the default init system. It is compatible with both SysV and LSB init scripts. Therefore it can take the place of sysvinit in some situations.

      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to start GNOME desktop from command line in Debian | FOSS Linux

        GNOME, an acronym for the GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a graphical user interface and set of computer desktop apps for Linux OS users. It is aimed at making Linux OS an easy-to-use OS for non-programmers. With GNOME, you can set the interface to look like Windows or macOS. GNOME is a free and non-proprietary desktop environment for all the major Linux distros, including Fedora Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, SUSE, and others.

        On the other hand, a command-line alias cmd, CLI, prompt, console, or terminal refers to a text-based user interface (UI) utilized in viewing, manipulating, handling, running programs, and managing comp files as interacting with the computer. It is much like Windows Explorer or Finder on the macOS but without the graphical interface.

        GNOME has emerged as the most efficient, reliable, and stable of all the available desktop environments for Linux while retaining its user-friendliness features. GNOME began as a free and open desktop alternative to proprietary options like KDE at the time, and it has been going strong ever since.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Sublime Merge on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

        In this guide, we will show you how to install Sublime Merge on Ubuntu systems

        Sublime Merge is a git client. It allows to read a git repository in order to display the differential of the last modifications, the list of submissions (commits) and the branches, among other things.

        It is possible to submit (push) and retrieve (pull) modifications from the interface

        Sublime Merge includes a command line tool, smerge, to work with repositories on the command line. This can be used to open repositories, search, and merge files.

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

        In this guide, we will show you how to install Strawberry in Ubuntu systems.

        Strawberry is a free audio player for Linux , macOS and Windows. Strawberry has now been ported to Qt 6 and is therefore available for the three major desktop operating systems. It is a music player and collection organizer focused on cataloging your music collection.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Zim Desktop Wiki on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

        In this article, we will illustrate how to install Zim Desktop wiki on Ubuntu Systems.

        Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

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

        In this guide, we will install WoeUSB on Ubuntu systems

        WoeUSB is a free, open-source simple tool that enables you to create your own USB stick windows installer from an iso image or an actual DVD. I have used it myself to create bootable USB sticks for installing Windows from ISO images, and it has worked flawlessly every time. The interface is straightforward to use.

        It is a simple tool that enable you to create your own usb stick windows installer from an iso image or a real DVD.

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

        In this article, we will illustrate how to install DeaDBeef player on Ubuntu systems

        DeaDBeeF (as in 0xDEADBEEF) is a modular cross-platform audio player which runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.

        DeaDBeeF plays a variety of audio formats, converts between them, lets you customize the UI in almost any way you want, and use many additional plugins which can extend it even more.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        The Arduino IDE is free and open-source software to write and upload your programming code. It consists of an editor with features like assisted editing enabled by the compiler so you can do everything from within one program without switching between files or windows as often – it does help streamline things! The tool also enables better compiling because errors will be noticed before uploading. This means less time wasted on coding and more time spent on the project.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop with APT, Snap, or Flatpak method using the command line terminal along with instructions on how to update and remove the software in the future if required.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install/Enable FirewallD GUI on Rocky Linux 9

        Rocky Linux is a security-focused distribution that offers users a robust firewall feature with FirewallD. For users accustomed to a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the command line may seem daunting because there is no visual representation. However, for those willing to learn the commands, FirewallD provides an easy way to control the firewall and disable or enable access to ports, services, or protocols. The software is also highly customizable so that users can tailor the firewall to their specific needs.

        The following tutorial will teach you how to install and enable FirewallD and install FirewallD GUI on Rocky Linux 9 using the command line terminal.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Vivaldi Browser on Rocky Linux 9

        Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It was created in response to the decline of Opera, as many users were disgruntled when it switched from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. Vivaldi is built on the Chromium platform and shares many features with Google Chrome, but it also has some unique features that set it apart. These include built-in email and calendar functionality and advanced tab management options. Vivaldi is also highly customizable, allowing users to change the look and feel of the browser to suit their preferences. As a result of its unique features and user-friendly interface, the browser has become one of the most popular alternative web browsers on the market.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Rocky Linux 9 using the command line terminal and the option of Vivaldi stable or Vivaldi snapshot browser versions and how to maintain and remove it in the future.

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Find If My Linux System Runs on SSD or HDD

        So why would you want to find out whether your Linux system is running on SSD or HDD? There are various valid reasons for this question.

        Firstly, you might not be tech-savvy enough to understand the hardware infrastructure associated with your Linux system. Secondly, knowing whether your Linux system runs on SSD or HDD helps set reasonable performance expectations for your Linux machine.

      • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Restrict Script/Application Permission using AppArmor on Ubuntu/Debian – TREND OCEANS

        AppArmor is a Debian-based Mandatory Access Control (MAC) system alternative to SELinux (for RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, AlmaLinux, etc.), allowing you the ability to restrict certain applications or scripts from doing certain things or allowing access to certain resources.

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Copy Directory Structure Without Files in Linux

        In this article you’ll learn about AppArmor and how to create a profile for a user-generated script or application, and modify or update permissions for an already existing profile.

        [...]

        However, in some scenarios, you might want to mimic a certain directory structure that already exists maybe for your personal projects or for a files storage system just because that directory structure makes perfect sense and might require a lot of time to completely recreate it from scratch.

        This article will walk us through valid approaches to copying an empty directory structure from already populated directory files in Linux.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install PostgreSQL 14 on Rocky Linux 9

        PostgreSQL is a robust, stable, and reliable open-source database management system that has been in use for over 20 years. It’s backed by an active community of developers who contribute their time and expertise to its development, resulting in higher levels of resilience, integrity, and correctness. PostgreSQL powers many web applications, including those from Google Earth Engine Geospatial datastore for analytics software like Tableau. Its features include horizontal scalability, robust SQL compliance, and advanced data types such as JSON and XML support. In addition, PostgreSQL is open source software, meaning it can be freely used, modified, and distributed. As a result, it’s an attractive option for powering large-scale web applications.

        The following tutorial will teach you how to install PostgreSQL 14 on Rocky Linux using the command line terminal and some basic configuration and setup tips.

      • Its FOSS ☛ How to Install Discord on Manjaro and Arch Linux

        Discord is a cross-platform application that can be used for voice calling, video calling, text messaging, and sharing media and files.

        It is extremely popular among gamers and streamers. Although, many open source projects have started using it for hosting their community discussion. You can find official Discord servers for such open source communities.

        Discord can be accessed straight from your web browser. Installing the official desktop client gives you system notifications and focused communication rather than fumbling for the Discord tab among multiple opened tabs.

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ What’s the Difference Between Grep, Sed, and Awk Commands

        We cannot confidently call ourselves Linux file management experts without the mastery of text processing. Three known command-line tools (grep, sed, and awk) have built their reputation as Linux text processors. They come pre-installed on all major Linux operating system distributions hence no need to query their existence via a Linux package manager.

        Despite grep, sed, and awk commands being uniquely attributed in their text processing functionalities, some simple scenarios force their functionalities to slightly overlap.

        For instance, all these three commands can comfortably query the possibility of a file pattern match and forward the query results to standard output.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Edge Browser on Rocky Linux 9 [Ed: Bad idea. It’s spyware and a passwords stealer.]
      • TecAdmin ☛ How to Install Grunt on Ubuntu 22.04 & 20.04 – TecAdmin

        Grunt is a node-based task runner that helps developers automate common tasks during the software development process. It can be used to compile code, run tests, and more. grunt is easy to install and configure, and it can be used with any programming language.

        Grunt is available as a free, open-source tool, that is typically used in conjunction with other tools, such as Git and npm. A grunt is a powerful tool that can help developers save time and improve their workflow.

        In this blog post, you will learn to install Grunt on Ubuntu systems.

      • H2S Media ☛ Fix error: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/dpkg/status

        Linux distros come with lots of possibilities to develop new innovative ideas, however, while doing that you may face some errors, especially the newbies, who are yet developing skills to become a proficient Linux user… Out of hundreds of errors that may appear in Linux OS due to any bug or because of our mistakes, recently I faced the one: here is that:

        W: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/dpkg/status (1)
        E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
        W: _cache->open() failed, please report.

        I got this error because, by mistake, I deleted the Status file, the reason for this error in your case might be different.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install OpenLDAP on Ubuntu 22.04

        OpenLDAP is a software implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). This guide will teach you how to set up LDAP Server with OpenLDAP and LDAP Account Manager on the Ubuntu 22.04 server. This guide also will teach how to set up LDAP users and how to set up an LDAP Account Manager for managing the OpenLDAP server.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • Qubes OS 4.1.1 has been released! | Qubes OS

        We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.1! This release aims to consolidate all the security patches, bug fixes, and upstream template OS upgrades that have occurred since the initial Qubes 4.1.0 release in February. Our goal is to provide a secure and convenient way for users to install (or reinstall) the latest stable Qubes release with an up-to-date ISO.

    • Arch Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • CNX Software ☛ CrowPi L Raspberry Pi 4 laptop review – Part 1: Unboxing and teardown – CNX Software

        Elecrow CrowPi L is an 11.6-inch laptop shell based on Raspberry Pi 4 designed for STEM education with optional electronics modules and tutorials. That’s an evolution of the CrowPi 2 laptop I reviewed in 2020 with a thinner design and more flexible since the electronics modules are optional, so it can serve the market of people just wanting a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop.

        The company has sent me a full “CrowPi L Advanced Kit” for review with the CrowPi L laptop fitted with a Raspberry Pi 4, as well as the Crowtail Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi.

      • Arduino ☛ Move this custom robotic arm through a touchscreen interface | Arduino Blog

        Normally, robotic arms are controlled by a GUI running on a host PC, or with some kind of analog system that maps human inputs to various degrees of rotation. However, Instructables user Maurizio Miscio was able to build a custom robotic arm that is completely self-contained — thanks to companion mobile app that resides on an old smartphone housed inside a control box.

        Miscio started his project by making 3D models of each piece, most of which were 3D-printed. These included the gripper, various joints that each give a single axis of rotation, and a large circular base that acts as a stable platform on which the arm can spin. He then set to work attaching five servo motors onto each rotational axis, along with a single SG90 micro servo motor for the gripper. These motors were connected to an Arduino Uno that also had an HC-05 Bluetooth® serial module for external communication.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Trend Oceans ☛ What is Open Source and why should you support them – TREND OCEANS

      Consider what would happen if you were using one of the software applications that you have purchased by paying a hefty amount to the company and which you have been using for a decade without any issues.

      Although you know, this was the only application that could do specific work, and there was no alternative option to this application available on the market. Therefore, you couldn’t even imagine your life without that software.

      But unfortunately, one day, the company announced that we will not provide further updates or support to this particular application because they are shutting down their company due to some internal conflict.
      You will be under immense stress after hearing the announcement and finding a way out of this situation but you can’t do that because you don’t have the necessary resources to update an application.

      Now you are stuck in the middle of nowhere.

    • Web Browsers

    • Programming/Development

      • Qt ☛ The Ability to Modify the Qt Source Code – Does it Matter? [Ed: Qt is now misframing the subject of software freedom by pretending it's about "Ability to Modify... Source Code"]

        Yes, you can modify the source code of the Qt framework. You can also distribute products using the modified source code, as long it is in object form. You can also share the modified source code with the Qt Company for possible inclusion in upcoming releases.

      • DEV Community ☛ Afshan Ahmed Khan: Outreachy: Mid way blog post

        Time flies ! Now I have reached to middle of my outreachy internship. This blog post will throw some light on my journey till now .

  • Leftovers

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • IT Wire ☛ Sales of some Oppo, OnePlus models in Germany hit by lawsuit

          Some models of Oppo and OnePlus mobile phones will not be sold in Germany following a ruling by a Mannheim court in favour of Finnish telecommunications equipment vendor Nokia over a patent.

          The ruling, by a regional court in the southwestern German city, was the second in as many months and said Oppo’s use of some 5G and 4G technologies infringed Nokia’s patents, according to a report in the South China Morning Post, which cited a statement from the Finnish firm.

          The first ruling was issued in June. Oppo and OnePlus are both owned by Chinese firm B.B.K. Electronics which also owns the vivo, realme and iQoo brands.

          Oppo constantly ranks as the fourth selling smartphone brand after Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi. Neither Nokia nor Oppo’s owners have issued a public statement about the case.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Prefiguring community

        I’ve been calling myself an anarchist for all these years, and I feel like a colossal hypocrite for putting so much of my energy into fighting (occasionally viscous fights) to make “leftist” spaces “more prefigurative”¹ while I neglected building more of the kinds of relationships that are going to get me through the coming decades.

    • Technical

      • A screed against modern consumer electronics

        So I’m watching this video on a mouse/scanner combo thing when at the very end, Cathode Ray Dude [1] goes on a rant about the companies that make modern consumer electronics [2] that I found amusing. I also think it’s a sad state of affairs that I agree with his sentiment that most consumer electronic companies exist just to get bought out and not to sell a viable product.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • BBS with Gemtext Frontend (idea)

          I run a BBS (Bulletin Board System) on the Mystic BBS software which I find fun because it brings back memories of connecting to BBS when I was much younger before the Internet was popular.

          It is nostalgic to see the chuncky text and ansi graphics when I connect using a client like Netrunner or Syncterm however most of the time, I am not interested in the nostalgia but just to connect quickly to check for messages or any new activity.

          Since discovering gemini, this has stolen some of the time that I previously would have spent working on the BBS or chatting there or other improvements.

        • Update on Squid’s World

          I want to increase the amount that I interact in a positive way with others in the Geminispace, which includes promoting more of what other people are working on, and understanding and respecting the motivations for those others who are using this tech

        • Re: Thoughts on RSS

          Even the negatives on his list seem like huge positives.

          Technically, he’s wrong here; there’s nothing stopping an RSS feed from getting slathered in JavaScript and CSS and there are many reading apps that will display that.

          But culturally, that practice isn’t very widespread, thankfully, and RSS (including Atom) has been a readers’ bastion similar to what we have here on Gemini. This is a good thing, not a bad.

          I’ve always seen Gemini as kind of similar to RSS; another way to publish your stuff, that’s more reader-friendly. Friendlier to mashups, ebook exports, tours, offline, your own styling, your own font choices, a clean and consistent typography that goes across sites, not just your own.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

[Meme] Bubble Schwabble

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Terminating the EPO in only a few years

EPO is fine, EPO doing great!
Don’t listen to evil, malicious tongues. EPO management has done a great job! (For its own good)

Summary: The den of nepotism and despotism, led by Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos (shown above), is in denial about the direction in which it’s heading (burning laws, constitutions and treaties for a short-term money-grebbing expedition)

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