GNU/Linux

• Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #192

  Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

  We have a good week in the world of Linux releases with Garuda Linux 220717 and Pardus 21.3.

  I hope you have a wonderful week and a lovely summer!

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ GNU World Order 470

    **kdiamond** , **kdnssd** , **kdoctools** , **keditbookmarks** , **kemoticons** , **kfilemetadata** , **kfind** , **kfloppy** , **kfourinline** from Slackware set **kde**.

  • Video ☛ How to install Krita on Pop!_OS 22.04 – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install Krita on Pop!_OS 22.04.

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 333 – Open Source is unfair

    Josh and Kurt talk about Microsoft creating a policy of not allowing anyone to charge for open source in their app store. This policy was walked back quickly, but it raises some questions about how fair or unfair open source really is. It’s mostly unfair to developers if you look at the big picture.

  • E43: Building Supabase, the Open Source Firebase Alternative

    Paul Copplestone is Co-Founder & CEO of Supabase the open source Backend-as-a-Service company that provides storage, authentication, edge functions, and a postgres database to users.

    Supabase’s project, also called supabase, has 36K stars on GitHub and is positioned as the “open source Firebase alternative”.

  • Video ☛ Why Wayland Merges Compositing & Window Managers – Invidious

    One of the interesting changes between Wayland and Xorg is how Wayland decided to merge compositing and window management into 1 component, but why is that?

• Kernel Space

  • LKML: Linus Torvalds: Linux 5.19-rc8

    As already mentioned last week, this release is one of those "extra
    week of rc" ones, and here we are, with release candidate #8.
    
    There's nothing really surprising in here - a few smaller fixups for
    the retbleed mess as expected, and the usual random one-liners
    elsewhere.
    
    The diffstat shows mainly some documentation updates and a couple of
    drivers with bigger fixes (eg the i916 GuC firmware thing), and the
    networking sysctl data-race annotations.
    
    So it all just makes me go "yeah, I'm happy to have done another rc,
    but there is nothing particularly interesting here". Which is all
    fine. Shortlog appended for the curious among you.
    
    We'll let this simmer for another week, and please do give it another
    round of testing to make this last week count, ok?
    
                      Linus
    

  • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 5.19-rc8

    The 5.19-rc8 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “There’s nothing really surprising in here – a few smaller fixups for the retbleed mess as expected, and the usual random one-liners elsewhere.”

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ unlockR – Stupid Simple App to Remove PDF Password in Linux & Windows | UbuntuHandbook

    For those want to unlock / decrypt PDF files, there’s now a stupid simple graphical tool to do the job in Linux.

    It’s easy to encrypt you PDF files in Ubuntu Linux since the built-in LibreOffice office suite has the option on ‘Export as PDF’ dialog. However, there seems no easy way to remove password for PDF file, other than using qpdf command:

    qpdf –decrypt –password=<PASSWORD> input.pdf output.pdf
    unlockR is a new GTK4 application that use Libadwaita to provide a modern simple user interface to decrypt your PDF files.

  • Make Use Of ☛ The 4 Best MP3 Tag and Metadata Editors for Linux

    Streaming music online may have become the primary way many people listen to music, but MP3 files haven’t gone away. It’s still easy to purchase and download most songs, DRM-free, to your computer. From there, you can listen to them on just about any device with storage space and a speaker.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Switch From Debian Stable to Debian Testing

    While Debian is stable by default, it gets this stability by relying on older versions of software packages. There are times when you might want newer software. Fortunately, it’s easy to switch from Debian Stable to Testing to get the latest versions of software on your system.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to convert Apple HEIC images on Linux

    Apple’s iPhone and iPad use the HEIC image format to compress high-quality images. Unfortunately, many apps and computer operating systems don’t support this format. As a result, many people convert HEIC files to JPG and PNG. Here’s how to do it on Linux.

    [...]

    An image converter is the best way to convert Apple‘s HEIC images (High Efficiency Image Format) on Linux. The best converter tool to use on Linux is Converseen. It has support for dozens of codecs, including HEIC/HEIF.

    Converseen isn’t installed on any Linux operating systems by default, so you’ll have to set it up yourself. To install Converseen on Linux, open up a terminal window. Once open, follow the installation instructions below to get Converseen working.

  • uni Toronto ☛ We won’t be sending systemd logs to Grafana Loki in JSON format

    In yesterday’s entry on a Grafana Loki cardinality issue with the metadata you can harvest from systemd log messages, I said that I thought we’d wind up dealing with the issue by sending systemd journal messages to Loki in the journal’s JSON format. This JSON format preserves all of the available fields and Loki can process it to extract them when you access the logs. Having actually tried doing this, I’ve now given up on the idea.

    In theory, sending JSON to Loki is the correct approach. JSON is the standard modern way to send a collection of information together, such as a log message and the metadata associated with it, and Loki has tools for parsing JSON, extracting the fields, and so on. In a perfect world we’d ship JSON and everything would work nicely.

    In practice, trying to use JSON formatted systemd logs today with Loki and Grafana gave me a succession of papercuts and irritations. I’m currently mostly using Grafana’s Explore feature to poke through Loki logs, and this had various issues. For example, Explore gets unhappy if there are errors in the log processing, such as if you have a mixture of JSON and non-JSON log lines so that JSON decoding fails some of the time. Explore has a handy ‘show context’ feature that shows you related log lines around the selected log, but when you have JSON logs these are in JSON because that’s the native log message. Naturally, JSON blobs are harder to skim (and take up more screen space) than the actual log messages.

  • Data Swamp ☛ How to account systemd services bandwidth usage on NixOS

    Did you ever wonder how many bytes a system service is daily receiving from the network? Thanks to systemd, we can easily account this.

    This guide targets NixOS, but the idea could be applied on any Linux system using systemd.

  • Data Swamp ☛ Make nix flakes commands using the same nixpkgs as NixOS does

    This article will explain how to make the flakes enabled nix commands reusing the nixpkgs repository used as input to build your NixOS system. This will regularly save you time and bandwidth.

  • Data Swamp ☛ The Old Computer Challenge V2: done!

    The Old Computer Challenge V2 is over! What a week! It was even more than a week, as it was from 10th to 17th july included, that was 8 days.

  • Data Swamp ☛ 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.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install MCreator 2022.1 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install MCreator 2022.1 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Kate 22.08 – Kate

      22.08 will be no revolutionary jump for Kate, more a nice incremental update containing a lot of small improvements and bug fixes compared to 22.04.

      If you want to dive in more deep, we have a nice list of all merge requests that give you a proper overview about the larger development tasks that did take place.

      Naturally, there are some user visible top level changes to Kate. Per default, we now have some text free left & right border with just a bit larger icons. One can naturally switch back to the old style and adjust the icon size there. The bottom status/tool button/… border got fine tuned, too.

    • Swapping ten’s complements: Week 6 & 7

      The second sub-activity of the first activity is swapping the number cards to make consecutive cards 10’s complements of each other. As of now (while writing the blog), there are two levels to this. The first of them consists of the four numbers to swap, and the second level consists of the five numbers to swap. Currently, in this activity, the pupil can swap two numbers by clicking on the first number and then second click on the number with whom they wish to swap. The selected card is a bit enlarged compared to others to provide click feedback and the assurance that this number is assigned. The answer is checked by whether the first pair (first and second card), second pair (third and fourth number card ), and third pair (fifth and sixth number card), if available, are 10’s complements of each other or not. If the pupil can successfully swap the numbers, they proceed to the next sub-level. Now the question arises, “WHAT IS SUB-LEVEL”?. A single level may consist of sub-levels. One has to answer all the sub-level correctly if they wish to proceed to the next level. After reading the “swap” term this many times, it is relatively indicative that the name for this must contain the word “swap.” The name for sub-activity-2 is “Swapping Ten’s Complements.”

    • I’m going to Akademy 2022

      Akademy 2022 is almost around the corner, and I’m excited to be able to travel again after almost 3 years of Covid, lockdowns and more.

      I hope to meet all my KDE friends at the beautiful Spanish city of Barcelona, and remove the dust of my C++/QML coding skills. I do hope to be able to start a new interface for Atelier using QML, I already have most of the boilerplate from previous works, but now I want to keep it simple and clean.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Linuxiac ☛ 5 Best Proven Systemd-Free Linux Distributions You Can Rely On

  This article will explore the five best Linux distributions that do not use systemd on which you can rely in your daily job.

  Systemd has long divided the Linux community, polarizing it at both extremes – from widespread acceptance to complete denial. While both sides have valid arguments for their pros and cons, this article will look at five Linux distributions whose developers have chosen a side of not using systemd.

  But, before we get into the article’s meat, let’s briefly explain what systemd is and what it is used for.

  In Linux, there is a special process known as ID 1. It is the init process essentially in charge of starting and stopping the system. It got this ID due to being the first process to run on the system when it booted up.

  The systemd service is the process with process ID 1. It is started directly by the kernel, whereas all other services are started by systemd or one of its child processes. In short, systemd is responsible for the fundamental task of properly running your Linux system.

  Now that we’ve explained systemd and what it’s in charge of, let’s look at why it’s so controversial in the Linux community. First, we clarify that the topic is rather broad and that covering it in depth will necessitate a separate article, which we promise to deliver to our readers soon.

  So, the reasons for some people’s dislike of systemd can be divided into ideological and technical.

• HaikuOS ☛ XFS : Project Update

  When the number of entries are small enough we can store all the metadata information in inode core data itself, we call it shortform directories. My first task was to test V4 support for shortform directories aggressively, since implementation was correct and simple enough it passed all my tests. Then I tried to read V5 shortform directories and ofcourse it failed and the reason was inode core size. Xfs V4 has 256 bytes while V5 has 512 bytes inode, so the offset at which metadata is stored is different for both the versions. I implemented some helper functions to give us the correct data fork pointer based on the version of xfs and soon we were able to read V5 shortform entries, Later I did some testing and it passed all my tests.

  After that I began my work for block directory, ofcourse the number of entries would increase and we will no longer be able to store all metadata in inode itself so we use block directory and the format is changed to extents. Now things started to become interesting, there were new fields introduced in V5 block headers and I needed to elegantly handle it with V4 headers as well.
  PulkoMandy suggested I have two options for this: either go with virtual class or templates. I decided we will be using virtual class as it will be more consistent with our xfs code and implement as many methods as we need along with function to create class instance as per version of xfs mounted. Since now we have virtual class with vPtrs we need to be very careful with class and its on-disk structure, for example we now can’t use sizeof() operator on virtual class to match with data stored on disk, I added warnings on code about this on function which should be used instead of sizeof() operator.

  As the roadmap on how to handle both versions was clear to me I extended V5 read support for leaf, node, B+tree based directory and files as well.

• Reviews

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: EndeavourOS 22.6

    The EndeavourOS distribution is a member of the Arch Linux family. Endeavour is a rolling release platform which strives to be easy to set up and run as a desktop operating system. The project puts a strong focus on initial customization, providing the ability to choose our desktop environment (and various extras) at install time.

    I previously reviewed EndeavourOS just over a year ago and the distribution was one of a handful which made my list of remarkably good distributions of 2021. As you might imagine, I was eager to try out the project’s latest snapshot to see how it had evolved over the past year.

    Endeavour is available as a single 1.8GB download for 64-bit (x86_64) computers. Booting from the project’s live media brings up a menu asking if we’d like to launch the distribution normally, run the live media with improved NVIDIA video support, or launch in fallback mode. The normal method worked well for me and the live media quickly loaded the Xfce desktop. The Xfce interface is arranged with a panel across the bottom of the screen. This panel holds the application menu, quick-launch icons, task switcher, and system tray.

• New Releases

  • NuTyX 22.07.0 available with cards 2.5.4

    The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.07.0 and cards 2.5.4.

    New toolchain gcc 12.1.0, glibc 2.35 and binutils 2.38.

    The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.3, the Mesa 3D library in 22.1.4, Gtk4 4.6.6 and Qt 6.3.0.

    The python interpreters are en 3.10.5 et 2.7.18.

    The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.0.

    The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .

    The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 42.3

    The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.25.3, Framework 5.96.0 and applications in 22.04.3.

    Available browsers are: Firefox 102.0.1, Chromium 103.0.5060.134, Epiphany 42.3, etc

    Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 3.7.3, Thunderbird 102.0.3, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.3.4.2, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.

    Core NuTyX ships with Long Term Support (LTS) kernels: 4.14.288, 4.19.252, 5.4.206, 5.10.131 and 5.15.57 and the latest stable version 5.18.14 .

• Debian Family

  • URGENT: debian.community domain seized, use new feed URLs, 7000 new leaked emails

    Please update your browser home page, bookmarks and links from any pages you control.

    Use the new URL https://Suicide.FYI where we are continuing to document the Debian / Ubuntu culture and related suicides

    You can find the new RSS and Atom feed URLs on the same page. As the debian.community domain has been stolen, we can not rely on a redirect.

  • DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced

    Today, Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting more than 210 attendees from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf22 was a large success.

    The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile, reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers, to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using it and contributing to the community.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (29/2022): postmarketOS 22.06.1 for (PinePhone) Pros

    While DebConf 22 and GUADEC are happening, some more things happened, which is impressive considering the inactivity heat waves cause.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Earthly ☛ Terraform Import – Leaving Click Opps Behind

    Previously I built a REST API, deployed it into a container and got it all running on AWS as a Lambda. But setting this up involved just clicking around in AWS and occasionally using the AWS CLI.

    Today, I’m going to port that whole setup to Terraform so that its easier to manage, reproduce, and make changes to. ( These are the purported benefits of Terraform, or so my coworker Corey tells me. I’ve never used it before so I’ll be learning as I go. )

    Read this to learn about Terraform from a noob’s perspective. The specifics of my infrastructure import may not be relevant to you, but hopefully my thinking process and take-aways will be.

    Ok, follow along with me as import my infrastructure into Terraform.

  • peppe8o ☛ Getting Started with WiFi on Raspberry PI Pico W and MicroPython

    The Raspberry PI Pico W added a WiFi connection to the microcontroller from RPI Foundation, enabling our projects to connect to the internet world

    This tutorial will show you how to use WiFi with Raspberry PI Pico.

    With the release of Raspberry PI Pico W, adding the Infineon CYW4343 module to the RP2040-based microcontroller enabled us to get connected to 2.4GHz WiFi networks. It has been a big step, as before this evolution only a few microcontrollers were able to get connected with a WiFi connection and this makes the Pico usable in smart things projects.

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Update: sortcanon Version 0.0.2

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Update: base64dump.py Version 0.0.23

Leftovers

• On Sarcasm – boz.com

  I first discovered sarcasm as a freshman in college, which I realize makes me a bit of a late bloomer as far as teenagers go. There were certain classmates who seemed to always come across as clever and funny no matter the topic. Over time I noticed there was a simple formula to their contributions and it was pretty easy to mimic. It could be as simple as responding with the opposite emotion as one might expect, feigning joy at bad news and heartbreak at good. On more complex topics it could be as simple as just repeating something someone else said but in a sarcastic tone.

  I decided to give it a shot.

  At first being sarcastic was incredibly satisfying. Whereas previously I might have made an earnest argument or asked a question, I now seemed to be able to jump right to the part where the group appreciated me and my contribution. What is even more impressive is it required very little thought to execute. I could often get a positive reaction even on topics I knew almost nothing about.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ There Is No Bar — But Having One is Good Too – Jim Nielsen’s Blog

  As it relates to blogging, I’ve seen encouragement to Just Publish It™️. Matt says just put stuff out there while Chris adds that there is no bar for the quality of a blog post.

  I agree. I enjoy Matt’s and Chris’ approaches to blogging and I subscribe to and read both.

  But, I have an itching asterisk I want to attach to my agreement. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It has a personal bent to it, like “I like that generally, but not for myself specifically” kind of thing.

  Personally I tend towards the “don’t publish it, it’s not good enough” end of the spectrum. For example, I currently have fifty — that’s right 50 — blog post drafts. Some are quite long, full of disjointed thoughts and commentary in need of an edit. Others are quite short, containing a punchy thought in need of expansion and nuance. And if I have to guess how many of those posts will publish, I would say maybe ten at most.

  Why? I don’t think they’re good enough. I’m not sure what I mean by “good enough”, hence this post. I think what I mean is: they’re thoughts that don’t go anywhere and I don’t know where to take them. Some run in circles, seeking to go somewhere but never going anywhere. Others run contrary to some prevailing wisdom, then stop, offering no alternative suggestion or an accompanying rationale.

• Science

  • IEEE ☛ The Webb Space Telescope’s Profound Data Challenges – IEEE Spectrum

    When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals its first images on 12 July, they will be the by-product of carefully crafted mirrors and scientific instruments. But all of its data-collecting prowess would be moot without the spacecraft’s communications subsystem.

    The Webb’s comms aren’t flashy. Rather, the data and communication systems are designed to be incredibly, unquestionably dependable and reliable. And while some aspects of them are relatively new—it’s the first mission to use Ka-band frequencies for such high data rates so far from Earth, for example—above all else, JWST’s comms provide the foundation upon which JWST’s scientific endeavors sit.

    As previous articles in this series have noted, JWST is parked at Lagrange point L2. It’s a point of gravitational equilibrium located about 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth on a straight line between the planet and the sun. It’s an ideal location for JWST to observe the universe without obstruction and with minimal orbital adjustments.

  • TechXplore ☛ Do AI systems really have their own secret language?

    A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce “creative” images on-demand based on a text prompt. The likes of Imagen, MidJourney, and DALL-E 2 are beginning to change the way creative content is made with implications for copyright and intellectual property.

    While the output of these models is often striking, it’s hard to know exactly how they produce their results. Last week, researchers in the US made the intriguing claim that the DALL-E 2 model might have invented its own secret language to talk about objects.

• Hardware

  • Stacy on IoT ☛ Qualcomm launches wearable chips that may finally meet the moment

    Qualcomm has redesigned its silicon designed for wearable devices such as smart watches and activity trackers to launch what it’s calling the Snapdragon W5+ wearable platform. These designs are completely new and hopefully will help the makers of every other smart watch that isn’t an Apple Watch finally compete against the Cupertino-designed device.

    The new Qualcomm silicon embraces the concept of an ambient mode, offloading several sensing and other processes to co-processors that save on power without sacrificing performance. The design takes sensors such as heart rate and microphones for voice activation and embeds them on an always-on microprocessor. Qualcomm has also put a smaller GPU on this always-on chip so the screen gets cool visuals in ambient mode. Finally, it has put notifications and audio playback on this lower performance, low-power always-on processor to save on battery life.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Thoughts on Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first. Plus: Why Monkeypox is in the media in the first place.

    Thoughts on the “gay community” and Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first.

    WARNING: This post will be controversial and likely offensive to LGBT people. I’m gay myself, and I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really wish I didn’t feel compelled to talk about this.

    I consider myself to be the product of when we could still sit down and watch hard-hitting fact-based journalism, and talk about things like adults, without a total media circus, or worry that someone will take offense to facts.

    George Carlin warned about “soft language” in a video from a long time ago that I believe everyone should watch. It hasn’t gotten any better.

    So, I’ve sat down and thought a little bit about Monkeypox and how it spreads. I’ve decided that I won’t be getting my vaccine in the foreseeable future.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • ACM ☛ Raising the Voices of the Dead [Ed: How Amazon et al will be selling listening devices to people]

      Artificial intelligence experts and ethicists are urging caution about potential adverse effects of using the latest generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to simulate the expressions of people who have died. The issue is gaining attention after recent demonstrations of text- and voice-based machine learning models built on natural language processing. Like the use of deepfakes in online videos, the trend presents a minefield of moral quandaries.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael West Media ☛ Poor sports: how Morrison put a shark bite on the taxpayer – Michael West

    Speculation surrounding Scott Morrison’s post-parliamentary ambitions includes the possibility of a job with the Australian Rugby League. His involvement with the sport poses plenty of questions, including the grants largesse that defined his time as PM. Investigation by #Mate.

    Scott Morrison went to the footy the day after his ”miracle” election win in 2019. The image of a triumphant Coalition prime minister waving his blue Cronulla Sharks cap to the home crowd at Shark Park in Woolooware jarred with everyone who had expected the election to send a dysfunctional government packing.

    Morrison’s indulgence of the Cronulla Sharks was deft. It certainly fitted his well-crafted image, the private schoolboy from Sydney’s eastern suburbs presented as the daggy dad from middle-class Australian heartland. That image was cultivated, but not necessarily any more insincere than the Aussie-battler image cultivated by the Labor leaders who hobnob with the captains of business and other plutocrats.

  • Thomas McGarity on Trump and the Fall of Law and Order for Corporations

    Koch Industries spent $3.1 million in the first three months of the Trump administration, largely to ensure confirmation of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Students, Campuses and Dominant Corporate Power – Ralph Nader

    When it comes to corporate power and control over their lives, now and into the future, today’s college students are perilously dormant. When it comes to putting pressure on Congress to counter the various dictates of corporatism, there is little activity other than some stalwarts contacting their lawmakers on climate violence.

    Much of campus activity these days focuses on diversity, tuition, student loans, “politically correct” speech demands and conforming conduct.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Ish Sookun ☛ AFRINIC CEO, Eddy Kayihura, reaches out to the African Telecommunications Union (ATU), for potential Board Directors

    Today, an email landed on the AFRINIC Resource Policy Discussion list, in which a subscriber accuses the CEO of AFRINIC, Eddy Kayihura, of trying to ask a governmental body to interfere with AFRINIC’s independent procedure for electing Board Directors.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • I wrote a new track… Finally!

    I sometimes write music, and today I finished writing some music, so I wanted to share. Whenever someone listens to stuff I create, it gives me additional happiness points! Who knows, maybe one day I will level up to craete a whole album.

    [...]

    Thank you, team Ardour, I really love this DAW.

    (Compiling it required a dirty hack. If you try to compile version 6.9.0 and it fails, let me know, I will share my dirty hack.)

  • Win thrown away in France?

    The best car setup is a compromise. You want grip for the twisty parts and speed for the straights, but more of one gives you less of the other. Ferrari went with grip, and Red Bull went with speed. It seemed like Verstappen would be easily able to pass Leclerc on the long French straights. But that didn’t happen. Verstappen could stay with Leclerc, but never looked like passing. So Red Bull stopped Verstappen early. Fresh tyres should have got them an advantage, and it seemed like it was working. Leclerc would come out of his pit stop behind. Then we’d have had another race where Leclerc needed to overtake on track for the win. But instead he spun into the tyre barrier and Verstappen had an easy win. Leclerc said “I was thinking too much and I lost the rear.” Ouch.

• Technical

  • SVT vs cloud

    Gov’t pushing for BankID completely unquestioned. Everyone needs a Google account to be a citizen, is where we’re headed.

GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: USA – Alaska

  Alaska is a state located in the Western United States. Alaska borders the Canadian province of British Columbia and the Yukon territory to the east. It also shares a maritime border with the Russian Federation’s Chukotka Autonomous Okrug to the west.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ PeaZip is a FREE Archive Manager for Windows, Mac & Linux – Invidious

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.18.14

    I'm announcing the release of the 5.18.14 kernel.
    
    All users of the 5.18 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 5.18.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.18.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.57

  • LWN ☛ [PATCH 5.10 000/148] 5.10.133-rc1 review

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source Console-Based YouTube Tools – LinuxLinks [Ed: For those not wishing to use Invidious or similar]

    YouTube is a video-sharing website, created in February 2005, and purchased by Google in November 2006. The web service lets billions of people find, watch, and share originally-created videos. This service lets you watch a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. It also offers a forum for people to communicate with others around the world, and acts as a distribution platform. Mainstream media corporations such as CBS, Vevo, Hulu and the BBC publish some of their catalog via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

    Although some parents might disagree, YouTube is one of the shining lights of the internet. According to a survey of 1,500 American teenagers commissioned by Variety, the top five most influential celebrities are YouTube stars, with mainstream celebs eclipsed. Moreover, there are many thousands of “YouTube celebs” who have spun a full-time career of creating videos. This new wave of young ‘YouTubers’ threaten mainstream entertainment with their direct video blogs and interaction with their millions of mostly teenage devotees.

    A common complaint about YouTube is that to watch the material you need to use a web browser. Fortunately, some funky developers have created applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube.

    Each application featured is released under an open source license, and offers multi-platform support. The software allows users to access YouTube in a different way, creating a TV-like experience.

    Here’s our verdict captured in a ratings chart. YouTube rate-limits You-Get and youtube-dl limiting their download speeds to around 50kb/s. yt-dlp employs workarounds that circumvent the rate limiting.

  • SequoiaPGP ☛ Blog – sq 0.27.0 is Released

    We are pleased to announce a new release of sq, our command line tool for OpenPGP operations. This release brings some more functionality, as well as some bug fixes.

  • Medevel ☛ InfCloud is an Open-source Self-hosted CardDAV and CardDAV client

    InfCloud is a free open-source web-based CalDAV and CardDAV client that integrates both CardDavMATE and CalDavZAP in one platform.

    [...]

    GNU Affero General Public License (version 3.0).

  • Medevel ☛ dicom: an Open-source DICOM Parser for The Go Language

    The dicom or formerly “go-dicom” is a library and command-line tool to read, write, and generally work with DICOM medical image files in native Go.

  • Medevel ☛ 3DimViewer is an Open-source Free DICOM Viewer

    3DimViewer is a lightweight 3D viewer of medical DICOM datasets that is distributed as open source software. The viewer is multiplatform software written in C++ that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Scan QR codes right from your Linux Terminal

    The more things you can do via the terminal, the better, I always say.

    With that in mind, there is now a Linux shell tool that will scan QR codes (using your webcam), display an ASCII art version of the QR code, then spit out details about it (including the data / URL).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • H2S Media ☛ Install MongoDB 6.0 Server on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

    Here we are using the official repository to install MongoDB 6.0 server and client on Debian 11 to manage local or remote Databases with the help of a command terminal.

    MongoDB is a database based on a non-relational document model. As a so-called NoSQL database (NoSQL = Not-only-SQL) it differs fundamentally from conventional relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, or the Microsoft SQL Server. The name MongoDB is derived from the English word “humongous”, which roughly means “gigantic”.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Set Up a Windows Virtual Machine in Linux

    Need to run Windows software on Linux? One easy method is to install Windows in a virtual machine.

    Preferable to relying on Wine or dual booting, using virtualization gives the Windows virtual PC access to your physical computer’s USB ports and other devices. It also means that you can move the virtual machine to a new PC should your current computer need replacing.

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ AV1 live streaming: Exploring SVT-AV1 rate control

    I’m looking into AV1 live streaming these days; it’s still very early, but it looks like enough of the required parts may finally align, and it seems it’s the way I’ll have to go to get to that next quality level. (Specifically, I’d like to go from 720p60 to 1080p60 for sports, and it seems this is hard to do under H.264 as-is without making pretty big concessions in terms of artifacts/smudges, or else jack up the bitrate so much that clients will start having viewing problems.)

    After some brief testing, it seems SVT-AV1 is the obvious choice; if you’ve got the cores, it produces pretty good-looking 10-bit AV1 using less CPU time than x264 veryfast (!), possibly mostly due to better parallelization. But information about using it for live streaming was hard to find, and asking online turned up zero useful information. So I did some practical tests for live-specific issues, starting with rate control.

  • uni Toronto ☛ How to get (or recognize) a common Unix log timestamp format in things

    One common form for timestamps in Unix log files is timestamps that come out looking like ’2022-07-16 20:50:35′, which is to say the date (in a sensible order) and then the time, with no timezone. Unless the program writing the logs is perverse, the timestamp is in the system’s local time (whatever that is), not something fixed like UTC (of course the system’s local timezone may be UTC). On a casual look around our systems, this is the timestamp format used by Exim and rspamd.

    Go famously has a somewhat obscure approach to formatting and parsing timestamps, which pre-defines a number of common timestamp formats. However, this one is not one of them, and for reasons beyond the scope of this entry I recently wanted to recognize timestamps in this format in Go (more or less).

  • uni Toronto ☛ An assortment of timestamp formats found in our (Unix) logs

    When I wrote yesterday’s entry on producing and parsing a common Unix log timestamp format, I expected to casually find a bunch of examples of programs using that format. What I found instead was a veritable garden of timestamp formats, and today I feel like inventorying them. My examples will use real timestamps plucked from our logs; representing them in Go or C time formatting is up to you.

    (I thought about generating Go formats for all of these then realized I would need to test them all. That’s too much work.)

  • uni Toronto ☛ Grafana Loki and what can go wrong with label cardinality

    Grafana Loki (documentation) is described as ‘Prometheus for logs’, or to quote its website, it’s ‘a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from all your applications and infrastructure’. Similar to Prometheus, it has the idea of data points having both labels and a value (and a timestamp); where in Prometheus the value was always a number, in Loki the ‘value’ is the log message. On a modern Linux system, the obvious easy way to get started with Loki is to use the Promtail agent to ship the systemd journal into your Loki server. How to do this is covered in the “journal” section of the promtail configuration, and there’s a convenient example Journal configuration.

    One of the nice things about the systemd journal is that messages logged in the journal come with a lot of metadata, as covered in systemd.journal-fields. The promtail journal collector allows you to turn some (or all) of these systemd metadata fields into labels. If you aren’t shipping the raw JSON from journald to Loki as the ‘log message’, turning metadata into labels is the only good way to preserve it for later examination and use. Unfortunately there is a problem here, because Loki is more like Prometheus than you’d like.

  • Its FOSS ☛ How to Install Pamac GUI Package Manager in Arch Linux

    Pamac is the package manager of Manjaro based on libalpm which also supports Appstream, AUR, Flatpak and Snaps. Being an alternative to pacman it focuses on providing an easy-to-use interface whether it is GUI or CLI.

    Arch Linux relies on the pacman commands for package management. You may get a GUI-based software center from your desktop environment.

    However, if you want to install the fabulous Pamac package manager in Arch Linux, you could do that.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install/Upgrade Redis on Debian 11 Bullseye

    Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory key-value data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyper log logs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis also provides high availability with Redis Sentinel software logic, automatically partitioning across commodities by ensuring data is replicated in multiple locations. For example, when adding a new node to the cluster, the system will automatically detect the new node and begin replicating data to it. If a node fails or becomes unresponsive, the system automatically removes it from the cluster and routes traffic to the next available node. This way, you can be sure that your data is always accessible and live updates are always possible. Redis has become one of the most popular database options available today, thanks to features like these.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Redis on Debian 11 Bullseye using the terminal command line and the official Redis APT repository for users to install the latest version or for existing users to upgrade their Redis version that Debian, which is often outdated along with some basic setup instructions to get you started.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 9

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP a.k.a Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language especially suited for web development. Many popular CMS such as WordPress, Magento, and Joomla is written in PHP. Frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter. PHP 8 is a major update of the PHP language, there are numerous new features in it, such as enums, read-only properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, speed enhancements, and more.

    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 PHP 8 on Rocky Linux. 9.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to upload local files to Amazon EC2 instance using Terraform [Ed: AMS is vendor lock-in and proprietary, but howtos seem appropriate]

    In this tutorial, we will look at how to copy a file from a local machine running Terraform to a newly created Amazon EC2 instance (Ubuntu) on AWS. In this method, we will use the File utility provided by Terraform. We demonstrate its use by simply copying a file to an EC2 instance.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME Radio 16 on GNOME 42 Presentation at GUADEC 2022 – Ole Aamot

      GNOME Radio 16 is the Public Network Radio Software for Accessing Free World Broadcasts on Internet running on GNOME 42.

      GNOME Radio 16 is available with Hawaii Public Radio (NPR) and 62 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) live audio broadcasts for GNOME 42.

      The latest GNOME Radio 16 release during GUADEC 2022 (between July 20-25, 2022) features 200 international radio stations and 110 city map markers around the world, including National Public Radio, 62 BBC radio stations broadcasting live from United Kingdom and 4 SomaFM radio stations broadcasting live from San Francisco, California. GNOME Radio 16 for GNOME 42 is developed on the GNOME 42 desktop platform with GNOME Maps, GeoClue, libchamplain and geocode-lib and it requires at least GTK+ 3.0 and GStreamer 1.0 for audio playback.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Barry Kauler ☛ Testing Limine Installer on a UEFI computer

  Yesterday I posted testing Limine Installer on a BIOS computer:

  https://bkhome.org/news/202207/limine-installer-version-10.html

  Today I have tested the Installer on my Mele mini-PC, which has UEFI-firmware. I have posted about the Mele many times, such as here:

  https://easyos.org/install/how-to-install-easyos-on-a-new-ssd.html

  The internal eMMC flash memory has Windows 10, and /dev/mmcblk0p1 is the ESP boot partition for Windows.
  I left that drive alone, as-is. Back in 2017, I bought a 240GB Kingston SSD and installed EasyOS to it, simply by using ‘dd’ to write the ‘easy-*.img’ file to the SSD.
  The SSD then had a vfat ESP boot partition, with the rEFInd bootloader, and a second ext4 partition which is the working partition where EasyOS is installed.
  The great advantage of having the rEFInd booloader in its own separate ESP partition, is just need to press the hot-key at power-on to run UEFI-setup and choose to boot from the SSD. The eMMC drive is untouched, pristine. So, at anytime in the future could change the UEFI-Setup back to booting eMMC — in fact that would happen automatically if physically remove the SSD.

• Barry Kauler ☛ Limine bootloader introduction page

  I have created a page about Limine at easyos.org:

  https://easyos.org/install/limine-bootloader.html

  The intention is to add links to it, as there are more case-studies posted to this blog. Or anywhere else, if someone wants to do a case study on their particular hardware and installed-OSs.

• Slackware Family

  • Eric Hameleers ☛ LibreOffice 7.3.5 and updates for Chromium 103 (also -ungoogled)

    LibreOffice Community Edition 7.3.5 was released last week. The Document Foundation blog has the news on it.

    The 7.3.x releases are the bleeding edge of this popular office suite but nevertheless really stable software. Libre Office 7.4.0 is right along the corner (expected release is mid-august) but I might hold out on that first release.

    The new package set for libreoffice-7.3.5 (for Slackware 15.0 and -current) can be downloaded from my repository.

    Note that I compiled them on Slackware 15.0 so if you install them on Slackware -current you will also need to install ‘icu4c-compat‘. This is another package in my repository which contains older versions of the icu4c libraries, in particular the version that is part of Slackware 15.0 but no longer part of -current.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Datanami ☛ IBM Research Open-Sources Deep Search Tools [Ed: IBM has basically 'donated' its code to Microsoft's proprietary software prison]

    IBM Research’s Deep Search product uses natural language processing (NLP) to “ingest and analyze massive amounts of data—structured and unstructured.” Over the years, Deep Search has seen a wide range of scientific uses, from Covid-19 research to molecular synthesis. Now, IBM Research is streamlining the scientific applications of Deep Search by open-sourcing part of the product through the release of Deep Search for Scientific Discovery (DS4SD).

  • Talospace ☛ Raptor says the Blackbird crunch ends in August (and maybe Arctic Terns too)

    Good news for everyone with a Blackbird backorder: Raptor is announcing order fulfillment and restocking by August 31, 2022. This may not mean the order you submit now will get fulfilled by then, but if you have your order already in, the wait will be over soon and new orders should be processed much more quickly. (This date does not apply yet to the Talos II Lite, but I’m sure Raptor is working on it.) In the meantime, if you can’t wait, may we suggest a regular T2? Those are in stock and ready for purchase.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Thomas Rinsma ☛ Verifone POS hacking – th0mas.nl

    For now this is a reference page for my talk on MCH2022 on running arbitrary programs on the VX820. May contain more information later :).

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Hackster Projects to Inspire You! – News – SparkFun Electronics

    Has the Summer heat got you down, zapping your energy, developing into a creative slump? Perhaps, in the mid-year, you have felt your well of inspiration has begun to run dry? We’ve got you! Here are some inspiring project ideas from Hackster to get those creative juices flowing again.

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Absolute Pressure! – News – SparkFun Electronics

    This week the BMP581 Pressure Sensor and ISM330DHCX 6DoF IMU get the Qwiic treatment!

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Qwiic Goes Micro – News – SparkFun Electronics

    We have another exciting Friday Product Post for you today, revolving around the latest addition to our Qwiic Connect System. Qwiic Micro reduces the size of a normal Qwiic board by more than a third, creating a new standard of 0.75in. x 0.30in. / 24.65mm x 7.62mm.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Fed up of spam calls? Here’s how you can block them on your Android phone – Hindustan Times

  • Notebook Check ☛ Xiaomi 12S Ultra is the latest super-flagship Android smartphone to feature on the JerryRigEverything bend-test video series – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android Police ☛ Google is making Chrome more stylus-friendly for text input with Android 13

  • FOSSBytes ☛ How To Use RetroArch Emulator On PC & Android? [All In One Emulator]

  • XDA ☛ How to downgrade from Android 13 Beta to Android 12 on Google Pixel

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ IntelliJ vs. Eclipse: Which is Better for Beginners?

    IDEs come in every shape and size and may often cater to multiple programming languages. However, some of these environments might have a language for which they are famous. That said, Java programmers often compare IntelliJ vs. Eclipse to find the better choice for beginners.

    Java is a pure object-oriented language, and both IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse fulfill their purpose perfectly. Choosing to work with one over the other might seem like a choice that varies on the user’s comfort. Some may like tools that prove as a challenge but have better functionalities, while others want simple interfaces. So, let’s explore!

  • Rlang ☛ RStudio 2022.07.0: What’s New

    This post highlights some of the improvements in the latest RStudio IDE release 2022.07.0, code-named “Spotted Wakerobin”.

  • Rlang ☛ simstudy updated to version 0.5.0

    A new version of simstudy is available on CRAN. There are two major enhancements and several new features. In the “major” category, I would include (1) changes to survival data generation that accommodate hazard ratios that can change over time, as well as competing risks, and (2) the addition of functions to allow users to sample from existing data sets with replacement to generate “synthetic” data will real life distribution properties. Other less monumental, but important, changes were made: updates to functions genFormula and genMarkov, and two added utility functions, survGetParams and survParamPlot. (I did describe the survival data generation functions in two recent posts, here and here.)

  • Rlang ☛ Robin Donatello Talks About Growing an R Community at a State University

    Growing a user base for R at a university can be challenging at the best of times, especially when dealing with the silos that are present in the university system. Robin Donatello with the Chico R Users Group talks about how this issue became both easier and harder to deal with due to the pandemic.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Is raku Dan RubberSonic? – Physics::Journey

      Raku is a great software language that draws on the scripting heritage of perl. The newly minted raku Dan modules provide Data ANalytics (geddit?) capabilities to raku for data science and engineering use cases. (Intro slides & demo video here). This is one in an occasional series of blog posts that seek to explore the whys & wherefores of raku Dan.

      I you want to check out more, warts and all, visit /r/rakulang at Reddit and ask away!

  • Python

    • Earthly ☛ Analyze Your Amazon Data with Python – Earthly Blog

      How much have you spent on Amazon? Well, that’s a kind of interesting question to find an answer to. And it’s the type of question I like to answer using Python.

Leftovers

• Antipope ☛ Crimes against Transhumanity

  (Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)

  Humans are social animals, and it seems reasonable to assume that any transhuman condition we can wrap our minds around will also be a social one for most of its participants.

  Society implies a social contract, that is: we grant one another rights and in return make the concession of respecting each others’ rights, in order that our own rights be observed and respected.

  And violations of rights tend to be at the root of our concept of crime and injustice—at least, any modern concept of crime once we discard religious justifications and start trying to figure things out from first principles.

  Which leads me to ask: in a transhumanist society—go read Accelerando, or Glasshouse, or The Rapture of the Nerds—what currently recognized crimes need to be re-evaluated because their social impact has changed? And what strange new crimes might universally be recognized by a society with, for example, mind uploading, strong AI, or near-immortality?

  SF authors are paid to think our way around the outside of ideas, so it’s always worth raiding the used fiction bin for side-effects and consequences. Here’s qntm’s take on the early years of mind uploading–the process of digitizing the connectome of a human brain in order to treat it as software: I strongly suggest you read Lena (if you haven’t previously done so) before continuing. It’s a short story, structured as a Wikipedia monograph, and absolutely horrifying by implication, for various reasons.

• Code Breaker: Meet the Man Who Virtually Invented Computer Art – ELEPHANT

  Rejected and scorned in the 1950s, Herbert W Franke’s digital work is finally being recognised as revolutionary. Words by Steve Taylor

• Grgely Nagy ☛ The story of Byr

  I have no idea how much use it had, because apart from showing it during the demo, I never looked at the metrics. I never looked at its database, either. And in 2022, when I discovered this little Dyno is still there, the company that provided the database and the metrics were long out of business. The public URL it was originally demoed at was repurposed somewhere around 2018, too, and then that service was decommissioned – along with the URL – sometime in 2021. But Byr still ran.

  Every time someone tried to connect, it tried to do its job, but because there was nothing to back it, it could not. I felt sorry for the little Dyno. I did not have the heart to simply turn it off.

  I spun up a MongoDB, and a dummy server that mimicked the API of the metrics service Byr was using, and connected both to Byr. With its friends back, I restored the original URL it was using (I still had the domain, by pure chance), and I let it show me the front page, shorten an URL, and serve it back to me. Now I could shut it down without feeling awful, and this exercise inspired the Tragedy of Byr, which in turn, served as a fantastic way to test some ideas I had for a game.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Autochrome Lumière Mauretania

  I noticed Wikipedia’s article on the original RMS Mauretania had a color photo using the process. Its the only other time I’ve seen a colour image that wasn’t from her last days before scrapping, and the only one while she still had her standard ocean liner colours.

  I wonder how many other colour photos from the turn of the century are out there? I’d love to see them.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Finding Stuff to Write About

  In his book On Writing, Steven King talks about where he gets ideas. It’s a common question, I think, for anyone who writes steadily. I know people have asked me, “How do you find stuff to write about?” What King says resonates with me: I don’t go out seeking ideas, they whiz by me all day; I’ve just gotten better at recognizing them.

• Science

  • Why Open Access To The ACM Digital Library Matters | Associations Now

    ACM, in the midst of both a landmark celebration and a broader open-access initiative, is putting its history online for anyone to access. The archives give computing enthusiasts something to celebrate—and interested parties a window into ACM’s evolution.

  • IEEE ☛ D-Wave’s 500-Qubit Machine Hits the Cloud – IEEE Spectrum

    When quantum-computing pioneer D-Wave releases its next-generation Advantage2 system in 2023 or 2024, the company expects its 7,000-qubit machine to be the most powerful quantum computer of its kind in the world. Now D-Wave is making an experimental prototype of Advantage2 immediately available for use over the cloud.

    Classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes. In contrast, quantum computers use quantum bits, or “qubits.” Because of the strange nature of quantum physics, qubits can exist in a state called superposition, in which they are essentially both 1 and 0 at the same time. This phenomenon lets each qubit perform two calculations at once. The more qubits are quantum mechanically linked, or entangled, within a quantum computer, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

  • George ☛ How The Fuck Did Feynman Get Here !? – by George

    How The Fuck Did Feynman Get Here !? I’ve been re-rereading stories about Feynman again. People decry that no such geniuses exist today, they oft seem to decry the fact that no physicists since has developed such a thirst for understanding and beautiful ability to abstract for others.

  • DNA Typewriter Taps Out a Record Inside Cells | HHMI

    To test their DNA typewriter, scientists sought to hide well-known phrases inside cells. But this invention’s most powerful application may lie in documenting the biological events that unfold within the boundaries of normal and diseased cells.

  • Automated drones could scare birds off agricultural fields – WSU Insider

    In the future, cameras could spot blackbirds feeding on grapes in a vineyard and launch drones to drive off the avian irritants, then return to watch for the next invading flock. All without a human nearby.

    A Washington State University research team has developed just such a system, which they detail in a study published in the journal Computer and Electronics in Agriculture. The system is designed to have automated drones available to patrol 24 hours a day to deter pest birds, like European starlings or crows, that cost growers millions of dollars a year in stolen or ruined fruit.

    “Growers don’t really have a good tool they can rely on for deterring pest birds at an affordable price,” said Manoj Karkee, associate professor in WSU’s Department of Biological Systems Engineering and the study’s corresponding author. “With further refinement and industry partnerships, this system could work.”

  • Tim Bray ☛ Dark Matter Fun

    Anyone who’s read one or two of my Long Links curations knows that I’m fascinated by the ongoing conundra in Astrophysics and Cosmology on the subject of Dark Matter. There are a couple of recent developments that are worth noting.

• Hardware

  • Matt Rickard ☛ The Quick Uptake of ARM on Cloud

    ARM chipsets like AWS Gravitron and Google Cloud/Azure Ampere have quickly gained adoption. There are many enterprise tailwinds: supply chain, licensing, performance, cost, etc.

    But I’ve been most surprised with how quickly developers have adopted ARM in production. Even with superior cost and performance, there’s gravity to running a specific architecture. Ten years ago, switching off Intel would have been a long, painful transition.

• Security

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Sybil Attacks on Airdrops

    Sybil attacks occur when networked systems get gamed by a small number of accounts, creating multiple identities.

    Proof-of-stake and Proof-of-work mechanisms on blockchains provide Sybil resistance against attacks. These mechanisms prevent a single user from spinning up a large number of nodes to influence the network (economic costs).

    There’s a different flavor of Sybil attacks that occur on blockchains now. Many chains or web3 applications have used airdrops as a growth mechanism (whether or not it works, that’s TBD). Airdrops of new tokens or rewards might be allocated to users who used the application during a certain period. Some airdrops were even scaled with activity: i.e., the more you used the service, the higher the reward you were given.

  • Old VCR ☛ Old Vintage Computing Research: Crypto Ancienne 2.0 now brings TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things (except BeOS)

    Who says you can’t teach an old box new tricks? We did it before and we’re doing it again. Crypto Ancienne (“Cryanc”) is a TLS implementation for pre-C99 beasts and monstrosities featuring carl, a simple curl-like utility that serves as a demonstration command line tool and even as an HTTPS-over-HTTP proxy for suitably configurable browsers. Many operating systems are supported and a number of compilers too (not only gcc going back to version 2.5 and the egcs days, but also clang, MIPSpro, Compaq C and even Metrowerks CodeWarrior). Now, after a lot of late night hacking, screaming and unspeakable acts of programming, tons of bugs are fixed (including a long-standing big-endian issue with ChaCha20Poly1305) and the core has been significantly upgraded such that almost all of the supported platforms now support TLS 1.3.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Markup ☛ Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websitesgemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi

      A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

      The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.

    • Aadhaar advisory: the continuing saga of UIDAI’s breach of privacy rights – The Leaflet

      The recent advisories by the UIDAI’s regional office and then by its parent body are of concern. UIDAI, which has been functioning without a chairman since 2019, is responsible for managing one of the biggest databases in the world. It has already been revealed by the CAG report that it has failed to maintain the uniqueness of the Aadhaar. The database has unpaired and mismatched biometrics data on its system. It lacks a data archiving policy. The lack of a mechanism to ensure its accountability is another worry.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ A dream without a phone

      I had a dream last night that wasn’t so much scary as it was confusing, though I’m sure it tapped into some anxiety of some sort.

      I’d gone to a new country with my sister, checked into a hotel she’s booked for us, then taken the local metro down to a massive central station building. I turned around, and both my sister and my smartphone were gone.

      There I was, in an unfamiliar place, and no idea how to get back. I couldn’t ask for directions, because I didn’t know the name of the hotel. I couldn’t remember which line we’d taken. I had no money to buy a new phone because I’d used Apple Pay. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know my sister’s new foreign SIM mobile number.

    • New York Times ☛ In a Post-Roe World, the Future of Digital Privacy Looks Even Grimmer – The New York Times

      Welcome to the post-Roe era of digital privacy, a moment that underscores how the use of technology has made it practically impossible for Americans to evade ubiquitous tracking.

      In states that have banned abortion, some women seeking out-of-state options to terminate pregnancies may end up following a long list of steps to try to shirk surveillance — like connecting to the internet through an encrypted tunnel and using burner email addresses — and reduce the likelihood of prosecution.

      Even so, they could still be tracked. Law enforcement agencies can obtain court orders for access to detailed information, including location data logged by phone networks. And many police departments have their own surveillance technologies, like license plate readers.

      That makes privacy-enhancing tools for consumers seem about as effective as rearranging the furniture in a room with no window drapes.

      “There’s no perfect solution,” said Sinan Eren, an executive at Barracuda, a security firm. “Your telecom network is your weakest link.”

    • Towards Data Science ☛ Modeling Marketing Mix Using Smoothing Splines | by Slava Kisilevich | Jul, 2022 | Towards Data Science [Ed: Marketing predators try to paint their sinister agenda as a science]

      The established approach among marketers for modeling marketing mix is to apply linear regression models which assume the relationship between marketing activities such as advertisement spend and the response variable (sales, revenue) is linear. Prior to modeling, media spend variables should undergo two necessary transformations to properly capture the carryover effect and the saturation effect of the advertisement spend. It is known, that advertisement spend is not linear with respect to the response variable and follows the law of diminishing returns. However, the functional form of the saturation curve is not known in advance. Therefore, the modeler should first hypothesize about the possible transformation functions that should be applied to each media activity channel to match the true spend-to-response relationship. In this article, I show an alternative approach to modeling marketing mix by using Smoothing Splines, which is the way to model the non-linear relationship between dependent and independent variables within the framework of a linear model. By following this approach, the model will establish the non-linear relationship between media activity variables and the response variable without the need to transform those independent variables to account for the non-linear relationships.

• Environment

  • Michael West Media ☛ Coalition cowardice over environment report – Michael West

    It may not be provable that the Morrison government was the worst in Australian history. But it may have been the most stupid. Its suppression of the fourth State of the Environment report demonstrates this.

    The report, which hit the media on Tuesday, details disasters on animal and plant extinction, marine life, the Great Barrier Reef, bushfires, floods and land clearing.

    The report is, to quote the CSIRO, ”a comprehensive assessment of the state of Australia’s environment produced every five years by the Australian Government. It is an independent and evidence-based review that is mandated by the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.”

    In other words, not the sort of thing to bury in the bottom of a minister’s drawer. Yet the Coalition’s environment minister Sussan Ley, who received the report before Christmas, failed to release it. Why she would think this good strategy is the stupidity bit.

  • Energy

    • Michael West Media ☛ Robbing Australia: profits soar for gas giants, royalties and tax languish – Michael West

      Foreign gas giants Shell, Chevron, Exxon are enjoying an explosion in revenue while paying virtually no income tax and forking out just spare change in royalties. What’s the scam?

      The scam is Australia’s insipid governments and regulators are being gamed by the gas lobby, exploited like never before. Thanks to oil and gas industry spin, and thanks to a meek and compromised finance press, foreign multinationals are pillaging our resources like never before. The latest report from energy analysts at IEEFA estimates the gas majors’ revenue has surged 115% but the royalties they pay to Australian governments, which is already very low, are not rising in step with income and profits.

      Royalties are not tax. Royalties are the price which companies pay – or ought to pay – to drill and mine resources which are owned by us. Immense profits are being raked overseas, yet Chevron, Exxon and Shell – as written here many times – are egregious tax avoiders, Exxon booking $70bn in income over 7 years without paying a cent in tax.

• Finance

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Shannon’s Demon

    Or, how you can create positive returns out of a random walk simply by rebalancing a portfolio.

    Let’s say you have $100 that you want to distribute 50% in stocks and 50% in cash. $200 in stocks, $200 in cash.

    On the first day, the stock halves in price, so you now only have $100 in stock. You rebalance your portfolio by buying another $50 in stock, bringing your assets to $150 in stock, $150 in cash (total $300).

  • Troy Hunt ☛ If You’re Not Paying for the Product, You Are… Possibly Just Consuming Goodwill for Free

    Facebook. LinkedIn. TikTok. But this isn’t an internet age thing, the origins go back way further, originally being used to describe TV viewers being served ads. Sure, TV was “free” in that you don’t pay to watch it (screwy UK TV licenses aside), but running a television network ain’t cheap so it was (and still is) supported by advertisers paying to put their message in front of viewers. A portion of those viewers then go out and buy the goods and services they’ve been pitched hence becoming the “product” of TV.

  • The Wall Street Journal ☛ Tech Workers Long Got What They Wanted. That’s Over.

    Employees who switched jobs during the pandemic received salary bumps and permission to work remotely. Those perks are now under threat.

    Tech workers used to asking for the moon are starting to hear an unfamiliar word as startups and giants such as Google and Microsoft get more cautious: No.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael West Media ☛ Lies, damned lies and survey results – Michael West

    POLL: MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS DEMAND NEW COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS proclaimed the media release from the Institute of Public Affairs on Thursday. Yes, it was scary enough to rate capital letters.

    “A new poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs, reinforces that a majority of Australians want practical and proven solutions to solve the Great Energy Crisis, and this includes building new coal-fired power stations,” the handout harangue continued.

    ”The poll of 1,001 Australians undertaken for the IPA asked respondents whether they agree or disagree with the following statement: “Australia should build new coal-fired power stations to ensure families have reliable and affordable electricity all year round”. The result was 55% agree, 23% disagree, 22% neither agree nor disagree.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Albanese returns from his honeymoon, bumps into Adam Bandt – Michael West

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he is open to “sensible” changes to the government’s climate reform, but will not buckle under pressure from the Greens to increase the 43% emissions reduction target. Michael West on Albo’s first two months in office and the looming climate clash.

    He’s helped Australia’s workers to better pay, he’s repairing Australia’s battered relations with China, France and the Pacific Islands. He’s sorted the preposterous prosecution of whistleblower Bernard Collaery, he’s saved us a couple of billion dollars on the French submarine deal, he’s actually committed to an emissions target and the Biloela kids are going to school after four years in detention.

    We say, Labor is doing a good job so far. Anthony Albanese resembles a latter day Red Adair, running around the world putting out Coalition fires. Even better, the bombastic TV tirades – the lying, the blatant pork barrelling, the mollycoddling of the Murdoch goons and the towering incompetence of the Coalition regime are a thing of the past.

  • Michael West Media ☛ The Ex-Files: where is the life for discards of the parliamentary bubble?

    Australia is a different place politically, and so is Canberra. Scott Morrison is no longer a one-man employment agency. And many traditionally Coalition-aligned lobby firms have already started picking up Labor staffers, writes Stephanie Tran.

    There’s nothing more ex than an ex, as the old saying goes, but there are ways of landing on your feet after being dumped.

    Sure, Scott Morrison has is already enjoying the perks of life as an ex-prime minister, turning up in Seoul last week to hobnob with other has-beens such as former US vice-president Mike Pence and former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad and has-been / possible future star Michelle Obama. And on the weekend he was warning congregants at Margaret Court’s church in Perth of Satan’s plan.

    There’s never no options for an ex-PM, no matter in what odour they left the top job. Australia now has seven ex-PMs, and they are all doing something useful or making nuisances of themselves or making useful nuisances of themselves. Anyway they are doing OK in their own way.

  • Georgia Poll Workers Falsely Targeted by Trump [Ed: Proprietary voting machines ought not be used in the first place]

  • The Supreme Court’s Crisis of Legitimacy

    The United States of America today is a fundamentally different country than the United States of America three weeks ago.

    In this new U.S., the federal government can’t regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act because the law, which first passed in 1963, doesn’t specifically give the government that power. In addition, local government cannot stop a school official from leading students in prayer. But it can control what happens inside a uterus. But it can’t prevent you from carrying a gun in public. But it can assert legal jurisdiction over Native American reservations.

    The common thread is the Supreme Court is the most radically… I don’t even want to say “Conservative,” because this court has been throwing out precedents the way Donald Trump flung his lunch across the White House dining room. So … interventionist? Revanchist? Insurrectionist?

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Wired ☛ The Fight Over Which Uses of [computer programs] Europe Should Outlaw

    IN 2019, GUARDS on the borders of Greece, Hungary, and Latvia began testing an artificial-intelligence-powered lie detector. The system, called iBorderCtrl, analyzed facial movements to attempt to spot signs a person was lying to a border agent. The trial was propelled by nearly $5 million in European Union research funding, and almost 20 years of research at Manchester Metropolitan University, in the UK.

  • New York Times ☛ Robots Aren’t Done Reshaping Warehouses [Ed: Robots were in warehouses for many years already]

    When Digit spends an afternoon unloading boxes from a tractor-trailer in 100-plus-degree heat, co-workers never hear a complaint. Digit, a blue-and-white humanoid robot, was designed to handle the tough, menial and dangerous tasks at warehouses.

    The robot’s movements, informed by years of studying how birds walk, include a slight sway in its frame when it is at rest, to dispel the discomforting stillness that bothers humans. It also doesn’t talk, because voice recognition tech is not advanced enough yet.

    “Instead of designing the whole warehouse around the robots, we can now build robots that are able to operate on our terms, in our spaces, in our environments,” said Jonathan Hurst, the chief technology officer and a founder of Agility Robotics, the firm behind Digit.

  • uni MIT ☛ A helping hand for robotic manipulator design | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    With modular components and an easy-to-use 3D interface, this interactive design pipeline enables anyone to create their own customized robotic hand.

  • From Juneteenth to Reparations: Reclaiming Our Stolen Stories

    Do you know the story of Juneteenth?

    Can you imagine it?

    June 19, 1865, the day that General Order No. 3 “informed all Texans that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves were free,” is the day that we know as Juneteenth today.

    We can imagine asking:

    What kind of jubilee floated into the air that day?

    Do you think the exaltations shook fear out of the ground?

    What songs gave sound to words with no language?

    Juneteenth (“Emancipation Day” or “Jubilee Day,” as it was called in most early accounts) is a celebration of the news that informed Black people throughout Texas that the institution of slavery had been abolished—despite the Emancipation Proclamation marking the legislative end of slavery nearly two and a half years earlier. The day is celebrated throughout the United States with processions, speeches, art, and dance. It was only last year that it was declared a federal holiday, bringing it into mainstream consciousness.

  • For Indigenous Peoples, Abortion Is a Religious Right – YES! Magazine

    After the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June, Minnesota’s Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe Tribe, wrote on social media, “In Minnesota, your reproductive rights will stay protected. …Abortion is health care. Period.” She wasn’t just expressing the health care policy of Minnesota; she was also expressing the long-standing viewpoint of many Indigenous peoples. For thousands of years, reproductive health care has been an important part of Indigenous peoples’ cultural practices, which include religious rituals, sacred rites, and the right to abortion.

    With the recent ruling by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a question emerges: To what extent will Indigenous religious and cultural practices related to reproductive health, including the right to an abortion, be impacted by this decision?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Ish Sookun ☛ What is the SAFE submarine cable?

    The South Africa Far East (SAFE) cable is an optical fiber submarine cable that connects South Africa, Mauritius, Réunion, India and Malaysia.

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ There is a project to recreate the Prodigy online service

    Last month we talked about the effort to reverse engineer the AOL servers — named the “Re:AOL” project — and create a standalone AOL-compatible server that let people experience the joys of using America On-Line from “back in the day”.

  • JCS ☛ Writing and Running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus – joshua stein | jcs

    In 2015, I wrote a custom BBS server in Ruby and had been using it to run the Kludge BBS on a small OpenBSD server in my home office since then.

    Last year after writing a lot of C on my Macintosh Plus, I had the itch to write a new BBS server so I could move the BBS to run on another Mac Plus. As with all software development projects, it took quite a bit longer than expected, but last month I finally got far enough with the development to deploy the new BBS on a Mac Plus.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ Baie Jacotet SCLS, a restricted area

    Last Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Mauritius, P. K. Jugnauth, was replying to a question asked by a Member of Parliament, E. Juman, during the first session of the parliamentary debate.

    P. K. Jugnauth confirmed that the Security Division of his office had requested the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, to extend all necessary assistance to a three-member technical team from India who would field a survey mission at the South Africa Far East (SAFE) Submarine Landing Station at Baie Jacotet, Bel Ombre.

    P. K. Jugnauth stated that in the morning of 15 April 2022, he was informed that Mauritius Telecom had not made the necessary arrangements for the team to have access at the Landing Station. Therefore, he telephoned the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, and asked him to make arrangements for the survey to be carried out.

    The SAFE Submarine Cable Landing Station at Baie Jacotet was declared a restricted area through Government Notice 183 of 2004. The decision was taken by the cabinet on 8 October 2004 and the SAFE SCLS at Baie Jacotet has been a restricted area since 11 November 2004 in accordance with Section 13B of the Police Act.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • SpellBinding: GHYLMTI Wordo: FLING

  • Good Bye Peugeot — Hello Alfa MiTo and 75

    In September 2016 I bought an old Peugeot 206 triggered by the need to get to my mother’s place more regularly and a lot faster. One way takes 2,5 hours by car, and roughly 6 hours by public transportation. So after roughly 30 years of not having “my own car”, I did it again. We did have a family car for 20 of these 30 years. However, I did not want to crash my wife’s car on possibly snowy roads over the mountains, so that was the day.

    This particular Peugeot 206 was from 2005, with 152000 km on the odometer. It had seen its fair share of roads, hail storms, scratches and what not. It was ready to go to the press. But the operator of the recycling place had mercy and sold it.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Decrypting MIME multipart messages in Rmail

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 207: SCaLE 19x, RISC-V Laptop, Unreal Engine 5, Asahi Linux, System76 and more Linux news!

    On this episode of This Week in Linux: SCaLE 19x, Pre-Orders for First RISC-V Laptop, Gamify Your Life with Habitica, Unreal Engine 5 Offical Binaries for Linux, Bitwig Builds Official Flatpak for Linux, Asahi Linux Project Update, Apache OpenOffice, System76’s New Oryx Pro Laptop, FFMPEG 5.1, and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Kernel Space

  • uni Toronto ☛ I’ve now used Linux nftables for firewall rules and it went okay

    For a long time, Linux has perhaps been in a transition from the venerable iptables to nftables. I’m haven’t been terribly enthused about nftables in the past (the last time I considered it I was persuaded to take a different path) for an assortment of reasons. My recent use of nftables wasn’t because I’ve changed my spots; instead, it’s because Ubuntu 22.04 has chosen to make nftables the native interface. If you install a stock 22.04 server, you’ll get a system where the ‘iptables’ binary is actually a compatibility shim that sets up nftables rules. When I had to do some new firewall stuff on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine recently, I decided that I’d try nftables through its native interface.

• Applications

  • Medevel ☛ Lanchat: The Open-source LAN/ Local Network Messenger is No longer maintained [Ed: A mix of good and bad]

    Lanchat is a free open-source messenger app for local network messaging (LAN), that works for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

    It features a built-in encryption, file transfer, automatic connection and terminal UI.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Data Swamp ☛ How to use sshfs on OpenBSD [Ed: Slow Sunday, but still some howtos]

    But OpenBSD has a different security model than in other Unixes systems, you can’t use FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) file systems from a non-root user. And because you need to run your fuse mount program as root, the mount point won’t be reachable by other users because of permissions.

    Fortunately, with the correct combination of flags, this is actually achievable.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Configure Static IP Address on Ubuntu 20.04 (Server CLI and Desktop)

    In your IT environment, sometimes you may be compelled to configure a static IP instead of relying on the DHCP protocol. A perfect example is when you are setting up a Ubuntu server to act as a file or a web server for your organization. A static IP, as the name suggests, ensures that the IP address of your system remains unchanged. With DHCP, the IP address changes once the lease time for the IP address expires and this is undesirable for servers.

    In this guide, we will explore two ways of manually assigning a static IP on Ubuntu 20.04. We will demonstrate how you can configure a static IP on an instance of Ubuntu server and Ubuntu desktop.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Upload Files to S3 using Terraform

    Terraform is an open-source, Infrastructure as Code tool, created by HashiCorp. It is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently in the cloud. Infrastructure as code tool allows developers to codify infrastructure in a way that makes provisioning automated, faster, and repeatable.

    Amazon S3 is an object storage that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Create Your Own Repository for Packages on Debian

    There are various reasons why you would want to build your own local repository. It is a great way to create a local mirror repository for caching frequently used packages used by many computers to save bandwidth usage, or you might have a few modified packages that you want to make internally available for the dev team.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kdenlive on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Kdenlive is a powerful free and open-source cross-platform video editing program made by the KDE community. Kdenlive allows you multi-track video editing also compatible with almost any audio and video.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Kdenlive video editor 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.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Joplin Note-Taking App on Manjaro 21 Linux

    Joplin is a free, open-source note-taking application that can be used on any computer, tablet, or smartphone.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install Apple Music Client Cider on Linux – TREND OCEANS

    If you are a melophile like me and have multiple accounts on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, then you might have experienced that there is not an easy way to install them on a Linux system.

    However, we have already written a detailed guide on how to install Spotify and Tidal on Linux. So, today the focus will be on Apple Music.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install and Use Homebrew Package Manager on Linux – TREND OCEANS

    Homebrew gained its popularity after being the default package manager for macOS. It’s heavily used by developers to install, remove, and manage packages from the command line.

    Also, you cannot deny the fact that Linux is leading the race by providing an amazing package manager. Apart from that, you will also get Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage to manage your packages from the command line.

    But Homebrew’s popularity didn’t set it back, and Linuxbrew (a port of Homebrew) was created for Linux. However, the Linuxbrew project has merged with Homebrew, creating just one brew known as Homebrew.
    The question arises, why should you use the Homebrew package manager on Linux when you have others?

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install 7-Zip on Manjaro 21 Linux

    Created in 1999, 7-Zip is a free, open-source file archiver software that compresses files into archive containers with higher compression rates than most other archivers. In addition to beating most other forms of compression by 2-10%, 7-Zip also supports strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats. While 7-Zip may not be as famous as some archivers, its multi-archive format support across most known software makes it a powerful option for those seeking an archive solution. Overall, 7-Zip is a reliable and efficient file archiver worth checking out.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ Rate Limiting with Nginx

    Rate Limiting With nginx. This article explains how to use the nginx HttpLimitReqModule to limit the number of requests for a given session. This is useful, for example, if your site is hammered by a bot doing multiple requests per second and thus increasing your server load. With the HttpLimitReqModule you can define a rate limit, and if a visitor exceeds this rate, he will get a 503 error.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Its FOSS ☛ Wayland Core Protocol is Tailored Only for GNOME and That’s Not a Good Thing [Opinion] – It’s FOSS News

      Wayland is a display server system based on the idea of protocols. That means that there is no Wayland display server that clients need to talk to. Instead, Wayland defines a protocol for creating display servers. Any client application that is programmed to use this protocol can work on any display server(or compositor) that fully supports this protocol. It’s like the world wide web protocols, where any website can work on any browser as long as the browser is completely supporting the web protocols. So you don’t create websites for specific browsers.

      That also means that the functions defined in the protocol decide what applications (aka clients) can do & what they can’t do. Returning to the example of the website, if the protocol doesn’t define necessary functions, it will limit the web developers. Take CSS as an example; if it wasn’t available in the web protocols, all websites would have looked the same and boring. So the protocol must include all necessary basics in a way that doesn’t limit developers to a few cases and uses.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ Guest Post: FreeBSD in Science | FreeBSD Foundation

    FreeBSD has always been an exceptional platform for scientific computing, thanks in large part to its unrivaled reliability. This allows for computational analyses that need to run for weeks or months, a risky proposition on many platforms. Even if an intensive analysis can be parallelized, restarts are still expensive in terms of time, compute resources, and electric bills.

    The FreeBSD ports system is another advantage for scientific computing. It facilitates instant installation of over 30,000 software packages, with the option to build any of them from source using non-portable optimizations such as -march=native. This can make a big difference in run time for software that benefits from the latest SSE and AVX CPU features.

    FreeBSD ports has seen continued growth and maturation in the scientific categories, now boasting over 2,000 scientific ports across astro, biology, cad, math, and science, with the biology category recently surging past the 200 mark to 228. A major milestone is the biostar-tools meta-port, which makes it trivial for FreeBSD users to install all of the software needed to learn from the Biostar Handbook, the premier introductory text for budding bioinformaticians.

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Where the (dports) action is – DragonFly BSD Digest

    I mentioned a new committer for DragonFly, Sergey Zigachev, recently. He hasn’t shown in the commit logs for DragonFly directly – cause he’s fixing up dports. I’m mentioning that because the amount of work that goes into dports to keep all those ports working on DragonFly is separate and unseen – but necessary.

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ In Other BSDs for 2022/07/23

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ BSD Now 464: Compiling with kefir – DragonFly BSD Digest

    BSD Now 464 is out for the week, and has the normal roundup. Nothing unusual to point out, just good reading.

• Fedora Rawhide Performance / Red Hat

  • The performance impact of various debug options on Fedora Rawhide debug kernels

    The current Fedora Rawhide kernels are too slow to run libguestfs tests when doing Koji builds. These run in a qemu VM, running the Rawhide kernel, emulated using software virtualization (ie. TCG). They now time out because these kernels are so slow. Until fairly recently they were slow but working. I wondered if particular debug options had a greater effect on performance, so I compiled many kernels (v5.19-rc7 from upstream) using the baseline “no debug” config, then adding each debug option that we use in turn, and measuring the performance using [1], using qemu software virtualization (TCG). The tests were run many times with warmups discarded to get the mean and standard deviation, using the hyperfine program[2]. The results are below, and not very conclusive, but some options do have a very large performance impact. NO_DEBUG is the kernel compiled with no debug options enabled (ie. the baseline). In the actual debug kernel I expect the slow downs to be multiplied together. To test that I did an extra run with all debug options enabled (ALL_DEBUG). CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING, CONFIG_LOCK_STAT and CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC were present and enabled in the kernel when it was imported into git in 2010. CONFIG_DEBUG_WW_MUTEX_SLOWPATH was turned off in the past (RHBZ#1114160). It seems to have been switched on again in 2020. CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK seems like it was enabled in 2012. It’s also possible that an existing debug option has got slower in the upstream kernel, that is, it’s not that we’ve recently changed something in Fedora.

  • TechTarget ☛ Compare Docker vs. Podman for container management

    Docker and Podman offer similar capabilities to manage containers, but Docker’s security vulnerabilities might make Podman more appealing for some admins.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ How Red Hat’s new CEO Matt Hicks revealed his view of IT through interviews with theCUBE [Ed: Failing to disclose that Red Hat is paying them for these puff pieces, or selectively disclosing that, sometimes...]

    With his elevation this month to become the next chief executive of Red Hat Inc., Matt Hicks joined a select club of enterprise leaders well-known in tech circles but perhaps not as familiar to corporate America or the general business press.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ NanoPi R4SE dual Gigabit Ethernet router adds 32GB eMMC flash – CNX Software

    NanoPi R4SE is a variant of the Rockchip RK3399-powered NanoPi R4S dual Gigabit Ethernet router that adds a 32GB eMMC flash instead of only relying on a microSD card for the operating system.

    Most of the specifications remain the same with dual GbE, two USB 3.0 ports, but the router is now only offered with 4GB LPDDR4 and there’s no option for only 1GB RAM, and the GPIO and USB 2.0 headers are gone. The listed temperature range also changed from -20°C to 70°C to 0°C to 80°C.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ ATX board integrates 12th Gen Intel processors, dual 2.5GbE, quad-displays and 5G/LTE support

    A few days ago, IBASE unveiled an ATX motherboard debuting the 12th Gen Intel Core processors. The MBB-1000 supports up to 128GB DDR4 RAM, four SATA ports, eight USB 3.1 ports and several other peripherals.

    The MBB-1000 motherboards feature an LGA 1700 socket compatible with the latest Intel’s Alder Lake processors that integrate up to 8 P-cores and E-cores. According to the product page, the chipsets supported will be the R680E, Q670E and the W680. See this link to see the chipsets comparison.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Backpack Is Ready for Hacking on the Go | Tom’s Hardware [Ed: Lots of projects with SBCs in spite of the unprecedented shortages]

    The Raspberry Pi is an excellent option for sprucing up your home life, but what if you wanted to take it on the go? That’s where projects like this one from Davide Marchetti with Bag Builds (opens in new tab) comes into play. He’s taken the Raspberry Pi and a few extra accessories and packed them into a mobile platform inside a backpack.

    With his Pi-powered backpack system, Marchetti is ready for all sorts of “outdoor hacktivities” as he puts it. It includes a bunch of fun tools ranging from a sound system to a HackRF antenna, so he’s ready for anything fun and serious that might come his way while out and about. But, of course, a degree of flexibility comes with all-in-one rigs like this—which is part of its appeal—so pinning its purpose on one goal is challenging.

  • Gizmodo ☛ This James Webb Space Telescope Mirror Displays Real JWST Images

    To make the mirror worth staring at even for those who aren’t vain, the Cellar Nerd replaced the sensors in the center of the Webb Space Telescope’s mirror array with a salvaged 15.6-inch laptop screen connected to a Raspberry Pi 2 that holds actual images captured by the real telescope and scales them to fit the visible part of the screen as part of a passive slideshow. Eventually, the Cellar Nerd plans to update the mirror to automatically retrieve new images from the Webb Space Telescope as they’re shared online, to add to an ever-growing slideshow.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Lego-Powered Submarine Makes a Splash | Tom’s Hardware

    We’ve seen hundreds of Raspberry Pi projects on dry land, but not too many that function underwater. Brick Experiment Channel (BEC) created this impressive Lego-powered Submarine and used a Pi to drive the operation. It doesn’t just move forward; BEC has programmed it with several features that allow it to navigate still and moving waters.

    According to BEC, the submarine is radio-controlled, allowing for remote operation. Using a variety of sensors, it’s capable of maintaining its depth and can position itself in relation to the ground below. This positioning ability can be set manually and operates automatically.

    If you haven’t heard of Brick Experiment Channel, you’re in for a Lego-centric treat. Most of the projects you’ll find on the blog are created using Lego integrated with microelectronics. Previous projects worth a look include these pole climbing robots and this exciting boat train made from ten separate Lego boats. If it can be made with Lego, suffice to say that BEC is more than capable of tackling the project.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Powers Machine Learning Terminator | Tom’s Hardware

    This Raspberry Pi project created by maker Michael Darby of 314Reactor brings the fictional world of The Terminator to life. With the help of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a slew of accessories, he’s recreated the eerie T-800 Terminator villain—but, thankfully, it’s only the skull so we’re safe…for now.

    This project is housed inside of a replica prop that’s just big enough to house a full-sized Pi. In addition to the Pi, Darby has fitted the skull with a speaker for audio output and a camera module in the eye. Darby is using machine learning (ML) to synthesize speech as well as recognize objects detected via the camera module.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Amazon Alexa Controls Raspberry Pi Pico Door Lock

    Building the smart home of your dreams is as easy as Pi—Raspberry Pi that is. To prove this, today’s project created by Jithin over at the Electromaker website is a Raspberry Pi Pico powered project that controls a door lock using Amazon Alexa’s voice control system.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Tracks Airport Arrivals and Departures | Tom’s Hardware

    If there’s one thing a Raspberry Pi is good for, it’s working with data from the web. This project, created by maker and developer Rui Alves, is taking this idea to new heights, via the world of aviation. This homemade arrivals and departures board keep tracks up incoming and outbound flights in real-time for any airport of your choosing.

    It works by pulling relevant flight data from an open source API, processing the flight details, and displaying that information on a custom display. It features an animation effect that closely resembles airport flip boards. These animations trigger each time the flight data is updated. Overall, the end result is a tiny desktop arrivals and departures board that looks just like the ones you’ll find in actual airports.

  • Medevel ☛ Microscope-PiCam: An Open-source Raspberry Pi Microscope

    Microscope-PiCam is a free open-source web-based solution that acts as the soul of a Raspberry Pi based microscope.

    It is an ideal solution for taking still images using a 12 MP HQ camera attached to a gemmological microscope.

    The project has detailed instructions on how to setup your Raspberry Pi with the camera and attached them to the microscope.

  • Arduino ☛ Converting a Commodore PET into a USB docking station

    Docking stations come in many forms with many different purposes, but the general idea is always to expand a laptop’s (or tablet’s) capabilities. In this case, it turns the connected laptop into a desktop experience with a dedicated screen and a full tactile keyboard. The keyboard wasn’t actually very good in the Commodore PET 64, but Luna has plans to upgrade it with a MechBoard64 to keep the original look with modern high-quality mechanical keyswitches. As it stands, the PET 64’s keyboard connects to the docked laptop and a 12” TFT LCD screen (in place of the PET 64’s original CRT monitor) acts as a second monitor for the laptop.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget)

    Therefore, I always used to edit videos off my local SSD drive. And sometimes over the network using macOS’s built-in file sharing. But as my video workflow matures, I find myself needing a central storage solution disconnected from my main workstation.

    Thus, the all-SSD high-performance edit NAS—on a budget.

    I had five 8TB Samsung QVO SSDs from my insane $5000 Raspberry Pi server build. Until now, I had them inside my 2.5 Gbps NAS. But I wanted to build my own NAS capable of saturating a 10 Gbps connection, and allowing extremely low latency data access over the network to my two Macs, both of which are connected to my wired 10 Gbps home network.

  • Medevel ☛ OpenFlexure is an Open-source 3D-Printed Low-cost Microscope

    The OpenFlexure Microscope is a 3D printable microscope, including a precise mechanical stage to move the sample and focus the optics. There are many different options for the optics, ranging from a webcam lens to a 100x, oil immersion objective.

    It comes with a sophisticated guide that helps anyone print the microscope with any 3D printer, an open-source software to start using the microscope which works on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and rich tutorials to make its usage smooth and fun.

    Optomechanics is a crucial part of any microscope; when working at high magnification, it is absolutely crucial to keep the sample steady and to be able to bring it into focus precisely.

  • Hackaday ☛ Is 3D Printing Up To A Turntable?

    Thanks to a feature by Prusament because it uses their filament, we’ve been interested to read about the SongBird turntable from the British outfit Frame Theory (Note: at time of writing, they have an expired certificate). It’s a commercial product with an interesting twist for the Hi-Fi business: buy the completed turntable or buy a kit of parts and print the rest yourself.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Giz China ☛ 5 Best Android Phones In Singapore You’d Love To Get Your Hands On!

  • Android Authority ☛ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

  • SlashGear ☛ Why You Probably Need To Stop Using Your Android Phone’s Built-In Browser

  • Notebook Check ☛ Hands-On Xgimi Aura Projector – Inexpensive laser TV with Android and good features – NotebookCheck.net Reviews

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Klara ☛ Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development | Klara Inc.

  The cornerstone of any open source project is a rich and diverse community—not the code. Open source projects thrive because of the community built around them.

  A project’s ideas, comments, bug reports, forums, Twitter discussions, advocacy, design, documentation, mailing lists, and code contributions all reflect the presence of this community. These contribute to the project’s success and assure its long-term sustainability. Building such a community around open-source software (OSS) projects requires everyone contributing—hobbyists, developers, and non-developers such as technical writers, designers, and community managers—to stand on each other’s shoulders.

  However, non-coding contributions are frequently overlooked and underappreciated in open-source initiatives. Let’s cover why non-developer contributions should be appreciated and why those contributions help projects thrive.

• Computer Weekly ☛ The Matrix Interoperated: Element fuses growth in open source messaging protocol 

  Matrix is an open network for decentralised communication.

  The brand has now surpassed sixty-million users worldwide after experiencing 71% growth in the last 12 months.

  All Matrix-based apps are natively interoperable and its developers claim to have produced a means of offering secure communication that is free from data mining.

  Matrix’s flagship app Element is messaging and collaboration platform that works as a (free) privacy-respecting replacement for the likes of WhatsApp.

  Why might we need a WhatsApp replacement?

  As reported here on Forbes, “WhatsApp’s privacy label is awful. It’s the only leading secure messenger that harvests ‘data linked to you’, including your device ID, for ‘developer’s advertising and marketing’. It also collects your contact info, user ID and device ID for ominously vague ‘other purposes’. Other messengers collect your data to tailor functionality. WhatsApp is harvesting it for other reasons.”

• Web Browsers

  • Björn Wärmedal ☛ The Modern Web’s Many Single Points of Failure [Ed: Standards are being abandoned in the name of "innovation" (vendor lock-in)]

    Modern web services build their entire businesses on being available and their customers come to expect it. They use a whole suite of tools to reach that goal, but each new tool brings both benefits and risks. Would a slower development pace and a lower expectation of uptime and speed bring more security?

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ GNU Parallel 20220722 (‘Roe vs Wade’) released

    GNU Parallel 20220722 (‘Roe vs Wade’) has been released.

• Programming/Development

  • TechTarget ☛ A quick glance at the history of C programming languages [Ed: After 50 years C is still around! And still leading]

    Since C hit the scene in 1972, the language has continuously evolved to stay relevant in modern development. We examine C’s history and why it’s still relevant.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ How quickly can you convert floats to doubles (and back)? – Daniel Lemire’s blog

    Many programming languages have two binary floating-point types: float (32-bit) and double (64-bit). It reflects the fact that most general-purpose processors supports both data types natively.

    Often we need to convert between the two types. Both ARM and x64 processors can do in one inexpensive instructions. For example, ARM systems may use the fcvt instruction.

  • Medevel ☛ Utopia is an Open-source Real-time React Design and Coding Environment

    Utopia is a free open-source React development and design environment that allows developers to enjoy a visual real-time coding and design within one platform.

    Utopia is a browser-based project that can run on a server or any local computer. It can be installed on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

    Utopia is highly compatible with Microsoft open-source VS Code editor as it combines it coding functionality, with a real-time editing and design tools that is more similar to Xcode or even Sketch.

  • Rlang ☛ Beta version of NIMBLE with automatic differentiation, including HMC sampling and Laplace approximation | R-bloggers

    We’re excited to announce that NIMBLE now supports automatic differentiation (AD), also known as algorithmic differentiation, in a beta version available on our website.

  • Rlang ☛ Why this is the year you should take the stage at EARL 2022… | R-bloggers

    EARL is Europe’s largest R community event dedicated to showcasing commercial applications of the R language. As a conference, it has always lived up to its promise of connecting and inspiring R users with creative suggestions and solutions, sparking new ideas, solving problems and sharing perspectives to advance the community.

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Top Data Structures That Every Programmer Must Know

    A Data Structure organizes and stores data in a computer so that we can perform operations on the data more efficiently. There are many diverse applications of data structures in Computer Science and Software Engineering. The use of data structures is most common in all computer programs and software systems. As well, data structures are an important part of the fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering. There is no doubt that this topic is a key component of Software Engineering and also very important from the perspective of interview preparation. Therefore we must have good knowledge about data structure, In this post, we are going to discuss with you the top Data structure that every programmer must know. The knowledge of top data structure also becomes important for the implementation of the advanced data structure.

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ How to prepare for ICFP or International Conference on Functional Programming?

    The ICFP Programming Competition is an international programming competition that has been held in June or July every year since 1998. The results were presented at the International Conference on Functional Programming.

  • Rlang ☛ Join rstudio::conf(2022) Virtually

    Live streaming: Keynotes and talks will be livestreamed on the rstudio::conf website, free and open to all. No registration is required.

  • Lawrence Tratt ☛ CHERITech22 and PLISS 2022

    CHERITech22 is free; PLISS does have a registration fee, though we are able to subsidise some attendees who otherwise might not be able to attend. In both cases you have to fill out a form expressing your interest in attending, and we’ll notify the successful applicants later.

  • NVISO Labs ☛ Analysis of a trojanized jQuery script: GootLoader unleashed

    In this blog post, we will perform a deep analysis into GootLoader, malware which is known to deliver several types of payloads, such as Kronos trojan, REvil, IcedID, GootKit payloads and in this case Cobalt Strike.

    In our analysis we’ll be using the initial malware sample itself together with some malware artifacts from the system it was executed on. The malicious JavaScript code is hiding within a jQuery JavaScript Library and contains about 287kb of data and consists of almost 11.000 lines of code. We’ll do a step-by-step analysis of the malicious JavaScript file.

  • Buttondown ☛ On Metafiles

    The XML is a metafile which represents three different “actual” files. I’d estimate that this trick cut at least a week off the project time.

    (Why XML? It’s a poor data language, but it’s the best markup language for text. XML is good because it 1) preserves whitespace, 2) has inline markup, and 3) cleanly delineates between content and content data (via attributes).1)

  • Finnstats ☛ Best Books for Data Engineers

    Best Books for Data Engineers, Are you seeking the best books on data engineering? If so, your quest is over here.

    We’ve outlined the top 8 books on data engineering in this article. So, read the entire article to choose which book is ideal for you.

    The person in charge of overseeing data workflows, pipelines, and ETL procedures is known as a data engineer.

    Data engineering, as its name suggests, is a field that deals with the delivery, storage, and processing of data.

    SQL, R, Python, Spark, AWS, and other specialized technologies are the ones that data engineers need to master.

  • Rlang ☛ Best Books to learn Tensorflow | R-bloggers

    Best Books to learn Tensorflow, Are you interested in learning Tensorflow and searching for the best resources to do so? If so, you are in the proper location. We compiled a comprehensive list of the top Tensorflow learning materials in this article.

    So take a moment to look for the best resources for learning Tensorflow. This article can be bookmarked so that you can access it later.

  • Python

    • Geeks For Geeks ☛ How to Become a Python Developer?

      Python is indeed a very demanding and easy language in which everyone wants to grow his/her career. It has also been the most used language with a percentage of 48.24% globally.

• Standards/Consortia

  • CNN ☛ Why Bluetooth remains an ‘unusually painful’ technology after two decades

    ABI Research estimates that 5 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will ship to consumers this year, with that figure expected to rise to 7 billion by 2026. Bluetooth is now in everything from smartphones to refrigerators to lightbulbs, allowing a growing number of products to connect to each other seamlessly — sometimes.

    Despite its pervasiveness, the technology is still prone to headache-inducing issues, whether it’s the struggle to set up a new device to connect with, switching headphones between devices or simply being too far out of range to connect.

  • Jan Schaumann ☛ DNS Response Size

    Well, turns out it’s not quite as arbitrary as it may seem. Given that we want to avoid packet fragmentation along the way from the resolver to the client, we are looking to establish a reasonable guess for the most common Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) for the networks our packets might cross. That number is rather commonly 1500 bytes (in part because Ethernet II uses 1500 byte frames, and measurements done by researchers Axel Koolhaas and Tjeerd Slokker confirmed this size).

Leftovers

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Dealing with Unwanted Email

  The recipe is simple, but quite effective. It definitely beats not doing anything, as often sales people and recruiters will send you numerous “follow-up” emails if you let them do so. Some email services like HEY block email from unknown senders by default and that’s another effective way to combat unwanted email. You can build similar workflows with most popular email vendors – e.g. here’s how you can do this with Fastmail.

• Science

  • India Times ☛ TechM, Mahindra University to set up lab for Metaverse, quantum computing

    Makers Lab will focus on the effect of quantum on image optimisation for satellites etc and explore work on explainable AI(artificial intelligence) in collaboration with Mahindra University, Malhotra said.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Negative incentives in academic research – Daniel Lemire’s blog

    In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We have entered a ‘dark age’ where we are mostly stagnant. It is not that there is no progress per se, but progress is slow, uncommon and expensive.

    Why might that be? I believe that it has to do with important ‘negative incentives’ that we have introduced. In effect, we have made scientists less productive. We probably did so through several means, but two effects are probably important: the widespread introduction of research competitions and the addition of extrinsic motivations.

• Hardware

  • VOA News ☛ How China Became Ground Zero for the Auto Chip Shortage

    The global chip shortage over the past two years – caused by pandemic supply chaos combined with booming demand – has transformed what had been a high-volume, low-margin trade into one with the potential for wealth-spinning deals, he says.

    Automotive chip order times remain long around the world, but brokers like Pang and thousands like him are focusing on China, which has become ground zero for a crunch that the rest of the industry is gradually moving beyond.

    Globally, new orders are backed up by an average of about a year, according to a Reuters survey of 100 automotive chips produced by the five leading manufacturers.

  • Hackaday ☛ Adding A Battery To Extend Speaker Life

    Perhaps the weakest point in modern electronics when it comes to user servicability is the lifecycle of the batteries included from the manufacturer. Without easily replaceable batteries, many consumer goods end up in the landfill when they’re otherwise working perfectly. If you’d like to get more out of your devices than the manufacturer intends, you might have to go to great lengths like [Théo] did with his JBL speaker.

  • Hackaday ☛ Purpose-Built Plotter Pitches In To Solve Wordblitz On Your Phone

    It seems like most hackers have never played a game without at least wondering how to cheat at it. It’s not that we’re a dishonest lot, at least not as a rule. It’s more that most games hold less challenge for us than does figuring out how to reverse engineer the game’s mechanics. We don’t intend to cheat; it just sort of happens.

  • Hackaday ☛ Digital “Toy” Camera, Made For Tilt-Shift And Other Analog-Like Experimenting

    Like many others, [volzo] loves playing with photography in a playful and experimental way. Oddball lenses, vintage elements, and building from kits is what that world looks like. But that kind of stuff is really the domain of film cameras, or at least it was until [volzo] created his Digital Toy Camera design. The result? A self-built, lomography-friendly digital camera that allows for all kinds of weird and wonderful attachments and photo shenanigans.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hack Your Brain: Bionic Reading — Panacea Or Placebo?

    In the Star Trek episode Space Seed, [Khan] famously said, “Improve a mechanical device, and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousandfold.” Most of our hacks center on the mechanical or electromechanical kind, but we do have an interest in safely improving ourselves. The problem is that most of us don’t want to mess with our DNA or have surgery, so it sort of limits our options.

  • dwaves.de ☛ » What is the fastest ARM SoC? – GeekBench results Samsung S21 Ultra & how to send Android Apps over Bluetooth (or E-Mail) & how to backup an Android App to file | dwaves.de

    When will Intel & AMD release their first ARM based SoC?
    “Intel is working on a new SoC (system on a chip) that will compete with the ARM-based designs that have dominated the mobile market for several years. Through a partnership with fabless chip designer SiFive (RISC-V), Intel is licensing IP to create its own 64-bit SoC that’s built on its 7nm node.

    Last week, Intel announced a partnership with SiFive for its upcoming Horse Creek platform. Intel is using SiFive’s P550 core for the Horse Creek design, which is SiFive’s “highest performance processor” available. Intel said it will be incorporating its own IP, including DDR and PCIe, into the design.” (src: digitaltrends.com)

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • RTL ☛ Researchers find up to 88 different pollutants in children’s hair

    The researchers behind the “pioneering” Luxembourgish study, which was published this week, have found that children are regularly exposed to numerous pollutants. These can be linked to the development of “neurological diseases, developmental issues, hormonal disruption, respiratory and cardiovascular disorders, cancer and obesity”.

    By collecting hair samples from 256 resident children below 13 years of age, the researchers sought to better understand the chemical pollutants children were exposed to. A questionnaire was used to gather information on the children’s lifestyles, such as whether they had any pets at home, where they lived, and what they ate.

  • Hollywood Reporter ☛ YouTube Says It Will Remove Videos Showing Abortion Misinformation

    YouTube said it will take the video as part of its policy to “prioritize connecting people to content from authoritative sources on health topics.” The company already has an existing misinformation policy, which prohibits “certain types of misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm.” This includes “harmful remedies or treatments, certain types of technically manipulated content, or content interfering with democratic process,” as well as content that “contradicts local health authorities’ or WHO guidance on certain safe medical practices.”

  • TruthOut ☛ As Abortion Providers Move to New Mexico, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” Follow

  • Hackaday ☛ Machine Learning Baby Monitor Prevents The Hunger Games

    Newborn babies can be tricky to figure out, especially for first-time parents. Despite the abundance of unsolicited advice proffered by anyone who ever had a baby before — and many who haven’t — most new parents quickly get in sync with the baby’s often ambiguous signals. But [Caleb] took his observations of his newborn a step further and built a machine-learning hungry baby early warning system that’s pretty slick.

  • Common Dreams ☛ WHO Declares Monkeypox a Global Public Health Emergency

    The World Health Organization on Saturday formally classified monkeypox as a “public health emergency of international concern,” warning that the viral disease is spreading rapidly across the globe.

    The WHO’s decision came after a panel of advisers failed to reach a consensus position on whether monkeypox constitutes a global health emergency. Saturday’s move marks the second time in two years that the WHO has issued such an international health emergency declaration.

• Proprietary

  • Dawn Media ☛ Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient

    Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

  • India Times ☛ Albania resumes public online services, probes cyberattack [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Investigators are conducting what Rama described as the most delicate part of their probe, which is gathering evidence to identify one of the two countries suspected of the attack.

    Authorities said a “wide and complex” cyberattack tried to hit critical government systems on Friday afternoon before they were shut down.

• Security

  • Security Week ☛ New Cross-Platform ‘Luna’ Ransomware Only Offered to Russian Affiliates | SecurityWeek.Com [Ed: This only works if you've already taken over the machine]

    A new cross-platform ransomware named Luna can encrypt files on Windows, Linux and ESXi, but its developers are only offering it to Russian-speaking affiliates.

  • Security Week ☛ Intezer Documents Powerful ‘Lightning Framework’ Linux Malware [Ed: With Windows, there are back doors. With Linux, however, you need to first get in somehow. The media fails to mention this.]

    Security researchers at Intezer are documenting the discovery of a powerful piece of Linux malware that can stay undetected and has the ability to install rootkits.

    Dubbed Lightning Framework, the threat is described as a Swiss Army Knife-like piece of malware that has a modular design and a plethora of capabilities rarely seen in malware targeting Linux systems.

  • SANS ☛ Malicious Python Script Behaving Like a Rubber Ducky, (Wed, Jul 20th) [Ed: So don't run this script. Nobody forces you to.]

    Last week, it was SANSFIRE in Washington where I presented a SANS@Night talk about malicious Python scripts in Windows environment. I’m still looking for more fresh meat and, yesterday, I found another interesting one.

    Do you remember the Rubber Ducky[1]? Pentesters like this kind of gadgets. I still have one as well as others with WiFi capabilities The idea behind these USB keys is to deliver a payload by simulating a keyboard. When you connect then to a computer, they are detected as a HID (“Human Interface Device”). The payload will be “injected” like if the user pressed all the keys one by one.

    The script that I found provides the same behaviour! It was found on VT with a very low score of only 3/58[2] (SHA256:83d009773ecfbc4016493f131ea07aa57408c9a6d334dd66cac5dac81a745241). The magic happens with the help of a specific Python library called pyautogui[3]. The description says everything:

  • Fudzilla ☛ Linux hit by a rather nasty persistent virus [Ed: Conflating targets with infects. Just because someone wishes to infect "Linux" with this thing doesn't mean it'll be feasible; with Windows there are back doors]

    Intezer Labs security researchers have identified a sophisticated new malware that targets Linux devices.

    OrBit is rather nasty and can hide its presence in network activity by manipulating logs. The module hooks functions called in shared libraries, which is pretty common for malware, but it implements “advanced evasion techniques” and “remote capabilities over SSH.”

  • Computing UK ☛ All about SBOMs: the latest moves to secure the software supply chain [Ed: This is not security but Linux (Microsoft) Foundation propaganda and stigmatisation that distracts from the back doors]

    Following Biden’s Executive Order on cybersecurity, uptake of software bills of materials is taking off in the US. We need to follow suit

  • TechTarget ☛ CNCF, CISA address hurdles to SBOM for cloud security [Ed: This is not real security, this is bureaucracy and paperwork]

  • Forbes ☛ Google Update Warning Issued For 3 Billion Chrome Users [Ed: Proprietary software and sensationalising headlines, the usual from Gordon Kelly, basically naming how many people are estimated to use the software]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Amazon spending $3.9 bn in expanding health care push

      One Medical, which has a network of primary care practices across the United States as well as telemedicine services, has grown to 767,000 members, according to its latest results.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Scheerpost ☛ VIDEO: Aaron Maté Challenges Guardian on Syria

    A recent article in The Guardian parroted evidence-free allegations that The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté is “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” about Syria among a “network” of “conspiracy theorists.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Lawyers Who Enabled Trump’s Assault on Democracy

    Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone thinks that Mike Pence should receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for refusing Trump’s demand to commit a felony and subvert a presidential election. That’s how low the bar for heroism among Trump administration alumni has sunk.

  • The Verge ☛ Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are set to be deposed about Cambridge Analytica

    The lawsuit, which could wind up as a class action case if a judge agrees to it, alleges that Facebook illegally shared user data with third parties and didn’t adequately protect that data from being abused by bad actors. It stems from a case where Cambridge Analytica, a firm working for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was able to scrape data from millions of Facebook profiles without getting permission from those users. It later came out that the tactics they used to do so weren’t exactly novel. If you want to do a deep dive into the saga, you can check out our Cambridge Analytica page here.

  • Medforth ☛ In France, a man who recently converted to Islam threatens to “blow himself up” using an explosive belt against his wife: “Allah has told me to do it”

    It is 1.20 a.m. on this July 14 when one mother receives a video call from the man she recently separated from after 25 years together having four children. The man, who is still her husband, threatens to come to the small party she is having next Saturday with an explosive belt and “blow himself up”.

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ When Spain Crushed Islamic Jihad on the Battlefield

    Indeed, as an indicator of the importance of the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, for centuries thereafter, July 16 was celebrated as the “Triumph of the Holy Cross” in the Spanish calendar, until Second Vatican abolished it—in keeping with the spirit of the new age of historical amnesia.

  • ABC ☛ Serbia police detain 85 migrants; weapons seized in raid

    A police task force found automatic weapons, guns, knives and other weapons and ammunition during the sweep in the northern town of Subotica, police said in a statement.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Serbia police detain 85 migrants; weapons seized in raid

    The raid followed a major clash by groups of migrants in the border area in early July that left one person dead and several injured. Migrants gather by the Hungarian border hoping to cross from the Balkan country and move further west.

    Sneaking over Serbia’s northern border with the European Union neighbor often takes months because Hungary has put up two rows of barbed wire fence and deployed heavy security to stop migration. Migrants therefore often turn to people smugglers in order to continue their journey toward the EU’s more prosperous nations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Weaning the State Department Off War-Making

    Other than being an adjunct booster of overseas Pentagon military operations and refortifying its vulnerable embassies, what does the U.S. State Department stand for and do anymore?

  • TruthOut ☛ Rojava’s Experiment in Radical Democracy Braces for Turkish Invasion

  • TruthOut ☛ “Fortress Mentality” Among US Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle of Militarism

  • Common Dreams ☛ UN Chief Condemns Airstrikes on Key Ukrainian Port Hours After Grain Deal

    The head of the United Nations denounced airstrikes that slammed the key Ukrainian port of Odesa on Saturday, just hours after Moscow and Kyiv signed a deal aimed at freeing millions of tons of grain exports and alleviating the global food crisis.

    Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said that “the secretary-general unequivocally condemns reported strikes today in the Ukrainian port of Odesa.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Reason ☛ Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson, Left-Wing Authoritarians, and Identity Politics

    No living American journalist has a fiercer reputation for independence—and invective—than Glenn Greenwald. The Pulitzer Prize winner helped break the Edward Snowden revelations, was once threatened with jail time by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and was part of the team that launched The Intercept in 2014 before resigning six years later, claiming his colleagues were censoring his criticism of the Biden administration.

    So what are we to make of the fact that Greenwald, once a contributing writer at Salon who appeared regularly on the left-wing news show Democracy Now!, is now a fixture on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight? How do we explain the fact that Greenwald, known for his progressive critique of American foreign policy, is now welcomed in conservative circles but considered a pariah by many of his former colleagues on the left?

  • Federal News Network ☛ Biden to discuss immigration, trade with Mexico’s president

    López Obrador has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration, including decrying U.S. efforts to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K. for prosecution. He has vowed to bring up the topic during Tuesday’s meeting, and Biden officials say they are ready to discuss it.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Mexican President Renewed Asylum Offer for Assange in Letter to Biden

    Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday he gave a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden where he defended Julian Assange’s innocence and renewed a previous offer of asylum to the WikiLeaks founder.

  • New York Times ☛ After Summit Snub, Biden Meets With Mexican President

    Mr. López Obrador vowed to “start a campaign to tear down the Statue of Liberty” if Mr. Assange is “sentenced to the maximum penalty” in the United States.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ AMLO Is Trying to Free Mexico and Latin America From the US’s Imperial Grip

    He has also offered asylum to jailed whistleblower Julian Assange and recently suggested that the Statue of Liberty should be dismantled and returned to France if Assange is extradited and imprisoned in the United States.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Manchin to Climate: Drop Dead

    Just two weeks after the US Supreme Court voted to handcuff EPA efforts to regulate power plant emissions, Senator Joe Manchin’s abominable decision to pull back from supporting funding for climate and environmental justice initiatives in a budget reconciliation bill—at least until September—has dealt a deep, potentially knock-out blow to the US’s efforts to tackle climate change.

  • Energy

    • RTL ☛ Man spends night on sleeper train, wakes to find it never left the station

      Caledonian Sleeper did in fact let passengers know the service was cancelled, tweeting at seven minutes past midnight that “we will not be able to run our services”. Presumably by that point Metcalfe was fast asleep.

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ Right-Wing Judge Bars $18 Minimum Wage From California’s 2022 Ballot

    A Sacramento judge ruled Friday that an initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 cannot appear on the state’s ballot this coming November, even though the campaign behind the proposal obtained more than enough signatures.

    Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Arguelles’ ruling stems from a dispute between the Living Wage Act campaign and the office of California’s Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who said county officials didn’t verify a sufficient number of signatures in time.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scheerpost ☛ Brazil’s Lula Rips Bolsonaro’s Election Fraud Warnings

    The presidential front runner accused the incumbent of lying 20 times during a meeting with international diplomats.

  • The Hill ☛ Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’

    An investigative reporter for MintPress News on Monday said it was “very worrying” that Facebook is employing former CIA agents to moderate misinformation policies on the social media platform.

    Alan MacLeod, who published a piece last week about ex-CIA agents working at Facebook, told Hill.TV the decision to employ them to moderate content was worrying because the CIA has a “long history of infiltrating media organizations.”

  • Mint Press News ☛ Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy

    In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.

  • Broadband Breakfast ☛ Positive and Negative Responses to Committee’s Action on American Data Privacy and Protection Act

    During Wednesday’s markup of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, H.R. 8152 – which passed by a 53-2 vote in committee – Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Nanette Diaz Barragán, D-Calif., voted against the bill after they expressed concern it would override California’s own privacy laws. Eshoo proposed her own amendment, a flexibility mechanism which would allow states to add their own privacy provisions on top of a federal baseline, but it was not adopted.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ New Rules on political advertising to stop voter manipulation!

    Since the unlawful processing of personal data for political advertising can result in an unfair political advantage which financial sanctions cannot remedy, the additional sanction of suspending political advertising for a limited time should be introduced, proposes Breyer.

  • RTL ☛ President resigns to run for Pirate Party in 2023 elections

    Mathis Godefroid has stepped down after six years as President of the General Conference of the Luxembourg Youth (CGJL).

  • Security Week ☛ Understanding the Evolution of Cybercrime to Predict its Future [iophk: Windows TCO]

    From this simple realization, HP Wolf Security’s study of The Evolution of Cybercrime (PDF report) shows an underground business that follows and mimics the overground business ecosystem – digital transformation included. “Digital transformation has supercharged both sides of the attack-defense divide – shown, for instance, by the increasing popularity of ‘as a service’ offerings,” said Alex Holland, senior malware analyst and author of the report. “This has democratized malicious activity to the point where complex attacks requiring high levels of knowledge and resources – once the preserve of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups – are now far more accessible to a wider group of threat actors.”

  • uni Michigan ☛ U-M research data series awarded $14M to study 2024 elections

    The American National Election Studies at the University of Michigan has been awarded $14 million by the National Science Foundation to conduct a study of the 2024 elections in the United States.

    The award extends the ANES, a widely used research data series at the U-M Institute for Social Research and preeminent source for studying public opinion, political participation, representation, accountability and democracy.

  • Forbes ☛ National Science Foundation Awards $14 Million Grant For The Study Of National 2024 Election

    Following a competitive grant process, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $14 million grant to the American National Election Studies (ANES) to conduct research on the 2024 United States elections. ANES, housed at the University of Michigan, will head up the comprehensive, ongoing study, which will involve investigators from several universities.

    ANES will survey a large, representative sample of eligible voters both before and after the 2024 election, using a combination of in-person, online, video and postal service interviewing. Special efforts will be undertaken to include traditionally underrepresented groups.

  • 2024 American National Election Study Competition (ANES)

    The Accountable Institutions and Behavior Program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences expects to make one or two awards for the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES), with the award to run from fiscal years 2022 to 2025. We anticipate that the ANES funding will total no more than $14 million over four years, whether it is one or two awards. The expected starting date is July 2022.

  • Jihad Watch ☛ Rashida Tlaib campaign events in 2018 were organized by alleged jihad terror financiers

    Imagine if a sitting member of the House of Representatives had had campaign events organized by alleged financiers of the KKK. He or she would already have resigned in disgrace. But Tlaib won’t even be asked about this.

  • Washington Examiner ☛ Rashida Tlaib campaign events in 2018 were organized by alleged terror financiers

    The men, who organized events that were paid for by Tlaib’s campaign, were associated with a network of nonprofit groups that were found liable by a federal jury in 2004 for financing the terrorist slaying of an American teenager, David Boim, at a bus stop in the West Bank in 1996. A federal judge ordered the three groups to pay Boim’s parents a $156 million judgment for funding Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Presidency Isn’t Sinking Because of the Left—It’s Because of Right-Wing Democrats

    Joe Biden’s administration is in crisis.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden Must Do More to Protect Medication Abortion in the Post-Roe South

  • TruthOut ☛ 10 Floridians Were Charged With Voter Fraud After Official Helped Them Register

  • TruthOut ☛ Charity That Backs Trump’s Election Lies Has Ties to the Texas Attorney General

  • teleSUR ☛ Two Finalists in UK Leadership Race of Ruling Party

    On Wednesday, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss emerged as the final two candidates in the leadership race of the Conservative party.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • NYPost ☛ An inside look at Ivana Trump’s glamorous Manhattan funeral service

    Hillary Clinton’s name was also featured on the 1992 cover — but had been removed from the version on display during Ivana’s memorial.

  • Times Higher Education ☛ Scholars ‘reprimanded by universities’ for criticising Indian government

    Academic freedom is coming under threat in India due to increasingly stringent restrictions and institutions using tactics of intimidation and harassment, scholars in the country have warned.

    There have been reports of university officials reprimanding academics for openly speaking out against the policies of Narendra Modi’s regime in the latest sign that the prime minister’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, first elected in 2014, is using its power to stamp out freedom of speech.

  • India Times ☛ ‘Harassed and targeted’ Tanushree Dutta says she will not resort to suicide but will fight

    [...] First it was my bollywood work being sabotaged last one year, then a maid was planted to douse my drinking water with medications & steroids which caused all kinds of severe health problems, then when I escaped to Ujjain in May my vehicle brakes tampered twice & accident. I barely escaped death & returned mumbai after 40 days to resume normal life & work. [...]

  • Essel Group ☛ Tanushree Dutta claims ‘harassment by Bollywood mafia’ in an Instagram post, says ‘will not commit suicide’

    Former Miss India and Bollywood actress Tanushree Dutta has spoken out yet again about being harassed by #metoo perpetrators. Taking to her Instagram account, Dutta said that she is being ‘targeted very badly’ and went on to describe her painful experiences. In the post, she claimed that the Bollywood mafia and some political circles attempted to poison her and sabotaged several of her works.

  • Gatestone Institute ☛ Death for “Blasphemers” in Pakistan

    The problem with this law is not so much that the sentence is extreme and irrevocable, but rather that Muslims regularly exploit it to settle personal grudges against non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. The fact is, Pakistan’s non-Muslim minorities, mostly Christians and Hindus, know better than to say anything that can be misconstrued as offensive about the Muslim prophet — they are well acquainted with the dire repercussions. They are taught from their youth to exhibit nothing but deference for Islam’s prophet. That does not, however, stop Muslims from falsely accusing these “infidels” with whom they might have a gripe of supposedly insulting Muhammad.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • India Today ☛ ‘Tweet apology or go to jail’: Foreign journo says she was threatened by Taliban

    Foreign journalist Lynne O’Donnell said the Taliban in Afghanistan asked her to tweet an apology or go to jail for articles on forced marriages by Taliban commanders.

    Taking to Twitter, the Australian journalist said, “Tweet an apology or go to jail, said Taliban intelligence. Whatever it takes: They dictated. I tweeted. They didn’t like it. Deleted, edited, re-tweeted.”

    Tweet an apology or go to jail, said #Taliban intelligence. Whatever it takes: They dictated. I tweeted. They didn’t like it. Deleted, edited, re-tweeted. Made video of me saying I wasn’t coerced. Re-did that too.#TwoTakesTaliban (I’m out now) #Afghanistan #journalism

  • [Old] Morningstar US ☛ IWMF Announces 2022 Courage in Journalism Award Winners

    IWMF announces Courage in Journalism Awards. Women journalists from Ukraine, U.S. and China receive prestigious honor.

    The Courage in Journalism Awards are announced amid heightened global tensions around the world, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the consequences of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, numerous authoritarian crackdowns, and blatant human rights abuses. These awards recognize the women journalists at the frontlines of these challenges who are intrepid in their commitment to reporting.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Ahval ☛ Top Turkish court upholds withdrawal from women’s rights treaty

    Turkey’s highest administrative court on Tuesday upheld a ruling over President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to withdraw the country from a European treaty protecting women from violence, Sözcü newspaper reported.

    The Council of State ruled that the Turkish leader’s decision to exit from the Istanbul Convention was lawful, rejecting petitions seeking its cancellation, the newspaper said.

  • Four Christians Face Execution as Sudan Reverts to Islamist Law

    Then, just days ago in late June, the story surfaced that four men from the Sudanese Baptist Church in Zalingei, in Central Darfur had been arrested on charges of apostasy. Those Christian converts from Islam — Bader el Dean Haroon Abdel Jabaar and his brother Mohammad Haroon Abdel Jabaar, along with Tariq Adam Abdalla and Morthada Ismail — were taken into custody on charges that might soon cost them their lives.

  • Morning Star News ☛ Four Christians in Sudan Arrested under Annulled Apostasy Law

    Area Christians said they were arrested over allegations of apostasy under Article 126 of Sudan’s 1991 criminal code. In July 2020 the transitional government that took effect in September 2019 decriminalized apostasy, which had been punishable by death. Sudan’s 2020 Fundamental Rights and Freedoms Act prohibits the labeling of any group as “infidels” (takfir), according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

    The 2020 Act also repealed other Islamic-based articles of the 1991 criminal code, including public flogging as a punishment and prohibitions against drinking alcohol. Although Sudan has taken some steps to reform laws that violate religious rights, most current statutes are still based on Islamic law, Christian leaders say.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Historic Moment in American Labor’: Starbucks Workers Notch 200th Union Win

    With a victory in Cleveland on Friday, Starbucks workers officially reached 200 union election wins across more than 30 U.S. states, a remarkable achievement in the face of a full-throttle union-busting campaign by the coffee company’s management and its billionaire interim CEO, Howard Schultz.

    The speed with which Starbucks workers across the country built on the historic victory in Buffalo in December—when employees voted to form the company’s first-ever unionized store in the U.S.—has stunned observers who’ve seen the nation’s labor movement wither in recent decades amid a ruthless corporate assault.

  • TruthOut ☛ Starbucks Workers Officially Reach 200 Union Election Victories

  • Vox ☛ Rape and incest abortion exceptions don’t really exist

    Just three states with abortion bans in effect include the carveouts, and some anti-abortion advocates want to remove the exceptions altogether.

    The case of a 10-year-old Ohio rape survivor who traveled to Indiana to obtain an abortion drew national attention to Ohio’s near-total abortion ban, which does not allow abortions even in cases of rape or incest.

    Ohio isn’t unusual. Despite broad agreement among Americans that victims of rape should be allowed to obtain an abortion, nearly all of the states with abortion bans do not make exceptions for rape or incest.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ A song to dance the USMCA: the week at the morning news conferences

      The USMCA returned to the conference on Thursday after U.S. and Canadian officials announced they were seeking trade dispute talks over the government’s favoring of state energy companies. “There is no violation of the treaty … our policies are defined in Mexico and have to do with our Constitution and laws,” the president said.

      López Obrador added that separate dispute proceedings related to USMCA were previously initiated against the U.S. and Canada, and that Mexico had 70 days to respond before the matter would be referred to an international tribunal.

    • Hackaday ☛ Patents And The Missing Museum

      A beautiful chapter of the history of invention in the United States ended with a fire in 1880. Well, the fire took place in 1877, but the wheels of government turn slowly. For the first 90 years that patents were granted in the USA, applications were required to be accompanied by a working model – to prove that the idea works and rule out “the perpetual motion cranks”.

  • Software Patents

    • New York Times ☛ How Software Is Stifling Competition and Slowing Innovation

      In a new book, Mr. Bessen challenges what he terms the “disruption myth.” He makes the case that big companies in one industry after another have built complex software systems for managing their sales, marketing, operations and product offerings that are essentially moats against competitors.

      This mastery of software by major corporations, he argues, helps explain rising economic concentration, increasing inequality and slowing innovation.

      [...]

      Mr. Bessen then got in touch with his former roommate at Harvard University, Eric Maskin, who had become an economics professor at their alma mater. Mr. Bessen explained that he had ideas about the software industry that might be of interest to economists, Mr. Maskin recalled. The two went on to write a research paper on why patents often worked against innovation in software, an industry that prospered when information was shared.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ 127 Russian Cinemas Resort to Piracy, Movie Boss Says: “I Don’t Blame Them”

      Russia’s entire cinema industry is on the brink of collapse. A few weeks ago, around 16 cinemas were screening pirate copies of the latest movies; last week it was 127. Not even the chairman of the Association of Cinema Owners can muster much optimism. “I can’t even blame cinemas now dabbling in torrent screenings,” he says. It’s not a desire to make money, but a fight for survival.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Supreme Court of Canada on Copyright: “Copyright Law Does Not Exist Solely for the Benefit of Authors” – Michael Geist

      For much of the past two decades, copyright groups have steadfastly sought to deny what the Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly endorsed, namely that the purpose of Canadian copyright law is to serve the public interest by balancing users’ and authors’ rights. Last week provided the latest episode in the ongoing series as the Court delivered yet another strong affirmation on the importance of copyright balance and the role of technological neutrality, confirming that “[c]opyright law does not exist solely for the benefit of authors.” The decision – SOCAN v. Entertainment Software Association – can read on at least four levels: (1) as a repudiation of SOCAN’s effort to establish a new, additional royalty for the “making available” of music; (2) as a confirmation of the importance of technological neutrality and copyright balance; (3) as an example of the flexibility associated with implementing the WIPO Internet treaties, and (4) as the undeniable entrenchment of Canadian copyright jurisprudence that now features deeply layered precedents on users’ rights.

      If the parties to the case sound familiar, it may be because the Supreme Court issued a decision nearly ten years earlier to the day involving the same two litigants. In the 2012 ESA v. SOCAN decision, SOCAN was seeking payment for the downloading of video games that contained musical works. The inclusion of musical works within the games was already compensated, but the copyright collective argued that there should be an additional payment for the act of downloading the game containing music. The Supreme Court rejected the request, concluding that an additional payment for downloads would violate the principle of technological neutrality, famously stating:

    • Michael Geist ☛ Why The Government’s “Policy Intentions” For Bill C-11 Don’t Trump the Actual Text – Michael Geist

      Parliament may be on a summer recess, but the debate over Bill C-11, which is now in the Senate, continues. Yesterday, I engaged in a Twitter debate with Matthew Gray, an official in the office of Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez that ultimately focused on the relative importance of the government’s “policy intention” vs. the actual text of the bill. While officials and Minister Rodriguez regularly point to what they intend the bill to do, experts note that the text does not reflect those intentions.

      On Sunday, Gray had jumped into another Twitter debate involving Rodriguez’s Chief of Staff John Matheson, who posted several tweets which made the case that the bill does not include Canadian content quotas or content standards (I responded to those tweets by noting that the bill does open the door to Canadian content display quotas and the CRTC’s recent Radio-Canada decision confirms the risk of content regulation). Gray claimed that “only the largest services that are household names with hundreds of thousands of subscribers will be regulated” by Bill C-11. I responded that is plainly false under the bill as it is currently written since there are no thresholds and the government rejected several proposed amendments that would have established them. Gray didn’t find that persuasive, however, responding that his previous comment reflected the government’s “expectation and policy intent”, later adding that “it is hard to engage in forward policy if when we communicate our intent the reply is ‘it’s untrue you haven’t done it yet.’”

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 135: Co-Chair Emily Laidlaw on the Work of the Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety – Michael Geist

      Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez created an Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety earlier this year to help craft a potential legislative and policy response to online safety and harms issues. The panel recently concluded its work and though the media focused on a failure to achieve absolute consensus from a group that by design had different views, the reality is that common ground was found on several key issues. Emily Laidlaw, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law at the University of Calgary, served as co-chair of the expert group. She joins the Law Bytes podcast to talk about how the panel functioned, where it found consensus, areas of disagreement, and what could come next for one of the thorniest Internet policy issues.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • A Child’s View of Noise

    A common sight at restaurants, airports, shopping centers, and other public spaces are people with very small children–infants or young toddlers who don’t fully understand how to speak yet or what the vast majority of words mean.

    In almost every space in which there are people who communicate verbally, at least a few of them are going to be speaking at any time. Children in public spaces are hammered from all directions by the sound of human voices–noises emitting from mouths that they cannot comprehend.

    Kids are excellent imitators and are very impressionable. For all they understand, the big people are just making funny noises, so they join in, babbling and squealing and mewling along with everyone else.

  • OMG, OMD

    I watched a clip of Family Guy a bit ago, and they played (at length) the song “If You Leave” by OMD (or, Orchestral Manoeuveres in the Dark?), so I am listening to that song on Tidal from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, which was one of those movies that people couldn’t really get away from, or avoid hearing references to in the 1980s, even though I was a young pup in the 1980s…

    [...]

    To continue on the 80s tracks, I’ll toss on “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds, and we can fill the parlor with hairspray and snap bubble gum in large, obnoxious bubbles when people try to grab our undivided attention.

  • The Lord is compassionate and merciful

    I am leaving the conference, having left a piece of my heart there. I feel an intense joyful sadness, the indescribable feeling that I’ve only felt before when watching the plaščenica (epitaphion) be lifted up around the church during the lamentations.

• Technical

  • Thoughts on New OpenOffice Release

    I read yesterday that there is a new release of Apache OpenOffice (4.1.13). Despite the news release, the new release is less than exciting – it mostly consists of minor bug fixes.

    All of the OpenOffice takes I read noted the obvious. OpenOffice 4.1 was released eight years ago. The office suite is barely being maintained. LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, is carrying on its legacy and also vitiating any need for OpenOffice’s continued existence.

    I used OpenOffice in the early 2010s. When I needed a new office suite in 2014 and 2015 and did not want to pay for MS Word, I found LibreOffice after a tiny bit of digging and went with that. When I installed Manjaro Linux on my main desktop workstation in 2020, I went with LibreOffice, and I also run LibreOffice on two laptops and my re-purposed old desktop (all run different flavors of Linux).