10.05.22
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Linux Magazine
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week, Linux Out Loud chats about open-source photography. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
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Welcome to episode 32 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
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Welcome to episode 31 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
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Linux Mint 21 sees the popular distribution rebase onto Ubuntu 22.04, and comes with the latest Cinnamon desktop. In this video, Jay reviews the latest release and gives you his thoughts. Linux Mint 21 is definitely a great Linux distribution, but with a few rough edges.
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Ramon Miranda has published a new video on Krita’s Youtube channel: Making Brushes Part 2: the OTHER brush engines.
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Check out these community based distros that take some of the biggest names in desktop Linux and make them better, easier, accessible and more curated for new and experienced users alike.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.19.14 kernel.
All users of the 5.19 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.19.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.19.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Not that long ago, the idea that another major language would be supported in the Linux kernel would have been laughable. Linux was C’s poster child. Sure, there have been efforts to introduce other languages into the kernel, notably C++. They failed. Badly. As Linux’s creator Linus Torvalds once said, “C++ is a horrible language.” So, why is Torvalds now welcoming Rust into the kernel? Listen, my friend, and I’ll tell you.
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The first big change for the forthcoming Linux kernel 6.1 is in… and it’s a big one.
Kees Cook made the pull request and Linus Torvalds accepted it earlier this week, meaning that Linux 6.1 will soon have direct support for Rust code, as teased earlier this week. The initial support is in the region of 12-and-a-half thousand lines of code.
No, this doesn’t mean that the kernel will start to be rewritten in Rust. There are already other Rust operating system kernels in development, such as Redox OS, and Linux is not, practically speaking, going to become one of them.
What’s interesting is that it’s Rust that has made it. There are multiple languages vying to be successors to C, with C-like syntax but which extend C with new features. C++ was one of the first, which adds object oriented programming to C.
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A recent version of the Linux kernel can create a nasty flickering effect on Intel-powered laptops—to the point the problem may damage the display.
The problem involves a bug in the 5.19.2 release for the Linux kernel. On Monday, an Intel software engineer named Ville Syrjälä noted(Opens in a new window) the software contains a “potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel.”
“I recommend immediate revert of this stuff, and new stable release ASAP. Plus a recommendation that no one using laptops with Intel GPUs run 5.19.12,” Syrjälä wrote in the Linux kernel mailing list.
The good news is that the Linux team quickly rolled out(Opens in a new window) version 5.19.3, which seems to resolve the problem. Users can also downgrade their Linux release to 5.19.11 to prevent the flickering.
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Intel laptop users running Linux are being advised to avoid running the latest Linux 5.19.12 stable kernel point release as it can potentially damage the display.
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Graphics Stack
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…that I misspoke in the course of my XDC presentation. I want to apologize first to the live audience, for hearing such grave information firsthand, then to my fans, for disappointing them, and lastly to the ANGLE team:
During a Q&A, I stated that ANGLE uses Vulkan secondary command buffers. This is false. ANGLE does not use secondary command buffers.
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Applications
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Choosing the best remote desktop for Linux will enable you to access computers and mobile devices remotely from your Linux computer. But there are far fewer options available for Linux users than for Windows or Mac owners, and these tend to be much more difficult to use.
This can make it hard to select the right option, particularly if you don’t want too steep of a learning curve. Many Linux remote desktops are open-source and versatile, but they also require significant tech skills to install and use.
To help you find your way through the confusing jargon surrounding Linux remote desktops and select the right option for your business, we’ve put together this guide. In it, we take a close look at the leading Linux remote desktop programs available today.
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Data archive or compression is a method or an algorithm that we can use to squeeze the volume of the data to make the size smaller. Data compression is helpful for storing files on a drive and sending them over the internet. When you decompress the data, it uses the reverse algorithm to make the files as it was. Compression or archive is essential for data analysis, storing, and transferring. If we look at Gmail’s file attachment section, we can see that it doesn’t attach files more than a specific size. In that case, you can use the archive tools to make the file size smaller. Plenty of free and open-source tools can do the data compression/archiving task in Linux.
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If you are a Linux lover, you must have some knowledge about Linux log viewer tools. Log viewer gives you a full visual history of everything happening in your Linux system. We will have each piece of information in the logs file, such as the application log, system log, event log, script log, rewrite log, process ID, etc.
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The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development release in the unstable 1.21 release series.
The unstable 1.21 release series adds new features on top of the current stable 1.20 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
The unstable 1.21 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.22 series which is scheduled for release in December 2022. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.
This development release is primarily for developers and early adaptors.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Linux kernel 6.0 is the latest release for the operating system and includes the usual bevy of fixes, performance improvements, enhancements and new hardware support. However, it will be some time before the majority of Linux distributions ship with the latest kernel from creator Linus Torvalds.
Never fear: I’m going to show you how to get this new kernel running on your Ubuntu 22.04 deployments.
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Many enthusiasts have rallied together to create some awesome free software (and excellent guides) to help the average user create a home server in as little as a few minutes. Thanks to their creativity, we now have so many options to choose from.
With the right tools, you can create a media server, network storage solution, ad blocking security, music streaming service, Apache web services, and more. OpenMediaVault is one such free home server solution that, when paired with the Raspberry Pi, creates an affordable server in your own home.
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PulseAudio is a powerful cross-platform sound server Linux. Let me show you how to completely remove PulseAudio in Ubuntu & Uninstall it.
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Podman is a near 1:1 replacement for the Docker container engine. Although they are quite different underneath the hood, on top of it all they are quite similar. One thing they can both do is empower you to build your images to be used for custom container deployments. This means you can pull down an official image and then commit your changes so that image can be re-used for more custom deployments.
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When you run Fedora or any related distro (such as RHEL, CentOS, etc.) in VirtualBox as a guest, you get this error while installing the VirtualBox guest additions.
The primary reason is the difference in Kernel versions between the guest and the host system.
For example, if your host system has Linux Kernel 5.19 for example and you are installing any distribution with a different version, say 5.14, then you may run into this error while running the setup script for the virtual box guest additions.
The VirtualBox guest addition set-up requires the necessary Kernel modules to be built inside the guest system. Then it checks whether the Kernel modules match; otherwise, it throws this error.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Anaconda on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Anaconda is a distribution of the Python and R programming languages for scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. It includes packages related to data science for various platforms like Linux, Windows, and macOS.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Anaconda Python on a Fedora 36.
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For the average user, stability is vital regarding their computer. They don’t want to constantly update drivers or perform other maintenance tasks to keep things running smoothly. That’s why Linux distributions focusing on stability typically don’t include the latest and most significant drivers. Instead, they use the tried-and-true Mesa drivers. These drivers are free and open-source and support a wide range of graphic cards. However, they may not always be up-to-date with the latest hardware and technologies. As a result, you may need to periodically update your Mesa drivers to take advantage of new features and bug fixes using a LaunchPAD ppa that is well known.
The following tutorial will teach you how to upgrade or install Mesa Drivers on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series with Obigaf PPA for the latest drivers to support Intel Radeon, NVIDIA, etc.
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Heimdall is a software aimed at being a dashboard for all your web applications and is a perfect solution for your browser’s start page.
This web dashboard allows you to easily create what is essentially a bookmark for all your web applications, saving you from forgetting or losing them within your browser. It even allows you to set up a search bar to search straight from the dashboard easily.
Heimdall even has built-in name recognition for a huge range of web apps, meaning you will see icons and other fields populated automatically. For some applications, it will even show you additional information.
The Raspberry Pi is a perfect candidate for Heimdall as it is low-powered and is the perfect device to run many different web apps. Some examples of web apps you might use are PiHole, Plex, and PhotoPrism.
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In this project, we will be showing you how to install Heimdall on your Raspberry Pi. This software is an elegant application dashboard.
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sometime it’s good to copy important data between cloud providers, in my case we have about 10 TB of important data on DO spaces, and we need to copy it to AWS S3, in this guide i will show you how we do this process using Rclone.
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Open Source projects rule the world with their [usually] good code quality, but more importantly because they are available for free. This also means that the usage-to-contribution ratio is very low,
In other words, a few hundred contributors work on maintaining/improving those open-source projects compared to thousands or millions of users.
Hacktoberfest is one such event from DigitalOcean that encourages you to contribute back to your favorite projects. In exchange for your contributions, you either get a gift from DigitalOcean, or you can choose to plant a tree instead.
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A quick fix for the VirtualBox Kernel Headers Not Found Error which comes while installing VirtualBox guest additions in Fedora & related.
The primary reason is the difference in Kernel versions between the guest and the host system. For example, if your host system has Linux Kernel 5.19 for example and you are installing any distribution with a different version, say 5.14, then you may run into this error while running the setup script for the virtual box guest additions.
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Games
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Between 2022-09-28 and 2022-10-05 there were 33 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 313 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10.5 % of total released titles.
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There’s no need to waste family game-night time waiting for the same Steam game to download over the internet! All you need is a local caching proxy server. Repeated downloads from a local cache are faster, and you free up your internet bandwidth for other things (like downloading other games). Steam clients will even auto-discover and self-configure to use your local cache.
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Single-board computer specialist Hardkernel has launched its latest device — this time packing hardware from its ODROID-N2+ SBC into a handheld console built with emulation and gaming in mind: the ODROID-GO ULTRA.
“ODROID-GO ULTRA [OGU] is a new gaming focused development platform,” Hardkernel explains of its latest launch. “Its overall system was designed based on our powerful ODROID-N2+. OGU’s exterior and LCD size are the same as OGS [ODROID-GO SUPER], but the internal core components have been completely redesigned. The OGU PCB shape is identical to the OGS, but it has a totally different circuit design and requires a heatsink to cool down its more powerful CPU.”
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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A new version of a quarter-century-old window manager shows that there’s still room for improvement and innovation, even in established, mature tools.
The world of Linux desktop environments is full of sound and fury, with a constant stream of new developments and new versions. Lots of them duplicate each others’ work and functionality, sometimes just using slightly different tooling. All too often, ambitious or promising projects never reach version 1.0. Either they get abandoned or simply become moribund, and new updates stop appearing.
It’s easy to be distracted by this constant background noise and forget that there are simpler alternatives to a complete desktop, without going full Luddite and living at a console prompt. A trendy way to do this is with a tiling window manager, and alongside established favorites – for example awesomewm, i3, and ratpoison – there are lesser-known ones that are exploring new functionality such as bspwm, herbsluftwm, and Qtile. Lots of new tiling window managers are arriving on Wayland like cagebreak, dwl, newm, and river.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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There are times when you stumble upon an application that brings you big giant goofy smile on your face. This application is just that. There is an application, built into Plasma, or at least it is a part of Plasma that came in automatically at some point in time without any fanfare and I didn’t notice it. It is almost a shame too since it was first released in 2019 to the world. It is such a fantastic piece of software that I could have been using for years and have missed out.
[...]
When using this, I’m not sure if I like the copy to clipboard interface as much as I would like to have a select to paste automatically better. This is probably a safer option as I could see myself over using emojis in messages. Either way, I think this is an underappreciated application as outside of the references below, I didn’t see any other buzz about this.
If you are using Plasma, check this out and see what you think? Emojis are fun and now there is a bit more fun at my fingertips in my favorite desktop environment on my favorite operating system, KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed.
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For the last several years the translation system in KDE’s UserBase wiki has been somewhat dysfunctional. After the recent upgrade of the wiki software that seems to have changed!
If you have made translations on UserBase that were not displayed, they should be shown now. It would be great if you could check them and let us know, if something is still missing. Also please check that the translation system works as expected.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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The next Core Update is available for testing. It updates major parts of the distribution, such as the kernel and the IPS engine, and features bug fixes as well as stability and security improvements.
Also, it initiates the deprecation of IPFire support for 32-bit ARM hardware, ultimately taking effect on February 28, 2023.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PopOS has been working on a new rust based desktop called COSMIC for quite a while and recently they posted some screenshots to show off they’re new UI designs and you know what, they look pretty nice
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In this video, we are looking at Kubuntu 22.10 Beta.
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Today we are looking at Kubuntu 22.10 Beta. It comes with KDE 5.25.5, Linux kernel 5.19, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling.
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In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Unity 22.10 Beta.
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Today we are looking at Ubuntu Unity 22.10 Beta. It comes with Linux kernel 5.19 and uses about 900MB of ram when idling.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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As we reported back in July, the future direction of SUSE Linux Enterprise is starting to take shape, and it’s containers all the way down.
The Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) prototype’s internal version number is 0.01, so it has a long way to go yet, but it’s ready for you to start experimenting. SUSE has already published some background information, and there’s a 50-page manual too.
After community feedback, the new OS will require only x86-64 version 2 support, not the version 3 support that was bruited earlier in the year.
The first demonstration version, code named “Les Droites” after the first peak to surpass 4,000 meters in the Alps, is available for download.
At this stage, two QCOW2 disk images for x86-64 machines are available: one unencrypted, and one with full disk encryption enabled. The plan is that this will support either conventional passphrase entry to unlock the image when the server or VM boots, or work with a hardware TPM chip, as SUSE Distinguished Engineer Olaf Kirch explains, with some demo code to match.
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I’m pleased to share that once again this quarter G2, the world’s largest and most trusted tech marketplace, has recognized our solutions in its 2022 Fall Report. We received a total of 15 badges across our business units for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), SLE Desktop, SLE Real Time, and Rancher – including High Performer badges for almost each of our products – as well as a badge for the openSUSE community with Leap.
Last month, we celebrated 30 years of service to our customers, partners and the open source communities and it’s wonderful to keep the celebrations going with this recognition by our peers. Growing from 2 badges last quarter to 15 badges reinforces the depth and breadth of our strong product portfolio as well as the dedication that our team provides for our customers.
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After using the procedure explained for years in the upgrade with zypper article, I decided to collect all these steps in a practical script, which take care of all the statuses and, when needed, asks for confirmations, or suggests how to proceed manually in particular situations.
Although I tried to cover all the errors and provide the right solutions for a wide range of possible mistakes, it’s strongly recommended to read the aforementioned article to have a clear idea of what is going on during an upgrade and to better understand the whole process.
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The openSUSE community is filled with tons of volunteers, professionals and hobbyists who contribute to the project and want to see it thrive.
One of the ways of doing this is to organize an openSUSE booth for an event.
Recently, security engineer Paolo Perego did this at an event in Rome called RomHack Camp. Perego learned quite a lot at the event that took place Sept 23 – 25 and shared his experience about the hacker camp on the openSUSE Project mailing list.
Perego wrote that people at the conference were surprised to see an operating system vendor having a booth and was able to let them know that openSUSE is also a project full of tools for open-source development.
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Fedora and openSUSE are removing H.264, H.265, and VC-1 VA-API video codecs support from Mesa to avoid potential patent issues.
Fedora’s decision to drop support for several essential video codecs sparked widespread outrage in the Linux community last week. Additionally, openSUSE quickly followed suit, further escalating the situation.
Because the case is highly complex, we will try to shed light on the nature of the problem, who is affected by it, and possible solutions.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Flatpak is a universal packaging system that facilitates software installation on Linux. It’s stable, forward-compatible, and bundles dependencies with the program itself, so you don’t have to install them separately.
Another advantage of Flatpak is that all Flatpak programs run inside a sandbox for improved system security. However, this also means each Flatpak program needs to request access to different system components.
If you use Flatpak, you’d know that managing these permissions can be tricky. Flatseal is a graphical utility that simplifies this and lets you easily view and modify Flatpak permissions on Linux.
Let’s dive in to see how.
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Podman has plenty of great features that help you run containers better. These are my top three.
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We live in a data-centric world, where data drives most business decisions. While maintaining a steady influx of new insights is critical to continued growth, knowing how to use the data already available makes for more timely and effective decision-making.
IT teams face an ever-increasing demand for their time, compounded by ongoing stress from hiring shortages and burnout across the industry. For IT managers, preventing team burnout while delivering high-value projects to their team and the organization must be top-of-mind.
Data-driven decision-making enables IT managers to support their increasingly strained teams by informing insightful change, such as alleviating tedious manual tasks and providing greater opportunities to focus on high-value projects.
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IBM and Red Hat today reveal the core technologies within Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) will become the foundation for the next generation of the IBM Spectrum Fusion storage platform.
Scott Baker, chief marketing officer for IBM Storage, says it’s clear the storage technologies used to create Red Hat ODF are going to be applicable to a wider range of use cases beyond cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters. Those core components include an instance of the open source Ceph object storage operating system, the Rook orchestrator for Kubernetes and the NooBaa data management platform.
Brent Compton, senior director for Red Hat Storage, says the goal is to build a unified storage platform that bridges cloud computing and on-premises IT environments to better enable bi-directional application and data mobility.
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SMBs
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Raspberry Pi is the most popular SBC – Single-Board Computer around the world. It can do pretty much everything a desktop computer can do and is suitable for all ages keen to explore computing. Raspberry comes with all the software; you require for basic computing. But if you want to extend the functionalities to some extent, you will need to take OS running on your device.
It performs as a bridge between the user and Raspberry hardware. OS is the most crucial program that helps you to develop and execute programs. It enables the hardware to communicate with the software to generate meaningful interactions. Also, it manages CPU, memory, disk drives, printers, establishes user interface, and provides services for applications software.
Although Raspbian is the official Raspberry Pi OS, other alternative operating systems are available to run on the Raspberry Pi projects.
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I’ve been using one of my Raspberry Pis in my case with a wrap-around acrylic panel for the past few months, but one of the things that has been missing is an SSD. I don’t mind using a microSD card for tinkering with the Pi and for switching operating systems but when I start using it a bit more regularly with the same OS, then I prefer to use a faster and more reliable storage medium.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Canonical Ltd., the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, today announced that Ubuntu Pro for data centers and workstations, an expanded security maintenance and compliance offering that protects against a wider range of vulnerabilities and threats, is now available in public beta.
Ubuntu Pro is launching with a free tier for personal and small-scale users covering up to five machines, and paid subscriptions for those with larger deployments.
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Canonical has just launched its new free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five machines, making it available as a public beta for data centres and workstations and providing a free tier for personal and small-scale commercial use. Ubuntu Pro includes tools for compliance management in regulated and audited environments and Ubuntu Pro users can access FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic packages necessary for all Federal Government agencies.
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Ubuntu Pro, the expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription, is now offered in public beta for data centres and workstations. Canonical will provide a free tier for personal and small-scale commercial use in line with the company’s community commitment and mission to make open source more easily consumable by everyone.
“Since we first launched Ubuntu LTS, with five years free security coverage for the main OS, our enterprise customers have asked us to cover more and more of the wider open-source landscape under private commercial agreements. Today, we are excited to offer the benefits of all of that work, free of charge, to anyone in the world, with a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription”, said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical.
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To help bring our ambitious documentation plans to fruition, we’re going to be hiring people to work in documentation – over the next couple of years, we’ll be increasing the number of Technical Authors at Canonical four-fold.
This isn’t about documentation alone. If documentation is part of a product, and documentation work is part of engineering, then it has implications for engineering too.
Generally speaking, technical writing is a poorly-understood discipline in the software industry. It’s a specialised role, and though the skills that it requires are typically exercised privately, the results are very public.
And yet, everybody seems to have confident opinions about documentation! For example, an engineer might bristle hotly with indignation if an outsider were to cast judgements or make pronouncements about software theory or practice – but not hesitate to do the same about technical documentation.
Some of this is fair enough, and some of it must change.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CoreData Global, a Singapore-based research and development firm, has just introduced the RelayFi 4-channel relay board based on ESP32 and compatible with Tasmota open-source firmware, as well as Espressif’s ESP RainMaker cloud and ESP-NOW networking API.
RelayFi is fitted with an ESP32-WROOM-32D WiFi and Bluetooth module, four relays capable of handling a load of 250 VAC/7A or 30 VDC/10A, and EL817C Optoisolators for safety. The board also comes with CH340C USB to TTL chip for programming, an I2C header for expansion, and some jumpers for relay selection.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Events
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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Static website generator is taking the internet by storm, as they have proven to be fast, secure and reliable for quickly creating a highly customizable website that you can deploy easily anywhere.
As there are many open-source static website generator alternatives, as the famous Jekyll and Hugo, there are also some not that famous ones as Hexo. Which offers dozens of useful features for developers, website admins and content creators.
In this post, we will explain why Hexo.io is different, explore its amazing features, and why you should consider it.
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Programming/Development
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Lua Scripting Language on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Lua is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications. It’s an extensible and interpreted scripting language that is dynamically typed, and run by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine.
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 Lua programming language on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Linear programming is a method for determining the best solution to a linear function. Making a few simple assumptions is the best technique for carrying out linear optimization. The objective function is referred to as the linear function. Relationships in the real world can be extremely complex. However, such relationships can be represented using linear programming, which makes it simpler to analyze them.
Numerous sectors, including manufacturing, energy, telecommunications, and transportation, use linear programming. This article clarifies the various aspects of linear programming, including its definition, formula, approaches for using it to solve issues, and related examples.
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The syslog-ng team publishes nightly syslog-ng git snapshot builds for Debian and Ubuntu. I publish weekly snapshot builds for RPM distributions. Recently, I was asked if creating git snapshot builds for FreeBSD is also possible. Yes, it is. That is how I test syslog-ng on FreeBSD. However, it needs some extra preparations.
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We have released Qt 5.15.11 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.11 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
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Rust
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Low-level or systems programming languages generally strive to provide libraries and interfaces that enable developers, boost productivity, enhance safety, provide resistance to misuse, and more — all while trying to reduce the runtime cost of such initiatives. Strong type systems turn runtime safety/sanity checks into compile-time errors, optimizing compilers try to reduce an enforced sequence of api calls into a single instruction, and library developers think up of clever hacks to even completely erase any trace of an abstraction from the resulting binaries. And as anyone that’s familiar with them can tell you, the rust programming language and its developers/community have truly embraced this ethos of zero-cost abstractions, perhaps more so than any others.
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Mahmoud Al-Qudsi provides extensive details on what it takes to implement a safe semaphore type in the Rust language.
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Standards/Consortia
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In 1977, David Mills, an eccentric engineer and computer scientist, took a job at comsat, a satellite corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mills was an inveterate tinkerer: he’d once built a hearing aid for a girlfriend’s uncle, and had consulted for Ford on how paper-tape computers might be put into cars. Now, at comsat, Mills became involved in the arpanet, the computer network that would become the precursor to the Internet. A handful of researchers were already using the network to connect their distant computers and trade information. But the fidelity of that exchanged data was threatened by a distinct deficiency: the machines did not share a single, reliable synchronized time.
Over decades, Mills had gained wide-ranging expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. In the early seventies, as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, he’d written programs that decoded shortwave radio and telegraph signals. Later, largely for fun, he’d studied how the clocks in a power grid could wander several seconds in the course of a hot summer’s day. (The extent of their shifts depended not just on the temperature but on whether the grid used coal or hydropower.) Now he concentrated on the problem of keeping time across a far-flung computer network. Clock time, Mills learned, is the result of an unending search for consensus. Even the times told by the world’s most precise government-maintained “master clocks” are composites of the readings of several atomic clocks. The master clocks, in turn, are averaged to help create international civil time, known as Coördinated Universal Time and initialized as U.T.C.
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David P. Reed talks with Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on this episode of FLOSS Weekly. Reed, one of the Internet’s founding figures, discusses online freedom, openness operating systems (including the end-of-life for Linux) and about how standards and patents are naturally opposed.
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Leftovers
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Once, a few months ago, I went around my apartment apologizing to virtual assistants. Siri, Google Home—it wasn’t that I felt bad about anything, I just wondered what they would say. And they all had something to say. “It’s OK, Dayten.” “No problem.” Obviously the designers thought to program this in. It’s a little weird that they did, though—why assume humans would compulsively apologize to technology? Turns out we have a lot to apologize for. Today’s Tedium talks about humanity’s calamitous relationship with machines. (It has nothing to do with an imminent superintelligence takeover. It does have a little to do with demons.)
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Proprietary
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About 5000 Australian staff of the local unit of global security firm G4S have been affected by a data leak following a ransomware attack in July on a work site, iTWire understands.
The company offers services such as private security, prison management, cash transportation, care and justice, secure solutions and investigative services.
In Australia, it operates under the name G4S Australia and has provided security at the Coalition Government’s refugee detention centre on Manus Island sometime back. G4S also provides services in a number of prisons in Australia.
The company says it employs more than half a million people around the world and claims it “plays a valuable and important role in society”.
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Furthering its unstated, but much evident ambitions to replicate absolutely everything in existence inside itself, the latest version of the Vivaldi web browser comes with a new productivity feature.
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How to Use Microsoft PowerShell Core on Linux Virtual Machines [Ed: Like the above, a Microsoft boosting site promotes this phony narrative where GNU/Linux users need failing Microsoft tools. They don't.]
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Linux Foundation
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (barbican, mediawiki, and php-twig), Fedora (bash, chromium, lighttpd, postgresql-jdbc, and scala), Mageia (bash, chromium-browser-stable, and golang), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, and squid:4), Red Hat (bind, bind9.16, RHSSO, and squid:4), Scientific Linux (bind), SUSE (cifs-utils, libjpeg-turbo, nodejs14, and nodejs16), and Ubuntu (jackd2, linux-gke, and linux-intel-iotg).
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Confirms “the FBI and CISA have no reporting to suggest cyber activity has ever prevented a registered voter from casting a ballot, compromised the integrity of any ballots cast, or affected the accuracy of voter registration information.”
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Fox-IT developed and has used Dissect over the past 10 years as a critical framework in incident response investigations for customers. Now it is available on GitHub to the security community as open source software to help advance and accelerate forensic data collection and analysis.
“We developed Dissect because we dealt with increasingly complex IT environments and it has greatly enhanced our incident response capabilities. We are now sharing Dissect as open source software with the security community, particularly incident responders from fellow security companies and security teams from larger companies,” said Erik Schamper, Senior Security Analyst at Fox-IT.
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For the past nineteen years, October has been Cybersecurity Awareness Month here in the US, and that event that has always been part advice and part ridicule. I tend to fall on the apathy end of the spectrum; I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it before. But the memes can be funny.
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Ever since 2004, October has been Cybersecurity Awareness Month, created by the Department of Homeland Security and the nonprofit, industry-sponsored National Cybersecurity Alliance to … well … promote awareness of cybersecurity.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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It was revealed late last month that the Israeli government has installed an AI-controlled gun at a military checkpoint on the busy Al-Shuhada street in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Marwa Fatafta, who is Palestinian, tweeted in response “Believe us when we say we are a surveillance testing lab in every sense of the word.”
Fatafta is the Middle East-North Africa policy manager at the digital rights group Access Now and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka which seeks to “educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination.” Coda Story spoke with her to learn more about Israel’s use of surveillance technology in Palestine. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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The continuing tussle between India and U.S. social-media companies shows how difficult it is to rein in technology platforms’ outsize—and sometimes pernicious—influence on public discourse without radically enhancing governments’ power to police speech.
Recent developments in India are worth watching for the precedents they could set, particularly for other large developing democracies.
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Monopolies
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Software Patents
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The facts about the video codec acceleration on Fedora 37.
There’s been some articles that have gotten the current situation extremely wrong about video codec hardware acceleration on Fedora 37.
Here are the facts:
Fedora 37’s Mesa3d package has split out the video codec acceleration libraries, but it has since started building them again as separate packages.
It only affects users of open source AMD GPU drivers.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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In the early morning, which it is certainly not, one must have tea. Having stated that it is not (necessarily) early morning, do I have the requirement for tea? Yes. I must have tea. Why do I require tea if it is no longer early morning? The reason is the following: tea is omnipresent during all phases of time. The “length” of any arbitrary phase of time is immaterial. Thus, even though the original statement was that one must have tea in the early morning and it is currently no longer early morning, one must still have tea. The ubiquity of tea exists at every passing or stationary moment. In fact, this ubiquity is the membrane containing time. Each instant is an infinitesimal unit carried within *tea*. One could say, then, that *tea* is the true God. I bow to tea. I pray at its altar. I offer sacrifices of every imaginable variety to *tea*. Tea is gracious. Tea is delicious. Let tea be praised.
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The skies looked mostly clear when I woke up this morning at about 2:30am AKDT, and the forecast wasn’t looking great, so I decided to do some star gazing in the yard. I wanted to save time for devotions and prayer this morning, so I decided to take only my binoculars and to stay out there for about an hour.
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across the whole time i was with the company, there was talk about the dna, the vision, the values inside the company. multiple attempts were made to put that into words. a more ridiculous attempt was a workshop, and all employees should contribute, with the sum of it all being the company values.
unsurprisingly it didn’t work. company values, culture and dna come from the founders or the leadership board and they dribble down the ladder by example. this is a good way to handle it in companies that are new and not in there middle of restructuring. and finally during my parental leave, wait for it, the company founders had a workshop and there was a video about company culture and vision.
[...]
and now you probably feel a little bit liked i did. the essence of our company is to generate revenue by building a product that customers buy. and not a single word about how to get there, whether it’s ok to cheat, pollute, gamble, threaten or lie in the process.
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I’ve seen multiple Gemini capsules stating this when they’re talking about their employers and I find it amusing. For one, why would any employer even search on Gemini? They mostly search on those highly SEO-centric websites where they can get as much data as they can on you.
Even if they’d find a post where you just talk smack about your employer, it’s not like “hey this is fictional!” would stop anyone connecting two and two. Mark the boss that likes to power trip is still the same Mark. “This Mark is not real! I promise. Just a coincidence..”
On a more serious note, the whole “employers-stalk-you-before-employing-you” is just not a good behavior to encourage. No company or person should be preoccupied with the personal life of their employees at this level. Some really go to lengths of searching for social media accounts, if they don’t find you on there you’re “suspicious” which is silly for all the reasons you can think of.
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Technical
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For the last few days, I’ve been playing a game called Low Magic Age (LMA). It’s a little bit roguelike, quite a bit RPG, and all together pretty charming. The game has been sitting in Early Access on Steam for quite some time, and is still there today. Usually I avoid games in this section because so many of them just wind up being abandoned, or generally don’t turn out all that great. However, LMA was on sale for about five bucks, so I thought, “Why not check it out?”
[...]
Of course, another big thing people look for in an RPG is loot, and there is a lot of that in LMA. Stats and abilities fixed to weapons, armor, and the like are fairly steeped in DnD conventions for the most part. There is also an MMO-inspired color coding to show the rarity of an item. On the whole, the game is pretty generous with its loot drops, sometimes even too generous. Rare items are indeed rare, but +1s, masterwork pieces, and the like drop left and right. Thankfully, inventory space is also pretty generous, so it’s hard to run out. However, players may be caught with their pants down if a particularly strong character dies in battle because there are also weight limits for inventory where the party can become overburdened. So, if a fighter or paladin, or some other character with high strength stats goes down, you may be in a situation of suddenly needing to dump a lot of heavy gear that could have turned a nice profit selling off in town.
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Science
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Here is a spooky case of two similar and seemingly disconnected concepts both appearing independendtly both in physical experements and mathematical dynamics.
[...]
This video displays an interesting and deceptively simple physical demonstration using 3 magnets and a pendulum used to show how where the pendulum ends up is entirely dependent on its initial starting place. This shows something that we refer to as ‘sensitivity to initial conditions’ as well as suprising geometric structures that govern our physics and statistics.
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Internet/Gemini
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In class at time of writing. This class is entirely pointless and I could easily skip basically every day if not for the fact I sit in the very front and thus my absence is noticed.
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The answer largely depends on what your personal taste in reading is, how much you value blog spam and human based content for creations sake, informational value to storage ratio which plays into the ease of archival/sharing.
Imagine if libraries and other such public informational repositiories had flash drives that could be loaned out containing things like wikipedia (like kiwix project does) or in our case, a sizable portion of the small net. Im sure the internet archive team could figure out a way to adapt their services to gopher+gemini, and archive a SUBSTANTIAL portion of both protocols with much greater ease than the web.
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Because clickbait titles — which I’m defining here as “titles that withhold important information in order to get you to click through to see the entire article” — are so common on the Internet, I usually try and get myself to stop and consider if I could rewrite the feeds’ content text to put the most important part of the post in it, saving people clicks. More often than once, I’ve rewritten a title or two to make it more useful and less like Buzzfeed house style.
On the other hand, I tend to craft titles that make me grin, and care much less about whether they make sense or if they’re just a good vehicle for a joke or pun or a snowclone. Besides, if you’re reading the title, you’re already here.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Debian, Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum a2345451b594442f092bdf3b48a76b63
Freedom or Firmware
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The emphasis on software freedom (or Software Freedom) inside Debian has been lessened a bit; while this can make Debian easier to install in the ‘Wi-Fi era’ this might signal the shift towards Ubuntu-like Debian, i.e. a distro without principles
THE recent vote on firmware in Debian has been mentioned here in many batches of Daily Links (since more than a month ago) and even in IRC. It’s a question of freedom versus convenience and vice versa.
“Debian is the “base” (like template) for most GNU/Linux distros, so the decision to include firmware blobs on the media is kind of a big deal.”The video above is spontaneous commentary on coverage we’ve found since the results were revealed this past weekend. In the video I discuss my experiences adding the firmware (usually required for networking) and why for most people who choose Debian it should not be too shocking having to add a file from USB (or similar media; I’ve done this for over a decade). The impact on software freedom is perhaps minimal as many people choose Debian derivatives (like Ubuntu), but it’s a matter of principles. With Debian quickly becoming widespread (not just on desktops but devices and servers) we can expect many compromises and promotion of convenience by people who simply don’t grasp software freedom and probably underestimate the threats posed to security, at hardware, hardware-software interfaces, and software. Sure, software freedom (or Software Freedom capitalised, as if to denote or coin a concept) is not enough. Even the FSF and its founder Richard Stallman admit that. In the case of firmware, no hardware modification is required, however, so why not insist on full disclosure and transparency?
Debian is the “base” (like template) for most GNU/Linux distros, so the decision to include firmware blobs on the media is kind of a big deal. Having said that, many of the derivatives already add those blobs regardless. So have we lost so much? Are we worse off to the point of desperation? I’m personally a lot more concerned about Debian’s bad treatment of some high-calibre volunteers and censorship of their blogs (IBM did the same). Freedom of speech is very important. Without it, software freedom will be harder to attain.
One associate of ours said that “more important even than the bad treatment of volunteers is the lack of commitment to freedom. If derivatives want to modify the base, including by adding proprietary crap, then that’s on them. the upstream should strive to stay clean. However, the bad treatment of the volunteers might demonstrate a pattern matching that lack of commitment to software freedom.”
A few minutes ago in IRC FigOSDev called it “debibm: the universal sellout”.
To quote what Richard Stallman told me in person: “If you want to reach a goal that requires a long journey the crucial point is to remember the goal. If you forget the goal, you won’t get there.” █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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It doesn’t appear a lot of folks wanted to announce themselves. I guess I’ll be the odd duck out here. I just wanted to say hey to everybody. I’ve been running ONLY Linux on my personal computers for 20 years or so. I converted my wife about 15 years ago. She now uses Linux on her home computer, but still has to use a Windows PC at work. Just ask her what she thinks and you’ll get an earful about having to reboot the work computer 5 or 6 times a day. The good news is that she has finally decided to retire in a couple of months so I won’t be hearing her complain about that.
I ran PCLinuxOS a lot of years ago, but got away from it for whatever reason. I’ve run Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distros or their derivatives for a lot of years now. I began having some issues and wasn’t getting a lot of them resolved on the various forums. I’m not sure what has changed, but I recently decided to do a lot of distro shopping and hopping to see if I could come up with something better. I was kind of disappointed when I was unable to get their latest releases installed on any of my laptops. Every distro I tried gave me some sort of fit when I tried the install. I had never had trouble like that in the last 10 years and was getting really frustrated.
I decided to look for any distro that is NOT a derivative of that family. I also was looking for a non-systemd distro, and I prefer XFCE. Yep, up jumped PCLinuxOS. I decided to give it a whirl. I was really frustrated trying to get PCLinuxOS installed. The problem I was having was in partitioning my hard drive to suit PCLinuxOS. I was still partitioning for the distros I had been running. I don’t use UEFI and I still use a DVD for the installation media. Yeah, I know, I’m a dinosaur.
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At the beginning of the year, Matthew Garrett, the researcher who created the UEFI bootloader for Linux (which I do not agree with at all, as it sets a precedent for Microsoft to abuse the market, with its position of power, should not be allowed under any circumstances) said that the Pluton chip was not an attack on users’ freedom to use whatever operating system they wanted, which was not a threat.
In July 2022, he recanted, when he was unable to install Linux on a high-end Thinkpad Z13, complaining that this was not a legal practice by Lenovo.
But, that’s what Microsoft wants. Under the guise of enforcing security, it blocks the machine’s access to the user himself, being the gatekeeper of personal computing. In other words, “my” microcomputer is over. From now on, it will be Microsoft’s microcomputer, and only what it allows will run…
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Server
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WebAssembly (also referred to as Wasm) has gained popularity as a portable binary instruction format with an embeddable and isolated execution environment for client and server applications. Think of WebAssembly as a small, fast, efficient, and very secure stack-based virtual machine designed to execute portable bytecode that doesn’t care what CPU or operating system it runs on. WebAssembly was initially designed for web browsers to be a lightweight, fast, safe, and polyglot container for functions, but it’s no longer limited to the web.
On the web, WebAssembly uses the existing APIs provided by browsers. WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) was created to fill the void between WebAssembly and systems running outside the browser. This enables non-browser systems to leverage the portability of WebAssembly, making WASI a good choice for portability while distributing and isolation while running the workload.
WebAssembly offers several advantages. Because it is platform neutral, one single binary can be compiled and executed on a variety of operating systems and architectures simultaneously, with a very low disk footprint and startup time. Useful security features include module signing and security knobs controllable at the run-time level rather than depending on the host operating system’s user privilege. Sandboxed memory can still be managed by existing container tools infrastructure.
In this article, I will walk through a scenario for configuring container runtimes to run Wasm workloads from lightweight container images.
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Kernel Space
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Back in 1996, APM (Advanced Power Management) was replaced by ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Linux did not gain ACPI support until 2002. ACPI was originally developed by Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba, with HP, Huawei and Phoenix joining the development at a later date.
Back in 2002, to improve compatibility between Intel and certain AMD chips (remember the Athlon chips?), a special instruction set was added to the Linux kernel for AMD chips. It caused the processor to briefly stop/pause processing instructions, presumably to keep ACPI in “sync.” However, the new AMD chips no longer require this intervention … but it’s still there. Or, at least it was.
According to an article on The Register, Intel’s Dave Hansen issued a patch that limits the instruction set to Intel CPUs only, since they use a different method to pause the CPU than AMD CPUs use. The new patch should be available when the Linux 6.0 kernel is released on October 2, 2022.
EXCEPT … PCLinuxOS users won’t have to wait for the 6.0 kernel to appear. Texstar has applied the patch to the 5.19.12 kernel, and plans to also apply it to the LTS 5.15.71 kernel.
Don’t expect to see huge speed increases on AMD processors. Many of the AMD processors currently in use are faster than their 20-year-old predecessors, so desktop computing speeds are expected to be minimally affected, with little to no noticeable difference in speeds. Early reports indicate that the most noticeable differences are in a quicker boot time, and large programs at least appear to be launching a tad quicker.
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The Linux 6.0 kernel has been released with changes impacting areas such as chip hardware support, timer registers, and XFS file systems. Bigger changes such as Rust programming language support are lined up for Linux 6.1.
Unveiling of the kernel was announced by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in a bulletin on October 2. The bulletin cites various changes including proper enablement of registers before accessing timers as well as ensuring that all MACs are powered down before reset and only doing PLL once after a reset. Other changes, cited by the lwn.net news site for Linux, include buffered writes to XFS file systems and zero-copy network transmission with io_uring.
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Graphics Stack
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Jason Ekstrand of Collabora just announced NVK, a brand new open source Mesa Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs. No you’re not dreaming but it’s also not from NVIDIA directly — as usual the open source community is doing the work.
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Applications
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Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.
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A synthesizer is a computer program that enables artists or music enthusiasts to create digital audio. They are also referred to as soft synths and comprise an integral part of the digital music industry. Synthesizers employ various methods to generate audio sound while at the same time offering a wide array of services essential for professional music production. As a significant player in the computing world, Linux supports some of the best synthesizer programs that can be used by both professionals and hobbyists alike. However, finding the right synthesizer can be daunting if you do not have prior knowledge. To help you bag the right synthesizer for your needs, we compiled this guide outlining the 15 best Linux synthesizers available right now.
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The internet has transformed the world into a microcosm, which offers camaraderie through sharing information and values. Global cognitive norm is getting evaded regarding the data being spied on, which implies that internet security is at stake. Chameleon sources are tremendously cynical; hence, the free flow of information is getting impeded significantly. A continuing threat of hacking and spying proliferation has triggered the alarm to encrypt data to protect it from the brute-attacker. To this end, plenty of files and disk encryption software could be used on the Linux platform; thus, information and data would have had to be protected from the brute-attacker.
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Today’s article has been specially designed for music lovers, editors, and those who want to be professional DJs. We all know that editing music is not a cup of tea. One has to put much effort and labor into doing this. But to reduce your toil, today we are going to introduce you to some top-rated Linux DAW and DJ software that you can also use for music-making or mixing purposes as a digital audio workstation.
Linux has some astounding software for making editing easy and much painless. In addition to this, it is a huge opportunity for beginners who want to start editing music tracks. Linux has made this platform for you. So try to make the best use of it. If you are a Windows or macOS user, we have also covered you with our another article on the best DAW software for Windows and Macbooks.
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Linux is a strong open source platform where every type of necessary software tool is available for both beginners and professionals. If you are confused about which camera software or IP camera software to use in your Linux system, then I can only say that there are lots of IP, security, or surveillance camera software available for the Linux system. To help you sort it out, today, I will provide a list of Linux camera software where various kinds of webcam software, IP camera software, security camera software, and video surveillance software are included with focusing on various important features.
[...]
Webcamoid is a simple and versatile webcam program for Linux users. This online tool is written in C++ and Qt. It provides a huge number of options by which you can configure it as per your needs. It is suitable for both picture and video capture.
Webcamoid has over 60 effects, including blur, broken TV, cartoon, color filter, edge detection, pixelate, photocopy, oil paint, scan lines, and many more. It has a great feature of custom controls for the webcam.
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We no longer ship official 32-bit Windows packages starting with this release. If you need to use Wireshark on that platform, we recommend using the latest 3.6 release. Issue 17779
The display filter syntax is more powerful with many new extensions. See below for details.
The Conversation and Endpoint dialogs have been redesigned. See below for details.
The default main window layout has been changed so that the Packet Detail and Packet Bytes are side by side underneath the Packet List pane.
Hex dump imports from Wireshark and from text2pcap have been improved. See below for details.
Speed when using MaxMind geolocation has been greatly improved.
The tools and libraries required to build Wireshark have changed. See “Other Development Changes” below for more details.
Many other improvements have been made. See the “New and Updated Features” section below for more details.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Here we have come up with another article where you will learn how to use the touch command, which has been primarily used for creating empty files for a long time.
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I watch GIMP and Inkscape tutorials on YouTube, and have found several really great ones! The guy from Logos by Nick is very good, and posted one about putting a shape around another shape. This is useful if you have a pattern you want to use in a curved border or around a circle. Let’s look at it.
Start with a pattern or shape in Inkscape. I have a star I want to use for a flyer I’m making. I did an article similar to this in April, 2014, but we’ll do a different project this time. Make sure that whatever you use (curves and shapes) can be changed to a path.
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Way, way back in ancient computer times … in this case, 30 years ago (1992) … Adobe created the PDF file. The letters of the file extension stand for “Portable Document File.” Up until that time, the sharing of documents was more difficult. There were various word processing programs around, and there was no guarantee that one word processor’s files could be read by a different word processor. Plus, even then, not having the proper fonts installed on the “guest” system meant that the document might not display as it was intended.
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Linux Kernel 6.0 is finally here, with many features, including support for the newest generation processors from Intel and AMD along with security updates to improve performance on various hardware devices! For end-users, the most significant change will likely be new capabilities added alongside stability improvements. Everyone should upgrade if they require only installing an updated version or understanding the risks involved in using mainline kernels.
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NixNote is a popular unofficial Evernote client for Linux desktops. It was initially known as NeverNote. It used to be written in Java until NixNote 2 when it was switched to C++ with Qt framework for a smaller memory footprint and improved performance. The author has been using it since 2013 and provides an overview of the available features, installation, usage, and customization options.
Available features include: creating notes, attaching images, searching notes, and synchronizing with Evernote servers. Installation is simple and only requires a few clicks, usage is straightforward, and the user interface is intuitive. Customization options are plentiful, allowing users to tailor NixNote to their needs. So if you are looking for a powerful note-taking app that runs on your Linux desktop, look no further than NixNote. It’s feature-rich, open-source, and completely free.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install NixNote on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series desktop using the command line terminal with tips about installing the alternative development version and removing the application if required.
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Linux users often face issues with broken operating systems due to many reasons. This issue frequently occurs when turning on the system after a major software crush, update failure, or physical damage to the system. It’s not undeniable that getting a shake on the hardware (especially in laptops) might break your current operating system. Now, there is no hassle if you’ve started using your Ubuntu fresh, but it would be havoc if you’ve been using Ubuntu professionally and there are tons of files on your system.
In that case, you might not want to erase the current operating system entirely and reinstall Ubuntu. There are ways that you can use to fix your broken Ubuntu OS without reinstalling it on your machine.
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“Bash shell offers the export command, a built-in command that allows exporting variables in a shell to make them global, such that you can access them from another shell. With the export command, you export the environmental variables to other shells as a child process without tampering with the existing environmental variables. This guide discusses the Bash export command, giving examples of how you can use it.”
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Linux users can have a virtual block device called a “loop device” that maps a normal file to a virtual block, making it ideal for tasks related to isolating processes.
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TecAdmin ☛ How to Install Skype on Ubuntu 22.04 [Ed: Rahul's TecAdmin has gone downhill lately; lots of Apple stuff, then Microsoft proprietary software, even spam. Now, telling GNU/Linux to install Microsoft malware for eavesdropping]
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Use regular expressions to find and filter content in HTML pages in the grep and pcre2grep command-line utilities.
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Games
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Another fresh month and a new set of games in Humble Choice, the monthly subscription from Humble Bundle so let’s go over what’s in it and the compatibility. Listing how they will run across Linux desktop and Steam Deck, and if any have Native builds as usual or ProtonDB rating.
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Excuse me for being overly hyped about this one but HECK YES! Streets of Rogue 2 is coming along in development, with a Steam page up now.
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Blending together elements of survival, mining, exploration and tower defense — Dome Keeper is worth your attention. Note: key provided by the developer to our Steam Curator.
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Bottles is the awesome free and open source app to help you manage the Windows compatibility layer Wine. A fresh release is out now with version 2022.9.28 (yes I’m a few days late).
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SC Controller, what originally started as an application to control the Steam Controller outside of Steam and expanded to cover more gamepads now has a pre-release up with Steam Deck support.
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Want to pick up some more great games for Steam Deck (or your Linux desktop!)? Fanatical have put up another bundle with all games that are Steam Deck Verified.
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Valve just released a fresh Beta update for the Steam Deck, as they loved seeing all the custom boot screens so much they’ve now made it officially supported. This is currently available in the Beta and Preview channels you can swap over to by going into Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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You and I both know that there are a lot of people who get caught up in “the numbers.” We see it periodically when someone posts in the PCLinuxOS forum that PCLinuxOS fell two places in Distrowatch’s “ranking.” That “ranking” is a measurement of how many “hits” that distro’s page has received in a day, averaged out.
For what it’s worth, PCLinuxOS still sits in the top 20 of the top 100 distros, as ranked by “hits per day” on Distrowatch. PCLinuxOS, at the time I’m writing this article, is solidly ranked 16th in the Distrowatch HPD rankings.
I was around many years ago when PCLinuxOS actually (and briefly) held the number one rank for HPD on Distrowatch. It was somewhat chaotic, uncharacteristic for the calm that typically envelops the forum. Texstar and many others have stated they don’t want to be the number one ranked Linux distro. It brings all the “weirdos” out from the woodwork. It makes you a target. After all, who does everyone aim for? Who does everyone look to “dethrone?” Of course, it’s the “Big Guy” on top.
[...]
For the few of us that work on producing this magazine every month, it raises some questions for us. Like, are we not writing interesting enough articles? What could/should we be doing differently? What are we doing that isn’t liked? Or, has our readership numbers just fallen to such lower levels because fewer people are using PCLinuxOS? These are all valid questions, I think.
One of my guidelines on deciding what to write about every month goes something like this. First, cover PCLinuxOS first. Second, cover Linux. Third, cover computing and computing issues and advances. Fourth, cover things that PCLinuxOS/Linux users might find interesting. So, to that end, I do know that users of other distros do also read “our” magazine. I’ve heard it many times.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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This article is part of a series of articles that takes a closer look at Btrfs. This is the default filesystem for Fedora Workstation and Fedora Silverblue since Fedora Linux 33.
Filesystems are one of the foundations of modern computers. They are an essential part of every operating system and they usually work unnoticed. However, modern filesystems such as Btrfs offer many great features that make working with computers more convenient. Next to other things they can, for example, transparently compress your files for you or build a solid foundation for incremental backups.
This article gives you a high-level overview of how the Btrfs filesystem works and some of the features it has. It will not go into much technical detail nor look at the implementation. More detailed explanations of some highlighted features follow in later articles of this series.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Announced by Canonical last year, Ubuntu Pro is an expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription as part of Ubuntu Advantage, which was initially designed for enterprise customers offering global services who wanted long-term stability for their infrastructure and applications.
Now, Canonical decided to expand Ubuntu Pro for personal and small-scale commercial use with a free tier for up to five machines, in an attempt to make open source more easily consumable by the masses and provide Ubuntu users with better security for their installations to up to 10 years.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Retroid Pocket 3 it’s a low-cost portable console based on the quad-core Unisoc T310 SoC. This handheld console packs a 4000mAh battery along with a 4.7” touch display, wireless connectivity support and a USB Type-C port for fast charging.
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Beelink announced their latest mini PC which is based on a 12th Gen i5 Core processor from Intel. The SEi12 offers up to 32GB of RAM, 500GB of SSD storage, dual 4K displays and dual fans for efficient cooling.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Somalytics has used new materials — specifically carbon nanotubes — to create a new type of sensor manufactured in a way that enables them to be incredibly cheap and incredibly power efficient, and to sense movement and items more efficiently than any existing counterparts.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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OpenSSH 9.1 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
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This release contains fixes for three minor memory safety problems. None are believed to be exploitable, but we report most memory safety problems as potential security vulnerabilities out of caution.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Tor/Arti and Censorship-Dodging
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The last month, our team’s time has been filled with company meetings, vacations, COVID recovery, groundwork for anticensorship features, and followup from Arti 1.0.0. Thus, this has been a fairly small release, but we believe it’s worth upgrading for.
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Of course, ISPs in countries where Tor is banned are constantly trying to find the IP addresses of bridges and block them to prevent people from accessing Tor. Bridge connections can also be identified (or “fingerprinted”) as connections to the Tor network by an ISP using deep packet inspection. To deal with this, Tor has a clever solution called “pluggable transports.” Pluggable transports disguise your Tor connection as ordinary traffic to a well-known web service such as Google or Skype, and smuggles your Tor connection inside of the seemingly innocuous traffic.
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Standards/Consortia
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The proposal, known as a directive, forces all consumer electronics manufacturers who sell their products in Europe to ensure that a wide range of devices feature a USB-C port. This “common port” will be a world-first statute and impact Apple in particular since it widely uses the Lightning connector instead of USB-C on many of its devices. MEPs claim that the move will reduce electronic waste, address product sustainability, and make use of different devices more convenient.
The directive received 602 votes in favor, 13 votes against, and eight abstentions. A press release issued by the European Parliament earlier today states: [...]
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Regardless of their manufacturer, all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops that are rechargeable via a wired cable, operating with a power delivery of up to 100 Watts, will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C port.
All devices that support fast charging will now have the same charging speed, allowing users to charge their devices at the same speed with any compatible charger.
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Leftovers
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What do we owe our friends? Among other things, we owe our friends our discerning taste and sometimes, at the very least, a good mixtape—meticulously curated, every track selected with intention. Mixtapes have a theme, a mood, a message. They are given to friends for a birthday or a bad week. We anticipate what a friend might like, what might surprise them, what they might listen to when we’re not around, what might speak to their life separate from their relationship to us. Making a mixtape for a friend speaks to what we think we know about them and what we do not know—at least not yet.
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The return of Supercon is taking place in just a month. We’ve got 45 fantastic talks and workshops planned for the three-day weekend, and they are as varied and inspiring as the Hackaday community itself. From molecules to military connectors, here’s an even dozen talks to whet your appetite.
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Hardware
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We’ve seen credit card-sized computers before, but [Kn/vD] shows us a PIC18-based computer with 9 components that is only 2 mm thick! With 13 K of RAM and 128 K of flash, you can’t do much with it, but a built-in BASIC interpreter can use half the flash like a disk drive and operate with the 20×4 LCD display and the PCB touch-panel keyboard.
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For those of us with science and engineering backgrounds, opening the character map or memorizing the Unicode shortcuts for various symbols is a tedious but familiar part of writing reports or presentations. [Magne Lauritzen] thought there had to be a better way and developed the Mathboard.
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Being an early adopter is great if you enjoy showing off new gadgets to your friends. But any new technology also brings the risk of ending up at the wrong side of a format war: just ask anyone who committed to HD-DVD fifteen years ago. If, on the other hand, you were among the few who invested in CD-ROM when it was first released in the mid-1980s, you definitely made the right choice when it came to storage media. However, it was a bit of a different story for the interface that hooks up the CD drive to your computer, as [Tech Tangents] found out when he managed to get his hands on a first-generation CM100 drive. (Video, embedded below.)
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Electronics components are steadily moving away from through hole parts to using surface mount technology (SMT) exclusively. While the small size of the SMT components can be intimidating, with a little practice, soldering can come pretty naturally. To help folks get over their fear of soldering small parts, [Alpenglow Industries] have created a charming board to practice SMT soldering skills on.
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Opinions vary as to what actually constitutes a “complete” shop, but one thing is for sure: the more tools, the better. That doesn’t mean running out to buy a tool every time you have a need, of course. Sometimes you can throw together what you need from scrap, as with this ad hoc sandblaster. (Video, embedded below.)
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[Rob]’s IP00-Minus watch stands out on the Cyberdeck Contest project list page; it’s clear he decided to go a different path than most other hackers, and we can certainly see the advantages. For example, if there’s no case, there’s no need to redesign it each time you want to add a module — and [Rob] has added many, many modules to this watch.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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“Public speculation has suggested that the spread of social media in the 2010s may be linked to a decline in the birth rate. Here we show for the first time with survey data that there is a link,” said Anna Rotkirch, Research Director at the Finnish Population Research Institute.
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Last week, the FDA formally approved Relyvrio to treat patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive and rapidly fatal disease of the nervous system that currently affects tens of thousands of people in the United States.
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Proprietary
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The trend challenges teens to steal a car off the street by breaking into the car, popping off the steering wheel column and hot wiring the vehicle using a USB cable, similar to the wire used to charge a phone.
[...]
McClain calls the issue a “defect.” His firm has filed class action lawsuits in 12 states so far: California, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Texas. He’s also preparing to file in as many as seven other states.
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Sierra College was just one of 1,043 schools and colleges—part of 62 school districts and the campuses of 26 colleges and universities—hit by ransomware hackers in 2021, according to Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that tracks ransomware incidents. The company reports that, so far in 2022, there have been 27 districts with 1,735 schools hit with ransomware.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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When the smartphone detects such a dangerous incident, the device alerts you and in the event of no response, automatically calls the emergency services after 20 seconds. After connecting with the dispatcher, the system plays an audio message informing that the user has had an accident and provides geographic coordinates.
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SMS Protect is a security feature that has two purposes: to keep players accountable for what Blizzard calls “disruptive behavior,” and to protect accounts if they’re hacked. It requires all Overwatch 2 players to attach a unique phone number to their account. Blizzard said SMS Protect will target cheaters and harassers; if an account is banned, it’ll be harder for them to return to Overwatch 2. You can’t just enter any old phone number — you actually have to have access to a phone receiving texts to that number to get into your account.
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Aretha Franklin was closely monitored by the FBI for many years, recently declassified records have revealed.
Journalist Jenn Dize shared details from the bureau’s files on the “Queen of Soul” after requesting them under the Freedom of Information Act.
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“Years ago, I FOIA’d @fbi files on Aretha Franklin. Today, I received the files,” the reporter began the thread. “While incomplete, they show repeated and disgusting suspicion of the famed Black singer, her work, and activists around her.”
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The FBI kept a careful eye on the Queen of Soul and her activism, nothing unusual during the civil rights era when the bureau was monitoring a host of the movement’s luminaries. Franklin died in 2018, best known for her sturdy catalog of R&B and gospel hits, but her FBI file shows that her possible affiliation – both real and perceived – with Communist and Black liberation organizations was a regular focus for federal agents.
Though the documents are redacted, the agents and investigators seemed to conclude there was no cause for alarm, despite the extensive monitoring. The file also outlines death threats and an extortion attempt targeting the singer, as well as a copyright infringement lawsuit.
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The 270 pages of declassified FBI memos, released on the bureau website’s FOIA vault, include a series of reports on the “communist infiltration” of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose first president was Martin Luther King Jr. The bureau said SCLC leadership “has taken a ‘hate America’ and a ‘pro-communist’ line, which the mass of Negroes will not recognize but which they will blindly follow.”
Franklin makes cameos in those records because she sang at several SCLC events between 1967 and 1968. One report on King’s 1968 assassination notes that Franklin was booked to play a memorial concert for King at Atlanta Stadium, which a source warned could “provide emotional spark which could ignite racial disturbance this area.” The SCLC ultimately scrapped plans for the concert.
The FBI carefully followed Franklin’s other appearances, planned appearances, and contacts with leftist groups or causes, such as the Boston branch of the Young Workers Liberation League, the Black Panther Party, and fundraisers for black radical Angela Davis.
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One of the companies buying up all that data is Team Cymru who watches over all of it with a tool it calls Augury. Who buys Augury? We’ve just learned a lot of agencies within the federal government. Cyber Command, the Army, the Navy, are all using Augury to paw through internet traffic. But what, exactly, are they looking for? And what can they even see?
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At a conference hosted by the EU police agency, three ways to decrypt communications and storage media were discussed. One of the approaches was apparently pushed by the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation.
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With high-altitude platforms, the EU border agency aims to close the gap between its planes, drones and satellites.
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Riley didn’t articulate any standards that limit the scope of cell phone searches, and courts are taking different approaches. While some courts have constrained police searches to certain types of data on the phone, specific time periods, or limited the use of the data, other courts have authorized warrants that allow the police to search the entire phone.
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Defence/Aggression
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In his own opening statement, Phillip Linder, Mr. Rhodes’s lawyer, said Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates had never planned an attack against the government on Jan. 6. Instead, Mr. Linder said, the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, they claim, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.
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On January 6, 2021, as his comrades were smashing into the Capitol, right-wing Oath Keeper leader Stuart Rhodes yelled exactly what John Wilkes Booth did as he murdered President Abraham Lincoln in 1865: “Sic semper tyrannis!”
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The Internal Security Service (KAPO) wrote on social media: “Remember the drones we confiscated from a person trying to donate them for the Russian aggression in Ukraine? Well, these drones still made it to Ukraine. But the right way around and on the right side of the battlefront.”
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On Oct. 1, Russia’s Defense Ministry admitted that the Russian army had left Lyman, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine that had been captured by the occupying forces early last summer. According to the ministry, the Russian troops had now moved “to more advantageous positions.” That statement was followed by Ramzan Kadyrov’s derisive remark: “Yesterday, it was the parade in Izium, today it’s the Ukrainian flag in Lyman – and what about tomorrow? It would all be well and good if it weren’t so bad,” quipped the Head of the Chechen Republic. Shortly afterwards, Evgeny Prigozhin, the man behind the Wagner Group, replied to Kadyrov: “Beautiful, Ramzan, keep it up.” This wasn’t the first instance of Ramzan Kadyrov criticizing Russia’s Defense Ministry – and being seconded by Prigozhin. On Sept. 24, for example, the Chechen leader urged that 50 percent of the Russian law-enforcement troops be sent to the front. Immediately, Prigozhin spoke up – that Kadyrov was right. Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin think this is something more than just a coincidence. Here are the connections they shared with us, and what this may mean for the future of Russia’s military.
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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree “On the legally negligible status of legislation that violates the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.” This category includes a number of Vladimir Putin’s decrees. The document, published on Zelesnky’s official site, decrees:
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“The chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes.”
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A Russian court has fined 2022 Miss Crimea pageant winner Olga Valeyeva 40,000 rubles ($681) for singing the patriotic Ukrainian song Chervona Kalyna (“Red Guelder Rose”) in a video posted to Instagram, RIA Novosti reported on Monday. A friend of Valeyeva who also appeared in the video was sentenced to 10 days in prison.
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The border’s clogged, but, still, I’ve got To skip this war and not get shot. I’ll break an arm, so I can’t shoot. And better yet: I can’t salute.
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On the night of September 22, Ukraine and Russia conducted the largest prisoner swap since the start of Russia’s invasion. Ukraine released 55 Russians and Pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk in exchange for 215 Ukrainian soldiers, many of whom defended the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol when it came under siege by Russian forces in the spring. One of those soldiers was marine Mykhailo Dianov, whose face was seen around the world after he was photographed by his fellow serviceman Dmytro Kozatsky in the Azovstal plant. After the prisoner exchange, Dianov gave an hour-long interview to the Ukrainian media project Front 18. Meduza summarizes his account of his time in captivity.
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Alexander Lukashenko said that Belarus is taking part in the “special military operation,” which Russia is conducting against Ukraine, but is not sending its troops into the conflict zone, reports Belta.
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More than 200,000 Russians have entered Kazakhstan since Vladimir Putin announced mobilization on September 21, Kazakh Interior Minister Marat Akhmetzhanov reported on Tuesday. At the same time, he said, many of their stays have been short: between September 21 and October 4, about 147,000 Russians left Kazakhstan.
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Any military spouse with young children in tow who’s had to relocate somewhere in this nation’s vast network of military bases can tell you that just caring for another person is challenging in itself. Upon learning you’re pregnant, you practically need a Ph.D. to locate a competent obstetrician who also accepts military insurance.
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A September 2022 report from Tessa Jolls, president of the Center for Media Literacy, titled “Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic,” read like a blueprint for how to indoctrinate students in corporatism and militarism under the auspices of media literacy education. Jolls received a Fulbright-NATO Security Studies Award to study “aspects of the current information ecosystem and the state of media literacy in NATO countries.”
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Ukraine’s military has liberated eight more villages in the country’s Kherson region from Russian occupation, Volodymyr Zelensky announced during his daily address to the nation on Tuesday.
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On October 3, Elon Musk outlined a four-point proposal for achieving peace in Ukraine. His plan involved concessions to Russia on a scale that Kyiv instantly deemed unacceptable. The Kremlin, on the other hand, responded to Musk’s “initiative” with apparent delight.
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Alexey Navalny’s associates announced that they would relaunch the politician’s organization of regional offices.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree implementing a decision by the country’s National Security and Defense Council on Ukraine’s response to Russia’s attempt to annex Ukrainian territory.
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In a new post on Instagram, 73-year-old Russian pop star Alla Pugacheva addressed her critics in the wake of her recent anti-war statement.
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North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has expressed support for the results of the annexation “referendums” staged by Russia in multiple occupied Ukrainian territories in late September. In a statement, ministry spokesperson Jo Chol Su said the ministry “respects the will of the residents” of the annexed territories as well as the Russian government’s decision to annex the regions.
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The western African nation of Burkina Faso is facing its second military coup in eight months. After a day of gunfire rang out Friday in the capital Ouagadougou, Captain Ibrahim Traoré announced on public television that he had replaced Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba as president. Corinne Dufka, West Africa director at Human Rights Watch, says Damiba’s inability to improve security in the face of an Islamist insurgency was “the primary reason for the coup d’état.” We also speak with Aziz Fall, coordinator for Justice for Sankara, an international campaign dedicated to uncovering the truth behind the 1987 assassination of Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara. He says the legacy of U.S. military intervention and French colonialism has led to instability in the region. “People are outraged with the role of France but also the role of the United States,” says Fall.
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This weekend marked the 103rd anniversary of the 1919 Elaine massacre, one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. The violence started on September 30, 1919, when guards stopped two white men from breaking into a meeting between Black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, who were organizing to demand fair payments for their crops. After an exchange of gunfire, a white man was killed. White mobs, backed by the U.S. military, responded with three days of anti-Black violence, indiscriminately killing hundreds of Black people under the false claim of stopping a Black insurrection. Much of the Black farmers’ land was stolen as a result. We speak to Julia Wright, daughter of the acclaimed Black author Richard Wright, who called Elaine home and wrote about his great-uncle Silas Hoskins’s lynching in Elaine three years prior in 1916. Wright says she saw the lynching in a new light after the murder of George Floyd. “Two lynchings separated by so many years and yet so similar,” says Wright. We also speak with Paul Ortiz, historian at the University of Florida, who recalls the nationwide crusade, which included journalist Ida B. Wells, to seek justice for the Black farmers who remained and were taken into custody after the massacre, and ultimately won their freedom.
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Thanks to our readers’ continued support, Telex was able to send a team to Ukraine again – just like we did at the beginning of the war. This time, our team is in Kupyansk, one of the towns recently liberated after six months of Russian occupation. This is the report they sent back. (Make sure to turn on the English subtitles!)
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As a special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, Elena Milashina has been writing about Chechnya and the Caucasus for over a decade. She has been brutally attacked and threatened with attacks in the past, in connection with her investigations. On February 8, 2022, Milashina was forced to leave Russia, following new threats from the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov. Milashina’s new profile of Kadyrov for Novaya Gazeta and its web project, the Free Space, considers the inner life of the Chechen leader, and why he cannot be accurately described as “a hawk.” We have summarized Milashina’s long essay and present her understanding of Kadyrov in our own words.
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We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below are exactly as he provided.
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Second, there was the recent arrest, prosecution, conviction, and 9-year jail sentence for Brittney Griner for violating Russia’s drug laws. Hey, the U.S. has drug laws too and also sends people away for long periods of time for drug-law violations.
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Every military unit has a nickname, and the 20th Attack Squadron goes by the name Hellhounds. “We are very humbled and appreciative to receive such a prestigious award,” said Lt. Col. Daniel, 20th Attack Squadron commander, adding, “Everyone in the Hellhound organization worked incredibly hard to help accomplish our mission.” Col. Stephen Jones said, “Through their dedicated support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the 20th Attack Squadron became the US Air Force’s most lethal squadron, achieving a 97 percent strike effectiveness rating.”
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The scale of the recent exodus is enormous. Nearly 100,000 Russians entered Kazakhstan in the week following Putin’s military call-up, and large numbers entered Turkey and Armenia. More than 50,000 crossed into Finland before the border was closed, double the rate of previous weeks.
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Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev reported Wednesday that the level of “extremist crime” in the country has tripled in 2022.
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As is often the case, voices like those of Antonio Guterres – who called for “achieving and sustaining peace” – were drowned by those with the big guns and financial means to turn the Ukraine war into a long-drawn battlefield for their own strategic reasons.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the v of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” and Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. He also signed the constitutional laws on the “incorporation” of the four territories into Russia.
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Former Channel One employee Marina Ovsyannikova, who ran on stage with an anti-war banner during a live TV broadcast in March, announced Wednesday that she is intentionally not observing the house arrest she was put on in August. In a statement posted on Telegram, Ovsyannikova told Moscow’s Basmanny District Court that she’s decided to “absolve [herself]” from the measures.
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Environment
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The Board of Trustees of Princeton University voted earlier this month to dissociate from 90 companies pursuant to a fossil fuel dissociation decision made last year that focused on the most-polluting segments of the industry and on concerns about corporate disinformation campaigns.
As a step toward the Board’s related commitment to achieving a net-zero endowment portfolio over time, the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) will also eliminate all holdings in publicly traded fossil fuel companies. PRINCO will also ensure that the endowment does not benefit from any future exposure to those companies.
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And so it continues. Today, more people are in danger of displacement for climate than for armed conflict.
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The sweeping climate package, embedded alongside health care and tax reforms in the surprise passage of the more than 700-page Inflation Reduction Act, represents the largest U.S. funding boost to date to reduce greenhouse gases and promote climate-friendly “green” technologies. It is roughly four times what was authorized for climate action under President Biden’s Democratic predecessor Obama in 2009 in what was then the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This spending is in addition to the more than $200 billion in clean energy and climate action investments that a majority Democratic Congress already approved last year in a massive infrastructure funding bill.
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Compiled by the Sierra Club and Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, the report—titled The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges—is the authors’ second to examine whether the nation’s utilities are genuine in their pledges to help solve the climate crisis.
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Thom Hartmann writes about how the Babcock Ranch community near Ft Meyers shows building a resilient and low-carbon America will save both money and lives.
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In a letter to the CEOs of Facebook, TikTok, Google, Twitter, and Pinterest, 14 climate groups noted that the esteemed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has “named climate disinformation as a threat to the world’s ability to effectively address” the planetary crisis, which is fueling deadly extreme weather events across the globe.
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There’s nothing like a climate crisis to make everyone realize that they are living on the same planet. Wars, even international conflicts, are generally confined to one region. Economic downturns are sometimes so confined within national borders that they don’t even affect neighbors: consider North Korea’s “arduous march” of the 1990s and its lack of impact on South Korea’s economy.
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The party made Britain the first G7 country to adopt a legally-binding net zero target in 2019, but a refusal to accept established climate science persists at the margins. Climate campaigners fear that this sentiment could bolster a push against net zero by think tanks around new Prime Minister Liz Truss.
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Events at the lounge include a number of invite-only events – such as a “Heads of Mission Reception” with James Cleverly, the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs – as well as an international trade reception, according to a full-page advert in the party’s conference brochure.
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The court ruled that OSM failed to consider the impacts from this massive expansion on water resources, the Yellowstone River, and the climate. The expansion would allow the strip mining of an additional 6,500 acres containing about 70 million tons of coal, which would then be burned almost exclusively at the Colstrip power plant and release over 100 million tons of greenhouse gases. Burning the coal at the Colstrip Power Plant requires diverting 25,000 to 50,000 acre feet of water from the Yellowstone River each year.
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Energy
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More than half of the digital data firms generate is collected, processed, and stored for single-use purposes. Often, it is never re-used. This could be your multiple near-identical images held on Google Photos or iCloud, a business’s outdated spreadsheets that will never be used again, or data from internet of things sensors that have no purpose.
This “dark data” is anchored to the real world by the energy it requires. Even data that is stored and never used again takes up space on servers – typically huge banks of computers in warehouses. Those computers and those warehouses all use lots of electricity.
This is a significant energy cost that is hidden in most organizations. Maintaining an effective organizational memory is a challenge, but at what cost to the environment?
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Senator Joe Manchin failed in a bid last week to ram an environmental deregulation bill through Congress — despite support from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the powerful fossil fuel industry. The West Virginia coal millionaire couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed from his colleagues to attach the bill to “must pass” government funding legislation.
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“The global transition to clean energy is now more urgent than ever.”
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But the European Union is also a loser. Its members can no longer draw on cheap Russian gas, putting it at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with the US and China. Energy hungry industries like aluminum, steel, fertilisers and glass in the EU will all be hit. The EU’s GDP growth rate was already well behind that of the US since the financial crash in 2008/9 and even further behind China and the East Asian states.
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Saudi Arabia and even OPEC in the past failed as a cartel to control the price of global crude by controlling its supply. Yet the EU believes it can become a cartel and control the price of oil even globally even without influence over global supply.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Browse the map at earth.fm to discover immersive natural soundscapes! “Like Spotify, but for natural soundscapes.” Earth.fm adds new soundscapes every three days so you can access tons of variety.
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“Demand for seafood and advances in technology have led to fishing practices that are depleting fish and shellfish populations around the world. Fishers remove more than 77 billion kilograms (170 billion pounds) of wildlife from the sea each year. Scientists fear that continuing to fish at this rate may soon result in a collapse of the world’s fisheries.” (Source: Sustainable Fishing, National Geographic, June 2, 2022) As a follow up question to scientists’ concerns: Who’s counting the illegal catch?
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Mauna Kea, a 13,802-foot dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii, is one example. The mountain is managed as public land by the state of Hawaii. Native Hawaiians have protested the state’s management of Mauna Kea for decades, saying Hawaii has allowed too many research buildings on their sacred mountain, which disrupts their ability to practice their religion.
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Featuring scenes that have become more and more routine in recent years, summer in the northern hemisphere saw extreme heat and wildfires in many places, as well as torrential rains and colossal floods that washed away the products of human settlement in others. The worst hit by the latter, beginning in June, was Pakistan, where an agonizing humanitarian disaster put a third of the country under water and displaced 33 million people out of a population of 230 million.
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Finance
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When Britain’s new chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng stood up on stage at the Conservative Party conference yesterday, he was a lonely figure.
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Adani made his money, in part, by investing in digital services, leading one economist to say, “Wherever there is a futuristic business in India, I think… [Adani] has a stronghold.”
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A look at the very bottom of the chocolate supply chain and the legality of contemporary child slavery
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In this case, we did know of an important difference even before the pandemic: the retirement of the baby boom generation. The bulk of the baby boomers is now in their sixties and seventies. We are in the peak years of baby boomer retirement, which means the labor force would be expected to grow more slowly than it had in the recent past.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Shares of Twitter surged by more than 20% on the news that Elon Musk will go ahead with his takeover of the social-media company. Mr Musk has offered to pay the price he initially agreed, of $54.20 a share. For months he had tried to renege on his purchase agreement, resulting in a legal dispute with Twitter that was expected to go to trial later this month.
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So this was unexpected (well, perhaps not that unexpected) but Elon Musk sent a letter to Twitter last night stating he now intends to move ahead with the original deal to buy Twitter, with no changes to the terms.
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The board stated that to “depict the location of property lines, fixed works, and the geographical relationship thereto” requires a license, and required Crownholm to not only pay a $1,000 fine but stop his business.
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Google is celebrating 20 years of operation in Australia in a blog post written by its Australian MD, Mel Silva, which we’ve reprinted in full below: [...]
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Wei Jingsheng, a leading Chinese dissident living in exile in the United States, told VOA in a phone interview Monday that in his view, Google has been trying to put on a “balancing act” — maintaining its reputation and credibility as a global internet giant operating around the world while finding a space to operate in the highly restrictive environment in China.
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And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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American history continues to be rewritten as the conversation around education heats up.
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The media is all over the story that Governor DeSantis was notified that the danger threshold for evacuation was hit on Sunday, but he waited until Tuesday to order one (leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake).
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Suddenly, the vicious snarling of Florida’s radical right-wing governor Ron DeSantis has been subsumed by the reality that the little dictatorship he’s trying to build cannot deal with the level of death, displacement and destruction wrought by the latest “superstorm.” Suddenly, all his blather denying the climate crisis is proven false as the warming ocean feeds disastrous storms, ravaging the state he pretends to lead independent of the federal government and our Constitution.
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Then the 2020 pandemic shut down everything. I lost the few friends I used to meet every Saturday at a coffeeshop. Masked people walking the streets avoided each other like a plague.
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The politics of ending cannabis prohibition are good. The policy is even better.
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“This is what good lawyers who are stuck do to appease bad clients.”
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“It benefits not just tech companies large and small, but the hundreds of millions of people who use their services daily.”
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BT’s Rania Khalek talks with Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez.
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“It’s critical that the Biden administration use all levers available to make the promises of the bill of rights blueprint a reality.”
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The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair said in a press call that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) decision to direct the House Administration Committee to draft a proposal left members unaware of “what was happening with the bill,” which was released just before they were scheduled to go on recess.
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Is rhetoric passe?
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Between 1978 and 2021, according to new research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), CEO compensation at the 350 largest publicly traded U.S. companies rose by an inflation-adjusted 1,460%, far outstripping the 18.1% pay increase that the nation’s typical worker saw during that period.
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Citing the unnamed ex-girlfriend’s account, a receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt, The Daily Beast reported that Walker “reimbursed” the woman for the abortion and “told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was ‘not the right time’ for him to have a child.”
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“Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government? This was a surprise to America’s Finest News Source.”
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In most cases, it does not do you any good to try to be funny in legal filings. In most cases, judges will not be that amused (even if those same judges sometimes try to make jokey rulings). In the world of the courts, the judges can be funny, but no one else should try. But every so often it works. The ACLU’s Eat Shit, Bob filing, for example, was pretty good.
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A few days ago I renewed my acquaintance with Fritz Lang’s science-fiction thriller Metropolis. The Transit Films DVD edition I watched runs 124 minutes—a fifth of its original length is missing—but the movie retains much of the strange and appalling power it must have held for its audiences in 1927 in Weimar Germany.
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Messianism is the collectively held belief that an individual with supernatural powers will redeem our world from human misery. It is a religious phenomenon directed toward the future, but it has its origins in the material present, in the economic, social, and cultural crises of a particular historical moment. The conviction that the end of time has arrived—or soon will—comes from the hope that this messiah will help the world reverse course.
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I understand WHY it happens. It doesn’t happen because a president thinks a disaster area is a great place to campaign for re-election or for his party’s candidates. It happens because a president’s opponents will paint him as callous, uncaring, and out of touch if he doesn’t get on a plane and go through the motions of comforting the afflicted.
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Pretty smug and arrogant.
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“We want to highlight the fact that this hearing is a farce, a circus,” Kris Henderson said during the protest. Henderson is the executive director of the Amistad Law Project which does criminal justice reform work in Philadelphia.
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The policy and intelligence communities have substantial expertise in this area because the United States has been the global leader in election interference and regime change since the end of the Second World War. The strategic failures of the Central Intelligence Agency in this field are legendary. The classic case of CIA interference took place in Guatemala from 1952 to 1954, an operation codenamed PBSUCCESS. The congressional investigations of illegal CIA activities in the 1970s omitted the Guatemalan operation because it was such an embarrassment to the image of the United States and the Eisenhower administration.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The research question seemed like a cross between science fiction and a conspiracy theory. I could hardly believe that we were asking it. But the world of our psychological forefathers had changed, and we had to change our thinking to keep up. In 2013, I worked under the supervision of Robert Epstein, B.F. Skinner’s last doctoral student, to begin a series of behavioral experiments to address an unsettling question: Could a search engine be used to sway the minds of voters?
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Engaging in performative litigation may be fun to do and score points with your fan base. But, sooner or later, these theatrical productions tend to generate actual costs — something that can’t be offset with shares and retweets, or even votes at the polls.
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The long saga of one of the most infamous internet “Karens” has come to a close as New York City resident Amy Cooper, a.k.a. “Central Park Karen,” has lost her defamation lawsuit against her former employer. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)
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So, plenty of Supreme Court watchers and Section 230 experts all knew that this term was going to be a big one for Section 230… it’s just that we all expected the main issue to be around the Netchoice cases regarding Florida and Texas’s social media laws (those cases will likely still get to SCOTUS later in the term). There were also a few other possible Section 230 cases that I thought SCOTUS might take on, but still, the Court surprised me by agreeing to hear two slightly weird Section 230 cases. The cases are Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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As you probably already know, Techdirt recently marked its 25th anniversary and celebrated the occasion with an online party for our Insider subscribers. At the event, Mike was joined by Techdirt co-founder Dennis Yang for an interview conducted by Alex Feerst of Murmuration Labs, in which they looked back on the history of the site and took some questions from the audience. Now, you can listen to the full conversation on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.
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By the 1950s, when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish fiction was beginning to win acclaim in English translation, the future of the Yiddish language looked bleak. Its homeland in Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and the largest remaining Jewish populations were now being raised to speak different languages: English in the United States, Russian in the Soviet Union, and Hebrew in Israel. The readers Singer had addressed for decades in The Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish daily paper, represented a significant share of the world’s surviving Yiddish speakers. Few of them were younger than him, and their numbers were shrinking.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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It had happened two years earlier, after an informant bought less than a gram of marijuana from Antoine Bryant. Police broke open Bryant’s door with a battering ram, shattering the glass. Three children sleeping inside were startled awake.
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It’s been many years since the US delegation to an ICAO meeting has included a Cabinet member. Secretary Buttigieg’s presence brought greater public attention than usual to the ICAO general assembly and related side events. Unfortunately, news reports have focused on what Secretary Buttigieg said (mainly his comments about Taiwan) rather than on what ICAO is actually doing.
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“Without protections from Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, redistricting will be weaponized to strip Black communities of fair representation.”
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As Congress members fan out from Washington this week to hit the midterm campaign trail, the next Supreme Court term is lurching into gear. In the civics-textbook account of things, this is made to seem like a decorous upgrade in the conduct of the people’s business: the hectic and unruly discord of congressional lawmaking ceding ground to the duly credentialed and circumspect apostles of judicial review.
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As public support of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court falls to a record low, justices are set to hear major cases on affirmative action, voting rights and online speech. The court opened its term Monday with new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson becoming the first Black woman in U.S. history to hear a Supreme Court case. Although Jackson is a welcome progressive voice on the bench, “all she’ll be able to do is to highlight the extremism of the conservative majority voting bloc on the Supreme Court,” says The Nation’s legal correspondent Elie Mystal. He adds that the term ahead includes challenges to Native American sovereignty, voting rights, LGBT rights and more.
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One afternoon at the beginning of eighth grade, I was sitting in the room where Model United Nations met after school. Under the guise of open and inclusive debate, students played the roles of ambassadors. We talked about every political topic under the sun: the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the immigration policies of the Obama administration, police brutality in the United States.
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The masculine person is not someone going around wearing shoes they cannot walk in for more than a block. The classic masculine pursuits—hunting, fixing a car, throwing a ball—cannot really be performed in heels. The philosopher William James said the masculine virtues have historically derived from going to war or going to work; the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield says it’s all about confidence in risky situations. Wrong and wrong. The quintessential masculine virtue is simply an unwillingness to put on immobilizing footwear. When you see a masculine person in a physically restricting accessory—straitjacket, leg-irons—you can be fairly confident it’s not voluntary.1
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Despite being hugely qualified and popular across both sides of the aisle, Congress still hasn’t approved Gigi Sohn to the FCC, leaving the agency without the voting majority to do anything popular or even remotely controversial, such as restoring net neutrality, the FCC’s consumer protection authority, or the media consolidation rules stripped away during the Trump era.
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Monopolies
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Trademarks
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You will hopefully recall our recent discussion about a taco restaurant, or taqueria, in the UK being bullied by Worldwide Taqueria because the latter had somehow gotten a trademark on the word “taqueria.” As we pointed out in the original post on the topic, everything about this is ridiculous. First, it’s absurd that the company would have ever gotten a valid trademark for a word that is purely descriptive. “Taqueria” simply means “place that sells tacos.” But once that trademark was granted, it is equally silly for Worldwide Taqueria to go around issuing legal threats to other taco joints that use the word in their names and branding, which is what happened to Sonora Taqueria.
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Copyrights
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A fake law firm is currently sending emails to sites, many of them linked to mental health issues, claiming that copyright infringements have been found and need to be rectified. Recipients are told that by including a credit and a link to a domain, no further action will be taken. The entire scheme is a massive scam but could be facing its last few hours of life.
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Copyright holders have asked Google to remove six billion links to ‘pirate’ search results over the past decade. The vast majority of these requests were honored. While copyright infringement can’t be eradicated entirely, Google is slowly but steadily presenting itself as a willing partner in the anti-piracy fight.
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Please subscribe to the show in whatever podcast app you use, so you don’t miss any of our conversations with people working to make the internet and our global culture more open and collaborative.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I bounced off hard from the BBC version of Sherlock, I noped out after just two episodes. I didn’t and still don’t like the show. (There are other Sherlock Holmes versions I like better.)
So when YouTubers started ragging on the show, I ate that up and believed every word.
There are two things though, that I now, two years or so later, found out they were misrepresenting.
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My Two Dads was an 1987–1990 TV show that I had never heard of until a just few years ago. It’s a standard multi-camera, limited-set, limited-continuity, laughter-added 22 min, 60 ep sitcom.
The titular dads weren’t in a relationship with each other; they had been in a V triad with a woman; and years later, when she dies, the guys find out she had a daughter and they take her in. So the show is about this girl and her two dads. There aren’t that many gay jokes (compared to something like Three’s Company) and overall the show is presenting their li’l family, an unusual one for the eighties, with a lot of heart. Hopefully it made a good job paving the road for marriage equality to become a reality thirty years later.
[...]
Now, I get it. A sitcom of this genre needs to wrap up every episode neatly; in a way, every episode is like a satisfying finale. Every episode is like “Oh, I think our li’l family is gonna make it, after all”. They’re gonna have to do something different for the finale, something to shake up the status quo. So while I bristled at the whole “Joe marries someone and moves to San Francisco” premise at first, and part of that was some misguided “shipping” mentality on my end (as in shipping the two dads with each other, but… that wouldn’t‘ve fit the show’s premise unless it had been part of a slow boil throughout the series, and it hadn’t) after I thought about it a bit I changed my mind to thinking it’s actually good. Except: Michael (the yuppie dad, played by Reiser) and Nicole (the daughter, played by Keanan) should’ve moved with him! They could, after an appropriate and dramatic amount of despair and hemming and hawing, have moved into some sort of one-big-happy-family house out there. Unrealistic? Sure. Would it have worked in real life? Maybe not. Would they have hated each other after three seconds? I guess. But in the wish-fulfilment world of sitcoms, it would’ve been perfect.
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Politics
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The general public are woefully unaware of how bad the climate situation is and how dire the straits are. Here’s where all y’all doomers and Debbie Downers can help educate them.
People don’t know about tipping points, they don’t know about the methane in the melting tundra or in rice paddies, they don’t know what the heck a carbon “equivalent” is.
[...]
The problem is that there’s this huge excluded middle between people who think it’s not that bad (most people most of the time; people seem to be compartmentalizing this to a pretty wild degree) and people who are completely and utterly hopeless.
That’s where you doomers can help! Educate people how bad it is without pulling them all the way to the “give up” part of the spectrum.
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Technical
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As a friend of GNU, a contributor to the EFF, a rabid follower of Cory Doctorow and RMS, a subscriber of all that is FOSS and the FSF, an all around RJ¹ – and just an insufferable person in general – I’ve decided that the correct, moral, ethical, right, honorable, just, fair, proper, and applaudable thing to do is move more towards GNU as my choice of OS
[...]
GUIX is a package manager that can work on top of any existing flavour of Linux, and indeed can be considered a standalone OS in itself when deployed with either the linux-libre or the hurd kernel².
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Internet/Gemini
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Content is created with one purpose : being consumed. The target audience for any content is a consumer. You separate the world in two classes : content creators and content consumers. Creators being consumers themselves in their spare time.
Content consumption implies an economical transaction. Consumers give some currency token to the distributor (which, most of the time, is not the creator). Historically, that currency was fiat money but, nowadays, new kinds of token have appeared : likes, retweets, comments and even “clicks”. The whole point of the “clicks” is that the consumer exchanges it without even realising it.
[...]
Google and Facebook have a simple business model : they sell their own attention tokens against fiat money. Buy ads on Google and get a lot more clicks in your Google analytics. Buy page views on Facebook and get hits on your Facebook page. Buy ads on Twitter and get more random retweets.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:03 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
| CID |
Description |
Object type |
QmY8EADvffHZ9GSiMZQS3xZGBsmErhKm65HoqPwS2viQmR |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmZWKMNs5kdfk3BUbY1wTmqwDSfVaWMja4tYWMYXYXrXYZ |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Qmb8QpMxb64YDxuEX6ZSUxP5ZNQdiMP1cPLNMimGw6g8in |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmbatVkLtYcAoSaikC2X9m8gcJXrimHGvrTAKmaAVbew4w |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmXi1x5k5hZzwUqLCdfw2fjo47yqTzR1P966YX5XkhRQ1g |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmTnnK6MKRf8nfj9rHYEWG1Kq4drkUxsteEKoQWoFZvcBJ |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmVgovDq6WSnGYL9v8dBcVWnq57Mo2jY8wnb6vTQUyoh5y |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmVhtuwJEo7Gvw8XQPDqX7iN4xdVctmpBmfTQ2zaHdphUZ |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): Qmem9pBYyW9sJYffppf7bdghegoTHn1RzdbF1Q1wjVzuGt
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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I don’t know how Manjaro keeps doing it but it seems like everytime something happens Manjaro is here to break something, now they decided to ship a broken build of the Asahi Linux kernel to people running Apple M1/M2 hardware
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First up in the news, Stallman goes manual on C, DNF5 arrives in Fedora, LibreOffice gets fumigated, GNOME comes into its Shell, they have put hair in the Blender, Avast buys your cookies, and Intel fogs the processor market;
In security and privacy, we have multi-stage malware, website leaks, and shell attacks;
Then in our Wanderings, Norbert is cutting corners, Moss tries a different mint, Joe keeps modding, and Bill fixes a broken Arch …again.
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Instructionals/Technical
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A “package is referred to as a group of items such as scripts, text files, libraries, licenses, etc. These packages enable the installation of software in such a way that the package manager unpacks the software and includes it in your operating system. Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu 22.04 comprise some packages by default, and some are installed later on.
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From a DevOps standpoint, logging is one of the most important things to get right in applications.
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Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the OctaFX Broker on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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I’ve begun writing up my phd and, not for the first time, I’m pondering issues of how best to represent things. Specifically, rewrite rules.
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WoeUSB is a free, open-source simple tool that enables you to create your own USB stick windows installer from an iso image or an actual DVD. I have used it myself to create bootable USB sticks for installing Windows from ISO images, and it has worked flawlessly every time. The interface is straightforward to use. Select the ISO image or DVD you want to use, select your USB drive, and click “Create.” The process is quick and painless, and the results are always perfect. If you need to install Windows from a bootable USB stick, WoeUSB is the ideal tool for the job.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install WoeUSB on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.
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Signal is a secure messaging and voice chat application. It’s primarily used on mobile phones, and will require a phone number to register, but it can also be installed on PC operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux. It works similarly to WhatsApp and Telegram but has a much bigger focus on user privacy and security.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Signal on Ubuntu 22.04 using GUI, snap, or apt package.
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There have been many stories about people discarding old computers only to have someone pick them out of the trash. Most of the time this is for innocent enough reasons. However, there is a real threat to someone getting there hands on your old hard drive. Since most people do not encrypt their drives someone can very easily pull all the data off of these old discarded hard drives. In this article we will discuss how to securely erase a hard drive before disposal. This method is effective on any SATA / PATA hard drive, including destroying hard drives from a system running Windows or any other operating system.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As announced at Akademy a few days ago, I’m honored that my goal – Automate and Systematize Internal Processes – has been chosen by the KDE community! Those are a bunch of fancy words, but the idea is pretty simple: get our expertise (knowledge, skill, and wisdom) out of our heads, and onto KDE’s infrastructure.
Why? to reduce the burden on us personally to provide so much of that expertise on demand as an ongoing service, and to reduce the impact of breaks, vacations, and departures. Ultimately this will preserve expertise publicly in KDE where it’s easier to learn from, and free us all up to do other things!
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Devices/Embedded
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Renesas has launched the RZ/V2MA dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 microprocessor with a low-power (1TOPS/W) DRP-AI accelerator and one OpenCV accelerator for rule-based image processing enabling vision AI applications.
The MPU also supports H.265 and H.264 video decoding and encoding, offers LPDDR4 memory and eMMC flash interfaces, as well as Gigabit Ethernet, a USB 3.1 interface, PCIe Gen 2, and more. The RZ/V2MA microprocessor targets applications ranging from AI-equipped gateways to video servers, security gates, POS terminals, and robotic arms.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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AI Thinker has just introduced a new family of wireless IoT modules with the Ai-WB2 equipped with Bouffalo Lab BL602 RISC-V microcontroller offering both 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE connectivity.
There are ten different modules to choose from, probably to keep mechanical and electrical compatibility with ESP8266 and ESP32 modules, and the company expects customers to integrate those into Internet of Things (IoT) products, mobile devices, wearables, Smart Home appliances, and more.
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Redis is a fast, powerful data store that stores all of its data within memory. Storing data in memory allows the server to fetch and store data incredibly fast.
The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic device for Redis since it has low memory and CPU footprint. Basically, this means that Redis can make the most of the Pi’s hardware.
You can even run this server software on a tiny device such as the Raspberry Pi Zero. However, if you plan on dealing with a ton of data, the more memory and CPU cores the better.
The Redis team officially tests their software on the Pi, so you can be assured that the software will run well for its limited hardware.
If you are using a Raspberry Pi that has more than 2GB of memory, we recommend you use a 64-bit OS for the best experience.
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Use your Raspberry PI Pico with IR reflective sensor to detect obstacle detection with MicroPython, with wiring diagram and code explained
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Download and install the usual way, by clicking on the “sfs” icon. Beware, the SFS file is 1GB, and after installation, at first run it will want to download more files — in my case, about 1.3GB.
It can be launched from a terminal window, by running “astudio”.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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I then worked on a project, which didn’t solve any problem, but just strengthened my skills, it was my own Penguin-based OS, called Aryan Linux, made by using “Linux from Scratch”. On compiling it, I understood what open source really is, it made me so happy.
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We’re excited to announce our second group of Open Source Peer Bonus winners in 2022! The Google Open Source Peer Bonus program is designed to recognize external open source contributors nominated by Googlers for their open source contributions. This cycle, we are pleased to announce a total of 141 winners across 110+ projects, residing in 36 countries.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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I’d like to announce the release of version 1.0 of the PL/Haskell extension. This extension allows users to write PostgreSQL functions in the Haskell functional programming language.
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We are happy to announce the general availability of RapidRows — an open-source, low-code API server designed for PostgreSQL that can be configured to run SQL queries, perform scheduled jobs and forward PostgreSQL notifications to websockets.
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Programming/Development
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There are already Python editors such as Thonny, but the BBC thought those were not good enough and released a new web-based Python editor specifically designed for the micro:bit education board targeting 11 to 14 years old pupils.
The micro:bit Python editor includes drag and drop code examples, code structure & error highlighting, auto-complete feature, a simulator to test the code before uploading it to the micro:bit board, and a Quick ideas section to help pupils get started with projects.
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After months of work on your modernization project, the consultant helping you is almost done. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the consultant is now asking you to put a code freeze on changes to your old application. It’s not clear whether the code freeze will lasts two months or two years, but it’s absolutely necessary, you’re told.
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Are you in dire need of an aarch64 worker on your own openQA instance, but no suitable hardware lying around? If speed is not your main concern, then don’t worry – you can just enable a qemu-emulated aarch64 worker on your openQA instance (probably x86_64). In this post we’re gonna explore how to setup an emulated aarch64 qemu worker on your own openQA instance in less than 10 minutes.
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Modern applications are continuously being improved. They are created using modern product management techniques that ceaselessly strive for a better and better user experience.
Modern cloud-native applications are always available, anytime and anywhere a user wants to engage with them. They never go offline, they provide continuous availability and they automatically scale to meet the needs of all customers, all the time.
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We are excited to announce several new achievements in Dart and Flutter’s mission to harden security. We have achieved Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) Level 2 security on Flutter’s Cocoon application, reduced our Identity and Access Management permissions to the minimum required access, and implemented Infrastructure-as-Code to manage permissions for some of our applications. These achievements follow our recent success to enable Allstar and Security Scorecards.
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Perl / Raku
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Just released Graphics::Toolkit::Color for the purpose to create computationally harmonic color pallets (2 lines max for most needs). It is in fact a chunk out of Chart I needed to reuse in other projects as the Harmonograph. And as you can see in the SEE ALSO section of the POD – I’m aware that there are plenty other modules doing, parts, similar stuff or even more.
The reason you should care nonetheless are (beside having good error messages, being well tested, documented and maintained and having almost no dependencies) II (in words two).
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Today, my left Control key has been working intermittently, although it’s working now and has been for a while, knock on wood.
[...]
If the SHTF, then I suppose I could use my older laptop to wait out the 30 days and have a Lenovo tech come out to my house and repair it again.
I tried calling down to ubrekifix in Gurnee and the guy basically said they wanted $100 just to look at it but they couldn’t do very much because all of their diagnostic tooling is for Windows (of course) and they don’t know much about “Linux” (of course) and then we could go from there, but I could subscribe to a protection plan for everything in the house for….and that’s when I hung up.
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Security
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Microsoft has changed a portion of the advice it issued for mitigation of two bugs in its Exchange Server product, but made no mention of the change, well-known British security researcher Kevin Beaumont says, adding that it looked like the company needed to familiarise itself with the source code of this product.
The bugs, both zero-day vulnerabilities reported to be affecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019, are similar to the ProxyShell vulnerability for which updates were issued by Microsoft in May and July last year.
ProxyShell comprises three separate bugs used as an integrated attack chain and allowed attackers to bypass authentication and execute code as a privileged user.
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We expect the brand new Third Party Security Audit of Kubernetes will be published later this month (Oct 2022).
In preparation for that, let’s look at the state of findings that were made public as part of the last third party security audit of 2019 that was based on Kubernetes v1.13.4.
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Penetration testing has become popular as security vulnerabilities in corporate systems have become more apparent. Adversary simulation, or “red teaming,” is a similar technique that involves an active defense against a live adversary. If penetration testing is a passive activity designed to identify static flaws in your defenses, then red teaming is the dynamic version of it that allows your internal cybersecurity team to test their abilities in real time against the bad guys (i.e. the red team).
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The police drove Ian Murdock to suicide by hanging with about the same sort of things that they did to me.
However, Justice was done in the case of Derek Chauvin, who is going to be in prison until at least 2038 already, and he’s about to go on trial yet again on 9 felony counts of tax evasion and failure to report income.
I mean, you piss off the government, you piss off everyone in the country, bad things happen. They start digging up anything they can. I was pissed at what I saw. They had no right to do that, and I’m glad they were punished.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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a sci-fi story that is unique for focusing on the lives and realities of common place person instead of the elitist figureheads of power most sci-fi novels go for. I first got into the book through the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games (playing shadow of chernobyl now, best fps ive played in years and its from 2007 lol) So far its very well written, translated and entertaining. Im reading the rediscovered classics version released in 2012 btw, which is the latest version.
[...]
Take a look at this thing of beauty. Such a dope looking book, its friggin sweeet. More beautiful than any jewel. Soul Arts is an artbook that collects hundreds of artist finest submissions for contest based on the games, then binds them in the best looking cover+slipcase I have ever seen. I WANT THE PYSICAL EDITION SOOO SOOOO BAD MAN! Unfortunately I couldn’t justify the 80$ asking price for a book when it was first announced, and I still cant now.
THANK GOODNESS that they offer a 15$ pdf version (DRM FREE!) which can be loaded onto the ereader. 15$ is a slightly easier pill to swallow and I held off on even that for months but this week finally bit the bullet and got the damn thing. If I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY like the book I might consider it as a christmaas present to myself. But for 80 dollaroonies the books contents gotta be so cool that looking at each page is near orgasmic.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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