GNU/Linux

• 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: October 9th, 2022

  This has been a really interesting week with the release of Linux kernel 6.0, which you can already install on your Ubuntu machines. The GNU Linux-libre 6.0 kernel is also out, as expected, for those who want to build a 100% free computer.

  On top of that, Canonical launched free Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for everyone, Collabora announced an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, and TUXEDO Computers released a live ISO image of its Ubuntu-based TUXEDO OS Linux distribution.

• 7 Best Linux Laptops in 2022

  Linux is considered by many to be for pros and enthusiasts, but that’s not the case. There are plenty of Linux distros for beginners as well. Linux laptops can be great whether you’re new to the operating system or a power user.

  In this article, we’re going to move away from Windows laptops and Apple MacBooks to make way for the best Linux laptops in 2022. Below, you’ll find a couple of Linux laptops you’ve never heard of as well as some famous options that have been specifically built for optimal Linux performance. Additionally, we’re including a couple of Chromebooks on this list since ChromeOS is based on Linux and that means pure Linux distros will also perform well on them.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Using Linux without GUI

    A GUI is only a supplemental component of a Linux system, and is not essential. Many System Administrators will elect to keep their servers as command line only, as a GUI is completely unnecessary for running a plethora of different services. Everyday users, however, will usually want a GUI to perform basic functions like web browsing, watching videos, etc.

    In this tutorial, we will discuss some of the pros and cons of using Linux without a GUI, and look at scenarios where this type of configuration would be advantageous. You will also learn how to disable the GUI on popular Linux distros like Ubuntu and Debian.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ “Steam Deck will replace your gaming PC” and other myths, debunked. – Invidious

  • Everything PC S02E03 – ’Linux, Linux (almost) everywhere’ – TechCentral Tech Shows [Ed: “This season of Everything PC is sponsored by HP and Microsoft.” So they cannot name the company that attacks Linux. Microsoft does not sponsor media, podcasts, publishers, and events. It’s bribing them. There are strings attached, e.g. self-censorship and lying.]

  • Linux User Space: Episode 3:08: Scaling the Alpine

    Linux User Space
    A podcast focused on connecting user space and community

  • Video ☛ Linux, Alternative OS, – Retro Computing News – Oct 9, 2022 – Invidious

    Happy birthday, Free Software Foundation!

  • Good Software, Bad Blood | LINUX Unplugged 479

    What the heck is going on? Fedora is dropping features, GNOME is getting Iced, and the mistake we’ll never make again. We’ve got a lot to sort out.

• Kernel Space

  • WCCF Tech ☛ AMD Improves CPU Power Efficiency In Linux OS With New P-State EPP Drivers

    AMD’s recently updated P-state EPP driver for Linux-based computers delivers a good boost in CPU power efficiency. The company is utilizing the ACPI CPPC Energy Preference Performance information to control the CPU’s power, making the processor more efficient and increasing performance.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Linux Kernel 6.0 Released What’s New

    Linux Kernel 6.0 has been released with new features and improvements over the previous version. Linux Kernel is the backbone of the Linux operating system, managing hardware resources and providing essential services. This latest release includes better support for newer hardware and security and stability enhancements. This kernel is a significant update to which users of Linux distributions should be sure to upgrade.

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] wayland-protocols 1.27

    wayland-protocols 1.27 is now available.
    
    This release includes two new staging protocols:
    
     * Content type hint
    
    This protocol enables clients to provide hints to the compositor about
    what kind of content it provides, allowing compositors to optionally
    adapt its behavior accordingly.
    
     * Idle notify
    
    This extension allows compositors to notify clients about when the user
    is idle.
    
    
    Apart from these two new extensions, this release also brings the usual
    clarifications, cleanups and fixes. Enjoy!
    
    
    
    Daniel Stone (1):
          xdg-shell: ack_configure must be strictly monotonic
    
    Emmanuel Gil Peyrot (1):
          staging/content-type: Content type hint support
    
    Isaac Freund (1):
          ext-session-lock: add note on client termination
    
    Jonas Ådahl (1):
          build: Bump version to 1.27
    
    Simon Ser (3):
          xdg-shell: forbid loops in set_parent
          ext-idle-notify: new protocol
          build: alphabetically sort list of staging protocols
    
    git tag: 1.27
    

  • WCCF Tech ☛ Libva 2.16.0 Update Improves Intel VA-API Graphics Library, Benefits Arc GPUs on Linux

    Intel released the latest Libva update (version 2.16.0) to improve the VA-API library in Linux. The update will improve graphics hardware acceleration seen in multimedia software. The Libva integration is also commonly used in many drivers within Linux.

• Applications

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Best Video Editing Software on Linux

    A lot of people may not think about Linux when video editing comes to mind, but make no mistake, there are a myriad of fine choices available when it comes to video editing software on a Linux system. There are varying levels of software, depending on whether you want to do in depth video editing or just quick edits on the fly. In some cases, you may find it useful to have one of each.

    In this tutorial, we have compiled a list of our favorite video editing software for Linux. Check out our picks below to find one that suits you best for your video editing needs.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxConfig ☛ sudo command not found – Solution

    If you have tried to run the sudo command on your Linux system and are greeted with a sudo command not found error, we have the solution for you. This error most commonly occurs on minimal installs, such as in Docker or on a VPS (virtual private server), and can happen on any Linux distro, like Ubuntu Linux and Debian . In this tutorial, we will show you how to resolve the error and give you the ability to run sudo commands without error.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ journalctl command usage and examples on Linux

    The journalctl command can be used to view all of the logs collected by systemd on a Linux system. This includes logs related to the system’s kernel, initrd, various services and applications, as well as systemd itself. The journalctl command makes querying all of these logs pretty painless, since systemd gathers and stores all these various logs in a central location for administrators to view.

    In this tutorial, you will see how to use the journalctl command on Linux. This will include frequently used options, as well as information about how to interpret system logs, since they can be rather cryptic to the uninitiated. Check some of the examples below to grasp the command, and try out some of the command options on your own system while you follow along.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to list all disks, partitions and sizes on Linux

    The purpose of this tutorial is to list all disks, partitions, and their sizes on a Linux system. This will help you identify what hardware storage you have available, how the disks are partitioned, and what sizes each of them are. You will learn a command line and GUI method below.

  • Vitux ☛ How to Add a User to Group on Linux – VITUX

    When we create a new user on a Linux operating system, at that time user creation some set of privileges are granted to each user.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install and Configure Graphite Monitoring System on Ubuntu 22.04

    Graphite is an open-source tool used to track and graph the performance of computer systems.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install SysPass Password Manager on Rocky Linux

    SysPass is an open-source password manager written in PHP with AES-256 CTR encryption.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ventoy on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ventoy is an open-source tool to create a bootable USB drive. One of the interesting features of this tool is that it let you directly boot from an ISO file, with no extraction is needed. It supports Legacy + UEFI mode.

    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 Ventoy bootable apps 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.

  • H2S Media ☛ Install Terminator Terminal emulator in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    Tutorial to learn the steps involve in how to install the Terminator Terminal emulator app on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish Linux.

    Terminator is an open-source terminal multiplexer written in Python that allows you to use multiple terminals within a single window and switch between them using keyboard shortcuts. This is similar to the tiling mode of window managers. So you can keep several shells open at the same time without tabs or other terminal windows.

    Originally developed for GNOME, the program can now be used with any desktop environment. In contrast to programs such as Screen or tmux, however, an XServer (graphical desktop) is explicitly required.

    If you are looking for a great Terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop environment, the Terminator Terminal emulator is the best one for you. Among other features of the Terminator emulator, Terminator solves the problem associated with opening multiple tabs in a single Terminal window. You can seamlessly arrange the Terminal tabs with Terminator.

    Terminator basically comes with a lot of customization options, which can help you arrange the Terminals in a grid-shaped arrangement, besides support for multiple tabs. With the number of key bindings, you can carry out the most common activities, and you can easily drag and drop tabs for the purpose of ordering them and enjoy a streamlined workflow. Terminator has support typing the same text in multiple Terminal instances at the same time, which can also be useful in certain situations.

  • Red Hat ☛ Top tips on Linux, Rust, Kafka, and more | Red Hat Developer

    Here’s a recap of some of the articles our developers created for you in September 2022, from 101-level intros to deep dives.

  • Its FOSS ☛ How to Update Google Chrome on Ubuntu

    So, you managed to install Google Chrome browser on your Ubuntu system. And now you wonder how to keep the browser updated.

    On Windows and macOS, when there is an update available on Chrome, you are notified in the browser itself and you can hit the update option from the browser.

    Things are different in Linux. You don’t update Chrome from the browser. You update it with the system updates.

    Yes. When there is a new update available on Chrome, Ubuntu notifies you via the system updater tool.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Delete a Site From Certbot – Linux Nightly

    If you used the certbot utility to obtain your free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, but now wish to delete it, there’s a very simple way to do it. Follow along with us as we show you how to delete a site’s certificate data with certbot on Linux.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Brasero on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    Brasero is a free and open-source disc-burning program for the GNOME desktop environment. Developed by The GNOME Project, it has been included as a default application in many Linux distributions. Brasero is designed to be simple and easy to use, and it offers a range of features that make it well-suited for use cases such as creating audio CDs and data backup. For instance, Brasero can automatically detect the optimum writing speed for a disc and perform on-the-fly disc finalization. In addition, Brasero can burn both ISO image files and physical discs, making it a versatile tool for anyone who needs to burn optical media.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Brasero on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series disc-burning utility software using the APT package manager.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install LibreWolf Browser on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS

    With all the talk of big tech companies selling user data and government surveillance, it’s no wonder that more and more people are looking for ways to protect their privacy online. Your web browser is one of the essential tools for protecting your privacy. While many browsers on the market claim to be privacy-focused, few can rival LibreWolf. LibreWolf is a free, open-source browser designed from the ground up with privacy in mind. Its features make it easy to browse the web securely and anonymously, including built-in ad and tracker blockers, DNS over HTTPS, and a VPN.

    What’s more, LibreWolf is based on the same code as Firefox, so you can rest assured that it’s a reliable and stable browser. If you’re serious about protecting your privacy online, LibreWolf is your browser.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install LibreWolf Browser on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS release series. The tutorial will describe importing the official repository and gpg key and updating and removing the browser by utilizing the command line terminal.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Opera Browser on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS

    Opera is a freeware, cross-platform chromium-based browser developed by Opera Software. The browser features a built-in ad blocker, a VPN, and a social network aggregator. Opera has been downloaded more than 350 million times and is available in more than 90 languages. The browser was first released in 1996 and is based on Chromium’s open-source project. Opera also offers a mobile app for Android and iOS. Opera has been known for its speed, security, and reliability. The browser is also known for its innovative features, such as Opera Turbo, which compresses data to improve speeds, and Opera Unite, which allows users to share files and run applications without installing them on their computers. Opera also has an extensive collection of extensions and themes. In 2015, Opera was acquired by a consortium of Chinese companies.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS series that includes the stable, beta, and development (nightly) branch with steps to install, update and remove the browser using the command line terminal.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Steam Deck: Availability News, Dock Release, OS updates and the Yuzu Incident – Boiling Steam

    There’s been a few big developments related to the Steam Deck in the past week, so let’s get to it! The first one is about the availability of the device.

    [...]

    This will make the scalpers cry, but it seems like Valve has now increased their production to a point where they can now accept orders and ship directly without entering a queue system (note: this does not apply to Asia for some reason, where I am still waiting for Komodo to give any kind of useful info about the order since August 4th 2022). This also invalidates a bunch of predictions we have made back in early 2022: many of us expected the device to still remain largely limited in supply by the end of the year, and it looks like the situation has changed much faster than we had anticipated. In other news, there’s unsubtantiated numbers circulating around (in a recent KDE presentation related to the Steam Deck, the number of 1 million of Decks sold was given, without any specific source) that seem to indicate that the production is accelerating.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Post Collapse Computing Part 2: What if we Fail? – Space and Meaning

      This is a lightly edited version of my GUADEC 2022 talk, given at c-base in Berlin on July 21, 2022. Part 1 briefly summarizes the horrors we’re likely to face as a result of the climate crisis, and why civil resistance is our best bet to still avoid some of the worst-case scenarios. Trigger Warning: Very depressing facts about climate and societal collapse.

      While I think it’s critical to use the next few years to try and avert the worst effects of this crisis, I believe we also need to think ahead and consider potential failure scenarios.

      What would it mean if we fail to force our governments to enact the necessary drastic climate action, both for society at large but also very concretely for us as free software developers? In other words: What does collapse mean for GNOME?

      In researching the subject I discovered that there’s actually a discipline studying questions like this, called “Collapsology”.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Video ☛ Nitrux 2.4.1 overview | Powered by Debian, KDE Plasma and Frameworks, and AppImages. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Nitrux 2.4.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Magazine ☛ Welcome to our new Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator

    Great news, Fedora Friends! I am excited to announce that we have completed our search for a new Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator (FCAIC). He joins the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) team at Red Hat to work with the Fedora Community today. Please give a warm welcome to Justin W. Flory (he/him).

    If you’re a contributor to Fedora, you may have already worked with Justin on a variety of teams and projects. Although I couldn’t possibly list them all in one post, Justin’s Fedora contribution highlights include co-founding CommOps, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) Team, and Mindshare Committee. More contribution highlights include former editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine and Community Blog, former Council Member, leading the Marketing team, contributing as a packager, and traveling to events and conferences worldwide as a Fedora Ambassador. He has attended many Flocks: organizing workshops, presenting sessions, and coordinating informal socials like the international candy swap. Most recently Justin presented “5 Lessons Learned from 5 years of Fedora’s D.E.I. Events” at Nest with Fedora 2022.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Introduction to Kubernetes operators for sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

    Learn about Kubernetes operators and when you should use them—and when you shouldn’t.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Hybrid cloud: 5 ways it can improve the customer experience | The Enterprisers Project

    Remember when mobile phone service providers owned your mobile phone number? If you wanted to switch to another provider, you had to change your number and make sure all of your contacts got the new one (assuming you were brave enough to deal with the headache).

    There’s a similar situation today with cloud technologies. Should you place your bets on one cloud provider and keep everything in-house – or pursue a hybrid cloud strategy and avoid getting stuck?

    We took that question to Red Hat’s former bankers, who identified five critical advantages of adopting a hybrid cloud model.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Hackaday ☛ A Raspberry Pi Phone for the Modern Era

    
    While it might seem like mobile phones are special devices, both in their ease of use and in their ubiquity in the modern culture, they are essentially nothing more than small form-factor computers with an extra radio and a few specific pieces of software to run. In theory, as long as you can find that software (and you pay for a service plan of some sort) you can get any computer to work as a phone. So naturally, the Raspberry Pi was turned into one.

    [asherdundas], the phone’s creator, actually found a prior build based around the Raspberry Pi before starting this one. The problem was that it was built nearly a decade ago, and hadn’t been updated since. This build brings some modernization to the antiquated Pi phone, and starts with a 3D printed case. It also houses a touchscreen and a GSM antenna to connect to the cell network. With some other odds and ends, like a speaker and microphone, plus a battery and the software to tie it all together, a modern functional Raspberry Pi phone was created, with some extra details available on the project page.

  • Ubuntu ☛ IoT Project Lifecycle: Key considerations for OTA updates at scale [Part IV] | Ubuntu

    From entertainment to security, automation is now pervasive. Intelligent devices are transforming our homes while enriching our lives, making them more efficient, productive and environmentally friendly.

    Most embedded devices run Linux, and their number is poised to keep growing.

    [....]

    At Canonical, we know we stand on the shoulders of giants in building Ubuntu. We are now raising the bar of what is possible in the world of free software while delivering it with phenomenal security.

    With Ubuntu Core, we built the lightest and most secure version of Ubuntu for IoT devices. As Ubuntu Core is the premier embedded Linux choice by innovators, we are committed to keeping it secure by automatically delivering OTA updates on day zero.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino and K-Way, with the support of Edge Impulse, team up for a new idea of smart clothing | Arduino Blog

    Imagine the possibilities generated by integrating advanced AI and powerful sensors into one of the most iconic outdoors jackets with a heritage that’s more than 50 years old. You could start sensing and interacting with the surroundings like never before.

    This is what we created here at Arduino: enclosing the Nicla Sense ME, the new sensory brain from Arduino, into the K-Way jacket, powered with Edge Impulse AI, to sense the external world and enable a new way to conceive smart clothing.

  • CNX Software ☛ LILYGO T-RGB round color touch display is powered by ESP32-S3R8 wireless microcontroller – CNX Software

    LILYGO T-RGB is a wireless 2.1-inch round color touchscreen display based on ESP32-S3R8 dual-core microcontroller with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, 8MB PSRAM, and 16MB flash storage.

    The device also includes a microSD card socket for data storage and a Grove I2C connector for expansion and supports LiPo battery power. The company also says it can be charged through USB, so the board must include a battery charging circuit contrary to some other boards from LILYGO.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Tech Times ☛ OnePlus 7 Series Finally Gets OxygenOS Android 12 Update Three Years Since Launch | Tech Times

  • The Best Android Phones For Under $1,000

  • India among countries with highest infestation of Android malware, says report

  • The Sun ☛ Warning for millions of Android phone owners – make important check now – The US Sun | The US Sun

  • InfoQ ☛ Android Gradle Plugin 8.0 Improves Build Times, Requires Updating Third-Party Plugins and Libraries

  • Samsung Galaxy S23 suddenly looks like a much more appealing Android phone | T3

  • Samsung Tizen OS To Compete With Google Android In Smart TV Segment

  • Android Headlines ☛ Android TV Gets Update Reminder With October Google System Updates

  • Android Police ☛ How to change the keyboard on your Android phone or tablet

  • Android Police ☛ The best retro ports on Android in 2022

  • The Hindu ☛ Google fixes multiple security bugs in Android, Chrome OS – The Hindu

  • TechCrunch ☛ Samsung seeks smart TV growth with first Tizen OS licensing deals • TechCrunch

    Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia.

    Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary developer and driving force behind the project, using it across myriad devices, including smartwatches, kitchen appliances, cameras, smartphones and TVs.

    Although Samsung has essentially abandoned Tizen in smartphones and smart watches, TVs have remained fertile ground for Tizen to flourish, chiefly due to the fact that Samsung is the biggest selling TV maker globally. But while recent figures from Dataxis show that Tizen’s market share in 2020 was roughly one-third in terms of installation base, the number has been slowly creeping downward with the likes of Android TV and Roku edging upward.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Medevel ☛ Baku Is A Bookmark Manager Old School Users

  If you are an old school system user who prefer using Terminal apps over GUI programs, then you will enjoy Baku.

  Baku is a terminal application for to browse your and organize your bookmarks and minimal personal web for advanced users.

  It helps you import your bookmarks from your web browsers, organize them, easily browse them and search with a rich advanced search tool that offers a full-text search.

  As Baku imports your bookmarks, it automatically fetches the title, description, and other tags from the live version online, and add them to the bookmarks in your local database.

  [...]

  Baku is a free and open-source project (FLOSS) that is released under the GPL-3.0 License.

• Video ☛ Why The Question You Asked SUCKS! – Invidious [Ed: Citing OSI's cofounder ESR]

  You see it everyday in technical forums–people asking questions in a stupid way.

• Events

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Defining an open source AI for the greater good [Ed: Red Hat gives room for Microsoft-sponsored propaganda (whitewashing GPL violations) by Stefano Maffulli; OSI totally fails to fulfill its mission unless the mission is to bag bribes from Microsoft for openwashing of proprietary software and grooming of companies that attack GNU/Linux]

  • Document Foundation ☛ Video: Opening session from the LibreOffice Conference 2022

    We’re starting to upload videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2022!

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Its FOSS ☛ Simple Trick to Watch Netflix in Full HD on Firefox Browser

      Paying for full HD streaming to Netflix and yet it doesn’t play in 1080p?

      It’s because, for some stupid reasons best known to streaming services like Netflix, they do not stream full HD content in the Firefox browser. Not in Linux, not in Windows, or any other operating system.

      You can check it by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D while playing Netflix in Firefox but NOT in full-screen mode.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ Gnuastro 0.18.71 released [alpha]

    Dear all,
    
    The last few months (since the release of Gnuastro 0.18) have been
    very productive in Gnuastro (16866 lines added and 4864 lines removed,
    in 71 commits) with some pretty exciting, and long-awaited new
    features now available (for the full list, see [1] below).
    
     - Warp: align images with the WCS (usually RA/Dec), or another image
       (with any rotation/projection/distortion), while accounting for all
       WCSLIB-recognized distortions and projections (for the full list of
       projection and distortion models see [1] below). In other words, we
       are finally free from the chains of the TPV and can directly align
       images with SIP or other distortions in creating aligned coadds!
       Tip: if you get unreasonable results, upgrade to WCSLIB 7.12.
    
     - ConvertType: draw vector graphics markers based on input catalogs
       in the output PDFs (very good for producing high-quality figures in
       your papers).
    
     - Statistics: least squares fitting (currently in 1D).
    
    In fact, Pedram (author of the newly added Warp feature above) has
    recorded a video highlighing the first two points in Warp and
    ConvertType, please watch it to get a hands-on feeling of the power of
    these new capabilities using SDSS and J-PLUS images:
    
    https://peertube.stream/w/uq7SBDYZS1HRtJwCkbcDsz
    
    If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to get in touch with
    Pedram and the rest of the users and developers in our Matrix chat:
    
    https://openastronomy.element.io/#/room/#gnuastro:openastronomy.org
    
    As always, complete tutorials and documentation for all these features
    is also available. Currently the documentation is only in 'info'
    format, installed with Gnuastro (the webpage will be updated with
    version 0.19). A PDF copy of the latest documentation is available
    here: https://akhlaghi.org/gnuastro.pdf
    
    We are therefore almost ready for the next official release of
    Gnuastro; hence the reason for this alpha release. It would be great
    if you could try building and using this release to help us fix any
    important bugs, crashes, compiler warnings and etc. Your feedback will
    allow Gnuastro 0.19 to be smoothly usable for all of us :-).
    
    Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for
    this release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the
    validity of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig)
    see [3]:
    
    https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.18.71-c982.tar.lz
    
    
    https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.18.71-c982.tar.lz.sig
    
    Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums (other ways to check if the
    tarball you download is what we distributed). Just note that the
    SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding
    that most checksum tools default to (see [4] on how to generate it).
    For the list of software used to bootstrap this tarball, see [5].
    
    67df5849a8717da55b73982eaa72082fc9769296  gnuastro-0.18.71-c982.tar.lz
    Qw8bU2sZDVR28q8ZaNppFKJUQ0Dgqa106nzUIq25y0c  gnuastro-0.18.71-c982.tar.lz
    
    For their direct contribution to this version's source code, I am very
    grateful to Pedram Ashofteh-Ardakani (6 commits), Raul Infante-Sainz
    (6), Sepideh Eskandarlou (5), Jash Shah (3), Marjan Akbari (2), Elham
    Saremi (1) and Faezeh Bijarchian (1). I am also grateful to (in
    alphabetical order) Marjan Akbari, Faezeh Bijarchian, Sepideh
    Eskandarlou, Giulia Golini, Raul Infante-Sainz, Teet Kuutma and
    Richard Stallman for their good suggestions or reported bugs that have
    been implemented in this release.
    
    If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
    please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
    guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
    be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs
    you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued
    work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so.
    
    Best wishes,
    Mohammad
    
    --
    Staff Researcher
    Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA),
    Plaza San Juan 1, Planta 2, Teruel 44001, Spain
    

• Programming/Development

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Limine bootloader version fix

    EasyOS 4.4.1 has Limine version 3.20220928.0; however, Reynaldo reported that the image file (that you would write to a USB-stick) reports that it is version 3.25…

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Top 10 Best Php Projects Ideas and Topics in 2022

    Php (recursive acronym for Hypertext preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripted language that one can use to manipulate existing systems or create one from scratch. If you are still in the learning phase, working on different Php projects is the best way to master the language. It can also help you get a taste of how real programming projects work.

    Most such Php project ideas require a good grasp of fundamental Php concepts. That said, you can’t really start your career without any prior experience working on projects. But we know that starting a project or choosing which to work on can be confusing. So, if you’re stuck in that place right now, keep reading to explore with us.

  • rec-def: Minesweeper case study – Blog – Joachim Breitner’s Homepage

    After the talk, Franz Thoma approached me and told me a story of how we was once implementing the game Minesweeper in Haskell, and in particular the part of the logic where, after the user has uncovered a field, the game would automatically uncover all fields that are next to a “neutral” field, i.e. one with zero adjacent bombs. He was using a comonadic data structure, which makes a “context-dependent parallel computation” such as uncovering one field quite natural, and was hoping that using a suitable fix-point operator, he can elegantly obtain not just the next step, but directly the result of recursively uncovering all these fields. But, much to his disappointment, that did not work out: Due to the recursion inherent in that definition, a knot-tying fixed-point operator will lead to a cyclic definition.

Leftovers

• Make Tech Easier ☛ iPhone 14 Crash Detection Triggers False Reports on Roller Coasters

  Not even a month after the release of Apple’s new iPhone 14 series, the phones are already making headlines for a feature that works a little too well. The feature in the new phones is meant to detect car crashes and alert emergency workers. While it works as intended, the feature also triggers false reports by notifying 9-1-1 that iPhone 14 owners have been in crashes while riding roller coasters.

• Security

  • IT Wire ☛ Singtel-owned IT services provider Dialog hit by Windows ransomware [Ed: Well, almost all ransomware attacks are Windows]

    It appears to be raining data breaches at properties belonging to Singapore’s multinational telecommunications conglomerate Singtel, with the telco announcing on Monday that there had been an intrusion into its Australia-based IT services provider Dialog.

    Security sources have told iTWire that the attack on Dialog was carried out using the Agenda ransomware that runs only on Windows systems.

    This is the second breach in recent days to affect Singtel’s properties. On 22 September, Optus, Australia’s second biggest telco which is also owned by the Singapore firm, announced a massive breach that was initially said to affect nearly 10 million customers.

    On Monday morning, data stolen from Singtel on 20 January last year, during an attack through a file-sharing system from Accellion that was close to end-of-life at the time, surfaced on a forum on the clear Web.

  • CSO ☛ Secure web browsers for the enterprise compared: How to pick the right one | CSO Online

    The web browser has long been the security sinkhole of enterprise infrastructure.

  • Researchers Warn About New Shikitega Malware Targeting Linux Endpoints and IoT Devices [Ed: Petri the Microsoft propaganda arm is working hard and working overtime to stigmatise Linux as “not secure” while Microsoft works with NSA on back doors. Nowadays we have Microsoft media blaming “Linux” for bad passwords chosen by administrators or not explaining how malware gets to the system in the first place.]

  • Someone is pretending to be me. [Ed: Microsoft helps scammers find victims and then blames “Open Source”. LinkedIn (even before criminals and scammers bought the company… yes, Microsoft) convinced millions of fools that it’s “OK” and “normal” to share their CV with everybody, not just recruiters of a company they wish to work for.]

    So I was about to toss this in the trash, but it had a word document attached. Thankfully I’m not sitting on a Windows machine and can just preview the document via Google without a fear of infecting myself.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Complex Impersonation Story – Schneier on Security

    This is a story of one piece of what is probably a complex employment scam. Basically, real programmers are having their resumes copied and co-opted by scammers, who apply for jobs (or, I suppose, get recruited from various job sites), then hire other people with Western looks and language skills are to impersonate those first people on Zoom job interviews.

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (knot-resolver and libpgjava), Fedora (booth, dotnet3.1, expat, nheko, php-twig, php-twig2, php-twig3, poppler, python-joblib, and seamonkey), Mageia (colord, dbus, enlightenment, kitty, libvncserver, php, python3, and unbound), Slackware (libksba), SUSE (cyrus-sasl, ImageMagick, and xmlgraphics-commons), and Ubuntu (nginx and thunderbird).

  • Help Net Security ☛ Critical vm2 sandbox escape flaw uncovered, patch ASAP! (CVE-2022-36067) [Ed: It would be better to just avoid JavaScript]

    Oxeye researchers discovered a severe vm2 vulnerability (CVE-2022-36067) that has received the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. Called SandBreak, this new vulnerability requires R&D leaders, AppSec engineers, and security professionals to ensure they immediately patch the vm2 sandbox if they use it in their applications.

  • Port Swigger ☛ Zimbra remote code execution vulnerability actively exploited in the wild

  • Help Net Security ☛ Unpatched Zimbra RCE bug exploited by attackers (CVE-2022-41352) [Ed: Way to distract from Exchange getting cracked by the thousands or millions (of accounts) due to Microsoft letting bug doors just stay there for ages]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Surveillance tech is weaponry | Context

      Surveillance technology is weaponry – it targets, tracks, invades, and decimates – and its unbridled use is a far-reaching, destructive violation of human rights. It is an assault rifle in the sustained global offensive on civic space, and we need a global moratorium on its export, sale, transfer, servicing, and use.

      When news broke this month of three journalists and human rights activists in Mexico targeted once again by invasive Pegasus spyware from the NSO Group, it was not entirely shocking. This was yet another group of people attacked for fighting for basic human rights. However, the fact that President Obrador had publicly assured the world that his administration was no longer spying on activists, and more specifically that “there is no longer any relationship with the company [Pegasus],” makes this case particularly enraging.

      The recent Mexico revelations by digital rights organisation Red en los Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D) and The Citizen Lab is far from an isolated case. The relentless unearthing of spyware abuse across the globe — from Hungary and Poland to Thailand, El Salvador to Jordan — drives home the point that while this industry remains unregulated, no entity can fully be trusted to employ this technology while upholding human rights under international law.

    • Reuters ☛ Biden signs order to implement EU-U.S. data privacy framework

      U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order to implement a European Union-United States data transfer framework announced in March that adopts new American intelligence gathering privacy safeguards.

      The deal seeks to end the limbo in which thousands of companies found themselves after Europe’s top court threw out two previous pacts due to concerns about U.S. surveillance.

      U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters the executive order “is the culmination of our joint effort to restore trust and stability to transatlantic data flows” and “will ensure the privacy of EU personal data.”

    • AccessNow ☛ U.S. Solicitor General and Department of Commerce must hold NSO accountable

      Access Now fully supports members of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s recommendations to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, which urged “clear and determined action” against commercial spyware. This action is a step towards accountability for the purveyors of surveillance technology, and a moratorium limiting the sale, transfer, and use of these invasive tools.

      In their call, the lawmakers cited Access Now and partners’ letter, which outlines the reported abuses of Pegasus spyware over the past year. Through a letter, the House Intelligence Committee pushed for continuous updates to the Commerce Department’s Entity List — which puts restrictions on foreign companies that threaten U.S. interests — close monitoring of potential abuses to ensure spyware companies are not getting around the restrictions, and work with other states to ban foreign commercial spyware.

      Costa Rica remains the first and only country to support Access Now’s call for a moratorium — the U.S. and other countries must join the wave of pressure against this dangerous and unchecked industry.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • AccessNow ☛ New generation of changemakers: Technology Cohort of U.S. Summit for Democracy launches – Access Now

    The Technology for Democracy Cohort of the U.S. Summit for Democracy (S4D), co-led by Access Now, the UK, and Estonia, officially launched today, Monday, October 10, at the Tallinn Digital Summit. The international multi-stakeholder Cohort is composed of governments, civil society actors, and the private sector. The overarching goal of the Cohort, across three strands of work, is to enhance connectivity and democratic safeguards around the world.

    “Access Now, along with the UK and Estonia, is incredibly proud to be spearheading the Technology for Democracy Cohort of the U.S. Summit for Democracy,” said Jennifer Brody, U.S. Policy and Advocacy Manager at Access Now. “We are committed to defending and extending human rights in the digital age, and will work diligently to convene civil society from around the world to bring about real change, from combating internet shutdowns to advancing algorithmic transparency. Our priority is centering the lived experience of marginalized groups and ensuring civil society voices are meaningfully incorporated, especially from the global majority.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Marketplace ☛ Iran’s internet crackdown prompts frustration — and workarounds

    Protests against the Iranian government following the death of Mahsa Amini are now in their third week. The 22-year-old woman died in custody three days after being arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police. She was accused of wearing “inappropriate attire.”

  • Meta’s clampdown on Palestine speech is far from ‘unintentional’

    After much anticipation and delay, an independent consultancy finally released its report on the conduct of Meta — the social media giant that runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — during the events of May 2021 in Israel-Palestine.

    Following a bout of censorship during that violent month — which witnessed a mass Palestinian uprising, Israeli repression, and a war on Gaza — Meta commissioned Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) to conduct a review into its moderation policies for Arabic and Hebrew language content across all three platforms, and to produce a human rights due diligence report.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Daniel Aleksandersen ☛ I miss del.icio.us – the web’s discovery-engine and link classifier

    Delicious (stylized after its domain del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking website. It might not sound all that interesting, but it was one of the best websites in the early 2000s. Here’s why I miss this defunct website so much.

    Delicious let users bookmark their favorite links and annotate them with comments and tags. You would primarily save links you valued enough to remember. The site’s true value was all the organizational work and link comments.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • GLUOSTN Wordo: HONKS

• Politics

  • Be angry against institutions, be nice to people

    As a society, most of our problems, our lack of progress and our tendency to self-destruction seems to lie in the fact that we always submit to institutions, we play nice with more-than-human administrations, we accept being bullied, humiliated. All of that because we believe we don’t have the choice. Because we are convinced that institutions are always stronger than us.

• Technical

  • Programming

    • Re: Enjoying Common Lisp

      I love Common Lisp. I wish I had taken the plunge when I was a younger. I’ve been a CL user for about 10 years, and here is what I think about my experience.

      Emacs is the biggest problem, if you don’t already know it. I didn’t, and the combined cognitive overload made the curve hard.

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds’s faulty RAM slows kernel development • The Register

    If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds’s AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.

    In a post responding to a kernel developer inquiring if he had missed a Git Pull, Torvalds on Sunday revealed the request was still in his queue as “I’m doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive.”

    Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as “some instability on my main desktop the … with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc.”

    The Linux boss’s first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem – which isn’t good but sometimes happens.

    His instinct was wrong.

    “It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable,” he wrote. “Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight.”

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TecMint ☛ [Reposted as new] mStream – A Personal Streaming Server to Stream Music from Anywhere

    mStream is a free, open-source, and cross-platform personal music streaming server that lets you sync and stream music between all your devices. It consists of a lightweight music streaming server written with NodeJS; you can use it to stream your music from your home computer to any device, anywhere.

    Importantly, mStream Express is a special version of the server that comes with all the dependencies pre-packaged and in this article, we will explain how to install and use mStream to stream your home music anywhere from Linux.

  • TecMint ☛ Useful Tools to Monitor and Debug Disk I/O Performance in Linux

    A key performance metric to monitor on a Linux server is disk I/O (input/output) activity, which can significantly impact several aspects of a Linux server, particularly the speed of saving to or retrieval from disk, of files or data (especially on database servers). This has a ripple effect on the performance of applications and services.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install SMPlayer on AlmaLinux 9

    As the world of technology becomes increasingly complex, it can be hard to keep up with the latest software trends. However, one Program that has stood the test of time is SMPlayer. This free, open-source media player was first released in 2006, and it has since become a favorite among users thanks to its simple interface and powerful features. One of the most popular features of SMPlayer is its ability to play a wide range of audio and video formats. It also comes with a host of other features, such as support for subtitles, an equalizer, and a skins system that allows users to customize the player’s look.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install SMPlayer AlmaLinux 9 using one of the two third-party repositories RPM Fusion Free or Flatpak package manager, with the command line terminal.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ Install GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 Server & Desktop

    Although GNOME is the default GUI, there are many different desktop environments available for Ubuntu. If you want to try a different desktop environment, or need to install a GUI because you don’t have one yet, we’ll show you how in this guide.

    These instructions will also work for Ubuntu Server, which doesn’t have a GUI by default and only uses the command line.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Linux NFS clients (normally) make only one TCP connection to each fileserver

    Suppose that you have a Linux NFSv3 client that mounts a large number of filesystems from a much smaller number of fileservers, which naturally means it mounts a bunch of filesystems from each fileserver. Modern NFS is TCP based, and TCP requires one or more connections in order to make things go. In this situation, you might wonder how many connections the kernel makes; for example, is it one connection per filesystem, or one connection per N filesystems, or so on.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Python 3.8 on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    Python 3.8 is an LTS release that is currently receiving security-only updates of the Python programming language that is now. It was released on October 14, 2019. Python 3.8 includes several new features and improvements from its predecessor, such as support for assignment expressions, improved type checking, and more.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Linux Kernel 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9

    Rocky Linux, as many know, focuses on stability, which often means it is incredibly stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of new features, such as the latest mainline stable Linux Kernel. Currently, Rocky Linux features kernel 5.14, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, among many other things.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Move a User’s Home Directory on Linux

    A home directory is a user’s default directory when they log into Linux. It’s normally created automatically inside of the /home directory, such as /home/username. In this tutorial, you will learn how to change the home directory for a user in Linux by using the usermod command.

    Step 1. You can alter a home directory with the usermod command and the -d flag. This command must be executed with root permissions. Also keep in mind that the user must be logged out when you are attempting to change their home directory.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Spyder IDE on Ubuntu 22.04

    Python is a multipurpose high-level language with which we can create applications of all kinds. But specifically for the scientific section, there is an IDE with which you can take advantage of Python. So, in this post, you will learn how to install Spyder IDE on Ubuntu 22.04.

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Pass Command Line Arguments to Bash Script

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Dual Boot Linux Mint 21 alongside Windows 11

    In this guide, we explore how you can implement a dual-boot setup of Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa) alongside Windows 11.

    If you are running Windows on your PC and want to try out Linux, one of the options is to install a hypervisor on which you can create and run Linux VMs. While this is okay, it does not allow you to reap the full benefits of your Linux system. This is because some of the features are unavailable or do not work as expected in a virtual environment.

    The other alternative is to install Linux alongside Windows in such a way that only one operating system can run at a time. During boot time, you can choose which OS to login into and run. It’s also worth noting that both systems are installed on separate partitions on the hard drive. As such, no conflict arises between the two systems. This is known as a dual-boot setup and is precisely what we are going to look at.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ Install WebSSH to Connect Linux Terminal from Web Browser

    This article guide demonstrates the installation and usage of WebSSH (a web-based SSH client) for users to be able to easily authenticate and connect to SSH servers from web browsers.

    For most Linux users, the traditional approach of connecting to remote servers via an SSH client has always been through a command-line environment. However, WebSSH simplifies client-to-server SSH connection by providing an easy-to-use web interface, which is written in Python and based on xterm.js, paramiko, and tornado.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Check GNOME Version – Linux Nightly

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to check the installed version of GNOME desktop environment on your Linux system. This can be accomplished through command line or via GUI as you will see below.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ My current little wish-list for Steam Deck upgrades

    The Steam Deck has been out for a while and it’s now easy to purchase with no reservation queue, the long-delayed Steam Deck Docking Station is also here!  Valve has put out a lot of updates but there’s plenty they could improve. Honestly, it’s vastly different to how it felt at release.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Old VCR ☛ Going where BeOS NetPositive hasn’t gone before: NetPositive+

  This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise stock BeOS R5, surfing Hacker News and Lobste.rs using a modified, bug-fixed NetPositive wired to offload encryption to an onboard copy of Crypto Ancienne (see my notes on the BeOS port). NetPositive is the only known browser on the PowerPC ports of BeOS — it’s probably possible to compile Lynx 2.8.x with BeOS CodeWarrior, but I’ve only seen it built for Intel, and Mozilla and Opera were definitely Intel/BONE-only. With hacks for self-hosted TLS bolted on, NetPositive’s not fast but it works, and supports up to TLS 1.2 currently due to BeOS stack limitations.

• Reviews

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: Ubuntu Unity

    Earlier this year the Unity 7 desktop, which was originally started by Canonical, celebrated its first release in a long time. The desktop environment has found a new lease on life as a community project. Back in May I tried Unity for a few days on Lubuntu to see how it would perform. The experience was largely underwhelming, but it was nice to see someone was making an effort to modernize the Unity 7 desktop environment.

    In early September, I read that Ubuntu Unity, a spin of Ubuntu featuring the updated Unity desktop, may become an official community edition of Ubuntu. I was curious to see how this potential community edition would perform and set about testing the latest release.

    I tried downloading the latest stable release, Ubuntu Unity 22.04.1. Once the download had completed (apparently successfully) I ran its checksum and found the download was corrupted. I erased the original ISO file, which is a little over 3GB in size, and tried downloading it again along with its checksum. The transfer was once again corrupted. I’m not sure if the published MD5 was wrong, the file was corrupted on the server, or damaged in transit. However, I decided to look for an alternative.

    I next looked at the next most recent version, 20.04.5, and discovered its directory on the official Ubuntu Unity download mirror was empty. Going down through the list: 20.10 is no longer supported, 21.04 is no longer supported, 21.10 is no longer supported, and 22.04 failed its checksum again. I went back a bit further and found version 20.04.4 was available on the download mirror and the downloaded file passed its MD5 checksum. By process of elimination, this was the version I decided to install and run.

    [...]

    Most of my trial with Ubuntu Unity took place just before the announcement of the new 22.10 Beta release which also let people know this spin was becoming an official community edition of Ubuntu. As a result, the bulk of this review was based on past stable releases rather than the new beta.

    However, in an effort to cover all the bases, I did download the new 22.10 Beta and gave it a whirl. The packages and wallpaper have been updated. However, the same problems remain. Performance is still on the lower end of the scale and almost every time I opened the dash, Unity crashed. Often times launching a program or performing a search resulted in a crash. Adjusting the panel in the Unity settings caused a crash. Browsing directories in the Files utility caused a crash. At one point within the span of five minutes, I managed to cause three desktop crashes, bringing my exploration to a short pause each time.

    I still very much like the overall design of Unity and the way everything is oriented to the upper-left corner of the display, but the state of the implementation (even in the new beta snapshot) is in a poor condition.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 41 [Ed: Site sponsored by IBM for marketing]

    Just a reminder in case you didn’t see it last week: End of Marketing for IBM i 7.3 is 4/28/23 and end of standard support for IBM i 7.3 is 9/30/23. You can read IBM’s support statement about it here and you can see our related coverage on it there.

  • Integrated Does Not Have To Mean Included And Invoiced [Ed: "Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated" but then again IBM pays you to love everything IBM or at least pretend to]

    Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated…

  • Thoroughly Modern: Simplify IBM i Application Management and Extract Key Insights – IT Jungle [Ed: "The media" is so badly bribed that most of the time it's best off just ignored]

    IBM i developers and managers understand all too well that application documentation is often out of date – if it even exists. A study from the Singapore Management University says that developers only spend 5 percent of their time writing new code. They spend 20 percent of their time modifying legacy code, and they spend 60 percent of their time trying to understand the code before they modify it.

  • It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry – IT Jungle [Ed: This is a patent hoard, not a charity]

    Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.

• Debian Family

  • FOSS Activites in September 2022

    This was my 45th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! \o/

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ World’s Fastest Supercomputer Can’t Run a Day Without Failure

    While on paper, the Frontier supercomputer looks exceptionally good, and hardware parts of the machine system have been delivered, it seems like problems with hardware keep chasing the machine from coming online and being available to researchers requiring performance of around 1 FP64 ExaFLOPS.

    “We are working through issues in hardware and making sure that we understand (what they are),” said Justin Whitt, program director for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), in an interview with InsideHPC (opens in new tab). “You are going to have failures at this scale. Mean time between failure on a system this size is hours, it’s not days.”

  • CNX Software ☛ Intel Horse Creek platform showcased with SiFive P550 RISC-V CPU, 8GB DDR5, PCIe Gen5 – CNX Software

    When SiFive introduced its Performance P550 64-bit RISC-V processor in 2021, we were told that Intel would use it in the Horse Creek platform with “leading-edge interface IP such as DDR and PCIe” and manufactured with Intel’s 7nm process.

    We now have more details about the Horse Creek platform, as a development board was showcased for the first time in public at the Intel Innovation 2022 Developer Conference, and according to a report by Wikichip, the Cortex-A75 class quad-core RISC-V processor runs at up to 2.2 GHz, supports DDR5-5600 memory and eight PCIe 5.0 lanes, and was taped out with Intel 4 process.

  • CNX Software ☛ Pine64 Ox64 SBC to feature BL808 64-bit/32-bit RISC-V multi-protocol WiSoC with 64MB built-in RAM – CNX Software

    Pine64 Ox64 is an upcoming single board computer powered by Bouffalo Lab BL808 dual-core 64-bit/32-bit RISC-V processor with up to 64MB embedded RAM, multiple radios for WiFi 4, Bluetooth 5.0, and 802.15.4 (Zigbee), as well as an AI accelerator.

    The board also features up to 16MB XSPI NOR flash, a MicroSD card socket, a USB 2.0 OTG port with support for a 2-lane MIPI CSI camera module, and two 20-pin GPIO headers for expansion. It measures just 51 x 21mm, or in other words, is about the size of a Raspberry Pi Pico W.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SANS ☛ Wireshark 4.0.0 Released

  Many new features, changes and updates. First one you’ll notice is the layout: [...]

• Programming/Development

  • Sean Conner ☛ What is a “unit test?”

    Since most of the coding I do is in C, a “unit” would most likely be a function, or maybe a collection of functions known colloquially as “a library.” The various components I worked on, like “Project: Lumbergh” or “Project: Sippy-Cup” aren’t libraries, and most functions in those projects are single use that exist just for organizational sake, so of course the “unit” ended up being the entire program.

  • D Lang ☛ DIP1000: Memory Safety in a Modern System Programming Language Pt. 2

    This is pretty much all that there is to manual DIP1000 usage. But this blog series shall not be over yet! DIP1000 is not intended to always be used explicitly—it works with attribute inference. That’s what the next post will cover.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 185: MAC Address and Mask Code

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Relax And Have A Nice Cup Of Teeth

  Halloween is just around the corner and what better way to add a little spooky decor than to 3D print [DaveMakesStuff]’s Teeth Cup.

• Hackaday ☛ TRX-Duo Is A Red Pitaya Clone For Software Defined Radio

  If you’ve noticed the TRX-DUO software-defined radio transceiver, you might have wondered how it stacks up to other choices like Red Pitaya or HackRF.  [Tech Minds] obliges with a review of the Red device in the video below.

• Education

  • IDA ☛ Lisa Heschong to present keynote at 2022 Under One Sky Conference

    We are pleased to announce that Lisa Heschong is a keynote speaker for the International Dark-Sky Association’s 2022 Under One Sky Conference. The virtual conference will take place across 24 hours from November 11-12. During the Under One Sky 2022, you’ll hear from experts and storytellers in the dark sky movement, connect with passionate individuals from IDA’s global network, and learn about hands-on activities and tools that you can use to protect the night through engagement workshops. Lisa will present during the Global Opening. Registration for the conference is free but required.

  • American Chemical Society ☛ Chemistry professors decry firing of colleague at NYU

    Jacobsen adds that there needs to be a better way to evaluate professors than the current one, which relies heavily, if not entirely, on student evaluations.

    He and others also note that Jones’s dismissal highlights a common—and some say problematic—system of teaching organic chemistry in which chemistry majors and nonmajors take separate classes. The latter group, often heavily populated by premed students who are required to take the course, is seen as focused primarily on grades. Many who signed the petition at NYU were premed students.

    Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry and computer science professor at the University of Toronto, says the student petition points to a “premed culture” that needs to change. Jacobsen, on the other hand, says he views the challenge of teaching a nonmajor course as a welcome opportunity to get premed students engaged in a field vital to their intended career.

    Aspuru-Guzik points to the problem of a “TikTok generation” whose habits have been impacted by time spent online at the expense of textbook study. He also sees the university’s action as a threat to academic freedom.

  • NYPost ☛ NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

    New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.

  • CNN ☛ Opinion: This fired chemistry professor’s example shows what’s wrong with academia

    For his part, Jones says that he noticed a decline in student ability about a decade ago. He made his exams easier; an unusual number of students still did poorly on them. Then, the pandemic hit. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” Jones wrote in a grievance letter to NYU. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.” Jones isn’t alone in observing this dynamic. A great many experts in education have observed and quantified grade inflation and lowered academic standards. And the pandemic does seem to have turbocharged existing problems, while creating brand-new ones. Remote learning was a spectacular failure. Students in districts that closed down the longest during Covid-19 have experienced the most significant learning losses, studies and tests show.

    Students who completed their high school years during the pandemic, Jones observed in the Times report, seem to have no idea how to study. And some of the student complaints laid out in the petition might strike those of us who went to college in the Before Times as a bit unrealistic: They noted that Jones did not offer extra credit and that he did not make his lectures available via Zoom.

  • Reason ☛ NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard

    Not anymore: NYU has fired Jones after students circulated a petition protesting that his class was too hard.

    But according to Jones, the students weren’t putting in enough effort—and had become disengaged, anxious, and indolent as a result of the pandemic.

    “They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure,” said Jones. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”

    Jones is profiled in a recent New York Times article that chronicles his firing. The piece also raises uncomfortable questions about elite institutions of higher learning and their utter devotion to appeasing unreasonable student demands. Organic chemistry is the bane of medical students everywhere, precisely because it is such a hard class. But many doctors would argue that that’s the point: The class is designed to act as an effective gatekeeper, preventing underqualified students from entering the field of medicine.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ DIY E-Reader Has Hot Swap Mechanical Keys

    In the early days of e-readers, most devices had physical buttons to turn pages and otherwise navigate the device. [bwkrayb] longed for these halcyon days before touchscreen e-readers and improved on the concept by adding mechanical keyswitches.

  • Hackaday ☛ RotBot Adds A Extra Dimension To 3D Printing, With A Twist

    It always seemed to us that the Z-axis on a 3D printer, or pretty much any CNC machine for that matter, is criminally underused. To have the X- and Y-axes working together to make smooth planar motions while the Z-axis just sits there waiting for its big moment, which ends up just moving the print head and the bed another fraction of a millimeter from each other just doesn’t seem fair. Can’t the Z-axis have a little more fun?

  • Hackaday ☛ A Cold Light To Warm Your Heart

    Halloween is coming fast and what better way to add to your Halloween ornamentation than [Wagiminator]’s cute NeoCandle tea light simulator.

  • Hackaday ☛ This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT

    The days of cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are firmly behind us, and that’s generally a good thing. Display tubes were heavy, bulky and fragile, and needed complicated high-voltage electronics in order to work. But not all of them were actually large: miniature display tubes were also produced, for things like camcorder viewfinders, and [Tavis] from Sideburn Studios decided to turn one of those into a slightly creepy art project.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Head Topics ☛ Streamer Breaks Back In Two Places After TwitchCon Foam Pit Accident

    the attraction—a promo collaboration between Intel and Lenovo—has since been closed, both because of injuries but also because attendees using it had been “breaking rules”.Attendees like EdyBot say a potential cause of the injuries was the shallowness of the pit; she describes it as being “like three cubes deep”, while Grayson says “the pit itself goes up a little past my knee” and that it’s “shallow af”.

  • Game-News24 ☛ Twitch streamer breaks his back jumping into a foam pit at TwitchCon

    TwitchCon was held all weekend in San Diego, to celebrate a top streamer’s soaring success. And it was all by itself, even the worst event since a heavy blow out, and numerous serious injuries have been reported in the foam pit.

  • [Old] NIH ☛ Accelerating dynamics of collective attention

    With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.

  • [Old] CNET ☛ TikTok dethrones Google as this year’s most popular domain

    TikTok landed the top spot for a few days spread between February, March and May of this year, but after Aug. 10, it “took the lead on most days,” CloudFlare said in a blog post.

  • [Old] Cloudflare ☛ In 2021, the Internet went for TikTok, space and beyond

    The following will show the way Cloudflare saw Internet traffic focusing on specific domains (some of which have many websites aggregated into them) and their highs and lows in our global popularity ranking.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the ‘commercialization’ of COVID vaccines and therapeutics. | BaronHK’s Rants

    Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the “commercialization” of COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

    Right now, the US federal government pays about $16.50 per dose of COVID-19 vaccine under the Warp Speed deal with Moderna, according to CEO Stéphane Bancel.

    However, he was “optimistic” that they’d get $60 per dose out of Medicare.

    Medicare only tends to pay about 60-70% of what private insurance does, so that means your insurance will end up “negotiating” to get to $80 or more per dose.

    The companies are really jonesing to fleece the American public.

    They were not happy that the “vaccine passports” and mandates went away, because their thinking obviously was that they could come back every year and lock us all in our houses until we paid for the annual booster and some app on our phone turned green again.

    The situation as it stands now is that the monoclonal antibody therapies have already gone that way. No more clinics where you can go get them free of charge, and the vaccines will be this way next year.

    Since the monoclonal antibodies have to be administered in a clinic, not at a pharmacy, you know what that’s going to cost. Get ready to start seeing $60,000 bills again if you pass up the vaccine and have to go to the Emergency Room for the antibodies.

• Proprietary

  • Axios ☛ Meta finds 400 mobile apps out to steal Facebook login info

    About 40% of the apps were disguised as photo editing tools. The others fell into a range of categories including gaming, lifestyle, business utility and virtual private networks.

  • RNZ ☛ Education Ministry puts record keeping software on hold due to cybersecurity concerns

    The Education Ministry paused the roll out of Te Rito, a system that would help early childhood centres, schools and the ministry share and store information about students, in the middle of last year.

    The ministry said it reviewed schools’ systems for storing student information after major cyber security breaches in New Zealand in June last year.

• Security

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 344 – Python tarfile – 2022 is nothing like 2007 – Open Source Security

    Josh and Kurt talk about a newly rediscovered old python vulnerability. It raises a lot of questions about what was OK in 2007 vs what’s OK in 2022. The issue is very complicated and has a wild story surrounding it. There is no reason to not fix this in 2022.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Data from old attack on Optus parent Singtel surfaces on Web forum

    Data stolen from Singapore’s multinational telecommunications conglomerate Singtel on 20 January last year, during an attack through a file-sharing system from Accellion that was close to end-of-life at the time, has surfaced on a forum on the clear Web. Singtel owns the Australian telco Optus which recently suffered a massive data breach.

    The Singtel data was posted on 7 October and may have been put up now in order to capitalise on the news around Optus which announced on 22 September it had been breached.

    Asked about the data, a Singtel spokesman told iTWire: “[This] refers to data stolen during the 2021 zero-day attack on Accellion’s (now known as Kiteworks) file-sharing application, which affected many companies worldwide including Singtel.”

    The individual who posted the Singtel data claims that there is a total of 74.7GB of data. Some of the files released to satisfy likely buyers as to their authenticity appear to be genuine.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ Securing privacy: Privacy International on end-to-end encryption

      EDRi member Privacy International’s (PI) report on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) analyses and defends expanding the use of E2EE to protect our communications. It defines E2EE, delves into its human rights implications, briefly addresses some prominent proposals for government access to E2EE content, and concludes with PI’s recommendations regarding E2EE.

    • EDRI ☛ Football fans are being targeted by biometric mass surveillance

      Biometric mass surveillance involves the indiscriminate and/or arbitrary monitoring, tracking, and processing of biometric data related to individuals and/or groups. Biometric data encompasses, but is not limited to, fingerprints, palmprints, palm veins, hand geometry, facial recognition, DNA, iris recognition, typing rhythm, walking style, and voice recognition. Though often targeted at specific groups, the use of mass surveillance technologies is becoming prevalent in publicly available spaces across Europe. As a result, football fans are increasingly impacted by them.

      Apart from its undemocratic nature, there are many reasons why biometric mass surveillance is problematic for human rights and fans’ rights.

    • Axios ☛ The walletless future is closer than ever

      Over two days, I managed to take two flights, check into a hotel room and pay for meals — all from my phone. Everything worked, but there were some asterisks involved.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Facing Unrelenting Violence, Sahel Countries Turn To Drones

    In the Sahel, drones might be more valuable as reconnaissance tools than for their weaponized capabilities.

    “What is most important for a drone is to know where to send it,” journalist Wassim Nasr, a specialist in extremist violence, told Agence de Presse Africaine. “It’s the equivalent of a flashlight, armed or not, that lights up a specific target.”

    Most observers believe that drones can help in some scenarios, but fights against extremism ultimately will be decided by traditional military force and other on-the-ground, counter-extremism programs.

  • Africa Center for Strategic Studies ☛ Five Zones of Militant Islamist Violence in the Sahel

    More than 80 percent of all violent events took place in 30 districts of northern and central Mali in 2017. In 2022, more than two-thirds of the violent events linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel took place outside of Mali, mostly in Burkina Faso.

  • [Old] Middle East Institute ☛ The Schism of Jihadism in the Sahel: How Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are Battling for Legitimacy in the Sahelian Context

    As the Sahel region becomes the latest scene for jihadist infighting, this has serious implications not just for jihadist operations against local and foreign troops, but more importantly for local civilian populations. In neglected areas of the Sahel, with weak or non-existent government presence and feeble public services, groups like ISGS and JNIM are offering themselves as a strong alternative to the state, providing local constituents with essential goods and services.

    Against this backdrop, this paper examines the prospects of jihadist expansion in the region and its implications for security actors and civilian populations alike. More specifically, the report investigates the role of propaganda and public discourse narratives in bolstering jihadist group legitimacy and advancing attempts by groups seeking to generate local embeddedness and mass support. In doing so, the article offers a nuanced perspective of inter-jihadist contestation, one that goes beyond mere focusing on security operations and clashes and delves more deeply into group framing and identity.

  • The Defense Post ☛ Sahel Military Coups Only Help Jihadists: Analysts

    Coups only compound problems in countries where the armed forces are already accused of inefficiency and mismanagement, and security forces are often under-equipped, he and others said.

  • Meduza ☛ Zaporizhia subject to massive shelling. 13 people are dead, over 80 injured — Meduza

    By the latest count, 13 people have been killed and another 87 injured by shelling in the city of Zaporizhia during the night of October 9, the Zaporizhia regional military administration reports to Ukrainian broadcasting company Hromadske.

  • Meduza ☛ Belarus claims that Ukraine is planning an attack. Ukraine calls it provocation — Meduza

    The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that, on the evening of October 8, Ukrainian ambassador Ihor Kyzym was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, in Minsk, where he was handed a diplomatic note. 

  • Meduza ☛ Police arrest fifth-grader during class A Moscow school principal reported her student for a yellow and blue profile picture — Meduza

    The human rights organization OVD-Info reports that a school principal in Moscow contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs about a fifth-grader who used a yellow and blue profile picture while messaging with her classmates. In response, police pulled the girl out of school and brought her and her mother in for questioning. The inspector for juvenile affairs has placed the family on a “preventive register,” apparently because of the school’s concerns about their “civic position.”

  • Meduza ☛ Putin: the Crimean Bridge explosion was an ‘act of terrorism’ by Ukrainian security service — Meduza

    Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that Ukrainian security services were responsible for planning and executing yesterday’s explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge, Interfax reports.

  • Meduza ☛ FSB claims that border regions were shelled 100 times last week — Meduza

    The FSB claims that over the past week, Ukrainian Armed Forces have shelled 32 settlements over 100 times in the Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod regions, all of which lie on the border with Ukraine.

  • Meduza ☛ What we know about the bridge The facts, and the theories, about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge — Meduza

    Around 6:00am on Saturday, October 8, an explosion occurred on the only bridge between Russian and the annexed territories of Crimea. By most accounts, a truck crossing from the Russian side exploded, causing several sections of roadway to collapse into the water. The explosion also ignited a train hauling oil tanks on the neighboring railway part of the bridge, damaging a long stretch of track. Meduza gathers the latest facts and theories on what happened, how, and who did it.

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Common Dreams ☛ Acquittal of Activists Who Saved Dying Piglets From Smithfield Sets ‘Right to Rescue’ Precedent

      The not-guilty verdict—a landmark decision establishing the legal “right to rescue” distressed animals in need of care—is “the culmination of a more than five-year pursuit that multiple agencies, including the FBI and the Utah attorney general’s office,” The Intercept’s Marina Bolotnikova reported.

• Finance

  • TruthOut ☛ US Is Overcome With Debt and Death. Let’s Fight Inequality to Stop This Crisis.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | American Billionaires Show US Is #1 in Creating Grotesque Inequality

    Spin a globe, then stop it with any finger. Some fantastically rich individual will most likely be living—or yachting—somewhere close to wherever your finger lands.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Straight Up Fraud’: Data Confirms Private Insurers Use Medicare Advantage to Steal Billions

    “Medicare Advantage shouldn’t exist.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Chinese state-sponsored [crackers] have become more brazen, prompting an NSA advisory

    China has become “really brazen, doubling down on their activities to steal intellectual property [sic] and compromise sensitive networks,” Joyce told reporters Thursday. “They establish persistence and move laterally across the interconnected networks so malicious state sponsored activity is a major threat to U.S. critical infrastructure, election systems, national security systems and the Department of Defense along with the defense industrial base that we help protect.”

  • Axios ☛ Democrats’ swing-state local news ploy

    The intrigue: “About Us” pages for each of the sites say they’re run by a company called Local Report Inc., which was formed in Florida last year.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The data privacy deal driving the future of the US-EU commercial relationship

    The deal replaces the 2016 US-EU Privacy Shield agreement, which, according to the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) 2020 ruling, failed to protect the EU citizens’ data from US government surveillance. It also left in jeopardy the future of transatlantic data transfers and the more than $250 billion worth of digital services trade that took place between the United States and the EU in 2020.

    In practical terms, today’s executive order seeks to address the ECJ’s concerns with the previous data privacy framework by increasing transparency into the use of EU personal data by US authorities and national security justifications behind it. It also creates a mechanism for EU individuals to seek a review and redress if they feel their personal data was used in violation of established privacy protections.

    Will the new agreement be viable? Our experts break down the details of the DPF and tell us what to expect next.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Poll Workers Will Play Key Role in Midterm Elections

    With our democracy being challenged in unprecedented ways, it is imperative to strengthen free and fair elections. Poll workers are vital to achieving this goal. These individuals—who temporarily staff polling stations and perform other election administration duties, often voluntarily—help ensure that elections run smoothly and that their communities have a meaningful voice in the democratic system.

  • TruthOut ☛ Outside Spending on Federal 2022 Midterm Elections Tops $1 Billion

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Supreme Court poised to rewrite how social media confronts disinformation

      Taken together, the outcome of the four cases could fundamentally alter the flow of information online and dramatically exacerbate the global disinformation problem.

      “After 20 years of not telling us much of anything, the Supreme Court will finally decide the future of the [Internet],” said Alan Rozenshtein, a senior editor at Lawfare and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law. “These fundamental questions have not been addressed.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • SCOTUS ☛ BRIEF OF THE ONION AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER [PDF]

    ARGUMENT ……………………………………………….. 4

    I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real ……………………… 4

    II. Because Parody Mimics “The Real Thing,” It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing …………………………………… 8

    III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody ……………………………………………….. 10

    IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face …………………………… 15

  • TruthOut ☛ Let’s Build Leftist Academic Solidarities to Rebuff Far Right Attacks

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Scheerpost ☛ Chris Hedges: The Puppets and the Puppet Masters

    The judicial proceedings against Julian Assange give a faux legality to the state persecution of the most important and courageous journalist of our generation.

  • TruthOut ☛ Thousands Demand Release of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Journalism is dead. Now it’s just “some idiot on TikTok says” this or a Bill Gates puff piece.

    There’s been an even bigger drop in quality of “the news” lately.

    Consider that with all of the disasters going on in the world, these three things came up on my phone.

    I’ve “enhanced” the headlines.

    TikTok Karen didn’t get her vegan meal on an airline flight.

    Crazy Texas Karen says don’t watch Hocus Pocus 2 because they’ll put a spell on you through the TV. (And now you’re mine!)

    Bill Gates is frustrated that people who aren’t Bill Gates won’t eat bugs and totally give up on having a home to solve “climate change”.

    I mean. This is f***ing bullshit and the people posting it should be fired. Finding a news story is getting to be a real chore these days.

    The Web is crap. It’s all crap all the time. With GeminiSpace being the size of the Web (by page and site count) in 1996, I wonder if the real people will just all ultimately end up there.

    [...]

    The Bill Gates article was pretty bizarre. He started openly fantasizing about remaking the United States of America into something where the average person has the living standard of North Korea. That’s been underway since about 1999.

    [...]

    I suppose the advantage of living in North Korea is that they’re walled off from the global Internet and don’t have to hear a news story that appears on a dozen different sites about Bill Gates and how his morning shit went.

  • North Wales Pioneer ☛ Human chain to be formed around Parliament in support of Julian Assange

    Thousands of people will form a human chain around Parliament on Saturday calling for the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    He is being held in Belmarsh prison in London amid a lengthy legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States.

  • The Wire ☛ IFJ Urges Journalists’ Unions To Call for Julian Assange’s Release

    The IFJ said it is gravely concerned about the impact of Assange’s continued detention on media freedom and the rights of all journalists globally. It has asked all media unions and press freedom organisations to urge their governments to secure Assange’s release. “Irrespective of personal views, his extradition will have a chilling effect, with all journalists and media workers at risk,” the IFJ said in a statement.

  • RSF ☛ UK: RSF leads a coalition of 16 organisations in urging Home Secretary Suella Braverman to urgently intervene in Assange extradition

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has led a coalition of 16 organisations in urging the new UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to intervene in the US government’s request to extradite Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. These groups, representing press freedom, free expression, and journalists’ organisations, have also requested a meeting with Braverman to discuss concerns in the case, after a request for a meeting with former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, went unanswered. The full text of the letter is below.

  • WSWS ☛ Assange’s wife Stella Moris demolishes US warmonger John Bolton on live TV

    A segment on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored Program” yesterday provided its mass audience with a rare and unvarnished demonstration of the two sides in the case of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain and faces extradition to the United States for exposing American war crimes.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Lake County, Illinois Black Lives Matter Founder Arrested At City Council Meeting | BaronHK’s Rants

    The mistake that led to McLemore’s arrest appears to be that he used foul language and gave them an excuse to have him arrested so that he would stop annoying them while they figure out how to raise our taxes and spend the money digging up more perfectly good streets and then tear into them again next week for some reason while they let the main roads continue degrading into rubble.

    It does not appear to matter where you are. The cops are the cops. The job attracts……a certain kind of person. Little to the right of Hitler.

  • USA ☛ A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2022

    On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor the sovereignty, resilience, and immense contributions that Native Americans have made to the world; and we recommit to upholding our solemn trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal Nations, strengthening our Nation-to-Nation ties.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Iran’s anti-morality police protests: a different view from the ground

  • TruthOut ☛ More Than Two Dozen Abortion Clinics Closed in the First 100 Days Post-Roe

  • TruthOut ☛ Prison Strikers Across Alabama Demand Change Despite Severe Retaliation

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Filmmakers Should Tell the Truth About Slavery: A Critique of “The Woman King”

    When the musical film Black is King was released in 2020, African audiences and some critics said it defamed and distorted the continent’s culture and history.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Central American Anti-Corruption Activists Are Facing Criminal Prosecution

    Three activists are facing criminal charges for allegedly painting graffiti on the walls of the Guatemalan congressional building during protests on November 21, 2020. But the case against these protesters has been marked by the manipulation of information and due process. 

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Zimbabwe to get fibre optics, renewable energy funding from Africa50, is this a big deal?

    Zimbabwe is one of 29 shareholder countries in Africa50.

    Let’s be honest. There are so many organisations with similar sounding mission statements I could have switched them up and no one would have been the wiser. So, with low expectations, let us find out what Africa50 is cooking up for Zimbabwe.

• Monopolies

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Apple gets €1.1b French anti-trust fine reduced to a third

    Apple has managed to get two-thirds of a fine of €1.1 billion (A$1.7 billion) levied on it by French authorities knocked off by a court.

    The company will now have to pay €372 million.

    Apple was fined by the French anti-competition watchdog in 2020 for alleged anti-competitive behaviour against its distribution and retail network, the news agency Reuters reported, citing two sources who were said to have knowledge of the matter.

  • Copyrights

    • Zimbabwe ☛ How to avoid copyright strikes on audio in your YouTube videos

      Every YouTube content creator has faced this before. A seemingly harmless background track is added to a video and uploaded to the channel. Then after publishing the video you are slammed with a copyright strike. And I have even experienced this with music downloaded from supposed royalty-free music websites. Even had to make some appeals to which some were heard but others weren’t. And the obvious frustration with this is that your video can get demonetized because of such copyright strikes essentially interfering with the bag. Well, there are a couple of ways to get around this.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ European Union Imposter Uses Russia Sanctions to Target ‘Escape from Tarkov’

      Earlier this year the European Commission sent a series of removal requests to Google, asking it to remove Russian news sources RT and Sputnik from its search results. After Google took action, a similar request targeted videogame ‘Escape from Tarkov’ and its Russian developer Battlestate Games. However, there appears to be an imposter at work.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • neil in gemini space

    i am living in a site shed/office for a few months. i had not previously used the exped air pillow ul camping and decided to use it instead of conventional pillows. trading weight for size i have the medium (m) size.

  • catching up, again – 2022-10-09

  • 21 Hours

    I woke up at 01:00 (am, for those not using 24 hour time) yesterday and had trouble falling back asleep. Eventually I decided to get up, mostly because I was getting hungry.

    Of course I spent most of the day being pretty tired, but boy did I get things done before I went to bed at 22:00. Apart from chores, of which I did more than I thought I would do during the entire weekend, I made very much progress on my tea mod for OpenTTD. In fact I made so much progress that I could have been done by now if I hadn’t had “bright” ideas. I blame sleep deprivation.

  • Long Day Traveling

    Oh, nice, I found a wormhole in space time! It says WLAN on the entry. And after fiddling a while with three lines of magic incantations, I am able to send messages through without being sucked in! Great!

• Technical

  • Thoughts on workflows and graphical tools

    I’ve had a sort of rough sketch of an application in my mind that continues popping up every once in a while. The idea isn’t yet fully formed, but it’s a very persistent idea.

    Those who have been around in the Unix world for more than a few years no doubt remember when Konqueror was the default filemanager/webbrowser/documentviewer in KDE. I’ve often wondered why they got away from this concept. I imagine the scope of the project was probably a bit unwieldy to be sure, but I still fondly remember it.