GNU/Linux

• Carson City Linux Users Group | Serving Minden-Gardnerville and Carson Valley

  Hello, glenn green here and I am trying
  to start a Linux Users Group here in
  Carson City. There are no dues,
  membership is free as in beer.

• Server

  • InfoWorld ☛ 6 Kubernetes distributions leading the container revolution | InfoWorld

    Kubernetes has become the project developers turn to for container orchestration at scale. The open source container orchestration system out of Google is well-regarded, well-supported, and continues to evolve.

    Kubernetes is also sprawling, complex, and difficult to set up and configure. Not only that, but much of the heavy lifting is left to the end user. The best approach, therefore, isn’t to grab the bits and try to go it alone, but to seek out a complete container solution that includes Kubernetes as a supported, maintained component.

    This article looks at the six most prominent Kubernetes offerings. These are distributions that incorporate Kubernetes along with container tools, in the same sense that different vendors offer distributions of the Linux kernel and its userland.

  • Istio / Support for Istio 1.13 has ended

    As previously announced, support for Istio 1.13 has now officially ended.

    At this point we will no longer back-port fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.13, so we heartily encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.15.2) if you haven’t already.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ GreenWithEnvy Desperately Needs New Maintainers – Invidious

    GreenWithEnvy is an incredibly useful tool for NVIDIA GPU, control, overclocking and monitoring that’s in a bit of a pickle, the current maintainer is stepping down from the project and moving to AMD

  • Video ☛ LINUX is BETTER than macOS in these 5 areas! – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Amarok Linux OS 22.09 overview | Free and easy-to-use Linux Operating System – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Amarok Linux OS 22.09 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • FLOSS Weekly 702: Open Source and Mainframes – John Mertic on Using Open Source in Mainframes [Ed: Those mainframes are very heavily patented by IBM and they are proprietary (IBM even goes litigious over it). This is an openwashing PR stunt for 'Linux' Foundation.]

    There are some purposes for which only mainframes fit. In this show, John Mertic of the Linux Foundation tells Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett how open source is a growing part of how mainframes fit, and how the open source community for the first time has a mainframe of its own.

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ 397.5 – Anything You Can Do Linux Does It Better – mintCast

    1:08 Linux Innards
    34:10 Housekeeping & Announcements

    In our Innards section, we talk about how Linux has permeated Everything;

    And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  • Video ☛ How To Block TikTok From Tracking You (Even Non-Users) – Invidious

    Today we will talk about blocking Tiktok from tracking you even if you are not a user of the platform. They track everyone across the internet and the only way to stop it is for you to block it on your computer or network.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 6.0.1

    I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.1 kernel.
    
    
    All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    
    The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at:
            git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.19.15

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.73

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.2.1

    Hi list,
    
    I'm a bit late getting this out, I blame XDC. Anyway. This is pretty
    much what *should* have been in 22.21, with a few extras, so there will
    be a regularly scheduled 22.2 release next week.
    
    We've  got lots of stuff here: llvmpipe, lavapipe, freedreno, aco, mesa,
    turnip, virgl, r600, zink, radv, core gallium, and nir. All in all, lots
    of good fixes all over the tree.
    
    Cheers,
    Dylan
    
    

  • 9to5Linux ☛ NVIDIA 520.56.06 Graphics Driver Brings Support for OTA Updates in Proton and Wine

    NVIDIA 520.56.06 is here to implement support for OTA (Over-the-Air) updates in the Proton and Wine NVIDIA NGX build, making it easier to update the graphics driver to the latest version. However, this feature is not enabled by default, so users will have to manually enable it by setting the PROTON_ENABLE_NGX_UPDATER environment variable to value “1”.

  • UNIGINE 2.16 – Asset Store, Vulkan – DirectX 12, ROS Integration, New Window Manager

    Some things are worth waiting for. With the 2.16 release, we’re finally ready to introduce some impressive features that mark a new chapter for UNIGINE Engine.

• Applications

  • H2S Media ☛ 12 Best Terminal Apps for Ubuntu Linux – Linux Shout

    Here are the best Terminal applications to install on Ubuntu Linux distros to replace the default one for running various commands.

    For those who work with Linux, the terminal is an important and indispensable tool. An IT system administrator cannot do without it. Furthermore, the way via the terminal is usually much faster.

    Probably the most important instrument in the Linux system is the terminal with the corresponding shell, a shell is actually nothing more than a program that acts as a command line interpreter responsible for dialogue and interaction with the user in the Linux system this is usually the bash. The shell provides a command line on a terminal, all configurations can be made using the Linux terminal be it just creating data or writing complex scripts.

    Well, all existing Linux distros with GUI come with a default Linux terminal application to use such as Xterm. However, the look and feel of terminal apps will be different as per the Desktop environment installed on the Linux. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it will change the command syntax to use. For example, you may find Ubuntu and Linux Mint Terminal emulator apps look different, however, the usage of commands will be the same in both.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ CPU-X – Check Hardware Information on Linux

    Brief: In this article guide, we are going to explore ways in which CPU-X can be used to gather system-specific information related to the motherboard, CPU, and other components that complete your computer system.

  • TecMint ☛ RustDesk – An Open Source Remote Desktop Software for Linux

    In the highly digital and technologically advanced world that we live in, accessibility to remote devices is usually a top-of-mind goal for employees and regular users.

    Remote Desktop Service is a popular and widely-used remote access protocol that provides an efficient and user-friendly way for users to connect to their devices. It is particularly valuable to the IT helpdesk and support teams in troubleshooting users’ devices that are not physically accessible.

    Written in Rust programming language, Rustdesk is a free and open-source desktop software application that simply works out of the box with absolutely no configuration required. It allows you to easily access and control your Desktop PC and Android devices from anywhere at any time.

  • CNX Software ☛ SBC Case Builder 2.0 released with GUI – CNX Software

    SBC Case Builder 2.0 tool to create enclosures for single board computers has been released with a customizer graphical user interface, additional cases & SBCs, support for variable height standoffs, and more.

    We wrote about the SBC Case Builder tool to easily generate various types of 3D printable enclosures using OpenSCAD earlier this year. The SBC Model Framework used in the solution was focused on ODROID boards, and you had to type the parameters in a configuration file. SBC Case Builder 2.0 software changes that with a convenient-to-use graphical interface allowing for the dynamic adjustment of any of the case attributes.

  • Linux Magazine ☛ VirtualBox 7.0 is Now Available For Installation – Linux Magazine

    One of the most popular virtual machine applications for Linux has been upgraded to a major new release that offers an overhauled UI and some pretty important features.

    VirtualBox 7.0 is now ready for public consumption. Not only did this release see a major overhaul to the user interface, it finally enjoys support for Secure Boot, which means adding hosts like Windows 11 will be much easier.

  • GStreamer 1.20.4 stable bug fix release

    The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the stable 1.20 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

    This release only contains bug fixes. It should be safe to update from 1.20.x.

  • Best Linux CCTV Camera Software

    The Linux software universe is growing day by day and most of the software that is available only on Windows is now available in Linux too. In this blog post, we are going to list the best Linux CCTV camera software so that you can easily use the CCTV cameras from your Ubuntu system.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to Easily Integrate AppImages into your Linux Desktop | TechRepublic

    Jack Wallen helps take the frustration out of using AppImages on the Linux desktop with the help of an easy-to-use application.

    I don’t care where the application comes from, if it’s helpful I’ll use it. But with the Linux desktop, there are numerous ways to install an application. You can install from source, from your package manager, with the help of Snap or Flatpak packages, and even AppImages.

    All of these are great options and will end up with you having the applications you need. However, not all installation methods are created equal. For example, if you install from source, those applications won’t be easily upgraded via the built-in package manager. AppImages are a great way to run applications on Linux, but they don’t integrate with your desktop. Run an AppImage app, and try to pin it to your dock, panel or shelf. You can’t. At least not out of the box.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to change and Set default terminal in Ubuntu or Debian Linux

    Do you have multiple Terminal emulators on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04? Then learn how to set your favorite Terminal app as the default one on Ubuntu Linux.

    Almost all Linux distros come with a default terminal application to run commands. However, if you feel that your Linux Terminal is not enough for you and want to install some other then you are always free to do so. You can check our list of the 12 best Terminal applications for Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter which Terminal you have installed but if you have multiple and want to set one of them as your default emulator app to run commands then what to do? In this tutorial, we discuss how to do that using the update-alternatives command line utility.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to add network shares to your Chromebook

    If you use a Chromebook or Chrome desktop computer daily, you may want to access files on your local network. Thankfully, Chrome OS supports many types of file-sharing protocols. Here’s how to get network shares set up on your Google Chromebook.

  • How To Install SysPass Password Manager On Ubuntu | Itsubuntu.com

    sysPass is a free, open-source password manager. sysPass is built on top of HTML5 and PHP which supports AES-256-CTR for stronger password encryption. In this article, we will show you the steps to install sysPass password manager on Ubuntu.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install SteamOS 3 on Your Linux PC

    The Steam Deck has gained much attention as an excellent handheld gaming device allowing the average gamer to play AAA titles on Linux.

    For gaming and Linux communities, this news has created a lot of positive buzz, excitement, and anticipation for what is to come. Unfortunately, for now, the Steam Deck is proving to be really difficult for gamers to get their hands on.

    Thanks to the hard work of a collective group of enthusiasts, it’s now possible to install Steam Deck software (SteamOS) directly onto your PC. The best part is that the SteamOS installation is easier than you think.

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Install and Use Snapcraft on Linux – Make Tech Easier

    Have you ever wondered how some Linux distributions make it so easy to install software while others can be quite difficult? The difference is in the package format that they use. Some distributions use .deb files while others use .rpm.

    But what if there was a package format that could be used on any distribution? That’s where Snapcraft comes in. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and use Snapcraft to create and install snap packages in Linux.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ Automatic updates with unattended-upgrades on Debian and Ubuntu

    This tutorial shows how to configure unattended updates on Debian and Ubuntu. It covers all recent Debian and Ubuntu versions incl. Ubuntu 22.04…

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Install and Use 7-Zip on Linux – Linux Nightly

    7-Zip is free software for compressing/decompressing files. Although you can already compress files by using the tar and zip commands, 7-Zip can outperform other compression technologies in terms of compression ratio, as shown in our benchmark tests for the best compression tool in Linux. 7-Zip can also encrypt your compressed archives with AES-256.

    In this tutorial, you will see how to install 7-Zip on various Linux distributions and learn to use 7-Zip commands to perform compression and decompression of files and directories on the Linux command line.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ KYPO Cyber Range Platform Installation

    A cyber range is a controlled, interactive technology environment where up-and-coming cybersecurity professionals can learn how to detect and mitigate cyber attacks using the same kind of equipment they will have on the job. The range simulates the worst possible attacks on IT infrastructure, networks, software platforms and applications. The setup encompasses technology that is able to operationalize and monitor a trainee’s progress and performance as they grow and learn through simulated experiences. Used the right way a cyber range can instill confidence in cybersecurity workers.

    The range also contains learning management components (A “Learning Management System,” or LMS). An LMS enables both instructors and students to make measured progress through a defined training program. The LMS may also connect with what is known as an “orchestration layer” that connects specific parts of the curriculum with the underlying IT assets that comprise the range. For example, if the instructor wants to simulate an attack that features data exfiltration, the orchestration layer translates these attack parameters to the data and network components of the cyber range. The student can then experience the simulated exfiltration attack and apply his or her defense techniques.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Spotify on CentOS 9 Stream

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Neofetch on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Spotify is a digital music stream service that provides you access to tons of songs. You can stream for free or buy a subscription. Spotify has an impressive catalog, and it is very unlikely that you will not find your favorite artists.

    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 Neofetch command-line tool that displays the system on CentOS 9 Stream.

  • How to Install Microsoft Edge on Ubuntu [Ed: Terrible idea; it is a password stealer]

  • Running Netdata on the Raspberry Pi – Pi My Life Up

    Netdata is an open-source tool that you can use to collect real-time metrics. These metrics include details such as CPU usage, disk activity, and more.

    By using Netdata on the Raspberry Pi, you can quickly see how the system is being utilized.

    This software is designed to minimize its impact on its system, which is perfect for low-performance devices like the Pi.

    Best of all, Netdata provides all the data it collects in an elegant interface with easy-to-read graphs. It even has support for displaying all of its data in real time.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SeaMonkey on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SeaMonkey is a free open-source all-in-one internet suite, that is created as a continuation of Mozilla’s application suite. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat, and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers, and corporate users.

    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 SeaMonkey internet suite on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Disconnect From SSH Session in Linux – Linux Nightly

    If you’re logged into a remote system via SSH and need to disconnect, there are a few different ways to close the SSH session. You can choose from commands, a keyboard shortcut, or escape characters in the case of a hung connection. In this tutorial, you will learn all the ways possible to disconnect from an SSH session in Linux.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Enable .htaccess on Apache 2 Linux Server

    When using the Apache web server, .htaccess files (also called “distributed configuration files”) are used to specify configuration on a per-directory basis, or more generally to modify the behavior of the Apache web server without having to access virtual hosts files directly (this is usually impossible for example, on shared hosts). For these .htaccess files to have any effect, we must first enable the pertinent setting in the Apache configuration.

    In this tutorial, we will see how to enable .htacces on Apache 2 for a Linux system. You will also learn how to disable it, in case you decide to turn the setting off later.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 27 Best Linux Tutorial Books That You Need To Download Now
    [Ed: Spammy article]

    As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Proton VPN Launches New VPN Protocol to Fight Censorship [Ed: Sourav Rudra is posting SPAM for protonvpn (these URLs are SPAM); this site also posts spam for anti-Linux Foundation. Bunch of opportunists.]

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to get a Filename from the Absolute Path in Linux   – TREND OCEANS

    Let’s say I do have the path of /usr/share/man/man1/basename.1.gz, which I’ll use to execute the following command to get the filename.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ System Clock vs Hardware Clock on Linux

    The system clock and the hardware clock are used for different purposes on a Linux system. The system clock is maintained by the operating system, and the hardware clock is maintained in BIOS. The hardware clock will continue to keep time when the computer is powered off, thanks to the CMOS battery on the motherboard. The system clock maintains time by querying online time servers whenever the computer is powered on.

    The hardware clock will set the time for the system clock upon installation if there is no internet connection. Apart from this scenario, there is little use for the hardware clock in Linux. Instead, Linux uses systemd to synchronize the system time with online servers or an NTPD server.

    Linux programs and services will rely on the system clock, not the hardware clock. Usually, the hardware clock will get synchronized to the system time whenever the computer is powered off. This way, the hardware time can remain accurate and will not drift off more than a few milliseconds while the computer is off, usually. In this tutorial, you will learn the difference between system clock and hardware clock, and about commands that can be used to view or set the hardware clock and system clock in Linux.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to install, generate and list Locale on Linux

    The locale on a Linux system is what determines the type of characters and encoding that appear in your command line terminal. Changing the locale will set various environment variables to different values. The terminal and other applications can then query those variables to figure out what type of characters and settings to show the user.

    In this tutorial, you will see the step by step instructions on how to list all of the available locales on your Linux system, as well as set and generate a new one to use.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ List of exit codes on Linux

    When a script or process exits or is terminated by some other means, it will have an exit code, which gives some indication about how or why the script or process ended. For example, an exit code of 0 means that the process exited without error – in other words, it completed its task and exited as expected. On the other hand, an exit code of 1 means that the process encountered some kind of error upon exiting.

    In addition to those two exit codes, there are a slew of other reserved codes in Bash that have their own meanings. In this tutorial, we will show you a list of exit codes on a Linux system, and explain what each of them mean.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Change IP address on Ubuntu Server

    You have two options when configuring the IP address on your Ubuntu Server, and that is either a static IP address or DHCP. A static IP address allows you to manually select your IP address by configuring it on the Linux system, whereas DHCP relies on the router or DHCP server to lease you an IP address – either a reserved one or the next available one that is currently free, depending on the setup.

    In addition to the IP address configuration, Linux administrators may also need to set the DNS server and default gateway, or setup a virtual IP address. In this tutorial, you will see how to change to static IP or DHCP, and edit the other aforementioned network settings on Ubuntu Server.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Install Harbor Image Registry on Ubuntu 20.04|22.04 LTS

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Harbor on Ubuntu systems.

    Harbor is an open source registry that secures artifacts with policies and role-based access control, ensures images are scanned and free from vulnerabilities, and signs images as trusted. Harbor, a CNCF Graduated project, delivers compliance, performance, and interoperability to help you consistently and securely manage artifacts across cloud native compute platforms like Kubernetes and Docker.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install LOMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04

    LOMP Stack is an acronym for Linux, OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB and PHP. OpenLiteSpeed is an open-source version of LiteSpeed Web Server. Litespeed servers are essentially known for the best performance and responsive web server and it integrates easily well with different versions of PHP. MariaDB is a database server, Alot of popular CMS uses MariaDB/MySQL as a database backend to store the content so we will be installing that and alot of CMS are based on PHP Language!

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Python 3.9 on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    Python is a programming language that is widely used in many different applications. Python 3.9 is now classified as a Long Term Support (LTS) release of Python, which was released on October 5, 2020. Python 3.9 has moved to a security LTS release, receiving security-only updates until October 5, 2025. Python 3.9 includes many new features from 3.8 and improvements, such as support for Unicode 13.0 and improvements to the asyncio library. In addition, Python 3.9 is now faster and more memory-efficient than previous versions of Python.

    For the official Python 3.9 rundown notes, visit the official Python webpage What’s New in Python 3.9.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to download the latest Python 3.9 on Linux Mint 21 LTS using the command terminal and how to download and compile as an alternative method.

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

    As anyone who has used AlmaLinux for any time knows, one of its primary focuses is stability. This can often mean that the distribution is relatively stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of new features. For example, at the time of this writing, AlmaLinux features kernel 5.14, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, among many other things. While this focus on stability is admirable, it can be frustrating for users who need the latest and most significant features that newer kernels often provide. Fortunately, there are a few ways to work around this issue. One option is to use the ELRepo repository, which has an excellent reputation amongst EL9 distributions such as CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, etc.

    Some of the various changes besides the typical CPU improvements include the following.

  • Arco Linux ☛ Installing Windows 11 on VirtualBox on Arcolinux with two separate UEFI partitions

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ How To Get Started with Deepin Terminal on Ubuntu Linux

    Deepin Terminal is a free and open-source program developed by Deepin Technology. The appealing thing about the Deepin terminal emulator is its intuitive interface, which includes useful capabilities. It has a tabby user interface, similar to that of browsers, in which you may add extra workspaces. Customized terminal keyboard shortcuts are also possible.

    If you don’t want to have to write and execute a system update command every time, you can create a keyboard shortcut for it. After that, you just need to hit the assigned keystroke every time, and Deepin Terminal will automatically run the update command.

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Set Static IP Address on Ubuntu Server 22.04

    In this post, we will cover how to set static ip address on Ubuntu server 22.04. netplan is used set static ip address on ubuntu server from command line.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How to create a Kubernetes operator | Enable Sysadmin

    The Kubernetes Operator Framework is an open source toolkit that manages Kubernetes operators in an effective, automated, and scalable way.

  • Red Hat ☛ How to easily generate Helm charts using Dekorate | Red Hat Developer

    Learn how to easily generate Helm charts using Dekorate, how to map properties when installing or updating your charts, and how to use Helm profiles.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install Alacritty Terminal on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Linux Shout

    Learn the steps and commands to install Alacritty terminal on Ubuntu 22.04 jammy jellyfish Linux using the PPA repo or by compiling it from source code.

    Alacritty terminal is known for its fast speed. It’s written in Rust and uses OpenGL for rendering to be the fastest terminal emulator available. It is the simplest terminal emulator for Linux because the developers want to increase its performance of it. That means you won’t find things like tabs, splits, or GUI config editor. Therefore, this terminal is for those who are Linux using some old system or have limited resources, or looking for a performance-centric Terminal.

    It is not for those who want some fancy Terminal with dozens of features such as Tabby and Terminator instead a simple, minimal one that can use the GPU to enhance the performance. Well, it is a relatively new Terminal as compared to other popular names such as Gnome terminal or XFCE terminal.

    Here in this tutorial article, where we know how to install and use Alacritty on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux…

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-10-12 Edition – Boiling Steam

    Between 2022-10-05 and 2022-10-12 there were 27 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 292 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.2 % of total released titles.

  • The updated Steam Mobile App is now available

    Valve has released a brand-new Steam app for mobile devices, rebuilt from the ground up on a new mobile framework. The app will still carry the same features such as browsing the store and trading items, but brand new features will also be available such as the ability to sign in with a QR code from a PC, better notifications, and a brand-new library view. In addition to the QR sign-in functionality, the app will also improve security across all of Steam, as the app enables two-factor authentication.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • DebugPoint ☛ Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu: Top New Features

      Among all the great KDE Plasma-based distributions, Kubuntu is the best. Because it brings stability to both Plasma and at its core, that is Ubuntu.

      Kubuntu 22.10 is a short-term release based on Ubuntu 22.10 – supported for nine months from the release. Since short-term releases are to adopt the latest technologies, removing the obsolete ones, its features list is minimal.

      This release of Kubuntu features Linux Kernel 5.19, which brings run-time Average Power Limiting (RAPL) support for Intel’s Raptor and Alder Lake processor, multiple families of ARM updates in mainline kernel and usual processor/GPU and file-system updates. Learn more about Kernel 5.19 features in this article.

      Compared to the prior Kubuntu release 22.04 LTS (with Plasma 5.24), you get the latest KDE Plasma 5.25 (final point release) desktop with all the bug fixes and updates.

      Although, KDE Plasma 5.26, which has just got released, could not make it to this version. But I believe it should come in as a point release, just not on the release day.

      Besides, Plasma 5.25 is not small in terms of features. It’s, in fact, packed with new cool advancements. If you are especially using Kubuntu’s earlier version, you should be aware of these new items.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ 10 Best Lightweight Linux Distros To Revive Your Old Computer

  A lightweight Linux distro is the perfect solution if you have an old computer that you want to breathe new life into. Lightweight Linux distros are designed to use less system resources and are very easy to install. When it comes to choosing a lightweight Linux distro, there are a few things to consider.

  First, what kind of hardware are you running? If you have an older machine with limited resources, you’ll want to choose a distro that is designed for low-resource systems.

  Secondly, what kinds of tasks do you want to use your machine for? A lightweight distro will be more than sufficient if you’re just looking to do some basic web browsing and email. However, if you’re looking to do more demanding tasks like video editing or gaming, you’ll want to choose a distro with more robust features.

  Finally, what is your level of experience with Linux? If you’re a complete Linux beginner, you’ll want to choose a distro with a friendly user interface and plenty of documentation. However, if you’re an experienced Linux user, you’ll likely be able to get by with a more minimalist approach.

• The Register UK ☛ Hello, Tuxedo: German Linux PC vendor in-house OS now public • The Register

  Tuxedo OS 1 is Ubuntu 22.04, tweaked for the company’s own kit, with KDE instead of GNOME, a natively packaged Firefox, and Flatpak instead of Snap.

  As we mentioned when we covered the launch of Tuxedo’s Pulse G2 laptop, the company has its own in-house rebuild of Ubuntu, as well as as a deployment tool called WebFAI. Now, it is releasing that custom distro to the general public, as Tuxedo OS 1.

  German Linux PC vendor Tuxedo Computers may not be a household name – and we suspect System76 gets most of the limelight in the US – but where the Reg FOSS desk is located in Central Europe, its name pops up regularly, as a sponsor of openSUSE as well as various conferences and events.

  In releasing its OS for general use on other companies’ hardware, Tuxedo Computers is following in the footsteps of US vendor System76, which developed its own, customized version of Ubuntu and subsequently launched it as an independent distro, Pop!_OS.

  The Reg FOSS desk was distinctly underwhelmed by Pop!_OS 21.10, which rendered our test laptop unbootable. Saying that, the following version, based on Ubuntu’s latest LTS, was a much smoother ride.

• Red Hat / IBM

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ CIO role: 5 secrets to success

    Does it ever feel like some CIOs have a “special sauce” that helps them rise above others? They don’t necessarily have a fancier resume or a better tailor, but they somehow find ways to improve the team around them.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Digital transformation: Why emotion matters

    In this era of technology-fueled disruption, CIOs and IT leaders play a decisive role in make-or-break business transformations. Success depends not only on traditional factors such as which architecture they develop or the system they deploy but also on how they marshal the most timeless business resource: human talent.

    Business transformations are becoming more frequent, and the stakes are higher than ever. According to a survey from EY and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, 85 percent of senior leaders from a range of industries worldwide say they have been involved in two or more major transformations in the past five years.

  • Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates

    It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.

  • IBM Unveils Fall 2022 Tech Refreshes for IBM i

    IBM yesterday announced Technology Refreshes for its two most current IBM i operating systems, including 7.5 and 7.4. Security continues to be a big driver of new functionality with 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. But the fall TRs bring a bevy of enhancements across all areas, including the database, IBM i services, open source, application development, and analytics, among others.

  • [Book] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Administration | Pablo Iranzo Gómez blog

    Last year, together with my colleagues Miguel and Scott, we released with the help of Packt team the RHEL8 Administration.

    During this one, with the collaboration of Pedro, a long-time colleague from the University LUG, we worked on the updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Administration book that it’s now available for preorder on Amazon.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Capacity planning: Never go limitless

    We all know the importance of setting up limits, whether it is with our kids, our diet, our physical activities and so on. But, when it comes to resources dedicated to our applications, we may think, “Why limit ourselves? If a resource is available, then give it to me.” Well, it turns out that this approach, even in the seemingly unlimited resources world that the cloud offers, may not be such a good idea.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat at the Data Platform Virtual Summit 2022 [Ed: Red Hat spreads that lie that Microsoft "brought SQL Server to Linux." It did not. It's lousy Drawbridge.]

    It’s been five years since Microsoft first brought SQL Server to Linux.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Introducing the Red Hat Insights integration with ServiceNow

    More and more companies today use unstructured work patterns in their day-to-day management of operations. Tools are proliferating and often solve unique problems, resulting in many different applications, user interfaces (UIs) and processes that must be managed and maintained simultaneously. In response to these challenges, we find our users turning to integration and intelligent automation to create smarter operational workflows for a more efficient and connected enterprise.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • The Register UK ☛ Ubuntu 22.04.1: Slightly late, but a worthwhile upgrade • The Register

    The first point-release of the newest Ubuntu is here, which marks the stage it formally becomes the new long-term-support release.

    As we mentioned last week, there were some last-minute delays in the 22.04.1 release process. The release was delayed until August 11. But now it’s here, as Canonical announced on its official blog. The release notes list the changes.

    This is only a point release of the OS, and if you are already running “Jammy Jellyfish” you will automatically get 22.04.1 when you next run a full update. No new installation of the OS is needed. If you are doing new installations, though, Ubuntu makes new installation images for each point release, so if you go to the downloads page, you will get a shiny new 22.04.1 image. If you keep an emergency boot disk, for instance with Ventoy, this is a good time to update it.

    All the same, it’s significant in a few ways. It’s a bug-fix release, so with any luck, you won’t notice any changes – just a few things may start working more smoothly. In theory, the Snap-packaged version of Firefox may start a little faster.

    One of the most noticeable is that the first point-release that follows an Ubuntu LTS is when people running the previous LTS release will start getting notified and prompted to update. So if you are running 20.04 “Focal Fossa,” or the previous short-term release 21.10 “Impish Indri,” then you can expect to receive nags any time now.

  • IT Pro Today ☛ What Is Ubuntu?

    Ubuntu is a free and open-source Linux distribution. Learn about the benefits and drawbacks of using Ubuntu.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The DIY Life ☛ I Made A Keyboard For My Pi Using The xTool M1 – The DIY Life

    The M1 is a new new product by xTool, a company that is already well-known in the CNC diode laser space. This laser is quite different to their others though because it is fully enclosed, so it is much safer to use than open gantry style lasers, it properly manages smoke and fume extraction, and it’s got a trick up its sleeve for hobbyists.

    Not only does it have a 10W diode laser module for cutting and engraving, but alongside it is a blade cutting tool, allowing you to accurately cut vinyl, paper, leather, fabrics and felt, all without leaving burn marks around the edges.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ This DIY steering wheel is a cheaper alternative for use in sim racing | Arduino Blog

    When participating in sim racing video games, players often need to use a steering wheel controller in order to enjoy smooth and accurate movements of their on-screen vehicles. However, due to a shortage of certain racing rigs, finding one has become a challenge. Luckily, ilge ipek has come up with a custom solution that not only provides a far cheaper wheel alternative to store-bought ones, but even competes in regard to some features.

    The electronic components ipek selected for this project included a 10K ohm potentiometer for getting the wheel’s current position, an Arduino Leonardo to read the value and send it to the host PC, and an existing steering wheel that could be easily attached to the rig. In terms of software, the Leonardo runs firmware generated from the MMJoy program, which allows hobbyists to connect hardware as various HID inputs via USB. Once uploaded, the attached potentiometer was mapped as a new joystick input that adjusts along the ‘X’ axis.

  • Arduino ☛ Barilla and Arduino: This is not your grandma’s pasta! | Arduino Blog

    Italians are notoriously protective of their culinary traditions, often rooted in the use of specific local ingredients, family recipes passed on from generation to generation, and strict compliance to the way nonna and mamma always prepared favorite dishes.

    However, Italy is also a country of innovation and resourcefulness! So in the face of climate change, major pasta brand Barilla has taken a somewhat daring step forward to suggest their customers try passive cooking: let pasta cook in hot water after only two minutes of boiling on the stove, saving precious energy for the remaining cooking time. Italian grandmothers might cringe at the idea, but Barilla’s clear step-by-step guide claims this can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80% – which could generate a remarkable positive impact on the environment, considering approximately 400 million plates of spaghetti, penne, tagliatelle, and more are served around the world every day.

  • CNX Software ☛ Arduino-shaped development board ships with a Nordic Semi nRF9160 module

    Actinius Icarus SoM DK development board follows the Arduino Uno form factor and is equipped with the company’s Icacus SoM based on Nordic Semi nRF9160 system-in-package with LTE Cat-M, NB-IoT, and GPS connectivity.

  • Arduino ☛ How a smart home can be a safer home

    Security is one of the things we value most in our homes. A home is somewhere to feel safe, protected from the harms of the outside world. As a result, we tend to invest a lot of money in security features like well-locked doors, alarms, and cameras.

    Most of the tools we use to keep our homes safe are decades or even centuries old. Can smart technology and automation help make our homes even safer? In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the ways you can use automation and other tools to keep your smart home as secure as possible.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Central ☛ This Gboard update makes typing on Android tablets much easier | Android Central

  • 9to5Google ☛ YouTube for Android TV gets Material You-style player UI tweaks

  • TechRadar ☛ This 32-inch TV from Iffalcon is the cheapest Android TV you can get right now | TechRadar

  • PR Newswire ☛ Lexicon Tech Solutions LE45 Rugged Mobile Computer to Be Android 12 Google Mobile Service (GMS) Certified

  • Beta News ☛ Passkey support comes to Chrome and Android

  • Medevel ☛ BRouter: An Open-source Offline-first Cycling Routing App

    Cyclists often require a routing management app to organize their training and cycling practice. While, there are many apps who do this, almost all are not free or open source. Moreover, many apps of these apps do not respect the user’s privacy.
    With BRouter, it is different. Foremost, it is totally, free and open-source. It also works completely offline as you download the routing map to your device and make it available offline.
    But the most advantage of using it is: it comes without any tracking scripts, and it never shares your data with any third-party service. Also, there is no in-app purchase or in app advertisements.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Firefox View Doesn’t Feel Like a Feature, Mozilla. It Feels Like a Nag

      The unexpected addition (that masquerade as a pinned tab) is for new feature (in testing) called Firefox View. This is a dashboard-style overview showing your 3 most recently closed tabs, plus sections to “pickup” tabs you’re gawking at on your other devices, and promotion for more limited-edition “colorways” (no idea, lol).

      But… I need to digress …

      As a Linux user I take for granted how omnipresent Firefox is. In FOSS-world, this browser is still a big deal; I can pretty much count on a lone hand the number of major Linux distros that don’t ship it as their default browser. Also: it’s very widely used — Firefox is the browser zeitgeist, innit.

    • Andrew’s Searchfox Vision 2022 | visophyte: shiny? shiny.

      Searchfox (source, config source) is Mozilla’s primary code searching tool for Firefox introduced by Bill McCloskey in 2016 which built upon prior work on DXR. This product vision post describes my personal vision for searchfox and the rationale that underpins it. I’m also writing an accompanying road map that describes specific potential enhancements in support of this vision which I will publish soon and goes into the concrete potential features that would be implemented in the spirit of this vision.

      Note that the process of developing searchfox is iterative and done in consultation with its users and other contributors, primarily in the searchfox channel on chat.mozilla.org and in its bugzilla component. Accordingly, these documents should be viewed as a basis for discussion rather than a strict project plan.

    • Mozilla ☛ A longtime NPR education reporter on her favorite corners of the internet [Ed: Mozilla isn’t about browser technology anymore; it’s marketing spam, pushing “stories” to you like social control media (disinformation sites) do]

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • Medevel ☛ Builder.io Builds a Web and eCommerce Pages with Drag and Drop

    Builder.io is a free open-source framework agonistic library for building and design stylish web pages with drag and drop.

  • Alan Pope ☛ Reading My Own Blog Posts (no bots!)

    I had some fun when I blogged about using a bot to read my blog post. While fun, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to consume blog content. The audio is still a bit robotic, with little care for timing, ephasis and stress on words. So in my next blog post, in which I detailed how to setup Mimic 3, I actually read the blog post out loud, recorded that and attached it as an MP3.

  • Alan Pope ☛ Setting Up Mimic 3 – Alan Pope’s blog

    Yesterday I blogged about using Mycroft AI’s Mimic 3, an Open Source Text-to-Speech engine I used to generate audio of a blog post.

    One thing I didn’t mention, which might be useful, is how to setup Mimic 3. It’s pretty straightforward, so here we go.

  • Striving to Become a Professional WordPress Blogger? Keep These 6 Things in Mind [Ed: This has nothing to do with WordPress. It's applicable to blogging in general.]

    Starting a blog has never been easier. Thanks to WordPress, you can set up your blog in minutes with a few clicks and minimal technical knowledge. But, there are a few things that separate professional bloggers that make money from those that don’t.

• GNU Projects

  • Happy birthday, GNU Health!

    On a day like this, October 12th, 2008, I registered the “Medical” project at SourceForge. Fourteen years later, GNU Health has become the Libre digital health ecosystem used by governments, hospitals, laboratories, research institutions and health professionals around the globe.

    I want to sincerely thank all the professionals who believed in the project since early on… from small clinics in the African rain forest, to many public primary care institutions in Argentina, to the largest hospital in India and Asia (AIIMS).

• Programming/Development

  • Drew DeVault ☛ In praise of ffmpeg

    My last “In praise of” article covered qemu, a project founded by Fabrice Bellard, and today I want to take a look at another work by Bellard: ffmpeg. Bellard has a knack for building high-quality software which solves a problem so well that every other solution becomes obsolete shortly thereafter, and ffmpeg is no exception.

    ffmpeg has been described as the Swiss army knife of multimedia. It incorporates hundreds of video, audio, and image decoders and encoders, muxers and demuxers, filters and devices. It provides a CLI and a set of libraries for working with its tools, and is the core component of many video and audio players as a result (including my preferred multimedia player, mpv). If you want to do almost anything with multimedia files — re-encode them, re-mux them, live stream it, whatever — ffmpeg can handle it with ease.

    Let me share an example.

  • DEV Community ☛ Awesome tools for Open Source Contribution – DEV Community

    We are in October which is well known as the month of Hacktoberfest in the open-source community. During this month, beginner developers learn to contribute to open-source projects.

    I am participating in this event for the last three years. Last year, I also participated as a maintainer. This year, I am also participating as a maintainer and trying my best to help the developers.

    So, I am here to help you by providing some tools you can use while contributing to an open-source project.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Deploy applications using Foreman ACD | Opensource.com

    When you manage your IT infrastructure using Foreman and Katello, the smallest unit to operate on is generally a host. You can provision hosts, deliver versioned content, and set configurations. Using Foreman ACD, you can use your Foreman instance to deploy applications consisting of multiple services spanning multiple hosts. This blog post briefly introduces the Foreman ACD plugin and explains how it can help you deploy a Prometheus and Grafana stack. If you want to know more about deploying an ELK stack consisting of an Elasticsearch cluster and Kibana, look at Deploying an ELK Cluster with Application Centric Deployment.

  • Vulnerability Management: Context From Code to Cloud – Container Journal

    Almost all modern cloud-native applications are developed using open source components. And yet, security is not always the top priority for open source developers. While many vulnerabilities can be accidental (e.g., coding error) and have minimal impact, some of the largest breaches to date have relied on exploiting known vulnerabilities from open source components. Furthermore, there is also no standardization for open source security integrity. This makes vulnerability management more critical than ever.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Creator 9 Beta released

    We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 9 Beta!

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ 10 Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn’t Make It

  It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single day. And while we’ve landed on a few standards, a lot of desktop publishing tools failed to make to it the present day. So in a continuation of our list of things that didn’t make it, Today’s Tedium takes a look at 10 early examples of desktop publishing software that you probably don’t remember desktop publishing was a killer app nearly 40 years ago and you were in diapers back then … if you existed at all. (Oh yeah, quick reminder of what makes things obscure, from our point of view.)

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ ODROID-H3 and ODROID-H3+ SBC’s feature Intel Celeron N5105, Pentium N6005 processor

    There are now not one but two alternatives to the discontinued ODROID-H2+ SBC with the ODROID-H3 and ODROID-H3+ single board computers powered respectively by an Intel Celeron N5105 and Pentium N6005 Jasper Lake processor.

• Security

  • What is Hacking? and How do Hackers Hack? – Hack Ware News

    Despite what Tony Stark says, the word hackers really stuck. Because it’s easy to say, it has a derisive impression to those who do the deed for selfish ends, while remaining technically trendy. Say hacker ten times compared to malicious cyber actor. Anyway, exactly what is hacking? How do hackers hack our social media, our bank accounts, our very lives?

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Recovering Passwords by Measuring Residual Heat

    Researchers have used thermal cameras and ML guessing techniques to recover passwords from measuring the residual heat left by fingers on keyboards.

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and twig), Oracle (expat, gnutls and nettle, and kernel), Red Hat (expat, kernel, and kpatch-patch), and Ubuntu (advancecomp and dotnet6).

  • Sportskeeda ☛ New AMD Zen 4 Processors reportedly run even faster with Linux Kernel Security Mitigations enabled

  • Notebook Check ☛ AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs are faster in Linux with Spectre V2 mitigations enabled

    While most processors on the market are faster when disabling security tweaks/patches for certain bugs such as Spectre or Meltdown, it was recently discovered that the AMD Ryzen 7000 family does better when the Spectre V2 mitigations are enabled in the Linux kernel. The tests were first ran on the Ryzen 9 7950X, and then on the Ryzen 5 7600X.

  • CISA ☛ Adobe Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

    Adobe has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe software. An attacker can exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

  • Fear, Uncertainty,
    Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

    • eSecurity Planet ☛ Vulnerable API Exposes Private npm Packages [Ed: Microsoft failing at security and the corrupt media won’t even name the culprit]

    • SDTimes ☛ NSA’s and CISA’s recent security guidance: The good and the bad [Ed: NSA works with Microsoft on back doors and CISA is acting like a Microsoft agency these days. Nowadays, owing to corporate control of the media, it’s fashionable to pretend all security problems are “open source” or “supply chain”. Back doors in proprietary software ignored.]

      The NSA and CISA released the guide “Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers” last month and while David Wheeler, the director of open-source supply chain security at the Linux Foundation and OpenSS, welcomes it, he said there are some questionable requirements.

• Finance

  • BBC ☛ TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

    Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.

    Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value.
    The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that.

    TikTok said it would take prompt action against “exploitative begging”.
    The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ SC’s direction: Stop prosecuting people under S.66A

    The Supreme Court has disposed of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL)’s application for directions to stop the continuing prosecutions under S.66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act, 2000). The SC pronounced a significant order and issued several directions to ensure that individuals are no longer prosecuted under S.66A. S.66A was struck down by SC in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India & Ors., (2015) 5 SCC 1. Still, cases continue to be registered under it, as PUCL informed the SC in these proceedings. Recognising the graveness of the situation, SC directed: 1) individuals should not be prosecuted under the section; 2) existing cases shall stand deleted; 2) governments should instruct police not to register fresh cases; and 4) government publications which refer to S.66A should state that SC has struck it down in Shreya Singhal.

    [...]

    S. 66A of the IT Act penalized sending “offensive messages” via online communication. The wide powers of the section were frequently used to stifle political dissent. In March 2015, S.66A was declared unconstitutional by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union Of India as it violated the right to speech. The effect of this case should have been that Courts should have dismissed pending cases under S. 66A and authorities should not have instituted fresh cases under S. 66A. The findings on Zombie Tracker – a platform built by IFF in collaboration with CivicDataLab (CDL) – demonstrate that this did not happen and in fact, more cases were registered under S.66A after Shreya Singhal than before. Imagine being prosecuted for an offence which the Supreme Court has held is illegal!!

    The Supreme Court has issued a range of directions which will remedy the situation in proceedings instituted by PUCL with legal support from IFF.

  • India Times ☛ WhatsApp’s impossible choice: three reasons why the app will be badly hit by the Telecom Bill

    The draft Telecom Bill’s release for public consultation and comments three weeks ago hit a raw nerve for many. For one, it seeks to dramatically increase the government’s ability to surveil and snoop, while also giving it an even freer hand in shutting down the Internet when it seems fit. For a country that is ranked relatively low on global freedom indices and which is the world leader in Internet shutdowns, this is not exactly ideal.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ The Polyhedral Perspective – The Public Domain Review

      When geometrical solids took hold of the Renaissance imagination, they promised the quintessence of the third dimension in its pure and unadulterated form. Noam Andrews discovers how polyhedra descended from mathematical treatises to artists’ studios, distilling abstract ideas into objects one could see and touch.

      [...]

      Archimedes hesitates, transfixed by the rhombicuboctahedron hovering on the edge of the page, like a strange species never before encountered in nature. His body, rendered in layered chiaroscuro print, appears in a pose of almost vigorous, if haltingly arrested, contemplation. In Ugo da Carpi’s (1480–1532) dramatic rendering after Raphael, human and geometrical body are staged as a study in contrasts. At once rational, ordered, and finite, the rhombicuboctahedron is also out of this world. It stands both for itself and for the idea of itself, so much so that it appears to flicker in and out of focus, as if in excess of the real. Swathed in a cascade of wrinkled and tangled cloth, the philosopher is captured on the cusp of apprehending the crux of knowledge made palpable as a discrete object. He grips a tabula rasa in his left hand, grappling with the decision of whether to divert his gaze in order to ensnare it. Perhaps he wonders if, in so doing, he would run the risk of the polyhedron, and all it represented, vanishing beyond the reaches of his imagination.
      Polyhedra are a spectral yet constant presence in the history of Western culture. Emblems of essence, they encompassed two major groups in the early modern period — the Platonic or regular solids (corpora regulata) and the Archimedean or semiregular solids (corpora irregulata): the latter forms derived by slicing up, truncating, or embellishing the former. There have only ever existed five completely regular and symmetrical polyhedra. No more, no less.1 To artists, mathematicians, and philosophers at the turn of the sixteenth century, these regular solids — the pyramid (four triangular faces), cube (six square faces), octahedron (eight triangular faces), dodecahedron (twelve pentagonal faces), and icosahedron (twenty triangular faces) — radiated a tantalizing promise of divine symmetry, order, and perfection that spanned from the building blocks of matter to the proportions of the human body and the structure of the universe. The maturation of perspectival geometry had only made the representation of the solids a more pressing issue that verged on the realm of the existential. The capacity to produce disegni (drawings/designs), as theorized by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and others, resulted from years of artistic training required to fully transmit onto the page “an apparent expression and articulation of the conceit that one has in the mind”.2 Likewise, to successfully represent polyhedra in three dimensions was to boldly venture beyond the gauze separating the world of appearances from the world of causes and to return with an artifact that could be tangibly appreciated.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • SpellBinding: BHIUSTM Wordo: FEEDS

  • The pandering panic
    

    A misconception that spread widely and took root somewhere around 2014 is that when comics and movies are “pandering” or non-genuine by having diverse characters.

    I can’t believe it’s been almost a decade and it’s still a thing. No, not “pandering” (probably better known as representation) but the pandering panic, the hysteria at seeing slightly less than 95% white guys.

    It’s probably useful for us to know that those who suffer from “pandering panic” claim to not be opposed to those characters themselves (although often they do have some extra hatred reserved for whatever group is fascism’s wedge target du jour), it’s when they feel like the representation is “forced” or not genuine.

  • The clock that came in from the cold

    The other day, my grandfather clock [1] wasn’t chiming correctly, so I took off the top portion (I think it’s called a “hood”) and placed on a near-by chair. That was not a good idea as a few moments later, as I had my nose buried in the internals of the clock, I heard a horrible crash as the hood fell off the chair and was damaged.

• Technical

  • Forays into PostmarketOS

    Since Linux seems to be the theme of the week (and if not, I’ll make it so *sips Early Grey*), I’ll do another post about it.

  • Programming

    • Tools vs standards

      Everyone knows and loves the old comic strip where the situation is that there is 14 competing standards, and a guy says “14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.” and his friend says “Yeah!” and then the situation is that there are 15 competing standards.

    • ref

      Ref is a universal version of list-ref, hash-table-ref etc.

      It can handle lists, alists, hash-tables, strings, vectors, records, and all callable procedures (like call-tables).

      You can also pass multiple arguments to dereference recursively.

GNU/Linux

• Applications

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Blender 3.4 3D Graphics Software Promises Native Wayland Support on Linux

    It would appear that the Blender Foundation has been working on native Wayland support for its open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset, which artists widely use to create 3D-printed models, visual effects, motion graphics, animated films, interactive 3D apps, virtual reality, and, even video games.

    Wayland is slowly but surely conquering our Linux desktops, and more and more desktop environments and GNU/Linux distributions are enabling it by default, so it’s obvious that software developers need to follow suit.

  • Linux Links ☛ Spotube – Flutter based lightweight Spotify client

    This review puts Spotube under the spotlight. It’s billed as a “fast, modern, lightweight & efficient Spotify music client”. The software is Flutter-based, a Dart-based toolkit that helps build an app’s front end. Spotube is published under an open source software.

    The software uses YouTube for streaming/downloading an audio track provided by a Spotify playlist/album which sort of acts to circumvent the restriction of Spotify’s API not allowing playback on non-premium accounts. Spotube is not a YouTube client though.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Tuning is hard

    Before the year 1500 or so, Western Europeans mainly tuned their instruments in three-limit just intonation, which they called Pythagorean tuning. (Don’t be fooled by the name; this system was in use in Mesopotamia centuries before the Greeks described it.) Three-limit just intonation is based on the first three harmonics of a vibrating string. Western Europeans really like the pitch ratios produced by these harmonics, as do people from many other cultures (though not all of them). In this post, I will explain why Europeans liked three-limit just intonation, why they nevertheless eventually abandoned it, and what came after.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 12: max() trickery

    It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

  • Data Swamp ☛ A kiosk computer running OpenBSD

    Let’s have fun doing OpenBSD kiosks! As explained in a recent article, a kiosk is a computer dedicated to display things or to be used interactively without being able to escape the current program.

    I modified the script surf-display which run the web browser surf in full screen and run various commands to sanitize the environment to prevent users to escape surf to make it compatible with OpenBSD.

  • Migrating a Mastodon Account

    The Mastodon instance I’ve been using, mastodon.technology, is shutting down in a few months, so I’ve migrated my Mastodon account to a new server. I wanted to share the steps I went through in case the details are helpful to anyone, especially others migrating off that instance–especially a warning about when you lose access to your old account. I don’t know if these are the best steps to follow, but they worked for me.

  • Jan Piet Mens ☛ Ideas for using Ansible local facts

    I was asked today whether I’ve a list of ideas for using Ansible’s local facts, and my answer was, sadly, ‘no’. I thought I’d start one with the help of my Ansible followers.

  • Toby Kurien ☛ Simpler Linux self-hosting with tmux and bubblewrap

    Let’s say you want to self-host a Gemini capsule and a weblog. Maybe you’ll use a Raspberry Pi or VPS server. Typically, you’d install (or get a pre-installed) operating system, like Debian/Ubuntu. You might then apt install a webserver like nginx, and pip3 install a Gemini server like JetForce.

  • Update Ubuntu using Apt – Cron – Anto ./ Online

    There are several methods to update Ubuntu. These methods include package updates via the desktop, the unattended upgrade script, and good old Apt. As the title suggests, this post explores the last option using Cron.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install ZesleCP Control Panel Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will show you how to install ZesleCP on Ubuntu systems.

    Zesle is a graphical web-based web hosting control panel designed to make administration of websites easier. Zesle is often called DA for short. It is a lightweight and fully-featured Web Hosting Control Panel.

    Zesle runs on any system with at least the following specifications: Processor: 500 MHz Memory: 1 GB (2 GB is preferred), with at least 2 GB of swap memory HDD Space: minimal 2 GB free space (after the Linux install)

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Thunderbird Mail on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will install Thunderbird Mail on Ubuntu systems.

    Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Run Cron Jobs Every 5, 10, or 15 Minutes

    Cron jobs are an essential part of any Linux system. They allow administrators to schedule tasks to run at specified intervals, making it easy to automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks. Cron jobs can be scheduled to run by minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week, or any combination of these. This makes them very versatile and makes it possible to fine-tune the execution of tasks. For example, a cron job could be used to send out a daily report email or to back up a database every week. Cron jobs are extremely powerful and can make managing a Linux system much more manageable.

    The most commonly used cron schedules are every 5, 10, or 15 minutes; each has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, running a cron job every 5 minutes means the task will be completed more often and uses more resources. On the other hand, running a cron job every 15 minutes means that the task will be completed less often but uses fewer resources. Ultimately, the best schedule for a cron job depends on the specific task that needs to be completed.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Mystery adventure Kona II: Brume gets a Linux demo ready for Steam Deck

    Kona II: Brume is the follow-up to 2017′s Kona from Parabole / Ravenscourt bringing another cold and mysterious adventure to walk through.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Foolish Mortals is an upcoming spooky point and click adventure

    Up for more pointing and clicking while adventuring? You’ve come to the right spooky place, with Foolish Mortals being announced with Native Linux support.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Fanatical running an awesome ‘Dollar Collections’ sale

    Time to get some more really cheap games, as Fanatical have launched their Dollar Collections sale and there’s plenty of good choices in there to get you through the upcoming cold winter nights.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ The upgraded ivoler Steam Deck Docking Station is another good choice

    Don’t fancy buying from JSAUX and don’t need the charger + extra expense of the official Steam Deck Docking Station? ivoler are another good choice.

  • [Old] Timeline of Eamon history

    This article is a timeline of events in (or related to) the history of the Eamon text adventure series, from its earliest influences to the latest developments. For a more detailed narrative account, please see History of Eamon.

  • [Old] A Pico Z-machine

    I’ve finished a rough port of the bocfel Z-code interpreter for the Pico. To avoid confusion, I have decided to call it pocfel. According to the dog developer the p indicates that Fido’s upside down windowing system has been used rather than GLK to display the text. From my point of view the letter p does not look like an upside down b.

    Games are saved using a 0.5MB LittleFS partition located at 1MB while the Z-code binary is loaded as a separate uf2 image starting at 1.5MB in flash.

  • Hackaday ☛ Seeing If Cheating At Chess The Hard Way Is Even Possible

    With all the salacious stories about a cheating scandal rocking the world of championship-level chess, you’d think that we’d have delved into the story at least a bit here on Hackaday, especially given the story’s technical angle. But we haven’t, and it’s not because we’re squeamish about the details of the alleged cheat; rather, it’s because it’s just too easy to pun your way through a story like this. The lowest-hanging fruit isn’t always the sweetest.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, September 2022

  As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Sensing board equipped with ESP32-S3 SoC

    CrowdSupply recently featured the Bee Motion S3 board which integrates sensors such as a PIR motion and a light ambient sensor. This open source board also provides a LiPo battery charge circuitry for portable IoT applications and a Stemma connector to easily integrate additional sensor boards.

  • Stacey on IoT ☛ How John Deere built its own cellular network for its factory

    John Deere purchased the spectrum as part of an overall plan to modernize its factories. The company has had wired Ethernet in its factories for years; it even built its own manufacturing plant software. And the Moline plant has Wi-Fi networks in use today. It also has tested using Bluetooth and other wireless technologies, for location services. It is, in other words, a company with sophisticated IT and OT convergence.

    So let’s talk wireless, since that’s why I was there. Tracy Schrauben, a manufacturing emerging technologies manager at John Deere, told me the goal is to make factories wireless so it’s easier to reconfigure work stations whenever products or plans change. Doing so will save time and money in the form of extra cabling and Ethernet drops. The factories also have thousands of devices — among them handheld drills, loaders, and more — that can wander from station to station (either intentionally or not), and using wireless technologies to track that equipment saves time and money, too.

  • Adafruit ☛ Quick and easy aluminum casting

    In this Daniel Lupien YouTube short, he show you how easy it is to create a simple mold and cast it with aluminum.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • New Android Games: Best New Android Games This Week

  • XDA ☛ Vivaldi browser debuts new welcome flow and performance updates for Android

  • The Sun ☛ Warning for millions of Android phone owners – beware of tiny dot on screen | The Sun

  • Make Use Of ☛ 4 Ways to Improve the GPS Location Accuracy on Android Devices

  • Android Headlines ☛ Galaxy S21 – Galaxy A52 Get New Android 13 Beta Updates

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ 10 OpenOffice Tips and Tricks to Improve Productivity

    Apache OpenOffice is a free, open-source office suite that supports user privacy and stores all your work in OpenDocument format (ODF). The software is compatible with popular closed-source office alternatives, such as Microsoft Office, and covers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and database applications. Here’s a list of OpenOffice tips that you need to know.

• Programming/Development

  • [Old] Human-Centered Computing

    I’ve come to a professional focus over the years, and recently I’ve started summarizing it as “making software easier through removing accidental complexity and promoting evolutionary design, good abstractions, and end-user programming.” I’m glad that others are researching from a theoretical starting point, but for myself I’m glad to be learning and experimenting about these things from a hands-on starting point. If nothing else, it’s a great way to validate that human-centered computing isn’t just a university hobby: it’s an attempt to meet real needs at real organizations like the nonprofit I worked at, and like our clients at Big Nerd Ranch.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ The number of comparisons needed to sort a shuffled array: qsort versus std::sort

    Given an array of N numbers of type double, the standard way to sort it in C is to invoke the qsort function

  • Soylent News ☛ My Law of Effort for Secure Data Protection in Software

    I recently had to work with a large piece of well aged and reliable legacy software that had to be modified to include data protection for some sensitive personal information due to recent legislation. Developers not experienced with security bolted on some encryption. They made up their minds on what to do on the fly, as they tried to somehow add the security features. It could be expected, that under such circumstances, they ended up with a confusing mess of obfuscation that couldn’t even really called “secure”. Anyone with knowledge of the inner workings would be able to reconstruct all the data from accessible files. Yet they had to write extra software, not only for handling passwords, but also for moving data between machines that could be moved by simple file transfer before. Debugging this also became annoying, with many road stops, and I flinched a lot.

  • Sean Conner ☛ An answer to my question about unit tests

    I was browsing Gemini when I came across a response to my unit test question: [...]

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Where Logic Lives

    A primer. CSS is Turing complete, but it doesn’t behave like most other languages (no native package support, and hard to share styles between rules).

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ How the repos on this site work

    I got burned pretty badly by darcs and its “theory of patches”. Git’s model as a content-addressable file system suits me just fine.♥

  • Hari Rana ☛ How I Started Programming, and How You Can Too

    I am writing this article on my birthday to give my thanks and appreciations to those who helped me start and continue my journey with programming. I want to return the favor by explaining how I started programming, for those who are struggling with getting started with programming, and give them some motivation to continue their journey.

Leftovers

• [Old] Disagreeing About Tech Respectfully

  It’s inevitable that developers will use different technologies from one another and that they won’t agree on the assessment of those technologies. That disagreement can often end up being disrespectful–but it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a way to disagree that’s more respectful of other developers, as well as being more intellectually honest and productive.

  In no particular order, here are fourteen principles about how to disagree about tech respectfully.

• The Future of the Web is on the Edge

  When people say “the edge,” they mean that your site or app is going to be hosted simultaneously on multiple servers around the globe, always close to a user. When someone requests your site/app, they will be directed to the one closest to them geographically. These distributed servers not only serve static assets, but can also execute custom code that can power a dynamic web app.

  Moving servers closer to end-users is also a physical approach towards latency optimization. This means lower latency on every single page load. The longer your pages take to load, the more likely users will bounce. 32% more likely according to Google research when load speeds go from 1 second to 3 seconds. 90% more likely when speeds go from 1 second to 5 seconds. Users will visit 9 pages when pages load in 2 seconds, but only 3 pages when they load in 7 seconds.

  That’s the gist. Now the nuance.

• Science

  • David Rosenthal ☛ The “DNA Typewriter”

    It is time to catch up on a few developments in the field of storing data via chemicals, such as DNA. Below the fold I discuss a half-dozen recent reports.

• Education

  • Hindu Post ☛ Taliban expel schoolgirls who are 13 or older or have reached puberty

    The expulsions in Kandahar are part of the Taliban’s enforcement of its deeply controversial ban, which has fuelled protests inside the country and attracted international condemnation.

    According to the Taliban’s extremist view of Islamic Sharia law, girls who have reached puberty must be segregated from male students and teachers. The militants have claimed that, due to a shortage of female teachers, they cannot permit pubescent girls to attend school. Before the Taliban takeover, many girls’ schools were already segregated.

    The Taliban have not given exceptions to girls who started school late, had to repeat school, or have learning disabilities, RFE/RL reported.

  • International Business Times ☛ Regressive Taliban Dashes Hopes of Reform, Expel Girls Above 13 From Schools in Countrywide Crackdown

    In yet another regressive move that dashes all hope that Afghanistan’s Taliban might reform itself, the militant movement has banned school girls above 13 from schools. The Taliban have carried out inspections of girls’ schools in the Kandahar province and removed hundreds of children who have attained puberty, according to reports.

    There are already an estimated 3 million girls in Afghanistan who are being deprived of an education, IANS reports.

  • RFERL ☛ Taliban Inspects Girls’ Schools, Expels Hundreds Of Pubescent Students

    Since seizing power last year, the militant group has barred girls who are 13 or older or above the sixth grade from attending school.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 2022 Supercon: More Talks, More Speakers!

    Round two of the 2022 Supercon talks is out, and it’s another superb lineup. This round is full of high voltage, art, and science. If you’ve ever dreamed of starting up your own hacker company, making your own refrigerator, teaching your toaster to think, or just making your breath glow, then Supercon is where you want to be Nov. 4-6!

  • Hackaday ☛ Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy

    If you plan to attend Supercon or some other hacker conference, know that you’re going to get a badge with a SAO (Simple Add-On) connector, a 4-pin or 6-pin connector that you can plug an addon board onto. There’s myriads of SAOs to choose from, and if you ever felt like your choice paralysis wasn’t intense enough, now you have the option of getting a Jolly Wrencher SAO board!

  • Hackaday ☛ A Cassette Interface For A 6502 Breadboard Computer, Kansas City-Style

    It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long way from being the commodity they are today, cassettes enjoyed a long run at the top of the bulk data storage heap.

  • Hackaday ☛ Dumping An EMMC Chip With Many Bodge Wires

    Sometimes, you know where the data you need is stored, you just don’t have a way to access it. In this case, [GetHypoxic] needed to rip data off an eMMC chip, salvaged out of a camera. With no desire to wait for an adapter to show up, it was time to bust out the bodge!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Medforth ☛ According to Anasse Kazib, pointing out that it is customary in France to wipe one’s butt with toilet paper instead of by hand is “Islamophobic”

    Translation: The event company Lomatec has been accused of “Islamophobia” on social media for a message reminding its employees of certain hygiene regulations and has been under cyber attack for the past 24 hours. Dozens & dozens of messages have been posted on Google in an attempt to damage their reputation 1/2 This French medium-sized company, founded in the 1950s & based in Sevran, and yet making no reference whatsoever to any religion in the message attributed to it, is accused of being unhygienic, discriminatory, inciting racial and religious hatred, etc.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Whistleblower Lawsuit: Investment Fund Accused Of Defrauding COVID Relief Program Agrees To Pay Fine

  • Scheerpost ☛ Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks the US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic

    Prof. Jeffrey Sachs sheds light on the “alternative hypothesis” that COVID could be a biotech blunder.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Jeffrey Sachs: US Biotech Possibly Behind Covid Origins and Cover-Up

    Jeffrey Sachs alleges a vast cover-up of Covid origins, including by former members of his commission, and details the personal attacks he has incurred for speaking out.

  • The Nation ☛ A Cholera Outbreak in a Haitian Prison Threatens to Kill Hundreds Within Days

    Last Friday morning, after pacing around a cellmate’s decaying body for days, he couldn’t take it anymore. Despite the guards’ orders, he began lifting up the wet body to drag it from the small space they shared. The guards saw him. Shouting ensued. A few moments later, he too was dead—shot and killed for trying to remove the corpse. What were the guards at Haiti’s National Penitentiary so afraid of that they killed this man? “I think it’s called kolera or koleria. I don’t know how to say it in the [Kreyol] language, but it sounds like that,” a man inside the prison told us as he narrated recent events there via a cell phone. To mitigate the risk of retaliation, this man must remain anonymous; we’ll call him Moses.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Thousands in Haiti Protest Government Call for Foreign Military Intervention

    “It is unconstitutional and an act against the demands of the Haitian people.”

• Linux Foundation

  • The New Stack ☛ Making Europe’s ‘Romantic’ Open Source World More Practical [Ed: Disclosure missing. Heather Joslyn is paid by the Microsoft-funded anti-Linux Foundation to issue these The New Stack ☛ terrible and misleading puff pieces. LF ‘Europe’ is a monopolists’ think tank, foreign interference.]

• Security

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Microsoft Patch Tuesday, October 2022 Edition

    Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Fortinet authentication bypass flaw being exploited in the wild

    An authentication bypass flaw in security firm Fortinet’s products, which was patched on 6 October, is being exploited in the wild, the company has confirmed.

    It said CVE-2022-40684 was an authentication bypass on the administrative interface that enables remote threat actors to log into FortiGate firewalls, FortiProxy Web proxies, and FortiSwitch Manager on-premise management instances.

    The advisory issued by Fortinet said an attacker who exploited the flaw would be able to execute unauthorised code or commands.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Telstra chair refuses to criticise Optus over data breach

    Telstra chairman John Mullen has defended Optus over the recent major data breach, saying it was easy to be critical of another company’s performance when one was not in the firing line.

    Mullen told the company’s AGM on Tuesday: “…may I just say that it is easy for third parties to be critical of companies who have suffered devastating cyber-attacks such as happened recently to Optus.

    “Let me be blunt, however, and say that it is easy to be critical when it isn’t you in the firing line, and we should all avoid hubris because no-one can be complacent and no organisation can ever be 100% sure that it is completely protected and safe.

    “The threat and sophistication of the attackers grows every day, and to address the threat business needs to put aside competitive rivalry, and work constructively across industries, with government, and with the community to protect Australia from this modern scourge.”

  • ZDNet ☛ Microsoft Patch Tuesday: 84 new vulnerabilities | ZDNET

    This release comes on top of 12 patches for CVEs in Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) released earlier this month.

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft Exchange servers hacked to deploy LockBit ransomware

    Microsoft is investigating reports of a new zero-day bug abused to hack Exchange servers which were later used to launch Lockbit ransomware attacks.

    In at least one such incident from July 2022, the attackers used a previously deployed web shell on a compromised Exchange server to escalate privileges to Active Directory admin, steal roughly 1.3 TB of data, and encrypt network systems.

    As described by South Korean cybersecurity firm AhnLab, whose forensic analysis experts were hired to help with the investigation, it took the threat actors only a week to hijack the AD admin account from when the web shell was uploaded.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michael West Media ☛ Scraping the bottom of the barrel in assault on privacy

      While it does initially require ‘permission’ from the user when they hand over their login details and password, the user has no control over the ongoing collection process.

      It is essentially unregulated data sharing: the scraper can access it, download it, harvest it, sell it, and do whatever they would like with it without the active consent or knowledge of the customer.

      The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has been pushing for open access to consumers data and have not yet responded to a request for comment.

    • Techdirt ☛ University Rolls Back Bizarre Laboratory Surveillance Tech Deployment After Students Call Bullshit

      People come up with some really strange stuff to do when they have a modicum of power and apparently no idea how to utilize it responsibly. Such is the case at Northeastern University, a research university located in Boston, Massachusetts.

    • EFF ☛ First Court in California Suppresses Evidence from Overbroad Geofence Warrant

      Google has created a three-step process for responding to geofence warrants. First, it provides police with a list of de-identified device IDs for all devices in the area. In the second step, police may narrow the devices in which they’re interested and expand the geographic area or time period to see where those devices came from before or went to after the time of the crime. Finally, in the third step, police further narrow the devices in which they’re interested, and Google provides police those device IDs and full user account information. In general, police only seek one warrant to cover the entire process, which allows the police significant discretion in determining which devices to target for further information from Google.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ABC ☛ Iran’s crackdown on protests intensifies in Kurdish region

    Riot police fired into residential neighborhoods in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, as Amnesty International and the White House’s national security adviser criticized the violence targeting demonstrators angered by the death of Mahsa Amini.

  • SCMP ☛ Radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir backs Bali bombers, vows to enforce Islamic law in Indonesia

    The 84-year-old also called for establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia, saying that is the only way to practice perfect Islamic law

  • Medforth ☛ France: In the northern districts of Marseille, the private Catholic school “Saint-Jo” enrols more than 95% Muslim pupils

    At first sight, “Saint-Jo” alias Saint-Joseph Viala is no different from other types of schools in La Cabucelle, one of the famous northern districts of Marseille. The school is Catholic, but there is no catechesis, but “inter-religious teaching”. The children, from two-year-old toddlers to third graders, are over 95 % Muslims with a North African migrant background. The same noises can be heard in the courtyard of the older children and in the courtyard of the adjacent kindergarten. The same buildings, more or less dilapidated, stand next to the same prefabricated buildings. There is a vegetable garden, like everywhere else, and physical exercises in the morning before going to class. Mothers, veiled or not, and the few fathers who accompany the youngest are asked to stay at the door of the institution, which no one enters who is not duly authorised to do so. (…)

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Telex photojournalist István Huszti’s photos from Ukraine win prestigious award

    Telex photojournalist István Huszti was awarded this year’s Hégető Honorka Award for photojournalism. The award is named after a Hungarian editor-journalist who died in a tragic car accident in 2003.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ We need one more coat of arms for the math book, which one should we pick? The Russian one, of course!

  • Meduza ☛ Rostov and Kursk governors announce ‘second wave’ of mobilization — Meduza

    Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s Rostov Region, wrote on his Telegram channel that his regional government had received “a new mobilization assignment.” Regional draft offices, he added, have already begun work on this new task.

  • Meduza ☛ Nissan to exit Russian market and sell assets to Moscow — Meduza

    Nissan is withdrawing from the Russian market and selling all of its assets in the country to the Russian government, Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry reported Tuesday.

  • Techdirt ☛ Uvalde School District Kicks Ineffectual Officers To The Curb, Suspends Entire District Police Force

    The Uvalde (Texas) PD’s response to a school shooting was to show up and then do nothing for more than an hour. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies hung back as a gunman terrorized a classroom full of elementary school students, ultimately killing 19 kids and two teachers.

  • The Nation ☛ “The Class War Never Ends, the Master Never Relents”: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

    As I was reading today’s interview between David Barsamian of Alternative Radio and the remarkable Noam Chomsky, now 93 years old and still so much in and of our world, I had a “memory” flash of sorts. I wondered what, in his 20s, Tom Engelhardt would have thought of this ever more extreme planet if, as in one of the sci-fi novels he then read so avidly, he had been transported more than half a century into the future to this very America. And you know exactly the country I mean.

  • The Nation ☛ Embarrassed by Military Failures, Putin Takes Revenge on Ukraine’s Civilians

    Mykolaiv, Ukraine—Shortly before one in the morning on Monday, Serghiy awoke to the sound of a loud boom. It was louder than the usual sounds of the frequent shelling in this city in southern Ukraine, so he gathered that this one was a close hit. There were four more booms in the next 30 minutes or so, each one sounding more distant from his neighborhood south of the city, near occupied Kherson, and each one approaching closer to the city center.

  • The Nation ☛ Peace for Ukraine

  • Counter Punch ☛ Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine?

    Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

  • The Nation ☛ The Cuban Missile Crisis Was 60 Years Ago, but It’s Urgently Relevant Today

    Next week marks 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis—the 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union widely regarded as the closest we ever came to global nuclear war. On this anniversary, as we veer terrifyingly close to the brink of Armageddon once again, we should look to that crisis to guide us in resolving our present one.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “People Do Have Power”: Frances Fox Piven at 90 on Movements, Preserving Democratic Rights, & Fascism

    As the United States heads into another recession and labor organizing is surging, we speak with leading sociologist and longtime social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven as she turns 90 years old. “We’re at another juncture: a bitter contest about democratic rights,” says Piven, who claims the U.S. has always been a “limited democracy.” Despite attacks on fundamental rights, Piven says, “people do have power” to organize and protect their rights, because “we live in a complex, integrated society where the activities of ordinary people really do matter.” Piven’s groundbreaking books include “Regulating the Poor” and “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” with her late husband and collaborator Richard Cloward.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Orbán: Biden went too far, Trump is the hope for peace

  • Scheerpost ☛ How the West’s Sanctions on Russia Boomeranged

    If the damage inflicted by sanctions on the regime in Moscow is less than expected, the self-harm to the rest of Europe and to a lesser degree the US, has been far greater.

  • TruthOut ☛ Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Nuclear War Could Threaten to Erupt

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | As Ukraine Burns, the US and China Play With Nuclear Fire Over Taiwan

    Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Don’t Just Worry About Nuclear War—Do Something to Help Prevent It

    This is an emergency.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘What are they hoping for?’ A dispatch from Kyiv, where Russia is shelling civilian targets at a rate not seen since the start of the full-scale war — Meduza

    Story by Alexander Rybin. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.

  • Meduza ☛ On day two of massive air strikes, Russia targeted Ukraine’s power infrastructure Ukrainian regions report how much damage they took today — Meduza

    This morning, Russia resumed the massive shelling of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure that it had started the day before. Air-strike warnings were issued in all regions of Ukraine. Reports emerged about shelling and drone attacks in Kyiv and the regions surrounding Kyiv, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Rivne, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia continues attacks on Ukrainian cities — Meduza

    Russian forces continued to attack cities throughout Ukraine into Tuesday morning, according to local officials in the Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia regions.

  • Meduza ☛ Forbes Ukraine: Russia spent at least $400 million attacking Ukrainian cities on Monday — Meduza

    The wide-scale missile attack on cities throughout Ukraine on Monday cost the Russian government between $400 million and $700 million, according to an estimate from Forbes Ukraine.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Peace is a Fading Hope in Yemen

    Biden had promised to end US assistance to the coalition, both on the campaign trail and in his first major foreign policy speech as president on February 4, 2021.  Biden has scaled back US assistance, but the US continues to sell massive quantities of arms to the Saudis and Emiratis.

  • Counter Punch ☛ From Nuclear Sub Commander to Nuclear Weapons Abolitionist

    Later in his career, Rogers began to raise his voice against what he saw as a national security strategy flawed by its reliance on weapons that would cause a global holocaust. After he retired, he became an advocate for nuclear weapons abolition, and has been arrested at least 10 times blocking the gates at the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington, site of the largest concentration of deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.

  • Meduza ☛ Four people dead in weekend Crimean Bridge blast — including Moscow Arbitration Court judge — Meduza

    The death toll from the October 8 explosion on the Crimean Bridge has risen to four people, TASS reports, citing an anonymous source in the emergency-response services.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Dems Unveil ‘Simple Yet Urgent’ Bill Blocking US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia

    “Saudis must reverse their oil supply cuts, which aid and abet Russia’s savage criminal invasion, endanger the world economy, and threaten higher gas prices at U.S. pumps.”

  • Meduza ☛ The Wagner Group’s ‘best practices’ go mainstream Following Prigozhin’s example, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has begun recruiting soldiers among Russia’s inmates — Meduza

    The Russian Defense Ministry has begun to recruit new soldiers from among the inmates of Russia’s so-called “red” penal colonies. This is a class of penal institutions where some of the inmates are former law-enforcement and state-security servicemen. In “red” colonies, convicts are permitted to organize a good deal of their daily life, unlike the other “castes” of inmates in the Russian penal system. According to the media project Vazhnye Istorii (iStories), no later than the end of September, the Ministry of Defense began to recruit soldiers for a new formation called Storm among the people currently imprisoned in the “red” colonies. Military recruitment among convicts used to be something only done by Evgeny Prigozhin, the notorious founder of the Wagner Group — Prigozhin’s “private military company” that fought in Syria in 2015, and is now taking part in Russia’s war against Ukraine. But now the Defense Ministry, led by Sergey Shoigu, is taking Prigozhin’s lead — by trying to find new conscripts among the prisoners.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Justice Department Files Disgusting Attack On Journalist Jason Leopold For Being Good At His Job

    We’ve been writing about journalist Jason Leopold for many years, either focused on his FOIA adventures or the amazing (and important) scoops he achieves through them. If you look back through our archives, you’ll see that Leopold knows how to use freedom of information laws basically better than anyone, and thus wields them effectively to help better inform the public of just what our government is up to. That, of course, is the entire point of freedom of information laws in the first place. Our government is supposed to be transparent with us over what they do. FOIA makes that possible, and it only works when it’s used. And Leopold uses it.

• Environment

  • Counter Punch ☛ United in Climate Suffering, Divided in Climate Solutions

    Even though it is not yet over, 2022 has been a record year of climate-related suffering.

  • Energy

    • [Old] How the bicycle beats evolution and why Steve Jobs was so taken with this fact

      The “somebody” at Scientific American was S. S. Wilson and the eleven-page article in question, on bicycle technology, was printed in the March 1973 edition of the magazine. Wilson was a lecturer in engineering at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Cross College. S. S. Wilson said: “My interest in bicycles dates back to school days. I have always owned and used a bicycle; during World War II, I several times cycled more than 100 miles in a day as a means of transport.”

    • ACM ☛ FSOC Warns [Cryptocurrency] is Possible Systemic Risk

      The Financial Stability Oversight Council — a Treasury-led panel of top officials from the Federal Reserve, SEC and other agencies — released a 120-page reportthat identified a wide range of regulatory gaps and market risks affecting everything from Bitcoin trading platforms and stablecoins to consumer protection and cyberattacks.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Upset About High Gas Prices? Ro Khanna Says ‘Blame Big Oil’

      That’s the message that progressive U.S. Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has for voters in a pair of videos published Tuesday as part of a campaign to push members of Congress to enact windfall profits tax legislation.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Clean Energy Production Must Double by 2030 to Stave Off Catastrophe: WMO

      “Now is the time to accelerate the transition to a renewable energy future.”

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Enough Is Enough’: Top Senate Democrat Vows to Block All Future Arms Sales to Saudis

      Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has veto power over foreign arms sales, said in a statement that OPEC’s plan to slash production by two million barrels a day in a bid to prop up oil prices amounts to a “decision to help underwrite Putin’s war.” Russia, an OPEC ally, stands to benefit from higher oil prices without having to reduce its own production.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • YLE ☛ Efforts to protect endangered seal pups proving successful, conservationists say

      Conservation work aimed at protecting and replenishing the population of Saimaa ringed seals are proving successful so far, according to a report by Finland’s network of regional economic development ELY-centres.

    • Democracy Now ☛ Right to Rescue: Jury Acquits Animal Rights Activists Who Saved Piglets at Smithfield Factory Farm

      In a major victory for animal rights, a jury in Utah has acquitted two animal rights activists who each faced up to five-and-a-half years of prison time for rescuing two sick piglets from Smithfield’s Circle Four Farms, one of the world’s largest pig farms. During the 2017 rescue operation, activists with the group Direct Action Everywhere found piglets feeding on their own mother’s blood, pregnant pigs held in gestation crates too small for them to turn around in, and sick and feverish piglets left to die of starvation or be trampled. The long-awaited decision sets the stage for a “right to rescue’’ legal precedent, which would allow anyone to rescue dying animals from unsafe conditions. For more, we speak with one of the activists, Wayne Hsiung, who represented himself in trial and says the jury decision is “a resounding victory not just for transparency and accountability in factory farms but for the idea that animals are living beings and not just things to be thrown away in a garbage can.”

    • TruthOut ☛ Jury Acquits Animal Rights Activists Who Saved Piglets at Utah Factory Farm

    • Counter Punch ☛ How Rewilding Could Help Restore Colorado River Flows

      Downstream storage in reservoirs like Lake Mead is already at 28% capacity. There are discussions to cut water use throughout the river’s drainage. The lower Colorado River provides water to San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas, among other communities. Plus, 50% of the headwaters flows are diverted to Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, by intra-basin transfer.

  • Overpopulation

    • OCHA ☛ Extreme heat: Preparing for the heatwaves of the future (October 2022)

      Climate change is already having severe impacts across our planet, bringing new and previously unimaginable challenges to the people least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.

      This report, the first we’ve released jointly in the history of our organizations, provides a sobering review of how just one of those challenges – the increase in deadly heat-waves – threatens to drive new emergency needs in the not-so-distant future.

• Finance

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Inflation at record high 20,1 percent in Hungary in September

    Inflation reached a record level of 20,1 percent in September in Hungary. In other words, consumer prices went up by this much compared to September 2021 – information published by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office reveals. The level of inflation hasn’t been this high in a very long time.

  • Techdirt ☛ Everyone Seems To Be Getting The Story About PayPal And Its Supposed $2,500 Fines For Misinfo Wrong

    Over the years, we’ve posted so many different stories about questionable decisions by PayPal to cut off services from users it objected to, or even seizing the money in their account that it’s impossible to dig up all of those stories. But, by now, we’ve seen well over a decade of PayPal acting as some sort of morality police. It has every legal right to do so, though we could point out that there is much less competition for easy to use, consumer-friendly payment options. It is also an example of the trickiness that ensues when people look to infrastructure layer providers to get involved in content moderation.

  • The Nation ☛ The Human Costs of the Fed’s War on Inflation

    A. Philip Randolph, the great civil rights leader and labor organizer of the mid-20th century, said in 1966, “How we combat inflation, or the threat of inflation, is at bottom a moral or social question.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Biden Officials Propose Reclassifying Uber, Lyft Gig Workers as Employees

  • Common Dreams ☛ Social Security ‘In Grave Danger’ If GOP Retakes Congress, Advocates Warn

    “It’s clear what their intentions are: reaching into the American people’s pockets and stealing their hard-earned benefits.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘The Worst Is Yet to Come’: IMF Warns Severe Global Recession Is on the Horizon

    In its new World Economic Outlook report, the IMF lowered its global growth forecast for next year in the face of myriad “steep challenges” and warned that “the worst is yet to come” for many countries as a strong U.S. dollar worsens debt burdens and costs-of-living crises in developing nations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Antidote to the GOP’s Trickle-Down Scam Is a Bottom-Up Economy

    Within weeks of taking office, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Global Index Shows Governments Unleashed ‘Inequality Explosion’ During Pandemic

    Produced by Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI), The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2022 finds that most governments are doing little to combat income and wealth inequities that have become even more extreme during the coronavirus crisis, which has disproportionately impacted poor nations.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Good News About the Economy You are Not Hearing

    The fact that a country as rich as ours does not have decent welfare state provisions that can ensure people adequate housing, food, and health care is an outrage. But that is a longer-term story, not something that just happened in the last year and a half. When the media suddenly choose to emphasize the struggling population, in ways that they have not done in the past, that is a political decision on their part, not one responding to a new economic reality.

  • TruthOut ☛ Report: Thousands of Federal Officials Have Owned Stock in Companies They Govern

  • Common Dreams ☛ 1 in 3 of World’s Poorest Countries Spend More on Debt Repayments Than Education

    “Education systems desperately need more and better funding across low- and lower-middle-income countries.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Activists Disrupt Meeting to Demand ‘Loan Sharks’ IMF and World Bank Cancel All Debt

    “The solution to stabilizing the global economy is not going to be found in debt restructuring but rather from debt cancellation.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ America’s Rich Dominate the Ranks of Our World’s Wealthiest. Why?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Irish DPC submits Article 60 draft decision on inquiry into Meta

    The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has submitted a draft decision in a large scale inquiry into Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“MPIL”) to other Concerned Supervisory Authorities across the EU. This inquiry was commenced in April 2021 after media reports highlighted that a collated dataset of Facebook user personal data had been made available on the internet. The inquiry concerned the question of MPIL’s compliance with its obligations under Articles 25(1) and 25(2) GDPR (“data protection by design and by default”).

  • TruthOut ☛ Ron DeSantis’s Redistricting May Have Broken Florida Law

  • Pro Publica ☛ How DeSantis Remade Florida’s Congressional Districts

    DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

  • Pro Publica ☛ The Suspected Chinese Spy Who Met With Trump

    Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

  • Pro Publica ☛ The Gangster Who Changed Money Laundering

    As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels.

  • Craig Murray ☛ A Legal Farce

    Sir James Eadie, acting for the Westminster government, closed the day at the Supreme Court with a vicious twist of the knife: “If you can’t even persuade your own law officer, the shutters come down”.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Wanted to Cut Deal With Feds: Mar-a-Lago Docs for Russia Inquiry Materials

  • TruthOut ☛ Ron Johnson Suggests That Federal Minimum Wage Should Be Eliminated

  • TruthOut ☛ Greg Abbott Rejects Biden’s Plea to Pardon Texans With Marijuana Convictions

  • Counter Punch ☛ Brazil’s Lula Reemerges in a Very Different Political World

    In 2003, the crowds that had gathered in a Porto Alegre stadium to explore alternatives to capitalism greeted Lula with coordinated roars of “olè olè olè Lula!” It seemed at that moment that everything could change for the better, and that, in the words of Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who also addressed the WSF, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” Indeed, Lula’s rewriting of Brazil’s economic priorities emphasizing benefits for low-income communities was a welcome change in a world seduced by neoliberalism. He went on to win reelection in 2006.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Australia’s India relationship is driven by fear of China

    Thirteen years ago, as Indian students were being beaten up left, right and centre in Melbourne, India was anything but flavour of the month Down Under.

    But now, things have dramatically changed and Australia simply cannot find enough occasions to drool over India and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi, especially when issues pertaining to the Quad — a flimsy security partnership involving Australia, the US, Japan and India — are discussed.

    Suffice it to say that while Australia is ever alert to any report that China is violating human rights, Canberra turns deaf, dumb and blind when there is any such charge against India.

    The latest love-in was witnessed this week when Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar faced the media along with Australian Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong in Canberra.

  • Techdirt ☛ If Musk Completes His Twitter Takeover, His Fans Might Want To Start Supporting Section 230

    At this point, it seems exceptionally likely that Elon Musk will own Twitter within a few weeks. Because nothing is predictable in this saga, you never know, but the odds are that by Halloween Twitter will be Muskville. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about what that means, but in our post about Musk’s abrupt about-face, we joked that the takeover might come just in time for the Supreme Court to hold Twitter liable for any terrorist organizations who use the site and then go kill people in terrorist attacks.

  • The Nation ☛ The Rise of Mandela Barnes

    When Wisconsin’s United Auto Workers unions endorsed Mandela Barnes for the US Senate earlier this year, they did not make the announcement in Milwaukee or Madison or Green Bay. Instead, Barnes accepted the endorsement in Oshkosh, a historic manufacturing town on the shores of Lake Winnebago in the state’s industrial Fox River Valley. Barnes wanted to do the event in the city of 67,000 because its plight speaks to the issues that are at the heart of his campaign against Ron Johnson, the state’s constantly embattled Republican senator.1

  • The Nation ☛ Is Florida Becoming a Failed State?

    Florida will try to kill you. This is the Florida Rule, and it governs one of the most capricious landscapes on earth. Misunderstand the environment at your peril, as we were reminded by Hurricane Ian this past month. Parts of our unique paradise lie in ruin, and we will spend months, if not years, trying to process the experience. While Hurricane Ian has left Florida, it remains behind in the flooding and in our governor’s political maneuverings. It persists in the minds of survivors and in the material effects on their lives. Left behind, too, as porous as the sand the storm surge deposited miles inland, are questions about policy, storytelling, and the future of the state.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | US Makes Progress—But Not Nearly Enough of It—on Child Soldiers

    The Biden administration is finally putting firmer pressure on governments using child soldiers. On October 3, it announced that a majority of the 12 governments implicated in using child soldiers would be ineligible for certain categories of military assistance until they addressed the problem.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden Labor Rule Aims to Help End Gig Company ‘Exploitation’ of Workers

    U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh announced the administration’s proposed rule, which would establish a “multifactor, totality-of-the-circumstances” framework under the Federal Labor Standards Act to determine whether a worker is truly an independent contractor—a status which exempts people from minimum wage and overtime laws as well as tax contributions from their employers.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All

    On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.” 

  • TruthOut ☛ The “Problem” Isn’t Disabled Bodies — It’s the Violent Structure of Our Society

  • Counter Punch ☛ Data Retention and the Devotees of Mass Surveillance

    Despite this, EU member states continue to subvert, by varying degrees, such protections.  Fixated by notions of protecting society from the unsavoury and the criminal, lawmakers continue to flirt and court the mass surveillance properties inherent in such regulations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Real Climate Action Won’t Be at COP27, But in a Thousand Rebellious Communities Worldwide

    Two high-profile events will coincide next month. One of them—the U.S. midterm elections, which will conclude November 8—could provide the strongest indicator yet of which way our society will turn in the near future: toward an inclusive, pluralistic democracy or toward the anti-democratic “semi-fascism” of the MAGA right. It could go either way. In contrast, the other big event—the COP27 global climate conference from November 6 to 18—is highly unlikely to bring any perceptible change in the trajectory of world greenhouse-gas emissions or anything else.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Democrats – Broaden Your Campaign Messages and Strategies!

    With their ample funds, the Democrats have to aggregate the case against the GOP’s morbid opposition to humanity and contrast it with the Democratic Party’s own lawmaking, votes and positions. For example, the Dems need to compare all their pro-children work with the GOP’s ugly record of cruelty to the little ones once they are born. (See my column: Big Campaign 2022 Issue: GOP’s Cruelty to Children). Trump’s GOP went out of its way to keep federal Medicaid funds from insuring children in GOP-dominated states, lunged to revoke an Obama rule to ban a pesticide, especially deadly to young children, and blocked all attempts to enact paid sick leave, family leave and daycare. In 2017 the Republicans also slashed the already low tax rates for their Rich and Powerful paymasters.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Herschel Walker Life Hack for Would-Be Politicians

    I understand why the GOP recruited Walker to run for Senate. He’s got (and deserves) great positive name recognition, especially in Georgia, for his career in football.  His public political positions prior to running clearly fell within the Republican ambit. What wasn’t to like?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Off Guardian ☛ Chicken Little Was an Optimist

      Mostly, we all spend more time speculating on what will happen after an event rather than knowing about the actual event itself these days. The actual “knowing” of anything is farmed off to investigative bodies that take a great deal of time so that when we finally know the results we don’t care because we’re into another speculative if not spectacular event. And we’re watching it all on a screen three stops away from reality. That’s how it goes.

      If it weren’t for all the suffering and pain and fear, that might even be funny.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ ‘Nothing Left To Lose’: Afghan Women Refuse To Be Silenced In Face Of Taliban Violence, Restrictions

    The Taliban has responded to the protests with brute force, detaining, beating, and threatening female demonstrators.

    “The Taliban grabbed the girls and dragged and beat them with the butts of their guns,” said Nahid, a female protester in the western city of Herat who did not reveal her real name for fear of retribution. “I still have bruises on my back from the beating I endured.”

    She told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi that armed Taliban fighters attempted to disperse the October 2 protest in Herat by firing into the air.

  • BBC ☛ Iran protests: Mahsa Amini’s family receiving death threats, cousin says

    The family of Mahsa Amini – the 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose death in police custody three weeks ago sparked protests across Iran – say they have received death threats and have been warned not to get involved in the demonstrations.

  • Meduza ☛ The long arm of Roskomnadzor How Russia’s federal censor extends its power into Central Asia — Meduza

    Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the country’s federal censor, has gone into overdrive to limit Russians’ access to “undesirable” media. A recent investigation from Mediazona, however, found that the Russian authorities feel threatened by Russian-language news outlets abroad as well — and not only outlets that publish media for Russian audiences, like Meduza, but also Kazakh and Kyrgyz outlets writing primarily for Kazakh and Kyrgyz readers. Undeterred by national borders, Roskomnadzor has been sending warning letters to Central Asian news outlets demanding they remove articles on the war in Ukraine — and threatening to block them in Russia, where millions of Central Asians live, if the outlets refuse. In English, Meduza explains what Mediazona learned about Roskomnadzor’s power abroad.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • [Old] Local News is Dead

    It seems the answer is simple – just pivot to local news. Though who knows if your local news station is just owned by a central organization and fed scripts.

    You can see above that you may think local news is in-fact local, but chances are some scripts are from the central organization. So that begs a real question of who decides what your own local news coverage looks like.

  • Craig Murray ☛ Julian Assange and State Secrecy

    The video is now available of this discussion in Liverpool in the furthest fringes of the Labour Party Conference. While the session lacked any adversarial spark, it was a deep dive and I believe very informative. I am here with Stella Assange, Iain Munro, Deepa Driver and Ogmundur Jonasson. Ogmundur’s experience as an Icelandic minister dealing with the FBI is particularly interesting as an example of the lawlessness with which the USA has pursued its vendetta against Assange.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Middle East Monitor ☛ Saudi sentences 3 men to death for resisting displacement

    The three men — Shadli, Atallah and Ibrahim Al-Huwaiti — were arrested in 2020 for refusing to give up their home for the project. Shadli Al-Huwaiti is the brother of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti, a 43-year-old Tabuk resident who was shot dead by Saudi Special Forces in April 2020 for protesting against Riyadh’s eviction orders.

    Since their eviction the tribe has appealed to the United Nations for help in preserving their presence on their ancestral lands. Six months after the killing of Abdul Rahman, Al-Huwaitat tribal leaders called on the international organisation to investigate the Saudi authorities’ forceful displacement and abuse of tribal members.

  • Deccan Herald ☛ Saudi Arabia women reject stigma to embrace pole dancing

    Last month saw the Saudi women’s national football team compete in their first matches at home against Bhutan, and a women’s premier league is now in the works.

  • RFI ☛ Chilling documentary reveals women’s struggle for survival in Afghanistan

    British-Iranian correspondent Ramita Navai was in Bayeux, Normandy on Thursday to present the première of her documentary “Afghanistan: No Country for Women”, a harrowing look at life under the Taliban. Often using a hidden camera, she witnessed the daily struggle women face to stay alive.

  • NPR ☛ The diary of an Afghan girl killed in bombing reveals a list of unfulfilled dreams

    “These girls were targeted and attacked both because they were female and because they were from a persecuted minority [Hazaras]. They have been systematically discriminated against and denied their most basic human rights,” she said.

  • Meduza ☛ Alexey Navalny sent back to solitary confinement for refusing to wash fence — Meduza

    The Russian politician Alexey Navalny, currently imprisoned in the Vladimir region’s Sixth penal colony, is once again locked in a solitary confinement cell. This is the sixth of Navalny’s back-to-back stays in an unventilated six-by-ten-foot cell referred to as the “SHIZO,” or “disciplinary isolator.”

  • The Nation ☛ Megan Nolan’s Modern Women

    Acts of Desperation, the debut novel by the Irish writer Megan Nolan, explores a familiar sort of debilitating love affair. Its protagonist is a modern woman who, in full possession of herself, seeks to yield that self completely to a man. The unnamed twentysomething narrator meets Ciaran, a beautiful, emotionally unavailable art critic, at a gallery event in Dublin. The novel gives a retrospective account of their mutually destructive relationship.

  • The Nation ☛ Racism and the College Athlete

    This week we talked to Derek Silva, co-author of an article in The Guardian about racial epithets, college athletics, and what occurred at BYU when Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson faced racist taunts and was subsequently told by university officials that she did not in fact hear them.

  • The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Is Poised to Make It Even Harder to Challenge Wrongful Convictions

    There is a lot on the docket in this Supreme Court term that is cause for alarm: not only threats to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act affirmative action, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the Clean Water Act, but also the bizarre “independent state legislature theory.” With issues like these, it’s easy to overlook other matters before the court. But those cases matter just as much as the headliners do.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Black & Indigenous Activists Call for 3 Latinx L.A. City Councilmembers to Resign over Racist Remarks

    A political scandal is unfolding in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez resigned from her leadership post Monday after she was caught on tape using racist language about the city’s Indigenous immigrant population and referring to the Black son of another city councilmember as a “little monkey.” Martinez made the comments last year during a conversation discussing redistricting with Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, as well as Ron Herrera, the head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, who also resigned from his leadership post Monday. “Her [Martinez] inciting hate against Indigenous people has a direct impact on their lives,” says Odilia Romero of the L.A.-based organization Indigenous Communities in Leadership, who’s calling for Martinez’s resignation. “Beyond the pain and beyond the hurt is also this effort to really sideline Black power,” says Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, who is calling for the resignation of all four councilmembers, an investigation into how racism within the city council has undermined Black electoral power, and a “fundamental culture shift” in city politics.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Strange Fruit

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sotomayor Leads Dissent as SCOTUS Refuses to Take Up Death Penalty Case

    The vote was 6-3, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.

  • Common Dreams ☛ FEC Sued for ‘Failing to Protect Georgia Voters’ From Illegal Campaign Activity

    “This is yet another example of the FEC refusing to enforce our nation’s campaign finance laws.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Racism, Lies and Hypocrisy Are Now Seen as Electable Qualities in GOP Candidates

  • Common Dreams ☛ Former Starbucks Manager Tells NLRB He Was Ordered to Punish Pro-Union Workers

    David Almond, who until January managed several stores in the Buffalo area—where the pro-labor push among Starbucks workers across the U.S. began in 2021—told the NLRB in sworn testimony in August that the company had provided him with a list of pro-union employees and told him to find reasons to reprimand or penalize them.

  • Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg woman arrested for cemetery note to Putin’s dead parents — Meduza

    A St. Petersburg woman visited the grave of Vladimir Putin’s long-dead parents, leaving them a note allegedly containing a death wish for the Russian President. She is now facing criminal charges.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Predicting IPv4 services across all ports

    Internet-wide scanning — the process of initiating network connections with public services on a set of given ports — allows researchers and network operators to understand how the Internet works in practice.

    Unfortunately, no study has been able to analyse the entire IPv4 service space across all ports. Scanning all 65K ports across all 3.7 billion IPv4 addresses would take five years when using one of the fastest Internet scanners, ZMap, at a bandwidth of 1 Gbps (a bandwidth that does not overwhelm destination networks). Consequently, researchers have been subsampling the services and ports they scan, causing them to miss the majority (tens of billions) of Internet services.

    To scan all IPv4 services, my colleagues and I at Stanford University have built a system called GPS, which is the first scalable and wall-time efficient solution for predicting IPv4 services across all 65K ports.

  • Techdirt ☛ Google Fiber Shows Signs Of Life, Promises 100 Gbps Service

    Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened and nothing had changed.

• Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Techdirt ☛ Oatly Attempted To Trademark ‘Barista’ In New Zealand But Lost After Opposition

      It seems that trademark shenanigans are becoming something of a corporate tradition for the folks over at Oatly. The Swedish oat-milk maker, backed by several celebrities, last made it onto our pages first for suing another oat-milk producer essentially for having the word “oat” in its brand name… and then for losing that lawsuit because of course. You might have thought that experience would have changed Oatly’s behavior surrounding trademark, specifically in it ceasing to try to enforce trademarks over generic or descriptive terms.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Online Piracy Continues to Rise With the US Firmly in the Lead

      Piracy is on the rise. New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by more than 20 percent compared to last year. Movie piracy saw the most rapid increase after the Covid release slowdown. In line with tradition, the United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Whac-A-Mole: Sky Takes On TeaTV, CucoTV & Cinema HD

      Since its inception more than three decades ago, UK-based broadcaster Sky has been fighting piracy battles on multiple fronts. The internet certainly hasn’t made things any easier but the company continues to press on, despite what appear to be mounting odds.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Today I feel I love my life.

    Today I feel I love my life.

    I went to Integration systems classes. I don’t really enjoy Java, but the teacher is actually teaching stuff I don’t know anything about, Spring Boot Webflux. It’s based on the Java Streams and recent Java features.

• Technical

  • Programming

    • Hackaday ☛ ARM Programming By Example

      The ARM processor is popping up everywhere. From Raspberry Pis, to phones, to Blue Pill Arduino-like boards, you don’t have to go far to find an ARM processor these days. If you program in C, you probably don’t care much or even think about it. But do you know ARM assembly language? Well, if you look at it one way, it can’t be too hard. The CPU only has about 30 distinct operations — that’s why it is called RISC. Of course, sometimes fewer instructions actually make things more difficult. But you can get a great starting tutorial with the 21 programs on the ARM Assembly by Example website.