10.22.22

Links 23/10/2022: RIP, Wolfgang Denk (U-Boot) and EasyOS 4.4.3

Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Wolfgang Denk
        Dear U-Boot community,


it is my very sad duty to inform you that Wolfgang Denk, the father of 
U-Boot, passed away last week. We have lost a great developer and a very 
good friend.


I met Wolfgang the first time quite 25 years ago, when we worked for the 
same company. I was hired as consultant for a (at the time very 
frequently used) RTOS. I had no time to introduce me, because Wolfgang 
interrupted me with : "Just install Linux !". Well, of course I did. It 
was the first good suggestion he gave me. Many others followed.


Wolfgang was a pioneer and strong supporter of Open Source, in the time 
when Linux for Embedded System started its first steps. In many 
occasions he had strong discussions with customers to explain the 
advantages of Open Source, and he rejected business contracts if 
customer was going against his principles. We will miss him.


Rest in peace, my friend


Stefano Babic
      • LWN ☛ Mourning Wolfgang Denk

        The U-Boot list carries the sad news that Wolfgang Denk, the founder of the U-Boot project, has passed away.

      • Linus Torvalds Officially Kicks off Development Cycle for Linux Kernel 6, Release Candidate (RC) Announced – LinuxWizardry

        Linus Torvalds in typically fashion has officially kicked off the development cycle of what would be the latest version of the Linux 6.1 kernel series and announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.

        The two-week merge window that opened with the release of Linux kernel 6.0 on October 2nd is now officially closed and it’s time to get an early taste of the next major release, Linux kernel 6.1.

        The first Release Candidate (RC) of Linux kernel 6.1 is out now and ready for testers, early adopters, and bleeding-edge users who want to get a glimpse of what’s about to be included in the final release, which is expected in early or mid-December 2022.

        The biggest new feature of Linux 6.1 would be the merge of the Rust infrastructure code. However, while this sounds very exciting for some Rust developers out there, it’s only a very basic implementation of support for the Rust programming language that can’t be used for real-world use cases at the moment.

    • Applications

      • Linuxiac ☛ PowerDNS 4.7 Authoritative Server Brings Support for Catalog Zones

        Improved LUA records, LMDB backend improvements, and support for Catalog Zones are among the new features in PowerDNS 4.7.

        PowerDNS is a free and open-source authoritative DNS server that can be used in place of the standard BIND DNS server. It provides better performance while requiring less memory.

        On top of that, PowerDNS has a significant advantage in that, in addition to the conventional basic zone files, it supports a wide range of backends such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LDAP, LMDB, and others.

        The new just-released PowerdDNS 4.7 brings some improvements and new features, so let’s look at them.

      • PowerDNS ☛ Authoritative Server 4.7.0 | PowerDNS Blog

        This is the release of version 4.7.0 of the Authoritative Server.

        4.7.0 brings support for Catalog Zones, developed by Kees Monshouwer. As part of that development, the freshness checks in the Primary code were reworked, reducing them from doing potentially thousands of SQL queries (if you have thousands of domains) to only a few. Installations with lots of domains will benefit greatly from this, even without using catalog zones.

        4.7.0 also brings back GSS-TSIG support, previously removed for quality reasons, now reworked with many stability improvements.

      • DAOS Version 2.2 Release Notes

        We are pleased to announce the release of DAOS version 2.2.

      • Marcos Costales: Clipboard content to file. New app

        A simple, easy, fast and useful way to paste your clipboard content (text or image) into a file!

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • LinuxConfig ☛ How to upgrade Ubuntu from 22.04 to 22.10

        Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu is officially out. This is the latest version of Ubuntu and was released on October 20, 2022. Ubuntu 22.10 is an interim release of Ubuntu, meaning that it is different from a long term support release. It will be supported for nine months with updates. Users of Ubuntu 22.04 can upgrade to Ubuntu 22.10 to see all the new features right now.

        In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to upgrade your Ubuntu system to version 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, which is the latest interim release. Are you ready to enjoy all the new features of Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu? Follow our step by step instructions below and you will be upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu in no time.

      • LinuxConfig ☛ How to integrate dialog boxes in shell scripts with Whiptail

        The ability to create secure shell scripts is essential not only for system administrators, but also for users who wants to automate repetitive tasks. Sometimes, from our shell scripts, we need to provide the user with some kind of information, ask him/her to provide some input, choose from a set of alternatives, or just ask for his/her confirmation before performing a potentially dangerous operation. All those actions, can be performed from the command line, of course, but to make our scripts more user-friendly, we can use of Whiptail to customize and display textual widgets.

        In this article we see how can we make our scripts more user-friendly by using textual widgets created with Whiptail.

      • Terence Eden ☛ HOWTO: Remove the Blubrry PowerPress “New!” Banner

        The best thing about WordPress is the plugin infrastructure. A million little gadgets to make your blog better.

        Sadly, there are all sorts of ways plugin authors can abuse their privileges. Dodgy code and user-hostile features sometimes make plugins more trouble than they’re worth.

      • TechTarget ☛ Learn how to bootstrap Kubernetes clusters with kubeadm

        In this guide, learn to create, configure and run a Kubernetes cluster from scratch with kubeadm, a command-line tool that simplifies and automates cluster setup and management.

      • Citizix ☛ How to install and configure Squid Proxy on Alma/Rocky Linux 9

        In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Squid Proxy server on a Rocky Linux 9 server. This guide also works on other RHEL 9 based distros like Alma Linux and Oracle Linux. Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more.

      • H2S Media ☛ How to Zip and Unzip Files in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux

        Learn the commands to install Zip and Unzip in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish to extract the compressed files and folders archived in a ZIP format.

        This tutorial will help the users to learn the command to ZIP and unzip in Ubuntu Terminal. Zip is a command Archive format that can be used on almost all operating systems to use, especially on Windows. However, all Linux distros don’t have a tool to extract the Zip format files by default, for example, Ubuntu (especially the minimal installation). In such as case we manually have to install a command line tool to extract our files.

      • H2S Media ☛ How to Install Jupyter on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux – Linux Shout

        Tutorial to learn the steps involve in the installation of Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command Terminal.

        What is Jupyter Notebook?

        The Jupyter Project is a non-profit initiative that aims to develop and provide open-source software and open standards for interactive work. One of the most famous products of the project is Jupyter Notebook. It is software for sharing and creating interactive worksheets that work on the client-server principle. In a Jupyter notebook, numbers, text, graphics, and executable program code can be combined and made available to users. Other products include JupyterLab, JupyterHub, and Voilà.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use the wc Command in Linux

        Linux provides a vast number of command-line tools to help simplify your everyday tasks. One of these tools is the wc command.

        wc is your go-to command when you need to know the number of words in a file or even how many files exist in a particular directory. But that’s not all the wc command does. Read on to discover what the wc command is and how to use it effectively on Linux.

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

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SELinux on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SELinux is not installed by default in Ubuntu. Security Enhanced Linux is primarily used by the Red Hat-based Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora. Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a security architecture for Linux systems that allows administrators to have more control over who can access the system.

        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 SELinux 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.

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

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for developers looking to build modern web applications based on PHP. It provides a meaningful and creative syntax for simplifying common tasks such as authentication, routing, sessions, working with databases, and more.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Laravel PHP Framework on Rocky Linux. 9.

      • Barry Kauler ☛ How to give a user full root privileges

        In EasyOS, you run as the administrator, also known as “root”, with the ability to run network-facing apps as non-root, or in containers as “crippled root” or user “spot”.

        Some apps will object to being run as root, putting up a warning message, or requiring a special commandline parameter, or even refusing to run. They will even do this in a container, as they just check that UID == 0 and are not aware that it is a “cripple root” environment.

        VLC media player is the only app I know of that tries to detect if running in a container and if so will allow to run as root. I say “tries” because it only detects two or three mainstream containers; I recall Docker was one of them. Unfortunately, it does not know about EasyContainers, so aborts — we have to patch VLC to not abort when run as root.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install SQLite on CentOS 9 Stream / Fedora 36

        We already know that CentOS 9 Stream / Fedora 36 is a system desired by many developers to do their work. That’s why today you will learn how to install SQLite on CentOS 9 Stream. The process is simple, but it is always good to read a tutorial.

      • Kifarunix ☛ Delete Specific Records from Elasticsearch Index – kifarunix.com

        This is a simple tutorial on how to search and delete specific records from Elasticsearch index.

      • OMG Ubuntu ☛ How to See Battery Time Remaining in GNOME Quick Settings – OMG! Ubuntu!

        Ubuntu doesn’t show your laptop battery percentage by default, but it does give you an option to turn it on via Settings > Power — which is great.

        But what about estimated time remaining?

        On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (and earlier) this is available to see in the Status Menu. Just open the menu and look at the battery row and, lo, an estimate of how much longer your device will last before it nopes out and needs to be connected to a power source.

        In Ubuntu 22.10 that estimate is gone. The old masonry Status Menu is replaced by the new, pod-style Quick Settings menu, which shows battery percentage by default. To get an idea of figure of precisely how much longer your battery is going to chug along you now have to open Settings > Power.

        Now, I must stress: Quick Settings isn’t feature complete yet. GNOME devs are going to refine the form and functionality of it over the next few GNOME releases, adding new features and further finessing the design.

        In the mean time, if you want to see remaining battery time in GNOME 43’s Quick Settings menu instead of a battery percentage, there’s a third-party GNOME extension that (re)enables it.

      • AddictiveTips ☛ How to flash SD card images on a Chromebook

        If you’re a Chromebook user and need to flash an operating system image to an SD card, you’re in luck. As it turns out, you can use the Chrome OS recovery tool to flash custom operating system images.

        This guide will show you how to use the official Chrome OS recovery tool to flash custom OS images to SD cards. Ensure you have an SD card reader and a compatible SD card to use with Chrome OS.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • Dedoimedo ☛ The Unity desktop in 2022 – A trick of nostalgia or the real deal?

        Human memory is tricky, be it collective or individual. The reason is, we tend to forget the fine details of past experiences, which sort of grants us an average “picture” of these recollections. This means we normalize all but the most extraordinary events in our memories. However, because instinctively we also pay more attention to negative things surrounding us right now (as they could be dangerous), ergo bad stuff, and the future is uncertain, ergo possibly more bad stuff, we automatically associate positive values to things that have already happened, i.e., not so bad stuff. Hence, we all have our share of “good ole days”.

        This also applies to software. One could say, by and large, the new stuff is better. Well, spoiler, it isn’t really, especially not in the realm of code, but let’s pretend the world is better than it is so you can actually enjoy this article in the fullest. Indeed, in some cases, justifiably, old software ideas and concepts, programs and desktops included, might have been better in various ways than what we have today. Thus, a simple question: Is the Unity desktop any good, for real, still? To answer that, I took Ubuntu Unity for a spin. Follow me.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GNOME ☛ Post Collapse Computing Part 3: Building Resilience – Space and Meaning

          Producing power locally is comparatively doable given the right equipment, but internet access is contingent on lots of infrastructure both locally and across the globe. This is why reducing dependence on connectivity is probably the most important challenge for resilience.

          Unfortunately we’ve spent the past few decades making software ever more reliant on having fast internet access, all the time. Many of the apps people spend all day in are unusable without an internet connection. So what would be the opposite of that? Is anyone working in the direction of minimizing reliance on the network?

          As it turns out, yes! It’s called “local-first”. The idea is that instead of the primary copy of your data being on a server and local apps acting as clients to it, the client is the primary source of truth. The network is only used optionally for syncing and collaboration, with potential conflicts automatically resolved using CRDTs. This allows for superior UX because you’re not waiting on the network, better privacy because you can end-to-end encrypt everything, and better handling of low-connectivity cases. All of this is of course technically very challenging, and there aren’t many implementations of it in production today, but the field is growing and maturing quickly.

          Among the most prominent proponents of the local-first idea are the community around the Ink & Switch research lab and Muse, a sketching/knowledge work app for Apple platforms. However, there’s also prior work in this direction from the GNOME community: There’s Christian Hergert’s Bonsai, the Endless content apps, and it’s actually one of the GNOME Foundation’s newly announced goals to enable more people to build local-first apps.

          For more on local-first software, I recommend watching Rob’s GUADEC talk (Recording on Youtube), reading the original paper on local-first software (2019), or listening to this episode of the Metamuse podcast (2021) on the subject.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • Peropesis 1.8 released: GNU gcc and g++ compilers

        In the Peropesis 1.8 release, the GNU gcc and g++ compilers with the infrastructure they need were installed.

        New software installed:
        1. GNU Binutils 2.39. Binutils are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code.
        2. GNU GCC 12.2.0. GNU Compiler Collection is a compilers suite that supports many languages, such as ada,c,c++,d,fortran,go,lto,objc,obj-c++.
        3. GNU GMP 6.2.1. GNU MP is a library for arbitrary precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating point numbers.
        4. ISL 0.24. isl is a thread-safe C library for manipulating sets and relations of integer points bounded by affine constraints.
        5. GNU MPC 1.2.1. GNU MPC is a C library for the arithmetic of complex numbers with arbitrarily high precision and correct rounding of the result.
        5. GNU MPFR 4.1.0. The MPFR library is a C library for multiple-precision floating-point computations with correct rounding.
        6. Also libelf-0.187.so and libdebuginfod-0.187.so libraries from elfutils 0.187 software package and libfl.so.2.0.0 library from flex 2.6.4 software package were added.

        Updated Linux kernel (6.0.2 v.). List of

      • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS version 4.4.3 released

        Due to a major change that is intended to take place, 4.4.3 will be the last release for awhile

    • Slackware Family

      • Eric Hameleers ☛ First package for Calibre6 in my repository | Alien Pastures

        Not so very long after I was finally able to produce my first packages for Calibre 5.x, Kovid Goyal ended that development cycle and bumped his e-book management application’s major version number to “6” in order to make a switch from Qt5 to Qt6 as its graphical engine.

        The main hurdle for me when the upgrade from Calibre 4.x to 5.x happened was that internally, Calibre switched from Python2 to Python3. Essentially the whole of Calibre is written in Python and it uses PyQt to build the graphical interface using Qt widgets.

        It took me a lot of work to re-write the calibre.SlackBuild to also make that Python switch. After all, my single calibre package is actually getting built from many sources (44 tarballs for Calibre 4, 55 tarballs for Calibre 5) and a lot of those had to be replaced to work with Python3. Moving my calibre.SlackBuild to Python3 took so much effort that I decided to apply some simplification as well: I removed the script’s ability to build its own Qt5 libraries from source, instead I let my calibre-5.x packages depend on the qt5 package which is already present in the Slackware OS since release 15.0.
        Naturally I was not looking forward to doing the same cumbersome and time-consuming exercise again, now having to figure out the intricacies of Qt6, a graphical toolkit I had never built or used before.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • TechTarget ☛ What is a Raspberry Pi used for?

        IT infrastructure can get expensive fast, making single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi appealing for small projects. Learn what a Raspberry Pi does and explore IT use cases.

      • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Set Up Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi – Make Tech Easier

        If you’re looking to get cracking on a Raspberry Pi project, the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian) should be on your radar. It’s optimized to run on Raspberry Pi’s hardware, and it bundles a lot of useful software to help you get started. This makes it a great go-to OS for Pi consumers at any experience level. Here, we show you how to set up Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi.

        The below instructions apply to installing Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi that can be connected to a screen, keyboard and mouse. If you want to do a headless install, you’ll need to look up instructions for enabling Wi-Fi and SSH by editing files on the system’s microSD card.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Arduino ☛ Plumbing valves make great heavy duty analog inputs | Arduino Blog

        Most of your Arduino projects will require inputs and buttons are always the obvious choice. But most of the buttons and switches on the market meant for low-voltage DC projects are quite delicate. That makes them unsuitable for applications that need to withstand heavy-handed use. YouTuber Alistair Aitchison of Playful Technology designs interactive puzzles for escape rooms and knows a thing or two about building robust interfaces. He came up with an interesting technique that you can steal, which repurposes plumbing valves as analog inputs.

        Plumbing valves like the kind shown in the video contain either knobs or levers that gradually open interior gates to increase water flow. Like a variable resistor, they allow for many “values” (water flow rates) between LOW and HIGH (closed and open). One could measure the water flow rate through a valve connected to the type to get a value, but that is complicated and messy. Alistair’s method is far more elegant: measure light intensity through the valve.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Events

      • Volker Krause ☛ Volker Krause: OSM Indoor Mapping Workshop Recap

        Last weekend I attended an OpenStreetMap workshop about indoor mapping hosted by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt. After having started to use OSM indoor data in 2020 for KDE Itinerary this was my first opportunity to actually meet other people working on that subject in person.

        [...]

      • KDE Official ☛ KDE’s Google Summer of Code 2022 Projects: Final Report | KDE.news

        Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global, online event that focuses on bringing new contributors into open source software development. Like every year, KDE applied and aimed to integrate more and more developers. In 2022, KDE’s participation in GSoC covered nine projects to improve KDE, of which six were successfully completed.

        Snehit Sah worked on adding Spaces Support to NeoChat. Spaces is a Matrix tool that allows you to discover new rooms by exploring areas, and is also a way to organize your rooms by categories. The code is still not merged to the main branch.

    • Content Management Systems (CMS)

      • Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source Nim Static Site Generators

        A static site works very well in certain use cases. For example, it’s great for documentation. And static sites can be just as engaging as dynamic sites. The only real difference is that all the HTML is generated before being uploaded.

        To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 best Nim static site generators. All of these tools are released under a freely distributable license. Here’s our verdict.

    • GNU Projects

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Lunduke’s Normal Computing News – Oct 19, 2022

        A new website has launched to collect stories of people who believe their licenses and copyrights have been violated by Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.

        “We’re inves­ti­gat­ing a poten­tial law­suit against GitHub Copi­lot for vio­lat­ing its legal duties to open-source authors and end users.”

        “Microsoft and OpenAI must be rely­ing on a fair-use argu­ment. In fact we know this is so, because for­mer GitHub CEO Nat Fried­man claimed dur­ing the Copi­lot tech­ni­cal pre­view that “train­ing [machine-learn­ing] sys­tems on pub­lic data is fair use”.

        Well—is it? The answer isn’t a mat­ter of opin­ion; it’s a mat­ter of law. Nat­u­rally, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other researchers have been pro­mot­ing the fair-use argu­ment. Nat Fried­man fur­ther asserted that there is “jurispru­dence” on fair use that is “broadly relied upon by the machine[-]learn­ing com­mu­nity”. But Soft­ware Free­dom Con­ser­vancy dis­agreed, and pressed Microsoft for evi­dence to sup­port its posi­tion. Accord­ing to SFC direc­tor Bradley Kuhn:”

    • Programming/Development

      • Mark Dominus ☛ Tree search in Haskell

        To use this, you provide two callback functions. $is_good checks whether the current item has the properties we were searching for. $children_of takes an item and returns its children in the tree.

        [...]

        I felt a little bit silly, because I wrote a book about lazy functional programming and yet somehow, it’s not the glue I reach for first when I need glue.

      • the sticky mark-bit algorithm — wingolog

        A funny post today; I gave an internal presentation at work recently describing the so-called “sticky mark bit” algorithm. I figured I might as well post it here, as a gift to you from your local garbage human.

        Before diving in though, we start with some broad context about automatic memory management. The term mostly means “garbage collection” these days, but really it describes a component of a system that provides fresh memory for new objects and automatically reclaims memory for objects that won’t be needed in the program’s future. This stands in contrast to manual memory management, which relies on the programmer to free their objects.

        Of course, automatic memory management ensures some valuable system-wide properties, like lack of use-after-free vulnerabilities. But also by enlarging the scope of the memory management system to include full object lifetimes, we gain some potential speed benefits, for example eliminating any cost for free, in the case of e.g. a semi-space collector.

        [...]

        Going a bit deeper, here we have some basic implementations of mark and sweep. Marking starts with the roots: edges from outside the automatically-managed heap indicating a set of initial live objects. You might get these by maintaining a stack of objects that are currently in use. Then it traces references from these roots to other objects, until there are no more references to trace. It will visit each live object exactly once, and so is O(n) in the number of live objects.

        Sweeping requires the ability to iterate the heap. With the precondition here that collect is only ever called with an empty freelist, it will clear the mark bit from each live object it sees, and otherwise add newly-freed objects to the global freelist. Sweep is O(n) in total heap size, but some optimizations can amortize this cost.

      • Perl / Raku

        • DEV Community ☛ Elizabeth Mattijsen: Don’t fear the grepper! (2)

          This blog post is a follow-up on Don’t fear the grepper! (1), recommended to read first if you haven’t already.

          [...]

          I was in fact not telling the entire truth. The grep subroutine / method will take just about anything as the argument to filter on (not just a piece of code), in a process called “smart-matching”.

          Smart-matching basically is a form of comparison of two objects that somehow decides whether there is a match or not. The most visible form of that is the ~~ infix operator, but that is basically just syntactic sugar for an underlying mechanism.

      • Python

      • R

        • A dbplyr-based Address Matching Package

          Matching address records from one table to another is a common and often repeated task. This is easy when address strings can be matched exactly, although not so easy when they cannot be matched exactly. An overarching issue is that an address string may be spelt (or misspelt) in multiple ways across multiple records. Despite this, we may want to know which records are likely to be same address in another table, even though these addresses do not share the exact same spelling.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Tim Bray ☛ Long Links

        I was fascinated by The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time, in which no less than the New Yorker features NTP, the protocol and software by which any computer connected to the Internet knows the right time to within a tiny fraction of a second off what the best atomic clocks say. What’s interesting here isn’t NTP itself, but the people who’ve built and run it, and most of all, the way the world of geekery is presented in a prestigious publication addressed at intelligent non-technical people.

  • Leftovers

    • Matt Rickard ☛ Defaults

      Most people choose the default option. It’s why Google pays Apple $15 billion a year to remain the default Safari search engine. You can see the effects in programs that are default opt-in vs. opt-out – 401k programs, organ donation, and more.

      Defaults in technology can sometimes be stronger than network effects for platforms. Default, pre-installed applications – Notes, Mail, Maps, on iPhone.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ It’s all Gone Quiet Over Here

      I’ve got some personal stuff going on, as well as a family, a busy job and a house move. Hopefully the sale will complete in a couple days from this post going live and normal service will resume. Pinky promise.

    • Kevin Norman ☛ Convincing a Scammer That They’re Going Crazy

      According to 419eater.com, scambaiting is “enter[ing] into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves”. These scammers aim to take advantage of the elderly, people with disabilities, and others. I occasionally engage in scambaiting, but particularly enjoyed the encounter I document here.

      I received a message concerning a computer case I was attempting to sell on Gumtree. I’d listed it about 15 minutes prior to the message arriving.

    • Science

      • ACM ☛ Assessing the Quantum-Computing Landscape

        An emerging discourse in both popular and academic literature now exists regarding the potentially game-changing impact of quantum computing and quantum communications.6,18 Perceived returns on investment in quantum computing and its potential to disrupt the current classical digital-computing landscape has intensified competition amongst the so-called big tech companies and selected high-performing start-ups to deliver a functional quantum computer.15,17 While several software tools have been made available either freely or on an open source basis, most research and development on hardware by big tech companies and start-ups remains proprietary. This makes it challenging to realistically assess available quantum-computing capabilities and to distinguish the hype from market realities.1,23 Despite increasing, potentially unrealistic expectations and timelines associated with quantum computing,14,38 there appear to be a limited number of studies assessing the technology landscape from a market perspective as of 2021–2022.

      • ACM ☛ Deep Learning is Human, Through and Through

        It was 10 years ago, in 2012, that deep learning made its breakthrough, when an innovative algorithm for classifying images based on multi-layered neural networks suddenly turned out to do spectacularly better than all algorithms before it. That breakthrough has led to deep learning’s adoption in domains like speech and image recognition, automatic translation and transcription, and robotics.

        As deep learning was embedded into ever-more everyday applications, more and more examples of what can go wrong also surfaced: artificial intelligence (AI) systems that discriminate, confirm stereotypes, make inscrutable decisions and require a lot of data and sometimes also a huge amount of energy.

        In this context, the 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum organized a panel discussion on the applications and implications of deep learning for an audience of some 200 young researchers from more than 50 countries. The panel included Turing Award recipients Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Raj Reddy, 2011 ACM Prize in Computing recipient Sanjeev Arora, and researchers Shannon Vallor, Been Kim, Dina Machuve, and Shakir Mohamed. Katherine Gorman moderated the discussion.

    • Education

      • Buttondown ☛ Teaching Accidental and Essential Complexity

        So you may know that I’m teaching a 1-day TLA+ workshop in December (just 10 slots left!) This is unlike my normal workshops because it’s only 1 day and for 35 people instead of 3.1 The two workshops share almost no content between them. To understand why, I need to go into a bit of teaching theory.

        For the 700 or so new readers, TLA+ is a form of formal specification language. You can make a design for a system and then directly test the design itself for bugs. It’s an extraordinarily powerful technique but also notoriously difficult to learn. There are two reasons why. First, TLA+ involves a lot of skills and concepts that people aren’t familiar with, like formal logic and model checking. These concepts are all tightly interrelated and you need to understand them all to make TLA+ useful. This is essential difficulty: there’s no easy way to simplify the language while maintaining its power. Second, the tooling is very unforgiving, and there’s lots of unclear error messages and footguns. This is accidental difficulty: there’s only a couple people working on the main tooling and they haven’t had the time or resources to make things better.

        [...]

        I’ve talked about this idea before. As a refresher: when you use analogize a concept to the real world situation, people can use their existing mental models to work through the nuances, making it easier to internalize.

        For example, imagine a bunch of people all trying to find seats in an auditorium. Each person is nondeterministic: they can pick whatever seat they want, as long as it’s not occupied. The system is concurrent: people are making decisions independently of each other and don’t pick seats in a fixed order. With enough finesse, we can also intuitively introduce concepts like stuttering, fairness, and even refinement. Certainly beats the hour clock as the starting example.

        I also found that the corresponding specification can nicely be translated to one on threads and semaphores, showing that people are, in fact, learning something useful, as well as that a high level the spec represents an abstraction— converting “sitting and standing” to “use a semaphore” is just a matter of changing all the operation names.

    • Proprietary

      • Bloomberg ☛ Apple’s Industrial Design Chief Hankey to Leave Three Years After Ive

        Apple Inc.’s head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

        Hankey was named to the post in 2019 to replace Jony Ive, the company’s iconic design chief for two decades. Before taking her current role as vice president of industrial design, Hankey spent several years at Apple reporting to Ive. Since then, she has reported to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.

        The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. Hankey oversees several dozen industrial designers, and the company hasn’t named a replacement.

    • Security

      • Computing UK ☛ OldGremlin, which targets Russia, debuts new Linux ransomware [Ed: Tries to associate a Windows problem, ransomware, with "Linux", even though it's hard to actually install this thing on GNU/Linux]

        It is one of the few ransomware groups in the world that prefer to target Russian organisations, but this may change experts advise

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – EnergyAustralia portal compromised, details of 323 customers leaked

        Electricity and gas retailer EnergyAustralia has disclosed a breach of its MyAccount platform, which the company says affected 323 small business and residential customers and was automated through use of a bot.

        The company has now implemented 12-character passwords for MyAccount users which should have a mix of capital and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. Prior to the incident, eight-character passwords with a mix of capital and lowercase letters and numbers were used.

        In a statement issued on Friday, the company said the breach had taken place on 30 September and it informed customers the following Sunday. The platform was taken offline after the breach was discovered.

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Govt to increase fines for data breaches to $50m, says Dreyfus

        The Federal Government says it will put in place legislation to increase penalties for repeated or serious privacy breaches.

        In a statement issued on Saturday, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the fines would rise from the existing $2.22 million to one of three higher amounts.

        The government move comes a month after telco Singtel Optus announced a massive breach of its systems.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – 5G, AI used to automate counting of cattle in 12-month NSW trial

          The use of technology like 5G and artificial intelligence to aid the labour-intensive practice of counting cattle has been tested out by telecommunications vendor TPG Telecom.

          The company said in a statement that a 12-month trial had been carried out in Tamworth, adding that such methods could save time and money and also boost productivity.

          The trial involved automated, real-time counting of cattle being loaded and offloaded from trucks at the Tamworth Regional Livestock Exchange in northern NSW.

          Used in the trial were 5G and AI-image processing capabilities which allowed multiple high-definition video streams to count cattle. The data was then sent to the saleyard manager via a tablet or mobile app.

        • Patrick Breyer ☛ Data retention: France illegally extends blanket mass surveillance of the entire population – Patrick Breyer

          In a decree made public today, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has extended the temporary retention of communications data of all citizens in France for another year. The blanket retention obligation concerns identity data (surname, first name, date and place of birth, postal address(es), e-mail address(es), telephone number(s)) as well as payment information, connection data (IP addresses, port numbers, identification numbers of users and their devices, date, time and duration of each communication, data on supplementary services and their providers) and also

          the location data of electronic communications of the entire population. Providers are obliged to retain this data of their customers for 12 months. The reason given for the mass retention order is a current and serious threat to the national security of the country but details and evidence are not provided. The decree comes into force on 21 October 2022 and is valid for another year.

        • Benny Siegert ☛ Using a Mi Band with Strava – benzblog

          Every manufacturer would like to store your fitness data in their cloud. Your past data, the months or years worth of workouts, all this is a source of vendor lock-in that tech companies are all too eager to embrace.

        • ‘Digital mask’ could protect patients’ privacy in medical records

          Scientists have created a ‘digital mask’ that will allow facial images to be stored in medical records while preventing potentially sensitive personal biometric information from being extracted and shared.

          In research published today in Nature Medicine, a team led by scientists from Cambridge and China used three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction and deep learning algorithms to erase identifiable features from facial images while retaining disease-relevant features needed for diagnosis.

          Facial images can be useful for identifying signs of disease. For example, features such as deep forehead wrinkles and wrinkles around the eyes are significantly associated with coronary heart disease, while abnormal changes in eye movement can indicate poor visual function and visual cognitive developmental problems. However, facial images also inevitably record other biometric information about the patient, including their race, sex, age and mood.

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Michael West Media ☛ Greenwashed: how the new “Middle Arm” fossil fuel hub was rebranded green

          They have dubbed it “green”, about “clean energy industries” and “environmentally sustainable manufacturing”; yet Darwin’s Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct is all about subsidising fossil fuels. Callum Foote reports.

          Labor has announced a $1.5 billion Budget hand-out for the Middle Arm ‘Sustainable Development Precinct’ in the port of Darwin.

          Public subsidies for fossil fuels already run at a heady clip of $10bn a year, if you include fuel subsidies. And despite all the greenwashing and tricky language over the development of a second port for Darwin, the Albanese government has just slotted the fossil fuel industry another $1.5bn, at least.

          Is it a broken election promise? Pretty close. Climate Minister Chris Bowen said the government would not stop new private investment in fossil fuel projects but vowed there would be no government money directed at new fossil fuel developments.

        • The Register UK ☛ US Dept of Energy injects $47m into tokamak fusion research • The Register

          The US Department of Energy is handing out more fusion power funding, this time doling out $47 million to 38 projects that are exploring the feasibility of tokamak reactors.

          Tokamaks use powerful magnetic fields to force plasma into either a torus or a more spherical shape, depending on the type of design used. The ultimate goal being to fuse together atoms and generate more power from this reaction than is put into the thing to sustain it, so that the excess energy can be harnessed to, say, produce electricity.

    • Finance

      • Global Economics Intelligence executive summary, September 2022

        Led by the US Federal Reserve, most central banks are now following a tightening course, increasing interest rates to fight inflation. With 75-basis-point hikes in September, the Fed and the European Central Bank (ECB) brought policy interest rates to ranges of 3–3.25% and 0.75–1.50%, respectively.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Michael West Media ☛ Holy moley, that’s the way to spread the good word – Michael West

        It can be tricky running a mainstream religion these days. Here you are, cultivating your friendly media profile, while some of your adherents make scary pronouncements about sexuality and morality.
        Even worse, they do it by citing the very holy texts you are obliged to uphold. The answer to this conundrum: talk about the environment.

        Which is exactly what religious leaders are doing. Under the collective name of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, a group of them has written to the Albanese government urging it to stop approving coal and gas projects and to stop subsidising fossil fuels.
        The 100 signatories come from Australia and Pacific nations. They include the Anglican Primate of Australia Geoffrey Smith, Grand Mufti of Australia Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, Uniting Church Australia president Sharon Hollis and Cardinal Archbishop of Port Moresby Sir John Ribat.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Half a million squandered by Information Commissioner on frustrating public’s right to know – Michael West

        In stonewalling a request from transparency warrior Rex Patrick, the Information Commissioner is punishing taxpayers too, writes Michael West.

        The legal cost of the Information Commissioner’s fight in the Federal Court to ensure she can take forever to review government agencies’ Freedom of Information access refusals has blown out to more than half a million dollars.

        At the beginning of August the cost was $301,000. The answer to a parliamentary question by Greens senator David Shoebridge shows that in just 60 days the amount skyrocketed by an additional $200,000. No-one knows where the costs will end up. And the Information Commissioner doesn’t have to care because it’s not her money, it’s from taxpayers.

      • John Gruber ☛ The Washington Post: Musk Plans Massive Layoffs at Twitter

        I’ve had a few friends and sources inside Twitter over the years, and I’ve long heard that Twitter is vastly overstaffed. There’s just no reason for Twitter to have so many employees given the scope of what they offer today. And it’s ossifying for a company culture to carry a lot of dead weight. But Twitter has had a hiring freeze for the last six months, and roughly 25 percent of employees have left in the last year — so their headcount is quite a bit smaller today than it was before Musk launched his takeover bid.

        I suspect they’re still overstaffed. But a further 75 percent reduction would be cutting with a machete, not a scalpel. Maybe a machete is what Twitter needs, I don’t know, but if this is the plan Musk pursues, it’s drastic. It’s also possible that Musk is floating this drastic proposal now so that a big staff reduction — but far smaller than 75 percent — will taste more palatable when it comes.

      • The Washington Post ☛ Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce

        Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ Medieval Times invents a modern union-busting tactic

        In free culture/free software circles, the term “IP” is viewed as a smokescreen, one that indiscriminately blended a basket of unrelated regulations and laws (copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, anticircumvention, noncompetes, nondisclosure, etc) and then declared them to be “property” and thus sacred to the neoliberal religious doctrine.

        In my column, I argued that the policies grouped under “IP” were not an incoherent mess – rather, they all shared this one trait that made them useful to those who had, advocated for, or tried to expand “IP”: they were tools that would allow you to reach beyond your own business’s walls and exert control over the conduct of others – specifically, competitors, critics and customers.

        [...]

        This is, of course, bullshit. Trademark contains a broad “nominative use” exception: trademark doesn’t let Coca-Cola stop Pepsi from claiming, “Our drink tastes better than Coke.” It doesn’t let HP prevent companies from advertising “HP-compatible ink cartridges.” It doesn’t let Apple prevent shops from saying “We fix iPhones.”

        The union is contemplating mounting a defense at the National Labor Relations Board – not in a courtroom – “arguing that the lawsuit itself violates workers’ rights.”

        It’s part of a broad union-busting campaign from Medieval Times, including anti-union “consultants” who bill $3,200/day. The performers are unionizing over pay, respect and workplace safety issues caused by inadequate staffing, especially staff who police the audience to prevent them from spooking the horses during jousting tournaments. Some performers have been attacked by drunken audience members.

      • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Chatcontrol or Child Protection?

        Today I publish a detailed rebuttal to the argument from the intelligence community that we need to break end-to-end encryption in order to protect children. This has led in the UK to the Online Safety Bill and in the EU to the proposed Child Sex Abuse Regulation, which has become known in Brussels as “chatcontrol”.

        The intelligence community wants to break WhatsApp, as that carries everything from diplomatic and business negotiations to MPs’ wheeling and dealing. Both the UK and EU proposals will take powers to mandate scanning of both text and images in your phone before messages are encrypted and sent, or after they are received and decrypted.

        This is justified with arguments around child protection, which require careful study. Most child abuse happens in dysfunctional families, with the abuser typically being the mother’s partner; technology is often abused as a means of extortion and control. Indecent images get shared with outsiders, and user reports of such images are a really important way of alerting the police to new cases. There are also abusers who look for vulnerable minors online, and here too it’s user reporting that does most of the work.

        [...]

        As for surveillance, it has not helped in the past and there is no real prospect that the measures now proposed would help in the future. I go through the relevant evidence in my paper and conclude that “chatcontrol” will not improve child protection, but damage it instead. It will also undermine human rights at a time when we need to face down authoritarians not just technologically and militarily, but morally as well. What’s the point of this struggle, if not to defend democracy, the rule of law, and human rights?

      • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ ML models must also think about trusting trust

        Our latest paper demonstrates how a Trojan or backdoor can be inserted into a machine-learning model by the compiler. In his Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson explained how this could be done to an operating system, and in previous work we’d shown you you can subvert a model by manipulating the order in which training data are presented. Could these ideas be combined?

        The answer is yes. The trick is for the compiler to recognise what sort of model it’s compiling – whether it’s processing images or text, for example – and then devising trigger mechanisms for such models that are sufficiently covert and general. The takeaway message is that for a machine-learning model to be trustworthy, you need to assure the provenance of the whole chain: the model itself, the software tools used to compile it, the training data, the order in which the data are batched and presented – in short, everything.

      • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Alan Kohler explores remote work

        Australian economist and ABC finance fixture Alan Kohler had a clear and concise article in The New Daily about the rise of remote work.

        [...]

        Alan also discusses some of the ideas people are pitching for getting people back into the office. Most of them come down to making offices nicer, giving people free food, and so on. It strikes me as superficial. The way you get people in is to give them meaningful and engaging work.

        The cold truth for managers, and more broadly economically, is that entire classes of necessary jobs are only done because people are compensated for it, regardless of the bubbly or optimistic façades workers throw up during performance reviews. It’s literally why we have the concept of retirement.

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ How lawyers became sadists

        No one – not even a Wall Street finance ghoul – wants to raise a kid who elevates selfishness to a virtue. For one thing, living with that kid would be awful.

        The greed-is-good ideology comes out of a school of right-wing economics whose central tenet is “incentives matter.” Forget the high-minded rhetoric about public duty, empathy or morals – the only way to reliably motivate people is by paying them to act the way you want them to, and to take away their money when they stop.

        Hence the drive to “teacher accountability” where teachers are paid based on the test scores of their students, or the drive to pay doctors based on the health outcomes of their patients. These efforts inevitably come to ruin, because “every measurement becomes a target,” and teachers and doctors under these conditions figure out how to make scores go up without improving either learning or health.

        What that happens, the “incentives matter” crowd – incredibly – declares victory. “See?” they say. “Incentives matter. We told teachers that they had to make test scores go up and they did! Teachers were never concerned with learning – they were motivated by those sweet teacher paychecks, and we’ve just proved it!”

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • James G ☛ Adding hovercards to my website

        I love how Wikipedia shows you a preview of a page when you hover over a link to another page in a wiki entry. This makes Wikipedia more navigable for me, particularly if I am only looking for a definition of a term (text that appears in the preview) to help me better understand the contents on a page. This got me thinking about adding a hover feature to my website that would show you a preview of links that appear in my blog posts.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ The UPC – Hopes and Headaches [Ed: See the comments in particular]

          October 19, 2022 was a special day. It was the first day when the UPC website finally announced the names of the UPC’s first 85 judges. JuVe’s journalists quickly did their homework and provided further information on the origin and previous careers of these judges here. The overall picture is that the UPC recruiters obviously – and fortunately – prioritised relevant experience and quality in their choice of the judges over any other considerations. In regard to Germany, I think it is fair to say that the quality and experience of the judges picked for the UPC is outstanding – we clearly sent an A-team. I have heard and read similar comments from colleagues from other countries with a significant number of IP cases. All in all, this looks very good. Concerns about quality of the judges of the Unified Patent Court appear unfounded, at least for now, and the new court has indeed deserved a lot of confidence to begin with. Congratulations to all new judges and to their consummate recruiters!

          That said, let me pour some water into the wine. The concept of part-time judges gives me a bit of a headache in the context of a court as important as the Unified Patent Court.

          [...]

          Fortunately, some of the newly appointed technical judges might not face such problems. These include, in particular, (technical) judges who have been and continue to be working in judicial positions in their home countries, e.g. at the German Federal Patent Court. I dare speculate that these technical judges will have to shoulder more cases in the long run than the others, but this remains of course to be seen.

      • Copyrights

        • Michael Geist ☛ Government Funding For an Anti-Semite: They Knew For a Month. And Did Nothing.

          The Laith Marouf/CMAC incident took another turn today as Globe and Mail has a report that the Prime Minister’s Office knew for a month that the government was funding an anti-semite as part of its anti-hate program. And it did nothing.

          I have written previously about how calling out government ministerial silence on this issue led Liberal MP Chris Bittle to suggest I am racist and a bully. I have written about the shameful silence from virtually all but Jewish MPs, leading MP Anthony Housefather to call on all to speak out (I also discussed this with Housefather on a Law Bytes podcast). I have written about the embarrassing solitary Canadian Heritage hearing, in which Minister Ahmed Hussen was evasive in answering questions and the time for discussion with department officials was lost over an unnecessary hour-long debate over whether to call Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez to committee.

        • Michael Geist ☛ Broadcast Bonanza: PBO Says Bill C-18 Would Give a Quarter Billion to Broadcasters Such as Bell and the CBC, Less Than 25% of Payments to Canadian Newspapers

          As the witness portion of the Canadian Heritage committee hearing into the Online News Act (Bill C-18) comes to a premature end later this week (a hearing is planned with Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and the CRTC, but remarkably Facebook, the CBC, and many experts will be blocked from appearing), new data from the Parliamentary Budget Office calls into question the claims of big benefits for Canadian newspapers. In fact, while the government has been anxious to cite the (questionable) PBO estimate that the bill will generate $329 million per year for Canadian news organizations, last week the PBO quietly released supplementary data that suggested it believes the vast majority of the money will actually go to the CBC, Bell, Rogers, and other broadcasters. In fact, the supplementary data – which was posted with a link only after the release of the PBO’s report – concludes that newspapers will receive less than 25% of the funding or about $81 million to split among hundreds of news outlets.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • bernina foot control extension lead

        i have my sewing machines on a standing desk: the foot control leads are too short to have the foot control on the floor.

        the leads looked like a standard low voltage power lead so i took a punt and ordered a couple that could be the correct length. specifically 2.1mm x 5.5 mm DC Power Male to Female Adapter Extension Cable.

      • One month report of a low-carb diet

        It’s been slightly over one month that I have started a low-carb (“keto”) diet to reduce weight. I’m satisfied with the results and it’s an interesting lifestyle change.

        Approximately the only thing I do is count carbohydrates. During real meals, I avoid completely sources of carbs, which obviously includes things like pasta and bread but also carrots and potatoes. A low-carb diet allows eating things like meat, eggs and cheese and my consumption of those has gone up significantly. To both compensate, and to add some variety, I have been more diligent about eating more vegetables.

      • SpellBinding — UGINPSC Wordo: MAHUA

    • Technical

      • zshbrev

        zshbrev allows you to mix zsh code and brev code. Not for polished li’l “eggs” but for your own duct tape and chewing gum hacking and automation. Quick and dirty♥.

        The default directory is .zshbrev/ but you can change it with the –dir flag to zshbrev.

      • Programming

        • The painless way to multiple values on Scheme

          So on Scheme and other Lisps, you don’t have to write “return” to return from functions, they just instead automatically return the value of the last expression.

          If you wanna return multiple values, though, that’s when you can write (values foo bar).

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

Next Casualty of IBM: Red Hat’s Free Software-Centric Web Sites

Posted in IBM, Red Hat at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 6cff5965d711c315ab61fa24c623189e
OpenSource.com Not About Open Source Anymore
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Red Hat’s longstanding and long-established Web sites are becoming more proprietary as they abandon their original focus and adherence to standards; worse yet, they promote proprietary stuff for Microsoft (possibly an HR issue; Red Hat tactlessly hired managers from Microsoft)

THERE is a severe problem that’s we’ve mostly covered in prior videos and in IRC. IBM has turned more and more Red Hat Web sites into “apps” that aren’t accessible. They require proprietary JavaScript. Accessibility and standards out the window. Just like that. IBM should really know better, but it probably quit caring.

In all fairness, some of these trends occasionally predated the IBM acquisition, e.g. the way Red Hat had written press releases to help Microsoft. With IBM at the wheel, however, there is drastic escalation.

“IBM has basically become somewhat of a vandal.”Put aside the Red Hat layoffs and the exodus, which are very well documented. What on Earth is IBM doing? It’s ruining Fedora like it ruined CentOS, it’s defaming the founder of GNU/Linux, it blackmails the FSF, and then takes control of GNU projects (and their copyrights) in a hostile fashion, via employees inherited from Red Hat.

IBM has basically become somewhat of a vandal.

The video above speaks of one aspect that was recently explored here in relation to IBM running Microsoft-sponsored placements in OpenSource.com (the editor is IBM staff), basically helping an anti-GPL agenda. That’s an attack on copyleft, not on copyrights, encouraging GPL violations or making GPL enforcement a lot harder. Part of a trend?

This morning they ran pseudonym's promotion of proprietary software (of Microsoft!) in OpenSource.com, so where does this end? I summarise some of these issues in the video above. █

Links 22/10/2022: Global Encryption Day

Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Medevel ☛ KDE Ltinerary: An Amazing Travel Assistant That Cares about Your Privacy

        KDE Itinerary is a free open-source digital travel assistant for Linux desktops. It focuses on protecting your privacy and provide all required information to ease your travels and keep you safe.

        It is designed for KDE desktops, but it can work on other Linux desktops as well such as Gnome, Xfce, Budgie, and others.

        KDE Itinerary works best alongside KMail’s itinerary extraction plug-in and KDE Connect, or Nextcloud Hub and DavDroid.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • David Revoy ☛ painting study

        I also try to speedup and optimize my process a lot. I created new brushes for that, but I also learn to start painting differently. I’ll give you a quick overview under: [...]

      • It’s FOSS ☛ How to Create Custom Linux Mint or Ubuntu ISO – It’s FOSS

        It’s the things to do after installing Linux Mint that could feel tiresome.

        And if you have to do the same on more than one system, it gets frustrating.

        Imagine having several computers in your home, lab, or institution. And all of them need to have similar configurations and applications.

        Now imagine this. You download Linux (Mint), make a live USB and install it on all the systems. And then you have to do the same configuration and install the same set of applications on all of them.

      • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Baldi’s Basics Classic Remastered on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Baldi’s Basics Classic Remastered on a Chromebook.

        If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Setup Elasticsearch and Kibana on Linux

        The heart of this tutorial is to guide you in setting up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana on your Linux system.

      • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Open WebP Images on Linux – Linux Nightly

        Learn how to open WebP image files on Linux by installing support for WebP or by installing an application to open the files.

      • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Install Telegram on Manjaro – Linux Nightly

        This tutorial will show you how to install Telegram on Manjaro Linux via pacman (command line), snap, flatpak, and GUI methods.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Import CSV File in Kibana

        “Comma-Separated Values (CSV) is one of the most versatile and easy-to-use data formats. It is a lightweight data format that allows developers and applications to transfer and parse data from one source to another.

      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Get KDE Plasma 5.26 in Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

        KDE Plasma 5.26 is now available for installation in Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu via PPA. Here’s how.

        KDE Plasma 5.26 was released a few days back with some gorgeous updates.

        For the first time ever, you get animated wallpaper, automatic wallpaper switching based on dark and light backgrounds, floating panels and many such features. Check out my exclusive feature guide of Plasma 5.26 here.

        However, Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, released on Oct 20, 2022, doesn’t have this version due to a schedule conflict. It features the prior version of Plasma 5.25.

        KDE Developers now make it easy to upgrade the KDE Plasma 5.26 in Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu using the backports PPA. Here’s how you can update.

      • H2S Media ☛ How To install Logrotate to Manage Logfiles in Ubuntu Linux

        Learn how to install and Logrotate on Linux Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa to manage log files more efficiently.

        “Logrotate” is a tool to manage log files. Log files, if no attention is paid, they get bigger and bigger and end up occupying the space total available disk space. Furthermore, searching many/big Log files is time-consuming. To prevent this and disk space to save, “Logrotate” has been developed.

        With “Logrotate” you can log files from a certain size (e.g. 1 MByte) and/or a specific age (e.g. 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year). to let. By “rotate” it is meant that the current log file and previous Versions of it are renamed/moved and possibly compressed in the process. The current log file is emptied. Earlier versions of the log file are included numbered and possibly also deleted as soon as they reach a certain age or age reach a certain number.

        Most of the services come with their log rotation configuration that automatically tells the Logrotate what to do with the old log files. Furthermore, system administrators can use it to manage the logs for their scripts.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How To Restart Apache HTTPD on Ubuntu 22.04

        Apache is one of the most widely deployed web servers. It’s free and open-source software developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. It offers fast performance, reliability, security, and customization with the help of numerous extensions and modules. It is estimated Apache powers about 67% of all the websites in the world.

        This guide will showcase restarting the Apache HTTPD service on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • Linux Hint ☛ MongoDB Change Data Directory

        When working as a database administrator, you will encounter instances where you need to customize the environment of the database server.

        This article will show you how to customize the location where the MongoDB server stores the data files. This is useful when you need to set a custom location for your data files without changing the source code of the MongoDB server.

        Now, let’s jump in.

      • Linux Hint ☛ MySQL Converts From One Time Zone to Another
      • Linux Hint ☛ MySQL Default

        “In this post, we will discuss how to use the DEFAULT constraint in the MySQL column. We will learn how to use this constraint type in the table schema definition for a specific column.”

        If that sounds interesting, let us dive and learn more.

      • Linux Hint ☛ SQL Fetch Statement

        This post will explore how to use the FETCH statement in Standard SQL. This statement allows you to limit the number of records returned by a specific query.

        I’m sure you are familiar with the LIMIT clause that performs a similar operation. So, what is the difference between LIMIT and FETCH?

        The simple answer is there is not much difference. However, the LIMIT clause is not supported in Standard SQL. It was adopted from the FETCH clause by database vendors. Therefore, it is widely adopted by almost all major SQL database engines.

        In some rare cases, you may encounter an instance where your database vendor does not support the LIMIT clause. Or you are using Standard SQL in your environment.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Atlas Download Logs

        MongoDB Atlas is a full-managed cloud database for deploying and managing your MongoDB database on cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.
        In this post, we will discuss on how you can download the MongoDB logs from MongoDB atlas. This will allow you to get the server logs into your local machine where you can pass them to tools such as Elasticsearch.

        Let’s dive in and explore.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • It’s FOSS ☛ PaperDE is a Touch-Friendly Linux Desktop Environment

        
        Seeing that many desktop environments exist, you may ask, why do we need another?

        Well, the answer is simple. It is good to have options.

        Having various user experiences enables you to experiment with different setups until you find the perfect one. If you are new to the Linux world, you may want to check out

        some of the best desktop environments available…

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: UI improvements abound – Adventures in Linux and KDE

          A ton of UI improvements landed this week. If you can’t find something to like in this post, I’ll eat my hat!

          [...]

          On the Information tab of Gwenview’s sidebar, you can now reduce the area taken up by the metadata and description section using a draggable splitter between it and the Image Information section that’s above it. The splitter remembers its position, too! (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Gwenview 22.12. Link)

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Leftovers

    • Hackaday ☛ New Venue Gives Philly Maker Faire A Fresh Start

      When we last checked in with the Philadelphia Maker Faire in 2019, one couldn’t help but be impressed with what the organizers had pulled off with just a fraction of the budget and resources it took to put on the defunct World Maker Faire in New York. We came away absolutely certain the event was on the verge of explosive growth, and that next year would be even bigger and better.

    • Cable fault the third reported in waters around Shetland since mid-September

      But Faroese Telecom managing director Páll Højgaard Vesturbú has confirmed to Shetland News that there was also a break on the same Faroe-Shetland cable on 15 September.

      All incidents, on the SHEFA-2 cable network, are thought to be related to fishing gear.

      Vesturbú said the hope is for the 14 October break to be fully repaired on Saturday. The September fault has been repaired.

    • YLE ☛ Freezed Fish, Pan Flute Area: Turku publishes English place name map

      The city of Turku tweeted (siirryt toiseen palveluun) a map replacing its neighbourhood names from Finnish and Swedish to English.

      Some of the Turku place names included Vasaramäki becoming “Hammer Hill”, Varissuo getting translated into “Crow Swamp”, and Uittamo turning into “Dipping Pool”.

    • Techdirt ☛ Jamaican Government Thinks People Still Listen To The Radio, Bans Music About Drugs Or Crime

      Jamaicans are being asked to fund futility with their tax dollars. Radio still exists, but it’s nowhere near as powerful or relevant as it was three or four decades ago. A ban like this doesn’t make sense for several reasons, but the most obvious reason is that it will only “protect” people who listen to the radio, a steadily dwindling demographic pretty much everywhere in the world.

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Day-Glo Elephant in a Darkening Room

      As I was uncorking my response juices, my associative processes kicked in, and I felt for some seconds like an AI evaluating some schmo’s algorithmic desires, and then thought of another allusion I’d read and had been stunned by. Back in the Civil War era, Clement Vallandigham, a leader of the Peace Democrat (opposed to the War, and desirous of political settlement) observed of slavers:

    • Education

      • uni Stanford ☛ AI Lab celebrates 50th anniversary of Intergalactic ‘Spacewar!’ Olympics

        The original tournament, which was run by Rolling Stones journalist Stewart Brand B.S. ’60, first took place in 1972 at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and featured a handful of competitors. The participants played “Spacewar!,” an early video game where players navigate ships through an arena of torpedoes, space mines and limited fuel in a quest to remain the last player standing.

      • A canon of user experience: Seminal works of a discipline (A work in progress)

        According to Webster, a canon is “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.” The initative to start a canon came from the fact that increasingly I noticed a lack of historical knowledge of our intellectual roots by many members of our community. Without being familiar with the ‘classics’ there is always the danger of repeating mistakes from the past. And also, proper knowledge of the ideas, theories and works of previous movers and shakers is always interesting, valuable and useful. Some of them were too far ahead at the time and some even be forgotten. This overview can be especially used for educational purposes getting new generations connected to relevant predecessors.

        To be more specific, User Experience (UX) as a term was coined by Donald Norman when he was leading Apple’s ‘User Experience Architecture Group’ (1995). This is a contemporary term. In the near future, the label UX wil evolve (just like experience design, customer experience or service design will). However, the field has deep historical roots. These roots are found in seminal documents on research, design and validation of user experiences in and for the digital domain. Texts upon which new and current ideas are built or are referred to. Starting from WW II on to the WWW, mobile, social and what comes after. The UX field is grounded in many disciplines and therefore is to be considered interdisciplinary.

        Disclaimer: This canon is not an inventory of so-called mandatory literature written in stone, nor a stone table for eternity. It’s a guide, a source of inspiration, and a guiding post for teachers, students, professionals, reading clubs, librarians, publishers and other interested readers. Our field has a lot of treasures to offer which should not be forgotten. I explained my intentions with the UX canon in this episode of The Informed Life podcast (hosted by Jorge Arango).

      • [Old] Information Architecture on the World Wide Web [PDF]

        Some web sites “work” and some don’t. Good web site consultants know that you can’t just jump in and start writing HTML, the same way you can’t build a house by just pouring a foundation and putting up some walls. You need to know who will be using the site, and what they’ll be using it for. You need some idea of what you’d like to draw their attention to during their visit. Overall, you need a strong, cohesive vision for the site that makes it both distinctive and usable.

        Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is about applying the principles of architecture and library science to web site design. Each web site is like a public building, available for tourists and regulars alike to breeze through at their leisure. The job of the architect is to set up the framework for the site to make it comfortable and inviting for people to visit, relax in, and perhaps even return to someday.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Szeged and Pécs join protests for teachers, kindergartens in several Budapest districts stay closed on Friday

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ ERRF 22: Recreator 3D Turns Trash Into Filament

        In Back to the Future, Doc Brown returns to 1985 with a version of his DeLorean time machine that has been modified with technology from the future. After telling Marty they need to go on yet another adventure, Doc recharges the DeLorean’s flux capacitor and time circuits by tossing pieces of garbage into the slick Mr. Fusion unit mounted to the rear of the vehicle. The joke being that, in the future, you could simply head over to the local big box store and pick up a kitchen appliance that’s capable of converting waste matter into energy.

      • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2022: Recycled Plastic Skateboard Decks Demonstrate Small-Scale Injection Molding

        Injection molding is usually focused on high-volume production, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. The Recycled Plastic Skateboard Deck project centers on the use of injection molding for a relatively low-volume production line using open-source tooling.

      • Hackaday ☛ Neodriver Ornament Brightens Up Christmas

        Stores will sell you all kinds of gaudy holiday ornaments, but there’s nothing like the style and class achieved by building your own. [w3arycod3r] did just that, whipping up the fun and festive Neodriver Ornament.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Proprietary

      • Pro Publica ☛ Lawsuit Filed Against RealPage After ProPublica Investigation

        The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both.

    • Security

      • Tor ☛ Global Encryption Day: Demand End-to-End Encryption in DMs

        At the Tor Project, we’re proud to help millions of people take back their right to privacy, to freely access and share information, and to more easily circumvent internet censorship–and encryption makes this possible.

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • [Old] Paper storage and recovery of GPG keys

          To avoid disastrously losing your private keys, they should be redundantly backed up in a robust manner in a safe location.

          As one possible approach, we will store the GPG keyring as QR codes, print them on paper, and demonstrate recovering the keyring. Do note that this method excludes backing up the trust database.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Gizmodo ☛ Meta’s New Headset Will Track Your Eyes for Targeted Ads

          To celebrate the $1,500 headset, Meta made some fun new additions to its privacy policy, including one titled “Eye Tracking Privacy Notice.” The company says it will use eye-tracking data to “help Meta personalise your experiences and improve Meta Quest.” The policy doesn’t literally say the company will use the data for marketing, but “personalizing your experience” is typical privacy-policy speak for targeted ads. And if you had any doubts, Meta executives have been explicit about it.

        • JURIST ☛ Texas AG sues Google over collection of facial and vocal recognition data

          Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Thursday sued Google for allegedly collecting biometric data on millions of Texans without their informed consent. Paxton cited Texas’ Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, which prohibits companies from collecting voice or face data for commercial purposes without first informing users.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • JURIST ☛ HRW: Iran forces attacked and killed civilians in Kurdistan region of Iraq

        Human Rights Watch (HRW) Wednesday reported that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attack on Iranian-Kurdish opposition group offices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in September 2022 “struck towns and villages where the parties were not carrying out any military activity.” IRGC claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Iranian-Kurdish opposition group offices, referring to the targets as “terrorist bases.”

      • Jerusalem Post ☛ Iranian soldiers on ground in Ukraine aiding Russians, White House confirms

        “The Russians took Iranian instructors to the territory of the temporarily occupied Kherson Region and Crimea to launch Shahed-136 kamikaze drones,” the government body alleged, citing Ukrainian underground resistance. “They teach the Russians how to use kamikaze drones, and directly monitor the launch of drones on Ukrainian civilian targets, including strikes on Mykolaiv and Odesa.”

      • Barrons ☛ Rebels Kill Seven, Target Health Clinics In Eastern DR Congo

        The rebels belonged to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a movement presented by the jihadist organisation Islamic State as its affiliate in Central Africa, Muhindo said.

      • Meduza ☛ The brain fog of war ‘We all know they’re Iranian, but the government won’t admit it,’ Russian arms expert blurts out on live TV — Meduza

        Since last summer, multiple sources have reported that Russia was buying Iranian drones for the war in Ukraine. Russia’s Geran-2 drones (“Geraniums”) are none other than repainted Iranian Shahed-136 drones, now actively used by the Russian military in attacking the Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Still, both Moscow and Teheran are stubbornly keeping silent about this arms dealing. This makes the Russian arms expert Ruslan Pukhov’s recent TV blunder particularly curious.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian IT specialist killed in Ukraine despite being entitled to draft deferment — Meduza

        Timur Izmailov, a former IT specialist for Raiffeisen Bank who was conscripted despite the Russian authorities promising draft deferments for bank IT employees, has been killed by mortar fire in Ukraine, his lawyer, Konstantin Yerokhin, reported on Friday.

      • Meduza ☛ Russia shells homes and infrastructure in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia — Meduza

        Russian forces carried out multiple airstrikes in Kharkiv Friday morning, according to the city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov.

      • Site36 ☛ Jammers: Even more drone defence for Ukraine

        Russia and Ukraine are now fighting a drone war. The US, Germany and now NATO are supplying technology against it.

      • Techdirt ☛ Black Frogs Rising: How Nature Is Dealing With Chernobyl’s Radioactivity

        The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine is the largest in Europe, and one of the ten largest in the world. It’s of particular concern at the moment because it sits close to the front line between the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and has been subject to bombardment and loss of backup power. The fear is that damage arising from battles around it could result in the release of radioactive material, or even lead to a more serious accident.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | From Our Post-9/11 Forever Wars to Ukraine

        Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its side on the battlefield. And don’t forget the Russian president’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of additional civilians into his military, not to speak of the sham referendums he conducted to annex parts of Ukraine and the suspected cyberattack by a pro-Russian group that disrupted airline websites at hubs across the United States.  

      • TruthOut ☛ Scientists Warn Nuclear War Would Make the World Colder, Darker and Hungrier
      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden Still ‘Checking Values at the Door’ When It Comes to US Arms Sales
      • Common Dreams ☛ Trump Subpoenaed for ‘Central Role in a Deliberate, Orchestrated’ Effort to Overturn Election

        The committee called on the former Republican leader to provide records of any phone calls, text messages, and other messages he sent and received on the day of the attack; records of his communications between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021 in which the election and the certification of the results were discussed; any communications regarding extremist groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who have been linked to the attack, and more than a dozen other types of related documentation.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | 15 Seconds Until Nuclear Armageddon

        “When militarism is addressed as a psychosocial disease, the absurd irrationality of its symptoms is clearly exposed.”

      • Meduza ☛ Ukrainians are notified that crossing the Russia-Belarus border is prohibited — Meduza

        Ukrainians have started to receive notifications that crossing the Russia-Belarus border by train allegedly “violates laws governing crossing the borders of the Russian Federation,” reports TV Rain, citing the Every Human Being project.

      • Scheerpost ☛ How the Pro-Ukraine NAFO Troll Operation Crowd-Funds War Criminals

        Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists and wanted murderers.

      • The Nation ☛ Nationwide Protest of Putin’s War, and Exodus From Putin’s Russia

        Moscow—Vladimir Putin, by declaring a “partial” mobilization in Russia, achieved at least one thing: Russian society finally realized that it was in a state of war. In fact, in a matter of a few minutes, the president not only destroyed the social contract that had been functioning in the country for more than two decades of his rule but also nullified the work of his own propaganda during the previous seven months of the conflict with Ukraine.

      • Meduza ☛ More than 20,000 convicts have been drafted out of Russian prisons, says Russia Behind Bars foundation — Meduza

        The number of convicts conscripted for the war in Ukraine out of Russian prisons has exceeded 20,000. The Russian news outlet Agentstvo (“Agency”) reported this figure, citing Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars (RBB), a non-profit advocate for the incarcerated.

      • The Nation ☛ What We Should Have Learned From the War on Terror

        Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its side on the battlefield. And don’t forget the Russian president’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of additional civilians into his military, not to speak of the sham referendums he conducted to annex parts of Ukraine and the suspected cyberattack by a pro-Russian group that disrupted airline websites at hubs across the United States.

      • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: The Arms-Swapper

        Antony Blinken has been foraging around for Russian weapons for Ukraine. He even asked Cyprus.

      • Scheerpost ☛ The Chris Hedges Report: Noam Chomsky, Pt 1

        “In a wide-ranging discussion, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges discuss the war in Ukraine, the rising tide of global fascism, the climate catastrophe, and the role left to public intellectuals in an increasingly restrictive and censored media environment.”

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Techdirt ☛ Mississippi Courts Are Helping Cops Keep Search Warrants Out Of The Public’s Hands

        No-knock warrants remain under fire as they continue to needlessly increase the death toll of residents who often have no idea who’s violently entering their home and, therefore, respond in unpredictable ways. Supposedly obtained to increase officer safety, these warrants often seem like a handy way to put officers in “fear for your safety” mode, thus justifying the violence that follows.

    • Environment

      • The Nation ☛ Telling It Like It Is
      • The Revelator ☛ How to Vote If You’ve Been Displaced by Hurricanes
      • Democracy Now ☛ Egypt’s Carceral Climate Summit: Naomi Klein on the Crisis of COP27 Being Held in a Police State

        Egypt is preparing to host world leaders next month at the U.N.’s annual climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, a move that prominent environmentalist and author Naomi Klein calls “greenwashing.” While the government embraces superficial causes to mitigate climate change such as recycling or solar panels, “what is not welcome would be pointing out this enormous lucrative network of deals that the military itself is engaged in that are linked to fossil fuels, that are linked to destroying remaining green space in cities like Cairo,” says Klein. She adds that the international community should seize the opportunity to pressure Egypt into releasing its imprisoned political prisoners, who face brutal conditions.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Corporate America’s Big Money Could Fuel Victory for ‘Big Lie’ Candidates

        Despite facing various legal challenges, Trump is widely expected to seek reelection in 2024—and having allies serving as secretaries of state and state legislators could help him do successfully next time what he only attempted in 2020, particularly if the nation’s highest court embraces a fringe legal theory empowering legislatures to overturn election results.

      • Common Dreams ☛ UK Court Acquits Climate Scientists Who Glued Their Hands to Government Building

        “With knowledge comes responsibility and more and more scientists are mobilizing in civil disobedience around the world as we are running out of time.”

      • The Nation ☛ A Brower Youth Award Winner Outlines a New Fossil Free Research Campaign

        The Brower Youth Awards annually highlight the most impactful environmental youth leaders from across North America. Award recipients undergo a rigorous application review process and represent the most creative, young environmental leaders of today. We were delighted to hear that longtime StudentNation writer Ilana Cohen was a recipient of the 2022 Brower Award.

    • Finance

      • Counter Punch ☛ Is Inflation Forcing People to Live Paycheck-to-Paycheck?
      • Scheerpost ☛ Nomi Prins: How the Federal Reserve and Allied Central Bankers Wrote the Obituary for Competitive Capitalism

        Dr. Nomi Prins examines the games the wealthy elites play while the 99% suffer.

      • Pro Publica ☛ The Working-Class-Jobs Candidate in the Era of Resentment

        Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passion, outside of politics, is yoga and mindfulness practice.

      • TruthOut ☛ Warren Condemns All-Trump Court for Ruling Against Consumer Protection Agency
      • Common Dreams ☛ Food Insufficiency Up 25% Since Manchin, GOP Killed Child Tax Credit Boost

        “Even brief periods of deprivation during childhood can have lasting impacts.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Appeals Court Temporarily Blocks Student Debt Cancellation Program

        The court’s one-page order said it decided to grant the GOP officials’ emergency request for an “administrative stay” preventing the Biden administration from “discharging any student loan debt under the cancellation program,” pending further review of the Republican legal challenge early next week.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Only Class Struggle Can Save the Left

        A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the bitter divisions between statist and anti-statist socialists in the nineteenth century to the vicious rivalries between Communists and Socialists in the 1930s, followed by many more episodes of destructive sectarianism and flawed strategy up to the present, the left has often had trouble getting its act together. It isn’t clear why this is the case, although doubtless the usual lack of resources in comparison to the right (funded by business) has played a not insignificant role. It is indisputable, however, that the left has periodically suffered from a deficit of analytical and strategic intelligence. Confronted with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, for example, it was obviously suicidal for Communists and Socialists to train their guns on each other. In recent decades, a different type of suicidal impulse has gripped the left, both the activist and the academic left: a fixation on ascriptive “identity” at the cost of a relative disregard of class struggle. It is high time that the left exorcised its death instinct.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Kroger Goes From Supermarket to Superpower

        A week ago, Kroger and Albertsons, the two largest supermarket companies in the United States, announced a massive merger that would impact people across the country. It will impact workers whose jobs may be in jeopardy in the name of increasing corporate efficiency, consumers whose food may be more expensive as a result of lower competition in areas where both chains maintain a presence, farmers and other suppliers whose margins could be squeezed by worse contracts by a grocery superpower with disproportionate bargaining power, and local grocers who likely will be unable to compete against enormous economies of scale.

      • Meduza ☛ RBC: ‘Tired’ Turkish bank workers creating new rules to make it harder for Russians to open accounts — Meduza

        Turkish banks have started making it more difficult for Russians who arrived after the start of Putin’s mobilization campaign to sign up for payment cards, according to the news outlet RBC.

      • FAIR ☛ Media Narratives Shield Landlords From a Crisis of Their Own Making

        As landlords continue their relentless pursuit of profits, and politicians allow pandemic-era eviction moratoriums to expire, the human toll of a fundamentally brutal housing system is arguably more visible than ever—particularly in America’s largest cities.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Techdirt ☛ Report: Elon Musk Plans To Make Twitter Profitable By Firing 75% Of The Staff

        Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is likely to close within a week. The deadline before the Court of Chancery wakes back up is October 28th, which is rapidly approaching. I’ve discussed in the past ways in which I think Musk could actually be good for Twitter, but it requires having a pretty basic understanding of a bunch of things he has, to date, shown little capacity (or interest) in understanding. One thing that has been widely expected is that he was going to fire a bunch of people. He’s hinted at this repeatedly, suggesting that the company was bloated with people who weren’t star performers, and that he wanted to clean house.

      • Techdirt ☛ Don’t Expect The US Government To Actually Stop Elon From Buying Twitter

        Honestly, the only thing one can say about the whole Elon Musk buying Twitter situation is that you should expect the unexpected to happen. Nothing about this deal has been normal, even though some moves (like Musk coming up with laughably ridiculous pretextual excuses to try to get out of the deal) were telegraphed way in advance. The Delaware Court of Chancery has said that the deal needs to be completed by Friday October 28th or there will be hell to pay (if you’re Elon Musk), and in all likelihood that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I know a lot of people insist he doesn’t intend to close the deal, or that he doesn’t have the money, or that something else will happen to stop it, and I find all of those claims to be unlikely at best. The most likely scenario is that in a week, Twitter will be owned by Elon Musk.

      • TruthOut ☛ Steve Bannon Sentenced to 4 Months in Prison for Contempt of Congress Charge
      • Common Dreams ☛ Former Trump Aide Steve Bannon Sentenced to Four Months in Prison

        The sentence amounts to less than the six-month prison term and $200,000 fine that the U.S. Department of Justice recommended.

      • Democracy Now ☛ “Democracy Demands We Participate”: Black Voters Mobilize for Midterms Amid GOP-Led Voter Suppression

        We speak to law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and civil rights attorney Barbara Arnwine, who are on an Arc of Voter Justice bus tour of 26 cities across the country to increase Black voter turnout at critical midterm elections in November. They discuss fighting voter suppression and racial gerrymandering, and the high stakes in states where Republicans have instated bans on what they describe as critical race theory. “African American voters are key to all these races,” says Arnwine. “They’re going to vote what’s in the best interests not only of their community, but the entire nation.” Crenshaw says she is handing out banned books and education to voters because “when racism is unspeakable, then democracy — a full multiracial democracy — is unachievable.”

      • Democracy Now ☛ “We Are a Democracy in Name Only”: George Monbiot on Truss Resignation & Who Will Be Next British PM

        British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned Thursday after just 45 days in office, the shortest term in the nation’s history. Her low-tax, low-regulation financial policies were widely criticized after they sent the pound plummeting, causing several senior ministers to quit. We speak to George Monbiot, British journalist at The Guardian, about her short-lived time in office, what this says about the Conservative Party, and who her likely successor will be. “You’d think we’d have a general election after all this chaos, … but that’s not how it works in this country, because we are a democracy in name only,” says Monbiot.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | How Just 44 Days of Liz Truss Made a Nation Much Worse Off

        It would take longer to properly account for all the myriad ways Liz Truss leaves Britain worse off than when she entered office than the amount of time she spent inside Number 10.

      • The Nation ☛ Leaderless, Rudderless Britain Is at the Mercy of Desperate Conservatives

        London—“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen tells Alice, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It feels like over the past six weeks Britain has been waking up to at least that—and then some. In just 44 days, the country lost a queen, a pound, economic credibility, a chancellor, a home secretary, a prime minister—and its political sanity. We don’t know what will happen next, now that Liz Truss has ended the shortest premiership in British history, but it will happen relatively quickly and is unlikely to be well thought-out.

      • TruthOut ☛ Black Voters Mobilize for Midterms Amid GOP-Led Voter Suppression
      • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Warn of Federal ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law If GOP Wins Midterms

        Led by U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), 33 Republicans on Tuesday introduced the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”—taking the party’s attacks on LGBTQ+ communities national after similar legislation was pioneered earlier this year in Florida before being passed by more than a dozen state legislatures.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | In America, Democracy Can Simply Be Bought by the Billionaires
      • The Nation ☛ Without an Economic Message, Democrats Will Never Close the Deal

        With less than three weeks to go until the midterms, the Republicans are gaining traction in many individual Senate races, and taking a small lead in the generic congressional polling. As The New York Times reported on Monday, “Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinct advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.”1

      • The Nation ☛ Who’s Behind the Racist Campaign Ads in Arizona?
      • The Nation ☛ Barack Obama Is Wrong to Oppose Expanding the Supreme Court

        I’ll start by giving honor to whom honor is due. No one has had more of an influence on my political career, including my decision to run for office, than Barack Hussein Obama. He remains the most inspiring political figure in my lifetime. That’s why, as a college student, I knocked on doors for him in Nevada. Cried the night he won the Iowa Caucuses. Worked in his Justice Department and even defended him against the mob of leftier-than-thou Internet activists who never seem to understand the practicalities of governing.

      • FAIR ☛ Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas on 2022 Midterms
      • Meduza ☛ Team Navalny adds ‘foreign agent’ Alexey Venediktov to its ‘corrupt officials and warmongers’ list — Meduza

        Alexey Navalny’s associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation have updated their list of “corrupt officials and warmongers.” One of the new additions to the list is Alexey Venediktov, a well-known journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Echo of Moscow radio station. Since April 2022, Venediktov is persecuted in Russia as a “foreign agent.”

      • Meduza ☛ Ministry of Culture: figures who ‘disavow’ Russia will ‘completely logically’ disappear from posters — Meduza

        The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that names of figures who have “disavowed Russia” in today’s “complex time” will “absolutely logically” disappear from cultural institutions’ posters.

      • The Nation ☛ Willie and Joe

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • ABC ☛ Report: TikTok bad at culling US election misinformation ads

          The report raises fresh concerns about the wildly popular video-sharing app’s ability to catch election falsehoods at a time when a growing number of young people use it not just for entertainment, but also for finding information. The nonprofit Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University published the report Friday.

          [...]

          TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, performed the worst, letting through 90% of the ads the group submitted. Facebook fared better, catching seven out of 20 false ads — in both English and Spanish.

        • Pro Publica ☛ Misinformation vs. Disinformation: A Guide to the 2022 Midterms

          It’s time to talk about misinformation. You already know it’s all around us, but understanding how to spot it and defend against it is one of the most important parts of being an informed and active voter.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Meduza ☛ 15 Russian authors not to be featured by the Moscow House of Books — Meduza

        Moscow’s central House of Books bookstore told its staff not to feature books by fifteen Russian authors listed in an internal memo, writes Ksenia Sobchak on her Bloody Lady Telegram channel. Two-thirds of that list are writers officially declared to be “foreign agents” by the Russian Justice Ministry.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • JURIST ☛ Amnesty International: Indian authorities must end arbitrary travel bans on journalists and activists

        Amnesty International Wednesday condemned the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kashmiri photojournalist, Sanna Irshad Mattoo‘s arbitrary travel ban by the immigration authorities at the New Delhi airport in India.

        On October 18, Mattoo was barred from “traveling internationally despite holding a valid US visa and ticket” to the US to attend the award ceremony of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The immigration authorities have not yet provided any reasonable justification for why Mattoo was barred from travel.

      • Project Censored ☛ Has Media Literacy Week Been Co-Opted? – The Project Censored Show
      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Journalism’s Bad Bargain

        Yes, journalism is in crisis in the United States. That’s obvious to anyone observing the job losses and newspaper closures that have wreaked havoc on local news production over the past 20 years. But few of the lawmakers and lobbyists who claim they’re responding to this national emergency seem willing to focus relief efforts where they’re needed most.

      • Scheerpost ☛ ‘Political Fix’ Needed for WikiLeaks’ Assange—Lawyer

        By Reuters SYDNEY (Reuters) – A lawyer for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said an “urgent political fix” is needed in his case because legal appeals against his extradition to the United States could continue for another decade and his health is declining. Barrister Jennifer Robinson has been on Assange’s legal team for 12 years, and during a visit […]

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • The Sunday Times UK ☛ Met says sorry for arresting Christian preacher Hatun Tash

        Hatun Tash, an evangelist who regularly critiques and debates the Quran and Islam at the park, was arrested in 2020 and last year.

        On both occasions, Tash told officers that she was being harassed and threatened by Islamic protesters. Instead of protecting her, she said, the police arrested her for breaching the peace and other public order offences.

      • [Old] Are you a digital vegan?

        Dr Andy Farnell has launched a brand new book called ‘Digital Vegan, Healthier technology for a happier planet.’ Andy is a British computer scientist and an expert in signal processing, cybersecurity and algorithms.

        He has been a technophile since the age of eight. He also does not use a smartphone, does not use social media or much of the big tech that we take for granted. He is a digital vegan. While he loves what he does, he believes the technological future that he looked forward to when he was young has been misappropriated.

        “The degree of abuse by ‘big tech’ of our rights and our mental health, which is just coming to light now to the general public, has been known in the computing world for decades. It could have, and should have, been so much better,” he says.

        Andy’s new book addresses the concerns that we all have about technology and urges readers to take control over their tech.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ Indonesian women join Iran’s hijab protests amid fears own rights under threat

        A 2021 report by Human Rights Watch said most of the country’s provinces and dozens of cities and regencies were imposing discriminatory and abusive dress codes on women and girls, highlighting evidence of the “harmful impact” through more than 100 interviews that revealed long term consequences for refusing to wear the hijab.

        The report documented widespread bullying of girls and women to force them to cover up, as well as the deep psychological distress the bullying can cause.

        It said that in at least 24 of the country’s 34 provinces, girls who did not comply were forced to leave school or withdrew under pressure, while some female civil servants, including teachers, doctors, school principals, and university lecturers, lost their jobs or felt compelled to resign.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Women work for free in Hungary from the end of October

        In Hungary, women earn on average 17.2% less per hour than men, resulting in an annual pay gap of more than two months, according to a statement by Egyenlítő Alapítvány (Equalisation Foundation). Thus, the Hungarian Equal Pay Day, which highlights the pay gap between men and women in the country will take place at the end of October in 2022.

      • Techdirt ☛ Fifth Circuit Criticizes Pretextual Stops After Cops Kill A Man Because His Kid Threw A Candy Cane Out Of A Car Window

        The Fifth Circuit is often the worst circuit when it comes to protecting constitutional rights. Every so often, it will make the right call, but most often it’s willing to let the government expand its power at the expense of the citizens it’s supposed to be serving. It does this often enough even the Supreme Court — which has spent decades making qualified immunity case law worse — feels compelled to reject rulings and send them back for a do-over.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Sisters of Alaa Abd El-Fattah Stage Sit-In in U.K. Demanding His Release from Egypt Prison Before COP27

        The family of imprisoned Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been staging a sit-in outside the British foreign office to demand the government help release him. El-Fattah, who was recently granted British citizenship, has been on hunger strike for over 200 days to protest being held in harsh conditions during his seemingly endless jail sentence in Egypt. “We’re not sure how much time is left. We’re not sure how much his body can take,” says his sister, Sanaa Seif.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Techdirt ☛ FTC Eyes Integrating ‘Right To Repair’ Standards Into Existing Energy Saving Rules

        While the last decade hasn’t been what you’d call great for consumer rights in the U.S. (especially in sectors like telecom), one bright spot has been the mainstreaming of “right to repair” standards. What began as some nerdy fringe policy activism among those eager to repair their own tractors, has very quickly become a mainstream policy issue, thanks in no small part to activists and the Biden administration.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ House of The Dragon Season Finale Leaks Early on Pirate Sites

          The season finale of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” has leaked online, two days ahead of its official premiere. The popular Game of Thrones prequel was already quite popular among pirates and this release is drawing even more attention. The source of the leak is unclear but the Hebrew subtitles could be a hint.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ EU Opinion: Streaming Services Are Not Liable for VPN ‘Pirates’

          EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar has published his advice on potential liability for streaming platforms when subscribers use VPN services to bypass geo-blockades. According to the opinion, streaming services are not liable for VPN ‘pirates’, as long as they implement reasonable geo-blocking technology.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • Unix filters on region

        I write and use a lot of Emacs Lisp but what I do even more, maybe two or three times more often, is to just make Unix filters to run on the region (with a prefix if I wanna replace the text).

      • Internet/Gemini

      • Programming

        • Sloppy tree accessors

          I learned Scheme before Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp (well, my very first exposure was to the very basics of Emacs Lisp, I didn’t even get to defun part), but I’ve done my fair share of Common Lisp since and I’ve been vindicated in one thing I kinda independently invented and I’m sure a lot of other impatient, lazy, and hubristic hacks came up with the same thing.

          I often found myself wanting to do things on car, if there is a car. Or on cdr, if there is a cdr. And so on.

          I called these accessors scar and scdr, and I at first thought “s for ‘safe’ since they won’t error! I am so smart!” but soon enough realized these were anything but safe, since they fail silently!

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

OpenSource.com is Compromised, Leveraged to Promote Windows and Microsoft Vendor Lock-in Instead of Open Source

Posted in Deception, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Recent (this month): IBM Does Not Like Open Source? OpenSource.com Has Moved From 2-3 Posts Per Day to 1 Per Day | OpenSource.com started publishing Microsoft-sponsored placements

OpenSource.com for Microsoft

OpenSource.com for Microsoft

OpenSource.com for Microsoft

Allen Smithee

Alan Smithee (also Allen Smithee) is an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project

Summary: This morning’s featured/leading article in OpenSource.com is a symptom of what the Web site OpenSource.com is becoming

Microsoft Edge for “Linux” Uses Outdated GPG and Then Configures it to Silence Your Distribution’s Package Security Checks

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:07 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reprinted with permission from Ryan

Previously: Bruce Schneier: Microsoft Edge is Apparently a Password Stealer Too, Even on GNU/Linux

Microsoft Edge for “Linux” uses outdated GPG and then configures it to silence your distribution’s package security checks.

I got bored today and decided to look at the RPM package for Microsoft Edge for “Linux”.

If you installed it, it will add a microsoft-edge.repo file in etc/yum.repos.d with the following:

[microsoft-edge]
name=microsoft-edge
baseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/edge/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc

As you can see, Microsoft has essentially bypassed the GPG check by enabling the check, and then instead of installing a package signing key into the RPM database, like well behaved software does, they point it at a Public Key hosted on their server.

The gist of this is that it shuts up the “package is unsigned” warning that prevents tampering, but then provides no assurances that Microsoft Edge updates are actually not tampered with.

If an attacker compromises Microsoft’s server, they could replace the key, then replace Microsoft Edge with a package containing anything (or just add malware to Edge to increase the amount of time before people realized anything was wrong with the package), and it would pass the signature check because DNF would check the URL and find the attacker-modified microsoft.asc Public Key.

Additionally, by following the URL to the Microsoft Public Key block, I noticed that they are using an outdated branch of GPG as well, which dates back to 2004 and is only maintained to address CVEs.

GPG recommends migrating to the current branch (2.3.8 is the latest as of this writing), and Mullvad VPN warns its users not to use the 1.4 branch as well.

Additionally, GPG says that the 1.4 branch is not widely used, so there’s likely fewer people legitimately studying it to fix it, and more likely just attackers looking for slobs that are still using it, like Microsoft.

This should be yet another example of how much Microsoft can be trusted to “secure” your computer.

They can’t even secure their own. They had a couple of major data breaches thanks to misconfiguration of Azure recently, which even BleepingComputer covered.

I hope that if you’re considering putting Microsoft software where it doesn’t belong, on your GNU/Linux system, then witnessing their slovenly practices should give you some second thoughts.

Just this repo alone sets up your GNU/Linux system to be seriously compromised.

The point of installing GPG keys into RPM is so that when there’s a breach of the server, it doesn’t affect users that already have the program and get alerted that there’s an update. A legitimate update which updates RPM with the new GPG key would have to be signed using the old one, meaning that a chain of trust is preserved.

When you point it at a Web site, like Microsoft does, you have no idea what you’ll get. █

IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 21, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:26 am by Needs Sunlight

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