GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Systemd 76 ☛ November at System76: Products, Promos, & COSMIC DE

    After last week’s feast and many, many leftovers, we’re serving up a summary of all the juicy morsels we’ve encountered this month here at System76. Bon appétit!

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Wayland Finally Supports Fractional Scaling!!! – Invidious

    There are so many Wayland issues being dealt with right now and the latest is fractional scaling, finally Wayland is finally supporting it properly and not doing it through a giant hack.

  • FLOSS Weekly 709: The Tiny Free Library That Could – Jason Griffey, LibraryBox Project

    Jason Griffey of NISO is the guest this week on FLOSS Weekly. Aaron Newcomb and Doc Searls talk with Griffey about all the lessons we should all be learning from the successes, failures and future implications of his LibraryBox project. A great discussion on standards, open hardware and privacy.

  • Video ☛ 5.4 million Twitter User Data Leaked Online by Hackers – Invidious

    What’s up, Linux Community!!! In this video, I cover a cyber security article on how Twitter user data has been leaked online. While most of the data consisted of public information, such as Twitter IDs, names, login names, locations, and verified status, it also included private information, such as phone numbers and email addresses.

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.3.0

    Hello everyone,
    
    I'm happy to announce a new feature release, 22.3.0.
    
    New features (in no particular order):
    - GL_ARB_shader_clock on llvmpipe
    - VK_KHR_shader_clock on lavapipe
    - Mesa-DB, the new single file cache type
    - VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout on RADV, lavapipe
    - VK_KHR_global_priority on RADV
    - GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced_coherent on zink
    - VK_EXT_load_store_op_none on RADV
    - VK_EXT_mutable_descriptor_type on RADV
    - VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float on lvp
    - VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 on lvp
    - GL_NV_shader_atomic_float on llvmpipe
    - VK_EXT_image_robustness on v3dv
    - VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on lavapipe
    - VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on RADV & anv
    - VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness on v3dv
    - Mali T620 on panfrost
    - Shader disk cache on Panfrost
    - support for R8G8B8, B8G8R8, R16G16B16 and 64-bit vertex buffer formats
      on RADV
    - initial GFX11/RDNA3 support on RADV
    - various ray tracing optimizations on RADV
    - extendedDynamicState2PatchControlPoints on RADV
      (VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 feature)
    - Radeon Raytracing Analyzer integration (using RADV_RRA_* environment
      variables)
    - OpenGL 4.5 on freedreno/a6xx (up from 3.3)
    - VK_EXT_mesh_shader on ANV
    
    A couple of notes for packagers:
    - When building the Intel Vulkan driver with ray-tracing (using
      `-D intel-clc=enabled`, disabled by default), libclc is required
      (both as build and runtime dependency).
    - Rusticl, the OpenCL implementation (`-D gallium-rusticl=true`,
      disabled by default), introduces a bunch of new dependencies.
      Make sure you read docs/rusticl.rst (https://docs.mesa3d.org/rusticl)
      if you're considering enabling it.
    
    For now, no driver is enabled by default in Rusticl. See here for how
    to enable them:
    
    https://docs.mesa3d.org/envvars#rusticl-environment-variables
    
    If you find any issues, please report them here:
    
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
    
    The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on December 14th.
    
    Cheers,
      Eric
    

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Mesa 22.3 Brings Initial GFX11/RDNA3 Support on RADV, Shader Disk Cache on Panfrost

    Coming a little over two months after Mesa 22.2, the Mesa 22.3 release is here to introduce new features like Mesa-DB, a new single file cache type, initial GFX11/RDNA3 support on the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver, OpenGL 4.5 support on the Freedreno/a6xx driver, Radeon Raytracing Analyzer integration using the RADV_RRA_* environment variables, as well as shader disk cache and Mali T620 support on Collabora’s Panfrost driver.

    Mesa 22.3 also adds support for R8G8B8, B8G8R8, R16G16B16, and 64-bit vertex buffer formats on the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver, along with various ray tracing optimizations and the VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 feature.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Firefox, AppArmor – self-update – Tutorial

    Several weeks ago, I wrote an article that provided a basic overview of the AppArmor hardening tool, explained how it works, and showed you a practical example on how to confine and harden the Firefox browser. But wait, not just any which Firefox, but specifically the tarball version that you can download from Mozilla. I’m talking about the tar archive. Grab, extract, run.

    So far so good. Using the AppArmor profile (template) from my Kubuntu installation, I was able, with small modifications, to create a custom ruleset for the Firefox tar version running from my home directory. Things are fine, but there be one problem. By default, it cannot update. We shall fix that now.

  • Make Use Of ☛ 4 Ways to Shorten Linux Commands and Save Time

    Improve your terminal experience and save more time by reducing the length of your Linux commands with these methods.

    Linux commands are often known for being too long, and with excessive length comes increased complexity and comprehension issues. But there’s always a way to shorten your Linux commands and turn them into the neat, concise strings that everyone loves.

    Here are four ways to shorten the length of your commands so you can type less and do more within the Linux terminal.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Firefox on a Chromebook

    This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Create a Linux Virtual Machine Inside a Windows Virtual Machine Using Hyper-V [Ed: Proprietary software that makes GNU/Linux submissive, unsafe, controlled by Microsoft and its back doors]

  • TechTarget ☛ How to check an IP address in Linux

    Linux is an incredibly powerful operating system for both servers and desktops. For the most part, anyone using Linux on a desktop could go their entire life without touching the command line.

    However, there are a lot of very handy tools from within the terminal window. Take, for instance, identifying your IP address.

    Let’s say you’re using a desktop version of Linux, complete with a desktop environment and all the features that come with it. If you have that desktop configured for DHCP, your machine will be given an IP address from a server or router on your network.

  • Network World ☛ Commands for finding out if compressed Linux files are the same | Network World

    Compressed Linux files are helpful because they save disk space, but what should you do when you have a series of compressed files and want to determine if any are duplicates? The zdiff and zcmp commands can help.

    To begin, if a directory contains two files like those below, it’s easy to tell just from the listing that they are not identical. After all, the file sizes are a little different.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Videomass on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    Videomass is an excellent tool for anyone who needs to work with video files, and the user interface is intuitive and easy to use, making it perfect for beginners. Videomass also offers many features for more advanced users, including concatenating videos, creating presets, and managing conversions. Videomass is also open-source and cross-platform, meaning it can be used on Windows, Mac, and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. Another great benefit, Videomass is officially supported with a PPA making the installation and updating straightforward.

    As the introduction explains, the tutorial will teach you how to install Videomass on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 Linux using the command line terminal the LaunchPAD PPA by Gianluca Pernigotto. This is the best method for Ubuntu users to install Videomass and keep it up to date.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Qoobar Tag Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Qoobar Tag Editor in Ubuntu systems.

    Qoobar is a simple tagger which is designed for editing tags in files of classical music.

    Qoobar uses Qt for GUI and Taglib for tags manipulation and runs under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It also uses parts of other libraries: loudgain library, some files from Qt Creator sources and KDE sources.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Fotoxx on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

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

    Fotoxx is a free open source Linux program for photo/image editing and collection management. The goal is to meet the needs of serious photographers while remaining fast and easy to use.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Videomass on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

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

    Videomass is a cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and youtube-dl / yt-dlp.

    Videomass is a cross-platform GUI designed for FFmpeg enthusiasts who need to manage custom profiles to automate conversion and transcoding processes.

    It is based on an advanced use of presets and profiles in order to use most of the FFmpeg commands without limits of formats and codecs.

    It features graphical tools for viewing, analyzing and processing multimedia streams and downloading videos via youtube-dl or yt-dlp.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install and Use UNRAR on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will show you how to install and use UNRAR on Ubuntu systems.

    UnRAR is the name of two different command-line applications for extracting RAR file archives.

    RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by win.rar GmbH. The name RAR stands for Roshal Archive.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Xfce’s Apps Update for November 2022: Xfce 4.18 Preview, Plugin Updates, and More

    This month brought lots of goodies for fans of the lightweight desktop environment as the development team released the first preview version of the upcoming Xfce 4.18 release. It looks like they are sticking to the original schedule and, if everything goes according to plan, we might see the final release of Xfce 4.18 on our GNU/Linux computers as soon as this Christmas.

    Xfce 4.18 will bring many cool new features and improvements, including (hopefully) initial Wayland support in applications. Thunar received a lot of changes, so check out the previous editions of my “Xfce’s Apps Update” monthly roundup if you can’t wait until the final release hits the streets so I can take it for a test drive and present you with the best new features and enhancements.

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Xfce 4.18 is Coming Soon and Offers Subtle Improvements

    The Xfce team has announced the release date of the next iteration of the desktop, which includes a good number of features to polish the fan-favorite Linux UI.

    When the next version of Xfce is released, you might not be blown away by an array of new and game-changing features. Instead, what you’ll find are plenty of subtle new features and fixes that make the open source desktop better than ever… all the while remaining very familiar, stable, and easy to use.

    The new features include a number of improvements to the Thunar file manager – such as a new bookmark menu, Recent sidebar entry, customizable keyboard shortcuts, option to show full directory path, recursive search, UNDO/REDO options, a split view, support for drag & drop items in the view panels, and the ability to execute shell scripts from within a directory.

    As far as the desktop, you’ll find the panel length is now configured in pixels (as opposed to a percentage), a new Keep Panel Above Windows option, more font options for the Xfce clock applet, and header bards that can be disabled in dialogs.

    Also included are a new default multi-monitor behavior that can be configured before you attach a second display, fixes for move-to-monitor, and 1.25/1.75 scale ratios.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Proxmox Backup Server 2.3 Brings Essential Enhancements

    Proxmox Backup Server 2.3, based on Debian 11.5, adds namespace-aware prune jobs and offline mirroring capabilities.

    Proxmox Backup Server is a free, open-source enterprise backup solution to back up and restore virtual machines, containers, and physical hosts following the client-server model.

    The software stack is written in Rust as the software is published under the GNU AGPL, v3. Of course, it is also specifically optimized to function with the same company’s Proxmox Virtual Environment.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • EuroLinux 9.1 Release Notes – EuroLinux Documentation

    EuroLinux 9.1 introduces Keylime, a remote machine attestation tool using the trusted platform module (TPM) technology. With Keylime, you can verify and continuously monitor the integrity of remote machines.

    OpenSSH now supports setting minimum RSA key length. The option to be set is named RequiredRSASize. crypto-policies enforce minimum 2048-bit RSA key length for OpenSSH by default.

    NSS no longer support RSA keys shorter than 1023bit.

    SELinux user-space packages have been upgraded to version 3.4. Changes: – Improved relabeling performance through parallel relabeling – Support for SHA-256 in the semodule tool – New policy utilities in the libsepol-utils package

  • PR Web ☛ CIQ Stacks Advisory Board With Veteran Open-Source and Industry Leadership

    CIQ today unveiled an advisory board comprising veteran leaders with deep expertise in IT infrastructure, high performance computing (HPC), open-source software and business strategy. The advisory board will help guide CIQ as it builds the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution.

  • PR Web ☛ Rocky Linux 9.1 Arrives With Keylime, New Module Stream and Compiler Toolset Versions

    Rocky Linux version 9.1 is now available. Major changes include the availability of Keylime, a remote boot attestation and runtime integrity management solution using Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs). Additionally, 9.1 introduces the first module streams including: node.js 18, php:8.1, maven:3.8 and ruby:3.1. New compiler toolset versions include GCC 12, LLVM 14.0.6, Rust 1.62, and Go 1.18.

• Debian Family

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Shaya Potter & Debian WaReZ expulsion

    In recent years, Debian leaders have abused their positions to leak rumors and gossip about some developers while hiding far more serious scandals.

    One of those is the shadow expulsion of Shaya Potter (blog, CV) in 1998.

    Potter was a child prodigy who began a US Navy internship when he was fifteen or sixteen. At the same time, Novare, Inc was hosting some Debian infrastructure on their company servers.

    Potter claims his software was being deployed to the USS Theodore Roosevelt (Secure Tactical Access Terminal) while at the same time, Debian records show that he was stashing WaReZ on master.debian.org, a server operated by Novare.

    The case of a navy intern committing piracy is interesting for a wide range of reasons that have a lot more to do with Debian than the navy.

    Potter began co-authoring Debian as a minor. It appears that he was 19 when he was caught with WaReZ but it is not clear what age he was when he actually downloaded these illegal copies of software. The age of majority varies between different countries and different states of the US. Therefore, there was some confusion about whether it should be handled as a juvenile offence. I recently wrote about the concerns with FSFE encouraging minors to do unpaid work on open source projects.

    Earlier this year I wrote about the fact that only 86 of the original Debian co-authors agreed to form an association with a constitution. If we look at the names of the people who consented to form an association, Shaya Potter is not in the list. If Potter did not consent to the constitution then he wasn’t a member at all. Morever, the association only came into existence at the end of the vote in December 1998. Potter was supposedly expelled in November 1998, one month before the vote. Therefore, as the organization didn’t really exist yet and as he hadn’t consented to be a member, we can’t really say he was expelled at all.

    Nonetheless, it looks like his position with the US Navy also ended the year after the Debian drama. Barely five years later, Potter went on to win the LISA’05 award for the best student paper.

    The great irony in this case is that people were angry with Potter for violating copyright law. Yet this was the first time the developers forcefully removed the name of a Debian co-author from the software. Therefore, by removing his name and failing to give him equal credit as a joint author of the Debian software, they were violating his copyright interests. They set a precedent for violating the copyright interests of other authors, for example, the violent suppression of Ted Walther in DebConf6.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ This health belt can provide early warning of heart failure | Arduino Blog

    Heart disease is the most common cause of death — not just in industrialized countries, but for the world as a whole. Many deaths caused by heart failure could be prevented if the patient received medical care sooner, but people are often unaware of impending heart failure until it actually occurs. However, there are physiological indicators that become detectable in advance of heart failure. This wearable “health belt” contains sensors that monitor for those indicators to give warning of imminent heart failure so patients can seek lifesaving medical attention.

    This health belt has a variety of sensors to monitor key physiological indicators, including thoracic impedance, heart rate, electrocardiogram activity, and motion activity. None of those alone would reliably correspond to upcoming heart failure without many false positives and negatives, but together they provide a clear picture. The sensor array, which is wearable and resembles a cumberbund, communicates via Bluetooth with the user’s phone. When the signs of heart failure appear, their phone can either notify them to seek medical attention or notify a third party, like a family member or doctor.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Google ☛ Long Term Support Channel Update for ChromeOS

      LTS-102 is being updated in the LTS channel to 102.0.5005.189 (Platform Version: 14695.155.0) for most ChromeOS devices. Want to know more about Long Term Support? Click here.

  • Mozilla

    • Running For The @W3C Advisory Board (@W3CAB) Special Election – Tantek

      The W3C recently elected a Board of Directors (BoD) for the new W3C Legal Entity. Several new board members are currently on the W3C Advisory Board (AB) and they decided to step down from the AB to focus on the BoD. The W3C is holding a special election for the remaining 6-18 months of the terms of those four AB seats. This blog post is an extended version of my personal nomination statement for that election.

      Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help it reboot W3C as a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 24 years.

      I am Mozilla’s Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have previously served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013. In the early years I helped lead the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers. In my most recent term I led the AB’s Priority Project for an updated W3C Vision. I set the example of a consensus-based work-mode of summarizing & providing granular proposed resolutions to issues, presenting these to the AB at the August 2022 Berlin meeting, and making edits to the W3C Vision according to consensus.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress ☛ People of WordPress: Huanyi Chuang – WordPress News

    This month we feature Huanyi (Eric) Chuang, a front end developer from Taiwan, who helps connect local groups to WordPress and the worldwide open source community. He is part of the team helping to make the first WordCamp Asia a success in 2023.

    The People of WordPress series shares some of the inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global network of contributors.

    [...]

    In 2018, he took the step to help as an organizer, having joined the Taoyuan Meetup in Taiwan. He played several parts across the organizing team, and the welcoming feeling he got in every situation encouraged him to get more involved.

    He recalls meeting new friends from different fields and other countries, which gave him a great sense of achievement and strengthened his passion for participating in the community.

    When the team started this meetup, numbers were much lower than in the group in the city of Taipei, but they were not disheartened and gradually grew the local WordPress community.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2022-11-25

    Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today’s Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.
    Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD, which is a catalog of useful free software that runs under free GNU-like systems (not limited to the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants) and a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, November 25, 2022 meeting, where we saw a one new program added and two entries updated. We also discussed and learned what it could mean for a free program to depend on a platform like Docker. If a program requires Docker in order to be available, it runs the danger of introducing difficult to detect nonfree dependencies, so we must be cautious when we discover a Docker configuration file or the prerequisite of Docker to run an otherwise free program.

  • FSF ☛ Fifteen years of LibrePlanet: Register now to join us on March 18 and 19

    The fifteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) annual conference is only a couple of months away. Registration is open now.

    For fifteen years, free software enthusiasts from around the world have joined us for the annual LibrePlanet conference. You can watch videos from the last conference (and do so using only free software!) on our MediaGoblin instance or on PeerTube. Also, you can now pre-order the colorful and ethically manufactured LibrePlanet 2023 T-shirt in the FSF shop. And if you order yours before the March 1, 2023, cutoff date, you’ll be able to wear it to the event.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ texinfo – GNU documentation system – News: Texinfo 7.0.1 [Savannah]

    We have released version 7.0.1 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format. This is a minor bug-fix release.

  • GNU ☛ Texinfo 7.0.1 released

    This is a minor release containing minimal changes from the previous
    release (7.0).
    
    This is the first time we have issued such a release.  We have tried
    to show restraint in including any changes in order to make breakages
    less likely and to make it easier for people to review the changes.
    We hope to enable quicker fixes for known, serious issues in official
    releases.  We will also include any updated translations.
    
    This release process corresponds to a new use of "git" branches
    in the package development, where development continues on
    the master branch, and only selected commits are added to the
    release branch.  The git repository is to be found at Savannah
    (https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=texinfo).
    
    If there are further minor releases following on from the 7.0 release,
    the version numbers will follow the pattern 7.0.X.  Any future major
    releases will have version numbers of the form 7.X.
    
    Please email any comments to bug-texinfo@gnu.org.
    
    

• Programming/Development

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Setup C++/gtkmm Programming Tools on Ubuntu

    This tutorial will help ypu installing software required to develop desktop Ubuntu applications with C++ language and GTKmm library version 4. You might want to do so following examples of the excellent programs created with GTKmm like Ardour, Inkscape, GParted, Rawtherapee and even VisualBoyAdvance. This is an alternative to programming with C/GTK as we published back in 2018. We will show you how to prepare the tools, write your first program, compile it and repeat it.

    [...]

    At default configuration, Geany cannot compile, build and run C++/GTKmm source codes correctly. For that purpose, one should configure Geany build commands manually. You can do this following the example above.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 1: SparrowCI pipelines for everything – Raku Advent Calendar

      New year is a fun time when the whole family gets together by a table and eat holiday dinner.

      Let me introduce some fun and young member of a Raku family – a guy named SparrowCI – super flexible and fun to use CI service.

Leftovers

• Jeff Geerling ☛ Just Say No

  Saying yes is easy—at first.

  It makes you feel better. And it makes you feel like you can do anything! And the person you’re saying yes to also gets a happy feeling because you’re going to do something for them.

  Saying no is hard. It’s an admission you can’t do something. And worse still, you’re disappointing someone else who wants you to say yes.

  But here’s the thing: none of us is a god. We’re people. We have a certain amount of mental resources.

  Some people are kind of crazy and can do a lot more than you or I can, but nobody can do it all. And sometimes you can burn the midnight candle for a little while, but you’re just building up debt. Every ‘Yes’ is a loan you have to pay off.

  [...]

  The first time I seriously reflected on burnout as a maintainer was around 2016. I had a young and growing family, and had just had my third kid—with three under 5—and life was understandably getting stressful.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Jeff Geerling: Just say no

• Security

  • Matthew Garrett ☛ mjg59 | Making unphishable 2FA phishable

    One of the huge benefits of WebAuthn is that it makes traditional phishing attacks impossible. An attacker sends you a link to a site that looks legitimate but isn’t, and you type in your credentials. With SMS or TOTP-based 2FA, you type in your second factor as well, and the attacker now has both your credentials and a legitimate (if time-limited) second factor token to log in with. WebAuthn prevents this by verifying that the site it’s sending the secret to is the one that issued it in the first place – visit an attacker-controlled site and said attacker may get your username and password, but they won’t be able to obtain a valid WebAuthn response.

    But what if there was a mechanism for an attacker to direct a user to a legitimate login page, resulting in a happy WebAuthn flow, and obtain valid credentials for that user anyway? This seems like the lead-in to someone saying “The Aristocrats”, but unfortunately it’s (a) real, (b) RFC-defined, and (c) implemented in a whole bunch of places that handle sensitive credentials. The villain of this piece is RFC 8628, and while it exists for good reasons it can be used in a whole bunch of ways that have unfortunate security consequences.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Job Offer: Chat Control Campaigner (part-time)

      MEP Patrick Breyer is looking for a campaigner on defending the digital secrecy of correspondence against the proposal to indiscriminately scan personal messages and data for suspicious content (so-called chat control proposal, see chatcontrol.eu).

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Wire ☛ [Old] In Affidavit, Former RSS Worker Claims Top Right Wing Leaders Involved in Nanded Blast

    Yashwant Shinde, an RSS worker for 25 years, also claimed that he was told by a senior VHP leader about a terror training camp that was underway to “carry out blasts across the country”.

• Finance

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Booz Allen ticketmastered America’s public lands

    Want to pay your $7 to hike the prized Coyote Buttes North at Arizona’s Vermilion Cliffs National Monument? Sure, just pay a $9 “lottery application fee.” Even by junk fee standards, this is a very junky fee – it’s not a fee for paying a fee, it’s a fee for the chance to pay a fee.

    Only 4-10% of lottery entrants get a permit (Coyote Buttes is a very fragile ecosystem and entrance is severely limited), which means that Recreation.gov’s rake from this junk fee is about 1,000% of what it actually makes on hiking permits.

    Well, at least that money is going to Coyote Buttes, right? Preserving the petroglyphs and the dinosaur tracks and whatnot?

    Nope. The Bureau of Land Management gets the $7 entry fee from the 64 daily hikers who are lucky enough to visit Coyote Buttes. The $14,400 in lottery fees that the day’s hopeful hikers pay to Recreation.gov for a shot at a permit all go to a giant military contractor: Booz Allen.

    I know. What. The. Actual. Fuck. On his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller explains how a beltway bandit like Booz Allen became the Ticketmaster of America’s public lands. The deal started in 2017, when Booz got the contract to build Recreation.gov “at no cost to the federal government.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Video ☛ Is Elon Musk Right in the War with Apple? – Invidious

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Advent of DDNet 2022 – DDraceNetwork News

    DDNet is running an Advent of DDNet event starting tomorrow until the last door opens on December 24…

  • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Applauds Announcement of Memorandum of Understanding for Spectrum Access on Tribal Lands – Public Knowledge

    Today, the Departments of the Interior and Commerce and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will enhance spectrum access and broadband deployment on Tribal lands. In addition, the Department of the Interior will establish an Office of Indigenous Communications and Technology which will assist in the development and implementation of new wireless services on Tribal lands. Public Knowledge applauds this announcement as a major step in closing the digital divide while supporting Tribal self-determination in the digital era.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Feedback about Gemini and Gopher

    I was originally leaning towards Gopher, but exploring Gemini in the Lagrange browser reminded me just how much I love it. Rather than boiling the ocean, I might try running my own server with some basic stuff on it first.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • Congress Can Find Common Ground on Transparency

      Postmortems from the November 8th elections are in full swing with pundits and operatives making bold claims about what the results mean for Democrats, Republicans, and the country. The dust still hasn’t totally settled, but one thing is crystal clear: both chambers of Congress will be controlled by the slimmest of margins.

  • Copyrights

    • Michael Geist ☛ Freedom of Expression for a Price: Government Confirms Bill C-18 Requires Platform Payment for User Posts That Include News Quotes and Hyperlinks

      The longstanding debate over whether Bill C-18, the Online News Act, requires payment for linking came to an end yesterday. Government officials admitted that even basic quotes from news articles that include a hyperlink to the original source would scope user posts into the law and require platforms such as Google and Facebook to negotiate payment for the links. As noted below, even that position may understate the impact of the bill, which appears to also cover a user post of a news quote without a link. In other words, merely quoting a few sentences from a news article on an Internet platform is treated as making news content available, which triggers a requirement for the platforms to negotiate payment. This position runs counter to Canada’s copyright obligations under the Berne Convention and has no place in a country committed to freedom of expression.

      [...]

      The government’s aim is to remove the ability for platforms to argue that the use of news content on their platforms through quotation is permitted under the Copyright Act and therefore does not require payment or permission. The government now admits that the platforms are correct – this is a permissible activity – but wants to suspend the fair dealing rights of the platforms for the purposes of negotiating an agreement. Bill C-18 therefore sets aside user rights by forcing bargaining as if they did not exist. Article 10(1) of the Berne Convention creates a positive obligation to include a right of quotation within national copyright law, specifically citing the right to quote news articles…

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Pink bedsheets, for very non-existant values of “pink”

    The “pink” bamboo sheets [1] finally arrived at Chez Boca. These are the ones I paid $325 for because we “stained” them acidentally with some bed clothes. Bunny and I are both puzzled over these, because they certainly don’t appear pink in any meaningful, or unmeaningful, way. We looked at them in both dim light and exceedingly bright light, (thanks to some old-school 8mm movie lights I still have) and they look white to us.

  • Railroading, fudging, and cheating

    DMs who like linear campaigns are always super eager to discuss semantics and be like “that is actually not the definition of railroading, this is not railroading in that sense of the word, this is only a linear campaign”.

    And I, who really dislike linear campaigns of all kinds, am like “uh what a distraction. I wish I hadn’t called it ‘railroading’ because some people get really hung up on how it’s much more important that the stuff they’re doing is not called a particular taboo word that everyone knows is bad, than addressing what they’re actually doing and changing their campaign structures.”

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Alaska Weather Without Javascript

      This post is meant to be a brief overview of the NWS weather tools for Alaska and Fairbanks. I use these tools because they give a lot of detailed current and forecasted weather data for Alaska, without requiring the use of any JavaScript. Regarding my concerns about JavaScript:

    • Viewing Mastodon Art from the Terminal

      The Player and I (Lantashi) are continuing to use the Terminal as much as possible, and that includes using Mastodon. We use Toot (link below) to interact with Mastodon. Use “toot timeline” to read your timeline, or “toot tui” to bring up an ncurses interface.

      If you see an image in your timeline, you can wget the image – “wget myurl/mypic.jpeg”, and thus if you want to grab the images from your timeline, or from a tag search, you can grab them individually that way.

      As a Sylvan adventurer, defending the Wood Sea from the evil about, I don’t have time to individually wget images when I want them! I’d rather grab them all at once, and them “fim *” (link below) through them all, quickly!

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Tedium ☛ FydeTab Duo: Can This Linux Tablet Thrive Where the JingPad Faltered?

    Let’s be honest with ourselves. As much as we’d like the products we purchase and invest in to be with us for the long haul, any product is a risk. Especially a new one, by someone untested. And when you invest in a product through a crowdfunding site, you may not necessarily know what the final result is going to look like—after all, that’s part of the “fun,” I guess. Sometimes you don’t get a device at all. Sometimes, you get that device, but then all the people that were going to support it have essentially disappeared from view. I have one of those things, I reviewed it in this newsletter, and I’d like to talk about it—but I’d also like to talk about what comes after it. Today’s Tedium looks back at the JingPad experiment, one year later, faded dreams and all—and talks to another creator with big dreams and a Linux-friendly tablet with lots of potential.

    [...]

    So, my general rule with reviews is that if something significant changes I try to do updates, if possible. With the JingPad, I decided I wanted to give myself a little more time to see how things played out. And rather than just updating the piece, I thought what happened probably deserved something closer to a retelling.

    Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a review of the JingPad in which I highlighted the good and bad of the device, which took a full month and a half to land on my doorstep when delivered directly from China.

    It took a long time, but even after many delivery issues, including extended gummed-up delays in customs, it appeared, and I spent about two weeks playing with it before I wrote my full review. (I gave my first impressions over this way, in which I described the JingPad as “The Great Linux Tablet Hope.”)

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20 overview | So cool ice cubes are jealous. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Tux Digital ☛ 41: Single Board Power – Linux Out Loud – TuxDigital

    This week, Linux Out Loud chats about low-power device options.

    Welcome to episode 41 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ [PATCHSET RFC] sched: Implement BPF extensible scheduler class

  • Linux mailing lists ☛ [PATCHSET RFC] sched: Implement BPF extensible scheduler class

  • LWN ☛ The BPF extensible scheduler class [LWN.net]

    It was only a matter of time before somebody found a way to inject BPF into the CPU scheduler. This patch series, posted by Tejun Heo and containing work by David Vernet, Josh Don, and Barret Rhoden, does exactly that.

• Graphics Stack

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Wayland Protocols 1.31 Release Adds Fractional Scaling Support

    If you are using a high-resolution display, then you may have noticed issues like blurriness, jaggedness, and lag when using a program.

    This issue is caused by the fact that many programs use a default screen resolution (usually 1920×1080) to display their contents. This makes for a bad user interface experience on HiDPI devices.

    But you might be wondering, is there a solution to this? Yes, there is, in fact, a solution.

    It’s called ‘Fractional Scaling’. This method uses fractional values to scale a program’s interface according to your display’s resolution, resulting in a consistent look and feel.

    So, it would ensure that you had the same experience on any HiDPI device, regardless of the program you were using.

    Moving on.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to SAS Enterprise BI Server – LinuxLinks

    SAS Institute Inc. (“SAS”) is an American multinational developer of analytics software based in Cary, North Carolina. The company has around 14,000 employees.

    SAS started as a project at North Carolina State University to create a statistical analysis system used mainly by agricultural departments at universities in the late 1960s.

    SAS is the name of their software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. It has more than 200 components covering areas including statistical analysis, econometrics and time series analysis, an interactive matrix language, data mining and much more.

    [...]

    SAS Enterprise BI Server is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives to Enterprise BI Server.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Generate A Public/Private SSH Key in Linux – Make Tech Easier

    If you are using SSH frequently to connect to a remote host, one way to secure your SSH server is to use a public/private SSH key so that no password is transmitted over the network. It can prevent against brute force attack too.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bitcoin Core on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bitcoin Core is an excellent tool to create and manage your Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin has massive volatility, and the best part is that you can manage your Bitcoins from your Bitcoin wallet where you can easily buy and sell to anyone anonymously. Bitcoin works on nodes connected to the blockchain to verify each transaction to the digital ledger.

    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 Bitcoin Core 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.

  • How to Set Up a Virtual Private Server

    There is hardly any need to extol the benefits of having your own server. From storing and sharing your data to self-hosting useful web applications, a server is a versatile platform that can make your computing life easier. Opting for a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance that comes with pretty much everything you need and requires very little tinkering seems like a no-brainer. But running your own server on a local network is not without drawbacks. To access the server from the outside world, you need to punch a hole in your network, which leads to a whole new set of problems you have to deal with. Plus, your Internet connection may or may not be up to scratch in terms of reliability and speed.

    If you are only interested in running web-based applications, shared web hosting might look like a sensible option. Most providers have plans that include a web server, PHP, and a MySQL database – all configured and ready to go. Some providers even offer easy-to-use installers for popular web applications. However, ease of use comes with serious limitations. Can you Install PHP additional libraries? No. Can you run non-PHP applications? Forget about it. Some providers don’t even offer SSH access.

    A virtual private server (VPS) provides a middle ground between managing your own server and opting for shared web hosting. A VPS is a virtual Linux server system that you can manage yourself. Because you are the admin for your VPS, you have more control over it than you would with a basic web hosting arrangement. And, because the VPS is a virtual machine that shares the hardware with other VPS systems, it is much less expensive than leasing a dedicated server.

  • H2S Media ☛ Install Brackets Code Editor on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

    Steps to install Brackets Code editor on popular Debian 11 Bullseye Linux to start coding and having a live preview in the Chrome browser.

    “Brackets” was developed by Adobe and can be considered a successor of AdobeEdge Code. However, later Adobe discontinued support for Brackets in 2021. Nevertheless, the project was on GitHub, hence was picked up by the open-source developers and is still active as a fork.

    With the same functionality as Adobe Edge (not active anymore), “Brackets” is available to run on Windows, Mac, and Unix).

  • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Close Open Ports in Linux

    So you are dealing with a critical server where you have to maintain security at any cost. And closing ports to block unwanted traffic is the first step you’d take.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to read Linux partitions on Windows

    By default, it is impossible to read Linux partitions (filesystems) on Windows. Microsoft doesn’t provide the drivers to do this with the Windows kernel. However, there are ways to read these partitions. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can read Linux partitions on your Windows installation.

  • H2S Media ☛ 2 ways to Install FileZilla on Fedora Linux such as 37 or 36

    Tutorial to install FileZilla client on Fedora 37 or 36 using the command terminal for transferring data to the FTP server from your Linux.

    FileZilla FTP client is free software available for all popular OS such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Users can use it to copy files and folders via the Internet or local network from one PC to another computer. The FTP client is easy to handle and offers user interactive GUI with numerous special functions such as the continuation of interrupted transfers or the support of various transfer protocols such as FTP, SFTP, or FTPS.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ 5 ways to harden your Linux server with Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

    Automation allows you to apply compliance and security policies consistently across your servers, verify compliance, and remediate servers.

  • Syslog-ng 101, part 1: Introduction – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

    Welcome to the first part of my syslog-ng tutorial series. In this part, I give you a quick introduction what to expect from this series and try to define what syslog-ng is.

    Before introducing you to syslog-ng, let me introduce myself in a few words. I am Peter Czanik from Hungary, syslog-ng user for about two decades. I work as an open-source evangelist at One Identity, the company behind syslog-ng. I do syslog-ng packaging, support and advocacy. Syslog-ng was originally developed by Balabit, which is now part of One Identity.

  • Dignited ☛ Advantages, Vendors and How to Set Up

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-12-01 Edition – Boiling Steam

    Between 2022-11-24 and 2022-12-01 there were 18 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 181 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.9 % of total released titles.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 26 Best Free Linux Games That Everyone Should Play [Ed: Updated today]

    Linux users never had it so good. In the past, they typically had to make do with a limited selection of free-to-play titles, many of which lacked the polish and depth found in their console or PC counterparts. But all that has changed in recent years – the open source movement has led to an explosion of fantastic free Linux games, both casual and hardcore. Here are 30 of our favorites!

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 9to5Linux ☛ Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11 Is Out for Linux Phones and Tablets with Many Improvements

      Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11 is packed with all sorts of changes to improve the scrolling performance of the Homescreen in the grid app list on low-end devices and fix support for the Meta key, improve the performance and contrast of the lockscreen, as well as to add support for device panel orientations.

      This release also brings an updated design for the power menu that now includes a logout button, a new action drawer feature that lets users open the audio source app window by tapping on the media player, and updated Quick Settings to always open the mobile settings app and correctly display the marquee label in the Wi-Fi quicksetting.

    • Plasma Mobile Gear ⚙ 22.11 is Out – Plasma Mobile

      We have decided to migrate the releases of Plasma Mobile applications to KDE Gear, starting with KDE Gear 23.04. This means that Plasma Mobile Gear will be discontinued in the future, and Plasma Mobile applications will follow the release schedule of most other KDE applications, simplifying packaging. To prepare for this, an ongoing effort was made to ensure all applications have proper Bugzilla categories created.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• DebugPoint ☛ Exodia OS: Emerging BSPWM-based Arch Linux for Pentesters

  small team of Arch Linux enthusiasts from Egypt is developing Exodia OS based on BSP window manager (BSPWM). The primary use case of this distribution is to be a perfect distro for wire & wireless penetration testing by providing all the necessary tools by default (similar to Kali Linux).

  Here’s a first look.

• New Releases

  • Grml – new stable release 2022.11 available – Grml Blog

    This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bookworm. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.

    More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2022.11.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • The Register UK ☛ openSUSE moving baseline CPU requirements • The Register

    The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).

    It’s not all that often that specific sub-versions of the x86-64 spec come up, but you can expect it to happen a lot more often as the 64-bit x86 platform reaches 20 years old next year. So far, there are four revisions of the x86-64 spec, appropriately enough just called v1, v2 (2008-2011), v3 (2013-2017) and v4. More will doubtless emerge in the future.

    Back in July we covered the debate about CPU requirements for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). For a rundown of the differences between the revisions, refer back to that article.

    Around the middle of the year, SUSE was mulling making version 3 of the x86-64 instruction set a requirement, which would cut out a lot of relatively recent kit that was well under a decade old. That isn’t going to happen, at least for now. There was some controversy over this quite high requirement, so it’s been taken down a level. Instead, SUSE’s next-gen enterprise distro, the MicroOS-based Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP for short) will mandate x86-64-v2, the same baseline required by Red Hat’s RHEL 9.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora ☛ F38 proposal: RPM Sequoia (System-Wide Change proposal) – devel – Fedora Mailing-Lists

    This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT talent: 4 smart ways to recruit the right software engineers

    Software engineers are among the most sought-after employees today. And they’re some of the most difficult employees to get in touch with.

    To get the attention of software engineers, your recruiting strategies need to meet these professionals where they are while also laying out what you’re looking for in a candidate. It can be a delicate – and stressful – balancing act.

    Here are four proven strategies to help your organization attract and hire the right IT specialists without spinning your wheels or wasting time on the wrong candidates.

• Debian Family

  • New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2022)

    The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

    Abraham Raji (abraham)
    Phil Morrell (emorrp1)
    Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa)
    Mathias Gibbens (gibmat)
    Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun)
    Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)

    The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

    Gavin Lai
    Martin Dosch
    Taavi Väänänen
    Daichi Fukui
    Daniel Gröber
    Vivek K J
    William Wilson
    Ruben Pollan

    Congratulations!

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Kudos for Kudu Customization | Ubuntu

    As awesome as the default Kinetic Kudu desktop is, we know many Ubuntu users love to customize their workspace. If you count yourself among that crowd, you’ll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 22.10 comes packed with some incredible backgrounds from our most recent Wallpaper Competition.

    The community was given the difficult task of reviewing nearly 50 amazing submissions from their fellow community members and choosing their favorites. The initial plan was to include the top 5 into the Kudu release, but due to a surprise tie, a bonus 6th wallpaper was included!

  • Ubuntu ☛ Need help choosing an embedded Linux distribution? Get guidance here | Ubuntu

    Enterprises are looking to capitalise on the new wave of small form-factor computing and navigate the shift to the edge. Device manufacturers across the world are racing to build embedded, connected devices that will deliver on the promise of the fourth industrial revolution. Many of them are looking to explore data-driven value-chain optimisations, predictive maintenance and or new digital customer experiences.

    However, keeping devices in the field up-to-date is a full-time job requiring dedicated kernel engineering teams. When choosing their deployment strategy, device manufacturers must decide whether to roll their own embedded Linux distribution or rely on a commercially-supported OS.

    [...]

    In this extensive primer on choosing an embedded Linux distribution, we will directly contrast Yocto and Ubuntu Core on the most pressing challenges facing any developer working on an embedded device: board bring-up, maintenance, updates, security, and many more.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy A02s Android 12 update now available more widely in the US – SamMobile

  • Galaxy S21 Gets Its Fresh Android 13 and One UI 5 Update in US

  • Android Central ☛ How to customize bedtime mode in Android 13 | Android Central

  • Android Police ☛ How to use Spotify on Android

  • 9to5Google ☛ How to add and use Waze with Android Auto

  • Android Central ☛ Android Auto tests a new Material You style redesign for settings | Android Central

  • Android Authority ☛ Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2022-11-30 – Android Authority

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Play lists best Android apps and games of 2022

  • SlashGear ☛ The 5 Best Equalizer Apps For Your Android Phone

  • Make Use Of ☛ Android vs Apple: Which Mobile Platform Is Best for Gaming?

  • The Sun ☛ Millions of Android owners get huge free Netflix perk – and it’s so easy to claim | The US Sun

  • TechRadar ☛ Gmail could finally be coming to your Android smartwatch | TechRadar

  • 9to5Google ☛ Samsung brings Android 13 to Galaxy S10 Lite, more devices

  • SamMobile ☛ Android 13 for Samsung’s beastly Galaxy A52s 5G goes international – SamMobile

  • SamMobile ☛ Galaxy S20 Android 13 One UI 5.0 update out in South Korea – SamMobile

  • Samsung One UI 5.0 (Android 13) update and bugs tracker (cont. updated)

  • Android Police ☛ Google’s 4K Chromecast gets its first security patch post-Android 12

  • 9to5Google ☛ Nothing OS Android 13 open beta for Phone (1) arriving in 2 weeks

  • Android Central ☛ OnePlus now guarantees more Android updates than Google | Android Central

  • Android Police ☛ How to change ringtone on an Android phone

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy M04 appears with one-year-old version of Android – SamMobile

  • Computer World ☛ 3 quick tricks for smarter Android sharing | Computerworld

  • Make Use Of ☛ Google Announces the Play Store’s Best Apps and Games of 2022

    Google has unveiled its choices for the best apps and games for Android, Wear OS, and Chromebooks in 2022.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ Is sustainability still a thing in open source

  Eugen Rochko just reported that the social service Mastodon had “hit 1,028,362 monthly active users […] 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27 and 489,003 new users”. Known mainly by open source developers, Mastodon has suddenly become mainstream, promising to take inclusive, open, and free values to social media. If Mastodon was sustainable, it is now thriving, attracting both users and developers, and able to launch more than 1,000 servers in a matter of days. How can this increase in users and infrastructure be explained? In this article, we want to suggest that there are different kinds of sustainability in open source and that these can have interesting interactions.

• Matcher interview with Justin Flory – Conservancy Blog – Software Freedom Conservancy

  Software Freedom Conservancy: Why do you care about software freedom? How long have you been involved?

  Justin Flory: My trajectory in life and career for the last eight years was molded by the Software Freedom movement. As a teenager, I used Linux and Open Source software to run my own multiplayer game server for Minecraft. This exposed me both to open source as a concept but also the communities responsible for the production of great things made together with others. Fundamentally, my interest and passion for Free Software come from a human-centered perspective as a method to build more responsible technology for and by society.

• Libre Arts ☛ Libre Arts Weekly-ish recap — 30 November 2022

  This is an almost too good of a release this close to v3.0: floating selections out, outlined text in, Align tool rewrite, pasting multiple layers as a single one, and more. I published a review of the most important changes the same day, and there’s official release notes that cover even more changes.

• Medevel ☛ Grist: An Open-source Spreadsheet Solution and Airtable Alternative

  Grist is a free open-source web-based app that allows you to create, edit, manage and manipulate spreadsheet files with your team and group.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Chrome Dev for Android Update

      Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Dev 109 (109.0.5414.23) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

    • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

      The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 108 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

      Chrome 108.0.5359.71 ( Mac/linux) and 108.0.5359.71/72( Windows) contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 108.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Celebrating Pocket’s Best of 2022

      The run-up to December is always my favorite time of year at Pocket. It’s when we sift through our data (always anonymous and aggregated—we’re part of Mozilla, after all), to see which must-read profiles, thought-provoking essays, and illuminating explainers Pocket readers loved best over the past 12 months.

      Today, we’re delighted to bring you Pocket’s Best of 2022. This year’s honor roll is our biggest ever: a whopping 20 lists celebrating the year’s top articles across culture, technology, science, business, and more. All are informed by the saving and reading habits of Pocket’s millions of curious, discerning users.

      The stories people save to Pocket reveal something unique—not only about what’s occupying our collective attention, but about what we aspire to be. And what we see again and again from 40 million saves to Pocket every month is the gravitational pull of stories that help us better understand the world around us—and ourselves.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt ☛ Qt for MCUs 2.3 released

    Since the very first release of Qt for MCUs, your feedback and requests have been driving the development of Qt for MCUs. Today, we are happy to announce the release of version 2.3, which includes several of the most requested features and improvements. This new version adds the Loader QML type to Qt Quick Ultralite, support for partial framebuffers to substantially reduce the overall memory requirements of your applications, support for building applications using MinGW on Windows, and much more!

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Get to know Lua for loops in 4 minutes | Opensource.com

    In programming, iteration is an important concept because code often must scan over a set of data several times so that it can process each item individually. Control structures enable you to direct the flow of the program based on conditions that are often established dynamically as the program is running. Different languages provide different controls, and in Lua, there’s the while loop, for loop, and repeat until loop. This article covers for loops. I will cover while and repeat until loops in a separate article.

  • Get Your Data On: Filtering Complex Data With gsignal

    The gsignal package is a new signal processing library ported from Octave. If you use Matlab or Octave, gsignal contains many of the signal processing functions you would expect to find. In this post, I’m going to compare filterComplex function to the gsignal::filter function.

  • Finnstats ☛ Replace the first non-missing value in R

    Replace the first non-missing value in R, to retrieve the first non-missing value in each place of one or more vectors, use the coalesce() function from the dplyr package in R.

  • Simple interfaces to the forecasting API

    A few weeks ago, I introduced a forecasting API (Application Programming Interface).

  • rOpenSci | Meeting the stars of the R-universe: R Community, Exchange and Learn

    This is the first post of our interview series “Meeting the stars of the R-universe”. We aim to introduce the working groups and people behind the development of software and packages many of us use and which are available through the R-Universe. We want to highlight and explore different teams and projects around the world, the work they do, their processes and users. We begin our journey in Argentina with a team that uses R and develops R packages for the Argentinean State. Be sure to watch the video at the end with excerpts from the interview.

  • Processing large scale satellite imagery with openEO Platform and R

    openEO is an open source, community-based API for cloud-based processing of Earth Observation data. This blog introduces the R openeo client, and demonstrates a sample analysis using the openEO Platform for processing.

  • NextGenTips ☛ How to perform CRUD functionalities on FastAPI App – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial we are going to learn how to perform Create, Read, Update and Delete operations in a FastAPI application. In our previous post, we saw how to install and create the first application using RESTful FastAPI.

    In this tutorial we will create an API to fetch your favorite songs from the database. We will be implementing the database using the MYSQL.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Build test scripts for your IoT platform | Opensource.com

    In my previous article, I introduced the open source test tool JMeter and used a simple HTTP test as an example to demonstrate its capabilities. This article shows you how to build test scripts for complex test scenarios.

    The user interface displays a JMeter test script in the “tree” format. The saved test script (in the .jmx format) is XML. The JMeter script tree treats a test plan as the root node, and the test plan includes all test components. In the test plan, you can configure user-defined variables called by components throughout the entire test plan. Variables can also thread group behavior, library files used in the test, and so on. You can build rich test scenarios using various test components in the test plan.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ German Perl/Raku Workshop 2023 Call for Papers | Max Maischein [blogs.perl.org]

      The German Perl/Raku Workshop takes place from February 27 to March 1st 2023 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

      We are looking for your contribution in the form a talk (20 minutes or 40 minutes), a lighting talk (5 minutes) or a workshop (2-4 hours). Please submit your proposals using this online form.

      The theme in 2023 is Perl Futures – of course the two developments of Perl, Raku and Perl as well as the reference to the financial metropolis Frankfurt am Main. Presentations with these emphases are especially sought after, but all contributions on Perl, Raku and software development in general are welcome.

Leftovers

• Video ☛ Woman Sues Kraft For $5 Million Over Mac-N-Cheese Prep Time – Invidious

  One of the things that makes me angry about the world today is frivolous lawsuits. Today, I was reading a story about a Florida woman that is suing Kraft Heinz for $5 million, because her Velveeta microwave Mac-N-Cheese takes longer to make than advertised on the package.

• Joe Brockmeier ☛ A cardinal sin of content marketing: Writing what you want the audience to have read: Dissociated Press

  No matter who your audience1 may be – admins, developers, decision makers, or anyone else – they’re not obligated to read your content. It’s all about “what’s in it for me?” If you need to communicate something to an audience, you have to write what they want to read and not what you want them to have read.

  One of the things I see over and over again in writing is an assumption that the reader is going to find and read something from start to finish. It’s someone else’s job to put the content in front of the reader and assumed that once it’s there, the reader will just start with the first sentence and dutifully read through to the end, soaking up the messaging like a sponge.

• Linux Foundation

  • PR Newswire ☛ Bosch and XPENG Motors join the ELISA Project to Strengthen their Commitment to Safety-Critical Applications in Automobiles

    Bosch is one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. Bosch solutions combine automotive software know-how across all domains with expertise in electrical/electronic architecture of large integrated systems, complex real-time software, IoT, and automotive hardware. Their middleware offers functional safety, real-time behavior, and reliability under automotive requirements, combined with cyber-security. The Bosch experience and formal membership in ELISA fits well within the project goals and mission.

  • PR Newswire ☛ New RISC-V Certification to Help Those Seeking Entry-Level RISC-V Roles or to Transition from Another Architecture

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization, have announced the immediate availability of the new RISC-V Foundational Associate (RVFA) certification exam, which is designed to test foundational knowledge of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Linux Foundation Newsletter: November 2022

    This month, we’ve got great news to share across the Linux Foundation. Here’s a roundup of must-read updates, including the release of Sylva, LF Europe’s first project, a new report from LF Research, community updates, Cyber Monday deals from LF Training & Certification, and so much more. We’ve also got a preview of what’s coming up in December!

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (krb5), Fedora (galera, mariadb, and mingw-python3), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, krb5, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (krb5), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (binutils, dbus-1, exiv2, freerdp, git, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, libarchive, libdb-4_8, libmspack, nginx, opencc, python, python3, rxvt-unicode, sudo, supportutils, systemd, vim, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (bind9, gnutls28, libsamplerate, linux-gcp-5.4, perl, pixman, shadow, and sysstat).

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ 20 Years in the Making: ClamAV Finally Hits Version 1.0 – OMG! Ubuntu!

    Does Ubuntu need anti-virus software? The general answer is no, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use one to run a check every now and then, especially if working with Windows files.

    Most folks’ go-to is open source anti-virus ClamAV, an app dedicated to ‘detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats’. ClamAV is available for Windows, macOS, BSD, and Linux systems, making it especially well suited to those who regularly work cross-platform and want some degree of familiarity.

    And a rather special new version was released this week.

  • Linuxiac ☛ ClamAV Reached v1.0.0, Bringing Functionalities Improvements

    With the ClamAV 1.0.0 LTS release, developers move the Dockerfile and related scripts from the main repository to a new one.

    ClamAV is the most popular free and open-source antivirus software. One of its most common use cases is scanning emails on mail gateways or keeping files stored on NAS solutions virus-free.

  • dwaves.de ☛ strange Let’s Encrypt errors – when a single domain is canceled + privacy problems

    let’s encrypt privacy problems

  • Sec Lists ☛ Security sensitive bug in the i915 kernel driver (CVE-2022-4139)

    Hi all,
    
    [This is a public disclosure of an issue reported 7 days ago to linux-distros () vs openwall org. CVE-2022-4139 has been assigned to the issue since.]
    
    Incorrect GPU TLB flush code has been discovered in i915 kernel driver.
    In some cases (Gen12 hardware with specific types of engine) the engine's TLB is not flushed at all. Depending on whether the GPU is running behind an active IOMMU there are two possible scenarios which can happen, due to stale TLB mapping: 1. Without IOMMU - GPU can still access physical memory which could be already assigned by OS to different process. 2. With IOMMU - GPU can access any memory, if the malicious process is able to create/reuse necessary IOMMU mappings.
    
    It is currently not known if specific memory could be targeted, but random memory corruption or data leaks are a known possibility.
    
    All Intel integrated and discrete GPUs Gen12 are affected, including Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, DG1, Raptor Lake, DG2, Arctic Sound, Meteor Lake. Fix has already been developed and consists of fixing the method of writing to specific registers. I am attaching a set of back-ported patches which implement the fix for all affected stable branches (all since 5.4).
    
    This vulnerability has similar impact as CVE-2022-0330[1].
    

  • drm/i915: fix TLB invalidation for Gen12 video and compute engines

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Facebook Fined $276M under GDPR – Schneier on Security

      Facebook—Meta—was just fined $276 million (USD) for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location.

      Meta’s total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion (EUR) since 2018.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta fined $276 million over Facebook data leak involving more than 533 million users – The Verge

      Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $276 million following an investigation into an April 2021 data leak that exposed the information of over 533 million users.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ Elon Musk Has Beef with Apple Over Twitter App – Make Tech Easier

    Elon Musk is finding out that buying one of the most popular social networks isn’t everything he’d dreamed it would be. He brought changes to Twitter shortly after buying it and has now claimed in tweets that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter” from the App Store.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Al Jazeera ☛ ‘No timeline’ for restoring internet to Tigray: Ethiopia minister

    There is “no timeline” for restoring internet access to the embattled Tigray region, the Associated Press reported a senior Ethiopian government official saying.

    Tigray’s internet service will be restored along with its phone and electricity services, though no timeline has been set for those goals, Belete Molla, Ethiopia’s minister for innovation and technology, said on Tuesday at the UN’s annual Internet Governance Forum in Addis Ababa.

    Tigray, home to more than 5 million people, has been mostly without internet, telecommunications and banking since war broke out between federal government troops and forces led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in November 2020.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • AccessNow ☛ Continued repression of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights staff – Access Now

    Open letter to the Foreign Ministries of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and to the European External Action Service

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ A Bestiary of Loss – The Public Domain Review

      To mark Lost Species Day, images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories — from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker.

    • Public Domain Review ☛ The Launch of Our End-of-Year Fundraiser! – The Public Domain Review

      Our End-of-Year Fundraiser is now live! Running from 30th November to 14th December, this is a vital two week period in which we raise most of the funds to keep us going for the next year. We don’t have big sponsors, we don’t do intrusive advertising, instead we are kept alive by donations from you, our wonderful community of readers. If you like the project, and would like to see it continue, then please do consider donating. We need your help, now more than ever.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Hike: Bockmattli, Round 2

    I decided to do this hike again with better weather, with much more success.
    The route up through the pass to the summit was pre-post-holed by other hikers, making it much easier going than before.
    There was a bit more exposure than I was necessarily comfortable with one point, but that section was thankfully quite short before opening to a nice flat field before the summit.
    The view from the top was spectacular, with views of Pilatus, Grosser and Kleiner Mythen, Gross Aubrig, and Chaeserrugg (and a billion other peaks I don’t know the name of and will have to get around to hiking eventually).

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEHMNRU Wordo: FROGS

  • Group by Group Initiative

    This is how we’ve been doing initiative for the last few months. It’s fast and it gives a varied result with a lot of back & forth instead of first all on one side go, then all on the other side goes. Best of all, your parry goes immediately into your own attack.

  • Shoes: the unknown resource

    One way to play exploration games like D&D is as a resource game. Spells, HP, food, water, and light. But there’s one resource I rarely see other DMs talk about.

GNU/Linux

• Make Use Of ☛ Payphones Are Coming Back in Philadelphia Thanks to Linux, No Quarters Required

  An “amateur phone collective” is making creative use of Linux and special hardware to help people without cellphones stay connected.

  As payphones have largely been superseded by cellphones, many cities have begun to remove them. One group in Philadelphia is actually putting them back in, and the new ones are powered by Linux and open-source software. Better yet, you don’t have to fumble for coins to use them.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 302: Twitter’s Fiasco and Mass Migration to Mastodon – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

    This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss the Twitter saga. What alternatives can you look at? Then we will be taking a look at Firefox and some sweet deals on services. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

  • Open Source Startup Podcast ☛ E64: Open Source Data Observability with Elementary Data by Open Source Startup Podcast

    Maayan Salom is Co-Founder of Elementary Data, the open source data observability platform which allows users to monitor their data warehouse directly from dbt.

• Kernel Space

  • Arca Noae ☛ USB driver package version 12.14 now available

    Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of release 12.14 of our USB stack.

    This is a maintenance release that contains some minor fixes.

• Applications

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Terminator: The Tiling Terminal Emulator for Linux Pros

    You might have seen some colleagues or YouTubers using a terminal window with multiple terminal sessions running in it.

    Some pro Linux users do the multiple split pane with screen or tmux commands. These commands work in any terminal application but involve a steep learning curve.

    If you want multiple terminal sessions in the same application window without the complexity of the tmux or screen commands, Terminator is your friend.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ OpenRGB v0.8 adds support of a ton more devices to control RGB lights on Linux

    OpenRGB is a stellar open source project that aims to allow you to deal with all the various RGB lights your hardware comes with, as most vendors don’t have apps for Linux. It’s cross-platform so it works across Linux, macOS and Windows.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Red Hat ☛ How to remotely query indexed caches in Data Grid 8 | Red Hat Developer

    The Red Hat Data Grid is a hosted data storage platform that offers different levels of caching for fast access to data in memory. Well-chosen indexes allow the data store to fetch results faster than non-indexed caches. This article demonstrates how to create indexes in Data Grid and use them in a Java application built on Spring Boot. Then we will run and test the application in a container on Red Hat OpenShift.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 48: inset 0

    On day 9 I’ve talked about the inset shorthand properties inset, inset-inline, and inset-block. I don’t believe that I will need those often, but inset can come in handy when you want one element to fill another element entirely.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 47: the overscroll-behavior property

    You can use the overscroll-behavior property to disable scroll-chaining.

    If you scroll the inner box in the following example to the end and you keep scrolling, the outer box starts scrolling, too, and finally the whole page.

  • University of Toronto ☛ The uncertain question of how much RAM our servers need

    Even with a metrics system, this isn’t a straightforward question to answer, and in fact we haven’t tried to do any sort of systematic assessment. A lot of the time we’ve shoved more memory in servers more as a precaution than anything else; at our scale, it’s not particularly expensive to overshoot on a few servers, while if we undershoot we’ll have to have a server downtime to add more RAM. The initial deployment is the one time when the choice of RAM amount is basically free.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ HackSpace magazine’s mince pie tutorial

    Christmas is all about food and, if there’s one food that we can’t do Christmas without, it’s mince pies. These little sweet fruit delights are so emblematic of the season. However, too often we see sub-standard mince pies churned out by the million by supermarkets with more of an eye on shelf life and profit per unit than quality. In this article, we’re going to go through our technique for making mince pies that we’ve honed over a couple of decades.

  • Byte Cellar ☛ Configure Your Mac to Allow Vintage Computers to “Dial In”

    I learned that in a few simple steps you can setup a listener macOS daemon that will allow an incoming telnet connection to a specified port and present a shell session with a login prompt where you can login and execute terminal commands. When I do so, I’m usually there to launch irssi and connect to an IRC server, but other commands work nicely, such as the system monitor top, if you want to keep an eye on how things are doing when fullscreen apps are hogging the displays. (Another nice terminal-based IRC client is WeeChat, by the way.)

  • Sean Conner ☛ Adventures in updating

    Before I go to the trouble of installing the latest version of Apache, I want to ensure my updates to mod_litbook will compile on the lastest version of Apache. I’ve been developing it using Apache 2.4.38, a version from 2019 (and because I’m using mod_lua it’s vulnerable to CVE-2021-44790). So I pull down the latest version (as of this writing, the latest stable version is 2.4.54) and start compiling.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Word “Value” in CSS

    When you say “value” in CSS, you might think you know what it means. But if you look closer — especially at the spec — you’ll find there are lots of different meanings for the word “value” in CSS, each one different than the next.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to use snapshots on OpenSUSE

    OpenSUSE is one of a few Linux operating systems that use BtrFS by default instead of Ext4. The BtrFS filesystem is excellent on OpenSUSE, and with it, users can take filesystem snapshots for each update and change made and roll it back if anything happens. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can use the robust snapshot feature in both OpenSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed.

  • Unix Men ☛ How To Use Chown Command in Linux: Examples and Quick Tips

    On Linux, every file has an owner and a group. They are given access rights accordingly.

    With the chown command, you can change the owner and group of a file or directory. Configuring file and folder permissions is critical to the security of the files.

    In this brief guide, we will cover all you need to know to use chown to change permissions. We use chown version 8.28 in Ubuntu 18.04.2. We also provide some examples.

    You will need a Linux machine with access to a terminal. You need to have superuser privileges (so you can use the sudo command) to change ownership of any file.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install ClamAV on Fedora 37/36/35

    ClamAV is a versatile and powerful antivirus toolkit that can protect against such malicious software. One of its most important uses is on mail servers, which can scan incoming emails for viruses and other threats. Still, it can also be used on file hosting servers to periodically scan files that are available for download to the public. In addition to its use on servers, ClamAV can also be used on individual computers to scan for malware and other threat. The antivirus software also supports multiple file formats, utilizes multi-thread scanner features, and receives updates for its signature database daily to sometimes numerous times per day for the latest protection making it a popular software choice for Fedora users.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install ClamAV on Fedora 37/36/35 desktop or server and some basic scan commands using the command line terminal.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ Bash test command explained with examples

    Comparison and checking might not be suitable in real life, but it is essential in programming. It helps to ensure that you have good code that interacts well and works as expected. Comparison of various values, checking of the different properties of files, and logical reasoning with and/or methods is a massive part of any programming language and the entire basis of reasoning within any script’s framework. For Bash, the command test provides many of these features, and as we will see, an even more simplified version of that also exists. So let us know what it is all about.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to use the distinct count query in MongoDB

    Displaying a specific number of documents in a particular collection is one of the retrieval queries. Use the distinct count query when you have hundreds of documents in a collection and want to know the total number of distinct documents in that collection.

    In today’s MongoDB tutorial series post, we shall discuss the fundamental notion of distinct count queries and their use in MongoDB.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to list databases in MongoDB

    MongoDB is a NoSQL database that can store many forms of data, including unstructured data. Data in MongoDB is stored as collections and documents rather than relations. This enables it to keep any form of data. MongoDB has hundreds of operators and accepts several document storage and retrieval techniques.

    MongoDB also includes the Mongo Shell, a command-line interface and interactive tool written in JavaScript. Using Mongo Shell, you may perform queries and engage with your MongoDB databases, collections, and documents. You need to know the database name and its fundamental attributes while working on a database. You may quickly list the available databases for this purpose, and MongoDB has several choices for checking the size of databases, approved databases, or empty databases.

    This post will teach you about the various Mongo Shell list database commands and how to list databases in JSON format.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GIT on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to extensive projects quickly and efficiently. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning-fast performance. It outclasses SCM tools like Subversion or CVS with features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install GIT on Ubuntu 22.10, 22.04, or 20.04 Linux with instructions on using the standard repository or importing the latest version from the Ubuntu Git maintainers teams. The tutorial will cover some basic Git commands required for everyday use.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    Beekeeper Studio might be perfect for an easy-to-use and comprehensive GUI electron front end for database management. This open-source database GUI can easily connect with any MariaDB or Postgres and works well alongside popular databases such as MySQL, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB. Currently, Beekeeper Studio only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not Unix socket connections. It is equipped with all sorts of useful features you would expect in a quality SQL program: autocomplete functionality includes completable queries without having to make multiple trips back and forth between programs; there’s even live reflection on what your query will do right before it finishes running so that minor mistakes don’t go unnoticed while typing.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 LTS by importing the official repository and installing the application with cli commands.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Protect your files with GnuPG

    In this post, you will learn a useful and simple trick that will help you to protect files. To achieve this, use GnuPG.

    [...]

    In other words, thanks to GnuPG we will be able to obtain several functionalities around file encryption but also signatures for repositories.

    Being an open-source project, it is possible to find it without too many problems in many Linux distributions. So, it is easy to install and use it.

    Let’s use it to protect a specific file.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install VSCodium on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 [Ed: This helps Microsoft augment its monopolies; use something else]

    VSCodium is a code editor based on the open-source version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VSCode). The source code for VSCodium can be found on GitHub, and it is licensed under the MIT license. This means it will remain free to use, provided you don’t mind installing extra features via third-party plugins or extensions. It is a solid alternative for users seeking to keep utilizing VSCode but reducing their footprint to Microsoft, especially if you do not require third-party plugs or extensions.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install VSCodium on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 Linux. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the IDE securely and adequately.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Avidemux on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    Avidemux is a free, open-source software application for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4, and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Avidemux has a wide range of features that makes it a popular choice for video editing, including support for most popular video formats, the ability to cutting and joining video files without re-encoding, and power management features allowing you to automatically shutdown your computer when the job is done and much more. If you are looking for an easy-to-use video editor with all the features you need, then Avidemux is worth checking out.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Avidemux on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 Linux using the command line terminal the LaunchPAD PPA by the XtraDEB team.

  • Mounting SMB1 shares after kernel 5.15 | Rafael Cavalcanti

    Linux kernel 5.15 dropped support for NTLMv1, a weaker authentication algorithm.

    As a consequence, if you have old hardware that only supports SMB1 (such as Apple’s Airport Time Capsule), you may have trouble mounting them on recent distributions like Ubuntu 22.04.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Portal with RTX releases on December 8th

    Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA have announced that the Portal with RTX free DLC will be release on December 8th. It’s only been announced with a Windows build, so for Linux you’ll need to run it with Proton.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Stellaris 3.6 ‘Orion’ is a big free update to many parts of the game

    Paradox have put out the latest free update to their grand space strategy game Stellaris, the 3.6 “Orion” update is less about new content and more about improving the game.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Return to Monkey Island gets a GOG release

    Fans of GOG and adventure games will be happy, as the new Return to Monkey Island is now available on GOG. The release comes with the Native Linux build too. Probably one of the most highly rated games of the year too, nice to see it didn’t take long to come to other stores.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve fixes the on-screen keyboard not showing in new Steam Deck Client Beta

    Another update is now available for the Steam Deck with a Client Beta, fixing up some annoying issues people keep finding and reporting to Valve.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Client Beta update has a few more New Big Picture Mode fixes

    While Valve continues working towards replacing the old Big Picture Mode with the UI from the Steam Deck, a few more fixes are in the new Steam Client Beta.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Heroic Games Launcher v2.5.0 is out with Downloads Manager, App Sideloading

    Heroic Games Launcher v2.5.0 is out now for managing GOG and Epic Games Store, this new release has some pretty exciting features like sideloading.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Xfce 4.18 Looks Exciting – Check Out Its Best New Features – OMG! Ubuntu!

    I can lie: my excitement levels are rising because an all-new version of the Xfce desktop environment is edging towards release.

    Nearly two years of development has gone in to shaping Xfce 4.18, which is due for release on December 15, 2022. The release will be the stable series follow-up to Xfce 4.16 which debuted back in Christmas of 2020 (and brought some cool new features like fractional scaling support).

    Keen to discover what’s new and improved in the latest version of this lightweight desktop I’ve dug through code commits, developer tweets, and the odd bug report or two to write-up this run-down about what to expect.

    Let’s dive in!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Systemd Free ☛ 2022 hardcore list of linux distributions without elogind and other systemd parts

  Welcome antiX and Noir linux to the strict list, with edition 22 antiX is fully functional and lighter than ever without a trace of elogind!

  This means this list has grown more than it has shrunk, over the past 2+ years it has been dynamically published.

  Edited: November 30th 2022 (replacing older strict list)

  This list is going to be short and there may be a sublist of distros with a medium strict standard. We shall explain what the object is, below the short list (which we hope the community will assist in making longer as we have not been able to currently review the work of every distro and fork).

• BSD

  • Scqr Inc ☛ PostgreSQL 14.5 On OpenBSD 7.2: Install

    In OpenBSD 7.2 release, PostgreSQL was upgraded to 14.5. This post shows how to install it on the latest OpenBSD.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Advance notice of discontinuation of openSUSE Leap 15.3

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Red Hat ☛ C# 11: Raw strings, required members, and auto-default structs [Ed: Tom Deseyn at Red Hat works for Microsoft, not Red Hat]

  • Red Hat expands expansion of its open solutions on AWS

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Radxa Taco – A Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board made for NAS with 5x SATA ports – CNX Software

    The Radxa Taco is a carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM4 and compatible system-on-modules that is designed for NAS applications with five SATA ports for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives, 2.5GbE and GbE networking, M.2 sockets for expansion, and more.

    The new board is the successor of the Rock Pi SATA HAT designed for the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC or Raxda Rock Pi 4 single board computers and supports more SATA drives, M.2 NVMe storage, optional WiFi 6, built-in RTC support, and so on.

  • CNX Software ☛ AMD Ryzen Embedded V2516/V2718 mini PC supports three 4K displays, 2.5GbE, RS232/RS422/RS485 – CNX Software

    AAEON PICO-V2K4-SEMI mini PC, powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded V2516 or V2718 processor, can drive up to three 4K displays, offers 2.5GbE and GbE networking, several USB 3.2 ports, as well as two optional COM ports supporting RS232, RS422, and RS485.

    The first mini PC from the company featuring AMD Ryzen V2000 Series processors also comes with up to 32GB RAM, a 64GB NVMe SSD, as well as M.2 and mPCIe sockets for expansion, and its compact form factor makes it suitable for edge computing, embedded gaming, and image processing applications.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ Aesthetic PCB Design Tips For Improved Functionality

    Those of us hardware types that spend a lot of time designing PCBs will often look at other peoples’ designs with interest, and in some cases, considerable admiration. Some of their boards just look so good. But are aesthetics important? After all, for most products, the delicate electronic components on that PCB are tucked safely inside a protective enclosure. But, as [Phil’s Lab] explains, aesthetic PCB designs can lead to functional improvements, such that better-looking designs are also better performing, in terms of manufacturability (and therefore yield), electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), and several other factors that can be important.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Using relevant contexts to engage girls in the Computing classroom: Study results

    Today we are sharing an evaluation report on another study that’s part of our Gender Balance in Computing research programme. In this study, we investigated the impact of using relevant contexts in classroom programming activities for 12- to 13-year-olds on girls’ and boys’ attitudes towards Computing.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • CNX Software ☛ Rikomagic RKM V7 – A Rockchip RK3568-powered Android 11 HDMI TV stick – CNX Software

    Rikomagic RKM V7 is an HDMI TV stick running Android 11 on a Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with 2GB RAM, 16GB flash, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5/6 connectivity, as well as HDMI female port, and two USB ports. While the device could be used as a general-purpose Android mini PC, it is also suitable as a digital signage player with features such as RTC for time on/off control, screen rotation support, and a watchdog timer to ensure continuous operation even if a software crash occurs.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Terence Eden ☛ WebMentions, Privacy, and DDoS – Oh My!

  Mastodon – the distributed social network – has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I’d like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Sharing a Notebook

  The state-of-the-art in generative AI is advancing fast. But, unlike previous AI waves marked by big launches and research papers, generative AI is spreading in a much more grassroots (and unlikely) medium: through Google Colab notebooks.

  Google Colab notebooks are free Jupyter notebooks that run in the cloud and are easy to share. Many people use them to tinker with models, experiment with code, and share ideas. Interestingly, it was launched by Google Research during the time I worked on Google Cloud AI (we shipped a similar but unbranded Jupyter workflow).

  So why are Colab notebooks the medium of exchange?

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • AIM ☛ Netscape is Dead, But its Legacy Lives On

    In 1994, a press release read: “Netscape Communications Corporation today announced that it is offering its newly introduced Netscape(TM) network navigator free to users via the Internet.” That was when Netscape released its first commercial browser for free. Netscape was probably one of the most important companies of its time and if you had access to a computer and the web in the early 90s, chances are you were using a Netscape browser.

    However, the company failed to live up to expectations and despite a stellar IPO, failed to compete with the likes of Microsoft. Netscape ended up disbanded, but it did leave a legacy behind.

  • Mozilla

    • Tor ☛ Ensure Tor is strong for years to come: become a monthly donor

      Tor is powered by community. Just as the privacy the Tor network provides is made possible by a decentralized network of volunteers running relays—the Tor Project is made possible by a wide variety of supporters.

      As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Tor Project relies on external support to fight for your privacy online. We will always build and offer free software. It’s part of our mission and our vision of a better internet. We don’t harvest or sell your data. We don’t charge you to use what we build. That means that everyone in the world can use Tor. It also means that if you have the ability, making a monthly donation to Tor ensures its availability for others.

    • Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 11.5.10 (Android)

      Tor Browser 11.5.10 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

      This is an Android-only release which fixes crashes on Android 12+ devices caused by the targetSdkVersion update in 11.5.9.

• Education

  • FUTO ☛ FUTO Fellows Program

    After a successful and fun inaugural class, we’re eager to see what the second round of our residential incubator project will bring. A few talented independent developers will spend February 1st to May 1st, 2023 building their dream anti-establishment project without having to give up any equity or compromise on any principle. This round of fellows will be the very first to work out of FUTO’s new, 13,000 sq. ft. Austin campus.

    If selected, each member of your team will receive at least $20,000 of funding, airfare to Austin, free housing for three months, incubator space, equipment, mentorship, and VIP invites to a full slate of events.

• Programming/Development

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Custom Jackson JSON serializer/deserializer from Circe

    It’s not very efficient, as deserialization seems to parse the JSON in both Jackson and Circe, but I don’t have better ideas.

  • AIM ☛ JSON, It’s Time To Move On

    Javascript Object Notation (JSON) as a data transfer format has been widely used by the developer community and still remains a mainstay to store data on the server side. This archaic format is all set to get fresh coat of paint with the launch of JSON Hero, a new and improved way to handle data stored in the JSON format.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing

    OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.

    The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.

  • Harshvardhan ☛ CK Cafe: Using Association Rules to Find Basket of Goods | Harshvardhan

    In this lab session, I share how to use apriori algorithm for association mining. The goal is to find useful causal and association rules which can help in designing promotions for the company. Plus, you get to see what’s served at an Indian cafe.

  • Dignited ☛ What is GitHub: Git vs GitHub, Pricing and More [Ed: Shallow and poor article, which repeats lies from Microsoft and omits a ton of information]

  • TecMint ☛ Best HTML & CSS Code Editors for Linux [Ed: This list starts with Microsoft proprietary software. Bad taste.]

    In this tutorial, we look at the 8 best HTML and CSS Code editors for Linux developers.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ iftop compiled in OpenEmbedded

    Click on “pkg” icon and choose to update the database, and it can be downloaded and installed.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Advent::Calendar – Raku Advent Calendar

      Welcome to the 14th edition of this Advent Calendar, which started at the old site, and continues in this new one. According to the Wikipedia, 14 years marks the ivory anniversary.

      If you really want to nitpick, it’s the 13th anniversary since it started in 2009, making it the lace anniversary. I’ll go for that. Lace adds nice touches to fabric, and it semi-transparent, making it a go-to choice for occasions, and also, why not, for your daily life; lace doilies are used for dinner tables, or over furniture.

    • Perl ☛ New feature: HTTPS support | Meta [blogs.perl.org]

      The site is now served over HTTPS.

  • Python

    • Earthly ☛ Structural Pattern Matching in Python

      In this tutorial, you’ll learn how structural pattern matching works in Python by coding several examples in the context of working with web services. We’ll explore this new feature to match the structure and attributes of the response from the JSONPlaceholder Fake API. JSONPlaceholder is a free online REST API that you can use whenever you need some fake data.

    • AIM ☛ Top 9 Python Libraries for Machine Learning in 2022

      Machine learning and artificial intelligence libraries are available in almost all the languages but Python remains the most popular programming language of all. One of the most important aspects that makes the language the go-to choice for developers and enthusiasts is its sizeable community and the fact that it has more than 137,000 libraries for data science.

      The communities on GitHub are contributing almost everyday to make the libraries even better and overcome the existing issues and challenges in AI/ML.

      Here’s a list of the top Python libraries that were the most contributed to and used in 2022!

Leftovers

• The Nation ☛ Myths of Doom

  In 1992, the mood in the United States should have been triumphal. The country appeared on the verge of reigning supreme: The Soviet Union had fallen, and the rusting tyrannies across the Eastern Bloc were turning to democracy. The US military had recently pummeled petty dictators in Panama and Iraq, exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam. And although China had avoided the fate of the USSR by brutally crushing dissent in Tiananmen Square, the country was embracing the American way—or at least its markets—and emerging as an eager trading partner. But going into the election year, the United States was surly, restless, preoccupied with grim fantasies of decline and collapse, and fearful of being overtaken by old foes and new rivals.

• Science

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ Specialized Zero-Knowledge Proof failures

    Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are useful cryptographic tools that have seen an explosion of interest in recent years, largely due to their applications to cryptocurrency. The fundamental idea of a ZK proof is that a person with a secret piece of information (a cryptographic key, for instance) can prove something about the secret without revealing the secret itself. Cryptocurrencies are using ZK proofs for all sorts of fun things right now, including anonymity, transaction privacy, and “roll-up” systems that help increase the efficiency of blockchains by using ZK proofs to batch transactions together. ZK proofs are also being used in more general ways, such as allowing security researchers to prove that they know how to exploit a software bug without revealing information about the bug.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Standing Desk With A Clever Flair

    Standing desks (also known as sit-stand desks) are somewhat polarizing. The height is adjustable, but the idea is that you move between sitting and standing while you work. Hundreds of manufacturers are out there, but they’re all the same. Two metal legs that extend and one or more motors to move the legs up and down. [JAR Made] tried to make something slightly different for their standing desk with an extending curved surface.

  • Hackaday ☛ Tiny 3D Printed HO Scale Escalator That Works

    [Luke Towan] has a cool HO scale Escalator mostly made of 3D printed parts, with some laser cut acrylic, for a station on his HO model railroad.

  • Hackaday ☛ Prototyping The Prototype

    For basic prototyping, the go-to tool to piece together a functioning circuit is the breadboard. It’s a great way to prove a concept works before spending money and time on a PCB. For more complex tasks we can make use of simulation software such as SPICE. But there hasn’t really been a tool to blend these two concepts together. That’s what CRUMB is hoping to solve as a tool that allows simulating breadboard circuits.

  • Hackaday ☛ Interfacing An Old Engine Cowl Flaps Indicator To USB

    [Glen Akins] had a WW2-era aircraft engine cowl flap indicator lying around (as you do) and thought it would make a jolly fine USB-attached indicator. The model in question is a General Electric model 8DJ4PBV DC Selsyn, which was intended for four-engined aircraft. For those not familiar with the purpose [Glen] explains in his detailed writeup, that piston-engine aircraft of that era were air-cooled, and during conditions of maximum engine power — such as during take-off — flaps on the side of the engine cowling could be opened to admit additional cooling airflow. These indicator dials were connected to a sender unit on each of the flap actuators, providing the pilots an indication of the flaps’ positions.

  • Hackaday ☛ This Electric Outboard Conversion Makes For A Quiet Day On The Water

    Nothing beats a day on the lake in a little boat with an outboard motor putt-putting along behind you. It’s great fun, if perhaps a little noisy with all that putting going on. And maybe that oily sheen on the water in your wake is not so nice. it could be that the fish are a little annoyed with your putting, too. Come to think of it, outboard motors are a bit of a problem.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • California18 ☛ Child protection: TikTok France’s fake com

    Too bad because we want to know: two weeks ago, Tristan Harris, a tech ethicist trained at Stanford and who heads the Center for Humane Technologyconfided to the magazine of CBS 60 Minutes : “TikTok reserves the organic version of its app for the Chinese market and floods the world with the opium version”. This is much more restrictive and its algorithm primarily serves educational, scientific (and also patriotic) videos to very young Chinese people, says Harris. And the researcher cites an international study where, when asked about their future aspirations, American pre-teens say they want to become “influencer” while the Chinese say “astronaut”.

    [...]

    Bytedance, the parent company is not a start-up, but a multinational media company. This year, TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin are expected to achieve $12 billion in revenue. We are therefore entitled to wonder how Bytedance allows communication to be so disconnected from the real issues.

  • Pro Publica ☛ EPA Grants Mississippi $500k for Air Monitoring in Pascagoula

    The Environmental Protection Agency has granted the state of Mississippi $500,000 to conduct air monitoring in Pascagoula, a year after ProPublica reported elevated cancer risks from industrial air pollution in the city.

    Residents in the Cherokee Forest subdivision had long complained of toxic fumes and persistent health problems including headaches, dizziness and nausea. The neighborhood is surrounded by industrial sites, including a Chevron oil refinery and a shipbuilding facility that Bollinger recently purchased from VT Halter Marine.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Private Equity Is a Parasite Consuming the US Health System

    Private equity has succeeded in depicting itself as part of the productive economy of health care services. even as it is increasingly being recognized as being parasitic. The essence of this toxic parasitism is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but also to dull the host’s brain so that it often does not even recognize that the parasite is there. This is the illusion that health care services in the United States suffer under today.   Parasitic private equity is consuming US health care from the inside out, weakening its structure and strength and enriching investors at the expense of patient care and patients. Incremental health reforms have failed. It’s time to move past political barriers to achieve consensus on real reform. says J.E. McDonough, Professor of Practice at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Private equity firms are financial termites devouring the woodwork and foundations of the US health care system. Laura Katz Olson documents in her new book, Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms US Health Care, “PE firms are gobbling up physician and dental practices; homecare and hospital agencies; mental health, substance abuse, eating disorder, and autism services; urgent care facilities; and emergency medical transportation.” Private equity has become a growing and diversified part of the American health care economy. Demonstrated results of private equity ownership include higher patient mortality, higher patient costs, fewer jobs, poorer quality, and closed facilities.

  • FAIR ☛ Maybe Bill Gates’ Billions Don’t Make Him an Expert on Hunger in Africa

    The tire fire that Elon Musk seems to be making out of his new toy, Twitter, is leading some to call for an overdue, society-wide jettisoning of the whole “if he’s a billionaire, that means he’s a genius” myth.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why We Should Be Very Skeptical of the Billionaires Who Vow to ‘Give It All Away’

    In the United States, we are now treated to regular announcements about benevolent billionaires pledging to share their wealth. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for instance, recently told CNN that he would be giving away the majority of his $124 billion fortune in his lifetime. Further back in 2015, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away what he makes from 99% of his Facebook shares.

  • Common Dreams ☛ From Floods to Droughts, Every Region of the World Suffered Water Extremes Last Year: UN

    The World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday in its first annual State of Global Water Resources report that every region of the world suffered water extremes last year as the climate crisis intensified flooding and droughts, inflicting deadly damage on the most heavily impacted areas.

    “In 2021, all regions experienced significant hydrological extremes in the form of floods and droughts, having substantial impacts on communities, including numerous fatalities,” the WMO, a United Nations agency, notes in its new report. “Record-breaking floods were observed in western Europe and in the northern Amazon. At the same time, the Paraguay and Paraná Rivers experienced all-time record low water levels.”

• Proprietary

  • IT Wire ☛ Telstra claims it blocks 332 million email scams every month [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Telecommunications company Telstra claims to have blocked around 332 million incoming scam and potentially unwanted emails to Bigpond customers—over a third (38%) of all inbound email to Bigpond accounts. To put into context: Telstra blocks 7,600 emails every minute, based on January – October 2022 figure.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ Ratification by EU Member States of the Second Additional Protocol of the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention [PDF]

      In this paper, we point out the shortcomings of this international agreement in terms of fundamental rights protections which, if ratified by EU Member States without further amendments (or at least significant reservations and declarations), could lead to substantive breaches of EU law. The paper focuses on the direct transfers of personal data from service providers in the EU to law enforcement authorities in third countries (Articles 6 and 7), and is not exhaustive for the potential incompatibility of the Protocol with the Treaties.

      Our analysis, which takes into consideration the opinions of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) and Board (EDPB), points out the following issues in particular: [...]

    • EFF ☛ From Camera Towers to Spy Blimps, Border Researchers Now Can Use 65+ Open-licensed Images of Surveillance Tech from EFF

      To address this information gap, EFF is releasing a series of images taken along the U.S. Mexico-Border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means they are free to use, so long as credit is given to EFF (see EFF’s Copyright policy).  Our goal is not only to ensure there are alternative and open sources of visual information to inform discourse, but to raise awareness of how surveillance is impacting communities along the border and the hundreds of millions of dollars being sunk into oppressive surveillance technologies.

      The images include various types of surveillance towers adopted by Customs & Border Protection over the last two decades: 

    • EFF ☛ Power Up! Donations Get a 2X Match This Week

    • Techdirt ☛ California Court Denies Facial Recognition Pariah Clearview’s Anti-SLAPP Motion Over Its Web Scraping Activities

      Clearview wants to be the best in a shady business. As facial recognition tech has undergone increasing public scrutiny, Clearview has chosen to be the turd floating in the government surveillance punchbowl. Clearview scrapes public websites for pictures and data, and sells access to its immense database and the AI to exploit it to whoever wants it — something that has seen it sued, fined, and ejected from barely polite facial recognition society.

• Defence/Aggression

  • NPR ☛ Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes convicted of seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 trial

    But the foundation of the government’s case was the hundreds of text messages, Facebook communications as well as audio and video recordings that allowed jurors to see and hear what the defendants were saying and thinking in the months leading up to Jan. 6, on the day itself and afterward.

    In many of those communications, Rhodes and his co-defendants spoke in incendiary, sometimes even apocalyptic, terms about violence, civil war and the need to fight to keep Donald Trump in power.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Very Good Day for Our Republic’ as Key Jan. 6 Insurrectionist Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy

    Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted Tuesday by a federal jury of seditious conspiracy for his leading role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump and his “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

    “Stewart Rhodes being convicted for seditious conspiracy will be a wake-up call for a LOT of other January 6 defendants.”

  • Quillette ☛ Misremembering the Korean War

    The historical record challenges another fundamental part of the revisionist argument: that the war was caused by US “imperialism.” On the contrary, the conflict demonstrated what can happen when America sends mixed signals about its willingness to defend its allies. After all, one of the principal reasons Stalin granted Kim permission to invade the South was that he believed Washington wouldn’t come to Seoul’s rescue. The Truman administration’s failure to save its Chinese nationalist allies and its decision to withhold heavy weaponry from the ROK military suggested a strong aversion to intervention on the Asian mainland. In January 1950, Stalin’s convictions were reinforced when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson excluded South Korea when he announced the American defensive perimeter in Asia. Even after the North Korean invasion, Truman waited almost a week before committing US ground troops, initially hoping that communism could still be contained in Asia without direct American involvement.

  • The Economist ☛ How will America deal with three-way nuclear deterrence?

    Admiral Richard last year sounded the alarm that China was staging a “strategic breakout”. This month he warned that America was losing the military contest: “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking.” President Joe Biden says America faces a “decisive decade” in which to shape the global order. In a flurry of national-security policy documents this autumn his administration classifies Russia as the “acute” threat and China as “the “pacing challenge”.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Case

    The historic verdict — the most serious yet secured in relation to the events of Jan. 6 — was nonetheless mixed. Alleged co-conspirators Jessica Watkins, Thomas Watkins, and Kenneth Harrelson were found not guilty of sedition. Meggs and Watkins were, however, found guilty of the lesser charge of conspiring to disrupt the counting of the votes of the Electoral College. All five prosecuted members of the militia group were found guilty on charges of obstructing an official proceeding. Four of the five, including Rhodes, were found guilty of “tampering with documents or proceedings and aiding and abetting.”

  • NBC ☛ Two Oath Keepers, including founder, convicted of seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 case

    A federal jury in Washington on Tuesday found Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, another member of the far-right organization, guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a victory for the government in a case that involved a rarely used Civil War era statute.

  • Counter Punch ☛ How Has the Russia-Ukraine War Impacted Germany’s Renewable Revolution?

    For more details, see the factsheets Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions and energy transition targetsand Germany’s energy consumption and power mix in charts.

    This article was first published by Clean Energy Wire. It is available under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” . 

  • Meduza ☛ Zelensky says rebuilding Ukraine will cost more than $1 trillion — Meduza

    Rebuilding Ukraine will cost more than $1 trillion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a video address to the General Assembly of the International Bureau of Expositions on Tuesday.

  • Meduza ☛ Kadyrov responds to Pope’s statement on Chechens and Buryats, calling him ‘victim of propaganda’ — Meduza

    Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov has responded to Pope Francis’s statement calling Chechens and Buryats “the cruelest” Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.

  • Meduza ☛ Pope Francis calls Buryats and Chechens ‘the cruelest’ Russian troops — Meduza

    In a recent interview with the Catholic magazine America, Pope Francis shared some striking words on the violence in Ukraine. He didn’t name Putin, for example, among those responsible for the war because “it is already known.”

  • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian prisoners, potentially numbering in the thousands, taken to Russia — Meduza

    Russian soldiers retreating from Ukraine’s Kherson region took Ukrainian prisoners to dozens of prison colonies within Russian territory, according to Sirena, a publication from Alexey Navalny’s team. The Sirena report cites their own data and information from the organizations Russia Behind Bars and Gulagu.net.

  • Declassified UK ☛ 11 years after toppling Gaddafi, UK gets Libya’s oil

    Last month Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) agreed for BP to start drilling for and producing natural gas in a major project off the coast of the north African country.

    The UK corporation, on whose board sits former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, controls exploration areas in Libya equivalent to nearly three times the size of Wales.

    British officials have long sought to profit from oil in Libya, which contains 48 billion barrels of reserves – the largest oil resources in Africa, accounting for 3% of the world total.

    BP is one of the few foreign oil and gas companies with exploration and production licences in Libya. Its assets there were nationalised by Muammar Gaddafi soon after he seized power in a 1969 coup that challenged the entire British position in the country and region.

  • Meduza ☛ Body of Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was abducted during Russian occupation, found in Izium mass grave — Meduza

    Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko died in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region while it was under Russian occupation. He was buried in the city of Izium, where about 400 new graves were found after the city’s liberation.

  • Meduza ☛ All of Ukraine’s larger thermal power plants and HPPs show damage from Russian missile strikes — Meduza

    Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukraine’s high-voltage transmission operator Ukrenergo, says that all of Ukraine’s larger thermal power plants and HPPs have been damaged by the massive missile strikes conducted by Russia since early October.

  • Meduza ☛ The platoon that would end the war What the adult, draft-eligible (civilian) children of Russia’s elite have to say about the invasion of Ukraine — Meduza

    “Let me form a platoon made up of children of the elite, and the war will end within a day,” goes a popular, if apocryphal, quote often attributed to the late Russian General Alexander Lebed. In this spirit, journalists at the investigative news outlet iStories telephoned the draft-age children of several Russian politicians and oligarchs and asked if they have received draft orders and how they feel about the war generally. These were the responses.

  • Meduza ☛ Analytical platform Riddle Russia declared ‘undesirable organization’ in Russia — Meduza

    The Russian Attorney General’s Office has declared the Lithuania-based analytical platform Riddle Russia an “undesirable organization.”

  • Meduza ☛ Evgeny Prigozhin confirms Zambian student who died in Ukraine was recruited from prison by PMC Wagner — Meduza

    Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin has confirmed reports that Lemekhani Nyirenda, a Zambian citizen recently reported to have died in the war in Ukraine, was recruited from a Russian penal colony by PMC Wagner, the mercenary group Prigozhin founded back in 2014.

  • Meduza ☛ A taste for resistance Philologist Gasan Gusejnov explains how Russian-speakers beyond the Kremlin’s control are learning to use language to undermine the Putin regime — Meduza

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Notable Victory on Loss and Damage at COP27

    There is something in the modern radical mind that wants the climate negotiations to fail. Such a failure, after all, would seem to prove that this wretched system cannot be reformed, that only a revolutionary break can save humanity’s future.

  • Counter Punch ☛ COP27 and the 10 Rules of Corporate Greenwashing

    Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh made itself looking green and sustainable – thanks to corporate PR superstar company Hill+Knowlton which also supplied corporate propaganda for ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco.

    Like whitewashing that seeks to wash things clean, corporate greenwashing is a form of corporate marketing spin telling you that toxic sludge is good for you. In short, greenwashing is designed to make people believe that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it really does. It sells lies.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival

    These points launch the world into the unknown and unknowable, as they engage feedback loops the consequences of which we cannot accurately predict. And yet those predictions concern the mass suffering and death of tens of millions, and maybe more. We are at a tipping point. And President Biden has yet to declare the climate emergency he publicly pondered in July 2022. He likely (and legitimately) fears a political backlash; populism is seen now as a barrier to climate reforms.

    What’s wrong? Threats to our species as a whole, and to our survival, are amorphous things. They are too large, and too slow, for us—for the slowly evolving human brain—to see properly. But threats framed as originating from other persons, from the people around us are not. Our species is quite accustomed to dealing with such threats—this is the history of war. And in the case of things like pandemics, where amorphous threats like contagions were framed as threats by the government to deprive us of liberty, they have triggered terrifying populist responses.

  • Counter Punch ☛ What If the U.S. and China Really Cooperated on Climate Change?

    These talks have been an on-again, off-again proposition since President Barack Obama initiated them before the Paris climate summit of December 2015, at which delegates were to vote on a landmark measure to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the maximum amount scientists believe this planet can absorb without catastrophic consequences). The U.S.-Chinese consultations continued after the adoption of the Paris climate accord, but were suspended in 2017 by that climate-change-denying president Donald Trump. They were relaunched by President Biden in 2021, only to be suspended again by an angry Chinese leadership in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2nd visit to Taiwan, viewed in Beijing as a show of support for pro-independence forces on that island. But thanks to Biden’s intense lobbying in Bali, President Xi agreed to turn the interactive switch back on.

    Behind that modest gesture there lies a far more momentous question: What if the two countries moved beyond simply talking and started working together to champion the radical lowering of global carbon emissions? What miracles might then be envisioned? To help find answers to that momentous question means revisiting the recent history of the U.S.-Chinese climate collaboration.

  • The Nation ☛ Without the US and China’s Cooperation, Climate Catastrophe Is Inevitable

    As President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14 “summit,” relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions, which, to the relief of many, did occur. No policy breakthroughs were expected, however, and none were achieved. In one vital area, though, there was at least a glimmer of hope: The planet’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters agreed to resume their languishing negotiations on joint efforts to overcome the climate crisis.

  • Scheerpost ☛ What If the U.S. and China Really Cooperated on Climate Change?

    Michael Klare tries to imagine where those two governments could actually go if they truly decided to cooperate.

  • Energy

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Fuel shortages in Hungary, the filling station attendant says it’s like Mad Max

    • Hackaday ☛ Weird Energy Storage Solutions Could Help The Grid Go Renewable

      We’re all familiar with batteries. Whether we’re talking about disposable AAs in the TV remote, or giant facilities full of rechargeable cells to store power for the grid, they’re a part of our daily lives and well understood.

    • TruthOut ☛ Puerto Rican Towns Sue Big Oil in First-of-Its-Kind RICO Case

    • Common Dreams ☛ Puerto Rican Towns File RICO Suit Accusing Big Oil of Colluding on Climate Denial

      A group of 16 Puerto Rican municipalities has sued Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel giants for alleged violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

      The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court and described by plaintiffs as a first-of-its-kind RICO case, accuses Big Oil of colluding to deny the climate-wrecking impacts of their fossil fuel products.

    • The Sun ☛ Russian billionaire ‘with spy links’ dies in mystery helicopter crash near sunny Monaco after passenger cancels trip

      Ukrainian news agency UNIAN described him as a “billionaire [cryptocurrency] businessman with likely ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service”.

    • New York Times ☛ ‘No Cooperation’: How Sam Bankman-Fried Tried to Cling to FTX

      When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, the company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, announced the news in a contrite message on Twitter.

      But his attempt to calm the situation belied what had just taken place within the company. As the crisis unfolded, a group of FTX lawyers and executives moved to strip authority from Mr. Bankman-Fried and urged the company’s top leaders to prepare for bankruptcy. For days, Mr. Bankman-Fried ignored their warnings and clung to power, seemingly convinced that he could save the firm, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

    • Vox ☛ [Cryptocurrency] probably isn’t dead, but should it be?

      [Cryptocurrency] isn’t just a financial space where the line goes up and the line goes down; it’s also a place where the line goes poof! and disappears.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ The Stablecoin Saga Continued

      In The Stablecoin Saga I discussed the first of Datafinnovation’s two series on (meta)stablecoins, about the mystery of where the backing for coins like USDT is. Now, below the fold, it is time to look at their second series, mostly about tracing the flows of stablecoins using data from their blockchains.

    • India Times ☛ Large cryptocurrency moved to Binance, Ether sinks. Here are the details

      After a whale moved a large sum of cryptocurrency to Binance, the on-chain researcher Lookonchain warned of selling pressure in Ether. Here’s what we know so far

    • DeSmog ☛ Leading ‘Sustainable’ Investment Funds Backing Fossil Fuels, Research Finds

      Major investment funds available to UK consumers are marketing themselves as “sustainable” and “ethical” while financing fossil fuel companies, research has found.

      Numerous asset managers are using “green” terms in their branding despite investing in oil giants, with the worst performer being a fund managed by BlackRock, a report by the Ethical Consumer magazine shows.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ Holland Lake: The Once Burnt Child Fears the Fire

• Finance

  • Russ Allbery ☛ Review: The Fed Unbound by Lev Menand

    The Fed Unbound is a short non-fiction exploration of US Federal Reserve actions to reducing systemic risk caused by shadow banking. Its particular focus is the role of the Fed from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, including the COVID shock, but it includes a history of what Menand calls the “American Monetary Settlement,” the political compromise that gave rise to the Federal Reserve.

    [...]

    Most people are familiar with the basic story of how banks work. Essentially no bank simply takes people’s money and puts it in a vault until the person wants it again. If that were the case, you would need to pay the bank to store your money. Instead, a bank takes in deposits and then lend some portion of that money out to others. Those loans, for things like cars or houses or credit card spending, come due over time, with interest. The interest rate the bank charges on the loans is much higher than the rate it has to pay on its deposits, and it pockets the difference.

    The problem with this model, of course, is that the bank doesn’t have your money, so if all the depositors go to the bank at the same time and ask for their money, the bank won’t be able to repay them and will collapse. (See, for example, the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, or Mary Poppins, or any number of other movies or books.) Retail banks are therefore subject to stringent regulations designed to promote public trust and to ensure that traditional banking is a boring (if still lucrative) business. Banks are also normally insured, which in the US means that if they do experience a run, federal regulators will step in, shut down the bank in an orderly fashion, and ensure every depositor gets their money bank (at least up to the insurance limit).

  • The Nation ☛ Nancy Fraser’s Lessons From the Long History of Capitalism

    Theories of capitalism have always also been theories of crisis. John Maynard Keynes linked the instability of capitalism to the instability of aggregate demand, and Marxist thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that capitalism depends on noncapitalist markets to survive but disavows and destroys them. In her new book, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It, Nancy Fraser—one of the best-known feminist political theorists working today—advances a similar argument but adds that capitalism should be viewed as an “institutionalized societal order” on par with feudalism. She calls for a broader understanding of capitalism that isn’t exclusively focused on private property, the means of production, wage labor, and accumulation. Just as we need an expanded view of capitalism, so too, she argues, do we need a broader conception of socialism.

  • Meduza ☛ More than $90 million sent from Russia to Kazakhstan in October — Meduza

    5.6 billion rubles (about $91.45 million) were sent from Russia to Kazakhstan through money transfer systems in October 2022, according to RBC. That’s reportedly 13 times more than the amount sent in October of last year.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Inequality Kills. But We Can Stop the Killing.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Serious Question: Is Twitter Worth Saving?

    Twitter is unraveling at the speed of a SpaceX rocket. Things have gotten so bad under the erratic reign of Elon Musk that the future of the social-media company is in question. What, if anything, should be done to pull Twitter from the brink?

  • Techdirt ☛ If Twitter Goes Down In Flames, What Happens To Its Huge And Historically Important Collection Of Tweets?

    This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I’m talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that have been written over the last 16 years of its existence.

  • TruthOut ☛ Global Coalition Calls for More Advertisers to Boycott Twitter

  • TruthOut ☛ MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell Says He’s Running to Head the RNC

  • Counter Punch ☛ Virginia’s Part-Time Republican Governor

    It soon became clear that Youngkin regarded the governorship as a stepping-stone to something greater, coy though Youngkin has been about his presidential ambitions. To some extent this tentativeness is understandable.

    If Joe Biden wins a second term in 2024, it will be 2028 before Youngkin can make a run at the presidency. If a Republican wins in 2024, they will almost certainly run for reelection in 2028, which will delay a Youngkin presidential bid by another 4 years, that is, until 2032. So 2024 is probably the optimal date for a Youngkin pitch at the presidency.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Xi vs Trudeau: How China is Rewriting History with the Colonial West

    “If there was sincerity on your part,” the Chinese President told Trudeau, “then we shall conduct our discussion with an attitude of mutual respect, otherwise there might be unpredictable consequences.”

    At the end of the awkward conversation, Xi was the first to walk away, leaving Trudeau uncomfortably making his way out of the room.

  • TruthOut ☛ Evangelical Lobbying Threatens Supreme Court’s Independence

  • Common Dreams ☛ Calls for SCOTUS Ethics Probe Grow as Court Lawyer Defends Alito

    Demands for a congressional investigation into potential ethics violations at the U.S. Supreme Court intensified Monday after a lawyer for the court refused to answer questions from two lawmakers about allegations regarding Justice Samuel Alito.

    Ethan Torrey, legal counsel for the high court, responded to a letter from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) dated November 20, in which the lawmakers had asked a series of questions about a bombshell New York Times report detailing a former anti-abortion activist’s efforts to gain access to Supreme Court justices.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trumpism Won’t Be Defeated in a Single Election Cycle

  • Counter Punch ☛ Trump 2.0 Could Destroy America as We Know It

    If his first term in the White House is any indication, Trump could wreak havoc both on the domestic and foreign levels. Michael Dimock and John Gramlich note in PewResearch that even before he took office in 2016, “Trump divided Republicans and Democrats more than any incoming chief executive in the prior three decades. The gap only grew more pronounced after he became president.”

    In addition, according to Jeff Tollefson writing for Nature, Trump “exacerbated the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States, rolled back environmental and public-health regulations and undermined science and scientific institutions.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ A Way to Dump Trump

    An intriguing proposal is in the works, backed by a congressman, that could sideline Trump from seeking the White House forever.

  • TruthOut ☛ The 2020 BLM Uprising Lives On in Houston’s Struggle Against Police Violence

  • Techdirt ☛ Wherein The Copia Institute Tells The Supreme Court The Florida Social Media Law Is An Unconstitutional Mess That Needs Its Review

    The Copia Institute was back at the Supreme Court last week with a new amicus brief urging it to grant review of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in NetChoice v. Moody. That case, if you remember, took issue with the Florida’s attempt to regulate the Internet with its social media bill (this was the one with the erstwhile “theme park exception.”). And that decision was largely a good one, with some strong language by the Eleventh Circuit explaining how platform moderation was a First Amendment-protected activity that states couldn’t mess with.

  • India Times ☛ Musk says Apple mostly stopped advertising on Twitter

    Elon Musk said on Monday that Apple Inc has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter, the most high-profile company to pull ads from the social media platform over concerns about content moderation policies under its new owner.

    The move aligns the iPhone maker with a rising list of firms from General Mills Inc to luxury automaker Audi of America that have stopped or paused advertising on Twitter since the billionaire’s $44 billion buyout last month.

  • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk Takes On Apple’s Power, Setting Up a Clash

    In a series of tweets over 15 minutes, Mr. Musk, the new owner of Twitter, accused Apple of threatening to withhold Twitter from its App Store, a move that would limit some new users from downloading the app. The action would amount to censorship, Mr. Musk said, with no explanation from Apple for why Twitter would be blocked. He added that Apple had also reduced its advertising spending on Twitter.

    With his tweets, Mr. Musk set the stage for a power struggle with Mr. Cook, who holds immense influence over other tech companies through Apple’s dominance. Mr. Musk has a vested interest now in Apple’s clout because of his ownership of Twitter, which he bought last month for $44 billion. Twitter is distributed through Apple’s App Store and is used by iPhone and iPad owners around the world. In one tweet, Mr. Musk implied he was ready for “war” with Apple.

  • Teen Vogue ☛ The Georgia Senate Runoff: Why It Matters for Democrats, the Senate, and Georgians

    First, let’s talk about the Senate: If Warnock wins, it will reduce the hurdles Democrats face as they push legislation to the floor for a vote. In the first two years of the Biden administration, the Senate was split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. That meant there was little room for opposition within the party. This has significantly empowered conservative-leaning Democratic senators, such as Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and made it challenging for the party to pass some of the legislation that its voters support.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Ralph Nader: How Raphael Warnock Could Win the Georgia Run-off

    Ralph Nader writes about the winning policy messages that the Georgia senator is ignoring as the December election approaches.

  • Techdirt ☛ Musk Does Have Some Good Ideas: Encrypting DMs Would Be Huge, But…

    We’ve been somewhat critical of Elon Musk‘s tenure as Twitter owner and CEO (I think for fairly good reasons), but he does have a few good ideas. Lead among them, wanting to enable encrypted direct messages (DMs). He’s mentioned it before, but also had this slide in a recent internal presentation he gave…

  • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Mobilize in Georgia for Dec. 6 Senate Runoff

    While more than 500,000 Georgians have already cast their ballots for a December 6 runoff, progressive leaders and groups are encouraging Peach State voters to help U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, defeat his GOP challenger, ex-football player Herschel Walker.

    The tight race has implications for not only Georgia but the entire country; though Democrats lost their majority in the U.S. House earlier this month, Warnock winning reelection would give his party 51 Senate seats—allowing for control of the chamber without a power-sharing agreement and making it easier to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, including to the Supreme Court.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Groups Blast Biden for ‘Siding With Billionaires Over Rail Workers’

    Advocacy groups on Tuesday joined rail workers and progressives in Congress in calling out U.S. President Joe Biden for encouraging legislative action that would avert a December strike and force through a contract with no paid sick leave.

    “If Congress must intercede, Biden should instead ask legislators to pass a better deal, including the necessary sick leave.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘All of Rail Labor Is Going to Suffer’: Workers Furious Over Biden Move to Preempt Strike

    Rank-and-file rail workers voiced frustration and anger late Monday after Joe Biden—a self-described “pro-labor president”—urged Congress to pass legislation forcing unions to accept a contract agreement without any paid sick days, a step that would avert a looming nationwide strike and deliver a win for the profitable railroad industry.

    “By forcing workers into an agreement which doesn’t address basic needs like healthcare and sick time, President Joe Biden is choosing railroads over workers and the economy,” said Ross Grooters, an engineer and co-chair of Railroad Workers United, an inter-union alliance that supports public ownership of the national rail system.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Congressional Labor Caucus Demands More Funding for NLRB Before GOP Takes House

    The six co-chairs of the Congressional Labor Caucus on Tuesday implored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ensure that the cash-starved National Labor Relations Board receives additional funding in the final appropriations bill of the lame-duck session.

    “The status quo of NLRB funding is untenable.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives in Congress Begin to Push Back Against Biden Betrayal of Rail Workers

    After a period of silence, progressive members of Congress began to push back Tuesday as President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders moved ahead with plans to approve legislation that would prevent a nationwide rail strike by forcing workers to accept a contract deal without any paid sick days.

    The president’s endorsement of congressional action—and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) subsequent vow to swiftly bring legislation to the floor—sparked a furious response from rank-and-file rail union members, a majority of whom voted to reject the White House-brokered contract agreement that Biden and lawmakers are now trying to impose on workers, denying them the right to strike and stripping them of any leverage to negotiate a better deal.

  • The Nation ☛ The Agenda of House Republicans

    We said when we ran that we’d make this place great. We’ll honor that pledge, but right out of the gate, Inflation, the border, will just have to wait. We need to nab Hunter before it’s too late.

  • The Nation ☛ A Tale of Two Campaigns in Pennsylvania

    In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, many Democrats find themselves in an unfamiliar position: winners. In our state of Pennsylvania, Democrats won big. Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman ran remarkably different statewide campaigns—and both won. Rather than argue over which win is more instructive, we want to explore what each of these campaigns did right, and what we can learn from them going into 2024 and beyond.

  • The Nation ☛ This Supreme Court Case Is a Case Study in Conservative Hypocrisy

    The morning after Election Day, as many Americans waited to learn whether Democrats would retain the power to pass laws that will later be invalidated by conservatives on the Supreme Court, the court heard a critical case aimed at rescinding key rights held by Native Americans. The conservative legal apparatus has launched a frontal attack on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and with it an attempt to redefine the nature of tribal sovereignty.1

  • The Nation ☛ The Midterms Showed Democrats Don’t Need to Pander on Crime

    Here’s another positive outcome of the surprising midterm elections: They should put an end to the crime scare.

  • The Nation ☛ The Response to Brittney Griner’s Capture Is an Indictment of the Right and the “Left”

    I am deeply disturbed by the response to my recent column about what we know about the abhorrent prison conditions that Brittney Griner is enduring in a labor camp in Mordovia, Russia. While the article garnered attention to her plight, there were two trends on the right and among some supposedly on the left that speak to how toxic and enraging our political world has become. Part of the problem is my own naivete in thinking that the idea of an Olympian in a penal colony for nine years just might create unity across the political spectrum. There are points of unity, all right, but nothing like what I expected.

  • Meduza ☛ Imprisoned Belarusian opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava rushed from penal colony to intensive-care unit — Meduza

    Maria Kalesnikava, the Belarusian opposition leader who had been serving an 11-year sentence in a penal colony, has been rushed to an emergency hospital. On November 28, she was admitted to a surgical ward, and was later moved to an ICU.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Colombia’s First Leftist President Charts a New Path on Venezuela/

    The two met privately, held a press conference together, and released a joint statement.

    While critics derided the meeting as just another propaganda spectacle for Maduro, Petro has sent a signal to opposition parties in Colombia and the international community, particularly the United States, to rethink its approach if they hope to improve relations and achieve a successful political transition in Venezuela.

  • Meduza ☛ 250 convicts will serve forced-labor sentences at Nizhny Tagil tank and armored-vehicle construction plant — Meduza

    250 people sentenced to “obligatory work” in Nizhny Tagil will serve their sentences at the Uralvagonzavod industrial plant, a nominal cargo-train manufacturer that also produces tanks and armored vehicles for the Russian military. This was reported by the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) for the Sverdlovsk region.

  • Meduza ☛ Putin asks Federation Council to remove Alexey Kudrin as Russia’s Audit Chamber head. Sources say he’s transferring to Yandex. — Meduza

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has submitted a request to the Federation Council asking for head Alexey Kudrin to be dismissed from his post as Audit Chamber head, the Russian state outlet RIA Novosti reported on Tuesday, citing Federation Council Budget and Financial Markets Committee Chair Anatoly Artamonov.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Hype About Democrats Passing the Torch: Don’t Get Fooled Again

    President John Kennedy reached heights of inaugural oratory when he declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Three decades later, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, a Newsweek headline proclaimed “THE TORCH PASSES.” The article underneath glorified “a film clip that made its way into a widely seen campaign ad: a beaming, 16-year-old Bill Clinton on a sun-drenched White House lawn, shaking the hand of his and his generation’s idol, John F. Kennedy.”

    Weeks later, when Time magazine named Clinton “Man of the Year,” its cover story carried the headline “THE TORCH IS PASSED.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Beware Corporate Democrats “Passing the Torch”

    Images of passing the torch can be stirring.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Perversions of Political Punditry

    I suspect that it is the triumph of the “pundit class” on US television which makes so much of it boring and uninformative. What makes the tedium so irritating is that it is quite unnecessary as Washington is bulging with real experts on almost every conceivable thing. But few of them get within sniffing distance of a TV studio where they might say alarming, unexpected and interesting things.

    Unfortunately, it is this same pundit class which decides which issues are important and which are not. Many of those who were speaking knowledgably a month ago about the inevitable “Red Wave” and “Republican Tsunami” in the midterm elections are now busy setting the news agenda for the coverage of the presidential election in 2024.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Love Wins Again’: Senate Passes Bill to Protect Same-Sex and Interracial Marriage

    Rights groups and other supporters of marriage equality celebrated Tuesday after 12 Senate Republicans joined with all Democrats present to pass protections for same-sex and interracial partnerships.

    “Today we celebrate this win, tomorrow we continue to fight for the justice and equity that every American deserves.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Twitter ends enforcement of COVID misinformation policy

      Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts and social media researchers that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.

    • NPR ☛ Twitter will no longer enforce its COVID misinformation policy

      Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

    • BBC ☛ Twitter ends [COVID-19] misinformation policy under Musk

      Twitter had previously reported suspending more than 11,000 accounts for [COVID-19] misinformation as of September this year.

      BBC News has approached Twitter for comment.

      Its other policies on false information remain on Twitter’s website, without a similar notice saying they will no longer be enforced.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ With Intimidation and Surveillance, China Tries to Snuff Out Protests

    The campaign to quash the protests on multiple fronts draws on the party’s decades-old tool kit of repression and surveillance, which Mr. Xi has upgraded in pursuit of unshakable dominance. He has expanded the police forces, promoted loyal security leaders into key positions and declared that “political security” — for him and for the party — must be the bedrock of national security.

  • Gannett ☛ Schools are becoming hotbeds of political conflict – especially in purple districts

    There is “so much heat on us right now from these parent groups that we’re treading carefully,” said one principal in a purple Ohio community, who like all the study’s participants was given a pseudonym. Some teachers at his school have questioned whether they can teach about the civil rights movement and Jim Crow without being accused of conveying that all white people are bad. Others have considered retirement.

  • India Today ☛ China clearing out campuses, using censorship to snuff out Covid lockdown protests

    The censorship has also gone into overdrive after the widespread civil unrest that started after a deadly fire at a high-rise building in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, killed 10. Frustration mounted as purported videos of the incident led to accusations that lockdown hampered rescue efforts.

    The protests slowly spread to over a dozen cities and China resorted to detention, surveillance and censorship to quell further dissent amid a record spike in Covid cases in the country.

  • VOA News ☛ Anti-Government Protests Grow in China and Elsewhere While Technology Tries to Keep Up

    Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson said Chinese officials appear to be resorting to “low-tech approaches” to tamp down online speech even as the protesters have become more adept at getting their messages past government censors.

    “Literally police stopping people on the streets, on public transportation, and forcing them to hand over their smartphones so that police can inspect them to see if they’ve got chats about the protests, if they’ve taken pictures or videos, or if they’ve sent these kinds of materials to other people,” she told VOA via Skype on Tuesday.

  • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple to restrict ‘Everyone’ option in AirDrop to 10 minutes in China with iOS 16.1.1 [U]

    The change in how AirDrop works has been included in both iOS 16.1.1 and iOS 16.2 beta 2, both released today for users and developers. Also noted by our readers, this restriction is based on hardware rather than software. This means that only iPhone models purchased in Mainland China are affected by the update.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Don’t Extradite Assange ☛ WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief meets Brazilian president Lula da Silva

    Brazilian President Elect, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, welcomed Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief, and Joseph Farrell, WikiLeaks Ambassador, in a private meeting in the capital Brasilia yesterday (28 November 2022) to discuss the condition of Julian Assange’s detention for his WikiLeaks publications which exposed evidence of government crime, corruption at the highest level and flagrant war crimes.

  • Scheerpost ☛ UK Government Deployed 15 Staff on Secret Operation To Seize Julian Assange

    New information raises further concerns about the politicisation of the WikiLeaks founder’s legal case.

  • Scheerpost ☛ WikiLeaks Delegation in Latin America to Rally Support for Assange’s Release

    Apart from a meeting with Lula, the two are also expected to meet with the civil society groups, trade unions, federations and journalist guilds to not only raise solidarity for Assange but also to campaign in defense of the right to information.

    The visit to Brazil is being coordinated by the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) and is part of a series of events and meetings that the two will be participating across Latin America with political and social leaders, movements, organized civil society and all those who support Assange’s release.

  • JURIST ☛ BBC journalist arrested and detained while covering COVID-19 protests in China

    According to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC), which represents journalists from over 40 countries but is not officially recognized by the Chinese authorities, “[Lawrence] was seen being wrestled to the ground by multiple officers before being led away.” The journalist was allegedly beaten and kicked by Chinese police authorities while in their custody for several hours before being released. Lawrence further shared that at least one Shanghai resident was arrested after trying to stop the police from beating him.

  • Craig Murray ☛ Trains (Mostly), Planes and Automobiles

    Two particular threads are worth serious consideration. The first is that it was Stefania who discovered that the Crown Prosecution Service had been insisting to the Swedish prosecution service that the allegations against Julian must be continued, when the Swedes had wished to drop them for lack of evidence.

    She also found that the Crown Prosecution Service had deleted almost all the relevant emails – allegedly because the staff member working on the case had retired.

    The CPS had claimed that when anyone retired their records were deleted, even on continuing cases. That is utterly false – government archives are not personal to the individual and case files do not belong to one person.

    As a lie it is particularly desperate. It is of course the case that once Julian was actually in custody, the Swedish allegations, which never had any real foundation, simply disappeared.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ABC ☛ Cherokees ask US to make good on promise: a seat in Congress

    “The promise was very simple,” said Cherokee Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. “The treaty literally says the Cherokee Nation ‘shall have’ a right to a delegate in the House of Representatives.”

    The non-voting position, similar to a role held by representatives of the District of Columbia, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, would give the Cherokee a voice at the epicenter of political power.

  • Site36 ☛ Go film the police: How the police want to define the „de facto public“

    The German Campaign for Victims of Racist Police Violence (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, KOP) calls for documenting police actions with video footage. Initially, the police defended themselves against this with the Art Copyright Act, now the police often describes its spoken word as „non-public“. I spoke about this with Maren Burkhardt, who represented and supported the campaign as a lawyer.

  • VOA News ☛ Niece of Supreme Leader Asks World to Cut Ties with Iran

    In a video posted online by her France-based brother, Farideh Moradkhani urged “conscientious people of the world” to support Iranian protesters. The video was shared online this week after Moradkhani’s reported arrest on Nov. 23, according to U.S.-based rights monitor HRANA.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Abdullah Al-Arian on First Middle East World Cup & Western Media’s “Orientalist Outlook”

    As the 2022 World Cup plays out in Qatar, the first Arab country to host the major sporting event, we speak with history professor Abdullah Al-Arian, who says the international media is projecting an “Orientalist outlook” in its coverage of the games. Al-Arian says despite mainstream discourse, football in the Middle East has historically been used by nationalist movements as “a means of organizing collectively on the basis of achieving their own liberation against colonial rule.” His recent New York Times opinion piece is “Why the World Cup Belongs in the Middle East.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Sportswashing & Greenwashing”: Ex-Soccer Player Jules Boykoff on Qatar Hosting World Cup

    We speak with author Jules Boykoff about the climate and political implications of the 2022 World Cup. The soccer tournament is being played in the winter for the first time due to Qatar’s extreme summer temperatures. Boykoff says Qatar and FIFA have greenwashed the event by erroneously claiming the World Cup is “fully carbon neutral” despite blocking an independent review of the games. Boykoff also says Qatar is participating in “sportswashing” by using the games to deflect attention from labor abuses. Boykoff’s article in Scientific American is “The World Cup in Qatar Is a Climate Catastrophe.”

  • Vox ☛ Qatar’s migrant labor system is bigger than the World Cup

    Focus on its labor system zeroed in on the construction industry, since so many new facilities were built and because it can be such dangerous work. A Guardian story from 2021 found that 6,750 South Asian workers in all industries died over a 10-year period in Qatar; only 37 of those workers were directly linked to the construction of World Cup facilities. Still, as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, many families of deceased migrant laborers still lack meaningful information about how and why their loved one died, as well as compensation for their loss.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Justice Demanded After Qatari World Cup Official Admits Hundreds of Migrant Worker Deaths

    An Amnesty International campaigner on Tuesday led calls for “truth, justice, and compensation” after Qatar’s World Cup chief admitted that hundreds of migrant workers died during the construction of projects related to the FIFA tournament.

    “Without full investigations the true scale of lives lost can never be known.”

  • Arkansas Times ☛ State Police set to settle lawsuit over crash maneuver; agree to change in policy for ‘PIT’

    State Police defended the PIT technique at the time. And in a recent appearance before legislators, Cody Hiland, legal counsel for the Department of Public Safety, continued to defend the practice. It was defended as an almost scientific practice. He acknowledged an increasing use of the technique but put it down to more reckless drivers. A Fox 16 investigation had found, however, that it was frequently being used for minor offenses, such as Harper’s speeding case. The ACLU had called on State Police to review the use of the technique.

  • Yahoo News ☛ Delta flight attendant threatens disabled travel blogger with ‘TSA guns’ in row over wheelchair

    The accessibility travel blogger held his ground as his request falls under the Air Carrier Access Act, which allows a passenger to remain seated until their wheelchair is brought to them.

    According to the US transportation department, the law mandates airlines return wheelchairs to users as closely as possible to the door of the aircraft, if requested.

  • EFF ☛ Coalition of Human Rights, LGBTQ+ Organizations Tell Congress to Oppose the Kids Online Safety Act

    As we’ve said before, KOSA would not protect the privacy of children or adults, and would force technology companies to spy on young people and stop them from accessing content that is “not in their best interest,” as defined by the government, and interpreted by tech platforms. KOSA would also likely result in an elaborate age-verification system, run by a third-party, that maintains an enormous database of all internet users’ data. 

  • Techdirt ☛ Ohio Cops Decide First Amendment Doesn’t Exist, Arrest Newspaper Editor For Committing Journalism

    Ohio cops just can’t seem to get their head around First Amendment protections. A case hopefully en route to a Supreme Court review involves Parma, Ohio cops who decided it was completely legal to arrest a town resident for creating a clearly satirical Facebook page that suggested the Parma PD was offering free abortions in a roaming van and promoting a “pedophile reform” event.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Australian Report Advises ‘Urgent Action’ to Combat Slavery in Clean Energy Supply Chains

    The leading Australian clean energy association warned Tuesday that modern-day slavery plagues global renewable energy supply chains, and that the industry must take “urgent action” to ensure human and worker rights are respected as nations decarbonize. 

    “Renewable energy technologies can have long supply chains that are linked at various points to modern slavery.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The MAGAfication of America Is a Prelude to Authoritarianism

    Just in case you didn’t notice, authoritarianism was on the ballot in the 2022 midterm elections. An unprecedented majority of candidates from one of the nation’s two major political parties were committed to undemocratic policies and outcomes. You would have to go back to the Democratic Party-dominated segregationist South of the 1950s to find such a sweeping array of authoritarian proclivities in an American election. While voters did stop some of the most high-profile election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and pro-Trump true believers from taking office, all too many won seats at the congressional, state, and local levels.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Senate Report Details Failure to Confront ‘Persistent and Lethal’ Threat of White Supremacists

    Despite the fact that federal law enforcement agencies have in recent years acknowledged that white supremacy represents a major threat to public safety in the United States and is fueling domestic terrorist attacks, a new U.S. Senate report reveals that authorities are continuing to pour resources into fighting international threats instead of addressing extremism stateside.

    After a three-year investigation, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month released a nearly 130-page report detailing how the FBI—part of the Justice Department—and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have “failed to adequately align resources to address the threat from domestic terrorism, despite the agencies highlighting the magnitude of the threat in their annual strategic intelligence assessments.”

  • The Nation ☛ Torture in the Heart of Venezuela

    Caracas—For the first 45 days of their imprisonment, three Venezuelan human rights defenders languished in a cold 13-by-13-foot cell. There was no natural light, fresh air, or communication with the outside world. Their only water source was the toilet pothole. Subject to what’s known as “white torture,” a method of psychological punishment the Nicolás Maduro government uses on political prisoners, they lost track of time and place. One of the prisoners, Rafael Tarazona, told me, “Psychologically, the hardest thing was not having information about our family, about our mom.”

  • The Nation ☛ Amazon Solidarity Forever Puzzle

  • TruthOut ☛ NYC DA Asks Judge to Drop Murder Charges Against Domestic Abuse Survivor

  • Democracy Now ☛ NYC DA Asks Judge to Drop Murder Charges Against Domestic Abuse Survivor Tracy McCarter

    In a remarkable courtroom scene, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg asked a New York judge Monday to dismiss murder charges against Tracy McCarter, who says she acted in self-defense when her estranged husband died from a stab wound in the chest in 2020. Bragg campaigned on a promise to fight to free McCarter of murder charges, though, when elected, advocates say his actions initially fell short. This comes as pressure is growing in New York to end the criminalization of domestic abuse survivors, which happens at a disproportionate rate against Black women. Advocates say 90% of women who are incarcerated in New York have been subjected to domestic violence. McCarter “had done everything we tell domestic abuse survivors to do,” says journalist Victoria Law, who has closely followed McCarter’s case, but the nurse still finds herself “in legal limbo, waiting to see if she can try to start picking up the pieces of her life or if she will be facing trial for murder.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ A New Union Rises in the South

    The Union of Southern Service Workers is organizing food service, retail and health care workers through direct action against low wages and historical racism.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Biden Accused of Selling Out Rail Workers by Urging Congress to Prevent Strike

    “Biden is siding with corporate rail bosses over the rank-and-file workers who voted against this agreement,” said one progressive commentator after the president urged lawmakers to take action to force through a deal without paid sick leave.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph

    Nations now fashioning a post–Western world order appear to be abiding by the Five Principles espoused by China’s first and long-serving premier.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How States Limit Teen Access to Abortion

    On a hot Texas morning in 2020, Giselle, who goes by G, slipped her arms into a borrowed blazer, flipped up the nose ring in her septum so it couldn’t be seen and walked into the Coryell County Courthouse. It was the first time she had ever been to court. She was 17, 11 weeks pregnant and already beginning to show. She was going to ask a judge for authorization to seek an abortion. Her lawyer had explained that she needed to prove that she was mature enough to make this decision. G squeezed her lips around her braces, reminding herself not to smile. She didn’t want the judge to see her as a child.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Autopsies Can Help Explain Stillbirths. Too Few Are Performed.

    After Dr. Karen Gibbins’ son was stillborn in 2018, doctors could not explain why it happened.

    She underwent genetic testing, which came back normal, and an examination of her placenta, which her medical records show was “notable for the lack of evidence” of an infection or any abnormalities.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Meduza ☛ Starlink raises service prices in Ukraine — Meduza

    Starlink, the satellite Internet provider that has been crucial for keeping Ukraine connected in the wartime, is raising its monthly service prices in Ukraine.

  • Project Censored ☛ The Post-WWII U.S. Rise to Global Dominance/Prospects for Stronger Net-Neutrality Protections – The Project Censored Show

    Aaron Good is the author of “American Exception: Empire and the Deep State,” a new book from Skyhorse Publishing. He also hosts a podcast titled “American Exception.” He holds a Ph.D from Temple University. In the tradition of Peter Dale Scott, Aaron’s writing emphasizes the role of a ‘deep state’ (a powerful, secretive, unelected governing force) in history. Chris Garaffa is co-host of the Covert Action Bulletin podcast, and is a frequent radio guest on issues of technology and surveillance.

  • Techdirt ☛ U.S Cable TV Companies Quietly Bled Another 785,000 Paying Customers Last Quarter

    The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free services like TikTok and YouTube.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Who Is the Government Really Backing With Bill C-18?: Rejected Online News Outlet Amendment Tells the Story – Michael Geist

    Last week, I wrote about Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner’s comments at the Heritage committee study into Bill C-18, as she dismissed a proposed Conservative amendment by offering a misleading take on CRTC regulation of the news and stating that online news outlets are “not news.They’re not gathering news. They’re publishing opinion only.” Those comments unsurprisingly sparked anger from many online news outlets, leading to an apology from Hepfner in which she said that Bill C-18 will support digital journalists in their work. Yet a day later, the committee was back at clause-by-clause review and while Hepfner remained silent, her colleagues voted down an amendment proposed by online news services which re-affirms that action speaks louder than words.

    Indeed, the rejection of online news outlet concerns suggests that Hepfner’s comments are closer to the mark than the government would like to admit. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has already estimated that over 75% of the revenues from Bill C-18 will go to large broadcasters such as Bell and the CBC. Once Postmedia and Torstar get their share, there is likely to be little left for independent and online news outlets. Of course, if your view is that those outlets don’t matter, that isn’t a problem.

  • Plumb Consulting ☛ How the Internet works (and is paid for)

    This study, led by Plum and commissioned by Google, explores in detail how the modern Internet actually works to deliver content to end users. This includes analysis of how data moves around the Internet, how the Internet is coordinated and governed, and the key features of today’s Internet. It also includes analysis of the economics of the Internet and how its infrastructure is paid for.

• Monopolies

  • Variety ☛ Apple Has Threatened to Pull Twitter From App Store, Musk Claims

    Elon Musk unleashed a stream of confrontational Twitter posts directed at Apple — including claiming that the tech giant has threatened to remove the Twitter app from the Apple App Store without providing a reason for doing so.

  • The Economist ☛ Microsoft, Activision-Blizzard and the future of gaming

    Trustbusters’ immediate concern is the console market. For two decades Sony and Nintendo have had the upper hand in the “console wars”, even as supply-chain problems have inhibited sales of Sony’s latest PlayStation (see chart). Nonetheless, Sony worries that gamers might desert the PlayStation if Microsoft made “Call of Duty” exclusive to Xbox. Some 45% of PlayStation owners play the game, according to MIDiA Research, a data firm.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Canada’s Federal Court Grants NHL Pirate Streaming Blockade for 22/23 Season

      Bell, Rogers, and other copyright holders have obtained a new piracy-blocking order at Canada’s Federal Court. The ‘dynamic’ injunction requires Internet providers to block access to unauthorized IPTV streams during the current NHL season. It’s the second order of its kind and, if effective, it won’t be the last either.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Cyando Kills Uploaded.net Before Copyright Quagmire Drowns It

      There’s no announcement on the site itself but in just two days, maybe even less, Uploaded.net will shut down, taking users’ files with it. In brief emails to customers, Uploaded owner Cyando blames “the situation” for the site’s closure, but provides no other details. It seems likely that Uploaded is being pushed off a cliff before a quagmire of legal action suffocates it to death.

    • Techdirt ☛ Canada Steals Cultural Works From The Public By Extending Copyright Terms

      We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: it cannot make sense to extend copyright terms retroactively. The entire point of copyright law is to provide a limited monopoly on making copies of the work as an incentive to get the work produced. Assuming the work was produced, that says that the bargain that was struck was clearly enough of an incentive for the creator. They were told they’d receive that period of exclusivity and thus they created the work.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Star Log 2022-11-28 Evening (Fairbanks, AK, US)

    This week, God put most of Alaska inside of a high pressure bubble, which gave us clear skies last night, so I was determined to do some more stargazing. Interestingly, the NWS forecast had predicted the skies would be mostly clear by Monday morning, but by mid-morning there was a layer of low-altitude clouds covering almost the whole sky. I checked the forecast again and the clear skies had been pushed back about a day. I’d have to say that, for all the great weather tracking tools we have, God is still in control of the weather, and our forecasting is just educated guesses.

  • Human Holidays

    Thanksgiving was fabulous. Despite being sick with some sort of weird sinus infection, I successfully made (mostly from the World of Warcraft cookbook) roast turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, spiced stuffing, cranberry chutney, and candied sweet potatoes. I forgot to plan ahead for pie but thankfully there was a bakery open so husband was able to order some pumpkin pie! We feasted and watched the National Dog Show together and then played games, relaxed, and tried our best to stay awake until bedtime. The whole experience was pretty much stress free for me. I bought everything I needed only a few days beforehand instead of obsessing over it weeks in advance. I started preparing most of the dishes on Wednesday, and only in between other tasks when I really felt like it. Nothing was written in stone. I find I work so much better when this is the case. I made the the foods I wanted to make. It’s my Thanksgiving now.

  • Music Spotlight: My Top Album 2021

    Better late than never! I ended up falling off of gemini last year so I never got around to compiling this list but I didn’t stop the data gathering!

    If you hadn’t read my previous post for 2020 I’ll share the link at the bottom!

• Technical

  • First Look at Textual

    I’ve found that sometimes it’s a good idea to learn something completely new and unfamiliar to avoid getting burned out on any one project or task. My latest go at that was learning Textual, a Python framework for building text user interfaces (TUIs).

    [...]

    Textual left a positive first impression on me. If you’ve ever worked on a web app using Vue or a similar javascript framework, Textual feels very similar where you’re quickly building widgets then piecing them together alongside the code and styling them with CSS. It might feel overkill for a TUI but as a result, UIs built with Textual are really rich and highly interactive. Just go check out some of their official examples on GitHub or projects other people have made if you don’t believe me.

  • Adventures in updating

    Before I go to the trouble of installing the latest version of Apache [1], I want to ensure my updates to `mod_litbook` [2] will compile on the lastest version of Apache. I’ve been developing it using Apache 2.4.38, a version from 2019 (and because I’m using `mod_lua [3]` it’s vulnerable to CVE-2021-44790 [4]). So I pull down the latest version (as of this writing, the latest stable version is 2.4.54) and start compiling.

    I then got a compilation error about a missing field in a structure definition. _Great!_ I think. _Just how much of my system will I have to have to upgrade?_ I start investigating and find something odd—said field not only exists, it exists in the source code for Apache! The very codebase I’m compiling. Yet, for some reason, the compiler thinks the field doesn’t exist.

  • Announcements

    • A Spartan to Gemini proxy server

      I’m always looking for ways to run things more efficiently, and for fun new projects. Now, Agate is a great high performance server, but Agis uses significantly less memory at idle than Agate. The biggest difference I believe is that Agate is using the Tokio async runtime. Tokio is great. It’s really high performance, and you can build monstrously high capacity web services with it. But that’s just it. It’s overkill. Instead of using async code everywhere and pulling in everything that Tokio requires, when I built Agis I did so with a simple threadpool model and four worker threads handling requests. This is configurable of course, but let’s be honest and assume that for most of us four simultaneous requests is wishful thinking on Gemini. But let’s stick with four worker threads vs the whole async runtime and check out the momory usage.

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Make LIBREOFFICE more compatible with MICROSOFT OFFICE – 365 – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu MATE 22.10 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

    A Quick Overview of Ubuntu MATE 22.10.

  • Video ☛ How to install Ubuntu Unity 22.10 – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Unity 22.10.

  • Video ☛ Tumblr Will Join Mastodon And The Fediverse – Invidious

    If you told me a year ago Tumblr would become relevent again I wouldn’t believe you but here we are, Tumblr has decided to join the Fediverse and implement activitypub to connect with Mastodon and other platforms

  • Video ☛ Keep Your Notes Private With This Built In Feature – Invidious

    Vim has this built in feature that helps you keep your notes private

• Kernel Space

  • Tales of the M1 GPU – Asahi Linux

    In order to handle all these moving parts in a reasonably safe way, modern GPU drivers are split into two parts: a user space driver and a kernel driver. The user space part is in charge of compiling shader programs and translating API calls (like OpenGL or Vulkan) into the specific command lists that the command processor will use to render the scene. Meanwhile, the kernel part is in charge of managing the MMU and handling memory allocation/deallocation from different apps, as well as deciding how and when to send their commands to the command processor. All modern GPU drivers work this way, on all major OSes!

    Between the user space driver and the kernel driver, there is some kind of custom API that is customized for each GPU family. These APIs are usually different for every driver! In Linux we call that the UAPI, but every OS has something similar. This UAPI is what lets the user space part ask the kernel to allocate/deallocate memory and submit command lists to the GPU.

    That means that in order to make the M1 GPU work with Asahi Linux, we need two bits: a kernel driver and a user space driver!

  • LWN ☛ Lina: Tales of the M1 GPU [LWN.net]

    Asahi Lina gives a detailed update on progress toward a graphics driver for Apple M1 hardware.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Linux on Apple Silicon Macs Is Now Good Enough for Gaming

    Even though the M1 and M2 chips in modern Macs are based on ARM processor designs, they aren’t like any other ARM designs. That has made porting Linux to new Macs a difficult challenge, but there has been some impressive progress recently.

    Much of the work around porting desktop Linux to Apple Silicon (M1 & M2) Mac computers has been under the Asahi Linux project, which already offers a desktop distribution that can boot natively on many models. Even though Linux has supported ARM chips for years, largely due to Google’s use of Linux for the Android kernel and devices like the Raspberry Pi, making everything work on Apple Silicon has been a challenge.

    The core operating system and desktop experience has been working on Asahi Linux for a while now, so some developers have moved onto proper graphics support. Alyssa Rosenzweig helped reverse engineer the GPU in the M1 chip to create a user space driver, based on documentation work by Dougall Johnson. However, a kernel-level driver was still missing — a task taken up by VTuber Asahi Linya.

    Asahi Lina explained in a blog post, “just like other parts of the M1 chip, the GPU has a coprocessor called an “ASC” that runs Apple firmware and manages the GPU. This coprocessor is a full ARM64 CPU running an Apple-proprietary real-time OS called RTKit… and it is in charge of everything! It handles power management, command scheduling and preemption, fault recovery, and even performance counters, statistics, and things like temperature measurement! In fact, the macOS kernel driver doesn’t communicate with the GPU hardware at all.”

• Applications

  • onak 0.6.2 released

    Over the weekend I released a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. At 2 years since the last release that means I’ve at least managed to speed up a bit, but it’s fair to say its development isn’t a high priority for me at present.

    This release is largely driven by a collection of minor fixes that have built up, and the knowledge that a Debian freeze is coming in the new year. The fixes largely revolve around the signature verification that was introduced in 0.6.0, which makes it a bit safer to run a keyserver by only accepting key material that can be validated. All of the major items I wanted to work on post 0.6.0 remain outstanding.

    For the next release I’d like to get some basic Stateless OpenPGP Command Line Interface support integrated. That would then allow onak to be tested with the OpenPGP interoperability test suite, which has recently added support for verification only OpenPGP implementations.

• Instructionals/Technical

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Kafka on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Kafka is open-source software that enables the storage and processing of data streams via a distributed streaming platform. It’s developed by Apache Software Foundation and written in Java and Scala. Apache Kafka is used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data stream, especially for enterprise-grade applications and mission-critical applications.

    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 Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform. on Rocky Linux. 9.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Caddy Web Server with PHP 8.1 on Ubuntu 22.04

    Caddy is a modern web server built in the GO language. It is a simple, user-friendly, lightweight, and commercially supported web server.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install RabbitMQ Cluster on Ubuntu 22.04

    RabbitMQ is a free and open-source message broker.

  • Use SSH to proxy web traffic

    As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network.

    When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel. The second advantage I have, is that I can choose the location where my traffic leaves my VPN, since I have multiple machines in multiple nations. Another advantage is that I can be sure that no data is visibile by the network manager, even if this is becoming less and less relevant, since the majority of the traffic is encrypted nowadays.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Access Hidden GNOME Settings With Dconf Editor

    Take GNOME desktop customization to the next level by accessing all the hidden desktop settings with Dconf Editor.

    As the default desktop environment for many distros, GNOME is popular in the Linux desktop space. Its consistent design principles and large app ecosystem make it attractive to many Linux users. But GNOME also has a reputation for lacking custom settings.

    To streamline the desktop experience, the GNOME team has had to make compromises on user customization. These compromises do not mean the end of GNOME customization. A lot of GNOME settings are actually present, though hidden out of the box. Users can access these hidden settings with a powerful app called Dconf Editor.

  • Major Hayden ☛ Make screenshots quickly in i3 with maim and xclip

    My daily workflow includes taking tons of screenshots. I’m constantly relaying views of different data or results of various work between different chat systems and emails. As with all things that I do often, I look for ways to optimize them as much as possible.

  • ZDNet ☛ How to create message filters in Thunderbird to keep your inbox organized | ZDNET

    Call me a dinosaur, but I still depend on email. I use it for personal and professional communication every day of the year. Because of that, my inbox can get scarily full. Within a span of sixty minutes, I’ll have received hundreds of emails in multiple accounts.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Pinegrow web editor on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Pinegrow web editor on a Chromebook.

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

    This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ This Extension Tells Your App Startup Time in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 | UbuntuHandbook

      Want to measure your application launch time in Linux? There’s an extension can do the job for GNOME desktop.

      Meaning Ubuntu, Fedora workstation, and other Linux with GNOME desktop can easily tell how much time it takes for launching an application, which is useful for benchmark and/or software developing purpose.

      With the extension enabled, every time you launching an application, an on-screen display pops up shows the loading time in millisecond. Not only for native .deb/.rpm, but also for Snap and Flatpak applications.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • Klara ☛ Running OpenZFS – Choosing Between FreeBSD and Linux | Klara Inc

    In this article, we’re not going to set out to tell you which operating system you should use—they’re both excellent!—but we’ll lay out their remaining OpenZFS differences, to help anyone on the fence decide which OS to use beneath our favorite filesystem.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Oracle Linux 9 Update 1 brings enhanced security and new development tools

    Oracle Linux 9 Update 1 for the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms is generally available today. This release is 100% application binary compatible with corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Update 1 release. This Oracle Linux 9 release includes the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7). UEK R7 is based on the upstream Linux Kernel 5.15 and is supported on both Oracle Linux 9 and Oracle Linux 8.

  • Upgrading to Oracle Linux Automation Manager 2.0

    Today, one very cool video recording, coming from Steen Schmidt, Principal Sales Consultant, based in Denmark and part of Oracle Linux and Virtualization Sales Consulting Team.

    After the announcement of new Oracle Linux Automation Manager 2.0 Release, Steen shares with us a quick demo on how to upgrade an existing installation to the latest release.

  • Oracle Linux and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Releases

    I’ve decided to create this blog entry just to share Oracle Linux and UEK releases, how those are associated and which UEK releases are available on different OL versions. So, maybe, this article could be useless for many people who already know which UEK releases are available on each OL release but, at the same time, could be helpful for many others approaching Oracle Linux:

  • Business Wire ☛ Red Hat Lowers Barriers to Hybrid Cloud Adoption with Expanded Public Offerings in AWS Marketplace | Business Wire

    Industry-leading open source solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, are now publicly available in AWS Marketplace

• Devices/Embedded

  • Notebook Check ☛ Orange Pi OS arrives to offer Android, Linux and Windows application support for SBCs – NotebookCheck.net News

    While Shenzhen Xunlong Software has released numerous Orange Pi-branded single-board computers (SBCs) over the years, such as the Orange Pi 5 and the Orange Pi 800. However, the company relied on third-party operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu rather than a first-party alternative. Shenzhen Xunlong Software has sought to change this with Orange Pi OS, which ships first in the Orange Pi 5 and is already available to download for the Orange Pi 800.

    According to Shenzhen Xunlong Software, it has based Orange Pi OS on Android 12, but Arch Linux ARM and Open Harmony variants should be available in 2023. Despite its origins, Orange Pi OS looks like Shenzhen Xunlong Software set about copying Windows 11, with its File manager and Control Center both facsimiles of the ones that Microsoft now ships in its desktop OS. Similarly, Shenzhen Xunlong Software has integrated classic Windows shortcuts, as well as familiar Settings and Start menus.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Fully automated desktop weaving machine controlled by Arduino | Arduino Blog

    Automated weaving machines are one of the most important (and underappreciated) advancements to come from the industrial revolution. Prior to their invention, most people only owned a few garments that were woven and maintained by the family. With the introduction of machines able to churn out textiles, affordable clothing suddenly became available. As an expert in the industry, Roger de Meester was able to construct a fully automated weaving machine controlled by Arduino boards.

    Unlike the early weaving machines of the industrial revolution that could only produce patterns inherent to their construction, de Meester’s desktop weaving machine utilizes sophisticated computer control to produce a huge range of patterns on demand. A new pattern can be completely different from the preceding pattern and the machine can even adjust the pattern on-the-fly during the weaving process, meaning it can create rich tapestries.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, Z Fold 4 get Android 13 update in Canada – SamMobile

  • The Register UK ☛ Android users in 12 US states cleared to sue Google Play • The Register

  • Dignited ☛ How to Turn Off Annoying Google Chrome Notifications on Android

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Spot a Fake Android App

  • The Sun ☛ Change your Android settings now to stop your smartphone browser getting ‘hijacked’ | The US Sun

  • Notebook Check ☛ Nokia T21: Budget Android tablet starts shipping in Europe at higher than expected prices – NotebookCheck.net News

  • 9to5Google ☛ You can play these games through Netflix – 9to5Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• TechTarget ☛ Small open source projects pose significant security risks [Ed: 12 months later "Log4j" is still used for FUD against Free software]

  Open source security initiatives might prevent large-scale vulnerabilities such as Log4j, but smaller projects pose risks without more maintainer support, industry experts say.

• ZDNet ☛ OpenStack cloud sees explosive growth | ZDNET

  One bit of accepted wisdom in some cloud circles is that OpenStack, the open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, is declining. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s alive, well, and growing like crazy. According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack now has over 40 million production cores. Or, in other words, it’s seen 60% growth since 2021 and a 166% jump since 2020.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Computing UK ☛ Google releases emergency Chrome fix for zero-day bug

    The company is aware of an existing in-the-wild exploit for the vulnerability

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ 3 ways to use Mozilla Hubs, a VR platform that’s accessible and private by design

      When NASA’s Webb Space Telescope team and artist Ashley Zelinskie wanted to bring space exploration to everyone, they chose Mozilla Hubs, our open source platform for creating 3D virtual spaces right from your browser.

      Ashley told us that they “didn’t want to cut people out that didn’t have fancy VR headsets or little experience in VR. … If we were going to invite the world to experience the Webb Telescope we wanted everyone to be able to attend.”

      That’s exactly why Mozilla has been investing in the immersive web: We believe that virtual worlds are part of the future of the internet, and we want them to be accessible and safe for all.

      That means each Hubs user controls access to the virtual world they created, which is only discoverable to the people they share it with. Hubs users and their guests can also immerse themselves in this world right from their desktop or mobile browser – no downloads or installations required. And while you can use a VR headset, you can access the same spaces through your phone, tablet or desktop computer.

• SFC

  • How we all develop and support free software – Conservancy Blog – Software Freedom Conservancy

    Today is Giving Tuesday, and I’d like to share part of my story that brought me to Software Freedom Conservancy. Having started as a donor over 5 years ago, I find myself now with even more passion for our mission as an employee.

    I’ve been using software for close to 30 years; I wrote my first program around 25 years ago, and I’ve been working in non-profit free software for over a decade. Over all that time the thing that keeps bringing me back is that software is for people. Made by and for people.

• GNU Projects

  • FSF ☛ GNU Guix: Support the growth of the distribution into 2023 and beyond

    An update from GNU Guix co-maintainer Maxim Cournoyer on the impressive work they did in 2022.

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) supports the work of several important free software projects through fiscal sponsorship through a program we call the Working Together for Free Software Fund.

    Donations to any of the Working Together for Free Software Fund projects directly benefit the work that can be done. Too often, these sorts of projects are underfunded, and developers put in a lot of personal time and effort to keep the project moving forward. With the FSF’s fiscal sponsorship, projects can receive donations, apply for funding, and enter into legal contracts, all enabling them to spend more time on their work.

• Programming/Development

  • October 2022: “Top 40″ New CRAN Packages – R Views

    One hundred seventy-four new packages made it to CRAN in October. Here are my “Top 40” selections in sixteen categories: Astronomy, Biology, Business, Computational Methods, Data, Ecology, Finance, Genomics, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Pharma, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, Visualization.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 193: Binary String and Odd String

Leftovers

• Matt Rickard ☛ Schelling Point

  Let’s say you are playing a game where you need to meet someone in New York City. You can’t communicate with the other person to agree on a meeting time or place – where would you think to meet, and at what time?

• Hardware

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Embedded platform integrates ESP32 module and RP2040 co-processor

    CrowdSupply recently featured the EsPiFF SBC designed for multimedia, firewall and NAS applications. The EsPiFF combines a ESP32-WROVER module for wireless connectivity and a RP2040 chip functioning as a coprocessor.

    The ESP32-WROVER module featured is likely to be the ESP32-WROVER-IE-N16R8 since it provides up to 16MB of Flash memory, 8MB of PSRAM and a connector for an external antenna.

• Security

  • CISA ☛ CISA Releases Seven Industrial Control Systems Advisories | CISA

    CISA released seven (7) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on November 29, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

  • Best Linux Patching Strategies for Business Success

    Anytime you upgrade software, you risk something breaking. This is the nature of the IT beast. The purpose of patches is usually to fix a bug or, worse, a security vulnerability. That said, sometimes good intentions lead to bad outcomes. For example, you hire a plumber to come and fix a leaky pipe. He patches it but inadvertently breaks the toilet in the process—good intentions with bad outcomes. That doesn’t need to be the case with Linux patching, though.

    To make Linux patching easier, you can use some tools known as patch managers to help you save time and money. A patch manager tool also helps you avoid the bad patch that could accidentally break your toilet. In this article, I’ll cover why patch management is important. I’ll also discuss its benefits, problems, best practices, and strategy. Let’s first talk about why patch management is important for your business.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Who predicted Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition in 2018?

    In 2018, attending the UN forum on business and human rights, I blogged a photo of the Afghan president and made some brief comments about the possibility of Twitter falling into the wrong hands.

    The full video is available from UN Web TV. There is an extract below where Bennett Freeman of the Global Network Initiative gives some interesting responses to my comments.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ At a China Covid Protest, a Mix of Giddy Elation and Anxiety – The New York Times

    The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. The people stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week.

    Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three years of coronavirus restrictions that have dragged life here to a near standstill. Temperatures were frigid, but people stayed for hours, even outlasting a shift change in the police officers who monitored the whole event Sunday night.

  • New York Times ☛ Why Protesters in China Are Using Blank Sheets of White Paper – The New York Times

    In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance.

    In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.”

    And on China’s suppressed internet, where positive messages abound and negative ones are scrubbed, protesters resorted to irony: They posted walls of text filled with the Chinese characters for “yes,” “good” and “correct” to signal their discontent while evading censors.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Le Monde ☛ Media outlets call to end Julian Assange prosecution for disclosing secrets

    Twelve years ago, on November 28, 2010, our five international media outlets – The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with Wikileaks that made the headlines around the globe.

    “Cablegate,” a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US State Department disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.

    In the words of the New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money.” Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.

  • Peoples Dispatch ☛ Wikileaks delegation in Latin America to rally support for Assange’s release : Peoples Dispatch

    A delegation from Wikileaks is on a tour across Latin America to drum up support from various social movements and progressive governments in the region to call for Julian Assange’s release. The delegation consisting of Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, and Joseph Farrell, journalist and Wikileaks ambassador, are set to finish their Brazil leg of the tour on November 30.

    The duo had already completed a visit to Colombia between November 22 and 24, before coming to Brazil. There, they met with the leftist president Gustavo Petro and Colombian foreign minister Alvaro Leyva Duran as part of their larger campaign to organize international solidarity for Assange.

    In a press release Hrafnsson stated that they were “content with the outcome of the meeting” and that Petro and Duran showed “their commitment and support for Julian Assange’s freedom, and strongly recognized the implications for press freedom worldwide that Assange’s extradition would set.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ International Media Groups Urge US to Drop Julian Assange Charges in Letter – scheerpost.com

    Publishing is not a crime: The US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.

    Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with WikiLeaks that made the headlines around the globe.

    “Cablegate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US state department, disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.

    In the words of the New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money”. Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.

    For Julian Assange, publisher of WikLeaks, the publication of “Cablegate” and several other related leaks had the most severe consequences. On April 12th 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high-security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organised crime groups. He faces extradition to the US and a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum-security prison.

  • Reason ☛ New York Times and Others Condemn DOJ’s Prosecution of Julian Assange

    The open letter warns the indictment “threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

    [...]

    The Times is joined in the letter by The Guardian in England, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, and El País in Spain. They were the five media outlets that in 2010 published many details of the hundreds of thousands of confidential cables from the U.S. Department of State about hidden corruption and diplomatic scandals.

    The letter includes a paragraph critiquing Assange’s judgment in releasing unredacted copies of these cables in 2011. It says “some of [the outlets] are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.” This is in reference to Assange allegedly helping Manning attempt to crack encryption on classified military files, according to the Justice Department indictment.

    In other words, the editors and publishers are willing to acknowledge that Assange might not be just a passive recipient of classified information but deliberately sought it out. But many major media outlets (particularly the five that signed the document) have recognized the public value and public concern of the information that Assange illegally obtained and published it.

  • New York Times ☛ News Outlets Urge U.S. to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange – The New York Times

    The New York Times and four European news organizations called on the United States government on Monday to drop its charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.

    In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

    “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

  • teleSUR ☛ Major Outlets Call on the US to Drop Charges Against Assange

    Twelve years ago, those American and European media released excerpts of the revelations obtained in 250,000 documents, which were leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning. Following that leak, Washington began proceedings to indict Assange under legislation designed to put World War I spies on trial.

    “Publishing is not a crime,” said those outlets, emphasizing that Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the U.S. First Amendment.

    “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists… If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker,” the letter stated.

  • The Nation ☛ A United Front Is Needed to Fight the Threat to Journalism Posed by the Assange Prosecution | The Nation

    Media unions, independent journalists, and civil libertarians have for three years argued that Julian Assange must not be prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for obtaining and publishing classified materials that revealed the extent of US wrongdoing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, as the WikiLeaks founder fights extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States, they’ve gotten some powerful allies.

    In a letter dispatched Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, The New York Times joined four major European publications—The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País—to argue that the attempt to go after Assange using the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.” The concern is that, by prosecuting Assange under the draconian law that was written in 1917 to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment during World War I, the Justice Department could create a new tool for intimidating investigative reporters who simply seek to inform the American people about what is being done in their name but without their informed consent.

    [...]

    Yet the letter also acknowledges that, for Assange, the publication of the 251,000 confidential cables “had the most severe consequences. On April 12, 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organized crime groups.” Assange now faces extradition to the United States and a 175-year sentence.

    The prospect that such a sentence could have a chilling effect on journalists is the overarching concern of the joint letter.

    “Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy,” it explains. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Fine Character Scale

    TL;DR: To convert, add or subtract 16 to DCs or contested rolls, multiply/divide distances by twelve, multiply/divide carrying-weights by sixteen, divide torchlight by four or multiply it by three.

    One of the reasons Fudge RPG was invented was actually… fairies! SOS was working on a GURPS Faeries book but it turns out that GURPS’s 3d6 roll-under system is super difficult to get to work for anything other than normal humans. The bell curve makes things difficult to scale and the roll-under-nature makes things difficult to move. Fudge’s zero-centered, dice+adds system is perfect since you can just have different “scales” for different things. Faeries and bunnies can have one scale, normal people another, and kaiju yet another.

• Technical

  • Accessibility is hard

    It goes without saying that accessibility in design is extremely difficult. So many different ability sets need to be taken into account and so many tools need to be provided. At a base level, all UI designs must follow web accessibility guidelines, all UX copy must follow best practice, and all tools must be considered for assistive technologies. This is a huge overhead, so it’s unsurprising when startups feel like they can’t focus on it while building their core offering for the market.

  • snac on the fediverse

    I installed snac, a simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance, written in C. I hate C, but it’s small, it uses JSON files (like Epicyon), and it seems to work. I think I finally figured out what kept GoToSocial from working. But instead of going back, I’m going to wait and see how much I like this one as a fallback. I’m @alex@social.alexschroeder.ch.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Chrome Uboxed ☛ 120HZ on Chromebooks doesn’t yet extend to Android or Linux

    I’ve really been enjoying 120Hz Chromebooks, but as it was recently pointed out, this fantastic feature doesn’t extend to the Android or Linux portions of ChromeOS quite yet.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Linux Crash Course Series – How to Share Files via SSHFS – Invidious

    While technologies such as Samba and NFS are very effective when you want to share files with other users, those solutions may not be best for those with simpler file sharing needs. In this video, sshfs is covered, which is a fuse-based solution that enables you to quickly share directories on your network. Note: sshfs no longer has a maintainer, so don’t use this solution for confidential or proprietary files.

  • Video ☛ KDE Bismuth Brings Tiling To The Plasma Desktop – Invidious

    In the last few days, I’ve been spending a little time trying out KDE Bismuth, a tiling extension for the KDE Plasma desktop. And it’s really nice. As a long time tiling window manager user, I feel quite comfortable using KDE Bismuth.

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] wayland-protocols 1.31

    wayland-protocols 1.31 is now available.
    
    This release introduces a new staging protocol: fractional scaling.
    Without going into details, this protocol allows compositor to communicate
    a scale with more precision than an integer. Clients can then use this
    together with the wp_viewporter protocol to allocate more appropriately
    sized buffers.
    
    The other protocol related change in this release involves adding a new
    error enum value to xdg-shell.
    
    Since the last release, a new member, Smithay/cosmic-comp, was added,
    represented by Victoria Brekenfeld. Some clarifications to the
    governence about about protocol ACKs requirements was also done.
    
    Enjoy!
    

• Applications

  • Linuxiac ☛ OpenRGB 0.8 Is Here with Many More Devices Supported

    OpenRGB 0.8, the latest release for this vendor-independent RGB lighting control tool, is available nearly a year after its last update.

    Many desktop computers now have RGB lighting with a variety of options. OpenRGB is a cross-platform open-source program that auto-detects and displays RGB-enabled devices and allows you to control them from a centralized interface.

    Assume you’ve upgraded your PC with lighting from several vendors. In that case, you may have many third-party apps to control them. This is where OpenRGB comes in, providing you with a single app to rule them all.

  • Linux Links ☛ 9 Best Free Linux Screencasting Software (Updated 2022) – LinuxLinks

    A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, typically carrying audio narration. Screencasting software takes a series of screenshots of a running application, recording the user’s actions, and creating a video file. The movies can be output in a variety of different formats. This type of software was brought into prominence by the commercial Windows application Lotus ScreenCam in 1994, followed by TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate.

    Screencasts have a wide variety of uses. This type of software is also often used to demonstrate operating systems, software actions, website features, troubleshooting, and evaluating technical skills.

    Things have moved on since we last covered screencasting software. The purpose of this article is to identify high quality open source screencasting software that makes it a breeze to create screencasts. Thanks to this software, anyone can make their own videos.

    To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 9 slick Linux screencasting tools. All of these tools are released under a freely distributable license.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 10 Best Typing Tutor Software for Linux | Increase Your Typing Skill

    Most of us know how to type using a keyboard but still don’t have satisfactory typing skills. Actually, it is not that much easier to control the movement of all 10 fingers at the same time, even without looking at the keyboard. Only practice can help you in this case. And you must know how fast and accurate typing is essential in this technology-based era. However, I am here to help you increase your typing skill by recommending some useful typing tutor software for the Linux platform. Hopefully, these applications will help you to be a pro typist.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Norbert Preining ☛ FFmpeg – tips and tricks | There and back again

    Over the years, and in particular with preparing videos of a conference for publication on YouTube, I have accumulated a few reminders how to do things with FFmpeg. It is such a fantastic beast full of features, that I will never run out of new things to learn.

  • dwaves.de ☛ GNU Linux Debian 10/11 – /etc/apt/sources.list suddenly empty (Signal?)

    something must have gone wrong during a apt update && apt upgrade…

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install Imagick on Ubuntu 22.04

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Upgrade Specific Packages using Yum

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Colors for ls Mean – How to Change Colors for ls in Bash

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Nice command in Linux with Example

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ tee command in Linux with usage Examples

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Semanage Command with Examples

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ od command in Linux with Usage Examples

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install and Use Exiftool on Linux

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ xxd Command in Linux with Examples

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install i3 Window Manager in Linux

• Games

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Heroic Games Launcher 2.5.0 Released as its Biggest Feature Update

    Heroic Game Launcher is a helpful tool that lets you access gaming services such as Epic Games and GOG via a single app on platforms like Linux, Windows, and macOS.

    It comes in handy to organize your game library and lets you install games that are not natively available for a platform.

    Now, they have pushed a new version update v2.5.0, which they claim to be their biggest release in a long time.

    Let me highlight the good stuff here.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ How to Play Games on Linux | Easy Tutorial for Newbie

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – Release Management: 4.0 and beyond

    We are getting closer than ever to releasing Godot 4.0. After years of development and countless hours spent by our contributors, we believe it’s finally ready for production use. But no matter the amount of time dedicated to testing and profiling — bugs and issues are inevitable. We believe that the Godot community understands this and expects as much. Still, we intend to quickly follow 4.0 with bug fix releases as we are dedicated to ensuring a stable experience as soon as possible.

    As those of you following the beta posts know, the work to finalize Godot 4.0 prior to release is in full swing. We have been in feature freeze since mid-August and have been focused on fixing workflow breaking bugs since then (well, we have accepted some small features and enhancements on occasion).

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Plasma 5.26.4 Is Out to Improve Plasma Wayland, Notifications, and More

      KDE Plasma 5.26.4 comes three weeks after the KDE Plasma 5.26.3 update and further improves the Plasma Wayland session by fixing two crashes, one that occurred when tapping a touchscreen after disconnecting an external screen and another one when moving the cursor over a Plasma panel.

      The Plasma X11 session has been improved as well for those who don’t or can’t use Wayland. This release addresses an issue that caused empty areas to appear around Plasma panels when disabling compositing.

    • KDE ☛ KDE Plasma 5.26.4, Bugfix Release for November – KDE Community

      Tuesday, 29 November 2022. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.26.4.

      Plasma 5.26 was released in October 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

    • Adriaan de Groot ☛ Migrating dinner plans | [bobulate]

      It’s fall, the leaves are on the ground, there are pumpkins on the table (and my local vegetable farm has blogged that the seasons are so screwed up due to climate change that it is no longer predictable which veggies show up when) and so, stew and hearty soup season is upon us.

      “If I was to become a vegetarian, what kind of stew would we eat?” was a question kid[1] (the only one still at home) put to me. Good question. I have vague ideas about lentils and celery root and beans and tahin, but nothing as concrete as my beef stew recipe (1 chunk of cow, 1 bottle of beer, 6 onions, 1 potato and seasoning). It bears investigating.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Reviews

  • ZDNet ☛ The three tiers of Linux distribution difficulty | ZDNET

    Linux has been around since 1996 and has, over the years, been maligned as being too difficult for average users. In some cases, there were claims that Linux was simply too challenging for anyone who wasn’t a developer. When I first started using Linux (back in ’97), it was very challenging — beyond the grasp of average users and even some advanced Windows users.

• New Releases

  • Proxmox Backup Server 2.3

    Some of the newly implemented features and updates:

    Based on Debian 11.5 “Bullseye”, but using a Linux kernel 5.15 or 5.19 as opt-in, and ZFS 2.1.6;
    Ransomware Protection – new chapter in documentation;
    Pruning namespaces – the prune job system now also takes namespaces into account, with fine-grained control;
    Support for sending metrics to InfluxDB;
    Tape backup: ‘inventory’ command allows restore of the catalogs of backups stored on tape;
    Proxmox Offline Mirror tool: keep air-gapped nodes up-to-date and running
    Several GUI enhancements;
    Countless general client and backend improvements
    and much more…

  • Proxmox Backup Server 2.3

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Gunnar Hellekson draws on passion for Linux and public sector expertise to run Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux – SiliconANGLE

    Gunnar Hellekson draws on passion for Linux and public sector expertise to run Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux

    [...]

    Red Hat’s RHEL strategy for the edge is also closely linked to its Ansible Automation Platform. In May, the company strengthened its edge focus with a series of updates for Ansible and OpenShift that included a new automated mesh element for edge environments. By automating edge workloads and moving them closer to devices, Red Hat believes this will appeal to enterprise customers seeking to simplify IT tasks and lower operational costs.

  • CACI’s Archon Joins Red Hat Embedded Partner Program – HS Today

    CACI International Inc has joined the Red Hat Embedded Partner Program. Through this program, CACI and Red Hat will collaborate to deliver an enterprise scalable, Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) mobility solution using CACI’s Archon product line with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a foundation to provide a sophisticated customer experience. As both a CSfC Trusted Integrator and CSfC Solution Provider, CACI’s Archon offers capabilities that enable secure remote access to classified environments with turnkey onboarding and administration.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • The Register UK ☛ New versions of Ubuntu Touch, Mir, and Unity arrive • The Register

    Various parts of Ubuntu’s cancelled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.

    UBports is edging closer to moving to a different LTS – except on the PinePhone, which is going its own way. It’s nearly six months since Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 appeared, and the UBports community have announced the next version, OTA-24. As the Reg noted last year, though, this release is still based on Ubuntu 16.04. We suspect that is because this was the last LTS release before Ubuntu cancelled the fondleslab version the following year, before the next LTS version, 18.04.

    As such, UBports is going to skip 18.04. The days of “Bionic Beaver” are numbered anyway: its official end of life is next April. Instead, soon, Ubuntu Touch will switch its base OS to Ubuntu 20.04, whose codename is “Focal Fossa.”

• Devices/Embedded

  • Notebook Check ☛ COI Uno5 Projector with 800 ANSI lumens brightness will shortly begin crowdfunding – NotebookCheck.net News

    Plus, the Linux-based projector supports HDR10 and Dolby Atmos technologies.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ The new Arduino Cloud for Business will have you… on a cloud! | Arduino Blog

    While our philosophy is all about the democratization of technology, we are well aware that businesses and professional users have specific needs: that’s why our Pro business unit is entirely focused on catering to them, with dedicated solutions that meet the strictest requirements for performance and security.

    And after growing our Arduino Pro hardware portfolio with over a dozen new components in the past few months, we are happy to announce a major software advancement in our ecosystem: the Arduino Cloud for Business offers unique benefits for companies and industrial clients wanting enhanced features in terms of device management, RBAC, fleet management and safe remote access.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Sun ☛ Watch out for Google alert on Android phones – it means someone may be stalking you | The US Sun

  • The Sun ☛ Alert for millions of Android phone owners over mind-blowing ‘anti spam’ trick | The US Sun

  • The Sun ☛ Warning over fake virus pop ups on Android – how to remove them and not get scammed | The US Sun

  • SamMobile ☛ Benchmark reveals Galaxy M54 SoC and memory specs, Android 13 – SamMobile

  • Gizmo China ☛ Android Auto Mobile App Finally Gets a Material You Makeover

  • Notebook Check ☛ ZTE Axon 40 Ultra Aerospace Edition launches as a super-premium Android flagship with up to 18GB of RAM and a new ceramic build – NotebookCheck.net News

  • OnePlus ‘Wireless Settings keeps stopping’ after Android 13 update

  • Chromecast with Google TV HDR not working after Android 12

  • Future Publishing Limited ☛ New Google Maps update for Android Auto users goes live | T3

  • SamMobile ☛ Android Auto finally gets Material You design – SamMobile

  • Indian Express ☛ How to get your wallpaper to change automatically on Android | Technology News,The Indian Express

  • Make Use Of ☛ The 9 Best Chrome Flags You Should Enable on Android

  • Future Publishing Limited ☛ Android phones in 2023 are getting a great battery upgrade | T3

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OSI Blog ☛ Start the holiday season by becoming a member of the Open Source Initiative. [Ed: OSI wants people to pay to help Microsoft attack Free software via the OSI, promoting GPL violation and proprietary software instead]

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Results from the survey about LibreOffice Impress – LibreOffice Design Team

    Similar to the questionnaires about LibreOffice Draw (see first and second blog post) and LibreOffice Calc (see this post) we now run a survey on LibreOffice Impress to learn how the program is utilized, what features are used most frequently, and what users see as positive and negative and what they expect of the future.

• GNU Projects

  • Emacs 29 is nigh! What can we expect? // Phundrak’s rambling

    It was announced a couple of hours ago, Emacs 29’s branch is now cut from the master branch! This means the emacs-29 branch will from now no longer receive any new feature, but only bug fixes.

    So, what’s new with this new major release? I skimmed over the NEWS file, and here are the changes which I find interesting and even exciting for some.

  • LWN ☛ Cartier-Tilet: Emacs 29 is nigh [LWN.net]

• Programming/Development

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Nibble Stew: Going inside Cairo to add color management

    I don’t really have prior experience with color management, Cairo internals or the like. I did not even look at the existing patchsets for this. They are fairly old so they might have bitrotted and debugging that is not particularly fun. This is more of a “the fun is in the doing” kind of thing. What follows is just a description of things tried, I don’t know if any of it would be feasible for real world use.

    [...]

    There are two things that I personally care about: creating fully color managed PDFs (in grayscale and CMYK) and making the image backend support images in colorspaces other than sRGB (or, more specifically, “uncalibrated RGB which most of the time is sRGB but sometimes isn’t”). The first of these two is simpler as you don’t need to actually do any graphics manipulations, just specify and serialize the color data out to the PDF file. Rendering it is the PDF viewer’s job. So that’s what we are going to focus on.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ 2022.48 Classy Core – Rakudo Weekly News

      This Saturday (3 December 2022 at 20:00 UTC), Vadim Belman will be giving the first online class about Rakudo core development (/r/rakulang comments). Requirements are a working knowledge of the Raku Programming Language, use of git and Github, and a willingness to self-learn things. It will be a kind of seminar where things may significantly divert from the initial plan.

  • Rust

    • The Register UK ☛ Redox OS version 0.8 is both strange and very familiar • The Register

      If the words “experimental operating system” don’t scare you off, Redox OS is an impressive demonstration of both homegrown OS development and the Rust language itself.

      Redox OS version 0.8.0 arrives some seven months after version 0.7.0 in April. That seems to indicate that the cadence of new releases is accelerating – it’s about three years since The Reg looked at Redox 0.5, and it’s coming along quite well.

      Saying that, though, it’s not quite ready to host itself. In other words, you can’t build Redox OS on Redox OS just yet. The Rust compiler rustc is working, but according to lead developer Jeremy Soller, the cargo build system and package manager isn’t yet.

      The main focuses in this version are to get the OS working on real hardware – there’s a handy list – as opposed to just inside VMs. It now has audio support (IntelHD and AC97), and can boot on both BIOS and UEFI PCs. There are both i686 (“32-bit x86 from the Pentium II and up”) and x86-64 versions, plus preliminary support for 64-bit Arm: it can boot to a login prompt inside QEMU.

    • Rust Blog ☛ Please welcome The 8472 to the Library team | Inside Rust Blog

      We’re very excited to announce that The 8472 has joined the Library team!

      The 8472 has been working on many optimizations and other improvements to the standard library, is involved in many library-related changes and discussions, and regularly reviews pull requests.

      Congratulations The 8472, and thanks for everything you do!

Leftovers

• Joe Brockmeier ☛ 20 blogging and article prompts for tech bloggers: Dissociated Press

  Stumped for ideas what to blog about? Not sure what people would want to read that would be worth writing about? Here’s 25 prompts to get you started (some tweaking may be required).

  Yesterday I wrote about the 100 days of blogging challenge. A friend of mine asked if I had a good source of prompts for folks interested in doing something similar. Truth is, I hadn’t thought much about that.

  Part of being a writer and editor for many years, or having jobs that depended on writing and editing, means that I’ve got the opposite problem: I see ideas for articles and blogs everywhere. My problem has been to carve out the time, pick one, and do it.

• Hardware

  • IEEE ☛ How the First Transistor Worked – IEEE Spectrum

    THE VACUUM-TUBE TRIODE wasn’t quite 20 years old when physicists began trying to create its successor, and the stakes were huge. Not only had the triode made long-distance telephony and movie sound possible, it was driving the entire enterprise of commercial radio, an industry worth more than a billion dollars in 1929. But vacuum tubes were power-hungry and fragile. If a more rugged, reliable, and efficient alternative to the triode could be found, the rewards would be immense.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • YLE ☛ Helsinki Christmas Market returns to Senate Square after 3-year break | News | Yle Uutiset

    The market will be divided into various categories, with foods relegated to some alleyways, and gifts and other items in others.

    Senate Square is adjacent to city landmarks including the Lutheran Cathedral, Government Palace, the University of Helsinki’s main building, as well as the oldest building in the capital, Sederholm House.

    Due to the Covid situation, the Christmas market was held online in 2020 and in 2021 the event was hosted at the nearby Market Square, due to lighting renovation work at Senate Square.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (frr, gerbv, mujs, and twisted), Fedora (nodejs and python-virtualbmc), Oracle (dotnet7.0, kernel, kernel-container, krb5, varnish, and varnish:6), SUSE (busybox, python3, tiff, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 148: Christelle Tessono on Bringing a Human Rights Lens to AI Regulation in Bill C-27 – Michael Geist

      Bill C-27, the government’s privacy and artificial intelligence bill is slowly making its way through the Parliamentary process. One of the emerging issues has been the mounting opposition to the AI portion of the bill, including a recent NDP motion to divide the bill for voting purposes, separating the privacy and AI portions. In fact, several studies have been released which place the spotlight on the concerns with the government’s plan for AI regulation, which is widely viewed as vague and ineffective. Christelle Tessono is a tech policy researcher based at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She was one of several authors of a joint report on the AI bill which brought together researchers from the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Toronto Metropolitan University, McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Christelle joins the Law Bytes podcast to talk about the report and what she thinks needs to change in Bill C-27.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Despite Election Criticism, US and EU Ready To Work With Reelected Kazakh Leader – The Media Line

  • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Honors the Memory of Representative McEachin – Public Knowledge

    On November 28, U.S. House Representative Donald McEachin passed away at the age of 61. Representative McEachin had represented Virginia’s 4th District since 2017. He was a champion of the public interest in Congress and was critical in passage of important legislation to help close the digital divide and to promote digital equity and inclusion efforts while serving as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

    The following may be attributed to Public Knowledge President & CEO Chris Lewis on behalf of Public Knowledge…

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Pegasus spyware inquiry targeted by disinformation campaign, say experts | Surveillance | The Guardian

      Victims of spyware and a group of security experts have privately warned that a European parliament investigatory committee risks being thrown off course by an alleged “disinformation campaign”.

      The warning, contained in a letter to MEPs signed by the victims, academics and some of the world’s most renowned surveillance experts, followed news last week that two individuals accused of trying to discredit widely accepted evidence in spyware cases in Spain had been invited to appear before the committee investigating abuse of hacking software.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Associated Press ☛ Ethiopia offers no date for end to blackout in Tigray region

    There is “no timeline” for restoring internet access to Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region, a senior government official said Tuesday.

    The restoration of Tigray’s internet service will be carried alongside the resumption of its phone and electricity services, though no date has been set for those goals, Ethiopia’s Minister for Innovation and Technology Belete Molla said.

    He was speaking at the U.N.’s annual Internet Governance Forum being held this week in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

    “The government of Ethiopia is designing a package that is not only about internet resumption but the resumption of everything, because this is what we need as a people, as a government,” Belete said of the internet shutdown in Tigray. “There is no timeline.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Declassified UK ☛ UK government deployed 15 staff on secret operation to seize Julian Assange

    New information raises further concerns about the politicisation of the WikiLeaks founder’s legal case.

• Monopolies

  • CCIA ☛ ICYMI: Challenges in Merger Enforcement – Where Next? – Disruptive Competition Project

    Under the current administration, the U.S. antitrust agencies, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), are taking a more aggressive approach to merger enforcement and have outlined strategies that seem to move away from traditional merger review tools and principles. In October and November, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) co-hosted with Competition Policy International (CPI) a series of panel discussions on the most pronounced challenges to the current antitrust framework in a changing economic environment. On November 16th, CCIA and CPI completed the final event of the four-part series, focused on current challenges in merger enforcement and expectations regarding the new merger guidelines.

    Before the main panel began, the event featured a brief conversation between Bloomberg reporter Leah Nylen and Richard G. Parker, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. In his talk with Nylen, Parker made two key points. First, he underscored that the recent swell of activity at the antitrust agencies in regards to adjudication must be tempered with data. Rather than presenting speculative theories on antitrust, the agencies are going to have to recognize that they can’t bring cases without solid facts, economic evidence or legal groundwork. He stated that “people who are deciding the cases want more facts and less fancy theories on antitrust.” Second, Parker commented on the expectation that the FTC and DOJ will release an overhaul of their merger guidelines by the end of this year. He emphasized that any new guidelines must follow in the footsteps of the 2010 guidelines, remaining politically neutral and grounded in factual analysis.

    Ilene Gotts, Partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz LLP, moderated the panel featuring Mark Meador, Deputy Chief Counsel for Antitrust and Competition Policy to Senator Mike Lee, Bernard (Barry) Nigro, Partner atFried Frank LLP, and Karen Kazmerzak, Partner at Sidley Austin LLP. The panel discussion revolved around the evolving regulatory landscape and the increase in Congress’ attention on antitrust. Mark Meador discussed the House Antitrust Subcommittee Investigation, which launched a flurry of legislation focusing on self-preferencing and trust-busting. Meador briefly covered a number of bills and explained that Congress has recently been focusing on AICOA and the Open App Markets Act.

  • Copyrights

    • Walled Culture ☛ Copyright is more important than privacy, says top EU court advisor – Walled Culture

      We recently wrote about the preliminary decision of Advocate General Szpunar, an advisor to the EU’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), concerning geoblocks. The same Advocate General (AG) has come out with another opinion, this time concerning important questions of copyright and privacy. The basic issue is whether EU Member States can require Internet Service Providers to allow copyright companies to access information about the IP addresses of users.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • That you don’t know what you did wrong makes it so much worse

    For most people, and I’m not an exception, a conflict usually feels even worse when the other person doesn’t even acknowledge or seem to understand what they did wrong. It’s adding insult to injury, it feels like they’re doubling down on their own bad behavior.

    But I’ve been in so many situations where it’s me that just don’t genuinely understand where I messed up. Once the other person calms down and explains it, I’m like “Ooooh! Yeah, now I get it, you’re absolutely right, I could see what I did was awful”, or maybe it’s a misunderstanding (“You thought it sounded like I said ‘jerk’? I said ‘work’!”) or maybe I do double down because I can be kinda stubborn but at least then I’m actually doubling down and it’s not just the illusory “you should know what you did wrong” that feels like a doubling down but most of the time is just genuine Hanlon’s law confusion.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AUHKPSE Wordo: STEIN

GNU/Linux

• Graphics Stack

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA Linux driver 525.60.11 is out now

    NVIDIA has today rolled out the 525.60.11 driver, following on from the 525.53 Beta earlier this month. It is largely the same as the Beta, with a few extra fixes included and since it’s not tagged as a Beta driver you should be all fine to upgrade to it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxTuto ☛ How to Install Ghost on Ubuntu 22.04

    Ghost is an open-source powerful NodeJS-based Content Management System (CMS) for creating blog oriented websites. It has full support for Markdown and provides an easy-to-use web interface for administration purposes.

    In this tutorial we will show you how to install Ghost CMS on a Ubuntu 22.04 OS.

  • NextGenTips ☛ How to install and use FastAPI – NextGenTips

    FastAPI is a web framework for developing RESTful APIs in Python. It is based on pydantic and type hints to validate, serialize and deserialize data and automatically auto-generate OpenAPI documents.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How to make an automatic dog feeder with Arduino and Linux | Enable Sysadmin

    Try this DIY project to learn (or teach your family) to write code that interfaces with real hardware.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install FileZilla on Fedora 37 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, FileZilla is a cross-platform and free software FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server which allows us to upload or download files to the FTP server. It supports many different file-transfer protocols, like FTP, SFTP, and many others. Its are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of FileZilla FTP clients on a Fedora 37.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to upscale images on Linux

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla on Fedora 37, as well as some extra requirements by FileZilla

  • Openstack RDO -& KVM Hypervisor: Install Virtual Box 7 on Fedora 37 Server via rpmfusion repository

    To make system ready for VitualBox 7 setup via rpmfusion repos,

    install the Linux kernel “header” files matching the current kernel for adding new hardware support to the system. The distribution packages containing the headers is probably: kernel-devel-6.0.9-300.fc37.x86_64. Kernel packages installation has been done as follows.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install Google Chrome Extensions in Microsoft Edge Browser on Linux [Ed: Microsoft Edge is a password stealer and technically malware on any platform including GNU/Linux. It makes no sense to help people obtain or use it.]

    In this quick guide, I will walk you through the steps to Install Google Chrome Extensions in Microsoft Edge Browser.

    Microsoft announced its latest browser a couple of years back – Microsoft Edge for Ubuntu and other Linux as a preview. Edge is based on the open-source Chromium project. And Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are both forked from it.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ How to Set Up Pi-hole to Get an Ad-free Life – It’s FOSS

    Pi-hole is a DNS-based advertisement blocker. Unlike a Chrome or Firefox extension, a Pi-hole can block ads even on your TV! So let’s see how to install and take advantage of this amazing tool!

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ Getting Started to Matrix Chat for Beginners

    This tutorial will help you join, message and call people freely using Matrix/Element Chat. You can use Matrix Chat on web (recommended), desktop and mobile. You are suggested to exercise this together with at least one friend of yours. We hope you will quickly find your community and happy with Matrix like us and others.

  • TecMint ☛ Install Viber – A Free Calling and Messaging App on Linux [Ed: Updated howto]

    This article shows various ways to install and use Viber, a free voice and video call, and messaging app in Linux.

    Viber is a well-known, free, and secure voice/video calls and messaging app, which works on desktops, mobile, as well as tablets and keeps all communications synced between devices.

    It offers a wide range of communication features such as making voice and video calls, group chats and calls, communities, disappearing messages, deletion and editing of seen messages, and much more.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Set Up an SSH Jump Server in Linux [Ed: Updated howto]

    A jump host (also known as a jump server) is an intermediary host or an SSH gateway to a remote network, through which a connection can be made to another host in a different security zone, for example, a demilitarized zone (DMZ). It bridges two dissimilar security zones and offers controlled access between them.

    A jump host should be highly secured and monitored especially when it spans a private network and a DMZ with servers providing services to users on the internet.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 46: ordering layers

    By default, cascade layers are stacked in the order they are defined, but you don’t have to rely on it. You can determine the order in one place.

    In the following example, the border color of the paragraph is first red, then blue, then rebeccapurple, and finally green.

  • Jon Udell ☛ Autonomy, packet size, friction, fanout, and velocity

    Nostalgia is a dangerous drug and it’s always risky to wallow in it. So those of us who fondly remember the early blogosphere, and now want to draw parallels to the fediverse, should do so carefully. But we do want to learn from history.

    Here’s one way to compare five generations of social software along the five dimensions named in the title of this post.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ CSS For URLs and HTTP Headers

    How do we get the DOM? The browser knows how to create it from an HTTP request consisting of a URL, some headers, and some HTML. For example, this is a simplified representation of (the beginnings of) the webpage for www.jim-nielsen.com.

  • Terence Eden ☛ Illegal Hashes

    To understand this blog post, you need to know two things.

    01. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal.

    02. There exists a class of algorithms which will take any arbitrary data and produce a fixed length text from it. This process is known as “hashing”. These algorithms are deterministic – that is, entering the same data will always produce the same hash.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Getting my unit size ‘prefixes’ (really suffixes) straight, sort of

    In theory, the official metric (power of ten) prefixes are written as ‘T’, ‘G’, ‘M’, and ‘k’. This isn’t in accordance with customary computer use, which upper-cases the ‘k’ to ‘K’. According to Wikipedia, binary prefixes are written as ‘Ti’, ‘Gi’, ‘Mi’, and ‘Ki’, although Wikipedia also notes that there’s plenty of usage (my phrasing) of plain ‘T’, ‘G’, and so on to mean the binary versions. However, both usage leave it ambiguous whether you’re writing about bytes or bits.

  • Martijn Braam ☛ Taking a good picture of a PCB

    So to create a great picture I’ve decided to make a better setup. I’ve used several components for this. The most important one is two external flashes controlled with a wireless transmitter. I’ve added softboxes to the flashers to minimize the sharp shadows usually created when using a flash. This produces quite nice board pictures with even lighting.

• WINE or Emulation

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Wine 7.22 out now with more 32bit on 64bit work

    The Wine 7.22 development release is now available for the open source Windows compatibility layer, as they continue working towards the Wine 8.0 release. This is part of Steam Play Proton, which allows you to play tons of Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Once a year they make a big new stable release, and eventually Proton updates to it too.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Half-Life: Alyx LEVITATION mod adds four hours of new story – out now

    Half-Life: Alyx LEVITATION is an incredibly ambitious mod for Valve’s amazing VR FPS and it’s out now! To this day, Alyx remains as one of my all time favourite gaming experiences and so I’ve been eagerly awaiting more of it with this free expansive mod.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory begins on December 5th

    Starting off a 12 month long cycle of updates, The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory is the first DLC for the survival game acting as an expansion pass. That, plus a bunch of free updates too. This is the first paid DLC for the game that released in 2017, with the full story not yet complete this is largely focused on the survival game mode.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Cyberspace hacking looter-shooter Black Ice gets a big content upgrade

    Black Ice is an indie first-person looter-shooter about hacking in cyberspace, I’m quite fond of it but it’s not very well known even though it’s a lot of fun. A big new update just rolled out with a bunch of extra content.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ JSAUX release ‘CaseKiller’ for the official Steam Deck Dock to help with protective cases

    Have the official Steam Deck Docking Station and find your Steam Deck doesn’t fit in it with a protective case on? JSAUX are back with another new product, the CaseKiller Anti-Slip Stand.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Dome Keeper adds new cave types and little critters to make exploration more interesting

    Dome Keeper is one of my favourite indie releases this year, blending together casual underground mining with frantic base-defence and a new update just rolled out making it even more interesting.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • DebugPoint ☛ LXQt 1.2.0 Arrives in Lubuntu 22.04 LTS via Backports PPA

    Lubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” was released on April 2022 this year which has the ancient version of the LXQt desktop 0.17. Since the release, there have been two point releases of LXQt desktop – 1.1.0 and 1.2.0. Although LXQt 1.1.0 is already featured on Lubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu (released in October), the LTS users are still with the older version.

    Keeping that in mind, Lubuntu devs have now prepared the backports PPA with the necessary updates to enjoy the latest LXQt desktop in Lubuntu 22.04, which has been supported for four years. A few days back, the backport PPA was refreshed with the 1.1.0 version and now with the latest 1.2.0.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • [Old] Martijn Braam ☛ Trying Plasma Desktop again

      So I’m trying KDE Plasma again, I hear 5.26 has many great improvements and the last time I ran KDE for more than a day was in 2014. I mainly run Gnome and Phosh and Sway on my devices and I feel like I don’t use KDE enough for the amount of times I complain about it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • DebugPoint ☛ Bodhi Linux 7.0.0 Testing Begins with New Features, Packages

    Bodhi Linux is based on Ubuntu LTS and features the Enlightenment-based Moksha desktop environment. Moksha desktop is lightweight while being an eye-candy desktop. In addition, it only includes base applications to get you started.

    At its core, it is based on Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS aligned with Ubuntu 22.04. With that, you get the improved Mokhsna desktop environment based on the latest Enlightenment desktop/Enlightenment foundation library (efl).

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ South African MSPs jump on board with SUSE | SUSE Communities

    South African Managed Service Provider (MSP) resellers (distribution partners), Axiz and Linux Warehouse, hosted two very successful Partner day events on October 18th and 19th. The days focused on the growing market for SUSE solutions as a service, being delivered via MSPs to meet evolving customer requirements. Bring together over 45 C-Level MSP delegates, the days provided very informative discussion around building managed services with SUSE technologies, and how this has accelerated business growth. With representatives from both newly on-boarded and established MSPs, there was some great interaction and sharing of how to leverage the SUSE One Partner Program to unlock new opportunities.

    The events were able to demonstrate how MSPs can monetize the SUSE Solution Stack and the benefits of partnering with SUSE. The event concluded with new opportunities for pipeline building and identifying joint customers as a focus for FY23.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Remi Collet ☛ PHP 7.4 is retired – Remi’s RPM repository – Blog

    One year after PHP 7.3, and as announced, PHP version 7.4.33 was the last official release of PHP 7.4

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 6 non-negotiable skills for CIOs in 2023

    It’s no secret that the CIO role has changed a lot over the years. It’s evolved from focusing on infrastructure, the help desk, and operational efficiency, and today is firmly rooted in technology, strategy, growth, and revenue. More of the C-suite and boards are looking at IT as a value creator rather than just as an operator.

    To support and propel IT as a value creator today and into the future, CIOs must hone and master new competencies. These non-negotiable skills for successful technology leaders help to fortify their strategic role in the organization, build strong, resilient teams, and cultivate loyal clients.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 3 steps to prioritize responsible AI [Ed: IBM does very racist projects disguised as "AI"; so it keeps issuing fluff such as this (for 4 years already, since it got caught and shamed in the media)]

    Artificial intelligence (AI), continues to be a huge growth driver for companies of all sizes going through digital transformation, with IDC predicting that AI spending will reach $500B by 2023. AI is helping organizations identify new business models, increase revenue, and gain a competitive advantage.

  • Red Hat ☛ How the new VSCode XML extension improves developer experience [Ed: Red Hat is promoting proprietary software of Microsoft, which spies on users. This is a disturbing ongoing trend at Red Hat.]

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Orange Pi Board Has Arch-based Linux Distribution in the Works

    The developers of the Orange Pi board are planning to release an Arch-based Linux distribution available for its hardware as an alternative to Orange Pi OS.

    The developers of the Orange Pi board have made available four operating systems supported for their hardware – Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Manjaro. Soon, they will be adding another distribution into the mix, one based on Arch Linux.

    This version of Arch Linux will be user-friendly and highly compatible with open source drivers. Orange Pi OS (Arch) will ship with LibreOffice and will support most of the major Linux desktops, such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce.

  • Old VCR ☛ Refurb weekend: Sega Dreamcast

    Remember when consoles weren’t glorified PCs? The 1999 Sega Dreamcast remembers. Sega’s final console and introduced on “9/9/99 for $199″ before the Sony PlayStation 2 hype machine overwhelmed it, it came on the heels of the Saturn, which had sophisticated hardware but was difficult to program and Sega lost millions on manufacturing them. In some ways the Dreamcast is the Saturn done right: the same SuperH architecture, just way faster (instead of dual SH-2s at 28.6MHz, one big SH-4 at 200MHz), a more conventional GPU (rather than the odd 3D VDP of the Saturn which used quads instead of triangles), and a straightforward uniprocessor design instead of the Saturn’s sometimes rickety dual CPU bus. It was also much cheaper to manufacture even considering its use of the Yamaha GD-ROM format; nothing else supported it, but it stored up to a gigabyte and was backwards compatible with CDs.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Being part of the Raspberry Pi community

    Hopefully by the time you read this, the fears over the bird app will have all (thankfully) come to nothing and service will resume as normal. In case it doesn’t though, Raspberry Pi has launched its own Mastodon server at raspberrypi.social, and we at The MagPi will likely follow suit. Otherwise, Raspberry Pi is also exploring braver, younger frontiers with videos on TikTok.

    Of course, the magazine will still be published, and I’m sure we’ll find you all again, wherever we end up.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 9to5Google ☛ Nokia T21 tablet released in more regions, by HMD Global

  • WCCF Tech ☛ Pimax Portal is a handheld, VR, and mobile Android system to compete in all markets

  • Sportskeeda ☛ PUBG Mobile latest 2.3 update: Direct APK download link�for�Android

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung’s tablets still don’t have two-column notifications panel with Android 13 – SamMobile

  • Samsung One UI 5.0 (Android 13) update and bugs tracker (cont. updated)

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G starts getting Android 13 update – SamMobile

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Ubuntu ☛ VMware to open source: what do you need to consider? | Ubuntu

  You might have read our previous blog VMware alternatives: discover open source where we discussed why you should consider open source-based infrastructure if you’re looking for VMware alternatives. We also held a webinar on the topic, where we received quite a lot of relevant audience questions that we wanted to elaborate on further. Read on for some of the most important considerations when thinking about migrating from VMware to Ubuntu-based open-source infrastructure.

  [...]

  Canonical has a wide range of infrastructure products that can be combined in different ways to deliver a full solution for your specific needs. It is difficult, and it would be misleading, for us to recommend one single option as a like-for-like alternative.

  If you are after a full private cloud on a mid to large scale, our Openstack solution might be the right one for you. If you are looking for a virtualisation layer, you might be interested in LXD, or an LXD-based micro cloud for a small-scale deployment. If you are interested in running cloud-native workloads our Kubernetes offering is the one to go with. Our Charmed Ceph solution might be suitable for your storage needs. There is no one-size, or rather a one-solution-fits-all approach.

• Bootlin ☛ A custom PipeWire node – Bootlin’s blog

  As described in previous articles (Introduction to PipeWire, Hands-on installation of PipeWire), the PipeWire daemon is responsible for running the graph execution. Nodes inside this graph can be implemented by any process that has access to the PipeWire socket that is used for IPC. PipeWire provides a shared object library that abstracts the communication with the main daemon and the communication with the modules that are required by the client.

  In this blog post, our goal will be to implement an audio source node that plays audio coming from a file, in a loop. This will be an excuse to see a lot of code, showing what the library API looks like and how it should be used. To introduce some dynamism to a rather static setup, we’ll rely on an input from a Wii Nunchuck, connected using a custom Linux driver and relying on the input event userspace API.

• OpenSource.com ☛ Give back to open source on Giving Tuesday | Opensource.com

  Giving Tuesday is always a reminder to me to consider how to give back to open source projects, communities, and organizations. In 2012, GivingTuesday was created to encourage people to simply do good. “Since then, it has grown into a year-round global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.”

  When I think about all the ways I have benefited from “standing on the shoulder of giants,” both professionally and personally. I start to think about all the individuals and organizations that have made being part of the open source community such a rewarding experience. Many have used an open source project or joined an open source community and immediately benefited from the contributions of past and current members.

  When you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that many of the organizations listed below have volunteer opportunities, ways to get involved with their community, and simple things like sharing information about why you support the organization or joining a newsletter to stay updated. They offer a variety of ways to support them beyond just financial donations.

  The list below is not an endorsement from myself or my employer, it is a collection of organizations for you to consider as you look at groups to support and ways to donate time, money, expertise, and other skills you might offer. I would encourage you to do your own research before making a donation, particularly if you are looking for any tax deductions.

• Medevel ☛ CryptoTracker: An Enterprise-Grade Cryptocurrency Monitor

  CryptoTracker is a free open-source web-based cryptocurrency data tracker and monitor. You can install it on your local machine or self-host at your remote server.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Eric Hameleers ☛ Updates for Chromium (-ungoogled also), LibreOffice, Java | Alien Pastures

    Around the last weekend I worked on several package updates. In the meantime I had to battle home infrastructure breakdown, as well as the realization that I had inadvertantly opened up my SMTP server as an open relay and had to do some fast infrastructure redesign

  • Nolan Lawson ☛ Shadow DOM and accessibility: the trouble with ARIA

    Shadow DOM is a kind of retcon for the web. As I’ve written in the past, shadow DOM upends a lot of developer expectations and invalidates many tried-and-true techniques that worked fine in the pre-shadow DOM world. One potentially surprising example is ARIA.

    Quick recap: shadow DOM allows you to isolate parts of your DOM into encapsulated chunks – typically one per component. Meanwhile, ARIA is an accessibility primitive, which defines attributes like aria-labelledby and aria-describeddby that can reference other elements by their IDs.

    Do you see the problem yet? If not, I don’t blame you ‒ this is a tricky intersection of various web technologies. Unfortunately though, if you want to use shadow DOM without breaking accessibility, then this is one of the things you will have to grapple with. So let’s dive in.

• FSFE

  • CNIL bosses approved Amandine Cryptie Jambert FSFE engagement

    We already blogged about the amateur sysadmins at FSFE and their exposure of members’ financial data.

    In a fresh leak, we reveal that Amandie “Cryptie” Jambert, who works at CNIL as a privacy specialist, was formally responsible for the FSFE GDPR compliance (or lack thereof).

    FSFE failed to report the breaches to the members and donors. The GDPR requires mandatory reporting of breaches.

    FSFE has been deliberately publishing the names of volunteers in a defamatory context. FSFE created the growing scandal of leaks and accusations, including the Outreachy grooming scandal. This outcome is the very opposite of what CNIL and the GDPR stands for.

• Programming/Development

  • Waiting for web content to do something in a Firefox mochitest – Paul Bone

    It’s not unusual for a Firefox test to have to wait for various things such as a tab loading. But recently I needed to write a test that loaded a content tab with a web worker and wait for that before observing the result in a different tab. I am writing this for my own reference in the future, and if it helps someone else, that’s extra good. But I don’t think it will be of much interest if you don’t work on Firefox as the problem I’m solving won’t be relevant and the APIs won’t be familiar.

    I don’t think of myself as a JavaScript programmer – I’m learning what I need to know when I need to know it, but mainly to write tests. So I’m not sure I’ll pitch this article at any particular level of JS knowledge, sorry.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Parse arguments with Lua | Opensource.com

    Most computer commands consist of two parts: The command and arguments. The command is the program meant to be executed, while the arguments might be command options or user input. Without this structure, a user would have to edit the command’s code just to change the data that the command processes. Imagine rewriting the printf command just to get your computer to greet you with a “hello world” message. Arguments are vital to interactive computing, and the Lua programming language provides the {…​} expression to encapsulate varargs given at the time of launching a Lua script.

    [...]

    Finally, in the go section, parse the index and values in the args variable (the arguments provided by the user at launch). In this sample code, the first for loop just prints each index and value for clarity.

    The second for loop uses the index to examine the first argument, which is assumed to be an option. The only valid option in this sample code is –say. If the loop finds the string –say, it calls the echo function, and the index of the current argument plus 1 (the next argument) is provided as the function parameter.

  • Burkhard Stubert ☛ The Key Principles of Continuous Delivery

    In the seminal book Accelerate, Forsgren and her co-authors provide empirical evidence that Continuous Delivery has a positive impact on the performance of software development organisations. If organisations neglect some of the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery, their performance will suffer. They will reach the point where simple changes will take ages to implement. Not so with Continuous Delivery.

  • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Open Source & Saying “No”

    A few weeks ago I was digging into a pretty complex issue that was only affecting less than 1% of users in the field with an application. With a constant mix of emotions working with React Native I appreciate how I can normally go all the way to the source during an investigation.

  • Jason Swett ☛ Modeling legacy code behavior using science

    When you want to understand what a legacy program you’re working on is supposed to do, what’s your first instinct? Often it’s to look at the code.

    But unfortunately legacy code is often so convoluted and inscrutable that it’s virtually impossible to tell what the code is supposed to do just by looking at it.

    In these cases it may seem that you’re out of luck. But fortunately you’re not.

  • Write yourself into obsolescence. – /home/jwf/

    This thought was pressed into my mind as I looked over all that I had created. Facing the inevitable end of one life chapter as it transitions into a new one, I recognized one possible way to improve our individual impact through documentation. Software and product documentation are classified as technical writing. While they differ in scope, they share a connection to other forms of written works like novels and newspapers; they are collections of a commonly understood, codified language meant to convey a meaning to other humans. The goal of writing yourself into obsolescence is not to create content for content’s sake. The goal is to create information pathways that leave behind a guiding light for those who come after us. The goal is to create some form of media or content that communicates information of value to someone else (even including your future self).

• Standards/Consortia

  • Joinup ☛ Commissioner Johannes Hahn on the Interoperable Europe Act Proposal

    Public administrations are often described as very big ships that need time to move. My vision is rather one of a diverse fleet of boats navigating together, with agility, around all obstacles along the way. What facilitates this is interoperability.

Leftovers

• CoryDoctorow ☛ How monopoly enshittified Amazon

  How did we get here? We always knew that Amazon didn’t care about its suppliers, but being an Amazon customer has historically been a great deal – lots of selection, low prices, and a generous returns policy. How could “Earth’s most customer-centric” company become such a bad place to shop?

  The answer is in Amazon’s $31b “ad” business. Amazon touts this widely, and analysts repeat it without any critical interrogation, proclaiming that Amazon is catching up with the Googbook ad-tech duopoly. But nearly all of that “ad” business isn’t ads at all – it’s payola.

• Hackaday ☛ Desktop-Sized Fully Automatic Loom Is An Electromechanical Marvel

  Weaving is one of the oldest crafts in the world, and was also among the first to be automated: the Industrial Revolution was in large part driven by developments in loom technology. [Roger de Meester] decided to recreate that part of the industry’s history, in a way, by building his own desktop-sized, fully automatic loom. After a long career in the textiles industry he’s quite the expert when it comes to weaving, and as you’ll see he’s also an expert machine builder.

• Science

  • Axios ☛ World’s largest active volcano starts to erupt in Hawaii

    Driving the news: Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano — located on the Big Island — began erupting late Sunday night, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ The annoying question of Intel CPU support for XMP RAM profiles

    The Intel answer is that while Intel won’t say that you have to have an overclockable K-series Core desktop CPU in order to use XMP, all of their examples of qualified DIMMs and systems with desktop CPUs use overclockable ones as far as I can see. Intel certainly wants you to buy a K-series Core i5/i7/i9 CPU if you want to use XMP and it will clearly do quite a lot to nudge you that way without actually saying anything untrue that could get it in trouble with authorities (such as ‘on desktop CPUs, you must have a K-series overclockable CPU’, which is likely false today since Intel isn’t actually saying that).

  • Hackaday ☛ Silicon Sleuthing: Finding A Ancient Bugfix On The 8086

    Few CPUs have had the long-lasting influence that the 8086 did. It is hard to believe that when your modern desktop computer boots, it probably thinks it is an 8086 from 1978 until some software gooses it into a more modern state. When [Ken] was examining an 8086 die, however, he noticed that part of the die didn’t look like the rest. Turns out, Intel had a bug in the original version of the 8086. In those days you couldn’t patch the microcode. It was more like a PC board — you had to change the layout and make a new one to fix it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Taking Distance Based CAD To The Next Level

    For those who model CAD models regularly, a pair of calipers is essential as it allows reasonably accurate measurements to fit a specific part. However, [Jason Harris] is taking that concept to the next level with a signed distance function-based CAD tool, SDFX.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Modchip To Root Starlink User Terminals Through Voltage Glitching

    A modchip is a small PCB that mounts directly on a larger board, tapping into points on that board to make it do something it wasn’t meant to do. We’ve typically seen modchips used with gaming consoles of yore, bypassing DRM protections in a way that a software hacks couldn’t quite do. As software complexity and therefore attack surface increased on newer consoles, software hacks have taken the stage. However, on more integrated pieces of hardware, we’ll still want to return to the old methods – and that’s what this modchip-based hack of a Starlink terminal brings us.

  • CNX Software ☛ JX1 Intel Celeron N5105 mini PC places all ports on the rear panel – CNX Software

    There’s a plethora of mini PCs on the market, but due to their size, the ports are often placed on several sides which may make cable management troublesome. The JX1 mini PC, equipped with an Intel Celeron N5105 Jasper Lake processor, does not have this issue since all ports are accessible on the rear panel.

    The computer ships with 8GB RAM, up to 256GB SSD, and the rear panel comes with two USB Type-C port, one for power only, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an HDMI ports, and three USB 3.0 ports. You’ll still find the power button on the front panel, and wireless connectivity is supported through a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module

  • CNX Software ☛ Allwinner V3LP gets low voltage RAM, should replace Allwinner V3S dual camera SoC – CNX Software

    Allwinner V3LP is a single-core Cortex-A7 processor for dual-camera systems with the exact same specifications as the Allwinner V3S processor introduced in 2016, except it should be more power efficient with a lower DDR operating voltage of 1.5V instead of 1.8V.

    Sochip explains that procuring the integrated DDR2 in the Allwinner V3s design is challenging, so Allwinner has replaced the memory in the pin-to-pin compatible Allwinner V3LP with more broadly available and lower power RAM.

  • Hackaday ☛ NABU PC – A 1984 Z-80 Computer You Can Buy Today

    Want to hack on brand new 8-bit 1980s hardware? Until recently you needed a time machine, or deep pockets to do this. All that has recently changed with the NABU PC. A retro machine that can be bought brand new for $59.99, (plus shipping) no time machine needed.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Advertising Standards Authority Ltd ☛ Key headlines from our 100 Children Report

    Registering false dates of birth: Findings from the study would suggest that around 93% of all 11–17-year-olds in the UK have a personal account with one or more of the major social media platforms. With over five million people in the UK aged between 11-17, each with an average of around three social media accounts, this age group is estimated to hold over 15 million social media accounts. Our findings would suggest that on at least 11% of these accounts, children are registered with a date of birth that suggests they’re 18 or older, implying that over 1.6 million social media accounts held by children in the UK are falsely registered with an adult age. Our report also found that 86% of 11–12-year-olds have their own account on at least one social media platform. Since they fall below the minimum age of registration (13) on social media, their submitted date of birth almost certainly signifies they’re older than they actually are.

  • The Independent UK ☛ More than 1.6 million social media accounts are owned by underage children

    Children are signing up to social media at an increasingly young age, the study found. Some 67% of accounts held by 11 to 12 year olds – younger than the minimum age of registration – were set up between school years one and seven, whereas just 21% of the accounts held by 13 to 17 year olds were set up in the same period.

    Some 75% of accounts were set up by a child without a parent or guardian’s supervision, while 94% of those who access social media do so through devices only they use.

  • Björn Ognibeni ☛ Why Tiktok is selling Spinach in China and Opium in the West.

    The sad truth is: TikTok is just mimicking what social media in the West looks like. Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook all have the same toxic business model: Maximizing reach to maximize ad revenue. Social media in the West is hooked on advertising, and there is no plan B. Meta tried e-commerce with live shopping — and failed. Elon Musk is trying to sell blue check marks for US$8 a month — but nobody seems to be buying. Google never really tried to diversify. Most of the Western Internet still is a one-trick pony. Good luck pushing educational content on a service built on such a model.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Social media giants face multi-million pound fines if they fail to ban child accounts

    Social media firms will be forced to bar underaged children or face multi-million pound fines under a new law to protect them from harm online.

    The Government will unveil the revamped Online Safety Bill on Tuesday, which will compel companies by law to publish how they enforce age limits so parents, as well as the watchdog Ofcom, can test their credibility.

  • The Nation ☛ When It Comes to Endometriosis, “Doing Your Own Research” Might Actually Be Necessary

    The phrase “do your own research” or “DYOR” has long been a fixture in conspiracy theory circles. During the height of the pandemic, you might have seen Halloween gravestone decorations engraved with “I did my own research” or photos of a scientist in a lab juxtaposed against some guy looking at his phone. The phrase has been coopted by anti-vaxxers and talking heads like Alex Jones, who have evangelized taking means into your own hands rather than following the advice of trained and certified scientific experts.

  • ASCO’s new guidelines promote quackery for cancer pain

    Before the pandemic, a frequent topic of this blog was the documentation of how rank quackery was being “integrated” into medicine to produce an unholy fusion dubbed “integrative medicine” or “integrative health” by its advocates. Rebranded from its previous name, “complementary and alternative medicine”—with the pithy acronym CAM, which was tossed aside because CAM adherents didn’t want the nostrums that they added to science-based medicine to be described as “alternative”—”integrative medicine” falsely promised patients the “best of both worlds,” the assumption being that there was a “best” of unscientific medicine based largely on religious prescientific understandings of how the body works and what causes disease to “integrate” into science-based medicine. Then the pandemic hit, and blogging about COVID-19 seemed to push nearly every other topic aside (for me, at least). However, just because I haven’t been paying as much attention as I used to do to the infiltration of what I used to like to call quackademic medicine into medical academia and then into community medical centers doesn’t mean that it didn’t continue during the pandemic, and not just in the form of claiming that various forms of alternative medicine could be used to treat or prevent COVID-19.

  • Hackaday ☛ App Detects Parkinsons Disease And COVID-19 Via Audio

    One of the challenges of diagnosing diseases is identifying them early. At this stage, signs may be vague or confusing, or difficult to identify. Early diagnosis is often tied to the best possible treatment outcomes, so there’s plenty of incentives to improve methods in this way.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How the Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle

    Over the years, Marsha Farmer had learned what to look for. As she drove the back roads of rural Alabama, she kept an eye out for dilapidated homes and trailers with wheelchair ramps. Some days, she’d ride the one-car ferry across the river to Lower Peach Tree and other secluded hamlets where a few houses lacked running water and bare soil was visible beneath the floorboards. Other times, she’d scan church prayer lists for the names of families with ailing members.

    Farmer was selling hospice, which, strictly speaking, is for the dying. To qualify, patients must agree to forgo curative care and be certified by doctors as having less than six months to live. But at AseraCare, a national chain where Farmer worked, she solicited recruits regardless of whether they were near death. She canvassed birthday parties at housing projects and went door to door promoting the program to loggers and textile workers. She sent colleagues to cadge rides on the Meals on Wheels van or to chat up veterans at the American Legion bar. “We’d find run-down places where people were more on the poverty line,” she told me. “You’re looking for uneducated people, if you will, because you’re able to provide something to them and meet a need.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘No F*cking Excuse’: Outrage in Houston Over Officials’ Late Notice of Boil Water Alert

    Houstonians voiced outrage Monday after authorities took six hours to issue a boil water advisory to more than 2.2 million residents of Texas’ largest city—and the nation’s fourth-biggest—in the wake of a power outage at a purification plant.

    “I learned about the boil water notice in Houston from a monkey.”

• Security

  • Krebs On Security ☛ U.S. Govt. Apps Bundled Russian Code With Ties to Mobile Malware Developer

    A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.

  • GitLab ☛ Cryptsetup 2.6

  • ClamAV® blog: ClamAV 1.0.0 LTS released

    The ClamAV 1.0.0 feature release is now stable and available for download on ClamAV.net or through Docker Hub.

    ClamAV 1.0.0 includes the following improvements and changes.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Charles V of Spain Secret Code Cracked

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Samba fixed in EasyShare again

    Yeah, again, because this bug was supposed to be fixed.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ EU Declaration on Digital Rights agreed

      MEP Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) comments on the text:

      “The declaration promises ‘effective protection of communications against access by unauthorised third parties’ and protection against illegal surveillance. The promise to promote interoperability, transparency, open technologies and standards is also a positive achievement. However, the plans for indiscriminate scanning of private communications („chat control“) and the blanket data retention laws in force in many European countries call into question the credibility of the agreed commitments. [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • NPR ☛ For Afghans who fought against the Taliban, life is fraught under their rule

    When the Afghan republic collapsed last year, so too did its U.S.-backed military. Overnight, tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers lost their jobs and suddenly found themselves living under the thumb of those they spent two decades fighting.

  • The Nation ☛ The Terrorism We Sought Abroad Has Come Home

    Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about governmental abuses of power, I wanted to cooperate with efforts to root out hate. However, I also feared that my involvement might spark some kind of retaliation.

  • TruthOut ☛ Purdue Students and Faculty Say No to War Criminals on Campus

  • The Gray Zone ☛ US sanctions and economic conditions drive Nicaraguan migration, while Washington blames repression

  • TruthOut ☛ With Biden’s Support, Democrats Push Assault Weapons Ban After Deadly Shootings

  • Scheerpost ☛ VIDEO: Alex Rubinstein on Nazism in Ukraine, NAFO and Information Warfare

    By ScheerPost Staff ScheerPost’s Diego Ramos and Max Jones talk to journalist Alex Rubinstein about his recent work. Alex is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in publications like The Grayzone and MintPress News. He has written extensively and broken news about the international effects of neoliberalism and regime change policies of the United […]

  • Scheerpost ☛ Furious With Biden, Europe Says US Is Profiting Off Ukraine War

    Officials are unhappy with the Inflation Reduction Act and its subsidies that could drive investment out of Europe.

  • Counter Punch ☛ As the World Fixates on Ukraine, Another War is Brewing in the Middle East

    If the US or Israel were to attack the main Iranian nuclear facility producing weapons-grade nuclear fuel, Iran would most likely retaliate by using its drone and missile arsenal to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, through which tankers daily carry almost a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.

    The confrontation escalated sharply this week when Iran announced that it intended to make near bomb-grade nuclear fuel at its Fordow plant, located inside a mountain to protect it from bomb and missile attack. Iran decided to ramp up its nuclear programme after the failure of talks to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal agreed in 2015 by President Barack Obama but denounced and dropped three years later by President Donald Trump.

  • Meduza ☛ At last minute, Moscow postpones planned consultations with Washington on strategic arms limits — Meduza

    Moscow has canceled a planned meeting of the New START treaty’s bilateral consultative commission, which was scheduled to begin tomorrow in Cairo, running from November 29 to December 6. Officials from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow told the newspaper Kommersant, “The Russian side informed the United States that Russia has unilaterally postponed the meeting and stated that it would propose new dates.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry also confirmed this information, but it provided no explanation.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Biden’s Response To the Rightwing Whirlwind in Israel—Weakness

    By Mitchell Plitnick / Mondoweiss At the beginning of November, when Israel and the United States held elections within days of each other, it seemed clear that the pull in opposite directions embodied in the disappointing showing for the American far-right and the strong showing for their Israeli counterparts portended tension in the “unshakeable” alliance […]

  • Meduza ☛ FSB says it ‘prevented a series of terrorist attacks’ in Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia — Meduza

    The FSB claims to have prevented “preparations for a series of terrorist attacks” on crowded places in the Kremlin annexed part of the Zaporizhzhia region.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden Mulls Sending Long-Range Missiles to Ukraine

    The Biden administration is considering an offer from military-industrial complex giant Boeing to supply Ukraine with long-range precision-guided bombs capable of striking targets up to nearly 100 miles away, Reuters reported Monday.

    The Pentagon is reviewing Boeing’s proposal to send Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB)—manufactured jointly with Sweden’s SAAB—to Ukrainian forces, a move that would enable them to hit targets deep behind enemy lines as they fight to repel invading Russian troops.

  • Meduza ☛ Vitali Klitschko: power outages in Kyiv may continue until spring — Meduza

    In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said power outages in Kyiv may continue until the spring.

  • Meduza ☛ Mobilized soldiers and relatives face rejection applying for debt relief — Meduza

    In November, conscripts and their families began complaining about their inability to access the debt relief which was promised to them by the Russian government. Kommersant noticed an increase in references to the “unfair approach” of banks on the forum Banki.ru.

  • Meduza ☛ Freedom and shackles Historian discovers records from 1976 documenting a 23-year-old Vladimir Putin’s role in suppressing Soviet protest art — Meduza

    New information has emerged about Vladimir Putin’s early professional life as a KGB officer. A St. Petersburg-based historian discovered a document which shows that Putin participated in investigating one of the first instances of protest art in the USSR. In 1976, at age 23, Putin helped to search the home of an artist who painted the slogan “You may crucify freedom, but the human soul knows no shackles!” on the wall of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. Two artists served time in prison for the action, but the slogan – and Putin – live on.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian contract soldiers who were held in a Donbas basement demand an investigation — Meduza

    Russian service members, who were held in basements for two weeks after they refused to fight in Ukraine, have demanded that the Russian Investigative Committee open a criminal case concerning unlawful imprisonment, kidnapping, and abuse of power, reports Pavel Chikov, head of the human rights group Agora.

  • Meduza ☛ Memorial calls journalist Ivan Safronov a political prisoner — Meduza

    The human rights organization Memorial called journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison on treason charges, a political prisoner.

  • Meduza ☛ Widow of Russian colonel who allegedly died by suicide asks Putin to oversee investigation — Meduza

    Yulia Boiko, the widow of the deputy head of Russia’s Pacific Higher Naval School, Colonel Vadim Boiko, wrote an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In it, she asked Putin to oversee the investigation into her husband’s death, which media outlets have reported was by suicide.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Common Dreams ☛ Citing Need for ‘New, Inclusive Leadership,’ Chuy García Files for Chicago Mayoral Race

    Progressive Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García on Monday filed his nominating petitions for mayor of Chicago, submitting signatures from nearly 50,000 residents of Illinois’ biggest city.

    “I’m proud to officially start our journey towards a safer, more prosperous Chicago for all.”

• Environment

  • Salon ☛ Will wild coffee go extinct from climate change? Botanists say we can still save this crop

    Surprisingly, it is a real possibility. As climate change worsens, the threats against coffee plants are rising, meaning one day many species of coffee could be extinct in the wild. Drought, floods, heatwaves and the spread of pathogens like fungus and viruses are already making it more difficult for coffee to grow in some regions. If this trend continues, one of humans’ favorite substances may become scarce and extremely expensive, with some estimates warning that 50 percent of the land used to grow coffee will be unproductive by 2050.

  • TruthOut ☛ US-China Climate Cooperation Could Reduce Tensions and Military Expenditures

  • Common Dreams ☛ On Cyber Monday, Climate Activists Take Aim at Fashion Industry

    As Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers have spent the past few days taking advantage of deals for holiday gifts, climate activists and reporters worldwide have highlighted the negative impact that the clothing industry—particularly fast fashion—has on the planet.

    “The ‘fast fashion’ model we’re in is an endless cycle of companies forcing people to spend more money and sell more products—all while they make huge profits off their exploitation.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Imagining the Necessary World in Which the US and China Cooperate on Climate

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | We Need a Global Treaty More Powerful Than the Plastics Industry

    In March, there was a collective cheer when United Nations member states adopted a historic resolution to end plastic pollution during the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi. Governments agreed to start work on a global, legally binding agreement that addresses the full lifecycle of plastic and that will come into effect in 2024. The decision has been called ambitious, revolutionary, and historic.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “A Forgotten Conflict”: Sahrawi Activists Slam Moroccan Greenwashing Amid Western Sahara Occupation

    As climate Sahrawi activists in occupied Western Sahara accuse Morocco of greenwashing, the Spanish Film Academy, the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars, has just given its social justice award to the Western Sahara International Film Festival and its film school. We feature our interview at the U.N. climate summit with Mahfud Bechri, who explains how Morocco sells the natural resources and wealth of Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people as part of an effort to greenwash its military occupation of Western Sahara, and his larger campaign to demand companies end complicity with the occupation. The new social justice award from the Spanish Film Academy recognizes how Spanish support for the Moroccan occupation has led to “a complete media blockade” of the conflict, says María Carrión, executive director of FiSahara, the Western Sahara International Film Festival.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | COP27: Progress or Performance?

    Since the end of COP27 in Egypt, it’s important to remark at the number of oil lobbyists who flocked to the desert oasis of Sharm El Sheikh. It’s hard to imagine how an international climate conference could allow such a thing. A meeting of the nations like COP seems important on paper, but in practice, the event has raised multiple questions on the ethics of a performative “green” space. Beyond the “Green Zone”‒where academia, youth groups, businesses, and artists are allowed to “participate” in the conference‒lies the “Blue Zone,” where powerful heads of state in conjunction with the United Nations engage in substantive negotiations.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Montreal Biodiversity COP15 December 2022

    For example, the tenth (10th) meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity was held in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan from October 18-29, 2010. More than 13,000 delegates from around the world. The Aichi targets were designed to help, or in the best of cases, save or revive biodiversity.

    Zoom forward twelve years to November 11th 2022: A news release by Climate Change News announces the upcoming COP15 biodiversity conference scheduled for Montreal December 7-19, 2022: “In the past decade, countries agreed to a ten-year plan called the Aichi targets, aimed at halting biodiversity loss. A UN summary report shows countries failed to meet a single one of those targets.” (Source: UN Nature Pact Nears Its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ Moment, Climate Change News Nov. 11, 2022)

  • Energy

    • NPR ☛ Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi declares bankruptcy, a consequence of FTX’s collapse

      Another [cryptocurrency] company has fallen, as contagion from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX spreads across the industry: BlockFi says it has filed for bankruptcy.

      BlockFi was one of a handful of companies FTX bailed out in recent months, and its prospects worsened considerably as FTX imploded.

      Announcing its plans to file for Chapter 11 reorganization in New Jersey, where the company is based, BlockFi noted FTX’s own bankruptcy proceedings will lead to delays.

    • New York Times ☛ [Cryptocurrency] Lender BlockFi Files for Bankruptcy as FTX Fallout Spreads

      But that agreement meant that BlockFi was financially entangled with FTX, and its stability was thrust into uncertainty this month after a series of revelations about corporate missteps and suspicious management at FTX. A few days after the exchange collapsed, BlockFi suspended withdrawals, explaining that it had “significant exposure” to FTX, including undrawn amounts from the credit line and assets held on the FTX platform.

    • ABC ☛ Tiantian Kullander, co-founder of [cryptocurrency] company Amber Group, dies suddenly, aged 30

      Hong Kong-based digital asset company Amber Group posted a statement announcing the death of Tiantian Kullander, who passed away unexpectedly in his sleep on November 23, 2022.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Tiantian Kullander: Founder of [cryptocurrency] company valued at $3bn dies ‘unexpectedly’ at age 30

      The statement revealed that Kullander, a former Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs trader affectionately known as “TT”, “unexpectedly” died in his sleep. It did not share any other details.

    • NYPost ☛ [Cryptocurrency] founder Tiantian Kullander unexpectedly dead at 30

      Earlier this year, the start-up reached a staggering $3 billion valuation after scoring a $200 million funding round.

    • Bloomberg ☛ Tiantian Kullander, Co-Founder of [Cryptocurrency] Firm Amber, Dies at 30

      Tiantian Kullander, the former Morgan Stanley trader who co-founded digital-asset trading platform Amber Group, has died. He was 30.b

    • New York Times ☛ Idle [Cryptocurrency] Is the Devil’s Workshop

      The blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency was supposed to make events like this a thing of the past. But FTX’s business was to serve as a gateway into (and out of) cryptocurrency. That business still depends on humans to serve as honest gatekeepers. And we’ve seen over and over that humans can’t resist the main temptation that comes with this role: to use their customers’ money for their own purposes.

      The FTX collapse could be the start of a wave of cryptocurrency exchange failures. Because these exchanges are largely unregulated, they don’t face the same rules placed on other exchanges to keep their customers’ money safe. And there’s nobody looking over the shoulders of the exchange managers to keep them honest. Given that — and given my experience in studying financial market development and regulation — I think it’s pretty likely that other firms are doing what FTX did with its customers’ money, and that some of them will blow up in the same way, especially now that [cryptocurrency] investors are nervous and looking for signs of trouble.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Sam Bankman-Fried’s Truly Effective Philanthropy: Teaching

      Now that the Ponzi has collapsed, the investors who trusted him look to be out of luck. And, of course there is no money for the philanthropies that he supported, many of which will are now struggling because they won’t get contributions they had been counting on.

      That all looks pretty reprehensible, but maybe that’s the point. See, Sam Bankman-Fried was so committed to his philosophy of effective philanthropy that he was prepared to make himself appear to be the epitome of a despicable human being, and spend many years in prison, all to teach us that finance is a wasteful cesspool that needs to be reined in for the good of humanity. And, the place to start is his particular corner of the cesspool: crypto.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ ‘Free Water’ Was Never Free, Writes a Historian of the American West

    • Common Dreams ☛ Great Barrier Reef Belongs on World Heritage ‘In Danger’ List: UNESCO

      Because Australia’s efforts to protect the Great Barrier Reef from damages wrought by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, pollution, and overfishing are falling short, the planet’s largest coral reef system should be placed on a list of World Heritage sites considered “in danger,” a pair of experts said Monday.

      “Despite the unparalleled science and management efforts” made by Australia in recent years, the Great Barrier Reef is “significantly impacted by climate change factors,” Eleanor Carter of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Hans Thulstrup of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) wrote in a report.

  • Overpopulation

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungarian population is on the decrease: 12 per cent fewer children born in October than last year

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | How to Stop Inequality That Kills

    Over a half-century ago, back in the mid-1960s, books about poverty abounded. But publishers paid relatively little attention to wealth’s concentration. A generation earlier, Americans had obsessed about grand private fortunes. By late mid-century, that obsession no longer excited either the media or the public.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • ABC ☛ Saudi viewers angry over apparent ban on World Cup streaming

    Qatar’s beIN group was caught in the crosshairs of a bitter political dispute between Riyadh and Doha in recent years. Saudi Arabia in 2017 led a group of four Arab countries in imposing a boycott on Qatar over its support for political Islamists, ties with Iran and its funding of Al Jazeera, a satellite news channel that has at times harshly criticized other Gulf Arab governments.

    [...]

    The Saudi government is believed to hold a controlling stake in MBC Group after a series of arrests in 2017 ordered by Prince Mohammed over corruption allegations that helped him centralize power in the kingdom.

  • [Repeat] Daniel Pocock ☛ Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession

    The email below also demonstrates the manner in which at least one member of the women’s clique, Amaya Rodrigo, was trying to convince Ted’s date that Ted might be dangerous. This is a hideous example of backstabbing and sabotage.

  • MWL ☛ Social Media Updates: Good-Bye Twitter

    After much thought, I’m making @mwl@io.mwl.io my main fediverse/Mastodon account. There’s no need to burden my pals over at bsd.network with moderating me or the attention I attract. I also don’t care if government accounts follow my business posts. Heck, as Terry Pratchett said, I will happily offer special rates for governments!

  • Tim Bray ☛ Protect Me From What I Want

    Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out that showing you exclusively stories vilifying or praising Donald Trump (depending) maximizes engagement, then that’s what you’ll see. So the chant over there is “No algorithms on Mastodon!” This chant is wrong, and the discussion around it teaches us that we need clarity on what algorithms are, what moral weight they can carry, and whether they can be avoided. (Spoiler: They can’t.)

  • Quillette ☛ Ending Discrimination by Twitter

    In one such opinion piece, appearing recently here in Quillette, Angel Eduardo disagreed with Musk’s characterization of Twitter. In “Twitter is Not the Town Square,” Eduardo declared that “No matter what we think, want, or feel, Twitter is not, has never been, and likely can never be a public square.” His argument was that because Twitter is a private company, it “can have whatever rules it likes—and it can apply them with whatever level of consistency it likes.” A social media company is a business, he says, and businesses don’t come to have obligations simply because of how we use them or what we’ve decided they’re for.

  • Broadband Breakfast ☛ FCC Halts Authorization of Equipment That Threatens National Security

    The commission’s action seeks to prevent Chinese tech companies deemed to be national security threats – such as Huawei and ZTE – from gathering data on and surveilling American citizens. The Chinese Communist government can force, under law, private companies to hand over data from their products, thus putting Americans at risk, experts and government officials have said.

  • IT Wire ☛ US Government bans Chinese telco equipment citing security concerns

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it has adopted rules banning communications equipment that are “deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security from being authorised for importation or sale in the U.S.”. The new rules adopt the Bipartisan Secure Equipment Act of 2021, signed into law by President Biden last November, requiring the Commission to adopt such rules.

  • The Hill ☛ Musk asks if Apple hates ‘free speech in America’ after Twitter advertising drop-off

    Racist language and misinformation have reportedly surged on Twitter since Musk’s acquisition, and left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America found that 50 of Twitter’s leading 100 advertisers appear to have halted their work with the site.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Musk threatens ‘war’ with Apple over claims it is censoring free speech

    Millions of people use Apple’s iPhones to access the Twitter app, which is downloaded through the tech giant’s App Store. The social network has around 260 million active users.

    Apple has previously blocked or delayed updates to other apps over safety concerns, such as by banning rival social network Parler last year.

    The tech giant can also choose to block companies from issuing updates to their apps if they break the terms of its iPhone store, such as by trying to avoid paying fees to Apple.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Canada and the Kidnapping of Ambassador Saab

    Something like that happens to me at the broader scale when I think of Canada’s foreign policy: big words but mean actions. What great eloquence we get from the prime minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers! The government of Canada presents itself – to itself, to its people, to the world, as great defenders of human rights, great lover of humanity, of law and order, of humanitarian actions.  And yet, what shabby, incongruous, filthy foreign policies it has!

    Canada’s role in Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, has not been anything to boast about. Furthermore, Canada has voted against every UN resolution upholding Palestinian rights, and its support for Saudi Arabia -even when it is chopping up journalists- extends to making arms deals with them.[i]  And in Latin America, Canada has been responsible for outrages in Haiti, Honduras, in Añez’s Bolivia, in Bolsonaro’s Brazil…and for 20 years of vile persecution of the beleaguered Venezuela, nation that has done no wrong to Canada or any Canadians.  Hence Ottawa’s silence on the kidnapping by the USA of the Venezuelan ambassador, Alex Saab.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Principles of International Order

    The Priorities of the United Nations are peace, development and human rights.  Most importantly, the world community must demand peace and condemn propaganda for war, which is already prohibited in article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    Art. 2(3) of the UN Charter already obliges all States to settle disputes by peaceful means.  This obligation to negotiate means good faith dialogue with the goal to reach a compromise, a quid pro quo.  There is no right to intransigence in the UN Charter. If one party refuses to talk, it is violating article 2(3) and actually provoking the other to the use of force.  Moreover, this constitutes a potential threat to international peace and security for purposes of article 39 of the UN Charter. It is bad faith in contravention of article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Demands Election Loser Kari Lake Be “Installed” as Arizona Governor

  • Common Dreams ☛ Democracy Defenders Vow to Sue After GOP-Led Arizona County Refuses to Certify Election

    Pro-democracy advocates are expected to sue a rural Arizona county after a pair of GOP officials on Monday refused to certify this month’s electoral outcomes despite a complete lack of evidence of miscounting.

    Heeding the calls of former President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans who have repeatedly lied about voter fraud and advocated for rejecting the popular will, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors declined to certify the results of the November 8 midterm elections in which Democratic candidates won races for governor, secretary of state, and state attorney general.

  • TruthOut ☛ Kevin Johnson Is Set to Be Executed Tuesday. Will Missouri Stay Execution?

  • Democracy Now ☛ Will Missouri Stay Execution of Kevin Johnson, Case Tainted by Racism, or Let Daughter Witness Death?

    Pressure is growing for Missouri to stop the execution of Kevin Johnson set for Tuesday. At a hearing Monday before Missouri’s Supreme Court, a special prosecutor will request a stay in order to fully investigate how the case was tainted by racism. Meanwhile, Johnson’s 19-year-old daughter has been barred from witnessing his lethal injection because she is under 21. “We understand that the death penalty does not solve anything,” says Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, who says Johnson is being “punished more severely” because of his race. Lawmakers are also urging Missouri’s governor to grant Johnson clemency.

  • TruthOut ☛ Democrats Will Push Electoral College Reform in Final Weeks of House Control

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Chris Hedges Report: Ralph Nader Explains Why Democrats Lost the House

    After losing the House to Republicans, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the two years of gridlock ahead.

  • The Nation ☛ The Disturbing World of the New GOP

    The Republican Party that will take narrow control of the House of Representatives in January 2023 has gone through a dramatic transformation in the two years since Donald Trump and his allies attempted a violent coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The party that was once torn over how to respond to Trump’s assault on democratic norms is no more. It was replaced in 2022 by one that did not merely tolerate Trump’s election denialism but embraced it by nominating January 6 insurrectionists and apologists for congressional and statewide posts—a strategy so noxious that it cost Republicans key US Senate contests and the “red wave” GOP strategists were counting on. But postelection pundits who imagine that the party will do an about-face and suddenly adopt a more politically rational course are sorely mistaken. The new Republican Party has a base—and many leaders—that does not merely fall for Trump’s lies. Republican partisans are increasingly looking beyond the scandal-plagued former president and taking inspiration from right-wing European nationalist leaders with politics rooted in a fascist sensibility that employs racism, xenophobia, and a win-at-any-cost approach to elections and governing. This transformed Republican Party will exploit its control of the House and state posts for a 2024 presidential election in which Trump and a rising generation of ruthless partisans will plot a return to unitary power—with a vision that is dramatically more authoritarian than anything seen in the 45th president’s first term.1

  • Common Dreams ☛ Analysis Finds State Legislators Proposed 306 Bills Targeting Trans People in Past 2 Years

    An analysis released Monday by NPR details what one rights advocacy group called the Republican Party’s “obsession” with curtailing the rights of transgender people, with U.S. state legislators proposing more than 300 pieces of legislation targeting the community over the past two years.

    Lawmakers in every region of the United States have put forward a total of 306 anti-trans bills since 2020, with 86% of the bills focusing on transgender youths.

  • The Nation ☛ Targets of Hate

  • TruthOut ☛ Police Units Formed by Republicans to Find Widespread Voter Fraud Come Up Short

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Reality is on our side – says Secretary of State Zoltán Kovács

  • Counter Punch ☛ Farm Workers Push for Congressional Action During Lame Duck Session

  • Counter Punch ☛ Letter from London: Mine Games

    Talking of depths, the international mining community came into town last week to attend a conference in the City of London. I don’t know what the collective noun for miners should be but given the fact that they are pretty much banished as a topic from certain quarters of polite society these days, an ‘underground’ of miners might work. Indeed, so toxic is mining’s image that the Red Cross won’t take its money anymore, and many of the academic institutes which used to train people in this field have had to shut down. Those remaining — for example, Camborne School of Mines and Royal School of Mines at Imperial College here in London — no longer offer mining or petroleum engineering degrees. Incredibly, London University has banned all mining and oil companies from campus recruitment events. But maybe what some people learn at these places is over-rated, anyway. One very good English friend of mine tells me of a successful miner he knows who never listens to his geologists and finds ore using a jade staff like a water diviner. This is the same friend who called it right by saying the establishment in this country would soon be exploring new ways back into Europe because the entire economy was going down the one-seater otherwise. We have all heard of data mining — as everyone knows, Brexit had data written all over it — so maybe we should be mining asteroids instead.

    It is disheartening for some of us living here in London to witness the persistent disgruntlement. It hangs in the air like the prospect of an over-expensive Christmas. It is rather like watching a city which has had it so good for so long that it no longer knows what to do with itself. Traditionally, there was always stoicism to the English character. Now this feels more like belligerence or bloody-mindedness. This of course just as the investigation into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament or not over partygate was delayed last week after what was described as a hold up with Downing Street evidence. Not only that, Johnson was on the attack against Germany, as if taking the crazy Churchill stuff one or two marching steps too far. (Memo to Johnson: you are no longer in power.) Tally that if you can with the fact one of Johnson’s former Conservative county councillors quit last week after photos emerged of the man in uniform at an openly fascist group. Just as one lot continue to grow extreme, however, another will find it harder in the face of what my friend predicted to defend Brexit at all, and I am not just thinking of the recent YouGov poll revealing that only 32% of Brits now believe it was right to leave Europe and 56% think it was wrong. Perhaps tellingly, fewer cars than normal here in London during a World Cup have been flying England flags. As for our immigration numbers on Brexit’s so-called watch, these show net figures of a record 504,000 in the year to June.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Ending the For-Profit Algorithms Before They End Us

    The man who coined the term “virtual reality” and helped create Web 2.0, Jaron Lanier, recently told a reporter for The Guardian there’s an aspect to the internet that could endanger the literal survival of humanity as a species. It’s an amazing story, and I believe he’s 100% right.

  • Techdirt ☛ Contrary To Popular Opinion, Most Teens Get Real Value Out Of Social Media

    There’s this narrative out there that “it has been decided” that social media is “bad for children” and that it is such a big danger that “regulation is needed.” A few months ago, we wrote about a Berkeley professor who claimed that this was settled and that there was “no longer any question as to the nature of the harm to children around the globe.” In that post we went through all of the linked research showing it proved nothing of the sort.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ABC ☛ World Cup TV pundit under fire for disparaging Qatari attire

    Wagner was referring to the thaub, the traditional white full-length robes with long sleeves worn by many men in the region.

    Wagner’s comments led to furious reactions on social media.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Football Capitulates at Qatar

    Then came Australia’s own uniquely celluloid performance: videos from the players claiming sympathy with the various efforts made by Qatar in improving the record on human rights in various areas yet frowning about the fact that more could be done.

    From the moment the first ball was kicked, even these feeble efforts were bound to be found wanting. FIFA President Gianni Infantino made his position clear from the outset, playing the role of defender of the Qatari state and mocking detractors for obsessing with such niggling things as human rights.

  • Democracy Now ☛ From Xinjiang to Shanghai, Protests Grow in China over COVID Restrictions After Fatal Apartment Fire

    Unprecedented protests have erupted in multiple Chinese cities over President Xi Jinping’s strict zero-COVID policies, which have resulted in extended strict lockdowns across the country. The protests were triggered by a deadly fire Thursday at an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where local COVID restrictions reportedly prevented firefighters from reaching the trapped residents. This comes as hundreds of workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory, Foxconn, clashed last week with police over restrictions that have forced many workers to live at the factory. “China now for three years has seen a level of lockdown that is simply inconceivable,” says Cornell labor scholar Eli Friedman, who calls the cross-class, cross-ethnic protests a “movement against surveillance.” Friedman says although China enforces the country’s COVID restrictions, top U.S. corporations like Apple and Tesla are implicated in upholding the closed-loop management system at Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturers.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Twitter grapples with Chinese spam obscuring news of protests

    Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.

    The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter

    Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

    There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

  • Nepal ☛ China tightens security after rare protests against Covid curbs

    Police have been asking people for their phones to check if they had virtual private networks (VPNs) and the Telegram app, which has been used by weekend protesters, residents and social media users said. VPNs are illegal for most people in China, while the Telegram app is blocked from China’s internet.

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Hard-Liners Propose Punishment For Cooperation With ‘Hostile’ Countries

    According to the plan, any interaction with any Western institutions and media, including social media, will be considered cooperation and criminalized under the title of “corruption on earth” a charge — often leveled in cases allegedly involving espionage or attempts to overthrow the government — that is punishable by death.

  • RFA ☛ Chinese universities send students home en masse after weekend protests

    Chinese authorities on Monday appeared to be moving to frame a wave of nationwide anti-lockdown protests at the weekend as the work of “hostile foreign forces,” with university students ordered to leave campus and go back to their hometowns aboard specially arranged train services, state media and a university source said on Monday.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ In Pictures: Hongkongers stage ‘blank placard’ demo in solidarity with China Covid protests

    “In mainland China, it is more easy to organise such protests than in Hong Kong. This is sad… I am just doing what I can do,” he said.

  • Bloomberg ☛ China Uses Police, Censors, Quiet Covid Easing to Stem Protests

    The unrest triggered by a deadly fire in the city of Urumqi last week sputtered Monday night, with Beijing deploying a heavy police presence to clamp down on protests. Cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and elsewhere saw fewer demonstrations, while censorship of protest-related discussions ramped up across social media platforms that had been used to vent public anger.

  • AccessNow ☛ #KeepItOn: 2022 elections and internet shutdowns watch

    Throughout 2021, the #KeepItOn coalition witnessed governments in Uganda, Zambia, Russia, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo hit the kill switch during elections, disconnecting millions of people from the internet — and their civic rights.

    When governments shut down the internet during elections, they rob people of their opportunity to participate in the democratic process. Without a fair, open, accessible internet, people — from voters to monitors, journalists to political opponents — cannot fully exercise their rights to access information, communicate, and hold authorities accountable for their actions.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New York Times ☛ An Open Letter from Editors and Publishers: Publishing is Not a Crime

    This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticize his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database. But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.

  • Don’t Extradite Assange ☛ Julian Assange receives the Almudena Grandes Award for freedom of expression

    Poet Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute and columnist for infoLibre, spoke on a large screen that dominated the stage. “We live in a world in which it is increasingly essential to defend the independence of journalism. We cannot commit ourselves to being in possession of the truth, but we can commit ourselves not to lie,” concluded and thanked the Almudena Grandes Award for the defense of the right to information, awarded to Julian Assange.

  • Shadowproof ☛ Attorney: Plenty To Uncover On CIA-Backed Spying That Violated Privacy Of Assange Visitors

    This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.In August, a lawsuit against the CIA, former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and UC Global director David Morales was filed that alleged Americans who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was living in the Ecuador embassy had their privacy rights violated.Attorney Richard Roth filed a complaint on behalf of two attorneys, Deborah Hrbek and Margaret Ratner-Kunstler, and two journalists, Charles Glass and John Goetz. They say they were spied upon by the CIA-backed operation when they met with Assange.The lawsuit will be deliberated over in a United States court in the Southern District of New York. It was assigned to Judge John Koeltl.Kevin Gosztola recently spoke with Richard about the status of the lawsuit and what happens next.

     

  • New York Times ☛ Major News Outlets Urge U.S. to Drop Its Charges Against Assange

    The case against Mr. Assange is complicated and does not turn on the question of whether he is considered a journalist, but rather on whether his journalistic-style activities of soliciting and publishing classified information can or should be treated as a crime.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Because ‘Publishing Is Not a Crime,’ Major Newspapers Push US to Drop Assange Charges

    The five major media outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish explosive stories based on confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department sent a letter Monday calling on the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange, who has been languishing in a high-security London prison for more than three years in connection with his publication of classified documents.

    “Twelve years after the publication of ‘Cablegate,’ it is time for the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” reads the letter signed by the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País. “Publishing is not a crime.”

  • VOA News ☛ China Arrests BBC Journalist Covering COVID Protests

    Lawrence, working in the country as an accredited journalist, was detained for several hours, during which time he was beaten and kicked by police, according to the BBC. He was later released.

    Lawrence tweeted on Monday to thank his followers, adding he believed “at least one local national was arrested after trying to stop the police from beating me.”x

  • VOA News ☛ Al-Shabab Militants Holed Up in Mogadishu Hotel

    “The terrorist gunmen are trapped inside a room in the building and the security forces are about to end the siege very soon…so far we have confirmed the death of four people,” Mohamed Dahir, a security official told AFP.

    Reuters reports Somalia’s parliament canceled sessions for both of its houses because of the militants’ hotel attack.

  • VOA News ☛ Ukraine Revokes Accreditation of Journalists Covering Liberated Kherson

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Nation ☛ When the NYPD Gets Desperate

    If they’re right, the Queens DA would be guilty of a Brady violation, meaning a failure by the prosecution to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence. If the DNA match and confession in the Vetrano investigation came from a search tactic that was never disclosed in court, that evidence could be ruled inadmissible, and Lewis’s conviction could be overturned.

  • EFF ☛ Red Alert: The SFPD want the power to kill with robots

    Police technology goes through mission creep–meaning equipment reserved only for specific or extreme circumstances ends up being used in increasingly everyday or casual ways. We’ve already seen this with military-grade predator drones flying over protests, and police buzzing by the window of an activist’s home with drones.

    As the policy is currently written, the robots’ use will be governed by this passage:

    This is incredibly broad language. Police could bring armed robots to every arrest, and every execution of a warrant to search a house or vehicle or device. Depending on how police choose to define the words “critical” or “exigent,” police might even bring armed robots to a protest. While police could only use armed robots as deadly force when the risk of death is imminent, this problematic legal standard has often been under-enforced by courts and criticized by activists.

  • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Denies Immunity To Officers Who Fabricated Evidence To Wrongfully Convict A Man For Murder

    When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the investigators went beyond simply ignoring other evidence to falsifying the “evidence” they had to ensure the person they picked out for the job ended up in jail.

  • TruthOut ☛ “Congress Must Stand With Rail Workers,” Sanders Says Ahead of Potential Strike

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden Accused of Selling Out Rail Workers by Urging Congress to Prevent Strike

    Warning that the looming U.S. railroad strike “would devastate our economy,” President Joe Biden angered labor advocates on Monday after he implored Congress to take legislative action to force union members to keep working under a contract that many of them have rejected, mainly due to its denial of paid sick days. 

    “Paid sick leave is both a basic part of fair employment practices and an absolutely essential part of national public health policy.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Vows to ‘Stand With Rail Workers’ as Republican Says Congress Will Prevent Strike

    A House Republican from Pennsylvania said Sunday that Congress will intervene to stop a nationwide strike if rail companies and unions don’t reach a contract agreement soon, a step that would likely force workers to accept a deal without any paid sick days.

    Acknowledging that rail workers “have a very reasonable ask” for better benefits and wages as they continue to labor under a punishing scheduling system, Rep. Brian Kevin Fitzpatrick said in a Fox News appearance Sunday that “Congress will not let this strike happen, that’s for sure.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Rev. Barber Breaks Down Why Democrats Must Engage With Low-Wealth Voters

    The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the grassroots Poor People’s Campaign, presented the latest evidence on Sunday that the Democratic Party stands little chance of winning congressional majorities and the White House in future elections if it continues ignoring low-income communities.

    The push by progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and others to focus on the economic struggles facing working families across the country during the midterm elections was not just based on a theory, Barber suggested, but was a strategy that was ultimately backed up by data.

  • TruthOut ☛ Peet’s Workers Are Filing to Unionize, Joining Massive Cafe Union Wave

  • Common Dreams ☛ Inspired by Starbucks Organizing Wins, Peet’s Coffee Workers File for Union Elections

    Galvanized by the remarkable organizing successes of Starbucks employees across the United States, workers at two Peet’s Coffee locations in Davis, California filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday in an effort to win higher wages, better working conditions, and a voice in day-to-day shop operations.

    “I’m organizing because we deserve a say in how our workplace is run and we deserve to be fairly compensated for the value we create,” said Schroedter Kinman, a worker at the Peet’s location in downtown Davis. “It’s also about having a support system and a set of procedures if we’re mistreated by our company.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Amazon Workers to Protest ‘Corporate Law-Breaker’ CEO Jassy, Demanding End to Union-Busting

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is set to be met on Wednesday by workers from his company’s first unionized warehouse when he arrives at a New York Times event, as the Amazon Labor Union calls on him to support negotiations for a fair contract for the people who help make sure billions of products are delivered by the company each year.

    Members of the union, which is headed by former warehouse worker Christian Smalls, plan to rally at Lincoln Center where Jassy is speaking at the Times’ DealBook Summit. The summit features talks by “high-level executives and emerging leaders” from sectors including financial services, media, private investment, venture capital, and banking.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Hosts Mar-a-Lago Meeting With Kanye West, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes

  • Counter Punch ☛ Lula Da Silva’s Election is a Victory for the World

    It was an election with massive stakes, perhaps the most important of 2022 in any country, a vote that, in the best-case scenario, will impact not only Brazil but the whole world, especially in terms of the unfolding climate emergency.

    As Brazil controls the largest part of the Amazon region, the fate of the region is in its government’s hands. Under the far-right reactionary Jair Bolsonaro, who has ruled Brazil since 2018, the meager protections in place to protect it were removed, leading to an orgy of both legal and illegal mining and logging and the subsequent encroachment of large agribusiness interests that threaten to transform the region from a forest into a savannah.

  • Shadowproof ☛ Leonard Peltier Supporters Walk Over 1,000 Miles To Demand Freedom For Native American Activist

    Hundreds of supporters of incarcerated Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier rallied at the nation’s capital on Sunday to demand President Joe Biden grant clemency to the long-held prisoner. 

    “He’s 78-years-old, he has type 2 diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s fatal if it ruptures. He had a stroke where he lost 80 percent of the vision in one of his eyes,” Rachel Thunder, one of the organizers for the rally, told Shadowproof. “He should be spending the remainder of his life with his family, not locked up in a cage.” 

  • AccessNow ☛ Content governance declaration in times of crisis

    In situations of armed conflicts and other crises, people use social media and messaging platforms to document human rights abuses or war crimes, access information, mobilize for action, and crowdsource humanitarian assistance. But governments and other actors leverage these same platforms to spread disinformation and hate speech, incite violence, and attack or surveil activists, journalists, and dissidents. In light of the increasingly important role social media companies play during crises, Access Now and partner organizations have co-authored a Declaration of principles for content and platform governance in times of crisis.

    This Declaration, jointly developed by Access Now, ARTICLE 19, Mnemonic, the Center for Democracy and Technology, JustPeace Labs, Digital Security Lab Ukraine, Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM), and the Myanmar Internet Project, sets out guidelines to help platforms protect human rights before, during, and after a crisis.

  • AccessNow ☛ New content governance principles in times of crisis for companies

    Social media platforms continue to fail the global majority during armed conflict, crises, and war. From Ethiopia to Syria and Myanmar, human rights are repeatedly ignored or deliberately discounted by companies like Twitter, Meta, and Google who allow disinformation to flourish, hate speech to fester, and unjust and inconsistent take down practices to control the narrative.

    Not anymore. Through the new Declaration of principles for content and platform governance in times of crisis launched today, November 29, at the Internet Governance Forum, Access Now and partners lay out principles for these platforms to overhaul the status quo and help ensure privacy, freedom of expression, and access to information for all. Read the full declaration and snapshot.

    “The amount of damage social media companies’ opaque, under-resourced, and ignorant policies and practices have caused during times of crisis and turmoil is immeasurable,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Advocacy and Policy Manager at Access Now. “Their modus operandi has been: if it’s not in English, if it’s not happening in ‘the west’, and it’s not affecting their profit margins, then it’s not worth investing time and energy into. It’s time to change how these companies think.”

  • Techdirt ☛ San Francisco Lawmakers Think It Might Be OK For Cops To Deploy Robots To Kill People

    Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | America Should Not Be Governed by Fear—And Neither Should Its Teachers

    The United States has an alarming problem: civic negligence. The signs of civic decline and decay are all around us – threats of extremist violence, book bans and legislative efforts to restrict honest discussions of history in schools. Renewing schools as civic spaces will require ending punitive testing policies to restore rich educational experiences. It will take shelving book bans to reaffirm trust in the freedom of thought. And it will call for repealing laws that seek to disrupt academic discussions to assert the value of freedom of speech. Urgent action is needed for our beloved public schools to renew civic life.

  • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: Pardoning Turkeys Instead of Humans

    Almost no pardon applications ever actually make it to the president’s desk if you don’t go gobble gobble.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Over 90 Organizations Tell Congress Not To Support Dangerous ‘Kids Online Safety’ Bill

    We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the children!” kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around moral panics and nonsense, blaming the internet any time anything bad happens, and insisting that if only this bill were in place, somehow, magically, internet companies would stop bad stuff from happening. It’s fantasyland thinking, and we need to stop electing politicians who live in fantasyland.

  • Common Dreams ☛ 90+ Groups Warn ‘Kids Online Safety Act’ Could Have ‘Damaging’ Effects

    Nearly 100 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups warned in a Monday letter to Congress that while “privacy, online safety, and digital well-being of children should be protected,” proposed legislation intended to do so would instead negatively impact all internet users.

    “While KOSA has laudable goals, it also presents significant unintended consequences that threaten the privacy, safety, and access to information rights.”

  • Techdirt ☛ NY Times Aptly Illustrates How The AT&T Time Warner Merger Was An Even Bigger Mess Than You Probably Realized

    The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Mercedes Puts Faster Acceleration Behind A Subscription Paywall

    Back in July, BMW raised a bit of a ruckus when the company announced that it would be making heated seats a luxury option for an additional $18 per month. Now, Mercedes aims to take the concept one step further by announcing that buyers of the company’s new Mercedes EQ electric models will need to pay a $1,200 (plus taxes and fees) yearly subscription to unlock the vehicles’ full performance.

• Monopolies

  • [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ UK competition watchdog investigates Apple and Google ‘stranglehold’ over the mobile market

    The CMA in June concluded a year-long study of the market for mobile software, hardware, and services. Based on its findings – that Apple and Google have “a stranglehold over operating systems, app stores and web browsers on mobile devices” – the UK competition watchdog said at the time that it intended to escalate by opening a formal investigation.

    That inquiry has now begun and it should conclude in no more than 18 months. At that point, the CMA may choose to impose remedies, such as demanding a change in the way certain products are sold, requiring the divestment of business units, or insisting upon the removal of anti-competitive restrictions.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Prolific Piracy Release Group EVO Goes Mysteriously Quiet

      P2P release group EVO has built quite a reputation for being the first to release pirated copies of screeners and popular movies online. The group is well-known for its steady and prolific release schedule, but last Friday things went quiet. EVO’s mysterious absence fuels rumors of a potential bust, but nothing is confirmed thus far.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Torrent Site User Who Transferred 120TB of Pirated Content Avoids Prison

      A torrent site user accused of downloading and uploading at least 120TB of movies, TV shows, eBooks, music and software, has avoided an immediate prison term. The 28-year-old was arrested as part of a police operation against DanishBytes. A member of the same site was sentenced earlier this month after he uploaded Netflix content obtained using hacked credentials.

    • Techdirt ☛ The Czech Republic’s Proposed Version Of Upload Filters Has A Bad Idea That Could Become A Great One

      A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the nominal deadline for doing so. That’s largely because of the upload filters of Article 17. The requirement to block copyrighted material without authorization while fully preserving users’ rights is probably impossible to put in place in any straightforward way. As a result, national legislators have had to come up with various kinds of approximations when drawing up their local laws.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • File the Future

    When it comes to “future paperwork” like “I’m gonna need these bus tickets next Wednesday”, and I’m talking actual paper here, for most people who only have like three or four such paper pieces in a given month (usually), it’s enough to have a li’l basket or bag or folder or envelope or stack or tray for them and make a note of them in your normal calendar or reminder app, which is where you need to be checking anyway.

    The Getting Things Done book recommends a system where you have an actual physical folder dedicated to every day, that you then also need to get in the habit of checking every day. This is great, but only worth it if you actually have a lot of physical paperwork incoming, which most people and professions in this digital era don’t. (I wanna say 99% don’t but I’d be pulling that number out of my hat since I don’t have actual stats. Not everyone has a digital profession, like if you, I don’t know, make pottery or something, but professions that deal with sorting a lot of incoming information usually are digital.)

  • exped medium pillow case

    i made a no zip cushion cover in my sewing class – very much like a pillow case but with a much larger inside tongue. time to use that design to make a pillow case for my exped medium pillow.

  • the wretchedness of being sick

    My SO had flu last week, and for some reason I thought – as I think every year (barring Corona) – that I’m somehow stronger or more immune to it. I wasn’t keeping my distance from her, sharing the same food she’d dipped her spoon in, and in general acting like I was an untouchable god.

  • New Job

    So I got a new job at the local, small-scale hardware store.

    Roomie has been working there the past 6 months or so and has really enjoyed it. There were a couple other times when spots had opened up and he had urged me to apply, but each time I found a different excuse to not do it.

  • I miss you so much lain

  • A year of SpellBinding

    Happy Birthday SpellBinding! The first official game was logged on Nov. 25 2021.

    For the last few weeks SpellBinding has been running as an autonomous system, picking words all by itself, and logging solutions on its Wordlog and Antenna.

    I have the option to schedule manually-generated puzzles, but I’ve been letting it run free, and it hasn’t been too bad. There are a few bad words in the dictionary, and I keep my fingers crossed that they won’t be picked for the pangram, spoiling the game.

    [...]

    Every day a bunch of people play SpellBinding. It’s gotten me through some hard days, and I hope you spend a few minutes pushing your brain in a different direction.

  • Time flies, Time drags

    I’m really fascinated by alternative time formats. Last night I found out about Arvelie dates, and felt the need to adopt them for my own needs. The coolest thing about the Arvelie format, in my opinion, is that there isn’t a defined year zero. It was designed with the purpose of recording “daily activity logs starting at year 0 when the tracking started.” It’s always relative to something different, making it a little more personalized. It also does not obey the classic 12 month system. Instead, there are 26 months (corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet,) each with 2 weeks consisting of 7 days. This leaves the 365th day without a month, and is treated as a special day of new years. Date strings are formatted as YYMDD. The current date as I write this is 2022-11-28, but the Arvelie date (relative to the creation of my website in 2021) is 01X10. A very pleasant date.

    [...]

    I think I like these alternative time formats so much because I don’t have a very good sense of time. A single, standardized form doesn’t really mean much to me, so I prefer to play around with different ways to quantify the 4th dimension.

• Politics

  • Library updates

    Recently I set up a capsule that hosts content from The Anarchist Library

• Technical

  • Ideas will find their way

    These are my thoughts on a topic I have tried to argue for at work for quite some time, and I think I am getting some support for it, but a solution is a much tricker thing to arrive at.

    Imagine a business where the product is backed up by internal software to help with deliveries. Imagine this software having been built upon and added to for quite some time now. We are seeing some technical debt accumulating, and it can be hard to add new features as they will not easily fit with the existing codebase. This means developers will have to say no or give really long estimates when someone from operations or sales comes along and says that we could do this really good customer project if only we had some feature X or could do the slightly different Y version of existing feature Z. The thing that they ask for is actually a sensible thing to do, not just easily implemented in the current state of the internal company software, or simply there are a million other more prioritized things to do currently, from the point of a Roadmap or Strategy.

  • This update took a bit longer than I expected

    [You know these round tuits have been sitting on your desk for many years now, right? —Editor / I … um … erm … —Sean] [1]
    I once mentioned updating `mod_litbook` [2] to run under a later version of Apache [3]. I wanted to do that because I’ve been running two instances of Apache—a later version that reverse proxies back to Apache 1.3 which just runs `mod_litbook` and nothing else, just to save me the agony of porting the code at the time. It only took me twelve years to locate the round tuit on my desk, but hey, better late than never.

    I did do a `mod_lua` version of `mod_litbook [4]` first, based on the version running on my Gemini server [5]. With that (twelve years after I first played with `mod_lua` [6]) and two hours of time, I was able to match the output from the original version [7] (nice!). But it should be easy to update the actual `mod_litbook` source code to the latest version of Apache [8], right?

  • Science

    • The Nation ☛ Fortress of Logic

      Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build and detonate nuclear bombs. His invention of game theory furnished the conceptual tools with which superpowers today decide whether to wage war, economists model the behavior of markets, and biologists predict the evolution of viruses. The pioneering programmable computer that von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

  • Announcements

    • Cosmos Upgrades

      Cosmos has been running for about 10 months without major issues. However, I’ve been noticing some glitches here and there, so it was time to make a few upgrades.

  • Programming

    • Trying to Revive sml_tk

      After the previous post, I intermittently worked on sml_tk. In particular, as mentioned I wrote a usable .smackspec and .use files for package management and build system respectiely. Of interest is that I wrote the .use file to only expose core Tk functionality and not any of the test code or SML extensions.