GNU/Linux

• Server

  • Rakuten Symphony taking off Red Hat, putting on Rocky Linux

    Rakuten Mobile is in the process of removing Red Hat software from its network deployment in Japan, and working with Rocky Linux for processing software workloads in distributed units across its Open RAN network. Similarly, Rakuten Symphony, the company’s hardware, software and services arm, will use the real-time Rocky Linux operating system with future customers. In an interview with media and analysts at the Telecom Infra Project’s FYUZ event in Madrid, Rakuten Symphony CEO Tareq Amin candidly explained that Red Hat’s subscription-based model doesn’t fit with his business model.

  • PR Web ☛ CIQ Joins Oracle PartnerNetwork; Rocky Linux Now Available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ GNOME Hates Mailing Lists And Is Ending It!! – Invidious

    GNOME has been in the process of shutting down there mailing lists for about 2 years and they’re finally getting ready to make those last few steps and move everything over to their forums, matrix and gitlab

  • Video ☛ Gnome Tweaks | Customize Gnome in Ubuntu 22.04 – Invidious

    What’s up, Linux Community!!! In this video, we check out Gnome Tweak tools that can help you customize your Ubuntu 22.04 install. Please enjoy the video and if you have any questions, leave a comment below. My goal is to expand the Linux community.

  • Video ☛ How to install Zorin OS 16.2 Core – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show how to install Zorin OS 16.2 Core.

  • Video ☛ Sparky Linux – Me surpreendi com as ferramentinhas! – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.10: Improvements for IoT and Desktop – Invidious

    Today we look at the updates to the Ubuntu 22.10 point release. This update brings us new themeing options, GTK4, and IoT improvements.

  • Video ☛ Nitrux 2.4.1 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

    A Quick Overview of Nitrux 2.4.1

  • Video ☛ Bookmarking for Unix Chads (For Browsers, Terminals, IDEs and everything else) – Invidious

    This is how GNU/Unix chads do bookmarking.

• Kernel Space

  • Hackaday ☛ Bye Bye Linux On The 486. Will We Miss You? | Hackaday

    A footnote in the week’s technology news came from Linus Torvalds, as he floated the idea of abandoning support for the Intel 80486 architecture in a Linux kernel mailing list post. That an old and little-used architecture might be abandoned should come as no surprise, it’s a decade since the same fate was meted out to Linux’s first platform, the 80386. The 486 line may be long-dead on the desktop, but since they are not entirely gone from the embedded space and remain a favourite among the retrocomputer crowd it’s worth taking a minute to examine what consequences if any there might be from this move.

• Applications

  • Make Use Of ☛ The 3 Best Terminal-Based Web Browsers for Linux

    Terminal-based browsers are something of a niche interest—even among seasoned Linux users, and most mainstream distros will come with either Firefox or Falkon pre-installed. But there are good reasons why you might want to experience the internet via a browser in your terminal.

    Here are some of the best terminal-based web browsers out there.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ HPLIP 3.22.10 Released with Linux Mint 21, RHEL 9, Manjaro 21.3 Support | UbuntuHandbook

    HPLIP, the open-source HP printer and scanner driver for Linux, released version 3.22.10 today with new Linux distributions support.

    The installer script for the new release is now working on Manjaro 21.3, Suse 15.4, RHEL 9, Linux Mint 21.0, Mx Linux 21.2.

    The release does not include any new HP printer and scanner support. Meaning you can just skip this release if the last HPLIP 3.22.6 was installed on your system. And for Ubuntu 22.10, the 3.22.6 release is available to install in system repository.

• Instructionals/Technical

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nagios on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Nagios is an open-source monitoring solution designed to run on Linux. Nagios offers to monitor and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. It also provides a web interface for viewing current network status, log files, notifications, and much more.

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

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

    Administering a server can be a daunting task. The good news is, there are plenty of tools available to make the job easier. One of these tools is Webmin. This tutorial shows how to install Webmin on an Ubuntu Linux server.

  • Help Net Security ☛ cert-manager: Automatically provision and manage TLS certificates in Kubernetes – Help Net Security

    cert-manager adds certificates and certificate issuers as resource types in Kubernetes clusters and simplifies the process of obtaining, renewing, and using those certificates.

    It can issue certificates from a variety of supported sources, including Let’s Encrypt, HashiCorp Vault, and Venafi as well as private PKI, and it ensures certificates remain valid and up to date, attempting to renew certificates at an appropriate time before expiry.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Connect to Wi-Fi Through the Linux Terminal With nmcli

    Need to connect to the internet on your Linux device, but don’t have an Ethernet port or access to graphical networking software? In this article, we’ll learn how to connect to Wi-Fi in the Linux terminal using the nmcli command.

  • Kifarunix ☛ How to Integrate ELK Stack with TheHive – kifarunix.com

    In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to integrate ELK stack with TheHive. ELK Stack can be configured to sent event alerts to TheHive case management system. This enables security personnel to create, investigate and follow up on various incidents or cases.

  • It’s Ubuntu ☛ How To Install WhatsApp On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

    How To Install WhatsApp On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    In this tutorial post, we will show you a method to install WhatsApp on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. WhatsApp is a famous chat messaging app currently owned by Facebook (Meta). We will be installing a third-party “WhatsApp for Linux” app that you can use to access WhatsApp. WhatsApp for Linux is an unofficial WhatsApp desktop application.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-11-02 Edition – Boiling Steam

    Between 2022-10-26 and 2022-11-02 there were 37 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 246 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 15 % of total released titles.

  • Linux Links ☛ Saving Money with Linux: Gaming – LinuxLinks

    Gaming is often synonymous with guzzling electricity.

    That’s because modern graphics card can be extremely power hungry and can sometimes generate incredibly high frames per second (fps) that a monitor can’t display. For example, most gaming monitors offer refresh rates of at least 144 Hz. If your graphics card is producing 300 fps in a game you’ll literally be wasting electricity for no gaming benefit unless you’ve got a gaming monitor with a very high refresh rate of say 360Hz. If not, you graphics card will be functioning mostly as an (expensive) mini heater, and potentially unnecessarily reducing its lifespan.

    The top graphics cards have staggering power limits. For example, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 has a power limit of 450W. Even midrange graphics cards have bulging power limits. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has a power limit of 200W which can be increased to 216W.

  • Mozilla ☛ How to talk to kids about video games

    I spend a lot of time talking to parents about screens. Most of those conversations are about fear.

    “I’m so worried about my child withdrawing into screens,” they say. “Are they addicted? How can I get them to stop?”

    I understand where they are coming from. I’m a clinical psychologist with 16 years of experience working in the U.K. and France, including for the U.K. National Health Service and in private practice. I’m also the mother of an 11-year-old girl and a teenage boy.

    “Screen time” has become one of the bogeymen of our age. We blame screens for our children’s unhappiness, anger or lack of engagement. We worry about screen time incessantly, so much so that sometimes it seems that the benchmark of a good parent in 2022 is the strictness of your screen time limits.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20 Best KDE Plasma Themes for Your KDE Desktop

      Linux is an open source operating system with superior customization abilities. If you use KDE Desktop, you’ll have many Plasma themes to choose from. And if you can’t find something you like, developers create new ones daily.

      It can be tough to choose the best KDE Plasma Themes from the Hundreds of themes available in the KDE store. All of these themes are designed to improve the look of your KDE desktop, but it can be hard to decide which one is right for you.

      For those who want to give their Plasma Desktop a makeover, here is a list of the best KDE Plasma themes.

    • Linux Magazine ☛ Nitrux 2.5 Released with Kernel 6.0 and KDE Plasma 5.26 – Linux Magazine

      Nitrux 2.5 has been officially released and is the first systemd-free distribution to include both kernel 6.0 and KDE Plasma 5.26.

      Nitrux is a Linux distribution, based on Debian, that emphasizes the use of AppImages for end-user software. And, instead of employing systemd as its init system, Nitrux uses OpenRC.

      To make things even more interesting, Nitrux adds a suite of convergent applications – called Maui Apps – as well as a curated collection of free and open source software.

      More importantly, however, Nitrux 2.5 is now available and is the first non-systemd distribution to include both kernel 6.0 and KDE Plasma 5.26. To be specific, Nitrux uses the 6.0.6 XanMod kernel, KDE Plasma 5.26.2, KDE Frameworks 5.99.0, and KDE Gear 22.08.2.

      As well, the developers decided to change their policy about including the Nvidia proprietary driver with the default installation.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Robert McQueen: Many thanks & good luck to Neil McGovern [Ed: But what legacy has Neil McGovern left? A GNOME that attacks the "G" in its name, using a campaign of defamation that serves monopolies (also GNOME sponsors)?]

      As President of the GNOME Foundation, I wanted to post a quick note to pass on the thanks from the Board, the Foundation staff team and membership to our outgoing Executive Director, Neil McGovern. I had the pleasure of passing on GNOME’s thanks in person at the Casa Bariachi this summer at GUADEC in Guadelajara, at the most exellent mariachi celebration of GNOME’s 25th Anniversary.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The Register UK ☛ New version of Plan 9 fork 9front released • The Register

  9front is a fork and continuation of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which is what the minds behind UNIX and the C programming language went on to do next. It is also rather strange.

  The Golden Age of Ballooning is the rather inscrutable name of the latest release from the 9front project. 9front is one of several projects that continues work on the Plan 9 operating system, which was relicensed under the GPL in 2014. Plan 9, or more formally (and nowadays somewhat inaccurately, since it was spun off from Bell Labs last year) Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research operating system.

  There are a great many research OSes out there. What’s significant about Plan 9 is that it, and its special dialect of the C programming language, are the direct continuation of the original UNIX research project. Plan 9 was in some ways an effort to deliver some of the original promises of UNIX while also bringing it into the 1990s.

  9front is probably the most active fork of Plan 9, and improves on the OS in a number of small ways: more drivers, more hardware support, a native x86-64 version, and so on. There’s a reasonable potted summary of 9front here, and the project’s own FQA [sic] file explains what’s new in this release. You might well ask what an FQA is, and don’t they mean FAQ? Well, a list of questions isn’t much help, even if they are frequently asked; a list of frequent answers is much more use.

• New Releases

  • The Register UK ☛ Zorin OS 16.2 is here • The Register

    Zorin OS 16.2 is a friendlier and more feature-rich distro than its parent Ubuntu 20.04, with a lot of updates and bundled apps.

    The Reg looked at Zorin OS 16 when it came out in 2021. Like the 16.1 release in March, the new version is an update of that same version, so it’s still based on Ubuntu 20.04 – albeit with the newer kernel 5.15 installed. This is a little surprising seven months after the release of the subsequent Ubuntu LTS release, but then again, to quote Bert Lance: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

    There are six different editions of Zorin OS in this version and three product families: the paid Pro version, plus free Education and Core product lines. Each has a matching Lite variant, which replaces the GNOME desktop with Xfce.

• BSD

  • Linuxiac ☛ TrueNAS 13.0-U3 Released, Adding Significant New Components

    TrueNAS 13.0-U3 open storage is a major release bringing improved performance, scalability, and reliability in subsequent releases.

    TrueNAS CORE is a free and open-source FreeBSD-based operating system that provides free network-attached storage (NAS) services produced by iXsystems. In addition, TrueNAS is the best-known and most powerful free NAS software.

    It has some of the best features you can find in NAS software, such as data snapshots, a self-repair file system, encryption of data volumes, and so on.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Quobyte and SUSE Rancher – Persistent state for scaling organizations | SUSE Communities

    Many organizations run Kubernetes today, for Development and actually more and more production workloads. This results in tens to hundreds of Kubernetes clusters within one organization and managing these clusters is a critical task. This is where SUSE Rancher enters the stage: As many clusters as needed can be controlled using a single interface. These landscapes can represent all of your organizational needs: Clusters can run on premise, in the cloud or as a service provided by any leading Kubernetes provider. In simple words: One interface to rule them all.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Navigate the Linux terminal faster, test with LTP, and more tips for sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

    October 2022 was a record-breaking month for Enable Sysadmin. During the month, we published 22 new articles and received more than 938,000 reads from nearly 640,000 readers across the site.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Explore Red Hat OpenShift training tailored to your professional journey

    When determining the next steps of your professional development journey, you want to make sure you are on the right path to meet your goals. Red Hat Training and Certification offers guided learning pathways for individuals of all experience levels, covering topics such as deploying containers, developing containerized applications, managing container storage and using automated DevOps pipelines. With so many options available, Red Hat is committed to making the process easy to navigate so you can understand what courses are aligned with your professional journey.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ How to establish a DevOps culture: 7 tips

    DevOps is the leading software development methodology practiced worldwide, with a market share of 47 percent. By adopting DevOps, which emphasizes constant collaboration between development and operations teams, you can experience 63 percent improvement in software quality, 63 percent faster release, and 55 percent better collaboration among teams.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Using daysofrisk.pl with the Red Hat Security Data API

    A few months ago, I wrote my first blog for Red Hat: Getting a list of fixes for a Red Hat product between two dates is easy with daysofrisk.pl

    In that blog we explored the use of the daysofrisk.pl script provided on the Red Hat Security Data page and show you how you can use it to return a list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSAs) included in a particular Red Hat Product between two specified dates.

    Today I want to build on that post and show you ways to enhance the data with the Red Hat Security Data API.

  • AlmaLinux Official ☛ AlmaLinux 9.1 Beta – Now Available – AlmaLinux OS Blog

    Hello Community! AlmaLinux OS is happy to announce that AlmaLinux 9.1 Beta “Lime Lynx” is available for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x architectures.

    Grab installation ISOs from mirrors now.

    As usual, a simple reminder, this is a BETA release. It should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don’t mind if something breaks. Now if you wanna test this somehow, somewhere to see how things will work in 9.1 stable, you’re on the right track.

• Debian Family

  • Better living through software – Ben Hutchings’s diary of life and technology

    In October I was not assigned additional time by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative, but carried over 9 hours from September and worked all those hours.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux Mint Gains a Windows-Style ’Show Desktop’ Button – OMG! Ubuntu!

    If you’re a loyal Linux Mint user who’s often thought: “I wish it was easier to peek at my desktop while I work”, you’re in luck.

    The Linux Mint team has said it will replace the “show desktop” launcher item in the Cinnamon panel with a new “corner bar” item instead. It is similar to the “show desktop” button that debuted in Windows 7 (which I believe some third-party efforts brought to XP and Vista).

    Now, lest anyone get red in the face at my mentioning of Windows I will stress that Mint’s Corner Bar is not a 1:1 clone: it’s way more customisable.

    You get to choose what happens when you click on the button, or middle click on the button. And while you can quickly “peek at desktop” by hovering over the Corner Bar (just like in Windows) you are able to turn this behaviour or off per your mood.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • CNX Software ☛ DongshanPI-D1s – An Allwinner D1s RISC-V development board designed to teach programming – CNX Software

    The DongshanPI-D1s development board is comprised of a soldered-on Allwinner D1s RISC-V system-on-module board (SoM) and a carrier board with two 40-pin headers and a 2.0mm dedicated header. This development board is specifically designed to teach programming with a focus on the RISC-V architecture.

  • CNX Software ☛ Quadric Chimera GPNPU IP combines NPU, DSP, and real-time CPU into one single programmable core – CNX Software

    A typical chip for AI or ML inference would include an NPU, a DSP, a real-time CPU, plus some memory, an application processor, an ISP, and a few more IP blocks. Quadric Chimera GPNPU (general purpose neural processor unit) IP combines the NPU, DSP, and real-time CPU into one single programmable core.

  • Arduino ☛ Preventing excessive water consumption with tinyML | Arduino Blog

    As the frequency and intensity of droughts around the world continues to increase, being able to reduce our water usage is vital for maintaining already strained freshwater resources. And according to the EPA, leaving a faucet running, whether intentionally or by accident for just five minutes can consume over ten gallons of water. However, Naveen has leveraged the power of machine learning to build a device that can automatically detect running faucets and send alerts over a cellular network in response.

  • Arduino ☛ Grow a beautiful garden with home automation | Arduino Blog

    A beautiful, lush garden is a wonderful thing. Not only does it look good year-round and impress the neighbours, but it’s also a great place to spend time in the summer months and entertain guests.

    However, a good garden is not an easy thing to maintain. It takes many hours of hard work and toil to create a beautiful garden in the first place, and then many more hours to keep it that way. If you take a vacation or have a few busy weeks, things can start to go wrong fast.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SamMobile ☛ Galaxy A14 features a MediaTek SoC and Android 13, reveals benchmark – SamMobile

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung could soon release stable Android 13 update to Galaxy A52s 5G – SamMobile

  • 9to5Google ☛ Samsung Android 13 update: What devices will get the upgrade?

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Use YouTube Picture-in-Picture on Android

  • 9to5Google ☛ November Google Play System updates: Wallet tweaks, more

  • Gizmodo ☛ Google Launches New Beta to Play Android Games on PC

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung could soon release stable Android 13 update to Galaxy A52s 5G – SamMobile

  • Top 6 Ways to Fix OneNote App Not Working on Android – Guiding Tech

  • Android Police ☛ Best communication apps for Android in 2022

  • Android Authority ☛ Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2022-11-02 – Android Authority

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ Achieve smart home interoperability with open source technology | Opensource.com

  Advertisers sell the myth of the “Smart Home” as a magical world where you automate everything with ease to simplify your life and free your mind of trivial tasks. It looks great on paper and TV, but so far, it’s mainly been a battle of technologies and manufacturers.

  Suppose you want to add a presence sensor from manufacturer A to your existing hub from manufacturer B so you can switch ON your light from manufacturer B. Or perhaps you want to switch OFF your air conditioner when your door is open, but the door sensor is not from the air conditioning manufacturer. Will it work?

  There’s a significant chance that the devices you want to link to one another don’t talk the same “language.” You might research compatibility for weeks before deciding to take your chances. It may or may not work. There are so many technologies, protocols, APIs, and cloud connectors involved that you just can’t be sure until you spend a lot of money trying them. So far, the “Smart Home” has been an over-complex world in which every vendor tries to push its own technology, protocol, and stack at the cost of consumer freedom, time, effort, and expense.

• Medevel ☛ Hack.chat Is A Free Open-source Distraction-Free Chat App

  hack.chat is a minimal, distraction-free, accountless, logless, disappearing chat service which is easily deployable as your own service. The current client comes bundled with LaTeX rendering provided by KaTeX and code syntax highlighting provided by highlight.js.

  hack.chat offers simple user-interface and several commands and mod. If you are an old school internet user, you certainly will enjoy the app.

  [...]

  This project is licensed under the WTFPL (DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE) License.

• Events

  • FSF ☛ LibrePlanet 2023 will be held March 18-19, CFS extended to November 23

    The dates for LibrePlanet 2023 have been announced and the Call for Sessions has been extended.

    Have you submitted a talk for LibrePlanet 2023 yet? For those unsure if they can make it to the event, we have now set the dates: March 18 & 19, 2023! We have also extended the Call for Sessions (CfS) for another three weeks, until Wednesday, November 23, 2022, at 10:00 EST (15:00 UTC). This gives you the chance to make sure that you’re a part of LibrePlanet 2023: Charting the Course.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: Call for Papers – PGConf India, 2023

    India PostgreSQL User Group is pleased to announce that PGConf India 2023 will be held in Bengaluru, India between 22nd Feb to 24th Feb 2023.

    Call for papers is out now. Please submit your proposal by signing up on https://pgconf.in and following the instructions there. The last date for submission is November 20, 2022. We would encourage everyone to submit their proposals as early as possible without waiting till the last date.

    With growing popularity and adoption of PostgreSQL, PGConf India has become one of the largest events in this part of the world. We expect more than 400 delegates to attend this year’s event. So this gives you a great opportunity to present your work in front of a large audience. More details about the conference are available on the conference website https://pgconf.in

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Launches First-of-its-Kind Venture Fund to Fuel Responsible Tech Companies, Products [Ed: Mozilla could instead pay salaries to much-needed Firefox developers]

      Today, amid a sea of internet companies and products that routinely put profits ahead of people, Mozilla is unveiling an ambitious new venture capital fund to transform technology investment — and the internet more broadly.

    • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Ventures: Investing in Responsible Tech [Ed: Mozilla laid off many engineers to instead waste money on optics]

      My response: we won’t know unless we try, together.

      Personally, I think it is possible to build successful companies — and great internet products — that put people before profits. Mozilla proves this. But so do ProtonMail, Hugging Face, Kickstarter and a good number of others. All are creating products and technology that respect users — and that are making the internet a healthier place.

• Programming/Development

  • TechRepublic ☛ SourceHut to remove all cryptocurrency-related projects

    Open-source repository SourceHut is pulling the plug on software projects that tap into cryptocurrency and blockchain. In a post published on Monday, Oct. 31, SourceHut founder and creator Drew DeVault said he would ban projects associated with these technologies, citing their use in “get-rich-quick” schemes and other types of scams.

    DeVault explained his decision by asserting that domains used in these types of projects are associated with “fraudulent activities and high-risk investments” that take advantage of people during difficult economic times and an inequality in global wealth.

  • The Anarcat ☛ A typical yak shaving session – anarcat

    Someone recently asked what yak shaving means and, because I am a professional at this pastime, I figured I would share my most recent excursion in the field.

    As a reminder, “yak shaving” describes a (anti?) pattern by which you engage in more and more (possibly useless) tasks that lead you further and further away from your original objective.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Spoken like a 1980s chip | Saif [blogs.perl.org]

      As an old simpleton, however, I can not drag myself away from the genius of the guys who with such limited resources managed so much, into the modern world were memory and processor power limitations are of no real issue. The SP0256-AL2 is the centre of this remarkable primitive utility, and I took it myself to explore how this worked, to transform it into a simple module that can be imported into any Perl program, with no dependencies apart from a means to transfer data to a speaker. There indeed many attempts to emulate this little chip, though I have not come across any that specifically use Perl, I do find resources including this one from Greg Kennedy that allow translation to the allophones used here.

    • DEV Community ☛ Specifying a pattern – DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

      This blog post will discuss the types of patterns you can specify with rak.

  • Python

    • Phylum Discovers Dozens More PyPI Packages Attempting to Deliver W4SP Stealer in Ongoing Supply-Chain Attack

      Last week, our automated risk detection platform alerted us to suspicious activity in dozens of newly published PyPI packages. Here’s what we uncovered.

    • LWN ☛ A new crop of malicious modules found on PyPI [LWN.net]

      Phylum has posted an article with a detailed look at a set of malicious packages discovered by an automated system they have developed.

  • Go

    • Video ☛ How to install GoLand on Linux Mint 21 – Invidious

      In this video, we are looking at how to install GoLand on Linux Mint 21.

    • FOSSLife ☛ Free Ways to Start Learning Go

      Go, also known as Golang, is an open source programming language developed at Google. The language, which was written by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, is widely used for cloud native development and building cloud infrastructure.

      “Docker, a Linux container manager, and Kubernetes, a container deployment system, are core cloud technologies written in Go,” states this Communications of the ACM article. “Today, Go is the foundation for critical infrastructure at every major cloud provider and is the implementation language for most projects hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.”

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • The Next Platform ☛ Cutting To The Front Of The Server CPU Line

    In many ways, particularly when it comes to the overall profitability of a CPU line over time, it sucks to be a CPU maker. Everything is exactly backwards.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Tedium ☛ What Gives Prescription Drugs Their Unusual Names, Anyway?

    A while back, I caught something interesting on the blog of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Andrew Marshall, a writer for Reuters who serves as a correspondent in Southeast Asia, had a need for an anti-diarrheal medication while in Burma, a country that has put him in the crosshairs of food poisoning multiple times. (I’m okay with not learning the specifics of his medical ailment.) With that in mind, he had purchased a drug with an unusual name when he was in nearby Thailand—Tedium. Yes, Tedium. The drug, essentially a regional variant of Imodium A.D., is kind of hilariously suited for this particular drug. “It not only alleviates the condition but, in a single word, captures the experience,” Marshall wrote. And I guess I’ve sort of been wondering: How do drugs get named? And why do drug names carry a certain flow to them, despite seemingly sounding like gibberish words? That’s a question I needed to answer for myself—and for today’s Tedium (the newsletter, not the anti-diarrheal).

• Linux Foundation

  • ONE Summit Adds New Industry Luminaries to Keynote Line-up, New Mini-Summits & Global Virtual participation

    Taking place in Seattle, WA, November 15-16, ONE Summit is the one industry event that brings together decision-makers and implementers for two days of in-depth presentations and interactive conversations around 5G, Access, Edge, Telco, Cloud, Enterprise Networking, and more open source technology developments. The event enables attendees to engage directly with thought leaders across 5G, Cloud Native and Network Edge and expand knowledge of open source networking technology progression.

• Security

  • IT Wire ☛
    Top security researcher Vitali Kremez dies while scuba diving

    Well-known security researcher Vitali Kremez has died apparently after going scuba diving off the coast of Hollywood Beach in Florida. He was 36.

    The US Coast Guard said in a tweet that Kremez’ body had been recovered by local authorities on Wednesday.

    Local reports said Kremez had entered the water at about 9am local time on Sunday and was not seen thereafter.

    At the time of his death, Kremez was working as the chairman and chief executive of Advanced Intelligence, a company that specialises in threat intelligence.

  • Help Net Security ☛ High-severity OpenSSL vulnerabilities fixed (CVE-2022-3602, CVE-2022-3786) [Ed: Still no apologies for prior exaggeration]

    Version 3.0.7 of the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library is out, with fixes for CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786, two high-severity buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the punycode decoder that could lead to crashes (i.e., denial of service) or potentially remote code execution.

  • Hacker News ☛ Inside Raccoon Stealer V2 [Ed: Windows TCO]

    Raccoon Stealer is back on the news again. US officials arrested Mark Sokolovsky, one of the malware actors behind this program. In July 2022, after several months of the shutdown, a Raccoon Stealer V2 went viral. Last week, the Department of Justice’s press release stated that the malware collected 50 million credentials.

  • Hacker News ☛ These Android Apps with a Million Play Store Installations Redirect Users to Malicious Sites

    A set of four Android apps released by the same developer has been discovered directing victims to malicious websites as part of an adware and information-stealing campaign.

    The apps, published by a developer named Mobile apps Group and currently available on the Play Store, have been collectively downloaded over one million times.

    According to Malwarebytes, the websites are designed to generate revenues through pay-per-click ads, and worse, prompt users to install cleaner apps on their phones with the goal of deploying additional malware.

  • Malware on the Google Play store leads to harmful phishing sites

    A family of malicious apps from developer Mobile apps Group are listed on Google Play and infected with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds.BTGTHB. In total, four apps are listed, and together they have amassed at least one million downloads.

  • Hacker News ☛ Multiple Vulnerabilities Reported in Checkmk IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software

    Following responsible disclosure on August 22, 2022, the four vulnerabilities have been patched in Checkmk version 2.1.0p12 released on September 15, 2022.

  • Google ☛ Project Zero: Gregor Samsa: Exploiting Java’s XML Signature Verification

    Earlier this year, I discovered a surprising attack surface hidden deep inside Java’s standard library: A custom JIT compiler processing untrusted XSLT programs, exposed to remote attackers during XML signature verification. This post discusses CVE-2022-34169, an integer truncation bug in this JIT compiler resulting in arbitrary code execution in many Java-based web applications and identity providers that support the SAML single-sign-on standard.
    OpenJDK fixed the discussed issue in July 2022. The Apache BCEL project used by Xalan-J, the origin of the vulnerable code, released a patch in September 2022.

    While the vulnerability discussed in this post has been patched , vendors and users should expect further vulnerabilities in SAML.

    From a security researcher’s perspective, this vulnerability is an example of an integer truncation issue in a memory-safe language, with an exploit that feels very much like a memory corruption. While less common than the typical memory safety issues of C or C++ codebases, weird machines still exist in memory safe languages and will keep us busy even after we move into a bright memory safe future.

    Before diving into the vulnerability and its exploit, I’m going to give a quick overview of XML signatures and SAML. What makes XML signatures such an interesting target and why should we care about them?

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

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg and linux-5.10), Fedora (libksba, openssl, and php), Gentoo (openssl), Mageia (curl, gdk-pixbuf2.0, libksba, nbd, php, and virglrenderer), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libksba, and openssl), SUSE (gnome-desktop, hdf5, hsqldb, kernel, nodejs10, openssl-3, php7, podofo, python-Flask-Security, python-lxml, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (backport-iwlwifi-dkms, firefox, ntfs-3g, and openssl).

  • Beta News ☛ Dropbox confirms serious security breach in which hackers stole code from 130 GitHub repositories

    Dropbox has revealed details of a phishing attack to which it fell victim. In the attack, a threat actor was able to steal code from the company after gathering employee credentials to GitHub repositories.

    The security breach took place in the middle of last month, with GitHub notifying Dropbox of suspicious account activity on October 14. The cloud storage company says that the code that was accessed “contained some credentials — primarily, API keys — used by Dropbox developers” but insists that “no one’s content, passwords, or payment information was accessed”, and that its core apps and infrastructure were unaffected.

  • [Old] Should hackers destroy communication? | Stop at Zona-M

    Last week, the day after the russian invasion of Ukraine, Jaromil remembered that opposition from 1999, asking hackers to keep the networks of communication alive between Russia and the rest of the world.

    [...]

    No answer for this. Not now, at least. Just the sad awareness that it will become a crucial issue, the next time there will be such a crisis.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • AccessNow ☛ Musk’s Twitter takeover must not silence activists – Access Now

    Now that tech billionaire Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter, he must protect the voices of human rights defenders across the globe.

    While Musk stated that the company will not make major revisions to its content moderation policy until a council is established, there are already campaigns to flood the platform with hateful conduct and messaging.

    Twitter, in spite of its flaws, is an essential tool for activists, journalists, and human rights defenders to share information, campaign, and address threats around the world. Musk must make decisions in the near future to ensure the platform will protect the people who depend on it.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ Playing Indian: *Cummins’ Indian Congress at Coney Island* (1903) – The Public Domain Review

      This recording of Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’ Wild West Show held in Brooklyn’s Steeplechase Park is one grand audio sleight-of-hand. The orchestra at Columbia Records’ Manhattan studio created the sounds of whooping “Sioux warriors”, beating tom toms, and stampeding horses. Cummins’ “five hundred Indians representing forty-two tribes, living in teepees, wigwams, and adobe houses” were all out at Coney Island, under the watchful eye of showman Cummins and his Lakota wrangler Henry Standing Bear, a veteran of Carlisle Indian School. Vaudevillian Len Spencer supplies the carny barker introductions, and orchestra musicians round out each section with mock applause or war cries.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EULMOSF Wordo: KINKS

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Mayan and Gemini priests

      I ordinarily try to steer clear of posting about Gemini itself. I do tend to post a good bit about the pieces of software that I’ve authored around Gemini, but those posts aren’t really about Gemini itself but rather my hobby of writing software. But this idea that Gemini is an elite community of tech nerds that keeps people out by having a high barrier to entry bothers me, big time. In fact, just the word “gatekeeping” is a trigger word for me these days, much in the same way as the term “woke” is when it comes to social issues. Both terms are thrown around as a pejorative and source of ridicule. Both terms also are applied far too broadly. Of course, I’d rather that they weren’t used as a pejorative to begin with, but the actual level of human decency or, correspondingly, technical awareness in the context of gatekeepking that can trigger their use is ridiculously low.

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 37: Spice of Linux – Linux Out Loud – TuxDigital

    This week, Linux Out Loud chats about how variety is the spice of Linux.

    Welcome to episode 37 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.

  • mintCast Podcast ☛ 399 – Lunar Eclipse? No, Lunar Lobster – mintCast

    News 1:29
    Security and Privacy 18:35
    Biweekly Wanderings 20:8
    Linux Innards 47:40
    Vibrations By The Ether 1hr 25m
    Housekeeping and Announcements 1h 32m

    First up in the news: The Kudu is out, with a Lobster on its tail, Fedora 37 is dragging, the next Kernel takes less power from the people, Steam Snap switches stacks, Flatpak gets Meson, and Linus wants to forget about 486;

    In security and privacy: we get the first security update for the Kudu;

    Then in our Wanderings: Joe goes to Micro Center, Moss is having a ball, and Bill is clouding around

    In our Innards section, we continue our historical journey through Linux distros;

  • Tux Digital ☛ Ubuntu Flavours 22.10, Flatpak, KDE Neon, Steam Deck Dock, Tuxedo OS, and more Linux news! – Podcasts – TuxDigital

    On this episode of This Week in Linux: we check out the 22.10 release of the Ubuntu Flavours, the latest release of Flatpaks format, a new distro from Tuxedo Computers, plus some interesting news from the GNOME project and the Linux kernel itself, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Applications

  • TecMint ☛ How to Monitor Linux System Performance with Nmon Tool

    If you are looking for a very easy-to-use performance monitoring tool for Linux, I highly recommend installing and using the Nmon command-line utility.

    Nmon short for (Ngel’s Monitor), is a fully interactive Linux system performance monitoring command-line utility that was originally developed by IBM for the AIX systems and later ported to the Linux platform.

    The important benefit of the nmon tool is that it allows you to monitor the performance of your Linux system aspects such as CPU utilization, memory usage, disk space, network utilization, top processes, virtual machine stats, file systems, resources, power micro-partition and more, in a single, concise view.

    In addition to monitoring your Linux system interactively, nmon can also be used in batch mode to gather and save performance data for later analysis.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Horde vs Roundcube vs Squirrelmail – Which Works Best

    Webmail is a great way to access your emails from different devices and when you are away from your home. Now, most web hosting companies include email with their server plans. And all of them offer the same three, webmail clients as well: RoundCube, Horde, and SquirrelMail. They are part of the cPanel – the most popular hosting control panel.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install Neovim on Ubuntu and Its Plugins

    Neovim is an easy-to-use fork of the well-known text editor VIM. You can also use a GUI, IDEs, web browser to embed Neovim as an editor. It provides asynchronous job control with better functionality and reusability. Neovim is an open-source tool that is available for all major operating systems, and it supports XDG-based directories.

    In this tutorial, we will learn how to install the Neovim text editor on Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu supports multiple methods to install Neovim on Ubuntu. Here, we will list some of the most used methods for installing Neovim.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ [Solution] Cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later – Useradd Error

    Sometimes in Linux when adding a user using the useradd command it throws the error ‘Cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later’ as shown below…

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Sed command in Linux – Options + Examples

    Text Manipulation in Linux – you should immediately know grep, awk, sort, sed, and cut. The sed command manipulates text files directly from the Linux command line without even opening the file. The most commonly used command for substitution.

    In this tutorial, we learn about sed command in Linux with its usage examples.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install Systemd on CentOS Stream

    Modern Linux Distributions already adopted systemd as their service manager. This includes Ubuntu, RHEL, and Fedora. To have new features immediately you can manually install systemd by compiling from the source.

    In this tutorial, we learn how to install systemd on the CentOS Stream 9 system…

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Remove Tomcat from Linux | Uninstall Tomcat Ubuntu

    Apache Tomcat or simply Tomcat (formerly it was also known as Jakarta Tomcat) is an open-source web server and servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat can be installed on CentOS Stream /Redhat machine either using yum or from the source file. However, in this tutorial, we will see, how we can uninstall/remove tomcat from the Linux machine.

    In order to remove tomcat from your machine, the first thing you need to check is how this package got installed on your server.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Dmidecode in Linux

    The dmidecode in Linux stands for Desktop Management Interface, abbreviated as DMI. The dmidecode is a Linux command that comes in handy in retrieving all details of your system’s hardware components, and it displays the output in a human-readable format. You can utilize the DMI on various Linux systems, including Debian, CentOS/RHEL, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Arch Linux.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Delete Lines in Vim or Vi

    UNIX-based operating systems offer various text editors. Working with text files on the command line is challenging for most beginners. Luckily, you don’t have to hassle any longer, especially when you must delete multiple or specific lines in a text file.

    With a text editor like vim or vi, you can utilize its normal mode or command mode to edit a file quickly, including deleting lines. Besides, there are plenty of options that you can use, provided you know how.

    This guide covers all details on how to delete lines in vi or vim editor.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to add new disk to existing Linux system

    When you are adding a new disk to an existing Linux system, you will need to format and partition it, add a file system to it, and then mount the disk to some path where you plan to access it from. This might sound complex or like a lot of steps, but it really only takes a few minutes. The following tutorial will make it very easy.

    In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to add a new hard drive or solid state drive to an existing Linux system. We will show the steps for both command line and GUI methods, so you can follow along with set of instructions you are most comfortable with. Let’s get started.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to clone a Linux system

    Making a clone of your Linux system is a great way to make a complete backup. This type of backup would preserve all your system and personal files, as well as any customizations and settings that you have applied to your operating system over time (assuming everything is on one hard drive). Cloning and restoring a Linux system is relatively easy, since Linux will not encounter errors if you clone it onto different hardware – at worst, you may have a few hiccups, such as the need to uninstall and install necessary drivers.

    You can even make a clone of your Linux system as its running. There are a few applications built especially for this type of function, like Partimage and Clonezilla, but we can also use a simple, default command line tool such as dd. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to make a clone of a running Linux system. You will learn three different methods below and can choose the one that you think fits your situation best.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Curl command not found

    If you encounter the curl command not found on a Linux system, it means that the tool has not yet been installed. The curl Linux command can use various network protocols to download and upload data on Linux. In this tutorial, you will see how to install the curl command on all major Linux distributions.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Store and analyze your test-suite logs with this open source tool | Enable Sysadmin

    Bunsen is a Python-based toolkit that keeps test-suite logs in Git and lets you analyze and report the results using an SQLite database.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Enable EPEL Repository on RHEL, Rocky – Alma Linux

    In this article, you will learn how to install and enable the EPEL repository on RHEL-based Linux distributions to install additional standard open-source software packages by using YUM and DNF package manager.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Linux Mint’s Update Manager Now Supports Flatpak

    Linux Mint’s Update Manager is an essential part of the distro that makes the experience easier for new users.

    A recent update has pushed many improvements to Linux Mint 21, including Flatpak support with the update manager.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Non-formal learning activities: What do we know and how do we apply it to computing?

    At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we engage young people in learning about computing and creating with digital technologies. We do this not only by developing curricula for formal education and introducing tens of thousands of children around the world to coding at home, but also through supporting non-formal learning activities such as Code Club and CoderDojo.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Many Ways You Can Easily Ruin Your PCB Antenna Design

    We have all seen Printed Circuit Board (PCB) antennas: those squiggly bits of traces on PCBs connected often to a Bluetooth, WiFi or other wireless communication chip. On modules like for the ESP8266 and ESP32 platforms the PCB antennas are often integrated onto the module’s PCB, yet even with such a ready-made module it’s possible to completely destroy the effectiveness of this antenna. These and other design issues are discussed in this article by [MisterHW].

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • CNX Software ☛ SiFive P670 and P470 RISC-V processors feature RISC-V Vector Extensions – CNX Software

  • Lifewire ☛ How to Stop Blocked Numbers Leaving Voicemail on Android

  • Computer World ☛ How to unlock Google Assistant’s most advanced Android shortcuts | Computerworld

  • Digital Trends ☛ 7 Android TV tips and tricks to maximize your TV time | Digital Trends

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ Best Android TV Boxes to Buy Right Now – Make Tech Easier

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android Auto forcing updates that cut off older phones

  • Business Standard ☛ Google announces plans to discontinue Street View app on Android next year | Business Standard News

  • Android Headlines ☛ Top ranked game categories for Android show a shift in gamer profiles

  • New Android Games: Best New Android Games This Week

  • Nokia 5.3 receiving official Android 12 update now – Nokiapoweruser

  • Express ☛ New Android warning: Check your phone now to avoid vicious new threat | Express.co.uk

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ 5 Best Calligraphy Apps for Android to Learn the Aesthetic Art Form

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • The Register UK ☛ Firefox patches Windows 11 Ctrl+C hang, introduces new bug

      Windows 11 and Firefox users who have experienced months of browser freezes when copying text, rejoice: there’s finally a patch that eliminates the problem, which has been persistent since May.

      Mozilla’s patch notes for Firefox version 106.0.3, released yesterday, only includes a couple of items, among them a fix for “an incompatibility” with a Windows 11 22H2 feature called “Suggested Actions” that pop a window up whenever anything is copied to the clipboard.

Leftovers

• The Nation ☛ First Foray Into Apophatic Theology

  If God transcends all, then God transcends language. If God transcends language, we cannot deploy language to particularize God. If we cannot articulate what God is, we can only announce what God is not. This is how I approach the divine; I study the corona that circles the eclipse, which I’ve been told not to look at, still there’s some elegance in the bright

• Telex (Hungary) ☛ Once imitating tennis players as a child, Dóra Kiss now appears in the world’s number-one horror film

• Techdirt ☛ Ninth Circuit Bucks Extremely Recent Trend, Says Chalking Tires Not A Fourth Amendment Violation

  I have to admit I’m amused by recent court activity dealing with chalking tires. Something that has been done for years with zero protest — marking tires with chalk to determine how long a vehicle has been parked — is now fodder for federal appellate decisions.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | A Pre-Dead Obituary of… Us

  Oddly enough, I’ve read obituaries with fascination from the time I was quite young. And yet, in all these years, I’ve never really reflected on that fact. I don’t know whether it was out of some indirect fascination with death and the end of it all or curiosity about the wholeness (or half-ness or brokenness) of an individual life in full. But here’s the odd thing: in all that time — put it down to the charm of youth or, later, perhaps a lingering sense of youthfulness or, at least, agelessness — I never really thought about my own obituary. Like so many of us when younger, I simply couldn’t imagine my own death. Against all reason, it seemed strangely inconceivable.

• Hackaday ☛ [Dana Sibera] Creates Devices That Don’t Exist

  [Dana Sibera], known as [@NanoRaptor] on Twitter, makes us wonder about devices that could have been, and wince about devices that must never see the light of day – summoned into existence by her respectable photo editing and 3D modeling skills. Ever wanted to see a Model M with a small green-tinted CRT built into its side? Now you have. Perhaps, a “self-tapping” DE-9 plug with wood screws for pins? Tough luck, here it is anyway, but you can have a palate cleanser if it was too much to bear. Having started over a year ago with the classic “spicy pillows, but actually pillows” design, she keeps gracing us with portrayals of tech and tech-adjacent objects straight from the depths of her imagination.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Plywood Lamp Has Customizable Light Output

    There’s something about light fixtures that attracts makers like moths to a flame. [danthemakerman] wanted something with a more configurable light output and built this Sculptural and Customizable Plywood Lamp.

  • Hackaday ☛ Reproducing Vinyl Records In Resin

    While most are just plain, vinyl records can be found in a variety of colors, shapes, and some even glow in the dark. [Evan and Katelyn] decided to spruce up a plain old record by replicating it in bright, glow-in-the-dark resin.

  • Hackaday ☛ Exploring Piston Engine Design With LEGO

    When learning about the design of a machine or mechanism, reading and watching videos is certainly effective, but it’s hard to beat hands-on experimentation. In the video after the break, [Brick Technology] uses LEGO to gain some practical insight into the world of piston engine design, from single-cylinder all the way up to radial twelve-cylinder engines.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Techdirt ☛ Someone Decides To Say Something Less Stupid About Rainbow Fentanyl… And It’s A Cop

    There’s a drug panic underway and the DEA is to blame. Ever since the appearance of multi-colored fentanyl pills on the scene, the DEA has somehow managed to surpass its normal ridiculous hyperbole in public statements, making all sorts of absurd claims about this new threat to the youth of America. Couple this hysteria with the normal, incredibly stupid claims miscreants will hand out (expensive) drugs for free to trick-or-treating kids and you’ve got a perfect storm of insane and inane “reporting” that just regurgitates whatever idiocy has fallen out of law enforcement officials’ mouths.

• Proprietary

  • Hacker News ☛ Dropbox Breach: Hackers Unauthorizedly Accessed 130 GitHub Source Code Repositories

    File hosting service Dropbox on Tuesday disclosed that it was the victim of a phishing campaign that allowed unidentified threat actors to gain unauthorized access to 130 of its source code repositories on GitHub.

    “These repositories included our own copies of third-party libraries slightly modified for use by Dropbox, internal prototypes, and some tools and configuration files used by the security team,” the company revealed in an advisory.

    The breach resulted in the access of some API keys used by Dropbox developers as well as “a few thousand names and email addresses belonging to Dropbox employees, current and past customers, sales leads, and vendors.”

• Security

  • IT Wire ☛ Australia to host international ransomware gabfest early next year

    Australia will host a virtual meeting of an international counter-ransomware task force early next year, a statement says.

    Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the meeting was a follow-up to the initial gathering in Washington earlier this week.

    “The cyber incident involving Medibank Private is a blunt reminder that we need a globally focused capability to combat cyber threats, including ransomware,” she said.

    “I want Australia to be a global leader in cyber security, and the Australian Government will continue to join with international partners, industry and the community to develop effective responses to the complex issue of cyber crime.”

  • Hacker News ☛ Experts Warn of SandStrike Android Spyware Infecting Devices via Malicious VPN App [Ed: "Experts" say don't install malicious software or it might do... gasp... malicious things!]

    Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky is tracking the campaign under the moniker SandStrike.

  • IT Jungle ☛ OpenSSL Flaw No ‘Heartbleed,’ But Other New Vulns Detected

    The cybersecurity world has been sitting on pins and needles for the past 48 hours, ever since news of a potentially devastating new flaw in OpenSSL started to leak out early Monday morning. That flaw turned out to be not as bad as initially feared, but that shouldn’t stop IBM i shops from patching other recent flaws, including some pretty serious ones in WebSphere Liberty, Java, the CCA, and Zlib.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TruthOut ☛ Murdered Civil Rights Activist Captured on NYPD Surveillance Footage

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ ‘We have no effective defense against ballistic missiles.’ Ukraine decries Iranian missile shipment to Russia. — Meduza

    The Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yury Ignat thinks that Russia is getting ready to deploy Iranian-made ballistic missiles near Ukraine’s northern border.

  • Counter Punch ☛ More Than 90 Organizations Reject Calls for Military Intervention in Haiti

  • Common Dreams ☛ 90+ Groups Tell Biden to ‘Listen to Haitian Civil Society,’ Reject Military Intervention

    The Caribbean nation has been in a state of crisis since the July 2021 presidential assassination that was followed by a devastating earthquake and hurricane. Last month, acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry called for a foreign military intervention, provoking protests.

  • Counter Punch ☛ No U.S. intervention in Haiti!

    Henry has called for U.S. intervention to defend such policies and repress popular resistance and gangs that have emerged out of the crisis within Haitian society. Already, Washington and its so-called Core Group, comprised of the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States, has secured the passage of one UN resolution, which imposes sanctions on one purported gang leader and former police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, paving the way for another resolution that would authorize the deployment of non-UN military forces to Haiti.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Dissolve the Pentagon for Its Nuclear Antics

    My hunch is that most of these radiated Americans would say to themselves, “No, in retrospect I don’t think it was worth it. Yes, we have wiped out the Pentagon’s mortal enemy Russia but just look at what has been done to our nation. A nuclear desert with pockets of life, all under strict military control for the rest of our short lives. I now realize that those libertarians were right in opposing the Pentagon’s extreme anti-Russia, interventionist antics. I wish I had listened.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ New US Sanctions are Designed to Hit Nicaragua’s Poorest Citizens

    Was it a coincidence that the sanctions were announced on the same day that the Sandinista government presented its annual budget for 2023? The budget is 14% higher than this year’s with more than half of the expenditures devoted to social investment. Included in this are the construction of no fewer than nine new public hospitals, adding 4,300 homes to the stock of social housing, bringing electricity to an extra 35,000 households and massive improvements in water and sanitary services. Much of the new investment is directed towards the country’s under-resourced Caribbean regions, now properly connected to the main population centers on the Pacific coast by recently completed highways and the huge new River Wawa bridge. These regions are a priority – in part – because they were heavily damaged by recent hurricanes. The government’s careful plans to protect people and rebuild affected settlements helped secure the highest levels of support for Daniel Ortega in any region during last year’s elections. Is it another coincidence that these are the areas where gold mining is a major source of employment, now to be the specific target of US sanctions?

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Post-Nazi Antisemitic Killing That (Un-)Shaped Germany

    Just a few weeks earlier – on August 22 – a terrorist group led by the neo-Nazi Manfred Roeder threw an incendiary bomb into a refugee shelter in Hamburg’s Halskestraße. Two Vietnamese – Nguyên Ngoc Châu and Dô Anh Lân – died. On  December 24, 1980, the known West German neo-Nazi Frank Schubert shot two Swiss border guards – and himself – while trying to smuggle weapons from Switzerland into Germany.

  • The Nation ☛ Kyrie Irving and the Fraught History of Our Collective Liberation

    Thanks to Jeff Bezos, Kyrie Irving is using his giant NBA platform to promote a movie available on Amazon that luxuriates in the heat of anti-Semitism like Steve Bannon at a cross burning. The film, Hebrews to Negroes, promotes the idea that the Holocaust—which affected my family intimately—was a lie. It promotes the idea of a link between us modern Jews and Satan worship. It includes quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler about how fraudulent modern Jews are—we aren’t “real Jews.” We are apparently instead focused on world domination. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never understood why, if Jews are set on world domination, I’ve never been invited to any of the meetings.)

  • Counter Punch ☛ Political Violence is the Currency of Fascism

    During the coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, mobs broke into the Capitol and proceeded down hallways calling out her name. Some of them erected makeshift gallows in front of the building. And since this incident there have been political ads depicting violence against the Speaker and other politicians in the Democratic Party.

  • Site36 ☛ Ukraine war: Iran now becomes a single-use drone power

    Russia’s war in Ukraine is increasingly being fought with unmanned systems. Both sides are using so-called „loitering munitions“ originating from the US or Iran. A new Iranian drone clone could also soon be flying attacks.

  • Pro Publica ☛ New Uvalde 911 Calls Highlight Botched Police Response

    A man had crashed his truck into a ditch by Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and he was rushing toward the school with a gun.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft

    Studying employment databases, MintPress has ascertained that hundreds of agents from Israeli military intelligence and spying organization Unit 8200 are now employed in influential roles in many of the world’s largest tech and communications companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

  • Meduza ☛ Military enlistment offices will tap data from Russian state registries, Pension Fund, Tax Service, and e-voting — Meduza

    The Russian government has approved a pilot project for connecting military enlistment offices to state-run databases. The RBC reported this, citing the Moscow region’s Military Commissar Alexey Astakhov.

• Environment

  • Energy

    • Counter Punch ☛ World Nuclear Industry Status Report Delivers All the Empirical Data We Need to Know About Nuclear Power’s Decline

      As its principal author, Mycle Schneider, pointed out during the rollout, the report’s authors are big fans of empirical data. Indeed, many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favor the industry very well.  No amount of nuclear industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Without Providing Any, Kremlin Claims It Has Evidence UK Was Behind Nord Stream Sabotage

      “Our intelligence services have data indicating that British military specialists were directing and coordinating the attack,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

    • Common Dreams ☛ G20 Nations, Banks Spent Nearly Twice as Much Financing Fossil Fuels as Renewables

      “Right now, G20 countries and MDBs are overwhelmingly using their international public finance to prop up fossil fuel companies and prolong the fossil fuel era.”

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Powerful Victory’ as Judge Dismisses Charges Against Line 3 Water Protectors

      “Why are U.S. citizens who are trying to protect themselves from a foreign fossil fuel corporation facing arrest, when no one at Enbridge will ever be held accountable for their crimes?”

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘They’re Ripping Us Off’: BP Profits Could Pay Energy Bills of 9.4 Million UK Households

      The company announced it will be using its banner profits to buy back $2.5 billion worth of its own stock, rewarding shareholders as millions of people across the United Kingdom are having trouble heating their homes ahead of the winter season. According to the Financial Times, BP has repurchased more than $10 billion of its shares this year.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ Yosemite and Logging in the Park

      The National Park Service (NPS) also says they are “restoring a historical view” as if the fact that trees have grown up obscuring the vista is somehow part of the NPS mandate. (Maybe we should restore the “historic” view of grizzly bears feeding at the dumps in Yellowstone too.)

• Finance

  • The Nation ☛ Supply-Side Economics Strikes Again

    We bid farewell to poor Liz Truss. Her economics caused a fuss. Supply-side loyalty prevails. Despite the fact it always fails. Liz thought that wealth would downward trickle. That quickly put her in a pickle.

  • TruthOut ☛ Warren, Sanders Slam Federal Reserve’s “Disregard” for Working Families

  • Common Dreams ☛ Lawmakers to Powell: ‘How Many Millions Will Be Thrown Out of Their Jobs’ Due to Fed Policy?

    In a letter led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), the lawmakers point specifically to Powell’s “disturbing warning to American families” in August that “they should expect ‘pain’ over the coming months as the Fed takes ‘forceful and rapid steps’ to ‘get supply and demand back into alignment… by slowing the economy.’”

  • TruthOut ☛ Labor Board Says Starbucks CEO Schultz’s Comment to Pro-Union Worker Was Illegal

  • Common Dreams ☛ US Unemployment System ‘Wholly Unprepared’ as Fed Risks Throwing Millions Out of Work

    Authored by Andrew Stettner and Laura Valle Gutierrez of The Century Foundation (TCF), the new analysis notes that “the share of jobless workers actually receiving UI benefits has shrunk dramatically” since federal benefit increases expired last year. According to TCF, just 26.8% of jobless workers were receiving state unemployment benefits in the 12 months that ended in August 2022, a sharp decline from the 76% rate through early 2021.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Rightwing Dark Money Bomb Coming for State Courts

    State supreme courts can be vital to protecting Americans’ freedoms, though the U.S. Supreme Court gets most of the attention, especially lately with its rulings limiting federal protection for reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety, and our environment. State courts are where the vast majority–90%–of civil and criminal cases of the country are decided.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Release of Trump Tax Records to Congress

    Chief Justice John Roberts issued an interim stay of a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit following an emergency request filed by the former president on Monday. Roberts ordered the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which is set to receive six years of tax returns for Trump and his companies, to respond to the former president’s emergency request by November 10.

  • Craig Murray ☛ A Response to James Kelly

    The ever excellent Scot Goes Pop blog of James Kelly has posted an article disagreeing strongly with my contention that the Alba party should fight the SNP at the next Westminster election, should the SNP renege on its commitment to a “Plebiscite election” that determines Independence.

  • The Nation ☛ Biden’s Recognition of Lula’s Win Is a Rebuke to Trumpism

    Trumpism is a domestic phenomenon. But it is aligned with a global movement. The cult of personality that has developed around Donald Trump and transformed the Republican Party into an antidemocratic cabal that rejects election results and embraces conspiracy theories is closely linked with neofascist, nationalist, and extreme right-wing movements in Europe and Latin America. And nowhere has that linkage been more pronounced than in Republican enthusiasm for the authoritarian strongman Jair Messias Bolsonaro, whose viciously bigoted, conspiratorial, and destructive tenure as president of Brazil has echoed the worst of Trump’s tenure as president of the United States.

  • Common Dreams ☛ No Concession From Brazil’s Bolsonaro—But Staff Say Transition to Proceed

    “Brazil’s democracy appears to be working.”

  • The Nation ☛ Lula Is President! Democracy—and the Planet—Has Won!

    São Paulo—In what might just be the greatest political comeback since Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, Lula da Silva has won the Brazilian election. Unless there is increasingly unlikely coup, he will be the president of Brazil for the third time just two years after languishing in a prison cell on since-overturned corruption charges.

  • TruthOut ☛ Bolsonaro Expected to Accept Defeat as Some Supporters Demand Military Coup

  • Common Dreams ☛ Bolsonaro Expected to Accept Defeat as His Supporters Block Roads, Demand Military Coup

    By Monday night, pro-Bolsonaro truck drivers and other motorists had set up 342 roadblocks, BBC News reported, citing federal police data. According to the news outlet, “Blockages were reported in all but two states, causing considerable disruption and affecting food supply chains.” Some flights were canceled after access to São Paulo international airport was restricted.

  • Look Up Which Fortune 500 Companies Fund Election Deniers

    Corporate America pledged to quit supporting lawmakers who challenged the 2020 election results. Two years later, the companies’ wallets are back open.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Companies That Fund Election Deniers

    It is not clear exactly what form such punishment would take. But there’s another complicating factor in this revenge scenario: Many of the corporations that announced with great fanfare their cutoff in contributions after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have since resumed giving to some of those 147 Republicans. In other words, if Greene leads a quest for revenge on those companies, she’ll be taking aim at the very corporations that have funded many of her allies.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How to Understand Political Contributions & Campaign Finance

    For journalists, that often means looking at how political campaigns are funded and who’s paying for lobbyists. Today we’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to dig into those subjects.

  • The Nation ☛ Vote for Your Future!

  • Scheerpost ☛ The West Must Stop Blocking Negotiations Between Ukraine and Russia

    Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations from 2014 to February 2022 – which could have prevented the invasion by Russia in the first place, and once the war started, could have led to the end of this war.

  • TruthOut ☛ Judge Tells Trump Org Lawyers to Stop Using “Confusing” Arguments in Trial

  • Techdirt ☛ Section 230 Immunizes TikTok Against Suit Brought By Parent Whose Child Died Participating In A ‘Blackout Challenge’

    Earlier this year, the mother of child who died of asphyxiation while participating in the so-called “Blackout Challenge” sued TikTok, alleging the company was directly responsible for her 10-year-old daughter’s death. The lawsuit claimed this wasn’t about third-party content, even though the content that the child allegedly emulated was posted on TikTok. Instead, the lawsuit tried to avoid the obvious Section 230 implications by framing its allegations as intentionally flawed product design.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Ralph Nader’s Urgent Appeal: Vote for Democrats

    When Ralph Nader appeared on “Democracy Now!” last week, a key moment came as he responded to the final question from host Amy Goodman: “You have campaigned as an independent and a Green throughout your political life. You ran for president four times. Why now throw in your lot with the Democrats?”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Trump’s Violent ‘Big Lie’ Politics Has Aimed Harpoon at the Heart of US Democracy

    Will we be governed by representatives we elect, or people put in office by angry mobs storming capitols?

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Wanted for Attempted Murder: Donald Trump

    Donald Trump did not personally break into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home at 2:30 am on Friday, but you might say he was there in spirit. He certainly is complicit in the attempted murder, just as he bears primary responsibility for the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol building and the deaths and serious injuries of several law enforcement officers trying to protect the Capitol from the right-wing mob he inspired and cheered on.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Hottest US Senate Races on a Very Hot Planet

    Vote Climate U.S. PAC’s priority U.S. Senate races are all very close and could go either way on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th. They are all critical for climate-action, reproductive choice and American democracy itself. According to Cook Political Report, all of our priority candidates including: John Fetterman (D), Pennsylvania; U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D), Nevada; U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D), Georgia; U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D), Arizona and Mandela Barnes (D), Wisconsin, are in toss-up races.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Even ABC’s own Wil Anderson says broadcaster is shutting out youth

    Well-known ABC personality Wil Anderson has bought into the claim that the broadcaster lacks young presenters by suggesting that he could act as some kind of overseer for late-night programs presented by young comedians.

    The Age quoted Anderson as saying: “Let’s make something. Let’s get all these young people and give them more shows and do something in a slot – I don’t care where it is, it could be 10.30 on a Friday night, or we find a channel and we do it every night – let’s just invest in people.”

    The debate over a lack of youth presenting on the ABC arose after the 8.30pm slot on Friday night was given to Fran Kelly, the former host of the news show, RN Breakfast. Kelly stopped hosting the show recently and it has been taken over by Patricia Karvelas.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: Disinformation, Absolutely

      By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost 1. Everything you will read in this commentary is disinformation. 2. To say that this commentary contains disinformation is disinformation. 3. To say statements calling this commentary disinformation are disinformation is disinformation. Th­is is what our public discourse has come to. This is what we have done to […]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Are Exaggerations About Cancel Culture Actually Leading To The ‘Self-Censorship’ People Screaming About Cancel Culture Are Worried About?

    I think, by this point, I’ve made my overall views on the hype around “cancel culture” pretty clear. To me it seems to be just as much of a moral panic about free speech as most other moral panics, though couched in language that pretends it’s about supporting free speech. As with most moral panics, that’s not to say there aren’t some legitimate concerns about whatever is at the heart of the panic, but the actual concerning bits are rare and quite limited, whereas the panic assumes that it’s widespread and pervasive.

  • New Rules For Social Media Intermediaries Vague, Will Result In Over-Censorship, Experts Say
    

    The new rules require intermediaries to “respect” Constitutional rights which are traditionally enforceable only against the State

    [...]

    Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are facing fresh requirements under India’s less than two-year-old rules for intermediaries.
    Grievance appellate committees, reduced timelines for vetting content, and communicating privacy policy, user agreement to consumers in Indian local languages are among the key changes made to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Counter Punch ☛ Washington as Mephistopheles, Iranian Opposition Edition

    Anyhow, back to the aforementioned charges against the Iranian journalists. I have learned not to take criminal charges that are informed by a government’s politics literally. In other words, I question whether the two journalists charged are in the employ of the CIA or any other foreign agencies. However, whether they are or not, their journalism is being manipulated to serve those agencies and their agendas. One such example can be found in the early dissemination of the original report of Mahsa Amino’s arrest which appeared on the Twitter feed of Voice of America reporter Masih Alinejad. Alinejad works for the US propaganda agency US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). This taxpayer-funded agency was preceded by the United States Information Agency (USIA), an agency whose partial mission was “to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest….” (USIA: an overview”. USIA. August 1998). USAGM is the institution behind numerous media efforts like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Network. All of USAGM’s endeavors are aimed at spreading the “good news” of US capitalism and militarism.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Nation ☛ We’ve Lost the Ability to Judge Behavior According to Its Context

    It has become increasingly common to read about people getting fired, punished, or otherwise “canceled”—often with good reason—for something they said on Twitter. Some of these casualties become free speech warriors or the subjects of searching profiles on the blurry line between our imagined “right” to be who we are on the Internet and our ability to still retain a job. And then there’s the recent case of Erick Adame, a popular weatherman on NY1 who lost his job after being anonymously harassed with images someone stole of him performing sex acts on a private, noncommercial website. We’re faced with fast-evolving standards of appropriate conduct. But we’re also dealing with the dissolution of boundaries between who we are and what we say or do depending on where we are.1

  • The Nation ☛ In Iowa, Voters Set Their Sights on Gun Rights

    This November, Iowans will vote on an NRA-sponsored ballot initiative to incorporate the right to keep and bear arms into the Iowa state Constitution. The amendment goes beyond just incorporating the language of the Second Amendment into Iowa’s law books, as many other states have done, but will instead make any push for gun regulations nearly impossible, while undermining any existing restrictions. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny,” reads the proposed amendment.

  • The Nation ☛ Can a District Attorney Dismantle Mass Incarceration and Fight for Gender Justice?

    Today, Pamela Price is an accomplished civil rights attorney, but her earliest interactions with the law were unfailingly negative. Devastated and enraged by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she organized student demonstrations as a teenager—and was tossed in jail for it. After running away from home, she bounced between the foster care and youth justice systems. “My juvenile experience led me to think, ‘Oh, these lawyers, this is all bad,’” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be part of a legal system, or even a political system. It took years for me to actually get back into being active.”

  • The Nation ☛ In This Time of “Polycrisis,” the Midterms Are More Critical Than Ever

    We live whipsawed by “polycrisis.” That’s the word historian Adam Tooze uses to describe multiple, simultaneous systemic crises that intensify as they collide, resulting in dire and deadly disruptions. The question we confront is whether we can rouse our battered politics to deal with them. If the 2022 election campaign is any indication, we’re not coming close.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Understanding India Through Faces of Inequality

    He further explores the nature of inequality through the distress migration of the Dalits and Adivasis (most marginalized communities) in the country. He expresses the nature of social hierarchies in terms of livelihood, decent wages, access to services, justice, and peace. Part 2 of the book explains the nature of work, the hardship within the workplace, and the blatant exploitation faced by these communities and their families in their quest for survival. He explores the patriarchy and gender discrimination instilled with physical, mental, and sexual violence by the brick owners towards their women workers, and exemplars the nature of social atrocities faced by the Dalit and Adivasi communities in the country. The migrant crisis during the lockdown shows the ugly side of unskilled/semiskilled industry in the country, which systematically ignores the right to life of the interstate migrants and their access to basic needs. The graphic representation of migrants walking hundreds of miles during the lockdown, without food, water, and proper protective gear in the first wave of the pandemic is heartbreaking. The story of Rakesh, a homeless migrant from Odisha, emotionally breaks down while begging for food encapsulates the story of millions of migrants in India.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Virtuous Hypocrisy: The Socceroos and the Qatar World Cup

    A number of footballing teams, however, could not contain themselves.  While not wanting to seem totally complicit in a regime’s atrocious labour practices and archaic punishments, there was the sense that something had to be done.  But how could disagreement with Doha’s policies possibly take place alongside continued attendance?

  • TruthOut ☛ Greg Abbott Is Still Prosecuting Migrants Under a Bogus Disaster Declaration

  • TruthOut ☛ Kemp Refuses to Say Where He Stands on Future Abortion Restrictions in Georgia

  • Common Dreams ☛ New Senate Report Spotlights ‘Barbaric Consequences’ of GOP Abortion Bans

    The Massachusetts Democrat contacted healthcare professionals at the American Medical Association (AMA), Physicians for Reproductive Health (PRH), National Nurses United (NNU), the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and the American Hospital Association (AHA) over the last two months to determine what impacts of abortion bans doctors and nurses have observed.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Supreme Court Quashes Graham Attempt to Avoid Testifying in Georgia

    The high court’s decision, which did not include any dissents or recusals, came after Justice Clarence Thomas last week temporarily blocked the subpoena following a ruling against Graham (R-S.C.) by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | I’m A Doctor. Here’s Why We Need Universal Healthcare

    On September 19th, Atlanta became one of the latest municipalities to pass a resolution endorsing national universal health coverage. This important local action is aspirational in its urging of the United States Congress to pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021 – 2022 (H.R. 1976). However, the need for the affordable insurance this legislation would provide for every American is huge and pressing.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Supreme Court Poised to Strike Down Affirmative Action in Cases Brought By Conservative Activist

    The majority-conservative Supreme Court appears poised to strike down race-conscious college admissions decisions, after hearing arguments Monday against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs argued the admissions process discriminates against white and Asian American applicants by giving priority consideration to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. The decision could jeopardize affirmative action initiatives implemented after the Civil Rights Movement to give more equal opportunities to people disadvantaged by centuries of racial discrimination and the legacy of slavery. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, says his organization investigated the allegations against Harvard and found no discrimination but rather that “allowing race to be considered benefited Asian Americans.” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, says rescinding affirmative action programs risks harming students of color and will dramatically decrease the racial diversity that has shown to benefit colleges.

  • The Nation ☛ Make No Mistake, the Supreme Court Will Kill Affirmative Action

    The Supreme Court started the process of officially dismantling affirmative action in college admissions on Monday as it heard two cases attacking the policy. The cases were brought by the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group that claims to represent the interests of Asian American and Pacific Islander students who claim they were discriminated against by race-conscious admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University.

  • TruthOut ☛ Supreme Court Appears Poised to Strike Down Affirmative Action

  • TruthOut ☛ Abortion Bans Are Barring People From Life-Saving Pregnancy Care

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 336: The DSA Is A Mess, But Will Now Rule The Internet

    There are big internet regulatory changes coming in the EU, with the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. Each is a huge bundle of new rules that could drastically change the future of the entire internet, and today we’re focusing on the DSA, which is set to come into force in 2024. Emma Llansó from the Center for Democracy & Technology and Daphne Keller from Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center join us on this week’s episode to dig into the DSA and its many, many implications.

  • Techdirt ☛ 5G Hype Simply Didn’t Deliver

    We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.

• Monopolies

  • Techdirt ☛ Microsoft, Staring Down Regulators, Promises To Keep CoD On PlayStation

    After Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision Blizzard was announced, alongside its deal to acquire Zenimax/Bethesda, we’ve had a series of posts pointing out that this consolidation of the gaming industry has featured vague statements from Microsoft leaving everyone wondering about the exclusivity of major gaming franchises. One of those major franchises would be Activision’s Call of Duty. Microsoft, in what has become its familiar fashion, made some vague statements about honoring Activision’s current agreements with Sony, along with a promise to keep CoD on the PlayStation for “at least another 3 years.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Senator Seeks Antitrust Review of Apartment Price-Setting Software

    The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Major Milestone’ as Judge Halts Mega-Merger Between US Publishing Giants

    Judge Florence Y. Pan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the proposed $2.175 billion merger would “substantially” harm competition as publishing houses compete for the rights to publish new books, which the U.S. Justice Department had argued would drive down compensation for authors.

  • IT Wire ☛ New EU digital act set to curb firms like Meta, Google and Amazon

    Companies that act as gatekeepers in the online economy will from now on be subject to a new regulation put in place by the European Union from this month onwards: the Digital Markets Act.

    In a statement, the political bloc said the act, which will be enforced from 2 May 2023, would end unfair practices by gatekeeper companies.

    The act was proposed by the European Commission in December 2020 and pushed through by the European Parliament and Council by March this year.

    Gatekeeper platforms are defined as “digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”.

  • Politico ☛ EU to launch advanced Microsoft-Activision probe

    The European Commission is set to launch an in-depth investigation into Microsoft’s record $69 billion splash on games developer Activision-Blizzard after the U.S. tech giant opted not to file remedies to the EU’s antitrust enforcers, people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.

  • Patents

    • Biden’s Regulatory Office Must Closely Review USPTO Rulemaking that Impacts our Economy  – Patent Progress

      In September, President Biden formally nominated Richard Revesz, former Dean of the New York University School of Law, to be Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

  • Copyrights

    • EFF ☛ Stop the Copyright Creep

      No copyright proposal—or copyright-adjacent one—has a place in “must-pass” legislation. Must-pass legislation is a bill that is vital to the running of the country and therefore must be passed and signed into law. They are usually the bills that fund the government for the upcoming year, in all its forms.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • On Void

    There is an abyss far from this world;

    The coffin of nine gates of darkness,

    of terror, thick loads of tar, an eternal trap of souls!

    The void is of the human nature. We have always known it, felt it and fled before it. Ergo we crafted the gods, the legends and the tales, for without them life is void.

    Yet from this very void we conjure ideas, thoughts, poems and philosophy, trying to make sense of this existence that is utterly ‘void’ of meaning or goal.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Mayan and Gemini priests

      I don’t appreciate it, but, I don’t feel guilty over publishing on Gemini any more than I feel bad for having an Atom feed.

      As I’ve mentioned before, it’s just as easy to make a polished Android or iOS app to read and write on Gemini than it is to make a Mastodon app. Probably way easier actually, so it’s ironic that this discussion is on Mastodon.

  • Programming

    • Matrix To MMS-Over-Email Bridge

      I made a friend online while locked-down during COVID who I want to continue communicating with. The problem, though, is that I do not use social media, and chat apps do not work for me no matter how hard I try. So after about a month of back-and-forth discussing possible solutions, we’ve thought of something that we think will work: I’m going to run a Matrix to MMS-over-email bridge on my server.

GNU/Linux

• Hacker Noon ☛ The Impact of Linux and the GNU Project | HackerNoon

  The moment we talk about open-source, the first thing that comes to mind is Linux and Linus Torvalds. Though Linus Torvalds created Linux and engineered the kernel on which most of the servers work today, Richard Stallman promoted the concept of free software and started the moment in 1985. Back then, Richard Stallman created the legal, technological and philosophical foundation for the free software movement through the GNU Operating System. Without these contributions, it’s unlikely that Linux and Open-Source would have evolved into the current forms that we see today.

• Server

  • IT Wire ☛ Cloud infrastructure services spend grows at slowest rate in 3Q 2022 [Ed: The clown computing bubble is imploding and Microsoft fakes its share by simple re-branding all sorts of things "Azure" (Azure is a division of layoffs, basically a failure covered up with media deceit)]

    Expenditure on cloud infrastructure services increased by 28% year-on-year globally during the third quarter to reach US$63.1 billion, the first time the rate has fallen below 30%, the technology analyst firm Canalys reports.

    The low rate of growth was attributed to high inflation, rising energy prices and the strong US dollar, with Canalys saying companies had responded to the uncertainty by cutting down on spending.

    This, it added, could have an effect on demand for cloud services in the near term.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.4.222

    I'm announcing the release of the 5.4.222 kernel.
    
    This release is only needed if you use clang to build your kernel.
    If not, no need to upgrade.
    
    The updated 5.4.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.4.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 4.19.263

  • LWN ☛ Linux 4.14.297

• Applications

  • Make Use Of ☛ 11 Fun Linux Command-Line Programs You Should Try When Bored

    Working on the Linux terminal doesn’t have to be stressful. Take some time out and enjoy the moment with these fun Linux command-line tools.

    The Linux terminal is a powerful utility. You can use it to control the whole system, crafting and typing commands as you go about doing your everyday tasks. But it can quickly become overwhelming to keep staring at a command line and carry on with your work.

    Lucky for you, the terminal is also a source of fun. You can play around with commands, listen to music, and even play games. Although expecting a great deal of entertainment from a window full of commands would be carrying it too far, you can find utilities to bind some time when bored.

    Here are some fun and entertaining commands every Linux user should try at least once.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • uni Toronto ☛ (Maybe) copying email anti-spam measures from Google and company

    You can have a number of reactions to this. One of them is to be grumpy that Google is rejecting email that’s otherwise (probably) perfectly valid and perhaps not even spam. Well, let’s be honest here; all competent modern mail system operators reject email at SMTP time for all sorts of peculiar reasons, so I can hardly pick on GMail for not liking messages without message IDs when we will reject your messages if they an attachment type we don’t like or ClamAV matches a signature.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 28: custom properties and web components

    We already know that we can encapsulate styles within a web component and we know that web components inherit styles. Another interesting feature of web components in terms of CSS is that custom properties used in a web component can be modified from the outside.

    Let’s take this basic alert component.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 27: the font-variation-settings property

    Adjustable features of a variable font are called axes. You can use the font-variations-settings property to change these features by specifying the four letter axis name along with a value.

    For example, the Saira variable font has two axes, weight (‘wght’) and width (‘wdth’). This is how the font looks like by default: [...]

  • DJ Adams ☛ More Untappd data explorations with jq – my top ranking beer types (part 3)

    So, about those rating values. I’ll take the ratings for the Winter Warmer category as an example to work on, and I can get a list of those by extending the current filter like this: [...]

  • uni Toronto ☛ I wish ZFS supported per-user reservations, not just per-user quotas

    The most common case that comes up is that we have a bunch of people in a single filesystem, some of whom may fill up the filesystem by accident in the course of their work and others (such as professors) who we always want to be able to use some additional space so they can keep working. This is the ideal situation for a positive reservation instead of a negative quota, since what we want to put a limit on is the pool of space used by a group of people.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate to Secure Nginx on RHEL 9/8

    In this article, we’ll guide you on how to generate and install an SSL/TLS certificate obtained for free from Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority that we’ll be using to secure Nginx webserver HTTP transactions on RHEL and RHEL-based distributions such as Fedora, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.

    If you’re looking to install Let’s Encrypt for Apache on RHEL and RHEL-based distributions, follow this guide below…

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Kotlin on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this post, you will learn how to install Kotlin on Ubuntu 22.04. This modern language is intended to replace Java in key processes of Android and other components where it reigned supreme.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Find Files on Ubuntu using the Terminal – Pi My Life Up

    If you are using a desktop version of Ubuntu finding files is straightforward as opening up the Files application and using the search bar.

    However, the process is slightly more complicated if you want to find a file using the terminal. You will have to utilize either the “find” or “locate” apps to find files within the terminal on Ubuntu.

    The find command is an integral part of Ubuntu and is one of the best ways to find files on your system. The locate package allows you to perform the same searches quickly but requires a database to be refreshed regularly.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Change a Filename in Linux – Pi My Life Up

    There are a few different methods that you can use to change a filename on a Linux system. However, we will be focusing on using the mv and rename commands. Both of these commands are easy to use.

    For this tutorial, we will be focusing purely on the terminal. However, for some Linux-based operating systems, you will have the option to use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to alter file and folder names.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Copy and Paste in the Ubuntu Terminal – Pi My Life Up

    When you are new to using the terminal on Ubuntu, you may be unaware of how to copy and paste from the terminal.

    Knowing how to copy and paste from the terminal will help you utilize it more efficiently.

    As long as you have a keyboard or mouse, copying and pasting into the terminal on Ubuntu is a straightforward process.

    Each terminal can work differently, so the keyboard shortcuts shown within this guide might only work with Ubuntu’s terminal.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ What is Pop Shell – How to Use POP Shell Tiling Extension on GNOME

    The Pop Shell is an advanced tiling window management tool that offers flexibility in controlling the layouts and positions of windows.

    Pop Shell is a gnome shell extension that runs on top of the GNOME Shell. It offers two window management modes; auto-tile and stacking.

    The stacking mode allows windows to overlap, as in the case of the traditional GNOME desktop. However, in the auto-tile mode, all the windows get tiled automatically. Besides, you can switch between the two modes from the Pop shell extension menu.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Add a User to the docker Group

    Docker has been one of the best containerization tools and many industries are using docker in their application. The developers find it to be a very effective tool and they can deploy their application in production or any other environment without any dependencies on the target system.

    It is always a best practice to not run any command as a sudo user since you have elevated permissions. Generally, when you install docker it needs root permission because the daemon runs as a root user. Due to this, you will have to run the docker command with sudo. While you run with sudo, you might see the below error -

    docker: Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Post http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.24/containers/create: dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied.
    See ‘docker run –help’.

    How can you fix the above error? In case you don’t want to run the docker as the root user, you can read this page to solve this issue. In this guide, we learn how to run docker as a non-root user.

  • Guide to WordPress Post Formats  – ThisHosting.Rocks

    WordPress formats are premade templates used for blog posts to present them in a different layout and style. The formats allow theme builders to define the visual manifestation of blog posts.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Julia Programming Language on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Julia Programming Language on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Julia is a programming language designed to be high-performance in computation and analysis. Julia is widely used in data sciences and application-building processes as a programming language. Not only that, but Julia can work with other programming languages as well, such as Python, C, C++, Rust, R, and SQL.

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

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Marvel VS DC Mugen on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Marvel VS DC Mugen on a Chromebook.

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

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PostgreSQL on Manjaro 21 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL (often called Postgres) is a free, open-source, and advanced relational database management system and is developed by The PostgreSQL Global Development Group. Users may rely on the PostgreSQL database system for its dependability, data integrity, extensive feature set, and flexibility.

    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 PostgreSQL open-source relational database management system on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).

• WINE or Emulation

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Windows compatibility layer Wine 7.20 is out

    The Wine hackers have put out a new development build of the Windows compatibility layer in Wine 7.20. 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 ☛ Steam Deck pushed Linux to the highest share on Steam in years

    A fresh month, which means a new Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out. Looking over the October 2022 data, it appears we’ve hit a fresh high point.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Dwarf Fortress releases December 6 on Steam and itch.io, Native Linux support later

    Dwarf Fortress is finally getting the big Early Access release on Steam and itch.io on December 6, although the Native Linux support is to come along later. Many years in the making, with actual proper graphics and more, it’s nearly here!

  • Hans Petter Jansson: Balance of Power: A rematch served cold

    There’s an old video game the memory of which recently escalated itself to my attention: Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power, a geopolitics simulator first released for the Macintosh in 1985. According to Wikipedia it sold about a quarter million units, which was a lot at the time, and I must’ve been somewhere in the impressionable age range of 10 to 12 years old when my father bought Incredible Technologies’ port for the Commodore Amiga.

    [..].

    Since Halloween seems like a good occasion to indulge in a little psychological horror (no other reason), I decided to do a rematch of sorts — this time with the help of fs-uae.

  • Evan Hahn ☛ Everything we know about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, as of November 2022

    This post tries to summarize everything we know about Breath of the Wild’s sequel. It’s arranged by time. It may contain spoilers.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Open source kart racer SuperTuxKart 1.4 is out now with Vulkan in Beta

    You can swap between the Vulkan and OpenGL renderer with a “–render-driver=vulkan” or “–render-driver=opengl” launch argument, and it seems to stick to the last one you picked. Currently, Vulkan doesn’t seem to have a lot of the graphical effects present in OpenGL so it’s very much a work in progress.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Missile Command: Recharged gets a revamp and relaunch on Steam

    Atari and Adamvision Studios have taken down the original Missile Command: Recharged, and replaced it with another Missile Command: Recharged of the same name but it has been upgraded. It’s seen a bump in the price too.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Beta update tweaks the new Big Picture Mode from Steam Deck for desktop

    Valve has today released a new Steam Client Beta, which amongst other things tweaks the new Big Picture Mode that is also in a special Beta that was taken from the Steam Deck.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Competitive tactics game Duelyst is being revived with Duelyst II

    Love competitive games? How about when they’re free to play? Dream Sloth Games are reviving Duelyst as Duelyst II, with approval from Counterplay Games. A game that originally reviewed quite well, but it was shut down and delisted on Steam back in February of 2020. Duelyst II was originally started as a fan-game but it’s now turning into a full complete sequel.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ These were the most popular Steam Deck games for October 2022

    Valve has revealed two fresh lists of popular games for the Steam Deck through October, sorted by both daily average player count and time played overall.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Video recording app OBS Studio v28.1 out with NVENC changes

    OBS Studio has a new release out now, and it comes with some changes for NVIDIA GPU owners who use NVENC. Some of the changes (as usual) only affect Windows, but there’s still some goodies in there for Linux too.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Barry Kauler ☛ Rethinking direction of EasyOS

  Have had a rethink about what EasyOS is all about. Easy is a unique and very quirky OS, and and does just about everything differently from other Linux distributions.

  I recently posted that have abandoned sync’ing the PKGget package manager (PPM, see “pkg” icon on the desktop) with Debian apt and synaptic. Decided to stay with PKGget only.

  For the last few days have been working on login as user “zeus”. Yes, it works, but I found myself having to apply so many workarounds. The simplicity and elegance of login as root, with apps able to run non-root, and “crippled root” or user “spot” in containers, was becoming compromised and complicated.

• New Releases

  • TrueNAS ☛ TrueNAS 13.0-U3 Increases Maturity and Includes iX-Storj Service – TrueNAS – Welcome to the Open Storage Era

    Building on the Enterprise quality of prior versions, the third update of TrueNAS 13 was released today. In addition to greater maturity and test coverage, Globally Distributed Storage provided by iX-Storj is also now included in this release.

    Compared to TrueNAS 12, TrueNAS 13 includes significant new components and has improved performance, scalability, and reliability in subsequent releases. In the two months since TrueNAS 13.0-U2 was released, it has already become the 2nd most deployed version of TrueNAS. TrueNAS 13.0-U3 builds on the maturity of the prior version with 30 bug fixes and security updates. It also includes enclosure management updates for the TrueNAS R50 Gen3, which was announced two weeks ago.

    To date, more than 25% of TrueNAS users have updated to TrueNAS 13, including many of our largest enterprise customers. Today TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is the default software used for all TrueNAS appliances, and it is recommended for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users by virtue of its improved security and reliability characteristics compared to TrueNAS 12.0-U8 and previous versions.

• BSD

  • MWL ☛ upgrading PHP 7.4 to PHP 8 on FreeBSD

    Like PHP. PHP is very much the real world. My site has been running PHP 7.4 for a while, which goes end of life on 28 November. I put this off as long as possible, but it’s time to update.

    I run my e-bookstore on Woocommerce, which is built on WordPress, which is built on PHP. What started as a silly experiment has become the center of my business. I need to minimize downtime, which means I must check everything before upgrading. It’s PHP, which means it’s a maze of twisty little modules that all look alike. PHP has this annoying habit of adding, removing, splitting, and changing modules. Running PHP applications on FreeBSD is all about finding the module your application needs, so I want to identify all possible problems before changing.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ How a Redditor Ended Up With an Industrial-Grade Netflix Server

    Dave Temkin, Netflix’s former Vice President of Network Systems Infrastructure told Motherboard there’s nothing too mysterious about what the servers can do, though they significantly help improve video streaming by shortening overall content transit time.

    “They’re just an Intel FreeBSD box,” he said. “We got Linux running on some of the generations of that box as well.”

    Netflix’s Open Connect Content Delivery Network hardware caches popular Netflix content to reduce overall strain across broadband networks. Netflix lets major broadband ISPs embed a CDN server on the ISP network for free; the shorter transit time then helps improve video delivery, of benefit to broadband providers and Netflix alike.

• Debian Family

  • Sparky news 2022/10 – SparkyLinux

    The 10th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2022:
    – Linux kernel updated up to 6.0.6 & 5.15.76-LTS & 4.9.331-LTS49
    – Common Desktop Environment (CDE) updated up to version 2.5.1 for Sparky 6+7 amd64+i386
    – Sparky 2022.10, 2022.10 Special Editions and 2022.10-1 and 2022.10-2 LXQt released
    – Cartillo started translating Sparky Wiki pages to Spanish; thanks a lot!

    The LXQt 2022.10 and 2022.10-1 iso images of the rolling line features LXQt 1.1.0 from the Sparky ‘extra’ repos, but it is not compatible with present Qt libs in Debian testing repos. You can remove the ‘extra’ repos and downgrade all LXQt related packages (see Sparky forums for details https://forum.sparkylinux.org/index.php/topic,6177.msg16986.html) or make fresh installation using Sparky 2022.10-2 LXQt iso.
    And, the Sparky ‘extra’ repos have been deleted now.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ SiFive Reveals New RISC-V Chips, the P670 and P470

    SiFive announced a pair (opens in new tab) of new high-performance RISC-V (opens in new tab) processors aimed at what it calls “next-generation wearables and smart consumer devices.” Known as the P670 and P470, the processors offer new features and improved performance compared to previous CPUs based on the popular open-source architecture.

    The SiFive Performance P670 and P470 #RISCV processors bring unparalleled compute performance and efficiency to wearables, smart home applications, AR/VR devices, and more. Read about how we’re raising the bar and giving designers true flexibility: https://t.co/11wb02d8YZ pic.twitter.com/eVvum8Y3jXNovember 1, 2022

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ ‘Gourdan’ the pun-kin(g) wins Halloween

    Gourdan is powered by Raspberry Pi, and his Adafruit LCD eyes have been trained to follow you around the room. Creepy. I like it.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Best RP2040 Boards 2022

    While Raspberry Pi has its own RP2040-powered board in the Raspberry Pi Pico, there are now more than sixty, third-party solutions that offer improvements which range from smaller sizes to built-in Wi-Fi, more storage or a lot of additional outputs. There are even RP2040-powered keypads and RP2040 breakouts designed to be embedded into your next project. All of these boards share the same $1 RP2040 chip, but offer much more than the stock model.

    With Raspberry Pi still being hard to come by we’ve compiled the best RP2040 boards to get your projects up and running. These boards can be used for everything from general learning to building Wi-Fi connected robots to implementing basic A.I.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Best Raspberry Pi HATs 2022: Expansion Boards for Every Project

    To help you choose, we’ve listed the best Raspberry Pi HATs that we have personally tested, grouped by their use case. These expansion boards can be used for everything from general learning to implementing A.I. via Machine Learning. Or you could just build your own Raspberry Pi powered robot to explore the world around us.

  • Arduino ☛ Arduino brings Ghost Rider costume to life | Arduino Blog

    Long before Nicolas Cage ever portrayed the character on the silver screen, Ghost Rider appealed to an edgier subsect of Marvel’s audience. We won’t do a deep dive into the character(s) and their Faustian deals, but suffice it to say that Ghost Rider is a human man who turns into a flaming skeleton that rides a motorcycle. Where that lands on the cool to cringe scale depends on the particular appearance, but Andy’s Halloween costume recreation of Ghost Rider is definitely cool.

    Andy’s costume includes a skeleton mask and the appropriate biker-style leather jacket, but really comes to life thanks to the added effects. Those include LED lighting and billowing flames. Andy can activate those using a small handheld remote control. When he does, the LEDs illuminate pieces of red cloth that flap in a wind created by big blower fans. Those mimic the look of flames shooting out from the jacket.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Silcon Republic ☛ Could Mastodon be the new Twitter now that Musk is in charge?

  However, one platform in particular has been getting a lot of attention as Twitter users consider flocking elsewhere.

  Decentralised microblogging platform Mastodon has seen a big surge in users since last week. The free and open-source platform tweeted on 30 October that it got more than 70,000 sign-ups on the day after the deal closed.

• Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Software – October 2022 Updates – LinuxLinks

  Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software. For October, we have focused almost entirely on expanding our recommendations for coding and web apps. A huge pat on the back to Eilidih Parris for her sterling work and dedication.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ HTTP Workshop 2022 – day 1 | daniel.haxx.se

    The fifth HTTP Workshop is a three day event that takes place in Oxford, UK. I’m happy to say that I am attending this one as well, as I have all the previous occasions. This is now more than seven years since the first one.

    [...]

    All the people gather in the same room. A person talks briefly on a specific topic and then we have a free-form discussion about it. When I write this, the slides from today’s presentations have not yet been made available so I cannot link them here. I will add those later.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 6.1 ‘Misha’ – WordPress News

    Say hello to WordPress 6.1, “Misha,” inspired by the life and work of Soviet-Norwegian jazz pianist Mikhail “Misha” Alperin. Misha introduced the work of jazz ensembles in the USSR and globally. He is also celebrated as a founding member of the Moscow Art Trio.

    “Misha” further refines the site-building experience. Inside WordPress 6.1 you’ll interact with enhancements that continue to make site creation more intuitive while pushing your creative boundaries further than ever. Don’t forget to enjoy some of Misha’s jazz piano as you take in all WordPress 6.1 has to offer.

    The third major release of 2022 is here. Download it now! As of the time of this release, WordPress powers 43% of websites worldwide.

    Site owners and administrators should upgrade today to take full advantage of the many stability, performance, and usability enhancements. Furthermore, WordPress content creators will enjoy a suite of new features geared toward improving the writing and designing experiences.

• Programming/Development

  • Andy Dote ☛ Deploy != Release

    This turned out to be somewhat controversial until we discussed what I specifically meant by deploy and release.

    As with all things, agreeing on definitions or understanding what someone means when they use a specific term is essential, so I thought I would write down a short blog post on it.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: tint 0.1.4 on CRAN: Miscellaneous Updates

    A new version 0.1.4 of the tint package arrived at CRAN today. tint provides a style ‘not unlike Tufte’ for use in html and pdf documents created from markdown. The github repo shows several examples in its README, more as usual in the package documentation.

    This is the first release in over two years and it brings a few incremental changes which are described in detail below. The trigger was an email from CRAN desiring compacted pdf files inside the package sources. Which, coincidentally, was made a default about a year ago in the build.r script from littler I use to make packages. But as we had not updated tint this has not reached CRAN. So there.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppXts 0.0.5 on CRAN: Maintenance

    A new maintenance release 0.0.6 of RcppXts is now on CRAN. The RcppXts package demonstrates how to access the export C API of xts which we contributed a looong time ago.

  • Paul Tagliamonte: Decoding LDPC: k-Bit Brute Forcing

    I’ve been working on the next generation of the “PACKRAT” series called “RATPACK”. I’m hoping to start writing new posts soon, and hopefully this is an interesting note of what’s to come! In the meantime, you can check out the PACKRAT posts until then.
    My initial efforts to build a PHY and Data Link layer – from scratch using my own code – have been progressing nicely since the initial BPSK based protocol I’ve documented under the PACKRAT series. As part of that, I’ve been diving deep into FEC, and in particular, LDPC.

    I won’t be able to do an overview of LDPC justice in this post – with any luck that’ll come in a later post to come as part of the RATPACK series, so some knowledge is assumed. As such this post is less useful for those looking to learn about LDPC, and a bit more targeted to those who enjoy talking and thinking about FEC.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 189: Greater Character and Array Degree

  • Python

    • Paolo Melchiorre ☛ Ubuntu Summit 2022

      I’ll share a lot of examples from my personal participation in the the Python and Django community.

• Standards/Consortia

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Fax machines to finally disappear under proposed Ofcom rule changes

    Ofcom has proposed rule changes that mean BT and Hull telecoms operator KCOM will no longer be required to provide dedicated landlines for fax services at affordable prices.

Leftovers

• Fred Herbert ☛ The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents

  This whole analysis serves the objective of learning from incidents. But learning isn’t something you control or dictate. People will draw the lessons they’ll draw, regardless of what you had planned for. All you can hope for is to provide the best environment possible for it to take place. In environments like tech, a lot hinges on people’s mental models. We can’t implant nor extract mental models, so challenging them through experience or discussion is the next best thing, and exposing how people were making decisions, the various factors and priorities they were juggling, or the challenges they were encountering are all key parts of their experience you wish to unveil.

• The Nation ☛ Mama I Am Sorry

  ways I have betrayed you.

• Hackaday ☛ Tambour Table With A Puzzling Secret

  Some people really like puzzles. [Simone Giertz] is one of these serious puzzle lovers and built a transforming table (YouTube) to let her easily switch between puzzles and more mundane tasks, like eating.

• Education

  • DJ Adams ☛ Stop asking for slides in advance

    A slide deck is not the talk content. A slide deck is there to aid the talk, to enhance it, to provide a bit of context (or light relief) for those attending. They’re there to support what’s being said, to underpin the message.

    That’s why, sometimes, I don’t use slides at all. I just show stuff on my computer, fumble around and wave my arms about wildly. Anything to get the point across, to help explain what I’m trying to say, to be more effective in landing the concepts that I’m attempting to convey.

  • Terence Eden ☛ I’ve reached a local maxima in my career

    I’m now at the point where I face several challenges to moving up to the next grade.

• Hardware

  • IT Wire ☛ Fifth successive quarter of falling shipments for tablets, Chromebooks

    Tablet shipments fell by 8.8% year-on-year in the third quarter, coming in at 38.6 million units, making this the fifth successive drop, the technology analyst company IDC says.

    Chromebooks followed a similar trajectory, shipping 4.3 million units, a decline of 34.4% year-on-year, and making this the fifth straight quarter of decreasing shipments.

    IDC said Chinese vendors were able to perform well in emerging markets where there was demand for low-end devices. Additionally, sanctions on many vendors enabled Huawei to sell well in the Russian market.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Nation ☛ Meet the California State Senator Who Wants to Decriminalize Psychedelics

    In an unassuming, off-white, two-story house in San Francisco’s Mission District, built in the Italianate style that predominates in the neighborhood, you’ll find the Institute of Illegal Images, aka the Blotter Barn. It houses an extensive personal collection of LSD art, called “blotter paper,” lovingly curated by Mark McCloud, a wizened, affable remnant of the city’s counterculture. McCloud came to California from Argentina as an adolescent, attended one of Ken Kesey’s early Acid Test “happenings” in the 1960s, puttered around the globe, and eventually put down stakes in the Mission in the mid-’70s, opening a home gallery that serves as an unbound history of the War on Drugs.

• Proprietary

  • BBC ☛ Cyber-attacks on small firms: The US economy’s ‘Achilles heel’? [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Cyber-crimes are expected to cost the world $10.5tn (£9.3tn) by 2025, according to cyber-security research firm Cyber Ventures.

    On the current trajectory, small businesses will absorb most of the hit.

    They are three times more likely to be attacked by cyber-criminals compared to large businesses, cloud security firm Barracuda Networks has found.

  • India Times ☛ France’s Thales says hackers claim to have stolen data [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Thales said the extortion and ransomware group had announced plans on the dark web to release the data on Nov. 7. It added that so far it had not received any direct ransom notification.

  • Times Higher Education ☛ Fears for overseas students following Australian cyber breach [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Medibank Private, one of five companies authorised to provide overseas student health cover (OSHC), revealed on 13 October that it had been the subject of a “cyber incident”. At the time it said there was no evidence that sensitive data had been accessed, and that customers could expect little inconvenience other than temporary disruptions as the international student policy management systems were taken offline.

    That assessment changed a week later, with Medibank revealing that it had been contacted by a “criminal” claiming to have stolen 200 gigabytes of data. The extortionist had sent sample records from 100 policyholders, including international students, detailing their names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, insurance details and medical histories.

  • The Strategist ☛ Quad’s ransomware commitment could help shore up regional software supply chains [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Since the Covid-19 pandemic, ransomware attacks have increased dramatically worldwide. The latest annual report on the state of ransomware, by cybersecurity firm Sophos, indicated a 78% rise in attacks globally between 2020 and 2021. Nearly two-thirds of the organisations surveyed reported having been affected.

  • India Times ☛ Google increases storage to 1TB from 15GB on Workspace individual accounts

    The tech company in a blog post revealed that upgrading one’s account to 1TB safe cloud storage is an entirely automatic process. When Google rolls out the new upgrade, every Google user will automatically get the standard 15GB storage updated to 1TB. Users will be able to add up to 100 different formats including CAD files, PDFs, and various image formats on Google Drive.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ The Ventura problem

    At the beginning of last week Apple released macOS Ventura, the next major version of their desktop operating system for Mac computers. We’d been monitoring a problem with Ventura since the early betas back in August with the hope that, on release, things would be working normally.

    Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Right now, if you’re using a Pico with your Mac, we don’t recommend upgrading to Ventura (at least not yet).

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ MacOS Ventura Does Not Play Well With Raspberry Pi Pico

    A problem has arisen in the way the latest version of MacOS mounts Raspberry Pi Pico (opens in new tab) virtual volumes, meaning Macs updated to 13.0 Ventura, released October 24, cannot copy across the UF2 files used for flashing instructions onto the microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi blog has a post about the error (opens in new tab), and the company has reported it to Apple as a bug.

• Security

  • dwaves.de ☛ - OpenSSL fixes two high severity vulnerabilities – OpenSSL versions 3.0.0 to 3.0.6 are vulnerable – OpenSSL 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 NOT affected | dwaves.de

    BUT: only 1.5% of all OpenSSL instances were found to be impacted by this security flaw

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ OpenSSL fixes two high severity vulnerabilities, what you need to know

    Cloud security firm Wiz.io also said that only 1.5% of all OpenSSL instances were found to be impacted by this security flaw after analyzing deployments across major cloud environments (i.e., AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, and Alibaba Cloud).

  • OpenSSL vulnerabilities: Everything you need to know | Wiz Blog

  • Xe’s Blog ☛ OpenSSL gave everyone alarm fatigue

    So, the OpenSSL security issue embargo ended today and the patches dropped [sic]. Based on the contents of the security issue, the difficulty of exploiting it in practice, and the fact that most Linux distributions take basic precautions to prevent it from being a viable attack vector: this issue doesn’t affect nearly any users of OpenSSL in the real world.

  • Protocol ☛ OpenSSL dodges a bullet

    However, after initially rating the vulnerabilities as “critical” in a heads-up advisory last week, the new vulnerabilities have been downgraded to a severity rating of “high,” though administrators are still being urged to patch systems quickly.

  • CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602: X.509 Email Address Buffer Overflows

    Today we published an advisory about CVE-2022-3786 (“X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow”) and CVE-2022-3602 (“X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow”).

    Please read the advisory for specific details about these CVEs and how they might impact you. This blog post will address some common questions that we expect to be asked about these CVEs.Q: The 3.0.7 release was announced as fixing a CRITICAL vulnerability, but CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602 are both HIGH. What happened to the CRITICAL vulnerability?

  • OpenSSL Security Advisory [01 November 2022]

    Pre-announcements of CVE-2022-3602 described this issue as CRITICAL. Further analysis based on some of the mitigating factors described above have led this to be downgraded to HIGH. Users are still encouraged to upgrade to a new version as soon as possible.

    In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious server. In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests client authentication and a malicious client connects.

  • Using Sysmon for Linux to Monitor Against MITRE ATT-CK Techniques – LogRhythm [Ed: Fake security from Microsoft]

    Microsoft Sysinternals recently released Sysmon for Linux. Beyond installing and configuring the software, there are several next steps you can take to use Sysmon for Linux to monitor against MITRE ATT&CK Techniques.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Hill ☛ FCC commissioner calls for TikTok ban over data concerns

      One of the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is calling on Congress to ban TikTok over concerns that user data could end up in the hands of China’s government.

      “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in an interview with Axios published Tuesday.

    • NBC ☛ America’s Ring doorbell camera obsession highlights the scourge of mass surveillance

      Surveillance proponents will claim this act of violence had nothing to do with Ring and other networked doorbell cameras. They’ll blame the neighbors, the neighborhood, the guns. But we have to face reality: Blanketing our neighborhoods in surveillance devices that promote a culture of suspicion makes all of us less safe.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ RBC: TikTok offered to let Russian employees move abroad to evade the draft — Meduza

    After the start of Russia’s mobilization campaign in September, TikTok’s management in Russia offered to let employees move to Kazakhstan, Armenia, or Kyrgyzstan, the news outlet RBC reported, citing two sources from TikTok and one former employee of the company.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Like Wagner’s meat’ In the occupied Luhansk region, Russian soldiers who refuse to fight are imprisoned without a trial and pressured back to the frontline — Meduza

    In the summer of 2022, it emerged that Russian contract soldiers refusing to fight in Ukraine and trying to get discharged from the military were being imprisoned in specialized detention camps. Hundreds of soldiers may have passed through these camps by now. The army command speak of these facilities euphemistically, calling them “centers for the recovery of combat readiness.” Since the start of mobilization, these “centers” have become places of detention for new conscripts, many of whom also refuse to fight in the Ukrainian war. This article is a nutshell version of an investigation published by Mediazona and talking about one such facility, discovered near the Ukrainian city of Perevalsk.

  • Meduza ☛ Prigozhin’s lesser war Now a ‘full-fledged member of Putin’s inner circle,’ the Wagner Group’s founder wages a crusade against St. Petersburg’s loyalist governor, Alexander Beglov. What does this mean for the future of Putin’s regime? — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Occupying authorities in Kherson announce ‘mandatory evacuation’ near Kakhovka hydropower station — Meduza

    Vladimir Saldo, Russian-appointed head of the annexed part of the Kherson region, announced the evacuation of residents of areas within a 15-kilometer [about nine-mile] radius of the Dnipro.

  • Meduza ☛ Novaya Gazeta: at least 101 conscripts killed since beginning of mobilization — Meduza

    Since September 21, when Russia announced its “partial mobilization,” at least 101 people who were called up as part of the campaign have been killed. The figure comes from Novaya Gazeta Europe, which cites Russian authorities as well as news reports and social media.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu says 87,000 mobilized troops have been deployed — Meduza

    Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on a conference call Tuesday that 87,000 mobilized Russians have now been sent into combat, Interfax reported.

  • Democracy Now ☛ End the Occupation: Norwegian Refugee Council Warns Israeli Elections May Empower Extremist Parties

    As Israel holds national elections amid increasing crackdowns on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, we speak with Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who is in Jerusalem and has been speaking with Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories. He is calling on Israel to end its decades-long occupation. He describes the ongoing Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes and the growth of illegal settlements, and says the situation is likely to get worse after elections as the political parties expected to make major gains are “in favor of illegal settlements, colonization of occupied land and the displacement of Palestinian families.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Who Killed Malcolm X? New York to Pay $36 Million for Two Men Wrongfully Jailed For 1965 Murder

    The city and state of New York have agreed to pay $36 million to settle lawsuits on behalf of two men wrongly convicted and imprisoned for decades for the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were exonerated last year for the murder after investigators found “serious miscarriages of justice” in the case. They each spent more than 20 years in prison for a crime they did not commit, and Islam died in 2009 before his record was cleared. We speak to civil rights lawyer David Shanies, who represented the men in their lawsuit, and scholar Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who helped spark the reopening of the case, and was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary series “Who Killed Malcolm X?”

  • NBC ☛ An Arizona court seems to think voter intimidation isn’t voter intimidation

    Yet, citing the First Amendment, a federal judge in Arizona last week refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the groups of people carrying out these menacing activities in Maricopa and Yavapai counties as voters participate in the midterm election. The Ninth Circuit court of appeals is currently considering an emergency request for an order to overturn that decision and put the injunction in place. The court should grant it and protect the right to vote, recognizing that First Amendment rights do not extend to threats of violence and voter intimidation.

  • BBC ☛ North and South Korea fire missiles across maritime border for first time

    North and South Korea have both fired missiles across their maritime border for the first time.

    The South retaliated on Wednesday three hours after Pyongyang fired a missile which landed less than 60km (37mi) from its eastern city of Sokcho.

  • Salon ☛ The Pelosi attack was long foretold — and make no mistake, Republicans are thrilled

    Republican candidates, often armed with guns, have “hunted” Pelosi in campaign ads and “humorous” videos, and have made other none-too subtle threats against her.

    The right-wing media echo chamber has made Pelosi into a larger-than-life villain and evildoer who must be removed from power, by any means necessary, in order to “save America.” The antisemitic QAnon conspiracy cult, with its deranged fantasies about Democrats and liberal celebrities who murder children and drink their blood, has also stoked hatred toward Pelosi.

  • The Hill ☛ Whoopi Goldberg calls Fox News out after Paul Pelosi attack: ‘Some of this is on your hands’

    “Fox News, some of this is on your hands. Some of this is on your hands. You like to call people out, I’m calling you all out,” Goldberg said. “Stop with the ‘That side is not good,’ because this is what it puts out there. It tells people that you think it’s OK to do this. Stop doing it.”

  • VOA News ☛ Man Accused of Attacking Paul Pelosi Held Without Bail

    DePape faces state charges of attempted murder, burglary and elder abuse. He also faces federal charges including attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official. Those charges are outlined in an affidavit detailing the assault, which was largely captured on police body camera imagery after authorities responded to a 911 call from the Pelosis’ Pacific Heights home.

  • Defence Web ☛ ISS: As terrorists claim new ground, an African strategy is vital

    There is the growing possibility of mergers or alliances of convenience involving the three prominent violent extremist groups in Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin, namely ISWAP, Ansaru and Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS). The move to expand and consolidate operations is forging unlikely ties not only between terrorist groups but between them and organised criminals.

  • Jerusalem Post ☛ Palestinian terrorists, attacks against Israel praised at Brussels rally

    Samidoun is alleged by the Israeli government to be a front for the the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), recognized as a terrorist organization.

    In videos of the event, some participants shouted slogans calling on people to throw rocks or shouting for the use of “bullets and rockets.” One prominently displayed banner depicted the launch of rockets. Such projectiles are often fired by Gazan terrorist organizations into Israel.

  • Medforth ☛ France: Anthony C. under investigation for stabbing his mother in the throat and threatening his father by shouting “Allah Akbar”. He says he is in conflict with his parents over his conversion to Islam

    On Thursday, in response to AFP’s question about a possible radicalisation of the accused, she had explained that he was “not known to the police and judicial authorities so far” but had “converted to Islam for several years”. BFMTV

  • Reuters ☛ Alarmed by suicide attack, China and Pakistan work together on probe

    A highly educated female suicide bomber killed three Chinese teachers in Karachi in April along with their local driver, targeting nationals from Pakistan’s most important partner and seeking to undermine a relationship on which Islamabad’s financial survival largely depends.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Partial mobilization is over, full stop,’ says the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Why doesn’t Putin sign a decree to make this official? — Meduza

    On October 28, the Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported that Russia’s conscription goals had been met. On October 31, President Vladimir Putin said that mobilization was completed — and that he’d “talk to the lawyers” to find out whether a “demobilization” decree was needed to make this official. Now, the Kremlin cites legal opinions that no such decree is necessary. But human-rights advocates are concerned: they think that Putin’s earlier mobilization decree, signed on September 21, is still in effect.

• Environment

  • RTL ☛ ‘Earth is in our hands’: Astronaut Pesquet’s plea for the planet

    From his unique viewpoint hundreds of kilometres above Earth, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet told AFP he felt helpless watching fires rage across the planet below, calling for more to be done to protect this fragile “island of life”.

  • NBC ☛ Emperor penguins are now a threatened species due to climate change, U.S. officials say

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said emperor penguins should be protected under the law since the birds build colonies and raise their young on the Antarctic ice threatened by climate change.

    The wildlife agency said a thorough review of evidence, including satellite data from 40 years showed the penguins aren’t currently in danger of extinction, but rising temperatures signal that is likely. The agency’s review followed a 2011 petition by the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity to list the bird under the Endangered Species Act.

  • Energy

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Greater Fool Supply-Chain Crisis

      Below the fold I look into this persistent failure to proceed moon-wards

    • RTL ☛ Do you know these new road signs?

      Tim Wagner confirms that this is indeed the case. One sign that is quite recent and that drivers will see more and more on the road is: Rue Cyclable. With this sign, several rules must be followed: [...]

• Finance

  • Firstpost ☛ Explained: How Elon Musk is trying to avoid paying $122 million severance to Parag & other fired Twitter exec

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Hill ☛ Celebs eye Twitter exit after Musk takeover

    The controversial Tesla CEO was named the sole director of Twitter on Monday after completing his $44 billion acquisition of the company last week. Musk has suggested he plans to lift lifelong bans and transform Twitter’s content moderation policies, leading critics to express concerns about the spread of misinformation.

  • The Hill ☛ Groups call on top Twitter advertisers to press Musk to enforce rules

    Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Google and Disney were among the 20 advertisers to receive the open letter, signed by groups including the NAACP, the Center for American Progress, GLAAD, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, and #Voteprochoice. The effort was organized by Free Press, Media Matters and Accountable Tech.

  • The Hill ☛ Musk to raise Twitter Blue to $8 per month: Current checkmark system ‘bull—-‘

    Musk called Twitter’s “current lords & Peasants system” governing who has a blue checkmark or not “bullshit” in his post about the new system he’s planning to launch.

  • Axios ☛ Elon Musk and Twitter’s Saudi situation

    The big picture: Murphy is aware of the history. In a tweet, he argued: “The Saudis could have cashed out, like most everyone else. That would have been the financially sound thing to do. Instead, they allied with Musk … There’s a clear political motivation to their decision, and CFIUS should get to the bottom of it.”

  • Axios ☛ “It’s going to be a bloodbath”: Twitter workers brace for cuts

    Reports suggest those executives were fired “for cause,” which could allow Musk to avoid large payouts in cash and stock.

  • Variety ☛ Elon Musk Calls Twitter’s Verification System ‘Bulls—,’ Says Twitter Blue Will Cost $8 per Month for Blue Check Mark and Other New Perks

    Elon Musk, less than a week into his ownership of Twitter, announced that the price of Twitter Blue will increase to $8 per month — and will be the only way to achieve verification on the platform.

  • Tim Bray ☛ How Much For Twitter?

    Following on Mr Musk’s acquisition of Twitter a discussion has broken out about what to charge for. Which makes sense, because Twitter revenue is kind of lousy, notably out of sync with its societal importance, and now they’ve got a great big honking debt to service.

    Whatever I may think about Twitter’s leadership, previous or current, I like the service and would prefer that it continue functioning. In fact, I like it enough to pay for it! But how much and what for?

  • Matt Rickard ☛ What If Google Builds This?

    But behind every bad question is a shred of truth. For later-stage startups (let’s say $1B+), incumbents will enter the market. At that point, the question is probably more nuanced — how much better is the distribution, production, or other advantages?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Axios ☛ Elon Musk tweets misinformation about Paul Pelosi

      Why it matters: Musk linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known for years for publishing false stories.

    • New York Times ☛ Letters, Tweets, TV: How Midterm Disinformation Has Washed Over Pennsylvania

      Pennsylvania, with about 13 million people, is by no means unique when it comes to the problem, but as a swing state narrowly won by President Biden in 2020, it has become a disinformation battleground ahead of the midterms on Nov. 8. The result has hardened the state’s partisan divide and deepened distrust not only of politicians but of the political process itself since the way ballots are cast and counted has been at the heart of much of the disinformation swirling around.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Firstpost ☛ Racial slurs on Twitter increased by 500 per cent after Elon Musk took over, platform blames trolling campaign

  • Help Net Security ☛ Instagram account suspension wave hits users – Help Net Security

  • New York Times ☛ Instagram Users Report Widespread Account Suspensions

    Unable to post Halloween photos on the app, users sought answers on Twitter and other platforms, with many of them saying they had no idea what the violations cited by Instagram could have been.

    Meta, the app’s parent company, confirmed that users in different parts of the world had issues accessing their accounts, but a spokesperson said in a statement that those problems had been resolved.

  • Jerusalem Post ☛ Iranian teen girl beaten to death by police for tearing Khomeini’s photo – report

    An Iranian girl in middle school was beaten to death after police officers found a torn-up photo of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in one of her schoolbooks, local news outlet in the Sistan and Baluchestan Province Haalvsh reported on Sunday night.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Youraccountcontent is permanentlysuspendedgone

    On October 23rd I got shadowbanned on Twitter, followed by a permanent suspension on October 25th. As someone who was very active on Twitter, I was surprised, shocked, and sad that this happened. Especially because I didn’t know why it happened.

  • WSWS ☛ Oppose the censorship of WSWS rail coverage on Reddit and Facebook!

    In the last 24 hours, two different supporters of the committee have reported that attempts to post a recently published letter written by a Chicago-area railroader were removed on the popular social news aggregation website Reddit.

    Reddit is one of the largest social media websites on the planet, with over 1.7 billion visitors in May 2022. The advertising-based, for-profit website was valued at over $10 billion in August 2021 following an additional $700 million in funding led by Fidelity Investments.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Explainer: Hong Kong’s national security crackdown – month 28

    Another now-defunct pro-democracy activist group, Student Politicism, also saw four of their members sentenced to up to three years in prison or a training centre after they pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to incite subversion under the national security law. They included ex-convenor Wong Yat-chin, ex-secretary general Chan Chi-sum and ex-spokespersons Jessica Chu and Alice Wong.

  • RFERL ☛ Self-Exiled Activist Who Protested Against War In Ukraine Stripped Of Russian Citizenship

    A court in Moscow has stripped an activist of his Russian citizenship after he protested against the war in Ukraine. Arshak Makichyan, who is currently in an EU country but officially stateless, wrote on Facebook on October 31 that his father and two brothers were also deprived of their Russian citizenship. The activist, who is originally from Armenia but has lived almost all his life in Russia, said the court’s decision was politically motivated and linked to his position against the war. To read the original story from RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus, click here.

  • Meduza ☛ Wikipedia fined two million rubles ($32.6k) for articles containing ‘false information’ about war in Ukraine — Meduza

    A Moscow court has fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia, two million rubles ($32.6k).

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • VOA News ☛ Military Coup Propels Myanmar Into Global Impunity Index

    The press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) included Myanmar in its annual Global Impunity Index for the first time in 2022. Of the five journalists killed there in the past 10 years, three died while detained by the junta, according to CPJ research.

    Somalia, for the eighth year, tops the list published Tuesday. Mexico, which is on track to record its deadliest year with more than a dozen journalists slain, comes in at sixth on the index, which tracks unsolved journalist killings.

  • RFA ☛ Myanmar junta bans Irrawaddy news agency after months of harassment

    Myanmar’s junta has officially banned online news outlet The Irrawaddy and charged the outlet’s registered publisher for violating national security laws, state media reported over the weekend, following months of legal harassment.

    The ban is the latest on at least 20 media groups – news agencies, publishing houses and printing presses – since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup and began a crackdown on press freedom in Myanmar.

  • RFERL ☛ Family Of RFE/RL Journalist Says His Body Is Still Missing In Iran

    The statement sent to RFE/RL’s Radio Farda said authorities have failed to inform the family which state organ has seized Haghighatnejad’s body following his October 25 repatriation to Iran for burial in his home province of Fars.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran journalists demand release of jailed colleagues

    More than 300 Iranian journalists on Sunday called for the release of colleagues who were detained amid nationwide demonstrations.

    They signed a statement published in the Iranian Etemad and other newspapers in which they accused authorities of arresting members of the press and “stripping them of their civil rights.”

    “They did not have access to their lawyers, they were interrogated and charged before holding a public hearing,” the statement said.

  • BIA Net ☛ Who are the nine arrested Kurdish journalists?

    The arrest of the journalist and Şebnem Korur-Fincancı, head of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), sparked protests in the country the next day. The International Press Institute (IPI) condemned the action, stating that Türkiye regularly abuses anti-terror law to target journalists, The institute called on Türkiye to release all journalists immediately.

    Nine of the 11 journalists are still remanded in custody.

  • BIA Net ☛ Eleven journalists working for Kurdish outlets detained in ‘terror’ investigation

    Police have detained 11 journalists working for two pro-Kurdish news outlets in raids across five cities in “terrorism-related” investigations.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ Getting Started With Accessibility – Presented at WordPress Accessibility Day 2022

    Why accessibility is so important? It is said that 1 in 4 people (and recent stats say it’s about 15% of the world) identify as having a disability. That disability could be something you see, or invisible. You may not even know that someone has a disability unless they tell you. Accessibility is so important because it shows that you care and you want everyone to be able to access what you offer. If you don’t include accessibility you could not include 25% (or more) of your potential audience.

  • VOA News ☛ Iranian Protests Continue, Defying Crackdown

    Rights groups say more than 200 people have died during the protests, and hundreds, if not thousands, have been arrested.

  • Times Higher Education ☛ Iranian students defy official demand for end to protests

    In recent days, students at several universities – including Tehran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology and the Hormozgan University, located in a more socially conservative part of Iran – took the battle inside campuses as they tore down the barriers that segregate cafeterias, dividing men and women.

    The students’ actions show that they are “prepared to engage in civil disobedience because they completely reject the Islamic Republic’s gender apartheid strictures”, said Mr Brodsky.

  • RFA ☛ Authorities allow Tibetans in Lhasa to travel in region amid COVID wave

    Now authorities are allowing Tibetans living in Lhasa who are natives of the cities and towns of Shigatse, Kongpo, Lhoka, Nagchu, Chamdo and Ngari to return to their homes. But they can do so only after first getting in touch with their respective points of contact as set by regional authorities for “swift processing,” according to an official notice dated Oct. 31. They are prohibited from returning on their own.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Shirin Neshat: ‘Biggest uprising since Islamic revolution’

    DW: There are over 200 dead and the regime is striking back brutally. Is this extreme reaction a sign of fear?

    SN: This movement, which we Iranians now call a revolution, is the biggest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. We’ve had a number of different short lived uprisings in the last few years. There was the Green Movement in 2009, which lasted no more than ten days or so. And so many expected this to be another upheaval, kind of a hiccup. But we are now in the second month and it is not as trivial as they thought. This time it is not about the economy, unemployment or water — it is about women. And women are a very sacred part of society. For the men, these are their sisters, wives, mothers. So, the murder of a young woman is sacrilegious to the Iranian people. That’s why I don’t see the women or the people in Iran going back to the way they were six weeks ago.

  • Firstpost ☛ Iran anti-hijab activist missing for 10 days, family fear ‘abduction, rape, torture’ by authorities

    Armita, an Iranian girl, participated in recent demonstrations for freedom. She was taken to Imam Ali Karaj Hospital by the IRGC security agents on October 18. Hospital authorities said that their daughter had been arrested eight days earlier by Islamic Police.

  • Jerusalem Post ☛ Artist paints Marge Simpson cutting her hair outside Iranian consulate

    Both murals were almost identical, albeit with slight differences. The first mural depicted the famous cartoon character holding a pair of scissors in one hand and most of her iconic blue hair in the other as a reference to the Iranian women who cut their hair in protest of Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of the morality police.

    The mural was immediately painted over by the consulate, but despite that, it reappeared shortly after, this time with Simpson giving the middle finger and with a more angry expression than before.

  • RTL ☛ Women leaders call to expel Islamic Republic of Iran from U.N. Women’s Rights Commission

    The Open Letter was published in Sunday’s New York Times and expresses solidarity with Iranian women and girls, as well as men, who are continuing their daily protests for more than 40 days now across the Islamic Republic and abroad following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini.

    Reports of extreme punishments and harsh crackdowns against protestors by Iranian authorities have flooded international headlines and social media feeds in the weeks since Amini’s death, gaining worldwide attention and scrutiny.

  • India Today ☛ POCSO Act overrides personal law in case of minor Muslim girl’s marriage, observes Karnataka HC

    The accused in the case was booked under sections of the POCSO Act and the Prohibition of child marriage Act for marrying and impregnating a minor Muslim girl. The incident came to light when the victim visited a Primary Health Care Centre for a check-up. Upon examination, it was discovered that she was pregnant and was around 17 years old.

    When it came to court, the accused’s counsel argued that attaining puberty was the consideration for marriage under Mohammaden Law. The counsel further argued that since the girl had attained puberty at 15, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act was not applicable.

    The court rejected this by stating that since POCSO is a special Act, it overrides personal law.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU court prohibits extradition of Serb from Germany to US

    The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Friday that Germany is not allowed to extradite a Serbian national to the United States. The ruling decrees that a non-EU citizen cannot be sent to serve jail time for the same crime twice.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ ‘Auntie, he will kill me’: The woman murdered while the police asked her for paperwork

    Raneem’s husband, Janbaz Tarin, murdered both his wife and her mother, following an horrific campaign of domestic abuse towards Raneem. When they married in April 2017, Tarin, an Afghani Muslim, had warned Raneem: “We don’t have a divorce in our culture. The day you will be free from me is when I’ll kill you.”

  • ABC ☛ Family of man killed by Detroit police are suing them for $50 million

    Fieger also claimed White showed the public “edited videos” of the incident during the press conference.

    “He has never provided those videos to the family and we don’t want an edited video…we want the full video,” Fieger said.

    Despite his claims, Fieger says he and his team plan to obtain all video footage by issuing subpoenas to the Detroit Police Department and will release the videos to the public once obtained.

  • The Nation ☛ How to Crush a Movement for Racial Justice

    Little Rock, Ark.—It’s a scorching July day during the pandemic’s first summer. in the month since the murder of George Floyd, residents have gathered frequently in front of the Arkansas State Capitol, marching to protest the police killings of Black people across the country.1This story was reported in partnership with Type Investigations and produced with support from the Puffin Foundation and the Fund for Constitutional Government.

  • The Nation ☛ Guilty Before Innocent

    Writing in 1923, the prominent American judge and legal philosopher Learned Hand stated that “under our criminal procedure the accused has every advantage. While the prosecution is held rigidly to the charge, [the defendant] need not disclose the barest outline of his defense. He is immune from question or comment on his silence; he cannot be convicted when there is the least fair doubt in the minds of any one of the twelve [jurors]…. Our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.”

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ The Murder of Political Prisoners in Tehran | Frontpage Mag

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • LRT ☛ The man who brought internet to Lithuania and predicted smartphones

    For example, they do say that it is good that the internet was brought to Lithuania 30 years ago. It was brought in three months, not [...] like the Vilnius stadium which is being built for 30 years. It is an example to me of how not to work.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CBC ☛ Netflix subscribers in Canada can now get a break on the price — if they don’t mind watching ads

    Netflix essentially killed every part of the conventional television business when it launched a streaming video service 15 years ago. But now that it’s facing an existential threat of its own from upstarts closing in on all sides, it’s borrowing from the playbook of its old rival to save itself: advertising.

  • Variety ☛ YouTube Is Reselling Subscriptions to 34 Streaming Services, Including Paramount+ and Showtime

    The Google-owned video giant announced the launch of Primetime Channels, a storefront stocked with 34 streaming services, available for any YouTube user to subscribe to. The lineup includes Paramount Global’s Paramount+ and Showtime, Lionsgate’s Starz, MGM’s Epix, AMC Networks’ AMC+ and TelevisaUnivision’s ViX+, along with more than two dozen niche-oriented channels. Users can sign up through YouTube’s Movies & TV hub; initially, the channels will be available only in the U.S.

    Notably absent from YouTube’s Primetime Channels lineup are major streamers including Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max — which are also unavailable in Amazon Prime Channels, its collection of third-party streaming services that Prime members can subscribe to.

• Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • Latvia ☛ For Stability! party banned from using S! as its trademark

      The court has satisfied the request of the municipality of Sigulda to provide temporary protection for the “S!” trademark, which has been used by the municipality for over 12 years on its own and as part of the slogan S!gulda aizrauj (S!gulda excites). The municipality of Sigulda claims the right to be the only user of this trademark in Latvia in order not to create misleading associations with the values of the municipality.

      The Court has prohibited the use of the trademark, including advertising and representation materials, without the permission of the municipality of Sigulda, until the final decision.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Don’t Feed Copyright Trolls: Canadian Court Urged to Protect Internet Users

      Copyright holders often write to internet billpayers claiming that their IP addresses have been linked to piracy. They say that billpayers are liable because they pirated content themselves or failed to stop someone else who did. When movie company Voltage Holdings tried to win default judgments against 30 internet subscribers, none of whom were shown to be the actual infringers, a judge refused to comply. In its appeal, Voltage says the judge made the wrong decision.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ RIAA Seeks $250,000 in Attorneys’ Fees from YouTube Ripper

      After winning a landmark legal battle against Yout.com last month, the RIAA is seeking $250,000 in attorneys fees from the stream-ripping site. The music group successfully thwarted Yout’s request for a declaration that its service doesnt circumvent YouTube’s technological protection measures. This was a futile endeavor from the start, the RIAA argues.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • I hope I find all you fellow midnights well!

    It is over a month since I last graced the pub with my ramblings, and I admit I need to do the courtesy of reading what you have all been saying these past few weeks.

    I am trying to change habits. Again. The most sensible advice I have come across is to not to just stop doing something but to replace it with another action – don’t leave a void. We all know how nature feels about voids.