11.16.22

Jim ‘FTX’ Zemlin: “My Wife Who is a Successful Technology Executive and Harvard MBA [and Fraudster Facing Class Action Lawsuit for Securities Fraud] Really Had an Obvious Look of Disappointment… When I Told Her I Worked at a Non-Profit” [sic]

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Videos at 2:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Mr. Zemlin promotes Microsoft's version or vision of (fake) security; he did this again last month in the talk above (he’s paid to relay these talking points by Microsoft and Snyk as Linux Foundation sponsors) and here’s what he said about Sheela Microsoft, his Microsoft-sponsored wife who had defrauded a lot of people [1, 2]

This Month’s ‘Linux’ Foundation Event (Linux Foundation Member Summit 2022) Sponsored by the Company That Attacks Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 1:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Linux Foundation Member Summit 2022 - Keynote Sessions

Summary: The Linux Foundation‘s latest event is, as usual, beholden to the company which attacks Linux the most (Microsoft); this contributes to censorship

‘Linux’ Foundation Became an Instrument of Microsoft and Proprietary Software Openwashing

Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 1:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

As part of the openwashing PR stunts so far this week (paid-for press releases and sponsored fluff disguised as “news”):

LF Sonic PR
One might think it’s just some random project

Proprietary PR
But it is actually Microsoft and the Web site of the ‘Linux’ Foundation uses proprietary software

Github Sonic
Of course it’s controlled by Microsoft and its proprietary prison (GitHub), i.e. not vendor-neutral

Sonic is 404
And Microsoft linked to a missing page

Summary: The Seattle puff pieces from the Linux Foundation include openwashing Microsoft PR for Microsoft, amplifying deceit; to make matters worse, it promotes proprietary GitHub, a repository that is missing, and the Linux Foundation recently moved from Free/Open Source software to a proprietary and outsourced CMS (so basically everything is proprietary here, even the announcements)

Links 16/11/2022: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 and GNU Lightning 2.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • Ubuntu ☛ Apache Kafka service design for low latency and no data loss | Ubuntu

        Designing a production service environment around Apache Kafka that delivers low latency and zero-data loss at scale is non-trivial. Indeed, it’s the holy grail of messaging systems. In this blog post, I’ll outline some of the fundamental service design considerations that you’ll need to take into account in order to get your service architecture to measure up.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Video ☛ The Starship Prompt Offers Infinite Possibilities – Invidious

        Starship is a minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any most shells, including: bash, fish, ion, nushell, powershell and zsh. In this video, I’m going to play around with customizing the prompt by editing the configuration file.

      • Tux Digital ☛ 39: Tech Bug-Out-Bag – Linux Out Loud – TuxDigital

        Welcome to episode 39 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.

      • Video ☛ 7 Days To Die A20.6 | Server Mods – Boat House RP Base Tour | Hosted in AWS EC2! – Invidious

        I have wanted to try EC2 as a game server host for a while and running a 7 Days to Die dedicated server seemed like a great way to test! I’ve hosted 7 Days to Die servers before but never modded them. I was surprised at how easy it was!

      • Tux Digital ☛ Celebrating 300 Episodes by Giving Thanks to Open Source

        This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re celebrating our 300th episode! Thanks to you the listeners and to the amazing contributors of open source that give us stuff to talk about. Then we will be taking a look at a potential new contender for the Linux laptop championship belt? We might have a perfectly spec’d laptop on our hands. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

    • Kernel Space

      • LWN ☛ Linux 6.0.9
        I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.9 kernel.

All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.

The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at:
	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

thanks,

greg k-h
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.79
      • LWN ☛ Linux 5.10.155

    • Applications

      • Johnnycanencrypt 0.11.0 released

        A couple of days ago I released Johnnycanencrypt v0.11.0. It is a Python module for OpenPGP written in Rust.

        The most interesting update is for Linux users, now we have pre-built wheels for Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 & 3.11. You can just install that via python3 -m pip install johnnycanencrypt. You can also do the same on Intel Macs (for Python 3.10 and 3.11). But, I failed to build for Apple Silicon systems. I will work on it in the coming weeks.

        To know the Yubikey card version we can call get_card_version function written in Rust.

      • Anbox Cloud 1.16.0 has been released

        The Anbox Cloud team is pleased to announce the release of Anbox Cloud 1.16.0.

        Please see the component versions for a list of updated components.

      • Linux Links ☛ Excellent Utilities: Sticky – note-taking app – LinuxLinks

        This series highlights best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.

        Sticky is a note-taking app for the Linux desktop that simulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop. Sticky is written in Python, and uses the GTK3 toolkit.

        This is free and open source software.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to Install SSL Certificate in RedHat Linux Server?

        RedHat is a Linux-based server designed specifically for organizations. It’s a community-supported counterpart that has its multiple variants. But, when it comes to SSL installation, the process is still the same one. For instance, first, you must generate a CSR before installing an SSL certificate on RedHat Linux Server.

        Nonetheless, here is the complete SSL certificate installation process you’ll require to go through before installing the SSL certificate.

      • Beebom ☛ How to Switch Between Wayland and Xorg in Ubuntu | Beebom

        If you are getting a dark preview after recording the screen in Ubuntu, it’s most likely because you’re using the Wayland display server. We tried some of the best screen recorders on Linux recently, but the results were all the same. Only when we switched from Wayland to Xorg (also called X11) on Ubuntu did the recorders start working properly. So if you are having issues with the display server and want to switch between Wayland and Xorg in Ubuntu, we have compiled an easy step-by-step guide for you here. We have included the steps to move to the Xorg windowing system in Ubuntu.

      • H2S Media ☛ How To Install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux

        InfluxDB is an open-source database developed by InfluxData that prioritizes maximum efficiency with limited complexity, unlike relational databases such as MySQL and MariaDB or structured databases such as Redis. Although the software is distributed under an open-source license, the company also offers commercial extensions such as access controls for business customers within its root server and cloud services with graphical data analysis via a web interface. Some of its key features are Specialization in time series; Combination of several sources in one central instance; Very high processing efficiency; Support of Flux as a scripting language for administration and Collection of data from different sources, for example via the third-party API.

      • AddictiveTips ☛ How to upgrade to Fedora 37

        Fedora 37 is here and has an updated kernel, new drivers, Gnome Shell 43, and much more. This guide will cover how to upgrade your Fedora 36 installation to the latest and greatest: Fedora 37.

      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install Unity Desktop in Arch Linux [Complete Guide]

        Good news for Arch Linux users. Here’s how you can install the awesome Unity desktop in Arch Linux.

        Unity desktop was originally developed by Canonical and introduced earlier for Netbook computers with Ubuntu 10.10. Then it became the default desktop environment for Ubuntu until Ubuntu 16.04. Eventually, it was dropped by Canonical and replaced by GNOME as the default Ubuntu desktop environment from Ubuntu 18.04 onwards. However, in the recent release of Ubuntu 22.10 onwards, Ubuntu Unity became the official flavour as a spin.

        However, installing Unity desktop in Arch Linux was not possible until now. Recently it has been ported to Arch User Repository (AUR), and you can easily install it. Here’s how.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Use Grep Command in Linux [12 Useful Examples]

        Have you ever been confronted with the task of looking for a particular string or pattern in a file, yet have no idea where to start looking? Well then, here is grep to the rescue!

        grep is a powerful file pattern searcher that comes equipped on every distribution of Linux. If for whatever reason, it is not installed on your system, you can easily install it via your package manager as shown.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Apache Kafka on Rocky Linux

        Apache Kafka is a distributed data store for processing streaming data in real time.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install and Use MS SQL Server on Rocky Linux [Ed: Not only is this proprietary and controlled by Microsoft; it doesn't truly run on GNU/Linux, so better migrate to a free alternative]

        MS SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) developed by Microsoft.

      • OSTechNix ☛ How To Upgrade To Fedora 37 From Fedora 36 – OSTechNix

        Great news for Fedora users! Fedora 37 has been released!! This step by step tutorial explains how to upgrade to Fedora 37 from Fedora 36 and older versions. If you’re already using Fedora 36, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 37 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements.

      • TecAdmin ☛ Stop – Remove All Docker Container’s – TecAdmin

        Docker containers are great for many reasons, but one of the biggest advantages is that they can be stopped and started at any time. This means that you can easily remove a container if it’s no longer needed or you want to upgrade or reconfigure your system. And because Docker containers are lightweight and run in their own isolated environment, there’s no need to worry about having too much overhead on your system.

        So when it comes time to clean up after using Docker, it’s important to remove all of the containers first before starting the process of removing Docker itself. Otherwise, you may find yourself with a mess on your hands.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 21 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP, intended to handle the administration of MySQL and MariaDB over the Web. It has become one of the most popular MySQL administration tools, especially for web hosting services.

        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 phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Pinta on Fedora 37/36/35 [Ed: Microsoft Mono infestation; better not recommend this]

        Pinta is a free, open-source image editing tool for Linux distributions such as Fedora. The user interface is straightforward, making it an excellent choice for novice users. The drawing tools are comprehensive and easy to use, and the wide range of effects makes it easy to add a professional touch to your images. One of the best features of Pinta is the ability to create unlimited layers, which is impossible with other image editing tools. This makes it possible to experiment with different effects and corrections without damaging the original image.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Pinta on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the command line terminal and alternative methods using the default DNF package manager or for users that favor the most up-to-date version available with the Flatpak alternative method.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ How I decreased the time to create and destroy an OCI container to 5 milliseconds | Enable Sysadmin

        The journey to speed up running OCI containers took longer than expected, but the effort was worth it.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Plex Media Server on Fedora 37/36/35

        Plex Media Server is a powerful software that allows you to store all your digital media content in one place. It is extremely popular with people who have large TV and movie libraries, as it allows them to share their content with friends and family. Plex Media Server organizes your files and content into categories, making it easy to find what you are looking for. It also supports a wide range of client applications to access your content on your TV, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, Mobile App, and many more platforms. Fedora is an excellent platform for running Plex Media Server, providing stable and reliable performance, especially with the six-month release schedule; it suits personal home use perfectly.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Plex Media Server on Fedora Linux 37/36/35 Linux workstation desktop or headless server using the command line terminal, along with some basic guidance on first-time setup.

      • NextGenTips ☛ How to install Ruby on Manjaro Linux – NextGenTips

        Installing Ruby is a bit of a hustle simply because Ruby on Rails has many dependencies. It depends on Sqlite3, node, and yarn which sometimes becomes tiresome to start getting all the dependencies together.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDE Official ☛ KDE’s New Goals – Join the Kick Off Meeting | KDE.news

          Our previous Goals, Consistency, All about the Apps, and Wayland; are not forgotten! We will continue to focus on them moving forward. However, the selection of the new Goals indicate where the Community wants to go next, and it’s now time for the Champions to leverage the support of the community and the KDE e.V to deliver on those ideas.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Our 8 Best Looking Linux Distros That Will Have You Staring in Awe

      I’ve been using Windows OS for almost my entire life–ever since I first learned about computers. And whenever I needed to do any development work, I would use macOS. But now Linux has changed everything regarding what I think about operating systems and desktop environments.

      While Windows and macOS are both user-friendly systems, they don’t allow users to change things per their own requirements or interests. Both systems prevent me from making my own computer exactly how it should be.

      If you want a system that will allow your creativity to flourish, use Linux. It’s an open source operating system that is smooth, customizable, user-friendly, and, best of all – it’s free! You can tailor it specifically for your needs, whether you’re using it for work or leisure activities.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

      • PCLOS Official ☛ Tokodon 22.09 – PCLinuxOS

        Tokodon is a Mastodon client. It allows you to interact with the Fediverse community. Mastedon has microblogging features similar to the Twitter service, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy options, and moderation policies. Now available for the KDE Plasma Desktop.

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • YaST Development Report – Chapter 11 of 2022 | YaST

        As the end of the year approaches, the YaST team is focusing more and more on evolving D-Installer with the goal to release an incomplete but decent prototype in December. But we also find time to improve (Auto)YaST with small corrections and not-so-small new features incorporated into openSUSE Factory and released as updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Neowin ☛ Fedora 37 arrives with GNOME 43 and two new editions – Neowin

        Fedora 37 is now available for download by the public and includes the latest software, notably GNOME 43. With GNOME 43, you get a device security panel in Settings that shows information about hardware security and firmware that’s installed on your system. Additionally, there are two new Fedora Editions, Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Cloud – these are designed for specific use cases.

        Most users will want Fedora Workstation, this is the edition designed for normal desktop computing.

        [...]

        Fedora now officially supports the Raspberry Pi 4 with accelerated graphics, unfortunately, Fedora 37 also drops support for the ARMv7 architecture. For developers, Fedora has included some of the latest updates for various programming languages, packages include Python 3.11, Golang 1.19, glibc 2.36, and LLVM 15. You can download Fedora now or use these upgrade instructions.

      • Red Hat ☛ What’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 | Red Hat Developer

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 brings new features and enhancements that deliver a more secure and consistent foundation for open, hybrid cloud environments and allow organizations to deliver workloads, applications, and services faster and more efficiently. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 can be downloaded at no cost as a part of the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals.

        This article summarizes some of the ways Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 further improves the developer experience.

      • Business Wire ☛ Red Hat Introduces Latest Versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Business Wire

        Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Along with the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7, these minor versions add and refine capabilities for a wide range of enterprise IT needs, from helping to streamline complex infrastructure environments to improving the security stance of containerized applications.

      • Enterprisers Project ☛ A 15-minute primer on Kubernetes | The Enterprisers Project

        Kubernetes has been admired by cutting-edge technology enthusiasts and engineers since its initial release in 2014. Container orchestration was still a relatively new concept at that time. As more software development teams began adopting containers, the demand for Kubernetes grew. Kubernetes is now revolutionizing the way companies of all sizes do business. According to Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, 70 percent of IT leaders say their organizations are using Kubernetes.

        Whether your organization is an early adopter or you’re just getting started, the possibilities for automation, optimization, and innovation are endless with Kubernetes. But time is not endless. That’s why The Enterprisers Project put together a Kubernetes primer that you can read in less than 15 minutes.

      • Red Hat ☛ Why OpenShift is essential for containerized applications | Red Hat Developer

        Over the past few decades, application development has been evolving from bare metal hosting to virtualization to containers, leading to the adoption of the Kubernetes orchestration platform. This article traces these developments and explains how Red Hat OpenShift provides the next level of application support.

        There has been an explosion in the modernization of application development and deployment over the past few years. Several publications such as Forbes and Business Wire quoted IDC’s prediction that between 2018 to 2023 more than 500 million logical applications will be developed, which is equal to the number of applications built over the previous 40 years. In addition, businesses expect faster changes to applications.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX Software ☛ GOLE 1 R mini PC offers Rockchip RK3588 CPU, 5.5-inch touchscreen display [Ed: Moving away from Windows]

        HIGOLE introduced the GOLE1 mini PC with a touchscreen display in 2015 mostly to get a free and legal Windows 10 license, but over the years the company launched more Intel models inspired by the original design. However, their latest model, the GOLE 1 R, is based on Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Arm Cortex-A76/A55 SoC instead and running Android 12 by default.

        The GOLE 1 R is equipped with 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, a 5.5-inch touchscreen display, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, a microphone, speaker, a gravity sensor, and a 2,500 mAh battery. The company also sells the GOLE 1 RN mini PC without a display, a microphone, a speaker, or a battery for power.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Stacey on IoT ☛ Podcast: Arduino Opta adds a little IT to the OT

        This week’s show kicks off with a discussion of the lawsuit between Arm and Qualcomm amid accusations that Arm is changing its licensing model. We cover what has been said, and what it might mean for the IoT before heading into some industrial news. Arduino has announced a programmable logic controller (PLC) in conjunction with Finder called the Arduino Opta.

      • Arduino ☛ Host the best BBQs ever with home automation | Arduino Blog

        Everybody loves a good BBQ. Getting your family and friends together on a long summer day and evening, cooking delicious food and having a great time as smoke drifts through the air — it’s the perfect weekend activity.

        BBQs can also be stressful, however. Anyone who has ever tried to host one will know the challenges of managing multiple meats at once, trying to avoid any overcooking (or undercooking) disasters, and keeping track of all that equipment.

        Automation can help run your BBQ much more smoothly, minimizing any mishaps and making sure everyone has the best experience possible. In this article, we’ll look at how home automation can improve the BBQ experience and share some examples from Arduino’s Project Hub.

      • Bootlin ☛ Updated Yocto support for SiFive RISC-V platforms – Bootlin’s blog

        In the next releases, we plan to continue to update BSP parts, as well as the layers, in order to stick as close as possible to the mainline. In addition, we are working to improve CI/CD in order to increase the quality and the tests coverage.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Medevel ☛ 15 Free and Open-source Self-hosted Messaging Platform And Slack Alternatives

      RocketChat is another Slack alternative messaging platform that you can self-host at your server. It supports audio and video calls, file attachments, full-text search, and many other features.

      RocketChat offers mobile and desktop clients alongside a web version which supports mobile as well.
      Like Slack, Users can create groups, use hashtags in messages, pin and bookmark messages, and allows a high level customization.

      RocketChat comes with a desktop clients, web self-hosted server/ client, and mobile apps.
      It supports webhooks, embedded chat widget, and features a rich real-time API.

    • OpenSource.com ☛ How open source powers innovation | Opensource.com

      One possible answer is the corporate research lab. More long-term focused than most company product development efforts, corporate labs have a long history, going back to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. Perhaps most famous is Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor—although software folks may associate it more with Unix and the C programming language.

      But corporate laboratories have tended to be more associated with dominant firms that could afford to let large staffs work on very forward-looking and speculative research projects. After all, Bell Labs was born of the AT&T telephone monopoly. Corporate labs also aren’t known for playing with their counterparts elsewhere in industry. Even if their focus is long-term, they’re looking to profit from their IP eventually, which also means that their research is often rooted in technologies commercially relevant to their business.

    • Video ☛ Build Your Own Mastodon Server on Debian (Step by Step Server Build Guide) – Invidious

      There’s way too much drama with Twitter nowadays, so the alternatives are looking more attractive than ever. Setting up your own Mastodon server is a fun project, and also a potential alternative to Twitter. In this video, Jay walks you through the entire process of setting up your own Mastodon server on a Debian-based VPS.

    • OpenSource.com ☛ How to address challenges with community metrics | Opensource.com

      The previous two articles in this series looked at open source community health and the metrics used to understand it. They showed examples of how open source communities have measured at their health through metrics. This final article brings those ideas together, discussing the challenges of implementing community health metrics for your own community.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Document Foundation ☛ Month of LibreOffice, November 2022 – Half-way point… – The Document Foundation Blog

        So far, 203 sticker packs have been awarded in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022. But we’re only half of the way through – so if your name (or username) isn’t on the list, join in, help to make LibreOffice even better, and get some cool swag! We’ll have 10 bonus pieces of merchandise to give away, to 10 lucky people…

    • GNU Projects

      • GNU ☛ GNU lightning – News: GNU lightning 2.2.0 release [Savannah]
        GNU lightning 2.2.0 released! 
GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs 
that compile assembly code at run time. 
Development: 

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/lightning.git

Download release: 
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/lightning/lightning-2.2.0.tar.gz 
  GNU Lightning 2.2.0 extends the 2.1.4 release adding support for 
Darwin aarch64, tested on Apple M1. 
  Now there is the new --enable-devel-strong-type-checking configure 
option, not enabled by default, but code that works with that option 
will work on Apple M1. 
  This release required significant rework as the Apple abi in aarch64 
requires arguments to be truncated and zero/sign extended, unlike all 
other ports. Jit generation will understand it, and use the system ABI, 
avoiding double truncate and zero/sign extension. 
  Due to the significant rework, the library major number was bumped, 
and the opportunity used to reorder the jit_code_t enumeration.

    • Programming/Development

      • LWN ☛ Meta’s Sapling source-code management system [LWN.net] [Ed: Corbet ('Linux' Foundation) shilling and openwashing Facebook, a top sponsor of 'Linux' Foundation; the server side is proprietary]

        At this point, only the client side of the system has been released; the company “hopes to” release the rest later.

      • Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023 with GNOME! – Felipe Borges

        Google has recently announced the 2023 edition of Google Summer of Code.

        The 2022 changes in the program’s format have been successful and are continuing for 2023, with just a small adjustment around eligibility (described in the link above).

        GNOME is certainly going to apply to be a mentoring organization, and we hope to once again be part of the program.

      • Qt ☛ From design to reality: building functional UIs with Qt Design Studio

        Qt Design Studio offers a comprehensive set of resources to help UI designers bring digital experiences to life. Any 2D and 3D graphics content can be seamlessly imported into Qt Design Studio via Qt Bridge technology and transformed into a real UI application. This blog post looks at some of the features we love the most.

      • Qt ☛ Qt Design Studio 3.8 Released

        We are proud to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.8.

  • Leftovers

    • Linux Foundation

    • Security

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

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (grub2, nginx, and wordpress), Red Hat (389-ds-base, bind, buildah, curl, device-mapper-multipath, dnsmasq, dotnet7.0, dpdk, e2fsprogs, grafana-pcp, harfbuzz, ignition, Image Builder, kernel, keylime, libguestfs, libldb, libtiff, libvirt, logrotate, mingw-zlib, mutt, openjpeg2, podman, poppler, python-lxml, qt5, rsync, runc, samba, skopeo, toolbox, unbound, virt-v2v, wavpack, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yajl), SUSE (389-ds, bluez, dhcp, freerdp, jackson-databind, kernel, LibVNCServer, libX11, nodejs12, nodejs16, php7, php8, python-Mako, python-Twisted, python310, sudo, systemd, and xen), and Ubuntu (mako).

      • CISA ☛ CISA and FBI Release Advisory on Iranian Government-Sponsored APT Actors Compromising Federal Network | CISA [Ed: VMware (proprietary) exploited]

        Today, CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Iranian Government-Sponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network, Deploy Crypto Miner, Credential Harvester.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • El Salvador’s Pegasus spyware case left uninvestigated ten months later – Global Voices

          Ten months ago, in January 2022, Access Now and the Citizen Lab confirmed that several journalists were targeted with the use of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware on a massive scale in El Salvador. At least, the mobile phones of 35 journalists from six media outlets (El Faro, GatoEncerrado, La Prensa Grafica, Revista Digital Disruptiva and El Diario de Hoy) were infected by this spyware between July 2020 and November 2021.

          Amnesty International Security Lab reviewed the report and verified forensic evidence on the use of Pegasus spyware against Salvadoran journalists. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said that “the use of Pegasus for the surveillance of communications in El Salvador reveals a new threat to human rights in the country. The authorities must stop any efforts to restrict freedom of expression, and conduct a thorough and impartial investigation to identify those responsible.” But president Nayib Bukele’s government has denied its responsibility and showed not results or signs of a full investigation of this case of espionage.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Bruce Schneier ☛ Russian Software Company Pretending to Be American – Schneier on Security [Ed: CIA pretended to be Swiss company, so...]

        Computer code developed by a company called Pushwoosh is in about 8,000 Apple and Google smartphone apps. The company pretends to be American when it is actually Russian.

      • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Russian software disguised as American finds its way into U.S. Army, CDC apps
         [Ed: The problem is not that it is Russian; the problem is that it's proprietary and "app"]

        Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple (AAPL.O) and Google’s (GOOGL.O) online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.

        The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States’ main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the U.S. capital. After learning about its Russian roots from Reuters, it removed Pushwoosh software from seven public-facing apps, citing security concerns.

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Deutsche Welle ☛ Twitter’s sacking of content moderators raises concerns

        Until last Saturday, it was Melissa Ingle’s job to help keep Twitter safe.

        As a member of the company’s “civic integrity” team, the data scientist monitored the platform for political misinformation about elections from Brazil to the US, and she wrote algorithms to automatically detect similar content.

        “We wanted to make sure Twitter was a healthy platform,” Ingle told DW.

        Then, on November 12, a notification popped up on her phone, telling her she no longer had access to her work emails. When she realized that she had also been logged out of her Slack account, the 48-year-old knew she had been fired. She wasn’t alone. Thousands of other contract workers had their contracts terminated last weekend, in addition to about 3,700 employees Twitter had already fired earlier this month.

        “The cuts didn’t really seem to be targeted,” Ingle told DW. “It seems to be huge swaths of people who were just fired.”

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Public Knowledge ☛ Should Algorithms Be Regulated? Part 3: Evaluating Alternative Frameworks for Regulating Algorithms – Public Knowledge

        This is the third in a series of blog posts from Public Knowledge examining the public policy implications of algorithmic decision-making. A first post clarified what algorithms are and aren’t and identified some basic principles for attempting to regulate algorithmic decision-making, especially as it relates to content distribution. The second post cataloged the harms that can arise from algorithmic decision-making, including (1) harms to safety and well-being; (2) harms to economic justice; and (3) harms to democratic participation. (We’ve also written in other forums about the harmful consequences of unregulated, unproven AI.)

        In this post and the accompanying policy framework, we seek to assess various theories of change and related policy frameworks for creating accountability for algorithmic decision-making. We describe each approach’s drawbacks and benefits and put forward Public Knowledge’s perspective.

        Spoiler alert: There is no single or simple solution for the complex questions our exploration has raised. As you’ll see in our framework, there are several potential approaches for trying to mitigate the myriad harms algorithmic decision-making about content can create through direct regulation of algorithms. But most of them face substantial hurdles, particularly those that entail or even approach the regulation of user-generated content – most of which is protected speech. The hurdles include constitutional challenges, patterns of Supreme Court jurisprudence, or narrow or ambiguous definitions that would compound the challenges of content moderation for both platforms and users. As a Federal Trade Commission report on combating online harms noted, “governments, platforms, and others must exercise great caution” and focus attention on a broad array of considerations before turning to regulation to mitigate online harms.

      • Public Knowledge ☛ Alternative Frameworks for Algorithmic Accountability – Public Knowledge

        This framework was created to accompany the third post in our “Should Algorithms Be Regulated?” series examining the public policy implications of algorithmic decision-making.

    • Monopolies

      • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Joins 45 Groups Urging Congress To Rein in Big Tech by Passing Popular Bipartisan Antitrust Bills [Ed: This organisation had the audacity to publish this while having Microsoft inside its Board; They even use Microsoft's lobbying term "Big Tech"]

        Today, Public Knowledge joined 45 public interest and civil society groups in a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to pass the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act” and “Open App Markets Act” to rein in Big Tech. The groups call on Congress to pass these widely supported, bipartisan antitrust bills this year before the current congressional session closes.

        [...]

        “The bills are also incredibly popular with the American people and people around the world who depend on digital platforms. Poll after poll has shown the public [is] fed up with Big Tech’s unchecked power and eager to support members getting tough with them. In a recent poll, 77 percent of voters agreed Big Tech was too powerful and 65 percent were more likely to support their representative [for voting] for greater Big Tech regulation.

        “As history writes the final chapters of the 117th Congress, you face a consequential choice on how it concludes. Passing the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act would mark a triumphant, bipartisan and politically popular win. The choice is yours.”

  • Gemini* and Gopher

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

Links 16/11/2022: Big Changes at IGEL, Offpunk 1.7 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • LinuxStans ☛ How Linux Changed My Life (My Linux Journey)

      At the risk of sounding cliche, the statement “Linux changed my life” isn’t said lightly. It has changed not only the course of my career but also changed the way I think and taught me quite a few things about myself.

      I never made it through high school. In fact, until recently I haven’t been to school since I was 15. I’m 31 now. But a few years back while working at an Iron foundry I met someone who was an advocate of open-source software and Linux. He ran a non-profit on the side which taught Linux. He used Slackware, which is what I started with at first. He even gave me a laptop with Slackware Linux on it.

      With a lot of patience, and when I say a lot I mean more than most people have the sanity for, this man did his best to teach me the terminal and bash scripting, from the simple to the advanced, he tried his best. I wouldn’t say I’m a bad student, just a student with a thicker skull who 8 out of 10 times has to just learn things the hard way.

      So I wouldn’t suggest Slackware being the first distro to start with. But starting with it was like sink or swim rather than starting at the shallow end and learning slowly, it was more like being tossed into the deep end. But every Sunday I went to the non-profit and learned what I could and practiced throughout the week.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • CRN ☛ ‘Dream Come True’: IGEL Exits Hardware Business | CRN

        IGEL, a maker of well-engineered thin client hardware devices for two decades, is exiting that business as part of an all-out drive to make its popular Linux secure edge operating system the standard for Windows workspace computing across any device or cloud.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Snap/Snap-Store on Fedora 37/36/35

        By default, Fedora does not come with Snap or Snap Store installed as this is a feature that was built by developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, and Snap packages are installed from a central SNAP server operated by Canonical. Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on Fedora-based systems that are currently actively supported.

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 37: cascade layers

        Let’s say we’re using a combination of a tag and an attribute selector for styling e-mail input fields. This declaration is part of our base stylesheet and comes early in the stylesheet. Later in the document, we want to use a class to overwrite parts of the base styling: [...]

      • uni Toronto ☛ It’s useful to think about a ‘ground up’ recovery of your environment

        One of the things that many system administrators don’t like to think about is a total loss scenario for their entire environment. For people who run physical hardware, what you’d do if your machine room or data center had a fire; for people with virtual hardware, what you’d do if your entire cloud (short of your ‘offsite backups’) was wiped or deleted. Often we push this off as Disaster Recovery and then punt on it, because a real DR plan is both a lot of detailed work and also something that often doesn’t survive contact with reality unless you really, really care about DR (care enough to budget for it and test your plans and so on). However, I’d like to advocate for the exercise of thinking through what it would take in your environment.

      • Terence Eden ☛ How to search Mastodon by date & time

        I’m trying to build something similar for the Mastodon social network. Yes, I know it is new to you – but some of us have been there for several years.

        So here’s how to search Mastodon for posts made on specific dates!

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

        qView is a free, open-source image viewer designed to be minimal and space-efficient with super-fast opening images. The image viewer features no cluttered interface, just your image with a title bar containing features such as animated GIF controls for easy viewing on any device. For more information about what qView features and looks like before installing it, visit the qView website, which features some great examples of the image viewer in action.

        In the following small tutorial, you will learn how to install qView on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux desktop using the command line terminal with tips about installing the alternative development version and removing the application if required in the future.

      • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Find the PID of a Linux Process With pidof or pgrep

        Working with a Linux process often means knowing its process ID, or PID. It’s a unique number given to each piece of running software. Here are two ways to find out what it is.

      • Network World ☛ How to use errexit | Network World

        In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at a bash option that will cause a script to exit any time it encounters an error. It’s called “errexit.”

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install Latest Python 3.11 in Ubuntu

        Python is the fastest-growing major general-purpose programming language. There are a number of reasons attributed to this, such as its readability and flexibility, ease to learn and use, reliability, and efficiency as well.

        There are two major Python versions being used – 2 and 3 (the present and future of Python); the former will see no new major releases, and the latter is under active development and has already seen a lot of stable releases over the last few years. The latest stable release of Python 3 is version 3.11.

      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to install and use MongoDB Compass | FOSS Linux

        MongoDB Compass is an excellent tool for anyone who does not know how to analyze and alter data using command-line queries. MongoDB Compass is simple to download and install on major operating systems. It is a simple procedure that takes little time.

        This article will explain how to install and use MongoDB Compass and discuss its essential features. Furthermore, it will walk you through the MongoDB Compass Windows, Linux, and macOS installation processes. To effectively utilize MongoDB Compass on your desktop environment, follow the simple and quick procedures provided in this article. Continue reading to learn about the functions and benefits of installing MongoDB Compass on your OS.

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

        Wike is a lightweight and open-source Wikipedia reader app for Linux-based GNOME desktops and uses the MediaWiki API to fetch content from Wikipedia. The app has a minimalist interface, with just a search bar and a sidebar for navigation, and articles are displayed in a simple, easy-to-read format. Wike also supports dark mode, so you can easily read articles at night or in low-light conditions.

        The following tutorial will teach you how to install Wike on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using a COPR repository using the command line terminal with cli commands for those looking for a fast and lightweight way to view Wikipedia articles on their Linux desktop.

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

        CMake is a well-known compiler that has gained much popularity in recent years. The main reason for its popularity is that it is open-source and cross-platform, so developers can use it on any operating system they want and don’t have to worry about licensing fees. Additionally, CMake can generate wrappers and executables in any combination, making it very versatile. Given Fedora is an upstream-focused distribution on a six-month release schedule, most often, the latest CMake version is available to install, making the installation for developers requiring the latest packages very straightforward compared to some other Linux Distributions.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install CMake on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation or server using the command line terminal with two methods: dnf package manager with the native app-stream or compile method.

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

        When running Windows applications on Linux, Wine is a popular software many people use. However, one of the issues with Wine is that it can be pretty time-consuming and prone to errors when setting up required configurations for each application. Thankfully, a great program called PlayOnLinux can make your life much easier by providing automated installation of popular apps. This can be a massive benefit for those new to using Linux or who don’t want to spend a lot of time setting things up. Fedora is one distribution that makes it easy to install PlayOnLinux with the application being available in the default repositories.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to get the latest stable version of Opera on Ubuntu 22.04 / Linux Mint 21

        Today you will learn how to get the latest stable version of Opera on Ubuntu 22.04 This web browser is one of the most advanced you can find out there.

        Opera is a powerful web browser based on Chromium that tries to differentiate itself from its competitors with interesting new features that make it very appealing to advanced users. As you can expect, Opera has versions for many operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.

    • Games

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Hackaday ☛ Mastodon Comes To The IBM PC | Hackaday

      Elon Musk has bought Twitter for an eye-watering sum, and his live adventures in chaotic mismanagement of a social media company have become a compelling performance for the rest of us. As we munch on our tasty popcorn and enjoy the show, many Twitter users have jumped ship for the open-source alternative Mastodon. It offers much to the escapee including instances tailored to particular communities, but aside from all that it’s got something Twitter never had. You can now use a Mastodon client on an IBM PC.

      Many of you are no doubt looking askance at us, as you have been Tooting for years from behind the keyboard of a PC. But it’s likely that the PC you’re using is a generic modern x86 machine running an up-to-date operating system such as a GNU/Linux flavour or Microsoft Windows, by contrast here we’re referring to the original, the daddy of them all. Because the client we’re talking about is DOStodon, designed to run on a real IBM PC as though it’s the early 1980s again.

    • Wired ☛ The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment

      Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has been working long hours to keep his own server, Mastodon.Social, running, while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon, but he took time to videochat with WIRED from his home in Germany. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

      In light of recent events at Twitter a lot of the people that I follow (or used to follow) on that platform have started evaluating (or moved) to Mastodon. And I also have a Mastodon account now. But after a few days with this thing I have a lot of thoughts on this that are too long for a Tweet or Toot. Since some of my followers asked though I decided do a longform version of this and explain my dissatifaction with Mastodon a bit better.

      The short version of this is that I believe that Mastodon — more specifically federation and decentralization won’t work out.

    • Bèr Kessels ☛ The Fediverse is Inefficient (but that’s a good trade-off)

      Let’s address the mammoth in the room: the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, is very inefficient.

      In this post I’ll show why it is inefficient and why that isn’t a problem.

      A great analogy to explain this with is growing food.

    • Matt Rickard ☛ On the Mastodon Experiment

      Users don’t want to host their own servers. Even the most technical ones. SaaS is the optimal solution. I’m an avid believer in running open-source software and controlling your own destiny, but for the vast majority of services, I don’t want to manage it.

      Moderation and user experience vary from instance to instance. It’s hard to sustain at scale. In practice, decentralized moderation ends up as a series of fiefdoms without accountability (e.g., if you don’t like it, find another server).

    • Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut

      Releasing Offpunk 1.7 today which fixes a handful of crashes and brings some nice features.

    • Hackaday ☛ Blender Builds LEGO Models

      Blender is a free and open source computer graphics package that’s used in the production of everything from video games to feature films. Now, as demonstrated by [Joey Carlino], the popular program can even be used to convert models into LEGO.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • uni Toronto ☛ Firefox will now copy non-breaking spaces from HTML and that can be a problem

          For many years, Firefox’s copy and paste had a limitation or bug, which is that if you selected something that contained non-breaking spaces and copied it, the non-breaking spaces turned into regular spaces when you pasted. This was traced in bug #359303 and then bug #1769534. In recent Firefox Nightly builds, Mozilla (finally) changed this behavior, but the change has created a new issue for some people, me included. At least on Unix, there are a number of things that don’t consider non-breaking spaces to be spaces (or whitespace).

        • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: Mozilla Comments on FTC’s “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security” Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

          Like regulators around the world, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is exploring the possibility of new rules to protect consumer privacy online. We’re excited to see the FTC take this important step and ask key questions surrounding commercial surveillance and data security practices, from advertising and transparency to data collection and deceptive design practices.

          Mozilla has a long track record on privacy. It’s an integral aspect of our Manifesto, where we state that individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. It’s evidenced in our products and in our collaboration with others in industry to forge solutions to create a better, more private online experience.

          But we can’t do it alone. Without rules of the road, sufficient incentive won’t exist to shift the rest of the industry to more privacy preserving practices. To meet that need, we’ve called for comprehensive privacy legislation like the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), greater ad transparency, and strong enforcement around the world. In our latest submission to the FTC, we detail the urgent need for US regulators and policymakers to take action to create a healthier internet.

    • Programming/Development

      • [Old] Bèr Kessels ☛ “How do I test X” is almost always answered with “by controlling X”

        First, there is the question: “can I control X?”. Because if you cannot, testing it becomes impossible. When X is some external service, or tool, for example a payment provider or email-server, and there is no way to control it, you cannot (, and therefore should not) test it.

      • Matt Rickard ☛ On Launching

        Consumer products lend themselves more to feature creep, which is the enemy of PMF. It’s never been easier to create software, which means faster MVPs, but also the possibility to build more out before you even reach your users.

      • ChiselStrike ☛ Why middleware may not be the right abstraction for your data policies.

        Every frontend developer knows, or at least suspects, that backends are hard. But why would that be?

        There is nothing intrinsically difficult with the business logic of backends: after all, it’s just code and algorithms. A fizzbuzz is a fizzbuzz: equally useless on the backend as it is on the frontend.

      • Lawrence Tratt ☛ More Evidence for Problems in VM Warmup

        VMs start programs running in an interpreter where they observe which portions run frequently. Those portions are then compiled into machine code which can then be used in place of the interpreter. The period between starting the program and all of the JIT compilation completing is called the warmup time. Once warmup is complete, the program reaches a steady state of peak performance.

        At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen: our work showed that, on widely studied small benchmarks, it often doesn’t. Sometimes programs don’t hit a steady state; sometimes, if they do reach a steady state, it’s slower than what came before; and some programs are inconsistent in whether they hit a steady state or not. A couple of examples hopefully help give you an idea. Here’s an example of a “good” benchmark from our dataset which starts slow and hits a steady state of peak performance: [...]

      • Making a Go program 42% faster with a one character change

        If you read the title and thought “well, you were probably just doing something silly beforehand”, you’re right! But what is programming if not an exercise in making silly mistakes? Tracking down silly mistakes is where all the fun is to be had!

        I’ll also state the usual benchmarking caveat up front: the 42% speedup was measured while running the program on my data on my computer, so take that number with a big old pinch of salt.

      • Rlang ☛ Promoting the Use of R in Mali

        The R Consortium recently caught up with Fousseynou Bah of the Bamako Data Science Group (also on Facebook) and talked about the budding R community in Mali. Online events allowed the group to broaden its horizons and invite international speakers to present at their events. They hope to host hybrid events in the future to make the most out of both online and physical event formats.

      • Python

        • Trail Of Bits ☛ Are you sure your Python ABI is actually stable?

          The age of Python’s packaging ecosystem also sets it apart: among general-purpose languages, it is predated only by Perl’s CPAN. This, combined with the mostly independent development of packaging tooling and standards, has made Python’s ecosystem among the more complex of the major programming language ecosystems. Those complexities include: [...]

        • Python Speed ☛ Who controls parallelism? A disagreement that leads to slower code

          If you’re using NumPy, Polars, Zarr, or many other libraries, setting a single environment variable or calling a single API function might make your code run 20%-80% faster. Or, more accurately, it may be that your code is running that much more slowly than it ought to.

          The problem? A conflict over who controls parallelism: your application, or the libraries it uses.

          Let’s see an example, and how you can solve it.

  • Leftovers

    • Hackaday ☛ EV Sales Sticking Point: People Still Want Manual Transmissions

      Call me crazy, but I’m ride or die for manual transmissions. I drove enough go-karts and played enough Pole Position as a kid to know that shifting the gears yourself is simply where it’s at when it comes to tooling around in anything that isn’t human-powered. After all, manuals can be roll-started. A driver has options other than braking and praying on slippery roads. Any sports car worth its rich Corinthian leather (or whatever) has a manual transmission, right? And you know that Rush’s Red Barchetta ain’t no automatic. Face it, shifting gears is just plain cooler. And it’s not a chore if it gets you more, although the fuel efficiency thing is a myth at this point.

    • Meduza ☛ Masters of adaptation András Tóth-Czifra explains how the war on Ukraine is reshaping Russia’s digital underground — Meduza
    • The Nation ☛ The Limits of Language

      it was something about the bounce in my step, in the rippling jiggle of my belly & breasts, something about the periwinkle painted pinkies, the purple pointers, the chipping its own kind of fashioning, something about the bend of the wrist, of the flick, about the way it shares the blunt, something about passing, breaths falsetto’d, about the difficulty of altitudes— & maybe less how & why, more when & where— all of the comings in & out, something about pride with a sibling fear of my own body, someone checking the clock, how a sentence shivers, something about my sentient shivering, everything about how i’m too sensitive sometimes, too sensual, something suspect & censured, something to do with attunement, with pulses in the blood, something about water & thickness & viscosity, something more like nectar, yeah, like golden honey, like golden bees & their buzzing geographies—the gut brain in the hive mind, something closer to how land shifts & water waves & waves, something like the supple becoming of flora & fungi, then, of drifting pollen, yeah, reaching closer to something in how limbs can reach & how nails reach in that reach like a camera eye zooming in, out, in, all a single take

    • Hackaday ☛ Rapid Prototyping To Measure Turbidity In Rapids

      [RiverTechJess] is in the process of getting a PhD in environmental engineering and has devoted a chapter to creating a turbidity sensor for river network monitoring. Environmental sensing benefits from being able to measure accurately and frequently, so providing low cost devices helps get more data and excuse the occasional device loss that’s bound to happen when deploying electronics out in the wild. Towards this end, [RiverTechJess] has created a low cost turbidity sensor that rivals the more expensive alternatives in cost and accuracy.

    • Hackaday ☛ Wearable Sensor Trained To Count Coughs

      There are plenty of problems that are easy for humans to solve, but are almost impossibly difficult for computers. Even though it seems that with modern computing power being what it is we should be able to solve a lot of these problems, things like identifying objects in images remains fairly difficult. Similarly, identifying specific sounds within audio samples remains problematic, and as [Eivind] found, is holding up a lot of medical research to boot. To solve one specific problem he created a system for counting coughs of medical patients.

    • Chris Hannah ☛ Reaching the Hacker News Front Page

      As you may have seen, last night I wrote about my experience using Arc Browser. I then submitted this blog post to Hacker News. Usually this gets a tiny bit of attention. But this time, it managed to get on to the front page. The highest I saw it was at 12, although the bulk of the views were once I went to sleep, so who knows, it could have been higher.

      Nevertheless, it’s been common to write a post to analyse the impact of being on the Hacker News front page, so since it’s now dropped to the second page after around 14 hours, I thought I’d write about the impact it had.

    • Jes Olson ☛ .io domains considered harmful

      [...] but what people may not know is that the .io domain name has an annoying history.

    • Buttondown ☛ Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”

      Now that Twitter is on a downward spiral I’m rewriting my favorite tweetstorms in a more permanent medium, so here’s the first: why do we have the term “boilerplate code”? It comes from the peculiar interplay of two industrial revolution technologies: steam engines and hot metal typesetting.

    • Next Twitter Announcements – A Bingo Card

      Since I was joking about this with two friends over text message about the poor decisions that the new head of Twitter is making, and I asked “Is there a bingo card?” and one said “You should absolutely make one!”

    • Wired ☛ Five real-world arcologies under construction

      The individual casinos themselves have many arcological features too, including careful climate control, isolation from the traditional day/night cycle, and careful management of scarce resources. It differs from many of the other projects in this list, however, by its lack of any real commitment to sustainability or environmental factors. In fact, in many ways it stands as the antithesis of those principles.

    • Axios ☛ Web3 is in FTX’s blast radius

      Web3, at its heart, is all about using blockchains and [cryptocurrency] tokens as tools for organizing decision-making, governance and financial incentives in every realm of human endeavor — from virtual world-building to social networking and from accounting to art-making.

    • Space ☛ US military’s X-37B space plane lands, ending record-breaking mystery mission

      The robotic X-37B touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida today (Nov. 12) at 5:22 a.m. EST (1022 GMT). The winged vehicle had spent 908 days in orbit — more than four months longer than any previous X-37B flight.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Ken Burns, US and the Holocaust

      That said, it would be fair for one to assume that with thirty-five films in the can (and six new efforts on the way) his perpetually expanding cannon would have a reasonable number of miscues, or lackluster projects. But I must say, although I have not experienced all his titles, Burns, in my opinion, has been rather consistent in delivering a sustained level of quality and integrity, in his bare-knuckled approach to filmmaking.

      Notwithstanding superb gems like, The Civil War, Baseball, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Jazz, Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The Dust Bowl and Hemingway, his latest endeavor, The U.S. and the Holocaust is the most compelling film Burns has delivered. The touching three-part documentary befittingly takes the United States (and its WWII allies) to task, for their negligent response to Germany’s inhumane assault on the European Jewish community. Full disclosure, my grandfather, Jerome (Jerry) Netburn, who I did not have the pleasure of meeting, was a Russian Jew who fought in World War II, but one does not have to be born of Jewish ancestry to voice displeasure in the loss of, approximately, six million innocent lives…

    • Science

      • Multi-ciphertext security degradation for lattices

        Abstract. Typical lattice-based cryptosystems are commonly believed to resist multi-target attacks. For example, the New Hope proposal stated that it avoids “all-for-the-price-of-one attacks”. An ACM CCS 2021 paper from Duman–Hövelmanns–Kiltz–Lyubashevsky–Seiler stated that “we can show that AdvIND-CPA PKE ≈ Adv(n,qC )-IND-CPA PKE ” for “lattice-based schemes” such as Kyber, i.e. that one-out-of-many-target IND-CPA is as difficult to break as single-target IND-CPA, assuming “the hardness of MLWE as originally defined for the purpose of worst-case to average-case reductions”. Meanwhile NIST expressed concern regarding multi-target attacks against non-lattice cryptosystems.

        This paper quantifies the asymptotic impact of multiple ciphertexts per public key upon existing heuristic analyses of known lattice attacks. The qualitative conclusions are that typical lattice PKEs asymptotically degrade in heuristic multi-ciphertext IND-CPA security as the number of ciphertexts increases. These PKE attacks also imply multi-ciphertext IND-CCA2 attacks against typical constructions of lattice KEMs. This shows a contradiction between (1) the existing heuristics and (2) the idea that multi-target security matches single-target security.

        The asymptotic heuristic security degradation is exponential in Θ(n) for decrypting many ciphertexts, cutting a constant fraction out of the total number of bits of security, and exponential in Θ(n/ log n) for decrypting one out of many ciphertexts, for conservative cryptosystem parameters. Furthermore, whether or not the existing heuristics are correct, (1) there are flaws in the claim of provable multi-target security based on MLWE, and (2) there is a 288-guess attack breaking one out of 240 ciphertexts for a FrodoKEM-640 public key.

      • Hackaday ☛ The Blood Factory: New Research May Open The Door To Artificial Blood

        There were news stories afoot this week with somewhat breathless headlines that suggested a medical breakthrough was at hand: “In a 1st, two people receive transfusions of lab-grown blood cells.” A headline like that certainly catches the eye, especially as the holidays approach and the inevitable calls for increased blood donations that always seem to happen this time of year as the supply gets pinched. Does a headline like that mean that someone is working on completely artificial blood?

    • Education

      • Niall Murphy ☛ Reflections on SREcon EMEA 2022

        Though I’ve been involved with SREcon EMEA many times before, this time was unique for two reasons: firstly and most importantly, we hadn’t been physically together since late 2019, and secondly, I was program co-chair (alongside Daria Barteneva) – a new experience for me. With the freshness of the experience still in mind, I thought it was the perfect moment to write up my reflections.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Missouri’s Sheltered Workshops Have a 2.3% Graduation Rate

        One weekday morning in July, Kerstie Bramlet was at her workstation inside the Warren County Sheltered Workshop near St. Louis, Missouri, putting plastic labels on rabbit-meat dog chews one by one.

        The 30-year-old, who wore a St. Louis Cardinals shirt and a blue-and-white tie-dye hat, is autistic and has intellectual disabilities. She was on dog-chew assignment that day with a dozen or so coworkers, who are also disabled. As they chatted excitedly about an upcoming bocce ball tournament — part of a local Special Olympics event — Bramlet and her coworkers formed an assembly line of sorts, some counting the dog chews using a gridded piece of paper to ensure they reached the right total before handing them off to a supervisor for shrink-wrapping.

      • The Nation ☛ Was This Professor Fired for Having Tourette Syndrome?

        In January 2020, Dutchess Community College in New York banned a photography professor named Lowell Handler from its property and declared him unqualified to continue teaching there. Handler, the school claimed, had touched students “in a sexual manner” without their consent and peppered his classes with suggestive comments. “Students have a right to an educational environment free of sexual harassment and forced touching,” wrote then-president Pamela Edington.

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Getting To The Heart Of A Baofeng

        In amateur radio circles, almost no single piece of equipment serves as more of a magnet for controversy than the humble Baofeng handheld transceiver. It’s understandable — the radio is a shining example of value engineering, with just enough parts to its job while staying just on the edge of FCC rules. And at about $25 a pop, the radios are cheap enough that experimentation is practically a requirement of ownership.

      • CNX Software ☛ An Oscilloscope with ARM+FPGA+ADC scheme CNX Software

        The FNIRSI 1013D is a dual-channel flat-panel oscilloscope with a rich set of features. It is cost-effective and useful to people in the maintenance and R&D industries. Although it has been on the market for a few years, I purchased one, and I decided to introduce it and disassemble it to check out the hardware design.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Rlang ☛ Using functional analysis to model air pollution data in R

        The data comes from DEFRA’s (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN), which reports the level of nitrogen dioxide (among other pollutants) in the air every hour at 164 different locations. For this analysis, we considered data recorded between November 6, 2018 to November 6, 2022.

        The data can be downloaded from uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/data_selector_service.

      • NPR ☛ Her miscarriage left her bleeding profusely. An Ohio ER sent her home to wait

        Holeyman, Zielke’s husband, says hospital staff seemed “hesitant.” The two of them wondered at the ER if that was because of Ohio’s new six-week abortion ban. “I wish someone had come out and said, ‘Hey, this is a state law, this is what we’re afraid of,’ and was a little more frank,” he says. Instead he says, paraphrasing what he heard: “It was, ‘Well, we don’t know if this [pregnancy] is viable, this could still be viable. This is the information you got in D.C., but we need to confirm it.”

      • NBC ☛ Walmart agrees to pay $3.1 billion over sale of opioids at its pharmacies

        The retail giant’s announcement follows similar proposals on Nov. 2 from the two largest U.S. pharmacy chains, CVS Health and Walgreen Co., which each said they would pay about $5 billion.

        Most of the drugmakers that produced the most opioids and the biggest drug distribution companies have already reached settlements. With the largest pharmacies now settling, it represents a shift in the opioid litigation saga. For years, the question was whether companies would be held accountable for an overdose crisis that a flood of prescription drugs helped spark.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ The scary chemicals you don’t want to see in your food

        UPFs are foods that are industrially altered to a high degree using techniques and ingredients not available in the home; think ready meals, sweet and savoury packaged snacks, soft drinks, confectionery, breakfast cereals and packaged bread.

        UPFs now account for almost 60 per cent of all the calories eaten in the UK. And they all come with a hefty dose of additives; artificial colours and sweeteners, emulsifiers and other chemicals designed to enhance the appearance, taste, texture and shelf life of manufactured food. But are all these additives safe?

      • Pro Publica ☛ A Florida Fund for Injured Kids Raided Medicaid. Now It’s Repaying $51 Million.

        Florida’s long-troubled compensation fund for infants born with catastrophic brain injuries has resolved one of its thorniest disputes: the claim that it avoided hundreds of millions in health care costs by raiding the safety net for impoverished Floridians.

        The Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, settled a three-year-old whistleblower complaint that alleged the program grew assets of nearly $1.7 billion partly by dumping health care and caregiving costs onto Medicaid, the state-federal insurer for poverty-stricken and disabled Floridians.

    • Microsoft Security Failures and Lies

      • Techdirt ☛ Microsoft Says China Is Abusing Vulnerability Disclosure Requirements To Hoard Exploits [Ed: Microsoft is more an enemy than China is. This is Microsoft leveraging nationalism fro distract from its liability.]

        Plenty of countries have vulnerability disclosure requirements in place. This is supposed to increase the security of all users by requiring notification of affected platforms or software of exploits that may be used by malicious entities.

      • Times Higher Education ☛ Why do university IT systems drive staff round the bend? [iophk: Windows TCO]

        The University of Edinburgh was recently brought to a near standstill by a switchover to a new payments system, with PhD students going unpaid, contracts cancelled and the overseers of multimillion-pound research projects unable to order basic necessities such as paper.

        While an extreme example, the case demonstrated what many who work in higher education have known for years: the systems universities rely on to function on a day-to-day basis are often apparently not fit-for-purpose.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Medibank sticks by [ransomware] ransom call [iophk: Windows TCO]

        But Mr Wilkins said paying a $US9.7m ransom was never an option and would have supercharged the [ransomware] industry.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Cyber attack to cost Medibank up to $35m [iophk: Windows TCO]

        “Based on our current actions in response to the cybercrime event, we currently estimate $25 million to $35 million of pre-tax non-recurring costs will impact earnings in the first half of 2023,” Chief Executive David Koczkar will say in his address at Wednesday’s annual general meeting in Melbourne.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Top Zeus Botnet Suspect “Tank” Arrested in Geneva [Ed: Windows TCO]

        Vyacheslav “Tank” Penchukov, the accused 40-year-old Ukrainian leader of a prolific cybercriminal group that stole tens of millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses in the United States and Europe, has been arrested in Switzerland, according to multiple sources.

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Techdirt ☛ Apple Sued After Another Study Finds Its Well-Hyped Privacy Standards Are Often Theatrical

          Last week yet another study indicated that Apple’s heavily hyped new dedication to privacy was somewhat hollow, with the company’s apps often extensively tracking user behavior despite claims that doesn’t happen. It was the latest in a series of studies showcasing how Apple’s pivot to a privacy-dedicated company is often a bit performative once you dig a centimeter or two beneath the surface.

        • Techdirt ☛ Public Records Expose Indian Government’s Full Access To Nation’s Internet Traffic

          The government of India continues to increase its monitoring of residents’ day-to-day lives. Like pretty much every other country in the world, India relies on the internet to handle communications, data, and multiple services used by residents.

        • BBC ☛ Google to pay record $391m privacy settlement

          The technology giant tracked the location of users who opted out of location services on their devices, 40 US states said.

          Google has been told to be transparent about location tracking in the future and develop a web page telling people about the data it collects.

          It is the largest privacy-related multi-state settlement in US history.

        • IT Wire ☛ Google pays out US$391.5m to settle privacy case in US

          The lawsuit was filed in 2018 after an article by the Associated Press noted that the check-box for “Location History” could not control location history across an entire Google account. The article also pointed out that many features associated with location-tracking were controlled by a second check-box with the name “Web & App Activity.”

          The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission took Google to the Federal Court over the same issues in October 2019 and won its case.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Michael West Media ☛ Come on Mr Attorney-General, transparency is more than a cry for opposition benches – Michael West

        Has the government forgotten who employs it? Everyone should get their Freedom of Information requests dealt with in a reasonable time, writes former senator and transparency warrior Rex Patrick.

        When Ralph Nader coined the phrase, “information is the currency of democracy”, he was talking about timely information and information beyond what government actively decides to share.

        And if you agree with the US consumer and transparency advocate’s proposition, then last week’s examination of the Information Commissioner’s (IC) performance at Senate Estimates by Greens Senator David Shoebridge would cause serious concern.

        Last financial year the IC received 1956 applications to reviews agencies’ Freedom of Information (FOI) access refusals. That’s up 60% from the previous year. And of those, the IC only got through 1377. That’s a deficit of 579 reviews.

    • Environment

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Neoliberal Investor-State System Is a Threat to Democracy and Planet

        In advance of the global climate negotiations taking place in Egypt, several countries announced important actions to curb the power of the fossil fuel industry.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Vanessa Nakate Condemns Fossil Fuel Lobbying at U.N. Climate Talks as Global Warming Devastates Africa

        At the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, we speak with prominent Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate about the impact of the climate crisis on the continent of Africa. Earlier today she spoke at a COP27 event and blasted world leaders for not doing more. She describes the need for wealthy nations gathered at the U.N. climate conference, particularly the U.S., to finance loss and damage for poorer nations in the Global South. “For the current and historic emitters, they need to take responsibility for the climate crisis, and they need to pay for this crisis,” says Nakate.

      • Scheerpost ☛ It’s Not Just Coca-Cola: Corporations Have Co-Opted the UN Climate Talks

        COP27 is covered with logos. But that’s just the start of companies’ influence.

      • DeSmog ☛ ‘Back Off’: African Climate Groups Decry Europe’s Dash for Gas at COP27

        Waving giant euro banknotes splattered with the words “blood money”, African protesters at U.N. climate talks in Egypt demanded European governments halt a “dash” for the continent’s natural gas.

        German, Italian and other companies have been scouring Africa for alternatives to Russian supplies in the wake of the February invasion of Ukraine, raising fears that new projects will lock Africa into long-term dependence on fossil fuels.At least nine gas deals have been struck so far on the sidelines of the negotiations – known as COP27 – five involving Africa. In the run-up to the summit, Egypt signed a memorandum of understanding with Germany to expand liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity by 2050. Last week, Tanzania committed to a $40 billion LNG deal with Equinor and Shell, while Germany and the United States agreed to finance Egyptian renewables to “free up” gas for export.“European companies should not be here in Africa,” said Dean Bhekumuzi Bhebhe, a South Africa-based campaigner for the Don’t Gas Africa coalition of advocacy groups, which rallied dozens of protesters in a designated space at the tightly-marshalled venue in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday.

      • TruthOut ☛ Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Gather at COP27 as Climate Crisis Devastates Africa
      • Democracy Now ☛ Hossam Bahgat on the “Full-Scale Human Rights Crisis” in Egypt as Country Hosts COP27

        Broadcasting from COP27, the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, we speak to leading Egyptian human rights advocate and journalist Hossam Bahgat about how authorities have launched a widespread crackdown on political dissent. Hundreds have been arrested, including lawyers and journalists, and police have been stopping people randomly on the streets of Cairo and other cities to search the contents of their phones. Meanwhile, imprisoned British Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has sent a letter notifying his family that he has stopped his hunger strike and asked for them to visit on Thursday. Bahgat disagrees with calls to boycott COP27, and gained entry through asking a foreign environmental group to include him. “Sustained engagement with the Egyptian government in public and private about its catastrophic human rights record can actually lead to some change,” says Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Urgent Climate Action Is Needed and Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer

        Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s dangerous dependence on fossil fuels, increasingly frequent and intense climate-driven weather events are highlighting the death and destruction that fossil-fuel dependence has wrought. Understandably, political and public pressure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, move away from insecure primary energy supplies, and develop new, reliable, secure, and affordable energy sources is at an all-time high. But rather than rushing ahead, we need to consider carefully which options are most realistic, and how they will be deployed and operate in the real world.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Major Media Outlets From 20+ Nations Demand Windfall Profits Tax on Big Oil

        More than 30 major media outlets from countries on nearly every continent published an editorial Tuesday calling on governments to impose a windfall profits tax on fossil fuel giants that have made a killing as poor nations face devastating climate impacts and people worldwide struggle to heat their homes, feed their families, and pay rent.

        “As a bare minimum, a windfall tax on the combined profits of the largest oil and gas companies—estimated at almost $100bn in the first three months of the year—needs to be enacted,” reads the editorial, which appeared at The Guardian in the U.K., The Nation and Rolling Stone in the U.S., The Hindu in India, Camunda News in Angola, El Espectador in Colombia, and dozens of other publications.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Vanessa Nakate Slams World Leaders for Perpetuating Deadly Fossil Fuels

        Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate denounced world leaders Tuesday for continuing to support new coal, oil, and gas projects despite overwhelming evidence that extracting and burning more fossil fuels will exacerbate deadly climate chaos.

        “You are sowing the wind and frontline communities are reaping the whirlwind.”

      • Energy

        • New York Times ☛ Collapsed [Cryptocurrency] Exchange FTX Could Owe More Than 1 Million Creditors

          The firm’s founder and chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, announced his resignation when the bankruptcy papers were filed on Friday in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware. Mr. Bankman-Fried had agreed to step aside at around 4:30 a.m. that day, the new filing said, after consulting with his own legal team.

          He handed control to John J. Ray III, a veteran of corporate crises. Since then, Mr. Ray and other FTX officials have worked “around the clock” to get the company in order, according to the bankruptcy filing. The firm halted trading and responded to a “cyberattack” reported late on Friday night, the filing said.

        • Craig Murray ☛ FTX

          The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to Biden and the Democrat’s mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors money with it.

          That is some trajectory.

          The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it: [...]

        • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: At least $1 billion of client funds missing at failed crypto firm FTX

          The exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters.

          A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.

        • CNBC ☛ Between $1 billion and $2 billion of FTX customer funds have disappeared, SBF had a secret ‘back door’ to transfer billions: Report

          Both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal found that Bankman-Fried, now the ex-CEO of FTX, transferred $10 billion of customer funds from his crypto exchange to the digital asset trading house, Alameda Research.

          Alameda, also founded by Bankman-Fried, was considered to be a sister company to FTX. Those cozy ties are now under investigation by multiple regulators, including the Department of Justice, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is probing how FTX handled customer funds, according to multiple reports.

        • SBF built bespoke ‘backdoor’ to outwit FTX compliance systems: Reuters

          He used bespoke software that was designed so that even external auditors would not be notified of changes to FTX books, the report said. It meant that no red flags were raised when $10 billion of funds were moved to FTX’s sister trading arm Alameda.

        • The Hill ☛ Why the FTX collapse is turning up the heat on Congress

          Washington policymakers are under growing pressure to write new rules for the cryptocurrency industry and crack down on fraud after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

          The federal government’s failure to find common ground on cryptocurrency regulation blew up in its face last week with the downfall of one of the industry’s most prominent and politically connected firms. As regulators pick up the pieces of what happened, lawmakers are going back to the drawing board to find a path forward — and point fingers.

        • The Gray Zone ☛ FTX partnership with Ukraine is latest chapter in shady Western aid saga
        • The Nation ☛ It’s Time to Cut Off Arms Sales to the Saudi Regime

          Last month’s decision by the members of OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day sparked outrage in Washington. Prominent Democrats were furious, arguing that Saudi Arabia sought higher oil prices in order to weaken US-led sanctions on Russian fossil fuels, and also to benefit Republicans by inflating the cost of gasoline before the midterms.

      • Overpopulation

    • Finance

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Workers Win’ as Illinois Passes Pro-Labor Constitutional Amendment

        Labor advocates on Tuesday applauded the passage of an Illinois state constitutional amendment enshrining what one proponent called “the strongest worker protections in the nation.”

        “Illinois is and always will be a workers’ rights state. This victory is a historic moment for our workers and our entire state.”

      • Michael West Media ☛ Foreign tax crooks nab hospitals, nursing homes, electricity – now aim to gut Origin Energy too – Michael West

        Australia’s electricity grid, hospitals, nursing homes. All off to Caribbean tax havens. What the blazes are we doing allowing a bunch of tax cheats to gut our essential services? What’s the scam?

        The scam is that if you are a financial engineering tax grifter from overseas and don’t pay corporate income tax in Australia, you have a 30% advantage over local companies when it comes to winning takeover bids. And these guys from Brookfield are pinning their ears back. Origin Energy is their latest target.

        And why not? They must be quietly thinking Australia’s politicians and policy-makers are a bunch of supreme numpties.

        A couple of years ago, Brookfield bought 41 private hospitals via the Healthscope takeover. These essential services are now controlled in the Cayman Islands. Then it bought a slather of aged care assets when it bought Aveo. Took that to Bermuda. Then it won AusGrid in an $18bn takeover bid early this year.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Billionaire babies: how James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch kept their eyes on the prize – Michael West

        Billionaire media scions Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer have a close friendship which has endured the ups and downs of mega-deals including Australia’s ‘Super League’ war, the collapse of One.Tel, the rise of Realestate.com.au and failure of Channel Ten – some of the best and worst moments of Lachlan’s career. This edited extract from Paddy Manning’s new biography of Lachlan Murdoch sheds new light on their tumultuous business history.

      • Scheerpost ☛ IMF Warns of ‘Wave of Debt Crises’ Coming in Global South, With War, Interest Rate Hikes, Overvalued Dollar

        The IMF said a “wave of debt crises” may be coming in the Global South, and “the global economy is headed for stormy waters,” due to war, rising US interest rates, and many currencies depreciating against the dollar.

      • TruthOut ☛ Biden May Extend Student Loan Payment Pause Again Amid Court Battles
      • Common Dreams ☛ Secrecy Enabled by Rich Countries Lets Corporations Dodge $90 Billion in Taxes Per Year

        An analysis released Tuesday finds that rich countries are allowing multinational corporations to dodge at least $89 billion in taxes every year by not requiring firms to publicly disclose how much of their profits they are shifting to tax havens.

        The Tax Justice Network’s latest assessment of the state of global taxation castigates the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—often described as “the rich countries’ club”—for failing to uphold basic tax transparency standards in the decade since the G20 directed OECD nations to collect and disclose country-by-country data on corporate profit shifting.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Asking the Right Post-Election Questions in a Nation Adrift

        Britons mourned the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and understandably so. The outpouring of affection for their long-serving monarch was more than commendable, it was touching. Yet count me among those mystified that so many Americans also professed to care. With all due respect to Queen Latifah, we decided way back in 1776 that we’d had our fill of royalty.

      • TruthOut ☛ Tenants Demand Emergency Measures From White House as Rents Skyrocket

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • VOA News ☛ Vietnam Using Jail to ‘Silence’ Human Rights Journalist, Lawyer Says

        Kurtulus Bastimar, an international human rights lawyer representing Trang, believes the legal case against his client is an attempt to stifle her.

        “In order to silence Pham, the government is trying to give the impression that her detention is related to state security issues and making ‘anti-state propaganda,’ when this is not true,” Bastimar said in a phone interview with VOA.

      • RFERL ☛ Two RFE/RL Correspondents Released From Police Custody In Moscow

        [...] Yury Lebedev and Yelizaveta Movchan were taken to a police station after a person whom the reporters wanted to interview called the police. [...]

      • Common Dreams ☛ Israel Refuses to Cooperate With US Probe Into Palestinian-American Journalist’s Killing

        The family of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh expressed hope Tuesday that the FBI’s newly announced investigation into her death will bring them “closer to justice,” as Israeli officials said they will not cooperate with the FBI and condemned the U.S. for opening a probe at all.

        Israeli Foreign Minister Benny Gantz suggested the Biden administration should accept the “professional, independent investigation” already conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which concluded that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank in May was too damaged to determine who had fired it.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • The Nation ☛ White Nationalist Hate Is Infiltrating Our Police

        It would be the first time the government has endeavored to do so, despite plenty of studies finding that the issue is a major problem. Over 140 years after Reconstruction saw slave patrols reform as Southern police departments, a 2006 FBI report warned of a new tide of “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Hate groups, the paper noted, have long found police departments to be fertile recruitment grounds, but there was now evidence of “self-initiated efforts by…those already within law enforcement ranks, to volunteer their professional resources to white supremacist causes.” Three years later, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted that the white backlash to a Black president might become “the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States”; the report was rescinded in the face of conservative outrage. By 2015, an internal FBI counterterrorism guide admitted that agency investigations of white supremacist and other domestic terrorist groups “often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”

      • Stacey on IoT ☛ Amazon is building robots at scale in Massachusetts

        Amazon has built a fleet of robots to help workers get packages from its warehouses to your door, and on Thursday it showed off two new ones. The first is Sparrow, a machine designed to pick up items (not packages) from a container and place them in a different container. The second is a concept for a new delivery drone called the MK30.

      • France24 ☛ Taliban bans Afghan women from gyms, public baths

        Activists have said the increasing restrictions on women are an attempt to stop them from gathering to organise opposition to the Taliban’s rule.

      • France24 ☛ Iran charges more than 750 over ‘riots’, issues first death sentence

        Authorities have denied claims by rights groups abroad that about 15,000 people have been detained in the ensuing unrest.

      • Scheerpost ☛ How It Feels to Visit an Apartheid Country

        Racial profiling in Israel is rampant. Abuse and invective are normal. This is the daily machinery of separating Jews from Arabs and justifying it in traditional colonial terms.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Inside an Anti-Abortion Meeting With Tennessee’s GOP Lawmakers

        When state Sen. Richard Briggs voted “yes” on Tennessee’s total abortion ban, he never thought it would actually go into effect.

        It was 2019, and Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. His vote seemed like a political statement, not a decision that would soon impact people’s lives.

      • The Nation ☛ Democrats Should Use This Moment to Codify Roe v. Wade

        I guess “Roevember” really was a thing. Lots of factors played a role in the Republicans’ underperformance in the midterm elections, but it sure seems like the decision by conservative justices on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade was a major one. The United States Senate might have been handed back to Democrats by Samuel Alito and his extremist ruling—signed, of course, by all five of the other conservatives.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Inter-American Commission Hears Landmark Case of Torture and Killing by US Border Patrol

        Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s widow, Maria de Jesús Puga, testified that her “whole family, we have all been bearing this pain, 12 years, 12 years of pain and anguish not knowing why, why they killed my husband.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Chilling’ Video Footage Shows Asylum-Seeker Being Force-Fed in ICE Detention

        Human rights advocates on Tuesday renewed calls for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop force-feeding detained people and end its reliance on mass detention after The Intercept obtained and published footage of a hunger-striking asylum-seeker being force-fed in 2019.

        The video depicting nurses forcibly inserting a tube into the nose of Indian asylum-seeker Ajay Kumar in an El Paso, Texas detention center marks the first time the U.S. public has ever seen the federal government force-feed someone, according to The Intercept.

      • Scheerpost ☛ College Degrees Help Incarcerated People Take the Next Step to Freedom

        Since 2013, the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons initiative, or NJ-STEP, has helped hundreds of individuals earn degrees. What’s next for the program?

      • The Nation ☛ Kiribati’s Disorder in the Court

        David Lambourne sat in the bare airport departure lounge in Kiribati, a nation of islands in the middle of the Pacific, and watched a curious standoff play out before him.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Jan Schaumann ☛ Who controls the internet? A look at diversity of authoritative NS records in gTLD

        But while the DNS root servers are known to be distributed, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the immediate levels up from the root, and so I went to analyze the diversity or centralization of the authoritative nameservers for the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and the second-level domains in those gTLDs.

    • Monopolies

      • Trademarks

        • Techdirt ☛ In-N-Out Trademark Tourism Allows It To Keep Mark For ‘Double-Double’ In Canada

          In-N-Out is In-N-At it again. In our many posts on the burger chain, we’ve discussed the company’s habit of what I’ll call trademark tourism. In posts that have focused primarily on its trademarks in Australia, we’ve detailed out how In-N-Out will conduct a popup restaurant in these countries that it otherwise has zero brick and mortar presence in, usually once a year or so, simply to satisfy the use-in-commerce requirements to retain its registered trademarks. This allows the company to lock up language and branding in a country it refuses to operate in generally, other than these bullshit events designed solely to allow it to keep these trademarks active and registered.

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ VPN Restrictions Are Problematic, App Association Tells U.S. Government

          The App Association is concerned about restrictive policies in countries such as Russia and China, that ban VPN usage. The industry organization shared its concerns with the US Trade Representative for the forthcoming Foreign Trade Barriers report. Recent actions regarding Iran already show that the U.S. is well aware of the value of VPNs.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Man Used Stolen Netflix Credentials to Acquire Content For Torrent Site

          A man who used hacked Netflix credentials to obtain content before uploading it to a torrent site has been sentenced in Denmark. The 34-year-old DanishBytes user was a staff member for two months, offering tech support to the site’s users. The stolen credentials allowed him to obtain content from legal streaming services using other people’s accounts.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Russell up a win 🏁🇧🇷

        I didn’t write about the Mexican GP. It wasn’t very exciting. Verstappen won, but got in a snit because a TV reporter said that Hamilton was “robbed” of the championship last year. I agree that he was robbed, nobody suggested that Verstappen stole it. Verstappen can be an arse sometimes.

        So we arrive in Brazil at a track that everyone likes. As usual, it rained and fastest in qualifying was Kevin Magnussen, who was delighted. His team mate, (son of) Schumacher, was slowest, so Haas had two amazing results.

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

IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:52 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

text logs

text logs

#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

text logs

text logs

#boycottnovell-social log as text

#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now

IPFS Mirrors

CID Description Object type
 QmXvHgYoRTZd2NLA6RrmPc1HJnnqkAMoQhRGLvhiGQMvp2 IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmaFfwbRMaxJCtKz7oDrDGBsczZjFfx3n5jZ3EzkTNAoM4 IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmdCecUcJ3hZdnDoyyfhkz1wFXJZMwjatkKe4L8KztHTcK IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmUkWUEUEgmM6pNmaM5NQ9KsTD87VPhWT3em8jz1zpn64x IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmUx7i18fFrEYbzcjPoM4pA4dCCE2mi8oKGniBy5msTM5X IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmQJQ15esB98YiKRTo5BxBnrTe6KiAe42Jda9aPmDSwtoT IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmYa1Kztqd4dCYZCfvEQBbvsRxATyJxS1f1gajwUf2pGV7 IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmRCgd4TCZ8iHAPSUhQX3BVQKQTLaGqD7ddmDpZRGpMKa5 IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmX7kxj1MQf3W96GYsRLdeSLXusC9JaFtCSoT8SGEYzW8w

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts