11.30.22

Links 30/11/2022: Mesa 22.3, EuroLinux 9.1, and Texinfo 7.0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Graphics Stack

      • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.3.0
        Hello everyone,

I'm happy to announce a new feature release, 22.3.0.

New features (in no particular order):
- GL_ARB_shader_clock on llvmpipe
- VK_KHR_shader_clock on lavapipe
- Mesa-DB, the new single file cache type
- VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout on RADV, lavapipe
- VK_KHR_global_priority on RADV
- GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced_coherent on zink
- VK_EXT_load_store_op_none on RADV
- VK_EXT_mutable_descriptor_type on RADV
- VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float on lvp
- VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 on lvp
- GL_NV_shader_atomic_float on llvmpipe
- VK_EXT_image_robustness on v3dv
- VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on lavapipe
- VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 on RADV & anv
- VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness on v3dv
- Mali T620 on panfrost
- Shader disk cache on Panfrost
- support for R8G8B8, B8G8R8, R16G16B16 and 64-bit vertex buffer formats
  on RADV
- initial GFX11/RDNA3 support on RADV
- various ray tracing optimizations on RADV
- extendedDynamicState2PatchControlPoints on RADV
  (VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 feature)
- Radeon Raytracing Analyzer integration (using RADV_RRA_* environment
  variables)
- OpenGL 4.5 on freedreno/a6xx (up from 3.3)
- VK_EXT_mesh_shader on ANV

A couple of notes for packagers:
- When building the Intel Vulkan driver with ray-tracing (using
  `-D intel-clc=enabled`, disabled by default), libclc is required
  (both as build and runtime dependency).
- Rusticl, the OpenCL implementation (`-D gallium-rusticl=true`,
  disabled by default), introduces a bunch of new dependencies.
  Make sure you read docs/rusticl.rst (https://docs.mesa3d.org/rusticl)
  if you're considering enabling it.

For now, no driver is enabled by default in Rusticl. See here for how
to enable them:

https://docs.mesa3d.org/envvars#rusticl-environment-variables

If you find any issues, please report them here:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new

The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on December 14th.

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

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

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

    • Instructionals/Technical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • Linuxiac ☛ Proxmox Backup Server 2.3 Brings Essential Enhancements

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

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

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

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • EuroLinux 9.1 Release Notes – EuroLinux Documentation

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

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

        NSS no longer support RSA keys shorter than 1023bit.

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

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

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

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

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

    • Debian Family

      • Daniel Pocock ☛ Shaya Potter & Debian WaReZ expulsion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Open Hardware/Modding

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

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

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

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

        • Google ☛ Long Term Support Channel Update for ChromeOS

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

      • Mozilla

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

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

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

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

    • Content Management Systems (CMS)

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

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

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

        [...]

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

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

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

    • FSF

      • FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2022-11-25

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

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

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

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

    • GNU Projects

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

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

      • GNU ☛ Texinfo 7.0.1 released
        This is a minor release containing minimal changes from the previous
release (7.0).

This is the first time we have issued such a release.  We have tried
to show restraint in including any changes in order to make breakages
less likely and to make it easier for people to review the changes.
We hope to enable quicker fixes for known, serious issues in official
releases.  We will also include any updated translations.

This release process corresponds to a new use of "git" branches
in the package development, where development continues on
the master branch, and only selected commits are added to the
release branch.  The git repository is to be found at Savannah
(https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=texinfo).

If there are further minor releases following on from the 7.0 release,
the version numbers will follow the pattern 7.0.X.  Any future major
releases will have version numbers of the form 7.X.

Please email any comments to bug-texinfo@gnu.org.

    • Programming/Development

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

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

        [...]

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

  • Leftovers

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ Just Say No

      Saying yes is easy—at first.

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Jeff Geerling: Just say no

    • Security

      • Matthew Garrett ☛ mjg59 | Making unphishable 2FA phishable

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

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

      • Privacy/Surveillance

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

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

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Finance

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ Booz Allen ticketmastered America’s public lands

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

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

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

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

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

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Advent of DDNet 2022 – DDraceNetwork News

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

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

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

      • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Feedback about Gemini and Gopher

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

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Congress Can Find Common Ground on Transparency

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

      • Copyrights

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

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

          [...]

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

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

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

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

      • Railroading, fudging, and cheating

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

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

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Alaska Weather Without Javascript

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

        • Viewing Mastodon Art from the Terminal

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

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

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

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

Links 30/11/2022: Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11

Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

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

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

        [...]

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

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

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

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Moving on.

    • Applications

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

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

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

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

        [...]

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

    • Instructionals/Technical

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

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

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

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

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Bitcoin Core on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • How to Set Up a Virtual Private Server

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Close Open Ports in Linux

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

      • AddictiveTips ☛ How to read Linux partitions on Windows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Dignited ☛ Advantages, Vendors and How to Set Up

    • Games

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

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

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

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

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

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

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

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

        • Plasma Mobile Gear ⚙ 22.11 is Out – Plasma Mobile

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

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

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

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

      Here’s a first look.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

        • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Chrome Dev for Android Update

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

        • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

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

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

      • Mozilla

        • Mozilla ☛ Celebrating Pocket’s Best of 2022

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

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

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

    • Programming/Development

      • Qt ☛ Qt for MCUs 2.3 released

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

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

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

      • Get Your Data On: Filtering Complex Data With gsignal

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

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

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

      • Simple interfaces to the forecasting API

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

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

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

      • Processing large scale satellite imagery with openEO Platform and R

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Perl / Raku

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

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

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

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

  • Leftovers

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

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

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

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

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

    • Linux Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Security

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

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

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

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

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

        And a rather special new version was released this week.

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

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

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

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

        let’s encrypt privacy problems

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

[This is a public disclosure of an issue reported 7 days ago to linux-distros () vs openwall org. CVE-2022-4139 has been assigned to the issue since.]

Incorrect GPU TLB flush code has been discovered in i915 kernel driver.
In some cases (Gen12 hardware with specific types of engine) the engine's TLB is not flushed at all. Depending on whether the GPU is running behind an active IOMMU there are two possible scenarios which can happen, due to stale TLB mapping: 1. Without IOMMU - GPU can still access physical memory which could be already assigned by OS to different process. 2. With IOMMU - GPU can access any memory, if the malicious process is able to create/reuse necessary IOMMU mappings.

It is currently not known if specific memory could be targeted, but random memory corruption or data leaks are a known possibility.

All Intel integrated and discrete GPUs Gen12 are affected, including Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, DG1, Raptor Lake, DG2, Arctic Sound, Meteor Lake. Fix has already been developed and consists of fixing the method of writing to specific registers. I am attaching a set of back-ported patches which implement the fix for all affected stable branches (all since 5.4).

This vulnerability has similar impact as CVE-2022-0330[1].
      • drm/i915: fix TLB invalidation for Gen12 video and compute engines

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

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

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

    • Censorship/Free Speech

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

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

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

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

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Hike: Bockmattli, Round 2

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

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AEHMNRU Wordo: FROGS
      • Group by Group Initiative

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

      • Shoes: the unknown resource

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

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

Links 30/11/2022: More Twitter Trouble and Tor Browser 11.5.10 (Android)

Posted in News Roundup at 7:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

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

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

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

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

    • Applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Instructionals/Technical

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

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

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 48: inset 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Raspberry Pi ☛ HackSpace magazine’s mince pie tutorial

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

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

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

      • Sean Conner ☛ Adventures in updating

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

      • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Word “Value” in CSS

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

      • AddictiveTips ☛ How to use snapshots on OpenSUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • FOSSLinux ☛ Bash test command explained with examples

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

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

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

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

      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to list databases in MongoDB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • UNIX Cop ☛ Protect your files with GnuPG

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

        [...]

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

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

        Let’s use it to protect a specific file.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Mounting SMB1 shares after kernel 5.15 | Rafael Cavalcanti

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

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

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

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

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

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

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

        Let’s dive in!

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

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

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

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

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

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

    • BSD

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Devices/Embedded

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Hackaday ☛ Aesthetic PCB Design Tips For Improved Functionality

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

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

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

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

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

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

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

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

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

    • Matt Rickard ☛ Sharing a Notebook

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

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

      So why are Colab notebooks the medium of exchange?

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

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

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

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

      • Mozilla

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Education

      • FUTO ☛ FUTO Fellows Program

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

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

    • Programming/Development

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

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

      • AIM ☛ JSON, It’s Time To Move On

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Dignited ☛ What is GitHub: Git vs GitHub, Pricing and More [Ed: Shallow and poor article, which repeats lies from Microsoft and omits a ton of information]
      • TecMint ☛ Best HTML & CSS Code Editors for Linux [Ed: This list starts with Microsoft proprietary software. Bad taste.]

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

      • Barry Kauler ☛ iftop compiled in OpenEmbedded

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

      • Perl / Raku

        • Rakulang ☛ Advent::Calendar – Raku Advent Calendar

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

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

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

          The site is now served over HTTPS.

      • Python

        • Earthly ☛ Structural Pattern Matching in Python

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

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

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

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

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

  • Leftovers

    • The Nation ☛ Myths of Doom

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

    • Science

      • Trail Of Bits ☛ Specialized Zero-Knowledge Proof failures

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

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Standing Desk With A Clever Flair

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

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

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

      • Hackaday ☛ Prototyping The Prototype

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

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

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

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

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

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

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

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

        [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Proprietary

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

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

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • EFF ☛ Power Up! Donations Get a 2X Match This Week
        • Techdirt ☛ California Court Denies Facial Recognition Pariah Clearview’s Anti-SLAPP Motion Over Its Web Scraping Activities

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

    • Defence/Aggression

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Quillette ☛ Misremembering the Korean War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Finance

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

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

        [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

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

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

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

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

      • TruthOut ☛ Global Coalition Calls for More Advertisers to Boycott Twitter
      • TruthOut ☛ MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell Says He’s Running to Head the RNC
      • Counter Punch ☛ Virginia’s Part-Time Republican Governor

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

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

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

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

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

      • TruthOut ☛ Evangelical Lobbying Threatens Supreme Court’s Independence
      • Common Dreams ☛ Calls for SCOTUS Ethics Probe Grow as Court Lawyer Defends Alito

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

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

      • TruthOut ☛ Trumpism Won’t Be Defeated in a Single Election Cycle
      • Counter Punch ☛ Trump 2.0 Could Destroy America as We Know It

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

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

      • Counter Punch ☛ A Way to Dump Trump

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

      • TruthOut ☛ The 2020 BLM Uprising Lives On in Houston’s Struggle Against Police Violence
      • Techdirt ☛ Wherein The Copia Institute Tells The Supreme Court The Florida Social Media Law Is An Unconstitutional Mess That Needs Its Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “The status quo of NLRB funding is untenable.”

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

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

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

      • The Nation ☛ The Agenda of House Republicans

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

      • The Nation ☛ A Tale of Two Campaigns in Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Images of passing the torch can be stirring.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Perversions of Political Punditry

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

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

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

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

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

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • India Times ☛ Twitter ends enforcement of COVID misinformation policy

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

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

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

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

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

          BBC News has approached Twitter for comment.

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

    • Censorship/Free Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Civil Rights/Policing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • The Nation ☛ Torture in the Heart of Venezuela

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

      • The Nation ☛ Amazon Solidarity Forever Puzzle
      • TruthOut ☛ NYC DA Asks Judge to Drop Murder Charges Against Domestic Abuse Survivor
      • Democracy Now ☛ NYC DA Asks Judge to Drop Murder Charges Against Domestic Abuse Survivor Tracy McCarter

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

      • Scheerpost ☛ A New Union Rises in the South

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

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

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

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

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

      • Pro Publica ☛ How States Limit Teen Access to Abortion

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

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

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

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

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Meduza ☛ Starlink raises service prices in Ukraine — Meduza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Monopolies

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

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

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

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

      • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

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

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

      • Human Holidays

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

      • Music Spotlight: My Top Album 2021

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

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

    • Technical

      • First Look at Textual

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

        [...]

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

      • Adventures in updating

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

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

      • Announcements

        • A Spartan to Gemini proxy server

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

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

IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:01 am by Needs Sunlight

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