GNU/Linux

• Ars Technica ☛ PineTab 2 is another try at a Linux-based tablet, without the 2020 supply crunch

  Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages.

  The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64′s “December Update,” is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It’s “a dream-of-a-SoC,” writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a “modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and “is genuinely future-proof.” While Linux support was scarce early on, development for RK3566 is “booming,” and it’s now a prime candidate for mobile operating systems, Erecinski writes.

• Server

  • Help Net Security ☛ Security measures to protect Kubernetes workloads – Help Net Security

    As companies undergo the shift to Kubernetes, security must be considered throughout the entire data lifecycle for IT teams who are constantly facing potential data breaches, delays, and inadequate security features that cannot easily be fixed: 94% of DevOps professionals experienced at least one Kubernetes security incident in the past year.

    As Kubernetes poses unique and complex challenges that leave many exposed to outside threats, developers must work to ensure their applications are safeguarded from outside risks.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ BackBox Linux 8 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

    A Quick Overview BackBox Linux 8.

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Disqus-ting Tracking | Self-Hosted 86

    What disgusted Alex about Disqus, and how he replaced it with a Self-Hosted solution, a hot HDHomeRun tip, and an update on Chris’ hunt for the perfect notes app.

  • YouTube ☛ 10 things Valve needs to fix with the Steam Deck next year.

    The Steam Deck isn’t perfect, yet. We need to be honest with ourselves about what works and what’s broken.

• Graphics Stack

  • Dave Airlie ☛ vulkan video decoding: anv status

    After cleaning up the radv stuff I decided to go back and dig into the anv support for H264.

    The current status of this work is in a branch[1]. This work is all against the current EXT decode beta extensions in the spec.

    This contains an initial implementation of H264 Intel GPUs that anv supports. I’ve only tested it on Kabylake equivalents so far. It decodes some of the basic streams I’ve thrown at it from ffmpeg. Now this isn’t as far along as the AMD implementation, but I’m also not sure I’m programming the hardware correctly. The Windows DXVA API has 2 ways to decode H264, short and long. I believe but I’m not 100% sure the current Vulkan API is quite close to “short”, but the only Intel implementations I’ve found source for are for “long”. I’ve bridged this gap by writing a slice header parser in mesa, but I think the hw might be capable of taking over that task, and I could in theory dump a bunch of code. But the programming guides for the hw block are a bit vague on some of the details around how “long” works. Maybe at some point someone in Intel can tell me

• Applications

  • DebugPoint ☛ LibreOffice 7.5: Top New Features – Release Info

    The upcoming LibreOffice 7.5 release is loaded with features and improvements across modules. It’s currently undergoing beta testing. The changes includes feature updates, bug fixes, Microsoft Office compatibility, export features, macro programming improvements and many more.

    In this article I will brief about some of the important visual updates that may impact your day-to-day workflow.

  • DebugPoint ☛ 10 Best Ubuntu Apps for Everyone in 2022 [Part 2]

    This article lists the top 10 best Ubuntu apps for different use cases in 2022.

    If you plan to migrate to Linux permanently, you should be happy knowing that there are thousands of applications that can compete with commercial or paid applications. Also, if you are a Windows user and using Linux first time, then you may not hear of those apps.

    Hence, in this article series, we are highlighting a set of Ubuntu apps at a time to increase collaboration and awareness among the user base.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TechRepublic ☛ AlmaLinux checklist: 9 things to do after installation | TechRepublic

    AlmaLinux is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular drop-in replacements for CentOS/RHEL. Anyone who has used CentOS will immediately be familiar with the operating system. Any admin who’s not used CentOS will find it as solid a platform as any other for enterprise-level computing.

    Although the installation of AlmaLinux is just as simple as any other server-ready operating system, you might find yourself at a loss as to what to do upon the first login.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to delete a stubborn Kubernetes namespace | TechRepublic

    Kubernetes namespaces are a means to divide resources between users and teams so there’s no cross-pollination or confusion about what belongs to what and which deployments go where. Namespaces are a great way to spread those resources across your teams and projects.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Put single task/goal or Jot Something Down in Top-bar in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

    Have an important task to do in next few hours, or you have to write something down hurriedly? Here an extension allows to write one thing into the top-bar in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with GNOME Desktop.

    It’s ‘One Thing‘, a gnome shell extension allows to write any word into top panel, to remind you something important!

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Now Available: Designing with LibreOffice 2nd E… – Linux Magazine

    The second edition of Designing with LibreOffice, by Bruce Byfield and Jean Hollis Weber, is now available.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install GNOME Mines, a clone of Minesweeper, on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install GNOME Mines, a clone of Minesweeper, on a Chromebook.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to know which ports are in use on Linux

    Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to know which ports are in use on Linux. This as a sysadmin can be easy, but it can always help to solve a problem or two.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zlib on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Zlib package is a popular data compression library that is used by many programs and libraries. If you are developing software that requires the Zlib library, or if you are using a program that depends on it, you will need to install it on your Ubuntu system. Zlib is also a crucial component of many software platforms, including Linux, macOS, and iOS.

    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 Zlib on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

  • Linuxiac ☛ VirtualBox 7 on Linux Mint 21: A Complete Installation Guide

    This guide will walk you through each step of installation of VirtualBox 7, a widely-used and popular full virtualizer app, on Linux Mint 21.

    VirtualBox 7 is a popular virtualization software that allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single physical host. With its latest release, VirtualBox 7, users can now take advantage of even more features and enhancements.

    This guide will show you how to install VirtualBox 7 on Linux Mint, a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution known for its user-friendliness, reliability, and great support. So, whether you are a beginner or an experienced user, this guide will provide the steps to set it up on your Mint system successfully.

  • Linux Handbook ☛ Important GCC Flags in Linux

    If you program in C or C++ using Linux, the compilation process is going to be handled by the GCC, aka the GNU project C and C++ compiler.

    And as always, you can use flags to extend the functionality.

    So let’s look at some of the most important GCC flags.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It is known for its speed, security, and support for various websites and web standards. The browser is available for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. Some of the features of Google Chrome include the ability to search and navigate directly from the address bar, support for extensions and add-ons, and a range of tools and options for customizing the browser to suit your needs. Overall, Google Chrome is a popular choice for many people looking for a fast, reliable, and secure web browser.

    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 Google Chrome web browser on Rocky Linux. 9.

  • OSTechNix ☛ Display Memory Information Using Ramfetch In Linux – OSTechNix

    This brief guide explains what is ramfetch, how to install ramfetch in Linux, and how to display Memory information using ramfetch in Linux operating systems.

  • TecAdmin ☛ How to Enable CORS in Nginx – TecAdmin

    Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an important security feature for web applications. It allows web applications to use resources from other domains while preventing malicious access. In this article, we’ll look at how to enable CORS in Nginx.

  • Rocky Linux ☛ Introducing HelloTux as a Rocky Linux Merchandise Provider | Rocky Linux

    We are excited to announce that we have added a new merchandise provider for the Rocky Linux project – HelloTux! This partnership will expand the options available for our community to show their support for Rocky Linux with high-quality t-shirts, hoodies, polo shirts,1 and other swag.

    Located in Hungary, HelloTux is positioned to provide great shipping prices for Rocky Linux community members in Europe. They have a long history of working with open source projects and are dedicated to providing top-notch embroidered merchandise, using only free and open source software

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ XFCE 4.18 Released with Greatly Improved on Thunar File Manager | UbuntuHandbook

    The popular lightweight desktop environment XFCE4 got a new major release after 2 years of development.

    The new release, XFCE 4.18, focuses on improving its Thunar file manager. They include image preview, Undo/Redo option, customize toolbar, highlight files with different background and filename colors.

    In the List View mode, it shows how many files contained for directories, and supports for displaying ‘file creation date’ column.

  • Make Use Of ☛ Lightweight Linux Desktop Xfce 4.18 Released After Two Years With Small Tweaks

    The Xfce developers worked for nearly two years to come out with 4.18, the last major release being 4.16 in December 2020. The developers seem to have been taking their time in polishing new features.

    “Our team added multiple nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that is going to be released for your pleasure,” Xfce’s announcement page said.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Plasma: Multi Screen

      Ah, working with more than one screen, nice and convenient, but always has been the scourge of usability, due to broken hardware and software, on every platform you can imagine. And yes, on Plasma we are notorious to have several problems with regard to multi screens, which spurred many bug reports.

      For Plasma 5.27 we did a big refactor on how the screens are managed (and how they are mapped to desktops and panels) which hopefully should solve many of those issues, creating a much more predictable experience, both for “fixed” multi screen setups (like a setup at your desk) and “on the go” (like attaching a projector at a conference).

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ #74 Decades Later – This Week in GNOME

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 09 to December 16.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • The Register UK ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed team changes its mind about x86-64-v2 • The Register

    Tumbleweed is changing course once again, but it’s due to popular demand, and it means broader compatibility for more people. Saying that, it’s looking for someone to help maintain its 32-bit support.

    Back in November, the openSUSE project announced that it was changing the minimum CPU requirement for Tumbleweed on x86-64 to version 2 of the instruction set – as well as dropping support for x86-32 machines.

    This would bring Tumbleweed into line with the requirements of its next-gen enterprise OS, currently available as a prototype called ALP. There’s a summary of the issue on the project’s website. However, following an outcry from openSUSE users, the plan has changed… again. It’s still dropping the x86-32 edition, but it’s not going to switch to requiring second-generation x86-64 chips.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ openSUSE Board Election 2022 — Results

    The openSUSE Board Election 2022 ran for 15 days — starting on 1 December until 15 December. Electronic voting in the election ended at 23h59 UTC on 15 December.

    In the early hours of Friday 16 December the results were computed and emailed to all voters. The results were also publicly announced on the project’s mailing list.

    There were 544 eligible voters in the election and 218 voters have cast their votes.

  • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/50 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

    We’re slowly reaching the end of the year, and some people have less time for openSUSE, as the holiday season is upon us. Others use their free time from work to contribute more time to openSUSE. In any case, we’re not seeing any slowdown just yet and Tumbleweed keeps moving, again with 7 snapshots released during this week (1209…1215).

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Cockpit 282 – Cockpit Project

    Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.

    [...]

    Right-to-left language support has been enabled for languages that require it. When selecting a RTL language from the list, the layout will shift to be right-aligned.

    We have also started modifying Cockpit and PatternFly to work better with RTL languages. However, there are still some alignment and spacing issues. We will continue to work to fix the more obvious problems.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-50 – Fedora Community Blog

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    Fedora Linux 35 reached end of life on Tuesday.

    I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

• Debian Family

  • Bad words in Debian.

    A discussion on the debian-project mailing list caught my attention to an Italian word meaning something like “would you be so kind to please go somewhere else?”, but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used http://codesearch.debian.net to study its usage more in detail.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Snapcrafters: 2022 wrap-up | Ubuntu

    Last year, we officially re-launched the “Snapcrafters” initiative. We’re a community of volunteers who build and maintain unofficial snap packages. Although snaps make it easy for developers to publish their software directly to users, some of them don’t (yet) do this. Here is where Snapcrafters come in: we build snap packages, update them, and work with developers to eventually hand over these packages into their care.

    Throughout the year, we’ve been busy improving the snaps and our tooling around the project. This post summarises some of the highlights.

    [...]

    Are you interested in helping out? Would you like to improve software used by hundreds of thousands of people? Then we’re happy to have you! The best part is, you don’t even need much knowledge about snaps!

    For example, one of the ways you can contribute is by improving and updating the metadata of our snaps. These are, for example, the description of a snap, screenshots and useful links. This helps users find the applications, figure out what they do and know where they can get help. We can definitely use help in improving this information for our snaps. Most of this metadata is stored in the snapcraft.yaml file itself.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Check out James Bruton’s robotic camera operator | Arduino Blog

    We’re ages past the time when a YouTuber could get away with sloppy camera work. If someone wants to achieve any level of success making videos today, they need near-professional camera equipment. But even that equipment isn’t enough if it’s still used for static shots. Many makers build sliders and other rigs, but James Bruton skipped those small steps and jumped straight to a versatile robotic camera operator.

    Bruton wanted to capture dynamic videos at any time of day or night without hiring a live-in camera operator and this robot is the result. It can drive around and has complete control over the mounted DSLR camera. It can follow pre-programmed movement patterns, can use tracking to stay focused on Bruton, or a combination of the two to change perspective while staying centered on Bruton. It can also automatically zoom in and out based on motion to ensure that anything interesting is in frame. Bruton can even trigger additional features using foot switches, such as raising a robotic thumbs-up into the frame.

  • Arduino ☛ Ghostwriter is a gorgeous typewriter with an onboard AI co-writer | Arduino Blog

    Much to the consternation of those of us who write for a living, AI writers are gaining traction as their capabilities increase. The hot name in the AI content creation industry at the moment is ChatGPT, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine. With the right input and direction, GPT-3 can output some impressive writing. To harness that power in a co-writing assistant, Arvind Sanjeev built the Ghostwriter.

    Ghostwriter is a vintage Brother electric typewriter retrofitted with modern hardware that lets it access and utilize the GPT-3 API (application programming interface). The user can type a query onto paper, such as a writing prompt or question, and GPT-3 will return a result that also prints out on the paper. By guiding GPT-3 with suitable prompts, the user can receive as much AI-generated text as they like. They might then edit that text for publication, use it as-is, or showcase the manuscript as an art piece.

  • Arduino ☛ Predicting potential motor failures just using sound | Arduino Blog

    Nearly every manufacturer uses a machine at some point in their process, and each of those machines is almost guaranteed to contain at least one motor. In order to maintain uptime and efficiency, these motors must always work correctly, as even a small breakdown can lead to disastrous effects. Predictive maintenance aims to achieve this goal while also not going overboard in trying to prevent them entirely by combining sensors with predictive techniques that can schedule maintenance when a failure is probable.

    Shebin Jose Jacob’s solution utilizes the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, along with its built-in microphone, to capture audio and predict when a motor is about to fail. He achieved this by first creating a new Edge Impulse project and gathering samples for four classes of sound: OK, anomaly 1, and anomaly 2, as well as general background noise. After designing an impulse and training a classification model on the samples, he was able to achieve an impressive accuracy of about 95% on the test samples.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Phone Arena ☛ Google Nest and Android devices now supported by Matter – PhoneArena

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Google Nest and android devices get Matter – Geeky Gadgets

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Lens shortcut comes to google․com on Android

  • Android Headlines ☛ 2 methods to bypass verify pin after reset on Android devices

  • The Sun ☛ People are being warned over horrifying Android mistake that could cost you thousands | The US Sun

  • Ghacks ☛ Customize Vivaldi for Android’s Menu Bar

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft warns of new Minecraft DDoS malware infecting Windows, Linux [Ed: Microsoft is badmouthing "Linux" in relation to its proprietary "game", which it bought in order to harm GNU/Linux]

• TechRepublic ☛ Open source code for commercial software applications is ubiquitous, but so is the risk [Ed: But SolarWinds is proprietary software; FOSS-hostile media at it again...]

  As the SolarWinds and Log4j hacks show, vulnerabilities in open source software used in application development can open doors for attackers with vast consequences. A new study looks at the open source community’s efforts to “credit-rate” the risk.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress ☛ State of the Word 2022: A Celebration of the Four Freedoms of Open Source – WordPress News

    A small audience of WordPress contributors, developers, and extenders gathered on December 15 for the annual State of the Word keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Those who could not join in person joined via livestream or one of 33 watch parties held across 11 countries, with more than 500 RSVPs.

• Funding

  • Support the Qubes OS Project via Proton’s charity fundraiser! | Qubes OS

    The Qubes OS Project is grateful to have been selected as one of the beneficiaries of this year’s Proton charity fundraiser alongside so many other wonderful organizations. The continued support of the privacy community means the world to us! For details about the fundraiser and how you can participate, please see the official Proton blog post: The 2022 Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser has started!

• Programming/Development

  • Xojo Adds Support For Building Apps For Linux ARM 64

    Xojo, Inc., developers of Xojo, a cross-platform application development environment for macOS, Windows, Linux, Web, Raspberry Pi, iOS and soon Android, today announced the immediate release of Xojo 2022 Release 4. This latest update adds 250+ improvements, including the ability to build applications for Linux ARM 64, as well as Linux Dark Mode support for Xojo. It also includes more than 100 bug fixes to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Framework, increasing quality and reliability, and 18 new features.

  • The Register UK ☛ GCC 13 to support Modula-2 • The Register

    Incoming support for Modula-2 in GCC, and a new Gitlab repository for its descendant Oberon, shows that the Wirthian family of programming languages remains livelier than you might think.

    Modula-2 is what Pascal inventor Niklaus Wirth did next. Modula-2 is the direct descendant of Pascal, aimed at more modular (the clue’s right there in the name), and more parallel, programming. Part of the idea was to make it easier to break programs up into discrete chunks, so that they can be compiled, and run, separately.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Design Studio 3.9 Released

    The Material Browser was updated to represent the available textures alongside the materials. Adding and using textures is now easy and intuitive thanks to the new Texture Editor and the textures section in the Material Browser. Adding a light probe from a texture, as you can see in the screenshot, is just one context menu click away.

    We will be updating the Content Library in upcoming releases of Qt Design Studio. Stay tuned.

  • Qt ☛ Creating Controls from Figma Design

    How to turn your Figma design into a working control set without any coding!

    Here at Qt we are big fans of Figma. Their Design System approach comes the closest to the kind of development thinking required to build an full production application UI in Qt Design Studio. Because of this large conceptual overlap and the well defined API provided for the Figma files we can capture and convert much of the design process into QML via our Qt Bridge exporter plugin.

    But until now there was a disconnect, an important missing piece of the puzzle, Controls.

    Sure, you could design and export the visual parts of your Controls but in the end you would still have to somehow convert this design into a working control, usually replicating only part of the functionality that Qt Quick Controls has available as standard.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ This Week in PSC (091)

  • Rust

    • Diziet ☛ diziet | Rust needs #[throws]

      Ok-wrapping as needed in today’s Rust is a significant distraction, because there are multiple ways to do it. They are all slightly awkward in different ways, so are least-bad in different situations. You must choose a way for every fallible function, and sometimes change a function from one pattern to another.

      [...]

      Ever since I read withoutboats’s 2020 article about fehler, I have been using it in most of my personal projects.

      For Reasons I recently had a go at eliminating the dependency on fehler from Hippotat. So, I made a branch, deleted the dependency and imports, and started on the whack-a-mole with the compiler errors.

      After about a half hour of this, I was starting to feel queasy.

      After an hour I had decided that basically everything I was doing was making the code worse. And, bizarrely, I kept having to make individual decisons about what idiom to use in each place. I couldn’t face it any more.

      After sleeping on the question I decided that Hippotat would be in Debian with fehler, or not at all. Happily the Debian Rust Team generously helped me out, so the answer is that fehler is now in Debian, so it’s fine.

      For me this experience, of trying to convert Rust-with-#[throws] to Rust-without-#[throws] brought the Ok wrapping problem into sharp focus.

Leftovers

• Linux Foundation

  • Ars Technica ☛ Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly [Ed: It's not "Linux", it's Zemlin, a front man for monopolies]

• Security

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

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libde265, php7.3, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, freeradius, freerdp, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (firefox, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, nodejs:16, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), and SUSE (ceph and chromium).

  • TechCrunch ☛ Apple fixes ’actively exploited’ zero-day security vulnerability affecting most iPhones – TechCrunch

    Apple has confirmed that an iPhone software update it released two weeks ago fixed a zero-day security vulnerability that it now says was actively exploited.

    The update, iOS 16.1.2, landed on November 30 and rolled out to all supported iPhones — including iPhone 8 and later — with unspecified “important security updates.”

    In a disclosure to its security updates page on Tuesday, Apple said the update fixed a flaw in WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari and other apps, which if exploited could allow malicious code to run on the person’s device. The bug is called a zero-day because the vendor is given zero day’s notice to fix the vulnerability.

    Apple said security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates nation state-backed spyware, hacking and cyberattacks, discovered and reported the WebKit bug.

  • NIST ☛ NIST Retires SHA-1 Cryptographic Algorithm | NIST

    The SHA-1 algorithm, one of the first widely used methods of protecting electronic information, has reached the end of its useful life, according to security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The agency is now recommending that IT professionals replace SHA-1, in the limited situations where it is still used, with newer algorithms that are more secure.

    SHA-1, whose initials stand for “secure hash algorithm,” has been in use since 1995 as part of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-1. It is a slightly modified version of SHA, the first hash function the federal government standardized for widespread use in 1993. As today’s increasingly powerful computers are able to attack the algorithm, NIST is announcing that SHA-1 should be phased out by Dec. 31, 2030, in favor of the more secure SHA-2 and SHA-3 groups of algorithms.
    “We recommend that anyone relying on SHA-1 for security migrate to SHA-2 or SHA-3 as soon as possible,” said NIST computer scientist Chris Celi.

  • USCERT ☛ Samba Releases Security Updates

    The Samba Team has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple versions of Samba. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

  • CISA ☛ FBI, FDA OCI, and USDA Release Joint Cybersecurity Advisory Regarding Business Email Compromise Schemes Used to Steal Food | CISA

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA OCI), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing recently observed incidents of criminal actors using business email compromise (BEC) to steal shipments of food products and ingredients valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joint CSA analyzes the common tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) utilized by criminal actors to spoof emails and domains to impersonate legitimate employees and order goods that went unpaid and were possibly resold at devalued prices with labeling that lacked industry standard “need-to-knows” (i.e., necessary information about ingredients, allergens, or expiration dates).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ Read our consultation response on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022

      Before we get into the response, it is important to highlight certain issues with the consultation process for the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022. The consultation process requires interested participants to register on the MyGov website in order to be able to provide comments. This is a significant hurdle as many individuals may not want to register on a government portal for this exercise. Further, the feedback can only be given for specific chapters or clauses in the DPDPB, 2022 and each specific response has a character limit of 2500 characters. This significantly restricts the ability to provide in-depth feedback on the provisions of the Bill as well as feedback which may not be specific to a particular clause.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Video ☛ Social Media is Under Attack – Invidious

    This week in the Weekly News Roundup, Social Media is under attack for PI tracking, the FBI crime sharing database is hacked, and TikTok study shows self-harm videos shown to kids in less than 30 minutes.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • FSF ☛ Worldwide community of activists emphasize the freedom to share digital media for International Day Against DRM

    A global community of activists is taking part today in the Defective by Design campaign’s 16th annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to protest use of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), a widespread technology that places unethical restrictions on how people access digital media. Though from different backgrounds, countries, and perspectives, participants in the campaign share the common cause of opposing DRM in all of its forms. This year’s theme was the freedom to share.

    Led by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Defective by Design campaign is mobilizing activists to spread awareness on the predominating influence of DRM over the public’s consumption of media. The campaign drew attention to the need for “DRM-free” media by asking their supporters to share DRM-free works with a friend or family member. This was joined by a general challenge to go a “day without DRM” as a way to raise awareness for publishers and storefronts that intentionally refrain from using it, such as those cataloged by the campaign’s Guide to DRM-free Living.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • A few potential cases (and a percolating issue?) to watch at the ITC – Patent Progress

      On a recent episode of Ropes & Gray’s Talkin’ Trade podcast, my colleagues and I mentioned a few current developments…

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 6 Rewire my brain? Nah, I’m good.

    Ahm where to blog to? Originally there was blogspot before that became a pain to use. I switched over to WordPress for a number of years. It is heavyweight, and cumbersome to use for technical writing. I briefly switched over to blogging on Gemini. It is well-suited to technical writing, but I did not want to have too many files on my system. I tried bearblog, which is pretty reasonable, but very confusing to navigate. Medium is the last one I tried, and I am using that. It is fairly simple, accomodates code well, but not quotes. Which brings me to brain rewiring … So, in the side panel “More from Medium” as such links as “4 Books So Powerful, They Can Rewire Your Brain.” Clickbait much? “10 Little Behaviours that Attract People to You.” Actually, I know what my problem is: I score way high on the disagreeableness scale. According to a Stars Wars test I did, I have the disagreeableness of Emperor Palpatine. Oh dear. Then there’s “How I have Made $280k Selling Spreadsheets on Etsy.” I am unemployed at the moment, so as it happens, I am open to the idea of making money plying my computer skills. But I am not so open that my brain has fallen out. In other words, I have not clicked on the article. Ah the modern internet. The hustle. Always the hustle.

  • You know what would be refreshing? Vintage ads for Saturnalia

    I like vintage Coca-Cola ads, and a lot of our modern view of Santa Clause comes from said vintage Coca-Cola ads, but I’m not sure what I make of this holiday display from the neighborhood:

    [Huge, three-panel display of a vintage Coca-Cola Santa Ad flanked by a life-sized Santa on the left, and maybe a yeti on the right, in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood] Either Sasquatch is planning an Artic expedition, and thus shilling for Coke for funding, or else he’s really old and trying to raise retirement funds by shilling for Coke. In either case, we know Santa has been a sell out for mostly a century now. [1]…

  • Specialization and Stewardship

    My wife and I play a lot of board games together: a relatively new pastime for me, as growing up I rarely played them after my elementary school days. She owned several board games already before we got together, and we’ve more than doubled our collection in the intervening years.

    Board games undoubtedly have their merits: they’re creative, they’re tactile, they encompass a wide range of game genres, and once printed and packaged, they consume no further resources. However, they have a downside: any given board game can often only support one style of game. If one wants to play a different genre, one usually must purchase a different board game.

• Technical

  • Switched to Gnus

GNU/Linux

• Linux Gizmos ☛ PineTab2 powered by Rockchip RK3566 SoC

  Pine64 revealed today some details about the successor of the original PineTab released in 2020. The PineTab2 is featured in a metal chassis powered by a 2.0GHz Rockchip RK3566 SoC in addition to a detachable keyboard, dual cameras and other peripherals.

• Kernel Space

  • Updated Linux Kernel 6.1 Makes Rust the Greatest Programming Language

  • It’s FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #22.47: Kernel 6.1, Xfce 4.18, ArchBang and More Linux Stuff

    The holiday season is about to begin. Several distributions and open source projects have released their final version of the year 2022. A few remaining ones will do it around Christmas before going for the year-end holidays.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ Linux Candy: ctree – Christmas tree on your terminal

    Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open-source software in this series.

    As we’re fast approaching Christmas, it seems only appropriate to start decorating the desktop. ctree offers a Christmas tree right on your terminal.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Get started with Raspberry Pi in The MagPi magazine issue #125

    You’ll get solidly to grips with Raspberry Pi using our gigantic starter guide this month. Discover the strengths of each Raspberry Pi computer and all the official accessories. Newcomers can use our QuickStart guide to setting up Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi OS; experiment with Python code and basic electronics; Linux and the Command Line. We’ve got everything you need for your Raspberry Pi journey.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Add Linux Host to Nagios Monitoring Server Using NRPE Plugin [Ed: Page revised]

    In the first part of the Nagios series article, we’ve explained in detail how to install and configure the latest version of Nagios Core and Nagios Plugins in RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Fedora.

    In this article, we will show you how to add a Remote Linux machine and its services to the Nagios Core Monitoring host using NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) agent.

  • What is TTY and PTY in Linux?

    If you have been using Linux for a while, then you have definitely heard the terms TTY (and PTY), but what are they, how do they affect the Linux user, and their sweet little history will be covered in this article.

  • How to Switch Between TTY Screens Using the Chvt Command in Linux

    This article requires knowledge of TTY in Linux. If you are unfamiliar with this term, check out our recent article on TTY and PTY in Linux, then come back to continue this article.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Introduction to policy as code with automation | Enable Sysadmin

  • Ubuntu ☛ Launch your own micro cloud with one command | Ubuntu

    If you are looking for a small-scale cloud deployment suitable for the edge, chances are you came across Canonical’s Micro cloud solution. These are small-footprint clusters of compute nodes with distributed storage and secure networking, optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. We are happy to announce that with the help of snaps and some clever engineering, we have significantly simplified the deployment process and now you can deploy your own micro cloud with a single command in just a few minutes. We invite users to test it out and give feedback. Read on for more details or skip to the video to see it in action.

  • [Old] Newfold Digital Inc ☛ Out-Tridging Tridge

    Most servers don’t change a great deal on a day to day basis, so transferring just the differences is a very smart way to perform nightly incremental backups. You just copy yesterday’s image and update the small parts that have changed, and rsync is the perfect tool for this.

    A newer development in our backups is use of the btrfs filesystem, which we talked about a little earlier this year. One of btrfs’ killer features is copy-on-write snapshots, which effectively give you copies for free and only stores the changes when you modify data. In normal usage, rsync makes a new copy of the file with the changes applied, but this defeats btrfs’ copy-on-write benefits. To make this right, we use the

    –inplace

    option, which tells rsync to write directly to the original file, letting btrfs work its magic.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve just gave away another bunch of Steam Decks so check your email

    During The Game Awards 2022, Valve were giving away a Steam Deck every minute and it seems they loved throwing hardware at people so much they just did it again.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Immortals Fenyx Rising now on Steam but quite messy on Steam Deck

    Immortals Fenyx Rising is another from Ubisoft as they continue putting their games back on Steam, and sadly this release seems a bit messy on Steam Deck.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translator VKD3D-Proton version 2.8 out now

    Valve and their open source contractors sure are a busy bunch. VKD3D-Proton, which translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan version 2.8 is out now.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve hit a home run with the first year of Steam Deck

    What an absolutely exceptional first year Valve had with the Steam Deck, and it continues to be my main way to play games now. From playing lots of indie games, to plenty of AA / AAA that work surprisingly well on it even right at release, the Steam Deck has opened up PC gaming to many new ways to play.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Hotfix from Valve gets The Witcher 3 next-gen DX12 working on Steam Deck

    Well, that certainly didn’t take long did it? Valve have already put up an update to Proton Hotfix, that works around the crashing issue in DirectX 12 in The Witcher 3 next-gen on Steam Deck.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ We may get a Steam Controller 2, plus fun updates coming to Steam Deck

    The Verge managed to speak to a couple of developers at Valve on the Steam Deck, and while most of it was already known and largely covered here on GOL already (go through our Steam Deck tag) there’s a couple of interesting bits to pick out. ICYMI: see my end of year Steam Deck article.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • OpenSource.com ☛ 5 reasons to love Linux GNOME Files

      The GNOME desktop is a common default desktop for most Linux distributions and, as with most operating systems, you manage your data on GNOME with software called a file manager. GNOME promotes a simple and clear naming scheme for its applications, and so its file manager is called, simply, Files. Its intuitive interface is simple enough that you forget what operating system you’re using altogether. You’re just using a computer, managing files in the most obvious way. GNOME Files is a shining example of thoughtful, human-centric design, and it’s an integral part of modern computing. These are my top five favorite things about GNOME Files, and why I love using it.

    • It’s FOSS ☛ Better Late Than Never! GNOME’s File Picker Adds Thumbnail View After 18 Years

      Nowadays, the user interface of a program is extremely important; even the simplest of interactions can make or break the user’s experience.
      The GNOME file picker lacked a proper thumbnail preview for viewing files, instead relying on a plain list view. This may have been unintuitive for many.
      The lack of this feature was also the topic of many memes and debates over the years.
      But now, finally, after 18 long years since the original feature request was put out, GNOME is set to receive support for a proper thumbnail view.
      Let’s look at this upcoming change to GNOME’s file picker.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: PHP version 8.1.14RC1 and 8.2.1RC1

    Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 50 2022

    This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

    We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 10 articles IT hiring managers must read before 2022 ends

    Along with other challenges, The Great Resignation has demanded that IT hiring managers be on top of their game. We’ve published a ton of advice for hiring and retaining IT talent this year. Check out our top 10 articles from 2022 and brush up on the in-demand jobs, skills to build a strong team, and advice for retaining high-performing talent.

• Debian Family

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Debian vs. Arch Linux: Which is Better for You?

    Debian and Arch Linux are two of the most popular open source Linux distributions available. They offer users a wide range of advantages, but each is better suited for different types of users. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Debian vs. Arch Linux to help you decide which is right.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • [Old] Steve Litt ☛ The Right Lubricant

    Your choice depends on a large degree on your willingness to take a risk. On safety critical or mission critical applications, I’d recommend Stabilant 22. For data bearing machines, I’d recommend Stabilant 22, ProGold G100, or else tuner spray. All three are made for electronics. Perhaps in the future you’ll find out for sure that another lubricant does an excellent job on connectors, but you’ll need to use it and watch the machine’s performance for several years.

    The place to experiment with other lubricants is on less important machines — experimental machines and the like. That’s where you’ll use lubricants like transmission oil, gun oil, white grease, or dialectric grease.

    That being said, I’m currently using Break-Free CLP on my entire fleet of computers, with excellent results so far.

    The following is a list of lubricants I’ve tried or heard of, and my observations: [...]

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Supporting KiCad open source design automation software

    Today I am pleased to announce that Raspberry Pi Ltd is helping KiCad with their end-of-year funding drive by matching donations made on KiCad’s website up to $5000.

    KiCad is a free, open source suite of CAD tools for schematic capture and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design. It allows you to draw your electronic circuits in schematic form, using graphically represented components and wires, and then transfer this data into a PCB editor which is used to place the components and draw the copper tracks and vias that connect them. The tools know what is connected to what, and also what design rules must be followed (such as what is the smallest width of copper track you can use), and they therefore help the designer make sure that the design is manufacturable. Once a design is completed, the tool will spit out data that a PCB manufacturer can use to make a physical PCB.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ How to build a Raspberry Pi cluster

    Why would you build a physical cluster? Today you can go to Amazon, or Digital Ocean, or any of the other cloud providers, and spin up a virtual machine in seconds. But the cloud is just someone else’s computers: a Raspberry Pi cluster is a low-cost, versatile system you can use for all kinds of clustered-computing related technologies, and you have total control over the machines that constitute it. Building something from the ground up can teach you lessons you can’t learn elsewhere.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Pico W IoT with Anvil: Mood lamp | HackSpace #62

    With built-in wireless connectivity, Pico W is ideal for creating Internet of Things (IoT) projects. To make it even simpler, Anvil has released a Pico W IoT toolkit to enable you to connect easily, and securely, to web apps you create on the Anvil platform. There’s a drag-and-drop web UI builder, built-in database, user authentication, email integration, HTTP APIs, and more – and it all talks to your Pico W.

    By using Anvil’s special UF2 firmware image, you can code programs on Pico W in MicroPython as normal, with a few extra lines to connect to Anvil, then create a web app on the Anvil site which can send and receive data to/from your Pico W program. In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to control the colour of an RGB LED using sliders in an Anvil web app.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • GSM Arena ☛ Google enables Matter across Nest Home and Android devices – GSMArena.com news

  • GSM Arena ☛ Google spotted beta testing state ID cards in Android Wallet in Maryland – GSMArena.com news

  • Android Headlines ☛ How Android phones are making learning easier in schools

  • Computer World ☛ 10 Android tips you shouldn’t miss from 2022 | Computerworld

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Realme V23i Android phone unveiled – Geeky Gadgets

  • Android Police ☛ Spotify is catching up to Android 13’s redesigned media player

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ A new generation of tools for open source vulnerability management

  Product security incident response teams (PSIRTs) are teams of security professionals that work diligently behind the scenes to protect software products and services of companies. A PSIRT is a different breed than a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), those that tend to be called Information Security. The difference is simple but stark: a CSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect a company’s infrastructure, data or users. A PSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect products a company builds, the most common being the discovery of a vulnerability or security defect, and subsequent actions to manage or remediate.

• Education

  • FSFE ☛ FSFE holds 2nd edition of Legal Education Day at the SFSCon 2022 – FSFE

    The 2nd Legal Education Day (LED), organized by the FSFE, took place in Bolzano to help Free Software developers understand legal topics on a basic level, so that they can avoid common pitfalls, allowing their software projects to reach full potential. The LED track featured sessions on the basics of copyright law, licenses, and other legal topics.

  • CNX Software ☛ SpinQ quantum computers target the education market – CNX Software

    Quantum computing promise a leap in the performance of applications relying upon parallelism using the properties of quantum physics like superposition, interference, and entanglement to perform computation instead of flipping “0” and “1” like traditional transistors. It will be used in scientific simulations, cryptography, machine learning, computational biology, and more.

    So far, I had seen massive quantum computers in research labs, but companies like Intel and IBM are working on providing quantum processors with hundreds and thousands of qubits that should eventually be found in supercomputers. It’s unclear to me whether we’ll ever see “quantum accelerators” in embedded processors, and in any case, it would be many years away. But if you are interested in better understanding the technology and playing around with quantum computing, SpinQ is selling 2-qubit and 3-qubit quantum computers for the education market: Gemini Mini, Gemini, and Triangulum.

Leftovers

• Counter Punch ☛ 35 Years of the Last Emperor

  The Bertolucci of 1900—where the liberated peasants of Emilia dance beneath a great red banner, and the director seems to be tracing his own radical progress—has moved on, outliving so much hope and disappointment. -David Thomson

  Opening with Thomson’s 2008 essay, originally published with the Criterion Collection edition of the picture, seems especially appropriate given our political moment. With the ascendancy of China and the reactivation of Cold War antagonism as a result, we have seen a vigorous debate, oftentimes in Counterpunch, about the nature of their governance, their aims on the world stage, and the “meaning” of political developments like the seemingly-endless tenure of President Xi.

• Counter Punch ☛ Can Contemporary Art Displays Outside of the Art Museum Matter?

  There is a real desire for these many otherwise diverse institutions to expand temporarily or permanently outside of the museum walls. Because a great deal of present day art makes political statements, it’s desired that these works be set in a public space in order to reach the larger public. And so, just now when I published my review of the important local survey exhibition, the 58th Carnegie International “Is it morning for you yet?,” I realized that I had missed something. It include some drawings and works on paper by James “Yaya” Hough which I had seen in the museum, and also his painted mural A Gift to the Hill District (2021-22) on a billboard outside the Carnegie. Just a couple of miles from the museum, it is installed opposite a vacant lot in an impoverished Black neighborhood. That site is close to the childhood home of the famous Pittsburgh playwright, August Wilson, whom the poster quotes. A Gift, which is a lively painting, is different from most of the art in the museum. As its title says, it is a visually straightforward celebration of the local life.

  As the website of the Carnegie explains, Wool’s statement “in the painting is lifted from Greil Marcus’ social commentary, Lipstick Traces, and is a definition of nihilism as quoted by situationist Raoul Vaneigem: The show is over.” This good art world painting was not a successful public work, for its clever comment on the commonplace 1980s art world belief that the history of painting had ended hardly meant anything to the men (or woman) on the street. If you have not read the Guy Debord’s situationists, the meaning of this statement will elude you. By contrast, Hough’s quotation of Wilson, “Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief” speaks in a straightforward positive way to the Black community. As the artist, who grew up nearby says: “I want people to really start believing in this community, I want people to start engaging in this community, and I want people to start sharing, you know, themselves.” For art from the museum to be effective in a public space it needs to speak to the larger audience. Most museum art does not aspire to achieve that goal; A Gift would look out of place installed in the Carnegie’s galleries.

• Counter Punch ☛ Multiple Breadbasket Failures as Radicals Stop Private Jets

  This article explores the impact of “multiple breadbasket failures” as defined by UN research. As well as a discussion of angry radicals that stop private jets, thus challenging in direct fashion a source at the pinnacle of climate issues, discussed in the final 7 paragraphs.

  But first: (1) What will stop global warming? (2) Will global warming get worse even as countries go to net zero by 2050, which will continue adding CO2 every year for the next 27 years? (3) Therefore, does net zero by 2050 imply loss of commercial waterways like the Danube and loss of major water reservoirs like Lake Mead, both of which nearly failed in 2022? (4) Is net zero by 2050 a ruse?

• Counter Punch ☛ Dylan: An Old Box of Basement Tapes

  Anyway, I took the plunge. I laid down the hard e-cash. I downloaded the PDF from Kobo. Then, as it was my kid’s birthday, I ordered the hard copy. Then I noticed that there was an accompanying audiobook that you could purchase, if you want to hear a galaxy of stars–Jeff Bridges (Big Lebowski), Steve Buscemi (Happy Gilmore), John Goodman (O Brother Where Art Thou!), Helen Mirren (Caligula), Rita Moreno (Carnal Knowledge), Sissy Spacek (Carrie)–read chapters from Philosophy, so I bought that, too. So the total splash out for this kit was close to $AUD 150. I almost upped the ante and purchased some of that 12-year-old whiskey from Dylan’s Heaven’s Door–the distillery he opened up a few years ago, presumably with his Nobel Prize money.  Based in Tennessee, where still waters run deep. Woulda been a nice set of drops to read or listen to Dylan by. It’s good stuff, and the critical conclusions drawn on the wall aren’t half wrong:

  Right?  But that would have set me back another set of C-notes, what with international shipping included. So, I didn’t cave on that impulse. (Maybe at Christmas, I winked to myself.)

• Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: A 1960s Look At The 21st Century Home

  If you only watch the first 60 seconds of 1967’s “At Home, 2001,” you’ll be forgiven for thinking that the film is riddled with missed predictions. And to be sure, the cold open is rife with them, from disposable paper furniture to seashell-shaped houses that look like they’re extruded from concrete. Really, the only clear winner from that first tranche of predictions is the rise of the microwave oven, which given the expense of magnetrons in 1967 and the complexity of the electronics needed to drive them was a non-obvious development.

• Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungary’s top meteorologist, dismissed after canceled fireworks called back to his old position

• Counter Punch ☛ The Blast

  It’s a hard-boiled story, a yarn worthy of Dashiell Hammet or Chester Himes.  Its prose is as down and savvy as Rachel Kushner or Jonah Raskin, as brilliantly local as Rebecca Solnit or Chris Carlsson. Like any hard-boiled American story this is a story of class struggle, no holds barred.  The blast in question was a bomb exploded at the San Francisco Preparedness Parade of 1916.  The bombers had met here at this restaurant.

  Alexander Berkman came to SF in January 1916 after finishing a fourteen year bid in the state penitentiary for having attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick of Carnegie Steel in 1892.  Politicos justified it as propaganda-by-the-deed while anarchist political science deemed it an attentat.  As soon as he arrived free in San Francisco, Berkman began publishing the semi-monthly magazine, The Blast, from which Matthews takes his title.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Gonzo Playbook

  This is the new normal of Gonzo Governance that has emerged from our communication order featuring digital media that provide instantaneous, personal, and visual information. This entertaining conflict-ridden media logic promotes evocative reaction rather than referential and reflective communication.  Gonzo, or breaking the mold of a conventional activity, was popularized by Hunter Thompson’s deviant-drugged-edgy lifestyle and approach to journalism. Sociological and communication researchers argue that a key feature of a Gonzo perspective is that individual actors use media performances to rail against a fearful disorder that needs drastic correction. Politicians cultivate and pursue the emotional appeals to audiences and potential constituents.  Gonzo is justified by a perceived crisis and a breakdown in institutional and conventional means of dealing with a problem or issue, whether in journalism, criminal justice sentencing, or social organization. A dramatic resolution is offered that resonates with an audience who shares the sense of disorder. The solution is extraordinary—even deviant, illegal or immoral– breaking boundaries and violating the parameters of social and discursive participation within a community of actors, typically promoting raw emotional meanings and symbols. Gonzo rhetoric requires attention-grabbing bold action that only the savior can provide, such as Kari Lake or Donald Trump.  Gonzo Governance is becoming institutionalized as routine resistance to the election process and the rule of law.

  Changes are due to a new set of practices that I refer to as the Gonzo Playbook. The basic premise of this new order is that one side will win unless there is cheating in the entire election, counting, and certification process. The Gonzo Players support: 1. Attempting to destroy some target and promote a false narrative about a higher moral and civic order. This is done by simultaneously mobilizing an emotional constituency by connecting with their anger, resentments, envies, and hatred. Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist, Paul Starr, identifies the challenge to entrenched American values and taken-for-granted forbearance about authoritarianism, voting rights, and progressive change; 2. Denying the legitimacy of major institutions, including education, science and journalism, and denial of basic facts; Targets include officials, workers, and particularly day-to-day operations involving elections at federal, state, and local levels;  3. Disrupting with legal and extra-legal means many governmental activities by elected and appointed officials; 4. Suppressing and discouraging voting through regulations, additional eligibility requirements, and certification processes; 5. Promoting mistrust with massive propaganda and disinformation through media and particularly social media platforms; 6. Encouraging supporters to protest, harass election workers, and threaten violence.

• Hackaday ☛ Supercon 2022: Sam Mulvey Shows You How To FM Radio

  Sam Mulvey built his own radio station in Tacoma, WA. Is there a better way to meld ham radio practice with a colossal number of DIY electrical and computer projects? Sam would say there isn’t one! This 45-minute talk is basically the lessons-learned review of setting up KTQA 95.3 – the radio station on the hill.

• The Nation ☛ The Mythology of George Balanchine

  Jennifer Homans is a dance historian and critic. Her first book, Apollo’s Angels, traces the origins of classical ballet, from Louis XIV’s performances as the Sun King in Renaissance France to its arrival in New York in the 20th century. Ballet, she writes, is rarely transcribed or recorded through text. Instead, it is passed down from dancer to dancer. A trained dancer herself, Homans’s work demonstrates how ballet exists within both the mind and the body while also revealing how retelling ballet’s history is another way of illuminating the history of empire.1

• The Nation ☛ Tears on My Pillow

• Meduza ☛ Conning the desperate How scammers exploit the information vacuum around Russia’s missing soldiers — Meduza

• Science

  • BioRxiv ☛ Phase 1 of the NIH Preprint Pilot: Testing the viability of making preprints discoverable in PubMed Central and PubMed

    The National Library of Medicine (NLM) launched a pilot in June 2020 to 1) explore the feasibility and utility of adding preprints to PubMed Central (PMC) and making them discoverable in PubMed and 2) to support accelerated discoverability of NIH-supported research without compromising user trust in NLM’s widely used literature services.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Fusion. Really?

    “This is a landmark achievement,” declared Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Her department’s press release said the experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California “produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it” and will “provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy.”

    “Nuclear fusion technology has been around since the creation of the hydrogen bomb,” noted a CBS News article covering the announcement. “Nuclear fusion has been considered the holy grail of energy creation.” And “now fusion’s moment appears to be finally here,” said the CBS piece.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 3D Printed Gadgets Make Lab Work Easier

    If you’ve worked in a bio or chem lab, you’ve probably found yourself handling all manner of plastic. Test tubes, fixtures, clamps — there’s a cavalcade of this stuff that fattens up the order books of lab suppliers every quarter. Sometimes, though, the commercial solutions aren’t quite what you need. For [AtomicVirology], the solution was to 3D print custom lab accessories to make work easier.

  • Hackaday ☛ Sonos Speakers Free To Sing Again

    Over at the EEVBlog, [Dave Jones] takes a second look at the Sonos Play 5 Gen 1 that he rescued from the dumpster recently. Despite being solidly built, [Dave] discovered that even the stereo line-in jack can’t be used without registering an account with Sonos. Not to be defeated, he hacks these speakers to make them work standalone.

  • Hackaday ☛ Top Up Your Teapot In Time With This E-ink Tea Timer

    Whether you’re a tea aficionado or just a casual drinker, it’s important to pay attention to your brewing times: too short and you’re just drinking hot water, too long and your brew becomes bitter and astringent. [Bob] wanted to help his parents avoid the latter scenario, and made them a convenient little tea timer that displays the time when they last replenished the pot.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Kid’s Toy Guitar Turned Into An Electric Ukulele

    With the holiday season fast approaching, there’s a good chance that some well-meaning friend or relative might buy a toy musical instrument for your children, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never have to listen to the results! The sound from these cheap toy guitars is pretty terrible, partly because they’re just too small to tune to a pleasing guitar tuning, so [joekutz] decided to see if one could be turned into an electric ukulele instead.

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Chain Drive Differential From Junkyard Parts

    A differential is a very useful thing for a vehicle. It allows two driven wheels to rotate at different speeds, such as when going around a corner. [Workshop From Scratch] needed a chain driven differential, so set about building one from a salvaged automotive unit.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ Line Between Medicine, Politics Blurred at Chicago Hospital

    In 2013, Roseland Community Hospital was looking for a new leader. Its former chief executive had alienated the Illinois governor and other lawmakers amid a messy fight over the hospital’s funding.

    The small nonprofit facility on Chicago’s South Side turned to Tim Egan, a longtime hospital executive who had begun to make a name for himself as a political operative and fundraiser with an ability to navigate the insular circles of state and local government.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Government Admits Its Ortho-Toluidine Exposure Limit Is Too High

    Before his shift at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Niagara Falls in May 2021, a worker peed in a cup.

    Before he clocked out, he did it again.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ This country has passed world’s first law to ban smoking for next generation

    Future generations of New Zealanders will be banned from purchasing tobacco as part of a package of new anti-smoking laws that passed parliament on Tuesday and are among the most strict in the world.

    The suite of new laws include bans on selling tobacco to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2009, punishable by fines up to NZ$150,000 ($95,910). The ban will remain in place for a person’s whole life.

  • ABC ☛ New Zealand bans young people from buying cigarettes for life

    The legislation will also reduce the amount of nicotine allowed in smoked tobacco products and cut the number of retailers able to sell tobacco by 90 per cent.

    Retailers licensed to sell tobacco will be cut from 6,000 to 600 by the end of 2023.

  • AAAS ☛ The final puff?

    Unveiled in December 2021, the plan features three radical interventions. One, called the smoke-free generation strategy, will make it illegal to ever sell combustible tobacco products to those born in 2009 or later. The goal is to create an ever-growing cohort that never picks up the smoking habit. A second provision calls for reducing the number of tobacco retailers by as much as 95%, to make cigarettes harder to get. The boldest proposal in the eyes of experts is reducing cigarettes’ nicotine content to below addictive levels. This “cuts right at the heart of why people smoke in the first place,” says Geoffrey Fong, head of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Waterloo. It’s potentially a “true game changer in the battle against smoking.”

  • NDTV ☛ New Zealand To Be Smokefree By 2025, Passes World-First Law To Ban Smoking For Next Generation

    The smoking rate in New Zealand is already low, with only 8% of adults smoking daily, down from 9.4% a year and a half ago and half the rate compared to ten years ago.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Born after 2008? You’ll never be able to buy cigarettes in New Zealand.

    “This bill will create generational change, and it will leave a legacy of better health for our youth,” Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said Tuesday.

    Under the new changes, retailers who sell tobacco to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2009 — those around 13 years old or younger today — will face fines of up to 150,000 New Zealand dollars, or around $96,000. The ban will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2027, when those born in 2009 will start turning 18.

  • Sydney Morning Herald ☛ ‘Smoke-free by 2025’: NZ imposes lifetime ban on buying cigarettes

    The bill was first introduced a year ago. Then Verrall said more needed to be done to stop young people from taking up smoking in the first place and to make it less addictive and appealing.

  • CNN ☛ New Zealand bans tobacco sales for next generation

    The legislation – the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill – will also reduce the amount of nicotine allowed in tobacco products, aiming to make them less addictive.

  • TruthOut ☛ UK Nurses Kick Off Largest-Ever Strike by NHS Workers After Negotiations Fail

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Nurses Have Had Enough’: Largest-Ever NHS Strike Kicks Off in UK Over Low Pay

    Tens of thousands of nurses across the United Kingdom are set to walk off the job Thursday in what’s been described as the largest-ever strike by National Health Service workers, who said they were forced to act after the government refused to negotiate over pay amid painfully high inflation.

    The walkout represents NHS nurses’ first national strike, and it comes as U.K. rail and postal workers are also taking major labor actions in response to falling real pay, meager benefits, and worsening conditions.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Warning of Winter Surge, White House Revives Free At-Home Covid Test Program

    Amid rising fears of various illnesses going into the winter, the Biden administration on Thursday resumed its program for mailing four free at-home Covid-19 tests to every U.S. household that requests them.

    “Starting today, every household can order four free Covid tests to be shipped straight to your door.”

• Linux Foundation

  • Android Police ☛ Linux teams up with partners to overthrow Google Maps’s dominance [Ed: The media is intentionally conflating “LINUX” with monopolies (like Microsoft); they’re killing the brand; It is OKAY to support Linux but NOT to support Linux Foundation. They are NOT the same thing. One could even argue that in many ways Linux Foundation is oppressing Linux or allowing hostile companies to manipulate its development for the worse.]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Old] MIT ☛ “The Right to Privacy”

      That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the new demands of society. Thus, in very early times, the law gave a remedy only for physical interference with life and property, for trespasses vi et armis. Then the “right to life” served only to protect the subject from battery in its various forms; liberty meant freedom from actual restraint; and the right to property secured to the individual his lands and his cattle. Later, there came a recognition of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect. Gradually the scope of these legal rights broadened; and now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life, — the right to be let alone; the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges; and the term “property” has grown to comprise every form of possession — intangible, as well as tangible.

    • Project Censored ☛ FERPA and Higher Ed Should Prioritize the Safety of Students’ Private Data – Censored Notebook

      Around the time of Richard Nixon’s presidency—a low point for public trust in government—families of K–12 students and adult college students raised concerns regarding the volume of sensitive, personally identifiable student information that schools, colleges, and universities were collecting and storing. Fifty years on, educational institutions still routinely collect and store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as students’ birthdate, gender, ethnicity, race, economic status, debt load, special needs and abilities, enrollment standing, grades, ID numbers, photos, contact information, and medical records. But today some or all of that sensitive data may be stored in databanks administered by third parties, such as the National Student Clearinghouse and Parchment.

    • EFF ☛ Dangerous “Kids Online Safety Act” Does Not Belong in Must-Pass Legislation

      The bill’s sponsors have made last-minute changes to the bill in an attempt to assuage concerns, but these edits don’t resolve its fundamental problems. We’ve spoken about the harms KOSA will cause at length, and they remain in the current version. 

      To recap: KOSA’s main provision contains the vague requirement that online services act “in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or should know is a minor,” by taking “reasonable measures” to prevent and mitigate various enumerated harms. These harms include mental health disorders, including (to name a few) the promotion or exacerbation of suicide, eating disorders, and substance use disorders; physical violence, online bullying, and harassment of the minor; and sexual exploitation and abuse.  

      KOSA’s latest text still contains this glaring and unconstitutional flaw at its core. 

    • Public Knowledge ☛ Privileged Conversations | Jan 2023 – Public Knowledge

      Bedoya was the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center, where he was also a visiting professor of law. He has been influential in research and policy at the intersection of privacy and civil rights and co-authored a 2016 report on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and the risks that it poses to privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights. He previously served as the first Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law after its founding in 2011, and as Chief Counsel to former Senator Al Franken, of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was an associate at the law firm WilmerHale.

    • The Nation ☛ America Online: A Cautionary Tale

      Brandee Barker was having a great time in the back of an Uber as her driver entertained her. It was November 2016, and the former Facebook executive and Lean In flack had just arrived in Ohio to canvass for Hillary Clinton.1This article is featured in The Nation’s blockbuster special issue, “The ’90s: Cradle of the Present,” a fascinating look at the ways that the decade forged the current moment. From food to crime to gender to exercise to music to technology to activism to foreign policy to environment to politics, the period set the stage for the turmoil of today.

    • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ The DPDPB, 2022 does not meet Puttaswamy standards

      The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) released the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 (Data Protection Bill, 2022) for public consultation on November 18, 2022. Feedback has been solicited on the Data Protection Bill, 2022 by MeitY through the MyGov website by December 17, 2022. We have analysed the Data Protection Bill, 2022 and found that it does not meet the standards of privacy that have been laid down by the Supreme Court in the Puttaswamy matters. At its core, the Data Protection Bill, 2022 forms a scheme for the interaction of persons, companies or other entities (called Data Fiduciaries in the Bill), who collect, store, index, share etc., personal data of their users (called Data Principals in the Bill) with each other.

      [...]

      In Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 (Puttaswamy-I), a nine-judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the status of the right to privacy as a fundamental right guaranteed in Part III of the Constitution of India. The Court held that privacy is an integral part of Articles 14,15, 19 and 21.

      The Court held that informational self-determination and informational privacy constitute an integral part of the right to privacy. Chandrachud J. held that information control empowers individuals to use “privacy as a shield” to retain control over personal information. Nariman J. held that informational privacy relates to a person’s mind and therefore individuals have “control over the dissemination of material that is personal” to them. Kaul J. held that “the right to control dissemination of personal information” is a part of the right to privacy.

      Though the case arose in the context of the constitutional challenge of the Aadhaar Act, the Court recognised that data protection is closely intertwined with informational privacy. The Court notes that a robust data protection law must be formulated by the State by “carefully balancing” individual privacy and legitimate concerns of the State.

    • Techdirt ☛ Greek Government Responds To Domestic Surveillance Controversy By Making Things Worse

      Malware and exploit developers are generating a seemingly endless number of headlines, thanks to misuse of their products by government entities. Israel’s NSO Group has made the most headlines, but other Israel-located malware purveyors have made the news as well. Candiru, another Israeli exploit developer, was hit with the same sanctions the US Commerce Department leveled against NSO Group.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Medforth ☛ He wanted to avenge the Prophet and punish Switzerland, so he stabbed a man to death shouting “Allahu Akbar”

    Before the attack, he allegedly walked past the pub eleven times. The victim, who had been dining with his family in the pub on that Saturday evening, died at the scene. The perpetrator fled, but was arrested the following day. This is said to be the first fatal knife attack in Switzerland with a jihadist background.

  • New York Sun ☛ Qatar Is Reported To Be Funding Radical Islamic Centers All Over Italy

    A muscular Belgian police dragnet has exposed widespread corruption linked to the World Cup host nation.

  • The Nation ☛ What the West Gets Wrong About the Rwandan Genocide

    In early April 1994, when the genocide began in Rwanda, the meetings started in Washington. “They couldn’t say we were not going to do anything, because that’s b

  • Pro Publica ☛ The Truth About Afghanistan’s Zero Unit Night Raids

    This story contains graphic descriptions and images of war casualties.

    On a December night in 2018, Mahzala was jolted awake by a shuddering wave of noise that rattled her family’s small mud house. A trio of helicopters, so unfamiliar that she had no word for them, rapidly descended, kicking up clouds of dust that shimmered in their blinding lights. Men wearing desert camouflage and black masks flooded into the house, corralling her two sons and forcing them out the door.

  • Pro Publica ☛ What Is the Leahy Law?

    For more than two decades, the U.S. military has been barred from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

    The law, named for its author, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, applies to military assistance for foreign units funded through the Defense or State departments. Lawmakers including Leahy, a Democrat, acknowledged that it does not cover commando outfits like Afghanistan’s Zero Units.

  • TruthOut ☛ Leahy Calls for Expanding Human Rights Law to Cover US Intelligence Agencies

  • Scheerpost ☛ See No Evil

  • TruthOut ☛ Jewish Groups Say GOP, Not Ilhan Omar, Is Pushing Antisemitism

  • Counter Punch ☛ Talking Anti-Semitism

    There may be more than three – Jew-haters have been at it for a long time — but these are the most obvious:

    1) Judeophobia – individual or community animus toward Jews. Arising from multiple sources, including the medieval blood libel that Jews kill Christian babies, Judeophobia has persisted for centuries. It can be obnoxious (disparagement) or murderous (pogroms), and quickly change from one to the other. Because some ideas are just too stupid to die, the blood libel persists today. QAnon, for example endorses it, though their roster of baby killers now also includes liberals, socialists, journalists, queers, and of course, the Clintons. The man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in San Francisco, was a QAnon follower and Judeophobe. A poll of QAnon believers published in Morning Consult reveals that about half think liberal Jews are actively seeking to control the world. (Jews are .02 percent of global population.) Just as disturbing, about a third of “right-leaning” Americans (aka Republicans) believe the same thing.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICC Wanted to Investigate Israeli War Crimes. Now It’s Caving to US Pressure.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Yemen Yes-Men Ride Again

    Promises, promises.

    Every time Congress rattles its war powers saber against continuing US support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, presidents simultaneously threaten to veto such resolutions, and pretend they’re just about ready to end that support, if only Congress will back off. And it does.

  • Counter Punch ☛ On Justice for Kashmir

    1947 was a momentous year for South Asia as British colonial rule came to an end, followed by a partition of India that resulted in much bloodshed throughout the process of establishing the Muslim state of Pakistan alongside the secular Hindu majority state of India. At this time, Kashmir was one of 560 ‘princely states’ in India, governed by a Hindu Maharajah while having a population that was 77% Muslim. The partition agreement reached by India and Pakistan gave the peoples of these ‘states’ a partial right of self-determination in the form of a free choice as to whether to remain a part of India or join their destiny with that of Pakistan, and in either event retaining considerable independence by way of self-rule. It was widely assumed that these choices would favor India if their population was Hindu and to Pakistan if Muslim. In a confused and complicated set of circumstances that involved Kashmiris and others contesting the Maharahah’s leadership of Kashmir, India engaged in a variety of maneuvers including a large-scale military intervention to avoid the timely holding of the promised internationally supervised referendum, and by stages coercively treated Kashmir more and more as an integral part of India. This Indian betrayal of the partition settlement agreement gave rise to the first of several wars with Pakistan, and it resulted in a division of Kashmir in 1948 that was explicitly not an international boundary, but intended as a temporary ‘line-of-control’ to separate the opposed armed forces. It has ever since given rise to acute tension erupting in recurrent warfare between the two countries, and even now no international boundary exists between divided Kashmir. The leadership of Pakistan has always believed that Kashmir was a natural projection of itself, treating India’s behavior as occupying power as totally unacceptable and illegitimate as have the majority of Kashmiris.

    The essence of India’s betrayal was to deny the people of Kashmir the opportunity to express their preference for accession to India or Pakistan, presumably correctly believing that it would lose out if a proper referendum were held. Back in 1947 the Indian secular, liberal leadership did itself make strong pledges to the effect that Kashmir would be allowed to determine its future affiliation in an internationally supervised referendum or plebiscite as soon as order could be there restored. The two governments even agreed to submit the issue to the UN, and the Security Council reaffirmed the right of Kashmir to the agreed process of self-determination, but India gradually took steps clearly designed to prevent this internationally supervised resolution of Kashmir’s future from ever happening. It appears that India sought control of Kashmir primarily for strategic and nationalist reasons associated especially with managing Kashmir’s borders with China and Pakistan, and in doing so converting Kashmir into a buffer state of India, giving it the security that supposedly accompanies strategic depth of a ‘Great Power.’ Unsurprisingly, Pakistan reacted belligerently to India’s failure to live up to its commitments, and the result for Kashmir was a second level of partition between India occupied Kashmir and a smaller Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir. In effect, India’s unilateralism poisoned relations between these two countries, later to become possessors of nuclear weapons, as well as producing a Kashmiri population that felt deprived of its fundamental rights with accompanying atrocities (including torture, forced disappearances, sexual violence, extrajudicial killing, excessive force, collective punishment, the panopoly of counterinsurgency crimes), which amount to Crimes Against Humanity, in a manner somewhat resembling the deprivations associated with Palestine and Western Sahara.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Pentagon Audit: Assets Gone Missing

    When I say they “failed” their audit, I don’t mean they put a 9 instead of a 7 on one of the balance sheets, causing two soldiers to get accidentally left in Antarctica freezing their asses off. I mean, they really failed their audit. As The Hill put it, “The Defense Department has failed its fifth-ever audit, unable to account for more than half of its assets, but the—” Hold up. Hold up. Did ya catch that? They can’t account for over half their assets! This is the largest murder machine on the planet – nearly a trillion dollars spent every year – and they don’t know where half their shit is?! How is this not criminal?

    If you worked at a shoe store, or a hardware store, or a daycare, and you couldn’t locate half your inventory, you’d be locked up right now! But apparently, if you’re simply responsible for more killing on the planet earth than any other modern organization, no one’s held accountable for anything.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Work of National Importance

    Akst’s new book, titled War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation who Revolutionized Resistance, is a fascinating and detailed history of this movement. By focusing on the best known organizers, Akst tells the story of pacifism in the United States from the 1930s up through the 1960s. Those names–Dorothy Day, David Dellinger, Dwight McDonald and Bayard Rustin among others–are as important to twentieth century US history as any politician or general that ever convinced others to go to war. His narrative highlights the role of peace churches like the Quakers and Mennonites in the expansion of conscientious objector status and the shortcomings of that expansion. More importantly, he details several acts of resistance in the camps, farms, hospitals and prisons by those who refused to fight. Likewise, he discusses the good works that the resisters performed in hospitals and mental health facilities and their development of an idealized community that transcended their confines. That community ultimately set the stage for the antiwar and anti-racist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was their moral outrage, philosophical justifications and organizing approaches that would form the basis for one of the most popular movements against a nation’s war in human history.

    The resisters portrayed here–and the thousands of others whose names are known mostly to their family and friends–were heroes in a manner beyond the comprehension of most human beings. I would argue, based on my experience, that incomprehension is especially true when considering citizens of the United States. After all, in the minds of most US residents, their military has never lost a war. Furthermore, it is a nation founded and sustained by continuous expansion fueled by war. Consequently, war seems to work to their benefit. The current time is certainly no exception. Indeed, the past fifty years has seen Washington engaged in some kind of military conflict with nary a pause.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Why Has Qatar Jailed a World Cup Whistleblower? The Brother of Abdullah Ibhais Speaks Out

    As the world’s attention turns to the World Cup final on Sunday between Argentina and France, we look at the case of imprisoned World Cup whistleblower Abdullah Ibhais, a former communications director for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup organizers, who has been imprisoned since November 2019. Ibhais, a Jordanian national, was given a five-year sentence in Qatar on what his family says are trumped-up charges after he raised concern over working conditions for migrant workers who’d gone on strike over months of unpaid wages — including workers building stadiums for the games. Ibhais’s sentence was later reduced to three years, but his family recently said in an open letter that he was subjected to torture after he contributed footage to the ITV documentary “Qatar: State of Fear?” Ibhais’s family has also blasted FIFA, calling it complicit in his imprisonment. For more, we speak with Abdullah’s brother Ziad Ibhais and Nick McGeehan, co-director and co-founder of the human rights organization FairSquare, where he advocates for migrant workers.

  • TruthOut ☛ Brother of World Cup Whistleblower Imprisoned in Qatar Speaks Out

  • Counter Punch ☛ EU Qatar Corruption

    How utterly fitting that it should happen at this time. The Qatar FIFA World Cup is coming to a close, a tournament nakedly bought by a state keen to be a standard bearer, not merely of the Arab world, but the world of shameless sportswashing. Despite being criticised for its human rights record, its laws against sexual minorities and its shabby treatment of migrant labourers, Doha will be delighted at yet another tournament passing without effectual criticism.

    The tournament has certainly seen a number of converts to Qatar’s increasingly large tent of the uncritical. The French President Emmanuel Macron, for one, is telling us that “sport shouldn’t be politicised.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Kremlin’s Cold War with the Modern World Has Become a Russian Tragedy

    Imbeciles on the right have long condemned this form of politically incorrect critical thinking as sympathizing with terrorists and dictators but sadly, increasingly, once wise people on the left have joined these imbeciles in rejecting the hard work of asking ‘how the hell did it come to this?’ When I was first initiated into the antiwar movement as a pissed-off teenage dirtbag, I was enlightened by left-wing firebrands like William Blum and Ward Churchill who dared to put themselves in the uncomfortable shoes of the men who hijacked four planes on September 11th to initiate a holy war.

    They weren’t justifying such clearly despicable violence; they were attempting to provide context on how it became inevitable. Now, whenever I attempt to do the same thing by comprehending the equally despicable actions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, I get accused of being an apologist for authoritarianism and, all too often, the person hurling this insult at me is a fellow self-described anarchist.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Madness of Nuclear Warfare Is Alive and Well

    Hey, cheer up because it truly is a beauty! I’m talking about this country’s latest “stealth bomber,” the B-21 Raider, just revealed by Northrop Grumman, the company that makes it, in all its glory. With its striking bat-winged shape and its ability to deliver a very big bang (as in nuclear weapons), it’s our very own “bomber of the future.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it at its explosive debut, it will “fortify America’s ability to deter aggression, today and into the future.” Now, that truly makes me proud to be an American.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Madness of Nuclear Warfare, Alive and Well in America

    And while you’re at it, on this MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) world of ours, let that scene, that peculiar form of madness, involving the potential end of everything on Planet Earth, sink in. As a retired Air Force officer, it reminded me all too vividly of my former service and brought to mind the old motto of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), “Peace Is Our Profession.” Headed in its proudest years by the notorious General Curtis LeMay, it promised “peace” via the threat of the total nuclear annihilation of America’s enemies.

    SAC long controlled two “legs” of this country’s nuclear triad: its land-based bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. During the Cold War, those Titans, Minutemen, and MX “Peacekeepers” were kept on constant alert, ready to pulverize much of the planet at a moment’s notice. It didn’t matter that this country was likely to be pulverized, too, in any war with the Soviet Union. What mattered was remaining atop the nuclear pile. A concomitant benefit was keeping conventional wars from spinning out of control by threatening the nuclear option or, as was said at the time, “going nuclear.” (In the age of Biden, it’s “Armageddon.”)

  • Common Dreams ☛ Russia Warns of ‘Unpredictable Consequences’ If US Sends Patriot Missiles to Ukraine

    Responding to reports that the Biden administration is finalizing plans to send Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine as the country endures waves of deadly Russian missile strikes, a top Kremlin official said Thursday that such a move would be viewed as an escalation in hostilities.

    Citing anonymous sources, CNN reported Tuesday that a Pentagon plan to send an unknown quantity of Raytheon MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile systems is awaiting approval by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin before being sent to President Joe Biden’s desk. 

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Bring on the Labor Movement Militancy!

    The public doesn’t usually warm to the notion of labour militancy—until reminded that, without it, weekends would be a lot shorter, or maybe not exist at all.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian pounds Ukraine with missiles, prompting emergency power shutdowns in multiple regions — Meduza

    Ukrainian authorities reported Friday that Russia had launched a series of missile attacks on multiple regions through the country. An air raid alert was declared on all of Ukraine’s territory.

  • Meduza ☛ Employees of Voronezh university were asked to donate wages to Russian army — Meduza

    A sample form, which employees could use to request that one day’s worth of their wages be directed instead to the Russian military, was sent around departments at Voronezh State University. The publication 7×7 Gorizontalnaya Rossiya published photos of the template form.

  • Meduza ☛ Ichkeria dreamin’: A new Chechen separatist army is being formed in Ukraine, but beating Russia in the Donbas is easier than deposing Ramzan Kadyrov — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Ads seeking trench diggers in Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Belgorod regions appear on Russian job sites — Meduza

    Job postings seeking workers to build fortifications and dig trenches in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk regions as well as in Russia’s Belgorod region have begun appearing on Russian social media and job sites.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale’s Case Is ‘Exactly What The Pardon Power Is For,’ Says Ilhan Omar

• Environment

  • The Nation ☛ Lessons on Resistance From a Child of the First Climate-Change Generation

    On a visit to a Black woman healer that I see often, I heard the sounds of climate change wafting down the corridor—warnings of storms and fires, rising temperatures, ruptured ecosystems, and broken supply chains. I turned to her, perplexed. “Is that your baby?” She nodded: it was, in fact, her seven-year-old child watching videos on YouTube. “That doesn’t scare them?” I asked. “It doesn’t give them nightmares?” No, she assured me. In fact, the information in the videos empowered them: it helped them understand how to plan for disasters, when and where to evacuate. The videos told the truth, after all: Climate change is here and it is getting worse. Predictability is but a mirage.1

  • The Nation ☛ A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency

    This story is part of “Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

  • The Nation ☛ The Rise of the Year-Round Wildfire

    Mike Savala’s boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Climate Defenders Celebrate as Manchin’s Dirty Deal Defeated a Third Time

    The U.S. climate movement and people on the frontlines of the planetary crisis celebrated Thursday after the U.S. Senate declined to add Sen. Joe Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly permitting bill to a military spending package.

    “The Senate’s rejection of this dangerous bill is a resounding win for environmental justice communities and the climate.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Amid Fight Over Manchin Deal, Climate Justice Groups Offer Roadmap for Green Infrastructure

    As U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin fights to force through fossil fuel-friendly permitting legislation, nine green groups on Thursday offered a roadmap for boosting clean energy infrastructure while also respecting impacted communities.

    “We need a clean energy revolution shaped by justice and equity.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden’s Latest Push for Manchin Dirty Deal Condemned as ‘Disgraceful Betrayal’

    Climate groups and advocates voiced anger Thursday after President Joe Biden reiterated his support for industry-backed permitting changes pushed by Sen. Joe Manchin that would fast-track oil and gas projects, undercut bedrock environmental protections, and drown out the voices of frontline communities harmed by polluting infrastructure.

    In a statement released ahead of a possible Thursday vote on Manchin’s legislation—which Democratic leaders are attempting to add to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) despite opposition from rank-and-file lawmakers and the climate movement—Biden said he supports the West Virginia Democrat’s “permitting reform proposal as a way to cut Americans’ energy bills, promote U.S. energy security, and boost our ability to get energy projects built and connected to the grid.”

  • Energy

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Szijjártó calls on European Commission’s help as Croatia plans to increase transit fee on oil pipeline

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Crypto-Populist Pyramid Scam

      Consider NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. These are collectibles—some might call them art—created by the same block-chain technology as cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, turned an image of his first tweet into an NFT in December 2020 and auctioned it off for $2.9 million a few months later. Dorsey donated the proceeds to charity, but most others have taken the money and run. When the purchaser of his NFT tried to resell it in April 2022 for $50 million, the highest bid was a paltry $280.

      That might just seem like a single appalling financial miscalculation. But consider the fate of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which are nothing more than cartoon representations of an ape face with various expressions and accoutrements. You might pay $20 max for such a drawing on paper. But the price of these NFTs started to rise when celebrities began to buy them and then promote them to their fans. The collection topped $1 billion in value.

    • The Nation ☛ Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Scam Is Business as Usual

      It looked like a set piece straight out of Law and Order: Just a few weeks after he made his surreal star turn before a New York Times DealBook crowd, disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was under arrest in the Bahamas, awaiting extradition to the United States on eight charges alleging rampant fraud at his now-shuttered currency exchange FTX. And only a month after a damning expose from the crypto site CoinDesk triggered a massive selloff at FTX, the newly anointed dark lord of crypto was behind bars. And as a pointed legal addendum, the financial industry’s lead regulatory agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, have each launched separate complaints against SBF, as the 30-year-old former billionaire was familiarly known.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ Humans Are Weapons of Mass Extinction

      In 2020, a UN report (Global Biodiversity Outlook 5) warned:

      “Humanity stands at a crossroads with regard to the legacy it leaves to future generations. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying. None of the… Biodiversity Targets will be fully met…The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance of the relationship between people and nature, and it reminds us all of the profound consequences to our own well-being and survival that can result from continued biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems.”

    • Common Dreams ☛ Outlook ‘Grim’ Halfway Through Global Biodiversity Summit, Climate Groups Warn

      Disagreements over financing biodiversity protection, the piracy of natural resources, and commitments to protect at least 30% of the Earth’s land and water by 2030 are some of the top sticking points at the United Nations’ global biodiversity summit in Montreal, which is set to wrap up in just four days.

      Following a walkout early Wednesday by developing nations outraged over the Global North’s opposition to creating a biodiversity fund, one anonymous negotiator at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) wrote in The Guardian that the summit is at risk of amounting to more of what climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has called “blah blah blah.”

    • BBC ☛ Berlin’s giant AquaDom hotel aquarium containing 1,500 fish explodes – BBC News

      “This is not one disease in isolation,” said the president’s Covid-19 response coordinator. “We are very aware that this increase that we’re seeing in Covid is in that context of one of the worst flu seasons in a decade and RSV that was quite bad.”

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ After Latest Fed Rate Hike, Housing Justice Activists Demand Biden Act to Fight Soaring Rents

    A grassroots advocacy coalition on Thursday demanded that the Biden administration “address the acute crisis that so many families are feeling today by pursuing rent stabilization policies to stop the skyrocketing cost of housing.”

    “The Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes ignore corporate landlords’ role in creating and maintaining this crisis.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Companies That Illegally Fire Workers Will Now Have to Pay for Debts Incurred

  • Counter Punch ☛ Rents Blast Through the Roof

    Sliding further down the social ladder, we encounter the November 25 news from Invisible People, a group that supports the homeless, that a fire ravaged a village of tiny domiciles designed to shelter unhoused veterans in California. Apparently, such conflagrations are a trend, due to the flammable nature of these miniscule homes. These veterans can’t catch a break. They served their country, many doubtless diagnosed with PTSD as a result, lack sufficient funds for rent, sleep on the sidewalk, finally get some kind of shelter, which Invisible People dubs a flammable prison-sized cell, and it burns down, leaving them lucky to escape with their lives. I suggest the state of Florida confiscate the opulent Fisher Island penthouse and break it up into apartments for some of Miami’s many, many vagabonds, whom one encounters all over the city but most heartbreakingly in the shadow of the luxury high-rises that line the shores of Miami Beach. They migrate to Miami because the warm weather makes sleeping and living outdoors easier. But the city some have called Fascism’s Capital has no use for these human discards, whose shabbiness contrasts so glaringly with the harsh and haughty opulence of its pitiless glittering glass, chrome and steel.

    “Millennials have always lagged behind other generations in homeownership,” the Post informs us. Educational debt is a culprit here. But lately the millennial predicament got worse. That’s because housing costs recently hit an all-time high. For individual buyers, the market stinks. For renters, it’s worse. A full-time minimum wage employee cannot afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. They have to double up or sleep in their car, assuming they have one. That’s because as of June the average rent reached $2000 per month.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Amtraks Across America: Oswald’s New Orleans

    Early in the morning, on my way to a breakfast diner, I loved riding my beach cruiser bicycle through the French Quarter, which, despite the evening onslaught of the tourist brigades, come sunrise retained its European sensibility.

    I warmed to the wrought-iron balconies (many are actually Spanish) above the sidewalks, and I enjoyed window shopping over my handlebars, despite the voodoo-themed gifts in many galleries.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Workers, Not ‘Stockbrokers and CEOs,’ Will Pay Price for Fed Rate Hikes: Warren

    Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the most outspoken critic of Federal Reserve policy in Congress, said Wednesday that the central bank’s decision to continue raising interest rates into 2023 risks “throwing millions out of work,” a warning that came shortly after Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the U.S. unemployment rate will likely rise in the coming months.

    “Chair Powell has a dual mandate: to bring inflation down and keep unemployment low,” Warren wrote on Twitter. “But his rate hikes risk throwing millions out of work. He should remember that the people who’ll lose their jobs aren’t stockbrokers and CEOs, it’s working people who need that paycheck every week.”

  • The Nation ☛ ’Tis the Season to Talk About Student Debt Cancellation

    It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Folks everywhere are getting ready to spend quality time with friends and family for the holidays—perhaps some of their first large gatherings since the Covid-19 pandemic began. As much as everyone is excited to open gifts and dig into their favorite recipes, there is one thing most people are still afraid of: conversations at the dinner table.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Elon Musk Is Dumping Billions in Tesla Stock

    The sale was revealed in an SEC filing submitted by Musk showing that between Monday and Wednesday he offloaded around 22 million shares of the electric vehicle company. The total value of Musk’s Tesla stock sales this year is estimated to amount to around $40 billion.

  • NPR ☛ Twitter has changed its rules over the account tracking Elon Musk’s private jet

    He also threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the @elonjet flight-tracking account, and “organizations who supported harm to my family.” It’s not clear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for an account that automatically posted public flight information.

  • Brussels Morning Newspaper ☛ EU bodies sign digital rights declaration

    Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, added “this declaration makes it crystal clear that the rights we have offline, we also have online.”

    At the same time, she noted that the EC will “look if we get it right through an annual report on the state of the digital decade” and added that the body will put the declaration “into practice with the EU legislation already in place.”

  • European Commission ☛ European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles

    The European Parliament, the Council and the Commission solemnly proclaim the following joint Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade [...]

  • Counter Punch ☛ Neoliberalism and Its Discontents

    There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. This class appeared in the form of our corporate elite.

    Given a green light in the late 1970s by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by the 1990s, America’s corporate leadership had evolved a simple strategy for criminal self-enrichment.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Swiss/U.S. Political Partying and Fleeting Loyalty

    Switching parties is not a new phenomenon and has had mixed results. Several years ago an important Geneva figure, Robert Cramer, went from the extreme right to the Greens with considerable success, including election to the national Parliament. His electoral career was not hindered by his fundamental change in orientation. In the United States, Donald Trump was a Democrat in the 2000s, according to New York City voting records. His switch to Republican helped him all the way to the Oval Office. But switching parties does not always guarantee voter approbation. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania changed from Republican to Democrat in 2009 but was not re-elected.

    Moving from one party to another is not as dramatic in Switzerland with its multiparty system as is a shift in the United States from one of the two major parties to the other or to run as an independent. Sinema will join Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Maine’s Angus King as independents in the Senate; both ran as independents.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Giuliani One Step Closer to Being Disbarred in DC for Trying to Overturn Trump Loss

    A Washington, D.C. Bar committee said Thursday that disgraced attorney Rudy Giuliani violated at least one professional rule when he tried to help former President Donald Trump overturn his 2020 election loss—a preliminary finding that could result in the suspension or revocation of his license to practice law.

    Following a week of testimony from Giuliani and some of his allies, the three-member disciplinary panel agreed that “Giuliani’s rushed effort to file lawsuits to throw out hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania votes without any direct evidence of election fraud… crossed ethical lines,” Politico reported.

  • The Nation ☛ Steve Phillips on Sinema and Nelson Lichtenstein on the UC Strike

    The Democrats triumphed in Arizona this November, electing the governor and the secretary of state, and reelecting Senator Mark Kelley—in what used to be a red state. But then Senator Kyrsten Sinema quit the Democratic Party, and progressives moved toward a primary election to challenge her. On this week’s podcast, Steve Phillips explains how the victories happened, and what’s to be done about Sinema. Powered by RedCircle

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Beyond Razor Wire: A Connected Planet

    “Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Watershed Moment’: House Approves Statehood Vote for Puerto Ricans

    Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two of the four current Puerto Rican members of the U.S. House, were among those who celebrated the passage of the Puerto Rico Status Act on Thursday as lawmakers made history by approving a binding process for a referendum in the territory regarding potential statehood.

    The proposal passed with a vote of 233-191, with 16 Republicans joining the Democratic Party in supporting it.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Peru Civil Society Calls for National Strike as Unelected President Declares State of Emergency

    Organized labor and progressive civil society groups in Peru are calling for a national strike as unelected interim President Dina Boluarte imposes a 30-day state of emergency in a bid to quell protests demanding her resignation and an end to the country’s neoliberal economic model.

    Thousands of Peruvian workers have taken to the streets in recent days to push for the immediate dissolution of Congress, fresh elections, and the creation of a new constitution by a constituent assembly.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | We Can’t Let Voter Suppression Be Normalized

    Earlier this month, incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff election, strengthening the Democrats’ control of the Senate. Historians note that Warnock—first seated following a special election that went to a runoff in January 2021—became the first Georgia Democrat to win reelection to the Senate since Sam Nunn in 1990, and the first Deep South Democrat to win reelection to the institution since Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu in 2008.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Republicans Sick of Trump Have a Major Problem: The Trump Base

    As Congress ends its first post-Trump term, the biggest political question hanging over America is this: When will the GOP finally reach its anti-Trump tipping point—when a majority of Republican lawmakers disavow him?

  • Techdirt ☛ Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists

    Well. Just after finishing that last post about Twitter banning the official Mastodon account on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new “free speech absolutist” Twitter have really come off. In quick succession, a whole bunch of high profile reporter accounts were suspended, including Aaron Rupar (who famously covers and quotes videos of high profile politicians), Drew Harwell from the Washington Post, Ryan Mac from the NY Times, Donie Sullivan from CNN, and Matt Binder from Mashable.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon’s Commitment To Free Speech Rapidly Replaced By His Commitment To Blatant Hypocrisy: Bans The JoinMastodon Account

    Oh, Elon. Following on yesterday’s nonsense in banning the ElonJet account that robotically posted the public information regarding Elon’s private plane flights, and then trying to justify it later (after initially promising to keep the account alive to demonstrate his “commitment to free speech”), it appears that Elon’s commitment to free speech continues to dwindle.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘There’s plenty of idiots on both sides of the Atlantic’ The decline of Skoltech, Russia’s cutting-edge research institute that once partnered with MIT — Meduza

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Continues to Grift Supporters With $99 Trading Card Announcement

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ China believes the EU could learn from Hungary

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungary is a modern, democratic state based on the rule of law – the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights says

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungary’s recovery plan received the same grade as 23 others

  • TruthOut ☛ Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger Wants to End State Runoff System

  • TruthOut ☛ Poll Shows Few Americans Believe House Republicans Will Enact Positive Change

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | State Legislatures Cannot Defy Constitutional Democracy and Destroy Majority Rule

    Are state lawmakers free to ignore the results of a presidential election?

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Popularity Is at Its Lowest Point Since 2015

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Everything we have is here’ In Armenia’s southeast, local residents are still reeling from September’s attacks — Meduza

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ A propaganda sampler Russian state TV hosts mock Ukrainians dealing with aftermath of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure — Meduza

      Months of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have left Ukrainian civilians facing rolling blackouts and interruptions to heat, water, and telecommunications services. Russian state television and pro-Kremlin Telegram channels can’t avoid discussing this reality, but they find ways to spin the facts, either making light of the situation in Ukraine or, when that fails, blaming Ukrainians themselves for the destruction. Meduza collected some glaring examples of the Russian mass media propaganda machine at work. A warning: the collected quotes contain derogatory terms for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Scheerpost ☛ Project Censored: Hunting the Twitter Files

    Nolan Higdon on how legacy media censors details about censorship.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian blogger fined for posting ‘foreign agent’ disclaimer in too-small font — Meduza

    Russian blogger Andrey Alekseyev has been fined 10,000 rubles ($155) for posting the “foreign agent” disclaimer required by the authorities in too small a font.

  • The Register UK ☛ UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

    In notes published along with the Bill, the government promised to tackle anonymous abuse by social media platform users by giving users the option to verify their identity, and tools to have more control over the legal content that they see and who they interact with – such as excluding interactions with unverified users.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Top journalists banned from Twitter without notification or explanation—and Mastodon’s account is gone too.

    Wesley Lowery speculates that the suspended journalists may all have linked to an on-the-record statement published today by the LAPD concerning Musk’s report that the car his son was traveling in was accosted by a stalker.

  • The Verge ☛ Twitter suspends Mastodon after it tweeted about Elon’s jet

    We don’t know exactly why the account was banned, but it may not have been done entirely out of spite for a rival platform. Instead, it could have been because Mastodon tweeted about @ElonJet.

    The Mastodon suspension happened sometime on Thursday. The Wayback Machine has an archive of the active profile from 12:39PM ET, but an archive from 6:12PM ET shows the suspended page. On the archive of the active profile, there’s a tweet pointing to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account.

  • NPR ☛ Twitter suspends several journalists who shared information about Musk’s jet

    Musk took the highly unusual move of booting journalists from Twitter following a sudden change in policy about accounts that share the travels of private jets using publicly available information.

    Musk tweeted that those who violate Twitter’s new policy will be suspended for 7 days.

    Many of the journalists who were suspended Thursday night had tweeted or written about the rift between Musk and the jet-tracking account.

  • Counter Punch ☛ “The Twitter Files”: It’s Not About Free Speech

    That of course is the point: whatever Matt Taibbi may or may not tell himself, “The Twitter Files” is explicitly intended as right-wing political project. Any potentially significant information it includes doesn’t really matter—not only because the report is singularly meant to bolster one narrative—but also because any meaningfully ameliorative changes to the issues theoretically raised, like publicly and transparently managing Twitter, are not going to happen.

    So it is difficult not to see this as particularly pathetic for Taibbi, if the latest in a years-long downward slide. Of course, it’s not just him (though for more, Yasha Levine’s write-up of Taibbi’s cowardice and willingness to jettison his past collaborators, like Mark Ames—presciently written in 2020—reads as one of the best explanations of what led him here).

  • Common Dreams ☛ Ellsberg, Donziger Among Those Demanding Freedom for Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale

    Anti-war and First Amendment advocates are among those ramping up pressure on President Joe Biden to commute the 45-month prison sentence of Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst and Pentagon employee who disclosed documents regarding the U.S. drone assassination program and was convicted last year of violating the Espionage Act.

    Human rights attorney Steven Donziger and political activist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked classified information about the U.S. war in Vietnam to the New York Times five decades ago in what became known as the Pentagon Papers, are scheduled to join Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a press conference Thursday morning where they plan to appeal to the president and highlight what the congresswoman called Hale’s “courageous” and “patriotic” actions.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Counter Punch ☛ New York Times Strike: From Reporters to Rabble-Rousers

    “We make the paper, we make the profits!” chanted striking workers in a raucous rally outside the Times’ headquarters. Some union members called on the public to show solidarity by refraining from accessing the digital edition of the Times, even in order to play the popular game Wordle. The NewsGuild has also called on subscribers and supporters to sign a petition in support of their demands, saying, “We are the people who deliver groundbreaking journalism and keep the newsroom running every day.”

    The strike is particularly significant given that the Times is arguably the most influential journalistic outlet in the nation, framing political and economic issues for the public. It is considered the “national ‘newspaper of record,’” and its journalists have won more than 100 Pulitzer Prizes. They have leverage over their employer, although their reluctance to use it is apparent given both the rarity of such strikes and the very limited scope of the December 8 action.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ County Benchslapped For Illegally Detaining All Foreign-Born People For Pickup By ICE, Even If They’re American Citizens

    This is some kind of ugly. When law enforcement starts talking about being “proactive,” it’s time to start worrying about your rights. Here’s what happened to Myriam Parada after a routine traffic stop.

  • JNS ☛ Iran booted from UN women’s commission in ‘unmistakable message’

    Iran was ousted from the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women on Wednesday after the world body’s 54-member Economic and Social Council adopted a U.S.-initiated resolution to take that step.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Women’s Rights Activist on Protests Sweeping Iran, the Intensifying Gov’t Crackdown & Executions

    Human rights groups say over 14,000 people have been arrested across Iran since protests began in September following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. At least 400 people have reportedly been sentenced to up to 10 years in prison, and multiple people have been executed. The protests are “the longest sustained protests since the start of the revolution,” says Sussan Tahmasebi, a women’s rights activist and feminist from Iran joining us from Brussels, Belgium, who says women and youth are sick of the status quo and are seeking fundamental freedoms. “Iranians voted multiple times for over two decades for some process of reform … but the state has not given in to those demands,” she says. “What we’re seeing now is the result.” Tahmasebi is the director of FEMENA, an organization that promotes gender equality and supports women human rights defenders, and co-founder of the Iran Civil Society Training and Research Center, as well as the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots effort working to end gender-biased laws in Iran.

  • The Sun ☛ Fury as Iranian footballer is handed DEATH SENTENCE just for backing women’s rights after girl’s brutal killing by cops

    Nasr-Azadani is not the only athlete being punished for speaking out against Tehran.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Coalition Urges Biden Admin. to Consider Creating US Human Rights Body

    U.S. President Joe Biden declared during a speech last year that the United States must demonstrate that “our commitment to human rights begins at home.”

    That’s how dozens of human rights experts and groups began a Thursday letter to Ambassador Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, which “drives the development and implementation of the president’s domestic policy agenda in the White House and across the federal government.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ A Year of Global Displacement

    Even more alarming, this milestone was reached by the middle of the year. Over 50 million people were internally displaced within their own countries, over 30 million were refugees forced to flee their countries, and some 4.3 million were stateless.

    More than 70 percent of all refugees came from five countries mired in violent conflict: Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Climate-related emergencies, meanwhile — including severe floods in Pakistan and drought in Somalia — contributed heavily to the growing number of people internally displaced.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why Not Pay Fine Imposed for Actions Against Nuclear Threats?

    I’ve appealed the convictions to the Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest, which has yet to issue a decision. The appeal complains that expert witnesses in international law — who were prepared to validate my defense of “crime prevention” — were not allowed testify, effectively eliminating my right to present a defense.

    My refusal to pay the fine raises a lot of questions, principally: Why not avoid prison and just pay?

  • Counter Punch ☛ When the United Mine Workers Ousted Their Entrenched Leadership: a Lesson for Today’s Labor Movements

    In national balloting supervised by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Arnold Miller, Mike Trbovich and Harry Patrick ousted an old guard slate headed by W.A. (“Tony”) Boyle, the benighted successor to John L. Lewis, who ran the UMWA in autocratic fashion for 40 years. Boyle’s opponents, who campaigned under the banner of Miners for Democracy (MFD), had never served on the national union staff, executive board or any major bargaining committee. Instead, 50 years ago they were propelled into office by wildcat strike activity and grassroots organizing around job safety and health issues, including demands for better compensation for black lung disease, which afflicted many underground miners.

    Today, at a time when labor militants are again embracing a ​“rank-and-file strategy” to revitalize unions and change their leadership, the MFD’s unprecedented victory — and its turbulent aftermath — remains relevant and instructive. In the United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, local union activists recently elected to national office — and fellow reformers still contesting for headquarters positions in a runoff that begins January 12 — will face similar challenges overhauling an institution weakened by corruption, cronyism and labor-management cooperation schemes. Some UAW members may doubt the need for maintaining the opposition caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), that helped reformers get elected, but the MFD experience shows that such political breakthroughs are just the first step in changing a dysfunctional national union.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Neoliberal Fascism, Cruel Violence, and the Politics of Disposability

    Cruelty has always had a special place in fascist politics. Not only did it embody a discourse of hate, bigotry, and censorship, it also initiated a practice of cruel power in order to eradicate those ideas, dissidents, and human beings considered unworthy. Legacies of fascism in Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy, among others, mixed a language of dread, fear, and contempt with wide-spread practices of suppression and the repressive power of the state in order to eliminate any just concept of politics and the structural conditions and ideological possibilities for developing civic and democratic communities.

    Under fascist regimes, however diverse, cruelty and its transformation into extreme violence occupied the very core of everyday life.[1] Cruelty as a form of extreme violence was structured in relations of domination and traded in fear, insecurity, corruption, forced precarity, and the production of what Etienne Balibar calls “death zones.”[2] Under such circumstances, politics and violence permeated each other, and in doing so transformed all vestiges of the social state into a punishing state. Fascist politics represented a war waged not only against democracy, but against the social contract, public goods, and all social bonds rooted in “movements of emancipation aimed at transforming the structures of domination.”[3] The social does not disappear in this context but is simply removed from democratic values and ruthlessly subjected to the workings of capital.[4]

  • Counter Punch ☛ Congress: Fund the Fight Against Union-Busting

    Workers began delaying doctor’s appointments. Others were forced to delve deeply into their pockets — one even put thousands of dollars of chemotherapy charges on credit cards to save his wife’s life.

    Lisa Wilds, president of United Steelworkers Local 152M, assured her colleagues that the company would be held accountable. And it was. This past August, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered Tecnocap to reinstate the old health plan and reimburse workers, with interest, for all expenses they incurred.

  • Techdirt ☛ Congress Is About To Make This Post Telling You When To Celebrate SCOTUS Justice Birthdays Illegal

    The US Supreme Court has a big year ahead with lots of weighty matters to consider in 2023. But the seriousness of their job doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate each justice’s special day! If you would like to know when to fill your heart with warm birthday wishes for your favorite justice, here are all their birthdays in this handy convenient form.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Despite Warnock Win, Gigi Sohn’s Path To The FCC Remains Mired In Dumb, Corrupt Bullshit

    We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy year-long smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of blocking her confirmation vote and miring the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press through various think tanks and nonprofits, and accuse Sohn of everything from hating police to being an enemy of rural America.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Lee Yingtong Li ☛ DRM Round-up: IDAD 2022

    Self-published books continue their upward climb, narrowly overtaking Macmillan (which publishes the DRM-free Tor imprint). This year the growth in self-published sales was driven primarily by authors publishing via Amazon.

  • Techdirt ☛ Patients Are Being Left High And Dry When Medical Implant Makers Implode

    Techirt has long discussed how in the modern era, the things you buy aren’t actually the things you buy. And the things you own aren’t actually the things you own. Things you thought you owned can be downgraded, bricked, or killed off entirely without much notice.

• Monopolies

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | California’s New Antitrust Suit Shows How the State Can Lead on Reining In Amazon

    California has been a policy trendsetter for decades, leading the way nationally on issues ranging from environmental policy to online privacy. At a time when gridlock and aggressive industry lobbying threatens antitrust reform in Washington, California can and should lead the way on holding predatory monopolists like Amazon accountable.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Coalition Urges FTC to Ban Employer Non-Compete Clauses, Which ‘Keep Workers Stuck’

    A coalition of 25 progressive advocacy groups sent a letter Wednesday urging the Federal Trade Commission to immediately begin working on a rule to prohibit the use of non-compete clauses in employment contracts, arguing that such agreements disempower tens of millions of workers.

    “Employers’ use of non-compete clauses inflict real and substantial harms on the American worker and the overall U.S. economy without any legitimate justification,” states the letter to the FTC. “By limiting workers’ mobility, non-competes drive down wages, reduce the formation of new businesses, and keep workers stuck in unsafe or hostile workplaces.”

  • Patents

    • Counter Punch ☛ We Don’t Need Government-Granted Patent Monopolies to Finance Drug Development

      The most obvious example, that really deserves a hell of a lot more attention than it is getting, is the Covid vaccine developed by Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Botazzi at the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital. This vaccine was developed using grants in the single digit millions. Unlike the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, it uses a long-established technology. It is also completely open-sourced; the technology is fully public and there are no patents or other restrictions preventing its manufacture anywhere in the world.

      The vaccine, called Corbevax, is cheap and easy to produce, costing less than $2 per shot. By contrast Pfizer and Moderna charged close to $20 a shot for the initial round of inoculations. They are looking to charge considerably more for subsequent booster rounds. This is in spite of the fact that the U.S. government paid close to $900 million for the development and testing of Moderna’s vaccine, in addition to supporting the development of mRNA technology for decades.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Record Companies Hit Optimum With Billion Dollar BitTorrent Piracy Lawsuit

      Record companies, including BMG, UMG, and Capitol, have filed a huge copyright lawsuit against the owners of internet service provider, Optimum. The plaintiffs claim the ISP turned a blind eye to pirating subscribers responsible for millions of infringements. The lawsuit lists thousands of songs and could be worth over a billion dollars in damages.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Services Generate Over €1 Billion Per Year in Europe

      New research shows that, in Europe, pirate IPTV services generate over a billion euros in annual revenue. The number of Europeans using illegal IPTV services has increased by 25% in three years, but popularity differs greatly between countries. Unauthorized IPTV services are most in demand among the youth.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GHITNOK Wordo: LINGS

GNU/Linux

• Notebook Check ☛ Pine64 announces PineTab2 Linux tablet powered by Rockchip RK3566 – NotebookCheck.net News

  Pine64 is well-known for making affordable open-source gadgets and devices. Today, the company announced its latest device, the PineTab2.

  As the name implies, the PineTab2 is a tablet. Like all of Pine64′s devices, it will run Linux and will likely support a variety of Linux distros. The tablet will feature a 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen with a currently unknown resolution housed in a metal frame. Pine64 has selected the Rockchip RK3566 SoC to power the tablet. Pine64 previously used this chip in their Quartz64 Model B single-board computer, and the silicon has been featured in a variety of other small gadgets.

• CNX Software ☛ PineTab2 Linux tablet to feature Rockchip RK3566 SoC, up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash – CNX Software

  The PineTab2 is an upcoming 10.1-inch Linux tablet based on the 1.8 GHz Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor and equipped with up to 8GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash.

  The new model is a clear step-up compared to the Allwinner A64-based PineTab which did not survive the supply shortage and has also gone through a complete physical redesign with a modular metal chassis that is easy to disassemble for upgrades and change parts such as the eMMC module, camera module, battery, or even the display.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ A NEW LOOK! – Linux Mint 21.1 Beta Impressions – Invidious

    Time to take a quick look at the new visual changes and other tweaks coming to Linux Mint 21.1 in the recently released beta. First impressions incoming…

  • Video ☛ My HARROWING ENCOUNTER with the Valve Steam Deck Cult. (rant) *Reaction* – Invidious

    So apparently #steamdeck owners are a cult according to this person.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Composefs for integrity protection and data sharing [LWN.net]

    A read-only filesystem that will transparently share file data between disparate directory trees, while also providing integrity verification for the data and the directory metadata, was recently posted as an RFC to the linux-kernel mailing list. Composefs was developed by Alexander Larsson (who posted it) and Giuseppe Scrivano for use by podman containers and OSTree (or “libostree” as it is now known) root directories, but there are likely others who want the abilities it provides. So far, there has been little response, either with feedback or complaints, but it is a small patch set (around 2K lines of code) and generally self-contained since it is a filesystem, so it would not be a surprise to see it appear in some upcoming kernel.

  • LWN ☛ Checking page-cache status with cachestat() [LWN.net]

    The kernel’s page cache holds pages from files in RAM, allowing those pages to be accessed without expensive trips to persistent storage. Applications are normally entirely unaware of the page cache’s operation; it speeds things up and that is all that matters. Some applications, though, can benefit from knowledge about how much of a given file is present in the page cache at any given time; the proposed cachestat() system call from Nhat Pham is the latest in a long series of attempts to make that information available.

    In truth, even current kernels make it possible to learn which pages of a file are present in the page cache. The application just needs to map the file into its address space with mmap(), after which a call to mincore() will return a vector showing which pages in that file are resident. This is an expensive solution, though; it requires setting up a (possibly unneeded otherwise) mapping and returns information that, for many applications, has a higher resolution than is necessary.

  • LWN ☛ Losing the magic [LWN.net]

    The kernel project is now more than three decades old; over that time, a number of development practices have come and gone. Once upon a time, the use of “magic numbers” to identify kernel data structures was seen as a good way to help detect and debug problems. Over the years, though, the use of magic numbers has gone into decline; this patch set from Ahelenia Ziemiańska may be an indication that the reign of magic numbers may be reaching its end.

    A magic number is simply a specific constant value that is placed within a structure, typically as the first member, to identify the type of that structure. When structures are labeled in this way, in-kernel debugging code can check the magic number and raise the alarm if the expected value is not found, thus detecting problems related to type confusion or data corruption. These numbers can also be located in hexadecimal data dumps (stack contents, for example) to identify known data structures.

    The use of magic numbers in the kernel appears to have had its origin in the filesystem code, where it was initially used to identify (and verify) the superblock in the disk image. Even the 0.10 kernel release included a test against SUPER_MAGIC (0x137f) to verify that the boot disk was, indeed, a Minix filesystem. Other filesystems came later, starting with the “first extended” (ext), which used 0x137d for its EXT_SUPER_MAGIC value in the 0.96c release in July 1992.

    In the 0.99 release (December 1992), the sk_buff structure that is still used in the networking subsystem to hold packets was rather smaller than it is now, but it did gain a magic field to identify the queue a packet was expected to be in. Toward the middle of 1993, the 0.99.11 release acquired an updated kmalloc() implementation that sprinkled magic numbers around as a debugging aid. That release, incidentally, is also the one where an attempt was made to use C++ to build the kernel; that only lasted until 0.99.13, a couple of months later.

  • LWN ☛ Juggling software interrupts and realtime tasks [LWN.net]

    December 2, 2022 The software-interrupt mechanism is one of the oldest parts in the kernel; arguably, the basic design behind it predates Linux itself. Software interrupts can get in the way of other work so, for almost as long as they have existed, developers have wished that they could be made to go away. That has never happened, though, and doesn’t look imminent. Instead, Android systems have long carried a patch that tries to minimize the impact of software interrupts, at least in some situations. John Stultz is now posting that work, which contains contributions from a number of authors, in the hope of getting it into the mainline kernel.

    Hardware interrupts (or just “interrupts”) are initiated when a physical component in the system wants the kernel’s attention; they will usually cause an immediate trap into a special handler function. Since interrupts take the system away from whatever else it was doing, interrupt handlers have to do their work quickly; there is not time for any sort of extended processing. This is not a new problem; pre-Linux Unix systems often included the concept of a “bottom half” as a way of deferring work that could not be done in an interrupt handler.

    The Linux kernel, too, has had to develop mechanisms to defer processing until a more convenient time. One of those mechanisms is software interrupts (or “softirqs”). It was first introduced in the 0.99 kernel under the familiar “bottom half” name; the term “softirq” doesn’t appear until the 1.1.77 development release. The abbreviation “bh” (“bottom half”) can still be found in the names of kernel functions related to software interrupts.

  • Paul E. McKenney ☛ Stupid RCU Tricks: So You Want To Add Kernel-Boot Parameters Behind rcutorture’s Back?: paulmck — LiveJournal

    A previous post in this series showed how you can use the –bootargs parameter and .boot files to supply kernel boot parameters to the kernels under test. This works, but it turns out that there is another way, which is often the case with the Linux kernel. This other way is Masami Hiramatsu’s bootconfig facility, which is nicely documented in detail here. This blog post is a how-to guide on making use of bootconfig when running rcutorture.

• Graphics Stack

  • Dave Airlie ☛ vulkan video decoding: radv status

    I’ve been working the past couple of weeks with an ffmpeg developer (Lynne) doing Vulkan video decode bringup on radv.

    The current status of this work is in a branch[1]. This work is all against the current EXT decode beta extensions in the spec.

    This contains an initial implementation of H264 and H265 decoding for AMD GPUs from TONGA to NAVI2x. It passes the basic conformance tests but fails some of the more complicated ones, but it has decoded the streams we’ve been throwing at it using ffmpeg.

  • Collabora ☛ Machine Learning with Etnaviv and OpenCL

    Machine learning is increasingly seeing more applications and it’s important to have FOSS options to accelerate such workloads. Unfortunately, the present options in this space are often not appealing, causing users to opt for vendor-specific alternatives with downstream kernels and userspace. An example of this is VeriSilicon’s VIPNano-QI NPU IP, which is used for ML workloads but isn’t supported upstream.

    This post will give a brief overview of the state of FOSS ML options and announce some work that we are doing to support OpenCL on the Etnaviv driver.

• Applications

  • The Register UK ☛ FOSS video editors OpenShot and Kdenlive updated • The Register

    Well, it took the project a while, but they got there. OpenShot 2.0 came out in 2016, after “nearly two and a half years” as our scribe said at the time. Its maintainers aren’t rushing their job: this week, six and half year later, they just released OpenShot 3.0. To be fair, there have been a whole series of interim 2.x releases, the latest of which was version 2.6.1 in September 2021.

    The new version claims over 1,000 improvements, and better performance and stability. The app can now export multiple videos at the same time, and users of HiDPI monitors should benefit from improved 4K display support. This version is compatible with Blender 3.3 They’ve also done a lot of work on the program’s user guide.

    OpenShot supports an impressive range of platforms. It’s available in both native .DEB format in an Ubuntu PPA, and as a cross-platform AppImage, which you can also run on ChromeOS (so long as it’s an x86-based ChromeBook). There are also macOS and Windows versions. The Windows version can be run as a portable app, meaning that you can run it and use it, without admin permissions, for instance by installing it on a USB key. It does require a 64-bit CPU, though.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Harmonoid: A Beautiful Cross-Platform Music Player With Essential Features

    Fortunately, there’s no shortage of good open-source music players for Linux. We have covered a variety of options in the past.

    Here, I highlight a music player that is free to use, open-source, and available for multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Android.

    Harmonoid is written in Dart programming language. It utilizes libmpv and mpv for its media playback capabilities on desktop platforms.

    It provides an excellent user interface to work with. And does not use electron.js. So, if you hate Electron, this is something you can try.

  • H2S Media ☛ What is Linux hosting with cPanel software? – Linux Shout

    Online you can find dozens of Linux-based hosting service providers such as Godaddy, Hostinger, and more, but what is the common among them? It is the usage of the most popular operating system Linux. Because of its lightweight and free + open-source license. However, the thing which makes beginners annoyed while using Linux is its command line interface. That’s why Linux hosting providers generally combined it with Cpanel (Control Panel) software, one of the best among other popular GUI control panels.

  • H2S Media ☛ 7 Best free Cloud Web hosting Control Panels for 2023 [Ed: List extended by one item]

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20+ Best LaTeX Editors for Linux System [Ed: Newly-updated list]

    LaTeX is a standard markup language often used in the Linux arena. It takes users to the level of document editing, where they can control content and insert styles. Though there are many good LaTeX Editors available for Linux, beginners may find it challenging to choose the right one according to their level of expertise.

    To save such users from the hassle, let’s take a look at some of the best LaTeX Editors available for Linux. This list aims to help both beginner and advanced users find the best LaTeX Editor for their needs on a Linux system.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtualization ☛ Introduction to Docker, Part 2: Repos and Resource Consumption — Virtualization Review

    In the first article of my Docker series, I covered the basics of Docker containers: how to install one, and how to run, start and access a Docker instance. In that article, I ran two different Linux distros on an Ubuntu host and accessed them from the command line.

  • Joe Brockmeier ☛ Careful when cloning: Editing machine IDs for fun and profit : Dissociated Press

    Today I was setting up some VMs on Fedora in Cockpit and decided to clone an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image, which immediately pulled the same IP as the original. I hadn’t had that issue with CentOS or Debian, not quite sure why, but the culprit is a duplicate machine ID. Here’s how to fix that.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to install FreeLAN on Linux | FOSS Linux

    FreeLAN is a PC software that implements peer-to-peer, a virtual private network(VPN), and full mesh methodologies to create secure site-to-site or point-to-point connections in bridged or routed configurations and remote configurations access facilities.

    When it comes to encoding or encryption, FreeLAN utilizes the OpenSSL library to encrypt the control channels and the data. It allows OpenSSL to perform all the encoding and authentication work, permitting FreeLAN to use all the cyphers available in the OpenSSL package. FreeLAN incorporates a couple of ways to authenticate peers with each other. From version 2.0, FreeLAN provides pre-shared keys, usernames, and password-based and certificate-based authentication.

    What do you do if you intend to use a VPN in a much more flexible way rather than the way VPN services offer it? Or using third-party servers not permitted or insufficient? What if you need to create a secure network? In such instances, FreeLAN can be the solution you have all been looking for.

    In this guide, we will cover some essential features offered by FreeLAN, some of their pros and cons, describe the uniqueness of its configuration and use, how to set it up on our Linux machine, and finally give some recommendations.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Write to a File in Bash

    Reading and writing the files is one of the common tasks while writing bash scripts. For example, saving the output of a command to a file or simply manipulating the files in bash different commands are used. There are a number of ways of writing any file in bash through terminal and if you are finding ways to write any file while scripting then read this guide.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Use APT Command in Linux [15 Useful Examples]

    This article guide walks us through the use of the Linux apt command with practical examples for effective package management in a Debian-based system.

    Before Ubuntu 16.04, Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint made use of the ‘apt-get‘ command for package management.

• WINE or Emulation

  • ScummVM ☛ Drill a 3D alien moon, become an interplanetary hero!

    Driller aka Space Station Oblivion (in the US), the FIRST supported game of the Freescape engine, is ready for public testing!

    Published in 1987 by Incentive Software Limited, this revolutionary new engine allowed players to explore a solid 3D graphic environment with complete freedom of movement for the very first time in videogame history.

    A new threat emerges after humanity abandoned a dying Earth to establish a new home on planet Evath. Evath’s moon Mitral has turned into a gigantic gas time bomb. A meteor is also due to impact Mitral in the next several hours. You were chosen to secure each of Mitral’s 18 sectors by positioning a drilling rig over the gas pockets in each sector before the meteor strikes.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • A grid for the file chooser – GTK Development Blog

      In the last post, we discussed deprecating treeviews and cell renderers, among other things. All these deprecations cause a lot of work for applications and libraries using these APIs, so why are doing this?

      One of the reasons is to enable new features. Such as a grid view for the file chooser. It only took us 18 years! You can see the original feature request in Bugzilla. This is easily possible now because GtkListView and GtkGridView can use the same data models.

    • Purism ☛ Libadwaita in the Wild – Purism

      It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021. With that in mind it’s pretty remarkable how widely adopted it is today. Between the majority of GNOME core and Circle apps having already been ported, the many new third party apps, and even all GNOME Shell extension settings, Libadwaita is everywhere today.

    • Georges Basile Stavracas Neto ☛ Maintainership of GNOME Settings – Georges Stavracas

      GNOME Settings is one of the largest modules of the GNOME desktop. It sits comfortable as one of the bigger repositories out there. Not only that, but feature-wise, Settings is a pretty big hub of the desktop, connecting to GNOME Shell, Mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, the Bluetooth stack, NetworkManager, XDG portals, upower, CUPS, colord, online accounts, only to name a few.

      Of course, such a big piece of software requires constant maintainership, issue triage, reviews, and design work. The project is virtually eternal, since it evolves with the platform, and there’s no effective point where we can call it done.

      Sadly, the number of contributors and maintainers hasn’t been growing at a pace that matches the number of new features and new designs. That’s why we’re putting out a call for people to help out with this critical part of GNOME.

      In the rest of this post, I’ll go through some of the current issues and how you can help.

    • Status update, 15/12/2022 – Sam Thursfield

      I’m commit full time at work to a project, as is normal, and a couple of spare hours a week lets me push forward a few things in GNOME.

      (By the way, if you have a few hours to donate towards improving GNOME, Georges has some ideas for you).

      I’ve been intermittently looking at OpenQA testing of GNOME since the summer, and I just posted a short progress report about that over on discourse.gnome.org.

      I’ve also been looking at search in GNOME since about 2012, and the two things are hopefully about to converge.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • AVL-MXE 21.2.1 + MXDE-EFL 21.2.2 Released! – bandshed.net

    Eeeeesh! What was intended as a routine ISO freshen up job went down the rabbit hole quickly but ended up in some pretty cool places and so here we are with new ISO’s of AV Linux MX Edition and MXDE-EFL. It’s usually bad form to make deep changes to a ‘within-version’ ISO and better to save such tomfoolery for new releases but there were some pretty strong motivating factors to jerk the wheel and take that left turn in Albuquerque at this point. Much to my chagrin in the live music world a persistent quirk of human nature is the old “people don’t know what they like… they like what they know” mindset.. well it affects Linux Desktop Users too.. When AVL-MXE 21 came out I wanted to trim the resource consumption of XFCE4 and also put together something a little less ‘garden-variety’ because one of the things I loved about Linux when I got onboard many years ago was how it was ‘alternative’, a different way to do the same things… I thought a Distro catering to artists should be different than your basic Office box and have some art within itself. Well it seems I was dead wrong on that one! For the most part the reviews and the User comments have not been terribly positive about Openbox, most people like how the system works, they just don’t want to look at it…lol. We have entered a time where computers have become powerful enough and RAM and storage has become plentiful and cheap enough that resource consumption is much farther down the list of concerns than it ever was. New Linux shoppers in large part want their Desktops to be big, familiar and enterprise-y, Linux Desktops that are clever, crafty and light for the sake of lightness will always have their devoted adherents as MX-Fluxbox and antiX will readily show but I feel that these types of projects are more used and tried by people that have been under the Linux tent for a while or are tireless tinkerers. It seems AV Linux is an initial point of contact for many people trying Audio and Video production on Linux for the first time so although I may have my pet opinions I’m not so stubborn that I can’t listen and change direction, the limitations and caveats imposed by Openbox were not the best decision in hindsight.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • OpenSUSE ☛ KDE, GNOME, Audio packages update in Tumbleweed

    Updates for sound, image and system components arrived this week throughout several openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, and the arm images are rolling again, according to notes from the project’s release engineering meeting.

    For those NVIDIA users, testers with aarch64 servers and NVIDIA cards are wanted. Proprietary drivers are now available for aarch64, which is only for the G06 version.

• Fedora and Red Hat

  • Red Hat ☛ Configure a pod security context with Cryostat Operator | Red Hat Developer

    Since Kubernetes 1.21, the old PodSecurityPolicy API is being deprecated and has been removed from versions 1.25 and later. This API will be replaced by the new built-in Pod Security Admission (PSA), which introduces a new set of Pod Security Standards. To support these standards, The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform introduces new security context constraints (SCC) policies.

    With these changes, especially starting with OpenShift 4.12, all namespaces will run in the restricted mode, and pods must be properly configured under the enforced security standards defined globally or on a namespace level to be admitted to launch. See discussions here. This has implications for Cryostat, a container-native JVM application that provides a secure API for profiling and monitoring containers with JDK Flight Recorder, if you’re running it on OpenShift.

  • Red Hat ☛ New enhancements in the Cryostat 2.2 JMC agent plugin | Red Hat Developer

    The JDK Mission Control (JMC) agent is a powerful tool that allows users to inject custom JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) events into running applications without restarting the Java Virtual Machine. The new release of Cryostat 2.2 now offers a graphical user interface for communicating with the JMC Agent in containerized applications that support it. This article introduces the Cryostat JMC agent plugin and enhancements made in version 2.2.

  • Red Hat ☛ Standardizing application delivery with OpenShift | Red Hat Developer

    More and more organizations are adopting inner loop and outer loop constructs as part of their digital transformation and cloud-native development initiatives. This development strategy can improve developer productivity, reduce cognitive load, and standardize application delivery and deployment.

    Figure 1 shows how the division into an inner loop and outer loop helps developers innovate and deploy applications faster with Red Hat OpenShift. There is a clear and physical distinction between the tasks performed by the developer and the larger CI/CD process.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Council election: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova

    In recent years Fedora achieved great results in becoming a user-friendly, easy to use, polished and reliable Linux distribution. I would like us to continue this work, but also to push towards more people becoming not just consumers of the Fedora distribution, but members of the Fedora community and contributors to the Fedora Project.

    For that I think we need to continue updating and modernizing our communication channels and reduce barriers for people willing to contribute changes. We should create paths for occasional contributors to get deeper into the Project’s internals, so that they can eventually take over larger tasks and initiatives.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT leadership: 4 resolutions for 2023 | The Enterprisers Project

    According to a survey of HR professionals, leader and manager effectiveness is a priority for 60 percent of HR leaders in 2023. Effective leadership requires us to look back before we look ahead and consciously reflect on how we can unlock our full leadership potential in the New Year.

    [...]

    Leadership requires an open mind, the ability to see the whole picture, and a willingness to foster the human-to-human dynamic in the workplace

  • Now You Can Enrich Your Fedora Wiki Profile With Your Fediverse URL. | Bogomil Shopov

    After a long time, I was trying to edit my Fedora wiki space and realized that I could not add my Fediverse ID there. Since this is the only “social media” I use now, I edited the userinfo template and added the missing details, so your profile can show your decentralized DID.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Repatriation to reduce public cloud spend – easier said than done? | Ubuntu

    Repatriation in cloud computing refers to moving workloads from the public cloud to on-premise infrastructure. Sarah Wang and Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz have written one of the most popular articles about repatriation: they explain the motivation with the significant cost savings possible. For software-based businesses, public cloud spend can rise to 50% of the cost of revenue (COR). Reducing these costs has the potential for significant margin increases.

    The idea of repatriation is often compared to a rent-or-buy decision. We all make rent-or-buy decisions for various items in our daily lives: cars, housing, or skiis during winter holidays. Every situation comes with individual constraints, but the main decision factors appear the same: if an item is being used over a more extended period, buying appears cheaper. If an item needs customisation, buying such an item seems to be more appropriate.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 23.04 Dev Builds Now Look a Pinch More Appealing… – OMG! Ubuntu!

    No lie, the latest daily builds of Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” are looking a lot more luscious than usual.

    For what I believe is the first time, Ubuntu devs have decided to ship a bespoke desktop background to be used exclusively in development builds.

    And naturally the new artwork conveys a creative concurrence of the release codename.

    Now typically, each new dev release of Ubuntu uses its predecessor’s artwork for the bulk of its development cycle. It only gains a custom wallpaper of its own near UI freeze. Not so with the Lunar Lobster, the next short-term release of Ubuntu ear-marked for emergence in April 2023.

• Devices/Embedded

  • There is life after Linux, just not a sustainable one – Rethink

    The extinction of pay TV set tops has been forecast every year since streaming alternatives arrived on the scene. While cord cutting has again terrorized developed pay TV territories the world over throughout 2022, there remains persistent pockets of opportunity for pay TV operators and the vendor community – across hardware, software, and even in setting a bar for sustainability. When exploring the topic of life after Linux and looking ahead to next-gen set top options in 2023, some might be disappointed to hear that there are still only two viable technologies on the table – Android TV and RDK. We have been having the exact same conversations for the past five or six years, so what’s new in life…

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux Hint ☛ Raspberry Pi History

    Raspberry Pi is a series of single board computers designed by Raspberry Pi foundation in the United Kingdom with the association of Broadcom. Eben Upton is the founder of the Raspberry Pi device, which released the first model in February 2012. The name “Raspberry” is a homage to famous computer companies like Apple, Blueberry and Tangerine Computer Systems. The “Pi” name was suggested keeping its importance in running the Python programming language. The main goal behind developing Raspberry Pi board was to make access to computing cheap and learning computer programming.

    This single-board computer is capable of performing different tasks, such as web server, home automation, robots, database management and more. This article discusses a brief history of Raspberry Pi models.

  • Arduino ☛ Grimmboy is an RFID music player designed for kids | Arduino Blog

    Kids, like full-sized humans, love music. But most music players are designed for adult dexterity and user interface familiarity, which makes them difficult for young children to operate. For many parents, Amazon’s Alexa and similar services are the answer, as kids can simply ask a device to play the song they want. But to give them a less noisy way to play music and retain some control over what they can listen to, consider building the Grimmboy Arduino-based RFID music player for kids.

    Because Grimmboy is for kids, the controls are as simple as possible. There is a pause/unpause button, a volume dial, and a status LED — that’s it. To select a song, album, playlist, recorded story, or any other audio file, the child simply taps one of the RFID cards to the device. The cards, which are laminated with nice cassette tape graphics, contain MiFare Ultralight C RFID tags that the parent can program with lists of four-digit track IDs. Grimmboy reads the card’s track ID list and starts playing the files with those IDs.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 7 Best Digital Scale Apps for Android Devices

    Many of us never believe that a digital scale can provide accurate answers when a smartphone uses it. Thing is not entirely right or wrong. Indeed, some digital scale apps for Android genuinely work, while most others are only simulators. The apps use many different technical functions to give you an estimated unit of measurement.

    However, a digital scale app can be of different types and won’t be used for specific measuring systems. While some are good for kitchen measurement, some calculate weight and length. In today’s discussion, we will try to learn some of the apps that give more or less accurate results in scaling.

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Pixel 6A

    I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It’s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that’s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don’t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option.

    The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was advertised as being discounted from $750. Later I discovered that other retailers were selling it for $500 or for $550 when bundled with a Chromecast. Also one of the other retailers was a company that I could get discount gift cards for. So this is the type of item you should really shop around for. It doesn’t come with a charger so you don’t have the gray-market disadvantage of getting yet another charger that doesn’t fit the sockets in your country.

  • Running PostmarketOS on my phone

    Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now.

    It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem 5 kept charing on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.

    My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device.

    The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Your Android Phone as a PC Remote With KDE Connect

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android Auto’s redesign is now available to cars with rotary input

  • 9to5Google ☛ What Android Automotive looks like on the 2023 Honda Accord

  • Android Headlines ☛ The technology behind the scenes of Android casino apps

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android photo picker rolling out to several more apps

  • Ars Technica ☛ Google Nest and Android devices are now Matter controllers (for future devices) | Ars Technica

  • TechRadar ☛ This Android browser might have leaked the details of millions of users | TechRadar

  • Express ☛ Urgent Android warning! Update your phone now to fix a dangerous flaw | Express.co.uk

  • Phone Arena ☛ This could be the fastest Android phone at the moment – PhoneArena

  • Sportskeeda ☛ 5 best mid-range Android phones of 2022

  • GSM Arena ☛ Nothing Phone (1) gets Nothing OS 1.5 beta, based on Android 13 – GSMArena.com news

  • 9to5Google ☛ Spotify rolls out support for the Android 13 media player [U]

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• LinuxSecurity ☛ Large-Scale Phishing Campaign Floods Open-Source Repositories with 144,000 Packages [Ed: Misleading title; this is not an "open source" problem but a repo or centralisation problem, or "install random stuff from the Net" problem]

  The phishing packages used in this campaign have since been removed from the repositories, except in the case of NuGet, where the packages were unlisted from the repository’s search results. These unlisted packages are still available, but not easily accessible.

• Alan Pope ☛ Adding giscus Comments [Ed: Alan Pope left Canonical. Now he's outsourcing part of his blog to proprietary software controlled remotely by Microsoft.]

  I had a look around, and recently discovered giscus, a comment system which uses GitHub discussions for the backend…

• Google ☛ Google Online Security Blog: Announcing OSV-Scanner: Vulnerability Scanner for Open Source [Ed: Google is outsourcing security tools to proprietary software managed by the NSA and Microsoft; that's a very negative sign]

  Today, we’re launching the OSV-Scanner, a free tool that gives open source developers easy access to vulnerability information relevant to their project.

• The Register UK ☛ Google debuts OSV-Scanner – a Go tool for finding security holes in open source

  Google this week released OSV-Scanner – an open source vulnerability scanner linked to the OSV.dev database that debuted last year.

  Written in the Go programming language, OSV-Scanner is designed to scan open source applications to assess the security of any incorporated dependencies – software libraries that get added to projects to provide pre-built functions so developers don’t have to recreate those functions on their own.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LWN ☛ Disunity at The Document Foundation [LWN.net]

    The Document Foundation (TDF) was created in 2010 to steward and support the development of the LibreOffice suite, which was then a new fork of OpenOffice.org. TDF has clearly been successful; unlike OpenOffice, which is currently under the Apache umbrella, LibreOffice is an actively developed and widely used project. But TDF has also been showing signs of stress in recent years, and the situation does not appear to be getting better. There are currently some significant disagreements over just what role TDF should play; if those cannot be resolved, there is a real chance that they could rip the Foundation apart.

    [...]

    The big argument over the last few months, though, is on a related topic: whether TDF should employ developers of its own and, if so, what those developers should work on. In February, board member Paolo Vecchi (Omnis Cloud Sarl) proposed that TDF should hire some developers of its own; the two suggested positions would work on creating a presence for LibreOffice in app stores, among many other things. (Then) board member Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), instead, argued that TDF needed mentors to support developers elsewhere: “teaching how to fish, not fishing itself”.

    There followed an intense conversation that continues to this day. Some participants feel that TDF should not be in the business of employing software developers — or even that, according to its bylaws, it cannot do so. Others see TDF-based developers as the core of a strong LibreOffice going forward. Yet others can accept developers employed by TDF, but want strong constraints on what those developers should be doing.

    These viewpoints have been expressed in several interminable threads arguing over the proper role of TDF, with accusations of conflicts of interest flying in all directions. Much of the conversation was evidently in private, and it is hard to determine what the actual course of events was but, at some point, Vecchi and Holesovsky got together and put a serious effort into the creation of a proposal for the hiring of developers that would be acceptable to all involved. As part of this effort, Holesovsky backed down from the “not fishing” position and accepted that development could be done within TDF. Numerous versions of the proposal resulted from this dialog as various issues were worked out.

    As of this writing, version 3.1 is the latest attempt. It makes the claim that TDF can support the community by employing developers to work on LibreOffice, especially if they focus on otherwise neglected areas. Suggested targets include better support of right-to-left and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text, accessibility, interoperability with non-native file formats, and fixing of regressions: “there are 12.6K open bugs in TDF Bugzilla, of which 1.3K of them are regressions”. The proposal also makes it clear that these developers will not work on long-term-support or “enterprise” versions of LibreOffice.

• SFC

  • Mark J. Wielaard: Software Freedom Conservancy 2022 Fundraiser [Ed: Mark J. Wielaard is working against the FSF; Red Hat ☛ he works for IBM and his loyalty is to the salary, not to software freedom]]

    Please donate to the Software Freedom Conservancy this year. Software Freedom Conservancy has been growing and is able to take on the work it does thanks to the incredible support of individuals who care about an organization who stands up for the equitable, ethical and end user focused technologies.

• Programming/Development

  • GCC ☛ Merge modula-2 front end onto gcc.

    This commit merges the devel/modula2 into master. The libraries reside in libgm2, the compiler in gcc/m2 and the testsuite in gcc/testsuite/gm2.

  • ephemeral success — wingolog

    Good evening, patient hackers Today finishes off my series on implementing ephemerons in a garbage collector.

    Last time, we had a working solution for ephemerons, but it involved recursively visiting any pending ephemerons from within the copy routine—the bit of a semi-space collector that is called when traversing the object graph and we see an object that we hadn’t seen yet. This recursive visit could itself recurse, and so we could overflow the control stack.

    The solution, of course, is “don’t do that”: instead of visiting recursively, enqueue the ephemeron for visiting later. Iterate, don’t recurse. But here we run into a funny problem: how do we add an ephemeron to a queue or worklist? It’s such a pedestrian question (“just… enqueue it?”) but I think it illustrates some of the particular concerns of garbage collection hacking.

  • Qt ☛ Embedded Device Requirements for Digital Advertising [Ed: Qt helps companies make very annoying applications that embed ads inside the GUI, distracting the user from what he or she actually wanted to do; imagine GUIs that refuse to let you change settings or press "Next" until you have watched all the ads]

    The concept of digital advertising across different types of hardware has become increasingly popular as of late, and the opportunities for ad placements in novel locations is continuously growing. However, there are certain minimum requirements which must be taken into consideration to ensure optimal performance across this multitude of devices.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Creator 9.0.1 released

    We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 9.0.1!

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.3 on CRAN: Adding File Logger

    A second update to the still-new package spdl is now om CRAN, and in Debian. The key focus of spdl is a offering the same interface from both R and C++ for logging by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package.

    This release add support for a simple filesetup() initialiser to direct logging output to a file. For now the console logger and the file logger are exclusive, if there is interest we could borrow a page from upstream and combine them.

  • Frederik Braun : DOM Clobbering

    When thinking of HTML-related security bugs, people often think of script injection attacks, which is also known as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). If an attacker is able to submit, modify or store content on your web page, they might include evil JavaScript code to modify the page or steal user information like cookies. Most developers out there protect their websites against XSS by disallowing or controlling script execution.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Inet_Ntop() Function in C

    Socket functions use data structures in their input arguments that contain client and server-specific information. The most important information in them is undoubtedly the IP addresses. There are several types of structures that are used by socket functions to store these addresses such as sockaddr, addrinfo, or in_addr, etc.

    IP addresses are not encoded which means that each of the numbers in their fields is represented by its binary equivalent. This means that in certain cases, it is necessary to convert the IP addresses to strings or the strings to IP addresses in order to work with them.

    In this Linux Hints article, you will learn how to convert the IP addresses to strings using the inet_ntop() function.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Getaddrinfo() Function in C Language

    To open a socket client-server, we need some important information about the server that we want to connect to such as the domain address, the address family it uses, etc.

    This connection process requires the use of several functions, and the call to each of these has a specific order that must be strictly followed. Many of these functions are used to retrieve the data from the server that you want to connect to. Their results are some of the input arguments for the subsequent function.

    These arguments are descriptors and data structures that contain the client and server-specific information about some of the layers that make up a network connection.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Radix Sort (C++)

    A radix or base is a representation of a number that shows how many digits are required to represent a positional number. For example, to represent the binary number, the radix value is 2 (we represent the binary either with 0 or 1). To represent the decimal number, the radix value is 10 (we represent the decimal number with numbers 0 to 9).

  • Linux Hint ☛ Return Array From Function C++

    Arrays store the data of the same type in a consecutive memory location. Functions break the bigger problems into smaller chunks to make it easier for programmers to code. Another advantage of using the function is that it makes the code look presentable and clean. Sometimes, we need a function that returns an array so that we can utilize that array in other functions. Then, comes the concept of the array return function in C++. It is the function that returns the array to another function. In this Linux Hint tutorial we will show you with examples how to return arrays from functions that you write in the C++ language.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Using Floating Data Types in PostgreSQL

    Float data type falls under the numeric data type category. It supports floating point numbers., numeric, and real numbers. Floating data types can be confusing. But this guide will shed light on understanding the three main floating data types and how to represent them in PostgreSQL using different examples.

  • Linux Hint ☛ PostgreSQL Temporary Tables

    PostgreSQL has reliable database features for handling different transactions. For instance, its temporary table saves data per given session. A temporary table exists for a given session and closing the given session or trying to query the same temporary table in another session will return an error.

    This post will guide you in understanding how temporary tables work. We will create a temporary table, then try to access it from another session.

  • Linux Hint ☛ PostgreSQL Grant All Privileges on Schema to User

    Databases are crucial, and it’s the work of the administrator to control what different roles the users can do within a given database. As part of authorization, the administrator can define user entities within the database and grant or revoke various privileges to the roles.

    That way, you attain control over who can access a database and what privileges they have if they can access the database. For instance, you can revoke the database modification or grant all privileges on the schema to a user or users in a given table. This guide details how to use PostgreSQL to grant a user all privileges on the schema to a user.

  • GNOME ☛ Fiber examples and Windows support

    I know there are a few things I’d like to still add and change the APIs, but I guess now it’s at the point where it’s time to start building things with it. I’m likely to target pieces of Builder which have a lot of complex async callback chains. Those are likely to benefit the most from fibers.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 16: Santa CL::AWS (part 2) – Raku Advent Calendar

      … in Part 1 of this winter drama, we left Mrs CL::AWS in a pickle.

      The story so far: the elves needed to rebuild their eChristmas website on AWS EC2 – Mrs CL::AWS had quickly whipped up a minimal raku script to use the AWS CLI with a basic procedural coding approach and shell execution of the required commands.

      BUT was this code just too procedural? was it too hard to maintain? would the elves be able to pick it up, to grok it and to extend it come next year after their hibernation under the polar ice? Was raku the right choice?

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 195: Special Integers and Most Frequent Even

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 15: Junction transformers – Raku Advent Calendar

      This carries ‘any’ as a type of operation and 0..9 as a list of eigenstates internally. In a smartmatch context, this can match any object that can smartmatch against any of its digit eigenstates. While the list of these is not exposed, there is a means of traversing its contents.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Linux Hint ☛ Turing Machines and Computability Theory

    In 1936, to calculate any computable function, the machine invented by “Alan Turing” was named “Turing Machine (TM)”. In computer science, TM is the abstract mathematical model of computation and primary theoretical construct. Turing machines work through a pre-programmed uncountable number of instructions. It plays an important role and helps the users find the computation by delimiting the “Computable Functions”.

    [...]

    Compatibility is not just a-machine (Turing machine), a recursive function, Pascal programming language, or calculus, but the combination of all. Alonzo Church, Turing’s doctoral advisor, introduced this concept known as “Church’s Thesis”. It is also called the “Church-Turing Thesis”.

    Moreover, it is not a theorem but is used to compare the computable function with the functions that can be computed by a-machine. Those functions that are not computable by a-machines, cannot be computed by another method. When the concept of the Church’s thesis was formulated, at that time, people did not know about the capability of modern computers, and it was such a significant achievement.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Business card-sized SBC ships with Intel Core Tiger Lake or AMD Ryzen V2000 processor [Ed: Well, no, the proper SBCs are a lot cheaper, take less energy, and don't have back doors like this one]

    We’ve recently reviewed the UP 4000 SBC as a more powerful x86 alternative to Raspberry Pi 4, but if it still does not cut it, AAEON de next-TGU8 or de next-V2K8 should, as the business card-sized single board computers (SBC) are equipped with respectively an Intel Tiger Lake processor up to a Core i7-1185G7E, and an AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 SoC up to Ryzen Embedded V2516.

    [...]

    AAEON does not directly list supported operating systems but provides drivers for Windows 10 64-bit for both platforms as well as Ubuntu 22.04 drivers for the AMD board, and Ubuntu 20.04 drivers for the Intel Tiger Lake SBC.

• Linux Foundation

  • PR Newswire ☛ Cloud Hypervisor Project welcomes Ampere Computing as a Member

    The Cloud Hypervisor Project, a leading virtual machine monitor (VMM) for running modern cloud workloads, is excited to welcome Ampere Computing as a member. The Linux Foundation and the founding members of the Cloud Hypervisor Project would like to welcome Ampere Computing and look forward to working with them to foster an environment of open source collaboration.

  • Venture Beat ☛ Creating the ultimate smart map with new map data initiative launched by Linux Foundation | VentureBeat [Ed: GAFAM hoarding OpenStreetMap to make something they control]

    The project aims to complement existing open geospatial data and integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques.

  • PR Newswire ☛ Linux Foundation Announces Overture Maps Foundation to Build Interoperable Open Map Data [Ed: We already have OpenStreetMap and it's not controlled by these abusive monopolies; "The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap" but be controlled by Microsoft, Facebook etc. Privatising the Commons, volunteers' work]

    The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation, a new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide. The initiative was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and is open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.

    [...]

    The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques to create a living digital record of the physical world.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Daily Crunch: Major tech firms partner with Linux Foundation to support open map data development [Ed: 'Linux' Foundation as a GAFAM front group; 'Linux' Foundation is not even using Linux; Linux Foundation is privatising the Commons, privatising volunteers' time and work by putting that in the hands of greedy monopolies. You can't say the f word and the c word in the 'Linux' Foundation and it's not because of the CoC. Those words aren't f--- or c---. They're Freedom and Community.]

  • Gizmodo ☛ Big Tech Companies Join Linux in Effort to Kill Google Maps [Ed: Nothing to do with Linux; this is shoddy 'journalism']

    The companies include Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and TomTom, which together could facilitate a new wave of geolocation apps.

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Linux Foundation Newsletter: December 2022 [Ed: Linux Foundation Newsletter is out and it's published using proprietary software; Linux Foundation is to Linux and Open Source what Greenpeace private jet is to environmentalism]

    It’s the end of the year, and the holidays are upon us, but we’re not slowing down at the Linux Foundation. We’ve launched a new foundation for Overture Maps, an intent to launch Open Metaverse, and our Annual Report is now available! Plus, three recently published reports from LF Research, community updates, December deals from LF Training & Certification, and more.

• Security

  • Hacker News ☛ Cryptocurrency Mining Campaign Hits Linux Users with Go-based CHAOS Malware [Ed: This is not a problem with Linux and with Go; Linux needs to be compromised in the first place (some other way, e.g. bad password) and Go is just used to write programs; this is classic Microsoft-centric FUD]

    A cryptocurrency mining attack targeting the Linux operating system also involved the use of an open source remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed CHAOS.

  • The Register UK ☛ Researchers smell a cryptomining Chaos RAT targeting Linux systems [Ed: They try to paint this as "open source tool" to demonise the way it is developed too]

    Additionally, the open source tool can perform reverse shell on the infected system, take screenshots of the victim’s device, collect info on the operating system, and download, upload or even delete files.

  • Soylent News ☛ Effective, Fast, and Unrecoverable: [Windows] Wiper Malware is Popping Up Everywhere

    wish more articles were more clear about these viruses and malware garbage. Windows only folks. There are still ZERO viruses and stuff for linux, BSD, unix, MacOS (since they migrated to BSD based OS) and so on. And, just because people can imagine a virus for linux, it doesn’t mean that it’s technically feasible or even doable.

  • Sentinel One ☛ Feature Spotlight | Announcing General Availability (GA) of Linux and K8s Agents v22.3 for Cloud Workload Security – SentinelOne

    For any SentinelOne customers still running Linux or K8s agent v21.x, the resource efficiency gains alone are compelling reasons to upgrade your cloud workload protection agent to v22.1 or higher. We’ve been working with some forward-leaning customers, taking their feedback and further extending our resource efficiency. As a result, v22.1 (and higher) improves performance in 2 dimensions compared to version 21.x: 40-50% improvement in memory usage, and 40-50% improvement in CPU usage.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Microsoft discovers Windows/Linux botnet used in DDoS attacks [Ed: There is no such thing as "Windows-Linux"; this is Microsoft spreading FUD about "Linux" yet again, as usual... boosted by its media partners (Microsoft pays Ars Technica)]

    Microsoft researchers have discovered a hybrid Windows-Linux botnet that uses a highly efficient technique to take down Minecraft servers and performs distributed denial-of-service attacks on other platforms.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TechCrunch ☛ Twitter just banned prominent journalists who cover Elon Musk with no warning

  • TechCrunch ☛ Twitter suspends Mastodon’s account and bans links to Mastodon servers

  • The Daily Beast ☛ Elon Musk’s Twitter Suspends CNN, Washington Post, New York Times Reporters Who Cover Elon Musk

Gemini* and Gopher

• Technical

  • On Decimal Time

    Funny, I had a similar idea back in the 80s. Except I thought of dividing the day into 100 units, each just under 15 minutes. A centiday. This is a little easier, as each centiday requires only two digits, and the 15-minute quantization is enough to schedule events or make plans. Kind of matches human precision.

    Meet you at my house at 72. Right?

    Of course, for finer precision you can have hundredths of that, slightly under 9 seconds. Or a thousandth, for just under a second.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Writing, maybe.

      Having too many links on one page makes me feel claustrophobic.

  • Programming

    • Re: Conformance Should Mean Something – fputc, and Freestanding

      It is a mess. The code from the blog post works on most systems, but most systems these days use 8-bit characters; the article is about systems where a character is defined as 16-bits (allowed by the C Standard) and where an integer is also 16-bits (again, allowed by the C Standard and is the minimum size an integer can be per the C specification). It’s rare to have non-8-bit characters on desktop computers these days (or even tablet and smart phones) but it seems it’s not quite that rare in the embedded space, where you have DSP (Digital Signal Processor)s that have weird architectures and a charater is most likely the same size as an integer. And that’s where the trouble starts.

    • Simplified vi

      This is a small subset of vi key strokes and commands, which cover most of the sorts of things you might want to do when editing a text file. They were selected from the large array of vi key strokes and commands as they are fairly easy to remember, and combine consistantly together. Some of the combinations have defined vi shortcuts, but to keep consitancy with the subset, these generally aren’t shown.

    • DOLIST Pitfall

      I’ve seen multiple people trip over the fact that DOLIST does not yield what one might reasonably expect.