12.21.22
Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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On the other hand, we can see that corporations prefer to use Linux systems more. One of the reasons for this is Linux offers a great range of cybersecurity opportunities and other benefits for businesses. If you are a business owner or an IT specialist in a company, you should try the Linux system to see how it can accelerate your cybersecurity compliance process.
Linux is preferable in terms of cybersecurity solutions in corporations. Among other benefits, most companies use Linux for its credit on cybersecurity. Although Linux is a bit more trustable when compared to Windows it can not provide total cybersecurity in corporations. Businesses must take other precautions to avoid unwanted breaches or attacks. Blending the appropriate cybersecurity solution with Linux can skyrocket business quality and cyber safety.
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Christmas is a great time to celebrate with your loved ones and learn new skills. But Linux can make holidays even better for you.
The holiday season is a great time to relax, get cozy, and take time for yourself. There are free tools that will help you boost your Christmas spirit, especially with Linux.
All that is needed is a Linux PC, a little patience, and a willingness to provide yourself with a priceless gift that keeps on giving. What is it? Being proud of yourself for learning a few more skills before we ring in the new year.
Powerful tools such as GIMP, Blender, and Bash scripts are great ways to help put you in the Christmas spirit.
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Server
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Kubernetes v1.26 introduced generally available (GA) support for kubelet credential provider plugins, offering an extensible plugin framework to dynamically fetch credentials for any container image registry.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Finally Global Shortcuts have been merged into the XDG Desktop Portal project and are now available in the 1.16.0 release but now we must wait for all the desktop backend to actually implement it
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Intellij Community on KDE Neon.
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In this episode we highlight some of the available accessibility software that Ubuntu Mate has and how to use it. Accessibility software can help everyone to use a computer and use it to get things done. All without breaking the bank. Accessibility, also referenced as “Assistive Technology” or “Universal Access,” is a key priority for Ubuntu MATE. When computer access is shared within a household or business and where individual needs differ, Ubuntu MATE is an excellent solution.
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Dan Lorenc of Sigstore and Chainguard joins Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman on FLOSS Weekly to discuss the software supply chain.The open source software supply chains are increasingly vulnerable attack surfaces. Nobody knows more, or is doing more, to secure those surfaces than Dan Lorenc.
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Today we will just talk fun holiday, Linux, Tech, and random hangout discussion with very little agenda.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.1 kernel.
All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Applications
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The world of technology is teeming with tools to help you create the most stunning designs for any project. And for Linux users, the good news is that you have some of the best design tools at your fingertips. From powerful vector graphics editors to versatile desktop publishing programs, this guide explores the best design tools available in the Linux ecosystem that will give your projects a professional edge.
Design tools on Linux can enable users to create highly polished visuals, prototypes, and designs quickly and easily. They provide access to an extensive range of features, allowing users to customize their experience to fit the needs of their project. One of the advantages of using design tools on Linux is the cost savings compared to more expensive software packages and services. Linux is open source, meaning that the underlying code is available and customizable by anyone.
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Linux partition managers are powerful tools that allow users to create, resize, and manage the various partitions on their Linux systems. These partitions are essentially slices of your hard drive that can be used to store different types of data, such as your operating system, documents, media files, and more. With a partition manager, you can easily create new partitions, delete old ones, or resize existing partitions to better suit your needs.
Whether you’re a seasoned Linux user or just starting out, a good partition manager can make it much easier to manage your system and keep it running smoothly. So let’s dive in and explore the world of Linux partition managers!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Every IT pro knows that data is key to keeping things running smoothly. To that end, you need tools that can monitor usages such as CPU, RAM, load, Swap, bandwidth, disks and more. You might think getting a tool like that up and running would be a bit of a challenge. However, if Ubuntu Server is your platform of choice, adding this powerful web-based monitor is incredibly easy.
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In this post, you will learn how to rename a table in MySQL / MariaDB, The procedure is simple and can save you some headache.
In some situations, you may want to rename a certain table in MySQL / MariaDB. This process although simple is important to know if you work daily with this powerful database manager.
Let’s go.
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The ss command on Linux systems can provide extensive details on the sockets that provide communications between systems.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu Cleaner is a utility tool that is designed to help users clean up their Ubuntu system by removing unnecessary files, such as old package files, cached data, and temporary files. This helps to save space on your hard drive and increase your system’s performance.
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 Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Here’s a guide for saving and opening tabs in your favourite web browser from the last session.
If you use hundreds of tabs and are reluctant to close them, like ever, then there’s a way to keep them as open as long as possible. Even if you close your browser or shut down your laptop, the browsers can pull up those tabs again for you.
This is usually done via built-in settings in popular web browsers. And they are different for each of them.
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Most modern email clients have Send Later functionality already built into them. Find out how to add it to the open-source Thunderbird app.
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Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the OctaFX Broker on a Chromebook.
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The Linux time command is a utility that is used to measure the execution time of a command or program. It can be useful for testing the performance of different commands or programs, or for identifying bottlenecks in the execution process.
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WINE or Emulation
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The Wine development release 8.0-rc2 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
– Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.
The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.0/wine-8.0-rc2.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Next release will come soon, but since there have been some big changes it would be nice to have them tested by more people.
The biggest changes are to the playlist which can now open m3u files, supports adding both local files and urls, can be sorted, cleared and saved.
The other big changes are to the recent files, which has been rewriten to fix a bunch of bugs, see below.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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If you want to add a clock to your Ubuntu desktop (or the desktop of any Linux distro using GNOME Shell) install the Desktop Clock GNOME extension.
This super simple, typographic timepiece puts the current time and date on your desktop.
Naturally, you can position the clock anywhere on your desktop, and tweak the typography to suit your tastes. It inherits your system font by default, and puts the time and date on separate lines, but you can choose to have it in a single line, and use any font that you want.
And what “you want” is the point here: this is a highly customisable widget for your desktop. You can pick a custom font, increase or decrease the font size, change font colour (including its opacity), and tweak the text shadow to make your timepiece pop (or set a totally transparent colour for no drop-shadow effect at all).
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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In the Peropesis 1.9 edition, the ability to set the system language, region and the ability to read and write text content in your native language was implemented (Note. Only a few languages of European countries have been tested). For this reason, the GNU C Library software package was fully installed and the KBD software package was newly installed. New chapters locale, terminal font and keyboard map was created in the user manual to discuss the nuances of managing the new equipment. Also in release 1.9 a full-featured terminal-based and ncurses-based text editor, JOE, was installed.
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We hereby announce a new revision of Hyperbola live image for Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre. With this new version we have completed the support for runit as system for services and initialization. Furthermore we have fixed, updated and added many packages.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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A new mirror is added at https://openmandriva.mirror.garr.it
Many thanks to GARR Mirror
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Slackware Family
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Someone recently contacted me with the request to base Slackware Live DAW edition on a stable Slackware release like 15.0 instead of using Slackware -current. The rationale being that it would bring relative peace of mind not having to worry about daily updates and potential sudden breakage of your audio applications. Instead you would only have to worry about applying security updates and as a result have a solid DAW experience.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Back in April, I announced the availability of gopass in the Fedora repositories. In the last few months, though, gopass had multiple releases, many of which arrived in Fedora 38 but not Fedora 37. Since Fedora 38 will be released in a few months, most users are not using it, and therefore those releases are not directly benefitting those users. The reason for the delayed update for Fedora 37 is that the dependencies of gopass changed in the course of those updates, and the Fedora process makes updating packages with many dependencies changes more painful than it could be.
The good news is that the update of gopass to 1.15.1 arrived in the Fedora 37 repositories.
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Mint
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Vera has arrived and although it is still using kernel 5.15, there are plenty of improvements sure to please everyone.
Linux Mint 21.1 (Vera) is available now and includes a refreshed UI with a new cursor, plenty of new app icon themes to choose from, and a change from the previous “minty” accent color to the new aqua color.
The changes aren’t just aesthetics. You’ll also find the Driver Manager can now be launched without typing your password. The Driver Manager also now displays an offline page if you’ve lost connectivity, and the mounting of live USB media is much more user-friendly.
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This article guides you through all the steps to upgrade your current Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” system to Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera.”
As we announced earlier, Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” is now available for download and installation. This is the best Mint release yet, with many aesthetic and functional enhancements, so switching to it is strongly recommended.
Fortunately, because this is a minor upgrade if you are currently running Mint 21 “Vanessa,” upgrading to Mint 21.1 “Vera” is simple and seamless. Here’s how to do it.
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The Linux Mint development team released a new version of the popular Linux distribution earlier this week. Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release, just like Linux Mint 21. The new Linux Mint version changes the look and feel of the operating system, and introduces improvements to several core applications, such as Update Manager, Software Manager and Driver Manager.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Banana BPI-Bit-S2 is a board for the education market that’s compatible with the BBC Micro:bit V2, but offers WiFi connectivity instead of Bluetooth LE through an Espressif Systems ESP32-S2 wireless microcontroller.
The BPI-Bit-S2 succeeds the earlier Banana Pi BPI-Bit with ESP32 WiFi & BLE microcontroller that was a closer match to the original BBC Micro:bit than the new ESP32-S2 board for which I see little benefit, except for the slightly lower price tag.
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Our customers and supporters are concerned about the privacy of their phone data. With other big telecom providers, phone data does not stay private; it’s collected, linked with a person’s identity, and sold to advertisers. Purism treats user data like uranium. Unlike Big Telecom, Purism does not spy, and does not share any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) with any cellular carriers, fully protecting the privacy of its users.
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You’ve probably seen videos of people moving magnets near iron dust, which results in the dust aligning itself to the patterns created by the magnetic fields. Magnetic viewing film works the same way, but with the dust in an oil suspension sitting in the gap between two sheets of transparent plastic. By moving that film over magnets, one can see the magnetic fields almost like they’re on an LCD panel. Moritz v. Sivers took advantage of that fact to build a clock that displays the time on magnetic viewing film.
Sivers did this by putting a small sheet of magnetic viewing film in a 3D-printed frame over four wheels. They arranged numbers around the circumference of those four wheels, a bit like an analog clock face. The numbers are made of magnetic foil, so their magnetic fields appear on the viewing film as the wheels rotate. Four boxes stenciled onto the viewing film indicate which numbers make up the current time, so reading this magnet clock is as easy as any digital clock.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Open-source software recently earned a new round of accolades as an educated benefit in schools and government offices. German state officials flunked Microsoft’s Office suite and turned to a well-known, non-proprietary, cross-platform replacement.
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Mastodon’s surge in popularity shows no signs of slowing down.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Programming/Development
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Hello! On Monday, we released a new zine: The Pocket Guide to Debugging! It has 47 of my favourite strategies for solving your sneakiest bugs.
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Perl / Raku
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If there’s anything that Santa and his elves ought to know, it’s how to make a list. After all, they’re reading lists that children send in, and Santa maintains his very famous list. Another thing we know is that Santa and his elves are quite multilingual.
So one day one of the elfs decided that, rather than hand typing out a list of gifts based on the data they received (requiring elves that spoke all the world’s languages), they’d take advantage of the power of Unicode’s CLDR (Common Linguistic Data Repository). This is Unicode’s lesser-known project. As luck would have it, Raku has a module providing access to the data, called Intl::CLDR. One elf decided that he could probably use some of the data in it to automate their list formatting.
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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As reported, it has 8GiB soldered onto the motherboard and 8GiB in a SODIMM card.
Online searching revealed very little information whether the laptop will support anything larger than 8GiB. The Acer official docs state that 8GiB is the maximum. One user reported a 16GiB SODIMM module worked, but he had problems with 32GiB — no details provided.
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Linux Foundation
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Open source connected car apps will be displayed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), EPAM, Igalia, Panasonic, Renesas, and VNC Automotive in the AGL booth.
AGL, an industry-wide initiative creating an open source platform for all connected automotive technologies, will exhibit at CES 2023 at the West Hall Booth #4141 of the Las Vegas Convention Center from January 5–8, 2023.
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Security
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Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang writes about his work with Cramium to bring more openness to secure element chips…
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Thanks to an OpenSSF grant, OSTIF helped us set up a curl security audit, which the excellent Trail of Bits was selected to perform in September 2022. We are most grateful to OpenSSF for doing this for us, and I hope all users who use and rely on curl recognize this extraordinary gift. OSTIF posted about this separately.
We previously had an audit performed on curl back in 2016 by Cure53 (sponsored by Mozilla) but I like to think that we (curl) have traveled quite far and matured a lot since those days. The fixes from the discoveries reported in that old previous audit were all merged and shipped in the 7.51.0 release, in November 2016. Now over six years ago.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Software Freedom Conservancy has today submitted its reply to the FTC’s request for comments on how repair information should be displayed on EnergyGuide labels. In particular, SFC has recommended that the FTC mandate a “Software Repair Instructions” section on the EnergyGuide labels that are already required on a variety of home appliances, including televisions, refrigerators, clothes washers, and dishwashers. This would not be a new notice requirement for most manufacturers, since it (currently) only requires manufacturers to provide the notice when they already had obligations under copyleft licenses to offer source code already. This merely changes the prominence of such notices, so that users can more easily see which products contain copylefted software (and thus software repair instructions) or not. This is important because many manufacturers make efforts to deemphasize or obscure their offers (if they have them at all), which prevents consumers from learning that they have rights with respect to their software.
We are very happy to see the FTC requesting comments on how repair information for home appliances can be better provided to purchasers of these products. While the FTC’s EnergyGuide labeling program started out as a way for purchasers to better assess how much energy each appliance would likely use, and approximately how much that would cost them, the FTC has been taking a more holistic view of how appliance purchases impact the world, not just in terms of how much energy they consume while operating, but also how much energy is required to manufacture them and, consequently, how we can reduce the number of appliances going into landfills, reducing the number of new appliances that need to be manufactured. Free and open source software provides many answers to these repair and longevity questions, and we hope that appliance purchasers will be made more aware of this through the FTC’s updated labeling requirements.
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As one of his first official acts as Director of Compliance, Denver Gingerich submitted a comment to the FTC on behalf of SFC proposing adding software Right to Repair instructions for copyleft software on appliances. In conversations with various Right to Repair organizations, we brainstormed how to submit to the new FTC request for comment for the EnergyGuide labeling system. Based on these discussions, we found that there is no organization or governing body requiring repair instruction labeling for software. Given how many modern electronics and appliances rely on copylefted free software, SFC recommended adding software repair instructions that include labeling that there is copyleft software on the device and including specific links to the source code and repair instructions on the manufacturer’s website. These are already required by the license, but are often buried deep in a manual somewhere. Adding these instructions would extend the rights afforded by copyleft software to all users of hardware that rely on it.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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On Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment titled: Litigation Funding: A multibillion-dollar industry for investments in lawsuits with little oversight.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I love the system (saved my life a couple of times) but I don’t think the book is a good place to start. I’ve read it many times because I’m obsessed with it but it led me down to a couple of bad paths when I was first starting out.
Bad path number one: writing down everything but not processing it properly.
Bad path number two: writing down and processing everything but not actually doing the stuff.
Bad path number three: having lots and lots of well-organized lists, doing the stuff, and getting stressed and exhausted.
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A post about my own personal 2022 – financial situation, GTD, and downtime.
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Drink in the memory of the fallen and in the honor of the living.
Don’t forget to ask your fortune from Hafez.
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Politics
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“Political Order and Inequality” by Carles Boix is a rather good book; it posits a simple game whereby agents can produce or loot. If someone is good at producing, then it makes sense for others to loot from them. This has much relevance to high technology, where it makes sense for those not in the knows to loot from those who are; looting knowledge is much easier than the many hours and much reading and experimentation it takes to figure out how these computer things work. Therefore, help vampires. Digital goods on account of their ease of storage will also be prone to looting.
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Technical
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While I did see a handful of people with the misconception that previously released OGL material would somehow “go away”, most of us were concerned that the new, incompatible version (for example, subclasses don’t match up on the same levels) would not be released as an open source SRD. This worry was especially relevant as we participated in an unpaid playtest process (which, for an open source game, we would gladly do).
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Science
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Did stargazing from about 8:30pm to 10pm AKST yesterday evening at the Chena Pump boat launch. I wouldn’t call it one of my better stargazing session, but it was the first one I’ve done at -40 ℉ (-40 ℃). I wonder if that puts me in some kind of exclusive club. Maybe the Club of People Crazy Enough to Go Stargazing at -40.
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Internet/Gemini
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Solderpunk’s piece in the noodle issue of Circumlunar Transmissions sent me on a hunting trip for the book “Life on an ice floe: diary of Ivan Papanin”, from the leader of the first soviet North Pole scientific mission.
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Programming
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I left off my previous entry pointing to a function that I would love to have seen someone else “unit test,” but alas, no one did. But I always had plans on going all “The Martian [4]” on the code [5] and “unit test the XXXX out of it.”
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Pine64′s last update of 2022 brings word of a new version of its PineTab FOSS-driven tablet after chip shortages effectively killed the first generation.
As per the December update from the Hong Kong kit vendor, the PineTab is officially dead. As we mentioned a year ago, the original PineTab was the larger sibling of Pine64′s PinePhone Pro FOSS-driven smartphone. The company says:
PineTab’s death was, in some part, a choice on our part as decisions were made to allocate resources to secure PinePhone’s availability throughout late 2020 and early 2021.
Component supplies gradually improved this year, and the PineBook Pro laptop resumed shipping back in August, although in limited numbers. The PinePhone Pro is also trickling out. A recent tweet from Adam Pigg, a developer of Jolla’s Sailfish Linux-based phone OS, shows a PinePhone Pro in its optional keyboard case, working with an unfinished port of Sailfish. Another tweet this month shows one running Kali Linux. The hardware is out there – we saw one of this pairing at last month’s Ubuntu Summit, although we were sadly unable to ask the owner about it.
Now that the spec of the PineTab tablet is looking rather dated, the company is giving up on it and moving straight on to a second-generation device. This will use the same Rockchip RK3566 SoC as the company’s Quartz64b single-board computer and the PineBook Pro laptop. This means a 2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A55. There will be two models, one with 4GB RAM and 64GB flash, and a higher-end one with 8GB/128GB. The device will include both a 2MP forward-facing camera and a 5MP rearward-facing one, a microSD slot, and a headphone socket. The device will be 9mm thick.
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Desktop/Laptop
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The Linux command line is a powerful tool used to control and interact with the operating system. It is a text-based interface that allows users to enter commands and execute programs, as well as view and edit files. The command line provides access to a wide range of Linux features and commands, including system utilities and applications, network configuration, file manipulation, and more.
It is often used by system administrators, developers, and power users who need to perform complex tasks quickly and efficiently. What follows are eight main reasons why to learn Linux command line.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This is a GitHub project that installs virtual machines for more than 300+ spins of Linux, Windows, and macOS!
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What are loop devices? This is a question that comes up a lot these days, especially from Ubuntu users. This is due to the fact that Snap packages are mounted as loop devices.
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Let’s see what kind of fun Christmas-themed apps and desktop themes are available from KDE’s Discover! This video was somewhat inspired by the Vaporwave-theme I made for elementaryOS.
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This week, Linux Out Loud chats about festive-themed games.
Welcome to episode 44 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
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Graphics Stack
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The wlroots version of xfwm4-wayland now has partial support for the
wlr-foreign-toplevel protocol.
I have now declared feature parity with the libweston version, so I
have merged the wlroots branch into the wayland branch.
Link to the git repository:
https://github.com/adlocode/xfwm4/tree/wayland
Regards
adlo
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Applications
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Brief: SSH is a popular remote protocol for making secure remote connections. In this guide, we explore some of the most popular SSH clients for Linux.
SSH (Secure SHell) ranks as one of the most popular and reliable remote protocols for connecting to remote devices such as servers and network equipment, including routers and switches.
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This release introduces read and write for JPEG XL images, read-only support for WebP images, support for embedded ICC profiles in exported WebP files, support for the JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) file extension, as well as support for updating existing pictures in Piwigo exports.
Also new in Darktable 4.2 is a Sigmoid display transform module that can be used as a drop-in replacement for the filmic and base curve modules, two new algorithms in the highlight reconstruction module (inpaint opposed and segmentation based), and a new pipe routine for the duplicate manager to calculate previews.
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If you use a general purpose media player to access your music collection, you’re missing out on a wealth of features that can improve your listening experience. That’s why we recommend a dedicated music player. Linux offers a huge range to choose from which is why we put together this roundup to help save you time. But there are always new projects coming along.
Musicly is billed as a simple and elegant music player. It’s cross-platform software written in JavaScript. It’s based on Electron and React, put together with Electron React Boilerplate.
This is free and open source software.
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4Pane is a multi-pane file manager for Linux that allows for customized layout, and provides quick access to traditional desktop conveniences as well as common Linux tools. 4Pane aims for speed over visual effects, and places the way you want to work above all else. In honor of its name, I’ve got a list of my four favorite features of this fine file manager.
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At 10:00 CET (9:00 UTC) on December 21, Daniel live-streams the release presentation on twitch. This paragraph will later be replaced by a link to the YouTube version of that video.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Free VMware Workstation 17 Player for Ubuntu Linux is the latest version and upgrade of VMware 16 Player. If you are still using the older version then here in this guide we can learn how to upgrade that.
Apart from the free one for personal usage, VMware also offers a Workstation pro version with more features, however, it is paid. Although many Linux prefers to use open-source VirtualBox, VMPlayer has its own benefits. Good performance and ease to use are one of them.
With the latest release, Vmware can now support Windows 11 guest operating system to run without a TPM error. Hence, it fulfills the encryption requirement of Win 11. Apart from it, RedHat 9, Ubuntu 22.04, and other latest versions of Linux distros are now supported along with OpenGL 4.3 graphics support.
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On Linux and Unix-based systems, the crontab command helps you schedule tasks so they can automatically run in the background at a specified time or interval.
When you start crontab for the first time, you’ll see a prompt asking you to choose the default text editor for editing crontab files. But what if you want to change the editor later on?
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By itself, SSH is a secure way of connecting to a remote machine. However, if you are still keen to add additional security to your SSH connection, you can add two-factor authentication to be prompted to enter a random verification code when you connect via SSH. We previously showed you how to do so on various social networks and show you here how to add two-factor authentication to your SSH connection.
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In the beginning, there was the command line. While modern Linux distributions include graphical desktops like GNOME and KDE, the command line remains one of the power features of every Linux system. With the command line, you can leverage a rich set of instructions to edit and manipulate files, control your system, and automate processes.
This year, our contributors wrote a lot of great articles about the Linux command line. Here are five of my favorite topics.
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In Linux, PS1 is an environment variable that specifies the format of the command prompt displayed in the terminal. It stands for “Prompt String 1” and it is used to customize the appearance of the prompt.
By default, the bash prompt includes the current username, hostname, and current working directory, followed by the `$` symbol for a regular user or the `#` symbol for the root user. The prompt is displayed on the command line, and it indicates that the terminal is ready for input.
You can customize the bash prompt by modifying the value of the PS1 variable. For example, you can use special characters and codes to change the colors, font styles, and other formatting options of the prompt. You can also include other information, such as the current time or the git branch name, in the prompt.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install sysPass Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SysPass is a password manager that allows users to securely store and manage their passwords and other sensitive information in a central, encrypted location. It uses a combination of encryption and hashing algorithms to protect user data, and offers a range of features such as password generation, automatic login, and password sharing. SysPass is open-source software, which means that its code is publicly available and can be audited by anyone for security purposes. It is designed to be easy to use and can be accessed from any device with an internet connection.
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 sysPass Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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In this short tutorial, we will see how to prohibit directory listing in Linux from commandline. To put this in other words, we are going to deny the regular users from listing the contents of a directory using ls command, but still allow the users to access and modify the files from the same directory.
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Executing the history command without specifying any options will give you a clean record of previously executed commands with their event numbers.
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Git is a version control system that allows you to track changes to your files and coordinate work on those files with other people. One common task in Git is deleting files, either because you no longer need them or because they contain sensitive information that should not be shared. Here’s how to delete a file from Git.
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Most users always seek to get more performance out of their graphics cards. One of the better ways is to install Nvidia Drivers, which depending on your installation method, comes with an open-source variant. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers on Debian 11 Buster or Debian 11 Bullseye repositories and to install Nvidia drivers directly from Nvidia repositories, with open-source and proprietary drivers available.
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Linux Mint users may want to install the official Nvidia drivers if they use a Linux system for graphical design or gaming to gain more out of their current Graphics card, especially for those with impressive hardware. The following tutorial will teach you how to install NVIDIA Graphic Drivers on Linux Mint 21 or 20 with multiple methods available. Hopefully, you can install and keep these drivers up-to-date on your Linux Mint desktop.
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AbanteCart is an open-source e-commerce platform based on PHP. It is an ideal e-commerce solution for small to medium businesses.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AbanteCart on Ubuntu 22.04 OS. 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.
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It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 21 to version 21.1.
If you’ve been waiting for this we’d like to thank you for your patience.
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In the Linux system, each executed command in your terminal is taken as an event and associated with an event number (or index number) that is later found in the “~/.bash_history” file.
Now, you can use a program like cat to read the record of this file, but Linux provides a separate “history” command that gives you more features and functionality.
It involved features like viewing history records, removing single or complete records, executing a specific command from the history using its event number, and many more.
In this article, you will learn how to configure history records, history command usages, and a few more tips that will help you in your Linux journey.
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Podman added many features in 2022 that improve the user experience and flexibility to handle various container use cases.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME yearly participates in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. These internship programs basically consist on having new contributors working on a well-scoped project alongside an experienced mentor.
Defining project ideas is not as easy as it might sound. One needs to consider the perspective of a newcomer approaching the project for the first time, having a schedule where they are expected to onboard, work, and produce contributions that benefit the project.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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New desktop Hyprland
Hyprland is our first desktop that we could actually install with Wayland.
Gradually these desktops will get better.
Virtualbox and Nvidia drivers spoil the fun.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium and some of the applications pre-installed.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed are rolling out this week like a postal worker delivering presents.
The snapshots are plenty, but only a few software packages are arriving in each snapshot as developers begin to take some time off during the holiday season.
Snapshot 20221219 delivered just one package. That package was cppcheck 2.9.3, which is a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. This update brought various Graphical User Interface and premium feature handling bugfixes. The package improved the lifetime analysis with this pointers, and added debug intrinsics debug valueflow and debug valuetype to show more detail including source backtraces.
The 20221218 snapshot had just two package updates. An update of bash 5.2.15 added some upstream patches in the rolling release snapshot. The patches addressed several cases where bash is too aggressive when optimizing out forks in subshells, and how bash can leak memory when referencing a non-existent associative array element. The shell and command language package also defers processing additional terminating signals when running the EXIT trap while exiting due to a terminating signal; the patch allows the new terminating signal to kill the shell immediately. The other package to update in the snapshot was XFS filesystem utility xfsdump 3.1.12. The package contains tools to create and restore backups of directory trees, which fixed on-media inventory for media unpacking, stream unpacking, stream packing and unpacking logic.
Snapshot 20221217 had a major version update of VPN client openconnect. The 9.01 version added a webview callback and support for some of Cisco’s AnyConnect sessions and verifications. An update of pipewire 0.3.63 fixed a critical bug that caused some audio distortion in some cases when using Advanced Vector Extensions AVX2. The audio and video package for linux also fixed some crash triggers and a potential starting issue with audacity A few other KDE’s Qt5 packages were updated in the snapshot, along with osinfo-db 20221130, which added some patches for supporting LeapMicro versions.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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2023 is just around the corner, and like every year, it will come with new challenges and surprises. Great leadership is a key component in a team’s ability to embrace change; therefore, it’s wise to reflect on what aspects of your leadership style are working well and what needs improvement as you head into a new year.
We asked CIOs who recently won a SoCal CIO of the Year ORBIE Award to share a top leadership lesson they learned in 2022 and how they plan to apply it to future challenges.
Read on for wisdom you can use in 2023 and beyond.
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Edge computing has emerged as a rational and important use case demonstrating why hybrid cloud architectures usually win out over purely centralized cloud approaches. There are several reasons to adopt edge computing, but most involve moving compute closer to where data is created or consumed.
For example, if latency is important because some local action must be taken in response to an event – perhaps a process has drifted out of allowable parameters on a factory floor – it’s useful not to have to traverse a network to take that action.
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I encourage everyone to contribute to open source projects in every company I work. If you are a developer, I am sure you know how to do that already, but what about the rest of the people who can contribute with the same impact?
[...]
I wrote a particular article about my motivation for volunteering which you can find here. Also, some of the companies match your volunteering hours with cash incentives, so you can even do more good while doing good.
Identify what change you want to see in the world and find a way to support it with your skills, peers, money, goods, or anything they need. They can’t do it by themselves. Change is a group sport. Involve your colleagues as well!
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Not all developers work in the same environment or use the same workflow. It’s important to understand typical development workflows when building tools and processes or sharing your experience so that you can consider how developers using different workflows may be able or unable to apply your tool, processes, or techniques, given their situation.
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Learn the components of the control plane and workers nodes, along with Kubernetes resources that developers should know.
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DH2i, a provider of always-secure and always-on IT infrastructure solutions, has announced that DH2i’s DxEnterprise multi-platform smart high availability clustering software has earned Red Hat OpenShift certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The first point release of Linux Mint 21 is out! Code-name ‘Vera’, Kernel 5.15, Ubuntu 22.04 package base, and Cinnamon 5.6, MATE 1.26, XFCE 4.16 for each desktop edition.
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The Linux Mint team has announced that Linux Mint 21 users can now officially upgrade to version 21.1. Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ was only released yesterday following a two-week Beta phase and now upgrades are open too. The Mint team has outlined five steps for performing the upgrade, all of which are pretty easy to follow.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Cloud gaming apps for Android are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. It’s because more and more people look for ways to access their favorite games on their smartphones and tablets. These apps let users stream high-quality video games to their devices without needing expensive hardware or device memory. Indeed, users don’t need to install games at all. With a stable internet connection and a compatible device, you can easily play your favorite games anywhere, anytime, with this kind of app.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Maybe you hate pumping gas in the cold (or heat), or you care about the environment. Maybe the latest gas prices and general inflation has you thinking more about stretching your money. Perhaps you simply think electric vehicles (EVs) look cool. No matter the reason, you’re excited about your next vehicle being an EV and you’re not alone! The EV market share is set to expand to 30% by 2040. The US government provides a handy comparison tool to show that the cost of ownership of an EV easily beats owning and operating fossil fuel vehicles. Despite this, EV charging costs can still hit you hard in your wallet.
One of the most elegant ways to solve cost problems in general is to apply open source principles to accelerate innovation. Fortunately for you, this has been done in the EV charging area to find a way to get low-cost electricity and low-cost chargers.
To control the costs of EV charging, first you need low-cost electricity. In the old days, that would mean going from oil to coal, which is not a step up. Today, as it turns out, solar photovoltaic (PV) devices that convert sunlight directly into electricity normally provide the lowest-cost electricity. Coal companies are going bankrupt because they can no longer compete with clean solar power. This is also why solar power is seeing explosive growth all over the world. Many homeowners are putting solar panels on their roofs or on ground mounts in the backyard to cover all of their home’s electric needs. But how can you charge your EV with solar energy if you have limited roof area or a small backyard?
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The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it’s not the only new distro for Yule.
Mint 21 arrived back in August as the Franco-Irish project’s take on Ubuntu “Jammy”. Way back in the old days, Mint did not take too kindly to version upgrades, but it’s got a lot better in recent years, and the last few times that The Reg FOSS desk has tried it, it’s gone perfectly smoothly. We took a look at the beta of 21.1 at the start of this month, and now the final version of “Vera” is here.
As usual, there are three editions, and there are three separate release announcements: the flagship Cinnamon 21.1, plus MATE and Xfce 21.1. There are a few known issues in there, so it’s worth your time to read them, although in testing we didn’t encounter any hitches.
Unfortunately for Xfce fans, this release doesn’t include the brand new Xfce 4.18, which was released last Thursday. Mint is based on the LTS releases of Ubuntu so it won’t get such major component upgrades. For that, you’ll have to wait for Mint 22, some time in mid-to-late 2024 after the release of Ubuntu 24.04.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Today is Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day where I spend some time taking stock of things and maybe move some projects to the done pile.
In June, I ran a Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day [1] for Mozilla Data Org because the idea really struck a chord with me and we were about to embark on 2022h2 where one of the goals was to “land planes” and finish projects. I managed to pass off Dennis and end Puente. I also spent some time mulling over better models for maintaining a lot of libraries.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Various data types are used in LibreOffice code and also in LibreOffice API. Here we discuss the some of these data types, which are important when you are working with LibreOffice code and API.
You should know that LibreOffice API can be used from many languages, but here we only focus on C++. LibreOffice uses a component model called UNO (Universal Network Objects), which is designed to provide an environment for accessing network objects from different languages. The data types that we discuss here are among UNO data types.
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FSF
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The job of a lighthouse is not to drift along with the currents, but to unwaveringly resist tides, storms and pressure, serving as a reference point, a guiding light, a strong foundation.
[...]
The FSF has done a great job resisting corporate pressure and propaganda that attempts to push public opinion towards self-defeating behaviors. It has also stood strong in preserving its mission, of defending freedom for all software users, from submission to other valuable social justice causes.
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Programming/Development
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Encouraging people to share projects and tutorials has always been central to Arduino’s mission of democratizing technology. Learning from the work of others is very important as we always felt that most makers like to start from an existing project and evolve from their own creation. If you’ve been following Arduino for a while you know we went through a few tools in our history, from “Playground” to “Scuola” arriving at our current “Project Hub” in search of always simpler and better ways to share.
In 2014, we collaborated with Hackster.io to establish “Project Hub”, based on the Hackster platform. Together we grew a space that hosts thousands of well-documented projects submitted by all of you. Although this partnership is very important to us, Arduino will move Project Hub in-house. Building our own project sharing platform allows us to further integrate with Arduino Cloud and better align with our new features.
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The end-of-life (EOL) for PHP 7.4 was Monday, November 28, 2022. If you’re like me, that date snuck up much faster than anticipated. While your PHP 7.4 code isn’t going to immediately stop working, you do need to begin making plans for the future of this codebase.
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Python
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Everyone, for sure, must have heard or read about the number of characters that make a password secure. Experts recommend that the minimum required to create a secure password is twelve characters.
Malicious programs rely on the hardware power of the PC to crack the codes. The longer the password, the more processing power is required and the more time it takes the software to crack the password.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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To detect and handle errors in a bash script, you can use the `set -e` and `trap` commands, as well as the `if` and `case` statements and the `||` and `&&` operators.
You can use the set -e command at the beginning of your script to enable this behavior, or you can use it before individual commands to enable it only for those commands.
It’s important to note that the `set -e` command only affects the exit status of individual commands. It does not catch errors caused by syntax errors or other issues in the script itself. To catch these types of errors, you can use the `set -o` errexit option instead.
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The rsync command is a utility that is used to synchronize files and directories between two locations. It is a powerful tool that is commonly used for backups, data synchronization, and transferring files between servers. rsync is particularly useful because it only transfers the differences between files, rather than transferring the entire file. This makes it much faster than other file transfer utilities such as cp or scp.
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The SCP (Secure Copy) command is a powerful tool that allows you to securely copy files between servers or between a local machine and a server. It is similar to the cp command, but it uses Secure Shell (SSH) to transfer the files, which means that the data is encrypted and secure during the transfer.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the basic syntax of the SCP command and some examples of how to use it.
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Leftovers
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People hate advertising. Year after year, advertising professionals are routinely cited in Gallup surveys of dishonorable professions. Ask users how to improve almost any entertainment experience and removing ads is the most common suggestion. Near universal disdain for advertising belies how massive the industry really is. With billions spent on advertising annually, companies will pay a premium to get their products onto your favorite content. But can an ad agency be so effective as to get people to pay for their ads? Or at the very least, not mind the ads in the first place? Today’s Tedium is looking at Foote, Cone, and Belding, a legendary advertising agency that helped a greeting card company transform into a media juggernaut with the power of Christmas.
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Hardware
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Qualcomm QCX216 is a new IoT-optimized LTE Cat1 bis modem with a data rate of up to 10 Mbps at ultra-low power and support for WiFi-based terrestrial positioning thanks to the company’s database of billions of geolocated beacons.
LTE Cat1 bis is an update to LTE Cat1 that does not require software and hardware upgrades to the base stations, enables smaller, simpler, and cheaper designs with a single antenna, and delivers higher speeds than LTE Cat M1 typically used in IoT applications. Qualcomm QCX216 LTE IoT modem will be used in smart utility meters, trackers, e-mobility solutions, parking meters, home automation and security equipment, and other location-based solutions.
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We’ve previously covered the EdgeBox-RPi4 industrial controller powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and plenty of I/Os such as RS485, RS232, digital inputs and outputs, and connectivity options such as Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5, and 4G LTE.
But if you don’t quite need the power of a Linux controller, the EdgeBox-ESP-100 industrial edge controller based on an ESP32-S3 dual-core WiFi and Bluetooth microcontroller and offering a similar set of features, albeit with twists, may be an interesting option.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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As the destructive effects of climate change become more apparent, “we need to fight climate change with both sword (cutting our emissions to fight further increases in warming) and shield (protecting ourselves from climate change’s increasing effects),” says the World Economic Forum.
Both control and mitigation approaches must be pursued, and “everyone must be involved in deciding how societies will adapt,” says this COP27 report.
One way to get involved is through open source. For example, we previously mentioned the Protontypes website as a valuable resource for finding projects that are actively working toward a more sustainable future. The site provides a comprehensive, curated list of open technology projects that can provide key information and help shape critical climate solutions.
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OSI Blog ☛ 2022 is almost over, welcome 2023! [Ed: OSI works for Microsoft and proprietary software; do not give them a dime!]
As I’m closing out my first full year as executive director of the Open Source Initiative, I’m amazed by what our small team has accomplished. I’m proud to end the year with a solid 20% growth in revenue from sponsors and an even more impressive increase of the total number of corporate sponsors, to a whopping 51 up from 36 last year!
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (xorg-server), Fedora (samba, snakeyaml, thunderbird, xorg-x11-server, and xrdp), Slackware (libksba and sdl), and SUSE (cni, cni-plugins, java-1_7_1-ibm, kernel, openssl-3, and supportutils).
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This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a Russian problem. Here’s a more general article on the problem from 2020.
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Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone.
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Finance
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Shutdown is a history of the world macroeconomic response to COVID-19, covering 2020 and the very beginning of 2021.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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For a year and a half, phone calls to people trying to survive one of the world’s worst wars didn’t go through. Now, as phone lines start to be restored to parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region after a fragile peace deal, some Tigrayans are relieved while others grieve.
“I have been dreading receiving phone calls,” said a Tigrayan living in Norway, who like others spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals against his relatives. “You want to speak to your family, but you don’t know what kind of stories you will hear, in terms of who is still alive.”
The conflict between Ethiopian and allied forces against the Tigray side is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people since late 2020, according to the United Nations and the United States, citing academic research. The U.N. secretary-general has said more people have died in this conflict than in Ukraine’s.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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The policy team at IFF participated in 13 consultations with Union and State governmental bodies as well as non-governmental bodies, sent 103 letters and tracked 126 Facial Recognition Technology (“FRT”) systems. Through sustained advocacy, we came one step closer to successfully safeguarding sanitation workers from workplace surveillance and were able to get IRCTC to roll back its plans to monetise passenger’s digital data. On the one hand we authored 6 public briefs, explainers and summaries, while on the other, we collaborated with various organisations with the aim of increasing collaborative public output on digital rights issues. In our efforts to strengthen Parliament’s commitment towards a more secure digital environment for all citizens, we continued and expanded our engagement with Members of Parliament through routine publications and dialogue.
The aim of the policy vertical remains unaccomplished unless we are truly able to widely disseminate information as well as analysis regarding key, and often complex, policy issues. To that end, we adopted several tools to get the conversation started such as rapid responses, attention grabbing twitter threads, video explainers, citizen campaigns and pledges, etc. We are extremely grateful to our community for consistently engaging with and supporting our work and we promise to continue the hard work and do our best in the coming years.
[...]
The journey to a data protection framework at the national level has been long and full of roadblocks. While we have in the past and continue to advocate for a comprehensive national data protection law, this year we put on our policy-analysis lenses to check how states are faring when it comes to data protection policies. We compared and contrasted state-level data policies of 7 states, namely, Punjab, Odisha, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Telangana, and Chandigarh.
While the results were enlightening to say the least, we observed that Tamil Nadu fared better as compared to the other states. Thus, we wrote to the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency, providing our inputs on the Tamil Nadu Data Policy, 2022 (TNDP, 2022). A great outcome of this initiative was that IFF was invited to a closed-door round table discussion by ICRIER to partake in this consultation meeting wherein the Tamil Nadu IT Dept were seeking comments on their data policy with a special focus on issues related to data sharing, pricing, and monetisation. This was for us a tiny, incremental win, as we were able to open lines of engagement with the Tamil Nadu state government in a meaningful manner.
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Today, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to promote equal access to broadband in every community by seeking comment on potential rules preventing digital discrimination. The Commission’s new effort, as directed by Congress in the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” is to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination, which occurs when broadband providers underinvest in low-income and marginalized communities. Public Knowledge commends the FCC for moving to create a more connected and creative future.
The following can be attributed to Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:
“We applaud the FCC’s effort to meet the congressionally mandated deadline to create rules preventing and eliminating digital discrimination, although we’ll still need to fill the fifth Commissioner seat to achieve this goal. The Commission’s forthcoming rules around digital discrimination, if implemented correctly, could prove one of the most effective mechanisms available to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, reliable internet service.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Under control” or controlled demolition?
Summary: Everything at Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been very rapidly coming down this year; not much was left of the company, more was being outsourced (what’s left), then the “office manager” (for an office that does not exist) went on extended leave (causing severe operational problems/lapses), and a ‘controlled demolition’ sequence was initiated to deprive remaining staff of severance payments/separation fees
THE situation at Sirius is not just bad. It is very bad. It is chaotic. There are even confidential documents to that effect, but we’re not sharing confidential and sensitive material here.
The company continues to fake its size and its future prospects. That basically involves deceit or — to put it more bluntly — lying.
“In Sirius, either you’re in the club or you’re being obstructed by the club. If you sleep with a member of the club, you get special access. But that’s a shortcut and an exception.”The current ‘UK’ CEO (the company likes to pretend that it operates from the US as well, but everyone inside the company can see beyond this façade) showed some promise at first, but over the past year the evasion and pointless finger-pointing became too much. Some believe that he came from a client (not the first such ‘manager’) without even mentioning this anywhere, but actually he came from the University of Oxford. He used to work on a large project that became a lot smaller over time. Some think that maybe he got sacked and used Sirius as a landing point or ‘consolation prize’. In fact, coming from the client (far bigger) to managing a very small team that’s rapidly decreasing in size is a bad sign. It’s not a rational migration; one lucky colleagues moved in exactly the opposite direction (to the public sector with job security). Either way, Cambridge University and the University of Oxford are known for all sorts of things, including patronising behaviour that had both institutions dubbed “Oxbridge” — a ticket to “the club” (Eton et al).
In Sirius, either you’re in the club or you’re being obstructed by the club. If you sleep with a member of the club, you get special access. But that’s a shortcut and an exception.
I’ve no personal grudge with the University of Oxford. I used to work with them and went there regularly when completing my doctoral degree; but that seems to be a place where people are taught never to admit mistakes or listen properly. I had several very lengthy talks with management, but even though I was being heard (or maybe even listened to) this resulted in no changes, not even basic compliance.
“I had several very lengthy talks with management, but even though I was being heard (or maybe even listened to) this resulted in no changes, not even basic compliance.”Sadly for the dude from the University of Oxford, he is harming the company he was entrusted to manage and soon he might be out of work, with nothing to show for it (not even a company left to write a reference for him).
The text below is the first part of the last major section. It’s about how the charismatic genius from the University of Oxford decided to become judge, jury, executioner, and monarch. That culminated in truly irrational and self-harming behaviour — a vindictive campaign of witch-hunting to defend one’s big ego.
The Self-Destruction
The company — and it seems safe to predict so — has reached a point of no return. A new client, Argo AI, officially became defunct earlier this month. The company’s recent meetings (Sirius and Support Team) suggested that they needed to lay off staff but preferred to encourage any of those attending to take voluntary resignation instead, i.e. no compensation. The Support Team is the majority of the company, so this is a very big deal.
It’s reasonable to assume the company looked for excuses to dismiss without compensation, seeing its financial state (which is in the public domain for all to see). Staff was repeatedly asked whether it was willing to “voluntarily” resign, i.e. leave without compensation. Nobody ever said “yes”, in spite of the question being asked several times. External HR people were apparently (allegedly a company that provides other service to Sirius) advising and steering towards this strategy.
For a number of weeks there was apparently an effort to take this further, looking for reasons to dismiss staff, preferably without compensation. Prior to that, around July, Roy was already cautioned he had been put on a “shortlist” (a bit of a vague term). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Graphics Stack
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For those of you who use the special NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Drivers, version 525.47.04 was recently recently to go along with the release of Vulkan Video and hook up their latest GPUs.
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The Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan Video is done and ready, the 1.0 release is out with the Vulkan 1.3.238 spec update and no longer considered provisional.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Not long ago, when I was building melt, I learned something interesting: if you restore a private key from its seed, and marshal it back to the OpenSSH Private Key format, you’ll always get a different block in the middle.
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On day 56 you’ve learned that you have to define a container-type when working with size containers and on day 59 you’ve learned that you can name containers using the container-name property.
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If you create an HTML document, it comes with default styles that are more or less the same in most browsers. A serif font, transparent (white) background, black text color, etc. You could say that the default theme for any HTML document is a light theme because it uses a light background color. Now here comes the big revelation (at least to me) Sara writes about: There’s also a dark theme.
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In this post, you will learn how to install the Binance Desktop app on Ubuntu 22.04 | Linux Mint 21
Note: In some countries, trading cryptocurrencies is illegal and subject to laws. Please check the legal status of Binance in your country.
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This post is about how the Recursor can write to files even when its permissions to access the file system are restricted.
When PowerDNS Recursor is running it mostly does not need to access files. In many runtime environments its access to the file system is restricted to limit the impact of potential security issues. When reconfiguring the Recursor, we need to make sure the files it needs to read are accessible in this restricted runtime environment. But in some cases, we also want to be able to write files.
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Pi-hole is one of the most effective ad-blockers available for you to use. You can install it on your router or a dedicated system and get an ad-free experience for all the devices connected through it.
In an earlier article, I discussed the steps for installing Pi-hole. But you must update it regularly to win the cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and ad providers (Google, Facebook, etc). Another aspect is to patch a security vulnerability that might affect you negatively.
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This article guide demonstrates the usage of the Linux ar command to create, modify, and extract from archives.
Linux provides several useful command-line utilities for managing archives. The ar command-line tool is among these utilities, which create, modify, and extract from archives.
An archive is a single file format that holds a collection of other files within the archive that are referred to as members. The structure of the archive file makes it possible to retrieve the original files prior to their compression into the archived state.
The archive preserves the original file attributes such as owner, group, timestamp, and mode (permissions).
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This article guide provides an understanding between static and dynamic libraries and thereafter demonstrates how a user can create a static library in Linux via the aid of the Linux ar command.
During the compilation process of a C program, an object code is usually the end result of a successful compiler runtime. Afterward, a linker is invoked to make the library function code available to a user program. The linker accomplishes this objective either by making the library function code copy available to the user object code or by availing the library function code at run-time.
When the linker creates a copy of these re-usable library function codes and passes/avails them to an executable program file, a static library is born. It’s called a static library because the libraries and/or library files are statically linked. Static libraries in Linux are identified by the ‘.a’ file extension.
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A recursive chown is a command that allows you to change the ownership of a directory and all of its subdirectories and files. This can be useful when you want to transfer ownership of a large number of files or directories to a different user or group.
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When making backups, and copying/moving large files on your Linux system, you may want to monitor the progress of an ongoing operation. Many terminal tools do not have the functionality to allow you to view progress information when a command is running in a pipe.
In this article, we shall look at an important Linux/Unix command called pv – Pipe Viewer.
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While writing complex macros to automate various tasks in LibreOffice, you definitely encounter errors. Some run-time errors are self-explanatory. But some of them are very generic. To debug those, you need to carefully put breakpoints and step through the code to see where the problem is in your code.
Hence this tutorial. These techniques apply to all the macros written in Calc, Writer or Impress. And should be applied to OpenOffice macros as well.
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In Linux, device files are quite special as they provide applications to interface with device drivers which also include the /dev/zero.
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This guide explains what is GNU Stow, how to install GNU Stow in Linux, and how to remove programs installed from source using GNU Stow.
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Hello techies, in this guide, we will show you how to install ansible on rocky linux 9 step by step.
Ansible is a free and opensource automation tool, it is used to configure and manage remote Linux and windows systems over ssh protocol and WinRM protocol respectively. We don’t need to install any agent on remote linux systems as it connects ssh connection.
The system on which we install Ansible is known as control node and systems which are managed by ansible are known as managed hosts.
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Docker is an open-source, well-known tool for project development. It offers the developer a consistent development environment. The Docker containerization concept makes Docker stand out among other applications for local development. It can access the code remotely and deploy it on the local machine with the help of Docker containers.
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Tutorial on MySQL’s round() function, what it does, its function syntax, accepted parameters, return values, and practical examples of the function usage.
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Number rounding refers to finding the approximate nearby value of a given numerical value. Number rounding is a common practice when working with numerical values, allowing you to get a numerical value that is easier to read and parse.
In this tutorial, you will learn about MySQL’s round() function. We will cover what the function does, its function syntax, accepted parameters, return values, and the practical examples of the function usage.
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Games
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Selaco, an upcoming GZDoom-based shooter from Altered Orbit Studios has been featured before and I’m bringing it back again here because of the huge upgrade to the demo. It’s simply fantastic.
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You think I’m joking? I’m not. Okay, okay. It’s not a game but I’ll get to that in a moment. The Steam Deck has transformed everything about gaming for me.
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Another chance for you to get a free game, and perhaps take a look at some tasty discounts too with the GOG Winter Sale 2022 now giving away Broken Sword: Director’s Cut.
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A dedicated Star Wars fan and code hacker has created something awesome: The Force Engine. A brand new free and open source modern game engine for Star Wars Dark Forces.
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Tiny Life is The Sims without EA and done in pixel art. There’s a fresh free Beta out, the final one before Steam Early Access in 2023.
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I’m all outta gum. The Duke Nukem Forever Restoration Project is coming along nicely and a fresh trailer is out to show it off.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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When I started helping out with Crosswords, JRB taught me a valuable lesson: before implementing a non-trivial feature, or doing a non-trivial change, one should first write a document with the design of the feature. It doesn’t have to be anything formal; just an explanation of where you are coming from, the point to which you want to get, and a little technical detail if appropriate. You can then discuss the feature based on the document itself before going down the rabbit hole of actually implementing it.
Over time, these little documents form a high-level technical overview of the thing you are building; a sort of development history with less irrelevant detail than commit logs.
You can see examples of these little documents in the repository for Crosswords.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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NetBSD 10, a major update to the NetBSD operating system, is finally ready for beta testing after nearly three years of development. This update includes various new features and improvements, including improved cryptography, hardware devices support, and new userspace programs.
Let’s quickly brief you about the highlights of this release.
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Debian Family
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Tails 5.8 is the most important release of Tails in years. It includes both major redesign of existing features, important usability improvements, and hardened security.
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This work has been made possible by donations from users like you. If you like these changes and want more, donate now to fund our work in 2023.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has a new focus on IoT, specifically on bringing connected Bluetooth shelf labels and tags to retail and other settings. According to Ken Kolderup, chief marketing officer at the SIG, the organization is making plans for a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard for electronic shelf labels and discussing what standards ubiquitous electronic BLE tags might need. These are among several efforts the SIG is taking to ready the Bluetooth radio protocol for a larger market.
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There are a lot of IoT solutions and frameworks out there, and [Davide] demonstrates how to make a simple data logging and tracking application with his ESP8266-to-ThingSpeak project, which reads up to four NTC (negative temperature coefficient) thermistors and sends the data to ThinkSpeak over WiFi.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The Arducam Mega is a low-power camera compatible with any microcontroller that supports SPI protocol. This embedded camera is offered in 3MP/5MP variants and it supports a fully open-source SDK for software development.
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ArduCam Mega is a 3MP or 5MP camera specifically designed for microcontrollers with an SPI interface, and the SDK currently supports Arduino UNO and Mega2560 boards, ESP32/ESP8266 boards, Raspberry Pi Pico and other boards based on RP2040 MCU, BBC Micro:bit V2, as well as STM32 and MSP430 platform.
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“Secure Element” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Bunnie Huang writes: [...]
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Have you ever received a package in the mail that looks like it might have fallen off the truck? Then probably ran over by that same truck a couple of times? Well I wanted to know just how handled packages get when traveling to their destinations.
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ESP32 is a microcontroller-based platform that can interface with several devices to control different outputs according to the input. All communication protocols like UART, SPI and I2C play a significant role in ESP32 communication. We will be discussing Inter Integrated Circuit or I2C communication protocol in this guide and how to scan an address of a device.
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Transferring data to Raspberry Pi may look difficult for someone who doesn’t want to bother transferring it using the options like USB, email, or FTP server. Though these options are mostly utilized for data sharing from any device to Raspberry Pi, but if someone is interested in using the Bluetooth service for data transfer, he/she can follow this article for a detailed guideline.
In this guide, we are going to discuss how to easily transfer data through Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi.
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If you are using the Raspberry Pi for gaming purposes or for some other purpose that requires fast speed and better graphics quality then you can overclock your Raspberry Pi CPU for better performance and fast speed, and you can also overclock the GPU to obtain better graphics quality. In this tutorial steps to overclock the GPU and CPU of Raspberry Pi are discussed.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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I’ve been discussing Mastodon UX wishlists with some new acquaintances there. This excerpt from A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon concludes with part of my own wishlist.
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The fediverse isn’t a single, gigantic social media platform like Facebook or Youtube. It’s an expanding ecosystem of interconnected sites and services that let people interact with each other no matter which one of these sites and services they have an account with. That means people can tailor and better control their own experience of social media and be less reliant on a monoculture developed by a handful of tech giants.
For people hosting instances, however, it can also mean some legal risk. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to mitigate that risk – if you plan ahead. To help people do that, this guide offers an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations.
Two important notes: (1) This guide is focused on legal risks that flow from hosting other people’s content, under U.S. law. In general, the safe harbors and immunities discussed below will not protect you if you are directly infringing copyright or defaming someone. (2) Many of us at EFF are lawyers, but we are not YOUR lawyers. This guide is intended to offer a high-level overview of U.S. law and should not be taken as legal advice specific to your particular situation.
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I was curious about how Mastodon is actually implemented. A high-level overview: [...]
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So to limit Handbrake a bit—which would slow rendering to 5-10 fps but also not cook my lap—I added threads=2 to the ‘Additional Options’ field in Handbrake’s Video settings: [...]
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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WordPress enthusiasts tuned in last week for the State of the Word address to celebrate the project’s yearly accomplishments and explore what 2023 holds. But that’s not the only exciting update from the past month. New proposals and ideas are already emerging with an eye on the year ahead—let’s dive into them!
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FSFE
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Programming/Development
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Two new language frontends have been added to GCC: Modula-2 and Rust. I think this is great news on both accounts: having a Wirth language in GCC fills my childhood heart with joy (though I do wish GNU Pascal can one day be revived and mainlined, as Pascal was the first non-BASIC language I learned). And Rust appears here to stay, so having more than just the one official compiler seemed all but inevitable. I think both languages make sense for GCC and am glad to see that they will be making the upcoming GCC 13.1.
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With this in mind, a simple algorithm to compute the length of a C string is as follows: [...]
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There’s a tradition at Recurse Center of writing a Return Statement after your batch. I’m not sure of the origin of the terminology, but it seems like it’s a pun on the return statement in programming languages. It’s a great tradition, and it gives me a good motivator to reflect on my batch and share those reflections.
This is going to be a ride, so buckle up. First I’ll go through what was life-changing and formative about this period for me. This is going to be very personal and not so much about programming at first. Then I’ll go through what I worked on during RC and what the batch was like.
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Visiting #2 and doing some $WORK-work, but intrigued with Hanukkah of Data since Puzzle 0 was solvable with a ZIP password cracker (the calendar date math seemed too trivial to bother with).
Decided to fall back to R for this (vs Observable for the Advent of Code which I’ll dedicate time to finishing next week).
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Fundamentals of R programming, Here, we provide you with some programming in R multiple-choice problems and their corresponding answers.
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Contrary to a belief by some, a thing is not “designed” through the application of visual aesthetics (e.g. color, type, etc.), but rather by virtue of being assigned a functional role within an ordered system. Design is the act of giving names, assigning functions, dividing up roles, and refining aesthetics.
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Hey all, today was my first day back from PTO. While away, I was thinking what I often think: I should write more on here. With Twitter effectively defunct, and my Mastodon being set to ephemeral mode (posts auto-delete after 30 days), I should start keeping a better record of what I’m up to somewhere more permanent. And this blog seems as a good a place as any.
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Why this is important is hard to convery in a static picture, but in motion the quality difference is very obvious. And it turns out the speed difference is not actually significant, so why not go for the extra quality?
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When working with mesh shaders to draw meshes, you need to split your source geometry into individual units called meshlets. Each meshlet would be processed by one mesh shader workgroup, and when compiling this mesh shader you need to specify the maximum number of triangles and vertices that the meshlet contains.
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Instead of keyword matching, vector search uses vector similarity to find relevant content. It uses a vector space model to represent the documents as points in an N-dimensional space. Words closer to each other in this space are more relevant, and documents with similar words are more relevant. This allows searching for concepts and phrases instead of exact words. Models like GPT-3 have large embeddings (12288 dimensions)!
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In the final seminar in our series on cross-disciplinary computing, Dr Tracy Gardner and Rebecca Franks, who work here at the Foundation, described the framework underpinning the Foundation’s non-formal learning pathways. They also shared insights from our recently published literature review about the impact that non-formal computing education has on learners.
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Python
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As with last time, that was a lot of words to cover what turns out to be not a particularly complex set of recommendations; it’s just explaining the “why” of everything that takes a while. And hopefully now you have an idea of a “boring” Python code-quality regimen; this won’t prevent every bug or problem you might introduce into your code, but it will help to catch a lot of potential issues.
And as before, even if you don’t adopt the recommendations I’ve given, I’d like to think that seeing them laid out and explained will at least be helpful to you, and that you’ll learn something you can take away and put to use in whatever setup you do choose to adopt.
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Leftovers
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In the prologue to Cimino, Charles Elton’s new biography of Michael Cimino, the author describes pulling up to his subject’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills, knowing full well that the director would not be home. Elton showed up at the mansion’s doorstep in 2018, a year and a half after the director’s death at the age of 77 from undisclosed causes. He was there to sift through the artifacts of a career that changed the course of American movie history even as it also, to some extent, has become lost to it.
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The Russian Ministry of the Interior (MVD) has placed Marat Gelman, an influential art dealer and political consultant, on the federal “Wanted” list.
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The Russian Justice Ministry has filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), Interfax reported on Tuesday, citing the Moscow City Court.
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We have a collection of Apache servers, and as part of our Prometheus metrics system we indirectly scrape metrics from them, using a third party Apache exporter that queries Apache’s mod_status information and converts it to Prometheus metrics. Because the exporter’s author chose to write it that way, you need to run one instance of the exporter per Apache server you want to extract metrics from. Ordinary people would probably run these exporter instances on the Apache hosts themselves. We opted to instead run all of the exporters on our metrics server, which means that we need one systemd unit per exporter instance. As we gather metrics from more and more Apache servers, this had led to more and more systemd units, each of them basically identical.
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Every year, Bob sends Chris Hedges and Mr. Fish into the blistering cold of the New Jersey woods to chop down a tree for the annual ScheerPost Christmas party. Please donate to ScheerPost so we can start buying a tree instead—and so you can get a book.
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Patrick Lawrence delivered the following remarks, based on his book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, before the Committee for the Republic in Washington on December 15. The Committee is a nonpartisan group founded in 2003 that advocates a restoration of the U.S. Constitution, notably the […]
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The National Democratic Party has to set aside the champagne and rigorously face its disastrous failures.
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Last week we launched paid plans for our top three most popular websites (PNG Tools, JPG Tools, and GIF Tools) and this week we’re launching paid plans for our next two most popular websites – Text Tools and String Tools. Text and string tools are collectively used by 300,000 people every month. Next, we’re adding paid plans to all other online tools websites that we built and eventually joining them into a single ultimate get things done website called OnlineTools.com (we already bought this premium domain!)
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Ever since sixth grade, all the way through High School, I’d invent games in which, in my mind, the future of the Civil Rights movement, or ending the escalating war on Vietnam, or even the good health and happiness of my family would depend on my ability to discipline myself sufficiently to master some seemingly unrelated and irrelevant situation. Going up the stairs, I’d sprint from the downstairs door straining to reach the landing before the door slammed shut. Invariably, I was successful, by a hair’s breadth, and Nazism, racism, or death itself was defeated, dead to the world–at least until the next time I raced the slamming door. Each time I added a greater distance I had to run in order to win. The combination of elation and relief with every “victory” (and this occurred at least once every day for eight or nine years), empowered me over conditions I wanted to change but over which I had no control.
I fought against the temptation to “waste” this effort on minor or personal desires, like getting an A on an exam. These games, in which I was the only one involved but in which every occurrence became some sort of private signal and each rearrangement of reality became an esoteric omen, were reserved for only the most important world-shaking questions. “If I don’t beat that door, it’ll prove that god exists,” I’d think, and, fancying myself to be of scientific, non-religious mind despite five years in Hebrew school, I’d never fail to beat the slamming door, never fall down, always straining against my own physical limits, never setting it up as an easy goal, and thus, always giving abstract philosophical questions a real physical dependence.
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Science
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Unless you are an audiophile, you likely think of tubes as mostly relegated to people who work on old technology. However, photomultiplier tubes are still useful compared to more modern sensors, and [Jaynes Network] has a look into how they work, especially with scintillating detectors.
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[Asianometry] has been learning about gallium nitride semiconductors and shares what he knows in an informative video you can see below. This semiconductor material has a much higher bandgap voltage than the more common silicon. This makes it useful for applications that need higher efficiency and less heating.
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Education
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When writing a resume, there are possibilities where you end up writing your biography and making it a short essay of 5-6 pages. It might make you think that whatever you wrote was very much needed but we’re afraid to say, “they were unnecessary and not required.” If you’re wondering “Is a 4-5 page resume too long?“, it definitely is. Resume length is still a mystery for many because some people have 1-year experience and some have 25+ years of experience, so it’s hard to gather all in a 1-page document.
Before looking more into ideal resume length, you need to know what a resume is.
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Hardware
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[Joshua Coleman] likes to design his own computers. Sometimes, that means drawing up bus architectures, memory maps and I/O port pinouts. Other times, he can focus his efforts more on the general aesthetics, as well as on building a great set of peripherals, as he shows in his latest ColemanZ80 project. Thanks to the RC2014 architecture defining most of the essential features of a classic Z80 computing platform, [Joshua] was able to design a modern retrocomputer that’s not only genuinely useful, but also looks as if it came off a production line yesterday.
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It’s always great when we get a chance to follow up on a previous project with more information, or further developments. So we’re happy that [“Ancient” James Brown] just dropped a new video showing the assembly of his Lego brick with a tiny OLED screen inside it. The readers are too, apparently — we got at least half a dozen tips on this one.
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There’s two cases when hackers have to think about USB-C connector mechanics. The first is when a USB-C connector physically breaks, and the second is when we need to put a connector on our own board. Let’s go through both of them.
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The original Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner led to loads of clones and lookalikes over the years, and one of them is the ALEE mopping “robot”. [Raymond] tears it down and reveals what’s inside. Turns out it contains mostly regret! Although it does host some design cleverness in its own way.
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The xG24 Explorer Kit is a low-cost embedded platform based on the EFR32MG24 Wireless System-on-Chip. This compact board integrates a 2.4GHz radio in addition to one mikroBUS socket, one Qwicc connector and a SEGGER J-Link onboard debugger.
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Just let it run, compiling the entire 1,620 packages… it took 4 days and 3 hours!
As mentioned in that post, OE was set to use only 3 threads, also compiling of each package was with “make -j2″, that is, only using 2 threads.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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But now the world has changed. In the United States, being tough on China is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement. And in this fraught geopolitical context, TikTok is considered a Trojan horse — for Chinese influence, for spying, or possibly both. In China, meanwhile, a broad crackdown has sought to rein in high-flying tech companies and their founders, out of fear that, with their influence, independence and popularity, they were becoming alternative power bases to the Chinese Communist Party. The campaign is only one part of a broader political and social chill that threatens to pull the country back to the days of Mao. TikTok itself is not available in China — users there must access a different ByteDance app, which follows Chinese government directives on censorship and propaganda.
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TikTok is used by more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. alone, and its ability to create instant viral hits has put it at the forefront of internet culture, though concerns about data security have long dogged the app.
If you count yourself among its users and you’re wondering how this crackdown might affect you, here is what you need to know: [...]
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The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021 and, in response, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and the United States froze the Afghan central bank’s roughly $9 billion in foreign assets—$7 billion of which was under control of the United States.
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Despite high hopes for the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House, negotiators on Capitol Hill yet again failed to deliver even modest cannabis reforms in the 4,155-page omnibus government spending legislation released early Tuesday.
“Marijuana businesses, the hundreds of thousands of people they employ, and the millions of Americans that patronize them will continue to be at a higher risk of robbery.”
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The Times article uncritically reported the responses of leading figures in psychiatry to Moncrieff’s review. They asserted: (1) her conclusions are not news, as the serotonin imbalance theory of depression is an “old theory” that has long been discarded by psychiatry; and (2) it does not matter that antidepressants do not work to correct a chemical imbalance because antidepressants are very effective.
These responses should have resulted in at least two questions for serious journalists and their editors: (1) If the serotonin imbalance theory of depression—an idea which convinced many people to take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Celexa so as to correct this imbalance—has long been discarded by psychiatry, why has Moncrieff’s findings, as the Times put it, “made headlines”? (2) Given that antidepressants lack a neurobiological rationale of correcting a chemical imbalance, what is the evidence that antidepressants are scientifically effective (i.e., more effective than a placebo, and more effective than the simple passage of time)?
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Proprietary
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Owners of faulty butterfly keyboards used in MacBook machines between 2015 and 2019 are receiving emails from Apple on how to receive their payments, which could range from $300 to $395, MacRumors reports(Opens in a new window).
The email comes after Apple agreed to pay $50 million in July to settle a class-action lawsuit over the faulty keyboards. They led to characters repeating unexpectedly; letters or characters not appearing; and/or the keys feeling “sticky” or not responding in a consistent manner.
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The trojanized files use the Ukrainian language pack and are designed to target Ukrainian users. Following compromise targets selected for follow on activity included multiple Ukrainian government organizations.
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The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s annual Cyber Threat Report this year found a cyber crime is reported every seven minutes while the overall number of cyber crime reports increased by 13% from 2021. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cybersecurity recently announced a new cybersecurity strategy will be developed as part of government’s ambition to make Australia the most cyber-secure nation in the world. How can organisations help ensure we get there?
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The deal will provide the Navy with access to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) commercial cloud environment, Professional Services and its training and certification courses.
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China-based Nio Inc said on Tuesday that hackers had breached its computer systems and accessed data on users and vehicle sales, in the latest [break-in] incident to hit the global auto industry.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time might’ve succeeded if they had been a li’l bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.
If they had tied it to 刻 time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of “beats”, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasn’t meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe we’d have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which would’ve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an “open standard”.
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In the month of November we rebooted our public policy mailing list and expanded our Policy and Standards program beyond the EU and into the US. We thought it would be helpful to share what our areas of focus are as we look forward to planning for the coming year.
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Security
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Millions of people likely just received an email or snail mail notice saying they’re eligible to claim a class action payment in connection with the 2017 megabreach at consumer credit bureau Equifax. Given the high volume of reader inquiries about this, it seemed worth pointing out that while this particular offer is legit (if paltry), scammers are likely to soon capitalize on public attention to the settlement money.
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Is this irony? It kind of seems like it is. Maybe it isn’t. It could just be a coincidence. An extremely unfortunate, ironic coincidence.
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Freexian has been using Tryton for a few years to handle its invoicing and accounting. We have thus also been using the Debian packages maintained by Mathias Behrle and we have been funding some of his work because maintaining an ERP with more than 50 source packages was too much for him to handle alone on his free time.
When Mathias discovered our Project Funding initiative, it was quite natural for him to consider applying to be able to bring some much needed improvements to Tryton’s Debian packaging. He’s running his own consulting company (MBSolutions) so it’s easy for him to invoice Freexian to get the money for the funded projects.
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The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 229. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Skip test_html.py::test_diff if html2text is not installed.
(Closes: #1026034)
[ Holger Levsen ]
* Bump standards version to 4.6.2, no changes needed.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Control-flow integrity (CFI) refers to techniques which prevent control-flow hijacking attacks. This article describes some compiler/hardware features with a focus on llvm-project implementations.
CFI schemes are commonly divided into forward-edge (e.g. indirect calls) and backward-edge (mainly function returns). AIUI exception handling and symbol interposition are not categorized.
Let’s start with backward-edge CFI. Fine-grained schemes check that a return address refers to a possible caller in the control-flow graph. This is a very difficult problem and the additional guarantee is possibly not that useful.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Digital rights advocates on Tuesday called for a ban on private use of biometric surveillance technology after a mom taking her daughter to see a Christmas show in New York City was kicked out of the theater after its facial recognition system identified her as an employee of a law firm involved in legal proceedings against the venue’s operator.
“There are just so many ways that biometric surveillance technology can be abused to discriminate and put people in danger.”
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While your kids were playing Fortnite, Fortnite was playing with consumer protection laws.
Epic Games, the maker of the very popular Fortnite series, is paying two of the largest settlements in Federal Trade Commission (FTC) history over children’s privacy violations and “dark patterns” that intentionally tricked users into making purchases through manipulative design.
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On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of illegally collecting children’s personal information, of harming young players by matching them with strangers on Fortnite while enabling live communications and, separately, of using manipulative techniques, called “dark patterns,” to trick millions of players into making unintentional purchases. In a historic deal that puts the entire video game industry on notice, Epic agreed to pay a record $520 million in fines and refunds to settle the F.T.C.’s accusations.
The F.T.C. acted at a moment of heightened public concern over the mental health, safety and privacy risks that some popular social media networks and multiplayer video games may pose to children and teenagers.
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Under the first phase of the plan, companies that use Microsoft products and services will be able to store and process their customer data within the EU. Microsoft has included Azure, Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 under the first phase.
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Canadian digital law and policy in 2022 was marked by legislative battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, the Rogers outage, stalled privacy and AI reform, copyright term extension, and a growing trade battle with the U.S. over Canadian policies. For this final Law Bytes podcast of 2022, I go solo without a guest to talk about the most significant trends and developments in Canadian digital policy from the past year and to think a bit about what may lie ahead in 2023.
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Maybe, just maybe, before we rush to pass questionable new laws about “protecting children online,” we should look to make use of the old ones? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been in place for years, and it has problems, but so many companies ignore it. I’ve mentioned in the past how I once walked around a part of CES that had a bunch of startups focused on offering services to kids, and a DC lawyer I was with made sure to ask each one what their COPPA compliance strategy was… and we just got blank stares.
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Defence/Aggression
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Bullets had pierced Eva Mireles’ chest as she tried to shield students from a gunman’s semiautomatic rifle. But the fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary was still conscious when police carried her out of classroom 112 and through a hallway crowded with dead and dying victims.
“You’re fine. You’re fine,” said her husband, Uvalde school district police officer Ruben Ruiz, who had been frantically trying to rescue her since the attack began. Mireles looked at him but could not speak. She’d been losing blood for more than an hour.
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In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.
The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.
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However, despite controlling Afghanistan for more than a year, the Taliban have failed to gain recognition from any country for their so-called Islamic Emirate. The United States and the global community in general have vowed not to recognize any government in Kabul imposed by force, fearing Taliban-led rule would prolong the Afghan civil war and threaten human rights in the country.
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As U.S. military forces continue to kill and wound civilians in multiple countries during the ongoing 21-year War on Terror while chronically undercounting such casualties, a pair of Democratic lawmakers on Monday asked the Pentagon to explain discrepancies in noncombatant casualty reporting and detail steps being taken to address the issue.
“The report did not admit to any civilian deaths in Syria, despite credible civilian casualty monitors documenting at least 15 civilian deaths.”
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To encourage Congress to authorize the largest defense budget ever, the Pentagon just released its annual report on China, which dangerously misrepresents the country’s defense strategy. Such deliberate lies about China to drum up justification for more US war spending need to be urgently addressed.
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This fall, the Ukrainian military succeeded in liberating the country’s Kharkiv and Kherson regions from the occupying Russian forces. Photographers who visited the cities of Izyum and Kherson, newly regained by Ukraine, captured images showing what had become of the two urban centers that thrived before Moscow’s invasion; devastated landscapes disfigured by explosions, broken roads, and half-demolished buildings met the eye everywhere. But large cities are just part of this story of destruction: understanding its full scale requires seeing the Ukrainian villages that often mark the shifting front line. At Meduza’s request, Ukrainian photographer Yakiv Liashenko visited several war-torn villages and got as close to the destruction as his camera would let him.
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The House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol accused Trump as president, only days away from the end of his first term, of “inciting or assisting an insurrection” against the United States.
It referred four criminal charges against him to the Justice Department, which is conducting an investigation of him on accusations that he took home hundreds of sensitive documents that should have gone to the National Archives.
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TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications.
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U.S. President Joe Biden said in a November exchange caught on camera and now circulating on social media that the Iran nuclear deal “is dead.”
Damon Maghsoudi, who published the video on Twitter, told The Hill that it was filmed by Sudi Farokhnia, acting president of Iranian-American Democrats of California, on the sidelines of a November 4 campaign event in the state.
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Many foreign workers who aided the U.S. military by working on bases in Afghanistan during the 20-year occupation—and were more likely than Americans to be killed or injured by bombings—have received little to no compensation for injuries or death, despite the fact that U.S. law requires the Pentagon to recompense them and their families.
“While this research looks specifically at Afghanistan, it’s clear that this type of labor exploitation will persist there and elsewhere until there is accountability for these U.S. government abuses.”
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The head of NATO recently warned that the war in Ukraine could turn into a direct war between NATO and Russia.
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Thanks to his eye infection, Pavel Filatyev, that’s the soldier’s name, was admitted to a hospital in Crimea. During the 45 days of his hospitalization he wrote a personal diary about his war experience. In August he published his text, titled ZOV (“call”; moreover, is the acronym for the war against Ukraine) on the social media site Vkontakte. After publication, the ex-paratrooper was forced to go into hiding: he stayed in different hotels, one night in each. His mother advised him to leave Russia and that’s what he did. He traveled from one country to another – he was arrested in Tunisia where he was suspected of being a spy – until he arrived in France, where he asked for political asylum.
Shortly after its publication I had access to ZOV, in Russian. The account, which begins on February 24, the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is a unique source of information about the conditions of the Russian army on the Ukrainian front. The soldiers did not know why they had been posted to Ukraine. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian territory and that Russia had attacked Ukraine,” the author explains and then goes on to report on the state of debasement in which the army found itself. “The paratroopers, the elite of the Russian army, captured Kherson and started stealing computers because their value is higher than their salary. Then we attacked the kitchens. Like animals, we devoured everything we found: oatmeal, porridge, jam, honey… We didn’t care about anything, we had been pushed to the limit, to a savage state. Like hostages, we were just trying to survive.”
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Soccer player Nadezhda Karpova, a member of the Russian women’s national team, posted a new message for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko online after Lukashenko joked on Monday that the two men consider themselves “toxic aggressors.”
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In a recorded greeting to the Russian “state security workers” on their day, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged branches of the security and intelligence apparatus to intensify their work in key areas. In light of new risks and threats to the state, Putin said, key directions include countering terrorism and extremism, and defending the state borders.
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The “Twin Hearts” installation, celebrating St. Petersburg’s “brotherhood” with Mariupol, the Ukrainian city razed to the ground by the Russian military, has been returned to the Palace Square in St. Petersburg.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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This article was originally published as part of the Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.Reality Winner is an NSA whistleblower who was harshly prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but she is also more than that. She is an advocate who has used the visibility gained from her case to promote an end to prisons in the United States.I covered Reality’s detention and incarceration as a whistleblower extensively. What she endured further solidified her understanding of how prisons function. Yet according to Winner, she questioned the existence of the US prison system before she was arrested in June 2017.This is the first time that I have spoken to Reality since she was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in 2018. We discuss her incarceration during the COVID pandemic, rampant sexual abuse in Bureau of Prisons facilities, and why prison is one of the worst places for a person struggling with drug addiction or substance abuse problems.
Some of what Reality shares in the interview was reported previously by The Dissenter Newsletter, however, her stories from prison are much more detailed than what was described in earlier reports.
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Notes: Andy Lee Roth is Associate Director of Project Censored, co-editor of the Project’s annual volume of censored stories, and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. He has published widely on media issues. Nolan Higdon is a university lecturer in media studies and history. He’s also the author of “The Anatomy of Fake News,”
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It became quite easy, in the days after the so-called Twitter Files were dumped across the Internet, to dismiss entirely all of their revelations. For many progressives, the whole affair was a right-coded distraction, and therefore worth deriding or ignoring altogether. First, it was an Elon Musk production, and Musk has evolved into a puerile reactionary, suspending journalist accounts at will and tossing off idiotic gibes to his 122 million followers. The recipients of the Twitter Files were either apostates from the left or actual conservatives; major news organizations did not disseminate the documents. So while the likes of Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss bellowed the importance of what was found, the mainstream could collectively consign their reporting to a psychological backwater—safely ignored or, at most, angrily gestured at.
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Environment
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In 1999, when Shpresa Loshaj was 19, she fled her home town of Deçan, Kosovo, as a refugee and moved to Canada. When she returned in 2018, long after the war had ended, a journalist encouraged her to go into the hills and take a look at some new hydropower plants on the river Lumbardhi i Deçanit. The journalist was investigating claims by local people that the plants run by KelKos, a subsidiary of Austrian energy firm Kelag, were operating without permits and potentially damaging the local ecosystem and water infrastructure.
“We are a mountainous town where we depend on the river and the mountain,” Loshaj told DeSmog. “I remember how when we grew up we could not even break a branch because our parents said this is our livelihood. And that became my motivation — to either accept that all my sacrifices for Kosovo are just down the drain, or I have to believe that it was worth something and I can still speak up.”
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced Monday that he will convene a “no-nonsense” Climate Ambition Summit next year amid mounting frustration with world leaders’ refusal to phase out fossil fuels and take other necessary steps to combat runaway planetary warming.
“I call on every leader to step up—from governments, business, cities and regions, civil society, and finance,” Guterres said during his end-of-year press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York City. “They must come with new, tangible, and credible climate action to accelerate the pace of change. The invitation is open.”
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Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn’t help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city’s homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there. Other warning signs indicated that you could only sit for 30 minutes at a time at the food-court tables, while barriers had been placed where benches used to be to make it that much harder to congregate, no less sit down.
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Here are our five top reads on how 2022 pulled out the carpet from under the energy debate.
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Courts are becoming a critically important arena for addressing issues of justice and accountability pertaining to the climate emergency. Increasingly citizens and communities are turning to the courts in efforts to hold governments and corporations accountable for their roles in the escalating planetary crisis. This trend is so significant that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even referenced it several times in its latest report on climate mitigation published last spring.
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Climate campaigners welcomed the U.S. Postal Service’s announcement Tuesday that it plans to buy at least 66,000 electric vehicles in the coming years to replace its aging, gas-guzzling fleet, a move that comes after months of pressure from environmental groups and the Biden White House.
In a statement, the USPS—led by scandal-plagued Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—said at least 45,000 of the 60,000 next-generation delivery vehicles (NGDV) it intends to purchase from Oshkosh Defense by 2028 will be electric. The postal agency added that it also plans to buy “an additional 21,000 battery-electric delivery vehicles through 2028, representing a mix of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) vehicles.”
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That’s a sound-bite snapshot of the past 15 years for climate change and for this site since it first went live online. It’s been a great ride as founder and editor.
[...]
Better too in terms of the affordability of renewable energy alternatives relative to continued splurging on fossil fuel alternatives that yet today remain, by far, the dominant sources of energy for much of the planet’s now-eight-billion human inhabitants. And better also concerning the technological fixes available and under development and the growing acceptance of same. (The U.S. Department of Energy’s December 13 announcement of a potentially world-changing “second sun” fusion breakthrough is just the most recent example.)
Improvement in the overall “climate on the climate” derives in large part from hard-earned gains in public understanding, brought about by endless hours of tireless work and commitment by the global scientific community. And much of the credit for the progress stemming from their findings goes to federal support, notwithstanding its ebbs and flows, and to the charitable giving community and others who not only supported that work and, critically, spreading the word about it.
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Energy
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One climate writer said the new exposé, published by NPR and Floodlight, “pulls back the curtain on yet another insidious corporate strategy to erode the core tenets of democracy for profit.”
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Again this year, there will be almost 250 collection points at K-supermarkets and Neste service stations where waste cooking fats can be dropped off.
The recycled fats are used in the production of Neste diesel fuel. Last year, 55.5 tons were collected.
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To briefly summarize my op-ed: I argue that while Slow Streets, the JFK Promenade, and the weekend use of the Great Highway as a car-free Great Highway Park represent progress worth celebrating, San Francisco is still moving in the wrong direction overall when it comes to transportation. Biking is up a little. (Parents biking kids to school on cargo bikes seems to have exploded in popularity.) But the share of car trips has seen a greater increase than that of bike trips, and public transit usage has fallen in the latest SFMTA survey. The missing element is full-throated political support—including an ambitious vision and strong funding—for Muni, which has failed to fully restore prepandemic service (exacerbating existing deficiencies on the west side), and which makes it hard to fill up your Clipper card if you travel among outlying neighborhoods and aren’t going downtown every day.
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Parked at the end of the alley behind our house as I set out on my morning bike ride was a large pickup marked Nuro hauling a large trailer with some vehicle inside. I often see Nuro’s “autonomous” Priuses in our neighborhood, so I assumed one had failed and was being collected. Near the end of my ride a few blocks from our house I passed another. At the end of the alley as I returned was this unfamiliar vehicle, so I stopped and took a picture.
As I watched it drove forward about 15 feet, paused, drove forward another 15 feet and stopped about 4 feet from the back of a parked SUV. It thought for a while then backed up, returning to near its starting point. I understand, I too think it is a problem that our streets are infested with parked monster SUVs.
Unlike Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” I don’t think testing the Nuro-bot on our streets is a significant danger. They move slowly, make noise, are clearly cautious, and aren’t being used by cult members. Below the fold I question not the technology but the economics.
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Wildlife/Nature
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A policy rider included in the must-pass omnibus spending bill unveiled by the U.S. Congress is almost certain to doom the endangered North Atlantic right whale, environmental groups said Tuesday.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that this rider will doom the right whale to extinction.”
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Finance
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Progressive advocacy groups cheered Tuesday after federal regulators at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.7 billion in fines for a wide range of “illegal activity” that harmed millions of U.S. households, including charging surprise overdraft fees, wrongfully foreclosing on homes, improperly denying mortgage modifications, and unlawfully repossessing vehicles.
“The CFPB’s actions today send a loud and clear message: Wells Fargo is not above the law,” Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), said in a statement.
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Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers (the United States, China, and the EU) for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. U.S. capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. […]
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UK media (print and internet) have been replete with advice for individuals in such straits. For the relatively well-off (and I include myself in this category) such advice may seem banal and commonplace, even though the guidance proffered is hugely salutary for anyone interested in a low-commodity-acquisition and low-energy-consuming way of life.
Here are some snippets from these myriad pieces of advice:
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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German Constitutional Court hears case on automated data analysis by the police
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The Democratic Party can’t cease congratulating itself about the mid-term elections results defying the pundit’s predictions of a red wave. (Newt Gingrich even predicted that Herschel Walker would win the Georgia senate race without a runoff.) This is a self-serving, self-destructive standard by which Democratic operatives measure their performance. They need to unfailingly look into the mirror and list their losses.
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After an hourslong debate behind closed doors on Tuesday, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee voted 24-16 along party lines to publicly release six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
“The House Ways and Means Committee has righted a historic wrong.”
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We feature excerpts from the final hearing of the House January 6 committee that resulted in Monday’s unanimous vote to recommend criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. The committee’s 18-month investigation determined that Trump intended to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election and played a central role in the U.S. Capitol insurrection. This marks the first time in U.S. history a congressional committee has recommended criminal charges against a former president.
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With the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol recommending criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, we speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism and authoritarianism, and Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen. They say the committee has left no doubt that the insurrection was part of a larger plot to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election and that the Department of Justice must act soon if it intends to follow through on the referral. “The most important thing to prevent this kind of coup from ever taking place again is accountability for the people at the top,” says Weissman.
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It seems the madness just never stops on Elon Musk’s Twitter, and it’s almost impossible to keep up. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast’s podcast, The New Abnormal, for a discussion with host Andy Levy about just what exactly is going on with Twitter under Musk’s erratic leadership. The conversation first appeared as part of The New Abnormal’s latest episode, and now you can listen to Mike’s segment here on the Techdirt Podcast.
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Sigh.
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A month ago, when Elon Musk’s Twitter first set out to revamp the Twitter Blue subscription, workers at the company identified a problem. Musk had promised that subscribers to the $8-a-month service would see half as many ads as free users. But that would cost the company about $6 in ad revenue per user per month, according to internal estimates. Factor in Apple’s App Store fees — something Musk would later go briefly to war with the company over — and the new Blue promised to lose the company money.
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According to testimony from an FBI agent presented to the Northern District of California, a Saudi government agent began courting Abouammo in 2014 by buying him gifts and depositing money in his cousin’s bank account. Abouammo then began secretly accessing accounts of users who were critical of the Saudi government and sharing their email addresses and phone numbers with the government agent.
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The Interoperable Europe Act proposal itself contains several important elements relevant for our community: [...]
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Content moderation is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media fails: end-to-end (E2E), and freedom of exit. These are much neglected, and that’s a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.
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I’d sooner believe Facebook is capable of stealing Twitter’s audience than any of the upstarts trying same, including Mastodon, Post, Hive, Counter Social, Plurk and Amino.
But because no single one of them seems to be seeing the kind of momentum it should, I’m getting Trump vibes all over again: The preponderance of also-rans reminds me of the large field of candidates who tried to take on Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries, only to essentially cancel out one another.
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Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company and the private office of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal said on Friday that they will continue their ownership of Twitter (TWTR.N) shares valued at $1.89 billion after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company, according to a statement tweeted by Prince Alwaleed.
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Murphy, D-Conn., who leads a key Foreign Relations subcommittee, sent a letter to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, requesting a review of the financing of Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, some of it from members of the Saudi royal family and the kingdom of Qatar.
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That means Twitter, whose shares were delisted last week after almost a decade as a public company, has a new lineup of top investors.
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That made him one of two investors who chimed in about co-investing with Musk. The Qatar Investment Fund announced in an SEC filing that it had committed a previously agreed upon $375 million. These Middle Eastern investments have sparked national security concerns for a number of government officials, including Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) who called for a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (aka CFIUS) in a tweet Monday.
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Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal helped Musk finance the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (TWTR) by rolling over his existing $1.9 billion stake in the social media company. The move makes Saudi entities the second-largest shareholder in Twitter – behind only Musk himself.
“We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting US politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform,” Murphy said in a tweet on Monday.
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Supporters had been pushing for two other antitrust bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which aims to limit tech companies from preferencing their own products and services, and the Open App Markets Act, which aims to impose additional regulations on dominant app stores. The proposals came out of a House Judiciary Committee investigation into the market power of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, now under the parent company name Meta.
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A federal investigation into former President Donald Trump appeared to enter a new phase this month, according to reporting Tuesday that the U.S. House panel probing the January 6 attack on the Capitol is “extensively cooperating” with Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to lead Trump investigations.
Punchbowl News reported that the bipartisan House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has begun sending Smith’s team documents and transcripts related to a scheme by Trump’s allies to create slates of “fake electors” who supported the Republican in states that were actually won by Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
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The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol engaged in an exercise in futility Monday, when it recommended that the House Ethics Committee investigate four Republican lawmakers for defying the committee’s subpoenas—including the bumbling apologist for Donald Trump’s abuses of power who is expected to become the next speaker of the House, and the incendiary right-wing extremist who is set to chair the House Judiciary Committee. The sad fact is that nothing is likely to come of the recommendation because, in short order, Republican foxes will be guarding the henhouse.
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The Nation ☛ Griner
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All Nikki Addimando’s two children want for Christmas is their mother.
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Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman labels this theory as a “hyper-literal interpretation” of Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” North Carolina Republican State Legislators initiated the Moore v. Harper case before the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to argue that a state legislature can violate its state’s Constitution in congressional elections.
If SCOTUS were to uphold ISLT, a state legislature could overturn any federal election’s popular vote if they believed it was critically unfair. They could ignore their state’s supreme court order to adhere to the recorded vote. In a close electoral count, Feldman points out that “a rogue state legislature could determine the outcome of a presidential election” by reassigning electors to the losing presidential candidate.
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Exhibit A: Kari Lake, the Republican who ran for governor in the recent midterm elections. Though she lost in November, she’s still campaigning — on social media, in the courts, and in her own beclouded imagination. She refuses to accept that Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent, won by 0.6% of the vote. It’s a delusion she shares with Donald Trump who tweeted that Lake should be “installed” in the position anyway, like a triumphant coup leader. Lake, Trump, and all-too-many Americans now believe that any election in which a MAGA extremist doesn’t achieve a pre-ordained victory is, by definition, “stolen.”
Then there’s Blake Masters, the losing Arizona Republican Senate candidate, who accused the Biden administration of encouraging millions of immigrants to enter the United States “to change the demographics of our country.” That’s a clear reference to the “great replacement” theory according to which outsiders (foreigners, non-Whites, Muslims), abetted by liberals and globalists, are using immigration and higher birthrates to replace “indigenous” White majorities. It has become ever more popular among White nationalists, alt-right activists, and mass murderers from El Paso to New Zealand who cite it in their manifestos.
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John Feffer sorts out the deplorables and persuadables in this strange America and on this strange planet of ours.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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For many Chinese who turned to the platform as demonstrations against Covid-19 restrictions had grown political and widespread — more so than any protests there in decades — the experience of using the app appeared to capture a different reality.
Much of the spam is linked to commercial bot networks that have operated on Chinese-language Twitter since before the protests began on Nov. 25, according to an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of tweets, interviews with people behind some of the bot accounts and a report by a researcher at Stanford University.
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The executions are Tehran’s main response to protests that swept the country since Amini’s death, and they signal that Iran’s clerical leadership feels it has few options other than brute force to quell the unrest.
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The past year has seen many controversial decisions from big tech platforms, but 2022 might end up being the last year that such decisions are shielded by the liability protections of Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act.
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“I have worked with Taraneh on four films and now she is in prison for her rightful support of her fellow countrymen and her opposition to the unjust sentences being issued,” Farhadi wrote on Instagram. “If showing such support is a crime, then tens of millions of people of this land are criminals.”
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The State Duma has passed in first reading a draft of the amendments to the law on “Countering Extremist Activity.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Carol Mangis explains that the decision to stop publishing PCMag: “As much as we have enjoyed carefully curating its contents and presenting our stories in the most visually compelling ways each month, it’s hard to compete with the immediacy we can deliver online. So we’ve made the decision to shift our focus fully toward PCMag.com”.
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Wishart questioned how tenable it would be to keep the press club in Hong Kong under such terms, saying, “It’s a short lease and an even shorter leash.”
This not the first time the club has made changes with the national security law in mind.
In April, the club scrapped its Human Rights Press Awards after the board cited concerns they could violate the law.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Since October, that task has fallen to Nida Mohammad Nadim, a hard-line cleric who was appointed as the minister for higher education.
A former governor and military commander, Nadim has vowed to root out all forms of the modern secular education that thrived in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 toppled the Taliban’s first regime. He has also voiced his opposition to education for girls and women, calling it un-Islamic and against Afghan values.
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“What news could be worse than this?” said Zahra in a voice message to NPR, left in response to a question about how she felt. She requested her family name not be used, fearing she’d be identified by Taliban officials. “I’ve been shaking with anger. I can’t even cry.”
“The Taliban took our last hope from us. The female students had their last exam tomorrow,” she said. “But the Taliban closed the gates of university today.”
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The United Nations and several countries have condemned the order, which takes Afghanistan back to the Taliban’s first period of rule when girls could not receive formal education.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur to Afghanistan said it was “a new low further violating the right to equal education and deepens the erasure of women from Afghan society.”
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Robert Wood, US Deputy UN Ambassador has strongly condemned the Taliban’s latest actions, when he said, “the Taliban cannot expect to be a legitimate member of the international community until they respect the rights of all Afghans, especially the human rights and fundamental freedom of women and girls.”
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Human Rights Watch criticized the ban on Tuesday, calling it a “shameful decision that violates the right to education for women and girls in Afghanistan.”
“The Taliban are making it clear every day that they don’t respect the fundamental rights of Afghans, especially women,” the rights watchdog said in a statement.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell celebrated what he called a win for the GOP as lawmakers on Tuesday unveiled a sprawling government funding package that includes $858 billion in military spending and leaves out a Child Tax Credit expansion that Democrats and progressive advocates demanded.
“This is a strong outcome for Republicans, and much more importantly, it’s the outcome that our nation’s security needs,” McConnell declared in a floor speech, touting the fact that the 4,155-page omnibus contains more money for the military than non-military domestic priorities.
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For the first time in nearly a decade, Congress has moved to increase the annual budget of the National Labor Relations Board.
The NLRB Union, which warned last month that the federal agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor law faces “budgetary Armageddon” and has long advocated for more resources, welcomed lawmakers’ proposal to allocate an additional $25 million to the NLRB in fiscal year 2023.
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Progressive advocacy groups and economic analysts on Tuesday denounced retirement savings-related tax changes embedded in Congress’ end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package, characterizing the pending reforms taken directly from the SECURE 2.0 Act as a “giveaway to the rich.”
“This bill does not make it easier for workers to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes.”
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Proponents of lifting U.S. sanctions on countries including Iran welcomed Tuesday’s announcement by the Biden administration that the United States will take steps to make it easier for humanitarian aid to reach people who need it in sanctioned countries.
“Historically, exemptions on paper do not lead to exemptions in practice, as the private sector prioritizes its bottom line.”
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In a recent incident of Islamophobia, a teacher in Florida was fired for crassly interrupting Muslim students’ prayers, accusing them of doing “magic.” Her reasoning is cringeworthy: “I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor.” Though no reason is given for the boys’ recording their prayers, I suspect it’s because this type of incident isn’t the first time they’ve been harassed while praying. As someone who teaches world religions, including Islam, I find so much wrong with this TikTok video. In order for our pluralistic society to thrive, we must work together to repair a sense of the sacred in teaching.
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The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.
Education and legal experts say the federal probe of the Granbury Independent School District — which stemmed from a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and reporting by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune — appears to be the first such investigation explicitly tied to the nationwide movement to ban school library books dealing with sexuality and gender.
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Minnesota’s Student Survey shows high suicidal ideation and self-harm — pointing to a broader problem that needs to be studied.
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In the months after a West Virginia court permanently took away their right to parent their daughters this past April, Jackie Snodgrass and her husband were left in a quiet house. The kids’ rooms remained untouched. The same dolls and stuffed animals were arranged on their younger daughter’s bed. The same clothes in the closets, becoming outgrown. The same photos on the walls, outdated.
The court had denied a final visit — despite the children continually saying they missed their mother — so the parents never got to say goodbye to them in person. Snodgrass worried about them constantly, especially her older daughter, who has diabetes. An app pinged her intermittently with updates on her child’s blood sugar. Occasionally, it would dip too low or spike too high.
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In the United States, the death penalty has been falling out of favour. The outgoing governor of Oregon Kate Brown announced on December 13 that she would commute all of the state’s 17 prisoners on death row. In terms of the sheer bloodiness of it all, the figure of 18 executions in six states comes across as one of the lowest in recent years.
The 2022 report by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) is merely another reminder as to why such cruelty should be ditched. It reads like a sadist’s dream and a humanitarian’s nightmare: over a third of executions this year were botched in the United States. “2022,” the report declares, “could be called ‘the year of the botched execution’.” To be more precise, seven of 20 execution attempts were bungled (“visibly problematic”, write the authors). Executions, it was found, were mostly concentrated in select jurisdictions – more than half in Oklahoma and Texas.
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Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, who is currently serving a nine-year sentence at Correctional Colony No. 6 in Russia’s Vladimir region, reported Tuesday that a prisoner with poor hygiene was put in his cell for the second time, presumably as a way to punish Navalny himself.
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By the time Karl Ashanti neared his office in the New York City Law Department’s headquarters in March 2018, the police were shutting down Park Place. Ice had fallen from the buildings above, so an officer had cordoned off the area. Ashanti flashed his work ID and the cop let him through. Then, about two-thirds of the way down the block, he ran into a second officer. “Turn around now,” John Shapiro barked. “I said now.”
Ashanti stiffened. The two men were about the same size, each around 6 feet tall and 240 pounds. Shapiro was in his blue New York Police Department uniform. Ashanti, a city lawyer, wasn’t due in court that day and had dressed casually in dark slacks, a button-down, an overcoat and a winter hat. The two had never met before, but there was something about Shapiro’s brusque demeanor that Ashanti recognized.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. And the company certainly isn’t alone.
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That’s the easy part. The hard part is defining what exactly “essential internet infrastructure,” is, and to which users. We also need to recognize that this designation can and does change over time. Right now, the “infrastructure” designation is in danger of getting tossed around too easily, resulting in un-nuanced conversations at best and an unjustified cloak of protection, sometimes for anti-competitive business models, at worst.
The term “infrastructure” can encompass a technically nuanced landscape of things – services, standards, protocols, and physical structures – each of which has varying degrees of impact if they’re removed from the proverbial stack. Here’s how EFF thinks about the spectrum of infrastructure with respect to content moderation in late 2022, and how our thinking has changed over time.
Some things are absolutely, essentially, infrastructure. These things often have no meaningful alternative, no inconvenient but otherwise available option. Physical infrastructure is the easiest type to see here, with things like submarine cables and internet exchange points (IXPs). These things make up the tangible backbone of the internet. Parts of the logical layer of the internet also sit on this far side of the spectrum of what is or is not critical infrastructure, including protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP. These components of physical and logical infrastructure share the same essentialness and the same obligation to content neutrality. Without them, the internet in its current form simply could not exist. At least not at this moment.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians involved – even the big names earn a pittance – with most of the money ending up with the recording companies. That doesn’t mean that streaming services are beyond redemption. It just requires a little imagination to think of ways in which they can be great for artists and audiences alike. Take this idea, for example, reported on Vice:
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Monopolies
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The Commerce Act 1986 (Act) currently exempts certain conduct in relation to intellectual property from being assessed as anti-competitive and in breach of the Act.
The Commission says that from 5 April 2023, these exemptions will be removed, and all conduct relating to intellectual [sic] property [sic] will be capable of breaching the Act.
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From 5 April 2023, these exceptions will be removed, and all conduct relating to intellectual [sic] property [sic] will be capable of breaching the Act’s anti-competitive conduct provisions.
To assist businesses to better understand the application of competition law to intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic], we have drafted guidelines (draft Guidelines) that explain how the Commission assesses conduct relating to intellectual [sic] property [sic] under the Act. We are doing this to help businesses and other parties dealing with intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic] to assess whether their conduct complies with the Act.
We are issuing the draft Guidelines for public consultation. We are keen to receive feedback and submissions on the draft Guidelines from interested parties, including responses to the following questions, which will assist us to better frame the final version of the guidelines for its intended audience: [...]
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The settlement helps Amazon avoid what could have been a multibillion-dollar fine, while giving the European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, a victory in delivering long-sought changes to the world’s dominant online shopping platform. Under the deal, the company will also be barred from using nonpublic information it gathers about independent merchants to inform Amazon’s own product choices.
The deal is an attempt to put more guardrails between Amazon’s role as a digital storefront that many merchants depend on to reach customers, and as a maker of products that often compete with those outside sellers. The dual roles have created a conflict of interest, critics say, allowing Amazon to favor its own products and services over small rivals who have few other ways to reach customers online.
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The suit filed on Tuesday in federal court in California alleges that the deal will suppress competition in the gaming industry. It comes less than two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission sued to stop Microsoft from finishing the largest deal ever in the video game market.
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While this has implications for game consoles, the main attraction is the mobile market, specifically Apple’s iOS-based mobile devices: iPhones, iPads, iPods and Apple Watches. These devices are locked to Apple’s official App Store, and EU law prohibits the public from modifying them to accept alternative app stores from other vendors, under Article 6 of 2001’s EU Copyright Directive (EUCD).
With the public unable to legally reconfigure their devices to use rival app stores, we are dependent on Apple’s permission if we want to get our iOS apps elsewhere, and, according to a Bloomberg report, that’s just what Apple is about to do.
Though Apple hasn’t formally announced a plan to open its devices to rival app stores (and indeed, has not yet affirmed that it will comply with the DMA at all), Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman cites multiple Apple employees who provide early details of the plan.
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Copyrights
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An Australian cheat developer who had his house searched and assets seized, has been ordered to pay AU$130,000 in profits to Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. The man, who’s linked to the once popular GTA 5 cheat “Infamous”, was previously found liable for copyright infringement by the Federal Court.
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After reaching consensus that isolated actions are ineffective in the fight against online piracy, around 20 companies, regulators, and government representatives have signed an agreement to form a new global anti-piracy coalition. Global Anti-Piracy Pact lists pirate IPTV as a key issue, noting that pirates today are “extremely dynamic” criminal organizations.
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Hundreds of thousands of pirating BitTorrent users have been sued over the years. These cases rarely ever make it all the way to trial but, in a Florida court, this is about to happen. Before the trial starts, however, several outstanding issues have to be decided, including the use of the term “copyright troll” before the jury.
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The team, network, and community of Creative Commons have so much to be proud of in 2022. We celebrated our 20th anniversary with community events around the world and an in-person party in San Francisco. In these two decades, CC revolutionized the copyright landscape, creating an open access alternative to traditional “all rights reserved” restrictions. Today, this system continues to empower a new era of online sharing and collaboration that has transformed our global digital landscape. Now two and a half billion pieces of content have been freed up because our open licenses and public domain tools empower creators, researchers, librarians, archivists, musicians, artists, educators, students, and individuals globally to share content openly. We are so proud of our key relationships, where our licenses are used every second to share knowledge and culture on platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr. And now in new spaces, we saw our public domain tools celebrating the #CC0Summer in 2022, where NFT artists used our licenses to place their creations in the commons.
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Earlier this month, it seemed like that might happen. Proponents added this controversial, unconstitutional, poorly-conceived piece of legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a routine but “must-pass” military budget bill. Thanks to all of you who spoke against this trick and forced the JCPA to be considered on its own merits.
While many like to frame the opposition to the JCPA as that of Big Tech, we know better. The union that represents many reporters was against it. Civil society and Big Tech opponents were against it. And most importantly, you were against it. You drove thousands of messages to Congress exposing this bill as dangerous to the free flow of information online.
We couldn’t rest after that fight because while the NDAA had closed its doors to the JCPA, there was still a chance that it would be added to the end-of-year omnibus, a massive spending bill that lays out the budget for the government for the next fiscal year and routinely gets all sorts of other bills added to it. But we kept pushing—you kept pushing—and it appears we have finally won.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Politics
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One of the people who cheered about Musk’s Takeover of Twitter is Ben Shapiro, a conservative publisher and YouTube Video host. Shortly after Musk finally bought Twitter and made a PR-stunt to the headquarters with a sink, Shapiro brought this video:
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Technical
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Internet/Gemini
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This little gemini pod was off-line for a little while. It’s now back up, (still) on a small AWS Lightspeed instance. It was moved from Ubuntu Linux to FreeBSD, though, and it now has a static IP.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:05 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
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IRC log for #boycottnovell
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Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmNhjQG4XJrooeuqLbPUPR9RtcgJkwZXoswD1oPWfgY7kD
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Posted in Deception, Finance, Free/Libre Software at 1:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It’s no longer true to its mission*, either
Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been operating a bit like a shell for nearly half a decade; but one must study where the company originally came from and how it fell from grace
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* The founders are long gone.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 12:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Does ISO even care?
Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been ‘vomiting’ its data (and its workers’, its clients’ data too!) all over the place; at what point is the posturing/masquerading as ‘Open Source’ false advertising*?
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* The company was wasting its money away on Google ads. Those never seemed to have attracted clients, it was just another misguided policy of management. Staff wasn’t consulted at all.
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