Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/09/2022: messenger-cli 0.1.0 and General News



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • OMG UbuntuOpen Source Qt ’Notes' App Adds Folders, Tags + More - OMG! Ubuntu!

        A major update to Notes, a free, open source, and cross-platform note-taking app written in Qt, is available to download.

        Mentioning/recommending this app is made a little difficult by the fact its name is also its function — that and Apple’s own notes app is also called simply ‘Notes’. Regardless, Notes is a solid tool that handles the basic needs of note taking well with search and native markdown support.

        And in its latest version, it’s now even better.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Jonathan Dowland: memtest

        Since I'm writing about my NAS, a month ago I happened to notice an odd kernel message:

        Aug 8 04:04] list_del corruption. prev->next should be ffff90c96e9c2090, but was ffff90c94e9c2090 A kernel dev friend said "I'm familiar with that code ... you should run memtest86". This seemed like advice it would be foolish to ignore!

        I installed the memtest86 package, which on Debian stable, is actually the formerly open-source "memtest86" software, last updated in 2014, rather than the currently open-source "memtest86+". However the package (incorrectly, I think) Recommends: memtest86+ so I ended up with both. The package scripts integrate with GRUB, so both were added as boot options.

        Neither however, would boot on my NAS, which is a UEFI system: after selection from the GRUB prompt, I just had a blank screen. I focussed for a short while on display issues: I wondered if trying to run a 4k monitor over HDMI was too much to expect from a memory tester OS, but my mainboard has a VGA out as well. It has some quirky behaviour for the VGA out: the firmware doesn't use it at all, so output only begins appearing after something boots (GRUB for example). I fiddled about with the HDMI output, VGA output, and trying different RGB cables, to no avail.

      • ID RootHow To Install OneDrive on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS [Ed: Very bad idea. Microsoft Trojan horse and surveillance inside GNU/Linux. Then again, Canonical already helps Microsoft do this all on its own.]
      • Ubuntu HandbookEnable Wayland Support for Firefox/Chrome in Ubuntu 22.04 for Better Experience

        Running Ubuntu 22.04 with the default Wayland session? You can switch your web browser’s backend to get even faster and smoother experience.

        Firefox, Google Chrome and Chromium based web browsers do have native Wayland support, but they still use X11 as backend in Ubuntu desktop.

      • Using the Ubuntu Docker image - Octopus Deploy
      • HowTo ForgeRetrieving Emails From Remote Servers With fetchmail on Debian

        Fetchmail is a program for retrieving emails from remote servers. Imagine you have five email accounts on five different servers. Of course, you don't want to connect to each of them to get your emails. This is where fetchmail comes into play. If you have a user account on a Linux server, you can make fetchmail download emails from remote servers and put them into just one mailbox (the one of your Linux user), from where you can retrieve them with your email client (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook).

      • rclone - dump teamdrive config to config file
      • The New StackDeploy a Kubernetes Cluster on Ubuntu Server with Microk8s - The New Stack

        Kubernetes is hard. There is no way around that. From start to finish, you’ll find so many roadblocks in your way that, at times, you might feel so inclined as to give up.

        Don’t.

        There’s actually a very easy way to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that can be used for development purposes or even production.

        That method is thanks to Microk8s.

    • Games

      • Boiling SteamNeoDash Review: A Feast of Light, Sound and Speed - Boiling Steam

        NeoDash is a futuristic racer when you race against time to finish levels as fast as you can. The time pressure is represented by a line of fire that’s chasing your car. Its position is indicated at the bottom of the screen, by a marker on a line representing the whole level from start to end. In other words, you need to go fast, fast, and most of the time faster still, to make it.

        There’s no opponents, the main difficulty is to be fast as lightning, and avoid obstacles or moving parts/lasers on the way that would destroy your car. There’s no concept of “lives”. You can try the levels as many times as you want, while you always have to restart from the beginning. Think Super Meat Boy, racing style. After the first few easy levels, things get really difficult and you will fail dozens of times before you can finish a track. Tracks are not too long: from start to end it’s usually less than a minute if you manage to land your moves correctly.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • SUSE's Corporate BlogReduce the Barriers to Entry for Blockchain by Leveraging Kubernetes’ Capabilities | SUSE Communities

        Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are changing the nature of doing business and helping companies reimagine how to manage tangible and digital assets.Trendy cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) capture media headlines and the public imagination, but these and other blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are also electrifying the enterprise.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/36

        As we are used to by now, Tumbleweed is kicking and rolling. 7 snapshots in a week would be nothing surprising. Unfortunately, this week we ‘only’ reached 6 snapshots. Number 7 was discarded – not for having issues, but the next snapshot passed so quickly through OBS that it was ‘ready for testing; before openQA could even finish the previous run. Not something we see very often. In any case, no harm done: you just needed an extra day of patience to get some of the updates.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Raspberry PiBack to school 2022: Our support for teachers

        The summer months are an exciting time at the Foundation: you can feel the buzz of activity as we prepare for the start of a new school year in many parts of the world. Across our range of fantastic (and free) programmes, everyone works hard to create new and improved resources that help teachers and students worldwide.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • PostgreSQLPostgreSQL: PGConf.NYC 2022 (Sep 22-23) Registration Closing Soon!

        Come join us in New York City on September 22 - 23, 2022 at Convene on 237 Park Ave for two packed days of fun, informative PostgreSQL content. Learn from PostgreSQL experts and source code contributors about best practices for developing the world's most advanced open source database!

    • GNU Projects

      • GNUnetmessenger-cli 0.1.0 released

        We are pleased to announce the release of the messenger-cli application.

        The application is a counterpart for the terminal to the previous release of the GTK application using the GNUnet Messenger service. The goal is to provide private and secure communication between any group of devices. So server admins or users relying on a terminal focused window manager have now a proper option to utilize the service as well.

    • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

      • HackadayUpcycling Flat Scraps With Open Source Tools

        If you have any sort of device that cuts like a CNC mill or a laser cutter, you probably generate a lot of strange-looking scrap material. Most of us hate to throw anything away, but how do you plan to use all these odd shapes? [Caddzeus] has an answer.€  Using a camera and some software he digitizes the shapes accurately into a form usable in his CAD package of choice.

  • Leftovers

    • HackadayYour Car Gets Hot When Left In The Sun. Hot Enough To Cook?

      In hot weather, those of us who drive are familiar with the sensation of getting into the car and having it feel like an oven inside. A car is a essentially sealed metal box with large windows, thus on a sunny summer day it has more in common with a greenhouse, and in a heatwave this can become unbearable. But does it get hot enough for cooking? [Julian Lozos] aimed to find out, by cooking Icelandic rúgbrauð using only a 2016 Honda and the California sunshine.

    • The NationManga Hulks Its Way to the Top

      Blame it on Jujutsu Kaisen.

    • Counter PunchOpportunity Shouldn’t be About Luck

      Children born to wealthier families tend to have a€ higher college graduation rate€ and are shielded from economically traumatizing events, such as a major health problem or eviction. These children also tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods served by better resourced schools.

    • Counter PunchFrom Russia with Vision: My Journey to Parecon

      My earliest memory that might be called politically significant is: when I was a child — I don’t even remember how young exactly — there was a lot of talk on TV about poverty and unemployment (often being spoken about as ‘people having no work’). So, once I asked my father: “Why is ‘there’s no work’ a bad thing? Doesn’t that mean that all that has to be done is done and there’s no need to do more?” And my father said: “It’s bad because people don’t work and don’t get money”. I asked: “Then why don’t they print enough money and hand it out, so everyone has enough?”. “Because then money would be less valuable, and you wouldn’t be able to buy as much”, he said. That made some sense, so I asked no further questions then.

    • Counter PunchSo-Called Normality and Fear

      But the thing is as I said elsewhere, there are times when we are definitely better off dealing with what’s actually in front of us, regardless of analytical labels, abstractions or levels, just deal in straight power concepts and wage love. This is such a time.

    • HackadayApple’s Satellite Emergency Texts, How Do They Work?

      There is always some hype surrounding an Apple product announcement, and while maybe it’s not in the same league as those for the original iPod or iPhone, their iPhone 14 model will include emergency texting by satellite has generated quite a bit of coverage. It’s easy to find a lot about the system from the software end in terms of its interface and even Apple’s use of compression, but what about the radio side? Whose satellite constellation are they using, and how does it work?

    • The NationSue Bird Sets a Standard and Says Goodbye to the WNBA

      It’s a basketball legacy that—factoring in longevity, consistency, and success—is exceeded only by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s. Sue Bird played a record 21 seasons, all with the same team, the Seattle Storm; won four championships, each one achieved during a different part of her career; made 13 All-Star appearances; and has a future spot in the basketball Hall of Fame. In addition to being the WNBA’s all-time assist leader, she has a closetful of championship trophies from Europe, Olympic gold medals, and two titles from starring for what may have been the greatest college team in history, at the University of Connecticut. Bird never won an MVP, but her consistency and solidity have been unmatched, averaging double figures for her first 16 seasons in the league, always suppressing her own statistics to give what the team asked of her.

    • The NationWerner Herzog’s Exit From Civilization

      With his latest work, a novel called The Twilight World, the filmmaker Werner Herzog has chosen a subject so tailor-made for him that it verges on self-parody. In a cinematic oeuvre devoted to questing megalomaniacs and half-bestial outcasts, it seems inevitable that he would eventually find his way to Hiroo Onoda, most famous of the so-called “Japanese holdouts” after the Second World War—that is, soldiers stranded on islands that were bypassed by the US military in its advance across the Pacific, who refused to surrender for years or even decades after the conflict’s end.

    • HackadayTroubleshooting Barcodes: A Lesson In Critical Thinking

      We’ve all been there. Something that is known to work doesn’t work out in the field. But back at home base, it works fine. How do you fix it? Of course, there’s no one right answer to that question, but [Benji York] had a particularly satisfying round of troubleshooting some errant barcodes and even came up with a very creative solution.

    • Counter PunchTrick Babies
    • Education

    • Hardware

      • HackadayADSL Router As Effects Pedal

        Moore’s law might not be as immutable as we once though thought it was, as chip makers struggle to fit more and more transistors on a given area of silicon. But over the past few decades it’s been surprisingly consistent, with a lot of knock-on effects. As computers get faster, everything else related to them gets faster as well, and the junk drawer tends to fill quickly with various computer peripherals and parts that might be working fine, but just can’t keep up the pace. [Bonsembiante] had an old ADSL router that was well obsolete as a result of these changing times, but instead of tossing it, he turned it into a guitar effects pedal.

      • HackadayTracking Weather Balloons With SDR

        The advent of cheap software-defined radio hardware means that what would have once been an exotic expensive undertaking can now be relatively cheap. [David] notes that using some pretty simple gear, he could track down weather balloons.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Counter PunchAs New Covid Boosters Move Forward, Better Outreach is Needed to Save Lives

        In late July, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the share of people living in counties designated by the CDC’s guidelines as medium or high risk had grown significantly due to the spread of the BA.5 variant; at that time, 87 percent of the entire population lived in a medium or high risk area. KFF estimated that the number of people living in those counties who were not up to date on their Covid-19 vaccinations had also jumped––to 198 million. This jump represented a 65 percent increase since the start of June alone.

      • Common DreamsScientists Develop Malaria Vaccine With 'World-Changing' Potential

        "With the right support, the world could end child deaths from malaria in our lifetimes."

      • The NationEnding Free Covid Tests, US Policy Is Now “Figure It Out Yourself”

        Last summer, getting vaccinated was promoted as the most fun, fashionable, sexy thing a person could do. Free vaccines and boosters were a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s policy and its messaging. The sense of hope, progress, and even hookups enabled by vaccines was crystallized in the upbeat single “Vax That Thang Up” by Juvenile—perhaps the only credibly sex-positive Covid-related US public health message to date. Iconically, the video featured scenes from a pop-up vaccination site, with a health tech/backup dancer in a face shield and the rapper Juvenile “making it rain” with white CDC vaccination cards. The unsung hero of that cultural moment, of course, was the significant federal expenditures underwriting national vaccine supplies.

    • Privatisation/Privateering

    • Security

      • CISACisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

        Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • The NationDHS Surveillance Increasingly Targets US Citizens

          Days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Mattie Walker woke up to police knocking on her door in Texas. The officers, who worked for the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service—the agency tasked with protecting federal buildings and their employees—handed her a letter referencing something she posted on Twitter the day of the decision. “You became upset at the Roe Vs Wade decision and stated, ‘Burn every fucking government building right down right the fuck now. Slaughter them all. Fuck you goddamn pigs,’” the letter stated. Then it warned her against “any harassing/threatening language when contacting any government agency,” threatening her with arrest if she didn’t comply.

        • The Wall Street JournalG-7 privacy regulators aim to ease turbulent international data flows

          New trans-Atlantic privacy deal is the missing puzzle piece to help data move more smoothly between wealthy countries

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Counter PunchThe Death Penalty Needs Transparency & Regulation

        Although the death penalty has existed in the United States since the earliest colonies, in the 1700s, Congress was already questioning the legality and humanity of these severe methods of punishment. As a result, the evolution of execution methods progressed to what is perceived to be more humane. Lethal injection has been broadly touted as the most humane method since 1977, € and since then, there have been 1,370 executions by lethal injection — now the primary execution method used by 30 states and the U.S. government.

    • Environment

    • Finance

      • Counter PunchThe Fed Appears to Have Violated the Dodd-Frank Act in the Second Quarter of 2020, Giving $455 Billion in Loans to Citigroup

        But during and after the 2008 financial crisis, the largest of the Fed’s emergency lending facilities, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), sluiced $8.9 trillion in cumulative loans to trading firms on Wall Street. Two-thirds of that amount went to just three firms: $2.02 trillion to Citigroup; $1.9 trillion to Morgan Stanley; and $1.775 trillion to Merrill Lynch according to a congressionally-mandated audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). (See chart below from the government audit.)

      • Counter PunchThe World Bank: Promoter of Starvation?

        I ordered the Bank’s 1974 Annual Report. The cover photo is of bent over rice farmers working in a field in Bangladesh perhaps reflecting the mentality of an institution of western imperialism,.

      • Counter PunchRousing the Power of the Rank and File

        Some of these jobs sucked more than others, but they all sucked. Being a temporary worker most of the time, I used that as an excuse and told myself I did not have time to attempt any organizing. Before I took the job in Washington state, I signed what was essentially an illegal yellow dog contract in which I promised not to talk union at all. I broke the promise, but it didn’t matter. The people who worked there were the castoffs from a major union busting campaign undertaken at the local Simpson lumber mill right before I moved there. The International Woodworkers of America (IWA) had conceded hundreds of jobs and most of its future operations in the town. Consequently, my co-workers at the circuit board assembly plant were afraid of unionizing and skeptical that a union could really do much about anything, anyhow.

      • Counter PunchPutin’s No Superfluous Man

        In 19th-century Russian fiction, the superfluous man is a man who imagines big ventures but does not act upon them. He is an aristocrat, landholder, and possessor of serfs, oversensitive to class distinctions, up and down; he lives off the land he rarely visits; seeks women of high status, but ineffectively; fights duels to save his honor but reluctantly; dies prematurely from a mysterious illness but lives a thoroughly pathetic and wretched life.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • MeduzaAs the war against Ukraine rages on, Russians head to the polls What to look out for in Russia’s 2022 municipal elections — Meduza
      • TruthOutReport: 17 of 18 Pro-Democracy Bills Were Killed by Filibuster This Congress
      • Counter PunchDeSantrump

        DeSantis has fired elected, Democratic officials on thin pretexts and created a new police force – electoral brownshirts — to hunt down voting fraud. These fearless centurions were deployed in August 2022 – weapons drawn, and doors smashed in — to arrest and charge 20 hapless ex-cons who, it turned out, were ineligible to vote even though election authorities sent them registration cards. The point of the raids and subsequent press conference was not prosecutions (they are almost certain to collapse) but to intimidate former prisoners from exercising the franchise returned to them by a citizen referendum in 2018. Black people are greatly over-represented (47%) in Florida prisons, so the prosecutions serve the additional effect of bullying Black voters overall.

      • Counter PunchTransparent Idiocy and Cynically Wishful Democratic Party Thinking: Reflections on a Poll and its Reporting

        The NBC poll has been cited over and over by liberal cable news talking heads claiming that the main thing driving voters today is the danger to democracy posed by the Donald Trump “MAGA Republicans,” who were recently described by Joe Biden as “semi-fascists” – an understatement from a semi-liberal.

      • Democracy Now“Attack Philanthropy”: Right-Wing Billionaire Fueled Climate Denial & Conservative Judges, Schools

        New revelations about the secretive right-wing billionaire Barre Seid, who donated $1.6 billion to a conservative nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, known as Donald Trump’s “Supreme Court whisperer,” show he has also used his massive fortune to undermine climate science, fight Medicaid expansion and remake the higher education system in a conservative mold. We speak with The Lever’s Andrew Perez, who reported on what Seid calls “attack philanthropy,” after obtaining emails through an open records request.

      • Common Dreams'Abhorrent and Anti-Democratic': Outrage as DNC Panel Blocks Vote on Dark Money Ban

        Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a DNC member who faced an onslaught of dark money during her recent campaigns for a U.S. House seat, told Common Dreams that "it's really a sad state of affairs" for the DNC Resolutions Committee to "not even bring this to the floor so that the members of the DNC can weigh in."

      • Counter PunchYes, Gorbachev Was a Failure but Other Hands Helped Bring Down the Soviet Union
      • Counter PunchLetter From Crimea: Yalta, the McCarthy Era and Trump

        As I was early to the scrum, I got the front seat, which on the twisting coastal road high above the water gave me spectacular views. Then the bus cut slightly inland, which meant I didn’t see the palaces in Koreiz—not far from Yalta— where Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill stayed during the February 1945 conference.

      • Counter PunchPossible Prisoner Exchange in US Hybrid War against Venezuela

        Alex Saab, who has been confined for over two years, is a victim of the US economic war calculated to achieve regime-change in Venezuela. He has been targeted because of his role in helping circumvent the sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the US. These measures, really collective punishment, are intended to make conditions so onerous there that the people would renounce their elected government. Such unilateral coercive measures are illegal under international law.

      • Counter PunchMAGA Civil War? Ain't Gonna Happen

        It’s astounding that individuals like Sen. Lindsey Graham could possibly stand up in all his faux-righteous indignation and claim there will be “riots in the streets” if the Department of Justice dares prosecute a former president for stealing top secret government documents and storing them haphazardly at his Florida resort with no control over who may have seen, copied, or stolen them.

      • Counter PunchBiden’s New War on Extremism and Liberty

        Biden declared that “Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” But Biden didn’t confess to the audience that he considered almost half of all Americans to be “extremists.”€  A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, € “When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” € Is this wacko definition of extremism designed to vilify anyone who doubts Biden will save America’s soul?

      • Common DreamsQueen Elizabeth II of England Dead at 96

        The Royal Family made the announcement on social media and with a public statement.

      • TruthOutQueen Elizabeth Is Dead, But Her Bloody Legacy Lives on
      • Common DreamsOpinion | The Unified Anti-Bolsonaro Front Needed to Save Brazil—and the Planet

        In less than a month, Brazilian voters will elect their next president. One might imagine that the unpopular far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, doesn't stand a chance. But Bolsonaro retains the support of some very powerful forces, and he continues to pose a severe threat to Brazilian democracy.

      • The NationWe Were Supposed to Help Asian Migrant Women—Instead We Got Police

        After a white man shot dead six Asian women at three spas in Atlanta in March 2021, unprecedented interest fell on grassroots organizations serving New York City’s Asian communities. Mainstream discussions about violence against Asians in America have rarely focused on migrant workers, who face aggressive policing, unfair housing policies, garnished wages, and other discriminatory actions. But New Yorkers sympathetic to the Atlanta victims suddenly inundated organizers like Yves Tong Nguyen with queries about how to help. In response, Nguyen would repeat a blunt message: “I want you to care when people are still alive.”

      • The NationThe Far Right Has Already Had an Impact on Sweden’s Elections

        The far-right Sweden Democrats don’t stand a chance of winning a majority in the upcoming elections here on September 11, but you can see their presence everywhere. On an August day when election posters were going up on fences and lampposts, the sun blasted down with unusual intensity in this part of the world and both center-left and center-right parties promised a higher level of policing and a crackdown on “segregation”—code here for opposition to neighborhoods where a majority of residents are migrants.

      • MeduzaMoscow municipal deputy candidates receive calls from ‘journalists’ who don’t exist — Meduza

        Candidates for Moscow’s upcoming municipal council elections have begun receiving calls from people claiming to be journalists from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Novaya Gazeta, Polit.ru, and other media outlets. In the calls, the “journalists” ask candidates about their views on sensitive issues such as the war in Ukraine and opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s “Smart Vote” initiative, Yabloko party representative Kirill Goncharov told Dozhd.

      • TruthOutSteve Bannon Charged With Fraud, Conspiracy and Money Laundering
      • TruthOutNew Poll Shows 6 in 10 Voters Don't Want Trump to Run in 2024
      • The NationThe Planetary Stakes of the Brazilian Election

        Brazilians vote to elect a president on October 2, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former president and the Workers’ Party candidate, is leading in the polls. But the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, is threatening to disregard the results and seize power. If that happens—or if Bolsonaro somehow wins at the ballot box—it will accelerate the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Brazil is skidding toward an environmental disaster, and if Bolsonaro remains in power, his government will sabotage the international campaign to slow global warming. It is no exaggeration to call the next election in Brazil one of the most important votes in environmental history.

      • TechdirtPolitico’s New Owner Heads To The Fainting Couch Over TikTok

        New Politico owner and Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has called for a ban on TikTok at the Vox Media Code conference. In fact, the lion’s share of the conference involved folks hyperventilating in one form or another over the existential threat posed by a popular social media app:

      • The NationWhat the Republicans Did
      • MeduzaEstonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland to restrict border crossings for Russians with Schengen visas starting September 19 — Meduza

        In a press conference, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said that Estonia would close its border to Russian citizens with tourist visas, starting September 19.

      • ScheerpostKatrina vanden Heuvel: Mikhail Gorbachev’s Legacy Was Squandered. Now We’re All Paying the Price.

        On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence," Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, remembers the Russian leader—whom she called a friend—as a committed pro-peace thinker.

      • ScheerpostThe Chris Hedges Report Podcast: Historian Paul Street on the Bankrupt Liberalism and Gilded Absurdities of the Democratic Party
      • ScheerpostRepeat After We
      • Misinformation/Disinformation

        • Counter PunchDinner Versus the Truth: The Problem With Facebook’s Content Warnings

          Ads are placed on Facebook feeds by animal rights organizations like€ The Humane League, the group I work for, to raise awareness about the reality of factory farming. These ads depict chickens raised for food (commonly known as€ broiler chickens) and their experiences on factory farms. But Facebook’s algorithm often rejects those ads under its “sensational content” policy. Facebook requires posts that share€ “violent” or “graphic content” information€ and images to come with a content warning, which cannot be included in paid ads.

        • Common DreamsOpinion | The Dangerous Digital Forever War of Far-Right Conspiracy Theories

          The three men and three women stood with their right arms raised. Behind them the remains of the daylight hued the sky a bluish gray. As a fire danced at their feet, they gazed straight ahead at a camera recording their words. The square-jawed man in the middle, retired Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, spoke first. The others, including members of his family, repeated after him.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • Counter PunchJournalists, Israel and War Crimes

        And CNN wasn’t the only independent organization to investigate: “Witnesses, including Al Jazeera journalists, immediately said Israeli forces had carried out the shooting in Jenin, a claim that was backed up by numerous investigations by media outlets, human rights organisations, and the United Nations.”

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • TechdirtAmy Klobuchar’s Link Tax Bill Put On Hold Because She Doesn’t Understand Her Own Bill And Ted Cruz Doesn’t Understand The 1st Amendment

        Earlier today, there was a Senate Judiciary Committee markup on the JCPA — the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act — put forth by Senator Amy Klobuchar. Last week I wrote a long post about just how broken the bill is. It does almost everything it seeks to do badly, in ways that are genuinely dangerous. That post has the details, but in short: it tries to force big internet companies to pay news organizations for linking to them, which fundamentally changes how the internet works (you should never have to pay to link). While it pretends not to, it fundamentally messes with copyright law, because while it talks about “licensing,” it never explains what these sites need to actually license. That’s because the reality is that they’re trying to license links, news snippets, and headlines. All of those are fair use and require no license. Yet under this bill, they’ll need to be licensed.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent FreakTarantino and Miramax Settle Copyright Lawsuit Over “Pulp Fiction” NFTs

          Quentin Tarantino and Miramax have settled their copyright infringement lawsuit over the "Pulp Fiction" NFT project. The film studio accused the director of using copyrighted materials, including the screenplay, without owning all the rights. The settlement details are not public but both parties say that they might collaborate to release more NFTs in the future.

        • TechdirtCopyright Troll In Taiwan Accused Of Uploading Movies Itself To Entice, Sue, And Threaten ‘Pirates’

          It’s no secret that copyright trolls have been a scourge on many countries for some time now. The typical method of the copyright troll is quite simple. You buy or acquire the rights to some media, you watch for any of that media to show up on the internet illicitly, and then you attempt to legal-fu the IP addresses out of ISPs or site hosts and then threaten those using those IPs with a lawsuit if they don’t pay a “settlement fee.” This scheme is problematic for any number of reasons: this isn’t how copyright laws were intended to work, IP addresses are not people representing guilty parties, there have been a ton of false positives, etc. etc. etc.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • Science

        • Tedium10 Executable File Formats That Didn’t Make It

          Whether the way you roll is .EXE, .APP, or .SH, you most assuredly executable some things in your life as a computer user. Maybe you don’t even realize it—after all, Android and iOS really go out of their way to separate you from the process of direct file execution—iOS with a whole flippin’ App Store. Of course, the nature of execution is such that every type of computer has its own way of doing things, and that way of doing things may not be compatible with any other. As a result, it leads to a lot of incompatiblity over time—some of which we’re talking about today. Continuing on our list of things that didn’t make it, we now lean really hard on once-common file formats that execute things—or, at least, look like they do. Today’s Tedium executes some code. (Got a problem with the list? See the disclaimer.)

      • Announcements


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



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Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
"AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
based in Germany and does not speak the language
Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
 
Once Again, GAFAM Deletes All Your Data, Only Corrects This After Millions of People Lead an Uproar Online ("Richard Stallman Warned Us About This")
No lessons learned, eh?
You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
One day we'll write about all this in great depth
"But Corruption is Everywhere"
"We'll always have Polio..."
Days Without Slop About "Linux"
It's time to move on
Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
Links for the day
Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
Links for the day
Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
We said we'd continue in the weekend
Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
Links for the day
Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
How did Ubuntu get so fat?
The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
Links for the day
The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
they actually put effort into it
How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
Links for the day
Giving Money to Free Software
In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
That really says a lot about The Register MS
EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
XBox as a console is pretty much dead
The Year of the Bubble
We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
on mobile the options would be more limited
libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
the FSF made it past $300,000
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025