● 02.16.21

● Links 16/2/2021: Slackware 15.0 Alpha, Monado 21.0.0, VLC at 20

Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Archiver: Easier Way To Extract Archives – YouTube

• I’m always forgetting the commands I need to run for individual archiving utilities like tar, zip, rar, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way and it turns out there is, it’s with a little application called Archiver which handles all of your archives in the same application with the same command form for each type.

=> ↺ Destination Linux 213: Ghostery Joins The Browser Wars & Facebook Improves The Telecom Industry?

• Today we want to dive into the topic of browsers. Browsers are a crucial part of any PC experience today whether corporate or on the desktop. Yet, the competition for alternatives to Chrome are growing smaller by the year. In this episode we dive into some new offerings and ask the question what Firefox could do to take back some of the browser market. Later in the show, we’re also covering how open-source is now set to take over the telecom industry . . . thanks to Facebook? Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux.

=> ↺ Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #200

• Ubuntu 20.04.2 and Flavors with HWE Stack Released

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2021-February/000264.html

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours

• Ubuntu To Replace Ubiquity Installer

• https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/refreshing-the-ubuntu-desktop-installer/20659

• Apache Project Hoping for New Rust Cryptography Module, with Help from Google

• https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-funds-project-to-secure-apache-web-server-project-with-new-rust-component/

• Martin Wimpress to Leave Post at Canonical

• https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/02/martin-wimpress-ubuntu-desktop-lead-leaving-canonical

• Ubuntu Core 20 Out

• https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-core-20-secures-linux-for-iot

• AlmaLinux 8.3 Beta Out

• https://blog.almalinux.org/introducing-almalinux-beta-a-community-driven-replacement-for-centos/

• EndeavourOS’s first 2021 Update Release Out

• https://endeavouros.com/news/our-first-release-of-2021-has-arrived/

• Solus 4.2 Out

• https://getsol.us/2021/02/03/solus-4-2-released/

• Ubuntu’s Yaru Theme with GTK4 Support Out

• https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-testing-yaru-gtk4-theme/20668

• Ubuntu 21.04 Artwork Out

• KDE’s Februrary App Update Out

• https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2021-02-apps-update/

• LibreOffice 7.1 Out

• https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoffice-7-1-community/

• Darktable 3.4.1 Out

• https://www.darktable.org/2021/02/darktable-341-released/

• Feral Interactive Have Announced Linux Support for Warhammer III

=> ↺ Mailspring Is An Email Client For Windows, Mac And Linux

• Mailspring claims to be the “best email client for Mac, Linux and Windows.” Is this true? I don’t know. Until recently, I resisted trying Mailspring because it was not fully free and open source.

=> ↺ mintCast 354.5 – Everyone Has an Opinion

• 1:30 Linux Innards 33:12 Vibrations from the Ether 51:24 Check This Out 53:45 Announcements & Outro

• In our Innards section, We discuss chromium and how to pick a distro

=> ↺ Late Night Linux – Episode 112

• Internet outrage about Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu on Azure, slightly new LibreOffice branding, when software freedom is a matter of life and death and more in the news, plus the usual Kool Kapers in KDE Korner.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ KVM With Linux 5.12 Allows For Userspace To Emulate Xen Hypercalls, AMD Optimization Too – Phoronix

• Even before the Linux 5.11 kernel was released on Sunday, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) maintainer Paolo Bonzini already had submitted early the initial batch of virtualization changes for Linux 5.12. There are some interesting changes on the KVM front for Linux 5.12.

• Perhaps most interesting with the KVM work for Linux 5.12 is support on x86/x86_64 to allow user-space to emulate Xen hypercalls. This ability stems from work published by Oracle engineers all the way back in 2019 as part of a broader series. Those Oracle-led patches are pursuing Xen HVM guest support for KVM. The aim is to allow KVM to boot Xen x86 HVM guests and implemented similar to how Hyper-V is handled for x86 KVM.

=> ↺ Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

• You can’t hurry Linux kernel upgrades, as The Supremes never sang and a Register reader discovers in today’s episode of Who, Me?

• Our story, from a reader Regomised as “Aapt”, takes us back to the days when the DEC Alpha reigned, er, supreme over computer labs and anyone with even a passing knowledge of Linux could fall all too easily into the “expert” bucket.

• Aapt was not short on confidence, be it tinkering with the xconfig file to persuade a monitor to work with Linux or, as we shall see, casually attempting a kernel upgrade. “I was convinced I was the best sysadmin for my lab computers,” he told us.

• Since finding a decent sysadmin for Linux was problematic back in the last century, and the institute where he worked had yet to do so, Aapt fell into the role. “For ‘best sysadmin’ read ‘only sysadmin’, for whatever I was worth,” he said, with the wisdom of decades now under his belt. “Thank goodness they didn’t ask me to administer any other institute machines…”

=> ↺ LG Q9 One (aka LG G7 One) Android 11 update looks near as kernel source code goes live

• FYI, OEMs are required to push out kernel sources for their devices under the GNU General Public License, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software.

=> ↺ The x86 Platform Drivers For Linux 5.12 Have Several Prominent Additions – Phoronix

• The “platform-drivers-x86″ area of the kernel that is primarily made up of driver support around Intel/AMD laptops and other platform drivers is seeing a number of noteworthy additions for the newly-opened Linux 5.12 merge window.

=> ↺ OProfile Kernel Code Slated For Removal In Linux 5.12 – Phoronix

• OProfile as a system profiler for Linux systems was started twenty years ago during the Linux 2.4 kernel days. While the user-space components are still going strong, the kernel-side support is redundant in an era of the perf subsystem and thus slated for removal with Linux 5.12.

• The OProfile user-space tools remain used and are still maintained (OProfile 1.4 came out last summer), but the kernel-side OProfile code is no longer needed since the user-space code has been refactored to make use of the Linux kernel’s wonderful perf capabilities. Thus the kernel OProfile code has basically gone unused for quite a while unless running very vintage OProfile user-space tools.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Monado 21.0.0, an officially conformant OpenXR implementation!

• We are pleased to announce that Monado now provides an officially conformant OpenXR implementation. The official listing of conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementations now includes Monado, based on running the OpenXR conformance test suite on a “simulated” device.

• Note that the OpenXR 1.0 conformant status applies only to the simulated device. Anyone building a product using Monado with non-simulated hardware still needs to go through the full, normal adopter and conformance process for that product in order to claim OpenXR conformance and take advantage of the benefits. This resembles the situation with Mesa: though Mesa implements numerous Khronos APIs, not all API and driver combinations are formally conformant, and hardware vendors have the responsibility to follow the adopter process and submit conformance results.

• Among other benefits of official adoption, this conformance result and adoption allows the Monado project to use the OpenXR word and logo trademarks to describe its feature set. This recognizes publically that the Monado open-source project truly does implement OpenXR as specified.

=> ↺ Monado 21.0 Released As An Officially Conformant OpenXR Implementation – Phoronix

• Monado, the leading open-source project implementing The Khronos Group’s OpenXR specification for AR/VR devices, is now officially considered a conformant implementation and is marked by its v21.0 release.

• Monado 21.0 is approved by The Khronos Group in officially passing the OpenXR 1.0 conformance requirements set forth by the OpenXR test suite with a simulated device.

Applications

=> ↺ 7 of the Best Linux System Cleaning Tools

• Many of us have to deal with slow and unresponsive systems due to improper maintenance and bloated software. This can have a negative impact on productivity and hampers the overall experience. Luckily, there are several ways to tackle unresponsive Linux installations. Cleaning up the system is arguably the most useful among them. This list includes some of the best Linux system cleaning tools.

=> ↺ 5 Privacy Alternatives to WhatsApp Messenger

• WhatsApp has been in the news a lot recently thanks to the changes for their Privacy Policy, which is essentially for the purpose to send more data to Facebook. Thanks to this news there have been people wondering if they should Ditch WhatsApp or not. If one does decide to switch away from WhatsApp then they may want some options for a good alternative to consider. Well then you found the right article because in this article and attached video I’ll give you 5 different alternatives to WhatsApp and you can decide which one will work best for you.

• Alright first, I’m going to do a brief rundown of what has happened to WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy and then you can decide whether or not it makes sense to you to consider an alternative.

• WhatsApp sent notifications to its users about a change in their Privacy Policy which will let it send data to Facebook. They also made it so agreement is mandatory, you either accept it or stop using WhatsApp.

=> ↺ VLC media player: revised design and marketability

• Dependent VLC media player It has been in the market since 2001 and has probably already been installed on Windows or Mac computers as well as on mobile devices over the years. So far, VLC has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times on various platforms. The open source program sees itself as a comprehensive media player that understands almost all formats and also offers some exciting additional features.

• The VideoLAN team behind the development of VLC Media Player now has the opposite protocol He indicated that one could also imagine a commercial solution for his own product in the future. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President, VideoLAN, described Plex media player as an example of an ad-supported business model that “can also work with VLC”.

=> ↺ 20 years of orange cones: The history of VLC

• When students at the École Centrale Paris lobbied for a campus network upgrade in the ’90s, they weren’t really thinking about the future of media. All they wanted was to play Duke Nukem 3D. But the public-private partnership that made the first-person shooter work on their campus network also laid the groundwork for the birth of the popular media player VLC.

• Open sourced 20 years ago this month, VLC has since been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times, making it one of the most popular free software projects to date. Software developed for VLC is being used to power some of the world’s largest streaming services. Despite all of this, VLC has largely remained a labor of love, with developers saying no to deals worth tens of millions of dollars.

• The story of VLC is about geeks pursuing their passion projects, fighting back countless legal threats and hatching a baffling plan to send Bitcoins to the moon.

=> ↺ Using the Wayback Machine Downloader to rebuild Dissociated Press

• This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far more attentive and consistent.

• I’ve lost track, but I’ve probably wiped the slate clean and started over seven or eight times since I first registered dissociatedpress.net. Most of the restarts have been intentional, but a few were not. More than a few times I’ve wished to recover things I’d written here (and elsewhere), either to put them back on the web or just to have them as reminder how truly bad my writing used to be. (Yes, once upon a time, it was worse.)

=> ↺ New Release: Tor 0.4.5.6

• After months of work, we have a new stable release series! If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.6 on the download page. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser likely next week.

• The Tor 0.4.5.x release series is dedicated to the memory of Karsten Loesing (1979-2020), Tor developer, cypherpunk, husband, and father. Karsten is best known for creating the Tor metrics portal and leading the metrics team, but he was involved in Tor from the early days. For example, while he was still a student he invented and implemented the v2 onion service directory design, and he also served as an ambassador to the many German researchers working in the anonymity field. We loved him and respected him for his patience, his consistency, and his welcoming approach to growing our community.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Starting a GNU Screen session via SSH’s ~/.ssh/config

• Recently a friend asked me how to automatically start or reconnect to a GNU Screen session directly via OpenSSH’s configuration file. Here’s how to do it: [...]

=> ↺ How to Search in Vim – Linux Hint

• Vim is a widely used, light-weight, free, multi-platform text and code editor. It is very popular among developers because of its efficiency and ease of use. Though Vim is a simple text editor, it still needs some time to learn for advanced usage.

• Learning the basics of Vim is very handy, therefore in this guide, we are going to focus on Vim editor’s search feature. Searching for some specific text (word/string) is one of the very common tasks when working with large files.

• Let’s understand the search feature of Vim from basic searching to advance search techniques. Make sure you are in command mode before searching for something.

=> ↺ How to Install Ruby 3 on Ubuntu 20.04

• Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented, and general-purpose programming language which is one of the most popular programming languages. Ruby programming language is the reason behind the powerful Ruby and Rails framework.

• There are multiple ruby managers available to install Ruby. Ruby managers allow to use multiple versions and help to switch between ruby versions. The most commonly used ruby managers are rbenv and rvm. Ruby is also available in the Ubuntu repository.

• In this article we will be learning three different ways to install Ruby 3 on Ubuntu 20.04.

=> ↺ Learn Difference Between $$ and $BASHPID in Bash

• Recently I was working on a shell script and I saw a significant difference in how bash special variable $ and BASHPID behaves. Every process running in Linux will be assigned with a process ID and that is how the operating system handles the process.

• Similarly, your bash terminal session will also be assigned with a process ID. There is a special variable called “$” and “$BASHPID” which stores the process ID of the current shell.

• Go ahead and run the below command to see what is the process ID of your current shell. Both “$” and “$BASHPID” is going to return the same value.

=> ↺ How to Install Flatpak, Snap and AppImage Apps in Linux – Linux Hint

• This article will explain how to install, remove and manage Flatpak, Snap and AppImage packages in Linux. These three packaging formats have been in development for the last few years and they provide distribution agnostic packages that can be installed on all major Linux distributions. A detailed comparison between these packaging formats is available here.

=> ↺ How To Install Flask on CentOS 8 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Flask on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Flask is an open resource micro web framework for Python. It is known as a microframework since it does now not require specific tools or libraries. Flask supports extensions that may add software features as if they were carried out in Flask itself. Extensions exist for object-relational mappers, form validation, add handling, various open authentication technology, and several normal framework associated tools. Purposes that use the Flask framework incorporate Pinterest and LinkedIn.

• 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 through the step by step install of Flask web framework on CentOS 8.

=> ↺ How to check the disk space in Ubuntu 20.04 and 20.10? – Linux Hint

• Monitoring the disk space is a very important activity to perform on any device like mobile, laptop, personal desktop computer, and Linux server. For instance, if you want to install any new application or software on your device, then it is important to know about the disk space. By checking the disk space, you can get to know about the free and used space. We can check the disk space from the terminal and graphical user interface based applications.

• The commands discussed in this article are generic and can be used on other Linux distribution like Debian, Linux Mint, etc.

=> ↺ ts Command – Add or Convert Timestamps To Output in Linux – Putorius

• At some point in a Linux admins career they need to add timestamps to output. Whether it’s logging for shell script or a simple command (like ping, traceroute, etc…) timestamps can come in handy. There are many ways to accomplish this, but none are as easy as the ts command. In this Linux quick tip we will show you how to easily add timestamps to any output using the ts command.

=> ↺ Developing With The Flatpak CLI – Chris’s Design & Development

• Flatpak is a very powerful tool for development, and is well-integrated into GNOME Builder. This is what I’d recommend for most developers. But what if you use a plain text editor? Barring Visual Studio Code, there aren’t many extensions for common text editors to use flatpak. This tutorial will go over how to use flatpak to build and test your apps with only the command line.

=> ↺ Creating Bash Infinite Loop by Example Scripts – Linux Hint

• An infinite loop in Bash or any other programming language refers to a loop that is continuous i.e., its terminating condition is never met or its executing condition forever stays true. Such loops in any programming language are very simple to write. Whether it is a “for” loop or a “while” loop, it can be made infinite with very slight tweaking in its normal syntax. In this article, we will be sharing with you the different ways on how you can conveniently make the “for” and “while” loops infinitely in Bash in Linux Mint 20.

=> ↺ How to Install MongoDB on Ubuntu 20.04 and CentOS 8

• MongoDB is an open-source and cross-platform NoSQL database system developed by MongoDB Inc. It is 100 times faster than a traditional database system like RDMS. It uses JSON-like documents to store its data. It is used in many modern web applications because it can be easily integrated with several programming languages. It is used by many big companies including, Uber, Stack, Lyft, Accenture, and many more.

=> ↺ Get Started With Anaconda Navigator Graphical Interface – OSTechNix

• Anaconda Python distribution includes command line package manager named Conda and a graphical user interface called Anaconda Navigator. They both used to launch applications, create, manage packages and conda environments. In this guide, we will learn how to get started with Anaconda Navigator graphical user interface in Linux.

=> ↺ Funkyware: ITCetera: OpenWRT: WRT54GL: Backfire: IPv6 issues

• While having a Debian-based boxen as a router feels nice, I kept on longing for something smaller and quieter. I then remembered that I still had my old WRT54GL somewhere. After upgrading the OpenWRT firmware to the latest supported version for that hardware (Backfire 10.03.1, r29592), I installed radvd and wide-dhcpv6-client. Configuring radvd to deliver consistent results was easy enough.

=> ↺ Protect your Home Assistant with these backups | Opensource.com

• In the last two articles in this series on home automation with Home Assistant (HA), I walked through setting up a few integrations with a Zigbee Bridge and some custom ESP8266 devices that I use for automation. The first four articles in the series discussed what Home Assistant is, why you may want local control, some of the communication protocols for smart home components, and how to install Home Assistant in a virtual machine (VM) using libvirt.

• Now that you have a basic home automation setup, it is a good time to take a baseline of your system. In this seventh article, I will talk about snapshots, backups, and backup strategies. Let’s get right into it.

=> ↺ How to install Ren’Py on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Ren’Py on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to install Vivaldi Browser on Linux Mint 20.1 – YouTube

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Vivaldi Browser on Linux Mint 20.1.

=> ↺ Getting Started With KVM Hypervisor, Virtual Machines The Right Way

• Linux KVM is a complete, open source virtualization platform. It is used by many cloud providers and virtualization products use at their core, and it has an extensive set of tools. What many Linux users don’t know, is that KVM is great also to be used as a desktop virtualization solution. It is easy to install, runs super fast, has no proprietary licenses. On top of that, you are likely to learn some enterprise virtualization skills while using it. Also, for those that work in IT, it is really great to have same virtualization platform that runs on desktops, laptops, and on servers.

Games

=> ↺ 1976: Adventure

• Adventure was a clever program, but also the right program at the right time. It arrived just as regional clusters of hackers were merging into a single online community, and the tantalizing possibility of home computers was becoming a reality, along with the need for compelling software to run on them. It inspired the first generation of commercial game companies and provided a template for their products: it’s no exaggeration to say Adventure’s success jump-started the entire computer gaming industry. It provided the direct model for parser interactive fiction, which would continue to be created and enjoyed for half a century and counting.

• But arguably its key innovation was to demonstrate one of the most powerful illusions a computer can create: transporting its user to another reality. While the game industry as a whole would eventually move to chase that illusion with images, not words, each new generation of writers, indies, and solo creators keeps rediscovering the magic of that original trick. Sometimes a single gripping sentence—describing, say, a mist-filled hallway and an angry snake—is all it takes to get you there.

=> ↺ Metro Exodus still due on Linux this year, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition announced | GamingOnLinux

• Deep Silver and 4A Games have just revealed Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and they’ve confirmed that Linux support for Metro Exodus is still happening.

• A lot of the work they’re currently doing is on supporting the newer consoles, and while it already supported Ray Tracing, they decided to do a “radical” overhaul of their proprietary 4A Engine to improve the Ray Tracing found using more advanced and better techniques.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KFluff — Kate’s External Tools

• I’ve been learning C++ lately. About two months ago I finished Codecademy’s C++ course (honestly really good for the basics), a month ago I managed to fetch the C++ Fundamentals book from PacktPub for free, and now I’m mostly following this amazing YouTube online course by The Cherno and taking a look at C++ Weekly. Since I did occasionally dabble with HTML, CSS, JS, C# and Perl in the past and know some Bash basics, learning C++ is progressing nicely, and it’s probably my most well-understood language so far. I took a short look at Qt for Beginners these days, which might warrant another blog post later.

• Because of this, I was taking a look at KDE/Qt-centric programs for development purposes; namely Kate, KDevelop and Qt Creator.

• Qt Creator has been great for learning QtWidgets, but it’s way more than is needed for basic C++ development/learning. KDevelop is more focused in this regard, but it’s likewise project-based and it utilizes CMake for building. C++ is already quite the challenge to learn, I was not in the mood to learn a new syntax just for the sake of building my simple C++ tutorials—at least not yet. For now some basic g++ commands suffice.

• Kate has the basics and it works well; its backend is used in KWrite, Kile and KDevelop, so it’s solid for text editing, that’s for sure. When I was venturing through KDE Web stuff, I used Kate, Nano and Atom, but mostly Kate.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 overview | The best! …until OpenMandriva does better

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 and some of the applications pre-installed.

=> ↺ OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 Introduces Desktop Presets, AArch64 Support, and More

• OpenMandriva Lx is an interesting Linux-based distribution which is also inspired and forked from Mandriva Linux, and offers a host of open-source software to complement the whole package.

• The OpenMandriva Association and the community are behind the development and maintenance of OpenMandriva Lx.

• Recently, they have announced the availability of the latest stable release – OpenMandriva Lx 4.2. This release includes updated bundled applications, various improvements and quality of life changes.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Slackware 15.0 alpha1

• Hold the press! There’s good news on Slackware development front. Slackware 14.2, the last stable release, saw the light on 30 June 2016. Since then, it has received many security patches but nothing has changed functionally and although 14.2 is super stable, it is also getting stale, in particular its default KDE desktop. In all that time since the release of Slackware 14.2, the distro has been heavily worked on, and the slackware-current development release is a joy to work with, containing the latest tools and desktop environments.

• The frequent and sometimes intrusive updates to -current are keeping the less knowledgeable Slackware users at bay, they prefer 14.2 since that requires minimal maintenance and won’t break after a careless upgrade.

=> ↺ Slackware 15.0 Alpha 1

• It’s been a long wait but Patrick has just called the current branch as Alpha 1 as the mass rebuilt due to glibc 2.33 has been done in the weekend. In this massive update, more than 1500 packages were rebuilt against latest glibc 2.33 to make sure it doesn’t have any regressions. Please note that the new glibc was just released in February 2021, so it’s very new. Good news is that based on most users who have just upgraded, the rebuilt works just fine as expected. I personally have upgraded to the latest version on both my desktop and laptop and it worked just fine. It just takes time to complete the upgrade and remove the .new or merge it with your existing configurations.

• So what’s next? Well it’s definitely working towards more bug fixing and making sure there are no regressions on the default installation of Slackware 15.0. You can help by downloading the latest ISO here and install it on your machine, either via VM or in bare metal and report it to the LQ where Patrick and most of the dev team are there to monitor.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Bringing Red Hat Resilient Storage to the public cloud

• The Resilient Storage Add-On lets users access the same storage device to each server in a group. The Add-On includes the Global File System 2 (GFS2) to support concurrent access, a cluster-wide locking mechanism to arbitrate storage access, a POSIX-compliant file system across 16 nodes, and Clustered Samba or Common Internet File System for Windows environments.

• Red Hat offers GFS2 as part of our High Availability Add-On because it provides the capabilities needed for cluster members to access the same block device concurrently. GFS2 is a true 64-bit shared namespace hybrid cloud cluster filesystem with very-close-to-POSIX semantics and full cluster coherency. A lot of cluster scenarios require that sort of thing.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2020

• Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Going Backwards

• Don’t use this. As they say on YouTube, this script is for educational purposes only. There’s probably a thousand ways to make this more elegantly. Indeed I tried a suggestion on AskUbuntu which didn’t work at all.

• All this does is check every package to see where it originated, and if it came from proposed, add it to a list of packages to be downgraded. That list is a shell script. Run that, and it downgrades the packages. There were a couple of tweaks I had to do to the resulting script. Specifically remove any mentions of kernel 5.10, and any other packages which were new in proposed and thus didn’t have a version to downgrade to.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 670

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 670 for the week of February 7 – 13, 2021.

=> ↺ Design and Web team summary – 15 February 2021

• The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Pine64 unveils Quartz64 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3566 SoC

• We may just have written about Geniatech RK3566/RK3568 development board, but as expected, Pine64 has now unveiled more details about Quartz64 SBC powered by Rockchip RK3566 SBC.

• As we’ll see below, the design is very similar to RK3399 based RockPro64, but the new model adds a native SATA 3.0 port, an integrated battery charging circuitry, an ePD port for e-Ink displays, and supports more memory with up to 8GB LPDDR4 RAM.

=> ↺ Elkhart Lake spins into COM Express, SMARC, and Qseven modules

• Avnet’s “MSC C6C-EL” Type 6, “MSC SM2S-EL” SMARC, and “MSC Q7-EL” Qseven modules run Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s Elkhart Lake Atom x6000 SoCs and support triple independent displays and up to 256GB flash.

• In the transition from MSC Embedded to Avnet Integrated, we fell off the company’s PR list –- our last MSC post was for the 9th Gen Coffee Lake MSC HCC-CFLS COM-HPC module in Mar. 3, 2020. We now see that Avnet Integrated has announced Intel Elkhart Lake based MSC SM2S-EL SMARC 2.1 and MSC C6C-EL COM Express Type 6 modules last October and December, respectively. The Avnet subsidiary also posted a product page, but not an announcement, for a Qseven based MSC Q7-EL module built around the same Atom x6000 processors.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Check beer stock with Keg Punk on Raspberry Pi

=> ↺ February Update: Show and Tell

• In this month’s update we’re going to take a close look at the Quartz64 model-A, showcase headway made on the PinePhone keyboard, discuss our first RISC-V single board computer and introduce plans for making LoRaWAN a staple of the PINE64 ecosystem.

=> ↺ Arduino Blog » Say hi to HuggieBot 2.0, a robot that knows when to hug and when to let go

• Do you need a hug? Are friends and family not around? As seen here, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and ETH Zürich may have just the solution in the form of HuggieBot 2.0.

• Based on a previous robotic system created by one of the paper’s co-authors Alexis E. Block, HuggieBot 2.0 robot uses computer vision to determine when a participant is approaching for an embrace, and wraps its 6-DOF JACO arms around them when in position.

=> ↺ EBBR on EspressoBin – Marcin Juszkiewicz

• Yeah, right. But world is not so nice and there are many cheap SBC on market which are not SBBR compliant and probably never will. And with small amount of work they can do EBBR (Embedded Base Boot Requirements).

=> ↺ Review: Android 10 on the Nintendo Switch is just as messy and awesome as it sounds – GSMArena.com news

• It will hardly come as a surprise that us geek folk over at GSMArena love the Nintendo Switch. Less surprising still is the fact that we love Android. Put the two together, sprinkle-in a hefty dose of tinkering and you get a janky “fusion” recipe that is just hard to pass by. Running LineageOS on Nintendo’s amazingly popular handheld/home console is actually nothing new. A bunch of amazing people who refer to themselves as the switchroot group have been working hard on getting alternative platforms running on exploitable Nintendo Switch units, including Ubuntu, forks of LineageOS, originating from the Nvidia Shield TV branches of Android. I have personally been running their older Android 8.1 Oreo, LineageOS 15.1 build for a good few months now on my personal Switch, as a secondary OS and was delighted with the results.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 2020 Honda Africa Twin picks up Android Auto – Roadshow

=> ↺ Honda Africa Twin 1100′s software update brings Android Auto support | NewsBytes

=> ↺ India- Honda Africa Twin 1100′s software update brings Android Auto support | NewsBytes | MENAFN.COM

=> ↺ Do you have an Android TV? – Bestgamingpro

=> ↺ Google pushing AV1 support into Android TV 10 | What Hi-Fi?

=> ↺ Developers create method to install Android TV on Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K

=> ↺ Samsung Android 11 (One UI 3.0) update tracker: Devices received so far

=> ↺ Vivo X50 users receive FuntouchOS 11 update based on Android 11 – The Hindu BusinessLine

=> ↺ Vivo releases Android 11 update for X50 smartphone in India | NewsBytes

=> ↺ Reminder: Your Galaxy S10 series phone will get the Android 12 update – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android Gaming Headlines: Warcraft Mobile, Crash Bandicoot, Terraria Meltdown, and More – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ Improve Your Android Gaming Experience – GameSpace.com

=> ↺ Android users less likely to have annoying tendencies compared to iPhone users? | TechNave

=> ↺ OnePlus Nord N100 and N10 5G join the Android Enterprise Recommended initiative – Gizmochina

=> ↺ Best Android Smartwatches: Wear OS, Samsung, more – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Google’s new two-factor authentication prompt now has dark mode on Android – The Verge

=> ↺ PinePhone’s Default OS Revealed: Manjaro Linux ARM with Plasma Mobile UI

• After revealing earlier this month that there won’t be any Community Editions of the PinePhone in the near future, PINE64 shocked the Linux community today by unveiling the fact that they decided upon a default operating system and desktop environment for the popular Linux phone.

• I bet some of you might have guessed already, but PINE64 selected Manjaro Linux ARM as default operating system for the PinePhone, as well as KDE’s modern and mature Plasma Mobile UI as default graphical interface.

=> ↺ Future PinePhones will ship with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile (and other updates on the keyboard, modem firmware, and more)

• After shipping five different PinePhone Community Edition models, each with a different operating system and/or user interface pre-installed, Pine64 ended the Community Edition program this month. So what’s next?

• A few things: Pine64 has announced that future PinePhones will ship with Manjaro Linux and the KDE Plasma Mobile user interface pre-installed. If you already have a PinePhone and want to try out that combo yourself, you can find the latest beta builds at osdn.

• But users will still be able to boot other operating systems from a microSD card or install an alternate OS to the phone’s built-in eMMC storage. And Pine64 is looking into ways to continue supporting the developers of other smartphone Linux distributions financially, possibly by selling a set of $15 custom back covers and providing OS developers with $10 for each sale.

=> ↺ No Android Please – User Feedback – LinuxLinks

• Android is very relevant to the site’s remit given that it’s based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Hacking the git shell prompt

• Git comes with a very complicated shell function,, called __git_ps1, for interpolating Git information into your shell prompt.

=> ↺ All the C compilers that can produce working binaries on OpenBSD -current (that I know of)

• I recently added support for Nils Weller’s C compiler to oksh. It would be good for me to document which C compilers work on OpenBSD and any caveats that come with those compilers. The following table is accurate as of the time of writing, which corresponds to OpenBSD 6.9-beta.

• If you know of any additional C compilers not on this list, please let me know so they can be tested and added.

=> ↺ Unique and Ordered Containers in C++ – Linux Hint

• {6, 10, 2, 8, 4} is a set; {2, 4, 6, 8, 10} is a set of the same integers, arranged in ascending order. In Mathematics, a set has unique elements (distinct elements), and that is, no element occurs more than once. Furthermore, a multiset is a set, where any element can occur more than once. {6, 6, 10, 2, 2, 8, 4, 4, 4} is a multiset. {2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 10} is the same multiset, but with the elements arranged in ascending order. This article does not deal with multiset. It deals with the C++ data structure called, set.

• [...]

• A multiset is to a set, as a multimap is to a map. This means that there are maps with duplicate keys. An example of a multimap is {{‘a’,10}, {‘b’,20}, {‘b’,20}, {‘c’,30}, {‘c’,30}, {‘d’,30}, {‘e’,40}}. And as stated above, this article does not deal with multimap, rather, it deals with the C++ data structure called, map.

• In C++, a data structure is a structure with properties (data members) and methods (member functions). The data of the structure is a list; a set is a list; a map is a list of key/value pairs.

• This article discusses the basics of sets and maps in C++, and to better understand this article, the reader should have had a basic knowledge of C++.

=> ↺ Qt for MCUs 1.7 released

• The first Qt for MCUs release of 2021 is out! Download it to get the latest features and create ever lighter yet impressive-looking Qt applications for microcontroller-powered devices.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ 2021.07 Easy | Hard – Rakudo Weekly News

• Steve Roe expands on the “making the easy things easy and the hard things possible” meme, and explains how the Raku Programming Language “combines an approachable on-ramp for less experienced coders and it offers power developers the keys they need to open up and adapt underlying structures to fit specialised requirements”. Recommended reading (/r/rakulang comments)!

Python

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt GUI Builder – Linux Hint

• PyQt is a popular Python library used to implement graphical applications in Python more easily. This library comes with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) builder tool called Qt Designer. The GUI can be built quickly in Python using the drag-and-drop feature of this library, though this tool has no debugging facility like the standard IDE. This tutorial shows you how to implement the GUI using the Qt Designer class of PyQt.

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt QComboBox – Linux Hint

• A ComboBox is used to select one item from a list of items, much like the radio button. The QComboBox class of PyQt is used to create drop-down lists using Python script. It brings up a list of items for the user to select. The items of the ComboBox can be added, changed, and removed using the script. Multiple items can be selected like the CheckBox button from the list of items from the ComboBox then it is called ListBox. This tutorial shows you how to use QComboBox to create a drop-down list in Python.

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt QMessageBox – Linux Hint

• The message box is used in the GUI application to provide necessary information for the user or to ask the user to take actions based on the message. Four types of message boxes can be created for any GUI application, including the informational message box, warning message box, critical message box, and question message box. The QMessageBox class of PyQt is used in Python to create a message box. This tutorial shows you how to use the QMessageBox class to create various message boxes.

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt QPushButton – Linux Hint

• Buttons are used in GUI applications to perform various operations based on the events generated by the user. The QPushButton class of PyQt is used in Python to create buttons required by the application. This class inherits the core functionalities of the QAbstractButton class. Text or icons can be used to caption the button. Buttons can be activated using a mouse and keyboard. Any button event, including the button being clicked or double-clicked, can be associated with a function or method to handle the event. This tutorial shows you how to create various types of buttons using the QPushButton class of PyQt in Python.

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt QTableWidget – Linux Hint

• A table is used to display data in a structured format, according to rows and columns. The QTableWidget class of PyQt can be used in Python to display data in tabular form for tasks related to research or data analysis. The content of the table can be generated from different types of storage, such as two-dimensional lists or tables, database tables, JSON files, etc. One or more tables can be created using QTableWidget in the PyQt application. This tutorial shows how to use QTableWidget to create various types of tables using Python script.

=> ↺ How to Use PyQt QTimer – Linux Hint

• The QTimer class of the PyQt library allows users to create a digital clock, time counter, progress bar, and more. This class is used to create a regular timer that sends out a signal when the timer fires and it inherits from the QObject class. The object of the QTimer class is created as a child of a widget. When the widget deletes, the timer object also deletes. The QTimer class provides a static function called singleShot() that can be used to call a function after a specific period. This tutorial shows you how to use the QTimer class to create time-related PyQt applications.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Opinion | “Libertad y Justicia Para Todos”: How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times

• A journey into the heart of a language we need now more than ever.

=> ↺ Opinion | Biko: And the Eyes of the World Are Watching Now

=> ↺ The Unknown Radicals of Black Photography

• When the Kamoinge Workshop began in 1963, taking its name from a Kikuyu word meaning “a group of people acting together,” a few Black photographers had already gained some prominence. Gordon Parks was probably chief among them. After starting as a portraitist in Chicago, he had gone on to work during the war years with the renowned photography program of the Farm Security Administration, best known for sending the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to document everyday rural life during the Depression; in postwar Harlem he went to work for Vogue as a fashion photographer before becoming a staffer at Life, the country’s most widely seen venue for photojournalism. There was also Roy DeCarava, a Harlem native, who had followed a less direct route: Having studied painting, he’d at first taken up photography as a way to gather visual stimuli for his canvases; he always used the camera with a rigorous sense for its purely artistic potential. His work had been included in the famous “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, and with Langston Hughes he’d published the collaborative book The Sweet Flypaper of Life the same year. The grand old man, James Van Der Zee, the portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance, was at this time almost forgotten but on the verge of being rediscovered.

=> ↺ Tech Fast for Lent

• As we approach the Lenten season, you might wonder what to give up in this time of reflection. Popular items include caffeine, meat, sugar, television, and alcohol, among others. For some, social media has become an addiction (or, at a minimum, an ineffective use of time). This leads many people to do a tech fast for Lent and give up some forms of technology.

=> ↺ Idiocy of not asking for word count

• I recently pointed out, from a different, much more serious angle that the advent of digital technologies has been so instantaneous that the human species has not even started to evolve to a stage that really understands what to do with them. A daily reminder of this reality is our continued usage of computers as glorified medieval printing presses. This post is about one of the most annoying proofs of that attitude, one that plagues contracts, terms of services, and almost every other important document that influences our lives.

• Several times a year, my work includes writing proposals that answer some public call for projects. Almost every time I do this, I have to comply with formatting requirements that come straight from the pre-Gutenberg era. They were dumb the first time I publicly denounced them, more than ten years ago (slides here), and they are even dumber now.

• And I keep fighting against something I have been dreaming about for more than ten years now.

Education

=> ↺ Opinion | What’s Really Wrong With—and How to Fix—Our Broken Education System

• Change the goal of schooling and watch the good unfold.

=> ↺ Karen Lewis Built a Proudly Militant Movement for Public Education

• Karen GJ Lewis saw the future of public education. At the heart of her vision was a radical faith that fully funded public schools could prepare children to meet every social, economic, and democratic challenge of the 21st century.

Hardware

=> ↺ ENIAC Day: 75th Anniversary of ENIAC Mini-Symposium

• Mini-symposium to celebrate the 75th anniversary of ENIAC and the birth of general-purpose computing. Automated computation has revolutionized the way we live, work, play, and connect. Join us on this anniversary to see where it started, celebrate how far we’ve come, and see visions of the bright future that is still ahead.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ ‘More Challenging This Year Than Last’: UN Envoy Warns Global Food Crisis Getting Worse, Not Better

• “We need to look at how we as human beings manage the planet,” says Agnes Kalibata, who is leading efforts to convene a food systems summit.

=> ↺ Lancet Report: 40% of U.S. COVID Deaths Were Preventable. The Country Needs Universal Healthcare Now

• As the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 approaches half a million, a new report says nearly 40% of the deaths were avoidable. By comparing the pandemic in the U.S. to other high-income nations, the medical journal The Lancet found significant gaps in former President Donald Trump’s “inept and insufficient” response to COVID-19, as well as decades of destructive public policy decisions. One of the report’s recommendations is reforming the system to a single-payer model like Medicare for All, which President Joe Biden has so far rejected in favor of bolstering the Affordable Care Act. “The Affordable Care Act still left millions of people — 29 million people — without healthcare insurance coverage,” says Dr. Mary Bassett, one of the authors of The Lancet report. “Single payer would address that.”

=> ↺ India’s arrest of activist tied to Greta Thunberg’s movement sparks outrage

• Thunberg had shared a “toolkit” or an action plan on Twitter that listed ways to help Indian farmers, who have been protesting agricultural reforms here they fear will ruin their livelihoods.

• Over the weekend, police brought Disha Ravi, a leader of the Indian arm of Thunberg’s climate crisis-related Fridays for Future movement, to the capital from her home in the southern city of Bengaluru to question her. Thunberg said she had no comment on the detention of Ravi.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Review of Five popular Hyperledger DLTs- Fabric, Besu, Sawtooth, Iroha and Indy

• As companies are catching up in adopting blockchain technology, the choice of a private blockchain platform becomes very vital. Hyperledger, whose open source projects support/power more enterprise blockchain use cases than others, is currently leading the race of private Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) implementation. Working from the assumption that you know how blockchain works and what is the design philosophy behind Hyperledger’s ecosystem, in this article we will briefly review five active Hyperledger DLTs. In addition to DLTs discussed in this article, Hyperledger ecosystem has more supporting tools and libraries that I will cover in more detail in my future articles.

• This article mainly targets those who are relatively new to Hyperledger. This article would be a great resource for those interested in providing blockchain solution architect services and doing blockchain enterprise consulting and development. The materials included in this article will help you understand Hyperledger DLTs as a whole and use its high-level overview as a guideline for making the best of each Hyperledger project.

Security

=> ↺ Bluetooth Overlay Skimmer That Blocks Chip

• As a total sucker for anything skimming-related, I was interested to hear from a reader working security for a retail chain in the United States who recently found Bluetooth-enabled skimming devices placed over top of payment card terminals at several stores. Interestingly, these skimmers interfered with the terminal’s ability to read chip-based cards, forcing customers to swipe the stripe instead.

=> ↺ Security updates for Monday

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (busybox, linux-4.19, openvswitch, subversion, unbound1.9, and xterm), Fedora (audacity, community-mysql, kernel, libzypp, mysql-connector-odbc, python-django, python3.10, and zypper), openSUSE (librepo, openvswitch, subversion, and wpa_supplicant), Red Hat (subversion:1.10), SUSE (kernel, openvswitch, perl-File-Path, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (postgresql-12).

=> ↺ Josh Bressers: The Titanic of security

• I listen to a lot of podcasts. A lot of podcasts. I was listening to the Dave and Gunnar Show podcast episode 212 with guest David A. Wheeler. The Titanic was used as an example of changing process after a security incident. This opened up a flood of thoughts to me, but not for the reasons intended in the conversation. The point of the suggestion was the Titanic sinking created changes to international requirements to help avoid a similar disaster next time, and we should be viewing SolarWinds in a similar way. The idea being we should use the SolarWinds event to drive meaningful change to make security better. Why no change will come of this is a different conversation: TL;DR it’s because nobody important died from SolarWinds, the Titanic killed a lot of important people. But I think this is an interesting way to talk about how we tend to deal with problems in software and how we deal with them in real life.

• [...]

• But the point is if you run this tool and look at the output, you are going to learn new things and have a different understanding for what you’re doing. It will help shape your future work and ideas.

• And the absolute most important thing you can do once you start this journey is to talk about it. When you do something that works, tell the rest of us. When you do something that doesn’t work, tell the rest of us. We have enough talking heads giving out unrealistic advice. I want advice from people doing the work. I don’t need to hear what the guy with an expensive suit thinks. He’s the reason we’re in this mess.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Parler Back Online After Getting Boot From Amazon Over [Insurrection]

• Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit pulled Parler’s internet service after users planned and supported the riot on the website. Amazon Web Services said Parler failed to follow rules to remove content that promoted violence after previously receiving multiple warnings about its lack of effective control.

• Cloud hosting company SkySilk Inc., which is based in Los Angeles, said it’s supporting Parler.

=> ↺ Parler announces official relaunch, says it is back online

• Parler was suspended from Amazon’s web hosting services and from Apple’s App Store after the [insurrection], when it was found to be full of discussions by users about invading the Capitol.

• Amazon and Apple did give Parler the chance to change its content moderation policy, as it had few rules of what could be published on the platform. Instead of changing, Parler has moved to a place where it says it can restart without restrictions.

=> ↺ Parler relaunches under new CEO after free-speech site was deplatformed amid Capitol [insurrection]

• Mark Meckler is serving as interim CEO of Parler after its previous top executive was fired by the social media platform, which has been favored by conservatives.

=> ↺ Social media app Parler crawls back online on ‘independent technology’

• Parler, a social media service popular with American right-wing users that virtually vanished after the U.S. Capitol [isurrection], re-launched on Monday and said its new platform was built on “sustainable, independent technology.”

• In a statement announcing the relaunch, Parler also said it had appointed Mark Meckler as its interim Chief Executive, replacing John Matze who was fired by the board this month.

• Parler went dark after being cut off by major service providers that accused the app of failing to police violent content related to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol by followers of then-US President Donald Trump.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ ‘We Shall Not Surrender’: Myanmar Rises Up Against the Junta

• Yangon—After five years of democratically elected governance, the people of Myanmar are not ready return to military dictatorship. Despite a curfew and martial law, hundreds of thousands of protesters are filling streets across the Southeast Asian country. From the largest city, Yangon, to the delta, mountains, and coasts, people from all backgrounds are shouting “Let the military fall!” and waving the three-finger Hunger Games salute that has become a symbol of resistance across Southeast Asia.

=> ↺ Expose the Insurrection Financiers

• Raskin’s trial team exposed a great deal of truth as they methodically made the case that Trump was “singularly responsible” for inciting the riot at the Capitol. At the same time, they laid out ample evidence that the assault was entirely predictable based on the former president’s track record of publicly egging on violent supporters.

• As Raskin pointed out in Day 3 of the trial, Trump had “road tested” his tactics for inflaming mobs at his campaign rallies and through Twitter. Social media traffic leading up to January 6 made clear that dangerous extremist groups were planning a violent attack in the nation’s capital.

=> ↺ Justice Reform Coalition Urges Biden to Pardon All Non-Violent Marijuana Convictions

• “It is past time for the harm to stop.”

=> ↺ Opinion | The Gulf War 30 Years Ago: Memories From a Shelter in Baghdad

• On February 13, 1991, a horrific massacre took place in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The U.S. coalition bombed a shelter and killed more than 400 people.

=> ↺ Opinion | Is Biden Committing Diplomatic Suicide Over the Iran Nuclear Agreement?

• American neocons and hawks, including those inside his own administration, appear to be flexing their muscles to kill Biden’s commitment to diplomacy at birth, and his own hawkish foreign policy views make him dangerously susceptible to their arguments. 

=> ↺ Biden Is Adopting a Militaristic Approach to the Far East

• Since taking office on January 20, President Biden has taken several steps on foreign policy that mark a sharp break from the global posture of the Trump administration. On February 4 at the State Department, Biden announced the end of US participation in Saudi Arabia’s offensive war in Yemen, drawing praise from Senator Bernie Sanders and raising hopes that he might end that nightmare altogether.

=> ↺ ‘We Must Get to the Truth’: Pelosi Announces Far-Reaching Probe Into Insurrection Incited by Trump

• “To protect our security, our next step will be to establish an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission,” said House Speaker.

=> ↺ DARPA’s New Space Program Stirs Worldwide Concern

• On the same day that Joe Biden obtained the Electoral College majority needed to become president of the United States, a metallic asteroid roughly half the size of New York City made its closest approach to earth. Far from indulging in apocalyptic visions of cosmic destruction, mining company executives like Bob Goldstein of US Nuclear Corp. were seeing dollar signs. Somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 quadrillion of them in fact.

=> ↺ “Shame on You, New York Times!” Scientists Speak Out Media Disinformation China

• ATexas teenager has been forced to use her entire college savings to prevent her single mother from being evicted after she lost her job amid a raging pandemic. Alondra Carmona of Houston made the appeal on crowdfunding site GoFundMe, noting that she had been accepted into prestigious New York university Barnard College, but that she used the money she had saved for tuition in order to save her mother.

=> ↺ Is America’s Soul Beyond Redemption?

• In that regard, the ensuing decades have filled a void in my education. I long ago concluded that Dr. King was then offering the essential interpretive key to understanding our contemporary American dilemma. The predicament in which we find ourselves today stems from our reluctance to admit to the crippling interaction among the components of the giant triplets he described in that speech. True, racism, extreme materialism, and militarism each deserve—and separately sometimes receive—condemnation. But it’s the way that the three of them sustain one another that accounts for our nation’s present parlous condition.

Environment

=> ↺ These celebrities cause 10,000 times more carbon emissions from flying than the average person

• The jet-setting habits of Bill Gates and Paris Hilton mean that they produce an astonishing 10,000 times more carbon emissions from flying than the average person. This was the conclusion of my research mining their social media accounts (tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts) as well as those of a number of other celebrities for clues as to where they were in the world over the course of 2017 and how they got there. As such, this estimate is conservative – they may well have taken more flights and not volunteered the information to their millions of followers.

Energy

=> ↺ Jaguar will be an all-electric car brand from 2025

• JLR’s plans are ambitious, but the automaker has previously been slow to embrace electrification. It’s only fully electric car to date is the Jaguar I-Pace SUV, which Bloomberg notes has struggled to make inroads against more established electric carmakers. Even then, the car is built by a contractor, rather than being produced by JLR in-house. The company had to pay a £35 million (around $48.7 million) fine in the EU for missing emissions targets last year.

=> ↺ Jaguar’s Electric Shift May Leave U.K. Plant With No Car to Make

• Jaguar Land Rover laid out plans to electrify its lineup under a new chief executive officer, with its namesake luxury-car brand ditching combustion engines just four years from now.

• JLR, owned by India’s Tata Motors Ltd., will invest about 2.5 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) a year into electrification and related technologies, the company said Monday. The Land Rover line will get its first fully electric model in 2024, and by the following year, all Jaguars will be entirely powered by batteries.

=> ↺ Fossil fuel subsidies amount to hundreds of billions of dollars a year – here’s how to get rid of them

• iAny feasible pathway out of the climate crisis involves dramatically lowering our consumption of fossil fuels. It’s astonishing, then, that many countries not only don’t reflect the damage caused by burning fossil fuels in the taxes imposed on them, but actively subsidise their extraction and use. Despite an agreement at the G20 in 2009 to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, the US, China and Russia alone spent US$909 billion (£656 billion) on them in 2017, the most recent year available – that’s nearly 40% more than in 2009.

• Governments can subsidise the fossil fuel production through transferring funds directly to companies, assuming some of their risk or selectively reducing their taxes. They can undercharge them for using goods or assets supplied by the state too – by letting oil companies drill on public land without paying royalties, for example. Governments can alternatively provide consumer subsidies by lowering taxes on fuel or electricity or setting their prices.

• Subsidies exist when fossil fuel prices fail to reflect their true costs, including how much pollution they cause. This encourages us to use more of them. Emissions from burning fossil fuels were responsible for one in five premature deaths in 2018, but the IMF has estimated that raising the price of fossil fuels to fully reflect their wider social costs could cut this number in half.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The Extinction Crisis: Coming to a Dinner Table Near You?

Finance

=> ↺ Can We Exit This Road to Ruin?

• Catabolic capitalism isn’t your grandparents’ capitalism. Back then, industrial capitalism profited primarily from growth, fueled by abundant fossil energy. But the centuries of cheap energy and an ever-expanding economic pie are over; and so are the rising living standards they generated. Even the recent decades of stagnation, debt-driven bubbles, and government bailouts are reaching their limit. Capitalism’s future is becoming catabolic.

• In biology, catabolism is a destructive metabolic process that causes a living thing to cannibalize itself.[1] Catabolic capitalism is an energy depleted, self-cannibalizing economy whose insatiable hunger for profit can only be fed by breaking down the society that sustains it.[2] As it rampages down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another, catabolic capitalism gathers a horde of raging tribalists around it. Flag-waving, gun-toting, white Christian tribalists glorify the mayhem and violence catabolic capitalism thrives on. These racist, anti-government holy warriors are becoming catabolic capitalism’s fanatic foot soldiers.

=> ↺ ‘Biggest Risk’ for Democrats on Minimum Wage, Says Top Sanders Aide, Is Not Raising It to $15

• With the White House and legislative branch under their control, says Warren Gunnels, Democrats “must win” fight on behalf of working people.

=> ↺ The Rich and Those Who Serve Them, Then and Now

• “It just so happens that we might have built the perfect product for Covid,” Subramanian recently told Vice World News.

• Her new company, founded by Uber founder Garrett Camp, has launched a luxury “semi-private jet” experience that offers safe and comfy virus-free flights. Seats in Aero’s suede-walled jets sit six feet apart in single file. “Hand-stitched Italian leather seats” aboard Aero’s “sleek black planes” combine with “sophisticated art lighting” to create a “renaissance of luxury travel.”

=> ↺ #ReleaseDishaRavi: Global Outrage After India Arrests Climate Activist Over Farmer Protest Toolkit Shared by Greta Thunberg

• Ravi’s arrest “is an unprecedented attack on democracy,” said Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. “Supporting our farmers is not a crime.”

=> ↺ Opinion | A $15 Minimum Wage Would Be Life-Changing for Workers and Save the US Billions per Year

• Beyond the working families who will get a raise, every single American taxpayer has a stake in raising the minimum wage.

=> ↺ Why Amazon Is Fighting So Hard to Stop Warehouse Workers From Unionizing

• Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the RWDSU, described to me in an interview the shocking details of what he calls “the most aggressive anti-union effort I’ve ever seen,” aimed at the 5,800-strong workforce. “They are doing everything they possibly can,” he said. The company has been “bombarding people with propaganda throughout the warehouse. There are signs and banners and posters everywhere, even in the bathroom stalls.”

• According to Appelbaum, the company is also texting its workers throughout the course of the day urging a “no” vote and pulling people into “captive-audience” meetings. Unsurprisingly, Amazon is resorting to the most commonly told lie about unions: that it will cost workers more money to be in a union than not. One poster pasted on the wall of the warehouse claims, “you already know the union would charge you almost $500 a year in dues.” But Alabama is a “right-to-work” state where workers cannot be compelled to join a union if they are hired into a union shop, nor can they be required to pay dues.

=> ↺ The Centers of Global Capitalism Are Migrating Away From the U.S., Europe and Japan

• However, new centers of capitalism have emerged and grown especially quickly over the last half-century. China, India, and Brazil are leading examples where jobs, real wages, consumption, profits, and investments are growing. Their size and global impact not only make them the new centers of capitalism but also require attaching the adjective “old” to capitalism’s earlier set of centers.

• The blunt truth of modern economic development is this: capitalism is leaving its old centers and relocating to its new centers. About this leaving we can and should borrow the phrase: this changes everything.

=> ↺ Union Workers In Ohio Try To Stop GE Lighting, Walmart From Shipping Their Jobs To China

• General Electric Lighting-Savant notified 81 workers at their plant in Bucyrus, Ohio that they would be laid off and production would move to China because of the high cost of producing LED light bulbs.In response to the planned layoffs, announced as of the first week of January, workers and their union are pushing to save those jobs because they fear job cuts will lead to the closure of the plant that has been open since 1942.If shut down, that would leave 200 people unemployed in a city of less than 12,000 people.According to Bucyrus Mayor Jeff Reser, the offshoring of jobs would directly result in a loss of about $100,000 in tax revenue for the city’s budget. It would also mean a substantial loss of local revenue to area businesses. IUE-CWA Local 84704, which is a chapter of the industrial division of the Communication Workers of America within AFL-CIO, proposed a joint-labor management study between the union and GE Lighting Savant on what can be done to save as many jobs as possible.The Ohio AFL-CIO started a petition to rally support from the community to the CEOs of General Electric, Savant, and Walmart, which exclusively purchases and sells the light bulbs produced at the plant. Steve Pifer, vice president of the union, has worked at the plant for 11 years. He said the tariffs enacted by former President Donald Trump against China, which are still in place, have increased the cost of materials for the light bulbs. Tariffs made it impossible to compete on costs with finished products from China.

• “We need to stop losing jobs. We need our government to step up. If you’re going to add tariffs, put it on a finished product and at least give us a chance. We’re fighting this whole battle with one arm tied behind our back,” Pifer declared. “We’ve already tried doing things to help get the cost of it down,” Pifer added. “At the end of the day, what it amounts to is what the cost of materials are. You can take all the labor costs out of it, and they can’t make the bulb as cheap as they can buy it from China.”

=> ↺ Young [attacker] tricks gambling site to pay out €600k before being caught

• A man in his early twenties who managed to exploit a vulnerability in an online game operated by the state-owned gambling monopoly Veikkaus managed to win hundreds of thousands of euros but was only able to keep his winnings for a short while.

• On Monday he was sentenced to a one-year and eight-month sentence for aggravated fraud by Pirkanmaa District Court. Meanwhile, his female accomplice received a six-month suspended sentence for an aggravated money laundering charge.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Trump: Turning Losing Into Winning

• It’s not that the Senate trial wasn’t riveting at times. Even so, the highlight of Thursday’s prosecution wasn’t all the video and tweets drawing a line from Trump to the attack on the Capitol. It was when Representative DeGette compared Trump to the Nazi who murdered the anti-fascist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. That is truth, no matter what the academics will argue regarding what constitutes fascism and whether or not Trumpism is a fascist movement. When it came to the presentation of attacks on police, it’s clear the intent was to call out those Trumpists in the Senate who claimed to be for police, especially when it came to their brutal acts against non-whites and anti-racist protesters. The point became clear in this testimony: to the Trumpists, the leader is the nation. All others are pretenders to the throne they have enshrined.

• In comments outside the chambers reported by the Washington Post, Schoen, a slimy and angry individual and one of the lawyers for Trump, once again decried the prosecution, telling the press that it was delaying something they call healing. If the concept of healing applied to politics—which it really doesn’t—it should not be up to those who turned a blind eye to the acts and actors that created the wound to determine the terms of that healing. We don’t need healing as much as we could use some justice. In the matter of Donald Trump, that justice only begins when he is inside a prison cell. I am not holding my breath.

=> ↺ Mapping the Trump Meridian in Texas

• President Donald Trump’s performance along the west and South Texas border in 2020 was nothing short of remarkable. Just five years after he’d called Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists, the enthusiasm of Latino voters for the 45th president dashed Democratic dreams of a blue Texas, resulting in voting shifts in Texas border counties unseen in over a century. The Democratic Party and its media sycophants blamed the lackluster showing on Covid-19, the “defund the police” backlash, and the specter of socialism.

=> ↺ What Happened to the Anarchist Century?

=> ↺ The Anarchist Century: A Response to Gabriel Kuhn

=> ↺ Europe Will Redefine Itself Despite Political Shift in the US

• The four years of Donald Trump were rife with tension and strife between the US and Europe – in fact, between the US and its traditional allies, including Mexico and Canada. However, the strain in the US-EU relationship long preceded Trump’s presidency.

• Trump’s eccentric personal style – and often blunt rhetoric and action – was an indicator to Europe that the continent urgently needed to create its own leadership alternatives to Washington. Following World War II, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact in 1991, the US became the uncontested leader of the West and, eventually, the globe’s only superpower. These dynamics are now experiencing an unparalleled influx.

=> ↺ Opinion | Out of the Ashes of Trump, Will the US Finally Bury Reaganism?

• Ronald Reagan convinced the nation that big government was the problem. It was rubbish.

=> ↺ Q

=> ↺ After Trump Acquittal by GOP, Sunrise Movement Says ‘Time Is Now to Abolish the Filibuster’

• “If Democrats don’t deliver in this moment, future Presidents Days will recognize Trump’s second term.”

=> ↺ The Verdict

• The House impeachment managers nailed him, though they could have been a tad less supportive of Mike Pence and the men and women in blue, and who knows what they were up to or why when, after winning the right to call witnesses, they decided not to call any.

• Was it the “centrist” Senate leadership? The White House? Was it their liberalism (liberals, Robert Frost pointed out, are too reasonable to take their own side in an argument or debate)? Perhaps this will become clear in time.

=> ↺ No Compromising with the GOP Cult

• We either have a future based on lies, violence, and authoritarianism – or on unyielding truth, unshakeable civility, and democracy. Biden and the Democrats must fight for the latter. And we must make them.

=> ↺ Impeachment Was Only the Beginning

• The second impeachment of Donald Trump was an improvement, but only a partial and halting one, over the first impeachment. When he was impeached in 2020 for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power in the Ukrainegate affair, the dividing line was almost entirely partisan. All Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected impeachment while all but three Democrats voted to impeach. The Senate was also divided on partisan lines, with Mitt Romney the only one to break ranks as the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party.

=> ↺ Poll Shows Nearly 60% in US Believe Senate Should Have Convicted Trump

• Over three-quarters believe senators voted based on partisan politics, compared with 23% who think they voted based on the facts.

=> ↺ Conservative Lawyer Bruce Fein: Trump’s Acquittal Gives Future Presidents License to Break the Law

• As the Senate votes to acquit former President Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we speak with constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein, who says the insurrection was not just an attack on the U.S. Capitol, but “an effort, basically, to destroy the rule of law and the Constitution itself.” Fein says failure to convict Trump will give license to future presidents to break the law. “It really is quite frightening that now we have a precedent that says a president has the right to do anything he wants, that he wishes to, without sanction,” he tells Democracy Now! “That is no longer the rule of law.”

=> ↺ ‘Bring On the Evidence. Bring On the Witnesses’: After GOP Refuses to Convict, Criminal Prosecution of Trump Demanded

• “Trump incited an insurrection to overthrow the elected government of the United States. 43 senators stood with him. It does not end here.”

=> ↺ Trump Acquitted in Senate Impeachment Trial After Lawmakers Refuse to Call Witnesses

• The Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection, but the vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to find the former president guilty. Seven Republicans voted with Democrats to convict, making it the most bipartisan impeachment trial verdict ever. House impeachment managers did not include any witnesses, after Republicans threatened to prolong the trial for weeks or even months and grind other congressional business to a halt if witnesses were called to testify. Instead, a single statement by Congressmember Jaime Herrera Beutler was entered into the record before the final vote on conviction. “This was about choosing country over Donald Trump, and 43 Republican members chose Trump,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote.

=> ↺ Remembering James Ridgeway

• We lost a great investigative journalist and progressive advocate on Saturday at the age of 84. James Ridgeway spent six decades exposing corporate crime, proposing environmental solutions, and opposing solitary confinement, among many other progressive causes.

• Ridgeway first came to national attention for a 1964 article in The New Republic exposing the carnage on American highways due to unsafe cars using a then unknown Ralph Nader as his source. His next big scoop was exposing that General Motors had hired detectives to dig up dirt to discredit the now famous Nader, which blew up into a national scandal for GM.

• Ridgeway was one of the first authors to emphasize the corporate roots of the environmental crisis in his 1970 book, The Politics of Ecology. He repeatedly exposed global corporate resource imperialism in the The Last Play (1973), Who Owns the Earth? (1980), and It’s All for Sale (2004).

• In New Energy (1975) and Energy-Efficient Community Planning (1979), he proposed a community-controlled national public energy system to deal with the energy crises of the 1970s from the viewpoint of replacing fossil and nuclear fuels with clean renewable energy. He always made himself available to activists as we advocated for this model of energy democracy, from the anti-nuclear/safe energy movement in the 1970s to our presidential campaign in 2020.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Chris Hedges: Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die

• Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration.  He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School.  He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.

=> ↺ Two Arrests, Two Outcomes Tell a Tale of Xi Jinping’s China

• Since Mr. Xi came to command, it has been virtually wiped out. Journalists with an independent bent have been silenced. Lawyers are jailed. Officials, even retired ones, know to keep their mouth shut. Businesspeople tread carefully to avoid crossing the government.

• China has always been plagued with human rights violations, said Chen Min, a veteran journalist who is known by his pen name, Xiao Shu. The difference, he said, is that civil society once had some space to push back.

• “Now there’s neither civil society nor space,” he said. “These are two different eras.”

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Same as the Old Boss, Julian Assange Edition

• As Trump’s presidency drew to an end, some activists held out hope that he’d pardon political prisoner Julian Assange, whose incarceration at the hands of the Swedish, British, and US governments has, according to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, gone on for more than a decade now (between British prisons and de facto house arrest in Ecuador’s London embassy). No dice. Trump handed out plenty of pardons to political cronies, but left Assange in stir.

• In January, British judge Vanessa Baraitser declined to extradite the founder of WikiLeaks to the US on trumped up (pun intended) espionage charges. Not because the charges are clearly nonsense, though they are. Nor because neither Assange’s person  or his alleged actions were subject to US jurisdiction, though they weren’t. She denied the extradition because she (probably correctly) considers Assange a suicide risk if he’s handed over.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ In Haiti, Protesters’ Anger Turns Towards the United States

• After five years of highly contentious rule, Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was scheduled to finally step down last week. However, his announcement that he would stay in office for (at least) one more year brought fresh impetus to nationwide protests that have continued almost unbroken since 2018. The protests have led to hundreds of deaths yet have drawn little attention in the West, largely because Moïse continues to be a loyal U.S. ally.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ How Kids Television Became the Most Heated Front in the Streaming Wars

• The world of kids TV has long been thought to be a peaceful one, a place where “Blue’s Clues,” “The Baby-Sitters’ Club,” “Phineas and Ferb” and “Rugrats” are left alone to ramble and play. As more consumers move to streaming-video services, however, kids properties are taking on new importance — and many major entertainment outlets, both traditional and upstart, are gearing for battle. “You can see that streamers are snapping up popular intellectual [sic] property [sic] and that studios are competing heavily for talent,” says Olivier Dumont, president of family brands for eOne, the large Hasbro-owned production company behind such kids series as “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”

Monopolies

=> ↺ Opinion | Big Pharma Must Share Their Vaccine Knowledge and Technology With the World—Now

• To stop the global pandemic, rich countries need to stop hoarding vaccines.

=> ↺ Why China’s Didi can succeed where Uber has struggled

• That Uber was willing to burn through so much cash, at least for a time, is a testament to the size of the prize. China boasts the world’s biggest ride-hailing market. According to its transport ministry, 21m trips were booked on ride-hailing platforms each day, on average, last October. That is double the figure in pre-pandemic America, when travel was safer. Until it sold its Chinese business, Uber received more orders in China than in any other country, including its home market. The gross transaction value of China’s ride-hailers reached 221bn yuan ($32bn) last year, up by more than half since 2017, reckons Frost and Sullivan, a consultancy.

Patents

=> ↺ The Time is Now: Opportunities to Advise the E.D. Va. or EPO as to Whether to Prohibit, Permit, or Require Listing an AI Algorithm as an Inventor

• Dr. Stephen Thaler created an artificial-intelligence algorithm – named Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) – that includes multiple neural networks (each trained in a given linguistic subspace) that are dynamically connected using controlled chaos. The AI included a novelty filter and foveator network to identify predicted novel sentiments having at least a target utility. Dr. Thaler filed patent applications on two technologies based on DABUS outputs around the globe. The only inventor that was listed was DABUS. The European Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office denied these applications, contending that a non-human inventor was impermissible.

• Dr. Thaler appealed both denials. Currently, the denial, and the issue of whether non-humans are allowed to be listed as inventors, is before Board of Appeals at the European Patent Office and before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

• The hearing date for the U.S. DABUS case (Thaler v. Iancu, et al, 1:20-cv-00903) is set for March 29, 2021. Thus, it is reasonably likely that amicus briefs submitted by mid-March will be considered. In Europe, the EPO (EP3564144)has until May 1, 2021 to submit comments. Thus, it is reasonably likely that third party observations submitted before that date will be considered.

=> ↺ No UK EPO exit; Next USPTO Director latest; New finance boosts NPEs; Foreign SEP owners take China validity hit; French delight for patent plaintiffs; and much more

• The UK will not leave the EPO despite plans to accede to the CPTPP and the seeming incompatibility between the organisations’ treatment of the grace period, government spokesperson tells IAM.

=> ↺ Draft Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2021 published; Bill in parliament to abolish tribunals such as IPAB

• The European patent office has published a document titled EPO Strategic Plan 2023 which aims to provide a clear roadmap for achieving a new vision for the EPO distributed over five goals. It outlines the actions and initiatives to be taken and the improvements required to deliver sustainability and excellence. The document may be accessed from the EPO’s official website or by clicking here.

=> ↺ Voluntis Announces Issuance of European Patent for Drug Dosing Support With Its Theraxium Digital Therapeutic Platform

• Voluntis (Paris:VTX) (Euronext Paris, Ticker: VTX – ISIN: FR0004183960), a leader in digital therapeutics, announced today the issuance of a new patent by the European Patent Office (EPO) for intelligent patient support in drug dosing applied in the field of diabetes for insulin titration support.

• Following the prescription of the drug and its companion digital therapeutic, the intelligent and adaptive algorithms developed by Voluntis will automatically recommend to a patient, day by day and according to the evolution of their monitoring data, a progressive increase of the dose to bring the patient into the target range as specified by their physician. Safety mechanisms are also present to decrease the dose if the situation requires it. Once the target range is reached, the dose will then remain stable as long as the patient’s follow-up data stays within the target range.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Anti-Piracy Group Doesn’t Have a Secret Tool to Unmask VPN Pirates

• After declaring victory over local torrent trackers, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance is now going after hardcore users who continue to pirate. The group previously suggested that not even those hiding behind a VPN are safe. Several people doubted this claim, which prompted the group to publish an explainer. It shows that there’s no secret tool to uncover VPN users.

=> ↺ Pirate TV Streaming App Mobdro Disappears, Users in Mourning

• For several years Mobdro has been delivering live TV and VOD content to vast numbers of mobile and set-top devices, making it one of the most-loved pirate streaming apps out there. However, for the past several days the app has been out of action, with current and historic domains all non-functional, leaving large volumes of fans worrying that this could be the end.

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