● 11.02.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 2/11/2021: Fedora Linux 35 Released and Solanum 3

Posted in News Roundup at 12:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ You’ll soon be able to easily run multiple Linux containers on Chromebooks

• I’ve been running Linux containers on Chromebooks since the feature first appeared in beta about 3 years ago and it has changed the way I use my Chromebook. With this feature, I was able to use a Chromebook for undergraduate Computer Science classes, for example. And I now use it for similar classes at the Masters level.

• [...]

• By choosing the extra containers option, you’ll be able to create or delete additional Linux containers, start or stop the VMs where the Linux instances are running, and more. As I read it, you should also be able to assign different colors to different Linux containers as well. So you could have different containers for Debian, Arch, or some other Linux distributions.

• This experimental, still-in-the-works feature will be disabled by default at first. To use it, you’ll need to enable the crostini-multi-container flag in chrome://flags. Note that the current code says the flag is called “crotini”. I assume that’s a typo, so I’ve corrected it above.

Server

=> ↺ China Has Already Reached Exascale – On Two Separate Systems

• Native CPU and accelerator architectures that have been in play on China’s previous large systems have been stepped up to make China first to exascale on two fronts.

• The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is set to unveil some striking news based on quantum simulation results on a forthcoming homegrown Sunway supercomputer.

• The news is notable not just for the calculations, but the possible architecture and sheer scale of the new machine. And of course, all of this is notable because the United States and China are in a global semiconductor arms race and that changes the nature of how we traditionally compare global supercomputing might. We have been contemplating China’s long road to datacenter compute independence, of which HPC is but one workload, and these are some big steps.

=> ↺ Nokia deploys SR Linux and data center switches for everyWAN for service expansion and capacity | MarketScreener

• Nokia today announced it is providing its SR Linux network operating system (NOS) and 7220 IXR data center switches to everyWAN, the Spanish operator that provides national and international IP transit and interconnection services between major data centers and internet peering points in Europe. The solution will enable everyWAN to expand its services and data center operations by improving network scalability, while helping operations objectives with more granular network visibility and NetOps automation.

=> ↺ Sara Assicurazioni: Transforming the Insurance Industry with Kubernetes | SUSE Communities

• “In SUSE Rancher we can standardize all our images and create a new container in a matter of seconds — it’s extremely easy.” Paolo Perrucci, Head of Infrastructure, Sara Assicurazioni.

=> ↺ What is a Homelab and Why Should You Have One?

• n case you have never hear the term, Homelab is the name given to a server (or multiple server setup) that resides locally in your home and where you host several applications and virtualized systems for testing and developing or for home and functional usage.

• This server can be a simple tower or small PC or a Raspberry Pi like device or a repurposed professional server that you can acquire from companies who discard them due to their age but are still usable.

• In my case, I have a small ITX case with a Core i5, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB of hard disk. This is a very modest machine but enough for my usage which is merely for home purposes.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE Telegram Client? Meet TOK! – Kockatoo Tube

=> ↺ Destination Linux 250: We’re Experiencing Some Ennuicastr

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an interview with the developer of Ennuicastr (“On we caster”) an open-source podcast, vodcast, interview multi-track recording tool. Then we’re going to discuss Samsung’s latest innovation powered by Linux and KDE Connect is now available for iPhone users. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• [...]

• [Tito] doesn’t seem to mention it in the video below, but we’re assuming the dock component of this project is just a 3D printed box with a connector sticking up for the GBA SP’s link cable port, since that’s where the TV-out modification outputs its video. Incidentally that means you don’t really need the dock itself, but it certainly looks cool.

• At the end of the video [Tito] goes over a few of the rough edges of the current build, including the rather lengthy pairing process to get the Joy-Cons talking to the Raspberry Pi. But ultimately, he says that not only does the system feel good in his hands, but playing those classic games on the big screen has been a nice change of pace.

=> ↺ Chromium is NOT free software. – Invidious

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 5.15 Released, Here Are the Top 3 New Features

• Linus Torvalds has announced the release of kernel 5.15. The release offers a huge plus in the form of a new NTFS driver, especially for cross-platform data exchange with other systems.

• Above all, Linux Kernel 5.15 is a significant milestone in that it’s also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.

=> ↺ folio-5.16

• “Add memory folios, a new type to represent either order-0 pages or the head page of a compound page. This should be enough infrastructure to support filesystems converting from pages to folios.

• The point of all this churn is to allow filesystems and the page cache to manage memory in larger chunks than PAGE_SIZE. The original plan was to use compound pages like THP does, but I ran into problems with some functions expecting only a head page while others expect the precise page containing a particular byte.

• The folio type allows a function to declare that it’s expecting only a head page. Almost incidentally, this allows us to remove various calls to VM_BUG_ON(PageTail(page)) and compound_head().

• This converts just parts of the core MM and the page cache. For 5.17, we intend to convert various filesystems (XFS and AFS are ready; other filesystems may make it) and also convert more of the MM and page cache to folios. For 5.18, multi-page folios should be ready.

• The multi-page folios offer some improvement to some workloads. The 80% win is real, but appears to be an artificial benchmark (postgres startup, which isn’t a serious workload). Real workloads (eg building the kernel, running postgres in a steady state, etc) seem to benefit between 0-10%. I haven’t heard of any performance losses as a result of this series. Nobody has done any serious performance tuning; I imagine that tweaking the readahead algorithm could provide some more interesting wins. There are also other places where we could choose to create large folios and currently do not, such as writes that are larger than PAGE_SIZE.

• I’d like to thank all my reviewers who’ve offered review/ack tags: Christoph Hellwig, David Howells, Jan Kara, Jeff Layton, Johannes Weiner, Kirill A. Shutemov, Michal Hocko, Mike Rapoport, Vlastimil Babka, William Kucharski, Yu Zhao and Zi Yan.

• I’d also like to thank those who gave feedback I incorporated but haven’t offered up review tags for this part of the series: Nick Piggin, Mel Gorman, Ming Lei, Darrick Wong, Ted Ts’o, John Hubbard, Hugh Dickins, and probably a few others who I forget”

=> ↺ Memory Folios Merged For Linux 5.16 – Phoronix

• The proposed memory “folios” functionality for Linux 5.16 is happening! This low-level change to the Linux memory management code was merged today for this next kernel.

• With memory folios not having landed for Linux 5.15 and lack of comment recently by Linus Torvalds on the matter, it wasn’t clear if he was going to take in this latest folios pull request. But to some surprise, right away today he pulled in the initial folios code for Linux 5.16.

=> ↺ Folios merged for 5.16 [LWN.net]

• The long-running and sometimes acrimonious discussion on the memory folio patch set has come to an end: the folio patches were the first thing pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.16 development cycle. Now the developers involved just have to do all of the other work identified as necessary to clean up the memory-management subsystem and isolate it from other parts of the kernel.

=> ↺ Linux 5.15 LTS release – Main Changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

• Released around two months ago, Linux 5.14 added support for Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer, merged the core scheduling functionality, removed the old IDE block drivers, improved support for Intel Alder Lake processors, and more.

• Linux 5.15 will be an LTS kernel getting long-term support for at least 2 years, and possibly more, if companies extensively use the new kernel and request a longer support period up to 6 years like for Linux 5.10 or Linux 5.4 for instance.

=> ↺ Linux 5.15 just arrived – and here’s what’s inside

• Linux 5.15 also addressed the introduction of -Werror — a move endorsed by Torvalds to force developers to fix bugs earlier. It was intended to be a new default behavior for kernel builds that treated all compiler and configuration “warnings” as “errors” that must be fixed. -Werror however was met with opposition from kernel developers and led to Torvalds partially backtracking on the effort.

=> ↺ Intel AMX Support Lands For Linux 5.16 – Phoronix

• After going through a number of rounds of patch revisions over the past year, Intel’s kernel-side changes for supporting Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) with next-gen Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors has landed for Linux 5.16!

• Intel was quick to land the initial AMX changes into the LLVM compiler and GCC compiler while getting the kernel-side bits squared away is what took more than one year but now in mainline, months ahead of Sapphire Rapids’ ramp in Q2.

=> ↺ Btrfs With Linux 5.16 Seeing More Performance Optimizations, NVMe ZNS – Phoronix

• The Btrfs file-system continues seeing new performance optimizations and other work, thanks in part to the renewed interest around the file-system with Fedora Workstation continuing to use it by default along with openSUSE and other Linux distributions.

• On the busy first day of the Linux 5.16 merge window the Btrfs changes were submitted by maitainer David Sterba of SUSE. There are performance improvements, some new feature work, and the usual assortment of fixes and code maintenance.

=> ↺ Linux 5.16 Networking Changes Are Quite Busy From New Drivers To Intel 100G Improvements – Phoronix

• Given the wide range of hardware running Linux and especially Linux being dominant in the data center, the networking changes each kernel cycle remain quite vibrant. Linux 5.16 is no exception with the main feature pull sent in on Monday for all the networking updates.

• One of the new drivers this cycle is the Realtek RTW89 WiFi driver for supporting the Realtek 8852AE 802.11ax adapters and future models.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Beelink U59 Review – Windows 11, Ubuntu on a Jasper Lake mini PC

Applications

=> ↺ Music Radar – music recognition application

• Shazam is an app that identifies multimedia. The program stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database. Shazam works by analyzing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of millions of songs. It generates a spectrogram (a time/frequency 2D graph of the sound, with amplitude at intersections) of the sound, and maps out the frequency peaks from it (which should match key points of the harmonics of voice or of certain instruments).

• Shazam can identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played either through the microphone of the device and also when you’re listening through your headphones. Unfortunately it’s proprietary software. As the software is developed by Apple it isn’t available for Linux. However, this doesn’t stop enterprising open source developers from making their own creations.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ 30 Nmap Examples

• This tutorial shows 30 Nmap usage examples, related to subjects which were explained in previous articles published at Linux Hint.

• Examples include from host discovery to vulnerability audit, network diagnostics and more. Most of them were produced in real or simulated scenarios making them real valuable for network administrators or students.

• Implementing the examples described in this tutorial is pretty simple, as running a command.

=> ↺ 4 ways to edit photos on the Linux command line

• Linux is useful to photographers and graphic artists. It provides many tools for editing different types of image files and formats, including photographs. This roundup shows that you do not even need a graphical interface to work with your photos. Here are four ways that you can edit images at the command line.

=> ↺ Use the Linux cowsay command for a colorful holiday greeting | Opensource.com

• You may have heard of a small program that takes input, such as a message that you type, and outputs a picture of a cow quoting your message. It is called cowsay. It has been written about before here on Opensource.com.

• So, to have a little fun with it, I thought I’d use it to celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

=> ↺ Install Squid Proxy Server on Rocky Linux 8 and AlmaLinux 8 – LinuxStoney

• Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. Squid has a lot of features, and it is used in variety of situations such as speeding up web server by caching repeated requests, caching web and dns lookups, filtering traffic, blocking websites, etc. It is written in C++ and distributed under GNU GPL license.

• Squid is considered as the most reliable content control software and has been used by many organizations since last 2 decades.

• In this article, we are installing Squid proxy server on Rocky Linux 8 or AlmaLinux 8. Although, there are too many similar articles already available on the web. But we write this article to include the minor (but important) steps, that are usually overlooked by the other writers.

• This article is strongly emphasizes on the installation and initial configuration of the Squid proxy server on Rocky Linux 8 or AlmaLinux 8. Therefore, if you are willing to configure some advance settings in Squid proxy then we strongly recommend you to purchase Squid Proxy Server 3.1: Beginner’s Guide by Packt Publishing.

=> ↺ Can now switch between pulseaudio and pipewire

• Continuing with setting up pipewire, previous blog post:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202111/initial-setup-of-pipewire.html

• Pipewire is working, until I connected a bluetooth speaker. Bluetooth mouse connected and worked, but the bluetooth speaker connected, but no sound. Pipewire is completely new to me, so it is probably just a configuration setting somewhere. I already had to make one change, turn on bluez5 in the pipewire default module loading, as explained in the Gentoo wiki:

• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PipeWire

• …that change, and the bt speaker connected, but no joy with sound.

=> ↺ ExplainShell: A Web-Based Alternative to the Traditional Linux Man Pages

• No matter how experienced you’re with the Linux command line, there will always be times when you’ll encounter unfamiliar commands. In such situations, while the natural instinct is to either refer to man pages or google the command to figure out what it does, what if we tell you there’s a better (read immersive) way to do it.

• Well, as it turns out, there’s a tool called ExplainShell that does exactly that: tells you what each part of a shell command does in an easy-to-comprehend manner.

• So let’s dive in to check out ExplainShell in detail.

=> ↺ Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers – I2C

• I2C is an important interface for many devices and Linux has a driver that means that you can use it worrying about the exact details of the hardware – if you know how.

=> ↺ Searching through compressed files on Linux | Network World

• There are quite a few ways to search through compressed text files on Linux systems without having to uncompress them first. Depending on the format of the files, you can choose to view entire files, extract specific text, navigate through file contents searching for content of interest, and sometimes even edit content. I

=> ↺ help2man and subcommands

• help2man is quite nice for autogenerating manpages from command line help, making sure that they stay up to date as command line options evolve.

• It works quite well, except for commands with subcommands, like Python programs that use argparse’s add_subparser.

=> ↺ Upgrade to Debian 11 from Debian 10 – Unixcop the Unix / Linux the admins deams

• Hello friends. Debian is one of the most used operating systems by sysadmins worldwide. This is because Debian is one of the best in stability and community support that making it ideal for all types of projects from the biggest to the smallest. Recently Debian 11 has seen the light of day, which makes many people wonder about the need to leap Debian 10. Well, that is exactly what we are going to explain to you because, in this post, you will learn how to upgrade to Debian 11 from Debian 10.

=> ↺ Configure VCS on CentOS 8 | RHEL 8 step by step – Unixcop the Unix / Linux the admins deams

• Here we explain how to configure the VCS Veritas Cluster Server (New name InfoScale) three node cluster on CentOS 8/RHEL 8 step by step for high-availability server. We already Installed VCS, visit how to install veritas cluster server

=> ↺ How to Install Linux Kernel 5.15 on Ubuntu 20.04 – LinuxCapable

• Linux kernel 5.15 is out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.15 kernel release further improves the support for AMD CPUs and GPUs, Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs, and brings new features like NTFS3, KSMBD (CIFS/SMB3), and further Apple M1 support, amongst many other changes and additions.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest 5.15 Linux Kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

=> ↺ Pacemaker with DRBD MariaDB Server -

• There are many forms of high availability, replication, and resilience in the face of various types of failure. For example, you can make the MariaDB Server work in an active/passive setup, such that the passive node can recover persistent messages written to the disk on the active node should the active node fail.

• While MariaDB Server is supported clustering is intended to facilitate scalability. Cluster if a node fails queues on the failed node are lost. However, with the high availability setup described in this tutorial. When a node fails, the durable persistent messages can be recovered by a different node.

=> ↺ How to Install GNOME 41 Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04 – LinuxCapable

• GNOME 41 introduces many changes from visual changes, new apps, and overhaul back-end changes to improve performance. Overall, it is a solid upgrade from GNOME 40 with introductions of a new remote desktop client called Connections, new mobile settings, improved multi-tasking, improved UI, and back-end performance, amongst many other additions.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the new GNOME 41 on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa desktop using a PPA by Taha Nouibat.

=> ↺ How to Upgrade to Fedora 35 from Fedora 34 Workstation

• Fedora 35 released with GNOME 41, new Kinoite flavor, tool chain updates and moderate new features. Here in this guide, we give you the step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade to Fedora 35 from Fedora 34 via GUI and CLI method.

=> ↺ Chromium Blog: Searching, browsing, and shutdown Chrome performance improvements

• You’ve probably noticed that potential queries are suggested to you as you type when you’re searching the web using Chrome’s omnibox (as long as the “Autocomplete searches and URLs” feature is turned on in Chrome settings.) This makes searching for information faster and easier, as you don’t have to type in the entire search query — once you’ve entered enough text for the suggestion to be the one you want, you can quickly select it.

=> ↺ How To Install XFCE Desktop on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XFCE Desktop on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. The XFCE desktop uses fewer resources (Memory and CPU) than the other desktops and is also comparatively stable. If you have Cinnamon or the MATE desktop running on your system, you can still install and switch to the XFCE desktop in Linux Mint.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of an XFCE Desktop on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

=> ↺ How to Install CUDA on Ubuntu 20.04

• CUDA is a parallel computing platform and a programming model that provides a remarkable user experience when leveraging GPU for everyday general-purpose computing. CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture. It is created by NVIDIA.

• CUDA comprises the CUDA toolkit ( compiler, profile, and debugger ), the software driver, and the CUDA SDK. The software layer gives direct access to the GPU’s virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements. For deep learning researches and framework developers use cuDNN for high-performance GPU acceleration. It is a library of primitives for deep neural networks.

• In this guide, we learn how to install CUDA and CuDNN on Ubuntu 20.04. There are two ways of going about this. You can install CUDA from Ubuntu Repository – which is the easiest approach – or install from the CUDA repository which provides the latest version of CUDA.

=> ↺ How to Manage KVM Virtual Machines with Cockpit Web Console

• In a previous topic, we walked you through how create and manage KVM machines on command line. For command-line enthusiasts, this is an ideal way of creating and keeping tabs on virtual machines. For those who prefer using a graphical display, the Cockpit utility comes very much in handy.

• Cockpit is a free and opensource web-based GUI that allows you to easily monitor and administer various aspects of your Linux server. It is lightweight, and resource-friendly and does not gobble up resources and neither does it reinvent subsystems or add its own tooling layer. It’s purely an on-demand service and uses your normal system login credentials.

=> ↺ How to install Mysql Server 8 on OpenSUSE Leap 15.3

• MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Its one of the popular relational management system.

• Mysql is commonly installed as part of the popular LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. It implements the relational model and Structured Query Language (SQL) to manage and query data.

Games

=> ↺ Steam Play compatibility tool Luxtorpeda gets controller support, new tooling | GamingOnLinux

• Luxtorpeda is a Steam Play compatibility tool (like Proton) that allows you to run games from Steam using various different game engines and reimplementations.

• The basic idea is that Luxtorpeda manages various Linux-native game engines for you. So you go to download a game on Steam, like Warzone 2100 or Arx Fatalis and instead of giving you the old and crusty versions Steam has it will give you the currently up to date open source game engines. There’s a lot it supports and the Luxtorpeda website was updated to make browsing what it supports easier.

=> ↺ Godot Engine – Animation Data Rework for 4.0

• One of the last areas pending for redesign in upcoming Godot 4.0 has now been completed, resulting in much improved usability when dealing animation data.

=> ↺ Growbot is a beautiful and thoughtful adventure about a little robot in a space garden | GamingOnLinux

• Point and click adventure game fans have quite the treat released recently with Growbot, an adventure set aboard a space station full of strange plants and aliens. Developed by Wabisabi Play and published by Application Systems Heidelberg, it has some truly excellent artwork that helps suck you into the world.

• “Growbot is a 2D point-and-click adventure set upon a beautiful biopunk space station. You play as Nara, a growbot in training to become a captain. When your station home is attacked by rapidly growing crystals, it’s down to you to save it.

=> ↺ The wonderful Mutazione gets a free epilogue in the Penpal Update | GamingOnLinux

• Have you played Mutazione yet? If not, you’re mad. It’s probably one of the nicest indie games to release in 2019 and then come to Linux officially in 2020. Developer Die Gute Fabrik, and publisher Akupara Games released this free update to celebrate the second anniversary of the IGF award-winning title Mutazione.

=> ↺ Linux Remains Above 1% on the Steam Hardware Survey

• The Steam on Linux market-share has been slowly but surely climbing since Valve introduced Steam Play as their Proton based solution for running Windows games on Linux.

• If you’re at all interested in gaming on PCs, you’ve probably come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface.

• There are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux. This approach is officially supported by Steam using a system called Proton, which is a compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux-based operating systems.

=> ↺ Steam On Linux Marketshare Hits New Multi-Year High, AMD Powering ~40% Of Linux Gaming Systems – Phoronix

• Back in July Steam on Linux re-crossed the 1.0% marketshare threshold following the announcement of the Steam Deck and continued progress around Steam Play / Proton. The Steam on Linux user-base has continued growing month by month and has hit another high with the numbers published today that cover the month of October.

• According to the new survey results, Linux now commands a 1.13% marketshare on Steam, a 0.11% increase compared to September. This is a larger number than normal for Linux and assuming no revisions are made, it’s likely the result of more gamers and developers trying out Linux / Steam Play ahead of Steam Deck units beginning to ship to consumers later this quarter. The Steam Deck announcement has certainly rejuvenated interest in Linux gaming and especially with Steam Play running an increasing number of modern Windows games with ease, especially now with EAC, CEG, and other DRM technologies working more nicely with Linux.

=> ↺ Linux has now seen 6 months of being above 1% on the Steam Hardware Survey | GamingOnLinux

• Something magical appears to be happening on Steam. Not only is Linux above 1% for another month but we’ve now seen 4 months of it continuing to rise. Going by our own historical stats, this makes it the highest it has been for over 3 years too.

=> ↺ Proton Experimental gets more CEG DRM fixes, new fsync code | GamingOnLinux

• Recently Valve upgraded Proton Experimental, the special version of Proton that pulls in advancements first with support for their older CEG DRM and another new build is up.

• In the changelog it simply notes that it improves “compatibility with games using CEG DRM” but it also has the latest fsync changes for the newer code. According to a Proton developer if you have an older Kernel fsync should be automatically disabled so if you want to use it you need to update.

=> ↺ Chill-out and sort through your room in the zen-puzzler Unpacking out now | GamingOnLinux

• Unpacking is an oddly satisfying game. It’s a chilled-out zen-puzzler where you get items from boxes and place them around various rooms. Developed by Witch Beam, it’s very much the opposite of their previous chaotic game Assault Android Cactus+.

• I hate moving. Really, I do. I’ve moved many times over the last 10 years and it got pretty irritating but Unpacking manages to make it relaxing. Can’t quite put my finger on why either. Just seeing everything eventually get put into the right place, it gives a nice calm feeling that they were clearly going for.

=> ↺ Apogee Entertainment gets another remaster out with Monster Bash HD | GamingOnLinux

• Originally released back in the ’90s, Monster Bash HD is a fresh remaster from Apogee Entertainment and Emberheart Games and it’s available for Linux. Continuing their work to upgrade games following Crystal Caves HD and Secret Agent HD, sounds like it won’t be their last either.

• One of the most challenging games of its time returns, with touch-ups like new environmental effects, smoother and improved gameplay, and support for modern resolutions. Preserving the classic while giving it a new life for new and old players alike.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Announcing Solanum

• A little while ago I released version 3.0.0 of my app Solanum. When doing the release, I realized something: I never announced the app here. Woops. So, here is the announcement.

• Solanum is an app that lets you work in timed sessions with regular breaks, based on the Pomodoro Technique. By default work sessions are 25 minutes, short breaks are 5 minutes, and long breaks are 15 minutes, and you work 4 sessions before a long break. These defaults can be configured in the Preferences window from Solanum 3.0.0 onward.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Linux Release Roundup #21.44: Microsoft Edge Stable, Calibre 5.31, EasyOS 3.1, and More Releases

• Tresquel [sic] GNU+Linux is a Ubuntu-based distribution that doesn’t make use of proprietary software as much as possible.

• The latest release is not a huge update but brings much-needed security fixes.

• You can know more by checking out their official release notes.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Firefox Browser » PCLinuxOS

• Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. Updated to 94.0.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Leap’s First Quarterly Update is Released

• The release manager for openSUSE Leap has announced the release of the first quarterly iso image update for the 15.3 release

• Dubbed as respins, these updates refresh the iso images based on General Availability (GA) release and contain all the updates for the past quarter.

• “The openSUSE release team has over time received quite some requests to provide regular refreshes of install media,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman in an email to the project. “Some of these 15.X requests date back to the 15.2 development cycle.”

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions behind customer and partner success stories

• Each month, we highlight how customers have found success with Red Hat products and solutions on the blog. Our partner ecosystem is behind many customer success stories, and partners are driving open source innovation within their geographical regions as well as the global community.

• In this post, we’re featuring an Argentina-based company and the Red Hat products that have helped it modernize services for customers in the United States, Europe and beyond. We also have the opportunity to feature how Red Hat solutions are helping fuel customer success for two partners—a technology provider that’s helping its customers in Ireland, and worldwide, achieve business success, and a gaming market pioneer that’s revolutionizing trillion-dollar industries such as transportation, healthcare and manufacturing.

=> ↺ RedHat celebrates Halloween by relaunching version 0.9 of its system – itsfoss.net

• Red Hat has made the decision to celebrate Halloween by recalling and relaunching version 0.9 of its system, which was published on October 31, 1994. That release was a paid beta and the first version of the system to be distributed publicly, so It is considered the starting gun for what is currently the leading Linux company , both in terms of economics and technological leadership.

• The fact that Red Hat 0.9 was launched on October 31, 1994 earned it, of course, the nickname of ‘Halloween’, and is that the day and month indicated are the date to celebrate the well-known festival of pagan roots, which has become increasingly popular due to the preponderance of English-speaking countries in global culture.

=> ↺ Debug memory errors with Valgrind and GDB

• Buffer overflows, memory leaks, and similar memory issues plague many C and C++ programs. Valgrind is a sophisticated utility for finding low-level programming errors, particularly involving memory use. The GNU Project Debugger (GDB), is a popular tool for use with C/C++ and other languages.

• This article explains how to use Valgrind and GDB together along with vgdb, a small program that serves as an intermediary between Valgrind and GDB. We’ll debug a simple program containing various intentional bugs to demonstrate the combined usage of Valgrind, GDB, and vgdb. This buggy program writes to invalid memory, uses an uninitialized variable, and leaks memory. We will see how to combine Valgrind, GDB, and vgdb to find each of these bugs.

=> ↺ IT leadership: 3 training tips | The Enterprisers Project

• Are your IT managers better at managing technology than they are at leading their teams? If your organization is like many IT groups, then your honest answer is probably a solid “Yes.”

• In most IT organizations, the best tech leads are promoted into management positions because they are good at managing technologies. But once they are in a management role, many new leaders struggle to provide effective leadership, and team productivity and morale often suffer as a result.

• Once you and your managers agree on what performance changes need to happen, use the following three tips to provide more effective leadership training.

=> ↺ Build a lab in 36 seconds, run Podman on a Mac, and more tips for sysadmins

=> ↺ How to provision AWS infrastructure with Ansible

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method to provision and manage infrastructure and other resources using declarative definition files or code. Instead of manually configuring the servers (physical or virtual) and network devices (and other resources), you can use IaC to manage the entire infrastructure lifecycle. Ansible is one of the best IaC tools, and this article explains how to use it to provision infrastructure and other resources in a public cloud.

=> ↺ CIO role: Why the first 90 days are crucial

• Imagine a boat leaving a port and sailing across the ocean. If the boat’s path is off course by just one degree when it leaves, after 90 days, it will be so far off course that it will never reach its intended destination. On the other hand, if the boat stays true to course early on, minor variations later in the journey can be course-corrected more easily.

• The same concept applies to the first 90 days on any job – but it’s especially important when you’re taking on the CIO role.

• Your first 90 days will determine whether you become a trusted senior executive in the organization or a technology manager who’s seen as merely “keeping the lights on” and fixing IT problems. This three-month window is the only time you can create this impression. If you fall down into the operational depths during this time, there is little chance you’ll be able to elevate yourself in the eyes of the organization and your peers in the coming months and years. Conversely, if you establish yourself in these three months as a senior leader with vision and strategy at the forefront, you will be elevating yourself to the level any CIO needs to operate at to be effective in an organization.

=> ↺ Digital transformation: 4 common beliefs to reconsider

• If you weren’t familiar with digital transformation before the pandemic, you certainly are now. When employees, executives, and customers across every industry and vertical were forced inside, organizations around the world adjusted rapidly to accommodate the limitations of a digital environment. Though physically more disconnected than ever, digital connections exploded as we all found new ways to reach clients, collaborate with coworkers, and do virtually everything else from home.

• The idea of top-down organizational change isn’t new, however. It’s been around for decades as a natural response to changes in technology and culture. Though business leaders across the globe have tried – and sometimes failed – to implement company-wide change, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to transformation.

• Here are four long-held beliefs about digital transformation that could hinder your change strategy.

=> ↺ Fedora 35 Linux-based operating system available for download with GNOME 41

• Today is the day many of us have been waiting for — Fedora 35 is officially here! Yes, folks, you can download the operating system immediately. For many Linux users, Fedora is considered the best distribution based on the open source kernel. Why? Because Fedora focuses on truly free and open source software — a pure Linux experience. It is also fairly bleeding edge, while at the same time, remaining stable enough for daily use.

• What makes Fedora 35 exciting? This version operating system uses the brand-new GNOME 41 as its default desktop environment. GNOME 41 is notable for having significant performance improvements when using Wayland. Speaking of Wayland, Fedora 35 Beta will run faster when using it with an NVIDIA GPU. Plus, version 35 Beta gets NVIDIA with XWayland, for an improved experience when using apps that aren’t designed for Wayland.

=> ↺ Fedora 35 Released with GNOME 41, Improved PipeWire Experience

• Yes, I know: this is not technically Ubuntu related, but I do like to report on events from outside the orange bubble from time to time — heck, I really should get around to doing something with omglinux.com, shouldn’t I?. Plus, I use Fedora regularly in order to keep tabs on GNOME development.

• So what’s new in Fedora 35?

=> ↺ Fedora Linux 35 Released with GNOME 41, Fedora Kinoite Flavor, and WirePlumber

• After six months of hard work, Fedora Linux 35 is here with the latest and greatest GNOME 41 desktop environment for the Fedora Workstation edition. GNOME 41 brings some cool new features, such as a redesigned GNOME Software package manager that gives you instant access to Flatpak apps from the Flathub repository, a new GNOME Connections app for remote desktop access, and new settings for multitasking

=> ↺ Fedora Linux 35 Released As Another Exciting, Feature-Packed Update

• Fedora 35 is now officially available today as the latest major release of this Linux distribution developed by Red Hat and the open-source community. Fedora 35 is another very rich feature update at the forefront of Linux innovations from servers to the desktop.

• Fedora 35 as usual ships with bleeding-edge packages and other new features Red Hat engineers developed for respective upstream projects from the Linux kernel to GNOME. Fedora Workstation 35 is using GNOME 41 by default, features all of the latest (X)Wayland improvements including support around NVIDIA’s proprietary driver, and also has other updated desktops available.

=> ↺ What’s new in Fedora Workstation 35

• Fedora Workstation 35 is the latest release of the Fedora Project’s free desktop operating system. It includes some new features and many tune-ups to the user experience. You can get Fedora Workstation 35 now from the official website, or upgrade your existing install using GNOME Software or through the terminal with dnf system-upgrade. This article describes some of the major improvements included in Fedora Workstation 35.

=> ↺ Worth the wait: Fedora Linux 35 is here!

• Today, I’m excited to share the results of the hard work of thousands of Fedora Project contributors: our latest release, Fedora Linux 35, is here! While we broke our six-release streak of on-schedule releases, we felt it was more important to resolve a few outstanding blocking bugs. Fedora believes that software has to be usable to be useful, so while we know that a predictable schedule is important, we also ensure that every release meets our criteria, no matter what the calendar says.

=> ↺ Ben Williams: F34-20211101 Updated isos Released

• The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F34-2021101-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.14-14-200 kernel. This is the Final Set of Fedora 34 updated isos.

• This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 1GB of updates savings )).

• A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks: dbristow, dowdle, geraldosimiao, Southern_Gentlem for testing these iso.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Systemd-free antiX 21 Release Brings in Debian 11 “Bullseye” as its base With New Applications

• AntiX, a popular Debian-based distro for users not wanting Systemd, has just announced its version 21 release. This release brings a couple of improvements, most notably using Debian 11 as a base, alongside updated apps and kernels.

• Before we start, it should be noted that AntiX uses SysVinit, instead of the much more popular Systemd. This means that it may not be ideal for beginners. With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the exciting changes in AntiX 21!

=> ↺ Lightweight antiX 21 Linux Distribution Released

• Published release of lightweight Live-distribution AntiX 21 , optimized for installation on outdated hardware. The release is based on the Debian 11 package base, but comes without the systemd system manager and with eudev instead of udev. You can choose to use runit or sysvinit for initialization. The default user environment is created using the IceWM window manager. ZzzFM and ROX-Filer are available to work with files.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu optimised for Intel processors accelerates adoption of IoT innovations

• Canonical published the first Ubuntu images optimised for the next generation of Intel IoT platforms, which address the unique requirements of the intelligent edge across multiple industry verticals.

• Both companies are dedicated to enabling on Ubuntu the Intel IoT platforms’ specific features such as real-time performance, manageability, security, and functional safety, as well as allowing users to take advantage of their improved CPU and graphics performance. The collaboration ensures that developers and enterprises can create reliable and secure devices, bring their products to market faster, and benefit from up to 10 years of commercial Ubuntu support.

=> ↺ Canonical Begins Offering Ubuntu Images Optimized For Intel CPUs

• Canonical has begun publishing Ubuntu install images that are optimized for use on next-generation Intel IoT platforms.

• Canonical with cooperation from Intel is beginning to publish ISO images of Ubuntu Core 20 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS desktop that are optimized for Intel Atom X6000E series / Pentium / Celeron N / Celeron J processors (Elkhart Lake) as well as Intel 11th Gen Core processors.

=> ↺ Canonical releases Ubuntu images optimised for Intel IoT devices

=> ↺ Top 7 Reasons To Use Ubuntu | Itsubuntu.com

• Ubuntu is a free desktop operating system that is easy to access, install, and customize. It is made for computers, smartphones, and network servers, and it is compatible with many types of modern sophisticated software. In addition to it, Ubuntu comes with lots of benefits that make it an operating system of choice for many users worldwide. In this article, we have explained some of them.

=> ↺ IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 161 available for testing

• A new update is available for testing: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 161. It comes with a huge performance improvement for the Intrusion Prevention System which allows it to deliver excellent throughput even on smaller hardware. On top of that come a brand new kernel and various security and bug fixes.

• Please note, that this update will reconnect any PPP connections and we recommend performing a reboot after the update has been installed.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 707

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 707 for the week of October 24 – 30, 2021.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Begins its Development, Download and Test Now. – LinuxStoney

• Shortly after the release of the stable version of Ubuntu 21.10, Canonical developers began developing the next release of the Ubuntu 22.04 distribution with long-term support. The new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was code-named Jammy Jellyfish. In addition to publishing the development cycle schedule, developer Steve Langasek also provided some details about upcoming software package updates in his report.

• With Ubuntu 22.04 comes support for Python 3.10 and finally the transition to the current version of OpenSSL 3.0. The desktop environment could most likely be GNOME 42, which would allow Ubuntu to catch up with GNOME again and always offer its users the latest version. As part of the updates, PHP 8.1 or Ruby 3.0 should also be added, while the GCC compiler collection will probably remain in the latest version 11, as GCC 12 has a scheduled release date in April (April) next year.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Expandable Tiger Lake DIN-railer serves up 2.5GbE with TSN

• UK based Impulse Embedded has launched Advantech’s UNO-148, a compact, expandable DIN-rail industrial computer and IoT gateway that features Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake ULP processors. The system is also available from some other distributors (see end of story) but is listed as “new” by Advantech. Designed for industrial applications including factory automation, traffic management, and robotics control, the UNO-148 follows other UNO-branded systems such as the 8th Gen Whiskey Lake based UNO-238.

=> ↺ Commell unveils first Tiger Lake-H SBCs

• Commell unveiled 3.5-inch “LE-37P” SBC and Mini-ITX “LV-6713” SBCs featuring Intel’s powerful 11th Gen H-series Core and Xeon-W CPUs. The LE-37P offers 2.5GbE, GbE, 7x USB 3.2 Gen2, 2x SATA, DP and HDMI, and 3x M.2.

• Commell often goes months at a time without a product announcement before touching down with one of the first SBCs built around Intel’s latest Core CPUs. The Taiwanese firm has done it again with announcements of 3.5-inch LE-37P and full-size Mini-ITX LV-6713 SBCs, which appear to be the first SBCs to feature Intel’s desktop-class, 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H. There is no guarantee they will be the first to ship, but when you can announce a product with this level of detail it usually means you are near the front of the line.

=> ↺ 3.5-inch i.MX8M SBC provides optional serial expansion cards

• Avalue’s 3.5-inch “RSC-IMX8M” SBC runs Linux or Android on an i.MX8M with up to 2GB DDR4, 8GB eMMC, 2x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, MIPI-DSI/CSI, 2x M.2, and optional serial expansion.

• Avalue has launched its first product based on NXP’s i.MX8 family of system-on-chips with a 3.5-inch board that offers an up to quad-core i.MX8M. Previous 3.5-inch SBCs from Avalue include the Intel Elkhart Lake powered ECM-EHL, among others. Other 3.5-inch boards based on the i.MX8M include Seco’s SBC-C20, and i.MX8M SBCs using other form factors include Boundary Devices’ Nitrogen8M, Arrow’s 96Boards CE Extended Thor96, SolidRun’s HummingBoard Pulse, and the armStone MX8M from F&S.

=> ↺ Building a Bicycle Dash Cam With Advanced Capabilites

• The original setup relies on a Raspberry Pi 3, which takes a photo every 10 seconds using the attached Pi Camera. It then processes these photos using OpenALPR, which is a piece of software for reading licence plates. Licence plates detected while cycling can be stored on the Raspberry Pi for later, something which could be useful in the event of an accident.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ The Pi Zero 2 W Is The Most Efficient Pi | Hackaday

• Last week we saw the announcement of the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which is basically an improved quad-core version of the Pi Zero — more comparable in speed to the Pi 3B+, but in the smaller Zero form factor. One remarkable aspect of the board is the Raspberry-designed RP3A0 system-in-package, which includes the four CPUs and 512 MB of RAM all on the same chip. While 512 MB of memory is not extravagant by today’s standards, it’s workable. But this custom chip has a secret: it lets the board run on reasonably low power.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Radxa Zero – Features and benchmarks comparison – CNX Software

• The just-announced Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is not the first quad-core Arm SBC following Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, and back in 2017, the Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero was introduced for $15, and the Radxa Zero was unveiled last June with an Amlogic S905Y2 SoC with price starting at $15 as well.

• With its Allwinner H2+ quad-core Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1 GHz and a price bumped up to $23, the Banana Pi M2 Zero has mostly become irrelevant, but the Radxa Zero may still be considered by some people with a 1.8 GHz processor, and options for up to 4GB RAM, so let’s see how features compare against Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, followed by some benchmark numbers.

=> ↺ Scale up your dragon costume with wings that extend, flap and retract | Arduino Blog

• This year for Halloween, Quint BUILDs wanted to make something special for his daughter’s costume. Quint’s idea was to design and fabricate a pair of mechatronic dragon wings that can mount to a user’s back and move in three different modes by utilizing a set of pneumatic air cylinders.

• The prototype began as a single air cylinder connected to a relay that was, in turn, controlled by a single Arduino Micro and button. This way, Quint could finely tune the timings and pressures required for the device. After 3D printing a simple controller, machining a few aluminum plates, and welding it all together into a second prototype, it was time to experiment with programming more complex movements.

=> ↺ YouTuber Shane Wighton built a robot that paints murals | Arduino Blog

• Driven by a desire to print massive pieces of art on his new studio’s blank wall, Shane Wighton of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here set out to create a large painting robot, which he calls “Janksy” after the famous artist and the jankiness of the construction.

• In principle, the device works by using a large gantry that spans the entire length of the wall to move horizontally whilst a series of cables and pulleys move it vertically. To avoid vibrations caused by moving such a large amount of weight so quickly, a second and far smaller/faster gantry houses a spray nozzle that deposits paint dots. All of this hardware is controlled by an Arduino Uno that translates positional commands into movements for the onboard stepper motors and servo.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ New Galaxy S21 Android 12 One UI 4.0 beta rolling out with lots of bug fixes! – SamMobile

=> ↺ Android 12 Theming System – A Swing And A Miss

=> ↺ Android 12′s new background app limitations could be a major headache for power users

=> ↺ How to Unlock the Bootloader on Your Android Device

=> ↺ Gamasutra – Press Releases- Check the store, Android gamers, a sweet surprise is waiting for you!

=> ↺ Stealthy Trojan that roots Android devices makes its way on app stores | CSO Online

=> ↺ LG built an infotainment system based on Android Automotive – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Android Users Need to Uninstall These 151 Apps Immediately | PCMag

=> ↺ Tablet shipments have started to drop again in time for Android 12L – SlashGear

=> ↺ Samsung One UI 4.0 (Android 12) update tracker: Eligible devices & more

=> ↺ Android 12′s broken casting volume issue will be fixed in Android 12L

=> ↺ How To View Your Notification History In Android 12

=> ↺ Android November patch fixes actively exploited kernel bug

=> ↺ Google just banned 150 dangerous Android apps, so delete them from your phone

=> ↺ Xiaomi Black Shark 4S Pro is the most powerful Android smartphone (for now) – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Moto E40 Review: Only for Android Purists on a Budget? | NDTV Gadgets 360

=> ↺ Android 12L Update: Everything You Need to Know | Digital Trends

=> ↺ Android 12: Everything you need to know | Android Central

=> ↺ Galaxy Z Fold 3 gets a taste of Android 12 in new beta – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Hands-On With Android 12L

=> ↺ Samsung Android 12 Tracker: Here are all the official One UI 4.0 beta builds to download and install

=> ↺ Will The OnePlus 9 / 9 Pro Get Android 12 Update?

=> ↺ You can fix Android 12′s mistake and add smart home controls back to the power menu with Tasker

=> ↺ Unverified App Links On Android 12 Will Always Open In The Browser

=> ↺ How To Mark Up Your Screenshots In Android 12

=> ↺ TCL X20 SE and TCL 20A 5G with Triple Rear Camera, Android 11 Launched in the United States; Read More | PINKVILLA

=> ↺ Best photo widgets for Android – Phandroid

=> ↺ Best Android app deals of the day: House of Da Vinci 2, more – 9to5Toys

=> ↺ Lenovo L5: 1080p projector launches with Android TV for US$199.99 – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Video And Photo Processing On Android: What Do You Need To Know First?

=> ↺ 3 easy ways to share images and files from Android to PC and vice versa

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ The Apache News Round-up: week ending 29 October 2021

• Farewell, October –we’re wrapping up the month with another great week.

=> ↺ Apache Month in Review: October 2021 : The Apache Software Foundation Blog

• Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community.

=> ↺ Blender Community Releases Sprite Fright Animated Movie – LinuxStoney

• The Blender Project has unveiled a new animated short, ” Sprite Fright “, a Halloween-themed 80s horror comedy movie. The project was led by Matthew Luhn , known for his work at Pixar Studios.

• The film was created using only open working tools for modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking and video editing. The project acted as a test base for honing new capabilities and technologies for creating modern visual effects developed in the new Blеnder branches. This is the thirteenth animation project of the Blender community.

=> ↺ Tor Forum: a new discussion platform for the Tor Community

• Communicating and finding help online is crucial to building a solid community. After many years of using emails, mailing lists, blog comments, and IRC to help Tor users, we believe that time has come to improve our discussion channels.

• Today, we’re happy to announce a new discussion and user support platform: the Tor Forum.

Web Browsers

Chromium

=> ↺ Version 95 of Chromium and its un-googled sibling available for download

• I have uploaded packages for Chromium 95.0.4638.69 as well as its un-googled variant.

• The source release was just before the weekend and the compilation was un-eventful, which is nice for a change. Get the chromium or chromium-ungoogled packages from slackware.nl and enjoy the update.

Mozilla

=> ↺ 94.0 Firefox Release

• With 94, you’ll find a selection of six fun seasonal Colorways (available for a limited time only). Now you can find a color to suit (or lift) your every mood. Fun fact: Did you know we have more daily users with color themes than dark or Alpenglow on Beta? With Firefox 89, 32% of users clicked through to customize their color theme. And that was just on the first day! We decided to introduce these new Colorways to give our users more to love.

=> ↺ Firefox 94.0 Released With Linux Build Using EGL For Better Performance, Power Savings

• Firefox 94.0 is now available and for a change it’s quite exciting on the Linux front.

• Firefox 94.0 introduces seasonal color schemes, support for using about:unloads to release system resources by manually unloading tabs without closing them, Site Isolation is now enabled for helping fend off side-channel attacks like Spectre, and a wide variety of bug fixes. The bug fixes in Firefox 94.0 also include some performance and security fixes.

=> ↺ Introducing New Colorways for Firefox 94

• Today, Firefox is launching Colorways, a new feature that allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web. As we challenge what the browser has been, and expand and define the vision of what Firefox browser is and can be, part of that challenge is to ask ourselves “who is it for and who can use it easily and feel included in the experience?”

• We caught up with Mikal Lewis, Senior Director, Product Management for Firefox, to hear more about his vision for Firefox and the impetus for launching Colorways.

=> ↺ Firefox brings you a new homepage making it easier to jump back in to the stuff you care about on your mobile devices

• Today, we are rolling out a brand new Firefox homepage on Android and iOS, designed for those on-the-go, short bursts of online interactions that are constantly interrupted by life.

• With this new Firefox homepage we wanted to lift that heavy mental burden of remembering to finish those halfway read articles or vacation research until you are ready to jump back and finish those tasks. We’ve simplified and organized your on-the-go mobile experiences into one central location, complete with new features to help you ignore the online noise and focus on what matters to you. Welcome to your new Firefox homepage, delivering a fast, intuitive and useful browser!

• In May 2021, we redesigned the browsing experience with a new Firefox release. In today’s mobile release we continue to put our users first and today introduce a completely new homepage experience that helps you accomplish what you set out to do whenever you go online. The new Firefox home is a re-entry point for you to access previously opened tabs with articles you have yet to finish, sites you’ve bookmarked, and search histories organized by topics so you can find it all in one central spot. Today’s mobile release is just the beginning as we plan to roll out more features that build on this experience. Check out the new homepage, a place to organize your thoughts and interests…

=> ↺ Firefox for iOS and Android gets new homepage with previously viewed tabs, searches, more

• Mozilla launched a major Firefox update for Mac, iOS, Android, and more this past summer and now the popular browser gets another useful overhaul today. For iOS and Android, Firefox now has a new homepage with a focus on recently viewed tabs and searches, one-tap private mode, and more.

=> ↺ Mozilla suggests improvements to Canada’s online harms agenda

• Later this year the Canadian government will publish new laws to overhaul how platforms in the country must tackle illegal and harmful content. The government’s desire to intervene is unsurprising – around the world, policymakers and the public are pressing for greater responsibility and accountability on the part of Big Tech. Yet in its proposal that platforms take down more content in ever-shorter periods of time, the government’s approach merely responds to symptoms and not structural causes of online harms. Worse still, the government’s proposal includes some suggested policy ideas that would have the opposite effect of making online spaces healthier and more inclusive. As we seek to advance a better vision for platform accountability across the world, we’re weighing-in here with some recommendations on how Canadian lawmakers can use this moment to meaningfully enhance responsibility while protecting rights and competition online.

• As detailed in a white paper released in the summer, the government wants content-sharing platforms to monitor their services for certain forms of objectionable content and act on user reports within 24 hours. The new rules will apply to some categories of content that are already illegal under the criminal code (like child abuse material) as well as forms of content that, though not captured under the criminal code, are nonetheless considered harmful when tranmitted though online services (e.g. unconsensual nude imagery). A new regulator will police the rules, and companies will be subject to strict retention and reporting requirements.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL JDBC 42.3.1 released

• The PGJDBC team are proud to announce release 42.3.1 of the JDBC driver for PostgreSQL

• This is mainly a regression fix to fix an issues with binary transfers of numeric.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: ODB 2.5.0-b.21 adds support for bulk operations in PostgreSQL 14

• The just published ODB C++ ORM version 2.5.0-b.21 adds support for bulk operations in PostgreSQL using the new pipeline mode introduced in libpq 14.

• For background on bulk operations (which until now were only available in ODB when using Oracle and SQL Server) see Section 15.3, “Bulk Database Operations” in the ODB manual.

• Note that while this functionality requires libpq version 14 or later, it s

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Weekly News – October 31, 2021

• pg_statement_rollback v1.3, an extension that adds server side transaction with rollback at statement level, released.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Babelfish for PostgreSQL

• Babelfish for PostgreSQL is a dual licensed, Apache-2.0 and PostgreSQL, open source project that adds additional syntax, functions, data types, and more to PostgreSQL to help in the migration from SQL Server. It includes a network end-point added to PostgreSQL to enable your PostgreSQL database to understand the SQL Server wire protocol and commonly used SQL Server commands. With Babelfish, applications that were originally built for SQL Server can work directly with PostgreSQL, with little to no code changes, and without changing database drivers.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PostgresDAC 3.11 meets PostgreSQL 14 and RAD Studio 11 Alexandria!

• PostgresDAC is a direct access component suite for RAD Studio (Delphi and C++Builder)/FreePascal/Lazarus and PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB, Amazon RDS, PostgresPro, and Heroku Postgres.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: EDB to Host Free Virtual Conference for PostgreSQL Users in Europe

• After the huge success of our Postgres Build 2020 (PG Build) online conference, the event returns in 2021 with an expanded agenda, more speakers, more tracks, and the latest in-depth talks around PostgreSQL.

• PG Build 2021 will bring together the world’s leading PostgreSQL experts, enterprises, community members, and thought leaders to connect and explore the latest in PostgreSQL technology and use cases.

CMS

=> ↺ WordPress brings “Sponsored Crap” to inject into my posts.

• This is just a heads up that I have nothing to do with anything you see that says “Sponsored Content” on my blog and I am considering moving to a different platform. WordPress just announced that they will be doing this to anyone who doesn’t pay them and there’s no way to opt out of it other than that.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Because Of Course: Trump’s SPAC Deal May Have Broken The Law

• If you thought that Trump’s new Truth Social website’s potential legal problems with its apparent failure to abide by the license on the open source code it seems to be using would be the worst legal problems facing the site, well, you underestimated The Donald. There’s been plenty of talk about the SPAC deal that valued the company at billions of dollars through one of those reverse merger IPOs. But, now the NY Times is reporting that the way the deal was done may have violated securities laws. So on brand.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ The Qt 6 QML Book

• One question that I often think about is: how to do you learn best? I come from a time where you read your BASIC reference manual until it fell apart. Perhaps you picked up another little nugget of knowledge in each iteration. But things have progressed. There are videos, books, online teaching materials, code challenges, and much much more. What brought me to Qt back in the late ’90s was the quality of the reference documentation (and that it ran on a 64-bit architecture).

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ berrybrew version 1.36 released!

• I’ve released version 1.36 of berrybrew, the Perlbrew for Windows. I’ve also reached out to see how I can become part of the Strawberry Perl team to get back on track with the release of new Strawberry Perls.

• If you have any information on the release procedure for Strawberry, or know anyone on that team I might be able to contact to get things moving forward again, please let me know.

Java

=> ↺ How to choose the best Java garbage collector | Red Hat Developer

• Garbage collection (GC) performs dynamic memory management in many modern programming languages. For developers, sophisticated garbage collection lightens the load of worrying about memory management. This article is the third in a four-part series that explains how to improve Java performance by choosing and tuning a garbage collector.

• Part 1 explained the basics of garbage collection and how to monitor the stages and levels of garbage collection. Part 2 delved into memory usage by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the compiler options that control it. This article compares Java garbage collectors and explains how to use your application’s throughput, latency, and footprint requirements to choose the right one for your needs.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Day of the Dead

=> ↺ Why You Should Root for Dusty Baker in This Year’s World Series

• You don’t have to care about baseball to care about Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, whose team is heading to the sixth game in the World Series tomorrow. He is a civil rights hero: a Black Major League Baseball manager who’s taken five teams, in three decades, in both leagues, to the playoffs and/or World Series.

=> ↺ Forget ‘The Kids These Days’; It’s The Adults And Their Moral Panics To Worry About

• A recent episode of the Reply All podcast, Absolutely Devious Lick, touched on a bunch of interesting points regarding the never-ending debates about social media, content moderation, and how it’s supposedly damaging the kids these days. It’s worth listening to the entire episode, but it begins by talking about a very slightly viral TikTok “challenge” which became known as Devious Licks — lick being slang for something you stole. It started with a kid putting up a TikTok video of him holding a box of disposable masks, suggesting that he had stolen it from the school. Because school kids sometimes do stupid things to copy their stupid friends, a few others posted similar videos, including one early one of a kid taking a soap dispenser. And then there were some stories of it spreading and people going more extreme, because, you know, kids. But it didn’t seem to spread that far initially.

=> ↺ Could age verified phones for kids work? SHOULD they? | Stop at Zona-M

• I do not say this because COPPA is a US-only law. Nor I say it because, in practice the only way to be sure that, for example, parents didn’t give their children unrestricted phones would be to continuously take those phones from the children, and check (that is, basically, to never leave the children without some guardian).

• I say this because there is no need at all of anything so complicated and expensive.

• I say this because, if children means “humans less than 13, maybe 14 years old”, we already have all the technology that would really help them to not waste countless hours of sleep, or to avoid all sorts of abuse on social media. It’s technology that is already available everywhere, and it’s really affordable too.

Science

=> ↺ Magnesium: Where It Comes From And Why We’re Running Out | Hackaday

• Okay, we’re not running out. We actually have tons of the stuff. But there is a global supply chain crisis. Most of the world’s magnesium is processed in China and several months ago, they just… stopped. In an effort to hit energy consumption quotas, the government of the city of Yulin (where most of the country’s magnesium production takes place) ordered 70% of the smelters to shut down entirely, and the remainder to slash their output by 50%. So, while magnesium remains one of the most abundant elements on the planet, we’re readily running out of processed metal that we can use in manufacturing.

• [...]

• We’ve established just how much we need magnesium, so what happens when we can’t get it? If the factories in China stay shut down for much longer, that’s a reality we may be facing. Auto makers will do what they can to get their hands on suitable aluminum, but there may not be enough to go around and some experts believe that this could cause car assembly lines to grind to a halt until the upstream supply chain is back in order.

• It isn’t only cars that would be in short supply. Consumer electronics production could suffer as well (as if the global chip shortage wasn’t already enough). The ramifications will be far-reaching and you’re likely to feel them even if you aren’t planning on buying a new car or laptop next year. Magnesium and aluminum prices have been increasing, and even smaller fabrication shops have started stocking up on materials that they worry won’t be available in a few months. It may be a good time to think about alternatives for that machined aluminum enclosure you were going to design for your latest project.

Hardware

=> ↺ Modded GBA SP Does Its Best Switch Impression | Hackaday

• The whole idea behind the Nintendo Switch is that the system isn’t just a handheld, but can be converted into a more traditional home game console when placed into its dock. The wireless controllers even pop off the sides so you can kick back on the couch and enjoy your big-screen gaming from a distance. Judging by how many units Nintendo has sold of their latest system, it’s clearly a winning combination.

=> ↺ Janksy Robot Paints Murals One Dot At A Time | Hackaday

• [Stuff Made Here] has a new shop, with a huge blank wall. A blank white wall just wouldn’t do, so rather than paint the wall himself, he designed a robot to do it for him. (Video, embedded below.)

• The result is Janksy. A huge machine made of metal, wood, and 3D printed parts. Janksy is an ingenious design in that it has two sets of X and Y axis. A large, slow-moving system of rails and cables positions the robot roughly in the right area of the wall. From there a much smaller, but faster and more precise motion system makes the final moves.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ ‘We’re Not Giving Up’: Sanders, Other Progressives Fight to Rescue Drug Price Reforms

• Sen. Bernie Sanders, lawmakers in vulnerable districts, and grassroots progressive groups are ramping up their last-ditch effort to rescue a plan to lower U.S. prescription drug prices as the longstanding—and widely popular—Democratic campaign promise is at risk of being excluded from President Joe Biden’s signature domestic policy bill.

• “It is outrageous that we continue to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”

=> ↺ Land of Capital

• The great surprise of 2016 was not the rise and election of Donald Trump; that path had been laid out for more than 50 years by Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, and the two Bushes. The great surprise was the emergence of Bernie Sanders. A proud, self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Sanders set his political sights on capitalism—especially in its corporate form—which he clearly named and then blamed for the economic inequalities, social injustices, concentrations of power, and neglect of public health that so deeply afflicted the country. Although he identifies as an independent in the Senate, Sanders chose to seek the Democratic

=> ↺ Sanders Says He’s Still Working to Get Drug Price Plan Into Reconciliation Bill

=> ↺ G20 Summit Deemed ‘Abysmal and Total Failure’ on Vaccine Equity, Climate Action

• Leaders of the world’s richest nations wrapped up the Group of 20 Summit in Rome on Sunday after taking virtually no concrete action to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and the intensifying climate crisis, drawing condemnation from human rights advocates who deemed the gathering’s outcome an “abysmal and total failure.”

• “G20 leaders could have taken urgent action to dramatically scale up manufacturing and access to Covid-19 vaccines around the world, promote a fair economic recovery, lower dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and help the poorest countries adapt to the climate change already happening,” Jörn Kalinski, senior adviser at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “The bottom line is that this summit failed to deliver much of anything for people, planet, or prosperity.”

=> ↺ Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.

• When Mai Yang is looking for a patient, she travels light. She dresses deliberately — not too formal, so she won’t be mistaken for a police officer; not too casual, so people will look past her tiny 4-foot-10 stature and youthful face and trust her with sensitive health information. Always, she wears closed-toed shoes, “just in case I need to run.”

• Yang carries a stack of cards issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that show what happens when the Treponema pallidum bacteria invades a patient’s body. There’s a photo of an angry red sore on a penis. There’s one of a tongue, marred by mucus-lined lesions. And there’s one of a newborn baby, its belly, torso and thighs dotted in a rash, its mouth open, as if caught midcry.

=> ↺ Nursing Home Residents Are Overlooked in Scramble for COVID Antibody Treatments

=> ↺ Florida strips federal funding from schools as further punishment for masking | Ars Technica

• The state of Florida this week withheld nearly $700,000 in funding from two school districts as part of an escalating feud led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over school mask requirements.

• The state had previously financially penalized the Alachua and Broward school boards by docking their salaries for issuing school mask requirements, which DeSantis has worked to ban. In response to the financial penalties, the Biden administration last month awarded the counties federal funding to compensate for losses. Alachua County was awarded $147,719 and Broward County Public Schools received $420,957 in federal grants under the US Department of Education (USDOE) Project Safe grant.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

=> ↺ Securing the Open-Source supply chain with Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud

• It’s official: since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercrime has increased by 600%. Among these, ransomware attacks are estimated to cost $6 trillion in 2021 alone. And there were nearly 550,000 ransomware attacks per day in 2020. The question is: are your workloads secure enough? In this blog, we will discuss how to make your Open Source workloads more secure in one second.

=> ↺ Google to Pay Hackers $31,337 for Exploiting Patched Linux Kernel Flaws

• Google on Monday announced that it will pay security researchers to find exploits using vulnerabilities, previously remediated or otherwise, over the next three months as part of a new bug bounty program to improve the security of the Linux kernel.

=> ↺ Google just tripled its bounty for Linux kernel bugs. Here’s why

=> ↺ GCC & LLVM Patches Pending To Fend Off Trojan Source Attacks – Phoronix

• Making rounds today are the “Trojan Source” attacks by which text displayed to the end-user/developer doesn’t match what is actually being executed. The problem stems from Unicode standards and could lead to malicious code being inadvertently introduced into upstream code-bases that could be overlooked during code review processes, etc. GCC and LLVM/Clang are among the early compilers preparing defenses against Trojan Source style attacks.

=> ↺ Trojan Source attack for introducing code changes invisible to the developer – itsfoss.net

• Researchers at the University of Cambridge have published a new technique for subtly substituting malicious code in peer-reviewed sources. The prepared attack method ( CVE-2021-42574 ) is presented under the name Trojan Source and is based on the formation of text that looks different to the compiler / interpreter and the person viewing the code. Examples of application of the method are demonstrated for various compilers and interpreters supplied for C, C ++ (gcc and clang), C #, JavaScript (Node.js), Java (OpenJDK 16), Rust, Go and Python.

• The method is based on the application of special Unicode characters in the comments to the code, which change the display order of bidirectional text. With the help of such control characters, some parts of the text can be displayed from left to right, and others from right to left. In everyday practice, such control characters can be used, for example, to insert Hebrew or Arabic strings into a file with code. But if you combine lines with different text directions in one line, using the specified characters, passages of text displayed from right to left can overlap the already existing ordinary text displayed from left to right.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Facebook relaunches itself as ‘Meta’ in a clear bid to dominate the metaverse

• But is this just a shallow PR exercise, with Zuckerberg trying to reset the Facebook brand after several scandal-ridden years, or is it a genuine bid to set the company on course for what he sees as the future of computing?

=> ↺ Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse may be as privacy flawed as Facebook | Fortune

• The planned metaverse, from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, raises significant questions about the future of data privacy.

=> ↺ California Prosecutors Are Still Trying To Get Signal To Hand Over User Info It Simply Doesn’t Possess

• Encrypted messaging app Signal is slowly educating federal prosecutors on the meaning of the idiom “blood from a stone.” Usually this refers to someone who is judgment-proof (or extortion-proof or whatever), since you can’t take money a person doesn’t have.

=> ↺ What Mark Zuckerberg Really Means When He Talks About the Metaverse

• The company is doubling down on user surveillance.

=> ↺ All reject our pointless fridge overlords

• The only really smart fridge is the one that is as small as possible, as energy-efficient as possible, as repairable as possible, and not connected to the Internet.

• It is a sad and dumb reality that we do not have much real choices in this matter. Dan himself points out that he has that fridge because it’s what his landlord unilaterally decided to buy. But it’s never too late to ask for REALLY smart fridges, the next time you need one. And if you already have one of these disgraces, do yourself and your stress levels a favour: unplug it from the net NOW.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Legal Brief Details What Trump’s Trying to Hide From the January 6 Committee

=> ↺ Why the Troubled U.S. Empire Could Quickly Fall Apart

• The United States has 4.25 percent of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20 percent of global deaths from COVID-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic. It now wrestles with a huge segment of its population that seems so alienated from major economic and political institutions that it risks self-destruction and demands the “right” to infect others. Refusing to accept lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates in the name of “freedom” mixes a frightening stew of ideological confusion, social division, and bitterly rising hostility within the population. The January 6 events in Washington, D.C., showed merely the tip of that iceberg.

• Levels of debt—government, corporate, and household—are all at or near historical records and rising. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve with its years of quantitative easing. Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the U.S. Treasury to enable more U.S. government spending. The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt. The goal is nothing less than freeing the government to inject still more massive amounts of new money into the capitalist system to sustain it in times of unprecedented difficulty. The Fed learned that today’s capitalism needs such quanta of monetary stimulus thanks to the three recent crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020) witnessed by the capitalist system. A desperate empire approaches a version of the Modern Monetary Theory that empire leaders mocked and rejected not very long ago.

=> ↺ “On Liberty” – Judge Learned Hand’s Wisdom from 1944 More True Today

• What impressed me most about Judge Hand was a brief address he delivered in 1944, in the midst of World War II, to an audience gathered in New York’s Central Park on the occasion of “I Am an American Day.”

• There was every temptation to give a “red, white and blue” speech of exuberant patriotic rhetoric. After all, the battles on the European and Pacific fronts were furious and producing mass casualties on all sides. Judge Hand resisted narrating the customary, nationalistic exaltations. Instead, he provided gentle transcendental wisdom for the ages. He spoke of people as being either the progenitors or destroyers of ‘liberty,’ as he broadly and deeply defined that abused word. We give birth or foster the light or darkness of a society. We are responsible, by clear inference, for allowing the concentrations of tyrannical exercises of power by the avaricious, despotic few over the many.

=> ↺ Opinion | Now Is the Time to Be Angry: Remembering Forgotten Afghanistan

• I know, I know. It’s the last thing you want to hear about. Twenty years of American carnage in Afghanistan was plenty for you, I’m sure, and there are so many other things to worry about in an America at the edge of… well, who knows what? But for me, it’s different. I went to Afghanistan in 2002, already angry about this country’s misbegotten war on that poor land, to offer what help I could to Afghan women. And little as I may have been able to do in those years, Afghanistan left a deep and lasting impression on me. 

=> ↺ Gitmo Jurors Liken CIA Torture to Acts by ‘Most Abusive Regimes in Modern History’

• Seven out of the eight members of a military jury called for clemency to be granted in the case of a Guantanamo detainee in light of his detention without due process and said his abuse at the hands of the CIA was “closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history” rather than the euphemistic “enhanced interrogation techniques” claimed by the agency.

• “The treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”

=> ↺ The United States is Organizing a Color Revolution in Cuba for November 15

• The United States government is playing a key role in organizing, promoting and amplifying upcoming nationwide protests in Cuba planned for November 15.

=> ↺ “Stain on the Moral Fiber of America”: Military Jurors Decry Majid Khan’s Torture at CIA Black Sites

• In a major development, a Guantánamo Bay detainee described his torture at CIA black sites for the first time in court last week, prompting military jurors to call his treatment a “stain on the moral fiber of America.” On Thursday, Majid Khan became the first Guantánamo prisoner to describe publicly the torture he experienced after being detained in Pakistan and then being held at CIA black sites, including forced feedings, waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse. Khan was sentenced Friday to 26 years but under a previous deal is scheduled for release in February 2022. His unprecedented testimony only represents the “top part of the iceberg,” says Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, which has helped represent Majid Khan. “We need more meaningful accountability for what the United States government did to Majid and many dozens of other detainees in the so-called global war on terror.”

Environment

=> ↺ Over 700 Groups Demand ‘Real Climate Solutions, Not Net-Zero Promises’

• As world leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland on Monday for a United Nations climate summit, more than 700 organizations from nearly 100 countries took aim at net-zero pledges “premised on the notion of canceling out emissions in the atmosphere rather than eliminating their causes.”

• “We are concerned that rich countries and polluting corporations will push ahead with ‘false solutions’ at COP26.”

=> ↺ ‘Words Won’t Save Us’: Climate Movement Slams ‘Empty-Handed’ Biden at COP26

• President Joe Biden’s speech at the opening ceremony of the COP26 conference on Monday was met with an icy response from the U.S. climate movement, which warned his lofty rhetoric will be meaningless if he continues to resist sweeping action to slash emissions, end all new fossil fuel projects, and swiftly transition to renewable energy.

• “All the negotiation in the world is ultimately hollow unless Biden acts boldly to end the fossil fuel era at home.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Why We Must Defund the Global Climate Wall

• At a National Security Council meeting in September, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the consequences of climate change “are falling disproportionately on vulnerable and low-income populations.” He continued, “And they’re worsening conditions and human suffering in places already afflicted by conflict, high levels of violence, instability.” He assured his colleagues that the climate crisis is a “core element of U.S. foreign policy” and that “every bilateral and multilateral engagement we have—every policy decision we make—will impact our goal of putting the world on a safer, more sustainable path.”

=> ↺ Letter Accusing World Leaders of Climate ‘Betrayal’ Signed by 1 Million People—And Growing

• As activists gathered Monday outside the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland to protest world leaders’ collective failure to address the worsening planetary emergency, a petition led by four young women at the center of the fight for climate action quickly gathered over a million signatures.

• “This is not a drill. It’s code red for the Earth.”

=> ↺ As COP26 Climate Talks Begin, Biden Pressures OPEC to Boost Oil Production

• Before U.S. President Joe Biden could tout Washington’s ostensible commitment to addressing the planetary emergency at the COP26 climate conference that kicked off Sunday in Glasgow, the White House doubled down on its ongoing effort to pressure the world’s oil-producing giants to boost supply, provoking frustration and alarm in the process.

• “Do you see any irony in pushing [OPEC+] to increase oil production at the same time that you’re going to COP26 to urge people to lower emissions?” Jeff Mason of Reuters asked Biden on Sunday at the conclusion of the latest G20 meeting in Rome.

=> ↺ Climate change: US vs. China — Here’s how the two biggest emitters stack up – CNN

• China and the United States are the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, so any attempt to address the climate crisis will need to involve deep emissions cuts from these two powerhouse nations.

• China’s emissions are more than double those of the US, but historically, the US has emitted more than any other country in the world. There are many factors to consider when judging a country’s climate credentials, and as leaders gather in Glasgow, Scotland for COP26 from Sunday, the US’ and China’s plans will be in the spotlight. Here’s how the two stack up against each other.

=> ↺ Protests at COP26 Call on UK to Block Massive Cambo Oil Field Off Scottish Coast

=> ↺ This Is the Decade to Reduce Emissions

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

=> ↺ Climate Justice in America

• By contrast, climate justice is about the interaction between human beings and nature. It is about issues like global warming understood as an ethical and political issue. Necessarily, climate justice involves social equality, human rights, collective rights, animal rights and our common responsibilities to prevent global warming.

• Despite the recent flooding of sections of New York, it is clear by now that there are disproportional impacts of climate disruptions on the world’s most vulnerable people. The promise of capitalism as the solution to global warming might turn out to be a hallucination. Instead, many climate justice advocates have been in the forefront of critiquing policy measures that aim to implement emission reductions through so-called market mechanisms.

=> ↺ Rich Countries Bring “Tough Talk on Climate” to COP26 But No New Plans or Money to Curb Global Emissions

• As U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders gather amid massive protests in Glasgow for COP26, the U.N. Climate Change Conference, we look at the growing pressure on countries to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avert the most damaging effects of the climate crisis. Leaders of the G20, representing the 20 wealthiest nations, gathered ahead of COP26 and pledged to do more to curb emissions but offered few specifics on reaching that goal, despite representing the countries responsible for about 80% of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. “What we’re seeing here is lots of tough talk on climate, but lack of plans, lack of policies and refusal to put money on the table,” says Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition. Rehman also gives an overview of the demands from protesters, and plans for the next two weeks.

=> ↺ ‘The Earth Is Speaking’: Indigenous Activists Tell COP26 There’s No Climate Solution Without Them

• As the United Nations Climate Change Conference—also known as COP26—got underway in Glasgow, Scotland this week, Indigenous activists from around the world warned that failure to center their peoples’ voices and solutions would seriously hamper efforts to tackle the growing planetary emergency.

• “We can develop actions based on our culture and our traditional knowledge.”

=> ↺ Protests at COP26 Climate Summit Call on U.K. to Block Massive Cambo Oil Field Off Scotland’s Coast

• As the U.K. government tries to claim the mantle of climate leadership at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, we speak with Mary Church, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland. She describes how activists are calling on U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to block the development of the giant Cambo oil field off the coast of Scotland, which would run counter to the U.N. goals of phasing out fossil fuels. “We know that fossil fuels need to be phased out long, long before 2050, but this proposal is to keep on drilling oil until 2050,” says Church, adding that the extraction of 800 million barrels of oil would be “the equivalent of 10 years of Scotland’s annual emissions.”

=> ↺ ‘Shame on You!’: Climate Activists Confront World Leaders at Lavish COP26 Dinner

• Chanting “shame on you,” activists rallied amid a heavy police presence Monday evening outside a swanky reception for world leaders and others attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland to protest their inadequate response to the planetary emergency.

• Members of Britain’s royal family and corporate executives joined heads of state and other leaders at the exclusive dinner event, which was hosted by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

=> ↺ Many Voices from Global South Shut Out of U.N. Climate Summit as Vaccine Apartheid Limits Travel to U.K.

• This year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow may be the whitest and most privileged one ever, with thousands from the Global South unable to attend because of lack of access to COVID-19 vaccines and travel restrictions. The global inequity in vaccine access mirrors the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis that has fallen mostly on poor countries least responsible for emissions, says climate activist Dipti Bhatnagar in Mozambique. “The people who need to be there, who need to hold people accountable, are not going to be there,” says Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, who was unable to attend the climate conference in Scotland because of a lack of access to COVID-19 vaccines. “What is going to come out of this COP is going to be largely illegitimate because of the way that they’ve organized it and because of the intentions behind it.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Street Murals to Glasgow: “Defund Climate Chaos!”

• On the eve of the Glasgow Climate Talks, wildfire survivors, Indigenous communities and Northern California community groups came together to paint the streets, send a message to Glasgow, and lay a creative siege to the biggest investor in climate chaos—BlackRock. It was part of a day of global action to #DefundClimateChaos with actions in over 100 cities in 26 countries on every continent—and painting street murals was a popular medium for the message.

=> ↺ Lawyers for Landmark Kids Climate Suit Cut Off Talks With Biden DOJ

• Lawyers representing a group of young people in a landmark climate lawsuit said Monday that settlement discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice ended without resolution and that they’re now eagerly awaiting a trial date to argue that the nation’s fossil fuel-based energy system violates the youths’ constitutional rights.

• “Emergency falls short in describing the climate situation and its devastating impact on these young Americans.”

Energy

=> ↺ The Problem With Calling Fracked Gas ‘Responsibly Sourced’

• By Ted Auch, PhD, FracTracker Alliance, with contributions from Shannon Smith of FracTracker Alliance

• The fracked natural gas industry has never been the most responsible or efficient consumer of resources. Drillers are using ever-increasing amounts of water and sand in order to produce the same volume of gas, with a corresponding rise in the levels of solid and liquid waste created.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ A Win for Lynx and Grizzly Bears in Montana

• In 2013, because lynx were being killed in traps set for other animals in violation of the Endangered Species Act, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Wild Swan, and WildEarth Guardians, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, filed a lawsuit in federal district court.

• In 2015, we signed a formal settlement agreement with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to restrict the types of trapping allowed in lynx habitat. The settlement agreement established a new Lynx Protection Zone covering occupied lynx habitat in Northwest Montana and the Greater Yellowstone area where special trapping regulations were designed to protect lynx, and indirectly, grizzlies. The agreement also put into place a three-year moratorium on wolverine trapping.

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | Behold and Beware! The Age of Trillionaires Is Coming

• Barely a year ago, my colleagues Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo noted the passing of “a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power.” On August 13, 2020, just twelve obscenely wealthy Americans held a combined $1.015 trillion. They called those twelve the “Oligarchic Dozen.”

=> ↺ America as Tax Haven: It’s Becoming Part of US Foreign Policy

• And there’s more: The US government can provide you with vital political support when you run into trouble at home. Case in point: Ecuador, where President Guillermo Lasso faces a major scandal as a result of the Pandora Papers’ revelations of his offshore assets. On October 19, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a special visit to Ecuador, a move that has been presented by the Ecuadorian government as a show of support for the beleaguered president.

• On October 10, the Ecuadorian National Assembly opened a formal investigation into the president’s finances. The legislative commission investigating Lasso seeks to establish whether he violated a law barring public officials, including presidents, from having assets in tax havens.

=> ↺ 250 Millionaires to Congress: ‘Now Is the Time’ to Tax Billionaires

• As congressional Democrats continue to revise a pared-back version of the Build Back Better Act, a group of roughly 250 millionaires on Monday urged party leaders to include an “overwhelmingly popular” proposal to tax billionaires’ annual investment gains in the final package, after it was excluded from the framework President Joe Biden unveiled last week.

• “Unless Congress acts now, billionaires will continue to be allowed by Congress to pay far less than their fair share of taxes.”

=> ↺ Biden Administration Caught in Lie Over Student Debt Forgiveness Memo

=> ↺ Opinion | The Super-Rich Have Taken Almost All of It

• They should pay something back to the society that made their unprecedented wealth possible.

=> ↺ Biden’s ‘Global Tax’ and the 40-Year US Corporate Tax ‘Shell Game’

• But why is the mainstream media bringing it up again now? Is it to soften the blow of Biden’s repeal of his proposal to hike corporate taxes in the US from Trump’s 21% to 26%? (It was 35% pre-Trump)? Or is there something else as well that explains why the media is running the global tax story that’s already weeks old?

• The global sign on to Biden’s 15% global minimum tax, announced weeks ago, is purportedly designed to prevent big multinational corporations’ manipulating governments by seeking out, and getting, special tax deals in certain countries at the expense of others.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ ‘Troubling’ Survey Finds Violent, Anti-Democratic Views Thriving on American Right

• “I’ve been doing this a while, for decades, and it’s not the kind of finding that as a sociologist, a public opinion pollster, that you’re used to seeing.”

=> ↺ The New York Times Nominates Bob Gates to Save the Biden Administration

• Gates’ deceitful record has not always been in the public view, but there is sufficient evidence of a bureaucratic career devoted to reckless self-promotion.  In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Gates to be the successor to the late William Casey as director of central intelligence.  Gates had to withdraw his name from the confirmation process because the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, David Boren (D-Ok), told him that the committee didn’t believe his claim to have no involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal. Boren even called Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating Iran-Contra, to ascertain whether Gates would be indicted.  Walsh “doubted Gates’ veracity,” but said he would “probably not” be indicted.

• In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates for a second time and, despite testimony from senior CIA officials regarding Gates’ role in Iran-Contra, he survived unprecedented opposition to serve the shortest tour of duty of any CIA director in history.  President Bill Clinton ignored Gates’ pleas to remain at CIA.

=> ↺ Republican Poll Watchers Make Their Return in Virginia Gubernatorial Race

=> ↺ Poll Shows O’Rourke Ties Abbott in Hypothetical Race for Texas Gov. Next Year

=> ↺ Voter Suppression Isn’t Just a Problem Down South

• We face so many issues as a state and as a nation, but few are more important than protecting our right to vote. A wave of voter suppression is spreading across the country, specifically targeting Black, Latinx, and Native voters. Our elders bled in the streets to make sure we could have a voice in our democracy, but even in a state as blue as New York, it’s still far too hard for many people to cast their ballot.

=> ↺ ‘Manchin Is a F**king Snake’: Progressives Urged to Keep Pushing for Both Bills

• Supporters of passing the Build Back Better budget reconciliation package urged congressional progressives to maintain their position that it must move forward simultaneously with bipartisan infrastructure legislation after Sen. Joe Manchin accused his colleagues of holding the latter bill “hostage” and demanded an immediate vote.

• During a Monday press conference, Manchin (D-W.Va.) said that “the political games have to stop” and called for the Democrat-held U.S. House of Representatives to swiftly vote on the infrastructure bill—which several Senate Democrats advanced in August with the expectation that it would only reach President Joe Biden’s desk alongside the reconciliation package.

=> ↺ Manchin Claims Others Won’t Compromise After Forcing Reconciliation to be Halved

=> ↺ Lee Camp: The Four Layers of Reality — and Why We’re Only Allowed to Talk About One

• No matter which mainstream media segment you’re currently watching, I can promise you it’s not getting to the heart of any issue. By definition they only participate in surface level analysis. For example, there are three or four levels of reality we should be discussing when we talk about any United States election. And by “discussing,” I mean “screaming about,” and by “screaming about,” I mean “freaking out about.” So, let’s freak out – shall we?

=> ↺ Meet the Socialist Candidate for NYC Mayor

• “This is not a socialist country; let’s be clear on that,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, on Real Time With Bill Maher in July, following a hotly contested Democratic primary. Throughout his campaign, Adams has made it abundantly clear that he is not aligned with the left. Indeed, just a few days before the Maher interview, he took a swipe at supporters of democratic socialism by announcing, “I’m no longer running against candidates. I’m running against a movement,” referring to democratic socialist activists in New York and nationally.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ It’s Ridiculous The ‘Developing World’ Wasn’t Given Access To The Facebook Files

• By now it’s fairly clear the Facebook leaks showcase a company that prioritized near-mindless international growth over the warnings of their own experts. They also show a company that continues to painfully struggle to be even marginally competent at scale, whether we’re talking about content moderation or rudimentary customer service. While this has become an all-encompassing media spectacle, the real underlying story isn’t particularly unique. It’s just a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset, where profit and expansion trumped all reason. It just happens to be online, and at unprecedented international scale.

=> ↺ Facebook: From the Shallow End to the Deep (But Not Really)

• And I don’t even have an active account. Sick of hearing about Likes. Sick of seeing folks everywhere scrolling in mid-feeds like chattel cattle. Sick of timelines that Ed Snowden sees as part of the Permanent Record that will one day contain evidence of our criminality, retroactively, and by algorithmic policing. It’s depressing: I know lots of good people who have such oxycontin-like accounts and I worry that by the time they discover “It’s a Cookbook,”(*) they’ll already be on their way to the intergalactic rotisseries (humans apparently taste like chicken: finger lickin’ goodness). Fuck Facebook.

• Meta as opposed to physical. Face, facetious, fecetious, facile, Facebook. Skin deep goes deep skin. Meta. Physical. Metaphysical. Beyond the mere biologicality of our physical beings is a metacognition, a consciousness of being, a transmigration of hive-minded souls to a Neurana existence. The bliss of the one and many rivers. But it’ll be the same old tappy-tap of fingers dancing on the keyboard The June Taylor Dancers, no doubt bringing new rushes of feralmoans and standing ovulations, but the same loneliness of the many folded into the one. You. Remember how sad and washed out they looked in last year’s Oscar-winning film, Nomadsland, Frances McDormand migrating from region to region, catching up with fellow free migrants at campsites in the middle of desert landscapes for pep talks, transferring her work from one Amazon Fulfillment Center to another? No? Keep the line moving, they say in baseball lingo — or you’re fired, they say in Amazon lingo. Cancelled, in the parlance of our day.

Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Justice For Julian Assange Is Justice For All: John Pilger

• While Julian Assange endures an endless prison sentence for revealing atrocities perpetrated on innocents during the West’s endless wars, John Pilger turns his gaze to some of the officials, journalists and media outlets who have aided and abetted one of modern history’s greatest and most public episodes of torture.

=> ↺ John Pilger: Justice for Assange is Justice for All

• When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.”

=> ↺ The CIA, Empty Assurances and Assange’s Defence

• The morning session was focused on defending the action of the defence witness Michael Kopelman, whose initial psychiatric assessment of Assange’s wellbeing omitted reference to Stella Moris and the existence of their two children.  The prosecution had contended that this impaired Kopelman’s partiality before the court, notwithstanding his correction to the account in the final court submission.  The omission, Fitzgerald contended, was justified given fears of the surveillance operation in the Ecuadorian embassy mounted by the Central Intelligence Agency, and concerns about potential abduction and assassination.  This point had been confirmed in the now famous Yahoo! News report.

• A day prior to the submission of the initial report, Kopelman had sought legal advice from the head of the solicitor’s firm acting for Assange, Gareth Peirce.  But as Peirce was facing an avalanche of documents to be served at the time – surveillance, allegations of kidnapping and poisoning, among other things – she was unable to furnish him with timely advice.  Baraitser duly found that Kopelman’s conduct, while misleading, was not that of a dishonest individual but “a very human response”.  The judge also knew about the identity of Moris prior to reading the initial report.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Hawaii School, Police Department On The Verge Of Being Sued For Arresting A Ten-Year-Old Girl Over A Drawing

• Putting cops in schools is never a good idea. It only encourages school administrators to hand over discipline problems to the “proper authorities,” which is what administrators used to be until the addition of law enforcement on campus.

=> ↺ ‘Stakes Could Not Be Higher’: With Roe in Danger, Coalition Demands Supreme Court Expansion

• “It should frighten all of us that the Supreme Court is actively attacking settled constitutional doctrine to achieve partisan political outcomes.”

=> ↺ The Erosion of Roe v. Wade and Abortion Access Didn’t Begin in Texas or Mississippi: It Started in Pennsylvania in 1992

• The court is set to weigh in on abortion restrictions from at least two states this term. The first is a Texas law effectively outlawing abortions after six weeks. The second is a Mississippi law barring abortions after 15 weeks.

• On Oct. 22, 2021, the Supreme Court upheld a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling allowing the Texas law to go into effect while the case is being litigated.

=> ↺ While Supreme Court Weighs Texas Abortion Ban, Senate Dems Urged to Kill Filibuster

• As the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments about a “dangerous and dystopian” abortion ban in Texas, Senate Democrats faced fresh calls to abolish the filibuster, an outdated rule that has impeded the party and President Joe Biden’s agenda.

• Although Vice President Kamala Harris is responsible for tie-breaking in the evenly split Senate, the chamber’s makeup and the filibuster mean that many bills are blocked from being debated, let alone receiving a final vote.

=> ↺ 2 Conservative Justices Hint at Letting Challenge to TX Abortion Law Go Forward

=> ↺ When Critical Race Theory Met the CFPB… at a Toyota Dealer

• When Rohit Chopra was still a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, in May of 2020, he issued a forceful public statement following an investigation into the racist lending practices his agency uncovered at a Bronx auto dealership. Chopra highlighted that the case hinged on subtly discriminatory “disparate lending” practices as he urged the FTC to ramp up its activity in that area. Chopra reminded his colleagues that in 2010, Congress passed legislation to enhance the FTC’s investigation and enforcement capacity in the auto industry—but that the agency had not leveraged the congressional activity into action. “Given the difficulty of uncovering direct evidence of discriminatory intent,” Chopra wrote, “disparate impact analysis is critical for detecting potentially unlawful discrimination.”

=> ↺ How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land

• In 1883, less than 20 years after emancipation, Curtis Gentry bought nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including ribbon cane, corn, and peas.

• “He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra money to the household.

=> ↺ LA Inspector General Looks Into Allegations of Racist Policing by Sheriff’s Deputies on School Grounds

• Los Angeles County’s Inspector General is looking into allegations of racial discrimination raised by an LAist-ProPublica investigation on high school campuses in the Antelope Valley.

• Priscilla Ocen, chair of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, asked Inspector General Max Huntsman’s office to explore our finding that in 2019, LA sheriff’s deputies disproportionately stopped and cited Black teens at high schools in Lancaster.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Senate Must Confirm Biden’s FCC Picks to Ensure Open and Affordable Internet

=> ↺ Lessons From The First Internet Ages

• On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I’m excited to be participating in an event that the Knight Foundation is putting on, curated by law professors Eric Goldman and Mary Anne Franks, entitled Lessons From the First Internet Ages. The event kicks off with the release of reflections on “the first internet age” from various internet luminaries who were there — but also, most importantly talking about what they might have done differently. I’m going to have a writeup at some future date on my response to the pieces, but I highly recommend checking them all out. In particular, I’ll recommend the pieces by Senator Ron Wyden, Nicole Wong, Brewster Kahle, Vint Cerf, Reid Hoffman, and Tim Berners-Lee. I also think that the interviews Eric Goldman conducted with Matthew Prince and Nirav Tolia were both fascinating.

=> ↺ Internet shutdowns are a political weapon. It’s time to disarm.

=> ↺ Slowdowns and shutdowns: Africans challenge internet restrictions

• Telecommunications were interrupted in Sudan this week after the army seized power in a coup, the latest in a string of internet outages in African countries …

=> ↺ Why are Google and Apple still silent on Russian censorship? | Internet | Al Jazeera

• The two tech giants need to be transparent on why they caved in to Russian pressure to censor an opposition app.

=> ↺ [Revealed] Udaipur Internet Shutdown Orders: Cut, Copy, Paste!

• Recently, an Internet shutdown has twice been imposed in Rajasthan to prevent cheating in exams. So, we filed Right to Information applications to determine the extent of compliance with directions in Anuradha Bhasin. We found that the office of the Udaipur Divisional Commissioner has issued 26 internet shutdown orders, most of which are similar! The orders followed a template format – (i) a bureaucrat recommends suspension of internet services citing ‘law and order’ concerns; (ii) the Divisional Commissioner expresses their satisfaction with the recommendation without providing any reasoning; and (iii) the Divisional Commissioner suspends internet services under Telecom Suspension Rules.

=> ↺ actcheck! The IT Rules 2021 FAQ

• ‘The Union Government had notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 in February, 2021 (‘the Rules’). Back then, we provided a deep-dive of the Rules and thereafter, they have been subject to several challenges. The High Court of Madras and Bombay have stayed Part III of the Rules. Now almost 8 months after the notification of the Rules, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has released a document consisting of Frequently Asked Questions purportedly to ‘bring clarity’ and to ‘explain the nuances of the due diligence to be followed by intermediaries’. In this blogpost, we separate the Facts from the Claims made in the FAQ document.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Why Hollywood Sucks: Third Time’s a Charm with “Dune”?

• Now, nearly twenty years after The Fellowship of the Ring’s release, which struck the mold of multi-film franchises that have been the mainstay of American cinema in this young century, Warner Bros. has released a proper adaptation of Herbert’s novel. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the picture is intended to be the opening of a new trilogy, with Part II covering the second half of the gargantuan source novel and Part III adapting the much tinier but far more frightening sequel Dune Messiah. Set 8,000 years hence in a neo-feudal galactic empire, the story follows the young noble-born Paul Atreides as he begins a life-changing journey on the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the all-important geriatric spice melange, which allows space travel and prolongs lifespans. To say the story is laced with analogies about the Middle East and fossil fuel geopolitics is an understatement.

• This was the third time that the book was adapted and considering each of these attempts is a fascinating exercise in cinema history.

=> ↺ Beyond Right to Repair – Purism

• Pick a random consumer device lying around your house and imagine someone coming across it after 70 years of neglect. Part of the device no longer works. Would they be able to fix it?

• Today, devices are designed to be cheap, short-lived and disposable. The assumption is that if something you buy breaks, the only solution is to throw it away. Repairability and longevity is simply not a factor in most consumers’ minds.

• In fact, this “use and throw” mentality contributes to massive e-waste. The total e-waste around the world this year is estimated to reach a record 57.4 million tonnes–that is, more than the weight of the Great Wall of China

• Being able to repair things we own is critical to extending their longevity. This past week the Library of Congress approved changes to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that grant people the right to get into their consumer devices for the purposes of diagnostics, repair, and maintenance. This is part of an overall initiative to expand the so-called “Right to Repair” nationally within the US (there are similar efforts in the EU).

• The core idea behind Right to Repair is to prevent companies from using the DMCA or other means to block consumers from being able to take apart, reverse engineer, and repair things they buy. Removing the legal risk is a big step forward, but we must move beyond the Right to Repair before the devices you buy are actually repairable. In this post I will elaborate on the problem of longevity in modern devices and some solutions. It starts with parts and ends with software.

Monopolies

Patents

Software Patents

=> ↺ SUSE Joins LOT Network to Protect Open Development and Innovation

=> ↺ 1

=> ↺ 2

• Today, SUSE joins LOT Network, a global community of more than 1,700 organizations who have collaboratively immunized themselves and helped protect customers from the negative effects of opportunistic patent trolls. Each of the companies in this community has pledged to ensure that any patents they transfer to non-practicing entities (NPE) do not pose a danger to the rest of the LOT community or any of their customers. SUSE is proud to further its commitment to patent non-aggression in the open source space and looks forward to an engaging future in LOT Network’s community.

Copyrights

=> ↺ An Iconic Line: Claude Mellan’s The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649) – The Public Domain Review

• Mellan’s pièce de résistance: an engraving of Christ incised with a single, spiralling line.

=> ↺ Publishers Want To Make Ebooks More Expensive And Harder To Lend For Libraries; Ron Wyden And Anna Eshoo Have Questions

• Techdirt has noted in the past that if public libraries didn’t exist, the copyright industry would never allow them to be created. Publishers can’t go back in time to change history (fortunately). But the COVID pandemic, which largely stopped people borrowing physical books, presented publishers with a huge opportunity to make the lending of newly-popular ebooks by libraries as hard as possible.

=> ↺ Digital Democracy from the ‘Global Britain for an open world?’ publication

• For digital democracy to succeed across the world, we need an open reformation in our democratic systems, practices and mindset. Far from radical, this is essential if we are to promote liberal democracy and open societies across the globe.

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