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● 01.05.22

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● Links 5/1/2022: WordPress 5.9 RC 1 and Heroic Games Launcher 2.0.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Video Editing with Linux: All About B-roll – Purism

• Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant dives into B-roll. You’ll learn what it is, how to use it, and where to find and create engaging B-roll shots. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!

=> ↺ Garuda Linux 220101 Cinnamon

• Today we are looking at Garuda Linux 220101, the Cinnamon, community, edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.15, based on Arch Linux, Cinnamon 5.0.7, and uses about 700-800 MB of ram when idling.

=> ↺ Garuda Linux 220101 Cinnamon Run Through – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at Garuda Linux 220101, the Cinnamon Community Edition.

=> ↺ Linus Is Right About Linux Gaming… For Now – Invidious

• Right now is a really interesting time to be involved in Linux gaming, it’s absolutely not perfect but we’re in the middle of it becoming absolutely incredible a few short years from now. Today Linus is right about Linux gaming but not for long.

=> ↺ Neptune 7.0 “Faye” overview | an elegant out of the box experience. – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Neptune 7.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.

=> ↺ Why Linux Will Win in 20 Years | Jupiter Extras 79

• It’s a casual community hangout, and we spin the Wheel of Topics. From what Linux does worst, our thoughts on EndlessOS, Ubuntu Web Remix, QubesOS, Brent’s adventures with JellyFin, and why Linux will ultimately dominate all operating systems in 20 years.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 5.15.13

=> ↺ Linux 5.10.90

=> ↺ Linux 5.4.170

=> ↺ Linux 4.19.224

=> ↺ Linux 4.14.261

=> ↺ Linux 4.9.296

=> ↺ Linux 4.4.298

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ LatencyFleX Is An Open-Source, Vendor-Agnostic Alternative To NVIDIA Reflex – Phoronix

• NVIDIA Reflex is an SDK for game developers for measuring and reducing rendering latency. But now there is an alternative, open-source implementation of those APIs that can work across drivers/vendors while still helping to reduce rendering latency: meet LatencyFleX.

• LatencyFleX is a vendor/game agnostic latency reduction middleware solution that can be used as a drop-in replacement to NVIDIA Reflex usage. LatencyFleX can work with Windows games running on Linux under Steam Play via Proton-NVAPI integration. There is also experimental support for directly hooking into Unreal Engine 4 and Unity games.

=> ↺ Google Has Been Quietly Developing “GFR” To Debug Vulkan GPU Hangs/Crashes – Phoronix

• Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux.

• Google has been developing the Graphics Flight Recorder with a focus on Stadia cloud gaming use-cases for developers to sort out GPU hangs/crashes. This Vulkan layer adds completion tags to Vulkan command buffers so when an error is detected those command buffers can be dumped — particularly around knowing where there was the last completed or first incomplete buffer.

=> ↺ Zink Working On Sparse Textures, Other Improvements To Kick Off 2022 – Phoronix

• After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz — who has been leading the work on Mesa’s Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve — is back at the game.

• Blumenkrantz and others involved with Zink made very impressive strides in 2021: Zink now allows for OpenGL 4.6 implemented over Vulkan, the performance is in rather good shape and continues getting better, and more games are running fine atop this component. There has also been other accomplishments like Wayland compositor support, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver runningm etc.

=> ↺ Choo Choo – Mike Blumenkrantz – Super. Good. Code.

• I said this was done yesterday, but the main CTS case for the extension is broken, so I didn’t adequately test it. Fortunately, Qiang Yu from AMD is on the case in addition to doing the original Gallium implementations for these extensions, and I was able to use a WIP patch to fix the test. And run it. And then run it again. And then run it in gdb. And then… And then…

• Anyway, it all passes now, and sparse texture support is good to go once Australia comes back from vacation to review patches.

• Also I fixed sparse buffer support, which I accidentally broke 6+ months ago but never noticed since only RADV implements these features and I have no games in my test list that use them.

• [...]

• I came back to the gift of a new CS:GO version which adds DXVK support, so now there’s also Gallium Nine support. It works fine.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ The Fastest Way to Recursively Count Files in Linux

• Before we take an in-depth tour of this article guide, we first need to understand what the article piece is trying to uncover. We need to understand or answer the question ‘why is it important to count files in Linux’. It is every Linux Administrator’s ambition to be familiar with the Ins and Outs of their operating system architecture.

• Therefore, knowing the location and number of directory files you have to administer/manage is equally important. In this case, you could be having thousands of manually or automatically generated files by system users or programs and want to keep track of their increasing or finite number.

• There are several inbuilt Linux-based commands that can easily help you in such circumstances. However, if we are looking for the fastest means of achieving this article’s objective, we have to be picky and considerate of other viable options.

=> ↺ [Fixed] bash: sudo: command not found

• sudo, Linux’s most useful command, is occasionally missing from several Linux distributions, most notably docker containers and lightweight Linux distributions.

• sudo is a utility that allows users to run commands with root access. It is the most helpful command and is included in almost all major Linux distributions. Yes, almost all. Several Linux distros, particularly docker images, do not ship the sudo package by default. If you see the error bash: sudo: command not found it simply means that sudo is not installed.

=> ↺ How to LXQt Desktop Environment on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• LXQt is a free desktop environment known for being lightweight, fast, and energy-efficient, which can replace the standard default GNOME Desktop on your Debian system, which can be desired for users with low-powered computers and laptops, and netbooks.

• LXQt has had a colorful history of merging and then splitting with the LXDE project in 2013 and 2018. However, both projects are of a high standard in sharing similar approaches regarding being more efficient than the major players such as GNOME and KDE.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LXQt Desktop Environment on Debian 11 Bullseye.

=> ↺ How to Install LEMP Stack on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• LEMP is a collection of open-source software commonly used to serve web applications. The term LEMP is an acronym that represents the configuration of a Linux operating system with an Nginx (pronounced engine-x, hence the E in the acronym) web server, with site data stored in a MySQL or MariaDB database and dynamic content processed by PHP that is popularly used for hosting extensive websites due to its performance and scalability.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LEMP (Nginx, MariaDB, PHP) on Debian 11 Bullseye.

=> ↺ How to Block SSH Brute Force Attacks Using SSHGUARD

• SSHGuard is an open-source daemon that shields hosts from brute-force attacks. It accomplishes this through monitoring and aggregation of system logs, detecting attacks, and blocking attackers using one of the Linux firewall backends: iptables, FirewallD, pf, and ipfw.

• Initially designed to provide an extra layer of protection for the OpenSSH service, SSHGuard also protects a wide range of services such as Vsftpd and Postfix. It recognizes several log formats including Syslog, Syslog-ng, and raw log files.

=> ↺ How To Install GoAccess on Debian 11 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GoAccess on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, GoAccess is a free and open source web log analyzer program which is able to analyze and check the web server logs rapidly. It can read and analyze log files of nearly all web formats including Apache, Nginx, and etc. It displays real-time web server statistics by displaying summaries of different reports in a dashboard.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the GoAccess web log analyzer on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

=> ↺ How to Install & Configure Unattended Upgrades on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

• Keeping your system up to date is an essential factor for anyone from simple desktop users, developers, sysadmins; well, let’s face it, anyone with a device primarily connected to the Internet.

• Ubuntu, by default, is not set up for automatic updates. However, with enabling and configuring unattended-upgrades packages, you can easily apply security, package, or even new feature upgrades in an easy, simple, efficient way if you do not always have the time to check or forget. IT is highly recommended to enable this just for security alone.

• The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install or enable and configure Unattended Upgrades on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish Desktop or Server.

=> ↺ How To Apply Git Commit Diffs to Different Files – CloudSavvy IT

• Git is a powerful version control system that allows for multiple branching versions of your project with automatic merging. That’s great, but sometimes it breaks when files are renamed or aren’t in the right place. Luckily, you can manually apply patches to different files.

=> ↺ How to install FreeOrion on a Chromebook

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

=> ↺ How to Add a ‘Shake to Find Cursor’ Feature to Ubuntu – OMG! Ubuntu!

• macOS has a nifty feature that temporarily enlarges the on-screen pointer when you shake the mouse vigorously.

• It sounds daft, but this momentary magnification makes finding your pointer’s location on screen faster (and since most of us shake the mouse to find the pointer anyway, it’s not exactly extra effort).

• In fact, on a huge or multi-monitor sets, or against a dark theme or dark wallpaper it’s real easy to loose track of where the mouse pointer arrow is.

• A quick shake of the mouse (or a firm trackpad tickle with your finger) to make the pointer briefly enlarge to say “I;m over here” is, well, a mini salve you quickly wonder how you managed without!

• But you don’t need to fork out for a pricey Mac to benefit, though.

=> ↺ Jelmer Vernooij: Personal Streaming Audio Server

• For a while now, I’ve been looking for a good way to stream music from my home music collection on my phone.

• There are quite a few options for music servers that support streaming. However, Android apps that can stream music from one of those servers tend to be unmaintained, clunky or slow (or more than one of those).

• It is possible to use something that runs in a web server, but that means no offline caching – which can be quite convenient in spots without connectivity, such as the Underground or other random bits of London with poor cell coverage.

=> ↺ How to Display System Details and Hardware Information on Linux

• A master craftsman is deeply familiar with the tools he or she works with, and you need to be familiar with your Linux system and the hardware it runs on if you want to call yourself an advanced user.

• Knowing how to display system details and hardware information on Linux is guaranteed to come in handy when troubleshooting all kinds of problems, from hardware devices not showing up to software applications not installing or running correctly.

• As is usually the case, Linux gives you multiple ways to display system details and hardware information, some requiring more technical knowledge than others.

=> ↺ Cron Job Scheduling by Examples

=> ↺ Bash Sleep Milliseconds Granularity

• We used to think the sleep instruction only took whole numbers as an input. It is not correct, as we discovered when attempting to find a technique to have a program halt for very little than one second. This is a terrible mistake on our part. But we are sure others think the same way we do. So, here’s a quick tutorial about how to put bash to sleep in less than a half-second. So, we will start it from the terminal shell. You need to open the shell terminal with the help of a “Ctrl+Alt+T” command of Ubuntu 20.04 at its desktop environment. Let’s have a look.

=> ↺ How Do You Kill a Process In Ubuntu Terminal?

• One of the best features of any Linux distribution is the advanced Command Terminal. Using the Command Terminal, you can execute long and complicated tasks by just writing a few lines of commands that would otherwise require a long and complicated procedure on the GUI.

• Although familiarizing yourself with the Terminal may seem daunting at first, it will become your most valuable asset in your journey to master Ubuntu with time and practice.

• An example of a task made easy with the help of the Command Terminal is killing a process in Ubuntu. Although there is a GUI method for killing processes, it is long and involves many steps.

• The CLI method is easier as it allows you to kill processes by typing a few commands in the Terminal.

• If you find the Command Terminal daunting or wish to learn the CLI method of killing processes in the Terminal, then this guide is meant for you. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a firm grasp on the commands you can use to kill processes in the Ubuntu Terminal.

=> ↺ Fix Make Command Not Found Error on Ubuntu

• Nowadays, we have evolved at a stupendous rate when it comes to technology and digitization. Almost every task which would have been a hassle is a click away due to modern technology. We can build applications through easy-to-use tools that save us time and facilitate day-to-day life.

• But what if we are faced with a situation where we don’t have these tools, or maybe we need to build an application from scratch or tweak certain aspects of it? Linux distributions answer this question by presenting an important command in the Linux arsenal, the ‘make’ command.

• Make command is one of the most widely used commands on Linux distributions, which offers a pathway to download polished versions of the developer’s tools on your system. However, its pivotal role lies in building or compiling entire programs via source code. ‘Make’ is a command which is generally used to build dependencies like executable files or libraries using a source code. It may be generally referred to as a command that transforms some code into something tangible that can be used and regarded as desired result or a part of it.

• This command works on a basic level, from compiling source files to object files, which in turn gives us executable files for various programs we run.

=> ↺ Fix error no supported authentication methods available

• Computer systems have become an integral part of our everyday life. Whether at work or leisure, we find ourselves hooked to our systems in one way or the other. There are times when we may need to access our system remotely on our insecure network. However, to keep ourselves safe, we need to ensure we are secure and our privacy is not compromised. In such situations, we may use SSH servers which makes our network service secure over an unsecured network. Expanding on that, we often encounter an error that states: “no supported authentication methods available.”

=> ↺ What is the difference between #!/bin/sh and #!/bin/bash?

• For most of the people who use computers, typing in commands into the command prompt of their respective operating systems is nothing new. Although modern computers commonly interact with using the GUI, there is the provision of using executable and typeable commands with their command terminals.

• This is especially true for the users of Linux and its distros. Using the command terminal for performing regular tasks is pretty common.

• The programs working behind the scenes of the command terminal are called “shells”. Shells are defined as programs that take in commands, interpret them, and then instruct the computer to perform the function the user wants it to do. So, everything you code into is part of a shell.

=> ↺ How To Install Java On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

• This tutorial post will help you to install Java on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Java is the most popular object-oriented programming language. There are multiple applications required for your system required Java on your system. Here we will install Java (OpenJDK 11 and OpenJDK 8) or Oracle Java 14.

=> ↺ How to install FastPanel on Debian 11

• Hello, friends. This post is easy to do, but it can help more than one sysadmin or newbie. In this post, you will learn how to install FastPanel on Debian 11.

=> ↺ How to Install MATE Desktop Environment on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

• For those not familiar with MATE Desktop Environment, it continues GNOME 2. It is famous for being lightweight, fast, and stable that runs on Linux and most BSD operating systems. MATE is also an excellent choice for a lower-end system or those looking to remain efficient on system resources.

• In the following tutorial, you will have learned how to install the MATE Desktop environment on Debian 11 Bullseye.

=> ↺ How to Install OpenJDK 17 on Ubuntu 20.04 – LinuxCapable

• Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.

• The tutorial will look at installing the OpenJDK version instead of the default Oracle JDK. The difference between these two is licensing. OpenJDK is an entirely free open-source Java with a GNU General Public License, and Oracle JDK requires a commercial license under the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement. Other differences are release schedules and other factors that come into play; however, performance is pretty much the same.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest OpenJDK 17 LTS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

=> ↺ How to install Prometheus in Debian 11 or Ubuntu 20.04

• Prometheus is a powerful system monitoring solution having a time-series database. Here in this tutorial, we learn how to install Prometheus on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux.

• The key idea behind the implementation of Prometheus is to get an environment to have, dedicated monitoring, alerting, and trending system. In today’s world where companies are facing difficulties in configuring and controlling multiple systems; there Prometheus monitoring tool, with a universal configuration solution companies can independently program and also document the control code for the respective control technology (operating system, PLC, I / O level, etc.).

=> ↺ How to convert text to path in Inkscape

• Inkscape permits its users to create editable text with the help of the “Text” tool. After adding text, you can customize it by changing its font style, size, and color. However, you may encounter the situation when you want to utilize the added text as a graphic element or object. For this purpose, you can convert the added text into the path in Inkscape software. When you convert text to a path, the text becomes a graphic object that cannot be altered. Still, Inkscape lets you change the converted text’s look by reshaping it. This type of conversion assists in making wordmarks or logos.

• Don’t know the steps of converting text to path in Inkscape? No worries! This post will assist you in this regard. This write-up will show you the procedure of converting text to path in Inkscape. Moreover, the method of customizing the converted text will also be provided. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to convert PNG to SVG in Inkscape

• Vector graphics and Raster graphics are the two primary types of graphics. Portable Graphic Format (PNG) files are the raster images built from discrete colored boxes, called pixels. Pixel graphics are static and have a predetermined size. In a raster image, the individual pixels become more visible as you zoom in or try to magnify them. On the other hand, Vector graphics are based on mathematical formulas that specify the graphics features on the X and Y axes. These formulas are significantly more dynamic than a sequence of static boxes or pixels. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format offers many additional advantages compared to the PNG, such as being fully editable by utilizing the vector graphics tools and having the capability to enlarge its points.

• Suppose that you have a logo file in PNG format and you want to convert it to SVG. What will you do? You will look out for this feature in popular image editing software or vector graphics editors such as Inkscape. Inkscape permits users to save and convert the PNG or JPG image file into SVG file format. Today, we will thoroughly demonstrate how you can convert PNG to SVG in Inkscape. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to change canvas size in Inkscape

• In Inkscape, after creating a design that is ready for finalization, you will most likely need to change the size to accommodate whatever you have created. For instance, you have designed a logo, and now you want to finalize the editable vector copies to deliver them to the intended recipients. Also, when you create a PDF file, Inkscape only saves the objects that exists within the page border. So, understanding how to change the canvas size is essential if you need to change it according to your preferences.

• This write-up will show you how to change the canvas size in Inkscape by using the “Documents Properties” menu. The “Documents Properties” menu also permits you to change the size of the canvas with numerical input. You can also customize your canvas size to fit the specific objects added in your Inkscape document. So, let’s get this guide started!

=> ↺ How to Fix the dpkg interrupted error in Linux?

• If you are a person who uses Linux or its distros as their primary OS, there is a high probability that you have come across the annoying error message “dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to correct the problem”. You get this error when you are using the $apt-get command to install some packages or update your existing software packages, and the process gets killed.

• Imagine you are required to update your favorite application, and you proceed to update it using the Command Terminal and the $apt-get command. The process is going along fine, but it stops suddenly, and you are presented with this error. It is very frustrating as you don’t know what went wrong and how to correct it.

• The error can be caused by multiple reasons. You might have lost your internet connection, the package being installed was corrupted, or another issue you can’t point out. The problem with not knowing why the error occurred is that you can’t solve the issue straight away. You try out different things in the hope that the error is resolved.

• For the users who are continuously experiencing this problem without any resolution, we will be taking a look at which commands you can execute on the Command Terminal to get rid of this error. So hang on tight, and let’s start the troubleshooting.

=> ↺ How to Fix the “mount point does not exist” Error in Linux?

• While using computers, users continuously play around with the file systems to manage their data. They create new directories, create new folders, or add another file system to increase space or divide the data into the new files for their convenience.

• Mostly, this is done using the GUI with new directories and folders created instantly with a few clicks of the mouse. However, there are a few people who like to do the same using the CLI. They attempt to make new directories and attach file systems to their existing ones using commands typed in a command window.

• While this may sound interesting, the probability of getting errors and running into different problems is much higher than doing it through the GUI. One of the common errors that users can come across is the “mount point does not exist” error.

• The mount point is an accessible directory of the previously existing file system with which you attach the new file system. The mount point is the root directory of the new file system, and the original content of that directory becomes inaccessible till the new file system is unmounted.

• The system itself generally designates the mount points. These directories are already listed in the /etc/fstab directory. Users can also designate mount points themselves by using one of the directories listed in /etc/fstab. The names of these directories can also be edited using text editor software.

• Now, the “mount point does not exist” multiple reasons can cause an error. You make even the tiniest of mistakes, and you can’t mount new file systems on your computer. It is important that you perform each and every step of the process diligently. There are many things that are to be considered while attempting to mount a new file system.

=> ↺ How to crop image in Inkscape

• Knowing the cropping feature is essential if you want to edit your images in Inkscape. Inkscape crop is a method utilized to remove or trim the edges of an image. Cropping an image in Inkscape is typically used to eliminate irrelevant details, unwanted subjects, or extra visual information. It also improves the overall composition by concentrating on the main point and adjusting its orientation and the aspect ratio of the image.

• In Inkscape, cropping an image is easy to use, quick, and efficient. There exist various tools and options in Inkscape that assist in this process. This write-up will teach you how to crop images in Inkscape using Stars and Polygons, Bezier, and Rectangles and Squares Inkscape tools. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to copy and paste with a clipboard in Tmux

• Tmux is an open-source terminal multiplexer application for efficiently managing multiple terminal windows. People who have previously used the Terminator application are mostly familiar with the notion of tab management in Linux Terminal. With Tmux, we can split the terminal into a number of panes. We can adjust these panes by moving around, resizing, and switching between them. This helps curb the pain of managing multiple windows and tabs of the Gnome terminal.

• In general, when you close an SSH connection, the corresponding remote terminal sessions are also closed. Here comes the Tmux for help as it preserves those sessions when the SSH connection is terminated.

• After installing Tmux, you will not find any icon associated with it. It will not appear as a separate application; instead, we will have to invoke it from the Gnome Terminal itself. We will later see how to do this.

=> ↺ How to Reset Forgotten Root Password in Debian and Bedrock Linux

• Once you add a general user into the sudo group, then there is no need to use a root account for the administrative tasks. But due to some odd reason, you are not able to access your primary account?

Games

=> ↺ Free top-down action game Steelbreakers gets a bunch of new maps | GamingOnLinux

• Love local multiplayer action games? Do check out Steelbreakers, a free 2D top-down multiplayer arena fighter.

• In Steelbreakers you hack, slash, shoot and run to defeat your opponents and emerge victorious, or team up to defeat monsters and survive. Inspired by many different retro games it features different game modes and various maps to fight through.

=> ↺ Send help as I have discovered Bloons TD 6 | GamingOnLinux

• Stepping slightly out of my comfort zone recently to try something different, I picked up a copy of Bloons TD 6 and I think I now may need help to tear myself away from it. Note: played with Steam Play Proton.

• I’m a huge fan of strategy games but I usually go for the more base-building RTS types, with Tower Defense not something I go for often. Based on how it looks, Bloons TD 6 is a game I would say you could easily pass up and not think anything of it. I honestly thought it looked a bit, dare I say it, overly childish. Oh how I was wrong. Bloons TD 6 is a monster of a game but family friendly for sure.

• [...]

• So I did and cross-platform multiplayer works exceptionally well even between a Linux machine running it through Proton and someone else on Windows (tested both joining / hosting)

=> ↺ 3D rendering engine OGRE 2.3 released adding Vulkan support | GamingOnLinux

• Even more Vulkan goodness came recently with OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) releasing Ogre-Next 2.3.0 Deadalus just before Christmas.

• While this isn’t something us normal consumers will use, it’s another bit of great free and open source tech and having it continue to advance is great. Vulkan is gradually starting to replace OpenGL in more places for gaming, which is good news for Linux.

=> ↺ Ogre-Next 2.3.0 Deadalus Released and Merry Christmas! | OGRE – Open Source 3D Graphics Engine

• Most games don’t care too much about device lost because games can assume they own almost the entire computer while they’re running, and nothing else will be happening. A device lost is considered a critical failure and very uncommon, typically because of a Hardware or Software malfunction. Or a Windows Update in the middle of a gaming session, in which case the gaming experience is already interrupted anyway. However this is not true for non-gaming apps: device lost can happen because of multiple reasons, but the two most common are:

• • The graphics driver is upgraded - Switching from power saving mode to performance or viceversa (mostly on laptops or other mobile devices)

• Due to these two reasons, device lost becomes an almost certainty for long-running applications that could encounter a graphics driver suddenly upgrading; or for mobile/laptop-oriented applications where power mode switching can be very frequent. Recovering from device lost can range from very easy to very difficult; depending on the complexity of an application and what the application was doing at the time the device was lost. Eugene’s work goes to great lengths to try to gracefully recover from a Device Lost.

=> ↺ Heroic Games Launcher 2.0.0 ‘Anniversary Edition’ Releases With Essential UI Improvements and Features – It’s FOSS News

• Gaming on Linux has truly improved over the years. It’s safe to say, 2021 was a great year for Linux gaming.

• We’ve come across exciting news such as Linus Tech Tip’s experiments with desktop Linux, official support for Anti-Cheat systems, 80% compatibility of Steam’s top hundred games, Valve’s new Steam Deck with Arch-based Steam OS 3.0, and many more.

• We know how much effort Valve is putting into Linux gaming through Steam and Proton. But what about those users who prefer playing games from other platforms?

=> ↺ China’s Regulatory War On Its Gaming Industry Racks Up 14k Casualties

• It isn’t news that China has begun a campaign against video games within its borders. The battles in this war are being waged on a couple different fronts. In 2021, Beijing set new rules for what youths can play when it comes to games, as well as a strict schedule for when they can play them. This birthed an underground economy for account sharing to get around those rules, but the rules still had some effect. Chinese regulators also have exerted strict control over what foreign games are available in online stores, while those same regulators strictly control what games gain approval for release from within. This all seems to be some sort of legislative stream of consciousness from President Xi Jinping’s belief that video games are somehow massively harmful and addictive to children.

=> ↺ Wordle Is a Love Story

• If he were optimizing the game to gain as many players as possible, he would have included a link at the end of the tweet that the tool generates, he said. But after looking into it, he said it would have looked “trashy” and not as visually compelling, and he liked the grid’s mysterious air, which he felt piqued people’s interest.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Plasma Desktop Update [in PCLinuxOS]

• The KDE Plasma Desktop packages have been updated to 5.23.5. This is a service release update.

=> ↺ KDE finally gets root operations in Dolphin, big 2022 plans for Wayland | GamingOnLinux

• KDE developer Nate Graham continues blogging about how KDE and Plasma are evolving and there’s been some great improvements recently, along with some huge plans for 2022.

• Making things easier for users is important and the KDE team are clearly taking on a lot of feedback. A major new feature is that Dolphin, and anything that hooks into KIO, can now create, move, copy, trash, and delete files in non-user-owned locations. Instead of just giving you a warning and not letting you do anything, it should now ask for a password and let you do what you need to without resorting to a terminal window. Nice. This change should land in KDE Frameworks 5.91.

• Wayland improvements also came in recently like supporting greater than 8-bit colour, the ability to open the current directory or any other folder you right-click on in any app, not just the file manager with Konsole.

=> ↺ KaOS Linux Kicks off the Year with a New 2022.01 Release

• Being one of the best KDE focused Linux distros, KaOS has launched the new version KaOS 2022.01 with major changes in the Calamares installer.

• KaOS is a rolling release Linux distro focused exclusively on the KDE Plasma desktop. The distro was influenced by Arch Linux, uses Pacman as its package manager, but does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch. Instead, it labels itself as a built-from-scratch Linux distro since all packages in each of its repositories are compiled by the project for the distro.

• Now the first release for this year of this Plasma-focused Linux distro is out. So let’s give it a shot and see what’s new.

=> ↺ More consistent font rendering in Plasma

• The most distinctive characteristic of font rendering in Qt applications is that glyphs look thicker. Some people may argue that macOS-style font rendering is the worst one but after using Plasma for a long time, I’m used to that style of font rendering and would like fonts to look the same regardless of the underlying toolkit.

• After digging though some code, I’ve discovered that Qt enables stem darkening by default in its freetype font engine. With stem darkening, glyphs are embolden to improve readability. And, indeed, after putting export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=”cff:no-stem-darkening=0″ in my profile scripts, the glyphs look a bit thicker in non-Qt applications.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ You can now give your Linux desktop a Windows 11-style ‘Fluent’ makeover

• Windows 11 is far from perfect — it’s still very early days for the new operating system after all — but it sports an attractive, modern aesthetic thanks to the use of Microsoft’s Fluent Design System.

• If you like the look of Windows 11, but prefer to use a Linux OS, you can now get the best of both worlds by applying a new ‘Fluent’ icon set.

• Created by designer Vince Liuice, the icons in his Fluent theme aren’t an exact copy of those found in Windows 10, Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft products. Instead, they’re ‘inspired’ by the software giant’s design system with the use of color, typography, and acrylic material.

=> ↺ A ‘Fluent’ Icon Theme for Linux Desktops – OMG! Ubuntu!

• Windows 11 (and indeed many Microsoft products) now use the ‘Fluent’ design system — but you don’t have to switch to Windows or lock into its ecosystem to enjoy it.

• Prolific Linux design champ Vince Liuice — his portfolio is impressive — has made an icon set for Linux desktops that draws inspiration from Redmond’s fancy ‘acrylic’ aesthetic.

• The result is ‘Fluent‘, a striking Linux icon set that looks quite unlike anything else currently available. It won’t appeal to everyone’s tastes but Fluent is an interesting alternative to increasingly 2D, flat icons.

• Layering, opacity, colour, and shadow are used to create glyphs that are eminently recognisable and also somewhat physical in look, with dimension and a sense of materialness.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Raspberry Slideshow 15.0 has been released – Binary Emotions

• Raspberry Slideshow is an operating system for the Raspberry Pi microcomputer lineup used for digital signage when you need images’ or videos’ slideshows.

• It plays all media contained in a USB key, fetched from a network share, from a webserver, from a folder of your Dropbox account and loaded via scp as well.

• The operating system can refresh the media list in order to slide images and videos according to any remote change (addition or deletion of a media file). An optional photos’ rotation based on embedded EXIF informations is available.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS Magazine – Welcome From The Chief Editor

• Now seeing how dad hasn’t run Windows (as an administrator, anyway) since Windows Vista came out (that’s what pushed me to switch to Linux), I was a bit “out of the loop” on setting it up. You would have laughed if you watched me and mom struggling to activate and tweak the copy of Windows 10 that came on the laptop. We were definitely floundering like a fish out of water.

=> ↺ Screenshot Showcase

=> ↺ GIMP Tutorial: Create A Rubber Stamp Text Effect

• I found this as a Photoshop tutorial, and I always experiment with Photoshop tutorials to see if they work in GIMP. This one had several effects that I wasn’t sure of (I’ve never used Photoshop), so I tailored it to GIMP.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Digital transformation: Your 6 key teams in 2022

• Forrester says organizations will continue with their transformation initiatives well into 2022. But while 2021 focused on short-term goals, 2022 will see digital transformation leaders focus on long-term challenges and leverage a customer-obsessed approach to technology. Future-fit companies – ones that are adaptive, creative, and resilient – are known to outperform their peers.

• Based on my own experience in the enterprise IT domain, I can assert that digital transformation is here for the long haul. It will require enterprises to draw up tightly woven strategies and provide a handsome payoff for those that start planning early.

=> ↺ IT careers: 3 IT job interview questions for 2022

• As attrition rates continue to climb, many IT hiring managers are seeking to fill dozens of open roles while struggling to identify qualified talent. Digital transformation shows no signs of slowing in 2022, and organizations set to tackle an infrastructure overhaul next year need strong developer teams to support their initiatives.

• Job interviews have expanded from being a tool used to vet candidates into an opportunity to sell your organization to prospective employees. Depending on the parameters of your recruitment process, the interview may be your only opportunity to develop a connection with applicants and should be treated with care.

• Beyond standard questions and problem sets that assess the hard skills of your tech job applicants, you have a unique opportunity to pose questions that are in line with your organization’s goals for 2022. The employees you bring on in Q1 will help shape and implement new flexible work policies.

=> ↺ Building a container by hand using namespaces: The UTS namespace | Enable Sysadmin

• This article builds upon my previous articles about namespaces, The 7 most used Linux namespaces and my series on Building a Linux container by hand using namespaces, using the mount namespace, and using the PID namespace. This article covers the UTS namespace and its relationship to containers.

• The casual observer often misunderstands the Unix Timesharing System (UTS) namespace, largely because its name no longer matches its purpose. Despite its name, the UTS namespace actually controls the hostname and the NIS domain.

=> ↺ Fedora Has Too Many Security Bugs 3

• Right now, there are 1917 open CVE bugs against Fedora. This is a decrease of 172 from last year – so again, we report good news. Gratitude toward maintainers who have been reducing their backlog.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, the balance has shifted back toward EPEL: EPEL has 1035 of the 1917 total, a change of +77. This has outsized impact because EPEL is much smaller than non-EPEL Fedora.

=> ↺ Vanessa Christopher: Week5 Blog Post

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Linux Mint, HD scaling, fractional scaling

• Well, I must say I am a bit disappointed with my exercise. I had hoped I could have a well-scaled and clear display, but this wasn’t meant to be. I can have one or the other, but not both at the same time. Font scaling works well in Cinnamon, but various theming elements just never change. Even if you increase the icon size for panel items (there’s an option for that), the system area ones never do. And the window button controls are just too small for comfort.

• Please do remember that Cinnamon does disclaim the fractional scaling functionality. Yes, it is experimental. But considering we’ve had FHD 13-inch and 14-inch laptops around for years, plus the fact Plasma can do all of this without any great fussing, plus the fact the same fractional scaling option offers better results in stock Gnome, this isn’t a good outcome overall. Anyway, for now, your best bet is font scaling. Hopefully, these issues will be ironed out soon, because I would like to try using Mint beyond my initial test, to see how it fares in day-to-day scenarios. But at the moment, it’s not ergonomically robust enough. The article ends here.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board comes with 5x SATA, 4x GbE, 2x HDMI, RS-485 interfaces

• We just wrote that Wiretrustee carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM4 with four SATA interfaces was canceled and made open-source hardware a few days ago, but the Axzez Interceptor carrier board is offering a solution that is somewhat similar with 5x SATA ports and designed for NAS, NVR, IoT, and Managed Switch applications.

• The Interceptor Carrier Board for Raspberry Pi CM4 notably includes two 4Kp60 capable HDMI ports, 5x SATA ports, 4x RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4x USB 2.0 interfaces, RS-485, and is powered via an ATX-24 connector, with a Mini-ITX adapter in the works.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ RISC-V CTO: We’re not chip dictators like Arm or x86 • The Register

• Chip technologies from Arm and x86 are getting the most attention amid semiconductor shortages and trade wars. But in the background, the open-source RISC-V chip architecture is stealthily emerging as a viable third architecture that is cheaper, flexible, and free of political intrigue.

• RISC-V is often referred to as the Linux of chips with engineers collaborating to design, set, and improve the architecture. RISC-V International sets the spec, which is free to license, and chip designers are free to implement it as they see fit in their processors and system-on-chips.

• China and Europe are moving to RISC-V for homegrown silicon to achieve chip sovereignty. Companies are also looking at RISC-V to cut licensing and royalty costs associated with the Arm and x86 architectures.

• To be sure, it may be many years until RISC-V emerges as a viable alternative to x86 and Arm in PCs, servers, and mobile phones. But it is off to a good start in microcontrollers and FPGAs, and single-board computers with RISC-V are already available. It also has the backing of companies including Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia.

• RISC-V International’s CTO, Mark Himelstein, spoke with The Register about RISC-V and its progress.

=> ↺ Making A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Case – 3D Printed – The DIY Life

• In this project, we’re going to be making a case for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This is a new and more powerful version of the original Pi Zero W, and has a quad-core 64-bit Broadcom BCM 2710 A1 chip. The CPU is similar to the original Pi 3, but with a few tweaks made specifically for the Pi Zero 2 W.

• This new, more powerful board is a significant improvement over the original Pi Zero, but it also uses more power and produces more heat. So we’re going to design a case which uses a 40mm fan to provide some additional cooling to the CPU.

=> ↺ Modular Design Enables Huge Ping-Pong Ball LED Displays | Hackaday

• Ping-pong balls have many uses: apart from playing table tennis, they have been used for countless art projects, science experiments, and even to raise ships from the bottom of the ocean. As it turns out, they also come in handy as diffusers for LED pixels, allowing the construction of large-size displays without requiring large individual LEDs.

• [david] designed an LED ping-pong ball display using 3D printed components, which allows for the construction of arbitrarily-large LED displays thanks to a strictly modular design. The basic unit is a small piece that holds a single LED module and has a cup-like structure for attaching a standard table tennis ball. Twenty-five of these basic units combine together into a panel that also contains wiring ducts. Finally, any number of these panels can be combined into a display, thanks to clips that give the structure rigidity in the out-of-plane direction.

• [...]

• The finished panel is driven by a combination of a Teensy 3.2 to generate the data signals and a Raspberry Pi to process the images.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 22 of the best tablet-optimized apps for Android

=> ↺ Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2022-01-05 – Android Authority

=> ↺ TCL intros a pair of budget Android slates, three child-friendly tablets too – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Google Is Adding A New Form of 2FA Utilizing Chrome For Android Along With QR Codes / Digital Information World

=> ↺ ‘Repainter’ gives you control over Android 12 colors – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Android 12 works on the Samsung Galaxy S2 (sort of) – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Samsung rolling out Android 12 to the Galaxy A72, more – 9to5Google

=> ↺ HMD admits it screwed up Android 11 rollout for Nokia phones

=> ↺ Alpine’s Newest Receiver Boasts Wireless Android Auto

=> ↺ Samsung rolling out Android 12 to the Galaxy A72, more – 9to5Google

=> ↺ The most powerful Snapdragon 888 Android phone is… foldable – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Asus’ Android 12 update offers an early look at the ZenFone 9 and ROG Phone 6

=> ↺ Developer ports Android 12 to the Samsung Galaxy S2 – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Galaxy S20 FE 4G receives the Android 12, One UI 4.0 – PhoneArena

=> ↺ [List] Countries where Galaxy S20 series has received Android 12 update – SamMobile

=> ↺ Galaxy Note 10 Lite & Galaxy A72 Are Getting Android 12

=> ↺ HMD admits it screwed up Android 11 rollout for Nokia phones

=> ↺ 7 smart steps to get your Android phone in tip-top shape for 2022 | Computerworld

=> ↺ HyperX Clutch wireless controller works with Android and PC

=> ↺ How to set up a new Android phone

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy S21 FE goes official for $699 w/ Android 12 – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Android 12 January security patch OTA for Pixel rolling out – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Galaxy A72 just got Android 12, it’s Christmas all over again! – SamMobile

=> ↺ Galaxy Note 10 Lite gets the Android 12 update (One UI 4.0) – SamMobile

=> ↺ Anker’s portable 4K projector runs Android TV and brings its own speakers – The Verge

=> ↺ Strong Announces Super Affordable 4K Ultra HD Android TV Streaming Box With Google Stadia

=> ↺ 5 Best augmented reality games for Android – Phandroid

=> ↺ This Weird Android Tablet Transfers Data Through Light | Digital Trends

=> ↺ Polestar 3′s next-gen Android Automotive infotainment powers up at CES 2022 – Roadshow

=> ↺ Android app deals of the day: Scalak, Home Workouts Gym Pro, Cubasis, and more – 9to5Toys

=> ↺ The OnePlus 10 Pro will have flagship Android specs – The Verge

=> ↺ How to remotely control or access any Android phone or laptop – Technology News

=> ↺ Adyen launches Android POS terminals

=> ↺ Mobile Linux postmarketOS v21.12 supports more devices

• A slim and pure Linux operating system on the smartphone, tablet or ARM notebook – postmarketOS delivers exactly that. The open source operating system is primarily aimed at Linux enthusiasts. The recently released version postmarketOS 21.12 is based on Alpine Linux 3.15 and has three updated user interfaces optimized for mobile devices.

• Changes under the hood

• postmarketOS also contains some useful extensions. Sometimes the GUI gets stuck or a terminal stops responding. With a keyboard you can then quickly open a new terminal with a key combination and, for example, complete or restart processes. With the built-in TTYescape it works on the smartphone or tablet by pressing the volume down button, clicking the power button three times and finally releasing the volume button.

• The Phosh user interface – a mobile-optimized variant of the GNOME Shell – does not hide apps that are not optimized for mobile devices in the app list. This so-called app drawer filter can be used with postmarketos-tweaks in Version 0.9.0 switch off via GUI. On some devices they also support the adjustment of the suspend timeout for deep sleep modes and now set it down by default from 15 to 2 minutes – that saves a lot of battery. The developers describe further small adjustments in their PostmarketOS release announcement December 21st.

=> ↺ Nokia 5.4 review – Newer, cheaper but not better

• You have to admit, for a person who doesn’t really like or care that much about smartphones (that person would be me, if you’re wondering), I tend to do a fair deal of mobile device reviews. But hey, I must. When someone calls me a grumpy dinosaur, I need to have evidence that proves I’m still hip and leet and can dance the meanest of discos. Ergo, technology.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Create bookmarks for your PDF with pdftk | Opensource.com

• In introducing pdftk-java, I explained how I use the pdftk-java command to make quick, often scripted, modifications to PDF files.

• However, one of the things pdftk-java is most useful for is when I’ve downloaded a big PDF file, sometimes with hundreds of pages of reference text, and discovered that the PDF creator didn’t include a table of contents. I don’t mean a printed table of contents in the front matter of the book; I mean the table of contents you get down the side of your PDF reader, which the PDF format officially calls “bookmarks.”

=> ↺ Will Kahn-Greene: Kent v0.1.0 released! And the story of Kent in the first place….

• Before explaining what it is, I want to talk about Why.

• A couple of years ago, we migrated from the Raven Sentry client (Python) to sentry-sdk. One of the things we did was implement our own sanitization code which removed personally identifyable information and secret information (as best as possible) from error reports.

• I find the documentation for writing sanitization filters really confusing. before_send? before_breadcrumb? When do those hooks kick off? What does an event look like? There’s a link to a page that describes an event, but there’s a lot of verbiage and no schema so it’s not wildly clear what the errors my application is sending look like.

=> ↺ curl 7.81.0 – more percent

• There has been eight weeks since 7.80.0.

• [...]

• When the curl command man page is generated at build time, the script now makes sure that there is a “see also” for each option. This will help users find related info. More mandatory information for each option makes us do better documentation that ultimately helps users.

Web Browsers

Chromium

=> ↺ Google makes the perfect case for why you shouldn’t use Chrome

• Back in 2020, Google released Manifest V3, which it called a step in the direction of security, privacy and performance.

• It took a while, but on Dec. 9, 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation labeled MV3 a “conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.”

• The EFF is right, and Google’s plans for MV3 is yet another reason why the best browser for Linux, Windows and Mac isn’t Google Chrome.

• Let me explain.

=> ↺ Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 97 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux.This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• Chrome 97.0.4692.71 contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 97.

=> ↺ Chrome 97 Released With WebTransport API – Phoronix

• Chrome 97 is admittedly not too exciting on the end-user feature front, but it does come with several developer additions. Exciting me the most at least with Chrome 97 is the introduction of the WebTransport API as a WebSockets-like interface. WebTransport is a protocol framework similar to WebRTC data channels but principally for clients constrained by the web security model to communicate with a remote server using a secure, multi-plexed transport. WebTransport uses the HTTP/3 protocol for bidirectional transport. Unlike WebSockets that is TCP-based, WebTransport relies on UDP-like datagrams and cancellable streams.

=> ↺ Short Topix: Is The $399 PinePhone Pro Linux Smartphone Enough To Gain Traction In Mobile Market?

• THE GOOGLE CHROME BROWSER EXPERIENCED NOT ONE, BUT TWO SECURITY UPDATES during the month of December, 2021. The first one was a security update of the vulnerable browser on December 5, 2021. That update addressed 20 security vulnerabilities, 16 of them reported by outside researchers, and 15 of which were rated as “high severity,” according to an article on the SecurityWeek website. Then, on December 13, 2021, Google patched the desktop browser AGAIN to address five security flaws. One of those vulnerabilities was a high-risk zero-day vulnerability that was already being exploited “in the wild” by hackers, according to an article on the Tom’s Guide website. Seems to validate one line of thinking that the more complex you make the browsers, the more vulnerable they are.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

=> ↺ WordPress 5.9 RC 1 – WordPress.org

• The first Release Candidate (RC1) for WordPress 5.9 is now available!

• Thank you to everyone who has contributed to reach this important milestone in the community’s progress towards a WordPress 5.9 release.

• “Release Candidate” means the new version of the software is ready for release. It helps the community check that nothing is missed, given the thousands of plugins and themes and differences in how millions of people use the software.

• WordPress 5.9 is slated for release on January 25, 2022. This is just three weeks to go – and there’s still time to help!

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Oracle Siebel CRM

• Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.

• In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.

• Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ 5 ways to learn the C programming language in 2022 | Opensource.com

• I am proficient in several programming languages, but my favorite has to be C. Developed in the 1970s as a systems programming language, C remains one of the most popular programming languages in 2021.

=> ↺ Against Pair Programming

• I’d argue that pair programming isn’t only ineffective, but detrimental. Pair programmers tend to give feedback that’s more appropriate in a design or code review. The overall strategy should be agreed to before you write any code. For the pairs that follow this, the only feedback that’s left tends to be bikeshedding or stylistic, both of which kill velocity. It’s like having a backseat driver. Not to mention the coveted flow state that most developers look for.

=> ↺ How programmers make sure that their software is correct

• The importance of producing correct software has long been understood. The best scientists and engineers have been trying to do this for decades.

=> ↺ Neural Network From Scratch

• In this edition of Napkin Math, we’ll invoke the spirit of the Napkin Math series to establish a mental model for how a neural network works by building one from scratch. In a future issue we will do napkin math on performance, as establishing the first-principle understanding is plenty of ground to cover for today!

• Neural nets are increasingly dominating the field of machine learning / artificial intelligence: the most sophisticated models for computer vision (e.g. CLIP), natural language processing (e.g. GPT-3), translation (e.g. Google Translate), and more are based on neural nets. When these artificial neural nets reach some arbitrary threshold of neurons, we call it deep learning.

=> ↺ How to Do Bash Nested While Loop

• The loops are quite well-known in most programming languages to iterate the data or increment or decrement the values in the code. The loops can be used alone or in nested forms. One of the most famous loops used in programming is the “While” loop. This loop continues to get executed until the mentioned condition is satisfying. Within this guide, we will be deliberating the way to use the nested “while” loop in bash programming. As most of our work would be through a terminal, so we need to open it first. Hence, we are trying the shortcut key “Ctrl+Alt+T” to open the terminal shell application of the Ubuntu 20.04 system.

• Let’s start creating a nested “while” loop in the bash script of Ubuntu 20.04. This will be started from the creation of a new file in a terminal with the help of a simple touch query with the bash file name. The file name is “new.sh”. This file is now held at the home folder of our Ubuntu 20.04 system. We need to open it within some editor to add bash code. So, we have been utilizing the “GNU Nano” editor for this purpose. This file has been opened with the help of a simple “nano” instruction and quickly opens it within the editor. Both the touch and nano instructions are shown in the attached screenshot picture.

=> ↺ Pyqt5 and MLT compiled in OE

• I have been looking around at video editors, as having ongoing issues with LiVES. There are a couple that require ‘pyqt5′ and at least one that requires ‘mlt’.

=> ↺ GNU libunistring-1.0 released

• The license has changed from “LGPLv3+ or GPLv2″ to “LGPLv3+ or GPLv2+”.

Python

=> ↺ Extracting information from Python source code | Red Hat Developer

• What library symbols does a Python source code file use? And what symbols does it provide to its users? A simple tool called invectio can provide this information based on static source code analysis. Invectio means “import” in Latin. As the name suggests, this small tool can extract information about imports as well as information about what users can import from Python modules.

=> ↺ Get current date in python

• The current date must be read for different types of programming purposes. Python has different modules to get the current date. The datetime module is one of them. It is a built-in module of Python. So, you don’t need to install it. To read the current date, you have to import this module into your script. The uses of this module to get the current date have shown in this tutorial.

=> ↺ PyPI is not trustworthy: zaitcev — LiveJournal

• I was dealing with a codebase S at work that uses a certain Python package N (I’ll name it in the end, because its identity is so odious that it will distract from the topic at hand). Anyhow, S failed tests because N didn’t work on my Fedora 35. That happened because S installed N with pip(1), which pulls from PyPI, and the archive at PyPI contained broken code.

• The code for N in its source repository was fine, only PyPI was bad.

• When I tried to find out what happened, it turned out that there is no audit trail for the code in PyPI. In addition, it is not possible to contact listed maintainers of N in PyPI, and there is no way to report the problem: the problem tracking system of PyPI is all plastered with warnings not to use it for problems with packages, but only with PyPI software itself.

Java

=> ↺ IntelliJ IDEA plugin catches cut’n’pasted Java code • The Register

• Boffins affiliated with dev tools biz JetBrains and HSE University in Moscow have devised an open-source plugin for the company’s Java development editor that guards against copy-and-paste coding.

• AntiCopyPaster, available on GitHub, works with IntelliJ IDEA, JetBrain’s integrated development environment (IDE) for Java programmers. It was created by Anton Ivanov, Zarina Kurbatova, Yaroslav Golubev, Andrey Kirilenko, Timofey Bryksin to help mitigate the problems that can accompany copied code.

• In a paper posted to ArXiv, the researchers observe that while “[c]opying and pasting constitute an essential part of writing programming code,” doing so can lead to code maintenance, security problems, and licensing issues.

• “While there is nothing wrong with the copying and pasting as such, research also shows that having clones inside a project can make its maintenance more difficult due to overgrown codebases,” the paper explains. “Fixing vulnerabilities across multiple duplicate instances can be difficult and lead to increased security risks.”

Leftovers

=> ↺ Antonio Brown Is a Damning Reflection of the NFL

• In the 1977, Paul Newman classic Slap Shot, a film about a down-and-out hockey team with a penchant for extreme violence, a player takes off all his clothes on the ice, stripping while lazily skating around. People are predictably outraged, but he is holding up a mirror to the violence of his sport and asking why his naked body is out of bounds but bludgeoning another human being is not.

=> ↺ Top Russian ice hockey team names son of Putin’s close friend as new head coach

• Boris Rotenberg, one of Russia’s richest businessmen and a close friend of Vladimir Putin, can boast another achievement this week: his son Roman was just named the head coach of St. Petersburg’s top ice hockey team, SKA. Roman Rotenberg has never served as a head coach before, and he’s never played hockey at a professional level, but he’s now at the helm of one of the Kontinental Hockey League’s wealthiest teams, reports Radio Svoboda.

=> ↺ Don’t Look Up: The Hipster/Liberal Book of Revelation

• Teeming with overripe targets and cardboard heroes, this is political satire dumbed down to the masscult expectations of an MSNBC demographic; if anyone is expecting the unhinged, Swiftian divine madness of Dr. Strangelove, forget it–you get two and a half hours of left liberal snark, sporadically diverting enough, with a few laughs. But it’s a decidedly lo-cal affair, and only the two featured non-American actors conjure memorable and original characters: Cate Blanchett as a chat-news anchor and Mark Rylance as a tech-billionaire Dr. Evil-type. Meryl Streep afflicts us with her customary over-busy caricature, while Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence serve up nothing more than the pedestrian mugging that passes for a star turn in Hollywood nowadays.

• It’s not a complete waste of time, but somehow you feel invited to conspire in a protracted liberal-elitist sneer at the dumb masses rather than to understand anything profound about human folly. Predictably, the noble university academics are the heroes, the parodied Republicans are the arch-villains, and the neoliberal elite that is actually perpetrating most of the destruction of the planet is mostly invisible—conveniently enough, given the main production and financing sources of the film: Bluegrass Films is headed by Scott Stuber (also head of original films at Netflix), who  in 2020 was a major donor to the two anointed “next-generation” stars of the neoliberal class—$5,600 to Kamala Harris and $4,000 to Pete Buttigieg; and Hyperobject Films, headed by the film’s main producer and director, Adam McKay, who tilts a bit farther to the left (he was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 and 2020) but remains firmly ensconced in the orbit of the corporate-financed Democratic Party, like Sanders and the Squad urging ballot-box support of its presiding corporate vassals despite sporadic, impotent, and well-contained yelps of discontent about its centrist policies.

=> ↺ Car shortage could change buying behavior forever

• The bottom line: The pandemic finally made it possible to complete your car purchase online without ever setting foot in a showroom.

Hardware

=> ↺ [Older] Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3: Too dangerous to deploy

• Slow, expensive, and malware in hardware

• [...]

• You might recall in 2018 when Qualcomm debuted their compute efforts with the 8cx SoC, a Windows laptop chip that was both woefully underpowered and vastly overpriced. It was locked to 32-bit code with 64-bit promised really soon. 3+ years later we aren’t sure if it has fully arrived but honestly no one cares at this point. Windows on ARM RT/WART/ARM laptops were a really bad idea to start off with and have gotten worse since.

• When the 8cx debuted it was met with cautious optimism by the press. We all thought that even with the crippling disadvantages like emulating a faster CPU with a slower one, it might have been a good ‘bathroom PC’ or something you give to the grandparents. Basically a consumption device with a keyboard not on the screen, a tablet competitor. Given the specs of the first device we all figured it would cost in the $2-300 range, basically about the same as a slightly better equipped x86 PC.

=> ↺ The Cucumber House That LEGO Built | Hackaday

• How far are you prepared to go to build a novelty seasonal ornament? Maybe a gingerbread house, or perhaps a bit of 3D printed glitter to hang on your Christmas tree. For [The Brick Wall], none of this was enough. Instead what was needed was a complete LEGO automated factory that builds a log cabin, from the unlikely raw material of cucumbers.

• What has been created is the LEGO equivalent of a timber mill, with the various machines served by an overhead gantry crane. The cucumbers are trimmed to square, before being transferred to a saw which cuts out the notches for the interlocking corners. Another saw line chops the sections around door and windows to length, and finally the roof planks are cut in a vertical saw. The video below is reported as taking 83 days to complete from planning to filming, and 18 cucumbers to build the house. We’re not sure the cucumber will become a regular building material, but we salute the effort involved here.

=> ↺ What You Should Know Before Buying An Industrial Sewing Machine | Hackaday

• I’ve been sewing off and on since I was a kid, and I really started to get into it about ten years ago. Even though I technically outgrew my little 3/4 size domestic machine pretty quickly, I kept using it because it always did whatever I asked it to. I even made my first backpack on it before deciding it was time for something bigger. Don’t ask me how I managed to not kill that machine, because I have no idea.

=> ↺ Growing Spectacular Gem-Like Crystals From Rust And Simple Ingredients | Hackaday

• When we talk about crystals around here, we’re generally talking about the quartz variety used to make oscillators more stable, or perhaps ruby crystals used to make a laser. We hardly ever talk about homegrown crystals, though, and that’s a shame once you see how easy it is to make beautiful crystals from scratch.

• We’ve got to say that we’re impressed by the size and aesthetics of the potassium ferrioxalate crystals [Chase Lean] makes with this recipe, and Zelda fans will no doubt appreciate their resemblance to green rupees. The process starts with rust, or ferric oxide, which can either be purchased or made. [Chase] chose to make his rust by soaking steel wool in a solution of saltwater and peroxide and heating the resulting sludge. A small amount of ferric oxide is added to a solution of oxalic acid, a commonly used cleaning and bleaching agent. Once the rust is dissolved, potassium carbonate is slowly added to the solution, turning it a bright green.

=> ↺ UV Resin Perfects 3D Print, But Not How You Think | Hackaday

• At this point, everyone knows that the print quality you’ll get from even an entry level UV resin printer far exceeds what’s possible for filament-based fused deposition modeling (FDM) machines. But there’s a trade-off: for the money, you get way more build volume by going with FDM. So until the logistics of large-format resin printers gets worked out, folks looking to make things like replica prop helmets have no choice but to put considerable time into post-processing their prints to remove the obvious layer lines.

• But thanks to this somewhat ironic trick demonstrated by [PropsNstuff], you can actually use UV resin to improve the finish quality of your FDM prints. The idea is to put a layer of resin over the layer lines and other imperfections of the 3D print, cure it with a handheld UV flashlight, and then sand it smooth. Essentially it’s like using resin in place of a body filler like Bondo, with the advantage here being that the resin cures in seconds.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ “There’s No Social Distancing”: Immigrants Held in ICE Jails at Risk Amid New Omicron Surge

• As the Omicron variant sets record-high COVID-19 infection rates across the United States, we look at the conditions in the sprawling network of jails run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement where the Biden administration is holding more than 22,000 people. “There’s still a lot of people detained. There’s no social distancing. People are still facing COVID,” says longtime immigrant activist Maru Mora Villalpando, who adds that most COVID infections are coming from unvaccinated workers who are coming from outside of the jails. She describes how people held in GEO Group’s Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, say conditions have gotten even worse during the pandemic, after a federal judge ruled the company must pay detained people minimum wage for work like cooking and cleaning instead of paying them a dollar a day. GEO Group responded by suspending its “voluntary work program.”

=> ↺ House Progressives Hail Biden Moves to Combat Meat Industry ‘Price Gouging’

• The Congressional Progressive Caucus on Tuesday joined family farm advocates in applauding President Joe Biden’s new executive action plan targeting “price gouging” and other monopolistic conduct by the U.S. meat industry, which has pushed high costs onto consumers while raking in huge profits during the pandemic.

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the CPC, said in a statement that throughout the public health crisis, U.S. corporations “have raked in record profits while continuing to raise prices and squeeze families, consolidating to prevent competition and increasing the burden on small businesses and consumers.”

=> ↺ “Essential But Excluded”: Pandemic Aid Left Out Undocumented Immigrants & Their U.S. Citizen Kids

• Pandemic relief programs have helped millions of families get through the economic shocks of COVID-19, but undocumented immigrants — many of whom are essential workers — have been largely shut out of such federal aid. Those undocumented workers who have received limited assistance are now losing the pandemic aid they had only started receiving in August through the Biden administration’s expanded child tax credit program, which expired and is being blocked from further implementation into Build Back Better legislation. “These families, in spite of the fact that they were essential workers, endured this really punishing income gap,” says journalist Julia Preston, who reported on an undocumented immigrant community in New Bedford, Massachusetts, who sustain the United States’ largest commercial fishing port. Preston and Ariel Goodman wrote the article “Essential But Excluded” for The Marshall Project and say the difference in income amounts on average to almost $35,000.

=> ↺ Immigrants Held in ICE Jails at Risk Amid New Omicron Surge

=> ↺ Opinion | Harmful Ingredients in ‘Healthy’ Breakfast Cereals

• Many breakfast cereals claim to be a healthy way to start the day. Their boxes feature cute, colorful characters and catchy slogans that attract children, and their promise of a “complete” breakfast with whole grains, fiber and vitamins captures adults’ attention.

=> ↺ ‘Huge Increase’ in Child Poverty Feared as Tax Credit Expires Amid Omicron Wave

• The lapse of Democrats’ expanded child tax credit program at the end of last month has progressive lawmakers and advocates vocally warning of a major spike in child poverty in the new year just as the Omicron variant wreaks havoc across the U.S., fueling a staggering rise in infections and hospitalizations.

• While some research suggests the highly transmissible Omicron strain causes less severe disease than other mutations, the enormity of the current wave is driving fears of widespread and potentially sustained societal disruptions, with disproportionate impacts on families without the resources to weather more pandemic-induced economic chaos.

=> ↺ Capitalism Is Preventing Bold Steps to Curb COVID as Cases Skyrocket

=> ↺ Whistleblower flags mysterious neurological illness in Canadian province

• While the official figure for suspected cases has remained 48 since the cluster was first announced last spring, a number of sources suggest there could be over 150 cases. Scientists at the public health agency have speculated that the environmental neurotoxin β-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) could be at play, but the government has failed to order mass testing, which some believe is for political reasons.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Microsoft Is Trying to Force You to Use Its Software Like It’s 1998 All Over Again | Inc.com

• Microsoft has had a very good run the past few years. It introduced a new browser, Edge, based on Chromium, which is faster and more reliable than what it replaced. It also launched Teams, a competitor to the popular communication platform Slack, which exploded as millions of people moved to working remotely during the pandemic.

• Microsoft’s Edge browser isn’t bad. It’s one of the better Chrome alternatives, and it comes with a few interesting features that make it worth a look. Microsoft Teams isn’t bad either if what you want is something other than Slack and you’re already deeply integrated into Microsoft’s productivity ecosystem.

• If you’re using Windows, however, Microsoft very much wants you to use both. For example, Windows 11 makes it very difficult to get away from Edge as the default. Sure, you can set a different browser as your default, but any link within the system will still open in Edge regardless of your choice. Microsoft even went so far as to block a utility called EdgeDeflector that opened those links in whatever browser you set as default.

Security

=> ↺ 17 Best Penetration Testing Tools in 2022

• The idea behind penetration testing is to identify security-related vulnerabilities in a software application. Also known as pen testing, the experts who perform this testing are called ethical hackers who detect the activities conducted by criminal or black hat hackers.

• Penetration testing aims in preventing security attacks by conducting a security attack to know what damage can a hacker cause if a security breach is attempted, the outcomes of such practices helps in making the applications and software more secure and potent.

• So, if you use any software application for your business, a pen-testing technique will help you check the network security threats. To carry forward this activity, we bring to you this list of the best penetration testing tools of 2021!

=> ↺ Auto-update is a bad idea

• Automatic updates are bad for privacy and some security aspects. Turning on auto-update on a system puts you in danger of trusting the device manufacturer to behave good. Anything could be contained in the update and the possible harm may not be reversed.

=> ↺ Log4J – What is the most severe vulnerability of 2021?

• To close out 2021, a major vulnerability has been discovered that has left the whole world on alert: the Log4J flaw.

• The open source platform used by Apple, Twitter, Steam, and Tencent ventures has a serious loophole that allows malicious actors to steal sensitive data, send files to a server, and more.

• According to Google, more than 35,000 Java packages, which represents more than 8% of the Maven Central repository (the main Java repository), were affected by the problem. Discovered on December 16, the vulnerability was deemed one of the “most serious” ever seen by Jen Easterly, head of the US Department of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

=> ↺ Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (xorg-x11-server), Debian (apache2), openSUSE (libvirt), Oracle (grafana, qemu, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (idm:DL1, samba, and telnet), SUSE (libvirt), and Ubuntu (python-django).

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds in December 2021

• Welcome to the December 2021 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try and summarise what we have been up to over the past month, as well as what else has been occurring in the world of software supply-chain security.

• As a quick recap of what reproducible builds is trying to address, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. As always, if you would like to contribute to the project, please get in touch with us directly or visit the Contribute page on our website.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Interview With Elena Elkina – Women in Security and Privacy

• Elena Elkina: When we started WISP, we felt that privacy and security were emerging. And we felt that there was a huge need to have a place where people can share their knowledge, learn different things, and have a collaborative network. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find anything that was specifically directed to both privacy and security. There are a lot of security organizations and networking groups, there are a few privacy groups, but there was nothing for privacy and security, and we felt it was essential. None of it was directly related to women and minorities, and we felt that on top of privacy and security, as a subject matter expert, we really needed the place where women and minorities can connect and help each other. And that’s how WISP was born.

=> ↺ Chinese Government Fines Local Car Dealerships For Surveilling While Not Being The Government

• The Eleventh Commandment (paraphrased from the original Homer Simpson):

=> ↺ Congress Could Help Prevent Another Jan. 6 With Data Privacy Law, Say Campaigners

• Nearly a year after a right-wing mob—inspired by lies about the 2020 presidential election results—stormed the U.S. Capitol, civil society groups and Sen. Ron Wyden came together Tuesday to promote federal data privacy legislation for the sake of American democracy.

• “Congress passing a strong data protection law in 2022 that limits these practices will be one of the most important steps they can take to safeguard democracy.”

=> ↺ CSS Fingerprint

• CSS Fingerprinting is a technique of tracking and gathering information on site visitors. This method exploits the nature of CSS to track various characteristics about the visitor’s browser and device, which can later be used to either identify or track said visitor.

=> ↺ What Google Found To Be Important To Us In 2021

• By now, everyone knows that Google collects every little scrap of data that it can grab hold of. So, it should be no surprise that Google has come out with the top 10 search terms across a dozen different categories that people searched for on Google.

• I know … I know. There are many who don’t use Google any more … or any more than they have to. And, it’s not without a valid reason. Google, having long ago departed from their “do no evil” mantra, has eroded the trust that the public and users had put in them. But, you can also make a sane argument that if these were the most popular search terms on Google, then the search terms were probably similar on other search engines that do more to protect user privacy, like StartX and DuckDuckGo.

• If nothing else, Google’s search results rankings help delineate the topics that we most cared about during 2021. Across much of the world, COVID restrictions and lockdowns were relaxed, and people sought to start to get back to life as they remembered it.

=> ↺ U.K. proposal to ‘Bcc’ law enforcement on messaging apps threatens global privacy

• United Kingdom officials suggest that messaging apps should build in law enforcement access to encrypted text, raising concerns about user privacy.

• [...]

• The government proposal says “you don’t even have to touch the encryption” to implement ghost protocol. End-to-end encryption works by generating a pair of public and private keys for each user. Text encrypted using the public key can only be decrypted using the private key, and vice versa.

• Hence, if Bob and Alice want to have a chat, both share their public keys and keep their private keys secret. Bob encrypts messages using Alice’s public key (so only Alice can decipher them), and Alice encrypts messages using Bob’s public key.

• In a group chat between Alice, Bob, and Jill, every message Alice sends is encrypted using Bob’s public key (to Bob) and Jill’s public key (to Jill). Alice is notified by the app that each message has two recipients. This means that the messaging service’s servers only see public keys and encrypted text: they cannot decipher text, even at the request of law enforcement.

=> ↺ ‘We need it now’: 24,000 people sign petition urging Congress to pass data privacy law

• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and a coalition of civil rights, internet rights, and public interest groups said on Tuesday it is urgent that Congress gets its act together and passes data privacy legislation.

• The groups—led by Fight for the Future, Access Now, Open Media, and Public Citizen—launched a petition earlier this year in the wake of the testimony from Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower. The petition allowed for people to urge Congress to pass legislation, arguing that it would be “a clear step that you can take right now to stop Facebook from causing more harm, and to make all social media and the internet a better, safer place that enhances our democracy and where our rights are protected.”

=> ↺ Decoding the draft data protection law – Hindustan Times

• It undermines privacy; places unchecked powers in the hands of the State; holds the government to a much lower standard of accountability; makes unwarranted advances into areas beyond its mandate

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Opinion | The 20-Year War on Terror Was an Amazing Success—If You Were Terrorism

• It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.” If he meant a 20-year slide to defeat in Afghanistan, a proliferation of militant groups across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and a never-ending, world-spanning war that, at a minimum, has killed about 300 times the number of people murdered in America on 9/11, then give him credit. He was absolutely right.

=> ↺ Opinion | Harry Reid’s Disastrous Foreign Policy Record Should Not Be Forgotten

• The death of former Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada has brought forth praise for his parliamentary skills, which helped make possible some critically important legislation, as well as preventing the passage of a number of seriously problematic bills. However, on the foreign policy front, it should be noted that Reid not only failed to challenge dangerous Republican initiatives that violated fundamental principles of international law and human rights, he was often among their most prominent supporters.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Other Drone Casualties: The Whistleblowers Who Tried to Stop It

• The New York Times’ investigation into the Pentagon’s civilian casualty files is some of the most important journalism in the War on Terror. It methodically and thoroughly picks apart the layers of lies around drone warfare and proves that the few examples of civilian casualties that have been investigated previously were not one-off mistakes. Unfortunately, this reporting comes too late for the civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria who bore the brunt of the brutal air campaigns.

=> ↺ Opinion | From Sore-Losers to Violent Terrorists?

• An attendee at an October 2021 political rally hosted by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk asked: “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”

=> ↺ One Brother Gave the Soviets the A-Bomb. The Other Got a Medal.

• In April 1950, three months before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested as Soviet atomic spies, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began chasing a bigger fish: the physics wunderkind Theodore Alvin Hall. Hired at 18 as a Harvard junior by the Manhattan Project, Hall arrived at Los Alamos on January 28, 1944, and learned he’d be helping to create an atomic bomb. Although the project was a response to fears that Germany might develop nuclear weapons, by that summer, with the German army in retreat, Hall grew concerned that the bomb’s real target would be the USSR, America’s wartime ally.

=> ↺ Remembering Wounded Knee 1890 & 1973: an Interview With Bill Means

• Bill is a friend of mine, and a close friend of the coauthor of this piece, Miguel Gavilan Molina. Together, with Bill, we covered the republican convention in 2008 in Minneapolis, where the republicans actually had a platform that mentioned the environment, but not the fact within a very short distance from where the convention was being held, was the sight of several massacres of Native Americans. And no reporters mentioned it either. Nobody brought it up around that convention except for Bill. You will learn about it and much more in the following interview, which aired on Flashpoints/Pacifica radio on the actual anniversary of the original massacre..

• So just a little more about Bill. He is a Vietnam Combat Veteran and Veteran of Wounded Knee (1973), Bill Means was a founder of the International Indian Treaty Council and former Board President. He has worked with the United Nations and is an expert on US & Indian Treaty relations. He also has been on the Grand Governing Council of the American Indian Movement since 1972 and has served Native people on many different levels assisting people by coordinating legal defense work for over 500 Wounded Knee federal indictments and employing over 14,000 when he was the Executive Director of American Indian /O.I.C.

=> ↺ The Best Way to Commemorate January 6 Is to Pass a Voting Rights Law

• Some people believe everything happens for a reason; there are no coincidences. I’m agnostic, but I do think coincidences can serve to point you in the direction of meaning. There was no known connection between Donald Trump’s declaring his presidential candidacy in June 2015, for instance, and white supremacist Dylann Roof’s murdering nine Black churchgoers in Charleston the very next night. But, with hindsight, it seemed to me at least an eerie harbinger of how the white backlash that powered Trump’s political movement could, and would, shade into violence.

=> ↺ What a Sensible Ukraine Policy Would Look Like

• With tensions between the United States and Russia over tens of thousands of Russian troops now massed near Ukraine’s border, recent phone calls between President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin last week and the announcement of US-Russia talks in Geneva this month were both wise and welcome.

=> ↺ Major Corporations Have ‘Broken Promises and Funded Seditionists’ Since Jan. 6, Reports Reveal

• A pair of watchdog groups on Monday called out companies and trade groups that continued to financially support the 147 congressional Republicans who voted last year to overturn the 2020 presidential election results even after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

=> ↺ Recent Interviews Shed New Light on Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol

• Nearly a year after an angry mob swept through the U.S. Capitol, ProPublica, Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program and FRONTLINE will air an updated edition of the documentary “American Insurrection” on Tuesday.

=> ↺ African human trafficking fugitive nabbed in joint operation

• Kenyan police arrested Habeta in Nairobi on 16 December in a sting operation co-ordinated between authorities in The Netherlands and Kenya with the support of Interpol General Secretariat headquarters. Habeta allegedly smuggled dozens of men, women and children to Europe from east Africa.

=> ↺ Scholars’ Ink, Martyrs’ Blood in Afghanistan

• Azzam’s mentorship of bin Laden explodes the myth that jihadists like him have no proper understanding of Islamic doctrine, as Michael Scheuer, the director in the years before and after 9/11 of the CIA’s unit for tracking bin Laden, noted. Bin Laden always presented himself as a “simple Muslim” merely following established Islamic teachings, Scheuer wrote, along with many other Muslims who waged jihad in Afghanistan from countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Many other Muslims would follow Azzam and bin Laden’s call to turn Afghanistan into a base for global jihad, as the next article in this series will examine.

=> ↺ Russell Coker: Terrorists Inspired by Fiction

• The Tom Clancy book Debt of Honor published in August 1994 first introduced the concept of a heavy passenger aircraft being used as a weapon by terrorists against a well defended building. In April 1994 there was an attempt to hijack and deliberately crash FedEx flight 705. It’s possible for a book to be changed 4 months before publication, but it seems unlikely that a significant plot point in a series of books was changed in such a small amount of time so it’s likely that Tom Clancy got the idea first. There have been other variations on that theme, such as the Yokosuka_MXY-7 Kamakazi flying bomb (known by the Allies as “Baka” which is Japanese for idiot). But Tom Clancy seemed to pioneer the idea of a commercial passenger jet being subverted for the purpose of ground attack.

• 7 years after Tom Clancy’s book was published the 911 hijackings happened.

=> ↺ U.S. and Britain Help Ukraine Prepare for Potential Russian Cyberassault – The New York Times

• Russia has attacked Ukraine’s power grid in the past, and experts say Moscow might take similar steps as it masses troops along the border.

• [...]

• Now the United States and Britain have quietly dispatched cyberwarfare experts to Ukraine in hopes of better preparing the country to confront what they think may be the next move by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he again menaces the former Soviet republic: Not an invasion with the 175,000 troops he is massing on the border, but cyberattacks that take down the electric grid, the banking system, and other critical components of Ukraine’s economy and government.

• Russia’s goal, according to American intelligence assessments, would be to make Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, look inept and defenseless — and perhaps provide an excuse for an invasion.

• In one sense, the Russian cybercampaign against Ukraine never stopped, American officials say, though until recently it bubbled along at a low level. But in interviews, American officials and experts say the action has stepped up over the past month even while public attention has been focused on the troop buildup.

Environment

=> ↺ Earth’s final frontier: China and the deep-sea gold rush set to cause environmental catastrophe

• Scientists say that a highly controversial deep-sea “gold rush” risks potentially devastating consequences for marine ecosystems, biodiversity, coastal communities and climate change.

• The deep seabed is Earth’s final frontier but this mostly unexplored, dark and pristine abyss is threatened by highly destructive deep-sea mining which could be at full throttle within months.

=> ↺ ‘Snow guns’ for spouting fake snow at Beijing Winter Olympics raise environmental concerns

• An International Olympic Committee evaluation report said that Zhangjiakou and Yanqing — the Games zones hosting alpine skiing and snowboarding, among other outdoor events — “would rely completely on artificial snow”.

• A 2020 study in science publication Nature warned that groundwater depletion in northern China was a “critical issue” and among the highest globally, due to intensive agricultural irrigation, rapid urbanisation, and a dry climate.

• A man holds a banner showing the Beijing Winter Olympics logo near the Birds Nest Stadium on February 4, 2021. Photo: Noel Celis/AFP This has meant water shortages for millions of Beijing residents and the water supply is likely to worsen in the future, researchers said.

=> ↺ New Year, New Changes to Do Things Better

• The two major and unavoidable issues facing us right now are the on-going pandemic and the quickly worsening crisis of climate change — or more accurately, global baking — and the panoply of extreme weather events it is causing.

• As far as the pandemic goes, the good news is we know how to deal with the virus and its current delta and omicron variants. Our vaccines are effective at reducing both fatalities and hospitalizations — but only if they’re used. There’s reason to believe, after far too long and far too many tragedies, that the tide is turning on the anti-vax, anti-mask crowd. Even the former guy is saying get vaxxed. And although his delusional “followers” booed him for that, perhaps he has finally realized you can’t win elections if all your voters are sick or dead.

Energy

=> ↺ Protests in Kazakhstan against doubled fuel prices escalate to clashes with police

• Protests in Kazakhstan’s biggest metropolis against rising fuel prices escalated to violence on Tuesday. Demonstrators in Almaty smashed and set fire to several police cars. Journalists at multiple news outlets reported the use of riot-control measures like stun grenades and tear gas against crowds at Republic Square, where as many as several thousand people gathered.

=> ↺ Another Nuclear Fusion Folly: Billions Already Spent on ‘Energy Pipedream’

• Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) has rarely commented on nuclear fusion, given such energy projects have yet to be commercially realised. All have foundered around the complex challenges in developing such technology, many of which in the third decade of the 21st century remain unsolved.

• In summary, to date, none of the experimental reactors in operation have produced more energy than was put into them.

Finance

=> ↺ Jayapal to Biden: ‘Grab a Pen’ and Cancel Student Debt for All

• Two weeks after the White House announced—following intense pressure from economic justice advocates and progressive lawmakers—that the moratorium on federal student loan payments would be extended until May, activists are beginning the new year with renewed calls for President Joe Biden to cancel student debt by executive order.

• In a tweet late Monday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, pointed out that “student debt cancellation is supported by more than 60% of Americans.”

=> ↺ How Private Capital Strangled Our Cities

• Credit and debt, two sides of the same proverbial coin, place a bet on time. Credit makes money mobile and funds the future. Soon enough, however, it becomes debt, with the lender demanding from the borrower returns with interest that threaten to constrict the possibility of further credit. Personal debt masquerades as moral obligation, a contract freely chosen, yet at the heart of the promise debt creates is not social reciprocity, as the late David Graeber wrote in Debt: The First 5000 Years, but a “simple, cold, and impersonal” market transaction. As nothing more than a “matter of impersonal arithmetic,” debt requires shame and ultimately the threat of force to fulfill its terms and realize the returns for creditors it promises. It lodges coercion at the heart of the supposedly “free” market.

=> ↺ As Tax Credit Expires, “Huge Increase” in Child Poverty Feared Amid Omicron Wave

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Orban’s influencers shower cash, become largest social media spenders

• Circumventing campaign ad rules, a Hungarian fund financing pro-government social media personalities created about a year ago is on track to spend more than HUF 1 billion (€2.7 million) by April’s general polls. By 31 December, they had paid more than €1.3 million (HUF 0.5 billion) for ads in social media. Translation by Vlagyiszlav Makszimov, / Euractiv.

=> ↺ Schumer Says Senate Could Vote on Filibuster Changes Later This Month

=> ↺ Opinion | Congress Must Defend Democracy Against Those Who Are Trying to Destroy It

• Jan. 6, 2022 marks one year since the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, incited by a president voted out of office by the vast majority of the American people. What is now clear is that Donald Trump and his zealous aides and complicit right-wing legislators were deadly serious about overturning the results of that vote and keeping Trump in office. They failed but have since launched a systematic campaign in states across the country to make it possible to succeed the next time.

=> ↺ 2021 Was Deadliest Year for Palestinians Since 2014: Israeli Human Rights Group

• A Jerusalem-based human rights group on Tuesday released new statistics revealing that Israeli security forces and armed settlers’ violence against Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories escalated in 2021 to the highest levels in seven years.

• Last year was the deadliest year for Palestinians living under occupation since 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge and killed thousands in the Gaza Strip, according to B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

=> ↺ Palestinian Prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash Ends Hunger Strike After Deal With Israel

• Palestinians and human rights defenders around the world on Tuesday cheered reports that Hisham Abu Hawash—who has been imprisoned in Israel without charge for 16 months—is ending a 141-day hunger strike after reaching an agreement with Israeli officials.

• “As long as this inhumane system exists, there will be more hunger strikes and more pain.”

=> ↺ McConnell Openly Admits His Very Real Fear Is American Democracy Actually Working

• U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday laid bare his reasoning for vehemently defending the use of the legislative filibuster, which the Republican Party has used in the past several months to block two major pieces of voting rights legislation—both of which would have kept the GOP from continuing its voter suppression push across the country.

• “If 51 votes is good enough for a lifetime confirmation to the highest court in our land, it should be enough to protect our freedom to vote.”

=> ↺ Why It’s Time We Reclaimed Patriotism From Populist-Nationalist Figures like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump

• But if they went on to inquire if that meant that I “was half English and half Irish,” I would politely say that it did not mean anything of the sort.

• I would explain that the Anglo-Irish had been the dominant Protestant landowners and professional class during the last three centuries or so of British rule in Ireland. Their descendants, stripped of political and economic power, lived on there after independence. I would then take the questioner, who was by now probably a little aghast at this torrent of information and wishing that they had kept their mouth shut, on a rapid excursion through Irish history starting with the Norman invasion led by Strongbow in 1170.

=> ↺ New Poll Shows Democrats Barely Ahead of Republicans in 2022 Midterms

=> ↺ The Brazilian Dictatorship and the Two Demons

• And more I read, in news from the Casa Rosada:

• What a difference to Brazil! Here, we continue with the two demons in the right-wing discourse: “If there were murders, there were murders on both sides,” they talk, while omitting the tortured and killed prisoners from only one side. Worse, we have continued under the demon of state terror, as the denialism of the dictatorship returns. The fascist government calls authors of crimes against humanity heroes. Upon us, like a Pentecost of terror, a new language descends that mocks civilization.

=> ↺ Progressive Leaders Demand Closure of Toxic Navy Facility in Hawaii

• A coalition of eminent progressives from across the globe—including environmentalist Naomi Klein and intellectual Noam Chomsky—demanded Tuesday that the U.S. Navy immediately shutter its aging Red Hill facility in Honolulu, Hawaii, where a major fuel leak has contaminated local drinking water and displaced thousands of residents.

• In a new open letter, members of the Progressive International Council noted that since its construction in the 1940s, the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility has “leaked at least 180,000 gallons of petroleum-based fuel into the soils and waters of the island,” and “nearly 200 million gallons still remain in the leaking underground tanks.”

=> ↺ If Biden Doesn’t Act on AUMF, the US’s Blank Check for War Continues

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Facebook Hosted Surge of Misinformation and Insurrection Threats in Months Leading Up to Jan. 6 Attack, Records Show

• Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.

• The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously — turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of then-President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Earth on the Edge – The Project Censored Show

=> ↺ Google Blocked An Article About Police From The Intercept… Because The Title Included A Phrase That Was Also A Movie Title

• A week before Christmas, Radley Balko published a typically excellent story about the police chief in Little Rock, Arkansas, Keith Humphrey. It’s a good story, and you should read it. Humphrey, who was appointed police chief as part of a reformist campaign, has faced on ongoing campaign to try to take him down from stalwarts within the Little Rock police department, including a few others who wanted his job — but mainly by the local police union, the Fraternal Order of Police. Anyway, what caught my attention was that a few days after the article went live, The Intercept reported that it had been removed from Google search due to a DMCA copyright takedown notice.

=> ↺ Google reportedly threatens to delete video from U.S.-based blogger after Russian censor flags it as ‘illegal gay propaganda’

• A U.S.-based Russian-language blogger says Google is threatening to delete one of his YouTube posts after Russia’s federal censor flagged it as prohibited content and a Russian court added it to Russia’s Internet blacklist. Court records from late November 2021 confirm that a judge in Vladivostok granted a request by Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor to ban a video uploaded to YouTube on June 11, 2019, by a man named Felix Glyukman because the content supposedly violates Russia’s law against “gay propaganda.”

=> ↺ Florida activist handcuffed while trying to attend DeSantis news conference

• DeSantis’s news conferences, in which he often blames the Biden administration for holding up monoclonal antibody treatment doses, are usually tightly controlled. But Tuesday’s event at the Duval County Public Health building went far off script when Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, refused to leave the room where a podium was set up for the governor and state surgeon general to speak.

• Frazier said he wanted to listen, then talk to DeSantis about the pandemic and the “antiriot” bill that the governor signed into law last year. The Northside Coalition is one of several groups that have sued the DeSantis administration over the new law, which they say violates the First Amendment by placing limitations on public demonstrations. Advertisement

• “I didn’t think I’d end up in handcuffs,” the 71-year-old said later in the afternoon.

=> ↺ Community activist arrested ahead of DeSantis news conference

• In an interview, Frazier said his group did not come to the press conference to stage a protest. They wanted to ask the governor about his pandemic and criminal justice policies.

• “Had the governor chosen to deescalate the situation, he could have taken a few questions from the public, answered them and been on his way,” Frazier said.

• But once they were asked to leave, the situation turned into an opportunity for civil disobedience, Frazier said.

=> ↺ Community activist in Jacksonville handcuffed before DeSantis press conference

• The confrontation started when DeSantis aides asked those present for the news conference at the Florida Department of Health building in Duval County to show media credentials. The event was only open to credentialed journalists, they said.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Suspended jail terms for journalists in Niger who published report on corruption

• The court’s decision to convict the two journalists is all the more shocking given that Niger’s Central Office for the Suppression of Illegal Traffic in Narcotics (OCRTIS), which initiated the proceedings against them, finally withdrew its complaint on 27 December.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Has New Year’s Resolution for Progressives: Fight Like Hell in 2022

• Amid a disheartening array of crises and challenges facing the United States in 2022, Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed optimism Tuesday that working people can muster the courage, solidarity, and, ultimately, the power to build on the progressive victories of 2021 to win new ones in the year ahead.

• “The challenges we face are enormous and it is easy to understand why many may fall into depression and cynicism. This is a state of mind, however, that we must resist.”

=> ↺ Community Bonds and Mutual Aid Sustain Anti-Fascists Targeted by the State

=> ↺ What We Can Learn From Portland’s “Queen of the Bolsheviks”

• In the first week of January 1920, power brokers in the United States were gripped by fear. The Red Scare was burning bright, and Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 was still fresh in capitalists’ minds. The nation had seen a post–World War I upswing in labor activity and strikes. Even worse, the radical Industrial Workers of the World were agitating from coast to coast, and the union’s anti-capitalist message was finding purchase among disaffected, exploited workers, who would form crowds in front of IWW speakers on soapboxes. Anarchists, communists, socialists, and trade unionists—many of whom were immigrants, women, and people of color—were publicly and loudly pointing out the inequities and indignities of capitalist exploitation.

=> ↺ Eighth Circuit (Again) Says There’s Nothing Wrong With Detaining Innocent Minors At Gunpoint

• What’s unreasonable for law enforcement to do when searching for a criminal suspect? Not much, apparently. The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court has handed down a ruling that says detaining minors at gunpoint is just good policework when they’re in the general vicinity of a suspected criminal act. (via FourthAmendment.com)

=> ↺ Neoliberal Era Was Rich in Revolutionary Lessons. Movements Must Learn Them.

=> ↺ Desmond Tutu and the Labour Party’s Phonies on Israel

• But Labour’s hypocritical luminaries simply can’t bring themselves to take this logical step.

• Any credible eulogy of Tutu can’t therefore discount, however tacitly, his unyielding opposition to Israeli apartheid, just as Starmer’s “unconditional support for Zionism” can’t be squared with the spirit, if not the letter, of his claim that Tutu spent “his life to tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed”. Tutu “tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed” includes inextricably his support for the Palestinian people, which in turn is irreconcilable with any “unconditional support for Zionism” (predicated as it is on Palestinian subjugation).

=> ↺ Photo-Shopped History: Editing Out Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Support for Palestine

• On January 1, 2022 – as South Africa buried one of its most illustrious sons and anti-apartheid icons, Archbishop Desmond Tutu – the hypocrisy of the corporate media was on full display. Reuters described him as “Africa’s ‘moral compass’.” Al Jazeera referred to him as “South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon.” CNN published articles referring to him as the “voice of justice.” and South Africa’s national conscience.” South Africa’s largest media outlet, SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) took the cake with an article titled: “Dalai Lama’s representative at Tutu’s funeral urges the world to think about China-Dalai Lama issue.”

=> ↺ Max Boot’s Rant Against Oliver Stone

• The title of Boot’s piece, which was published in the Washington Post, is “Oliver Stone Just Can’t Stop Spreading Lies About JFK’s Assassination.” In his article, he attacks Stone not only for his 1991 movie JFK but also for Stone’s latest update to the movie, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

• Interestingly, Boot makes a reference to Stone’s accusation “that Kennedy’s autopsy reports were falsified.”

=> ↺ Providers Accuse Federal Court of Delaying Texas Abortion Case, Ask SCOTUS to Intervene

• Reproductive rights advocates said Tuesday that women in Texas are suffering and their rights are being violated by the state’s forced-pregnancy law as they called on the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to end the delay of their lawsuit now languishing in a lower federal court.

• “For 125 days, Texans have fled to find reproductive care. SCOTUS needs to act immediately and put an end to these delays.”

=> ↺ Texas Abortion Providers Ask Supreme Court to Invalidate Circuit Court’s Delay

=> ↺ France and U.K. Sued for Manslaughter After 27 Migrants Seeking Help Drowned in English Channel

• The French humanitarian group Utopia 56 has filed a manslaughter lawsuit against British and French officials for failing to help 27 migrants who drowned to death in the English Channel in November. The only two survivors say they were ignored when they made distress calls and told their location to French and English rescue services after their boat capsized and started sinking in the freezing waters off the French port city of Calais. We speak with Nikolaï Posner of Utopia 56, who says the lawsuit is meant to “bring the truth and the transparency on what happened.”

=> ↺ ICE Is So Toxic That The DHS’s Investigative Wing Is Asking To Be Completely Separated From It

• The Department of Homeland Security is trying to distance itself from its most toxic asset, the Washington Post reports:

=> ↺ Abort the Court!

• Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

=> ↺ Tenth Circuit Denies Qualified Immunity To Social Worker Who Fabricated A Mother’s Confession Of Child Abuse

• For the second time in about as many weeks, an appeals court has handed down a decision denying qualified immunity to a government employee. That’s good! We don’t see a lot of these. Getting more than one in a month almost feels excessive, as if we’re being set up by the courts for a few months of anger and disappointment to offset this judicial largesse.

=> ↺ EFF Condemns the Unjust Conviction and Sentencing of Activist and Friend Alaa Abd El Fattah

• According to media reports and social media posts of family members, Fattah, human rights lawyer Mohamed el-Baqer, and blogger Mohamed ‘Oxygen’ Ibrahim were convicted on December 20 of  “spreading false news undermining national security” by the court, which has extraordinary powers under Egypt’s state of emergency. El-Baqer and Ibrahim received four-year sentences. 

• A trial on the charges held in November was a travesty, with defense lawyers denied access to case files or a chance to present arguments. At least 48 human rights defenders, activists, and opposition politicians in pre-trial detention for months and years were referred to the emergency courts for trial just before Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi lifted the state of emergency in October, Human Rights Watch reported.

• The profoundly unjust conviction and years-long targeting of Fattah and other civil and human rights activists is a testament to the lengths the Egyptian government will go to attack and shut down, through harassment, physical violence, arrest, and imprisonment, those speaking out for free speech and expression and sharing information. In the years since the revolution, journalists, bloggers, activists and peaceful protestors have been arrested and charged under draconian press regulations and anti-cybercrime laws being used to suppress dissent and silence those criticizing the government.

=> ↺ Iranian court sentences teacher to 5 years in prison for teaching Kurdish

• Iranian state authorities have been targeting female teacher Zara Mihemidi for many years. The only reason is her educational activities to teach Kurdish.

• The young woman who voluntarily teaches Kurdish was released on bail last year after being detained several times.

• Previously, the Sine Revolutionary Court sentenced Mihemi to 10 years in prison. However, a court of appeal later reduced her sentence to 5 years.

=> ↺ Another church in Istanbul defaced by vandals

• Two other churches in Kadıköy were also reported to have been defaced.

• Many of Istanbul’s churches have previously come under attack.

=> ↺ Turkish judge draws criticism for saying women should not demonstrate against femicide

• The controversial remark was made during the hearing of 35 women who were standing trial for demonstrating against femicide on March 8, 2020 in a “Femicide Night March” in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district. The women were accused of violating the law on demonstrations, preventing the police from carrying out their duties and damaging public property.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Wireless Carriers Balk At FAA Demand For 5G Deployment Delays Amid Shaky Safety Concerns

• We’d already noted how the FAA had been making some shaky claims about how 5G deployments in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” spectrum range posed safety threats to airline safety. More specifically, the FAA claims operating in this band poses a potential interference problem for airline altimeters. The problem: FCC data, and data from upwards of 40 countries where 5G is already deployed in this band, suggest the concerns are baseless, and that the FCC’s decision to set aside a 220 MHz unused guard band to act as a buffer was more than enough to prevent any issues whatsoever.

=> ↺ Rosenworcel Stands Firm on Net Neutrality in Face of Lawmakers Urging Status Quo

• Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a letter to lawmakers last week that she continues to stand by her view that the restoration of net neutrality principles would be the best move for the internet economy.

• Rosenworcel was responding to an April letter by over two dozen members of Congress, who urged the chairwoman to maintain the current “light touch” regulations imposed by the 2017 commission, led by chairman Ajit Pai, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump. That change rolled back net neutrality rules imposed by the 2015 Obama-era commission, which prevented internet service providers from influencing the content on their networks, including barring carriers from providing certain services for free over their networks – also known as “zero rating.”

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Volunteer Quits Moderna Vaccine Trial Over ‘Ruthless Corporate Profit-Making’

• A volunteer for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine trials made waves Tuesday when he publicly quit being a “human guinea pig” due to what he called Big Pharma’s “ruthless corporate profit-making.”

• “We allowed Moderna to test its experimental vaccine and booster on us in order to help end this pandemic, not to make more pharma billionaires.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ Winnie-the-Pooh and More Early Sound Recordings Enter Public Domain

• That law was widely regarded as a protective measure for Disney, since early Mickey Mouse cartoons will enter the public domain in 2024. As far as Winnie the Pooh is concerned, Disney still holds some brand trademarks. But the public can now reprint the original book, adapt it into a play or film, write a sequel, or use the appearance and traits of its characters.

=> ↺ DMCA-Circumventing Cheat Maker Uses DMCA to Take Down Cracked Copy

• Copyright law exists so that creators of all kinds can enjoy the fruits of their labor. But what if a piece of software, that appears to breach the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA to enable cheating in Genshin Impact, gets cracked by a third party and distributed online for free? Apparently, the logical first step by the creators is to claim breaches of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

=> ↺ Record Labels Still Want to Know if Piracy Trial Jurors Read TorrentFreak

• The piracy liability trial between several major record labels and Internet provider Grande is about to begin. To rule out conflicts, both sides submitted an updated series of questions for the jury selection. The music companies still want to know who reads TorrentFreak and Ars Technica but are also more specific. There are new topics of interest including VPN use and church-going habits.

=> ↺ YouTube Rippers Oppose $82 Million ‘Piracy’ Damages Recommendation

• YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com are opposing Magistrate Judge Buchanan’s recommendation to award $82 million in piracy damages to the RIAA. The Judge’s findings are in direct contravention of the law, they argue, because the music companies failed to provide evidence of any infringing activity taking place in the United States.

=> ↺ Eric Clapton Pretends To Regret The Decision To Sue Random German Woman Who Listed A Bootleg Of One Of His CDs On Ebay

• There is no greater example of just how totally broken copyright is than the story of Eric Clapton suing — and winning — a poor German woman for copyright infringement after she listed (but did not sell) a bootleg CD that her late husband had purchased in a store. The woman had no idea it was a bootleg. She just knew that she had the CD and wanted to sell it, so she put it on eBay. Eric Clapton — who has been a despicably awful human being for decades — sued her over this and won. He won, despite the fact that (1) she hadn’t bought the CD, and was just selling her late husband’s CD, (2) she had no idea it wasn’t authorized, (3) she didn’t actually sell it, as she quickly pulled down the listing, and (4) it was just one damn CD and she listed it for less than $12. And not only that, under German copyright law, she was told she also needed to pay Clapton’s legal fees.

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