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● 01.06.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 6/1/2022: Linux Mint 20.3 and PipeWire 0.3.43 Available

Posted in News Roundup at 6:32 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ The ‘Dell XPS 13 Plus’ Features a Radical Redesign, But Keeps Ubuntu Option – OMG! Ubuntu!

• The big design changes don’t end there, either.

• Dell has updated the keyboard on the XPS 13 Plus, replacing the row of physical function keys along the top with capacitive ones. Users can change between regular functions or media controls so, Dell say, they can ‘see the keys they need’.

• I’ll be honest: capacitive function keys is a change owners are going to dig or deeply detest. Apple did something semi-similar and it never quite landed with regular users to the pint they brought physical function keys back (to much applause – such an easy crowd, eh?).

• A fingerprint reader is built-in to the Dell XPS 13 Plus power button.

• As you’d expect of a modern XPS, the Plus also features a stunning 13.4-inch “Infinity Edge” display (i.e. barely-there-bezels), though only the most premium of premium models boasts an OLED 4K Ultra HD (3840×2400) display. The regular model comes with a more modest FHD display, with touchscreen option.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ BSD Now 436: Unix Standards Battle

• UNIX Wars, What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 3, FreeBSD 12.3 is here, TrueNAS 13 begins, what Unix pre-boot envs looked liked, run Unix on Microcontrollers with PDP-11 emulators and more.

=> ↺ mintCast 377 – Zero Days of Christmas

• 1:56 The News 21:20 Security Update 32:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings 1:20:55 Announcements & Outro

• In the news, Pop OS 21.10 is released, GNOME 42 – Top New Feature and Release Detail, ReactOS 0.4.14 has been released, Krita 5.0 has been released, and there’s yet another desktop environment on the horizon

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 936

• between the holidays or between the sheets, joel is always rocking your night away! So grab a yule log and join in on the fun.

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 937

• it might pop and crackle but joel has the inside scoop to stoke your fires

=> ↺ All Roads Lead to Clippy | Coder Radio 447

• Mike has a significant moment of clarity and sets out on a new path for 2022. Meanwhile, Chris is just happy to be out of the woods.

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 662: FreeBSD – Deb Goodkin, Linux vs FreeBSD

• Deb Goodkin, Executive Director of the FreeBSD Foundation joins Doc Searls and Shawn Powers on this episode of FLOSS Weekly. There are lots of ways FreeBSD is not Linux or vice versa. Or ways they’re actually better for some purposes. Just ask Netflix. In a lively hour of conversation, Goodkin visits many operating systems and related topics regarding the open source world as well as FreeBSD.

=> ↺ What will happen to Linux in 2022? A few predictions! – Invidious

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux is Getting an Exciting New Firmware Feature » Linux Magazine

• Intel is bringing a new driver to the 5.17 kernel that will make it possible to update firmware without a reboot.

• When you upgrade your motherboard firmware (such as the BIOS or UEFI), you have to reboot your system. Thanks to a new patch from Intel, both BIOS and UEFI updates can be done without forcing a reboot.

• How is this possible? Currently, an upgrade is done by uploading the firmware from within the operating system. The desktop or server is then rebooted, at which point the firmware is transferred to the motherboard and is flashed to either the BIOS or UEFI. However, there’s a new API specification, called Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry (PFRUT), which makes it possible to flash the firmware without the reboot. Intel has been working on PFRUT (previously dubbed Seamless Update) for quite a while now, in order to reduce downtime for servers. The idea is to enable such machines to reach that mythical 100% uptime.

=> ↺ AMD P-State Driver To Premiere In Linux 5.17 With Aim To Deliver Better Power Efficiency – Phoronix

• The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD’s collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel.

• After going through several rounds of patch review the past number of months, the AMD P-State driver as an alternative to the common ACPI CPUFreq driver is going mainline. This AMD P-State driver relies on ACPI CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Controls) for making finer CPU frequency scaling / performance state decisions than what is afforded by ACPI CPUFreq. But because of the dependence on ACPI CPPC information, it only supports Zen 2 processors and newer. Additionally, CPPC functionality must be enabled by the system firmware/BIOS as well otherwise you will continue needing to use CPUFreq.

=> ↺ Another feature hit Mainline Linux : CleanCache/ transcendent memory

• Last week has been a good week for a number of projects we have been working on at Oracle (in cooperation with others or helping out others in the linux kernel development community)… I wrote a blog entry earlier about how all the Linux kernel bits to be a complete Dom0 and DomU kernel on top of Xen have been committed to the mainline Linux tree. Shortly after Linus pulled that set of changes in, he also merged something called CleanCache.

• Cleancache is something that’s actually very cool, has huge potential to make running VMs super optimized/performant/efficient and is the result of quite a bit of research and experimentation.

• At the end of the blog I will have a few links that point to more information regarding the topic as it’s actually quite complex to get into great detail.

• cleancache is a way for the kernel to put away pages that can disappear at any point in time, as would normally be the case when it would discard cache pages. However using the cleancache method, if at some point in time that page would still be useful, it might still exist and as such doesn’t have to come back from disk.

=> ↺ Linux’s CleanCache Set To Be Cleaned From The Kernel After Being Hyped Up A Decade Ago – Phoronix

• Merged into the mainline Linux kernel a decade ago was the CleanCache patch series but now it’s set to be retired.

• Merged today into Linux-Next as part of Andrew Morton’s patches is the removal of CleanCache. Why? Because, well, there are no more users left. Since the removal of the Xen Transcendent Memory (TMEM) driver code in 2019, CleanCache hasn’t had any users left but still living within the kernel.

• CleanCache was developed by Oracle engineers and at the time it was introduced they announced it as “something that’s actually very cool, has huge potential to make running VMs super optimized/performant/efficient and is the result of quite a bit of research and experimentation.”

=> ↺ New Ubuntu Linux Kernel Security Updates Fix 9 Vulnerabilities, Patch Now

• These new Linux kernel security updates are here a little over a month after the previous ones, which addressed six vulnerabilities, and they’re available for Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri), Ubuntu 21.04 (Hisute Hippo), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), as well as the Ubuntu 16.04 and 14.04 ESM releases.

• Patched in this new kernel security updates are CVE-2021-4002, a security flaw affecting all aforementioned Ubuntu releases and discovered by Nadav Amit in Linux kernel’s hugetlb implementation. This leak could allow a local attacker to alter data from other processes that use huge pages.

=> ↺ Intel AMX Support For KVM Use May Be Ready For Mainline – Phoronix

• In preparation for Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be “requested” for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn’t made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline.

=> ↺ EXT4 Finally Picking Up Support For The Common Get/Set Label Ioctls – Phoronix

• It looks like EXT4 with Linux 5.17 will finally be supporting the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls that several other prominent file-systems have been supporting the past few years.

• FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL are ioctls for online reading and setting the file-system label for supported and mounted file-systems. These ioctls originally started out as specific ioctls for the Btrfs file-system but since Linux 4.18 were made generic. The ioctls were merged to the kernel’s VFS area to allow this common interface for reading/setting the file-system label by user-space software without having to worry about file-system particulars. In turn file-systems like XFS and F2FS have also picked up FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL/FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL support and carrying it in the mainline kernel going back to 2019.

=> ↺ AMD Prepares Linux Fix For Some Laptops Not Resuming From s2idle Suspend – Phoronix

• Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition.

• For some modern Ryzen-powered laptops there have been reports recently of some failures in resuming from suspend-to-idle, even after recent AMD s2idle Linux fixes.

• The issue appears to stem from the fact that currently Linux just assumes to offer s2idle even if the Fixed ACPI Hardware Table (FADT) doesn’t directly indicate it or if there is not an low power S0 (LPS0) device activated. For at least some Intel hardware, s2idle can handle the suspend/resume cycle out even without proper firmware support… AMD hardware, however, cannot without the necessary firmware bits aligning.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Radeon Linux Driver Adds Option To Limit Number Of Enabled CUs – Phoronix

• The RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers within Mesa 22.0 have now added an override for controlling the number of enabled compute units (CUs) for the graphics processor.

• Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák introduced this new AMD_CU_MASK= environment variable override as a way of controlling the number of CUs enabled — to artificially limit the number of compute units enabled — for both RadeonSI and RADV drivers.

=> ↺ It’s 2022 But AMD’s Open-Source OpenGL Driver Isn’t Done Being Optimized – Phoronix

• After the many years now that AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up… But that doesn’t appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations.

• Over the course of 2021 were still significant RadeonSI improvements made even with this open-source Linux OpenGL driver performing similar to — or in numerous cases exceeding — the performance provided by AMD’s proprietary cross-platform OpenGL driver. RadeonSI for years has been excellent for OpenGL gaming performance and last year even seen a lot of work optimizing on OpenGL workstation workloads. The workstation optimization focus of last year for RadeonSI was very apparent where as traditionally that was one of the strongholds for AMD’s proprietary OpenGL driver.

Applications

=> ↺ Avidemux video editor

• I have compiled version 2.8.0 in a running EasyOS and created a PET package, so it will be available via the package manager.

=> ↺ Mini review – TextShine is a simple but powerful text modification tool for Linux – Real Linux User

• Textshine is a single task application originally developed for the elementary OS platform, but since it is available in Flatpak format it can be used on any Linux distribution.

• TextShine is an application that focuses entirely on converting text to a specific format easily and quickly. I do not mean the file format here, but the format in which the text itself is converted, such as well-known text presentations such as camel case, title case, upper case, lower case, etc. But also options such as indent, change to curved quotes, double to single quotes, remove leading whitespace, etc. TextShine is therefore a powerful tool to easily implement large amounts of standardized changes to a text. Consider, for example, a coding assignment for which a standard naming convention with camel case must be applied based on a list of attribute names, or a messed up text from which duplicate sentences must be cleaned.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ OpenSSH ProxyUseFdPass

• When enabled, instead of communicating with the server through the ProxyCommand standard input and output, the SSH client expects the command to give it a file descriptor to use. The idea is to avoid having a uncessary lingering process and extra write/reads when it is not necessary.

=> ↺ 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.

=> ↺ Configuring authselect sssd Centos/RHEL 8

• So, in previous RHEL releases, the authconfig command was used to control the authentication of user logins on local and remote systems. Authentication methods and various authentication configurations using each of this tool. The authconfig command became too complex as a central management tool and troubleshoot problems with authentication setup. Moreover, for authselect, sssd, steps are indicated below tutorial. Red hat documentation on this link. Configuring Openldap for sssd service.

=> ↺ How to install Roblox Studio on a Chromebook in 2022

• Today we are looking at how to install Roblox Studio 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.

• This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

=> ↺ How to save image as JPG in Inkscape

• Is it possible to save a file or image as a JPG in Inkscape? This question would be wondered by most of the new Inkscape users. The answer to this question is Yes! You can now save the image as JPG in Inkscape, and this update is added in Inkscape version 1.1. In the earlier versions, the only format supported for saving files was PNG. Whether you are a newbie or a professional Inkscape user, you will find the process of saving JPG as simple as exporting your work as a PNG image. In Inkscape, you can use the “Export PNG Image” menu for exporting your current file as JPG. It provides various Export area options such as Page, Document, Selection, and Drawing. Each of the mentioned options assists in figuring out the content of the document you want to export. This write-up will provide a step-by-step guide to help you understand how to save images as JPG. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to rotate object in Inkscape

• As a beginner to Inkscape one of the first things you would want to learn is rotating objects in Inkscape. As compared to other photo editing software and image manipulation applications, Inkscape does this operation differently. In Inkscape, you can use multiple rotation options for rotating your selected objects. This write-up will show you how to rotate objects in Inkscape using the toolbar buttons, Transform tool, and the on-canvas Rotate handles. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to Convert Text to Shape in Inkscape

• Text to shape conversion is a graphic designing technique used to create logos, do word art, and represent any design or shape through the text. It gives an artistic look to the converted text. As an Inkscape user, you can convert text to any shape with the help of the “Path Effects” tool. The “Path Effect” tool has an “Envelope Deformation” option that can be utilized for bending the text path according to a specific shape. This write-up will demonstrate how to convert text to shape in Inkscape. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to convert object to path in Inkscape

• Inkscape permits its users to add different objects such as Circles, Rectangles, Stars, and even text in its canvas. By utilizing each of the mentioned objects, you can create specific shapes based on different styles. However, converting them to the path will allow you to manipulate them in ways that Inkscape object mainly does not offer. Don’t know the steps of converting an object to path in Inkscape? No worries! This post will assist you in this regard.

• This write-up will show you the procedure of converting an object to path in Inkscape. Moreover, the method of customizing the converted object will also be provided. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to center align object in Inkscape

• You can convert any object to the path using the Object to Path option from the Inkscape Path menu. In Inkscape, various methods exist for changing an object’s appearance. The added object can be a Star, Ellipse, Rectangle, Line, Curve, or Text. This article explains the method of converting objects to paths in Inkscape. The method of customizing the converted object is also provided in this article.

=> ↺ How to create gradient in Inkscape

• A “Gradient” is one of the most versatile ways for changing the look and feel of any design. It comprises two or more colors that flow into one another while creating a gradual color blend in typography, images, text, logos, shapes, and more. Gradients also offer the light and shade impression, as well as movement. In Inkscape, a gradient is created to add a three-dimensional effect to the selected object. It can be also used for drawing the attention of the audience to some text, or to fade an image to a white background.

• There exist two general types of gradients in Inkscape: Linear and Radial. In Linear gradients, the added colors follow a straight line whereas in the case of Radial gradients a circular path is followed by the colors. This write-up will demonstrate the procedure of creating gradients in Inkscape. Moreover, the method of converting the Linear gradient to Radial gradient will be also provided. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to group objects in Inkscape

• Working with multiple objects as a group in Inkscape permits you to make changes that affect all group elements equally. Also, the created group can be duplicated, copied, and cloned as a single entity. In Inkscape, grouping object assists in organizing the canvas; for example, if you have added several shapes in a row or column, grouping the objects will ensure that none of them become offset.

• This write-up will teach you the method to group objects in Inkscape. We will also show you how to manipulate an Inkscape group, its group elements, remove a grouped object, and lastly, the procedure to ungroup objects in Inkscape. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to merge objects in Inkscape

• Working with multiple objects as a group in Inkscape permits you to make changes that affect all group elements equally. Also, grouping objects will make it easier to organize complicated projects. This article explained the method of grouping objects in Inkscape. Moreover, the procedures of manipulating group objects, entering a group, removing objects, and ungrouping objects are also provided.

=> ↺ How to merge layers in Inkscape

• You may find yourself using the layers in Inkscape if you have started working with advanced designs and want to merge numerous layers into a single one. Merging layers is also useful when you need to merge multiple objects that exist on separate layers. For instance, in an Inkscape document, you have added different shapes in different layers. Now to categorize those layers, we can use the functionality of the merging layer.

• Do you not know how to merge layers in Inkscape? No worries! This write-up will provide step-by-step instructions for merging layers in Inkscape. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How Do I Use Docker Compose with Synology?

• Docker Compose is a command-line tool to help you run and manage Docker projects easier. Docker Compose uses YAML configuration files (i.e., docker-compose.yaml) for your Docker projects. In the YAML configuration file, you define your containers, their configurations, port maps or exposed ports, volumes, networks, links, and so on. Once the YAML configuration file is ready, you will be able to run all the containers that you’ve defined on the YAML configuration file with a single Docker Compose command. You will also be able to stop all the defined containers with a single Docker Compose command. Docker Compose is a must-have tool for every Docker user.

• This article will show you how to use Docker Compose on your Synology NAS. So, let’s get started.

=> ↺ How to generate PGP keys with GPG

• “Pretty Good Privacy” or “PGP” is a program that encrypts and decrypts data and also provides cryptographic authentication and privacy for online communication. PGP is mostly used for encrypting and decrypting documents, texts, and emails in order to improve security. Techniques such as hashing, public-key cryptography, and data compression are all utilized in PGP encryption. By utilizing “GPG” or “GnuPG” which is free signing and free encryption software based on PGP, you can generate the public and private keys. The generated public and private PGP keys will have cryptographic features.

• This write-up will demonstrate three different methods for generating the keys that are with the help of “–gen-key”, “–full-gen-key”, and the “–quick-gen-key” GPG options. Before moving ahead, install GPG if you do not have it already.

=> ↺ How to encrypt and decrypt with PGP

• PGP plays an important role in encrypting and decrypting the data. Techniques such as hashing, public-key cryptography, and data compression are all utilized in PGP encryption. By using “GPG” or “GnuPG” which is free signing and encryption software based on PGP, you can export, import public and private keys, and also encrypt and decrypt data. The GPG key pair comprises two types of keys: Private and Public keys. You can use the public key for encrypting the data, and that encrypted data will be decrypted using the secret or private key of the receiver. The procedure of encrypting and decrypting files with PGP comprises some simple steps. Firstly, the sender has to export your public key and send it to the receiver. Then, the receiver will import the public key in its keyring. After this, the receiver can encrypt any file utilizing the public key of the sender. On the other hand, the receiver will then decrypt the shared file using its private key.

• This write-up will guide you about how to encrypt and decrypt with PGP. From exporting and importing public keys to encrypting and decrypting files, step-by-step instructions will be provided for each procedure. So, let’s start!

• Note: We have already generated two GPG keypairs for the demonstration purpose, one for “john” and the other for “fred” on two separate systems. Now, we will export john’s public key, and then import it on the other system.

=> ↺ How to Delete GPG Keys in Linux

• Is your GPG keyring overloaded with hundreds of unnecessary entries? If yes, then you should immediately delete the revoked, unsigned, expired keys. The ideal solution of this issue is to only keep the keys that have signed your public key and then import the new keys as per requirements. Do you not know how to delete GPG keys in Linux? No worries! This write-up will demonstrate how to delete GPG keys of single and multiple users. The procedures of using “uid” and the “Key ID” for deleting the private and public keys will be provided as well. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to export and import keys with GPG

• To encrypt email and files, you need to know how to generate, export, and import GPG keys. For instance, you have generated a GPG key pair by using the “gpg –gen-key” command, and now you want to export your public and private keys to exchange in communication. With the help of the “gpg” command, you can easily export and import the public key and private key. However, in the case of the private key, a passphrase will be associated with the exported file that can be utilized to import that specific private key in a secret keyring.

• This write-up will guide you in exporting and importing public and private keys with GPG. Moreover, a practical example will be provided to show you the procedure of exporting and importing GPG keys between two systems. So, let’s start!

=> ↺ How to Boot From a USB Using Grub

• We may have installed and configured many Linux Operating systems via their ISO images in Oracle Virtual Box without creating anything bootable. Of course, that was a simple and easy task to do. Here comes another thing when it comes to Linux distros. When the already installed Linux distribution is not working, the USB bootable for Linux image comes in handy. GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) seems to be the most commonly used bootloader in Linux distros. Grub is extremely useful for debugging and altering boot parameters. When the Linux kernel does not start immediately, we may use GRUB to load it from a USB drive. The procedure for booting from a USB drive using GRUB is straightforward, and we’ll go through it in-depth in this article. Ensure you have already installed the Ubuntu 20.04 system in case we are unable to load the kernel via the USB bootable. Now, let’s have a fresh start.

=> ↺ How To Install Snap on Fedora 35 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Snaps are containerized software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run. And because they bundle their dependencies, they work on all major Linux systems without modification. Snaps are faster to install, easier to create, safer to run, and they update automatically and transactionally so your app is always fresh and never broken.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Snap Store on a Fedora 35.

=> ↺ Install LXQt Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 Linux

• Learn the steps to install LXQt GUI desktop installation on Ubuntu 20.04 focal or 22.04 Jammy with minimal CLI interface or with GUI desktop.

• LXQt is a complete Linux desktop environment. It is a port of the LXDE desktop environment to the Qt graphics library. It is a very lightweight desktop with a minimum of 512 MiB RAM to work, however of course, and more as you start doing work on it. This means that the hardware requirements are almost like XFCE. Like MATE, LXQt ranks in the middle when it comes to the required system resources. Well, if you don’t have your current Ubuntu Gnome desktop and looking for something lightweight then LXQt can be a good choice to go.

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

• Cinnamon Desktop Environment is a free, open-source desktop environment based on X Window System created from GNOME 3 by the Linux Community that was frustrated and disappointed with GNOME 3. Cinnamon offers a smart, clean look that is less bloated than alternative desktop environments and focuses on speed and flexibility.

• Cinnamon is the default desktop environment choice for Linux Mint, as many veteran Linux distro hoppers would know and are actively maintained by them. A bonus feature of installing the Cinnamon desktop environment on Debian 11 Bullseye is that it uses the GDM display manager, making it easy to switch between GNOME and Cinnamon environments.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install this alternative desktop environment on your Debian 11 Bullseye Desktop as an option choice to switch from GNOME.

=> ↺ How to install Asterisk on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04 and Debian 10/9

• In this post, you will learn how to install Asterisk on Ubuntu / Debian

• Asterisk in an Open Source Communication toolkit, It powers IP PBX Systems, Conference servers and VoIP Gateways and is used by call centres, enterprise businesses widely. It has many features and allows you to do calls using TCP/IP without any cost. Moreover, it has features like call recordings, Voice Response Menus, Voicemails etc. It can transform an ordinary computer into a IP PBX System. There are more than 1 Million Servers Setup using Asterisk Software.

=> ↺ How to install Oracle Java 17 LTS on Debian 11

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Oracle Java 17 on Debian 11.

• Oracle Java 17 is the latest LTS version of this popular programming language. Although many people still use version 11, the truth is that this new LTS will be adopted progressively.

• As we know, Oracle’s version differs from the OpenJDK in part due to the Linux community and the different treatment between licenses. However, many may find it important to install the Oracle version.

• So, in this post, we will help you with the task.

=> ↺ Install and Setup OpenLDAP server on Ubuntu 22.04 – kifarunix.com

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and setup OpenLDAP Server on Ubuntu 22.04. OpenLDAP Software is an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is a lightweight client-server protocol for accessing directory services, specifically X. 500-based directory services.

=> ↺ 3 Ways to install Inkscape on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS – Linux Shout

• There are multiple ways to install the popular Inkscape on Ubuntu 20.04 focal or 22.04 Jammy jellyfish, if not available already on your system.

• Inkscape is an open-source graphics program that can be used to create vector graphics. Its source code is available to use and anyone can change the program code, use the program and redistribute it, and it is supported by a community of dedicated, volunteer developers. Hence, unlike a single entity, there is a community efforts to build and develop this graphic editor. Inkscape offers numerous tools and different shapes, paths, texts, markings, clones, transparency effects (alpha), transformations, color gradients, patterns, and groups. The free tool also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, path-bound texts, text that flows around objects, direct XML editing, and much more.

=> ↺ Install LXQt Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 Linux

• Learn the steps to install LXQt GUI desktop installation on Ubuntu 20.04 focal or 22.04 Jammy with minimal CLI interface or with GUI desktop.

• LXQt is a complete Linux desktop environment. It is a port of the LXDE desktop environment to the Qt graphics library. It is a very lightweight desktop with a minimum of 512 MiB RAM to work, however of course, and more as you start doing work on it. This means that the hardware requirements are almost like XFCE. Like MATE, LXQt ranks in the middle when it comes to the required system resources. Well, if you don’t have your current Ubuntu Gnome desktop and looking for something lightweight then LXQt can be a good choice to go.

=> ↺ Why might you run your own DNS server?

• One of the things that makes DNS difficult to understand is that it’s decentralized. There are thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands? I don’t know!) of authoritative nameservers, and at least 10 million resolvers. And they’re running lots of different software! All these different servers running software means that there’s a lot of inconsistency in how DNS works, which can cause all kinds of frustrating problems.

• But instead of talking about the problems, I’m interested in figuring out – why is it a good thing that DNS is decentralized?

=> ↺ Classic SysAdmin: How to Move Files Using Linux Commands or File Managers – Linux Foundation

• There are certain tasks that are done so often, users take for granted just how simple they are. But then, you migrate to a new platform and those same simple tasks begin to require a small portion of your brain’s power to complete. One such task is moving files from one location to another. Sure, it’s most often considered one of the more rudimentary actions to be done on a computer. When you move to the Linux platform, however, you may find yourself asking “Now, how do I move files?”

• If you’re familiar with Linux, you know there are always many routes to the same success. Moving files is no exception. You can opt for the power of the command line or the simplicity of the GUI – either way, you will get those files moved.

• Let’s examine just how you can move those files about. First, we’ll examine the command line.

=> ↺ Releasing Tumpa for Mac

• I am happy to announce the release of Tumpa (The Usability Minded PGP Application) for Mac. This release contains the old UI (and the UI bugs), but creates RSA4096 keys by default.

=> ↺ Search, Study And Practice Linux Commands With Tldr++ – OSTechNix

• In this tutorial, we will learn about one of the tldr client named Tldr++, how to install Tldr++ in Linux, and how to search, study and practice Linux commands with the help of Tldr++ client.

=> ↺ The Extension Displays GNOME Dash as Top Dock When Mouse Hover Top-bar | UbuntuHandbook

• There are a few extensions (e.g., Dash-to-dock and Dash-to-panel) to change the Gnome Shell ‘Dash’ appearance and behavior. Here I’m going to introduce the new extension called “Dash from Panel“.

=> ↺ Top 20 Cloud Computing Terminology and Definitions You Need to Know

• In this blog post, we are going to explain the terminologies and definitions related the Cloud Computing.

• You will ask yourself first, what is Cloud Computing and what is the meaning and use of that. Of course, we are here to introduce you more to this. Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer systems of resources like data storage, CPU power, databases, networking, software and etc. Cloud computing offers very scalable and flexible solutions for customer needs, which may reduce the costs, or increase them for some unaware users.

• In the next paragraphs, we will explain the meaning of the most important terminologies and their definitions related to Cloud Computing. Let’s get started!

=> ↺ How to install Wine 7 on Ubuntu 20.04 – NextGenTips

• In this tutorial, we are going to install Wine 7 on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems i.e Linux, macOS, and BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls instantly eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to integrate Windows applications in your desktop.

=> ↺ How to deploy the Portainer container management tool with persistent storage – TechRepublic

• Since I last covered Portainer, things have changed a bit. That’s just how things evolve in technology. One minute something works, and the next you have to take extra steps to do the same thing. This is especially true within the realm of containers.

• And given I haven’t touched on Portainer since 2017, it should be obvious that things have dramatically changed and improved. That’s why I want to not only revisit the subject but also demonstrate a more reliable method of deploying Portainer. This time around we’ll be running the container with persistent storage, so should something go awry, you still have your data.

=> ↺ How to Install Google and Microsoft Fonts on Linux

• Are the preinstalled fonts on your Linux distribution missing that certain flair? You can easily customize your desktop’s typography by adding and configuring fonts, including those owned by Microsoft and Google.

=> ↺ How To Install AnyDesk on Fedora 35 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, AnyDesk is a free remote desktop sharing application that allows you to access the Linux desktop remotely from other operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. AnyDesk offers smooth and seamless remote access to your computers over a wide area network. You can say it is an alternative to the TeamViewer, which is available freely.

• 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 AnyDesk remote desktop application on a Fedora 35.

Games

=> ↺ ΔV: Rings of Saturn continues to be popular with Linux gamers | GamingOnLinux

• It seems that Kodera Software continue to impressed by the level of Linux sales on Steam for their space mining sim ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Be sure to also check out our previous interview with the developer.

• What is it? A physics-based mining sim, set in the thickest debris field in Sol. Every action has a reaction, lasers are invisible without a medium, and your thrust is a potent weapon. Find trade, adapt your equipment to your playstyle, hire a crew to help. Unravel the mysteries of the rings, or just get rich.

• Developed with Godot Engine, the developer has announced a few times how sales have been going across different platforms and they recently gave another update on Twitter to see if things had changed.

=> ↺ Humble Choice gets Iron Harvest and Mafia: Definitive Edition | GamingOnLinux

• Another month is here and so is the next Humble Choice with a fresh selection of games to pick from. Here you pay for whatever tier you feel is the best value to get access to the Humble Trove (a ton of DRM-free games), a discount at the Humble Store and the ability to claim Steam keys (sometimes GOG keys) for multiple titles – the amount of which depends on what tier you buy into.

=> ↺ Ubuntu No Longer Seen As Viable Gaming Distro (I Blame Snaps) – Invidious

• A few days ago, Canonical posted a new job opening for a “Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager”. The responsibility of this new position is to make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming. I find this posting quite interesting given that Ubuntu has largely given up on “desktop” Linux.

=> ↺ Remnants of the Precursors is a modern take on Master of Orion out now | GamingOnLinux

• Developed as a modern reincarnation of the original Master of Orion, the free and open source Remnants of the Precursors is officially out now. It’s been in development for somewhere around 6 years, with the big 1.0 landing on December 25.

• Master of Orion is an absolute classic, and the sequel is one of the games that firmly cemented my absolute love of video games so seeing the genre live on in such a way is awesome. According to the developer “ROTP takes that original award-winning formula and adds high quality artwork, writing, graphical design and AI development to recreate the authentic experience of the original game. There is arguably more quality artwork and writing in ROTP than in almost any space 4X game currently on the market”.

=> ↺ Canonical Cares About Linux Gaming??? – Invidious

• When you think of Linux gaming you probably don’t think of Canonical and Ubuntu but it seems like they want to change that and are hiring a Linux desktop gaming product manager.

=> ↺ LatencyFleX offers a generic open source latency reduction middleware | GamingOnLinux

• Want to reduce latency? There’s now a free and open source way with LatencyFleX, that gives a vendor and game agnostic latency reduction middleware that you can try out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Template for KDE Plasma Activity – research & call for help – Original problem, documentation, and getting stuck · Hook’s Humble Homepage

• With such a frequency of spinning them up and winding them down, I developed a preference on what a new Activity should consist of, to be as quick as possible as useful as it gets. And this blog post is my first step towards trying to create a Plasma template for when a new Activity gets created, to optimise this process.

• [...]

• To try it out I simply copy-pasted the Unity theme example and applied it. So I blame mostly myself. But it would be much more user-friendly if the tool would have an “Undo” button or a way to switch between the state that is stored in the settings and the script in the console.

• I admit, I did not find the time to go through all of the Plasma scripting documentation yet, but I am at the stage of getting lost a bit in all the information.

• One thing that makes me scratch my head is that the Plasma scripting: Configuration keys page is full of headings that say “BUG”, which I am not sure what to make of.

=> ↺ Krita in 2021 and 2022

• A bit later than planned… Our overview of last year and a look forward to this year! We’re all still alive and working hard — sometimes a bit too hard. We kept the same core team this year, but we also had a lot of contributions from volunteers. Over a hundred people made all in all over ten thousand contributions to Krita, the website, the manual and the translations.

• We also launched the Krita Dev Fund, based on Blender’s funding website code. We are really pleased with the community response to this initiative, but we’re not yet at a point where we won’t need the income from the various app stores. We launched Krita on the Epic app store, and we’ve made our first submission to the Apple MacOS store. (note: NOT the iPadOS store!)

• [...]

• The number of downloads from the download page grew to 5,637,579, almost a million more than in 2020, which was already a record year. That excludes all other places where people can get Krita, from Flatpak to Snap, from distributions to app stores to third-party download sites (but be careful with those!)

• We also had a huge problem, that’s since then hit other free software projects like inkscape and darktable: scammers mailed people behind a lot of youtube channels, related or unrelated to graphics software, about a possible collaboration with the Krita team. This was, obviously, not us. Some forensic work showed that they were trying to install ransomware on the victims’ computers.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Philip Chimento’s Open source Story

• After several false starts like this, in the fall of 2006 I finally started a project that I was motivated to finish. I had always been interested in text adventure games, and in 2006 Inform 7 was published, a design system for writing these games. The core was closed, but the development environments were open source, and they were only available for Mac and Windows. This looked like a good learning project for me! I expected myself to lose interest before I got anywhere, like I had with my other programming projects, but I actually stuck with it until I got something working. I first published it in October 2006 and got some good feedback immediately from the Inform community, which motivated me to keep working on it. Eventually I was invited to join the Inform development team. Because I had somewhat arbitrarily chosen to build the app’s UI using the GTK toolkit, I also learned a great deal about GTK and started getting involved in the GNOME community. Learning many best practices from others led me to refactor almost the entire app around 2008. When I saw how much I’d improved in two years, I started to be able to kick my feeling of inadequacy and consider that I could be a good programmer who had something to offer to open source projects.

• Around that time, Stack Overflow was launched, and I started answering questions about GTK on Stack Overflow. I don’t do much of that anymore, but I had lots of free time back then, and I spent lots of it writing little programs to answer Stack Overflow questions about GTK. Helping other people gave me a good feeling, but also gave me a lot of valuable practice in thinking about how to solve problems. To this day, I’ve still got the top number of GTK questions answered on Stack Overflow! Interestingly, I believe that partly enabled my career switch into software engineering in 2013, because I made a connection with my first software job at Endless due to showing up in searches.

• Fast-forward to now, in 2022, I work as a JavaScript engine developer for Igalia, which means that I collaborate on proposals to improve the JavaScript programming language, and implement them in browsers’ JavaScript engines. In my free time I volunteer for the GNOME desktop as a maintainer, and a board member of the GNOME Foundation. Both of these are exciting work and not things I could have imagined myself doing 20 years ago. In some sense being able to participate in open source is a dream come true.

=> ↺ GNOME 42 Lands DMA-BUF Feedback Support For Better Multi-GPU, Proper Direct Scanout – Phoronix

• Mutter landed a prominent addition today for GNOME 42: the Wayland compositor now supports the recently introduced DMA-BUF feedback extension.

• Wayland-Protocols 1.24 back in November introduced the DMA-BUF feedback extension. This “feedback” support for DMA-BUF was designed with multi-GPU setups in mind where needing to know about the capabilities of the GPU device powering the compositor in relation to the capabilities of any secondary GPU(s) to ensure the efficient and compatible exchange of buffers.

Distributions

=> ↺ Linux Kodachi: Extreme Privacy Protection Out of the Box

• Privacy is one of the main reasons many people switch to Linux from Windows. For new Linux users, though, the learning curve involved with configuring a Linux system prevents them from fully achieving the privacy protection they want.

• There is one Linux distribution, however, that delivers extreme security and privacy protection out of the box—even if you’ve never used Linux before. With Linux Kodachi, you’re protected automatically from the moment the system boots.

=> ↺ RYF can, and should, be improved

• Libreboot is based on coreboot. The coreboot project distributes binary blobs, which are required on most machines that it supports. Libreboot removes those blobs, resulting in only a handful of machines being supported, and efforts are made to support more machines in such a state.

• Until recently, Libreboot did not actually have a formal policy, defining specific standards or objectives. It simply defaulted to the FSF’s own message.

• I have now written a formal policy for the Libreboot project: [...]

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ KaOS 2022.01 Run Through – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at KaOS 2022.01.

=> ↺ KaOS 2022.01

• Today we are looking at KaOS 2022.01. It comes with Linux KerneOS ran as a Wayland session in a virtual machine. My host system is also Linux.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Simplify Java persistence using Quarkus and Hibernate Reactive | Red Hat Developer

• This tutorial shows how you can simplify reactive Java applications that persist data using the Hibernate ORM with Panache extension in Quarkus.

• Business applications preserve valuable business data in persistence stores such as relational databases. The application’s presentation layer usually showcases the data for multiple uses, such as inventory, shopping, subscription, and monitoring. Java provides a core feature, the Java Persistence API (JPA), to manage persistent objects using object-relational mapping (ORM) with databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Microsoft’s SQL Server. However, even when using JPA annotations, you must implement the JPA specifications to handle data transactions.

=> ↺ What’s new in Libabigail 2.0 | Red Hat Developer

• Libabigail is a framework dedicated to analyzing changes to application binary interfaces (ABIs) in ELF binaries. Libabigail 2.0, the latest major release of the framework, was released in October of 2021.

• This article is a tour of the main changes delivered in this major release. You’ll learn about changes to the core library to start, then move on to updates to specific ABI analysis tools and the library’s licensing terms.

=> ↺ Deploying bare-metal clusters from the cloud

• Our team took a fresh look at installing Red Hat OpenShift on bare-metal hardware and developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) installation service called the Assisted Installer, available as a technology preview on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. This article describes the design and architectural choices we made in order to be able to offer the service for both on-premises and cloud deployments, while also continuously improving user experience.

=> ↺ 4 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) trends to watch in 2022 | The Enterprisers Project

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in 2022 won’t be about what’s new and shiny, but rather the evolution and maturation of trends already underway.

• This should be welcome news for IT and business leaders who see RPA as a single tine in a multi-prong automation strategy. “New and shiny” does not necessarily produce results. But 2022 in general is likely to be a year where boards, investors, customers, and other stakeholders ask: Where are the results?

• To put it more specifically: Where are the results from those outsized investments you’ve been making in digital transformation, AI/ML, cloud, and elsewhere?

=> ↺ DevSecOps: 4 guiding principles for CIOs | The Enterprisers Project

• Modern software leaders are all too familiar with the concept of moving the goalpost. The business demands they deliver new features faster, and when they do, the feature must then be compatible across platforms.

• These days, the goalpost has moved again: Now the business wants quality software quickly –and they want it to be free of critical vulnerabilities, compliant with data privacy laws, and easily adaptable to new requirements the business demands in response to the market.

• DevSecOps was born to keep up with these requirements. The goal of DevSecOps is to unite software development, operation, and security into a collaborative system where all stakeholders work together to proactively address security issues before software is developed and through its deployment.

• Getting there is, of course, easier said than done. The four principles outlined below are drawn from the direct experience of putting these ideas into practice.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Community Blog monthly summary: December 2021

• This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

=> ↺ Red Hat Smart Management for SAP

=> ↺ PipeWire 0.3.43 Released With Many Fixes

• 2022 will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on desktop Linux distributions for managing both audio/video streams. New PipeWire releases come quick in working to address remaining gaps in this Red Hat led solution and ensuring it can fulfill the use-cases previously handled by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK.

• PipeWire 0.3.43 is out today as the latest significant point release for fixing outstanding issues and other compatibility improvements particularly around the JACK/ALSA/PulseAudio handling. Some of the PipeWire 0.3.43 changes include…

Debian Family

=> ↺ FAI.me service now support backports for Debian 11 (bullseye)

• The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports a backports kernel for the stable release Debian 11 (aka bullseye). If you enable the backports option, you will currently get kernel 5.14. This will help you if you have newer hardware that is not support by the default kernel 5.10. The backports option is also still available for the images when using the old Debian 10 (buster) release.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Happy New Year 2022! – The Linux Mint Blog

• Linux Mint 20.3 will be available this week, both as a stable release and as an upgrade. The ISO images are currently going through QA testing. We’ll make separate announcements for the upgrade and for the release as soon as they are available.

• I’d like to thank all the people who tested the BETA and helped us identify bugs. Thanks to your feedback we went through 85 reports and were able to address many usability issues.

• As always I’d like to thank all of you also who donate to our project and continue to support us financially. Many thanks for being there for us.

• I hope you’ll enjoy our latest release and I wish you a very happy new year.

=> ↺ How to Upgrade to Linux Mint 20.3 – OMG! Ubuntu!

• With Linux Mint 20.3 release now available you may be wondering how to upgrade to it — here’s how!

• You can upgrade Linux Mint 20.1 or 20.2 to Linux Mint 20.3. If you’re on an older 19.x release you will need to upgrade to Mint 20 first in order to upgrade to the latest point release.

• But before you upgrade anything you need to be sensible: backup all important files. You should also use the Timeshift utility (it comes with Linux Mint) to create a system snapshot. This way you can quickly restore to a working version of the OS should anything go wrong during the upgrade process (though don’t panic: it rarely does).

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 is Now Available to Download, This is What’s New – OMG! Ubuntu!

• You’ve patiently waited for it, and now it’s arrived —no, not the new year! I’m talking about the release of Linux Mint 20.3!

• Yes, after five months of development the much-fancied follow-up to July’s Linux Mint 20.2 release is sort of out (the downloads are live, but the release announcement hasn’t gone up). It is a substantial update packed with numerous visual changes and usability enhancements that make this already-user-friendly distro even easier to use.

• Linux Mint 20.3 is based on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS and ships with Linux 5.4 kernel. It is supported with updates until 2025, though you’ll be able to upgrade to Linux Mint 21 at some point (there’s no firm release date for it yet).

=> ↺ Will Linux Mint 20.3 ‘Una’ make 2022 the fabled ‘Year of Linux on the Desktop?’

• Will Linux Mint 20.3 make 2022 the fabled “Year of Linux on the Desktop?” Absolutely not. However, that won’t stop some fans of the Ubuntu-based operating system from making that prediction. While it won’t dethrone Windows anytime soon, the release of a stable Linux Mint 20.3 is imminent.

• You see, today, the Linux Mint developers share that version 20.3 of the operating system will be released this week! Sadly, the devs missed the Christmas 2021 deadline they previously shared — a major disappointment. Oh well, users simply had more time to play with the Beta release. At least the wait for Linux Mint 20.3 — code-named “Una” — will be over soon.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New

• Based on the Ubuntu 20.04.3 point release of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” ships with the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel to ensure seamless upgrades from the previous release, Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma”.

• The Cinnamon edition features the latest and greatest Cinnamon 5.2 desktop environment, which brings lots of enhancements and new features. On the other hand, the Xfce and MATE editions ship with the latest Xfce 4.16 and MATE 1.26 desktop environments.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 now available with updated system theme and new apps

• Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, with an Ubuntu base (giving it plenty of software to choose from) and several options for desktop environments. Linux Mint 20.3 has been available in beta testing for a while now, but the final release is out and available to download today.

• Linux Mint 20.3 (via omg! ubuntu!) is based on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS (just like Mint 20.2 before it), with the same Linux v5.4 kernel release, so it will receive critical software updates until April 2025. You can choose between the Cinnamon, MATE, or XFCE desktop environments, which all have a Windows-like interface and GTK-based applications.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 Is Now Available To Download | Itsubuntu.com

• Linux Mint 20.3 based on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is now available for download. Linux Mint 20.3 ships with Linux 5.4 kernel. You can upgrade Linux from Mint 20.1 or 20.2 to Linux Mint 20.3. If you’re using an older 19.x version of Linux Mint then you will need to upgrade to Mint 20 first in order to upgrade to the latest point release. Linux Mint 20.3 is a long-term support release that will be supported until 2025.

=> ↺ Application composability – a cloud computing perspective | Ubuntu

• Let’s remember the time in the 2000s when companies introduced their cloud computing offerings at a large scale. New services were put into the popular IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS categories. New kinds of storage and messaging technologies were promoted. Also, novel approaches were discussed, such as designing applications for horizontal scalability and eventual consistency. People were excited when Netflix – at that time, a business popular for selling and renting DVDs – began to migrate their business of streaming videos onto the AWS platform in 2008.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ LEGO Cup Holder Helps You To Stay Hydrated | Hackaday

• Eat more fruit, exercise more, drink more fluids; early January is traditionally the time to implement New Year’s resolutions. Most of the common ones simply require willpower, but if it’s staying hydrated that you’re targeting, then some help is available. [Pepijn de Vos] designed a LEGO cup holder and an accompanying desktop app that tell you exactly how much water you’ve had so far, making it easier to get to those eight glasses a day.

• The basic idea is simple: the cup holder contains a load cell that senses the weight of your drinking vessel. If the weight decreases, then a message is sent to your PC detailing the amount lost. If the weight increases, then the glass must have been refilled and the previous weight is disregarded. This way, the app simply needs to add up all the amounts reported, without having to compensate for the weight of the empty glass.

• [...]

• [Pepijn] modified an existing GNOME desktop widget to display a cup icon and the total volume consumed, which seems to work pretty smoothly judging from the video embedded below.

=> ↺ Intel Mobileye EyeQ Ultra RISC-V processor targets Level 4 autonomous driving

• Let’s carry on with Intel’s CES 2022 news, but with a twist as Mobileye EyeQ Ultra does not include any x86 cores, but instead, the automotive processor features 12 RISC-V cores, Arm GPU and DSP, and aims to bring Level 4 autonomous driving to cars thanks notably to a 176 TOPS AI accelerator.

=> ↺ Building A WiFi-Enabled Bird Box On The Cheap | Hackaday

• [Jude] was looking for a fun DIY project for him and his son and thought that a bird box might be a good option. He wanted to equip the box with a WiFi camera so he could watch his little guests from his phone but didn’t find any suitable, inexpensive, commercially-available options. So with that, he built one himself.

=> ↺ PVC pipe plotter prints pretty pictures | Arduino Blog

• Instructables user tuenhidiy wanted to create a new kind of CNC plotter that was unlike nearly all of the other ones. Rather than aluminum extrusions or wood, this machine is constructed from different pieces of PVC pipe all cut to exact lengths, hence its name, the “CoreXZ Puzzle Pipe Plotter.”

• Electronics wise, the plotter runs on an Arduino Uno loaded with an instance of the ubiquitous GRBL firmware. Stacked on top was a CNC GRBL shield, with three A4988 stepper motor drivers for delivering current to three NEMA17 motors.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Ditching Android? Samsung dallying with Google’s Fuchsia OS

• Android and iOS have dominated the mobile operating system world for so long, it is hard to imagine an alternative prying a manufacturer from the two OSes. But that is what might be happening, according to a report published by Sammobile recently.

• There are claims that Samsung phones may no longer run on the Android OS, in favour of a new operating system, called Fuchsia, that has been in development under Google for a few years now.

=> ↺ Oneplus Smartphones without Google

• We have way to many smartphones which are laying around in drawers, closets and basements. Before you start thinking of buying a new phone, even if it is a Fairphone, think about buying a used phone and running an up-to-date Custom ROM on it. This is very environment friendly, privacy respecting (if you ditch Google Play Services) and good on your valet.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Open-source predictions for 2022: Snap, Flatpak, CentOS Stream, Linux job demand and more – TechRepublic

• That’s right, I’m starting out big. But honestly, this isn’t such a far stretch, especially given how enterprise businesses absolutely depend on open-source technology. At this point, it’s pretty much set in stone that open-source software drives business. But I believe we’re going to see in 2022 that big business takes open-source technology to completely different heights. I’m fairly confident we’re going to see completely new use-cases for open-source software that will drive massive growth in industries, allowing them to become even more inventive, more productive and even more agile.

• This will also begin to trickle down from larger enterprise businesses into the smaller markets, such that businesses that struggled to compete with the larger corporations will find a bit more of a level playing field (at least with their technology). Part of this will be driven by low-code/no-code solutions (that depend on open-source technology) allowing companies of all sizes to build creative software to empower their businesses.

Events

=> ↺ Percona Live Returns in May as an In Person Event

• Good news for people who like their conferences live and in person. The North Carolina-based open source database management company, Percona, announced on Wednesday that after going all digital last year to deal with the pandemic, Percona Live will be reopening its doors to attendees for this year’s event, which will be held in Austin, Texas.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla’s call for cryptocurrency donations angers founder • The Register

• A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations via a new payment service provider.

• This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism, including that from Jamie Zawinski – who named the Mozilla project and was one of the original Netscape developers.

• You can read the blistering thread here yourself; it gives short shrift to the concept of using cryptocurrencies. Zawinski described the payment processor and digital coins as “planet incinerating.”

• “Hi, I’m sure that whoever runs [Mozilla's Twitter] account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I’m here to say fuck you and fuck this,” Zawinski wrote, adding that “everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision.”

• Billy Markus, who co-created Dogecoin, one of the crypto-coins accepted by Mozilla, observed in response to the general condemnation: “Reading the comments in this thread, as much as I rag on crypto-bros being counterproductive at marketing, the vitriolic, hateful, hyperbolic, hypocritical, sanctimonious whining coming from the anti-crypto people is 1,000x more insufferable than the pro-crypto people.”

=> ↺ Mozilla looking to improve Twitch playback in Firefox | GamingOnLinux

• Do you love watching Twitch livestreams? I bet there’s plenty amongst our readers! Well, it seems Mozilla are looking into making it better with Firefox.

• Writing on Reddit, jrmuizel a Gfx team Engineer at Mozilla said: “Over the past while, I’ve noticed quite a few reports of people complaining that Twitch has worse performance in Firefox vs Chrome/Edge. I’m hoping to spend some more time on fixing this over the next little while and am looking for more specifics on how and when it’s worse for people.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL Weekly News – January 2, 2022

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: pg_builder 2.0.0 and pg_wrapper 2.0.0 packages for PHP released

• I’m pleased to announce the new releases of pg_builder and pg_wrapper packages. The main topic of these releases is support for Postgres 14 and PHP 8.1

• [...]

• pg_builder is a query builder for Postgres backed by a partial PHP reimplementation of PostgreSQL’s own SQL parser. It supports almost all syntax available in Postgres 14 for SELECT (and VALUES), INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE queries.

• With pg_builder it is possible to start with a manually written query, parse it into an Abstract Syntax Tree, add query parts (either as Node objects or as strings) to this tree or remove them, and finally convert the tree back to an SQL string.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

=> ↺ News – The Month in WordPress – December 2021 – WordPress.org

• December was a busy month for the WordPress community. In the latest episode of the WP Briefing podcast, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares a carol of thanks and shows her gratitude to all the people who make the WordPress project a success.

FSF

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU Parallel’s 20th birthday – Free Software Foundation

• On 2022-01-06 GNU Parallel will be 20 years old. The birthday is an opportunity to take stock.

• Last year I found an old backup that contained the very first version of Parallel. It had an emacs backup file (parallel~) that did not contain working code. This gives a firm birth date of the very first working code of Parallel: 2002-01-06.

=> ↺ Guix maintainer rotation

• For some time already, Ludovic and Marius have voiced their desire to step down from the Guix maintainers collective. An email announcing the news and calling for new maintainers was sent more than 4 months ago [0]. We’re very happy to announce that Efraim Flashner has responded to the call and accepted to join the Guix maintainers collective! Efraim has been with Guix for a long time — the first recorded Git history of their activity goes back to 2015, and they have since authored more than 6000 commits! More importantly, Efraim has demonstrated traits we value for a co-maintainer, such as good communication and collaboration abilities, values that align well with those of the GNU project and overall a person you’d like to hang out with at FOSDEM :-).

• We’re sad to see Ludovic and Marius step down from their current duties, but we take comfort knowing they will remain among us for the good hacks and occasional guidance. Loosing them as co-maintainer will be a difficult test for the remaining Guix co-maintainers. Ludovic’s wit, relentless energy, tactful communication and wise planning have been invaluable to the Guix project throughout the years. Ludovic has mentioned this decision was at least partly based on their desire to guard Guix against the Founder’s syndrome, which is something we can only applaud. Marius has served as co-maintainer since October 2019. Their calm, composed attitude has helped us navigating through at times difficult situations, and their technical wizardry has brought us the likes of ungoogled-chromium and a Ganeti service, among many others.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Introducing KDBindings

• All Qt developers should know about signals, slots, and properties. Those of you who have used QML will know that property bindings are super useful and cool. Bindings allow us to write more reactive and declarative style code. However, they are only available within QML, which means there are no compile time errors when you do something wrong.

• Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have the sunlit uplands of Brexit — erm, I mean bindings — from the comfort and speed of C++? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use this with or without Qt? Wouldn’t it be nice if this was just plain C++ with no moc required? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could avoid executing a binding many times when you update each dependent property (lazy/deferred evaluation)? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have this right now?

=> ↺ Computer Coding – Computer Program Definition and Code Meaning

• When you start learning to code, one of the questions you probably ask yourself is “What lannguage should I learn first?”

• One of the most exciting – and at times overwhelming – things about learning to code is just how much there is to learn.

• But instead of just focusing on learning one specific technology, it can also help to learn the foundations – the building blocks. You can peel back the layers of abstraction to get to know the underlying principles that all technologies have in common.

• Understanding what coding is at a fundamental level will make solving problems easier and will give you a better understanding of how different technologies work underneath the hood.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ Perl warnings and the warn function

• It occurred to me after­ward that there may be some con­fu­sion between the warnings prag­ma and the relat­ed warn func­tion for report­ing arbi­trary run­time errors. warn out­puts its argu­ments to the stan­dard error (STDERR) stream, or if it’s not giv­en any then you get a string with any excep­tion from [email protected] ($EVAL_ERROR under use English) fol­lowed by a tab and then “…caught at line x.” If that’s emp­ty too, a plain warn just says, “Warning: something’s wrong at line x.”, which isn’t exact­ly help­ful, but then again you didn’t give it much to go on.

Rust

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 424

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ URL trends from 2013

• UTM tags hadn’t started their widespread URL pollution yet, but there was inklings that people were thinking that you could track people with get request parameters.

Leftovers

=> ↺ ‘Part of the Road to a Solution Is Really Understanding the Problem’

=> ↺ Sound Grammar: Out of the Past Into the Now, the Best Music of 2021

• A Love Supreme offers itself as an invocation, and most invocations, owing to their spiritual nature, seem timeless. They exist outside of time. We think we know it, the cadences of its notes, the beat of its rhythms. They seem as fixed as the words of a prayer. This is the way it goes: from the first assertive E flat to the shimmering cymbal that brings the suite to a close. This is the way it is. This is the way it will be.

• But what if someone opens a box, put away 55 years ago, and discovers  that’s not the way the invocation has to go. In fact, that’s not the way it was always played by its players. What if instead of being timeless, Coltrane’s invocation is revealed to be a way to play with time itself–to stretch it out, reorder it with sonic jump cuts, and pursue what we think we know in a way that chases the times themselves. What if a suite of music recorded in the past comes alive in a new way in the present?

=> ↺ Four Analogies

• Kyle Rittenhouse and the Grizzly Bear Exhibit

• It can be useful I suppose to analogize Kyle Rittenhouse to a teenage idiot who brings an illegally possessed assault rifle to the zoo and jumps over a railing down into the Grizzly Bear exhibit. When a bear comes at him, snarling, he shoots it dead. When other bears come after him, he shoots another one, killing it, and shoots another, taking off part of one of its front legs. He then finds his way out of the exhibit and runs home only to be arrested later and to face significant criminal charges for his reckless and stupid actions. A trial date is set. What did the moron expect, jumping into a zoo exhibit with fearsome animals?

=> ↺ Amid Apocalyptic Cynicism, Let’s Embrace Radical Hope in the New Year

=> ↺ Double Vision

=> ↺ The Mumbai Guard Who Never Knew Security

=> ↺ Does This Lead Make My Car Look Fat? | Hackaday

• It’s a very simple solution, of course. Back in the 1950s, petty concerns like fuel economy and efficiency simply weren’t front of mind. Thus, it was easy to slap a weight on and be done with it. These days, trucks are designed with a little more finesse and are usually plenty heavy all around, so such obvious measures aren’t needed. Regardless, it’s still important for a vehicle’s weight distribution to be appropriate, whether loaded or not, to maintain good handling.

=> ↺ Tempest Prognosticator History: A Leech-Driven Weather Machine

• Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from a new contributor, Nathan Lawrence, who decided to start the year out on a high note by delivering a piece about leeches and meteorology. Because sure, why not.

• [...]

• The year Galileo and fellow polymath Evangelista Torricelli began work on the first known barometer. Ever since, measures of air pressure have been used in weather prediction. When pressure is decreasing, stormy conditions tend to be on the way.

=> ↺ Dice Rolls From The Beginning Of Time | Hackaday

• Generating random numbers might seem like a trivial task, that is until the numbers need to be truly random for cryptography or security reasons. When that’s the case, it turns out that these numbers are really “pseudo-random” and follow a predictable pattern. Devices that can produce truly random numbers often do it by sampling random events in the real world rather than relying on a computer to do it directly, like this machine which simulates a dice roll by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Science

=> ↺ USB Power Has Never Been Easier | Hackaday

• USB cables inevitably fail and sometimes one end is reincarnated to power our solderless breadboards. Of course, if the cable broke once, it is waiting to crap out again. Too many have flimsy conductors that cannot withstand any torque and buckle when you push them into a socket. [PROSCH] has a superior answer that only takes a couple of minutes to print and up-cycles a pair of wires with DuPont connectors. The metal tips become the leads and the plastic sheathing aligns with the rim.

• The model prints with a clear plus sign on the positive terminal, so you don’t have to worry about sending the wrong polarity, and it shouldn’t be difficult to add your own features, like a hoop for pulling it out, or an indicator LED and resistor. We’d like to see one with a tiny fuse holder.

Education

=> ↺ After Chicago Teachers Vote for Remote Learning, City Cancels Classes Instead

Hardware

=> ↺ Expensive Motherboards Are Literally Bursting Into Flames

• “We have recently received incident reports regarding the ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard,” a statement received by Tom’s Hardware reads. “In our ongoing investigation, we have preliminarily identified a potential reversed memory capacitor issue in the production process from one of the production lines that may cause debug error code 53, no post, or motherboard components damage.”

• The company is also working with “relevant government agencies on a replacement program” — so there may be some hope for affected users after all.

=> ↺ A Simple Touch Probe Made With Basic Tools | Hackaday

• LinuxCNC contributor and machining enthusiast [Andy Pugh] is certainly not afraid to try making specialised tools to see how well they work out, and this time he’s been busy making a touch probe (video, embedded below) for checking the accuracy of machining operations and general measuring applications.

=> ↺ 3D Printering: One Bed Level To Rule Them All | Hackaday

• In an ideal world, your FDM 3D printer’s bed would be perfectly parallel with the print head’s plane of movement. We usually say that means the bed is “level”, but really it doesn’t matter if it is level in the traditional sense, as long as the head and the bed are the same distance apart at every point. Of course, in practice nothing is perfect.

• The second best situation is when the bed is perfectly flat, but tilted relative to the print head. Even though this isn’t ideal, software can move the print head up and down in a linear fashion to compensate for the tilt. Things are significantly worse if the bed isn’t itself flat, and has irregular bumps up and down all over.

=> ↺ Laptop Empty Space Filled With RS485 And PoE | Hackaday

• Out of all the laptop upgrade options typically available, you wouldn’t expect this specific one. [controlmypad] decided to take a part of his RS485 device programming workflow and put it inside of a spare laptop he picked up for cheap. Typically, he’d occupy some desk space and lay out an unwieldy combination of a USB-RS485 dongle, a PoE power injector, a PSU for that injector, and a few cables to join it all – being extra weight in the tool bag, cluttering the workspace when laid out, and the RS485 adapter slowly wearing out the USB ports during the work-related motions. No reason that all of this couldn’t be packed inside a laptop, however.

• What helps a lot is that, in many modern cheap laptops, the motherboard is fairly small, and the DVD drive plastic placeholder can be omitted without second thought. Cutting off the plastic molding from both of the adapters turns them into a nicely reusable circuit board and a small PoE module, respectively. After laborious yet careful cutting of the laptop case with a hobby knife, the PoE injector fits right in and, essentially, adds an extra RJ45 port to the laptop. From where the Hackaday.io write-up left off, it doesn’t seem like this mod got fully completed, but most of the important details are there for us to learn from. What got left out is connecting it to an internal USB port (should help that the motherboard’s schematics are available online), as well as creating 12V-24V from the laptop’s power rails. At this point, however, this mod is a big step forward usability-wise, even if it still requires an external PSU.

=> ↺ Improved Thermochromic Clock Uses PCB Heaters For Better Contrast | Hackaday

• We love timepiece projects round these parts, so here we are with another unusual 7-segment clock design. [Moritz Sivers] wasn’t completely satisfied with his last thermochromic clock, so has gone away and built another one, solved a few of the issues, and this time designed it to be wall mounted. The original design had a single heater PCB using discrete resistors as heating elements. This meant that the heat from active elements spread out to adjacent areas, reducing the contrast and little making it a bit hard to read, but it did look really cool nonetheless.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Opinion | The ‘War on Drugs’ Has Failed: When a Disease Becomes a Crime

• According to an American Medical Association report released in mid-November, every state has seen a spike in overdose deaths from illicit drug use since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with approximately 90,000 people losing their lives in the first year alone.

=> ↺ If You’re Feeling the Pandemic Era’s Weight Harder Than Ever, You’re Not Alone

=> ↺ AFL-CIO, Nurses Unions Demand Permanent OSHA Covid-19 Safety Standard

• With rising coronavirus infections and hospitalizations, the AFL-CIO and major nurses unions on Wednesday petitioned a federal court to order the Biden administration to issue an official and permanent OSHA standard requiring employers to protect healthcare workers from Covid-19.

• “We must treat the surge in new cases as the crisis that it is.”

=> ↺ Jayapal Leads 50+ Democrats in Urging Biden to End Trump-Era Assault on Medicare

• The physician-led effort to kill a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme gained fresh momentum Wednesday as Rep. Pramila Jayapal—the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—led more than 50 House Democrats in urging the Biden administration to cancel the Direct Contracting pilot program.

• In a letter addressed to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the lawmakers warned that the under-the-radar DC experiment poses a grave “threat to patient care and outcomes due to the encroachment of profit-driven organizations.”

=> ↺ Walmart and Kroger Hike Prices for COVID Tests Amid Shortage

=> ↺ ‘Pandemic Profiteering, Plain and Simple’: Walmart and Kroger Hike Prices for Covid Tests

• Walmart and Kroger are raising prices for one of the more widely used at-home coronavirus tests, leading critics to accuse the U.S. retailers of exploiting an Omicron-fueled surge in demand for the kits to pad their bottom lines.

• The companies said Tuesday that they are moving to hike prices for Abbott’s BinaxNOW tests following the expiration of a September deal with the White House under which they sold the kits at cost—$14. Abbott is the firm that, in mid-2021, instructed a factory assembling its tests to destroy millions of the products, citing then-dwindling sales.

=> ↺ The Making of Lina Hidalgo: From Democratic Party Nursery to Omicron Hysteria Queen

• HOUSTON — On the afternoon of December 20, Harris County, Texas’s top elected official, Judge Lina Hidalgo held a press conference to announce what she claimed was the county’s first death from the Omicron variant of COVID-19. It was a moment in the national spotlight for the 30-year-old Democrat, who, since her teenage years, has been rising through elite institutions and forging ties with the national security state. Those connections, and her close ties to a highly-sophisticated billionaire influence operation, revealed in detail in this investigation, would prove to be vital in shaping Hidalgo’s formulation of COVID-19 and other policies.

=> ↺ The Lesson of Covid: When People Are Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, They’re Less Ready To Think Critically

• When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.

=> ↺ Drone carrying a defibrillator saves its first heart attack patient in Sweden

• Someone having a heart attack needs help within 10 minutes in order to survive. Everdrone’s Emergency Medical Aerial Delivery (EMADE) service is designed to deliver help as quickly as possible — it allows emergency dispatchers to send a drone carrying the device to a caller’s home, kickstarting the lifesaving process before the ambulance arrives at their home. In this particular patient’s case, it took three minutes for the services to deliver the defibrillator to his home. A bystander, who happened to be a doctor on the way to his job, used the AED on the patient after providing CPR.

=> ↺ Joe Biden’s Lobbyists Are Helping Big Pharma Profiteers

• This is totally false: the federal government invests billions each year to subsidize pharmaceutical companies’ research and development costs, and the government has poured tens of billions of dollars into efforts to develop COVID vaccines and treatments.

• Indeed, a team of government scientists helped develop Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine — a fact the company fittingly decided to leave out of the patent application for its vaccine technology.

=> ↺ GMO is out, “bioengineered” is in, as new U.S. food labeling rules take effect

• Say goodbye to GMO’s. The new term for foods created with a boost from science is “bioengineered.”

• As of Jan. 1, food manufacturers, importers and retailers in the U.S. must comply with a new national labeling standard for food that’s been genetically modified in a way that isn’t possible through natural growth.

=> ↺ Walgreens is consistently one of the worst pharmacies in America, so why are people still going there?

• Yesterday, I went to Walgreens to get the last round in one of my adult vaccines (Hepatitis A), that I needed to catch up on.

• Once I arrived at the store for my appointment, the man at the pharmacy counter was quite rude. First, he couldn’t find me in their computer anywhere, and then he finally punched in the confirmation number after my name, birthday, and everything else failed.

• He then asked me to prove that I had the first and second doses, and when. I told him that I started taking the series before the pandemic got really bad and my first dose was logged with the state health department, but CVS didn’t log my second dose anywhere. So he made me step to the side and fumble with my phone some more to pull up the second dose, which clearly showed August of 2020, which was on my CVS account. He says, “That’s only 8 months ago!”. I looked at him, and I said, “2020 was 8 months ago?”.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Norton 360 Now Comes With Crypto Mining Capabilities And Sketchy Removal Process

• If you’re in the IT industry, as I am, and you come across someone talking about using Norton or Symantec antivirus software, as I occasionally do, it typically sends you diving for your calendar to check what year we’re in. The a/v provider, once dominant in the space, has since built a reputation for itself as bloated software that is mostly effective at grinding your computer to a halt. Whether or not that reputation is deserved, the company has also had issues in the past with users claiming an inability to fully remove Norton software when attempting an uninstall. So, a checkered recent past is the point.

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Multiculturalism in technology and its limits: AsyncAPI and the long road to open source utopia

=> ↺ hypocritical

• Being part of the initiative is simple: join the Slack channel and contribute through GitHub.

Security

=> ↺ Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome | CISA

• Google has released Chrome version 97.0.4692.71 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

• CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Chrome Release Note and apply the necessary updates as soon as possible.

=> ↺ VMware Releases Security Updates

• VMware has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability in Workstation, Fusion, and ESXi. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

=> ↺ What You Need to Know About the Predator-OS 20.04 LTS Release | Lin…

• Predator-OS – “the OS that naturally preys on others”- is a free and open-source security-centric project for penetration testing and ethical hacking that can also be used as a privacy-focued, hardened Linux distro. LinuxSecurity researchers spoke with Founder and lead developer Hossein Seilany to get insight into the unique features and benefits that newly released Predator-OS 20.04 LTS offers hackers, pentesters and privacy-conscious Linux users.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Facebook Hosted Three Huge Concerts in the Metaverse and They Seriously Flopped

• It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that the concerts were barely optimized for a VR experience. Guetta just had a 2D live streamed video of his performance at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, Young Thug and The Chainsmokers offered just a 180 degree view of their concert for Oculus users.

=> ↺ Tor exits online!

• Dotsrc is now hosting Tor exit nodes!

=> ↺ When Big Brother Is Your Boss: The Rise of Surveillance Wages

• Corporations are on a worker-data binge akin to the consumer data binge of the prior decade. Companies like Amazon are tracking their employees and contractors as if they were in a gig economy rendition of 1984. Companies map workers’ moods to their locations while recording conversations, keyboard strokes, health data and speed on task. Surveillance wages rely on monitoring and experimentation systems: thumb scans, identification badges, closed circuit cameras, geolocation tracking, sensors on tablets and vehicles, and software that can analyze employees’ tones of voice and facial expressions.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Poisoning Ourselves With War

• Part of the problem, a source told the Times, is that “the daily demands of overseeing strike after strike seemed to erode operators’ perspective and fray their humanity.”

• In other words, participating in the endless U.S. war on terror turned them into . . . terrorists, e.g.: Early one morning, as a Predator drone circled over the Syrian farming town of Karama, the operators focused on a particular building that they decided, with virtually no evidence, was an “enemy training center” and dropped a 500-pound bomb through the roof.

=> ↺ After 7 Years, Anti-War Group That Fed the Hungry Wins Fight With Fort Lauderdale

• Anti-hunger and anti-war activists in Florida have reportedly won their protracted legal fight against the city government of Fort Lauderdale, which agreed to compensate the local chapter of Food Not Bombs after spending years trying to prevent the group from sharing free food with people in need at a downtown park.

• “Nuts to all the narrow-minded fools who wanted to be rid of us.”

=> ↺ Biden and the Tragedy of US Foreign Policy

• Biden initially took care of the low-hanging fruit left behind by the fractured presidency of Donald Trump.  Biden returned the United States to the World Health Organization, the Paris climate accord, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which allowed the United States once again to assist pathetic Palestinian communities throughout the Middle East.  Biden is trying to repair relations with our traditional European allies as well as the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  However, the nuclear submarine deal with Australia, which infuriated France, suggests a diplomatic deaf ear.

• It remains to be seen if he can actually bring an end to the “forever wars,” but at least the use of drone warfare, responsible for an unconscionable number of civilian deaths, has declined.  If the White House hadn’t stood on the sidelines while Congress was passing a record-breaking defense bill, we might even think that the Biden administration was willing to reverse the militarism of the past two decades.  And if the Pentagon and the CIA weren’t using drones in Syria, Somalia, and the Horn of Africa, we might believe there was a genuine effort to abate, if not end, the “forever wars.”  Continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia and continued truckling to the Israeli government suggest no real change in policy toward the Middle East,  home to several “forever wars.”

=> ↺ Does Japan Aspire to be a Super Power?

• “The Indo-Pacific is today one of the strategically most important regions of the world,” Gen. Eberhard Zorn, chief of Germany’s armed forces said at a Tokyo press conference. “Here, important decisions over freedom, peace and well-being in the world are being made. Deploying our frigate to the Indo-Pacific makes clear that Germany stands up for our common values.” In other words, the Germans are doing their part to contain China, just as the British, French and Dutch have done. And, of course, the Americans.

• The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been described as the world’s fifth most powerful military. In November 2021, Japan’s military budget of $47 billion was supplemented by an additional appropriation of $6.7 billion. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and the ruling LDP had pressed for the supplement because of the ongoing threats not only from China but Russia and North Korea.

=> ↺ 2 Decades of Military Force Got Us Nowhere

• 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.

=> ↺ War in Ethiopia: Armed drones could be again a gamechanger

• In a surprise move, the Ethiopian military was able to stop the advance of attacking Tigray rebels on the capital, according to international media reports, with the help of armed drones. Allegedly „Bayraktar TB2“ ordered in Turkey have not been sighted anywhere so far. However, competitors from China and Iran have been documented.

=> ↺ Opinion | For End-of-War Declaration With North Korea to Succeed, US Policies Must Change

• As the US and South Korea continue to discuss an end-of-war declaration, they have a real opportunity to close this last chapter of the Cold War. However, the Biden administration is squandering this opportunity by continuing the same playbook that has failed for decades and resulted in a nuclear-armed North Korea: ramping up military deployments, adding more crippling sanctions, and continuing hostile rhetoric. To lower the chance of renewed military conflict and work toward lasting peace in Korea, the Biden administration must not only sign an end-of-war declaration but also reorient policy toward diplomacy and peace.

=> ↺ Opinion | Nuclear War Over Ukraine?

• How many American soldiers will die in the battle for Luhansk? Or Kerch? Not 1 in 1,000 Americans could find these drab Ukrainian (formerly Russian) industrial cities on a map.

=> ↺ Taiwan Does Not Resemble Ukraine as Much as it Does the Donbas

• On December 29, the newspaper El País criticized in the headline editorial the unilateralist policy practiced by Trump and Netanyahu, later continued by Biden, which has allowed, if not instigated, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and parts of Syria against international law (although apparently not against the US “rules based order”). In the concluding paragraph, the editorial warns that if this attitude is not changed, this ambiguity with regards to international law will have very negative consequences on “the message that Washington sends in the direction of Putin’s also internationally reprehensible expansionist instincts regarding Ukraine and Xi Jinping’s regarding Taiwan”. The language of hegemony seems to forget that international law upholds the integrity of Syria, Palestine and Ukraine, but also dictates that Taiwan is a part of China (whether called PRC or ROC, that is a secondary issue). It is precisely the support of the US that made it possible for Taiwan to de facto segregate itself from China, just as the Golan Heights have de facto separated from Syria, regardless of what international law had to say about this.

• Similarly, in an article involved in the whitewashing of US hegemony, The Economist mentions that “Unfortunately, America is tiring of its role as guarantor of the liberal order. The giant has not exactly fallen asleep again, but its resolve is faltering and its enemies are testing it. Vladimir Putin is massing troops on the border with Ukraine and could soon invade. China is buzzing Taiwan’s airspace with fighter jets, using mock-ups of American aircraft-carriers for target practice and trying out hypersonic weapons”. This stance, which hypocritically defends the moral integrity of the US as a global policeman despite the countless abuses of “international law” that it upholds, is based on the misrepresentation and manipulation of the facts. To begin with, China does not fly its fighter jets over “Taiwan’s airspace”, but over its ADIZ, an area without international legitimacy far from the island’s territory, over international waters. Likewise, the fact that China puts its weapons to test does not make China any different from any other military, unless we depart from the biased premise that all military development by China is illegitimate because it threatens US global dominance. In the same vein, Russia is not pretending to invade Ukraine, but to defend the Donbass. This is the post-truth of hegemonic discourse: it relies on a drop of truth to build a distorted political imaginary that precisely coincides with what the majority of the public wants to hear: China and Russia are evil, we Westerns are the force of good (and God).

=> ↺ On Eve of Jan. 6 Anniversary, Jimmy Carter Warns US Democracy ‘Teeters on the Brink’

• As the nation prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of the right-wing insurrectionist mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, former President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday warned that American democracy “teeters on the brink” of destruction and that there is a real possibility of a second civil war if the country does not rally to defend its democratic principles and institutions.

• “One year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems.”

=> ↺ Columnist Will Bunch: Trump Came Much Closer to Pulling Off a January 6 Coup Than People Realize

• The January 6 insurrection resulted in criminal charges for over 700 rioters, and the FBI has since called it an act of domestic terrorism. Philadelphia Inquirer national columnist Will Bunch says there is growing evidence that links Trump and his inner circle to the Capitol attack. He argues understanding what was happening behind the scenes at the Pentagon, which has operational control over the National Guard in D.C., can help explain Trump’s botched attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed. “I think they fully believed that they would be able to call out the National Guard,” says Bunch, explaining Trump’s strategy to incite violence between his supporters and counterprotesters in an attempt to make military orders to disrupt the certification. Bunch predicts Trump and allies will delay cooperation with the House probe into the attack until Republicans can gain congressional power in 2022 and dismiss the investigation.

=> ↺ Far Right Organizing Has Shifted to the Local Level, Making It Harder to Track

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Committee Wants Pence to Testify — and It Could Be Aired on Prime-Time TV

=> ↺ Opinion | The Grand Old Insurrectionist Party of January 6

• The defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to put an end to America’s delusional national politics.

=> ↺ Will Garland Do What It Takes to Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice?

• On January 6, 2021, precisely two weeks before he was to take office, Joe Biden planned to hold a press conference announcing Merrick Garland as his pick for attorney general. That press conference had to be canceled, because supporters of Donald Trump attempted to stage a coup d’état. They failed, but the attempt radically changed Garland’s job. Instead of merely restoring honor and stability to a Department of Justice defiled by Trump and Bill Barr, Garland would also be responsible for prosecuting the insurrectionists who attacked our Capitol.

=> ↺ “American Insurrection”: How Far-Right Extremists Moved from Fringe to Mainstream After Jan. 6 Attack

• Thursday marks one year since a violent mob of thousands of far-right and white supremacist Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election and resulting in five deaths and hundreds of injuries. We look at where these movements are one year later, with the updated investigative documentary “American Insurrection” by Frontline in collaboration with ProPublica and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Director Rick Rowley explains how the far-right social movements have grown since the insurrection and says “the locus of the organizing has shifted really from a national platform to a local one, which makes it more difficult to track and increases the potential for local or regional violence.” Rowley and Frontline correspondent A.C. Thompson interviewed January 6 select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson about what makes this a moment for “far-right mobilization” and discussed the significance of the widespread contradictory beliefs by many on the far right that antifa and Black Lives Matter dressed up as Trump supporters and carried out the January 6 riot, but that those who tried to overturn the election are patriots.

=> ↺ Republicans Promised to Banish Jan. 6 Insurrectionists. A Year Later, They’ve Purged Jan. 6 Critics

• Amid this propaganda blitz, the party had an inconvenient irritant. Liz Cheney — a member of House leadership — had seen the events of January 6th with the same moral clarity that Kevin McCarthy had at the start. She tweeted in real time after the event: “There is no question that the President formed the mob, the President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”

• But unlike her fellow partisans, Cheney never softened those charges or walked them back. And for that stubborn adherence to reality, she was voted out of House leadership — replaced with Elise Stefanik, a New York representative and enthusiastic Trump sycophant. Even as she was being expelled, Cheney warned her fellow Republicans: “We cannot let the former president drag us backward and make us complicit in his efforts to unravel our democracy.”

=> ↺ Campaign Aims to Bar All Jan. 6 Insurrectionists—Including Trump—From Future Public Office

• On the eve of the first anniversary of the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, progressives are ramping up their campaign to block January 6 insurrectionists—including Trump and hundreds of Republican elected officials—from ever running for public office again.

• “Disqualify everyone involved in the January 6 insurrection from seeking public office.”

=> ↺ To Avert Another January 6, Expel Coup Plotters From Congress

• The former party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump, an authoritarian cult that seeks to dismantle democracy in order to reimpose the minority rule of a disgraced former president and his white nationalist henchmen. That’s a fact, and it’s not going to change, no matter how ardently Democrats repeat Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney’s warning to her fellow Republicans: “Our party has to choose. We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.”

• The Republican Party has chosen. Cheney’s been booted from her position as a leader in the House Republican Caucus, and her home-state party has disowned her.

• The best hope for protecting democracy is an action agenda to hold coup plotters and supporters to account. That does not absolve Democrats of their responsibility to act to avert gerrymandering, voter suppression, and any attempt by Republicans to rewrite election rules, intervene in election certification processes, or overturn results. But, without a clear focus on accountability, the Democrats are allowing Republican insurrectionists to believe they can do anything to subvert democracy without suffering consequences for their actions. What do we expect will play out on January 6, 2025, if the wrongdoing of insurrectionist legislators on or before January 6, 2021, goes unpunished?

Environment

=> ↺ Opinion | In 2022, We All Need to Look Up

• Some strange, otherworldly things happened across America this Christmas season, as 2021 finally ground to a conclusion. For example, in the small town of Unalaska, Alaska (yes, that’s really its name … I did a double-take, too!), children woke up on Christmas morning to full stockings and a balmy temperature of 56 degrees—the highest ever posted in the state on the holiday.

=> ↺ Opinion | California’s Cap-and-Trade System Proves Limits of Market-Based Climate Action

• California has cast itself as a leader in the fight against climate change and global warming. The state set the stage for its transition to a low-carbon economy with the passage of AB32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which called for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and ultimately reducing them 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. AB32, signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), was carried out by various state agencies, and its implementation was funded by a fee collected from large sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy

=> ↺ Wet’suwet’en Water Protectors Evade RCMP as Police Mobilize For Raid

• Unceded Gidimt’en Territory, Smithers (BC):Two weeks after Wet’suwet’en water protectors evicted Coastal GasLink workers and occupied a key pipeline drill site, water protectors executed a strategic retreat to avoid arrest and violence at the hands of dozens of militarized RCMP. Before a large scale mobilization by police, water protectors vanished into the woods, evading police violence and criminalization. We expect an imminent assault on our people at the direction of Coastal GasLink as we continue to occupy and utilize our yintah.

• “Our warriors are not here to be arrested. Our warriors are here to protect the land and the water, and will continue to do so at all costs,” stated Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), a wing chief of the Cas Yikh people.  “Every time that the RCMP, the C-IRG, has come in to enforce CGL’s injunction they have done violence against our women. They have imprisoned our Indigenous women and our warriors. We will not allow our people to be political prisoners.”

=> ↺ The Green Deceit of Deep Sea Mining

• There’s some truth to that statement – if we wish to meet the rising demand for new technologies, we’d need to see a sharp increase in metal extraction. After all, electric vehicles require 4x the amount of metals found in standard cars, and a single wind turbine requires 340 tonnes of metal.

• Here’s the problem: the ‘green future’ he’s selling us is a lie, because what Barron fails to divulge in his upbeat sales pitch, is the ecological upheaval that his company’s plans would surely wreak.

=> ↺ Kazakh government resigns, shuts down internet amid protests, causing Bitcoin network hash rate to tumble 13.4%

• No timeline exists as to when the internet will switch back on in the second-biggest Bitcoin mining country in the world.

=> ↺ Blockchain Gaslighting

• The reason I tag authors like Wenger as gaslighters is that, at every level, blockchains and cryptocurrencies are not actually decentralized. I’ve been pointing this out since 2014′s Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks, most recently in my Talk at TTI/Vanguard Conference. Here are a few examples: [...]

=> ↺ Copenhagen named world’s most sustainable city

• Online education platform GetSmarter has pegged Copenhagen as the world’s most sustainable city in a new report on green lifestyles entitled ‘Sustainability: The Meaning, Changing Perceptions, and Expanding Agendas’.

• A sustainable city is defined as “one that’s able to retain the supply of natural resources while achieving economic, physical and social progress, while remaining safe against environmental risks”.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Can Roadless Areas Help Stem the Extinction Crisis in the United States?

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Subsidies for large families in Sweden impair integration of immigrants

• The family supplement, which gives extra financial aid for each additional child, was implemented in Sweden in 1982 at a time of falling birth rates. It now contributes to lock-in effects for immigrant women. Abolishing this supplement and limiting the child allowance to the first two children would help reduce social exclusion and public spending, at the same time benefitting the environment, as argued in this Op-Ed translated from the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

=> ↺ Letter: Overpopulation is cause of every environmental problem we face

• 3. Every economic model in use today depends on population growth to achieve economic growth. We need to find a model that will achieve economic growth with a decreasing population.

=> ↺ Overpopulation Facts

• The world population reached a billion between 1999 and 2011. One of the saddest overpopulation facts is that developing countries had experienced the most growth, yet still have the fewest resources to support it.

=> ↺ Overpopulation in Dhaka getting out of control

• All things considered, it is becoming increasingly clear that not only is the population burden on Dhaka leading to worsening living conditions, but it is also causing significant economic losses, as well as environmental damage. Therefore, it’s high time for the government to urgently develop other regions of the country to try and reduce some of the load from Dhaka. Some decentralisation measures and locating the government’s own agencies—most of which are in Dhaka—outside of the capital would be great steps towards that end. City authorities also need to be empowered so that they can pursue the necessary development goals that they have on their own, instead of always having to rely on the centre. Whatever steps the government can take, it should take them now, before Dhaka’s overpopulation situation becomes worse and the city becomes completely uninhabitable.

Finance

=> ↺ Biden Is Still Refusing to Cancel Student Debt

• President Joe Biden still plans on restarting federal student loan payments in May, falling short of his campaign promise to forgive at least $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower. As the coronavirus pandemic enters its third year and the White House hemorrhages support from young people, progressives, as well as advocates for debt cancellation, warn that inaction on the student debt crisis will almost certainly hurt Democrats in this year’s midterm elections.

=> ↺ Wealth of US Billionaires Rose $1 Trillion in 2021 as Build Back Better Stalls

=> ↺ A Return to Robo-Signing: JPMorgan Chase Has Unleashed a Lawsuit Blitz on Credit Card Customers

• Early in 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto and credit card payments. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sounded sympathetic about a year later as he offered broader reflections on what was ailing the country. “Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Many of our citizens are unsettled, and the fault line for all this discord is a fraying American dream — the enormous wealth of our country is accruing to the very few. In other words, the fault line is inequality.”

• But even as those words were published, the bank had quietly begun to unleash a lawsuit blitz against many of its struggling customers. Starting in early 2020 and continuing to today, Chase has filed thousands of lawsuits against credit card customers who have fallen behind on their payments.

=> ↺ ‘Can’t Afford’ Build Back Better? US Billionaires Saw $1 Trillion Wealth Boom in 2021 Alone

• A new analysis out Tuesday shows that the nearly 750 billionaires in the United States saw their combined wealth soar by $1 trillion in 2021, a 25% jump that—if taxed—would be enough to fully fund major priorities in Democrats’ stalled Build Back Better package.

• According to fresh number-crunching by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk led the billionaire pandemic profiteers with $118.2 billion in wealth gains last year, a 77% increase from 2020. Musk’s “single-year wealth gain alone,” ATF found, “would more than pay for Build Back Better’s $109 billion plan to offer six years of free preschool for six million children.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ An Extraordinary Woman

• During the 20th century, Guatemala’s most democratic government was that of Jacobo Arbenz. He had been democratically elected in 1950, but was later overthrown by the military. The highest levels of the United States government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actively supported the coup.

• Arbenz had raised fear in the U.S. because of a series of new policies, including the expropriation of unused, unfarmed land belonging to private corporations such as the United Fruit Company (UFC). Arbenz’s policy of land redistribution was strongly opposed by local and foreign landowners. The government’s policies triggered the U.S.-supported response.

=> ↺ 78% of Democrats Support Child Tax Credit Effectively Killed Off by Manchin: Poll

• Three weeks after Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the expanded Child Tax Credit ended his Democratic Party’s hopes of passing the Build Back Better Act before the end of 2021, a new poll out Wednesday shows a majority of voters still support the measure that has lifted millions out of poverty.

• A survey by Fighting Chance for Families, a project of progressive think tanks Groundwork Collaborative and Data for Progress, showed Thursday that 57% of all voters—and 78% of Democrats—support expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC).

=> ↺ Joe Manchin Is Tired of Your Tiresome Questions

• The US Senate returned to work Tuesday, commencing a bright new year in which all things seemed possible. It’s the first year since 2016 in which Donald Trump will not be president even for one day. As if to remind us of our clean political slate, Washington was blanketed in clean white snow. And yet some things don’t change: Joe Manchin spent the day talking about Joe Manchin.

=> ↺ Pennsylvania’s Fetterman Brings in Bernie-esque Grassroots Fundraising Haul for US Senate Run

• Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a progressive Democratic candidate for the key battleground state’s open U.S. Senate seat, raised $2.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2021—thanks to almost 100,000 donations averaging $27 each, his campaign announced Wednesday.

• “John is a unique candidate who has deep, enthusiastic, and engaged support.”

=> ↺ Closer Scrutiny Reveals How Close To State Power Sacha Baron Cohen Really Is

• Sacha Baron Cohen is widely hailed as a comedic genius, using his sheer audacity to mock the absurdity of his targets. The creator of Ali G, Borat and Brüno has become one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities. Yet his outrageous stunts often belie his agenda and his own proximity to state power.

=> ↺ Turning Point is quietly building the next generation of conservative influencers

• Sometimes, those techniques go too far. In September 2020, the Washington Post uncovered a secret social media campaign from Turning Point to pay teenagers to post content casting doubt on the integrity of the presidential election in battleground states like Arizona, where the organization is based. After the Post reached out to Facebook and Twitter for comment on these accounts, the platforms removed them. Facebook said that the removed accounts were using false names and that their “sole activity on our platform was associated with this deceptive campaign.”

=> ↺ Greene, Paul Social Media Developments Resurface Section 230 Debate

• Crenshaw himself has proposed federal amendments to Section 230 for any “interactive computer service” that generates $3 billion or more in annual revenue or has 300 million or more monthly users.

• The bill – which is still being drafted and does not have an official designation – would allow users to sue social media platforms for the removal of legal content based on political views, gender, ethnicity, and race. It would also make it illegal for these companies to remove any legal, user generated content from their website.

=> ↺ China exodus

• The number of people from China seeking asylum worldwide has risen sharply in the past decade, according to the U.N.

=> ↺ Rand Paul announces exit from YouTube

• Paul received two strikes from YouTube, in August and September, over videos the platform said violated its COVID-19 misinformation policy. His account was suspended for seven days for each strike. If a user receives three strikes within 90 days, the account will be terminated, according to YouTube’s policy.

=> ↺ Rand Paul mocked for quitting YouTube in vaxx misinformation protest: ‘Rand Paul was on YouTube?’

• A Kentucky senator was roundly mocked on Twitter for his announcement that he would be deleting his YouTube account and move his video-based content to Rumble, a social media site that has sought to attract creators dissatisfied with Google and other companies’ misinformation policies.

• Rand Paul, a Republican, made the announcement on Monday in an op-ed in the right-leaning Washington Examiner, declaring the move his New Year’s resolution.

=> ↺ Marjorie Taylor Greene and Big Tech’s never-ending censorship loop

• Now, Greene’s situation is a reminder that whether or not social media companies are ready for it, the debate about how politicians should be allowed to use social media is reigniting. And it’s happening in a political climate that’s highly polarized and conspiracy-theory-driven.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ A Fight Between Facebook And The British Medical Journal Highlights The Difficulty Of Moderating ‘Medical Misinformation’

• There are multiple efforts under way in the US to pass laws that require social media sites to take down “medical misinformation.” As we’ve described repeatedly, these are really dangerous ideas. Bills like those from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Lujan seek to force social media to remove medical misinformation as declared by the Ministry of Truth… er… Secretary of Health & Human Services. Of course, it was not all that long ago that we had an administration that was actively anti-science, and wanted to declare anything that made the president look bad as “fake news.”

=> ↺ “Naturopathic oncologist” Colleen Huber goes full COVID-19 quack

• I’ll start this post by saying that I’d like to thank Steve Kirsch, whose antivaccine stylings I inaugurated 2022 writing about. Why, you ask, would I be thanking such an utter COVID-19 crank and purveyor of antivaccine misinformation and pseudoscience? Simple. He led me to another topic that I don’t recall having touched upon since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a topic that back in the day, which now seems like ancient history, I used to address a lot, naturopathy, in particular that horrible pseudospecialty that naturopaths have dubbed “naturopathic oncology.” Mr. Kirsch did this by drawing my attention to a previous topic of this blog, a “naturopathic oncologist” named Colleen Huber, to whose Substack he pointed me. The Substack is entitled, ridiculously given that it’s a naturopath’s blog, The Defeat of COVID, and it is everything you would expect from a Substack by a naturopath—more, even.

=> ↺ How to Fight the Next Coup

• Most commentary informed by concern about the threat to US democracy focuses on countering voter suppression and strengthening voter rights across the country. For example, in a recent article the New York Times editorial board argued that the Democratic Party should end the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation, and admonished Republican leaders to respect the republic by combatting the extremists in their midst. These arguments are a response to the recent behavior of the Republican Party: following Trump’s insistence that the vote was stolen, the party has spent the last year advancing voter suppression laws and gerrymandering voting districts to ensure Trump’s return to power.

• Despite the continuing threat of a conservative overthrow of constitutional democracy in the US, most liberal political commentators continue to cling to democratic majoritarianism. This belief is based on the idea that whomever wins the elections is legitimate and has a political mandate. Yet we do not think that democratic majoritarianism is an effective antidote under the current circumstances. Electing a candidate who has campaigned for violating and perhaps overthrowing the constitutional government of the US is unacceptable—even if they win an election.

=> ↺ American Support for Conspiracy Theories and Armed Rebellion Isn’t New, We Just Didn’t Believe It Before the Capitol Insurrection

• Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon helped drive the attack, which has prompted concerns about further domestic upheaval.

• In the year since, a flurry of studies and analyses have tried to gauge the American appetite for conspiracy theories and the likelihood of more violence – even civil war. As someone who has studied the conspiracy theories that followed the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I keep revisiting a May 2013 poll about gun control that found widespread doubts about that shooting and shockingly high support for armed rebellion.

=> ↺ A Guide to the Right’s Unhinged Conspiracy Theories about Jan. 6

• “Conspiracy theories are powerful because they introduce premises that prevent evidence-based falsification,” Dolores Albarracín, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who studies conspiracy theories, tells Rolling Stone. “For a realistic style of thinking, if there is no evidence for a belief, the lack of evidence invalidates the belief. Conspiracy theories undermine this logic and make it so that lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary proves the belief.”

• Here are some of the most dangerous beliefs that have calcified under this premise in the year since the attack on the Capitol.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Chinese Government Dragnet Now Folding In American Social Media Platforms To Silence Dissent

• The Chinese government’s surveillance of undesirables isn’t limited to its borders. It has been working with tech companies to produce an outsider-oriented surveillance platform to keep tabs on visiting students and foreign journalists — neither of whom might feel particularly obliged to maintain the party line.

=> ↺ Content Moderation Case Study: Roblox Moderators Combat In-Game Reenactments Of Mass Shootings (2021)

• Online game platform Roblox has gone from a niche offering to a cultural phenomenon over its 15 years of existence. Rivalling Minecraft in its ability to attract young users, Roblox is played by over half of American children and has a user base of 164 million active users.

=> ↺ Internet disrupted in Kazakhstan amid energy price protests

• Network data from NetBlocks confirm a significant disruption to [Internet] service in Kazakhstan from the evening of Tuesday 4 January 2022, progressing to a nation-scale communications blackout on Wednesday afternoon.

=> ↺ Kazakhstan unrest: Internet cut amid fuel protests

• Internet services in the country have been disrupted since Tuesday. By Wednesday, internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported that Kazakhstan was “in the midst of a nation-scale internet blackout”.

• It came as thousands of people took to the streets, despite a state of emergency in the capital Nur-Sultan, in Almaty, and in the western province of Mangistau.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Since 2005, about 2,200 local newspapers across America have closed. Here are some of the stories in danger of being lost — as told by local journalists.

• The state of local journalism is widely, and correctly, understood to be grim. About 2,200 local print newspapers have closed since 2005, and the number of newspaper journalists fell by more than half between 2008 and 2020. In many places where papers still exist, a lack of resources prevents them from reporting thoroughly on issues vital to the community — issues like public safety, education and local politics.

=> ↺ Daily Papers that were Closed, Merged, or Shifted to Weeklies: Executive Summary

• Over the past decade, a new media baron has emerged in the United States. Private equity funds, hedge funds and other newly formed investment partnerships have swooped in to buy — and actively manage — newspapers all over the country. These new owners are very different from the newspaper publishers that preceded them. For the most part they lack journalism experience or the sense of civic mission traditionally embraced by publishers and editors. Newspapers represent only a fraction of their vast business portfolios — ranging from golf courses to subprime lenders — worth hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars. Their mission is to make money for their investors, so they operate with a short-term, earnings-first focus and are prepared to get rid of any holdings — including newspapers — that fail to produce what they judge to be an adequate profit.

=> ↺ More than 100 local newsrooms closed during the coronavirus pandemic

• Since 2004, about 1,800 newspapers have closed in the United States, Penny Abernathy reported in her research on news deserts. 1,700 are weeklies. The pace of closures, up till now, has been about 100 a year, said Abernathy, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

=> ↺ After 1,000 Days in Belmarsh Prison, Campaigners Demand Freedom for Julian Assange

• Press freedom campaigners on Wednesday marked Julian Assange’s 1,000th day of imprisonment in London’s Belmarsh Prison with renewed demands for the WikiLeaks publisher’s freedom ahead of his looming potential extradition to the United States.

• “Journalism is not a crime,” the Assange Defense Committee tweeted. “#FreeAssange. #DropTheCharges.”

=> ↺ Julian Assange passes one thousand days in Belmarsh Prison, dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”

• Not only were the assurances conditional, they were also issued by the government that has been exposed to have spied on Assange and plotted his extrajudicial kidnapping or murder. By rights, this evidence alone should have resulted in the extradition application being summarily dismissed.

• Assange’s persecution, however, is supported by the British authorities, and other US allies, including the Australian government, because it is the spearhead of a broader campaign to suppress widespread anti-war sentiment and to create a precedent for political frame-ups and persecution.

• Moris and other prominent Assange supporters have pointed to this broader context in recent days. They have noted the contrast between the knighthood of former British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government participated in the invasion of Iraq, claiming at least a million lives, and the imprisonment of Assange, who exposed so many of the crimes of that illegal war.

=> ↺ Campaigners call for Assange’s release on 1,000th day of his imprisonment

• “Every major civil liberties organisation, the National Union of Journalists, and MPs from every party have called for his freedom. It is long, long overdue that their voices were listened to.”

• National Union of Journalists assistant secretary Seamus Dooley called Mr Assange’s continued incarceration “a stain on the history of the UK.

=> ↺ Mexico president says he sought Assange pardon from Trump, renews asylum offer

• Lopez Obrador reiterated the asylum offer he had made for Assange a year ago, and said that before Trump was replaced as U.S. president by Joe Biden last January, he had written him a letter recommending that Assange be pardoned.

• Mexico did not receive a reply to the letter, Lopez Obrador told a regular government news conference.

=> ↺ News engagement fell off a cliff in 2021

• With fewer singular storylines capturing America’s collective attention, news consumption was more scattered and diverted to sports.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Congressional Progressives Endorse Expanding Supreme Court to “Restore Balance”

=> ↺ ‘To Restore American Democracy,’ House Progressives Endorse Adding 4 New Seats to Supreme Court

• The push to reform the U.S. Supreme Court got a significant boost Wednesday as the Congressional Progressive Caucus voted to officially endorse the Judiciary Act of 2021, which would add four seats to the bench and restore balance to what critics call a “hyperpartisan 6-3 stolen court.”

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the caucus, announced that following a number of rulings in the past several years attacking reproductive rights, voting rights, and other key tenets of a healthy democracy, its members have “determined that the urgent work to restore American democracy must include expanding the Supreme Court.”

=> ↺ The False Promise of Criminal Justice Reform

• The movement to abolish prisons and policing in the United States was not born last spring. But after the uprisings against racist police violence that erupted across the nation in 2020, abolitionist ideas have never been more widespread, whether in the pages of previously dismissive and hostile periodicals or in the average citizen’s social media feed. That a majority of Americans believed that protesters were justified in burning down a Minneapolis police station after the murder of George Floyd offered a striking confirmation of this sea change. More concretely, a 2020 report from Interrupting Criminalization concluded that organizing in almost two dozen cities resulted in the divestment of over $840 million from police departments and a reinvestment of nearly $160 million back into communities, along with a number of victories in removing police from schools, banning military-grade weapons or facial-recognition software, and achieving greater transparency and community control over local police budgets.

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders to Hold Coast-to-Coast Town Hall With Nation’s Striking Workers

• Just one day after calling on progressives to “stand up and fight back” in 2022, Sen. Bernie Sanders is scheduled to participate in a Wednesday night town hall discussion with Alabama coal miners, California bakers, and West Virginia steelworkers, all of whom are “on strike against corporate greed.”

• “Class warfare in this country is intensifying. The ruling class is united, and they are united in greed.”

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Encourages Workers to “Rise Up and Fight Back” in New Op-Ed

=> ↺ An uprising in Kazakhstan Nazarbayev is removed from nation’s Security Council as state authorities vow ‘extreme’ police response to protests

• Demonstrations began in Kazakhstan on January 2 in response to suddenly doubled fuel prices. After three days of protests and increasingly violent clashes with police, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev fired his government cabinet, restored price controls, and declared a state of emergency in three different regions. But the protests have continued. Beginning early on January 5, demonstrators started trying to seize control of administration buildings in major cities. In a second televised address, President Tokayev announced that he has appealed to the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization for military assistance, arguing that “terrorist gangs” who “trained abroad” now pose a grave national security threat. Armenian Prime Minister and acting CSTO Collective Security Council Chairman Nikol Pashinyan later confirmed that the military alliance will deploy peacekeepers to Kazakhstan for a limited time with the goal of “stabilizing” the situation in the country.

=> ↺ Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 1

• In my second week in Saughton jail, a prisoner pushed open the door of my cell and entered during the half hour period when we were unlocked to shower and use the hall telephone in the morning. I very much disliked the intrusion, and there was something in the attitude of the man which annoyed me – wheedling would perhaps be the best description. He asked if I had a bible I could lend him. Anxious to get him out of my cell, I replied no, I did not. He shuffled off.

=> ↺ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Responds to Mayor Eric Adams’s Comments on “Low-Skill Workers”

• His point was intended to call upon workers who have the option to work from home to patronize businesses that are still open despite rising COVID cases. Adams has since clarified that he meant “low-wage workers,” not “low-skill,” but the damage was done. Criticism rolled in, including from fellow New Yorker Ocasio-Cortez (assuming that allegations Adams lives in New Jersey are false).

• “The suggestion that any job is “low skill” is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Wednesday, reiterating the response spreading across social media.

=> ↺ Ocasio-Cortez Slams NYC Mayor Eric Adams for Disparaging “Low-Skilled Workers”

=> ↺ She Asked the Army to Investigate a Rape Trial. They Fired Her

• Knapp reached out to Rolling Stone shortly after the article was published. In a recent interview, she corroborated Scanlon’s account of the Army’s alleged mishandling of the case and added new, previously unreported details. “My job was to attend the trial,” Knapp says. “There were all kinds of things that went wrong.”

=> ↺ Forced marriages only

• Forced marriages are the norm in Pakistan, and they have created a nation of the emotionally unfulfilled. When the basic intimate partnership is bereft of equality, mutual respect, chemistry, etc. (none of which can exist in a made-to-order marriage), you end up with a society that lacks empathy. Instead of genuine human feeling, there is only obligation and duty and endurance, a resentful coexistence until one’s days run out. Forced marriages may differ in degree and submission, but the real plot acted out over a lifetime is always a tragedy.

=> ↺ A Philadelphia man is free after serving 37 years because of a false witness

• A Philadelphia man was freed from prison Tuesday after 37 years in a case marred by detectives who allegedly offered a witness sex and drugs at police headquarters in 1983 in exchange for false testimony.

• The trial witness was charged with perjury just days after Willie Stokes was convicted of murder in 1984. But Stokes didn’t learn about that perjury plea until 2015, decades into a life sentence.

=> ↺ Philadelphia Man Free After 37 Years Due to ‘Sex for Lies’ False Witness

• Lee recanted the story at Stokes’ murder trial in August 1984, but Stokes was nonetheless convicted and sent to prison for life. Days later, Philadelphia prosecutors charged Lee with perjury — not over his trial testimony, but over the initial testimony he’d given at the preliminary hearing. Lee pleaded guilty, admitting he’d made up the confession, and was sentenced to a maximum seven-year prison term.

• “The homicide prosecutors that used Franklin Lee’s testimony to convict Willie Stokes then prosecuted Franklin Lee for lying on Willie Stokes. And they never told Willie Stokes,” Diamondstein argued at the November hearing in federal court.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Court Ruling Paves The Way For Better, More Reliable Wi-Fi

• A ruling (pdf) last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has paved the way for deployment of faster, better Wi-Fi, while simultaneously cementing the FCC’s authority to make important decisions related to spectrum and interference concerns.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Warren, Jayapal Demand Google Stop Trying to ‘Bully’ DOJ Antitrust Official

• U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding that the company swiftly end its “ongoing attempts to strip Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of his authority to enforce antitrust law.”

• “These efforts to bully regulators and avoid accountability… are untethered to federal ethics law and regulations.”

=> ↺ Hospital beds are a monopoly

• The lawsuit accuses Hillrom of cornering the hospital bed market, with a 70% market share that includes standard beds, ICU beds, birthing beds, and more. It details “a series of secret, exclusive deals” that lock in the (monopolized) hospital sector to buying its beds and accessories, forever.

• As Dayen points out, the Hillrom playbook looks a lot like every monopolist’s. The company bought its way to dominance, using its access to the capital market to acquire and kill or absorb its competitors. Its acquisitions include companies that produce bed-adjacent products, creating a kill-zone around hospital beds where competitors can’t find purchase.

Patents

=> ↺ Strategy Beyond Markets

• These new rules were tough for FM. Any receivers that worked for the old spectrum needed to be replaced for the new spectrum. Armstrong would never see FM overtake AM in his lifetime. RCA eventually moved to FM, choosing to install FM receivers in television for sound. They didn’t work with Armstrong, but instead used his technology and claimed they had invented it in-house. Armstrong sued, but the lawsuit lasted the rest of his life (he was not as lucky as Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who successfully fought numerous lawsuits attacking his patent).

=> ↺ New Covid Variant in France the Predictable ‘Outcome of Vaccine Apartheid’: Experts

• Epidemiologists are expressing little surprise at the emergence of a worrying new Covid-19 variant which has been identified in southern France—emphasizing that new mutations with varying degrees of severity will continue to crop up unless rich nations and Big Pharma end their refusal to lift patent protections and share vaccines with the world.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday acknowledged that a new variant, currently called variant IHU or B.1.640.2, “has been on our radar” since it was first detected by researchers at Méditerranée Infection University Hospital Institute (IHU) in Marseille in November, around the same time the Omicron variant emerged.

Copyrights

=> ↺ It’s Great That Winnie The Pooh Is In The Public Domain; But He Should Have Been Free In 1982 (Or Earlier)

• It’s been four years now since the US finally started allowing old works to enter the public domain after decades in which cultural landlords continually moved to actively remove works from the public domain. Every year since the US got back into the public domain business, we’ve happily run a game jam, encouraging people to make use of these newly public domain works, and this year is no different (check out the Gaming Like It’s 1926 game jam page if you’re interested!).

=> ↺ Apple May Offer an Audiobooks Service This Year — Here’s the Latest Scuttlebutt

• Apple’s subscription services encompass a wide variety of services. It includes Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, and Apple Music. But a new report suggests Apple may be seeking to offer an audiobooks subscription service to better compete with Netflix, Disney, and Amazon. A report from The Economist cites, “there is talk of an audiobooks service later this year.”

• But industry chatter around Apple suggests the report is probably concrete. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says we should expect to see more services from Apple in 2022. He doesn’t make any assumptions about what those services may be but concludes that Apple will “expand the Apple One program and better integrate services.”

=> ↺ “Popcorn Time” Shuts Down Due to a Lack of Use

• During its heyday, Popcorn-Time.to had millions of active users but these and other forks have lost their shine. The piracy tool that once had Netflix CEO Reed Hastings worried has decided to shut down. The team informs TorrentFreak that a lack of use is the main reason behind this decision, which is likely the result of competition from other pirate tools.

=> ↺ Tarantino’s NFT Auction Goes Ahead Despite Miramax Copyright Lawsuit

• Quentin Tarantino is not backing down from his plan to auction “Pulp Fiction” NFTs. The director announced the official auction dates today, despite being sued by Miramax for alleged copyright infringement. In fact, the team behind the Tarantino auction appears to be using the controversy to draw more attention to the project.

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