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● 01.13.22

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● Links 13/1/2022: Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3 and More Microsoft Aggression Against Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ LWN’s unreliable predictions for 2022 [LWN.net]

• It is 2022 already, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time for your editor to make a (bigger) fool of himself by posting a set of predictions for what may come in the new year. One should never pass up an opportunity for a humbling experience, after all. There can be no doubt that interesting things will happen this year; let’s see how many random darts thrown in that direction can hit close to the mark. Starting with something that is, hopefully, fairly obvious: 2022 will see a wider awareness that maintainers need support for free-software projects to be healthy. It has been a while since companies working with free software realized that they needed to support the developers of that software; that is the path toward stronger projects and better influence over how those projects evolve. But even the projects with the most economic support struggle to support their maintainers, and the effects can be felt across the entire community. The ongoing Log4j debacle is just the latest symptom of this problem.

• Supporting maintainers can be a hard sell for a corporate manager. Developers can focus most of their time directly on their employers’ needs, but maintainers have to make the project work for all participants, including their employers’ competitors. The value of their contribution is harder to quantify. But the cost of neglected maintenance is high and growing, and the smarter companies will start to figure this out.

• This support will also take the form of a greater willingness to pay for supported free-software products in areas where that has not generally happened. The recent announcement that support for GnuPG is selling well is a case in point. This critical project has languished for years, depending on donations from individuals; maintainer Werner Koch is now telling donors that their support is no longer needed.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 937

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

=> ↺ The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 938

• let Joel tell you how to pop a tent over docker

=> ↺ Linux Saloon, the Next Generation of BDLL – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• Being a part of BDLL and doing distro challenges has introduced me to some incredible people and opened doors for me. This show with Rocco, Zeb, Dan, Eric and so many more really allowed me to have a lot of fun with technology in a whole new dimension.

• In late 2020, Rocco stepped away from BDLL. Later, with encouragement from a BDLL community member, Michael Vash, I picked up the torch, and with Rocco’s permission decided to continue to run with BDLL. I didn’t want this all to just drift off into the Internet ether. Largely because of the loyalty I have towards Rocco and the community.

• The name of the rebranded show is Linux Saloon. It will remain at the same time each Saturday, with the same or similar cast of characters that has been around the last few months and to avoid confusion, I have decided to move it to a new channel and give it a fresh start.

=> ↺ Multi-Monitor Video Editing – Purism

• Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant dives into using multiple monitors. Video editing is resource heavy on any laptop, which is why we recommend Librem 14. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 5.17 Lands Big Rewrite To FS-Cache & CacheFiles Driver Code

• Being worked on since early 2020 by Red Hat’s David Howells has been a rewrite to Linux’s FS-Cache and CacheFiles code focusing on making it smaller and simpler while also presenting possible memory/performance advantages. That major rewrite has been merged now for Linux 5.17.

=> ↺ Microsoft Reworks The “DXGKRNL” Driver It Wants To Get Into The Linux Kernel

=> ↺ aggressing against Linux

• Back in 2020 Microsoft announced the DXGKRNL driver as the kernel driver component for supporting GPU accelerated use-cases within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). That original DXGKRNL driver was quickly shot down by upstream kernel developers and various issues raised while now for the past year Microsoft has been reworking this kernel driver and on Wednesday published the new version.

• [...]

• Microsoft was also originally criticized with DXGKRNL since it relied upon closed-source CUDA and DirectX user-space components for operation. To that they now are celebrating the open-source user-space API support offered by Intel with their OpenCL / OpenVINO / oneAPI support atop this kernel driver for use with Intel graphics hardware.

=> ↺ x86 Straight Line Speculation CPU Mitigation Appears For Linux 5.17 – Phoronix

• The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation “SLS” mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow.

• Back in mid-2020 Straight Line Speculation was made public for Arm CPUs based on research by Google’s SafeSide initiative. Arm processors were found to be able to speculatively execute linearly in memory beyond what should be an unconditional change in control flow, such as for exception returns, other exception generating instructions, unconditional direct/indirect branches, and function returns. If speculatively executing a “Spectre revelation gadget” it could in turn make secrets vulnerable to revelation through timing analysis.

• Following that disclosure, open-source software quickly mitigated for Arm SLS via GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler hardening around BLR and RETBR instructions.

=> ↺ Linux Serial Console Driver Lands Patch For Possible ~25% Performance Improvement – Phoronix

• It’s not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17…

• Red Hat’s Wander Lairson Costa was noticing the serial console throughput on an HP Proliant DL380 Gen9 server was coming in well below expectations: expecting 10KB/s but with the current Linux kernel only hitting around 2.5KB/s. The Linux 8250 serial console driver was taking around 410 microseconds just to dispatch one single byte.

• With the Linux 8250/16550 serial port console driver, Wander has managed to improve the performance in 2022. The 16550 UARTs have an on-chip FIFO buffer to which is now being used on supported systems by the 8250 serial driver’s write function.

=> ↺ Intel Core i5 12400 “Alder Lake”: A Great ~$200 CPU For Linux Users Review – Phoronix

• Formally announced at CES, the Core i5 12400 and other Alder Lake non-K desktop CPUs are beginning to appear in retail channels. Last week I was able to buy an Intel Core i5 12400 “Alder Lake” from a major Internet retailer for $209 USD — and one week later there remains availability during these turbulent supply chain times. The i5-12400 has wound up being a very nice processor for Linux use that exceeded my initial expectations.

=> ↺ Zero-copy network transmission with io_uring [LWN.net]

• When the goal is to push bits over the network as fast as the hardware can go, any overhead hurts. The cost of copying data to be transmitted from user space into the kernel can be especially painful; it adds latency, takes valuable CPU time, and can be hard on cache performance. So it is unsurprising that the developers working with io_uring, which is all about performance, have turned their attention to zero-copy network transmission. This patch set from Pavel Begunkov, now in its second revision, looks to be significantly faster than the MSG_ZEROCOPY option supported by current kernels.

• As a reminder: io_uring is a relatively new API for asynchronous I/O (and related operations); it was first merged less than three years ago. User space sets up a pair of circular buffers shared with the kernel; the first buffer is used to submit operations to the kernel, while the second receives the results when operations complete. A suitably busy process that keeps the submission ring full can perform an indefinite number of operations without needing to make any system calls, which clearly improves performance. Io_uring also implements the concept of “fixed” buffers and files; these are held open, mapped, and ready for I/O within the kernel, saving the setup and teardown overhead that is otherwise incurred by every operation. It all adds up to a significantly faster way for I/O-intensive applications to work.

• One thing that io_uring still does not have is zero-copy networking, even though the networking subsystem supports zero-copy operation via the MSG_ZEROCOPY socket option. In theory, adding that support is simply a matter of wiring up the integration between the two subsystems. In practice, naturally, there are a few more details to deal with.

• A zero-copy networking implementation must have a way to inform applications when any given operation is truly complete; the application cannot reuse a buffer containing data to be transmitted if the kernel is still working on it. There is a subtle point that is relevant here: the completion of a send() call (for example) does not imply that the associated buffer is no longer in use. The operation “completes” when the data has been accepted into the networking subsystem for transmission; the higher layers may well be done with it, but the buffer itself may still be sitting in a network interface’s transmission queue. A zero-copy operation is only truly done with its data buffers when the hardware has done its work — and, for many protocols, when the remote peer has acknowledged receipt of the data. That can happen long after the operation that initiated the transfer has completed.

• So there needs to be a mechanism by which the kernel can tell applications that a given buffer can be reused. MSG_ZEROCOPY handles this by returning notifications via the error queue associated with the socket — a bit awkward, but it works. Io_uring, instead, already has a completion-notification mechanism in place, so the “really complete” notifications fit in naturally. But there are still a few complications resulting from the need to accurately tell an application which buffers can be reused.

=> ↺ User-managed concurrency groups [LWN.net]

• The kernel’s thread model is relatively straightforward and performs reasonably well, but that’s not enough for all users. Specifically, there are use cases out there that benefit from a lightweight threading model that gives user space control over scheduling decisions. Back in May 2021, Peter Oskolkov posted a patch set implementing an abstraction known as user-managed concurrency groups, or UMCG. Several revisions later, many observers still lack a clear idea of what this patch is supposed to do, much less whether it is a good idea for the kernel. Things have taken a turn, though, with Peter Zijlstra’s reimplementation of UMCG. One developer reimplementing another’s patch set is likely to raise eyebrows. Zijlstra’s motivation for doing that work can perhaps be seen in this message, where he notes that the UMCG code looked little like the rest of the scheduler code. He also remarked that it required “reverse engineering” to figure out how UMCG was meant to be used. By the time that work was done, perhaps, it was just easier to recast the code in the form he thought it should take.

• In truth, the documentation for UMCG is no better than before — a significant problem for a major proposed addition to the system-call API. But it is possible to dig through the code (and a “pretty rough” test application posted by Zijlstra) to get a sense for what is going on. In short, UMCG calls for a multi-threaded application to divide itself into “server” and “worker” threads, where there is likely to be one server thread for each CPU on the system. Server threads make scheduling decisions, while workers run according to those decisions and get the actual work done. The advantage of a system like UMCG is that scheduling can happen quickly and with little overhead from the kernel — assuming the server threads are properly implemented, of course.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Mesa 22.0 Pushed Back By Three Weeks – Phoronix

• While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks.

• Due to problems merging some merge requests from GitLab as well as FreeDesktop.org hosting issues, Mesa 22.0 has been pushed back. Additionally, some Mesa3D developers have expressed interest in trying to squeeze in some remaining patches not yet merged.

Applications

=> ↺ Plots is an open-source, free app to visualize visualize mathematical formulas

• Plots is a graph plotting app for GNOME. Plots makes it easy to visualize mathematical formulae. In addition to basic arithmetic operations, it supports trigonometric, hyperbolic, exponential and logarithmic functions, as well as arbitrary sums and products. It can display polar equations, and both implicit and explicit Cartesian equations.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Check MySQL User Privileges in Linux

• The first/fresh installation of a MySQL on any operating system only considers the root user as the default database user. The first database transactions/activities are performed by the root user only.

• Therefore, it is not ideal for any user that needs access to the MySQL database to gain entry via the root user credentials. Root user access should be reserved to the database administrator who will then use the root user credentials to create database users and grant privileges to execute different database queries.

=> ↺ Fix Firefox 96.0 And 95.0.2 Not Loading Websites With DNS Over HTTPS Enabled – Linux Uprising Blog

• The latest Firefox 96.0 as well as 95.0.2 have an issue which prevents the browser from establishing any connections when DNS over HTTPS (DOH) is enabled. Simply disabling this option once enabled doesn’t make the issue go away. Read on to see how to fix this.

• With DNS over HTTPS enabled on Firefox 96.0 and 95.0.2, besides not being able to access any websites, the browser hangs in the background when closed. The issue affects Linux, Windows, and macOS Firefox users alike.

=> ↺ How to Increase Request Timeout in NGINX – TecAdmin

• Sometimes the long running requests failed with the error message “504: Gateway Timeout” in NGINX web server. To solve this issue, you need to increase request timeout in NGINX server configuration. The default, NGINX request timeout is 60 seconds. Which can be increased or decreased by updating the configuration files.

• In this quick FAQ, you will learn to change the request timeout in NGINX web server.

=> ↺ How to Install ModSecurity 3 & OWASP Core Rule Set with Apache (HTTPD) on Fedora 35 – LinuxCapable

• ModSecurity, often referred to as Modsec, is a free, open-source web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity was created as a module for the Apache HTTP Server. However, since its early days, the WAF has grown and now covers an array of HyperText Transfer Protocol request and response filtering capabilities for various platforms such as Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and Apache.

• How the WAF works, the ModSecurity engine is deployed in front of the web application, allowing the engine to scan the incoming and outgoing HTTP connections. ModSecurity is most commonly used in conjunction with the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), an open-source set of rules written in ModSecurity’s SecRules language and is highly regarded among the security industry.

=> ↺ How to Install Linux Kernel 5.16 on Linux Mint 20 – LinuxCapable

• Linux kernel 5.16 has many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.16 kernel release has a great new feature, FUTEX2, or futex_watv(), which aims to improve the Linux gaming experience, growing considerably with better native Linux porting for Windows games utilizing Wine.

• Other improvements have seen write include improved write congestion management, task scheduler for CPU clusters sharing L2/L3 cache, amongst many other additions. More information can be found on the Linux 5.16 Kernel release changelog.

=> ↺ How to install and Configure HAProxy load balancer on Debian 11

• HAProxy is a free and open source software that provides a high availability load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP-based applications that spreads requests across multiple servers. It distributes the load among the web and application servers.

• Haproxy is popular for load balancing because of its efficiency, reliability, and low memory and CPU footprint. Load balancing is a common solution for distributing web applications horizontally across multiple hosts while providing the users with a single point of access to the service.

• It is available for install on major Linux distributions. In this guide we will learn how to install and configure HAProxy load balancer on Debian 11.

=> ↺ The choose command in Linux

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to use choose command in Linux. We have tested this tutorial on Debian 11, but it should work on Ubuntu 20.04 and derivatives.

=> ↺ 3 Ways to install and use HandBrake Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 LTS – Linux Shout

• HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder distributed under GPL license, here we learn the steps to install Handbrake on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

• After a gap of some time, finally, the developers of Handbrake recently announced the latest version 1.5.1 to install for Linux, Mac, and Windows. The key purpose of this free and open-source software is to convert common video files and formats; to play on smartphones, tablets, TV, game console, PC, or web browser—nearly anything that supports modern video formats. It offers tools such as FFmpeg, x264, and x265 to create new MP4 or MKV video files. To avoid misunderstandings, the Freeware Handbrake cannot handle copy-protected DVDs or Blu-Rays. So you cannot make copies of purchased films with the software. Otherwise, the open-source software is ideal for converting videos.

• One thing that is particularly important with video tools, broad format support. Handbrake definitely offers it, there is hardly a video that cannot be converted with the tool. Apart from the video, Handbrake offers a wide range of options for sound format, bit rate, and image sizes. You can also apply numerous filters or add subtitles. Once set, you can also run several videos in a series.

=> ↺ Restricting SSH agent keys [LWN.net]

• The OpenSSH suite of tools for secure remote logins is used widely within our communities; it also underlies things like remote Git repository access. A recent experimental feature for the upcoming OpenSSH 8.9 release will help close a security hole that can be exploited by attacker-controlled SSH servers (e.g. sshd) when the user is forwarding authentication to a local ssh-agent. Instead of allowing the keys held in the agent to be used for authenticating to any host where they might work, SSH agent restriction will allow users to specify where and how those keys can be used.

=> ↺ Install Node.js on Raspberry Pi 4

• Node.js is an open-source and cross-platform server-side JavaScript runtime powered by the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js is mainly used to develop network apps, APIs, and full-stack web apps. Node.js can also be used to develop desktop apps and mobile apps.

• In this article, I am going to show you how to install the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version of Node.js on Raspberry Pi 4 running the Raspberry Pi OS. So, let’s get started.

=> ↺ How to change canvas size in Inkscape

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

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

=> ↺ How to convert PNG to SVG in Inkscape

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

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

=> ↺ Linux Command: Namei Usage

• Linux is a diverse platform to play with a lot of commands in its shell at one time and does other work as well. These commands are of diverse use and purpose. There comes a moment while working in Linux that you have to find out and know more about some specific file, its owner, its path, and content between some folders. One of those unique and great commands is the “namei” command of the Linux system. The namei command is used so far to know more about the specific directory i.e., its path, location, and a lot more things. Therefore, today we will be discussing the namei command in our Ubuntu 20.04 Linux shell. So, let’s have a new start.

• You need to open up your system first and then open up the terminal console as well. Use the “Ctrl+Alt+T” for doing so. After the opening of the terminal, we are ready to utilize our command for specific purposes. You have to know that the namei command uses many flags in it for those reasons. If you want to find out more about the namei command, just write “namei” in the shell and you will see the commands info.

=> ↺ Linux Command: Bridge Usage

• In Linux systems, the brctl command has been called a bridge command. The “brctl” term stands for bridge control. It is the ultimate unique command to let you see all the current Ethernet bridges in your system. It may also let you add and create new Ethernet bridges and make changes to many of them with few keywords in them. Therefore, we will be utilizing the Ubuntu 20.04 system to discuss the brctl bridge command. For that, we have to start the shell console of our system via “Ctrl+Alt+T”. So, let’s get started.

• We are starting our article with the installation of bridge utilities. For this, we need to use the “apt-get” package command in the shell. The keyword “install” has been used after the apt-get package and the “bridge-utils” package name is utilized after that with the “-y” flag to force installation. At the start of installation, it probably asks for your sudo password and you have to add it necessarily. After that, the bridge utilities will be installed on your Ubuntu system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5.24 – Top New Features and Release Details

• We bring you the top new features of upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop in this post and give you a heads-up on what’s in store.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 42 Planned for Ubuntu 22.04, But Few GTK4 Apps – OMG! Ubuntu!

• GNOME 42 could still feature in Ubuntu 22.04 when it arrives this April — but don’t expect to see too many GTK4 apps with it.

• Ubuntu developers say they ‘aim’ to include the bulk of GNOME 42 release in Ubuntu 22.04 but are currently tasked with updating the GNOME Shell stack to the latest GNOME 41 release.

• GNOME 42 is itself under active development ahead of a planned stable release in March. The first alpha of GNOME 42 expected to drop this month and will feature a fair number of apps ported to and/or taking advantage of GTK4 and libadwaita.

• And it’s those that Ubuntu isn’t keen on including — not yet.

• If this all sound a bit conservative it’s because it is! Ubuntu 22.04 is an LTS and Ubuntu has to ship a solid, stable software set it can confidently commit to supporting over the next five years (and possibly beyond).

• While upcoming GTK4 ports of Settings and Files are likely to get a ton of stress testing by GNOME developers — and plucky enthusiasts — ahead of the GNOME 42 release, Ubuntu isn’t certain there’s enough time to test them well enough, not for inclusion in a long-term support release.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Aiming For GNOME 42, Avoiding GTK4 Where Possiblex

• Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring’s release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• While Ubuntu has been behind upstream when it comes to GNOME 40+ packaging, with Ubuntu 21.10 they are on GNOME 40 and for April’s release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS they are planning to get to GNOME 42. They are currently shifting to GNOME Shell 41 and then working on moving to GNOME 42 updates. GNOME 42 will be officially out in March and the plan is for that new upstream release to be powering this next Ubuntu Long Term Support release.

=> ↺ Zrythm Switches to GTK 4 and libadwaita Ahead of Other Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) – It’s FOSS News

• Now that it’s been a while since GTK 4 was unveiled, several applications have started to make the move from GTK 3.

• The latest of which is Zrythm. While still in its alpha phase, this change is incredibly large and impactful, so let’s take a look at it!

• In case you’re curious, Zrythm is a Digital Audio Workstation, just like LMMS, Ardour, and other options in our list of best DAWs.

• Zrythm allows users to edit audio, and make music. It has all the essential features expected from a DAW. And, it seems to be properly working with the various audio servers desktop Linux uses (like Pulseaudio, Pipewire, etc.).

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Kali’s stable Docker image is now named kali-last-release

• Here is a very quick announcement for users of the Kali Linux Docker Images.

• Until recently we used to have a Docker image named simply kali, and it was built from the last versioned release of Kali (e.g. 2019.4, 2020.1, etc.) matching our “kali-last-snapshot” network repositories branch. In a way, this is our “stable” release, as it will only get updates quarterly as it is in synchronisation with our release cycle.

• We still provide this Docker image, but now it has been renamed from kali to kali-last-release for clarity.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Development Release: Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3

• “Good hello, and welcome to the third and final release candidate for Slackware 15.0. We’re 99% frozen at this point and are mostly looking for regression or other bug reports that might be able to be addressed before this goes stable. Of course, the management here reserves the right to make exceptions… that 5.15.15 kernel version has a nice ring to it. If your requests didn’t make it into this iteration, perhaps we will revisit them for the next -current cycle. Some were just a little too late but will more than likely be needed next time (I’m looking at Didier’s grubconfig), while others are just out of scope for the main tree where I like to abide by YAGNI as much as possible. Anyway, let’s get some testing done and we’ll be there soon. Enjoy!”

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ How to troubleshoot DHCP communication problems on your network | Enable Sysadmin

• Imagine you have a repurposed enterprise switch with a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) service that you need to troubleshoot. There is little information available about the switch’s configuration or previous deployments. The device is reported to be functional and should lease Internet Protocol (IP) address configurations to clients. However, the attached clients are not receiving IP configurations from the switch.

=> ↺ IT talent: 3 hot IT roles in 2022 and beyond | The Enterprisers Project

• As organizations kick off 2022 IT hiring, the demand for IT talent is not slowing down. Digital transformation leaders and IT security professionals are in particularly high demand, driven by digital transformation and the continuation of remote work.

• Many companies that put digital transformation on hold during the pandemic are now prioritizing these initiatives and are seeking top IT professionals to lead them. Hand-in-hand with digital transformation initiatives is IT security. Security continues to be a top priority for organizations as phishing attempts and hacking threatens their data.

=> ↺ Get started with Node.js 16 on OpenShift | Red Hat Developer

• In April 2021, Node.js released its latest major version, Node.js 16. Code-named Gallium, it became a long-term support (LTS) release in October.

• Red Hat recently released a fully supported Node 16 container image. Every Red Hat build of a Node.js release is tested and supported on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is based on a Red Hat Universal Base Image.

• Red Hat runtimes are tested and certified against various popular development frameworks and technologies while running on Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL. We are unable to test every possible framework and version, but the specific components, modules, and frameworks supported on Red Hat’s build of Node.js can be found on the component details page as per the Node.js module and framework support policies.

=> ↺ A developer’s guide to CI/CD and GitOps with Jenkins Pipelines | Red Hat Developer

• CI/CD, or continuous integration and continuous delivery, is an essential part of the modern software development life cycle. Coupled with GitOps, CI/CD allows developers to release high-quality software almost as soon as they commit code to a repository such as GitHub.

• Automation is a key factor for implementing effective CI/CD. In this process, developers and release engineers create scripts that have all the instructions needed to test the code in a source code repository before putting it into a production environment. The process is efficient but complex. Fortunately, there are many tools that lessen the burden.

• Jenkins is one of the most popular tools used for CI/CD. Jenkins has been around for years and has undergone numerous revisions, adding features all along the way. One of the most transformative features added to Jenkins is the ability to run Jenkins Pipeline jobs driven by an automation script stored in a Jenkinsfile. Developers and release engineers can use Jenkinsfiles to combine the practices of CI/CD and GitOps into a unified deployment process. That’s the focus of this article.

• We’ll start with a brief refresher of what Jenkins is and how it applies to both CI/CD and GitOps. Then, I’ll guide you through how to use a Jenkinsfile to create deployments that combine CI/CD and GitOps.

=> ↺ Another Fedora integrity-management proposal [LWN.net]

• As is usual for feature proposals, Fedora program manager Ben Cotton posted it to the Fedora devel mailing list on behalf of the feature owner: Roberto Sassu. The change proposal is also on the Fedora wiki. The new feature would use the Digest Lists Integrity Module (DIGLIM) feature, which has been proposed by Sassu as an addition to the kernel’s Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA). Ensuring that file contents and metadata do not change in unexpected ways is IMA’s job; DIGLIM is an optimization of sorts to IMA.

• IMA has a number of different functions, but at its core it maintains “digests” of file contents and metadata; these digests are cryptographic hashes that can be used to reliably detect file changes. IMA can also use the digests, in combination with the system’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM), to calculate a value that proves that the system is running a known set of software. That value can be used to ensure the system has been securely booted or it can be sent elsewhere to remotely attest to the state of the system.

• Each file being protected by IMA needs its digest stored with the file, which is normally done using extended attributes in the filesystem. IMA can be configured to check each file before it is accessed to see if its digest still matches the stored value; if not, access can be denied. As files are assessed, their digest can be submitted to the TPM to extend a Platform Configuration Register (PCR); the resulting value is a reflection of the files measured, but it is also affected by the order of the accesses.

• According to the DIGLIM proposals (for Fedora and the patch set for the kernel), parallel execution during the assessment results in differing values from the TPM; even if the same code is used, it may result in a different attestation value. DIGLIM provides a mechanism to take a digest value of all of the files installed, instead, and use that for calculating the attestation value. Only files that have digests that were not included in the overall “installation digest” would be used to further extend the PCR in the TPM.

• It does so by providing a mechanism to enroll digest values from the installed files into a kernel “digest list”, which can then be consulted as files are accessed. If the digest of a file appears on the list, it can be considered to be unchanged and its digest value does not get submitted to the TPM; otherwise, the file has been modified or was not included in the digest list at all, so access could be denied and the file’s digest added into the attestation value. The latter would likely mean that the system fails its attestation.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian vs. CentOS | FOSS Linux

• It is a massive deal for any organization to finalize a Linux distribution. Even for an individual, it matters a lot which version of Linux they end up running on their system. Debian and CentOS are two different versions of Linux which have some similarities and differences. Today we will compare them to decide which one will work best for you.

• In addition to checking out the similarities, we will also look at the differences in the builds of both Debian and CentOS, their management tools, community support, upgrading, and a few more crucial features that define an OS. So let us dive right into it and first look at what these operating systems are comprised of.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to leverage zswap to run on Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM – CNX Software

• Canonical used to recommend Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 4GB RAM to run Ubuntu Desktop, but Ubuntu 22.04 LTS should run more smoothly on the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB as the company has enabled zswap by default to allow the Linux operating system to run better on systems with less memory.

• Canonical explains that zswap is essentially a compression tool.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Bitcoin Mining ASICs Repurposed To Keep NTP Server On Track | Hackaday

• They say time is money, but if that’s true, money must also be time. It’s all figurative, of course, but in the case of this NTP server heater powered by Bitcoin mining dongles, money actually does become time.

• This is an example of the lengths to which Network Time Protocol aficionados will go in search of slightly better performance from their NTP servers. [Folkert van Heusden], having heard that thermal stability keeps NTP servers happy, used a picnic cooler as an environmental chamber for his Pi- and GPS-based NTP rig. Heat is added to the chamber thanks to seven Block Erupter ASIC miner dongles, which are turned on by a Python script when a microcontroller sends an MQTT message that the temperature has dropped below the setpoint.

=> ↺ OnLogic reveals quartet of Alder Lake systems with up to 14 LAN ports

• OnLogic unveiled a “Karbon 800 Series” of 4x embedded PCs based on Intel’s up to 16-core 12th Gen Alder Lake-S CPUs with up to 64GB RAM and options including PCIe Gen 4 x16, hot-swap SATA, 4G, Wi-Fi 6E, -40 to 70°C, and up to 14 LAN ports.

• OnLogic has announced four Karbon 800 Series embedded computers that run Windows or Linux 20.04 LTS on Intel’s recently announced 12th Gen Alder Lake platform. This is really a pre-announcement as there are relatively few details and the systems will not ship until Q2.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi CM4 Nano industrial mini PC supports wide temperature range, 12-18V DC input – CNX Software

• If you ever wanted a mini PC similar to Raspberry Pi 4 but working within a wider temperature range and supply voltage, as well as a few extra features, the Raspberry Pi CM4 Nano industrial mini PC with a metal enclosure might be worth looking at.

• Based on the EDATEC CM4 Nano carrier board, the mini PC supports Raspberry Pi CM4 with up to 8GB RAM, 32GB storage, optional WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, and offers one HDMI port, a flat cable HDMI + Touchscreen connector, Gigabit Ethernet, three USB 3.0 ports and more. It works in settings with -25 to +60°C ambient temperature and offers a 12-18V DC input.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi system can detect viruses on other devices without use of software

• A team of researchers at the Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems has built a non-software-based virus detection system using a Raspberry Pi, an H-field probe and an oscilloscope to detect electromagnetic wave signatures of multiple types of viruses. The team presented its system and test results at last month’s ACM Machinery’s Annual Computer Security Applications Conference and published a paper describing their system on ACM’s Research Article page.

• The idea behind the new system is that running software generates electromagnetic waves. And each piece of software generates its own unique wave patterns due to the way the software executes its code. The researchers took advantage of this knowledge and began using an H-field probe to capture wave patterns of known computer viruses running on various devices and viewed the results on an oscilloscope. They saw oscilloscope patterns that were unique to individual viruses as they were running. The researchers used that information to program a Raspberry Pi to identify data from the other two devices to recognize known virus wave patterns, using the system as a virus detector. To determine if a virus is running on a computer, IoT device or smartphone, a user places the H-field probe close enough to the device to read the electromagnetic waves that are generated. The Raspberry Pi then reports on whether it found any viruses, and if so, which ones. Testing found the system capable of detecting 99.82% of generic malware, along with a benign virus type.

=> ↺ Arduino And An OLED Make This Space Invaders Cabinet Tiny | Hackaday

• For as simple as it appears now, Space Invaders was one machine from the Golden Age of video games that always seemed to have a long line waiting for a chance to lose a couple of quarters. And by way of celebrating the seminal game’s influence, [Nick Cranch] has executed what might just be the world’s smallest Space Invaders replica.

• It appears that this started mainly as an exercise in what’s possible with what’s on hand, which included a couple of quite small OLED displays. For the build photos it looks like there’s an Arduino Nano running the show; [Nick] relates that the chosen hardware proved challenging, and that he had to hack the driver library to make it work. Once he got a working game, [Nick] didn’t rest on his laurels. Rather, he went the extra mile and built a miniature cabinet to house everything in.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU Guix: Announcing the second online Guix Days

• The Guix hackers are very happy to announce the second online Guix Days Conference on 19 & 20 February 2022. This conference is open to everyone and will be held entirely online. Want to speak? Submit your proposal!

• [...]

• In addition to the format you would like to choose, please describe your session with 10 lines or more (for lightning talks, at least 1 sentence).

• Once you have sent your proposal, you will be notified in the following days whether your talk will be part of the Guix Days. Submit earlier to get more time to prepare your session!

• Even for live presentation, please prepare a back-up pre-recorded talk, so we can play it if you cannot attend or have a technical problem during the Guix days. The deadline for short presentations (5 minutes) is February 16.

• We welcome all kinds of topics from the community, especially your own experience with Guix, your cool projects that involve Guix in some way, infrastructure around guix (translations, continuous integration, …), and any subject you feel should be discussed during the conference.

• We particularly encourage people who consider themselves part of a group underrepresented in Guix and the broader free software movement to submit a talk. Do not hesitate to get in touch with the organizers at guix-days@gnu.org if unsure or if you would like guidance on how to prepare your talk.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Arduino IDE Creates Bootable X86 Floppy Disks | Hackaday

• Arguably the biggest advantage of the Arduino ecosystem is how easy it is to get your code running. Type a few lines into the IDE, hit the button, and in a few seconds you’re seeing an LED blink or some text get echoed back over the serial port. But what if that same ease of use didn’t have to be limited to microcontrollers? What if you could use the Arduino IDE to create computer software?

• That’s exactly what boot2duino, a project developed by [Jean THOMAS] hopes to accomplish. As you might have guessed from the name, the code you write in the Arduino is turned into a bootable floppy disk image that you can stick into an old PC. After a few seconds of beeping and grinding your “Hello World” should pop up on the monitor, and you’ve got yourself the world’s biggest Arduino.

=> ↺ Moving librsvg’s documentation to gi-docgen – Federico’s Blog

• Librsvg’s documentation tooling is pretty ancient. The man page for rsvg-convert is written by hand in troff, and the C library’s reference documentation still uses the venerable gtk-doc.

• As part of the modernization effort, I have turned the man page into a reStructuredText document, and the C API documentation into gi-docgen. This post describes how I did that.

• [...]

• Gtk-doc assumed that magic happened somewhere in developer.gnome.org to generate the documentation and publish it. Gi-docgen assumes that your project publishes it with Gitlab pages.

• Indeed, the new documentation is published there — you can see how it is generated in .gitlab-ci.yml. Note that there are two jobs: the reference job generates gi-docgen’s HTML in a public/Rsvg-2.0 directory, and the pages job integrates it with the Rust API documentation and publishes both together.

Python

=> ↺ How to Get Return Code from Process in Python Subprocess Execution?

• A process is a name for a running program. Memory, lists of files, and a program counter that takes account of the instructions being implemented, and a call stack that retains the local variables are all part of each process’s system state. A process normally processes statements one after the other in a single command flow sequence known as the process’s main thread. The program only does one thing at any given moment. Our computer is always running subprocesses. Every action we take on our computer entails activating a subprocess. Even if we are constructing a basic “hello world” program in Python. Even if you have been programming for a while, you might not know the concept of a subprocess. The principles of the subprocess will be covered in this article, as well as how to use the Python subprocess standard library.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Leveling the playing field for non-native speakers

Rust

=> ↺ Learn Rust in 2022 | Opensource.com

• If you’re going to explore Rust this year, download our free Rust cheat sheet, so you have a quick reference for the basics.

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 425

Java

=> ↺ 8 Best Free and Open Source Java Object-Relational Mapping Software – LinuxLinks

• Object–relational mapping (ORM) is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a “virtual object database” that can be used from within the programming language.

• In essence, ORM is a design pattern for converting (wrapping) that data stored within a relational database into an object that can be used within an object oriented language. It creates a layer between the language and the database, helping programmers work with data without the OOP paradigm.

• Compared to traditional techniques of exchange between an object-oriented language and a relational database, ORM often reduces the amount of code that needs to be written. It standardizes interfaces reducing boilerplate and speeding development time. Advocates of ORMs claim they increase productivity, improve application design, reuse code and maintain the application over time. On the other hand, ORM suffers the disadvantage of the abstraction obscuring what’s happening in the code. And over-use of ORM software can produce poorly designed databases.

• There are a good range of ORM software available. Here’s our recommendations summarised in a legendary ratings chart.

=> ↺ How to install Oracle Java SE 17 on Ubuntu 20.04 –

• In todays guide, we are going to learn how we can install Java SE 17 on Ubuntu 20.04. Java is widely used in programs like Cassandra, Graylog, Wine etc.

• Java delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security updates that is the reason why java is widely used and has a larger community base worldwide.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Lucille Clifton and the Task of Remembering

• Lucille Clifton’s poetry has seeped into the public consciousness. These days I can’t open Instagram without seeing the telltale lines of won’t you celebrate with me commemorating a birthday or an accomplishment, or some other of Clifton’s poems fitting neatly into a white square. The reissue of her 1976 memoir, Generations, comes at a time of renewed interest in the poet’s life and works. Her daughter Sidney is currently leading the process of transforming the family’s home in Baltimore into a community space to commemorate her parents’ artistry (her father, Fred, was a sculptor and philosopher). Meanwhile, the novelist and poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at work on a biography. It is clear that Clifton’s legacy continues to blossom.

=> ↺ Downstream From Del Rio

• Del Rio, which is across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, hosts a smaller border crossing than those 350 miles downriver in the lower Rio Grande valley and those 400 miles upriver around El Paso. In early September, thousands of Haitian and other Latin American migrants began arriving and crossing the shallows of the river to set up an improvised camp under a bridge. By mid-month, the camp had grown to a maximum of some 15,000 people, without adequate water and sanitation. The migrants were blocked from entering the town to buy food and supplies, which forced them to cross the river to buy them in Ciudad Acuña. Conditions in the encampment were called “deplorable” by the United Nations.

• On September 19, Border Patrol officers on horseback tried to physically block families with children crossing the river to bring supplies back to the camp, which had previously been allowed. Videos of the aggressive use of force against peaceful migrants went viral and provoked widespread condemnation as an echo of historical racist aggression against Black people. The Biden administration disavowed the enforcement operation and initiated an investigation, which is ongoing as of early January.

=> ↺ CEO Of $10 Billion Open-Source Company Elastic Steps Down, President Leaves

• Shay Banon, co-founder of the $10 billion open-source company Elastic, who is known for being one of the most outspoken critics of Amazon’s dominant position in the cloud computing sector, is stepping down as CEO and chairman of the company.

=> ↺ Cost of Attrition

• How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?

• Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. If you have a hiring rate matching attrition rate it might look like the team health is maintained. It’s probably not.

• Tracking tenure by team and average tenure in team can be interesting proxy indicators. Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure.

=> ↺ Illuminating Origami Is Just Around The Corner | Hackaday

• Pop-up greeting cards are about to get a whole lot more interesting. Researchers at Seoul National University in Korea have created glowing 3D objects with a series of prototypes that fold thin QLED (Quantum Dot LED) sheets like origami. They used a CO2 laser to etch “fold lines” in the QLED so the sheets could be formed into 3D shapes. The bends are actually rounded, but at 5μm they appear to be sharp corners and the panels continue to illuminate across the fold lines for at least 500 folds. Some glow in solid colors, while others use smaller addressable areas to create animated matrix displays of patterns and letterforms. See the short video after the break, read the Physics World article or to see all the prototypes and dig into details of the full research paper in Nature (freed from the paywall by SharedIt).

Science

=> ↺ Melbourne-led research team finds new way to build quantum devices

• The new technique – developed by Professor David Jamieson and co-authors from the University of New South Wales, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering, and RMIT – embeds single atoms in silicon wafers, one-by-one, mirroring methods used to build conventional devices.

Education

=> ↺ American teacher fired from Taiwan cram school for catching COVID

• One the reasons the school listed for terminating him was that it had conducted “thorough research about Covid cases and how it’s still very possible for patients to relapse even after three weeks.” It cited the case of a “girl who came back from Japan” with COVID and claimed that after finishing 21 days in quarantine, her PCR test came back positive because she had “relapsed.”

Hardware

=> ↺ Stout Peristaltic Pump Fabricated From Scratch | Hackaday

• The peristaltic pump is perhaps most well known for its ability to pump fluids without the pump mechanism coming into contact with the working fluid. This is key for food-safe applications and other situations where a pump could contaminate the fluid. [Maciej Nowak] has built a great example of such a pump, crafted out of aluminium from scratch.

• The build video covers the machining process in detail, showing how the aluminium body was fabricated on the lathe before installing bearings and a silicone hose. The pump shaft was then fabricated, along with a set of brass rollers to press along the tube, creating the pumping action. The rollers were also lubricated in order to reduce friction on the tubing. Powering the pump is a small DC motor, sending drive via a small toothed belt, giving the finished build quite an industrial look.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Prevention Centers Save Lives, But Only Radical Change Will End Overdose Crisis

=> ↺ Single-Payer Bill Leaps First Major Hurdle in California

• Single-payer advocates cheered Tuesday after legislation in California to create a first-in-the-nation universal healthcare system took a decisive step forward.

• “As the single-payer movement continues to gain momentum, we signal to corporate interests that enough is enough.”

=> ↺ Québec PM Vows Health Tax for the Unvaxxed

• As the Omicron-driven surge in coronavirus infections strains their nation’s healthcare resources, Canadian progressives are balancing urgent public health concerns with respect for civil liberties after the province of Québec said Tuesday that it would begin levying fines on residents who refuse Covid-19 vaccinations.

• “I think the government has still not exhausted other alternatives that are more equitable and more fair.”

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Demands Refunds for Seniors Hit by Medicare Premium Hike

=> ↺ How the Concerns of Teachers Have Been Misrepresented in Omicron Reporting

• In-person return plans were disrupted at schools in Milwaukee (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 1/2/22) and Atlanta (WXIA, 1/3/22). Chicago canceled school after the Chicago Teachers Union “approved a labor action to work remotely due to safety concerns as Covid-19 and its Omicron variant surge in the city” (WTTW, 1/4/22).

• The Chicago labor dispute has drawn the most eyeballs, as it is the third-largest US city, but teacher unionists nationwide are indicating that the Omicron surge is pushing school systems to their breaking points. In San Francisco, the system saw as many as 600 educators out of work, with the union blasting the district for its severe deficit in Covid-19 testing kits (Mission Local, 1/6/22). The left caucus of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers reported 10,000 student absences and 2,000 staff absences, criticizing the mayor for inadequate “baseline testing” (Twitter, 1/6/22), while dozens of New York state and city lawmakers have demanded a remote option for the city’s schools (Twitter, 1/6/22).

=> ↺ On Medicare Limiting Coverage for Alzheimer’s Drug

• If the administration takes no action, Medicare recipients will continue to see their biggest premium increase in history, all because of Biogen’s greed. That cannot be allowed to happen.

• Beyond the incredibly high price, Aduhelm has not been proven to be effective by the scientific community. It was rejected for coverage by the Veterans Health Administration and at least a half a dozen private health insurance companies in the United States, while 10 out of the 11 experts on the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory council voted against approval of the treatment.

=> ↺ Brownstone Institute embraces its inner antivaxxer

• The Great Barrington Declaration was published in October 2020 by three scientists brought together by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an antimask, anti-“lockdown,” anti-(vaccine) mandate “free market” libertarian “think tank.” AIER is but one of many such astroturf groups that have been sowing doubt about collective public health interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19, but the Great Barrington Declaration was among the most successful efforts by any of them, at least when it comes to influencing the policies of major governments. At the time, I characterized the Declaration as eugenics (or at least eugenics-adjacent), given that, in a time before vaccines against COVID-19, it proposed, in essence, a “let ‘er rip” strategy for the coronavirus, at least to let it rip through the “healthy” population (in order to prevent economic damage) while using “focused protection” to keep those at highest risk of severe disease and death safe. Never mind that, as I pointed out, it’s impossible to keep the vulnerable safe when a deadly virus is spreading unchecked through the rest of the population, and, unsurprisingly, public health experts were very much opposed to this strategy. Such a strategy was thus nothing more than a big “screw you” to those at the highest risk from the pandemic. Last year, AIER begat the “spiritual child” of the Great Barrington Declaration, a new think tank named the Brownstone Institute founded by former AIER Editorial Director Jeffery Tucker, who bragged about being in the “room where it happened” as the Great Barrington Declaration was drafted.

=> ↺ Gorsuch Goes Maskless at Supreme Court, Increasing Colleagues’ COVID Risk Levels

=> ↺ Sanders Reintroduces ‘N95 Mask for All’ Legislation

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday announced the reintroduction of legislation to get free N95 masks to all Americans to “prevent death and suffering” as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage amid an explosive surge in cases driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

• The Masks for All Act, which has 15 co-sponsors in the Senate including Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, would ensure that all individuals—from college students to medical professionals to the unhoused—would receive a free package of three N95 respirator masks.

=> ↺ Sanders Introduces Bill to Send N95s to Everyone as Biden Considers Mask Plan

=> ↺ Biden Under Fire for Resisting Calls to Distribute N95 Masks to All

• The Biden administration faced growing backlash Wednesday for resisting calls from public health experts and progressives to distribute N95 masks to all U.S. households to help fight the Omicron wave, which is pushing new coronavirus infections to record-shattering highs nationwide.

• An unnamed senior administration official sparked outrage by claiming in an interview with Politico that because “half the country won’t wear any mask,” widespread distribution of high-quality face coverings would be pointless.

=> ↺ Sanders Demands Refunds for Seniors Hit by Medicare Premium Hike

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday demanded refunds for seniors who have been hit by the 2022 Medicare premium hike after federal health officials recommended limiting the program’s coverage of Aduhelm, the unproven and expensive Alzheimer’s drug responsible for a large chunk of the premium increase.

• In a statement, Sanders said CMS officials’ preliminary decision Tuesday to restrict coverage of Biogen’s Aduhelm to patients taking part in approved clinical trials was “an important step forward.” CMS’ final decision on the drug is expected by April.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Please Join Us In The January 2022 SPDX Community SBOM DocFest

• SPDX was designed for tools to produce and consume SBOM documents. A decade of experience has shown us that tools may interpret fields differently – a file may be a valid syntactic SPDX SBOM, but different tools may fill in different values.

• By coming together as a community to examine the output of multiple tools and to compare/contrast the results, we can refine the guidance to tool vendors and improve the robustness of the ecosystem sharing SPDX documents. Historically, these events were called Bake-offs, but we’ve evolved them into “DocFests.”

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

=> ↺ TellYouThePass ransomware returns as a cross-platform Golang threat

=> ↺ tries to associate Go with what people could in theory code using Go, as if it’s guilty of it

• Golang is a programming language first adopted by malware authors in 2019 due to its cross-platform versatility.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Interview With Reinard Mortlock – Livex

• Reinard Mortlock: We wanted to start a software company to enable startups and SME’s to get access to world-class software development without the massive development cost typically charged by the software industry.

=> ↺ VICTORY: Google Releases “disable 2g” Feature for New Android Smartphones

• What is 2G and why is it vulnerable?2G is the second generation of mobile communications, created in 1991. It’s an old technology from a time when standards bodies did not account for certain risk scenarios such as rogue cell towers and the need for strong encryption. As years have gone by, many vulnerabilities have been discovered in 2G.

• There are two main problems with 2G. First, it uses weak encryption between the tower and device that can be cracked in real time by an attacker to intercept calls or text messages. In fact, the attacker can do this passively without ever transmitting a single packet. The second problem with 2G is that there is no authentication of the tower to the phone, which means that anyone can seamlessly impersonate a real 2G tower and a phone using the 2G protocol will never be the wiser. 

• Cell-site simulators sometimes work this way. They can exploit security flaws in 2G in order to intercept your communications. Even though many of the security flaws in 2G have been fixed in 4G, more advanced cell-site simulators can downgrade your connection to 2G, making your phone susceptible to the above attacks. This makes every user vulnerable—from journalists and activists to medical professionals, government officials, and even law enforcement.

=> ↺ Livestreamed Hearing Friday: EFF Will Ask Court to Issue Judgment Against SFPD for Illegally Spying on Protesters Marching in Support of Black Lives

=> ↺ ABC to go ahead with compulsory iview logins despite privacy concerns

• iview is a service that allows viewers to see programs that have already been broadcast, or in some case which are yet to go to air. All content provided is paid for with taxpayer funds as the ABC is a government-owned body.

• Many commercial TV channels have similar services, but they require registration as this is used to monetise the service.

• An ABC spokesperson told iTWire on the phone this morning that the introduction of logins would go ahead as had been indicated last year, when the company decided to postpone a plan to introduce the measure on 1 July 2021.

=> ↺ Pegasus attacks in El Salvador: spyware used to target journalists and activists – Access Now

• NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware has been used to infect the devices of 35 Salvadoran journalists and activists between July 2020 and November 2021. This breaking information, initially flagged by journalists who tested their devices using Amnesty International’s Mobile Verification Toolkit, was analyzed and corroborated by Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, The Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders, Fundación Acceso, and SocialTIC. Read The Citizen Lab’s technical report.

=> ↺ Polish Gov’t Finally Admits It Deployed NSO Malware, Pretends Targeting Of Opposition Leaders Isn’t Abusive

• Poland — like far too many countries — has a Pegasus problem. The highly intrusive (and highly effective) phone malware sold by Israel’s NSO Group for the ostensible purpose of tracking down terrorists and other deadly criminals has been observed (yet again) being deployed to track government critics and political opponents.

=> ↺ Exposed: civil society condemns use of Pegasus in El Salvador to spy on journalists and activists – Access Now

• We, the undersigned organizations, condemn the use of NSO Group’s Pegasus technology in El Salvador for the surveillance of journalists and civil society, as initially flagged by El Faro and Gato Encerrado, and confirmed through a joint investigation by Access Now, Front Line Defenders, The Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, Fundación Acceso, and SocialTIC. Although, to date, it has not been established who the perpetrator of this surveillance is, NSO Group has repeatedly claimed it only sells Pegasus technology to governments.

• These attacks are particularly alarming, as several of the infections occurred after the Pegasus Project revelations became public in July of 2021, indicating that those behind the spyware attacks were aware of, but ignored, the widespread denouncement of Pegasus use, including by international human rights NGOs and UN experts and officials.

=> ↺ Project Torogoz: Extensive Hacking of Media & Civil Society in El Salvador with Pegasus Spyware – The Citizen Lab

• This report describes the results of a collaborative investigation into the abuse of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to target members of the press and civil society in El Salvador. The investigation led to the identification of 35 Pegasus-infected individuals (37 devices) among members of El Salvador’s media and civil society.

• Our investigation began in September 2021 when a group of independent journalists contacted Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline after testing their devices using the Amnesty International Security Lab’s Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) tool to detect Pegasus spyware.

• The resulting investigation was a collaboration between the Citizen Lab and Access Now, with investigative assistance and case referrals from Frontline Defenders, SocialTIC, and Fundación Acceso. We asked Amnesty International’s Security Lab to conduct an independent review of our analysis for a sample of cases, and they have confirmed our findings.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The “Credibility” Factor and Biden’s Foreign Crises

• Barely six months after the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden now confronts three crises—in Ukraine, Taiwan, and Iran—that could easily erupt into US military action abroad. Biden would no doubt prefer to avoid such an outcome, but he is under enormous pressure from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to demonstrate “resolve” in these disputes, thereby overcoming the catastrophic loss of “credibility” supposedly suffered by Washington as a result of the “debacle” in Afghanistan. How successful Biden will prove in resisting this pressure will largely determine whether this country will avoid being dragged into another military quagmire—and one that could prove far more deadly than the one in Afghanistan.

=> ↺ Opinion | Social Cohesion Is Vital, and We’re Losing It

• The United States is tumbling toward socio-political crisis. Here are just a few of the distress signals recently visible:

=> ↺ What If Nuclear Deterrence Fails?

• “It’s not absolutely foolproof, but it has protected us all from nuclear war for 75 years.”

• There is just one obvious problem with this statement. In order for deterrence to work, it has to be absolutely 100 percent foolproof. The consequence of it being less than that is beyond catastrophic. It could amount to the end of life on earth as we know it. That’s one hell of a gamble. And it’s a gamble that is not morally defensible on any level. It’s one that should never be taken.

=> ↺ Belarusian peacekeeping insignia adds to confusion as UN criticizes Kazakhstan over troops wearing blue helmets

• Kazakhstan has come under criticism from the United Nations after troops deployed to protect strategic infrastructure amid a crackdown on protests in Almaty were seen wearing blue helmets reserved for UN peacekeepers. According to UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, Kazakhstan’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations has offered assurances that the issue has been resolved. However, as reported by RFE/RL’s Kazakh service, the presence of forces from Belarus’s peacekeeping company has caused further confusion, as their insignia closely resembles the UN emblem.

=> ↺ Putin’s trigger: Ten years after they first caused the Russian authorities to clutch their pearls, Pussy Riot has been almost entirely forced out of the country

• In November 2021, the feminist protest group Pussy Riot turned 10 years old. For the entirety of the group’s existence, the Russian authorities (among others) have been trying their damnedest to shut them up. After staging a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in 2012, three Pussy Riot activists were sentenced to two years in prison. After a demonstration at the 2018 World Cup, other Pussy Riot members, who ran onto the field in police uniforms, were arrested — and the group’s unofficial spokesman Pyotr Verzilov was promptly poisoned. In the last two years, arrests and prosecutions targeting Pussy Riot activists have only become more frequent. Just last month, members Maria Alyokhina and Lyusya Shtein went on hunger strike while serving two-week stints in jail. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova spoke with past and present members of the group to find out who exactly they were in 2011 — and who they are now.

=> ↺ Seyed Mohammad Marandi on the Iran Deal and the Assassination of Soleimani

=> ↺ To Avert ‘Global Nuclear Holocaust,’ US Groups Demand Abolition of ICBMs

• More than 60 U.S. organizations issued a joint statement Wednesday calling for the total elimination of the country’s land-based nuclear missiles, warning that the weapons are both an enormous waste of money and—most crucially—an existential threat to humankind.

• Organized by the advocacy groups RootsAction and Just Foreign Policy, the statement argues that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are “uniquely dangerous, greatly increasing the chances that a false alarm or miscalculation will result in nuclear war.”

=> ↺ #Ethiopia #TigrayGenocide #ExcuseForRegimeChangeWar

=> ↺ Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Fight to Contain Them

• Science fiction? Not really. It could happen tomorrow. The technology already exists.

• In fact, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) have a long history. During the spring of 1972, I spent a few days occupying the physics building at Columbia University in New York City. With a hundred other students, I slept on the floor, ate donated takeout food, and listened to Alan Ginsberg when he showed up to honor us with some of his extemporaneous poetry. I wrote leaflets then, commandeering a Xerox machine to print them out.

=> ↺ Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Guardian Angel Platoon’

• The Guardian Angel Platoon is the moniker of Canadian veteran, activist, and singer-songwriter Dennis MacKenzie. He released the self-titled album in 2021, right before Canada’s Remembrance Day.

• The album is a conceptual work that chronologically charts MacKenzie’s journey as a soldier in Afghanistan. It deals with sobering topics such as PTSD, trauma during the war, and mistreatment afterward. It also discusses overlooked issues in connection with veterans.

=> ↺ FTA: Fuck the Aggression

• Vietnam was already an unpopular war by the time Fonda went on a political jaunt to NVN.  Still, she gave a radio broadcast from Hanoi in August 1972 that some veterans, to this day, regard as propaganda bordering on treason, and yet which I find quite lovely and moving, accentuating a people’s culture and humanity, de-demonizing them. Of course, she gave more than one broadcast and one speech. Here’s an excerpt of things she saw on her tour of war:

• Fonda’s more infamous speech describing the locals as humans is sharp.  Here is her speech presented before Congress during hearings they held on her travels to the North Country. (It’s preceded by Congressional denunciations that provide a glimpse at the poulter zeit geist.) It is full of humanistic observations of the North Vietnamese people.

=> ↺ ‘Not an easy discussion’ Russian and NATO officials say they are far from agreement after talks in Brussels

• Russian and NATO officials convened for talks at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, January 12. The meeting came two days after diplomats from Russia and the U.S. held similar talks in Geneva. Both discussions were largely inconclusive. Washington and NATO are attempting to push back against sweeping security proposals put forward by Russia in December, while also trying to deter Moscow from launching a full-fledged attack on Ukraine. Speaking to the press after Wednesday’s talks, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the two sides remain divided on fundamental issues. Meduza summarizes their comments here.

=> ↺ Swing State Trumpers Forged Electoral Letters in Harebrained Scheme to Overturn Biden’s Win

• Pro-Trump groups in at least five states sent the government forged certificates of ascertainment declaring Trump the recipient of the state’s 2020 electors. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported on the falsified documents Tuesday night, noting that the fake certifications, which were obtained by watchdog group American Oversight, have “almost the exact same wording” to the real documents.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Overthrow of American Democracy: A Scorecard for Trump’s Next Coup

• “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can do much to help it…The freedom to do as one likes leads straight to its overthrow.” —Judge Learned Hand, 1944

=> ↺ Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust

• The Claremont Institute, once a little-known think tank often confused with the liberal-arts college of the same name, has emerged as a driving force in the conservative movement’s crusade to use bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election to rewrite voting laws and remake the election system in time for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. Most infamously, one of the group’s legal scholars crafted memos outlining a plan for how then-Vice President Mike Pence could potentially overturn the last election.

=> ↺ Drone drops explosives on civilians’ camp in Michoacán—and films the attack

• A video that shows explosives being dropped on a civilian encampment in a forest in Michoacán has been posted to social media, one of multiple attacks on civilians in the Tierra Caliente municipality of Tepalcatepec on Monday.

• The footage was filmed by a drone from which the explosives were believed dropped by members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), who were allegedly operating the unmanned aerial vehicle.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Trump Can’t Take the Heat, Hangs Up on NPR When Host Pushes Back on Election Lies

• Inskeep began to ask another question, but he realized mid-sentence that Trump had already hung up.

=> ↺ Pressed on his election lies, former President Trump cuts NPR interview short

• The interview was six years in the making. Trump and his team have repeatedly declined interviews with NPR until Tuesday, when he called in from his home in Florida. It was scheduled for 15 minutes, but lasted just over nine.

• After being pressed about his repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump abruptly ended the interview.

Environment

=> ↺ Environmental Justice Activists Want NJ Gov. to Vote No New Gas-Fired Power Plant in Newark

• In Newark, New Jersey, residents of the largely Black and Latinx community of Ironbound are calling on Governor Phil Murphy to stop plans to build a $180 million gas-fired power plant that could worsen the poor local air quality and exacerbate the climate crisis. As the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission holds a vote to begin construction on Thursday, activists are urging the governor to enforce the environmental justice law that he passed last year. “If we don’t set a good precedent for New Jersey, what does that mean for the country and other states that are trying to pass similar laws?” says Maria Lopez-Nuñez, member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

=> ↺ It’s Time to Hold Law Firms Accountable for Their Role in Climate Change

• For too long, law firms have been given carte blanche for their contributions to the climate crisis: They lobby on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, file the paperwork necessary for carbon-emitting projects, and litigate cases against indigenous and frontline communities. With over 1,500 lawyers in offices around the world, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher LLP is regarded as one of the top law firms in the United States. Like many of its peers, Gibson Dunn profits from squashing class action lawsuits and labor organizing drives, keeping shareholders from reforming corporate practices and debtors from getting their day in court, and shielding US companies from accountability for their actions overseas and from regulation at home. Even by the standards of the legal industry, however, Gibson Dunn’s behavior is notorious. In 2007, the Montana Supreme Court rebuked the firm for engaging in “actual malice” and “legal thuggery,” and a Delaware judge recently described its pretrial practices as constituting “fraud.”

=> ↺ Opinion | How Corporate Greed Fuels Killer Tornadoes

• In its ranking of business values, corporate America proudly provides a special place for elevated moral behavior. That place is the trash can.

=> ↺ Why Words Matter in the Fight Against Climate Change

=> ↺ ‘Don’t Look Up’: Hollywood’s Primer on Climate Denial Illustrates 5 Myths That Fuel Rejection of Science

• By Gale Sinatra, University of Southern California and Barbara K. Hofer, Middlebury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• Every disaster movie seems to open with a scientist being ignored. “Don’t Look Up” is no exception – in fact, people ignoring or flat out denying scientific evidence is the point.

=> ↺ Climate change: thawing permafrost a triple-threat

• Another study warns that methane and CO2 escaping from long-frozen soil could accelerate warming and overwhelm global efforts to cap the rise in Earth’s temperature at livable levels.

• Exposure of highly combustible organic matter no longer locked away by ice is also fuelling unprecedented wildfires, making permafrost a triple threat, the studies report.

Energy

=> ↺ Peak period [cryptocurrency] mining makes up 1 percent of all electricity consumption

• Nordcoin Mining manager Hermes Brambat told ERR that their consumption is close to 1.5 MW and there could be some 10 companies in Estonia with comparable consumption. Estonia’s total peak consumption in a colder winter month is close to 1,500 MW, meaning cryptocurrency mining makes up a percentage point of all consumption at peak periods.

=> ↺ Jack Dorsey Launches Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund to Protect Open Source Developers – Bitcoin News

• The letter explains that interested parties with questions or concerns can email the fund team and mentions the email domain “bitcoindefensefund.org.” The site appears to be currently under construction, with a message from domain host Namebright stating that the site is “coming soon.”Of course, the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund became trending topics on social media After the open letter was published.

=> ↺ Used To Free Electricity, Kosovo’s Bitcoin Miners Are Now Facing Difficult Times After Ban

• Energy prices have soared across Europe amid a spike in demand for natural gas as economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and fresh tensions with Russia, which supplies one third of Europe’s gas.

=> ↺ Will The CW Be a Streaming Wars Casualty?

• National broadcast TV networks don’t go on the market very often. So when the news broke that ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia were shopping a majority stake in The CW network, and that local TV giant Nexstar was the lead bidder, eyebrows were instantly raised. The deal, assuming it goes through (one source familiar with the talks says that while they were advanced, they could fall apart), would reshape the network TV landscape at a time when the very idea of what network TV should be is in question.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Natural population growth in minus by 5,300 people

• Last year, 13,138 people were born and 18,445 people died in Estonia, which means that there’s negative natural population growth of 5,307 people, the Ministry of Interior announced.

Finance

=> ↺ More Than 8,000 Kroger Grocery Workers Strike in Colorado

• On the heels of a new report showing significant financial insecurity, including homelessness, among workers at Kroger grocery stores, more than 8,000 of the chain’s employees in Colorado went on strike Wednesday to demand fair wages and better healthcare benefits.

• “The companies were thriving, but our workers didn’t thrive. Know what our workers got? Covid. Attacked. Beat up. Spit on. Slapped. Overworked. And the company? They did great.”

=> ↺ Thousands of Workers at Kroger-Owned Grocery Stores in Colorado Are on Strike

=> ↺ Report Debunks Manchin’s Inflation Argument Against Build Back Better

• To justify obstructing one of his party’s top legislative priorities, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has repeatedly claimed that the Build Back Better Act would exacerbate rising inflation.

• “The House-passed Build Back Better Act would make crucial investments to lower inflation and cut household costs.”

=> ↺ Manchin Signals Unwillingness Toward Backing Biden’s Calls for Filibuster Reform

=> ↺ Job Growth Under Biden and Trump

• It’s not unusual for there to be substantial differences between the surveys, but these are extraordinary. In the last months, the household survey has shown an increase in employment of 1,741,000. By comparison, the increase in jobs in the establishment survey has been just 448,000.

• While these divergences are striking, they largely disappear if we look over a longer period. Over the last year, the household survey shows employment is up by 6,092,000. The establishment survey shows a gain of 6,448,000 jobs.

=> ↺ The Nonprofit College That Spends More on Marketing Than Financial Aid

• Baker College sells itself as a place where students thrive and lives are transformed: “a haven for those who dream big.”

• From humble beginnings as a small business school in Flint, Baker rose to become the largest private college in Michigan, forging a presence in online learning and in Michigan towns where many students thought a college degree was beyond their grasp. For decades, the school’s marketing touted low costs and employment rates of nearly 100% for job-seeking graduates — making the dream seem both affordable and achievable.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Opinion | The Perilous Condition of American Democracy at the Hands of the Republican Party

• New York Times columnist David Brooks has breathlessly pronounced to his millions of readers Jan. 7 a crucial new discovery about the rising threat to American democracy, which he says, has been unfortunately distorted by election watchdogs, Democrats, and major media. 

=> ↺ Ron Johnson Breaks His Term-Limit Pledge in Order to Keep Serving the Billionaire Class

• Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator who has caused jaws to drop by promoting Covid vaccine skepticism while at the same time suggesting that gargling with mouthwash might help beat the virus, is running for reelection after pledging to quit at the end of his current term.

=> ↺ How the Left Alienates Jews

• Eons ago—in 2019—Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Bob Bland stepped down from their leadership positions on the Women’s March board after a series of self-inflicted wounds. Aside from the widespread mismanagement that starved state chapters of funding and alienated them over trademark wars, the leadership’s failure to grapple with its own anti-Semitism (i.e. cozying up to Louis Farrakhan then offering the weakest possible denunciation of his racist, homophobic vitriol under the guise of intersectionality) exposed a gaping ignorance that many, especially Jewish women, simply could not abide.1

=> ↺ Five Starbucks Locations Have Filed to Unionize Over the Past Six Days

=> ↺ Republicans in 5 States Forged Electoral College Documents, MSNBC Host Says

=> ↺ When Under Pressure, Tories Go “Anti-Woke”

• For one of the richest countries in the world— and one that is much less populated than US, Brazil, India, Russia, and Mexico— these numbers make dismal reading.

• The pressure caused by the Omicron variant on hospitals is not so much on the uptake of ICU beds (it causes less serious illness than preceding variants), but because so many staff are sick and unable to work as a result of the much more contagious Omicron variant.

=> ↺ Progressives to Clinton and Other Corporate Democrats: ‘Back Off’ on Election Advice

• Progressives on Wednesday dismissed arguments from corporate Democrats that the party should avoid “going too far left”—despite mounting evidence that voters are in desperate need of—and demanding—bold, far-reaching policies and social programs.

• An article published Wednesday at The Hill quoted a recent NBC News interview with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to former President Donald Trump.

=> ↺ AIPAC Goes PAC and SuperPAC to Cover its Tracks as it Targets Progressives

• The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading organization of the Israel lobby in the United States, launched two political action committees (PACs) last month in a move largely seen as an attempt to retain control amid a political climate becoming increasingly more critical of Israel.

=> ↺ Timeline of Filibuster Helps Explain Why So Many Say It Now Needs to Go

• A new timeline documenting the history of the Senate filibuster shows how the rule, which now requires a 60-vote supermajority to advance most legislation, has been used to protect ruling-class interests for over two centuries and makes the case that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on reforming it.

• “The Senate MUST end the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation. Our democracy depends on it.”

=> ↺ What’s Not to Like About Ike

• Although the 50s were generally a somnambulant era, there were seismic forces below and above the surface that would explode in the decade of the 1960s. The 50s weren’t as staid as they seemed, with a mass movement for civil rights that accompanied Brown V. Board of Education and the Birmingham bus boycott. Closer to home, and unknown to me, or to the vast majority of others, were the ongoing nonviolent protests at the nuclear submarine base and manufacturing facility in New London, Connecticut. There were people going to federal prison during that time, including women, who far outpaced the nascent feminist movement in radicalism and nonviolence. The peace collective that protested in New London was located in nearby Voluntown, Connecticut, which would become the scene of a violent encounter from an armed right-wing group. How much do times actually change?

• The late David Halberstam’s The Fifties  (1993) is a good place to start for a sweeping view of the decade of the 1950s and the change it presaged.

=> ↺ Opinion | Biden Is Calling for Urgent Action on Voting Rights—Will Congress Listen?

• President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hometown, focused national attention on a somber fact: the legacy of the civil rights movement is threatened by recent and ongoing attacks on voting rights.

=> ↺ ‘Victory’: Ohio Supreme Court Strikes Down GOP Partisan Gerrymandering

• Democracy defenders on Wednesday cheered a ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court that invalidated Republican-drawn state legislative district maps, which a majority of the justices found were unconstitutionally gerrymandered against the will of the state’s voters.

• “The General Assembly maps entrenched a GOP supermajority and flouted clear partisan fairness requirements in the Ohio constitution.”

=> ↺ Statues Down!

=> ↺ Although Democrats May Benefit From Redistricting, Midterm Outlook Remains Grim

=> ↺ Lani Guinier Taught Me Almost Everything I Know About Voting Rights

• Harvard Law professor and icon Lani Guinier passed away on Friday at the age of 71. When I heard the news, I was reminded of a line from Macbeth: “She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word”—not because I’m a budding authoritarian, but because the line reflects a sadness that grief over a momentous passing must be tabled due to an upcoming battle.

=> ↺ Activists Say Greed, Neglect Are to Blame for Bronx Fire That Killed 17 People

=> ↺ As Officials Blame Tenants After 17 Die in Bronx Fire, Activists Say Greed & Neglect Are to Blame

• A massive fire in an apartment building in the Bronx, New York, killed 17 people, including eight children, on Sunday. The city is blaming the fire on a malfunctioning space heater. Housing advocates say the real issue is the lack of safe, affordable public housing, citing lack of heat provided by the building during subzero winter temperatures and poor fire safety systems. Tenants and activists note one of the building’s co-owners is a member of Mayor Eric Adams’s transition team, and are demanding an extension to the eviction moratorium set to expire on January 15. “All of them are really asking for accountability, not just from the state and city agencies but first and foremost from their landlord and the building owners,” says reporter Claudia Irizarry Aponte, who covers the Bronx for the nonprofit newsroom The City.

=> ↺ Joe Biden Delivers the Speech, and the Fire, on Voting Rights He Should Have Brought Last July

• “I’m tired of being quiet!” President Joe Biden told a crowd at Atlanta University Center, which unites the city’s four historically Black universities, on Tuesday afternoon, in a speech that was supposed to represent Democrats’ new push for federal voting rights legislation. It raised the question: Who’s been keeping him quiet on voting rights?

=> ↺ Biden Backs Filibuster Reform to Pass Voting Rights Bills After Sustained Grassroots Pressure

• We go to Atlanta, Georgia, where President Biden and Vice President Harris spoke on Tuesday to pressure Congress to pass critical voting rights legislation. Biden endorsed changing the Senate rules to prevent a minority of senators from filibustering the bills. We speak to two leaders in the voting rights movement about the importance of passing the bills, particularly for people of color. “Right now 40 senators can stop 100 senators from having a vote, and that is absolutely unheard of anywhere else in our democracy,” says Ben Jealous, who attended Biden’s speech and is president of People for the American Way and former president of the NAACP. Biden should prioritize voting rights and “follow up the speech yesterday with actions,” says Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, who boycotted Biden’s address.

=> ↺ Nigeria lifts its ban on Twitter after 7 months

• The Nigerian government has lifted its ban on Twitter in the West African country, seven months after the country’s more than 200 million people were shut out of the social media network.

• Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari directed that Twitter’s operations will resume in the country on Thursday, according to the director-general of the country’s National Information Technology Development Agency. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi said that was only after Twitter agreed to meet some conditions, including opening an office in Nigeria.

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Fact-checkers urge YouTube to fight disinformation

• Videos containing false information had gone “under the radar of YouTube’s policies, especially in non-English speaking countries”, they said in an open letter to YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Rachel Riley Libel Ruling is the Latest Judicial Attack on Political Speech

• Assaults on the right to speak, and to think, are coming thick and fast. But the significance – and coordination – of all these developments is being largely missed.

=> ↺ Content Moderation Case Study: Facebook Knew About Deceptive Advertising Practices By A Group That Was Later Banned For Operating A Troll Farm (2018-2020)

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Florida GOP Bill Proposes ‘Cruel and Dangerous’ 15-Week Abortion Ban

• Progressives on Wednesday condemned a bill introduced in Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature that would ban abortions after 15 weeks—with no exceptions for incest or rape—as the latest salvo in Republicans’ nationwide attack on reproductive rights.

• “There is nothing ‘reasonable’ with controlling decisions about my pregnancy.”

=> ↺ New Illinois Law Says Cops Need A Warrant To Grab Data From (Some) Third Parties

• The state of Illinois continues to provide more protection than the US Constitution. Its privacy laws exceed what has been determined to be “reasonable” violations of privacy by decades of court precedent. This has allowed it to go after companies for violating state laws, even when the collections being prosecuted would likely be legal under the Supreme Court-created “Third Party Doctrine.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Remembering Dr. King’s Message of Hope in These Dark Times

• 2022 has begun with melancholy, as our country sees the pandemic reach new heights. Meanwhile our crises of climate, democracy, and inequality seem more entrenched than ever.

=> ↺ The Re-Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

• A year to the day before he was assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titled Beyond Vietnam:  A Time to Break Silence to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City.  In doing so, King uttered the following prescient statement.

• The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. … In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.  … I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.  We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.  When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

=> ↺ Child Porn Probe of Billionaire Businessman Denny Sanford Continues at State and Federal Level, Court Records Show — ProPublica

• Federal and state authorities are still actively investigating billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography, according to new court records.

• In 2020, ProPublica first reported that South Dakota authorities had started investigating the state’s richest man and had referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice. But it was not clear what the DOJ did with the referral or whether state investigators were still pursuing the case.

=> ↺ Yazidis Laud France, Sweden for Launching Joint Probe to Prosecute IS Fighters

• The two European countries formed a joint investigation team last week to look into crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against Yazidis by foreign militants linked to IS during the group’s ruthless rule over parts of Iraq and Syria.

• French and Swedish investigation efforts are being coordinated by the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust). The group said the joint team seeks to organize those efforts and enable information and evidence to be shared more effectively.

=> ↺ A year on, has Trump benefited from a Twitter ban?

• In theory Mr Trump will be allowed back onto Facebook in a year’s time, on 7 January 2023 to be exact.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Politely Tells ISPs To Stop Abusing Covid Broadband Relief Program To Rip Off Poor People

• During the COVID crisis the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), which gives lower income Americans a $50 ($75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gives money to ISPs (not exactly ideal given the industry’s history of fraud), which then dole out discounts to users if they qualify. But (surprise), many found that big ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very on brand.

=> ↺ Internet Shutdown Rules: Gauhati HC on IFF’s application

• IFF filed an intervention application in proceedings challenging the constitutionality of the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 issued under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. These rules empower the Union and State Governments to suspend internet services. But these rules stand on a tenuous legal footing – they confer unbridled powers to governments, and they are beyond the scope, ambit and intent of Sections 5(2) and 7 of the Telegraph Act. On 23rd December 2021, the Gauhati High Court has agreed to hear our application after listening to submissions from our counsel, Mr Anubhab Atreya.

• [...]

• In June 2020, IFF filed an intervention application in the proceedings initiated by Mr Bhuyan, to assist the Gauhati High Court in determining the constitutionality of the 2017 Rules. In the intervention application, we pointed out, firstly, that the constitutional validity of the 2017 Rules has not been considered by the courts. In fact, the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637 interpreted the 2017 Rules but stated that it was not concerned with its constitutionality since the parties therein had not canvassed arguments on the same (Paragraph 84).

• Secondly, we provided details regarding IFF and stated that one of the core objectives of IFF was to advocate and defend freedom of speech and expression, and access to information in the digital era. We also listed the cases where IFF had provided legal assistance to other individuals/organizations and those where IFF had previously intervened. We provided these details to the Gauhati High Court to demonstrate that IFF has long-standing expertise in freedom of speech, and has responsibly engaged with authorities on the issue of internet shutdowns.

Monopolies

=> ↺ ‘Major Win’: Judge Says Suit to Break Up Facebook Empire Can Proceed

• A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission’s revised antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, can move forward—a potentially significant blow to the social media empire, which sought to have the case dismissed.

• In an amended complaint filed last August, the FTC provided additional data and stronger details to back up its allegations that Facebook has maintained a monopoly on social networking services for the past decade by “illegally acquiring innovative competitors and burying successful app developers.”

=> ↺ FTC’s Second Antitrust Attempt Against Facebook Gets Past The First Hurdle

• As you’ll recall, at the end of 2020, the FTC filed an antitrust case against Facebook. Last summer, the district court dismissed the case, noting that the complaint was “legally insufficient,” and didn’t really back up its central claims. Based on that, the FTC went back to the drawing board and filed an amended complaint last August. As we noted, the amended complaint was better than the first one — which was heavy on narrative, but little on support to back it up. The amended complaint had more in it, though we still felt that the market definition was odd, and some of the complaint seemed to undermine other parts of it.

=> ↺ The World Handled A ‘Wordle’ Ripoff Just Fine Without Any IP Action

• In the video game space, it has become commonplace to see creators freak out over “rip-offs” and “clones” of their games when the targets of their ire are actually not rip-offs or clones at all. This typically comes down to the all to common confusion over whether you can own or protect ideas versus specific expression. Typically in these stories, it turns out someone is complaining that they’re seeing a similar idea in other games, whether it’s first person shooters that share common features, the explosion of battle royale games, or even just artwork.

=> ↺ Facebook Objection Dismissed, Glo Fiber Expanding, Utopia’s Timmerman Advocates Gigi Sohn

• Facebook’s attempts to convince the court to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s anticompetition case against it have been rejected by D.C. District Court Judge James Boasberg, which advocacy group Public Knowledge said in a Tuesday press release is “great news.”

• Facebook, now called Meta, filed a complaint in October asking the court to dismiss the case that alleges the company is a monopoly power that controls over 60 percent of the “person social networking services” market. But the court effectively ruled that there is evidence that can move the case forward against the company.

=> ↺ Judge says the FTC’s Meta monopoly lawsuit can go forward

• The FTC suit against Meta is one of several US government efforts to curtail the monopoly power of major tech companies, including a Department of Justice lawsuit against Google proceeding under antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter.

Copyrights

=> ↺ GitHub Takes Down “Widevine Dump” Forks Following MPA Complaint

• The Motion Picture Association has asked GitHub to remove a collection of scripts that allow people to rip content from popular streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. The tools in question bypass the Widevine copy protection, violating the DMCA, the group argues. Hundreds of forks of the “Widevine Dump” code were also targeted and removed by GitHub.

=> ↺ PrimeWire Down: Streaming Site Prepares To Counter Domain Seizures

• After being targeted in a lawsuit filed by Hollywood and Netflix, pirate streaming site PrimeWire appears to be digging in for the long haul. In preparation for imminent domain seizures, the site is now advertising a new service that will provide up-to-date information on where the official platform can be accessed in the future.

=> ↺ Open Minds Podcast: Hessel van Oorschot of Tribe of Noise & Free Music Archive

• In this episode, CC’s Ony Anukem sits down for a conversation with Hessel van Oorschot, founder and “Chief of Noise” of the online music business Tribe of Noise. Tribe of Noise is a music community that connects artists, fans, and professionals. Founded in 2008 in The Netherlands, its main objective is to create fair and sustainable business opportunities for talented artists. 

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