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● 05.31.22

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● Links 31/05/2022: NixOS 22.05 and Firefox 101 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 2:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Late Night Linux – Episode 179 – Late Night Linux

• FOSS alternatives to TeamViewer and Plex, Alexa automation made easy, Thunderbird is in great health, plus your feedback about all sorts including an amazing weird Linux installation.

=> ↺ How to install Toontown Rewritten on Debian 11 – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on Debian 11.

=> ↺ Is The Unix Philosophy Still Important? – Invidious

• Today’s video topic is “The Unix Philosophy”. I often get asked about my thoughts on The Unix Philosophy, or what I think about certain pieces of software that violate the philosophy. Well, I’ve some mixed feelings on this.

=> ↺ Did You Mean A Simple CLI Spell Checker Worth Using – Invidious

• My spelling continues to be terrible but luckily there are a bunch of cli spell checkers out there to help me out, today we’re looking at did you mean which gets rid of all the fancy stuff a spell checker doesn’t really need and strips it down to the basics.

Applications

=> ↺ EDDI is an open source chatbot platform for developer

• EDDI the answer to workflow and communication optimization through artificial intelligence.

• EDDI (Enhanced Dialog Driven Intelligence)is an open source chatbot platform to create, run and maintain multiple customizable virtual assistant. Labs.ai, the company behind EDDI, developed it and started shipping it by default since 2018.

• EDDI is important for developers who need chatbot in their apps, and basically anyone who wants to get free chatbot without having to deal with licensing issues (No attribution required).

• EDDI is an open source chatbot development platform for developers by developers. It is essential to know that this platform is developed in java and provided with Docker, orchestrated with Kubernetes.

• This is where EDDI comes into picture. It is an open source chatbots developer platform for conversational Artificial Intelligent.

• [...]

• It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and works on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install Googler on Ubuntu 22.04 & Linux Mint 20

• Googler is the command-line tool of Google and is used to go to the different URLs and also to browse news, and open different videos. It is a powerful and open-source tool to make Google searches, and moreover, it is dependent on Python, so make sure that the latest version of Python is installed on your operating system before installing Googler.

• In this write-up, we will discover different methods to install Googler on Ubuntu as well as on Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to Upgrade From RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 (Step by Step)

• Red Hat announced the General Availability of RHEL 9 on 17th May 2022. This is the latest release of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and it comes with numerous features and enhancements.

• Notable highlights include:

=> ↺ How to install Sonic Battle JUS Mugen V2 on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Battle JUS Mugen V2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ How to Install Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04

• Memcached is a memory object caching system specifically designed to enhance the speed of dynamic web applications by reducing the load of the database server. If we explain the usage of Memcached in simple words, it helps you to take the memory from the part of your system where it is unnecessary and assign it to that part of the memory where more memory is needed. In this way, mostly your web servers have not to deal with the cache, most developers dedicated the separate machines to deal with the cache. In this guide, two different methods of the installation of Memcached have been discussed in detail, along with its basic configuration on Ubuntu.

=> ↺ How To Install Jenkins on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jenkins on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Jenkins is an open-source automation server that automates the repetitive technical tasks involved in the continuous integration and delivery of software. Jenkins is easy to install and Java-based, moreover, it can be configured easily by using the web interface.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Jenkins on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

=> ↺ How to Install Sendmail on Ubuntu 22.04

• How to install Sendmail on Ubuntu 22.04 and configure it for sending emails using a email server which routes or relays the mail delivery.

• Sendmail is a opensource Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) which is used to route email using server or by using shell commands. You can also configure SMTP using Sendmail.

=> ↺ How To Install Nginx on AlmaLinux 9 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx (pronounced “engine-X”) is the most popular web server due to its performance and ease of use. It’s a free and open-source high-performance HTTP server. In addition to its web server capabilities, Nginx can also function as a reverse proxy and load balancer.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Nginx web server on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

=> ↺ How to Change Folder Color in Ubuntu 22.04

• The colors in life, either in nature or in front of the computer screen, have a great effect on the human mind as they can change the mood from dull to energetic and also from energetic to dull. If you are an Ubuntu user, then you can observe the default color of the folder icons present in different directories is blackish or sometimes purple color, as shown in the image below…

=> ↺ How to Install PeaZip on Ubuntu 22.04

• PeaZip is a very lightweight and easy-to-use archiving utility. You can also join or split files into chunks, find duplicate files, and make them secure as well by using a password. This is cross-platform software, which means that it’s available for different operating systems, but in this article, we are going to teach you how you can use it on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ How to Install Apache OpenOffice on Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux Mint 20

• Apache OpenOffice is an open-source office suite that is used for personal and business purposes to make reports, documents, and presentations. It is available for different operating systems. It is designed in Java and C++, so these languages should be considered the dependencies of the Apache OpenOffice.

• In this guide, we will discover the installation procedure of the Apache OpenSource on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ How to enable the EPEL repository in CentOS 9 Stream

• Hello, friends. Let’s go with a short post and dedicated to novice users. In this post, you will learn how to enable the EPEL repository in CentOS 9 Stream. Thanks to this repository, we will be able to install many more packages in this distribution.

Games

=> ↺ SCS put the Heart of Russia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 on hold for now

• SCS Software have put out a statement about the Heart of Russia upcoming DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and they’ve decided not to release it. With the ongoing barbaric invasion of Ukraine from Russia, it’s not exactly surprising that releasing a DLC expansion for a game that’s focused on Russia might cause problems.

=> ↺ Indie classic Super Hexagon gets a big free Neo update out now

• Super Hexagon, a true indie gem classic from Terry Cavanagh has a big update out now and it has also become Steam Deck Verified with it. Previously available in Beta, it’s now in the Stable branch for all players.

=> ↺ The QuickLaunch plugin for the Steam Deck is a great time-saver

• With the Steam Deck you can install various third-party games and applications in desktop mode. However, it’s a bit annoying adding them all to Steam and so the QuickLaunch plugin can save you some time.

=> ↺ Survival game Rust might be playable properly on Linux and Steam Deck soon

• Rust, the massively popular and quite brutal survival game from Facepunch Studios is working towards Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Steam Deck with Proton.

=> ↺ Visual novel dating sim Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers is out now

• One for the fans of dating sims and visual novels, as Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers the follow-up to 2019′s Arcade Spirits that was pretty good is out now. The developer has continued their Native Linux support too which is great to see.

=> ↺ Heroic Games Launcher gets more Steam Deck and Flatpak improvements

• Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games and GOG on Linux and Steam Deck has a new update out, mostly focused on cleaning up some problems but also sprinkles in some new features like a command-line interface.

=> ↺ Crazy rogue-lite ‘Wally and the FANTASTIC PREDATORS’ adds Linux support

• Up for trying out a new rogue-lite that looks completely bizarre? Wally and the FANTASTIC PREDATORS looks pretty hilarious and now it has Native Linux support.

=> ↺ Cute physics-based tank battler ‘Toy Tanks’ adds Linux support

• Love the style of this one, Toy Tanks is a physics-based tank battler with a campaign mode and player versus player combat. Originally released earlier in May, the developer has now put up a Native Linux version.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Evince, Flatpak, and GTK print previews – Will Thompson and the Blog of Atlantis

• Endless OS is distributed as an immutable OSTree snapshot, with apps added & removed with Flatpak (and podman for power users & developers). Although the snapshot is assembled from Debian packages, it’s not really possible to install additional system packages locally, nor to remove them. Over time, we have tried to remove as many apps out of the immutable OS as possible: Flatpak apps are sandboxed and can be updated at a faster cadence than the OS itself, or removed if not needed.

• Evince is one such app built into the OS at present. As a PDF viewer, it handles untrusted input in a complex format with libraries that have historically contained vulnerabilities, so is a good candidate for sandboxing. While exploring removing it from the OS in favour of the Flatpak version from Flathub, I learned some things that were non-obvious to me about print preview, and which prevented making this change at the time.

• Caveats: the notes below are a simplification, but I believe they are broadly accurate for GNOME on Linux. I’m sure people more familiar with GTK and/or printing already know everything here.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ NixOS 22.05 Is Out with GNOME 42.1, Calamares Graphical Installer, and Linux 5.15 LTS

• Dubbed “Quokka”, NixOS 22.05 comes six months after NixOS 21.11 and introduces Nix 2.8 as the default nix package management system, which includes lots of changes, improvements, and increased performance, as well as the so-called “flakes” experimental features that you can read all about here.

• Another cool new feature of the NixOS 22.05 release is the implementation of the Calamares universal installer to help newcomers who want to install NixOS on their personal computers. The installer starts automatically when launching the GNOME or KDE Plasma ISO images and allows for a one-time configuration of a new system.

=> ↺ NixOS 22.05 released

• Hey everyone, I’m Janne Heß, the release manager for 22.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”.

BSD

=> ↺ Installing pfSense 2.6 on ZimaBoard

• I backed the ZimaBoard Single Board Server project on Kickstarter in early 2021, a couple of months ago it finally arrived and the first project on the todo list was to try this as a replacement for my overkill pfSense server (Dell R210 II Server) which consumed ~100W compared to ~6W of the Zimabaord, a cost reduction of over £200 per year in electricity costs too. The ZimaBoard comes pre-installed with Casa OS on the onboard 32GB eMMC storage, but that can be overwritten with whatever software we want.

• When I backed the project, I also bought an extra NIC as I needed 3 connections if I was going to have a backup WAN link, however, there isn’t a way to mount the PCIe Network Card into the ZimaBoard and keep it secured. The usual riser bracket also has to be removed as it would otherwise foul the case.

• Note: This isn’t the setup I finally ended up running, but this is the journey I went on.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Amber Heard, Junior Female Developers & Debian Embezzlement

• The latest phase of the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp saga is a defamation trial in the United States. Heard falsely accused Depp of pushing his ex-girlfriend down the stairs. The ex-girlfriend, Kate Moss, joined the trial by video link to tell the world that she actually fell. In other words, Heard had tried to deceive the court and public opinion.

• Lies like that belong in Molly de Blanc’s infamous whisper network. Maybe Heard can volunteer to join the Debian anti-harassment team?

• Nonetheless, the Heard/Depp trial demonstrates the foolishness of going to court. Debian is spending vast sums of money on a greedy London lawyer to pursue a malicious claim at WIPO. Today we expose another one of the lies in their legal documents.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Advantech MIC-770 V2 Certified on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ensure Reliable AIoT Applications

• Advantech, a leading global provider of intelligent systems and industrial edge computers, is excited to announce that its MIC-770 V2 modular fanless edge IPC is certified on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. MIC-770-V2 is powered by a 10th generation Intel® Xeon®/Core™ i socket-type (LGA1200) processor with Intel® W480E chipset, offering excellent computing performance and flexible expandability using MIC i-Modules and Advantech iDoor modules, which are the best choice for machine automation and AIoT applications in diversified scenarios. With the Certification of Ubuntu 20.04, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, guarantees both 5-years of maintenance updates and extended security maintenance (ESM). This delivers a stable and secure IoT platform for AI applications and edge computing to enterprises.

• MIC-770 V2 – Secure Intelligent Systems for AIoT Applications with Ubuntu 20.04

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 737

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 737

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 737 for the week of May 22 – 28, 2022.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Forlinx OKMX6ULL-C SBC powered by i.MX 6ULL processor from NXP

• Forlinx recently released the OKMX6ULL-C which is a Single Board Computer (SBC) that is compatible with their NXP based FETMX6ULL-C System on Module (SoM). The SoM features a i.MX 6ULL that contains a Cortex-A7 with a frequency of 800MHz, 512MB DDR3 and 8GB for eMMC storage.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ LINMOB.net – Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (21/2022): More work on the PinePhone Pro camera, including a test app by megi plus KDE Eco and GSoC news

• Crickets, tumbleweeds, … just listen to the new episode of the postmarketOS podcast!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox 101 Released with Only Minor Changes – OMG! Ubuntu!

• With celebrations for its centenary release now done and dusted it’s back to basics for the Firefox development team.

• Releasing May 31, 2022 is Mozilla Firefox 101, a stable release update carrying a couple of minor new features plus a bunch of bug and security fixes.

• First up, accessibility. Firefox 101 adds supports the prefers-contrast media query. This allows web sites to discern if a user has asked for web content to be presented with a higher (or lower) contrast than default. Ground breaking it isn’t, but welcome it is.

Programming/Development

Python

=> ↺ How to read tab-separated values (TSV) files in Python

• To read tab-separated values files with Python, we’ll take advantage of the fact that they’re similar to CSVs. We’ll use Python’s csv library and tell it to split things up with tabs instead of commas. Just set the delimiter argument to “\t”.

=> ↺ Debugging a mysterious Python crash

• I recently wanted to prepare a Jupyter notebook with some example code and ran into an interesting problem: trying to display a Matplotlib chart made the IPython kernel crash.

Leftovers

=> ↺ The Things They Didn’t Carry

• Knuckles and Kelsch pop smoke, guide the birds in, enlist men to offload and break down the supplies the choppers have brought to us. Grunts with sleek machetes cut the metal cords from a pile of large cartons, dump out dozens of smaller ones. In a muted frenzy, the company swarms over the boxes in the hunt for the best C-ration meals.

• Each box contains a complete lunch or dinner packed in green tin cans with the contents of each stenciled in black. There is a main course, a can of fruit or tinned cake, flat chocolate disks. There are packets of salt and pepper, a plastic spoon, a small can opening device. Finally, there are five cigarettes in a slender pack, a napkin, and toilet paper. The dread Ham and beans are detested. Beans and franks are prized. Like an army of ants, we rifle through dozens of boxes, dump out their contents, quickly carry our trophies away.

=> ↺ Using A Laser Cutter To Replicate An Optical Comparator Screen

• Precision instruments often contain specialized components that are essential to their function, but nearly impossible to replace if they fail. [Andre] had just such a problem with an optical comparator, which is an instrument typically used in machine shops to help check the tolerances of a finished part. It does this by projecting a magnified picture of an object onto a glass screen with markings showing angles and distances.

=> ↺ Check Your Mailbox Using The AirTag Infrastructure

• When a company creates an infrastructure of devices, we sometimes subvert this infrastructure and use it to solve tricky problems. For example, here’s a question that many a hacker has pondered – how do you detect when someone puts mail into your mailbox? Depending on the availability of power and wireless/wired connectivity options, this problem can range from “very easy” to “impractical to solve”. [dakhnod] just made this problem trivial for the vast majority of hackers, with the FakeTag project – piggybacking off the Apple’s AirTag infrastructure.

=> ↺ critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (4)

• the last volume, published in 1981, is a reflection on how everyday life has changed since the first two volumes. it’s lefebvre’s reflection on what he sees as a failure of revolutionary potential in the twentieth century, so it’s a bit less hopeful and energized than the previous volumes, but it’s not a totally pessimistic diagnosis either.

=> ↺ Un-Amending the Deuce Our Forefathers Dropped

• Like it’s some kind of dance craze akin to the twist that we can’t shake.

• The MSM breaks news like an old man breaking wind and we salivate at the mixed metaphor bell. We get to our little social media niche and just type away our opines — liking and snarking our ways toward temporary relief of our overwrought feelings about. Anything.

=> ↺ CBO Joins Team Transitory

Science

=> ↺ Blind cave creatures light the way with DNA

• In watery underground caverns, there are creatures that live in an eternal midnight. Over the course of generations, these animals have adapted to their isolated and unique environments, and scientists believe their pasty skin and blind eyes may hold secrets to evolution –– and to genetic adaptations that could cast light on longevity, surviving starvation, and eye diseases in humans.

Education

=> ↺ Students are Often Segregated Within the Same Schools

• From 2007 to 2014, we tracked all North Carolina public school students statewide, from third through eighth grades, observing how the students were grouped into math and English language arts classes by each school’s process for creating class groups.

• We used course enrollment data to figure out how many students in each classroom were from families whose incomes are at or below 185% of the federal poverty threshold – and how many were not. We found that those economically disadvantaged students were increasingly likely to be concentrated in a subset of classrooms rather than spread out relatively evenly throughout the school.

Hardware

=> ↺ U.S. Retakes Top Spot in Supercomputer Race

• Frontier, the name of the massive machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was declared on Monday to be the first to demonstrate performance of one quintillion operations per second — a billion billion calculations — in a set of standard tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy several years ago pledged $1.8 billion to build three systems with that “exascale” performance, as scientists call it.

• But the crown has a caveat. Some experts believe that Frontier has been beaten in the exascale race by two systems in China. Operators of those systems have not submitted test results for evaluation by scientists who oversee the so-called Top500 ranking. Experts said they suspected that tensions between the United States and China may be the reason the Chinese have not submitted the test results.

=> ↺ California Right to Repair bill dies in Senate Committee

• The California Senate Appropriations committee failed to pass Sen. Susan Eggman’s (Stockton) Right to Repair bill, SB 983, Thursday, which would have significantly expanded Californians’ access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances.

• This was the furthest any Right to Repair bill for consumer electronics has come to becoming law. The policy had broad, bipartisan support, with 75% of Californians and majorities of both parties supporting Right to Repair. The bill, which passed through the judiciary committee with only a single opposing vote, met the same fate as a similarly popular medical Right to Repair bill that Sen. Eggman introduced in 2021.

=> ↺ Podcasting “Apple’s Cement Overshoes”

• Apple leads the anti-repair axis, which is weird, considering the company’s origins. The Apple ][+ gave rise to a generation of hardware hackers because it shipped with Steve Wozniak’s gorgeous hardware schematics, inviting tinkerers to extend, modify and fix their machines.

• But there is such a powerful temptation to break repair. A desktop computer only needs replacement when it goes obsolete – unlike a laptop or a phone or a smart-watch, your iMac is unlikely to suffer a cracked screen, get run over by a bus, get dropped in a toilet, or fall down a sewer-grate. The migration of computers from our desks to our backpacks, pockets and wrists is potentially wildly profitable. Not only do the damages from portability let manufacturers charge a fortune for repairs, but it lets them entice or coerce their customers into upgrading, rather than fixing, their gadgets.

• Apple isn’t particularly subtle about why it fights independent repair. CEO Tim Cook started 2019 with his annual shareholder letter, in which he warned his investors that Apple’s profits were threatened by customers who stubbornly chose to get their old gadgets fixed rather than trading them into Apple for replacements: [...]

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Why America spends so little on research into gun violence

• In 2021 the federal government gave $19m to researchers. But that sum is still relatively tiny. For every death caused by firearms, researchers received around $420 of funding last year. Drug dependency received $16,000 of funding per life lost, or 38 times more. Of America’s 20 leading causes of death, only research into falls receives less federal support than gun violence.

=> ↺ Frustrated with delays, doctors take aim at prior authorization

• Doctors have long asserted that prior authorization — the need to get approval from the patient’s insurer before proceeding with treatment — causes delays that can hurt patient care. In an American Medical Association survey conducted in December 2021, one-third of physicians reported that such delays have caused at least one of their patients to experience a serious problem, such as hospitalization, the development of a birth defect, disability, and even death. In that same survey, more than 80 percent of surveyed doctors said patients at least sometimes abandon their recommended treatment because of prior authorization hassles. Just over half of the physicians who treat adult patients in the workforce said prior authorization has interfered with patients’ ability to do their jobs.

Security

=> ↺ Your cloud? My cloud now

• A true story on taking over a client’s Azure tenant via a successful phish.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ A bottom-up approach to making differential privacy ubiquitous

• OK, now we’re seeing something… It’s not much, though. We’re still at a stage where I can list all public deployments of differential privacy in a single blog post

=> ↺ Privacy in the resilient state of human condition – Wojciech Wiewiórowski

• In our papers and conferences, we talk a lot about enforcement; about the powers of data protection authorities; about the impact of data transfers on current business models; about the use of algorithms in innovation. But, sometimes we get caught up in this noise. Sometimes we lose sight of what we are fundamentally protecting at the end of the day: the rights of people.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Russian oil: EU agrees compromise deal on banning imports

• Because of this, the immediate sanctions will affect only Russian oil being transported into the EU over sea – two-thirds of the total imported from Russia.

=> ↺ E.U. leaders agree to ban 90 percent of Russian oil by year-end

• EU Council President Charles Michel said the agreement covers more than two-thirds of oil imports from Russia. Ursula Von der Leyen, the head of the EU’s executive branch, said the punitive move will “effectively cut around 90 percent of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year.”

=> ↺ Will Indonesia Repeat the History of Population Mobility in Borneo?

• The Indonesian government declares transmigration as one of the population distribution policy instruments. Transmigration is regarded as one of the instruments of government policy that can help promote public welfare. Transmigration is another kind of population integration required to support national development. History recounts that transmigration in Indonesia began with the Dutch occupation, specifically during the situation of Indonesian politics in 1905. The government’s worry prompted the start of transmigration in Indonesia. The Dutch colonials observed the island of Java’s high population density.

• During the New Order era, Kalimantan was the site of a massive project known as “transmigration.” This project aimed to relocate people from overpopulated islands in order to balance demographic development. Java, Indonesia’s main island, was home to more than 70% of the country’s population. Over the course of two decades, 170 million people from Java, Madura, Lombok, and Bali were relocated. Transmigration has a long history; it began in 1950, replicating a Dutch colonial government program, and was later continued by the Indonesian government after 1945, the year of independence. Previously, transmigration served three purposes: (1) to relocate millions of people from the most densely populated islands such as Java, Bali, and Madura to less densely populated islands, (2) to alleviate poverty by providing land and employment opportunities for Indonesians, and (3) to find other resources in those less densely populated islands. However, this program appears to be a failure. The findings are also supported by the report from Forest Peoples Programme which stated that the transmigration process in the “outer islands,” particularly in Kalimantan, has triggered conflict between transmigrants and indigenous people. The native or indigenous people claimed that the national government provides them with limited access, in contrast to the transmigrants. On the other hand, indigenous people appear to have lacked the adequate infrastructure to support their lives (such as roads, health facilities, schools, etc). On the other hand, land ownership status became very important because indigenous people felt that their indigenous government did not give them their rights and land certificate despite having legal evidence of their land. More than 60% of Kalimantan’s rainforests have been cut down for the transmigration program, causing indigenous people to lose their homes and food sources. Without a doubt, the goal of transmigration threatens the lives of indigenous people. Transmigration enabled landless peasants and homeless people from urban Java to escape. However, by doing so, they destroyed the forest and contributed to environmental degradation in Kalimantan. It can be assumed that the transmigration program has so far failed to alleviate population pressure and poverty in Java. There is opposition to the transmigration program because indigenous people believe it violates their rights. According to the migrants, the transmigration program was only about political tools and power.

=> ↺ We Need “Gun Control” at the Pentagon

=> ↺ Opinion | The US Is Sick With Guns

• It’s difficult to find the words that adequately describe our feelings on first learning of the massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Texas last week. There was shock, fear, even nausea, and then disgust at the realization that this nightmare we’ve experienced too many times before was playing out again.

=> ↺ Opinion | US Gun Violence: ‘Why Does This Only Happen in Your Country?’

• This weekend in Houston, Texas, days after the nation’s deadliest school shooting in a decade, the National Rifle Association shows no signs of halting its first convention since the pandemic.

=> ↺ Violence of Settler Colonialism Stretches Across Generations of Native Families

=> ↺ Third accident in three years: Hermes 900 becomes a crash drone

• An Elbit drone has crashed in the Philippines. In Israel, the manufacturer received the world’s only permission to fly in civil airspace, despite similar incidents. Soon Switzerland will follow.

=> ↺ Violence in America: It’s Not Just About Guns

• The police paid little attention initially because the first person to be seriously wounded was a young black male in Columbia Heights. The police dismissed this as a “normal” crime for the area, stemming from disputes over control of the local drugs trade.

• Only when the killer started shooting people in the leafy streets of Mount Pleasant did the police move massively but ineffectually to try to find him – or so they said, though I never saw many police where I lived.

=> ↺ Crowd Booed Gov. Greg Abbott When He Arrived at Uvalde Memorial Site

=> ↺ ‘We Need Change, Governor!’ Abbott Booed at Uvalde Memorial Site

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was met with boos Sunday as he arrived at a memorial site for victims of the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, which sparked a nationwide wave of grief and anger over lawmakers’ persistent—and industry-funded—inaction on gun violence.

• “We need change, governor!” yelled one member of a crowd gathered at Robb Elementary School as Abbott, a Republican who just two days earlier delivered video remarks at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention, arrived at the site.

=> ↺ Memorial Day Salute to a Repentant Ex-Marine

• In its recent front-page series on foreign domination and poverty in Haiti, the New York Times vividly recounted the role of the U.S. Marine Corps in this painful history. The accompanying photos showed Marines, in battle dress, boarding a ship in Philadelphia headed for Port-au-Prince more than a century ago, forming a skirmish line in the jungle, and posing with the bodies of Haitians killed while resisting the U.S. overthrow of their government. As the Times reported, one highlight of this mission was the brazen theft of $500,000 in gold from the Haiti’s national bank and its transfer to the vault of a bank on Wall Street.

• One of the officers who departed from Philadelphia, to help oversee this brutal and murderous occupation was Smedley Darlington Butler, the son of a U.S. Congressman and the product of a wealthy Quaker family from the nearby Main Line town of West Chester. If that name sounds familiar it’s because no critic of the U.S. military has been more frequently quoted, by anti-war veterans, than the “Fighting Quaker,” who became the highest ranking and most decorated among them.

=> ↺ The Second Amendment is No Bar to Gun Regulation

• The Constitution is not an impediment to reasonable gun regulation. The real problems are threefold: The Supreme Court, a lack of political will, and devising policies that will work to address gun violence given the reality of there nearly four hundred legally owned guns in the United States.

• The Original Meaning of the Second Amendment (and why it may not matter)

=> ↺ Beyond Gun Control, We Need Hatred Control

• Does anyone understand this? Even if guns are easily, readily available, why, why, why? I find it impossible even to be angry — it’s hard to be angry under incomprehensible circumstances.

• Instead, I find myself imagining George W. Bush giving a speech in which he condemns the latest horrific murders at . . . but instead of saying Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he blurts out “Iraq.”

=> ↺ Thermobaric Weapons

=> ↺ Opinion | The 900 US Troops in Syria Should Not Be There

• Memorial Day or Decoration Day (referring to the decoration of the graves of soldiers killed in combat) began after the Civil War and has been commemorated since 1868. It is no wonder that the mourning began then. Historian J. David Hacker has estimated that 750,000 troops died in the war, the biggest total for any war in which the US was involved. Nearly 300,000 died in WWII.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Pentagon Is Funding the Same Gunmakers Democrats Want to Regulate

• In response to the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two adults dead, President Biden called for a reckoning. “As a nation, we have to ask, ‘When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said on Tuesday. “When in God’s name do we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

=> ↺ ‘We now have our own Mariupol’ Civilians in Severodonetsk left trapped at the epicenter of the battle for the Donbas

• The city of Severodonetsk is currently at the epicenter of the battle for the Donbas. Ukraine’s troops are trying to hold the line, but according to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russian forces are already entrenched on the eastern outskirts of the city. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Russian strikes had destroyed all of the city’s critical infrastructure, damaged 90 percent of its buildings, and completely destroyed two-thirds of its housing stock. Earlier, Oleksandr Stryuk, the head of Severodonetsk’s military and civil administration, reported that at least 1,500 residents have been killed. In their own words, locals who managed to escape the city describe what life is like for those who stayed behind.

=> ↺ ‘The whole system is collapsing’: Ukrainian captives are being sent to Russia’s ‘chronically’ overcrowded remand prisons, reports Kommersant

• Russia’s already overcrowded remand prisons are struggling to accommodate growing numbers of detainees, due in part to an influx of Ukrainians taken prisoner during the war, the newspaper Kommersant reported on May 30. 

=> ↺ School Principals Plead With Lawmakers: ‘Do Something… Protect Our Students’

• Principals whose schools have directly experienced mass shootings published an open letter Sunday with a desperate message for lawmakers at all levels of government: “Do something. Do anything.”

• “These horrific acts have compelled us to speak out. They compel us to act.”

Environment

=> ↺ Could Google’s Carbon Emissions Have Effectively Doubled Overnight?

• But, according to the new report, these efforts have missed perhaps the most important source of corporate emissions: the money that these companies earn and then store in banks, equities, and bonds. The consortium of environmental groups—the Climate Safe Lending Network, the Outdoor Policy Outfit, and BankFWD—examined corporate financial statements to find out how much cash the world’s biggest companies had on hand, and then calculated how much carbon each dollar sitting in the financial system may have generated. According to these calculations, Google’s carbon emissions, in effect, would have risen a hundred and eleven per cent overnight. Meta’s emissions would have increased by a hundred and twelve per cent, and Apple’s by sixty-four per cent. For Microsoft in 2021, the report claims, “the emissions generated by the company’s $130 billion in cash and investments were comparable to the cumulative emissions generated by the manufacturing, transporting, and use of every Microsoft product in the world.” Amazon, too, has worked to cut emissions; it plans to run its delivery fleet on electric trucks, for instance. But in 2020, the report claims, its “$81 billion in cash and financial investments still generated more carbon emissions than emissions generated by the energy Amazon purchased to power all their facilities across the world—its fulfillment centers, data centers, physical stores.” Also according to the report, in 2021, the annual emissions from Netflix’s cash would have been ten times larger than what was produced by everyone in the world streaming their programming—which is to say, Netflix and heat.

=> ↺ Indigenous Organizers in Alaska Lead the Way Toward Livable Climate Future

Energy

=> ↺ War in Ukraine: Latest developments

• The trophy — a large crystal microphone with the song contest’s logo — nets $900,000 (836,000 euros) after a bidding war won by Ukrainian bitcoin company WhiteBIT

=> ↺ Eurovision Winners Sell Trophy for $900,000 to Buy Drones for Ukraine

• The crystal microphone trophy was auctioned off on Facebook, with the band writing: “You guys are amazing! We appreciate each and every one of you who donated to this auction, and a special thanks to the team (of cryptocurrency exchange) Whitebit who purchased the trophy for $900,000 and are now the rightful owners of our trophy.”

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Chimpanzees have their own language — and scientists just learned how they put “words” together

• Few animals appear to be able to communicate with a range as complex and intricate as humans. Those language skills may exist in a limited capacity in our nearest evolutionary neighbors, the great apes, many of whom have been trained to communicate via sign language by human researchers. Yet while sign language is communicated physically, researchers did not believe that great apes possessed their own comparable, complex spoken language.

• Until now, that is. A new study reveals that chimpanzees — or at least, a group of 46 chimpanzees at Taï National Park in the African country of Côte d’Ivoire — are capable of complex vocalizations far beyond what more pessimistic scientists thought was possible. Their “words” were not like human phonetic words, but a combination of chimpanzee sounds, which generally sound a bit like grunts and chirps to human ears. And the size of the chimp dictionary? Almost 400 words.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ How censoring China’s open-source coders might backfire

• On May 18, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view.

• Later that day, Gitee released a statement explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed, as all open-source code would need to be before being published from then on. The company “didn’t have a choice,” it wrote. Gitee didn’t respond when MIT Technology Review asked why it had made the change, but it is widely assumed that the Chinese government had imposed yet another bit of heavy-handed censorship.

• For the open-source software community in China, which celebrates transparency and global collaboration, the move has come as a shock. Code was supposed to be apolitical. Ultimately, these developers fear, it could discourage people from contributing to open-source projects, and China’s software industry will suffer from the lack of collaboration.

=> ↺ Exit by Jean-Michel Jarre

• This techno track features a spoken-word contribution from whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose revelations about surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency were published in the Guardian. Jean-Michel Jarre asked the UK newspaper to put him in touch with America’s most wanted man and a meeting was set up in Moscow through Snowden’s solicitor, where the recordings took place.

=> ↺ How Illinois Is Winning in the Fight Against Big Tech

• Because the United States lacks meaningful federal privacy protections, states have passed a patchwork of laws that are largely favorable to corporations. By contrast, Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation six years ago, restricting the online collection and sharing of personal data despite a tremendous lobbying push against it by the tech companies.

• The Illinois law’s provision allowing individuals to sue the companies, known as a private right of action, has led to hundreds of lawsuits, to surprising success. Google recently agreed to pay $100 million to settle a lawsuit that it had improperly used Illinois residents’ photos, and the company said it will add new prompts to seek consumers’ consent to group photos together. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, will pay $650 million to settle a similar lawsuit filed in the state, and the video streaming platform TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, agreed to settlement terms over claims that it scanned and used biometric data without consent in Illinois. Snapchat is also facing a class-action lawsuit in the state over its facial recognition practices.

• “People don’t realize how much they’re just giving away to these companies,” Faye Jones, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, said in an interview. “It’s not that difficult for companies to comply with Illinois’s rules.”

=> ↺ Lula Among the People

• So, I send the testimony of this beautiful moment in the neighborhood of my childhood in Recife, when I saw, heard and felt the value of Lula in the bosom of the people:

• In front of what was once the Cinema Império, the first branch of the Azteca Bank in Brazil was going to be inaugurated. The place chosen was the Recife neighborhood of Água Fria. Men, women and children took over the square, as in the 60s they invaded the same place to dance the frevo. But on March 27, 2008, they did not come for carnival, much less to attend the inauguration of a bank branch, small and without luxury. “Lula is coming. Lula is coming to inaugurate the Bank”, was the slogan that ran.

=> ↺ As Biden Mulls Trip to Saudi Arabia, Rights Group Spotlights Death Sentence of Child Defendant

• Following reports that U.S. President Joe Biden may visit Saudi Arabia during his trip to the Middle East next month, a human rights group on Monday highlighted global calls to release Abdullah al-Howaiti, a young man twice sentenced to death by the country’s courts.

• Reprieve pointed out in a statement that United Nations experts have urged the Saudi government to annul his sentence “because he did not receive a fair trial, as credible reports that he was tortured into making a false confession when he was 14 years old were not investigated.”

=> ↺ ‘What in the Neoliberal Hell Is This?’ Biden Suggests ‘Rational’ GOP Senators Will Act on Guns

• U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday sparked anger and frustration in the wake of a Texas mass shooting with remarks about gun safety reform that included describing two GOP congressional leaders as “rational.”

• “We’re in the midst of a civil war, but most Dems don’t seem to realize it.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ Opinion | YouTube Is a Breeding Ground for Internet Conspiracy Theories and Extremism

• Despite the proliferation of fringe ideologies on YouTube—and the availability of truly alternative information there—the video hosting service’s anti-establishment status may be overblown.  A FAIR analysis of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube news channels worldwide found that the majority of the top news channels on the platform are not independent.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Top Gun sequel shows that Hollywood is finally tiring of China’s censorship

• Tencent operates the WeChat messaging app, a videogame business, a streaming-entertainment platform, and has been one of several Chinese firms moving into Hollywood. The company invested in Terminator: Genisys, the Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and sci-fi disaster movie Moonfall.

• However, according to the outlet, Tencent executives later dropped out of the $170 million Paramount Pictures production of the Top Gun sequel due to concern that Communist Party officials in Beijing would be angry about a movie celebrating the American military.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Journalism organizations call for withdrawal of Press Law amendment

• In the statement signed by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey (TGS), International Press Institute’s (IPI) National Committee in Turkey, Association of Journalists, Progressive Journalists Association (PJA), Turkish Press Council, Haber-Sen and İzmir Journalists Association (IGC), it was noted that the bill was prepared behind closed doors by the ruling AKP and the MHP executives and the opinions of the journalists were not consulted.

• “The bill adds a new crime titled “distributing deceptive information publicly” to the criminal code with prison sentences. It also gives the administration new powers to sanction the media with fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth throttling.”

• “If the bill becomes law, it will boost the systematic censorship and self-censorship in Turkey, instead of fighting disinformation. We call for its immediate withdrawal because a media law that fails to reflect the views of journalists and journalism organizations cannot solve the problem of disinformation.” stated the press institutions.

=> ↺ Major UK Political Parties Back ‘State Threats’ Bill That Would Restrict Press Freedom

• In 2015, the Cabinet Office requested that the Law Commission, an organization of individuals in the legal profession who advise the government, review the Official Secrets Acts, which apply to unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Workers vote to become first unionized Starbucks in Alabama

• Baristas and other employees at a downtown store voted 27-1 to organize in a tally announced Thursday, news outlets reported. Documents show they would be represented by Workers United if the vote stands.

=> ↺ Starbucks Workers Have Now Unionized 100 Stores

=> ↺ In Order to Change the Past, Remember the Future Now

• One local 21 year-old woman I met lost fourteen close friends all in their 20s. For a while, the sea was the only toilet, bread the only food. Talk about trouble in paradise. People scanned the horizon for the United States Sixth Fleet and no one came. This was a conflict which — in the face of Ukraine today — is not only forgotten now but was already forgotten back then when it was still taking place.

• I was one of only five guests in Hotel Excelsior. Out of 214 rooms, 209 were still unoccupied. The Excelsior had seen much better days. It was where the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Sophia Loren, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had all stayed. The hotel alone received twenty-one direct hits. When news teams of the world pack up their metal cases and leave, all that is left is personal scrutiny. Who cares now about continued shelling in Syria? The recent Islamic State explosions in Afghanistan? In honour of those we will soon forget again, I want here to remember those who were already forgotten in the past. Or, as one Ghanaian said to me on another trip close to the Ivorian border: ‘In order to change the past, remember the future now.’

=> ↺ How Mining Companies Have Exploited the Pandemic to Push New Mines on Vulnerable Communities

• Arundhati Roy’s call to critical reflection was published in early April 2020. At the time, she was observing the early evidence, on one hand, of the devastating toll of the pandemic as a result of extraordinary inequality, the privatized health care system, and the rule of big business in the U.S., which continued to play out along lines of class and race.

• She was also writing with horror at how the Modi government in India was enacting an untenable lockdown on a population of over a billion people without notice or planning, in a context of overlapping economic and political crises. While the rich and middle class could safely retreat to work from home, millions of migrant workers were forced out of work into a brutal, repressive, and even fatal long march back to their villages. And that was just the beginning.

=> ↺ Suppress? Subvert? Or Both!

• Substitute the word authoritarian for fool, and this piece of conventual wisdom is particularly apropos in our struggle to obtain and maintain the goal of truly free, open and fair elections as guaranteed under Montana’s constitutional right of suffrage.

• Article II, Section 13 provides: “All elections shall be free and open, and no power, civil or military shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

=> ↺ Anti-Abortions Fanatics’ Real Enemy is Sex

• In the weeks since Supreme Court Grand Inquisitor Justice Samuel Alito’s anti-choice screed was disclosed, amidst all of the mass protests, speechifying, pontificating, punditry, etc., I noticed that something essential to the abortion brouhaha was completely missing from what passes for public discourse in this country: That sexual intercourse for pleasure and intimacy is under attack.

• In our age of artificial insemination, etc., male/female copulation is still the main source of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion has, among other things, served as a backup, a sort of court of last resort to prevent the birth of unplanned babies. In essence, what all angry pro-abortion female protesters are saying is: “We want to enjoy sexual intercourse without the fear and/or consequences of getting ‘knocked up.’” Birth control, including abortion, are ways individuals accept responsibility for and consciously acknowledge that they are sexual beings – and good for them, they shouldn’t be slut-shamed for owning their sensuality, which is their right. To paraphrase the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper: Girls – and boys – just want to have fun.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Corporate espionage is entering a new era

• The episode illustrates how interest in business espionage, and learning how to foil it, has broadened. Snooping is no longer mostly centred on a few “sensitive” industries that have long been vulnerable, such as defence and pharmaceuticals. It is increasingly used to target smaller companies in surprising sectors, including education and agriculture. It has, in short, become more of a general business risk. Just as the cold war may have been the heyday of great-power spookery, at least in the popular imagination, corporate espionage may now be entering its golden age.

• There are two, closely intertwined reasons for this. The first is the inexorable growth of the intangible economy; intellectual property (ip) [sic] is increasingly the currency of business. The second is the growing sophistication of online hackers. ceos should be worried when they see their firms’ secrets being hawked on the dark web: one new marketplace, Industrial Spy, flogs stolen data and documents to “legitimate” businesses. Information is sold in packets ranging from a few dollars to millions. Keeping ip safely locked in the digital vault can be devilishly difficult.

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