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● Links 25/08/2022: Deepin Chooses Another Way

Posted in News Roundup at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Meet the Kubuntu Focus NX Mini Linux PC with 11th Gen Intel CPUs, Up to 64GB RAM

Meet the Kubuntu Focus NX mini Linux PC, the first small form factor desktop system from Kubuntu Focus, which only produced Linux laptops until now. Kubuntu Focus NX is powered by 11th generation Intel CPUs, namely the Intel Core i5-1135G7 or Intel Core i7-1165G7 with 4 cores and 8 threads, and featuring integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics and supporting up to four 4K displays at the same time.

=> ↺ Kubuntu Focus Announces New Desktop Model » Linux Magazine

The Kubuntu Focus team has announced their newest system would be a small form factor desktop optimized for Kubuntu 22.04.

The Kubuntu Focus NX is a new, small form factor desktop computer that ships with Kubuntu 22.04 and the latest KDE Plasma interface. This new machine can be specced with either an i5-1135G7 or i7-1165G7 11th gen Intel CPU, both of which include the Xe iGPU which can drive up to 4 displays.

The Kubuntu Focus NX supports up to 64GB of memory, up to 2.0 TB of NVMe storage, and up to 4 TB of SATA storage and even comes with a bracket that allows you to mount the device to the back of your monitor.

Server

=> ↺ Kubernetes 1.25 Update Focuses on Security and Storage – Container Journal

This week, the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for Kubernetes released a Combiner update to the cloud-native platform that adds more than 40 enhancements.

The bulk of the enhancements delivered in Kubernetes 1.25 involve capabilities that were previously in beta to stable, which means they will soon find their way into curated distributions of the platform. Those capabilities include replacing the current PodSecurityPod module with a pod security admission module that is more accessible and ephemeral containers, which are designed to exist for a limited amount of time on a pod to make troubleshooting a cluster simpler.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Gaining Experience for your Linux Career – What should you Learn?! – Invidious

If you’re trying to get your foot in the door for an exciting career in Information Technology, what should you learn? There’s countless technologies out there, and you can’t learn them all. In this video, Jay discusses an unlikely source of information for what to learn – visiting job boards!

=> ↺ How to install Neptune 7.5 “Ada” – Invidious

In this video, I am going to show how to install Neptune 7.5 “Ada”.

=> ↺ YET ANOTHER package format, and Ubuntu might not get this GNOME feature – Linux & Open Source News – Invidious

=> ↺ Linux Action News 255

Details on two new efforts in the Linux kernel, the Pi-like RISC-V board that just hit its funding goal, and a significant milestone for Asahi GPU driver development.

=> ↺ Xdotool Simulates Key Presses and Mouse Clicks – Invidious

xdotool is a command line utility that is most often used to simulate key presses or mouse clicks. This is especially useful to those of us that use standalone window managers because sometimes you want to bind an action to a keyboard event or mouse event rather than a shell command.

Kernel Space

Applications

=> ↺ 7 Best Free and Open Source Linux Student Information Systems – LinuxLinks

A student information system (also known as a student management system or school management system) is computer software for educational institutions to manage student data.

It helps members of the school or other educational organization to organize their work in learning and teaching, and to simplify digital processes, especially those that involve analytical evaluation, statistics, or information that is updated very frequently and should be made available to its recipients in a timely manner.

This type of software typically provides tracking of demographic attributes, gradebooks, tracking student attendance, calendars, reporting, building student schedules, transcripts, and managing many other student-related data needs.

A student information system is a critical application for educational organizations. They help to automate many daily tasks, and reduce the amount of time spent on administrative functions. By helping teachers to be more productive and informed, this type of software can make a real contribution to the classroom. Parents also have access to data about their children, helping them to make enlightened educational decisions.

In some respects, a student information system has similarities with Enterprise Resource Planning.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Display the Weather Forecast on Linux – Make Tech Easier

Weather information is crucial for planning and scheduling your daily tasks. In Linux desktops, there are variety of options to get that info. This article will walk you through some of the best solutions available for you.

[...]

These are traditional desktop apps that display weather information. They have little to no integration with the desktop shell.

=> ↺ How to tune the Linux kernel with the /proc filesystem

Linux is an amazing and powerful operating system. More specifically, the Linux kernel is the source of many of its superpowers. I have been using Linux for 25 years and have used a lot of versions of the Linux kernel. I have even compiled the kernel a time or two in class and a few times just for grins.

=> ↺ Install Memcached on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux Server

Tutorial for learning the commands to install and configure Memcached on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa to cache data for PHP or Python-based applications.

Memcached is a BSD-licensed published cache server used by many organizations and website owners to quickly retrieve data from memory. It has been used by many users to improve the overall speed and performance of their dynamic websites with database connectivity to improve performance by avoiding disk access by storing important data in memory or by minimizing the call of complex and frequently used database queries – especially SELECT statements.

Data is provided with a unique key value and stored as strings in memory whereas the connection takes place to the Memcached server via the PROTOCOLS TCP and IP. The stored data can be either permanent or temporary. Well, in the case of temporary storage, the deletion of cached data will happen automatically after the configured interval of time.

=> ↺ How to set up wordpress in Ubuntu 22.04 with Mariadb and Nginx

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. WordPress is one of the most popular CMS available today.

WordPress.com is a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that lets you build a website using WordPress building blocks. It will cost you to host your website on the WordPress site.

The WordPress software is free and Open Source but to have it up and running you need to set up hosting. In this guide we are going with this option, setting up WordPress in Ubuntu 22.04 with Mariadb as a database with Nginx and php-fpm to serve wordpress.

=> ↺ How to Calculate Subnet Masks on Linux With ipcalc

Subnetting a large network improves security, increases performance, and organizes your network in a logical way. But some of the calculations are tough. The Linux ipcalc command makes the planning stage easy.

Games

=> ↺ ODROID-Go Ultra handheld game console coming in October for $111 (Amlogic S922X chip and Ubuntu Linux OS) – Liliputing

Hardkernel has been making single-board computers for more than a decade and starting in 2018 company began repurposing some of its hardware to make hacker-friendly game consoles sold under the ODROID-Go brand.

The latest model is the same size and shape as the ODROID-Go Super, which was introduced in 2020. But the new model has a faster CPU, improved graphics performance, and twice as much RAM (the memory is also speedier now).

The ODROID-Go Super also had just enough built-in storage for a bootloader, which meant that the operating system had to be installed on a microSD card. The new Ultra model has 16GB of eMMC flash storage for the operating system, which means it boots more quickly and offers better stability.

Amlogic’s S922X processor has been a popular option for Android-powered media streaming devices in recent years, but it’s less commonly found in mobile devices. But Hardkernel seems pretty confident in the new processor and other upgrades. The company says the new ODROID-Go Super performs more than twice as fast as the previous-gen model… although it’s a bit less energy efficient. Despite having a larger battery, the new handheld should only get an estimated 6 hours of continuous game play time, compared with 10 hours for the ODROID-GO Super.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Do you use Kdenlive? Share your project and behind the scenes footage and stills! – Kdenlive

Kdenlive will be carrying out a fundraiser soon and we would like to explain its place in the moviemaking ecosystem through the experience of the filmmakers that use it. That is you.

We would like to hear about your projects. If you have parts of your work you can share with us, behind the scenes stills or footage on set, shots of your team working on post-production using Kdenlive, and so on, we would love to see them.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME’s New Quick Toggles Land in Ubuntu 22.10 – OMG! Ubuntu!

GNOME Shell 43 beta is now available in the Ubuntu 22.10 daily builds.

If you read this blog regularly — you’re certifiably awesome if you do — you’ll have a good idea on the new features GNOME 43 has to offer. The big one for me is the new version of GNOME Shell and its Quick Toggles system menu.

GNOME devs have radically redesigned the system menu to be more useful, more modern, and more versatile. The utilitarianism of the ‘masonry layout’ previous builds used gives way to interactive pills. You can click on a pill to enable/disable its function instantly, and if more menus are available you can access those too.

I’ve tweeted about this menu a lot cos, simple: I love it. I can now switch Wi-Fi networks from the system menu (no more full-screen network picker). I can change audio device ad-hoc without needing to open the Settings app. The menu also lets me change input device as well, though the input slider only appears if a mic is in use.

[...]

If you run Ubuntu 22.10 daily you’ll get these updates in the next few days, or you can get them now by enabling the proposed repository.

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Deepin releases 20.6 plus a preview of major new version • The Register

A leading Chinese Linux vendor is polishing what may be its last Debian-based release, and preparing for the move to becoming a fully independent distro with its own new package format, Linglong.

Deepin, the most internationally visible Chinese Linux distribution, has put out two new versions: the latest release of its existing stable version, Deepin 20.6, and a preview of the forthcoming new major release, Deepin 23.

Back in April, we looked at Deepin 20.5, the previous release. This version is a relatively minor update with some components refreshed: kernel 5.15, including native NTFS support, and the option of kernel 5.17; version 510 of the Nvidia binary graphics driver; and Qt version 5.15. Issues in the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) and various accessory programs have been fixed, and the system-wide search tool has been improved

[...]

We installed the preview version of Deepin 23 in a VM, and so far this test release is still based on Debian. For instance, we were able to install DKMS, which allowed us to install VirtualBox’s guest additions.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ ALP Aims to Balance Past, Present with Future – openSUSE News

The openSUSE Project has been discussing technical aspects for the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) on the development mailing list.

An email titled x86_64 architecture level requirements, x86-64-v2 for openSUSE Factory kicked off a discussion acknowledging challenges possessed by instructional sets for different subsets of the x86-64 architecture. Four defined levels of the x86-64 architecture are categorized as x86-64-v1, x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4. The newer micro-architectures after 86-64-v2 allow for greater performance advantages and are present in many of the newer hardware on the market.

All these architectures exist within the code stream of openSUSE Factory, which are targeted for specific builds and distributions. For example, openSUSE Tumbleweed is a customized build blueprint of all the code functioning together that leads to a well tested release of a snapshot for the rolling release distribution. Another would be the super stable openSUSE Leap release, which is based on years of building toward a mature target that was designed to bring uniformity among Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

[...]

However, once the prototype is released, the release team plans to run tests and gather comparative data to understand the performance differences of v2 and v3. There is a desire to support a migration path.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Tails 5.4 Privacy-Focused OS Released for Linux Paranoids

Tails, a Linux distribution focused on security and anonymity, has reached version 5.4, hardening several aspects of the Linux kernel.

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based distro that differs from all other Linux distributions in that it is a live system solely focused on privacy.

However, keep in mind that it is not a daily driver OS. In other words, Tails isn’t something you’ll want to go if you’re a Windows or Mac user looking to switch to Linux for your everyday jobs.

The distribution is intended for security paranoids looking for maximum personal security and anonymity on the Internet. But, of course, this has its drawbacks.

For example, because it is primarily designed to run from a USB stick, the changes you make don’t get saved. Therefore, as soon as you reboot, everything goes to default.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Brian Kernighan Updates Awk to Add Unicode Support

Brian Kernighan, co-creator of Awk (and the K in the name of the tool), has quietly submitted code for adding Unicode support to the scripting language, reports Kevin Purdy.

Awk is “a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix’s pipeline features and interoperability between systems,” Purdy explains.

=> ↺ Unix legend, who owes us nothing, keeps fixing foundational AWK code | Ars Technica

A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977.

“I have tested this a fair amount but clearly more tests are needed,” Kernighan wrote in the email, posted in late May as a kind of pseudo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. “Once I figure out how … I will try to submit a pull request. I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don’t have a proper understanding, so this may take a while.”

Kernighan is the “K” in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix’s pipeline features and interoperability between systems. A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are countless variants of awk—including modern derivations with support for Unicode—but “One True AWK,” sometimes known as nawk, is a kind of canonical version based on Kernighan’s 1985 book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent input.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Our America

Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: “History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.” Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom (as well as of its absence from historical memory) and a chronicle of the ways in which those who have struggled for liberation understood their history and were ultimately able to change it materially.

=> ↺ Walking the Authenticity Beat in the City of Big Shoulders

Chicago isn’t listed as a cast member of The Bear—but it probably should be.

Education

=> ↺ Biden Student Debt Relief Plan a ‘Big Deal,’ Says Sanders, ‘But We Have Got to Do More’

“In the year 2022, in the wealthiest country on Earth, everyone in America who wants a higher education should be able to get that education without going into debt.”

Hardware

=> ↺ PET Bottles Diligently Turned Into Filament

While the price of 3D printers has come down quite a lot in the past few years, filament continues to be rather pricey especially for those doing a lot of printing. This has led to some people looking to alternatives for standard filament, including recycling various forms of plastic. We’ve seen plenty of builds using various materials, but none so far have had this level of quality control in the final project.

=> ↺ Everything You Didn’t Know You Need To Know About Glitching Attacks

If you’ve always been intrigued by the idea of performing hardware attacks but never knew where to start, then we’ve got the article for you: an in-depth look at the hows and whys of hardware glitching.

=> ↺ Skarper E-Bike Conversion Kit Simplifies Electrifying Your Bike

If you’re a Hackaday reader, it’s a good bet you could figure out how to convert your bike to use an electric motor. But you might have more important things to do, so a start up company, Skarper, wants to help you with a conversion kit and the folks over at [autoevolution] took a closer look at how it works. The interesting part is that it transfers power from the motor to your wheels through a disc that substitutes for the bike’s disc brake. You can see a promotional video about the product from the company below.

=> ↺ China Launches The Inevitable Indigenous GPU

It was absolutely inevitable that China would try to create its own GPU compute engines. It was never a given that it would succeed in only three years.

But with the launch of the BR series of products from Biren Technology, there is finally a credible homegrown GPU controlled by China for graphics and compute, and that is going to add even more competition to the already intense GPU market.

Back in 2019, the trade war between the United States and China was escalating and the Middle Kingdom had long-since been prevented from buying compute engines for its HPC system aspirations. And so Zhang Wen, a serial entrepreneur who, among other things, worked to helped China make better LED chips at a startup created by Zhang Rujing, the founder of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China’s largest chip foundry, decided that China needed its own GPU for computer graphics as well as for numerically intensive high performance computing.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ The Stealth Plan to Privatize Medicare for All

In a rational world, this simple fact would lead Congress to do what every other industrialized nation has done; create a publicly funded system of universal health care either through a government-run system such as Medicare for All, or through a tightly regulated system of non-profit insurers that offer a defined benefit package specified by the government, as in Germany. Of course, politics in the US is rational only in the sense that it follows the logic of profits over people. The desires of the donor class come first, and the corporations of the Medical-Industrial Complex have lots of money to give.

=> ↺ More Young Americans are Using Cannabis and Hallucinogens. That’s Good News.

That, believe it or not, is good news. Both of these “drug” categories have a history of use as long as the history of humanity, with known medical and mental benefits, few negative side effects, and virtually no correlation to violent behaviors.

Security

=> ↺ Phishing PyPI users: Attackers compromise legitimate projects to push malware – Help Net Security

PyPI, the official third-party software repository for Python packages, is warning about a phishing campaign targeting its users.

“We have additionally determined that some maintainers of legitimate projects have been compromised, and malware published as the latest release for those projects. These releases have been removed from PyPI and the maintainer accounts have been temporarily frozen,” the PyPI team noted.

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

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libxslt, and open-vm-tools), Fedora (dotnet6.0 and firefox), Oracle (curl, firefox, rsync, and thunderbird), Red Hat (curl, firefox, php:7.4, rsync, systemd, and thunderbird), SUSE (bluez, chromium, freerdp, glibc, gnutls, kernel, postgresql10, raptor, rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, and spice), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-azure-fde, open-vm-tools, and varnish).

=> ↺ Music Video Disclosed as a Cyber Vulnerability – Invidious

Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation music video of 1989 has officially been declared a security vulnerability as it freezes some models of hard drives on older computers.

=> ↺ GitLab Patches Critical RCE in Community and Enterprise Editions | eSecurityPlanet

The GitLab DevOps platform has released fixes for a critical remote code execution vulnerability, urging users to patch ASAP.

=> ↺ CISA releases 1 Industrial Control Systems Advisory | CISA

CISA has released 1 Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisory on August 25, 2022. This advisory provides timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

=> ↺ Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

Cisco has released security updates for vulnerabilities affecting ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator, FXOS, and NX-OS software. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ U.S. Solicitor General and Department of Commerce must hold NSO accountable – Access Now

NSO Group must be held accountable for facilitating human rights abuses around the world. This week, Access Now and partner human rights organizations wrote to the U.S. Departments of Commerce, State, Energy, and Defense calling on them to ensure that NSO Group remains on the Entity List — a trade restriction list.

“There is clear evidence that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware continues to be used by governments to engage in secret surveillance of journalists around the world,” said Michael DeDora, US Advocacy Manager of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “This is a direct threat to freedom of the press, and the free flow of information. The U.S. government must hold NSO Group accountable for their violations and send a firm message to the world that this behavior will not be tolerated.”

NSO Group was originally added to the list in response to the company’s threats to human rights and national security, on November 2, 2021. These threats remain unmitigated, and this list is where the company must remain.

Earlier this month, Access Now and coalition partners also urged the U.S. Solicitor General to oppose NSO Group’s claims before the U.S. Supreme Court that it is entitled to sovereign immunity before U.S. Courts — it should not be. The Solicitor General will be providing an opinion to the Supreme Court on NSO’s appeal.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The New Schism: Will the Idea of the ‘West’ Survive the Scourge of the Russia-Ukraine War?

The ancient Greek historian and geographer Herodotus is often credited with the coinage of the term ‘West’ in the 5th Century BC. The root causes of that coinage might have been mostly geographic. However, in the 11th Century, the division between West and East became decidedly geopolitical, when the center of power of the Catholic Church began shifting eastward, from Rome to Byzantium. While the Catholic Church represented the West, the Orthodox Church epitomized the East.

=> ↺ The Tight Connections Between Slavery and War

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

=> ↺ The Assassination of Ayman al-Zawahri

Both justifications, however, are nothing more than rationalizations for a state-sponsored murder on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment.

Environment

=> ↺ Extreme Heat, Droughts in China and Europe Signal Global Climate Emergency

“There’s no question that there will be some loss of crops.”

=> ↺ Opinion | China Suffers Through ‘Worst Heatwave Ever Recorded’

In a year when climate records—from floods, fire, and drought—are being shattered daily like shards of glass, there is one country that bests them all: China. The country is experiencing a heatwave like no other.

Energy

=> ↺ Over 650 Progressive Groups Vow to Fight ‘Dirty’ Manchin Deal ‘With Everything We’ve Got’

“After the IRA paved the way for another decade of fracking and pipelines, we have no choice but to fight this dirty deal with everything we’ve got.”

=> ↺ Opinion | Energy Giants Spending Millions to Block This State’s Effort to Create Consumer-Owned Utility

As the 2022 election season heats up, Maine’s highest spending political committee doesn’t belong to the fundraising division of any political party. Instead, the dubious honor belongs to a ballot question committee called Maine Affordable Energy.

=> ↺ US Banks Pouring $23 Billion Into Russian ‘Carbon Bomb’ Projects

Compiled by the Leave It in the Ground Initiative (LINGO), the new database details the various investors and creditors of Russian “carbon bombs”—extraction projects with the potential to emit at least one billion tonnes of carbon.

=> ↺ ‘This Is Huge’: California to Ban New Gasoline-Fueled Car Sales by 2035

“We cannot address climate change without phasing out oil-powered transportation, and we applaud California for embracing the promise of clean transportation.”

=> ↺ WSJ Sells Lithium Neocolonialism as Climate Necessity

Lithium mining in Northern Chile by Andrew O’Brien. Via Flickr By Teddy Ostrow / FAIR True to its name, the Wall Street Journal never fails to lay bare its corporate sympathies.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ A River of Shit Runs Through It

Old Chet told us Montanans who were present at the pre-construction public meetings that Big Sky was going to be a “place for regular Montanans to go skiing.” But Chet was lying through his teeth. That was evident to anyone looking at who was putting up the money for the venture. That would be the Chrysler Realty Corp., General Electric Pension Fund, Burlington Northern, and the Montana Power Co. to name a few. And not only did they get everything they wanted, Chet even “cajoled two Montana governors, obtaining permission for the resort to make use of the state’s nickname, Big Sky.”

Overpopulation

=> ↺ The State Audit Office worries that too many Hungarian women getting university education will lead to less children being born

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | The March Towards US Fascism Began With the Corporate Hijacking of Democracy

“At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding , and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.

=> ↺ As Student Debt Fight Continues, Progressives Eye Another Goal: Tuition-Free College

While President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe $10,000 off the student loan balances of most federal borrowers includes reforms that will make debt repayment more manageable going forward—as well as new rules aimed at cracking down on institutions that drown vulnerable students in debt—it will do little to alter an absurd and massively unjust system that allows colleges to drive up costs at will.

=> ↺ We Can Do So Much More on Student Loan Forgiveness

That the president is calling for just $10,000 in loan cancellation, or, in the case of Pell Grant recipients, $20,000, is an insult especially to people of color who are still carrying student debt burdens. NAACP President Derrick Johnson made that much clear in early June. “The black community will be watching closely when you make your announcement, but $10,000 is not enough,” he said then.

=> ↺ Progressives Say Biden Student Debt Plan ‘A Good Start, But Not Enough’

“Every penny of student debt should be erased because college is a public good and it should be free.”

=> ↺ After $1.9 Trillion Giveaway to Rich, McConnell Calls Debt Relief for Working Class ‘Slap in the Face’

“You should sit this one out,” government watchdog Public Citizen suggested after McConnell (R-Ky.) lamented the cancellation plan as a “slap in the face” to borrowers who have paid their debt or didn’t go to college.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Only Decent Economy Is One That Works for Working People

Consider what typically constitutes ”good” economic news: The stock market booming. Corporate earnings rising. Business growth. In general, any factor that contributes to an environment in which businesses can get bigger, hire more workers, make more profits, and enrich investors to a greater degree. This vision of the economy’s legitimate purpose is so deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric of America that any economic journalist or analyst who did not accept it would never be hired in the first place. Yet it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the economy really is.

=> ↺ Why the Elites in the Global South Favour Indebtedness, How Creditors Have Eroded National Sovereignty, and How States are Beginning to Fight Back

The book which they co-edited offers no explanation for this phenomenon. For my part, I have often written on the subject. Here is a very brief summary of my explanation:

=> ↺ Productivity Growth: What Happened to the Upturn?

However, there was also some anecdotal evidence that we might be a faster growth trajectory. The most obvious story had to with the increased use of Zoom and other technologies allowing for teleconferencing. Insofar as business can be conducted without people traveling across town or across the country, there is a gain in productivity. There were many other stories of businesses being forced to adopt new and often more efficient ways of operating to get around the disruptions of the pandemic.

=> ↺ Ryanair prepared to take case of 300 million forint fine to EU Court of Justice

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ When Moral Clarity Goes Extinct

Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq—I mean of Ukraine.”

=> ↺ Howard Zinn at 100: Remembering “The People’s Historian”

Today marks the centennial of historian Howard Zinn’s birth. More than a decade after Zinn’s death in 2010, his best-selling A People’s History of the United States (1980) remains the most popular—and radical—introduction to American history, having recently surpassed 4 million copies sold. Zinn did more than any other historian to popularize the historiographical revolution of the Long 1960s, bringing from the campuses to the public its spotlight on the oppression of groups formerly marginalized in US history textbooks: African Americans, workers, Native Americans, women—and on their liberation movements. In place of traditional textbook triumphalism, Zinn’s People’s History offered a scathing account of American capitalism’s role in promoting economic, racial, and sexual inequality.

=> ↺ United We Rise

=> ↺ Chomsky: Six Months Into War, Diplomatic Settlement in Ukraine Is Still Possible

=> ↺ Amid Redistricting-Fueled Chaos, Corporate Democrats Win in New York Primaries

=> ↺ The Progressive Industrial Complex and Our Fascist Future

Don’t tell the liberals that the average Democrat in the Congress is worth a bit more than the average Republican. They don’t want to be confused by reality. In their minds, the Democrats are still the party of the working class. You know, the party that it almost maybe was, for a few years in the 1930’s, when it had to be.

=> ↺ Corporate Democrats Maloney and Goldman Fend Off Progressives in NY Primary

Maloney, chair of the powerful Democracy Congressional Campaign Committee, which controls the party’s election year war chest for House candidates, fended off progressive challenger state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi in the 17th District who said as she launched her campaign that the Democratic Party “should be led by fearless champions—not selfish, corporate politicians.”

=> ↺ Dr. Oz Condemned for ‘Disgusting’ Comments on Fetterman Stroke

“No real doctor—or any decent human being, to be honest—would ever mock a stroke victim… It’s disgusting.”

=> ↺ Watchdog Leader: ‘It Is Clear Why Barr Did Not Want the Public to See’ Newly Released Trump Memo

Following a watchdog group’s win in court last week, the Biden administration on Wednesday released an unredacted memorandum from 2019 about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russia’s election interference.

=> ↺ Dutch far right politician Geert Wilders awarded Hungarian state honour

Misinformation/Disinformation

=> ↺ NPR Host and NYT Guest Stress that Russia is Communist While Vilifying Uninformed Republicans

After I and others tweeted about this, NPR posted this correction:

=> ↺ The Mozilla Blog: A little less misinformation, a little more action

As each generation comes of age, they challenge the norms that came before them. If you were to ask most people their go-to way to search, they would mention a search engine. But for Gen Z, TikTok has become one of the most popular ways to find information.

Adrienne Sheares, a social media strategist and a millennial who grew up relying on search engines, had difficulty grasping the habit. So, she spoke with a small group of Gen Zers and reported what she heard in a recent Twitter thread.

Among her learnings: Young people are drawn to content TikTok curates for them, they prefer watching quick videos over reading, and they know misinformation exists and “will avoid content on the platform that can easily be false.” Sheares’ thread went viral. Her curiosity resonated, especially for people with habits very different to those of Gen Z’s.

As part of our mission at Mozilla, we’re working to support families in having a healthy relationship with the internet. That includes an online experience where young people are equipped to cut through the noise – including misinformation. So we wanted to learn more about how Gen Z consumes the news, and how families can encourage curiosity about current events without shutting out social media. After all, while it may be rife with misinformation, it’s still an essential platform for many teens to connect with their peers.

[...]

Many teens know how to confirm facts through resources on the internet. That’s thanks to ongoing efforts by educators who include verifying information in their lesson plans.

Kevin, workshop team director at Teens for Press Freedom, recently saw a post on Instagram purportedly about a California bill that would allow late-term abortions. “I looked it up because I was curious,” he said. He quickly learned that the law doesn’t actually propose that.

The issue, Kevin said, is taking the time to fact-check.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ When Rap Lyrics Become Incriminating Speech

Jeffrey Lamar Williams, one of the most critically revered and commercially successful figures in contemporary poetry, has been held in solitary confinement in a Georgia jail since his arrest on May 9. Williams emerged from Atlanta’s thriving poetry scene in 2011 with I Came From Nothing, a genre-reshaping collection filled with imagery from his childhood in Jonesboro South, the notorious housing projects where a young Williams watched his older brother die of gunshot wounds. That collection and the prolific output that followed would launch a slew of imitators and protégés, many of them childhood friends who were members of Williams’s Young Stoner Life star-making poetry collective. But in an 88-page, 56-count indictment, Georgia prosecutors allege that YSL is not a poetry collective but a front for a “criminal street gang” whose members have committed crimes including armed robbery, aggravated assault, carjacking, and murder. All 28 people charged, including Williams—whom prosecutors name as a cofounder of the gang—are accused of conspiring to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. The most frequently cited evidence for the charges leveled against Williams? Incredibly, lines lifted directly from his own poetry.

=> ↺ Oklahoma Teacher Disciplined for Sharing Access to Banned Books Has Quit

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ MN Abortion Laws Create an “Access Island” — but for Whom?

For nearly three decades, long before the fall of Roe v. Wade, the blond brick Building for Women in Duluth, Minnesota, has been a destination for patients traveling from other states to get an abortion. They have come from places where abortions were legal but clinics were scarce and from states where restrictive laws have narrowed windows of opportunity.

=> ↺ Golf’s Sportswashing of Saudi Arabia

Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used to cosmeticize Nazi Germany’s atrocities and promote Aryan superiority have sports and an otherwise despised government collaborated so blatantly to enhance their joint international standings.

=> ↺ Transforming the Narrative of the Latinx Community

From August 30–September 1, the Latinx House’s inaugural Raizado Festival will be a space of gathering for Latinx organizers and allies. The event, which will be held in Aspen, Colo. and livestreamed here, is set to feature talks on maternal health, wealth inequality, lack of representation in Hollywood, environmental justice, and more, along with film screenings and live music. The Latinx House cofounder Mónica Ramírez spoke with The Nation about the festival, creating rooted coalitions, and how culture and narratives shape policy.

=> ↺ At Long Last, Congress Considers a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights

=> ↺ Yoga Versus Democracy?

Today – the rise of a politically potent religious right over the past 50 years notwithstanding – fewer Americans identify with formal religions. Gallup found that 47% of Americans reported church membership in 2020, down from 70% in the 1990s; nearly a quarter of Americans have no religious affiliation.

=> ↺ Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Not Without a Fight’ By Danceland

The genesis of many of the tunes on the album was pandemic isolation and the death of Joe’s mom. They weave autobiographical elements into strong storytelling narratives. One of the songs called “Not Without A Fight” is a pointed social critique in support of Black Lives Matter, survivors of domestic abuse, homeless children, indigenous people, and the LGBTQ+ community.“This tune is a reaction to the constant injustice suffered by innocent people just trying to live their lives,” Joe explains. “It was inspired by a culmination of events including the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the horrific stories surrounding indigenous children in residential schools here in Canada.”A lyric video with complimentary visuals was developed for “Not Without A Fight.”Watch or listen to “Not Without A Fight” by Danceland:

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ ACEUPTO Wordo: COYPU

Technical

=> ↺ Using nix download bandwidth limit

I submitted a change to the nix package manager last week, and it got merged! It’s now possible to define a bandwidth speed limit in the nix.conf configuration file.

=> ↺ My RSS feed with HTML content is back

Dear readers, given the popular demand for a RSS feed with HTML in it (which used to be the default), I modified the code to generate a new RSS file using HTML for its content.

=> ↺ The Horribleness that is Android…

What’s wrong with Android, you ask? Google, obviously. You’d think that, with hundreds of billions of dollars to play with, they would soar above, say, an amateur effort like Linux. But no, instead they took linux and made it largely unusable, except in some, very specific use cases.

Don’t be fooled — you are not Google’s customer. Google is paid by hardware manufacturers and advertisers, and those who buy consumer data. You, the consumer, are the ticket to the game. Google (and other companies) will do the minimum necessary to keep the illusion of serving you while maximizing profits from their real customers…

[...]

An ‘app’, consequently, is a piece of spyware, combined with an advertising display, with a small amount of useful functionality, locked down to be incompatible and unusable by other ‘apps’, of course (lock-in). Apps are there to extract money from you, while providing Google with valuable telemetry.

[...]

These are cranked out by uninspired billionaire wannabees, who care more about ad integration and in-app purchases than actually performing a useful task. Collecting personal information is likely more lucrative than selling the app, and selling apps at the Google store for a buck with Google taking most of it is probably not a viable business model in the first place.

[...]

First task: find a file manager. The built-in ‘Device storage’ one is complete bullshit, so you go back to F-Droid. You try one that seems to not work at all, because your phone is like 3 years old. You try another one, which seems to work, called File Explorer.

[...]

Your partner is looking at you funny, because you said you were just going to get an audiobook, and three hours have gone by, and you are very agitated, muttering obsenities, and it’s really unpleasant to be anywhere near you when you get like that.

[...]

P.S. IOS, apparently, is even worse about not allowing you to see and manipulate files. Well, that prick Jobs was known for saying that “it’s not the customer’s job to know what they want”, so no great surprise there. Also why I would never own Apple hardware.

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