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● 09.23.22

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● Links 23/09/2022: PeerTube 4.3 and GNOME Report

Posted in News Roundup at 5:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Make It One with Linux

• We interview Tuxedo Computers founder Herbert Feiler about the company’s past, present, and future.

• In the old days, the operating system had to be Windows, but the times are changing. Tuxedo Computers is part of a new generation of computer vendors specializing in preinstalled Linux systems. The company is celebrating its 18th birthday this year, which seemed like a good time to ask Tuxedo founder Herbert Feiler about how he got started and the path ahead.

=> ↺ Linux Commands Every Sysadmin Must Know

• If you are a system administrator, then Linux commands are what you use everywhere, you know what they are for and how to use them. However, before moving on to Linux commands that will be useful for both beginners to learn and experienced network administrators to make up for forgotten, it is worth mentioning what Linux is.

• Linux is an open-source operating system designed for file management. This means that any developer can take freely available system files and create their version of Linux – a distribution. Versions differ in built-in features, performance, graphical environment, support for unique programs and commands, and much more. Therefore, before downloading the system installation files from the first link in the browser, you need to figure out what exactly you need Linux for and, based on the goals, choose the appropriate version.

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Framework Chromebook clarifies modules, operating systems

• This week the Framework Chromebook was announced as the first modular ChromeOS laptop. The ideas behind Framework are ambitious, to say the least, but how will this Chromebook version differ from the Windows option, and what about modules? In a Q&A on Hacker News, Framework’s founder has answered some of the community’s biggest questions around this new device.

=> ↺ Linux On The Laptop Works So Damn Well That It’s Boring | by Clive Thompson | Sep, 2022 | Medium

• A few days ago I took my Macbook Pro into the shop. It needed a new battery; the current one is five years old and dies after an hour. We’ll be in touch by next Tuesday, the repair shop said.

• So in the meantime, I started working on my backup laptop — which runs Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE 5.26 beta, GNOME 43, and New Snap Store – Linux and Open Source News – Invidious

=> ↺ How to Build an Awesome Kubernetes Cluster using Proxmox Virtual Environment – Invidious

• Proxmox Virtual Environment is an awesome virtualization solution. Kubernetes is an awesome containerization solution. So why not combine those great technologies? In this video, you’ll see the entire process of setting up your very own Kubernetes cluster from scratch, with Proxmox shown as the platform.

=> ↺ How do you keep your tech skills current?? @ITGUYRY – Invidious

=> ↺ The Digital Cold War

• This WeeklyNewsRoundup we talk about a digital cold war, LinkedIn links used in phishing, and LibreOffice Charging on Mac? We also go to SillyVille.

=> ↺ 80: Solving Whole Home Audio

• Alex is replacing his Chromecast and Google Nest Mini with an open-source solution, and why we’re all getting a little hyped about Matter.

=> ↺ 69: EVGA Says No More To Nvidia – A New Player Enters The GPU Market – Hardware Addicts – TuxDigital

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the state of the GPU market. There are a lot of changes in the air and we’re going to see which ones might benefit you the consumer. Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss Nikon Fun at Photography Show 2022

Kernel Space

=> ↺ futex2 at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 | tony is coding

• As in the past editions, I took the opportunity to discuss about futex2, a project I’m deeply involved in. futex2 is a project to solve issues found in the current futex interface. This years’ session was about NUMA awaress of futex. Currently, futex allocates a single hash table in the kernel to store all data. If this is done in a NUMA machine, the table is allocated in a single node. This increases the cost of futex operations when done from any other node, given that will need to access a memory outside of it’s node.

=> ↺ Linux 5.19.11

=> ↺ Linux 5.15.70

=> ↺ Linux 5.10.145

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Marcin ‘hrw’ Juszkiewicz: Is Wayland really a future of desktop?

• Each time I update my Fedora desktop to new release (usually around Beta) I give a try to Wayland. Which shows that I still use X11.

• [...]

• For desktop environment I use KDE. Which means Plasma desktop/panel, Konsole and few KDE apps. Firefox and Chrome as web browsers, Thunderbird for mail, Steam for gaming and Zoom (or Google Meet) for most of video calls.

Applications

=> ↺ Audacity 3.2 Released with Realtime Effects, VST3 Support – OMG! Ubuntu!

• Podcasters, musicians, and amateur video makers like me will be pleased to know that a new version of open source audio editor Audacity is available to download.

• Audacity 3.2 serves as the latest stable release of this capable digital audio workstation, and is, as ever, available for Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.

• But what’s changed since last year’s Audacity 3.1 release?

=> ↺ Audacity 3.2 Released With VST3 Plugins and Apple Silicon Support

• Audacity 3.2 is here, a point update to one of the most popular free and open-source audio editing/recording tools.

• This release comes in after more than a year of the previous major release, Audacity 3.0.

• It is still one of the best audio editors for Linux available right now, even after its controversy last year.

• This release has a lot of new additions, such as support for VST3 plugins, support for Apple Silicon, FFMPEG 5.0, and more.

• Let’s take a quick look at what’s new with Audacity.

=> ↺ PeerTube 4.3 Free Video Platform Is Out with New Functionalities

• The ability to automatically import all videos from a remote channel into one of your PeerTube channels is the big news in PeerTube 4.3.

• PeerTube allows anyone to set up their video streaming site. It is a free, self-hosted, and open-source software that users can install on their servers to create a video hosting and sharing platform. In other words, it is like having your personal YouTube at home.

• Furthermore, all PeerTube sites can connect, and users having accounts on one can interact with people on the others. All PeerTube servers are interoperable as a federated network, and video load is lowered thanks to P2P (BitTorrent) in the web browser via WebTorrent.

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #22.35: Linux Crossword, EuroLinux, GNOME 43, Files and Directories

• As promised in the previous edition of FOSS Weekly, we have created a crossword for you. This one is focused on various desktop environments and window managers.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Install Rust Programming Language on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Rust Programming Language on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Rust is a free and open-source, multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language developed by Mozilla. This language has many features such as safety, memory, and concurrency. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and simulation engines for virtual reality.

• 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 Rust Programming Language on Rocky Linux. 9.

=> ↺ How to Fix: bash wget Command Not Found Error

=> ↺ How to Install Nexus Repository Manager on Ubuntu 22.04

=> ↺ How to Install Neos CMS on Debian 11

• Neos is an enterprise content management built-in with custom content modeling that provides an effective way to edit and manage content, SEO optimization such as automatic redirects and SEO metadata, and powerful roles and user management.

=> ↺ How to Read and Execute From a File With the Linux source Command

• source is a handy built-in shell command that accepts arguments, parses commands in a script, and executes them in the shell environment. The file’s content is read by source and then passed on to the Tool Command Language (TCL) interpreter, which executes the commands.

=> ↺ How to install FreeOffice on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy

• Learn the commands to install FreeOffice on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the terminal to edit your documents.

• FreeOffice 2021 is a strong MS-Office alternative for those who don’t want to spend money but still rely on compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. Although FreeOffice is limited compared to the paid solution of SoftMaker, for most personal users the range of functions should still be sufficient.

• Using FreeOffice Microsoft documents can usually be opened, edited, and saved under FreeOffice without loss of formatting. Also visually oriented the software is stronger which won’t let you feel that you are using some free office version. This allows you to use a modern ribbon menu, as you are used to from MS Word. FreeOffice also includes a classic menu including Light and Dark Mode. In addition, there is a touchscreen mode, which significantly improves finger operation.

• To use FreeOffice for free, you must register the software after five days. All you have to do is provide a valid e-mail address.

=> ↺ Set up the Betterbird fork of Thunderbird on Linux

• Tired of waiting for Mozilla Thunderbird to get updated with new features or bug fixes on your Linux system? Try out Betterbird. It is a soft fork of Thunderbird that promises to keep the email client fresh, packed with features, and up to date. Here’s how to set up Betterbird on your Linux PC.

=> ↺ How to integrate Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes with ServiceNow

• In this post I will go through how you can integrate and send policy alert notifications from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (RHACS) to ServiceNow.

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security supports a number of specific notifier integrations today, including Slack, Jira, Splunk, syslog and email. Although ServiceNow is not currently in that list, it is possible to use generic webhooks to create this integration. Using this option together with the ServiceNow feature Scripted REST API will allow you to send security alert notifications also to ServiceNow.

=> ↺ How to Fix: sudo Command Not Found Error

• The sudo command is an abbreviation of “superuser do”, and it is a program which allows a user to execute a command with admin privileges. The sudo command helps you run programs/commands like an admin user.

• Also, the user, who is running the command with sudo must be a part of the sudo group. The primary reason you get this error is that the package itself is not installed. However, most modern Linux distribution provides this by default, but some don’t.

=> ↺ How to install Ubuntu 22.04 Server on VirtualBox – Linux Shout

• Learn the steps to install Ubuntu 22.04 Server ISO on VirtualBox Virtual machine running on Windows, macOS, Android, or Linux systems.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux server is the latest long-term supported server OS from Canonical developers. Although, yet most of the server users are resorting currently on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, however, for those who want to try out the Jammy Jellyfish on a Virtual machine before moving to it, this article will help them.

• Most of the users would already be familiar with VirtualBox, if not, then it is an open-source project from Oracle to run virtual machines on all popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.

=> ↺ How to automatically change X11 displays setup with autorandr on Linux

• Adding a monitor to a setup is probably one of the most effective and immediate ways to increase productivity. A multi monitor setup can be useful, for example, when we need to consult some kind of documentation and at the same time work on another task full-screen. Autorandr is a free and open source utility able to apply specific X11 configurations depending on the displays connected to our machine.

• In this tutorial we learn how use the autorandr utility, and how to install it on some of the most used Linux distributions.

=> ↺ Find text in files using the Linux grep command | Enable Sysadmin

• Using grep, you can quickly find text matching a regular expression in a single file, a group of files, or text coming from stdin.

=> ↺ Enable RPM Fusion Repository In Fedora, RHEL – OSTechNix

• In this brief guide, we will see what is RPM Fusion repository, why should we install RPM Fusion repository, and finally how to enable RPM Fusion repository in Fedora, RHEL, and its clones like CentOS, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux distributions.

=> ↺ How to Create a Software Bill of Materials – The New Stack

• Although there might be days when you feel like dropping “SBOMs” left and right, within the realm of technology we’re not talking about another term for a four-letter word starting with “S.”

• SBOM stands for Software Bill of Materials and has become a crucial aspect of security for enterprise businesses and developers. Essentially, an SBOM is a nested inventory of software that comes together to serve a greater whole. SBOMs have become absolutely necessary for maintaining the high standards of security required to do business successfully — especially concerning supply chain risk management.

• You see, every piece of software ever created may or may not include vulnerabilities. That’s just a part of dealing with technology. This gets increasingly difficult as a piece of software requires more and more dependencies.

=> ↺ How to Enable UEFI Mode in VirtualBox and VMware – TREND OCEANS

• Nowadays, you will find that most operating systems and hardware support UEFI mode, and when you buy new hardware that comes with a Windows operating system, you will find that the UEFI mode is the default boot firmware.

• However, you can switch back to legacy boot (on some hardware), but for that, you need to reinstall the operating system.

• But who will do that when UEFI has a lot of features enabled for users, like fast booting, which means you do not need to wait for a long period of time to just complete the boot process thanks to a separate EFI partition which holds the information about the operating system in a different partition.

• In addition, you will get a secure boot option to verify the integrity of the operating system at startup. It supports GUI over the boring blue screen, which can be complex for some users, but it has its own advantages.

=> ↺ How to Install Prestashop with Apache and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Debian 11

• PrestaShop is a free, open-source, efficient, and innovative e-commerce solution that helps you to sell your products online.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.18 is now available.

Games

=> ↺ Valve’s Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais’ Interview with Japanese Media: “We don’t consider the Nintendo Switch to be a competitor” – Boiling Steam

• As I was going around my press reviews for what was written about the Steam Deck in Japan after the Tokyo Games Show, I came across this exclusive interview given by Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais during their stay in Japan, just before the Tokyo Games Show 2022 started. I have prepared a translation below so that you can all enjoy making sense of it, but the original article (from Nikkei X-Trend) is here and should be considered the better source if you can read Japanese. If you reference the English translation please link to this page as well.

• [...]

• For example, we are working with Google to run Steam on Chrome OS. A prototype version of the software has already been released.

=> ↺ The END is near for the Steam Deck… reservation queue. (Plus other Steam Deck news) – Invidious

• There was a ton of Steam Deck news this week. So let’s review it all together!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Shared With Me files in KIO GDrive

• I’ve just merged in kio-gdrive master the support for Shared With Me files. This new feature will be shipped with the next KDE Gear 22.12 release.

• Your shared files and folders will be presented in a virtual “Shared With Me” folder (similar to the “Shared With Me” tab in the Google web-UI)…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Stupid Simple App to create Light & Dark Wallpapers in GNOME | UbuntuHandbook

• Got photo images in both light and dark style? There’s a super simple application to set them as dynamic wallpapers in GNOME 42+ desktop.

• As you may know, GNOME 42+ support light and dark wallpapers that change automatically depends on system color scheme.

=> ↺ #62 Forty-three! – This Week in GNOME

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 16 to September 23.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Mabox September 2022 ISO refresh

• September’s refreshed ISO images bring some interesting new features and a series of improvements for the already known Mabox tools.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ SparkyLinux “LXQt” 6.4 Quick overview #linux #sparkylinux – Invidious

• A Quick Overview of SparkyLinux “LXQt” 6.4

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/38 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

• During this week, openSUSE Tumbleweed was once again able to showcase the power there is in using OBS (open build service), openQA, and a dedicated team to make things happen. After six months of development, GNOME 43.0 has been released upstream on Sep 21. The openSUSE GNOME Team has been closely following progress and kept packages updated in the devel branch throughout the alpha/beta/RC phases. All the relevant package updates had been ready shortly after upstream released the tarballs and GNOME 43.0 could be shipped as part of Snapshot 20220921. This one snapshot only serves as an example of what happens in the various development areas. And this was just ONE of the snapshots published during this week. One, in a group of a total of 7, that is.

=> ↺ TCS Cognix Enterprise CaaS Solution with SUSE Rancher | SUSE Communities

• The following blog has been written by TCS Agile Computing, Cloud & Edge, Centre of Excellence (CoE) in collaboration with the Global SUSE GSI team. It examines the TCS Cognix Enterprise Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution with SUSE Rancher.

Red Hat and Fedora Family

=> ↺ 4 questions IT leaders should ask before investing in new technologies | The Enterprisers Project

• It’s becoming clear that the economic highs we’ve seen over the last few years are settling down. What’s less clear is how low they will go and for how long.

• Savvy business leaders understand that the one thing that will help them weather this change is technology. While spending on technology will remain strong going forward, the key drivers to tech investments will shift, and practicality will be the key watchword.

• The cloud will continue to gain momentum as the key enabler to work from anywhere. Still, cloud costs will be more closely scrutinized across different departments, and some tasks formerly handled by cloud providers will likely go back to the IT staff. In addition, companies will look to reveal underutilized services that could enable additional cost savings.

• Companies will also turn to automation and AI to boost productivity and reduce costs caused by errors and waste. For example, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems will help companies automate repetitive tasks while minimizing human error that can result in additional costs and penalties.

=> ↺ Pipelines for cloud-native network functions (CNFs) Part 2: Pipelines for lifecycle management

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 38 2022

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-38

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Gunnar Wolf: 6237415

• Years ago, it was customary that some of us stated publicly the way we think in time of Debian General Resolutions (GRs). And even if we didn’t, vote lists were open (except when voting for people, i.e. when electing a DPL), so if interested we could understand what our different peers thought.

• This is the first vote, though, where a Debian vote is protected under voting secrecy. I think it is sad we chose that path, as I liken a GR vote more with a voting process within a general assembly of a cooperative than with a countrywide voting one; I feel that understanding who is behind each posture helps us better understand the project as a whole.

• But anyway, I’m digressing… Even though I remained quiet during much of the discussion period (I was preparing and attending a conference), I am very much interested in this vote — I am the maintainer for the Raspberry Pi firmware, and am a seconder for two of them. Many people know me for being quite inflexible in my interpretation of what should be considered Free Software, and I’m proud of it. But still, I believer it to be fundamental for Debian to be able to run on the hardware most users have.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ IoT Project Lifecycle: Efficient prototyping with Snaps and Ubuntu Core [Part I] | Ubuntu

• There is nothing more exciting than creating something new. Whether developing a new idea, coding a new software feature or creating a new product altogether. After a lot of hard work, we can finally see users interacting with the system and sharing their feedback. The quickest way to reach that point in a project is to start prototyping early.

• With an abundance of hardware and software available, it has never been easier to create a working prototype. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Providing an interactive solution to stakeholders and potential users is the easiest and fastest way to convey and validate your ideas.

=> ↺ Design and Web team summary – 29 July 2022 | Ubuntu

• The Web and design team at Canonical runs in two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Astro Pi Mission Zero 2022/23 is open for young people

• Inspire young people about coding and space science with Astro Pi Mission Zero. Mission Zero offers young people the chance to write code that will run in space! It opens for participants today.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ A DIY non-contact digital tachometer for machinists | Arduino Blog

• A tachometer is a device that counts the revolutions of a rotating object, with the most well-known example being the automotive tachometer that monitors the revolutions per minute (RPMs) of an internal combustion engine. But tachometers are useful, and sometimes a requirement, in many other applications. RPM is a very important datum when working with machine tools like lathes and milling machines, which is what this DIY non-contact digital tachometer was designed to accommodate.

• The term “feeds and speeds” refers to the parameters a machinist uses to achieve the ideal tool load. A vertical milling machine’s end mill, for example, can only remove a certain amount of material with each stroke of each cutting flute. For that reason, it is imperative that a machinist know how fast the end mill is rotating. Most modern machine tools (not just CNC tools, but also manual tools) include a digital RPM display. But many older machines and some modern machines with low-cost VFDs (variable-frequency drives) do not and that makes it very difficult to maintain optimal load. This DIY device addresses those shortcomings in an affordable way.

=> ↺ Zen sand garden in a suitcase doubles as MIDI controller | Arduino Blog

• At the shallow end of the pool, a MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) controller can be as simple as a handful of buttons that correspond to different notes. But even as one wades into the deep end of the pool, MIDI controllers tend to still look like hunks of plastic with some knobs and keys. Redditor Gilou_ wanted something that felt more organic (actually, “inorganic” if we want to be technical) and so they built this unusual MIDI controller that looks like a Japanese-style sand garden in a suitcase.

• If you stumbled across this device without any context, you would assume that is exactly what it is: some kind of portable sand garden. Opening the top of the suitcase reveals a handful of dark stones resting in a bed of sand. Traditional rakes and scoops hang in straps on the lid of the suitcase. But underneath the sand there are a few electronic components that turn the sound garden into a functional instrument. A piezoelectric pickup, like the kind you’d see on some acoustic-electric guitars, in the sand translates the vibrations of sand raking and sifting into an audio signal that feeds into a computer’s sound card.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Top 5 Best Call forwarding Apps for Android Devices in 2022

=> ↺ Best running belts for Android phones | Android Central

=> ↺ Check out the top 5 new Android phone features, they will change your experience forever | How-to

=> ↺ Review of Arylic S50 Pro+ wireless stereo pre-amplifier – CNX Software

=> ↺ Here’s how to add Android Auto to any car – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Xiaomi finally drops Mi A3 software support, end of Xiaomi’s Android One

=> ↺ How to check and manage screen time on an Android phone

=> ↺ How to scan an Android phone for malware – Android Authority

=> ↺ How to Turn on Data Saver Mode on Your Android

=> ↺ We nearly missed Android’s 14th birthday because of Google Calendar

=> ↺ Android 13′s themed icons: What they do and how to enable them

=> ↺ Urgent warning for MILLIONS of Android users – check your hidden ‘hack status’ now | The US Sun

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Microsoft-funded ‘analyst’: The Dead End – tecosystems

• If we normalize projects baiting developers with an open source license to gain traction and switching to a non-open source license to monopolize the returns on that traction, then the logical next step for investors will be skipping that first step entirely.

=> ↺ drones run linux: the free software movement isn’t enough

• richard stallman. rms. if you’ve spent time in tech, you may know his name. in popular tabloid culture, he’s painted as a sexist pedo – in 4chan-esque dungeons, he’s heralded as a savior.

• in reality, he’s a very flawed human that discovered something most of us never will. a single cause to commit the rest of his entire life to.

• rms has led the free software movement for 40 years. his asset is his flaw. he is stubborn. extremely stubborn. absolutely unwilling to deviate, admit fault, change, or back down. a staunch revolutionary on a blazing battleground. the world will see free software as a moral right, and he will die fighting, no matter what anyone says.

=> ↺ OpenAI Hears You Whisper

• Should you wish to try high-quality voice recognition without buying something, good luck. Sure, you can borrow the speech recognition on your phone or coerce some virtual assistants on a Raspberry Pi to handle the processing for you, but those aren’t good for major work that you don’t want to be tied to some closed-source solution. OpenAI has introduced Whisper, which they claim is an open source neural net that “approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.” It appears to work on at least some other languages, too.

=> ↺ NMKD, An Easy GUI for the Stable Diffusion AI Art Generator – Invidious

• NMKD Stable Diffusion GUI is an easy to use, and easy to install, graphical front end to the Stable Diffusion AI Art Generator. In this video, I go through the steps involved in finding the tool, installing it, and creating your own AI masterpieces on your own PC.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Lox365 extension: XLOOKUP (and more) for LibreOffice Calc

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Lisp macros are magical

• In my previous post I introduced yet another Lisp interpreter. When it was posted there was no support for macros.

• Since I’ve recently returned from a visit to the UK, and caught COVID-19 while I was there, I figured I’d see if my brain was fried by adding macro support.

• I know lisp macros are awesome, it’s one of those things that everybody is told. Repeatedly. I’ve used macros in my emacs programming off and on for a good few years, but despite that I’d not really given them too much thought.

=> ↺ Limine 4.1.2 black screen

• I have built EasyOS 4.4, for final testing, and tested it on some of my small collection of computers. Unfortunately, get a black screen on one of the computers.

=> ↺ Qt for Android Automotive 6.3.2 is released

• We are happy to announce that the latest Qt for Android Automotive is out, focusing on better developer experience and bug fixes.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ TPF launches merch store for Perl 5 | dean [blogs.perl.org]

• TPF has launched an online store with Perl merchandise (swag) celebrating the Perl 5.36 release. The marketing committee plan to do a custom celebratory collection for each release of Perl with revenue from each sale goes to TPF’s Perl fund.

=> ↺ My Perl Weekly Challenge | AWNCORP [blogs.perl.org]

• All this talk about types, objects, and systems, got me to thinking, “what would it take to create a 100% backwards-compatible pure Perl proof-of-concept for optionally typable subroutine signatures”. I mean really, how hard could it be?

Python

=> ↺ Arch Linux drops Python 2

• Arch Linux has announced that Python 2 is being removed from the distribution’s repositories. “If you still require the python2 package you can keep it around, but please be aware that there will be no security updates.”

=> ↺ Python 2 Is No Longer Part of the Arch Linux Repositories

• Python 2 reached EOL in 2020, so Arch’s devs reduced the apps that used it to the point it is now entirely removed from the distro’s repos.

Rust

=> ↺ Linux embracing Rust will boost robotics community

• This week, Linux’s Benevolent Dictator For Life Linus Torvalds mentioned that the Rust programming language would be used in the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel. Currently, the Linux kernel is at preview version 6.0-rc6 (codenamed “Hurr durr I’ma ninja sloth”) so we have a bit of time before we all have Rust powering the kernel, but the mere announcement is news-worthy. It’s the author’s opinion that this embrace of Rust at the very core of Linux will be a huge boost to the robotics community.

=> ↺ Ten challenges for Rust

• Rust is in a pretty good place; it is getting more and more popular, has more and more contributors, and is used in some pretty significant places. However, it is a time of flux and change, and transitioning from a research project then a new, rapidly changing language to a popular, established project is a difficult change.

• Here, I want to describe what I think are the ten biggest challenges for Rust for now and the next few years. I have some ideas for solutions, but they are all big, difficult questions with no simple answer, so the real solutions will all take iteration, energy, and creativity. My focus is on the core project; there are many challenges for the community and ecosystem (e.g., how to make GUIs with Rust, or how to get more crates to 1.0) which I think must be primarily solved by the community.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Better Scope Measurements

• There was a time when few hobbyists had an oscilloscope and the ones you did see were old military or industrial surplus that were past their prime. Today you can buy a fancy scope for about what those used scopes cost that would have once been the envy of every giant research lab. However, this new breed of instrument is typically digital and while they look like an old analog scope, the way they work leads to some odd gotchas that [Arthur Pini] covers in a recent post.

=> ↺ Robots Chase Down Balls In Fun Outdoor Game

• Art installations aren’t always about static sculpture or pure aesthetics. In the case of Operation Kiba, they can be fun games for everyone to enjoy.

=> ↺ A Love Letter To Small Design Teams, And The B-52

• The true measure of engineering success — or, at least, one of them — is how long something remains in use. A TV set someone designed in 1980 is probably, at best, relegated to a dusty guest room today if not the landfill. But the B-52 — America’s iconic bomber — has been around for more than 70 years and will likely keep flying for another 30 years or more. Think about that. A plane that first flew in 1952 is still in active use. What’s more, according to a love letter to the plane by [Alex Hollings], it was designed over a weekend in a hotel room by a small group of people.

=> ↺ Hackaday Prize 2022: Solar Powered LoRa Weather Station For The Masses

• [Debasish Dutta] has designed a few weather stations in the past, and this, the fourth version of the system has had many of the feature requests from past users rolled in. The station is intended to be used with an external weather sensor unit, provided by Sparkfun. This handles wind speed and direction, as well as measuring rainfall. A custom PCB hosts an ESP32-WROOM module and an Ai-Thinker Ra-02 LoRa module for control and connectivity respectively. A PMS5003 sits on the PCB to measure those particulate densities, but most sensors are connected with simple 4-way I2C connectors. Temperature, humidity, and pressure are handled by a BME280 module, UV Index (SI1145), visible light (BH1750) even soil humidity and temperature with a cable-mounted SHT10 module.

Hardware

=> ↺ Wireless Water Detector Hooks Up To Home Assistant

• Water damage can quickly make even the nicest buildings unliveable. [Andres Leon] suffered a small flood from an air conditioning unit, and wanted to avoid such issues in future. Thus, he built a wireless monitor to solve the problem.

=> ↺ Simple Internet Radio Transplant

• While we have a definite sweet spot in our hearts for analog radio, there are times that just call for a digital upgrade. One of the downsides that can come with this upgrade is complexity. For example, the more software-minded among us might base their build on the Music Player Daemon, and use a web interface for control. But that’s not everyone’s idea of a good time, and particularly an older user of your gizmos might really appreciate a simple, tactile user interface. That’s the situation [Blake Hannaford] was in, while building an Internet powered radio for someone else.

=> ↺ We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Massive Surge in US Wildfire Smoke Chokes Air Quality Progress for Tens of Millions

• Researchers at Stanford University found that the number of people impacted by “extreme smoke days,” during which air quality is considered unhealthy for all age groups and populations, has increased by 27 times over the past decade, with 25 million exposed to hazardous air quality on at least one day in 2020.

Proprietary

=> ↺ RemotePC Offers High Performance and Affordable Remote Access for Linux Machines

• RemotePC™, an award-winning remote access provider is offering one of the industry’s best and most affordable remote desktop access for Linux solutions, allowing users to connect directly to their Linux machines and manage them from anywhere.

=> ↺ Meet the New Release of ODBC Driver for BigCommerce with macOS and Linux Support

• Devart, a recognized vendor of world-class data connectivity solutions for various technologies and frameworks, announces the new version of ODBC Driver for BigCmmerce 2.0 with macOS and Linux support.

Security

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

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, expat, firefox-esr, mediawiki, and unzip), Fedora (qemu and thunderbird), Oracle (webkit2gtk3), SUSE (ardana-ansible, ardana-cobbler, ardana-tempest, grafana, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-neutron-gbp, openstack-nova, python-Django1, rabbitmq-server, rubygem-puma, ardana-ansible, ardana-cobbler, grafana, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-murano, python-Django, rabbitmq-server, rubygem-puma, dpdk, freetype2, rubygem-rack, and virtualbox), and Ubuntu (etcd, libjpeg-turbo, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-raspi, linux-oem-5.17, linux-raspi-5.4, python-oauthlib, and python3.5).

=> ↺ Can reflections in eyeglasses actually leak info from Zoom calls? Here’s a study into it

• Our models and experimental results in a controlled lab setting show it is possible to reconstruct and recognize with over 75 percent accuracy on-screen texts that have heights as small as 10 mm with a 720p webcam.” That corresponds to 28 pt, a font size commonly used for headings and small headlines.

• […]

• Being able to read reflected headline-size text isn’t quite the privacy and security problem of being able to read smaller 9 to 12 pt fonts. But this technique is expected to provide access to smaller font sizes as high-resolution webcams become more common.

• “We found future 4k cameras will be able to peek at most header texts on almost all websites and some text documents,” said Long.

• […]

• A variety of factors can affect the legibility of text reflected in a video conference participant’s glasses. These include reflectance based on the meeting participant’s skin color, environmental light intensity, screen brightness, the contrast of the text with the webpage or application background, and the characteristics of eyeglass lenses. Consequently, not every glasses-wearing person will necessarily provide adversaries with reflected screen sharing.

• With regard to potential mitigations, the boffins say that Zoom already provides a video filter in its Background and Effects settings menu that consists of reflection-blocking opaque cartoon glasses. Skype and Google Meet lack that defense.

=> ↺ Private Eye: On the Limits of Textual Screen Peeking via Eyeglass Reflections in Video Conferencing

• Using mathematical modeling and human subjects experiments, this research explores the extent to which emerging webcams might leak recognizable textual and graphical information gleaming from eyeglass reflections captured by webcams. The primary goal of our work is to measure, compute, and predict the factors, limits, and thresholds of recognizability as webcam technology evolves in the future. Our work explores and characterizes the viable threat models based on optical attacks using multi-frame super resolution techniques on sequences of video frames. Our models and experimental results in a controlled lab setting show it is possible to reconstruct and recognize with over 75% accuracy on-screen texts that have heights as small as 10 mm with a 720p webcam. We further apply this threat model to web textual contents with varying attacker capabilities to find thresholds at which text becomes recognizable. Our user study with 20 participants suggests present-day 720p webcams are sufficient for adversaries to reconstruct textual content on big-font websites. Our models further show that the evolution towards 4K cameras will tip the threshold of text leakage to reconstruction of most header texts on popular websites. Besides textual targets, a case study on recognizing a closed-world dataset of Alexa top 100 websites with 720p webcams shows a maximum recognition accuracy of 94% with 10 participants even without using machine-learning models. Our research proposes near-term mitigations including a software prototype that users can use to blur the eyeglass areas of their video streams. For possible long-term defenses, we advocate an individual reflection testing procedure to assess threats under various settings, and justify the importance of following the principle of least privilege for privacy-sensitive scenarios.

=> ↺ Software Supply Chain Security Guidance for Developers

• Whether it’s package hijacking, dependency confusing, typosquatting, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) compromises, or basic web exploitation of outdated dependencies, there are many software supply chain attacks adversaries can perform to take down their victims, hold them to ransom, and exfiltrate critical data.

• It’s often more efficient to attack a weak link in the chain to reach a bigger target, like what happened to Kaseya or SolarWinds in the last couple of years. Attackers can implant an RCE (remote code execution) or harvest developers’ credentials to escalate privileges and perform malicious actions stealthily.

• Besides, they may only have to compromise a single package to distribute malware to a large range of users and organizations, because the current supply chain is insanely complex and interconnected.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Cellebrite Accidentally Leaked Thousands Of Sensitive Documents During Handover To Japanese Corporate Partner

• When a Cellebrite device is hooked up to a seized phone, the operator presses a few buttons to pull pretty much every bit of data from the device. From there, investigators can try to find the evidence they’re seeking. While the FBI continues to claim device encryption is preventing law enforcement from accessing evidence, plenty of private companies are providing solutions to the problem the FBI claims is unsolvable without backdoors.

=> ↺ San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors Grants Police More Surveillance Powers

• During the hearing, Supervisor Hillary Ronen introduced two key amendments to address and mitigate the ordinance’s civil liberties impacts. The first would have prohibited the SFPD from live monitoring public gatherings unless there was imminent threat of death or bodily harm. This failed, by the same 4-7 tally as the ordinance itself.

=> ↺ Lawsuit: SMUD and Sacramento Police Violate State Law and Utility Customers’ Privacy by Sharing Data Without a Warrant

• Utility data has historically provided a detailed picture of what occurs within a home. The advent of smart utility meters has only enhanced that image. Smart meters provide usage information in increments of 15 minutes or less; this granular information is beamed wirelessly to the utility several times each day and can be stored in the utility’s databases for years. As that data accumulates over time, it can provide inferences about private daily routines such as what devices are being used, when they are in use, and how this changes over time.

=> ↺ Military Whistleblower Challenges Pentagon’s Warrantless Purchase Of Internet Data

=> ↺ Press release: Use of Google Analytics for web analytics

• The Danish Data Protection Agency has looked into the tool Google Analytics, its settings, and the terms under which the tool is provided. On the basis of this review, the Danish Data Protection Agency concludes that the tool cannot, without more, be used lawfully. Lawful use requires the implementation of supplementary measures in addition to the settings provided by Google.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Casus Belli Under A Hidden Agenda Now in ‘End Game ‘ Stage Illicitly Understood

• Revolutionary truth being that lies and illusions are essential to any war because the vast majority of people are benign and peaceful.

=> ↺ “I Do Not Think I Know”: Scott Morrison’s Submarine Deception

• France was kept in the dark of both the AUKUS negotiations and the fact that their treasured, lucrative submarine contract would cease to exist after September.  It ruined, for a time, the relationship between Australia and France, and led President Emmanuel Macron to publicly accuse Morrison of lying.  “I don’t think,” he memorably responded to a journalist’s question when asked about the conduct of Australia’s prime minister, “I know.”

=> ↺ Dave Foreman and the First Green Scare Case

• He immediately thought of the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago, expecting to be shot in cold blood. But as Foreman put it, “Being a nice, middle-class honky male, they can’t get away with that stuff quite as easily as they could with Fred, or with all the Native people on the Pine Ridge Reservation back in the early 70s.”

=> ↺ The Polish-Hungarian friendship is not what it used to be – on account of Ukraine

=> ↺ The Pentagon Is Waging War on Planet Earth

• Stan Cox explores just what it means, in climate terms, for the U.S., no matter the administration, to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state.

=> ↺ How the War Changed Overnight

• By declaring referenda in four Ukrainian regions and vowing to defend new Russian territory with all means necessary, Vladimir Putin has created a whole new war.

=> ↺ Biden’s Afghan Shell Game Prompts Media Shrugs and Stenography

• The story of Biden’s reallocation of Afghanistan’s central banking reserves wasn’t mentioned by a single TV news outlet.

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Committee Announces Its Next — and Possibly Final — Public Hearing Date

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: The War in Ukraine Has Entered a New Phase

=> ↺ What Do Americans Care About? Not a Cold War With Russia and China

• Americans, it is safe to say, have different—one might suggest more practical—concerns, as revealed in a recent Quinnipiac University poll. Asked about the most urgent issue facing the country today, 27 percent of respondents—the highest number—ranked inflation as No. 1, while only 2 percent ranked Ukraine at the top. In a range of Economist-YouGov pollsover the past month, the top foreign-policy concerns included immigration and climate change.

=> ↺ Active Today or Radioactive Tomorrow?

• Thankfully, some rays of hope are emerging. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts recently did an independent inspection of the plant, and two have remained for ongoing monitoring. And there are reports that Russia and Ukraine are negotiating for some kind of agreement—but probably short of a demilitarized zone—to prevent military attacks on the plant.

=> ↺ Opinion | War Spending Like This as the Climate Emergency Grows Is a Global Nightmare

• On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and work on nuclear weaponry at the Energy Department will add another $600 billion to what you, the American taxpayer, will be spending on national security.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Military to American Youth: You Belong to Me

• Ah, the children!

=> ↺ Opinion | Putin Escalation Makes Diplomacy Measures More Urgent

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Trump Claims He Used His Mind to Declassify Documents Before Leaving White House

Environment

=> ↺ The Main Driver Behind Pakistan’s Floods Has a Familiar Name

• Juan Cole reports on a new paper regarding a third of Pakistan being under water as calls for debt relief and reparations grow.

=> ↺ Holding Back the Tide of Water Privatization

• At the end of August, severe storms hit Mississippi, and the Pearl River flooded, rendering the city of Jackson’s water treatment facilities inoperable. Now approximately 150,000 residents do not have access to safe drinking water. The crisis in Jackson has exposed a long-standing history of racism, white flight, and state sabotage of a majority Black city. Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi and himself the product of the suburbs to which white residents fled, has suggested that privatizing Jackson’s water supply could fix the problem. Water activists say this cure would likely be worse than the disease.

=> ↺ Groups Demand Ouster of ‘Climate Denier’ Leading World Bank

• Activists on Thursday unfurled a banner in front of the institution’s building in Washington, D.C. that labels Malpass a “climate denier” and called on U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders to ditch the World Bank chief.

Energy

=> ↺ ‘More of This!’ Merkley Leads Senate Demand for Separate Vote on Manchin Deal

• “Such important issues should be examined through detailed committee consideration and a robust floor debate separate from the urgent need to see that the government stays open.”

=> ↺ ‘Find the Courage’: 400+ Scientists, Health Providers Implore Schumer, Pelosi to Ditch Manchin Deal

• “Scientists who document the evidence for harm and health professionals who treat the harm are now speaking out with one voice.”

=> ↺ Manchin’s Big Oil Giveaway Deal Garners Opposition From Both Sides of the Aisle

=> ↺ Climate Leaders Arrested Outside Senate During Protest Against Manchin’s Dirty Deal

=> ↺ Opinion | Yes, Windfall Taxes on Big Oil Are Warranted—But That’s Not All

• Windfall taxes are utterly defensible as levies on unexpected pure rents that recipients did nothing to deserve and that they receive only by virtue of enjoying a position of market power within an economy. The usual criticisms of taxation as market-distorting, price-signal-jamming, investment-deterring state intervention do not hold. No one can argue convincingly against a windfall tax being imposed on an electricity-generating company that uses solar, wind, or hydro power, but suddenly is flooded with cash because the price of natural gas has skyrocketed.

=> ↺ Pentagon Spending Drains the National Budget and Leaves a Big Carbon Bootprint

=> ↺ Renewed Tensions Hit Drive to Reform Opaque Trade in Carbon Offsets

• Verra, which runs a carbon crediting standard used by hundreds of companies to offset their carbon dioxide emissions, said the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (IC-VCM), a new governance body, needed a “course correction” to deliver workable proposals. 

=> ↺ Opinion | The Sneaky Ways Big Oil Misleads the Public With Money and Power

• Last month, the residents of Allegheny County, PA were fighting to ban fracking in their parks. It came down to a special meeting, where County Councilmembers would vote whether to override a veto by the Council Executive.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ A Deafening Silence on Wolves

=> ↺ Giant squid corpse with half-eaten tentacles stuns tourists on New Zealand beach | Live Science

• One of the deep sea’s most elusive and spectacular creatures, the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), recently astonished a group of tourists after it washed up as a half-eaten corpse on a New Zealand beach. A tour guide who was leading the group at the time described the chance finding as a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience.

• The colossal cephalopod, with a mantle measuring around 13 feet (4 meters) long, was discovered Sept. 9 on the beach at Farewell Spit, a nature reserve in the north of South Island. A lone guide from the nature tour agency Farewell Spit Tours found the remains, which were half buried in sand, and quickly alerted a nearby tour group to come and take a look. After diverting to examine the squid’s corpse, the group spent time marveling at the amazing animal and snapping photos next to the rare remains.

• “It’s not a common find on any beach, so if you’re able to be there at the right time, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Anton Donaldson, the Farewell Spit Tours guide who was leading the group, told The New Zealand Herald (opens in new tab). But it was also sobering to see such a “magnificent example of a large sea creature” dead on the land, he added.

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion | Lives Are on the Line: It’s Time for a National Paid Leave Policy

• My husband and I dreamed of starting a family for so long. Our beautiful son, David, is the light of my life. But when he was born 11 years ago, those first few months were a very difficult time for our family. I had a c-section, so I needed time to heal as we brought David home. But neither my husband nor I had jobs with paid leave, and there are many expenses that come along with having a child.

=> ↺ Unionizing Starbucks

=> ↺ Unionized Boston Starbucks Workers Celebrate Win After 64-Day Strike

=> ↺ No, America Doesn’t Actually Need “Sacrifice Zones”

• In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

=> ↺ Fascists, Neofascists, and Postfascists: Italy’s Unreal Election Debate

• Rome—Ahead of Sunday’s general election, 92 percent of Italians say their top concern is rising energy prices. Even before the inflation crisis, millions of Italians avoided turning on their home appliances; now, they are discussing how to use less gas to boil pasta. Yet the importance of this issue doesn’t necessarily translate directly into partisan allegiances.

=> ↺ “You Strike So You Don’t Quit”: Across the Country, Nurses Are Fighting Overwork

• On the first day of a massive nurses’ strike across 16 hospitals in Minnesota, Emily Kniskern and her daughter arrived outside the hospital where she works, St. Luke’s Duluth, at 6:30 in the morning. Her daughter soon left to go to school, but after cross-country practice, she came back to rejoin the picket line. Other nurses brought their kids too. One had 4-month-old triplets in onesies emblazoned each with one of the unions’ three letters: MNA. Kniskern spotted children whose births she assisted. “Our kids get care there; this is the hospital that we go to when we are sick or when we are hurt,” she noted. The kids “are reminders of why we’re doing this.”

=> ↺ China is Capitalist

• Before explaining his proofs, Brown engages in some general applause for the Chinese system—though the causes for his cheer-leading are basically beside the point regarding whether China is communist-socialist or capitalist. He states that “China has become, in one generation, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP)”—a measure economists question anyway when used in reference to production, as Brown does.

=> ↺ House GOP Agenda Signals Push for Social Security and Medicare Cuts

• A one-page summary of the agenda that House Republicans, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), are expected to formally introduce Friday includes a highly misleading line that expresses the GOP’s commitment to “save and strengthen Social Security and Medicare.”

=> ↺ Fed Rate Hikes Won’t Tackle the Corporate Profiteering Behind Inflation, Experts Tell Congress

• During his opening statement, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), chair of the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, said that “we cannot ignore the reality that American corporations today are reporting higher profit margins than ever, while increasing prices more than necessary to cover costs—all at the expense of the American consumer.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Tish James Got the Goods on the Trump Family Grift—Now What?

• On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James unveiled a 222-page civil complaint against Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and a number of others involved in Trump’s business dealings in New York. The lawsuit alleges a raft of financial misdealings, fraud, and misrepresentations carried out by Trump, his family, and his cronies.

=> ↺ Siding With DOJ, Appeals Court Rules Trump Judge ‘Abused’ Discretion by Halting Criminal Probe

• In a scathing 29-page order granting a partial stay of the district court judge’s order, two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit dismantled Cannon’s legal reasoning for halting the Justice Department’s criminal probe of documents, writing that they could not “discern why [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings.”

=> ↺ Sanders Blasts GOP for Opposing Resolution Warning Against Military Coup in Brazil

• “This resolution is very simple and straightforward,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a floor speech outlining the details of a measure he introduced alongside Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and a handful of other Senate Democrats on Brazil’s Independence Day earlier this month.

=> ↺ Trump’s Latest Legal Peril Threatens to Bring Down His New York Empire

=> ↺ House Passes Bill to Correct Flaws in Certification of Presidential Elections

=> ↺ Zero GOP Senators Vote to Curb Dark Money’s Stranglehold on Democracy

• As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), author of the defeated legislation, said in a Wednesday floor speech, the bill’s goal is to prevent corporations and billionaires from using dark money loopholes to “spew bile and slime” into the nation’s political system.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Florida Officially Asks Supreme Court To Review Its Social Media Content Moderation Law

• Back in May, an 11th Circuit appeals court panel found that Florida’s ridiculous content moderation law was clearly unconstitutional, mostly upholding a district court ruling saying the same thing. As you’ll recall, Florida passed this law, mainly in response to Trump being banned from social media, that limits how websites can moderate content, largely focused on content posted by politicians. The 11th Circuit did push back on one part of the lower court decision, saying that the transparency requirements of the law were likely constitutional.

=> ↺ Queen’s Funeral in UK Set Off Harsh Crackdowns Against Critics of Monarchy

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ The Chris Hedges Report: Julian Assange’s Father on Looming Extradition and Imperative of Mass Resistance

• The persecution of Julian Assange is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ A Poet Confronts the Violent History of El Salvador

• In the early morning darkness of May 24, 2022, hundreds of people were camped on a street bordering a prison in San Luis Mariona, El Salvador. The encampment had been there for days, its inhabitants hoping for information about loved ones they suspected the state was holding on the other side of the prison walls. More than 50,000 Salvadorans have been arrested since late March in what President Nayib Bukele claims is a crackdown on gangs, but the administration refuses to share information about those detained. Most of the families that day in May couldn’t even be certain their relatives were in Mariona. But they had traveled hours by public bus from their rural homes to get here, where the only option was to sleep on the street, because the administration sometimes released prisoners by stealth at night.1

=> ↺ Caitlin Johnstone: America’s Perverse Poverty Draft

• Some lawmakers worry partial cancellation of student debts will harm military recruitment and they’ve written to the president and defense secretary about it.

=> ↺ Down for the Count

• “Down for the Count,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, takes a closer look at the fabric of our justice system.

=> ↺ Freedom to travel to get an abortion

• Both anti-abortion vigilantes and state laws criminalizing actions related to abortion, including facilitating abortion-related travel, are prompting women seeking abortions as well as those who support abortion rights to think about how to protect abortion travelers and their supporters against identification, surveillance, stalking, harassment, or legal sanctions.

=> ↺ 5th Circuit Awards Immunity To Cop Who Decided A Suicidal Man Should Be Tased While He Had A Noose Around His Neck

• Oh, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Whatever will you do next?

=> ↺ New Data From The Bureau Of Prisons Indicates Bail Reform Won’t Make Americans Less Safe

• Along with the call for law enforcement reforms following the inflection point created by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, there has been increasing demand for bail reform.

=> ↺ Congressional Staffers Are Holding Their First-Ever Union Vote

=> ↺ States Need Constitutional Amendments to Protect Abortion From Right-Wing Judges

• Marjorie Cohn writes about state government and right to abortion from constitutional protection. Although the California Supreme Court has declared that the state constitution’s right to privacy protects abortion, that safeguard remains ephemeral.

=> ↺ Ohio Court Filings Detail Dozens of Patients Put Under ‘Extreme Duress’ by Abortion Ban

• As the Ohio Capital Journal reported Thursday, abortion providers in the state have seen the effects of Senate Bill 23—which banned nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and is now temporarily blocked until mid-October—on dozens on patients facing fetal abnormalities, cancer diagnoses, and pregnancies resulting from rape.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Cable Giant Charter Will Pay $1.1 Billion After Tech Murders Elderly Customer

• Back in the early aughts, when I wrote exclusively about the broadband sector, you literally couldn’t go a week without a story about a cable broadband technician  falling asleep on the job, blowing up homes, occasionally murdering people or getting arrested for torturing and spray painting kittens.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Tips for the bachelors degree?

• Soon I will need to write my bachelors degree. I have mixed feelings about it, curious but also a bit scared. All in all, I think I have a pretty interesting topic (using low-earth-orbit satellites for routing the internet), and also have some (minor) experience in reading and writing scientific papers, but the scale of a bachelors degree is something completely new to me.

• I therefore thought about what I could do to ease the progress of writing the degree, and also want your feedback on what would be sensible to do in such a situation, maybe it will help me (and maybe also others) for this and further scientific works.

=> ↺ ROOPHLOCH

• Here we are again, writing from the bus. I’m slowly tapping away as I take the 20 minute journey into Reykjavik to meet a friend for coffee. I’ve not spent time with her in months, so we have much to catch up on.

• I like the bus. I never used it in the US. I lived in 16 states but only twice in a town with any substanitial public transit. In neither case did it feel like this, like community. As I sit here there are four children with scooters traveling alone into the city. Perhaps another dozen scattered and talking. I relax into the atmosphere instead of dreading it. I go to see a friend, yo share my community experiences with her and the journey is fitting.

• Last night I listened to a talk by Pawel (look up last name later) at my local hackerspace, Hakkavélin, about Solarpunk. It was inspiring, hopeful, and a wake-up to tge possibilities in my own actions. It was also the first introduction to the idea for many of my friends. The thrill of seeing their excitement redoubled my own.

=> ↺ FHIOSTU Wordo: VAPID

=> ↺ Star Log 2022-09-23 04:00 AKDT (Fairbanks, AK, US)

• Having had only overcast skies for days and days, I was eager to latch on to any opportunity. OpenWeather had forecasted a brief drop in the cloud cover in the early morning, so I gave it a try, getting up around 2am. Unfortunately, the cloud cover was still pretty bad, around 80% I’d guess. I tried to work with it, but the problem was that the clouds were moving pretty fast, so that once I got my sights trained on something, it would get covered up by clouds within about five minutes. So, if you are looking for an exciting post, you’ll want to skip the rest of this entry.

• On the whole, it was disappointing, but it was an interesting challenge to try to orient myself to the sky when only about a fifth of it is visible through random gaps in the cloud cover.

=> ↺ Media Rec: Severance

• Wasn’t sure what to call this style of entry, but it’s mainly going to be for raving about pieces of media that I’ve recently enjoyed. Severance was initially suggested to me by my parents, and I was curious about the concept, but oh boy did it exceed my expectations!

Politics

=> ↺ A rant about politics

• I am not a fan of politics, never have been. I don’t like reading about it, hearing about it, seeing about it. Thats because people aren’t interested in genuine heartfelt discussion and idealogical compromise, theyre interested in pointing fingers, playing with scapegoats and strawmen. Grown ass adults acting like children who would rather play the blame game with the polar opposite of their ideaology and say “this type of person is the reason for all the worlds problems! Look at how (insert political group) is to blame for our suffering! If only that country adopted Y economic system!”

• In my real life experience, ones who single mindedly talk about politics and ideaologies are arrogant and bullheaded people who think they are so much smarter and well informed than everyone else, and their opinions are the right ones.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ IDEA: Public Imageboard In Gemini

• There was once a gemini capsule called iich.space, it was run by sk! and is now defunct. It was another chan board inspired by 2chan. Now I would not be talking about a capsule dead for months if it did not do something special that has not yet re-appeared in gemini. A public image board.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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