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Posted in News Roundup at 4:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
 This week has been very slow in Linux news due to the Easter holidays, but sometimes we need to relax a bit and enjoy some family time. Being Easter and all that, this week brought us new Linux hardware from Star Labs, in the form of an all-AMD mini PC and an AMD Ryzen 7-powered StarBook Mk V laptop, as well as a new Ubuntu-powered laptop from Lambda and Razor for deep learning.
On top of that, the PeaZip open-source archiving utility gets a new release, the LXQt 1.1 lightweight desktop environment brings more features and a new theme, and the Linux kernel 5.16 series reaches EOL (end-of-life). You can enjoy this and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for April 17th, 2022, below!
Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.
We had a wonderful week in the world of Linux Releases with the releases of EndeavourOS 22.1, SparkyLinux 2022.04, Bluestar Linux 5.17.2, and Manjaro 21.2.6.
A headline at Hot Hardware calls it “a sexy Linux laptop with deep learning chops… being pitched as the world’s most powerful laptop for machine learning workloads.”
Chrome OS Flex is here, and it can turn any old Mac or PC into a Chromebook. There’s just been one burning question that has been floating around since its announcement: can you use Chrome OS Flex to bring old Chromebooks back to life? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, but it’s complicated. It might not work and Google won’t provide any support.
One of Chromebooks’ Achilles’ heels is how long they receive updates. After a certain period of time, they reach what is known as the “Auto Update Expiration” (AUE) date, and updates are no longer provided (feature, security, or otherwise). Devices used reach AUE in as little as five years. In 2020, Google announced that some Chromebooks would be eligible for nine years of updates.
There was a time when “real” engineering workstations ran Linux Unix. Apollo and Sun were big names and Sun’s version was Solaris. Solaris has been an iffy proposition since Oracle acquired Sun, but Oracle announced last month that you can download and use Solaris 11.4 CBE free for non-production use.
Do you care? If you ever wanted to run “real” Unix this is an option although, honestly, so is Free BSD and it probably has better community support. On the other hand, since you can virtualize a machine to spin up, it might be worth a little time to install it.
In this video, I discuss five incredibly useful command line utilities: uname, hostname, basename, dirname and logname. All of these programs are part of the GNU core utilities that are installed on every GNU/Linux distribution. You will find these utilities useful, not only as command line programs, but also in scripting.
On this episode of This Week in Linux: LXQt 1.1.0, Next-Gen of SUSE Linux Enterprise, MX Linux 21.1, OpenRazer 3.3, Razer + Lambda Tensorbook Laptop, StarLabs StarBook with AMD, StarLabs Byte Mini PC, Bitwig Studio Goes Rent-to-Own, Zettlr 2.2.5, OpenSSH 9.0. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Sometimes I need to convert some currencies but I don’t want to have to go to my web browser luckily though tools like Forx exist to help me do exactly what I need for both fiat and cryptocurrencies.
buntu 22.04 LTS (“Jammy Jellyfish”) will release next week. This tutorial explains how to safely upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the command-line and GUI options.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Minetest on Debian 11.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache ZooKeeper on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ZooKeeper is a software project by Apache Software Foundation that provides high-performance shared data, maintaining configuration information, naming, providing synchronization, and providing group services. In addition, distributed systems rely on ZooKeeper to implement consensus, leader election, and group management.
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 Apache ZooKeeper on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Today we are looking at how to install Obsidian on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
VirtualBox is a free and open-source virtualization tool for desktop and servers. It allows the users to run multiple virtual machines of different operating system at the same time. It is a type 2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Jupyter Notebook is a powerful and open-source tool for the documentation of data and scientific analysis. This tool can be used with several programming languages, including Python, Julia, Ruby, and much more. It is often used for working with data, statistical modeling, and machine learning.
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 Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
For many companies, the use of Microsoft Teams is vital. Before we had to use it only on Windows, but thanks to Microsoft’s openness we can now easily install it on Linux distributions. Today, you will learn how to install Microsoft Teams on Manjaro Linux.
Many beleive you do not need an antivirus if you use Linux. I am not going to start that debate here. However, in my opinion it is always better to have one and not need it, than to need one and not have it. In this tutorial we are going to show you how to install, configure, and scan for viruses on Linux with ClamAV. ClamAV is a fully open source antimalware toolkit. It is available for almost any operating system, including Windows (ClamWin).
Tmux is a Linux software that allows you to multitask between terminal windows. It is an abbreviation for Terminal Multiplexing, based on the notion of sessions. Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that can replace the GNU screen.
You can create a Tmux session and then launch many windows within it. Each window occupies the entire screen and is separated into rectangular panes. Tmux allows for simple switching between many apps on a single terminal and detaching and reattaching them to a different terminal.
Tmux enables the establishment of persistent terminal sessions even when the SSH connection or the current terminal is closed. Tmux sessions can be continued in the background and subsequently listed and used again. We will cover how to list and attach Tmux sessions in this tutorial.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Ntopng is a free, open-source software network monitoring solution based on commodity hardware. The main difference between ntopng and a traffic collector, is that ntopng not only reports traffic statistics but it also analyzes the traffic, draws conclusions on observed traffic type, and reports cybersecurity metrics. It is Cross-platform and runs on every Unix platform, macOS, and Windows.
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 Ntopng network monitor on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.
A VPS, or “Virtual Private Server,” can be an excellent choice for hosting your website. It will allow you to use a server without incurring the costs of purchasing your dedicated server and maintenance contracts.
This article is going to teach you how to set up a VPS with Ubuntu 22.04, including setting up SSH key-based authentication, a firewall, timezone, updating Ubuntu 22.04, and creating swap space and remote desktop via VNC.
When you have to edit multiple files in Vim from your terminal, it is nice to have the syntax of the file contents to be highlighted.
To enable syntax highlighting in Vim while you are using it, enter the normal mode using Esc key and then type:
:syntax on That’s easy, right? Let me provide more details on how it works and how you can make this change permanent.
Turns out that for a few use cases, the Steam Deck might actually be the best handheld out there to play Nintendo games. A Steam Deck owner on Twitter has shown how the Deck controls are ideally suited to support the Metroid Prime Trilogy.
LXQt is a free, open-source, lightweight, and user-friendly desktop environment built using the Qt libraries. Users looking for extreme performance in a desktop environment should consider LXQt. It is an excellent choice if you require a low-resource, nearly fully-featured desktop environment.
The LXQt desktop environment consists of many small individual components like a panel program, session manager, hotkey daemon, and more. It was formed as a merger between the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktop environments. Here’s the project’s website.
And now, the LXQt project has announced the release of LXQt 1.1. The following section briefly explains the most visible changes in the LXQt 1.1 release.
In 1986, a project called “GEM/XM” was started within Digital Research. The idea was to bring multitasking to the GEM environment. (Which, up until then, had been strictly a “one application at a time” system… much like the Mac System Software of the day.)
Unfortunately, GEM/XM never made it to market. Luckily, we now have the source code for it (under the GPL, thanks to the source being licensed that way and released by Caldera Thin Clients back in 1999).
The motivation here is Use attention-attracting cue when pressing Ctrl+F while in the find bar and do “something” to call attention to the widget. I thought I’d try some of the built-in GTK CSS support. So here we animate the widget to reduce its left and right margins inwards a little and its opacity to 50% before returning to its original properties.
After decades of Ubuntu use, I’ve replaced my desktop OS with antiX. It’s a minimal Debian system without systemd. Boots to desktop in about 5 seconds and uses only 150Mb of RAM. It’s a simple system that I can get my head around easily and administer without unlearning and relearning things all the time like I had to with Ubuntu. It feels fast and efficient, and looks good too. For similar reasons, on the server side, I’m moving from Ubuntu to OpenBSD where I can.
The problem that all Unix distributions face sooner or later is that the people using them generally want the platonic ideal version of semantic versioning minor releases, namely updates that only fix bugs and improve things and never introduce backward compatibility problems or undesired changes. Apart from other problems with semantic versioning, the reality of life is that almost no modern open source project works this way for very long, including languages. Rust has stopped accepting cargo.toml files that it used to (cf), Go has significantly changed how the toolchain worked (cf), and even C compilers have broken compilation of existing things by adding new warnings (cf).
After a long and continuous period of tests and development, we are happy to announce a new release of Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre. With version 0.4, we have reached yet another major milestone: With it Hyperbola will be able to start the groundworks, per say of HyperbolaBSD. This release will serve as a transitional platform, for the continued effort to create a copyleft BSD based alternative kernel and system. For more information on this check.
While Ubuntu technically came into existence during 2004… it was barely a blip on the radar.
By the very next year, 2005, Ubuntu had swooped in and claimed title of “most popular Linux distribution” — absolutely obliterating any competition. The entire Linux ecosystem shifted, in a dramatic way, in less than 12 months.
For the technologically inclined, trying out new operating systems can be an adventure. The rest of us, however, figure we have two choices: Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS because that’s what comes installed on our computers.
But there’s a little secret that about 2 percent of the population has known about for a couple decades (according to NetMarketshare): The open-source operating system called Linux, which isn’t new — it’s been around since 1991 — has a new version that has techies abuzz.
And, yes, it works on both PCs and Macs.
As you may know, GNOME 42 adopted Microsoft RDP protocol for its built-in remote desktop feature. Ubuntu 22.04 Beta previously excluded it because of the bug due to mixed Gnome-control-center and Gnome-remote-desktop versions.
In recent updates, this feature is finally back. Users may now easily remote access to Ubuntu 22.04 desktop with the more secure and MS Windows friendly protocol.
A list of new features of the beautiful Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 LTS with additional information.
After waiting for months I finally got my hands on the Pine Phone Pro. Was it worth the money? Obviously, it depends on what you expect out of this device. Instead of thinking of it like a phone, it’s better to think of it like a Linux computer that just happens to be in a mobile form factor. In other words, it fits in your pocket and has touchscreen input. It also just so happens to do phone calls, SMS, and connect to mobile data.
The phone is big and possibly overpowered. The battery doesn’t last too long. The Pro is also not really fit for use out of the box. It ships with some OS pre-installed, but by the time you get it it’s already outdated. And really, it doesn’t work.
I went into this device with the patience of someone who understands that this is a hobby project. Even being mentally prepared for it, it’s frustrating to have a device that doesn’t work out of the box. It sat unused on my desk for a week before I started learning what I’m supposed to do with it.
The first PCBs we built involved a draftsman laying out large pieces of tape. The finished artwork would be photographically reduced to produce the board. This solved a few problems. It was easier to work on the large pieces and any errors were reduced by the scale amount. Boards from this era have a distinct appearance because the tracks are generally curved. But when computer-aided drafting took over, the early packages couldn’t deal with wavy lines making all sorts of angles. So traces started appearing at very common angles like 45 degrees or 90 degrees only. If you use KiCAD, though, there’s no reason to have rectilinear traces. Now there is a plugin to help make your boards appear like old-fashioned circuit boards.
↺ This 4-year-old Samsung Galaxy phone still gets monthly Android security updates | Android Central
Look what the easter bunny dragged in, the fourth service pack for the v21.12 stable release.
In some ways I feel as though postmarketOS is the best of the three mobile operating systems I’ve tried so far on the PinePhone. It has a friendly and slick installer, it offers three user interfaces, and it has a nice welcome screen with helpful tips. The Phosh interface running on postmarketOS is probably the closest of the three to more mainstream mobile experiences, such as Android. The icons, top panel, and Settings app all seem fairly close to their Android counterparts. The names of pre-installed programs are some of the most clear as far as determining their utility – a problem I regularly faced when navigating the Plasma Mobile interface.
The performance of postmarketOS was the best of the three and the interface is fairly responsive. Considering the limited hardware of the PinePhone this is probably as good as one can hope for. It’s not snappy compared to a medium-level phone running Android, but it’s better than most other alternatives.
I also like that while Phosh provides a fairly familiar mobile interface, postmarketOS stays close to its roots behind the scenes. It’s entirely possible to run postmarketOS on the PinePhone similar to how we would run Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi. We have all the tools we need from the Alpine base to install packages and enable services should we wish to do so.
If you’ve moved up the food chain as a digital leader, it can be hard to keep abreast of what’s enthusing other technologists until someone starts chewing your ear about serverless* or NFTs**. A peak at some of the most active open-source projects is a good way to see what’s occupying some of the world’s developers; many of the most active projects were also spawned at digital-native companies with a track record of innovation.
The flexible/tinker-able nature of GNU+Linux is one of the reasons I use this over Windows, iOS or MacOS. Heard about Android? Android is based on Linux. It can be installed in a way without Google services and I recommend you to’degoogle’ your phone.
17 April 2022 Unifont 14.0.03 is now available. This release adds the new hex2otf program, which can convert Unifont .hex format files into OpenType fonts, as well as TrueType and other formats. See the hex2otf documentation for details.
The font files just add several new Under ConScript Unicode Registry (UCSUR) scripts: Xaîni (U+E2D0..U+E2FF), Ophidian (U+E5E0..U+E5FF), Niji (U+ED40..U+ED5F), Sitelen Pona (U+F1900..U+F19FF), and Shidann (U+F1B00..U+F1C3F).
Version 3.15 is released today. New in this version: mbox format: don’t count terminating empty line as part of the message Improve performance of the Sieve fileinto action Improve efficiency of operations on flat mailboxes in append mode Bugfixes in quoted-printable and fromrd filters Variois fixes in mbox and dotmail format libraries Fix compilation with flex version 2.6.1
So here I am, writing simple APIs for myself with Glitch: request, handler, response.
I threw together a small R package — {pubcheck} — to check local keys, keys in a character vector, and keys residing in GitHub. One function will even check the GitHub keys of all the GitHub users a given account is following: [...]
Pony is an actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language. It’s object-oriented because it has classes and objects, like Python, Java, C++, and many other languages.
By capabilities-secure we mean that the language is type safe, memory safe, exception-safe, data-race free, and deadlock-free.
Pony is an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled language. There is no interpreter nor virtual machine. It’s compatible with C.
The language is published under the BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License.
In which we pine for The Good Place, while visiting The Bad Place.
Rust has been wrestling with coherence more-or-less since we added methods; our current rule, the “orphan rule”, is safe but overly strict. Roughly speaking, the rule says that one can only implement foreign traits (that is, traits defined by one of your dependencies) for local types (that is, types that you define). The goal of this rule was to help foster the crates.io ecosystem — we wanted to ensure that you could grab any two crates and use them together, without worrying that they might define incompatible impls that can’t be combined. The rule has served us well in that respect, but over time we’ve seen that it can also have a kind of chilling effect, unintentionally working against successful composition of crates in the ecosystem. For this reason, I’ve come to believe that we will have to weaken the orphan rule. The purpose of this post is to write out some preliminary exploration of ways that we might do that.
What are the options you have for securing your workpiece to the drill press table? [Rex Krueger] shows us that there’s plenty, and you ought to know about them. He goes through the disadvantages of the usual C-clamps, and shows options like the regular drill press vice and a heavy-duty version that even provides a workpiece tilting mechanism, and points out small niceties like the V-grooves on the clamps helping work with round stock. For larger pieces, he recommends an underappreciated option — woodworkers’ wooden handscrew clamps, which pair surprisingly well with a drill press. Then, he talks about the hold-down drill press clamps, a favourite of his, especially when it comes to flat sheets of stock like sheet metal or plastic.
Tea really is a great thing. When one speaks of self-reliance and homesteading my first thought is “I could never grow enough tea for my own consumption.”
Electromagnetic interference problems can be a real headache to debug. If you need to prove what causes your WiFi to slow down or your digital TV signal to drop, then the ability to measure electromagnetic fields (EMF) can be a big help. Professional equipment is often very expensive, but building an EMF detector yourself is not even that difficult: just take a look at Arduino expert [Mirko Pavleski]’s convenient hand-held electromagnetic field detector.
At their best, laptops are a compromise design. Manufacturers go to great lengths to make the slimmest, lightest, whatever-est laptops possible, and the engineering that goes into doing so is truly amazing. But then they throw in the charger, which ends up being a huge brick with wire attached to it, and call it a day.
For the electronic badge enthusiast, these last two years have seen something of a famine. While the pandemic may not be over yet, we’re learning to live with it in 2022, and there’s the prospect of a flush of new badges even if not all events are in-person yet. First to reach us is the Carolinacon Online 2 badge, a fairly simple affair which naturally has us pleased as punch because it incorporates the only chip that’s guaranteed to get you through the semiconductor shortage, an NE555 timer. It’s got everything, a flashing LED, and, well, that’s it because with the best will in the world a 555 is no powerhouse on its own. As a memento and a way to support the event it fits the bill, but it’s fair to say that this is no electronic tour de force.
And the winner is … no, not Will Smith. Someone even less deserving – Tamara Lich and the folks from the trucker convoy.
To bring awareness to the insects’ importance and offer beekeeping classes and workshops, Mississippi State University constructed a new apiary, which will officially open in a few weeks. It will be housed at the Clay Lyle Entomology Complex as a partnership between MSU Extension Service and Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
MAFES researcher Priya Chakrabarti Basu, who will be the primary teacher for beekeeping classes, said it will enhance bee research and teaching activities, while giving bees a permanent home at MSU.
In addition to an entry ban for chlorpyrifos, the government is demanding that border control agencies combat smuggling of the hazardous chemical compound, which eradicates insects like mosquitos and cockroaches. It is also used in Taiwan’s agricultural and livestock sectors, with minimal residue limits of 2 ppm for beef, 0.01 ppm for dairy products, and 0.05 ppm for eggs.
You have a shiny new PC running Windows 10. It’s been using it for a while now, and everything is fine. Then, without any sign, the hard drive or SSD moves south. The problem is that you haven’t backed up to OneDrive, any other cloud storage service, or an external device. Sure, you can bring your device if it’s still under warranty and get a replacement, but the warranty won’t restore your files. so what are you doing?
The flaw in question, CVE-2022-26809, an RPC Runtime Library Remote Code Execution Vulnerability, was given a CVSS rating of 9.8 and required no user interaction to be exploited, meaning it was wormable.
That combination makes the discovery of the system, dubbed Pipedream by industrial control security experts Dragos, the realization of the worst fears of longtime cybersecurity experts. Some compared it to Stuxnet, which the United States and Israel used more than a dozen years ago to damage equipment used in Iran’s nuclear program.
I’m not a very patient person, so I knew that much of my time spent working on this project would be devoted towards making it go fast. I had actually built a primitive Minecraft server scanner using NodeJS about a year ago; however, trying to scale it up to whole-Internet scanning rates quickly ended up becoming a nightmare. I did end up scanning the entirety of 0.0.0.0/0 (even though it took five days); however, I accidentally deleted half the data in a stupid blunder which I will never forgive myself for, prompting me to fall into a deep depression. This time, I started by finding the fastest TCP port scanner available, which brought me to MASSCAN.
Oil India cyberattack: IB & central cyber security agencies join probeDibrugarh: The Intelligence Bureau (IB) and country’s two leading cyber security agencies — Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) — have joined the probe into the ransomware attack on state-run explorer Oil India Limited’s (OIL) headquarters at Duliajan in upper Assam’s Dibrugarh district.
Telecommunication operators and their vendors can save millions of dollars in testing and certification by using the numerous open source tools and platforms lying under the Linux Foundation umbrella, according to Beth Cohen, SDN product strategist at Verizon.
More specifically, Cohen was referring to those projects under the Linux Foundation’s Networking group. Those projects include the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Tungsten Fabric, and Anuket.
Josh and Kurt talk about a lot of security vulnerabilities in this month’s Patch Tuesday. There’s also a new Git vulnerability. This sparks the age old question of how fast to patch? The answer isn’t binary, the right answer is whatever works best for you, not what someone tells you is best.
Two top Democratic House lawmakers want ID.me to produce extensive records about its government business and accuracy following outrage about the IRS’ use of the company’s facial-recognition systems.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the Oversight Committee, issued the extensive requests in a letter with Rep. Jim Clyburn, who chairs a subcommittee on COVID-19 and is the No. 3 Democrat in the House. The letter said the two lawmakers’ panels had “serious concerns about the efficacy, privacy, and security of ID.me’s technology … being used to verify the identities of millions of Americans seeking to access essential government services.”
The information requests, which were first reported by the Washington Post, come after backlash to the IRS’ plan to have Americans upload a selfie for verification by ID.me’s software before they could access tax information online.
Video conferencing apps (VCAs) make it possible for previously private spaces — bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens — into semi-public extensions of the office. For the most part, users have accepted these apps in their personal space without much thought about the permission models that govern the use of their private data during meetings. While access to a device’s video camera is carefully controlled, little has been done to ensure the same level of privacy for accessing the microphone. In this work, we ask the question: what happens to the microphone data when a user clicks the mute button in a VCA? We first conduct a user study to analyze users’ understanding of the permission model of the mute button. Then, using runtime binary analysis tools, we trace raw audio flow in many popular VCAs as it traverses the app from the audio driver to the network. We find fragmented policies for dealing with microphone data among VCAs — some continuously monitor the microphone input during mute, and others do so periodically. One app transmits statistics of the audio to its telemetry servers while the app is muted. Using network traffic that we intercept en route to the telemetry server, we implement a proof-of-concept background activity classifier and demonstrate the feasibility of inferring the ongoing background activity during a meeting — cooking, cleaning, typing, etc. We achieved 81.9% macro accuracy on identifying six common background activities using intercepted outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.
Although the rulers of the world’s major military and economic powers have repeatedly claimed that they are making their nations great again, their policies have not resulted in widespread happiness among their citizens.
The Bring Back Our Girls Movement, Lagos, Saturday, held its weekly sit-out at Falomo, Lagos, to commemorate the eight anniversary of the abduction of over 200 students of the Government College, Chibok, Borno State by the dreaded Boko Haram sect.
One of the liberated girls, Grace Dauda, was there to share her experience.
The debate also goes to the heart of candidates portraying themselves as champions of the French principle of secularism, where religion and state are separate.
“The headscarf has been imposed by Islamists,” Le Pen told BFM TV in an interview on Friday describing it as a “uniform”.
The rally had a full 6 hours worth of speakers — a mix of local anti-vaxxers with a few national figures — and I thought I was ready for it. But what I witnessed during those hours was one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.
I saw an unholy, dark alliance best described as “festival fascism” — where QAnon, the People’s Convoy, and Dr. Robert Malone can fuse together in ways which make them more powerful than they’ve ever been.
While nearly everyone mocked this rally online, and most of the news coverage was fairly mundane, what I saw was a slickly packaged fascist telethon with ominous warnings of what lies ahead. I believe I saw the future of conspiracy movements, where the disparate outliers join forces to achieve parallel goals.
Another Coptic Christian clergyman was murdered in cold blood in Egypt today [this article was originally published on Thursday, April 7]. Local Christian media reported that, while walking in a crowded street of Alexandria with a group of church youth and his own family, Fr. Arsenius Wadid was repeatedly stabbed in the neck by an unidentified but bearded man, killing him.
At least 16 police officers were reported to have been injured and several police vehicles destroyed in unrest on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in places where the far-right group planned events, including in the suburbs of Stockholm and in the cities of Linköping and Norrköping.
Cars were set on fire and shop fronts were damaged in the clashes in the southern city of Malmö which have now been brought under control. There were several arrests.
In their summary for policymakers, the scientists said it was still possible to avoid the most dangerous levels of warming by keeping the rise in global temperatures under 1.5C this century.
This will take a herculean effort, with carbon emissions needing to shrink by 43% by the end of this decade to stay under this threshold of danger.
If traditional secular funerals aren’t for you, or if you want to leave the most minimal environmental impact after you die, here are a few alternative, green burial methods.
If you have been lucky enough to reach the city center without needing an ambulance or getting a police ticket, you’ll be rewarded with… cycle lanes. Yay! Unfortunately, the celebration is short lived as these lanes can just as quickly disappear, go up in thin air, dissolve, if you will. I can’t even begin to count how often I would suddenly be stuck at the ‘spontaneous’ end of a cycle path and had to search if and where it would continue (which it usually didn’t). As if some drunken painter without any patience or persistence has randomly drawn a few short cycle lanes here and there. Just for fun.
With the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and, most recently, Dogecoin, a web-based marketplace for in-game goods is also tapping the [cryptocurrency] boom.
Eldorado.gg is a marketplace that gives users access to a wide variety of games with heavily discounted prices and perks. Users can get access to boosting, new accounts, currency, and in-game items for their accounts in games such as Final Fantasy XIV Gold and Minecraft.
When a business publication posted an article several years ago called “Weird Things Top Billionaires Have in Common” — eg., less likely to wear glasses, more likely to be bald — Rep. Mark Pocan responded on social media with an addition to the list: “Another weird thing billionaires have in common? Not paying their taxes.”
The elevation of the private profit of a few over the welfare of the many is, sadly, the ordinary course of events in a capitalist world. This is brightly illustrated by the failure of the world’s governments to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South.
Business as usual, yes, and it would be easy enough to lament the standards of the United States and its wildly expensive health care system being exported to the rest of the world. The U.S. does play a role here, but this time the U.S. is not the biggest villain. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock.
Activision Blizzard is cooperating with a federal lawsuit and investigation into suspected insider trading that allegedly may have been facilitated by chief executive Bobby Kotick just days before the video game publisher was acquired by Microsoft, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As the war in Ukraine drags on, it becomes increasingly apparent that one of the major parameters is disinformation. For example, the attitude inside Russia seems to be that Vladimir Putin’s military operations are justified because Putin is protecting “the fatherland” from neo-Nazis. Pro-Putin propaganda has been disseminated throughout the world; It has infected Republican legislators.
“This is gutter politics at its lowest. And the most debased act any partisan can engage in,” he says. “However, this is the social media ecology that has developed over the last almost six years.”
François spoke on a panel with Karrie Karahalios, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, that was focused on the power of algorithms.
During the discussion, Karahalios commented on proposed legislation in the House of Representatives to remove Section 230 protections for online content which is promoted algorithmically – thus subjecting them to legal liability. She stated that content regulation truly must be done on a case-by-case basis rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach to regulation in all settings.
Which is to say Martin uses DNS data but is not as expert as a number of the possible witnesses at trial he would be suggesting were part of some grand conspiracy (note, this summary is silent on his Tor expertise, which is both a more minor part of the evidence but will be a far more contentious one at trial).
The more remarkable claim that Durham says Martin will make in rebuttal if Sussmann affirms the authenticity of the data is that, because the data was necessarily a subset of all global DNS data, it’s like it was cherry-picked, even if it was not deliberately so.
India continues to rank among the top 10 countries to have imprisoned the most number of writers and journalists, according to the Freedom to Write Index 2021. The index was released on April 13 by PEN America, a US non-profit working to defend freedom of expression across the world. The organisation lists the number of writers, activists, and journalists that countries have put behind bars every year.
Police could not get Gondwe to reveal the information; however, they did confiscate a mobile phone and laptop belonging to him and forced him to reveal passwords.
Russia’s independent journalists are taking desperate measures to continue working, including emigration and working anonymously, as the country’s harsh war censorship law effectively outlaws independent reporting.
Under a law pushed through shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, journalists face 15 years in prison for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army, including for using the words “war” or “invasion” to refer to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
The reasons behind calls for book bans are not all on the same coin. Some adults dub certain books too inappropriate or even harmful for young students, which displays that their requests for bans aren’t necessarily of ill intent. For instance, some schools have banned “To Kill a Mockingbird” because of its tackling of racial injustices from a white protagonist’s perspective and the peppered-in racial slurs. Others feel more of a moral calling to object to certain books, especially those with racial or LGBTQ+ themes, which some say is the result of conservative states’ desires to have more of a say in their children’s learning.
With these actions, Llano joins a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content related to race, sex, gender and other subjects they deem inappropriate. A movement that started in schools has rapidly expanded to public libraries, accounting for 37 percent of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.
In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, the Algerian government has forcibly closed 13 Protestant churches and ordered the closure of seven more, while two decades of conflict, instability and genocidal terrorism have reduced Iraq’s indigenous Christian community from 1.4 million to fewer than 250,000.
Elsewhere, India has a growing patchwork of laws that violate religious freedom or enable its violation, amid a rising tide of religious intolerance emboldened by Hindu nationalism. A third of India’s 28 states maintain laws restricting religious conversion, which are used as a pretext to target Christians and enable violence against them.
Video released Wednesday of the police shooting death of an African immigrant last week shows a Grand Rapids officer shooting Patrick Lyoya in the back of the head following a struggle.
In the incident, captured at different points on police dashcam and bodycam cameras, a neighbor’s doorbell video and on a cell phone video taken by a witness, what begins as a routine traffic stop over a car registration takes a quick turn, from an inquiry about the man’s license plates and whether he understands English, to Lyoya breaking away from the unnamed officer only to be wrestled to the ground.
On Wednesday, multiple recordings were released showing the Grand Rapids officer fatally shooting Lyoya on April 4. Lyoya, a 26-year-old Congolese refugee, was facedown on the ground when he was shot after a traffic stop for an apparently unregistered license plate.
The video shot by Lyoya’s companion is possibly the most important evidence of what took place; it may well take center stage if there is a trial.
Martin Chang [2] has some views of crawlers from the crawler’s perspective, but I still have some views of crawlers from the receiving end that Martin doesn’t cover. I finally got fed up with Gemini crawlers not bothering to limit their following of redirects [3] that I removed not only that particular client test from my site, but the entire client test from my site. Martin does mention a “capsule linter” to check for “infinite extending links,” but that’s not an issue a site author should fix *just to apease the crawler authors!* It’s an actual thing that can happen on the Inernet. A crawler **must** deal with such situations.
Another issue I’m seeing with crawlers is an inability to deal with relative links. I’m seeing requests like `gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2008/04/30/2008/04/30.1` or `gemini://gemini.conman.org//boston/2015/07/02.3`. The former I can’t wrap my brain around how it got that link [4] (and every request comes from the same IP (Internet Protocol) address—23.88.52.182), while the second one seems like a simple bug to fix (generated by only three different clients—202.61.246.155, 116.202.128.144, 198.50.210.248).
I agree that most of the technical content hosted on Gemini is about Gemini itself, and usually repeating the same points, because I guess there are bits from Gemini that are not ideal and there is a lot of conversation around them. And also, as I wrote here back in November, I’m not interested in the heated discussions -and gatekeeping- around them.
Here’s are just a whole bunch of RSS feeds, loosly grouped, that I think are worth subscribing to over on the Web.
But what is the main thing in the Geminispace? I’m always repeating that the answer is people. Gemini protocol gathered people who were attracted by its idea. It isn’t only loving to the protocol specification. It needs to explore the forgotten world, of the so-called, small-net. We won’t find each other on the big-net. It’s hard to find any old-school bloggers there. Big-net is dominated by products of GAFA monopolies. That products are creating needs of people in the natural for commerce way. There is not much space for ideas that people are attracted here.
Speaking on Bloomberg TV, journalist Spencer Soper described problems with the Amazon drone design. In a test last summer, an Amazon drone experienced a motor failure while in flight and plummeted to the ground despite anti-crash safety features and caused a 25-acre brush fire with the explosion of its lithium battery.
The crash of the drone, which weighs about 85 pounds, gave Federal regulators pause. Still Amazon has not abandoned drone R&D. Mr. Soper sees the ongoing investments as part of Amazon’s desire to shorten package delivery time beyond what has been possible so far.
Unified Patents struggles more than others to get IPRs instituted, Docket Navigator data reveals, but when it does, the firm has the third-highest win rate among the top 10 PTAB petitioners
The US Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will no longer grant requests from Russia’s IP office to participate in the Global Patent Prosecution Highway.
PPH programmes are collaborative arrangements between two (bilateral) or more (multilateral) patent offices. Their objective is to accelerate the granting of a patent application filed in an office of second filing (or second application) under priority of a patent application or patent filed in an office of first filing (or first application).
South Korea-based Samsung and Irish company Solas OLED have agreed to settle a patent suit, less than half a year after Samsung lost challenges against the finding that it owes approximately $77 million.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced that the official fees charged for European patent applications will be increasing from 1 April 2022. More details of the fee increases can be found here and here.
The majority of official fees are increasing, including the application fees, search and examination fees, and renewal fees. In each case, the increase will be an “inflationary” amount of around 2 to 5%. A small number of the more modest official fees are not increasing in April 2022.
It seems that Apple is on the wrong side of another Pear – this time in a patent dispute involving 2 lapsed patents, the Swiss Supreme court and the iMessage service. We’ll have to see where that one goes.
Previously Apple sued Prepear over their Pear logo in 2020 – see here: Apple sues Pear – Prepear is a small US food business and uses a pear logo as part of its branding. As well as being the name of a global digital business giant, ‘apple’ is also the name of a kind of food – a fruit. Apple (the global business) uses a logo featuring an apple (the fruit) with a bite taken from it.
On April 15, 2022, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 10,067,942, owned by Topia Technology, Inc., an NPE. The ‘942 patent relates to automatic file sharing across a distributed network. It has been asserted against Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte.
On April 8, 2022, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,836,257, owned by Flexiworld Technologies, Inc., an NPE. The ’257 patent relates to transmitting digital content from a mobile apparatus to a wireless output device and has been asserted against Roku.
Oppositions to EU trademark applications that included the word ‘Rocky’ have been rejected on the grounds that any likelihood of confusion with the titular film character has been neutralised by the obvious conceptual differences. Pierre Coppin explains the concept of trademark neutralisation in the context of the Rocky ruling.
More than ten years after Megaupload was shut down, the RIAA and MPA are still waiting for their chance to request damages in their civil lawsuits. With the criminal prosecution still pending, another delay has been granted. In a new twist, both cases are now reassigned to the judge who also convicted several NinjaVideo staffers.
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