GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • CNX Software ☛ BITBLAZE Titan BM15 Arm Linux laptop features Baikal-M1 processor – CNX Software

    Russian company Prombit has unveiled the BITBLAZE Titan BM15 Arm Linux Laptop equipped with Baikal-M1 octa-core Arm Cortex-A57 processor manufactured by TSMC, up to 128GB RAM, SSD storage, and a 15.6-inch Full HD display.

    Baikal-M1, also called Baikal-M, was already found in desktop PCs and All-in-One Arm Linux computers launched last year for the Russian government and businesses, but I think it’s the first time it shows up in a laptop.

• Server

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Open hybrid cloud and quantum computing shape future for Red Hat thought leaders [Ed: Disclosure is missing here; Red Hat openly pays this publishers for puff pieces]

    This year’s Red Hat Summit gathering in early May provided an opportunity to step back from the enterprise computing treadmill and assess the long-term implications of where network innovation is headed.

    Along with news surrounding an edge platform opportunity with General Motors Corp. and the latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this year’s gathering in Boston offered a glimpse into the computing future.

  • TechTarget ☛ Kubernetes training, tech can tackle orchestration pain

    DevOps can force developers to work outside their comfort zone and create frustration, but the right Kubernetes training and tools can ease the burden.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 66: From Star Trek To Reality : Microbots That Can Heal – 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 nanotechnology and how little robot armies can be used in the future to extend all of our lives. Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss anti-forgery signatures on a camera.

  • Video ☛ Need A FOSS Job, Linux Foundation Has Good News – Invidious

    Are you in the market for job in FOSS well the Linux Foundation does a yearly report on this field and it seems as though it should be getting much easier this year and going forward

• Kernel Space

  • Make Use Of ☛ What Is Virtual Memory on Linux? How to Manage It

    Virtual memory is a way of representing your memory that’s abstracted from the physical memory on your machine. It makes use of both your RAM and your storage space, whether that’s on a traditional hard drive or an SSD.

    In Linux, this is done at the kernel and hardware levels. The CPU has a piece of hardware called a Memory Management Unit (MMU) that translates physical memory addresses into virtual ones. These addresses are independent of where they physically reside on the machine. These address spaces are known as “pages” and they could be in RAM or on your hard drive or SSD. The OS sees these addresses as one big pool of memory, known as an “address space.”

    Virtual memory takes advantage of the fact that not all of the memory that’s being used in theory is being used all of the time. Programs in memory are broken down into pages and the parts that the kernel deems as unnecessary are “swapped out,” or moved to the hard drive. When they’re needed, they can be “swapped in,” or brought back into RAM.

    The space used for virtual memory on a drive is known as “backing store,” or “swap space.” In the Windows world, it’s usually implemented as a file, known as a “swap file.” It’s also possible to do this in Linux, but it’s much more common to use a dedicated disk partition.

  • nbdkit for macOS | Richard WM Jones

    However one larger problem remains (for performance) which is the lack of atomic CLOEXEC when opening pipes or sockets. Linux has pipe2 and accept4. I wasn’t able to find any good equivalent on macOS, and hence most of the time we are limited to serializing some requests that could otherwise run in parallel.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Change Comment Color in Vim – Fix Unreadable Blue Color

    Are you annoyed about the comment color in vim? The dark blue color of the comment is often hard to read.

    In this tutorial, we learn how to change the comment color in Vim. There are few methods we can use to look vim comment very readable.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Add Repository to Debian

    APT checks the health of all the packages, and dependencies of the package before installing it. APT fetches packages from one or more repositories. A repository (package source) is basically a network server. The term “package” refers to an individual file with a .deb extension that contains either all or part of an application. The normal installation comes with default repositories configured, but these contain only a few packages out of an ocean of free software available.

    In this tutorial, we learn how to add the package repository to Debian.

  • Lawrence Tratt ☛ Making a Video of a Single Window

    I recently wanted to send someone a video of a program doing some interesting things in a single X11 window. Recording the whole desktop is easy (some readers may remember my post on Aeschylus which does just that) but it will include irrelevant (and possibly unwanted) parts of the screen, leading to unnecessarily large files. I couldn’t immediately find a tool which did what I wanted on OpenBSD [1] but through a combination of xwininfo, FFmpeg, and hk I was able to put together exactly what I needed in short order. Even better, I was able to easily post-process the video to shrink its file size, speed it up, and contort it to the dimension requirements of various platforms. Here’s a video straight out of the little script I put together: [...]

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Things You Can And Can’t Do

    And it got me thinking about what you can and can’t do — what you do and don’t have control over.

  • Jan Piet Mens ☛ allow-new-zones in BIND 9.16 on CentOS 8 Stream under SELinux

    We run these training systems with SELinux enabled (I wouldn’t, but my colleague likes it :-), and that’s the reason I aborted the lab: I couldn’t tell students how to solve the cause other than by disabling SELinux entirely, but there wasn’t enough time for that.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Will the IndieWeb Ever Become Mainstream?

    This is an interesting question, thanks for asking it, Jeremy. I do have some history with the IndieWeb, and some opinions, so let’s dive in.

    The short answer to the question is a resounding no, and it all boils down to the fact that the IndieWeb is really complicated to implement, so it will only ever appeal to developers.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Install CUPS Print Server on Ubuntu 22.04

    If your business has multiple personal computers in the network which need to print, then we need a device called a print server. Print server act intermediate between PC and printers which accept print jobs from PC and send them to respective printers.

    CUPS is the primary mechanism in the Unix-like operating system for printing and print services. It can allow a computer to act as a Print server.

    In this tutorial, we learn how to set up CUPS print server on Ubuntu 22.04.

• WINE or Emulation

  • WINE Project (Official) ☛ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.15 is now available.

    The Wine development release 7.15 is now available.
    
    What's new in this release:
      - Command lists in Direct2D.
      - RSA encryption.
      - Initial Wow64 thunking in WIN32U.
      - Optional support for colors in test output.
      - Various bug fixes.
    
    The source is available at:
    
    https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.15.tar.xz
    
    Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
    
    https://www.winehq.org/download
    
    You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
    
    You can also get the current source directly from the git
    repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
    
    Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
    AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
    

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Windows compatibility layer Wine version 7.15 out now

    Wine is a compatibility layer that aims to let you run games and applications designed for Windows on Linux and a new release version 7.15 is out now. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run various Windows applications and games on Linux (and forms part of Steam Play Proton). Once a year or so, a new stable release is made but the development versions are usually fine to use.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Spider-Man Remastered is awesome on Steam Deck

    With Spider-Man Remastered now available on Steam after previously being PlayStation exclusive, I took it for a spin on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Humble Bundle have another interesting set of games in the Tactical Combat Bundle

    Need more games to fill up your library? Humble Bundle have put up another one that looks pretty good with the Tactical Combat Bundle. So here’s what to expect on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • HowTo Geek ☛ What’s New in GNOME 43?

      GNOME is one of the most popular graphical desktop environments on Linux. Practically every distribution has a release featuring GNOME. Imagine the impact then, when the GNOME developers shook things up—to put it mildly—with GNOME 40. It changed the desktop paradigm from a vertical one to a horizontal one and changed the look, feel, and functionality of, amongst other things, the dock, the activities view, and workplaces.

      Releases 41 and 42 were much smaller in impact, concentrating on polishing the interface and ironing out wrinkles that remained after the iconoclastic changes to GNOME 40. GNOME 43 is more of the same. Don’t expect major changes this time round.

      That’s not to say it is inconsequential. There are the expected subtle cosmetic touches, with more applications adopting a deeper integration with the libadwaita theming engine. But there’s also new functionality, including the Files file browser being enhanced. It is now adaptive and will give a better user experience on mobile devices.

      Although GNOME 43 beta is available, it won’t be rolled out to the public until its actual launch date of September 21, 2022. Fedora 37 is slated to use GNOME 43. Ubuntu 22.10 probably won’t. Rolling distributions based on Arch such as Garuda Linux, Manjaro Linux, and EndeavourOS will pick it up shortly after its release date.

      Although this isn’t the finished product, looking at the beta is still worthwhile. Even if small changes may still be made between now and the launch date, all the big elements are already in place. The release candidate build is the one when the portcullis drops and no more changes can be made. This is slated for September 3, 2022.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, July 2022

  As is now the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

  This report covers hrev56236 to hrev56320.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • SusamPal ☛ From XON/XOFF to Forward Incremental Search

    In the olden days of computing, software flow control with control codes XON and XOFF was a necessary feature that dumb terminals needed to support. When a terminal received more data than it could display, there needed to be a way for the terminal to tell the remote host to pause sending more data. The control code 19 was chosen for this. The control code 17 was chosen to tell the remote host to resume transmission of data.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico Used in Plug and Play System Monitor | Tom’s Hardware

    Dmytro Panin is at it again, creating a teeny system monitor for his MacBook from scratch with help from our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This plug-and-play system monitor (opens in new tab) lets him keep a close eye on resource usage without having to close any windows or launch any third-party programs.

    The device is Pico-powered and plugs right into the MacBook to function. It has a display screen that showcases a custom GUI featuring four bar graphs that update in real-time to show the performance of different components, including the CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD usage. It makes it possible to see how hard your PC is running at a glance.

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Remember DAB Radio? The Psion WaveFinder Gets A Teardown

  With digital music making a clean sweep in the 1990s over almost all listening media, it’s a surprise to find that there’s one area in which an analog hold-out is still very much alive and kicking. We’re talking not of a vinyl resurgence here but of FM radio, which has managed to effectively hold off its digital competition for a few decades now. Twenty years ago its days seemed numbered though, and in Europe the first generation of DAB digital radios looked ready to conquer the airwaves. Among them was a true oddity and one of Psion’s last significant consumer products, the WaveFinder USB DAB radio receiver. [Backofficeshow] has one, and has given it a teardown for our entertainment. He describes it as the first consumer SDR product which may be a little hyperbolic, but nevertheless, it’s an interesting look at what would become one of computing’s backwaters.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Beware the Corporations and Lawmakers Trampling On Our Established Norms

  Norms, in a society or culture, are the accepted ways of behavior we grow up observing and learning in our everyday lives. Norms are rarely backed up by laws, though when norms are grossly violated, calls for legislation may ensue.

• Soylent News ☛ Status Report For Jul 2022

  I thought that Elon Musk’s ventures would collapse around the privately held SpaceX but it now seems more likely to collapse around the publicly held Tesla – which remains unable to achieve volume and is losing money on every vehicle manufactured. This is especially true when electric vehicles get less eco subsidy and the cost of electricity has increased. Now that the astro-turfing has failed, Elon Musk is trying to peg Tesla’s worthless stock to other Silicon Valley turds, like Twitter which lost 15% of its value when it banned Donald Trump. Elon Musk – who requires adult supervision when using Twitter – may try to escape a $1 billion exit clause after establishing that the majority of Twitter accounts and Tweets are astro-turfed. You can’t scam an honest man. However, some scams look really obvious to other scammers.

  Jeff Bezos – who self-identifies as an astronaut – is diversifying out of Amazon. You should do the same because Amazon is going out of business. Amazon is running out of staff to exploit – staff who are violent or urinate in bottles to achieve unrealistic deadlines. Amazon has fired more than 20 million staff; mostly for performance which is acceptable in similar roles at other companies. If you’re stupid enough sell on Amazon, you don’t want to be too good or too bad. If you’re drop-shipping from China and using Amazon hosting then expect to be cut out of the loop by Amazon’s full time Chinese negotiators. Likewise, if you’ve been banned from selling on Amazon then expect to pay a quasi-para-legal more than $1000 to file your appeal – which will be read by a member of staff who is paid less than $15 to read your appeal in less than four minutes.

• Teen Vogue ☛ Why The FBI Searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home: To Find Classified Documents

  More information is trickling out about why the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida this week. According to a Thursday night report in the Washington Post, agents were searching for “classified documents related to nuclear weapons,” among other highly-sensitive materials.

• VOA News ☛ Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort Posed Rare Security Challenges, Experts Say

  Trump is under federal investigation for possible violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it unlawful to spy for another country or mishandle U.S. defense information, including sharing it with people not authorized to receive it, a search warrant shows.

  As president, Trump sometimes shared information, regardless of its sensitivity. Early in his presidency, he spontaneously gave highly classified information to Russia’s foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation while he was in the Oval Office, U.S. officials said at the time.

• New York Times ☛ Trump Search Said to Be Part of Effort to Find Highly Classified Material

  Mr. Garland said he had personally approved the search after the failure of “less intrusive” attempts to retrieve material taken from the White House by Mr. Trump.

  Mr. Garland provided no details. But the person briefed on the matter said investigators had been concerned about material from what the government calls “special access programs,” a designation that is typically reserved for extremely sensitive operations carried out by the United States abroad or for closely held technologies and capabilities.

• NBC ☛ ‘It worried people all the time’: How Trump’s handling of secret documents led to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search

  “It was a chaotic exit,” this source said. “Everyone piled everything — staff, the White House movers — into the moving trucks. When they got to Mar-a-Lago, they piled everything there in this storage room, except for things like the first lady’s clothes. Everything in a box went there.”

• Education

  • VOA News ☛ Ukraine Cyber Chief Visits ‘Black Hat’ Hacker Meeting in Las Vegas [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Zhora told Reuters in an interview that Microsoft, Amazon and Google had offered pro bono cloud computing services to the Ukrainian government as it moves its data out of the country, away from the destruction wreaked by Russian bombs and missiles.

    Some of Ukraine’s data archives are being held within data centers across “multiple [European] countries,” he added, without elaborating.

  • Times Higher Education ☛ South Asian students show ‘limited’ understanding of plagiarism

    Barring intervention, continued lack of clarity around plagiarism will make it more difficult for south Asian students and researchers – who are already underrepresented in global publications – to participate more in cross-border collaborations, Professor McCulloch warned.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ The 286 Gives Up One Of Its Final Secrets

    Though it is largely forgotten today, the Intel 80286 was for a while in the 1980s the processor of choice and designated successor to the 8086 in the world of PCs. It brought a new mode that could address up to 16 Mb of memory, and a welcome speed boost over machines using an 8086 or 8088. As with many microprocessors, it has a few undocumented features, and it’s a couple of these that [rep lodsb] takes a look at. Along the way we learn a bit about the 286, and about why Intel had some of these undocumented instructions in the first place.

  • Hackaday ☛ Testing A Laser Cut Wrench VS A Forged Wrench

    It is easy to not think much about common tools like screwdrivers and wrenches. But not for [Torque Test Channel]. The channel does a lot of testing of tools and in the video, below, they test a new wrench that is, oddly enough, laser cut instead of forged like the usual wrench.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Do You Build A Tradition?

    I was struck by reading our writeup of the Zenit in Electronics contest – an annual event in the Slovak Republic – that it’s kind of like a decathlon for electronic engineers and/or hardware hackers. It’s a contest, in which students compete presumably initially on a local level, and then up to 32 at the national level. There’s a straight-up knowledge test, a complex problem to solve, and then a practical component where the students must actually fabricate a working device themselves, given a schematic and maybe some help. Reading through the past writeups, you get the feeling that it’s both a showcase for the best of the best, but also an encouragement for those new to the art. It’s full-stack hardware hacking, and it looks like a combination of hard work and a lot of fun.

  • Hackaday ☛ An Amstrad NC100 Has A New Purpose In Life

    We’re used to laptop computers featuring flip-up screens; this article is being written on one and it’s probable you’re reading it on another one. But there’s another laptop form factor that has gained legions of fans ever since the days of the TRS-80 Model 100, the flat slab with no hinge and both keyboard and display on its upper surface. It’s surfaced most recently in the DevTerm, which inspired [0x17] to have a go at building his own. Instead of starting from scratch though, he’s chosen to use the shell of an Amstrad NC100 from the 1990s.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ Monkeypox Is Yet Another Global Health Crisis Fueled by Governmental Neglect

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem

    The approach clearly has problems: harassment, misinformation about topics like public health, and false descriptions of legitimate elections run rampant. But even if content moderation were implemented perfectly, it would still miss a whole host of issues that are often portrayed as moderation problems but really are not. To address those non-speech issues, we need a new strategy: treat social media companies as potential polluters of the social fabric, and directly measure and mitigate the effects their choices have on human populations. That means establishing a policy framework—perhaps through something akin to an Environmental Protection Agency or Food and Drug Administration for social media—that can be used to identify and evaluate the societal harms generated by these platforms. If those harms persist, that group could be endowed with the ability to enforce those policies. But to transcend the limitations of content moderation, such regulation would have to be motivated by clear evidence and be able to have a demonstrable impact on the problems it purports to solve.

• Proprietary

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Microsoft Death Spiral: Microsoft fires 200 employees “working to win back customers”.

    More people are on to this scheme than ever. Wondering why they should throw out a computer that’s plenty fast, during a dead economy where they could be the next layoff (and even if they aren’t, their landlord, utility companies, and the grocery store want ~11% more money this year), just so that Microsoft and Intel can stick it to them again.

  • The Verge ☛ The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root access on macOS

    When Zoom issued an update, the updater function would install the new package after checking that it had been cryptographically signed by Zoom. But a bug in how the checking method was implemented meant that giving the updater any file with the same name as Zoom’s signing certificate would be enough to pass the test — so an attacker could substitute any kind of malware program and have it be run by the updater with elevated privilege.

    The result is a privilege escalation attack, which assumes an attacker has already gained initial access to the target system and then employs an exploit to gain a higher level of access. In this case, the attacker begins with a restricted user account but escalates into the most powerful user type — known as a “superuser” or “root” — allowing them to add, remove, or modify any files on the machine.

• Security

  • TechTarget ☛ Eclypsium calls out Microsoft over bootloader security woes

    Eclypsium researchers criticized Microsoft for its response to the discovery of three new bootloader vulnerabilities that could be exploited to gain control of systems during the boot process.

    During a DEF CON 30 session Friday, security platform provider Eclypsium’s researchers delved into the vulnerabilities, which were disclosed in Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release this week.

    The three vulnerabilities exist in third-party bootloaders: Eurosoft Ltd. (CVE-2022-34301); New Horizon Datasys, Inc. (CVE-2022-34302); and Kidan’s CryptoPro Secure Disk for BitLocker (CVE-2022-34303).

    If exploited, threat actors could bypass Secure Boot, a security protocol used by OEMs and operating system vendors to ensure bootloaders and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) drivers are authenticated through valid digital signatures. Bypassing the Secure Boot checks would allow threat actors to commit attacks, such as modifying the OS, disabling security controls and installing backdoors.

  • TechTarget ☛ SentinelOne discusses the rise of data-wiping malware

    During a Black Hat 2022 session, researchers showed how expectations of cyber war may differ from the reality.

  • TechTarget ☛ Researchers reveal Kubernetes security holes, prevention

    Researchers with Palo Alto Networks took the stage at Black Hat to explain how configurations and system privileges in Kubernetes clusters can allow container escape and takeover.

  • TechTarget ☛ Google researchers dissect Android spyware, zero days

    Researchers with Google’s Threat Analysis Group say the ecosystem of surveillance vendors is far larger than just NSO Group, and some vendors are sharing or trading exploits.

  • TechTarget ☛ Docker’s rootless mode a welcome security update

    Docker containers have root privileges by default — a known security issue for several years. Now Docker’s rootless mode separates containers from underlying infrastructure.

  • Data Breaches ☛ New GwisinLocker ransomware encrypts Windows and Linux ESXi servers

    This site generally doesn’t cover or announce new types of ransomware, but this one targets the healthcare sector, so….

  • Security Week ☛ Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Over 1,000 Zimbra Email Servers | SecurityWeek.Com

    A new zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-37042 has been exploited since at least June to hack over 1,000 Zimbra email servers.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Unix Sheikh ☛ “Zero trust” is being hijacked by the big corporate hype machine

      The term zero trust is a security model, also known as “perimeterless security” that has been known for a long time and that was e.g. implemented internally at Google in 2009 in a project called BeyondCorp. In recent years, mainly due to the high amount of IT security problems we all are facing, the term gained renewed focus and popularity when cybersecurity researchers at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released their Zero Trust Architecture publication (PDF).

      Zero trust is a valuable model that provides many improvements and benefits to the security model of both small and large companies. However, as with so many other terms and concepts, the big corporate hype machine is in the process of hijacking the concept by rebranding their services and turning zero trust into something that it is not.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ 226 complaints lodged against deceptive cookie banners

      Today, noyb lodged 226 GDPR complaints with 18 authorities against websites that use the popular cookie banner software (“OneTrust”) with deceptive settings. Following a first batch of complaints in May 2021 many websites using OneTrust have adapted their settings and added “reject” buttons. OneTrust also changed the standard settings to be more GDPR compliant. However, there are still many websites that do not comply.

    • NPR ☛ Nebraska cops used Facebook messages to investigate an alleged illegal abortion

      A 41-year-old woman is facing felony charges in Nebraska for allegedly helping her teenage daughter illegally abort a pregnancy, and the case highlights how law enforcement can make use of online communications in the post-Roe v. Wade era.

    • iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

      The iOS Instagram and Facebook app render all third party links and ads within their app using a custom in-app browser. This causes various risks for the user, with the host app being able to track every single interaction with external websites, from all form inputs like passwords and addresses, to every single tap.

      [...]

      In the mean-time, everything published in this post is correct: the Instagram app is executing and injecting JavaScript code into third party websites, rendered inside their in-app browser, which exposes a big risk for the user. Also, there is no way to opt-out of the custom in-app browser.

    • NPR ☛ Does your rewards card know if you’re pregnant? Privacy experts sound the alarm

      Nicole did not respond to NPR’s request for comment. But several others responded to the original tweet with their own experiences of targeted marketing after purchases at other large chain stores. Some shared stories of receiving these types of packages in the wake of miscarriages.

    • India Times ☛ Apple, Meta once planned to build businesses together: Report

      According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Apple and Facebook discussed “revenue-sharing arrangements, including a potential ad-free, subscription version of Facebook”.

  • Confidentiality

    • Undeadly ☛ RAID 1C boot support added

      Stefan Sperling (stsp@) has committed support for RAID 1C [mirroring and encryption] boot to -current on the amd64 platform: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Economist ☛ How al-Qaeda and Islamic State are digging into Africa

    The Sahel, a vast, poorly governed stretch to the south of the Sahara desert, is now the world’s terrorism hotspot, accounting for more than a third of all terrorism deaths in 2021. It is home to Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (the Support Group for Islam and Muslims, or jnim), a coalition affiliated to al-Qaeda. Last year it was the world’s fastest-growing jihadist organisation, measured by the increase in the tally of attacks and deaths.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Da’esh, affiliates remain ‘global and evolving’ threat

    In charting the of the expansion of Da’esh expansion across Iraq, Syria and through areas of Africa that until recently had been largely spared from attacks, Mr. Voronkov attributed their success in part to a decentralized structure focused around a “general directorate of provinces” and associated “offices”.

    These operate in both Iraq and Syria, as well as outside the core conflict zone – notably in Afghanistan, Somalia and the Lake Chad Basin.

    Better understanding and monitoring, including through global and regional cooperation, are vital to counter the threat.

  • NPR ☛ An attempted attack on an FBI office raises concerns about violent far-right rhetoric

    Since the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, researchers who track extremism have sounded the alarm about an escalation of violent rhetoric from the far-right, including talk of another “civil war” and threats against federal law enforcement.

    By Thursday, an attempted attack on an FBI field office in Cincinnati appeared to underscore the real danger behind those threats, particularly given a digital trail of ominous posts that were left under the name of the suspect.

  • New York Times ☛ Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant Is Raising Fears of an Accident. Here’s a Look at the Risks.

    Now, five months later, repeated shelling inside the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant complex over the past seven days has stirred new concerns, with Ukrainian and Western officials warning that the attacks heighten the risk of a nuclear accident.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Flawed Amnesty report risks enabling more Russian war crimes in Ukraine

    Pokalchuk took to Facebook on August 4 to disavow the report, explaining that Amnesty’s global branch had effectively sidelined the Amnesty Ukraine team and proceeded with publication without their input or consent. She resigned the following day, writing, “Although unwillingly, the organization created material that sounds like support for Russian narratives. Seeking to protect civilians, the study has instead become a tool of Russian propaganda.”

• Environment

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Huron River chromium spill prompts call for stricter Michigan pollution law

    After a Wixom chrome plater released hexavalent chromium into sewers that lead to the Huron River, locals and activists are calling for tighter regulation to prevent future spills, if not an outright ban on nonessential uses of the toxic metal.

  • CNN ☛ The Rhine is shrinking, endangering Europe’s top economy

    Water in the river has dropped to “exceptionally low” levels in some areas, disrupting shipping on the country’s most important inland waterway, German officials told CNN on Friday.

    A lack of rainfall in recent months means that cargo ships are now carrying lighter loads, transport costs are soaring, and economic and power supply risks are worsening.

  • NBC ☛ Arctic warming is happening significantly faster than previously thought, study finds

    Climate researchers often use the situation in the Arctic as a bellwether for the impacts of global warming because the region is particularly sensitive to even small shifts in global surface temperatures. As a result, changes there typically play out more rapidly compared to elsewhere on Earth. What happens in the Arctic also has enormous implications for the rest of the globe, since melting ice sheets contribute to rising sea levels.

    In the new study, the researchers focused on the area inside the Arctic Circle, an imaginary demarcation approximately 66 degrees north of the equator. The scientists used data from the past 43 years to observe changes within this region, which includes parts of Russia, Norway, Sweden and Finland, most of Greenland and the northernmost reaches of Canada and Alaska.

  • TruthOut ☛ Activists Stress Need for Much More Climate Action After IRA Passes in the House

  • Energy

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Scorching Big Oil Profits on a Burning Planet

      In the second quarter, Exxon made US$18 billion, Shell and Chevron close to $12 billion each and BP $8.5 billion—much higher than their record first-quarter profits.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | This LNG Giant’s Greenwashing Reveals Gas Export Industry’s Dangerous Intentions

      In war there are winners and losers. One U.S. gas company profiteering off the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is America’s largest Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exporter, Cheniere Energy.

    • RTL ☛ Where does Luxembourg’s electricity come from?

      But where does Luxembourg’s electricity actually come from? This article draws a distinction between, firstly, the electricity produced in Luxembourg, and, secondly, what is consumed in Luxembourg. The latter includes energy imported from other countries such as Germany and Belgium.

    • RTL ☛ Electricity costs estimated to go up by 35%

      The country is yet to face another rise in energy costs. After gas suppliers announced potential increases of up to 80% in autumn, electricity may go up by 35%.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ The Exchange You Can Trust

      One of the many ironies about “decentralized, trustless” cryptocurrencies is that they are neither decentralized nor trustless. Since in practice you can neither buy nor sell real goods using them, you need to trust an exchange to convert fiat to cryptocurrency and vice versa. Exchanges range from those you definitely shouldn’t trust, such as Binance, through somewhat less sketchy ones such as Kraken (now being investigated for sanctions busting) to Coinbase, which presents itself as a properly regulated, US based exchange that is totally trustworthy.

    • Cal Paterson ☛ There aren’t that many uses for blockchains

      A common saying among those who are into their crypto is that “the real innovation isn’t Bitcoin, but the Blockchain”. Blockchains are increasingly popular. At some point using a blockchain stopped being called just ‘blockchain technology’ and started to be called “web3″. The implication being that blockchains have such wide applicability that they will come to displace the existing web as we know it now.

    • NBC ☛ The cost of green energy: The nation’s biggest lithium mine may be going up on a site sacred to Native Americans

      Industry experts expect demand for lithium from U.S. car manufacturers to increase tenfold by 2030. By then, they predict the U.S. will need 300,000 metric tons of lithium per year to make green vehicles and a wealth of electronic appliances. Currently, however, the U.S. has just one active lithium mine. Earlier this year, the Energy Department authorized $2.9 billion to boost battery production and President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to encourage U.S. production of lithium and other minerals like nickel and cobalt used in batteries and solar panels.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • NPR ☛ Dogs are sniffing out disease in animals vital to traditions of the Blackfeet tribe

      Chronic wasting disease has been detected in just one white-tailed deer on the Blackfeet reservation, but once it’s present, it’s impossible to eradicate, according to wildlife managers. The disease is already forcing tribal members to alter or abandon traditional practices like brain tanning, said Souta Calling Last, a Blackfeet researcher and executive director of the nonprofit cultural and educational organization Indigenous Vision.

      Calling Last also worries the spread of chronic wasting disease will prevent tribal members from eating wild game. Some families depend on meat from the deer, elk or moose they can hunt several months out of the year.

      That’s where the dogs come in. Calling Last received a $75,000 federal grant to run a yearlong study to train dogs to sniff out chronic wasting disease and toxic waste that might otherwise be ingested by people who hunt wild game and gather traditional plants. The project aims to protect tribal members’ health by letting them know where the disease has been detected and where toxic waste has been found in order to preserve safe spaces to conduct traditional practices.

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Biggest Win for Tax Fairness’ in Decades: Progressives Cheer Reforms in IRA, Demand More

    Following House Democrats’ passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, progressives applauded the most significant changes to the federal tax code since 2017, when Republicans’ highly regressive and deeply unpopular Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enthusiastically welcomed by corporations and the wealthy.

    “We should use this win as an opportunity to revitalize the fight for economic justice and equality, and continue demanding more.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Care Can’t Wait’: IRA a Good Start, Progressives Say, But More Is Needed

    While welcoming House Democrats’ passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, advocates for universal healthcare, child care, paid family leave, and home and community-based services stressed that greater investments in care infrastructure are needed to improve working households’ economic wellbeing.

    “The work to lift up struggling families is unfinished as our care infrastructure remains in crisis.”

  • PIA ☛ What Is the US Economic System: A (Brief) History

    It’s estimated that the US sees a recession every 6-10 years. Additionally, our national deficit is around $2.2 trillion and the last major decrease it saw was when President Bill Clinton was in office. 

  • TruthOut ☛ Many States Have Created or Expanded Tax Credits to Help Families Get By

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Big Donors, Small Donors, and the Fight for Democracy

    Notably, the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t attract a single Republican vote in the Senate. (And at least one Democratic senator—Kyrsten Sinema—made sure its tax provisions wouldn’t raise tax rates on rich individuals.) Why?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ Nonwhite Voters Face High Risk of Being Dropped From Arizona’s Mail Ballot List

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘I’m Back’: Fetterman Returns to Campaign Trail Following May Stroke

    “I’m back.”

    That’s what Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for the crucial battleground state’s open U.S. Senate seat, said immediately after Friday night’s rally in Erie—his first major campaign event since suffering a stroke in May.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Partisan Gerrymandering Is Carving Up US Democracy

    One of the most consequen­tial outcomes of this redis­trict­ing cycle has been the continu­ing decrease in the number of compet­it­ive congres­sional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percent­age points in 2020 and, like­wise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.

  • Insight Hungary ☛ State Secretary of Hungarian Foreign Ministry: “One China”

    Tamas Menczer, state secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs raised an important issue on his social media page after Taiwan rejected China’s ‘one country, two systems’ plan for the island. The state secretary implied that Hungary does not recognize two, but only ‘one China’.

    “Peace has been the focus of Hungarian foreign policy for many months. Peace is the only solution to the war next door and the suffering and economic issues it causes. We are concerned that security crises and tensions are also occurring in other parts of the world. In the current situation, we do not want to see two of the world’s major powers in conflict with each other, even if the conflict is geographically far away from us. We sincerely hope that the situation around Taiwan will not escalate and that the world’s major powers will return to cooperation based on mutual respect and trust as soon as possible. Hungarian foreign policy will remain consistent with the “one China” principle,”- the state secretary posted on Facebook.

  • The Verge ☛ Elon Musk pitches lofty goals in a magazine run by China’s [Internet] censorship agency

    Formed in 2013, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is in charge of creating and enforcing policies surrounding online content, user data, and digital security. The CAC later created a magazine that, according to China Media Project senior researcher, Stella Chen, typically includes regulatory announcements and research on [Internet] policy. The magazine was initially called New Media before it was rebranded as China Cyberspace earlier this year.

  • Variety ☛ Recording Academy Co-President Valeisha Butterfield Jones Steps Down for VP Role at Google

    In a surprise move, Recording Academy co-president Valeisha Butterfield Jones will leave the organization to return to Google, taking a new vice president role on the [Internet] giant’s diversity team.

  • Futurism ☛ OnlyFans Accused of Paying Bribes to Put Enemies on Terrorist Watchlist

    According to the suit filed earlier this year by Evans and fellow porn content creator Kelly Pierce, OnlyFans reportedly bribed Facebook employees to wrongfully place the actresses — who used OnlyFans competitor sites to sell their content — on a terrorism watchlist run by a consortium of internet companies, resulting in them being “shadowbanned” on Instagram and other social networks integral to the promotion of their content.

  • NYPost ☛ OnlyFans bribed Meta to put thousands of porn stars on terror watchlist, suits claim

    OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist, according to a group of explosive lawsuits.

    Adult performers who sold X-rated photos and videos on rival sites saw their Instagram accounts falsely tagged as containing terrorist content — crippling their ability to promote their business and devastating their incomes, according to the suits.

  • New York Times ☛ Kenya on Edge as Media’s Election Tally Suddenly Stops

    The commission began posting online results from over 46,000 polling stations within hours of the polls closing on Tuesday, a move of radical transparency intended to ward off fears of potential vote rigging.

    But in the counting, things haven’t gone entirely to plan.

    The election commission’s decision to post the results online — allowing the news media to do the first, unofficial tally of the results — has proved to be problematic. Media organizations tallied in different sequences, leading to conflicting reports of who was ahead.

  • NPR ☛ The reason why presidents can’t keep their White House records dates back to Nixon

    For the first two centuries of U.S. history, outgoing presidents simply took their documents with them when they left the White House. The materials were considered their personal property.

    But for the past four decades, every presidential document — from notebook doodles to top-secret security plans — is supposed to go directly to the National Archives as the material is considered the property of the American people.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • Axios ☛ National Archives rejects Trump’s claim that Obama took classified documents

      The big picture: After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday — finding 11 sets of classified documents — the former president made unsubstantiated claims that Obama also took records.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Netblocks ☛ Internet disrupted in Sierra Leone amid anti-government protests

    NetBlocks metrics confirm a nationwide disruption to internet service on multiple providers across Sierra Leone from the morning of Wednesday 10 August 2022. Internet was cut for two hours at noon, and then again overnight, amid reports of protests and clashes between the police and protesters in capital city Freetown and other areas. Authorities subsequently denounced an attempt to ‘overthrow’ the government and imposed a nationwide curfew.

  • India Today ☛ VLC Media Player banned in India, website and VLC download link blocked

    One of the most popular media player software and streaming media server VLC media player, developed by VideoLAN project, is banned in India. As per a report by MediaNama, VLC Media Player has been banned in India, but this happened nearly 2 months ago. However, if you have the software installed on your device, it should still be working. Meanwhile, neither the company nor the Indian government revealed any details about the ban.

  • The Independent UK ☛ JK Rowling says ‘police are involved’ after receiving death threat following Salman Rushdie tweet

    Shortly after posting the message, Rowling shared an image of a reply she had received, which read: “Don’t worry you are next.”

    The author initially tagged in Twitter’s support account, writing: “Any chance of some support?”

  • The Times Of Israel ☛ J.K. Rowling gets death threat by person who hailed Rushdie’s stabbing

    Aziz responded to her post saying the stabber, Hadi Matar, was a “revolutionary Shia fighter.” He went on to threaten Rowling, saying: “Don’t worry you are next.”

  • JK Rowling working with police after receiving threat following Rushdie tweet

    JK Rowling has said she is working with the police after receiving a potential threat from a Twitter user following her reaction tweet to Sir Salman Rushdie’s attack in New York.

  • BBC ☛ Horrifying, ghastly: Authors condemn attack on Salman Rushdie

    Booker-prize winning author, Ian McEwan, called it an “appalling attack” that “represents an assault on freedom of thought and speech”.

    “Salman has been an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world. He is a fiery and generous spirit, a man of immense talent and courage and he will not be deterred,” he added.

  • RTL ☛ Activists accuse Iran of responsibility for Rushdie attack

    Iran’s rulers bear responsibility for the attack against the British writer Salman Rushdie as the Islamic republic never repudiated a 1989 order issued by its founder calling for the novelist to be killed, activists and opponents charged Saturday.

  • VOA News ☛ Salman Rushdie Off Ventilator, Talking Day After Attack, Agent Says

    Earlier in the day, the man accused of attacking him Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges.

    An attorney for Hadi Matar entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York.

  • BBC ☛ Who is Salman Rushdie? The writer who emerged from hiding

    Over a literary career spanning five decades, Sir Salman Rushdie has been no stranger to death threats arising due to the nature of his work.

    The novelist is one of the most celebrated and successful British authors of all time, with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, winning the illustrious Booker Prize in 1981.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder′s case endangers press freedom, his wife tells DW | News | DW | 11.08.2022

    Stella Assange, wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has accused the US of targeting a foreign journalist for exposing war crimes. She told DW that Assange’s life depends on his extradition order being dropped.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Legal options running out for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    The tug of war over the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US is entering its final stages, with London’s High Court set to make a final decision in September. His family is worried about his health.

  • Reason ☛ There’s Nothing Legacy-Defining About the Inflation Reduction Act

    America seems to be significantly less free than the other countries in, for example, mass incarceration, excessive punitive punishments, criminalization of drugs, excessive power concentrated in the executive or the presidency, a militarized police, the prosecution of Assange and Snowden, and, of course, the death penalty.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ Playing for All the Jelly Beans at the EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON

    Thirty-five EFF supporters and their friends played in the charity tournament on Friday, August 12 at Bally’s Poker Room. The tournament was kicked off by emcee Jen Easterly and EFF Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl.

    Before the tournament, Tarah and her father, professional poker player Mike Wheeler, hosted a poker clinic to teach Poker 101 to those new to the game. In a video promoting the event, Tarah describes how her father taught her the game as a child by using jelly beans as the currency of choice. The jelly bean-filled championship trophy pays homage to the spirit of teaching and the humble beginnings of a great player.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Off with Their Legs!

    “Off With Their Legs!,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, wonders if sycophancy will be enough to save Donald Trump this time.

  • TruthOut ☛ The Lessons of the Kansas Primary Go Far Beyond Abortion Rights

  • Securepairs ☛ SecuRepairs is at DEF CON!

    And this August, the right to repair is on the agenda DEF CON. On Saturday, August 13 at 10:00 AM, I will lead a panel of leading repair, legal and cybersecurity experts: Brazil Redux: Short Circuiting Tech-Enabled Dystopia with the Right to Repair.

    Joining me on the panel are: [...]

  • VOA News ☛ Taliban Fire Shots, Beat Protesters as Women Rally in Kabul

    Heavy gunfire could be heard in social media video of the rally, with Taliban men assaulting female protesters. They also violently prevented Afghan journalists from covering the rally.

  • Axios ☛ Taliban beat women protesting in Afghanistan as anniversary nears

    Taliban fighters chased protesters and beat them with the butts of their rifles.

    The big picture: Since the calamitous U.S. withdrawal from the country last year, the Taliban have wiped away rights women gained during the two decades the U.S. occupied the country.

  • Le Monde ☛ Taliban violently disperses rare women’s protest in Kabul

    Taliban fighters beat women protesters and fired rounds into the air on Saturday, August 13 as they violently dispersed a rare rally in the Afghan capital, days ahead of the first anniversary of the hardline Islamists’ return to power in the country.

    Since seizing control on August 15 last year, the Taliban have rolled back the marginal gains made by women during two decades of US intervention in Afghanistan.

  • NPR ☛ Women march in a rare protest in Kabul’s streets — and face violence from the Taliban

    “It was important because it’s nearly the first anniversary of the Taliban rule and we wanted to say that we don’t consent to this government,” said one young woman who spoke to NPR after the protest. She requested anonymity so she couldn’t be identified by Taliban authorities.

    “After a year of this government, there is no change in the situation. We are showing that we won’t stay silent,” she said. “It’s important to show the world that Afghans don’t accept this. We will stand against injustice.”

    As the women marched, Taliban security forces began grabbing the phones and cameras of Afghan journalists and male international correspondents. They grabbed the phone of a boy on a bicycle who tried to take a photo.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ Air Filter DRM? Hacker Opts Out With NFC Sticker

    [Flamingo-tech]’s Xiaomi air purifier has a neat safety feature: it will refuse to run if a filter needs replacement. Of course, by “neat” we mean “annoying”. Especially when the purifier sure seems to judge a filter to be useless much earlier than it should. Is your environment relatively clean, and the filter still has legs? Are you using a secondary pre-filter to extend the actual filter’s life? Tough! Time’s up. Not only is this inefficient, but it’s wasteful.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Bungie Uses Hague Convention to Pursue Cheat Seller Evidence Overseas

      Bungie has been permitted to seek overseas cooperation under the Hague Convention to obtain evidence on a Destiny 2 cheat seller. The developer filed a copyright lawsuit against the alleged operator of Lavicheats in 2021 but almost a year later progress is slow. In addition to conducting discovery in the US, Bungie has an eye on the UK but whether that will bear fruit is another question.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Technical

  • Sunbeam F1 Daisy

    It is clear that the maker is catering to those who don’t want phones that vie for their attention. The frugalmatic review linked above notes that they have found a market in Jewish and Amish Americans who take unusual care in managing their relationship with communication technologies.

    The makers of this phone clearly paid a great deal of attention to small details of the user experience. For example, there are dedicated LEDs on the front of the phone that indicate from a distance when you have unread text messages (green light), when the phone is charging (blinking red light), or fully charged (solid red light). The T9 predictive text dictionary is very large. Emoji are easy to access.

  • Years-Late Thoughts on Untitled Goose Game

    So I just beat Untitled Goose Game. Actually beat it this time, when I last played (when it came out) I did the regular “New Game+” tasks but didn’t do the timed tasks because a few of them are insanely difficult and annoying. This time, the back garden timed tasks were still a real bitch but I actually persevered!

  • How Many Computers Do You Have?

    I did a little inventory for myself.

    I don’t have a solid definition of what constitutes a computer here, but I assume that all of these contain some part that works as a von Neumann machine.

  • Science

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Could ‘Something’ Exist Beyond the Brain? If So, What?

      On a shrugged-off afternoon of YouTube wandering, I came upon this: “Is There Life After Death?”

  • Internet/Gemini

    • selected works

      as much as i love the text-first culture of gemini, i’m a visual artist and there’s absolutely no reason not to put my work in my personal space. so here are some of my favorite works from the past two years, compressed into very reasonable sizes. fullsize images and more of my work can be seen on my tumblr, and zines on itch.io

  • Programming

    • MacOS ZSH wildcards

      Now ZSH has been the default shell in MacOS for a while now but I’ve only recently started to switch, call me old fashioned.

    • Earthly ☛ How to validate and clean your YAML files using Kubeval and ValidKube

      Kubeval is an important tool if you are writing YAML files on a daily basis. You should use it to validate your files before applying them to your cluster. In this tutorial, you will learn how to validate your YAML files using Kubeval and ValidKube which is a web tool that cleans YAML files.

GNU/Linux

• uni Toronto ☛ How old our servers are (as of 2022)

  Back in 2016, I wrote about how old our servers were at the time. They were rather older than people might have expected, because universities are generally cheap and so usually run servers much longer than many people do. My group no longer quite runs servers into the ground, but we still can come close. Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I’m going to do a 2022 version of my old entry.

  My group only handles general departmental infrastructure on the non-undergraduate side of things, although these days we have some big servers that are mostly in our compute cluster. However, most of the most modern and powerful servers are in research groups, and get turned over much faster than we do (in fact we just recently got rid of some vintage 2011 ‘compute’ servers we inherited that way).

  Our normal servers remain almost entirely 1U Dell servers, although we’ve wound up with some ultra-short Supermicro servers as well that we use for firewalls. What we consider our current generation of Dell 1U servers are R340s and R240s; these are what we use for new installs of machines that we particularly care about. Since we’re in the process of upgrading a bunch of machines from Ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04, the number of these servers in production use is likely to go up. Somewhat older than that are Dell R230s, which it looks like we started using in 2017 or maybe 2018, and then we have quite a number of R210 IIs and R310s still in service, although we’re rotating those out of service as we upgrade machines to Ubuntu 22.04. We’re still reusing some of these old Dells for test servers or unimportant things, although we’ve decided that a number of them have CPUs that are now just too slow for modern Linux.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Thinking aloud about web engagement

  Last Wednesday I talked about the growing trend of superficial Linux distro reviews, both on YouTube and in thousands of cookie-cutter websites. Michael Dexter has lamented the fact that site wrapping software announcement with ads places higher in search results than the announcements themselves.

  I have intimate experience with this. Software and writing I once published under my (now retired) alias would routinely get picked up and disseminated, usually without attribution. My primary blog here is now big and old enough that its harder to get away with this, but I still find people wrapping my words wholesale so they can get cents of ad revenue. I still continue to publish full articles in my RSS feeds, but I’m starting to understand why others only want to include summaries.

  [...]

  As I said in that Linux desktop review post, I don’t think everyone is guilty of this. But it does go part of the way to explain why we’re seeing so many more of these mass-farmed videos and blogs, all saying broadly the same thing. Substance has been replaced with SEO (an abbreviation I’ve long thought a red herring), quality with quantity, and search engines like Google are, at best, enablers. There’s a reason everyone thinks search results aren’t as good now as they used to be.

  [...]

  The web seems to be cleaving in two directions: rubbish, and paywalls. I’d guess there are just as many people sharing knowledge, experience, and ideas as ever before, but they’re being drowned out by an increasing tide of churnalism, theft, and low-effort spam. Sandy demonstrates as much when doing some basic geographic and health searches in the first linked post, some of which has already cost lives.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ WARNING! Always Read Scripts Before Running Them (Including AUR Package Builds) – Invidious

    One of the things that we often warn computer users is “Don’t grab a script and run it without reading it first!” But many users complain that they don’t read scripts before running them because they wouldn’t understand the script anyway. I challenge that! I think most Linux users can read basic scripts, such as AUR PKGBUILDs.

• Applications

  • Ingo Jürgensmann ☛ XMPP and the effect of providers.xmpp.net

    Some of you may already know that I’m operating an XMPP server. So far there are several domains running on that XMPP server and two domains are open for public registration. Namely these domains are hookipa.net and xmpp.social. You can find the service under the main domain on https://hookipa.net.

    Interesting in this is, that for some time xmpp.social seemed to be the domain of choice for many users, maybe because of “xmpp” and “social” in the domain name – or because it is easier to name it than “hookipa” with “double-oh” and “kay”… who knows…

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install and Use MariaDB on Ubuntu 22.04

    MariaDB is a free, open-source, and powerful database management system used to store application data. It is a stable and relational database management system, and fork of the popular MySQL database system. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB 10.6 on Ubuntu 22.04 server.

  • Unix Men ☛ How to Install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (For Beginners)

    The “Jammy Jellyfish” version of Ubuntu, version 22.04, was made available on April 21, 2022. The previous release that had Long Term Support was Ubuntu 20.04, which was released in 2020. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will receive support for five years, like earlier LTS releases, till April 2027.

    In this brief guide, we walk you through how to install Ubuntu 22.04 and also discuss its features.

  • Make Use Of ☛ Host Your Own Raspberry Pi Audiobook Library With Audiobookshelf

    Reading expands the mind, but sometimes, pulling a 600-page tome from your pocket just isn’t practical. You can’t indulge in classic prose when driving a car, for example. This is where audiobooks come in, giving you the benefit of a narrated literary experience without requiring that you take your eyes off the road. With audiobooks, you can consume fantastic literature while driving, doing the dishes or even while you’re working.

    While there are numerous audiobook subscription services available, it’s far more satisfying to create and host your own library on a Raspberry Pi.

  • ELinux ☛ How to install and configure Flask on a Linux shared hosting account | Linux Webhosting blog

    Flask is a Python-based framework that enables you to quickly and easily create web applications. This article demonstrates how to install Flask and configure it on a Linux shared hosting account that uses cPanel.

    After completing the following procedures, you will have a functioning Flask application on your account that displays a simple web page.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Apply Accent Colour in Ubuntu Desktop

    It’s easy to apply accent colour on Ubuntu desktop, thanks to recent developments. Here’s how.

    Every Linux distribution has its default theme, bringing a dominant colour. The Accent colours are used to highlight the dominant colour in any setup. Generally, the primary and Accent colours should contrast or complement each other.

    With the recent revamp of the GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu desktop introduced Accent colour in the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.

    Since it’s pretty obvious how to apply it, but for the sake of new buds in Linux, I will explain how to use Accent colour on an Ubuntu desktop.

  • ByteXD ☛ How to Install Nvidia Drivers on Fedora Linux 34/35 – ByteXD

    Fedora comes with an open-source NVIDIA driver. The driver installed is Nouveau, an open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA video cards.

    However, Nouveau drivers are considered slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. This won’t matter much if you only use your device for light use, but if you are into design or gaming, you’ll surely start to feel it – in this case it would be a good choice to install the latest NVIDIA drivers.

    In this tutorial we’ll be installing the latest NVIDIA drivers on Fedora 34/35 using the RPM Fusion repositories and also through the manual method of downloading the driver from the Nvidia website.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Timeshift on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Timeshift on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Timeshift is software that provides a function similar to System Restore on Windows or Time machine on macOS. Timeshift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored at a later date to undo all changes to the system.

    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 Timeshift restore or backup tool on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Remote Connect to a Windows PC From Raspberry Pi

  • OSTechNix ☛ Create Btrfs Snapshots With Snapper In openSUSE – OSTechNix

    Btrfs is a Linux filesystem that has been adopted as the default filesystem in popular Linux distributions such as openSUSE and Fedora. It has many unique features that are not available in other filesystems. It is based on copy-on-write, allowing for efficient filesystem snapshots and clones. In this guide we will see whats is Snapper, and how to create Btrfs filesystem snapshots with Snapper on openSUSE Linux.

  • Ingo Jürgensmann ☛ setupSSO.sh : SAML SSO in Univention UCS Server

    The official HowTo on setting up SAML SSO basically covers the process of setting it up, but my impression was, that this process can be made better, less error-prone and more reproducible by automatting the setup.

    So I wrote in my spare time a small shell script to follow the instructions from the official HowTo and after many tests and enhancements, I released the script on Codeberg: setupSSO.sh.

  • Neowin ☛ Screencasts not recording in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? Here’s how to fix that – Neowin

    Last week, Canonical released Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, which finally opened the upgrade path to users on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. One of the big changes between the two versions is the screenshot tool, which also has a built-in screen recorder called screencast. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of an issue with it that can be fixed with a simple command.

  • H2S Media ☛ 3 Ways to install Steam on Linux Mint or LMDE – Linux Shout

    Here we learn the commands to install and use Steam client’s latest version on Linux Mint based on Ubuntu or LDME Debian based to play games.

    Steam software is the largest online distribution platform for computer games and is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Steam comes from developer Valve and has more than 100 million active users.

    The online platform Steam is ostensibly a distribution platform for software, PC games, and series or movies. The platform is developed by the company Valve and has several million active accounts, according to its information

    Even though it is available for Linux, that doesn’t mean all the games available on it can be played on Linux Distros. Only games that are originally published by the developers with Linux support can be. Yes, indeed as compared to Windows the numbers of the games are not much for Ubuntu or other Linux distributions but whatever is there yet a good source to satisfy the binge of gaming on open source platforms. The games are protected with DRM.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to play Call to Arms on Linux

    Call to Arms is a hybrid 3rd person/1st person strategy game for PC. It was developed and published by Digitalmindsoft for Windows. However, with some tweaks, you can play it on Linux. Here’s how to get it working on your system.

• Games

  • GO Media ☛ Steam Deck Is Surprisingly Great As A PC—Here’s How To Do It

    From setup, to software tips, to must-have peripherals, here’s how to use your Steam Deck as an excellent personal computer…

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Reading analog gauges with the Nicla Vision | Arduino Blog

    Analog instruments are everywhere and used to measure pressure, temperature, power levels, and much more. Due to the advent of digital sensors, many of these became quickly obsolete, leaving the remaining ones to require either conversions to a digital format or frequent human monitoring. However, the Zalmotek team has come up with a solution that incorporates embedded machine learning and computer vision in order to autonomously read these values.

    Mounted inside of a custom enclosure, their project relies on an Arduino Pro Nicla Vision board, which takes periodic images for further processing and inference. They began by generating a series of synthetic gauge pictures that have the dial at various positions, and labeled them either low, normal, or high. This collection was then imported into the Edge Impulse Studio and used to train a machine learning model on the 96x96px samples due to the limited memory. Once created, the neural network could successfully determine the gauge’s state about 92% of the time.

  • Arduino ☛ This snake robot is large enough to ride upon | Arduino Blog

    If a robot is rideable, is it still a robot or is it a vehicle? We would argue that if it rolls on standard automobile-style wheels or even tank tracks, it is a vehicle. But James Bruton’s eight-wheeled robot snake bike is quite clearly something else. This “vehicle” started as a small functional model that everyone would call a robot. Now Bruton has finished the full-size rideable snake robot and it is something to behold.

    The robot consists of four caterpillar-like segments, each with a pair of wheels. Two of the segments have driven wheels, while the other two segments have free wheels. Each segment is able to pivot relative to its neighbor and can also tilt up/down. There are two reasons for the tilt actuation. The first is to compensate for the rider’s weight in order to keep all of the wheels on the ground. The second reason is to handle bumps and uneven terrain, similar to a car’s suspension. The rider sits on a motorcycle seat mounted to the third segment (which is driven), so their weight is roughly centered.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Police ☛ Shizuku: How to freeze unwanted apps or bloatware on your phone

  • SlashGear ☛ How To Fix A Flickering Or Flashing Android Phone Screen

  • How to Get Image Descriptions on Google Chrome for PC and Android – Guiding Tech

  • 3 Ways to Change YouTube Video Playback Speed on Android TV

  • Android Authority ☛ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • LinuxTechLab ☛ Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify? – LinuxTechLab

    WooCommerce is a free and open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress with over 38 million downloads. Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, WooCommerce is the world’s most popular e-commerce solution that gives both store owners and developers complete control. Whether you’re selling your own products, or those of others, WooCommerce is the perfect platform.

    WooCommerce was created in 2010 by three people: Jigar Shah (CEO), Mike Little (CTO) and Margot Schmorak (Lead Designer). It was originally designed as an add-on to Jigar Shah’s online store called “WooThemes”.

• Programming/Development

  • Linux Links ☛ 6 Top Free and Open Source Groovy Web Frameworks – LinuxLinks

    One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

    A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.

    Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax.

  • uni Toronto ☛ The pervasive effects of C’s malloc() and free() on C APIs

    If this structure is dynamically allocated by gethostbyname() and returned to the caller, either you need an additional API function to free it or you have to commit to what fields in the structure have to be freed separately, and how (ie, this is part of the API). Having the caller free things is also not all that simple. Since this structure contains embedded pointers (including two that point to arrays of pointers), there could be quite a lot of things for the caller to call free() on (and in the right order).

    This issue isn’t unique to gethostbyname(); it affects any C API that wants to return (in a conceptual sense) anything more complicated than a basic type or a simple structure (even in old C, simple structures can be ‘returned’ by passing a pointer to the structure to the function, as is done in stat()). C offers no good solution to the problem; either you add one or more ‘free’ functions to your API (one per dynamically allocated structure you’re returning), or you document and thus freeze the process for freeing what you return, or you do what BSD opted to in gethostbyname() and return a pointer to something static.

    (Documenting what callers have to free implies that you can’t later add extra fields to what you return unless they don’t have to be freed separately.)

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Component-driven Markup

    React, and other component-based JavaScript libraries have historically been used for web development – building a frontend site, whether it be statically generated or server-side rendering. But there’s an interesting trend to reuse UI components in environments that have been generated by templates or by hand before.

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Jussi Pakkanen: Making decision without all the information is tricky, a case study

    In a recent blog post, Michal Catanzaro wrote about choosing proper configurations for your build, especially the buildtype attribute. As noted in the text, Meson’s build type setup is not the greatest in the world., so I figured I’d write why that is, what would a better design look like and why we don’t use that (and probably won’t for the foreseeable future).

    The concept of build types was copied almost directly from CMake. The main thing that they do is to set compiler flags like -g and -O2. Quite early in the development process of Meson I planned on adding top level options for debug info and optimization but the actual implementation for those was done much later. I copied the build types and flags almost directly except for build types RelWithDebInfo and Release. Having these two as separate build types did not make sense to me, because you always need debug info for releases. If you don’t have it, you can’t debug crash dumps coming from users. Thus I renamed them to debugoptimized and release.

    So far so good, except there was one major piece of information I was missing. The word “debug” has two different meaning. On most platforms it means “debug info” but on Windows (or, specifically, with the MSVC toolchain) “debug” means a special build type that uses the “debug runtime” that has additional runtime checks that are useful during development. More info can be found e.g. here. This made the word “debug” doubly problematic. Not only do people on Windows want it to refer to the debug runtime but then some (but not all) people on Linux think that “debugoptimized” means that it should only be used during development. Originally that was not the case, it was supposed to mean “build a binary with the default optimizations and debug info”. What I originally wanted was that distros would build packages with buildtype set to debugoptimized as opposed to living in the roaring 90s, passing a random collection of flags via CFLAGS and hoping for the best.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Feedback from @Tubsta, @Crosse3, Paul Traylor

    I try hard to generate clean pages, feeds, and headers, even though I know almost nobody notices or cares. Messy source code has always existed, but I do miss the day when people took as much pride in how their stuff was presented under the covers as above.

  • Chris ☛ Queueing Systems 2: Percentiles and Simulation

    In response to the previous article on Markov chains to model queueing systems I received a lot of requests on how to compute percentiles.

    I’m happy about that! More people need to realise that the upper percentiles is where it’s at. That’s what you need to know to evaluate most systems. The average is useful for things like capacity planning and resource allocation, but not to determine user experience.

    As some of you guessed already, analytically figuring out percentiles for anything but a trivial queueing system is difficult.

  • Tencent Rhino-bird Open-source Training Program 2022 – SunEC sm2p256v1 Key Pairs Generation

  • My Summer of Bitcoin 2022 Project – CI for CADR [Ed: Microsoft GitHub? Seriously? You’d get banned very fast. As it turns out, this person is connected to Microsoft and other such stuff]

    Before the Summer of Bitcoin project, Cryptoanarchy Debian Repo (CADR) lacked Continuous Integration (CI), which troubles the new coming contributors because setting up the developing environment can be complex. I finally successfully implemented the CI using GitHub Actions default runners. The CI can be triggered manually, or by sending PRs as well as pushing directly to the master branch.

  • Earthly ☛ Terraform Route53 And DNS Fun

    In my previous article about terraform I moved my lambda and all related infrastructure to Terraform. I even tested things by destroying everything and then recreating it.

Leftovers

• Matt Rickard ☛ On Unoptimizing

  One of the most influential computer scientists stopped using email in 1990. He accepts letters, prints them out, and replies with written comments.

  Dijsktra, another famous computer scientist, only used email for a few years. It’s not just computer scientists without an email but even prolific writers like Umberto Eco.

• Science

  • The Surprising Way Crowd Size Affects Our Tendency to Cheat

    That’s the lesson from new research by Maryam Kouchaki, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. Across several experiments, Kouchaki and her coauthors—Celia Chui of HEC Montreal and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School—found that people cheat at higher rates in larger groups.

    Why? The researchers found an intriguing self-fulfilling prophecy at work: people expect there to be higher numbers of cheaters within larger groups. This perception, in turn, increases the sense that cheating is common and therefore acceptable.
    The study illustrates the importance of context and social norms in determining whether or not we behave ethically. After all, we don’t magically transform from saints in groups of five to sinners in groups of 100. Rather, we unconsciously cue off other people and what we expect their behavior to be.

    “When you think your behavior is normative,” Kouchaki explains, “then it seems more defensible. Questionable behavior seems more justifiable when you think more people are doing it.”

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: An obstinate port-forwarding router

    I had reason to port forward through my home router’s NAT to our bhyve box this weekend. There are some updates to Minecraft and Plex, and I wanted to do my Sunday maintenance from a coffee shop over SSH, like a gentleman.

    Before I left, I opened the requisite port and enabled the port forward on the router. I tested it from an external IP and… nothing. I rebooted it to confirm the setting was correct and had been committed… still nothing. OpenSSH dutifully timed out each time.

    I was in a hurry and couldn’t be bothered doing a port scan or any further troubleshooting, so I opened a remote SSH tunnel to my external jump box and left.

    You know the saying that the cobbler’s son walks barefoot? Well we use the crappy home router our ISP gave us when we moved; albeit one I keep regularly patched. Its Wi-Fi range is more than sufficient for our tiny apartment, and I haven’t ever been bothered to replace it because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But the fact I couldn’t get a console up or even do basic troubleshooting in a pinch may be enough to convince me otherwise.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Scientific American ☛ How Humans’ Ability to Digest Milk Evolved from Famine and Disease

    The dawn of dairy farming in Europe occurred thousands of years before most people evolved the ability to drink milk as adults without becoming ill. Now researchers think they know why: lactose tolerance was beneficial enough to influence evolution only during occasional episodes of famine and disease, explaining why it took thousands of years for the trait to become widespread.

    The theory — backed up by an analysis of thousands of pottery shards and hundreds of ancient human genomes as well as sophisticated modelling — explains how the ability to digest milk became so common in modern Europeans, despite being almost non-existent in early dairy farmers. This ability, known as lactase persistence, comes from an enzyme that breaks down milk sugar and usually shuts down after young children are weaned.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • E45: Creating Resilient Applications with Temporal (pt 2) by Open Source Startup Podcast

      Maxim Fateev is Co-Founder & CEO and Dominik Tornow is Principal Engineer at Temporal, the workflow platform for building resilient applications.

      Temporal is the company centered on the open source orchestration engine Temporal which is a fork of the project Cadence first created at Uber. The Temporal project and company have seen tremendous interest and the cloud service for Temporal will be GA later this year.

      The company is valued at $1.5B and raised from investors including Sequoia, Index, and Amplify.

      In this episode, we discuss the origins of Temporal at Uber, use cases for their resilient workflow engine, how the company’s messaging and positioning have evolved over the past year, and the company’s upcoming developer experience conference Replay which will be in-person in Seattle from August 25 – 26.

• Security

  • Google ☛ Google Online Security Blog: Making Linux Kernel Exploit Cooking Harder

    The Linux kernel is a key component for the security of the Internet. Google uses Linux in almost everything, from the computers our employees use, to the products people around the world use daily like Chromebooks, Android on phones, cars, and TVs, and workloads on Google Cloud. Because of this, we have heavily invested in Linux’s security – and today, we’re announcing how we’re building on those investments and increasing our rewards.

    In 2020, we launched an open-source Kubernetes-based Capture-the-Flag (CTF) project called, kCTF. The kCTF Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) lets researchers connect to our Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) instances, and if they can hack it, they get a flag, and are potentially rewarded. All of GKE and its dependencies are in scope, but every flag caught so far has been a container breakout through a Linux kernel vulnerability. We’ve learned that finding and exploiting heap memory corruption vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel could be made a lot harder. Unfortunately, security mitigations are often hard to quantify, however, we think we’ve found a way to do so concretely going forward.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google’s bug bounty boss: Finding and patching vulns? ‘Totally useless’

    Simply finding vulnerabilities and patching them “is totally useless,” according to Google’s Eduardo Vela, who heads the cloud giant’s product security response team.

    “We don’t care about vulnerabilities; we care about exploits,” he told The Register in an exclusive interview. “We expect the vulnerabilities are there, they will get patched, and that’s nice and all. But the whole idea is what do to beyond just patching a couple of vulnerabilities.”

    To this end, Google’s open-source, Kubernetes-based Capture-the-Flag (kCTF) project doesn’t pay researchers a bounty to just find a Linux Kernel vulnerability. Instead, they’ve got to exploit the bug: connect to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) instances, hack it, and use the bug to steal the hidden flags.

  • Slashdot ☛ Google’s New Bug Bounties Include Their Custom Linux Kernel’s Experimental Security Mitigations – Slashdot

    Google uses Linux “in almost everything,” according to the leader of Google’s “product security response” team — including Chromebooks, Android smartphones, and even Google Cloud.

  • Troy Hunt ☛ Sending Spammers to Password Purgatory with Microsoft Power Automate and Cloudflare Workers KV

    How best to punish spammers? I give this topic a lot of thought because I spend a lot of time sifting through the endless rubbish they send me. And that’s when it dawned on me: the punishment should fit the crime – robbing me of my time – which means that I, in turn, need to rob them of their time. With the smallest possible overhead on my time, of course. So, earlier this year I created Password Purgatory with the singular goal of putting spammers through the hellscape that is attempting to satisfy really nasty password complexity criteria. And I mean really nasty criteria, like much worse than you’ve ever seen before. I opened-sourced it, took a bunch of PRs, built out the API to present increasingly inane password complexity criteria then left it at that. Until now because finally, it’s live, working and devilishly beautiful

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New Scientist ☛ Fibre-optic cables could be used to spy on people a kilometre away

      Fibre-optic cables, such as those used in internet infrastructure, could be used for eavesdropping. A device that can pick up tiny changes in signals sent through the cables can detect words spoken from over a kilometre away.

      Optical fibres use beams of light to transport data across the world, underground and in the oceans. Researchers have previously found that these cables can also be used as sensors – for example, to detect earthquakes and track whales.

    • IEEE ☛ Who Actually Owns Tesla’s Data? – IEEE Spectrum

      On 29 September 2020, a masked man entered a branch of the Wells Fargo bank in Washington, D.C., and handed the teller a note: “This is a robbery. Act calm give me all hundreds.” The teller complied. The man then fled the bank and jumped into a gray Tesla Model S. This was one of three bank robberies the man attempted the same day.

      When FBI agents began investigating, they reviewed Washington, D.C.’s District Department of Transportation camera footage, and spotted a Tesla matching the getaway vehicle’s description. The license plate on that car showed that it was registered to Exelorate Enterprises LLC, the parent company of Steer EV—a D.C.-based monthly vehicle-subscription service.

      Agents served a subpoena on Steer EV for the renter’s billing and contact details. Steer EV provided those—and also voluntarily supplied historical GPS data for the vehicle. The data showed the car driving between, and parking at, each bank at the time of the heists. The renter was arrested and, in September, sentenced to four years in prison.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Conversation ☛ How Patrice Lumumba’s assassination drove student activism, shaping the Congo’s future

    During a recent visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), King Philippe of Belgium made a speech to the national parliament in Kinshasa expressing his “deepest regrets” for the exploitation and oppression of Belgian colonialism.

    The European nation ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1908 until 1960. Before that it had been a personal colony of Leopold II, Philippe’s great great grand uncle, for more than 25 years.

    [...]

    While Belgium has partly acknowledged its responsibility for the murder, no protagonists have been brought to justice. A parliamentary commission found that King Baudouin, the monarch at Congo’s decolonisation, was aware of plans to assassinate Lumumba. However, Baudouin’s complicity remains to be officially recognised.

    The commission “tried in a way to limit the damages with its conclusions” and shied away from linking Belgium directly to the assassination. That was because “the diplomatic, ideological and financial consequences would be extremely great.”

    This might be why King Philippe is focusing on moving forward. His speech in Lubumbashi positioned Congolese students as a future-oriented group with whom Belgium could forge a new partnership.

    But there’s a crucial element missing from this logic: the specific role historically played by university students in further entrenching decolonisation in the Congo. This appeared most strongly during the 1960s.

• Environment

  • Unchecked emissions could double heat-related child mortality

    If carbon emissions are limited to slow temperature rise, as many as 6,000 child deaths could be prevented in Africa each year, according to new estimates.

    A team of international scientists, led by the University of Leeds in collaboration with researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), have shown that thousands of heat-related child deaths could be prevented if temperature increases are limited to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5ºC target through to 2050.

    However, heat-related child deaths could double in sub-Saharan Africa by mid-century if high emissions continue.

    Their work, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, estimated the impact of climate change on annual heat-related deaths of children under five in sub-Saharan Africa, from 1995 to 2050.

  • Energy

    • Michael West Media ☛ Adam Bandt hung out to dry, in a solar-friendly way – Michael West

      It was a big day for the Albanese government on Wednesday when its 43% emissions reduction targets were guaranteed passage in the Senate. Announcing the news, Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen were grinning from ear to ear.

      The uncertainty had come with the stance of the Greens. But their leader, Adam Bandt, confirmed the deal while giving his first address to the National Press Club since storming parliament with 16 members on May 21. Looking not exactly chuffed to be outlining a rare compromise, Bandt labelled Greens the only party of the centre-left. He rebranded Labor the party of the centre right, with the Coalition naturally corralled to the far right.

      Bandt’s threat to hold up Labor’s Budget bills raised the spectre of 1975 so he walked that back too. In summary, it was a performance brimming with fire and brimstone, tempered with pragmatism and memories of the Greens’ disastrous vote against Labor’s climate bill in 2009.
      The Q&A segment of Bandt’s address was still in progress when ABC News broke away to cover the announcement by Albanese and Bowen (Albowenese?) of the climate deal. ”It’s now very clear that our legislation will pass the parliament,” Bowen said, trying not to gloat.

• Finance

  • Michael West Media ☛ Kidnapped: billionaires’ loophole swiftly abolished by Greens and Labor, finally – Michael West

    Under cover of climate debate, the Greens and Labor swiftly and smartly killed off a longstanding loophole which let Australian billionaires hide their financial affairs. Michael West reports on politicians beating the lobbyists.

    It was swift in the end, and silent. The “Billionaires’ Loophole” was abolished in a rapid act of Parliament yesterday amid the dramatic passage of Anthony Albanese’s climate bill, relegating 25 years of regulatory apartheid to Australian history, a period of one rule for the rich and powerful and another rule for the rest.

    We are talking about the “grandfathering” exemption, a loophole standing since 1995 which allowed Australia’s richest families of the time to hide their financial affairs.

    The Stokes, Pratts, Rineharts, Triguboffs and Lowys, Solomon Lew, Bob Ell, Marc Besen, and reclusive dynasties you’ve never heard of; all will now be subject to the same laws as everybody else. Even billionaire parvenus such as Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes, and multinational corporations too, are required to disclose their financial statements with the regulators. Not so, those on the “Secret Rich List”.

  • Michael West Media ☛ Our inflation sensation!

    The workers have done their bit for productivity. Yet they have not been rewarded, proportionately, for their work. Meanwhile the ‘Gas Cartel’ has been shown to be one of the bigger drivers behind your power bill increases.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama

    As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • Social media enables undue influence | Stop at Zona-M

      Some of our most popular technologies are becoming a means of mass coercion that open societies cannot survive.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Stacy on IoT ☛ Insteon’s new boss is ready for business

    For Ken Fairbanks, CEO of Insteon Technologies Inc., the last 60 days have been a rush to find office equipment, reestablish supplier relationships and figure out who his customers are. The former Insteon employee turned business consultant purchased the assets of SmartLab Inc. through a unique process that has left him and his investors scrambling to rebuild a company as quickly as possible. Along the way, he’s learning how hard it can be to restart a smart home company after it has essentially shut down.

    On April 15, Insteon users noticed that their hubs weren’t working. Their connections to services such as Alexa and Google were broken and their mobile apps could no longer connect to their hubs. A few days later all was explained via a note on the Insteon web site saying that the company has failed to make it as a business. Customers also received an email from a company representing Insteon creditors noting that they would be paid after the sale of the assets by a trustee.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • exercise is key

    the results from my yearly health exam are in. turns out I needed to exercise more. three months ago I started doing light exercise in the morning and it has paid off. my grades are up where they’re supposed to go up and headed down wherever they’re meant to be low. nice, nice.

  • SpellBinding: CDESKOI Wordo: BLATS

• Technical

  • Science

    • Ken Shirriff ☛ Reverse-engineering a 1960s cordwood flip flop module with X-ray CT scans

      How can you find out what’s inside a sealed electronics module from the 1960s? In this blog post, I reverse-engineer an encapsulated flip flop module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. These modules are undocumented1, so their internal circuitry is a mystery. Thanks to Lumafield, I obtained a three-dimensional CT scan of the module that clearly shows the wiring and components: transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors. From these images, I could determine the circuitry of this flip flop module.

      The photo below shows the module, a block of plastic 1.5 inches long with 13 pins. I could determine most of its functionality by probing it on a breadboard—conveniently, the pin spacing is compatible with standard solderless breadboards. The module is a flip flop (as the FF label suggests) but some questions remained. Last month, I reverse-engineered a simpler Motorola module (post) using 2-D X-rays. However, this flip flop module was much more complex and I couldn’t reverse-engineer it from standard X-rays.

GNU/Linux

• Real Linux User ☛ 10 Great Linux websites for beginners and everyday users – Real Linux User

  Many websites related to Linux and open source software have high technical content and often have less attention for the actual use and the things you can do with this operating system. But some of us just have other expectations. As a beginner or every day user in the Linux and Open Source world, you have different information needs than an experienced, highly skilled Linux user or developer. But also Linux users who use their computer for example for content creation, are less interested in the technical backgrounds, and have mostly different needs. In this artcle I give my thoughts on 10 great Linux websites for beginners and everyday users.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ 393 – Quantum of Solus – mintCast

    First up in the news: Vanessa is finally here, so is the Linux kernel version 5.19, which was published from an M1 Mac by Linus Torvalds

    In security and privacy, Sale of over a billion Chinese users’ data found, DuckDuckGo is (finally) blocking Microsoft trackers, and Linux 6.0 to have run-time verification for running on safety critical systems

    Then in our Wanderings, Bill is hearing things, Moss is losing power, Joe is soldering on, and Norbert is taming the fox

• Kernel Space

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Kernel now 5.15.60 with RTLXXXU driver

    I have had email communications with Muthukrishnan, Realtek wifi not working, but it does work on a different Linux distribution. He has investigated firmware, but narrowed the problem down to a missing kernel driver. This is part of one of his emails:

    The issue appears to be that CONFIG_RTL8XXXU is not set in the kernel config setting. Since the firmware for my laptop is RTL8723BU, it appears to be not loading it at the time of booting.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Calibre Server on Ubuntu 22.04

    Calibre is known for being a very efficient eBook manager and with important features to be ranked as one of the best. We can also deploy Calibre Server on Ubuntu 22.04 and thus have a more private management and accessible from anywhere.

    One of the main advantages of deploying our eBook server with Calibre is that it will be accessible using the Internet. This will also allow you to share it with family and friends without problems, and finally, you can read your eBooks from the web.

    So let’s get started.

  • What is PDB in Kubernetes? – Kernel Talks

    PDB i.e. Pod Disruption Budget is a method to make sure the minimum number of Pods are always available for a certain application in the Kubernetes cluster. That is a kind of one-liner for explaining PDB. Let’s dive deeper and understand what is PDB. What does PDB offer? Should I define PDB for my applications? etc.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software. As a Chromium-based browser, Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race. Opera has created a sleek and lightweight browsing experience using the Blink layout engine. In addition, Opera has built-in features such as an ad blocker, battery saver, and free VPN. With these features, Opera provides users with an efficient browsing experience that is both fast and private. As more and more people are looking for alternatives to the major browsers, Opera is poised to become a leading player in the browser market.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21 LTS series that includes the stable, beta, and development (nightly) branch with steps to install, update and remove the browser using the command line terminal.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install MySQL 8.0 on Rocky Linux 9

    MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but web database storage and management is the most commonly used feature. MySQL has been in production use for over 20 years and is considered one of the most secure and reliable database systems. Despite this, it has several drawbacks that should be considered before using it for any mission-critical applications. One such drawback is that it does not support transactions across multiple tables, which can lead to data inconsistency in the event of a failure. Additionally, MySQL does not support some of the more advanced features in other database systems, such as stored procedures and triggers. MySQL is an excellent choice for many applications, but it must be aware of its limitations before using it in a production environment.

    In the latest release of MySQL 8.0, the database management system brings new features and security updates. This new release of MySQL adds support for joins with larger data sets, better performance when importing large files, and various improvements to InnoDB, SQL mode, named ‘strict sql_mode,’ which will make MySQL more compliant with the SQL standard. In addition, there are performance enhancements for DML statements and replication and several new security features. With these improvements, MySQL 8.0 provides a more robust and secure platform for managing data.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 on Rocky Linux 9 using the command line terminal with instructions on how to secure the MySQL service, update, and, if necessary, remove.

  • markaicode by Mark ☛ How to Install Akaunting on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 | Mark Ai Code

    If you wish to install Akaunting for a demo on a local server or for permanent use on a cloud/hosting VPS server, this article will walk you through the procedures for installing Akaunitng on Ubuntu, Debian, and other comparable Linux distributions.

    Akaunting is a free and open-source accounting software accessible on GitHub that runs on PHP and MySQL. As a result, there is no need to utilize any client or install accounting software on every device in a business or household. Once installed, any user who wants to use the Akaunting for a small and medium company or for personal use may access it locally or remotely through the internet and browser.

    It has a web interface, comparable to certain WordPress-based websites, and the setup method is likewise similar. As a result, it is not only user-friendly but also a gadget. Yes, it is also compatible with cellphones and tablets.

  • Own HowTo ☛ How to change the SSH port on your Server

    We will show you how to install Akaunting, a free open-source accounting software, on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 LTS.

  • ByteXD ☛ Install & Use Darkstat Web Based Linux Network Traffic Analyzer

    Darkstat is an easy to use, low-resource, cross-platform, web-based network traffic analyzer application. For managing Linux servers, this is a great tool. It can analyze network traffic, calculates statistics concerning usage, and serves these reports over the HTTPS.

    This tool has an integrated web server. Darkstat also supports IPv6 protocol and asynchronous DNS resolution. Because of low-resource usage, it can keep running in the background and collect data and then present that data in a comprehensible format in its integrated web server.

    Let’s take a look at how to install Darkstat and then we will get into its uses.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ How to Save and Retrieve Files on Chromebook

    Chromebook runs by ChromeOS, which is completely different from other operating systems. So those who are shifted to Chromebook from Windows or Mac need to know some common tips to improve their productivity for operating Chromebook.

    For instance, you might want to save some files on your Chromebook. To do this, you have to know how to save and retrieve files from your Chromebook. This is why in this guide, we are going to show a simple trick to manage and access files on Chromebook. We think this topic is essential when you are using a Chromebook for work or school purposes.

    So allow us only a few minutes to learn how to save files and retrieve files from the drive on your ChromeOS.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ yuzu the Nintendo Switch Emulator gets an easy Linux installer

    Good news for Linux and Steam Deck fans, the yuzu team have worked to bring the installer for the Nintendo Switch Emulator over to Linux properly.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Retro racer Horizon Chase Turbo gets a big free Adventures game mode

    Horizon Chase Turbo is a very highly rated retro racing game from developer AQUIRIS and today it sees a huge free upgrade. This is to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the franchise.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Hollow Knight is getting cross-platform Steam Cloud Saves to help Steam Deck

    Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry has announced that an update due to go live on Monday, August 15th will bring a much needed change to the saving system.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valheim gets a small teaser as Iron Gate get back to work on Mistlands

    Valheim is due to get a huge upgrade at some point, which most players are now waiting on and Iron Gate have given the smallest of teasers on it again. Their team took a bit of a break recently they mentioned in a new update post, but they said they’re now back at their desks working away on the next update.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Get loads of Resident Evil in the latest Humble Bundle

    Love Resident Evil and want to get a whole lot of it? Humble Bundle have put up the Resident Evil Decades of Horror bundle and it’s a pretty full collection. Going over each game I’ll list the Steam Deck Verified rating plus either Native Linux status or ProtonDB ranking so you’ve got the full picture.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Deck got a few Beta updates recently so here’s what’s new

    While I was briefly away camping, Valve released a few Steam Deck Beta updates so here’s a round-up of what’s new in case you also missed it.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GSoC’22 – File Highlighting in Thunar

    This feature is possible with the support by Thunar’s lead developers – Alexander Schwinn (alexxcons), Sergios – Anestis Kefalidis (SKefalidis) and Yongha Hwang (MShrimp4).

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: Major accessibility improvements – Adventures in Linux and KDE

      Though KDE’s goal-setting process is still ongoing, contributors have started working on Plasma accessibility in a major way! As of Plasma 5.26, all Plasma widgets will be fully compatible and usable with a screen reader, thanks to Fushan Wen with assistance from Harald Sitter!

    • Volker Krause ☛ KDE Frameworks 6 QML porting

      It’s been three months since my last post about the ongoing transition to KDE Frameworks 6, so another update is long overdue given how much has happened since.

      QML Porting

      While the main attention had been on porting build system and C++ code so far, meanwhile QML code has also moved into focus. QML code is generally harder to port, due to the lack of compile-time checking and the lack of conditional code based on the Qt version.

      Only seeing mistakes at runtime means for every single change we need to ensure to manually exercise the affected code paths. That is much easier to do if everything else is fully working, ie. in the current Qt 5 codebase.

      That however is only an option for changes that result in code that works with both Qt 5 and Qt 6. Changes that only work with Qt 6 can’t be done at all yet due to the lack of version-based conditional code (such as the C++ prepocessor gives us).

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Debian Family

  • Sparky 6.4 – SparkyLinux

    The 4rd update of Sparky 6 – 6.4 is out.

    It is a quarterly updated point release of Sparky 6 “Po Tolo” of the stable line. Sparky 6 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 “Bullseye”.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Elkhart Lake powers mini-ATX with up to 6 2.5GbE ports

    The MI05-00K is a Mini ITX board specialized for embedded networks applications and developed by Jetway. This motherboard comes with an Elkhart Lake Quad-processor enabled with support for SSD storage, LTE and WIFI.

    The processor found in this motherboard is the Intel Celeron J6412 Elkhart Lake quad-core processor (4C/4T) which features a base frequency of 2.0 and a max frequency of 2.6GHz. The motherboard only provides one DDR4 SODIMM slot (up to 16GB @3200MHz.).

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Automation Kit packs RPI2040 chip and supports 5Km LoRa

    Yesterday, SB Components Ltd launched an Automation Kit platform based on the Raspberry Pi Pico with Long Range support. This LoRa based platform can be used in embedded applications that require long-range connectivity and low power such as smart agricultural apps, smart homes, etc.

    The Automation Kit Platform consists of four products, an 4-channel relay board based on Lora and RP2040 MCU, an 8-channel relay board based on LoRa and RP2040 MCU, an USB Dongle based on LoRa and RP2040 MCU and a Raspberry Pi HAT based on LoRa. 

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Say “aye” to Code Club in Scotland

    Since joining the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a Code Club Community Manager for Scotland earlier this year, I have seen first-hand the passion, dedication, and commitment of the Scottish community to support the digital, personal, and social skills of young people.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Blade-runner-inspired VK-Pocket camera

    James knew immediately that he wanted to use Raspberry Pi Pico for his VK-Pocket camera project. Moreover, composite video out, which Pico supports, was essential for driving the CRT (cathode ray tube) display he culled from an old video camera. “Raspberry Pi Pico was my first choice for this build. I love these things”, he exclaims! “They’re a full Linux PC in a microcontroller form factor. I’ve put them in all sorts of builds, from animatronic heads to robotic insects.” [Yes, we want to hear more about these projects, too - Ed].

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ SearchWing maritime search and rescue drones

    Flight paths are pre-planned on a tablet and parsed on board by the Raspberry Pi. Each flight lasts 60 minutes and the drones have an operating altitude of 300-500 metres. Cruising speed is 50km per hour, and they’re capable of scanning a 184km2. Constant contact with the base station is maintained and the drones have a 100km range.

    The drones are 102cm x 59cm x 59cm and weigh 2kg. They cost around €1000 to build. They are designed to be launched like a paper plane. You just throw them out into the air and they take flight.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Meet Matt Richardson: engaging the maker community for Raspberry Pi

    The one I had the most fun making was the dynamic bicycle headlight. I strapped a battery-operated projector to the handlebars of my bicycle and wired up a Raspberry Pi to read a sensor on the wheel and display my speed in the projector’s beam down ahead of me. The best part was when I was troubleshooting it, I had to log into its Raspberry Pi wirelessly via SSH. I thought it was crazy to be remotely logging into my own bicycle to get diagnostics and upload new code.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Lifewire ☛ How to Control F on Android

  • How to colour-correct pictures on Android?

  • Make Use Of ☛ Bypass your Android screen lock without a password using WooTechy iDelock

  • Forbes ☛ Android Circuit: Pixel 7 Ultra Mystery, Galaxy Z Fold 4 And Z Flip 4 Launched, Oppo And OnePlus German Sales Stopped

  • GSM Arena ☛ Samsung Galaxy A33 5G gets August 2022 Android security patch – GSMArena.com news

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Fly ☛ How SQLite Helps You Do ACID

    The rollback journal is a simple trick to simulate atomicity and isolation and to provide durability to a database. Simple tricks are the best kind of tricks when you write a database so it’s a great place to start.

• Programming/Development

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Level up your HTML document with CSS | Opensource.com

    When you write documentation, whether that’s for an open source project or a technical writing project, you should have two goals: The document should be written well, and the document should be easy to read. The first is addressed by clear writing skills and technical editing. The second can be addressed with a few simple changes to an HTML document.

    HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the backbone of the internet. Since the dawn of the “World Wide Web” in 1994, every web browser uses HTML to display documents and websites. And for almost as long, HTML has supported the stylesheet, a special addition to an HTML document that defines how the text should appear on the screen.

    You can write project documentation in plain HTML, and that gets the job done. However, plain HTML styling may feel a little spartan. Instead, try adding a few simple styles to an HTML document to add a little pizzazz to documentation, and make your documents clearer and easier to read.

Leftovers

• Counter Punch ☛ Full Disclosure

  I am incited to respond at first because way “back in the day” I wrote A Primer to Postmodernity and used it as a text in my modernity/postmodernity class in both pre-millennial and millennial worlds. With all impunity I concocted a Europe travel program “Is This a Postmodern World?” and that went on for 15 years. I double downed on all that with A Postmodern Reader, which Linda Hutcheon and I edited, and then Postmodernism: The Key Figures, edited with Hans Bertens. From 1991 to 2009, I was the SUNY Press series editor for Postmodern Culture.

  So, yeah, I nourished what Saad calls a parasite. But I didn’t think what I was describing was a parasite but rather a kind of disclosure of what finding truth and reality amounted to, how reason was inside and not outside our life-worlds, and how we put words to world, how unreliable that linkage was, and how terribly bad we were at facing the consequences of all that. It’s sad to tragic that we are more easily persuaded by straw man tactics than engaged in pursuing the politics of such tactics and then setting out to do the hard work of seeing ourselves and our world as clearly as we can. If I didn’t think we needed to re-tailor our thinking on basic foundational levels and, most importantly, that it could be done, I’d tend my garden as Voltaire suggested.

• Counter Punch ☛ Speaking Ill of the Dead

  It just so happens I have a little something I wrote a while ago about Mr. McCullough.  It’s from the book about unlearning white supremacy that I am finally close to finishing.  It’s part of a section on the transmission of white values. 

• Counter Punch ☛ Coast to Coast with Wainwright and the Kentish Quartet

  The path now led gently down to the headlands above the North Sea, a blue plain stretching towards a horizon flecked by oiler tankers. To our left Whitby Abbey, the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, glowered, as Gothic ruins tend to do even on a sometimes sunny day like this one.

  Alan’s concentration was elsewhere. He was on his phone to a piper. He’d called him two hours earlier with an urgent request: could he identify a melody that Alan, now fifty-six years old, had heard repeated dozens of times twenty-nine years earlier when he had led a group of cyclists from Land’s End on the Southwest tip of England to John o’ Groats at the very top of Scotland? After ten grueling days on the bicycles, Alan had secretly organized for two pipers to surprise the cyclists by playing the peloton over the last rise and down to the sea. That euphoric feeling of ceremonial arrival had stayed with Alan lo these three decades and the tune had too. I suspected that the tune was the feeling, and vice-versa.

• The Nation ☛ Julius Eastman’s Great Expectations

  Julius Eastman was good at turning insults into titles for his work. Example: In 1977, Eastman was 36 and, though respected in avant-garde circles for the boldly experimental music he’d been making for more than a decade, was struggling to sustain himself in New York City. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” his mother asked him, and Eastman used the question as the name for his latest piece, composed at the request of conductor Lukas Foss for the Brooklyn Philharmonia (later upgraded to the Brooklyn Philharmonic). If his mother’s taunt was only teasing—a loving maternal prod—Eastman used it for a fiercer purpose. Over the entirety of its 20-minute-plus duration, the composition states and restates the chromatic scale in blunt scoring—hammering and hammering, relentlessly. It feels less like an inquiry, teasing or otherwise, than a nearly physical assault. The title, a question founded on imposed expectations, imposes expectations of its own, setting up the listener for a piece of musical rumination or commentary. Yet the music provides something altogether different: a form of aural violence that batters the brain into numb submission.

• Education

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Five-Alarm Crisis’: US Has Shortage of 300K Teachers, School Staff

    National Education Association president Becky Pringle on Thursday warned that the U.S. teacher shortage has spiraled into a “five-alarm crisis,” with nearly 300,000 teaching and support positions left unfilled and policymakers taking desperate—and in some cases, questionable—measures to staff classrooms.

    Pringle told ABC News that teachers unions have been warning for years that chronic disinvestment in schools has placed untenable pressure on educators as they face low pay and overcrowded classrooms.

  • Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?

    Reading is, after all, a matter of decoding symbols in a way that makes them meaningful to the reader, which ideally approximates – but can never identically reproduce – the way they were meaningful to the writer who coded them.

    BUT The internet has made the entire world a library with no exits and no supervisors.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ The Chip Shortage Leads To The Strangest Things

    The global chip shortage has not made the life of the electronic design engineer an easy one, as products have been designed around whatever parts are available rather than the first choices. This has manifested itself in some unexpected ways, including as [CNX software] investigates, products whose multiple-choice bill of materials has led to mistakes being made in manufacture.

  • Hackaday ☛ Homebrew Biped Bot Shows Off Some Impressive Moves

    We’ve seen enough DIY robotic platforms here on Hackaday to know that most of them take the literal and figurative path of least resistance. That is, they tend to be some type of wheeled rover. But of course, there are plenty of other forms of locomotion, should you want to take on something a bit more challenging.

  • Hackaday ☛ Svelte VR Headsets Coming?

    According to Standford and NVidia researchers, VR adoption is slowed by the bulky headsets required. They want to offer a slim solution. A SIGGRAPH paper earlier this year lays out their plan or you can watch the video below. There’s also a second video, also below, covers some technical questions and answers.

  • Hackaday ☛ Swarm Vs. Iridium: Which Satellite IoT Service Is Right For You?

    In a world where it seems like everyone’s face is glued to a device screen, the idea that wireless service might be anything other than universal seems just plain silly. But it’s not, as witnessed by vast gaps in cell carrier coverage maps, not to mention the 70% of the planet covered by oceans. The lack of universal coverage can be a real pain for IoT applications, which is a gap that satellite-based IoT services aim to fill.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I never thought bread could be so beautiful’: Ukrainians describe the hunger they faced during the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion — Meduza

  • Common Dreams ☛ 94% of Pre-Packaged and Homemade US Baby Foods Contain Toxic Heavy Metals: Study

    Almost all of the baby foods that parents in the United States feed their children, whether purchased at the store or prepared at home, contain detectable amounts of toxic heavy metals that can impair brain development, according to new research published Thursday, which led to renewed demands for improved regulation.

    “Every day that the FDA delays is another day babies’ developing brains are harmed by toxic chemicals.”

• Proprietary

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Sounding the Alarm on Emergency Alert System Flaws

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System — a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS warning came in advance of a workshop to be held this weekend at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas, where a security researcher is slated to demonstrate multiple weaknesses in the nationwide alert system.

  • Techdirt ☛ Leaked NSO Group Presentation Details Malware’s Ability To Turn On Cameras, Mics To Surveil Targets

    Israel’s foremost purveyor of malware, NSO Group, has undergone nearly a yearlong reckoning. A leak last summer appeared to show NSO customers were routinely targeting journalists, activists, members of opposition parties, and, in one case, the ex-wife of a Dubai ruler.

  • Hackaday ☛ Local Simulation Feature To Be Removed From All Autodesk Fusion 360 Versions

    The removal of features from Autodesk products would appear to be turning into something of a routine at this point, with the announced removal of local simulations the latest in this series. Previously Autodesk had severely cut down the features available with a Personal Use license, but these latest changes (effective September 6) affect even paying customers, no matter which tier.

  • NPR ☛ Ransomware attacks are hitting small businesses. These are experts’ top defense tips [iophk: Windows TCO]

    However, sometimes companies struggle with understanding or feeling fully protected by those policies. According to a recent study from Blackberry and Corvus Insurance, a high percentage of companies said they would hesitate to get into business with organizations that aren’t covered by cyber insurance, recognizing its importance. However, just 14 percent of small and medium-size businesses have policies that cover over $600,000, restrictions that led more than half of respondents to say they hoped for more financial assistance from the government, particularly when attacked by a nation state. Many companies said there’s a lack of transparency from some firms about what is actually covered by their policies, which are constantly getting more expensive.

  • Techdirt ☛ Researcher Finds Russian Cybersecurity Far Shittier Than The Mythology Suggests

    For much of the last decade, Vladimir Putin has attempted to compensate for various shortcomings (like a less sophisticated real world military) by launching cyber and propaganda attacks on much of the world. And while this, for a while, resulted in a mythology that Russia was in a league of its own when it comes to hacking and cybersecurity, the reality isn’t nearly that exciting.

• Security

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Chinese hackers backdoor chat app with new Linux, macOS malware [Ed: Nowadays the Microsofters in the media are calling "backdoors" things that are simply malware and one has to actually install; of course they like to blame "Linux" (because the user can add malware on top of it). Saying Linux isn't secure because it doesn't prevent you installing malware is like saying bridges are dangerous because you may commit suicide by jumping off them.]

    Versions of a cross-platform instant messenger application focused on the Chinese market known as ‘MiMi’ have been trojanized to deliver a new backdoor (dubbed rshell) that can be used to steal data from Linux and macOS systems.

  • Linux Threats: A Black Hat 2022 Hot Topic? (Video) [Ed: Aside from patent trolling, Blackberry reinvented itself as anti-Linux FUD source in recent years. They intentionally overlook back doors (e.g. Windows) and blame everything on "Linux".]

    There are usually a few cyberthreat trends that seem to emerge as important themes at each year’s Black Hat conference. And this year, the increase in Linux threats may be one of them.

  • USCERT ☛ #StopRansomware: Zeppelin Ransomware [Ed: Ransomware is predominantly a Microsoft Windows problem]

    CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: Zeppelin Ransomware, to provide information on Zeppelin Ransomware. Actors use Zeppelin Ransomware, a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), against a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure organizations to encrypt victims’ files for financial gain.

  • USCERT ☛ CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates. 

  • USCERT ☛ Cisco Releases Security Update for Multiple Products

    This vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

  • Database Integrity Vulnerabilities in Boeing’s Onboard Performance Tool | Pen Test Partners

    Security gaps in older, unprotected Windows desktop versions of Boeing’s Onboard Performance Tool (OPT) could make certain Electronic Flight Bags (EFB) more susceptible to attack. In particular, OPT’s use of plain text configuration files and SQLite databases, means an attacker with physical access to an EFB could modify files directly on the device.

    While the likelihood of exploiting such gaps is low given existing regulations governing the use and employment of EFBs and Crew Resource Management procedures, if data modification occurs, and the resulting miscalculations are not detected during the crew’s required cross check or verification process, an aircraft could land on a runway too short or take off at incorrect speeds potentially resulting in a tail strike or runway excursion.

    Boeing released OPT version 4.70 and issued a service bulletin to operators to enhance the application’s security features and minimize the potential for manipulating OPT data. It is important that operators employing EFB solutions, including those that contain OPT, harden their devices and implement physical access controls in accordance with relevant aviation regulations.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Unix Sheikh ☛ No, you cannot trust third party code without reading it first

      For more than a decade I have been thundering against a lot of the bad practices that have permeated the software development industry, one such practice is to blindly trust code when using third party libraries, frameworks or packages. For about the same amount of time I have listened to all the reasons why time is money and we need to build something quickly, and we haven’t got the time to do security or X, Y and Z. But alas, now such companies are beginning to pay the price, a very costly and extremely damaging price!

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Federal Court fines Google $60m for collecting data on the sly

      The Australian Federal Court has fined Google $60 million for misleading consumers about collection and use of personal data on Android phones between January 2017 and December 2018.

      The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission initiated court action over the issue in October 2019. The court found that Google LLC and Google Australia Pty Ltd, which together make up Google, had breached Australian consumer law.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Australia’s Pine Gap: Eyes From the Sky

      The facility is in the Northern Territory. It’s the occasionally controversial spy facility that Aussies and Yanks use to help battlefield soldiers and pilots all over the globe map out their strategies. It’s Pine Gap, a six-part Netflix series that streamed for one season (2018). Working together to keep Us safe — and don’t you forget that, as Duane “Lump It” Clarridge used to say to the world on behalf of the gloves-off element in government.

      The series features secrets — theirs and ours — as they put it. Obama once said he loves being in the trenches with the Aussies — a little patronizing platitudinous reference to the Anzac legend — because he reckons they have Our backs. The series says otherwise. There’s a mole in the midst as the group operates to stop a terrorist plot and the aggression of China in the South China Sea. Also, presumably to be provocative, there’s an “unlikely” coupling of a African-Amerian intelligence officer and an Aussie Girl that comes across to the knowing as a homage-paying to the brassy days of Brisbane circa 1942 when racism caused a major riot, and some details of the scene tell of Black GIs moving off in the night from bars with white women. (See my flash fiction story, “The Battle of Brisbane,” that depicts the scene,)

• Defence/Aggression

  • Unity Announces Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results

    Unity partners with CACI International. Unity was awarded an exciting three-year multi-million dollar contract to Advance the Development of Smart Human Machine Interfaces by CACI International. This win is the single largest Digital Twin Solutions deal for Unity to date and is a strategic deal that helps to solidify Unity as the preferred real-time 3D platform for future systems design and simulation programs across the US Government.

  • Medforth ☛ Shock over Turkish schoolbooks: “Jihad is simply part of our religion”

    Two out of twelve official history books in Turkey contain questionable content. This was revealed by the exiled Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt in the Middle East Forum.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Tom Engelhardt: The Decline and Fall of Everything (Including Me)

    Tom Engelhardt ponders whether we will find some way to write America’s story that won’t end in the fall not just of this imperial power but of humanity itself?

  • Scheerpost ☛ Zelensky Calls on West to Ban Russian Travelers, Says ‘Whole Population’ of Russia Is Responsible for the War

    Russia denounced Zelensky’s demand as irrational.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ How Britain fueled Ukraine’s war machine and invited direct conflict with Russia

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I’m not afraid to take a bullet’ Russian convict turned Wagner Group recruit tells Mediazona why he agreed to go fight in Ukraine — Meduza

    Last week, Mediazona reported that Kremlin-linked catering tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin was personally recruiting Russian convicts to fight as mercenaries in Ukraine. In the words of one inmate, Prigozhin offered “not only money, but acquittal and a clean record” to convicts who agreed to enlist in the Wagner Group — a notorious private military company that he is said to finance.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘We had no moral right to attack another country’ Russian paratrooper pens memoir condemning February invasion of Ukraine — Meduza

    On the morning of February 24, thousands of Russian troops poured into Ukraine in a full-blown invasion. Pavel Filatiev was one of them. The 33-year-old paratroop spent two months on the front line before resigning from the army for health reasons. Now, he openly opposes the war. In a new book titled “ZOV” (after the symbols painted on Russian military vehicles), Filatiev offers an inside look at the state of the Russian army in the lead-up to the war and details his experience in the early days of the invasion. The following translated excerpts from his book were first published (in Russian) by the investigative journalism outlet iStories. 

  • Counter Punch ☛ Talking Sense About “A New American Civil War”

    Especially since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by frenzied supporters of Donald Trump, most of the “new civil war” talk has focused on far-right groups like those involved in the attack, and on the armed militias, estimated to be about 30,000 strong, that tend to identify as conservative nationalist, Christian nationalist, or white supremacist.  Many of their members are war veterans, current or former police officers, or security personnel, and they know how to use the weapons of war.  Of course, some leftists also have a capacity for organized violence. They have not been much in evidence lately, but one assumes that if a new civil war begins, they will make their presence felt.

    We need to talk sensibly about the potential of a nation like the U.S. for serious political violence, but this isn’t easy to do so.  “It can’t happen here” is obviously too glib and complacent, while “It will happen here” is alarmist and demoralizing.  The questions that most need thoughtful discussion are these:  What are the most important causes of serious political violence in wealthy nations like the United States?  Can these conditions be altered so as to make civil war less likely?  If so, how do we go about preventing the violence?

  • Counter Punch ☛ Connecting Toxic Memories: Hiroshima and Nuremberg

    Peace activists around the world often choose August 6th and 9th each year to grieve anew the human suffering and devastation caused by dropping atomic bombs on the undefended Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which lacked military significance. Among other things these atomic attacks were ‘geopolitical crimes’ of ultimate terror, with scant combat justification, and intended mainly as a warning to Soviet leaders not to defy the West in the peace diplomacy at the end of World War II.

    These August dates marking the utter destruction of these two cities are treated as events giving rise to what has been widely known as the nuclear age. This awful beginning can never be forgotten or redeemed, although ever since the explosions in 1945 the solemnity of these occasions has been overshadowed outside of Japan by widespread fears that a nuclear war might occur at some point and a quiet rage continues to build around the world that the nuclear weapons states, above all the U.S., have stubbornly defiantly refused to take steps to fulfill pledges to seek a reliable path to nuclear disarmament in good faith.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Roaming Charges: Gaza by Bomblight

    The press largely plays along, conditioned to the rhythms of mass slaughter. Gaza is being bombed because Gaza was bombed before and emerged from the rubble and craters. The question of why is rarely asked. Of course, Gaza is being bombed for the same reasons as last year, for the same objectives as the years before that.

    Yet the objectives for the bombing of Gaza will never be realized. Gaza cannot be eliminated. Gaza will exist. Therefore it must always be bombed. The question is not why. But, like some macabre moveable feast, only when. Is it time? Time to bomb Gaza again? It must be. Yes, look, there’s the bomblight! It came early this year.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Israel Continues to Routinize ‘Systematic Slaughter’

    Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip—codenamed Operation Breaking Dawn—spanned three days in early August and killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children. According to the Israeli government, the attack was a “preemptive” operation against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group—which is as creative an excuse as any for spontaneously bombing people for no apparent reason.

  • The Nation ☛ AIPAC vs. Democracy

    The benefits of democracy in the United States have never been shared equally, despite ongoing rhetoric claiming otherwise. African Americans, women, some immigrant groups, the formerly incarcerated and other marginalized populations have, at different times, been denied equal citizenship.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Seeing the Invisible: Reflections on Visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jaffa

    In the 60s I attended high school with Zionists who taught me about “the land without a people for the people without a land” and other lies.

    It was not until after I graduated high school and then met college students in the 70s from other countries like South Africa, Iran and Algeria, that I learned the truth about Palestine.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Everyone Has Already Lost the War in Ukraine but Raytheon

    It’s an admittedly perverse hobby likely driven by my own history of childhood trauma and the resulting need to gain some sense of control over the horrors of a violently uncontrollable universe, but it also ultimately drove me to become a downright evangelical anti-imperialist and anarchist once I realized the very basic fact that states kill. It is their most defining attribute. A monopoly on the use of grotesque behavior and the insanity of war is how they justify their very existence. All of them, in ways big and small. Not one of them is special. Every team in this blood sport sucks.

    But I can honestly say that in my 34 years as a compulsive antiwar nerd, I have never seen a war more horrifically insane than the rapidly expanding mess in Ukraine. There have been plenty of wars that are more violent. There are about a dozen raging in Africa as we speak that make the carnage of Bucha look downright quaint by comparison, but I’ve never in my lifetime seen a war that is more pointlessly dangerous.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation About China?

  • Scheerpost ☛ New Research Finds CIA Used Black Americans as Drugs Experiment Guinea Pigs

    Graphic by MintPress News\ By Kit Klarenberg / MintPress News By now, many will be familiar with Project MKULTRA. For decades, the CIA conducted highly unethical experiments on humans in order…

  • Counter Punch ☛ While Cuba Deals with Blazing Fire, the U.S. Watches and Waits

    This latest disaster – the largest oil fire in Cuba’s history – comes at a time when Cuba is currently undergoing an energy crisis due to soaring global fuel costs, as well as over-exploited and obsolete infrastructure. The raging fire will undoubtedly further exacerbate the electricity outages that Cubans are suffering from as a result of the on-going energy crisis that is occurring in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record globally.

    Almost immediately, the Cuban government requested international assistance from other countries, particularly its neighbors that have experience in handling oil-related fires. Mexico and Venezuela responded immediately and with great generosity. Mexico sent 45,000 liters of firefighting foam in 16 flights, as well as firefighters and equipment. Venezuela sent firefighters and technicians, as well as 20 tons of foam and other chemicals.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Sanctions Fuel the Fire at Cuba’s Matanzas Oil Storage

    Four of the eight tanks at the storage facility have been impacted by these fires. By August 8, Matanzas Governor Mario Sabines Lorenzo also confirmed that three tanks had been compromised. Clouds of dust now hover over the island. Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya, Cuba’s minister of Science, Technology, and Environment (CITMA), said that scientists from various backgrounds were monitoring the situation to see if the smoke resulting from the fire will lead to any negative health effects for the residents of the surrounding areas. As of that point, she said, “We have no evidence that there are effects on human health.” Nonetheless, strange substances have been detected in the water supplies in Yumurí Valley, Matanzas. Diosdado Vera, an 89-year-old farmer, showed journalist Arnaldo Mirabal Hernández the unusual color and odor of the water in an old bathtub that serves as the water source for her cows. “There are approximately 3,200 particles in the air right now,” said CITMA Minister Pérez Montoya. “The clouds have sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, among other substances that are falling on Matanzas, Mayabeque, and Havana.” Meanwhile, Pérez Montoya said that a team of scientists is investigating the strange substances found in the Yumurí Valley.

    This tragedy has also had immediate repercussions for the entire population in the province of Matanzas and the whole island of Cuba since it affects their electricity supply and access to health care, which already are strained under the weight of the U.S. blockade, due to lack of availability of spare parts and scarcity of medicines in Cuba, respectively.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Without Palestine, There is No Arab Unity: Why Normalization with Israel Will Fail

    Not so fast. Many events continue to demonstrate the opposite. Take, for example, the Arab League two-day meeting in Cairo on July 31 – August 1. The meeting was largely dominated by discussions on Palestine and concluded with statements that called on Arab countries to reactivate the Arab boycott of Israel, until the latter abides by international law.

    The strongest language came from the League’s Assistant Secretary-General who called for solidarity with the Palestinian people by boycotting companies that support the Israeli occupation.

  • Counter Punch ☛ On Choice, Revolution, and a “Rare, Special, Unique” Cult

    Anytime someone’s accused of “exploiting civil unrest to recruit followers,” there’s likely some Red-baiting involved.  If you hear about people “known for swooping into town and leeching off of existing…grassroots efforts across the country,” you’re probably hearing more of the same. These are variations of the old “outside agitators” theme, first directed (I think) at communists (or alleged communists) such as the Freedom Riders, swooping down from the north on segregated southern communities and “exploiting” black unrest to further their own (communist) cause in the early 1960s.

    Obviously, those making such accusations do not embrace the Marxian dictum that the fruit of the battle is not in the immediate result of the struggle, but in the increasing unity of those struggling—around truly revolutionary politics. Or the Leninist dictum that the revolutionary party becomes involved in all kinds of struggles, on the premise that the masses learn through such struggles how capitalism is the fundamental problem, and how it needs to be overthrown. At least they do so if guided by revolutionary leadership.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Enabling Gun Violence in the United States

    High rates of gun violence in the U.S. result from several enabling factors, including Supreme Court decisions conflating the historical reliance on state militias with the unrestrained “constitutional right” to bear arms; Congress’ reluctance to pass effective gun control legislation; easy availability of guns and manufacturers’ effective promotion of high caliber weapons; and parents’ lenient behavior towards their children’s possession of arms.

    Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the U.S. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, deaths related to the use of firearms increased 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, overtaking car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death among them. The country is now, virtually a war zone.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Letter From Crimea: the 1854 War Begins on the Alma and Continues Today

    To the River Alma

    Because I was wet from biking in the rain, I decided to search for a taxi to drive me, my bicycle, and my bags to the battlefields of the Alma River, which are along the Crimean Black Sea coast.

  • Counter Punch ☛ South Africa Is on a Knife Edge as Xenophobia Escalates

    The state has tended to stand down while a neighborhood is roiled with xenophobic violence. When it does move in, after the destruction, removal of people from their homes and killing have stopped, it usually arrives to arrest migrants rather than the perpetrators of the attacks. It is overwhelmingly impoverished and working-class African and Asian migrants who must face this pincer movement from the mob and the police.

    The severity of the situation in South Africa first came to global attention in May 2008 when xenophobic violence, sometimes intersecting with ethnic sentiment, took 62 lives. At the time, the country was ruled by Thabo Mbeki, a man with deep and genuine Pan-African commitments. But by the end of 2007, Jacob Zuma’s path to the presidency was clear, and the ethnic chauvinism he had introduced into the public sphere was rampant. The limited social support offered by the state was increasingly understood to be tied to identities such as ethnicity, nationality and claims to be part of long-established communities.

  • TruthOut ☛ US Sanctions Worsen Afghanistan’s Humanitarian Crisis as Taliban Targets Women

  • Democracy Now ☛ Afghanistan: The Taliban Cracks Down on Women’s Rights as U.S. Sanctions Worsen Humanitarian Crisis

    One year after the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we look at the new government’s crackdown on women’s rights while millions of Afghans go hungry. We speak to journalist Matthieu Aikins, who visited the capital Kabul for the first time since the U.S. evacuation one year ago. He writes the country is being “kept on humanitarian life support” in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine. The Biden administration’s economic sanctions are causing Afghanistan to spiral into a financial crisis, making the U.S. “at once both the largest funder of humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan and one of the main causes of the humanitarian crisis with these sanctions,” says Aikins.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Anti-War Veterans Group Asks Biden to ‘Read Our Nuclear Posture Review Before Releasing Yours’

    Amid heightened global fears of a nuclear war or accidental catastrophe, Veterans for Peace this week urged President Joe Biden to review its recommendations for U.S. policy related to weapons of mass destruction.

    “Our Nuclear Posture Review is a blueprint for a world of peace and cooperation.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Saudi Spying Inside Twitter Led to Torture & Jailing of Saudi Man Who Ran Anonymous Satirical Account

    A jury in California has convicted a former worker at Twitter of spying for Saudi Arabia by providing the kingdom private information about Saudi dissidents. The spying effort led to the arrest, torture and jailing of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who ran an anonymous satirical Twitter account. His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, and the lawyer for the family, Jim Walden, are calling on the Biden administration to push for his release. “The brutality of the Saudi officials have no limits,” says Areej al-Sadhan. “Twitter and other social media companies have more than a little responsibility for what’s happening, not just with respect to Abdulrahman’s case and the case of other disappeared Saudi human rights activists and outspoken dissidents, but across a much broader array of misconduct,” says Walden.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | It’s Okay to Enjoy the Moment of Joy and Hope This Climate Bill Offers

    As soon as today, President Biden is expected to sign into law a budget reconciliation bill with historic climate provisions. Writing these words brings an almost surreal mixture of sheer joy and relief that I know many of you share. Yes, the bill has some real flaws and there’s lots more that will be needed in the years to come; but for today, let’s savor this long-awaited and hard-fought progress, and give thanks for the tremendous effort of so many millions of people that it’s taken to secure it.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Migration as Sign of Climate-Change Impact in the Global South

    First among forces pushing masses of people northward is the environmental crisis. The role of climate change in reducing soil productivity and food availability and in predisposing already beleaguered people to migrate is of great concern.

    One assumption here is that capitalist systems of production and consumption have been central to causing the climate to change for the worse. Another is the need for war on capitalism so as to stave off more climate change and cope with its fallout. That hasn’t happened in the industrialized northern countries.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Botany as Archaeology, to Stop a Lithium Mine

    Many of the desert plants do indeed resemble ocean creatures: coral-like cactus and urchin-like succulents. Although it is commonly thought of as desolate and emptiness, the high desert steppe is incredibly abundant and alive. 350 species of wildlife and insects depend just on sagebrush herself.

    The sagebrush sea is one of the largest continuous landscape types in North America, but only 5% of the area receives protection at the federal level, making it the least protected landscape in the USA.

  • FAIR ☛ Is Record-Smashing Heat a Big Story? Depends Where It Happens

    As news of record-breaking heat around the world makes its way onto our screens, it’s clear some heat waves are made to matter more than others. The general dearth of TV news reporting on climate disruption in the Global South is particularly stark when it comes to heat waves, a conversation that is centered around Britain and Europe, as opposed to India and other non-Western countries.

  • The Nation ☛ Heat Wave!

  • The Nation ☛ The Climate Crisis Is Changing Our Concept of Home

    In a single week in July, more than 100 million Americans, from Massachusetts to Arizona, were under excessive heat warnings or advisories as temperatures soared into the triple digits. Thousands were forced to evacuate their homes in California as the Oak Fire burned near Yosemite National Park. And at least 100 people had to be rescued when record-level rains flooded St. Louis, Mo. This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Because Climate Science ‘Does Not Grade on a Curve,’ Experts Says IRA Not Enough

    While welcoming U.S. House lawmakers’ passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, climate campaigners and some progressive lawmakers said the $740 billion bill does not do nearly enough to address the worsening climate emergency.

    “This bill is not perfect. It contains some troubling provisions, including some that risk expanding fossil fuel extraction and use.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Arctic Warming Nearly Four Times Faster Than Earth as a Whole, Study Finds

    Scientists have been underestimating how rapidly the Arctic is heating up compared to the Earth as a whole, according to a new study which found the region is growing hotter nearly four times faster than the global average.

    “We were frustrated by the fact that there’s this saying that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the globe. But when you look at the data, you can easily see that it is close to four.”

  • Energy

    • DeSmog ☛ LNG Exporter Downplays Emissions to Justify Expansion

      A major exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas is “seeking to greenwash” its operations in order to portray gas exports as a climate solution and clear the way for further expansion, according to a new report.

      Global demand for gas has soared in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, sparking a scramble by U.S. gas exporters to increase export volumes, with the backing of the Biden administration. But building out LNG infrastructure to address an energy crisis is at odds with governments simultaneously trying to slash emissions to address the climate emergency.

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Big Win’ for Public Lands and Climate as US Judge Reinstates Coal Lease Ban

      Climate and Indigenous activists on Friday applauded the reinstatement of an Obama-era moratorium prohibiting new coal leases on all public lands until after the completion of a thorough environmental review.

      “The coal leasing program on public lands is harmful to wildlife, waterways, our fragile climate, and taxpayers’ pocketbooks.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Holiday Farm Fire and Industrial Logging

      Clearcuts along the McKenzie River wihtin the perimeter of the Holiday Farm Fire.  Look at the lower right corner for the blue color of Cougar Reservior in both images. Note the green (unburned or lightly burned) in the northeast corner of the burn perimeter where ther is no significant logging evident.

      Most of the area within the fire’s perimeter had been extensively logged, providing an excellent actual life model of why “fuel reductions” and “active forest management” are ineffective when there is extreme fire weather. Between September 8 and 9th, the fire grew to over 105,000 acres, driven by high winds. Here is a link to a video taken on September 10 of the community of Blue River, which was destroyed by the blaze.

    • The Revelator ☛ Protect This Place: Italy’s World Heritage Beech Forests 

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Game-Changer and Reason for Hope’: House Passes Inflation Reduction Act

    Without the support of a single Republican, Democrats in the U.S. House on Friday gave final passage to a $740 billion piece of legislation that includes historic investments in renewable energy development, a minimum tax on large corporations, and a landmark requirement for Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of a subset of prescription drugs.

    Democratic proponents of the bill and outside groups have hailed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as the most significant climate action measure ever passed by U.S. lawmakers, even though the package contains substantial handouts to the fossil fuel industry alongside the slew of tax incentives and subsidies for green energy that could substantially curb greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ygrene Suspends Controversial PACE Loans in Missouri, California

    One of the nation’s biggest residential “clean energy” lenders has suspended making loans to homeowners in Missouri, citing economic conditions and a new state law that mandated more consumer protections and oversight.

    Ygrene Energy Fund, based in California, said it will also stop lending in California, but will continue lending to homeowners in Florida, where it can make loans for wind and hurricane protection, a more viable business. No other states have large residential Property Assessed Clean Energy programs, although dozens of states allow them for commercial borrowers.

  • PIA ☛ What Is National Financial Awareness Day?

    It’s probably not a huge coincidence that Financial Awareness Day, August 14, is also the anniversary of the Social Security Act (SSA). The SSA was signed by President Roosevelt in 1935 and eventually established unemployment, retirement, and health care benefits, along with support options for the disabled and more. Both Financial Awareness Day and the SSA draw attention to the importance of financial health, giving you a chance to create a plan that helps you stay out of debt and enjoy retirement one day — instead of worrying about bills.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian sanctions evasion scheme may spark electronics shortage in EAEU countries — Meduza

    Russia’s use of “parallel imports” to make up for lost supply chains could cause an electronics shortage in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), according to distributors and retailers who spoke to Kommersant.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Inflation Reduction Act – Is it Enough Soon Enough?

    Compared to what?

    Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in a deadly chokehold, and they’re not about to risk voting for anything that smacks of help for ordinary Americans. Plus, as for climate-type legislation, they detest mention of global warming. It gives ‘em the willies.

  • Counter Punch ☛ If We Tax Share Buybacks, Can We Also Tax Stock Returns?

    The big issue here is that corporate profits are not a well-defined concept. There are a thousand issues that arise in determining profit, which depend to a substantial extent on judgement calls by accountants. Depreciation of capital is the most obvious problem, but there are many others.

    While profits are something that we cannot see, returns to shareholders can be easily seen. This is simply the increase in market capitalization, plus whatever money is paid out in dividends. This information is readily available on dozens of financial websites.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Is the Middle Class Even Real?

    The middle class was an opaque shade designed to cover real class differences existing in the United States. Much of the Left had always said as much, but their argument was diminished in the wake of World War Two when Washington and Wall Street, and Big Labor paid off the white working man with decent salaries and a good chance of a life with more than the basics needed to exist. Indeed, this is when the middle class became the popular notion it still is in some quarters of US society. The working class had disappeared into the suburbs and were resurrected in the media and their own minds as the new middle class. The ruling elites looked on approvingly while simultaneously encouraging this belief and continuing their never-ending chase for maximum profit.

    Everything was good in the land. A polity existed that ensured social stability and focused on the personal much more than the political. Sociologists from Vance Packard to C. Wright Mills examined and discussed this middle class in books discussing their easy manipulation by advertisers and the goods they sold. Some of those goods were to make tasks easier—washing machines and dryers, power tools, power lawn mowers—and some were to enhance leisure—televisions, hi-fis, air-conditioning. All of them were designed to make lots of money for those who owned and ran the industries manufacturing these goods.

  • TruthOut ☛ Detained Immigrants in California Strike Over $1 a Day Pay, Working Conditions

  • TruthOut ☛ Tenants Call on Biden to Act as Rent Increases Reach a 35-Year High

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Added IRS Funding in the IRA Would Help Ensure High-Income Earners Pay Their Fair Taxes

  • The Nation ☛ California Needs to Think Outside the Box on Homelessness

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ Wisconsin Primary Results Are Full of Good News for Mandela Barnes

    Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes formally secured a key Democratic nomination in his bid for the US Senate Tuesday. The win for Barnes came after three top Democratic rivals, who had spent roughly $25 million on their campaigns, acknowledged in late July that Barnes was ahead, folded their campaigns, and endorsed the lieutenant governor.

  • Meduza ☛ 17.1 million stuffed ballots: The elected officials who paved the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine weren’t really elected, according to video records obtained by Meduza — Meduza

    Days before Russian troops poured into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion in late February, 400 deputies in the State Duma voted to ratify an agreement on “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” between the Russian Federation and the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The document would become one of Russia’s formal justifications for its “special military operation” (though the pact didn’t take effect until after the invasion began). The lawmakers who endorsed the agreement won their parliamentary seats in September 2021, which were the first elections in a decade that weren’t streamed online using webcams. Russia’s Central Elections Commission said it lacked the funds to offer video transmissions at all polling stations. Direct access was limited to monitors from the parties participating in the elections, candidates, and the local election commissions themselves. Almost a year later, however, Meduza has obtained an archive of video footage from polling stations during those elections. A group of independent video monitors (whose names we are withholding for safety reasons) has analyzed the records and concluded that the number of stuffed ballots cast in September 2021 could have surpassed 17 million.

  • Meduza ☛ Shut up and eat: Russia is notorious for its political prisoners. Their experiences should teach us to be outraged about even more. — Meduza

  • Counter Punch ☛ American Dystopia Gets Bleaker

    And quite eagerly. Republicans nationwide have vocalized support for negating elections they lose and replacing electors they don’t like. The supreme court, dedicated to the destruction of what little democracy remains in the very oligarchic U.S., plans to hear Moore v Harper, a case based on a crackpot theory, which would grant state legislatures lots more power over federal elections. Those are GOP-gerrymandered state legislatures, you know, the ones who have rammed through model legislation written by that reactionary corporate gargoyle, the American Legislative Exchange Council, laws that, for instance, scrap plastic bag bans, or that overturn long-settled labor norms, or that slap oil pipeline protestors with multi-year prison sentences, or that make it legal for the supposedly acceptable people to ram their SUVs into a crowd of leftwing protesters, or that allow any lunatic to carry a semi-automatic weapon of war in public. Any normal court would decline to hear this bizarre case. But this is no normal supreme court. It’s a collection of partisan hacks, way out of line with its predecessors.

    Since Moore v Harper could constrict state courts and state constitutional power to control gerrymandering, based on what Adam Serwer in the July 23 Atlantic called “a crank legal premise called the ‘independent-state-legislature theory,’” which way do you think the troglodytes on the supreme court will go? They’ll eviscerate state court power. That also likely entails allowing state legislatures to overturn federal election results.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The U. S. Supreme Court and Conservative State Legislatures vs. Medical Science on Abortion

    This article has five goals: (1) to bring some historical perspective to this controversy; (2) to summarize the action of the Supreme Court in this case; (3) to describe the subsequent legislation passed by conservative state legislatures; (4) to consider the adverse impacts on women’s health; and (5) to show how this kind of action of the Supreme Court, uninformed by medical science, intrudes upon the role of the medical profession as caregivers as they try to act in the best interests of their patients.

  • Techdirt ☛ Data Privacy Matters: Facebook Expands Encryption Just After Facebook Messages (Obtained Via Search Warrant) Used To Charge Teen For Abortion

    In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, there has been plenty of attention paid to the kinds of data that companies keep on us, and how they could be exposed, including to law enforcement. Many internet companies seemed somewhat taken by surprise regarding all of this, which is a bit ridiculous, given that (1) they had plenty of time to prepare for this sort of thing, and (2) it’s not like plenty of us haven’t been warning companies about the privacy problems of having too much data.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Dangerous, Degenerate Dems: Pied Piper 2022 and Other Forms of Complicity

    It’s bad enough that Democrats function as the Republi-fascists’ enabling partner in numerous ways (see this, this, this, and this): demobilizing the majority working-class non-Republican electorate though cringing subordination to corporate, financial, and military-industrial authority; legitimizing right-wing agendas and narratives by embracing them; relentlessly seeking bipartisan cooperation with a militantly partisan neofascist party (the post-republic/-bourgeois-democracy Republicans); refusing to attack archaic minority rule institutions and practices that inflate the Republifascists’ power (including the Electoral College, the preposterously malapportioned, unrepresentative, and powerful nature of the U.S. Senate, the Senate filibuster, the absurd nine-member Supreme Court, judicial review, and states’ rights); failing to forthrightly and properly punish the putschist Trump for trying to install himself as a dictator; refusing to properly name the “late fascist” menace for what it is; keeping people off the streets by channeling everything into the killing confines of the nation’s right-tilted electoral politics; playing the bourgeois identitarian card with an irrational “wokeness” that is just the other “left” side of the Republi-fascists’ revanchist, anti-science, identitarian, and truth-canceling coin (see this essay’s postscript for further reflections on the objectively reactionary woke syndrome).

  • Counter Punch ☛ What I Learned From Professor Obama

    In 2004, as I watched the variety of better known democrat candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in the Illinois primary and felt it was a sort of embarrassingly corrupt version of the Keystone cops, I asked a local democrat insider what the Hell were they thinking. He advised me to look into this guy named Obama. The key selling point for Obama seemed to be that he was Constitutional scholar who had entered politics after being a community organizer in Chicago. As I was still foolish enough at that time to think that it might be possible for a democrat to not be so Clintonianly insulting, I figured Obama the unknown was probably a good message to send to the party.

    As I watched the democrat’s convention in Boston that year, it quickly dawned on me that I had been played. With the awareness that the democrats kept all of the real progressive activists corralled outside of earshot, I listened to Obama’s loudly touted speech. The abundance of platitudes and the slick delivery in his performance immediately raised flags. I still thought that maybe, maybe, maybe he might surprise me and I was still gullible enough to think he and the imagined progressive democrats probably would be better than the openly sadistic republicans and their conservative democrat allies.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Pelosi’s Pidgin Propaganda

    This deformed pidgin tongue, spoken by all San Francisco’s rulers – Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Feinstein, Vice President Harris, Governor Newsom – begins with the command: “Make no mistake about it …” a phrase probably going back to the dim origins of the Republic, but former California Gov. Pat Brown never failed to use it to signal the arrival of his next bumbling platitude.

    Nearly immortal incumbents like Pelosi and Feinstein put us to sleep to hide the tidal wave of bribery that has been washing over Congress since former Rep. Tony Coelho, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Party Whip, ducked charges and left the House for Wall Street in 1989.  The effort to raise enough money to keep your party in power in the House soon erases all memory of the needs and desires of constituencies, replacing them with “honest graft.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘This Is Insane’: Search Warrant Indicates FBI Investigating Trump for Espionage Act Violation

    This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates…

    Former U.S. President Donald Trump is being investigated for potential violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, and unlawful removal of government records, according to the warrant authorizing the recent federal search of Mar-a-Lago, which was released Friday.

  • TruthOut ☛ On the Trump Front, This Week Has Been a Year. What Will Come of It?

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | MAGA ‘Patriots’ Are Answering the Call to the Right’s Hatred of Liberal Democracy

    “Today and everyday is 1776. Never give up our freedoms. Never let the left steal them away. Be a watchman on the wall and stay guard every single second of every single day because the left will stop at nothing until they destroy our faith, our families, and our freedoms.”—Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, April 23, 2022 on Twitter.

  • Common Dreams ☛ WTO Threats Against US Electric Vehicle Tax Credit Prompt Calls for ‘Climate Peace Clause’

    South Korea and the European Union’s critiques of electric vehicle tax credit provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act—which U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law as soon as Friday—have sparked urgent calls for a global “climate peace clause” whereby nations would agree not to use archaic trade mechanisms to undermine the emission-reduction policies of other countries.

    “It’s time to end this circular firing squad where countries threaten and, if successful, weaken or repeal one another’s climate measures through trade and investment agreements,” Melinda St. Louis, Global Trade Watch director at Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Responses Among The Left To FBI Raid Against Trump

  • TruthOut ☛ FBI Was Reportedly Searching Mar-a-Lago for Nuclear Weapons-Related Documents

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Explodes Over Report That FBI Was Searching His Home for Nuclear Secrets

  • Common Dreams ☛ In Raid of Trump Home, FBI Was Seeking Classified Nuclear Weapons Documents

    FBI agents were reportedly seeking to recover classified nuclear weapons documents and other items when they raided Donald Trump’s Florida home earlier this week, a move that set off an immediate firestorm of backlash from the former president’s far-right loyalists.

    According to the Washington Post, which cited unnamed people familiar with the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation, it’s unclear whether the nuclear documents were among the dozen boxes of material that FBI agents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | There Is No in Sight End to the Damage Trump’s “Big Lie” Is Doing to Our Democracy

    We don’t know if former President Donald Trump ever studied Joseph Goebbels, but he certainly does practice Goebbels’ methods.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • BoingBoing ☛ Fox airs fake photo of Trump search judge getting massage by Ghislaine Maxwell

      [...] The faux news channel used a meme of Reinhart, in which his face was superimposed over that of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein (now dead) getting a foot rub on a private plane from his partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell (now imprisoned). [...]

    • NPR ☛ This conservative group helped push a disputed election theory

      Many legal scholars warn support for the theory from the Supreme Court could bring chaos to upcoming elections

    • FAIR ☛ Angelo Carusone on Alex Jones Trial, Karl Grossman on Nuclear War

      This week on CounterSpin: A Texas court has told Alex Jones to pay some $49 million dollars in damages for his perverse, accusatory talk about the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre being a “big hoax”—the jury evidently not believing Jones’ tale that he was suffering a weird and weirdly profitable “psychosis” when he told his followers that no one died at Sandy Hook because none of the victims ever existed, nor were they evidently moved by his subsequent claim that he did it all “from a pure place.”

    • Techdirt ☛ Yet Another Study Finds Cable News Has A Much Bigger Effect On US Polarization Than Social Media

      The past two election cycles have seen an explosion of attention given to “echo chambers,” or communities where a narrow set of views makes people less likely to challenge their own opinions. Much of this concern has focused on the rise of social media, which has radically transformed the information ecosystem.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ Salman Rushdie Is Attacked Onstage in Western New York

    The attack happened at about 10:45 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie took the stage to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, a community in western New York that offers arts and literary programming during the summer.

  • NPR ☛ Author Salman Rushdie was attacked on a lecture stage in New York

    Rushdie was visiting the institution to discuss how the United States serves as asylum for writers in exile with Henry Reese, co-founder of City of Asylum, a residency program for writers in exile, according to the Chautauqua Institution’s event page.

    Rushdie has written 14 novels, including The Satanic Verses, one of his most popular books, which resulted in death threats [sic] against the author from Iran’s leader in 1989.

  • RFERL ☛ Author Salman Rushdie, Focus Of Iranian Fatwa, Stabbed By Man Who Stormed Stage At Event In New York

    Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, a book banned in Iran as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. A year after it was published in 1988, Iran’s leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.

  • France24 ☛ Author Salman Rushdie stabbed on stage at event in New York after decades of death threats

    Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck, police said, as he was about to give a lecture Friday in western New York.

  • CBC ☛ Author Salman Rushdie airlifted to hospital after attack onstage in New York state

    “Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched nor faltered.”

  • [Old] CBC ☛ Reward for Salman Rushdie’s murder boosted by Iran cleric

    The total reward for the author’s death offered by the foundation stands at $3.3 million, with Sanei saying “these days are the most appropriate time to carry it (Rushdie’s murder) out.”

    Khomeini’s original fatwa on Rushdie was condemned in the West as incitement to murder and an assault on freedom of speech.

    The author came out of hiding in 1999 after Iran’s foreign ministry assured Britain that Iran would do nothing to implement the fatwa. In 2005, current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei renewed the fatwa, saying Rushdie was considered an apostate whose murder was authorized under Islam.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Georgia Moms Behind Book-Banning Push Say They’re Being Censored

    A group of Georgia mothers has been trying to get certain library books banned by reading sexually graphic passages aloud at school board meetings. Now, after the board barred one of the mothers from attending, the group is claiming in a federal lawsuit that their First Amendment rights have been violated.

    In essence, members of the group, which has dubbed itself the Mama Bears, are arguing that they’re being censored — in their own pursuit of censorship.

  • EFF ☛ Online Platforms Should Stop Partnering with Government Agencies to Remove Content

    When sites cooperate with government agencies, it leaves the platform inherently biased in favor of the government’s favored positions. It gives government entities outsized influence to manipulate content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for government—and particularly law enforcement—to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.

    For example, Vietnam has boasted of its increasing effectiveness in getting Facebook posts removed but has been accused of targeting dissidents in doing so. Similarly, the Israeli Cyber Unit has boasted of high compliance rates of up to 90 percent with its takedown requests across all social media platforms. But these requests unfairly target Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society, and one such incident prompted the Facebook Oversight Board to recommend that Facebook “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.”

    Issues with government involvement in content moderation were addressed in the newly revised Santa Clara Principles 2.0 where EFF and other organizations called on social media companies to “recognize the particular risks to users’ rights that result from state involvement in content moderation processes.” The Santa Clara Principles also affirm that “state actors must not exploit or manipulate companies’ content moderation systems to censor dissenters, political opponents, social movements, or any person.” 

  • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ IAMAI leads effort to establish a self-regulatory body; We release the draft document in public interest.

    Recent reports suggest that efforts to establish a Self-Regulatory Grievance Redressal Board (“the Board”), led by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (“IAMAI”), is underway. Despite civil society and experts raising several concerns around such a self-regulatory mechanism, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter have voiced support in favour of a Self-Regulatory Body (“SRB”), whereas Google expressed concerns. IFF has obtained a draft version of a “Code For Establishing A Self Regulatory Grievance Redressal Board” (“the draft Code”). We are making this draft Code public in the wider interest of the citizens of India.

    [...]

    We strongly oppose the creation of such an industry wide SRB. In today’s environment, self-regulation will lead to SMIs establishing extra caution and discretion in the case of politically controversial content, ultimately resulting in self-censorship and a vast chilling effect. Any efforts to self-regulate cannot be based on IT Rules, 2021 which restrict fundamental rights and are under challenge before the Supreme Court of India. Self-censorship has already been noticed with OTT platforms, where multiple shows on these on-demand video streaming platforms had been censored or cancelled in view of the IT Rules, 2021 before Constitutional Courts intervened. Any such model of regulation will likely have a substantial impact on citizens’ digital rights, result in economic harm, and also negatively impact freedom of speech and expression, and access to information.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Filipino Activist Walden Bello Speaks Out After Arrest Just Weeks After Marcos Jr. Inauguration

    We speak to Walden Bello, the longtime Filipino activist and former vice-presidential candidate. He was arrested Monday on “cyber libel” charges, which he says was just a tactic by the new administration to suppress his vocal criticism of them. The arrest took place just weeks after the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator. Bello says people are “worried that this is a foretaste of things to come. … They don’t respond to criticisms. Instead, they use the law and they use instruments of intimidation to silence you.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Inside the Horror of Islamic Sex Slavery – and the Real War on Women

    I recently interviewed Ms. Dahlmans about these issues. She currently writes (in Dutch only) for the conservative political news site PAL NWS, and is studying Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology, where she will be starting her thesis.

  • Medforth ☛ France: Iraqi attacks people in bar with a knife and accuses them of being bad Muslims

    While his pursuers continued to surround him at a safe distance, the man finally knelt down with his hands above his head in front of the police officers, who threatened him with their service weapons. Le Dauphiné

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Immoral, Irrational Case Against DACA

    The case has moved to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments were heard last month, and where a ruling by that court is expected this fall. It may well go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    When President Barack Obama created the program by executive action ten years ago, he was responding to political and moral pressure stemming from legislative failures to enact meaningful immigration reform over several decades. The last major reform, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, had allowed 2.9 million immigrants to advance on a path toward citizenship.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ California Legislature Kills Ridiculous ‘Social Media Addiction’ Bill, But Allows Other Bad Bills To Move Forward

    On Thursday, the California Senate’s appropriations committee was set to review a collection of anti-internet bills to see which ones should move forward. It decided to drop one that was particularly terrible: AB 2408, which would allow basically any California prosecutor (local or state-level) to sue companies for “addicting” kids (with addiction being extremely loosely defined). This was a very silly bill, that would have resulted in all sorts of frivolous litigation over basically any feature of social media, based on the extremely faulty belief that social media is designed to be “addictive.” The decision not to move forward with the bill is about the only good news that happened. And even as some are foolishly whining about this decision, should that bill have moved forward, it would have been a fundamental disaster for the internet.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Watchdogs Say FTC Must Foster Internet ‘Free from Unwanted Surveillance’

    As the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday launched a long-awaited rulemaking process, progressive watchdog groups urged the agency to swiftly implement digital privacy measures that would shield internet users in the United States from the predatory data practices on which technology firms and other corporate actors rely for profit-maximization.

    “Tech giants are right to be worried that accountability finally may be coming.”

• Monopolies

  • Techdirt ☛ Federal Election Commission Makes The Right Call Allowing A Dumb Program By Google To Whitelist Political Spam Into Your Inbox

    Over the last few months, Republican politicians have been working on a nonsense plan to force their spam into your inboxes. This kicked off following some Republican operatives misunderstanding (whether through their own cluelessness, or on purpose) a study about political spam and how different email providers deal with it. Since then, Republicans have been screaming about how Google is trying to silence their campaign emails — even though their emails tend to be a lot more spammy. And then you have GOP digital marketing people being so clueless that they misconfigure their email settings, and blame Google for it, rather than realizing it was their own fault (the party of personal responsibility is no longer, it seems).

  • Patents

    • TruthOut ☛ Pharma Claims Drug Price Reform Hurts Innovation. Experts Say That’s “Bullshit.”

    • Counter Punch ☛ Cracker Barrel’s Offering a New Sausage Option. The Response is Bananas.

      “Experience the out of this world flavor of Impossible [TM] Sausage,” the “Old Country Store” announced in an August 1 Facebook post, accompanied by a photo of two of the plant-based patties.

      Responses across thousands of comments vary from gratitude to “meh, I’ll stick with the real thing” to … well, here’s a somewhat representative sample from commenter “Barry Deaton”:

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Impossible™ Politics: Cracker Barrel and the Future of the Left

      As many people have heard by now, an online controversy erupted when the aptly-named Cracker Barrel restaurant chain added a “meatless sausage” option to its breakfast menu, a document whose otherwise unhealthy options have arguably mass-produced more arterial cholesterol than any other industrial gourmandizing operation on Earth. 

  • Copyrights

    • Techdirt ☛ Twitch Flags Let’s Play Of ‘Project Zomboid’ Over Copyright Of Police Siren

      We have long lamented how the current method for many streaming platforms to enforce copyright laws, be they via automated systems like ContentID at YouTube or DMCA reporting platforms, is wide open for fraud, abuse, and mistakes. There are a huge swath of posts just on ContentID you can go check out if you’re not aware of how completely borked this all is, but you can also look at specific examples such as a video getting flagged for infringement due to birds singing in the background. It’s a full on mess and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Microsoft Sues Activation Key & Token Sellers For Enabling Customers’ Piracy

      Software sold by market leaders tend to be primary purchases for regular consumers. Brand comfort is important but so too is affordability, especially when pirate copies are available for free. Some find a middle ground with purchases of discounted activation keys but, as a new Microsoft lawsuit shows, that can amount to copyright infringement for buyers and sellers alike.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ ‘Pirating’ WOW! Subscribers Object to Having Their Identities Exposed to Filmmakers

      As part of an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit, Internet provider WOW! must share the personal details of 375 subscribers with a group of filmmakers. Dozens of targeted subscribers, who are seen as the most prolific pirates, have filed objections at the Colorado federal court. While privacy concerns are understandable, the subscribers themselves don’t appear to be at risk.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Technical

  • AuraGem Ask > Raspberry Pi: Are RPIs still in short supply?

    They went from available and inexpensive to unavailable and expensive. Does anyone know where to get an RPI 3 or 4 for a good price in the US?

  • Science

    • Schooling system

      The schooling system has goals that are not beneficial for the growth and development of anyone participating in it. I am speaking from personal experience here, as I do not know how other schooling systems are, aside from what I have heard about them.

      Ignoring the power tripping teachers and other of the many questionable practices and doings of schools, the most important thing is the “how.” How is the information transmitted in order to facilitate deeper understanding and further transmission? The most common method is giving a book and repeating, or consuming, the information, forcefully drilling it into your brain, until you can play it back word by word. The additional trauma aside, this method is woefully inefficient and you forget most of the information in a few days, due to it being in your short memory.

    • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2022: Solar Power Through Pyrolysis

      We’re all familiar with solar cells, be they photovoltaic, or for heating water. But they are only the more common ways of converting the sun’s energey into usable power, and to the extended list there is now an addition courtesy of [Dennis]. He’s using the sun to drive the pyrolysis of biomass waste, releasing hydrogen fuel.

    • Counter Punch ☛ Mendel’s Genetic Revolution and the Legacy of Scientific Racism

      While Mendel’s work is central to modern genetics, and his use of experimental methods and observation is a model for science, it also set off the dark side with which genetics has been inextricably linked: eugenics and racism. But eugenics was much more than race “science.” It was also used to argue the superiority of the elite and dominant races, and in countries like India, it was used as a “scientific” justification for the caste system as well.

      People who believe that eugenics was a temporary aberration in science and that it died with Nazi Germany would be shocked to find out that even the major institutions and journals that included the word eugenics as part of their names have continued to operate by just changing their titles. The Annals of Eugenics became the Annals of Human Genetics; the Eugenics Review changed its name to the Journal of Biosocial Science; Eugenics Quarterly changed to Biodemography and Social Biology; and the Eugenics Society was renamed the Galton Institute. Several departments in major universities, which were earlier called the department of eugenics, either became the department of human genetics or the department of social biology.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Capsuleers: Where is Solderpunk?

      It seems Solderpunk has been inactive for a long time, other than a gemlog post a few months back. How will this affect the future of gemini, if at all?

    • Capsuleers: Re Where is Solderpunk?

      I don’t think it should affect Gemini at all. We should give Solderpunk time, and also not expect that everything must be done so quickly. The last spec update was in January, and some months later Solderpunk posted on the official gemini news. People have lives outside of Gemini. The post from a few months ago suggested he intends on finishing things up eventually.

      [...]

      If anything, the community can *have conversations* about the clarifications already being talked about on the Gitlab and each individual comes to a conclusion that, for example, this is how we can do IRIs correctly or in a way that is intended by the spec and sticks with the original spirit of Gemini as outlined by Solderpunk. I would be fine with that, and this is similar to what happened within Gopher. But, I suggest we don’t do this so early on either.

  • Programming

    • “If X You Shouldn’t Release Software”

      While I get the gist of these and understand the frustrations behind them I fundamentally disagree.

      What any and all of these statements boil down to is that you shouldn’t release any software unless it has substantial financial investment and a long development time behind it. Any single-developer projects would be banned from being made available at all, as would any project relying on volunteer effort that isn’t commercially profitable enough.

      It’s not that us small time developers don’t care about these issues; it’s that we want to build tools that work for us, using the limited time we often have to do it. And it’s okay to think “hey, this was pretty useful. Maybe I should publish it just in case someone else has a similar need?” That must be the minimum threshold for releasing something.

      Maybe something we release becomes more popular over time and we receive pull requests, patches, or requests for features. Maybe we have the time and inclination to continue development on the tool.

    • Introducing RocketCaster 2.0: Community Update

      One thing I wanted to do while I was first making RocketCaster, a gemini service I started in February for searching for and subscribing to podcasts, was have some sort of way to surface popular or trending podcasts. PodcastIndex does have an API endpoint for that, but I wasn’t happy with its results and scrapped the idea.

      It wasn’t until recently that I started thinking about it again but realized that all the cool podcasts that I listen to regularly I learned about through word of mouth. So if I wanted to build something to serve useful podcast recommendations, word of mouth between podcast fans should be the focus.

    • Raylgun POC

      I’ve spent a couple of days figuring out and implementing a simple vector-graphics game support library. And I got an Asteroids-like ship flying around and firing, using the keyboard…. It looks f***ing cool!