● 05.27.21

● Links 27/5/2021: WordPress at 18 and GNU/Linux in Schools

Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Launched today, the Poseidon is Entroware’s most powerful Intel-based Linux PC to date. You can spec it out with an eight-core Intel Core i9-11900 processor, up-to 128GB RAM, and even a terrifically epic 16 TB of combined HDD and SSD storage.

• The base config is priced from £760 and is rather modest than that, offering a six-core Intel Core i5-11400, 8GB DDR4 3200 Mhz RAM, and a single 250 GB PCIe NVMe SSD. You can switch out to an Intel Core i7-11700 if you want a little more oomph, and doubling the RAM to 16 GB (either when you buy or after, using RAM you buy yourself) seems like a bit of a no-brainer.

• More than 20 years ago, when Robert Maynord started teaching at Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Monona, Wisconsin, the school had only eight functioning computers, all running Windows 95. Through his expertise in and enthusiasm for Linux and open source software, Robert has transformed the school community, its faculty, and its students, who are in kindergarten to eighth grade.

• “In those early years, it quickly became apparent that paying license fees to Microsoft for each computer, in addition to purchasing all the software to install, was absurd when the computer itself was only worth $20,” says Robert. So he began installing Linux on the school’s computers.

• After a new shiny pre-built desktop PC built for Linux support? UK-based Entroware are back again after the recent Proteus laptop reveal with their new Poseidon desktop. This is their new top-end model built for “Every Linux Professional”.

• “From the sound-dampened chassis to the high quality power supply and everything in between, Poseidon is built from top to bottom with every component being carefully selected for for reliability and performance.” – Entroware

• Not exactly built for gamers mind you, however, don’t let that stop you. The point here is it’s another Linux vendor putting out a new model that might work out a little easier for you than slotting it all together from parts, along with having someone to fallback on if it doesn’t work right. The Poseidon does not come with a dedicated GPU either, it’s a bring-you-own graphics card box although you do get Intel UHD Graphics as standard with the CPU options.

Audiocasts/Shows

• fuschia, desktops and servers, 3d printing, food

Kernel Space

• Control groups (cgroups) are meant to limit access to a shared resource among processes in the system. One such resource is the values used to specify an encrypted-memory region for a virtual machine, such as the address-space identifiers (ASIDs) used by the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) feature. Vipin Sharma set out to add a control group for these ASIDs back in September; based on the feedback, though, he expanded the idea into a controller to track and limit any countable resource. The patch set became the controller for the misc control group and has been merged for Linux 5.13.

• The underlying idea is to allow administrators (or cloud orchestration systems) to enforce limits on the number of these IDs that can be consumed by the processes in a control group. In a cloud setting, those processes could correspond to virtual machines being run under KVM. The initial posting for ASIDs was met with a suggestion from Sean Christopherson to expand the reach of the controller to govern more types of encryption IDs beyond just those used by AMD SEV. Intel has an analogous Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) feature that uses key IDs, which are also a resource that may need limiting. The s390 architecture has its secure execution IDs (SEIDs), as well; those are far less scarce than the others, but could still benefit from a controller to limit the consumption of them.

• There have been many disagreements over the years in the kernel community concerning the exporting of internal kernel symbols to loadable modules. Exporting a symbol often exposes implementation decisions to outside code, makes it possible to use (or abuse) kernel functionality in unintended ways, and makes future changes harder. That said, there is no authority overseeing the exporting of symbols and no process for approving exports; discussions only tend to arise when somebody notices a change that they don’t like. But it is not particularly hard to detect changes in symbol exports from one kernel version to the next, and doing so can give some insights into the kinds of changes that are happening under the hood.

• The kernel has many thousands of functions and data structures; most of those are private to a given source file, while others are made available to the kernel as a whole. Loadable modules are special, though; they only have access to symbols that have been explicitly exported to them with EXPORT_SYMBOL() (or one of a few variants); many symbols that are available to code built into the kernel image are unavailable to loadable modules. The intent of this limitation is to keep the interface to modules relatively narrow and manageable.

• It is far from clear that this objective has been achieved, though. The 5.12 kernel exported 31,695 symbols to modules, which does not create an impression of a narrow interface. That number grew to 31,822 in 5.13-rc1. That is an increase of 127 symbols, but the actual story is a bit more complicated than that; 244 exported symbols were removed over this time, while 371 were added. The curious can see the full sets of added and removed symbols on this page.

• Group membership is normally used to grant access to some resource; examples might include using groups to control access to a shared directory, a printer, or the ability to use tools like sudo. It is possible, though, to use group membership to deny access to a resource instead, and some administrators make use of that feature. But groups only work as a negative credential if the user cannot shed them at will. Occasionally, some way to escape a group has turned up, resulting in vulnerabilities on systems where they are used to block access; despite fixes in the past, it turns out that there is still a potential problem with groups and user namespaces; this patch set from Giuseppe Scrivano seeks to mitigate it through the creation of “shadow” groups.

• There are two ways to prevent access to a file based on group membership. One of those is to simply set the group owner of the file to the group that is to be denied, then set the permissions to disallow group access. Members of the chosen group will be denied access to the file, even if the world permissions would otherwise allow that access. The alternative is to use access control lists to explicitly deny access to the intended group or groups. Once again, any process in any of the designated groups will not be allowed access.

• By way of a refresher, it’s worth remembering that Linux has two separate concepts of group membership. The “primary group” or “effective group ID” is the group that will be attached to new files in the absence of other constraints. This was once the only group associated with a process in Unix systems, and is set with setgid(). The “supplementary” groups are a newer addition that allow a process to belong to multiple groups simultaneously; the list of supplementary groups can be changed with setgroups(). Negative access-control decisions are usually (but not necessarily) based on supplementary group membership.

• The kernel’s BPF virtual machine allows programs loaded from user space to be safely run in the kernel’s context. That functionality would be of limited use, however, without the ability for those programs to interact with the rest of the kernel. The interface between BPF and the kernel has been kept narrow for a number of good reasons, including safety and keeping the kernel in control of the system. The 5.13 kernel, though, contains a feature that could, over time, widen that interface considerably: the ability to directly call kernel functions from BPF programs.

• The immediate driver for this functionality is the implementation of TCP congestion-control algorithms in BPF, a capability that was added to the 5.6 kernel release by Martin KaFai Lau. Actual congestion-control implementations in BPF turned out to reimplement a number of functions that already exist in the kernel, which seems less than fully optimal; it would be better to just use the existing functions in the kernel if possible. The new function-calling mechanism — also implemented by Lau — makes that possible.

Applications

• An electronic book (commonly abbreviated e-book) is a text and image-based publication which can be read on a computer or other digital devices such as an e-book reader.

• The rise of multimedia digital downloads in recent years has been truly extraordinary. The impact has been so great in respect of digital music downloads. Digital music accounted for half of the all the revenue generated by the music industry in 2016 and amounted to a total of 7.8 billion U.S. dollars that year. Over the years, many music labels stopped releasing singles on a physical format. We do not foresee that major book publishing companies will abandon paperbacks. However, the expansion of digital downloads equally applies to books. The biggest booksellers have reported that they sell more digital books than paperbacks.

Instructionals/Technical

• Well, there are two ways I could have done it. Since Site.js simply serves any content in the root of your site as static content, I could have just copied the content there. But Site.js also has a feature specifically for this use case called archival cascades.

• When it comes to using HiDPI devices such as monitors or high-resolution laptops, displaying programs that uses default screen resolutions can lead to undesirable results. To counter this problem, a lot of operating systems use a method known as scaling, which multiplies the number of pixels displayed by a discrete numerical value. For instance, scaling by 2 would double the pixels on the screen resulting in a clearer and sharper image.

• Fractional Scaling does the same thing. However, instead of using discrete numerical values, it uses fractional values to scale the program according to needs. This gives the user better control and more options to scale according to their requirements since they are not limited to integer values anymore.

• Like other operating systems, Ubuntu also offers its users the luxury of enabling fractional scaling. In this guide, we will cover how you can do the same on Ubuntu 20.04 and some previous versions as well.

• Often, we find ourselves stuck when we have to find all files with the same or different extensions. This has most likely happened to various Linux users while using the terminal. It is one thing to search for a single file type or file, but what will you do when you want to find out all files simultaneously? This article comes to the rescue for our readers who have such a dilemma.

• We can use various Linux utilities for finding or locating files on a file system, but searching all files or filenames with the same or different extensions can be difficult and require specific patterns or expressions. In the upcoming section of the article, we will understand the working, syntax, and execution of these utilities.

• LaTex is one of the high-quality markup languages and a documentation preparation scheme. In several areas, including computer science, mathematics, physics, it is the “de facto” standard for the publication and communication of scientific research papers. All of us utilize it for making school projects, research assignments, and important articles. On the other side, as a researcher publishing your findings is also important for you. At this point, you should question yourself that is it possible to convert the .tex LaTex file to PDF format in a Linux terminal? YES! PdfLatex is a Latex-to-PDF converter tool. PdfLatex installation on Windows seems to be a time-consuming process; however, it can be easily installed on your Linux system with the help of a few commands.

• Now, Let’s check out the complete installation procedure of PdfLatex and using it for the required conversion.

• The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is considered an essential component in any system. It is also referred the “Computer’s Brain” because it handles all kinds of data processing operations. CPU is embedded in any system based on various specifications; frequency is one of them. The CPU frequency is also known as Clock speed or Clock rate. The clock speed of your CPU figures out how quickly it can process instructions per second. It is a unit of measurement for the number of your CPU execution, expressed in MHz or GHz.

• But have you ever thought of knowing what kind of CPU your computer has and how fast it runs? There exist many reasons why you would want to know what CPU you have in your system. Perhaps you are troubleshooting any hardware issue or loading a kernel module. Whatever the cause is, determining the CPU speed and type from the command line is quite easy in Linux. Several commands can be utilized for obtaining information about your processor, including CPU frequency. In this article, we have compiled some of those commands to get to know your CPU better.

• When a Linux user types any command into the bash prompt, the terminal usually prints the output of the invoked command so you can read it straight away. However, bash also permits you to “redirect” or save any command’s output in the system.

• This article will discuss three different procedures of redirecting the output of the top command to any file.

• In this tutorial post, we will show you the basic process of installing aaPanel on Ubuntu based operating system. If you don’t know about aaPanel then this is a popular web hosting management software similar to cPanel. aaPanel is a is free, easy to use and lightweight web hosting control panel software.

• If you are looking to the alternatives to the cPanel then aaPanel is the best and free alternatives to cPanel. aaPanel is the international version of the popular BAOTA panel which is quite famous in Chinese market. aaPanel provides the one-click function such as one-click install LNMP/LAMP, one-click deployment of SSL, remote backup and other web softwares.

• You can easily create and manage websites, FTP, and databases, with visual file manager, visual software manager, visual CPU, memory, flow monitoring chart, scheduled tasks and other various hosting related tasks.

• Vim stands for “Vi improved.” It is a commendable text editor for Unix-like operating systems. vim can be utilized for editing different types of text documents, but it is complemented for editing computer programs. Vim comprises two modes:

• Vivaldi is one of the most secure and efficient web browsers out there. It offers protection from malicious sites, keeps your identity private, and comes equipped with an excellent adblocker. Other than Linux systems, Vivaldi is also available for Windows & macOS.

• Stadia is an online game streaming service developed by Google. Launched in November 2019, it is based on the concepts of cloud computing. Stadia allows users to play various console-based games remotely on Chromecast Ultra devices, the Chrome OS tablet, the Stadia app on compatible Android devices, and the Chrome Browser. This means that one can enjoy thrilling top-tier games such as FIFA, Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, Far Cry, and many more on our native Linux distro – Ubuntu.

• have a quick question for you, Vivek: I’m trying to find out my NVDIA display card memory size on Fedora Linux. How do I find out my VIDEO Card (VGA) Memory size on Linux?

• Shame on #cnxsoftware for getting back to #microsoft spam. “Sponsored Post” is NOT even a post, it’s just pure spam, promotion of #ProprietarySoftware and #malware … please don’t do things like these… they’ll doom the whole site.

• The Linux less command is a command-line tool that displays a file line by line or one page at a time. It is particularly helpful when viewing large files that would otherwise be cumbersome to view using a conventional text editor such as vim or nano. Less command is a bit like more command and allows you to carefully scroll through the file line by line or section by section.

• In this brief guide, we feature the Linux less command alongside some command examples.

• Linux provides several tools that help you find or locate files. One of them is the find command. While the find command does a commendable job in locating files, it’s quite sluggish and takes up a lot of your time. A better alternative to the find command is the locate command.

• Locate command is blazing fast and helps you find your files or search patterns without delays. It refers to a database called the updatedb database for searching the files instead of probing the entire filesystem, which is pretty much what the find command does and up a lot of time. This explains why the locate command is super-fast.

• Let’s dive in and explore the Linux locate command and check out its example usages.

• The stat command displays the detailed summary of the given file or file system. We will show you in this article the basic use of the stat command with different examples.

• The “df” command in Linux stands for “disk free.” It is used for checking the space available across the different file systems of your Linux system. We will learn the usage of this command in Linux in today’s article.

• Nmap (Network Mapper) is one of the best tools to deal with networking. Initially, it was just a ports scanner, and today it is considered one of the main sysadmin Swiss knives. Useful to scan ports, audit the network security and stability, find vulnerabilities, and even exploit them, Nmap is a tool no sysadmin can ignore.

• Nmap was already deeply explained at LinuxHint with practical examples in tutorials quoted in this article. This article describes several Nmap techniques to scan all ports on a single or multiple targets, including vulnerability and UDP scans.

• This first example shows how to scan all ports with Nmap, defining ports between 0 and 65535.

• Linux has 3 types of access to files and directories: reading, writing, and execution permissions. Reading permission grants users access to read files while writing permissions allow users to edit or remove files, execution permissions allow them to run files.

• These permissions can be applied with differences for the file owner, users belonging to the file’s group, and all users (not the owner nor group users).

• The bit setuid, setgid and sticky allow you to implement additional restrictions or privileges without changing the permissions table.

• Regular Linux permissions were deeply explained at Linux Permissions Explained, a recommended reading before continuing with this tutorial. The current tutorial focuses on flags setuid, setgid, and sticky to “inherit” the file owner or group permissions to users with restricted access and prevent non-privileged users from removing files they don’t own.

• The “ps” command in Linux is an abbreviation of “process status”. It is used to get information about the processes running within your system. The output of this command can vary depending upon the parameters used with it. However, in this article, we intend to teach you the basics of using the “ps” command in Linux with the help of a few examples.

• This article demonstrates two common scenarios for updating Red Hat OpenShift 4: to a newer z-stream release and to a newer minor release. I include plenty of screenshots of actual updates from 4.5.4 to 4.5.17 and then to 4.6.4, so you know what to expect when you make these updates yourself.

• NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine) enables additional functions in the Nmap scan process by allowing scripts for additional tasks such as brute force, vulnerability detection, or exploitation. The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) contains a set of scripts classified by category, and users can write their own scripts with custom features.

• This tutorial explains NSE basics, including practical examples showing how to use Nmap Scripting Engine to hack WordPress sites and SSH credentials or execute multiple additional security checks.

Games

• Guess what? We’re back again! The dynamic duo returns for another casual and frank chat about Linux and Linux Gaming topics across many different areas in the industry. Myself and contributor Samsai had some good stuff to talk about this week!

• After a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2018, the Backbone: Prologue release in 2019, we’re about to see Backbone officially launch on June 8.

• Backbone is a post-noir roleplaying detective adventure, in which you step into the shoes of raccoon private investigator, Howard Lotor, and explore dystopian Vancouver, BC, beautifully rendered in high resolution pixel art.

• Promising a social deduction game like nothing you’ve ever played before, Space Betrayers has managed to grab my attention because it genuinely sounds quite good.

• The setup sounds familiar in a way to other such deduction games, with plenty of betraying and backstabbing. Here you have just retrieved an ancient “Star Relic” from the hands of “the Swarm” and now you have to survive until you escape them all. Sounds like it could be fun.

• [...]

• Unlike certain other games of the genre (hi Among Us), you will see full Linux support for Space Betrayers which they proudly state very clearly on their Patreon page and it’s listed in the Steam system requirements too.

• After a long time waiting after being hyped when covering it here back in 2019 after chatting to the developer, The Garden Path from developer carrotcake gets a proper announcement and trailer.

• The Garden Path is a “slice-of-life sim” about gardening and the “small pleasures that follow”, so it follows along other similar casual experiences like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing and so on. You get to go fishing, grow some plants, trade, hang out with NPCs and go on little exploration adventures.

• Looking as gorgeous as ever, developer Louis Durrant has done a fantastic job at bringing the world to life in what looks almost like an animated painting.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The cross-platform screenshot and annotation application ksnip 1.9.0 release bring 30+ new features and a handful of bug fixes. We summarize the release for you.

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• I was once asked why computers are called “computers” when they do so much more than compute numbers. A modern PC browses the internet, plays audio and video, generates beautiful graphics for video games and movies, simulates and predicts complex weather patterns and epidemiological risks, brings architectural and engineering blueprints to life, and much more.

• The reason computers can do all of this because all these problems can be expressed as numerical equations, and the computer’s CPU—its central processing unit—is actually little more than a simple calculator.

• For many organizations, COVID-19 has made efficient virtual collaboration paramount to growth, success, or simple survival. Over the last year, we have seen companies including Facebook, Okta, Slack, Square, and Twitter commit to remote work for the foreseeable future – and more will follow as the benefits become more apparent.

• Remote work can increase overall job satisfaction and productivity, help attract and retain talent, and even lead to improved mental health. With more workers and employers realizing their work can be done from anywhere – sometimes even more efficiently – remote work looks poised to stay beyond the end of the pandemic.

• At Automox, a cybersecurity company, we have always had a remote strategy and mindset – even before the pandemic – and many employees were accustomed to occasional work-from-home days. Like many companies, however, we also missed things that were taken for granted when we were in the office three to four days a week.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Recently a United States man who uses the services of popular internet service provider Comcast got the shock of his life. He received an email from Comcast telling him they knew the man had been using his internet connection to illegally download copyrighted content. Specifically, the man was accused of illegally downloading a copy of the Ubuntu Operating system in ISO format.

• [...]

• This is a cheap and easy way to protect your copyrighted work. It will not be able to stop all cases of infringement but it should be enough to make it difficult for those who are profiting from your work to do so openly and with such ease. Often though, the artists and creators usually lack the skills and knowledge to use such tools and so it is common practice on the internet to pawn off this task to third party specialists.

• This is where problems crop up because often these third parties struggle to differentiate between legitimate and illegal use of copyrighted works. Not so long ago Techzim itself discovered that it had been accused by Udemy of pirating its works. The bots employed by representatives of Udemy happened upon our articles on Udemy and instantly flagged the content as infringement. Never mind the fact that this was actually material promoting the official Udemy site itself.

Devices/Embedded

• QNAP QMiroPlus-210W is an unusual networked storage device that’s acting both as a 2.5GbE & WiFI 6 router and NAS combining Qualcomm IPQ4019 Arm SoC for the router functions, and an Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core Gemini Lake processor for the NAS functions.

• Usually, you’d get the choice of either an Arm or Intel processor, but here QNAP decided to use both to keep the same performance as having separate Arm-based router and Intel-based NAS, but in a much more compact form factor.

Open Hardware/Modding

• We’ve repeatedly noted how the “right to repair” movement has been gaining a full head of steam as consumers, independent repair shops, schools, farmers, and countless others grow tired of corporations’ attempts to monopolize repair. Whether it’s Sony and Microsoft creating repair monopolies for their game consoles, Apple bullying independent repair shops, or John Deere making it a costly hassle just to fix a tractor, the more companies restrict access to cheap repair, parts, tools, and documentation, the more this movement seems to grow. Especially in the COVID era where the problem has also hindered health care.

• They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making – but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.

• Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

• The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Google has released Chrome 91, and although there’s little new on the surface, there are key changes for developers including WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, a Gravity Sensor API, and read-only access to files on the clipboard.

• SIMD (Single instruction, multiple data) is hardware acceleration which enables a single instruction to operate on multiple pieces of data, for faster computation of vector operations. WebAssembly SIMD, based on a new 128-bit value type for packed data, is now enabled by default in both Chrome desktop and Android.

Mozilla

• We are excited to announce that three new members are joining the Tor Project’s Board of Directors: Alissa Cooper, Desigan (Dees) Chinniah, and Kendra Albert! Each new member comes to Tor with a different set of expertise that will help the organization and our community. At the end of this post, you can read each of their bios.

• Please join us in welcoming Alissa, Dees, and Kendra to the Board!

CMS

• Today marks the 18th anniversary of WordPress’ launch, a day that I fondly refer to as WordPress’ birthday, which means WordPress is 6,575 days old. To celebrate another turn around the sun, the community has had parties, we have shared data, and we have told our story.

• Since our last birthday we developed our 40th release and now also support over 40% of the web. So it seems fitting that this year’s celebration should be a list of 40 milestones that have helped us get there.

FSF

GNU Projects

• Glimpse Image Editor can no longer be maintained and has been archived due to lack of contributors. The funding channels have been closed as well.

• [...]

• In case you did not know, the creator of the project (Bobby Moss) already left it a while back because of a conflict with his day job. He did have plans to come back but he cannot revive the project alone.

• [...]

• It could make a comeback, but for the time being, the Glimpse team encourages the existing users to continue supporting GIMP which can indirectly help if Glimpse Image Editor gets resurrected.

• If you are an existing Glimpse user, you should consider using GIMP and direct all your financial contributions to them until Glimpse returns.

• I should also keep an eye on another potential fork, if someone else decides to pick up where Glimpse left. Who knows?

Programming/Development

• While working on a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) solution for a customer, one of my first tasks was to automate the bootstrapping of a CI/CD Jenkins server in OpenShift. Following DevOps best practices, I quickly created a configuration file that drove a script to complete the job. That quickly became two configuration files when I realized I needed a separate Jenkins server for production. After that came the request that the customer needed more than one pair of engineering and production CI/CD servers for different groups, and each server had similar but slightly different configurations.

• When the inevitable changes had to be made to the values common to two or more of the servers, it was very difficult and error-prone to propagate the changes across two or four files. As CI/CD environments were added for more complex testing and deployments, the number of shared and specific values for each group and environment grew.

• As the changes became more frequent and the data more complex, making changes within the configuration files became more and more unmanageable. I needed a better solution to solve this age-old problem and manage changes faster and more reliably. More importantly, I needed a solution that would allow my clients to do the same after turning my completed work over to them.

• You must have heard about the constant variables, whose value cannot be changed. The constant values allocated towards the relentless variables are known as Literals. The literals could be a set of values that could not be changed. It still has memories. However, it has no links in the form of variables. As an illustration, Const int =10; of a constant variable statement where 10 is an int literal. C literals are mostly cast-off to simplify code to get around situations by declaring a variable is not a preference. There are different kinds of literals used in the C programming language. We will discuss each one of them separately.

• Static variables do have the ability to maintain their meaning even though they’ve been removed from their scope! As a result, static variables keep their former value in the setting mentioned above and do not need to be initialized once in the new environment. Static variables are always set up once. The compiler holds the variable until the completion of the code. Within and outside of the method, static variables may be specified. Static variables have a standard fixed value of 0. The static variables remain active until the code is over. Ordinary variables are restricted to the range in which they are specified, whereas static variables have a scope that extends within the code.

• A union is a very interesting user-defined data type in the C programming language. It is very much similar to structures in the C programming language. However, there are some differences due to which structures and unions are considered as the independent data types in the C programming language. In a straightforward way, you can consider a union as a conjunction or union of the different data types within one container. It means that a union can hold variables belonging to different data types within the very same container.

• All this discussion will start to make more sense once we go through some relevant examples based on the usage of unions in the C programming language in Linux. However, before sharing those examples with you, we would like to discuss the working of unions and structures so that you can differentiate between these two data types before taking a look at the associated examples. So, let’s take a look at the affixed portion of our article.

• Whenever we declare a variable in the C programming language, a chunk in the memory is reserved for holding that variable whose size depends on that variable’s data type. This is referred to as automatic memory management, and it happens at the compilation time. However, at times, you do not want to allocate memory automatically because, in some situations, the exact memory size is subject to change. In such situations, you need a mechanism for allocating memory dynamically.

• In the C programming language, the following four functions are used whenever we talk about dynamic memory management: malloc(), calloc(), realloc(), and free(). However, the scope of today’s article is limited to the malloc() function in C, which stands for “memory allocation.” We will take a look at its usage and try to justify why we need this function in the first place. Finally, we will conclude our article after walking you through an example of using the malloc() function in the C programming language.

Python

• May 11 marked a new major release for the Python-based Flask web microframework project, but Flask 2.0 was only part of the story. While the framework may be the most visible piece, it is one of a small handful of cooperating libraries that provide solutions for various web-development tasks; all are incorporated into the Pallets projects organization. For the first time, all six libraries that make up Pallets were released at the same time and each had a new major version number. In part, that new major version indicated that Python 2 support was being left behind, but there is plenty more that went into the coordinated release.

• [...]

• While Flask is pretty well-known and has even been written about here before, the Pallets umbrella organization has flown a bit under the radar, at least for me. The Jinja2 template engine, a Pallets component that is used by Flask, is also fairly high-profile, but the other pieces of the puzzle are less so. The only other Pallets library I had heard of was the Werkzeug library for supporting Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) applications. It is used to connect Flask applications to web servers.

• There are three more libraries on the pallet, but those are smaller and more specialized: MarkupSafe, which provides a text object that escapes characters interpreted by HTML, ItsDangerous, which provides helpers to cryptographically sign data that will be moved between trusted and untrusted environments, and the Command Line Interface Creation Kit, or Click, which is used for “creating beautiful command line interfaces in a composable way with as little code as necessary”. The coordinated release was announced on the Pallets blog; it is based on two years of work, though there have been other fairly substantial releases in that time span (e.g. Flask 1.1 in July 2019, Jinja 2.11 in January 2020, Werkzeug 1.0 in February 2020).

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• In Bash, an array can be an indexed array or an associative array. An indexed array is a list whose items are numbered beginning from zero. An associative array is a list where strings have replaced the numbers. Assume a pen, an exercise book, a textbook, a ruler, $42, and a pencil on a study table.

Rust

Standards/Consortia

• Documents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office should be in .DOCX format starting from next year – and if you want to stick to PDFs, that will cost extra.

• “At the USPTO, we are continuously working to modernize and streamline our patent application systems,” the agency announced this week. “To improve application quality and efficiency, the USPTO will be transitioning to DOCX for all filers on January 1, 2022.”

• The office said it decided to make the change years ago in an attempt to streamline the patent examining process. DOCX, otherwise known as Office Open XML, is standardized as ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500. Though it was created by Microsoft for its own products, such as Word, the file format is supported by LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and others. And though the Windows giant has sworn it won’t sue over licensing and patents regarding DOCX, there are some caveats.

• Until now, it has been optional for a practitioner to file a US patent application in DOCX format rather than in PDF format. But USPTO now proposes to charge a $400 penalty for filing a patent application in non-DOCX format. This is a very bad idea, for reasons that I will discuss in detail. Only if USPTO were to make fundamental changes in its way of receiving DOCX files would it be acceptable for USPTO to impose a penalty for filing in a non-DOCX format.

• USPTO needs to follow WIPO’s example, permitting the practitioner to file a “pre-conversion format” version of a patent application along with the DOCX file. In the event of some later problem with USPTO’s rendering of the DOCX file, the practitioner would be permitted to point to the pre-conversion format, which would control in the event of any discrepancy.

• The normal way to file US patent applications is in PDF format. With PDF format, the applicant has complete control over the appearance of characters and symbols.

• Some years ago, the USPTO began beta-testing a system that would permit a practitioner to file a patent application in DOCX format instead of in PDF format. Yours truly was among the very first of the beta-testers of USPTO’s system for DOCX filings. As implemented by the USPTO, the practitioner would upload a DOCX file, and USPTO would render the DOCX file in a human-readable PDF image format. As part of the e-filing process, the practitioner was expected to proofread the rendered image as provided by the USPTO’s e-filing system. The notion was that the practitioner would be obliged to catch any instances of USPTO’s system rendering the DOCX file differently from the way the practitioner’s word processor had rendered that same DOCX file. If, for example, some math equation or chemical formula had gotten corrupted in USPTO’s system, the practitioner would expected to catch this prior to clicking “submit”.

Leftovers

• Twitch seems to be putting on some sort of master class in how to respond to a crisis on its platform in as confusing a manner as possible. Without writing a thousand word summary, this whole thing started when Twitch nuked a bunch of streamer content in response to a backlog of DMCA notices, changed its affiliate program without notice, hung its streamers out to dry over the DMCAs when the backlash occurred, and basically angered the hell out of its most important asset, it’s creative community. This basically set the theme for the public that Twitch wasn’t treating its community very well.

• For 15 months, New York City has yearned for normalcy. For years, the New York Knicks fans have been yearning to matter. On Sunday, these worlds collided.

• With Shooting “Midnight Cowboy”, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and film historian Glenn Frankel completes a trilogy of behind-the-scenes accounts of cinematic cowboy ballads. Of course, technically speaking, John Schlesinger’s 1969 Best Picture winner isn’t a western like High Noon or The Searchers; its 10-gallon-hat hero Joe Buck styles himself after Gary Cooper and John Wayne, but he’s shooting blanks. Played behind blue eyes by a 29-year-old Jon Voight, Joe is a rootless dreamer, decamping from Texas to the East Coast via Greyhound. Arriving in New York to try his luck as a hustler, he’s quickly reduced to a face in the crowd. From there, Midnight Cowboy unfolds as the tender chronicle of a country mouse lost in a metropolitan maze and of his friendship with a resourceful big-city rodent, Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who becomes Joe’s pimp and pedagogue, imparting a few hard lessons about survival before succumbing to his own inherent vice.

Science

• He was treated with optogenetics – a field new to medicine, but one that has long been a staple of fundamental neuroscience.

• It uses light to control precisely the activity of brain cells and was used by the scientists to restore the ability of one of his eyes to detect light.

• The technique is based on proteins, produced in algae, called channelrhodopsins, which change their behaviour in response to light. The microbes use them to move towards the light.

• The first step in the treatment was gene therapy. The genetic instructions for making the rhodopsins were taken from algae and given to cells in the deep surviving layers of the retina at the back of his eye.

• Now when they were hit with light they would send an electrical signal to the brain.

• Optogenetics may enable mutation-independent, circuit-specific restoration of neuronal function in neurological diseases. Retinitis pigmentosa is a neurodegenerative eye disease where loss of photoreceptors can lead to complete blindness. In a blind patient, we combined intraocular injection of an adeno-associated viral vector encoding ChrimsonR with light stimulation via engineered goggles. The goggles detect local changes in light intensity and project corresponding light pulses onto the retina in real time to activate optogenetically transduced retinal ganglion cells. The patient perceived, located, counted and touched different objects using the vector-treated eye alone while wearing the goggles. During visual perception, multichannel electroencephalographic recordings revealed object-related activity above the visual cortex. The patient could not visually detect any objects before injection with or without the goggles or after injection without the goggles. This is the first reported case of partial functional recovery in a neurodegenerative disease after optogenetic therapy.

Health/Nutrition

• Many essential workers still aren’t vaccinated. It’s not because they don’t want to be—it’s because they can’t get time off work.

• In March 2020, I blogged about how articles denouncing the possibility that the Coronavirus pandemic originated with a leak from a bioweapons lab sometimes actually admitted to basic facts that made such an origin seem likely. The first reported outbreak was extremely close to one of the few places on earth actively experimenting with weaponizing Coronavirus, but a huge distance from the supposed source in bats. Not only had various labs had leaks before, but scientists had recently warned of the danger of leaks from the lab in Wuhan.

• There was a theory about a seafood market, and the fact that this theory fell apart seems not to have entered the public consciousness to the same extent as the false fact that it supposedly disproved the lab leak theory.

• It has also been linked to recent increases in cases among unvaccinated people in the UK, which now has the highest number of cases of the Indian variant outside India itself. According to The British Medical Journal, cases of the Indian variant in the UK have risen by more than 160% in the week to 20 May. The variant is still predominantly affecting the north west of England and London, but there are clusters across the country.

• India’s official death toll from the Covid pandemic is reported to be 295,525, with total infections standing at 26.3 million ((as of last Saturday). However, experts believe the real figure to be up to five times higher. Mortality and morbidity are 75% of those aged 45 or more, and this age-group has been given priority in the face of India’s vaccine shortages.

• “While the world has suffered as one, we have not suffered equally.”

• “The Biden administration is making clear that the best available science, and not political interference from industry, will guide the EPA’s decisions on protecting the public from pollution.”

• Some question whether lead service lines should be such a high priority. Lead pipe replacement makes up nearly half of the Biden administration’s proposed $110 billion to upgrade the nation’s water infrastructure. But by some estimates, the U.S. needs to spend close to $1 trillion to upgrade the entire drinking and waste water system, from water treatment plants to distribution lines.

• A soldier who called on his fellow military personnel to refuse helping with the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has been charged with an offence related to mutiny.

• It’s believed to be the first time in decades that the Canadian military has laid such a charge.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Microsoft says it has rectified an issue that saw emails being routed to the user’s junk folder incorrectly.

• A proper adversarial system means the accused can confront the accuser. But that’s rarely the case when crime solving software is involved. The FBI doesn’t allow accused child porn downloaders to examine the malicious software it used to identify their computers. Multiple law enforcement agencies have dropped cases rather than discuss Stingray devices in open court.

• [Crackers] sent patient data stolen during an attack on New Zealand’s Waikato District health system to local media outlets on Wednesday, with the outlets declining to publish the sensitive information.

• The Waikato District Health Board (DHB) confirmed the attack in a statement Wednesday, saying that it is “aware that the media have received what appears to be personal and patient information from Waikato DHB information systems.”

• Policyholders can expect 20% to 50% rate increases for cyber coverage throughout 2021 as trends that began last year continue at an accelerated pace, Aon PLC said in a report issued Wednesday.

• These trends include increased claim frequency and severity, much of it driven by ransomware events, according to the report.

• In 2020, the world seemingly entered a new era of cyberattacks. Although there have been decades of viruses, breaches, and other forms of attack, last year saw increased bad actor sophistication, a propensity to pay in ransomware cases, and a broad swath of geopolitical uncertainty — conditions that hackers have found favorable.

• The severity of financial consequences has been profound. Ransoms have rocketed from five-figure price tags into the millions, including $10 million reportedly paid by Garmin. Several ransom demands were far higher before being negotiated downward, according to clients of mine worldwide. All of which is further escalation of a worrisome trend: A recent report by Hiscox shows insured cyber losses of $1.8 billion in 2019, up an eye-popping 50% year over year.

• Since early 2018, ransomware attacks have increased 486%, leading to more aggressive underwriting and as much as a 20%-50% increase in some cyber policy premiums (Greenwald, J, 2021). The increase in cyberattacks and its subsequent effect on the insurance market is particularly dangerous to the healthcare industry. In 2020, healthcare rose from tenth place to the seventh most targeted sector for cyberattacks and its data breaches continue to have the highest associated cost of any leading industry (Davis, J 2021).

• The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will issue a directive later this week requiring all pipeline companies to report cyber incidents to federal authorities after a devastating ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline forced a shutdown of operations.

• The Washington Post first reported that DHS’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which is responsible for securing critical pipelines, will issue the directive this week following concerns that pipeline operators are not required to report cyber incidents, unlike other critical infrastructure sectors.

• A spokesperson for DHS told The Hill in an emailed statement Tuesday that “the Biden administration is taking further action to better secure our nation’s critical infrastructure,” with TSA and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) working together on the issue.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• As an open-core company, we understand the importance of the open source community. To support the community, we are offering Teleport Pro for free.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Yet, the landmark decision, while powerful in declaring that UK mass interception powers are unlawful, failed to protect journalists, and lacked legal safeguards to ensure British spy agency GCHQ wasn’t abusing its power, imprudently bought into spy agency propaganda that suspicionless interception powers must be granted to ensure national security. The Grand Chamber rejected the fact that mass surveillance is an inherently disproportionate measure and believed that any potential privacy abuses can be mitigated by “minimization and targeting” within the mass spying process. We know this doesn’t work. The Grand Chamber refused to insist that governments stop bulk interception–a mistake recognized by ECHR Judge Paulo Pinto de Albuquerque, who said in a dissenting opinion:

• The case at issue, Big Brother Watch and Others v. The United Kingdom, was brought in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who confirmed that the NSA and GCHQ were routinely spying on hundreds of millions of innocent people around the globe. A group of more than 15 human rights organizations filed a complaint against portions of the UK’s mass surveillance regime before the ECHR. In a decision in 2018, the court rejected the UK’s spying programs for violating the right to privacy and freedom of expression, but it failed to say that the UK’s indiscriminate and suspicionless interception regime was inherently incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. EFF filed a Declaration as part of this proceeding. The court, however, acknowledged the lack of robust safeguards needed to provide adequate guarantees against abuse. The Grand Chamber’s decision this week came in an appeal to the 2018 ruling.

• The new ruling goes beyond the initial 2018 decision by requiring prior independent authorization for the mass interception of communications, which must include meaningful “end-to-end safeguards.” The Grand Chamber emphasized that there is considerable potential for mass interception powers to be abused, adversely affecting people’s rights. It warns that these powers should be subject to ongoing assessments of their necessity and proportionality at every stage of the process; to independent authorization at the outset, and to ex-post-facto oversight that should be sufficiently robust to keep the “interference” of people’s rights to only what is “necessary” in a democratic society. Under powers given to UK security services in 2000, they only needed authorization by the Secretary of State (Home Office) for interception. The Grand Chamber ruled that, in lacking adequate safeguards like independent oversight, UK surveillance law did not meet the required “quality of law” standard and was incapable of keeping the “interference” to what was necessary.

• Today, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that the U.K. and Sweden‘s legislation on mass surveillance programmes violate human rights. In two separate proceedings, the Court concluded that both Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (human right to respect for private and family life) and Article 10 (human right to freedom of expression) were breached by failure to ensure end-to-end safeguards. In order to prevent violations in the future, the ECHR imposed independent reviews for countries that have acceded the convention. However it did not rule out mass surveillance as such.

• Representatives from a coalition of organizations gathered outside Facebook’s lobbying headquarters in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to protest the company’s alleged abuse of the American people and announce a formal list of 70 public complaints against the social media platform.

• Robert Weissman, president of the consumer rights advocacy group and think tank Public Citizen, accused Facebook of political indifference and subverting democracy, saying “the American people and people of the world will no longer tolerate Facebook’s abuses. This is a company out of control. It is literally out of the control of our democracy.”

• The organizations present hold Facebook responsible for the alleged spreading of misinformation that influences elections, limiting users’ access to competing ideas, and wielding unjust amounts of political power.

• Facebook posts claiming that COVID-19 was “man-made” will no longer be removed, the social media giant announced Wednesday.

• Why it matters: The lifting of the ban reflects a reinvigorated debate on the origins of the pandemic in recent days, following a Wall Street Journal report that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 after falling ill.

Defence/Aggression

• Here’s a small victory for the First Amendment and presumption of openness that’s supposed to apply to court proceedings. A recent opinion [PDF] by the DC Circuit Court will give everyone more access to recordings covering the dozens of prosecutions of insurrectionist cosplayers who raided the Capitol on January 6th. The court comes down firmly on the side of openness and transparency, but has hung a rather large asterisk on that statement.

• Despite decades of warnings against the practice, police departments across the country continue to hogtie people during arrests, sometimes with fatal results. On September 8, 2018, Marcus Smith, a 38-year-old homeless Black man in Greensboro, North Carolina, was facing a mental health crisis and asked police officers for help. Instead, eight white officers brutally and fatally hogtied him. Police videos show officers pushed Smith face down on the street and tied a belt around his ankles, then attached it to his cuffed hands so tightly that his knees were lifted off the pavement. Smith’s family filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging wrongful death, accusing the police department of a cover-up. “The Greensboro Police Department, spearheaded by the chief of police at that time, watched the video and then chose to put out a press release that … ignored and left out the crucial factor that he was hogtied,” says Flint Taylor, one of the lawyers for the Smith family and a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago. We also speak with Marshall Project reporter Joseph Neff, who says there is little data about instances of police hogtying. “It’s hard to know how extensive it is, because there’s no reporting requirement,” he says.

• Why should our troops enjoy such protected status, as though they exist in a separate reality from the rest of society? Arguably, in these years, the face of America has indeed been militarized, whether we like it or not. After all, we’ve just lived through two decades of endless war, American-style, in the process wasting significantly more than $6.4 trillion dollars, more than 7,000 uniformed lives, and scores of health- and safety-related opportunity costs.

• Meanwhile, it’s taken years for the public and members of Congress to begin to recognize that it matters how the military treats its own — and the civilians with whom they interact. (After all, many felonies committed by such personnel against civilians, at home and abroad, are prosecuted within the military-justice system.) That Congress has taken so long to support even such a timid bill in a bipartisan fashion and that few think to question whether felonies committed by American soldiers should be prosecuted within the military, suggests one thing: that we’re a long, long way from taking responsibility for those who kill, maim, and rape in all our names.

• Given the more than 60 Democratic and Republican votes lined up, the Senate is poised to move forward with a new bill that would change the way the military handles sexual assault and other felony crimes by service members. Sponsored by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the new law would assign decision-making on sexual-assault cases and a host of other felonies, including some hate crimes, to a specially trained team of uniformed prosecutors. While the bill will indeed inch the military away from its antiquated practice of allowing commanders to decide whether to prosecute their own officers and soldiers on sexual-assault allegations, it baffles me that it’s still allowed to handle its own violent crimes rather than having them dealt with through our criminal justice system.

• In future, military drones will be treated the same as manned aviation.Then European air forces could also station the „Eurodrone“ in their countries and exercise with it outside military training areas. For this, an EU project is to develop general standards.

• It was predictable that most of the early online harassment would target the one Japanese member of our group. As we prepared what would become an open letter demanding retraction of Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s article claiming that Korean “comfort women” were contractually bound prostitutes, we had braced ourselves for abuse. Ramseyer’s piece bolstered the ultranationalist Japanese worldview that rehabilitates Japan’s history of militarism and colonialism and denies the coercive and brutal nature of much of that era’s violence. Although it appeared in an obscure law and economics journal, the far right in Japan embraced it as “cutting edge” research. The Japanese far-right newspaper Sankei Shimbun introduced the article’s claims as definitive scholarly confirmation that “comfort women” were not sexual slaves. It made front-page news in Korea, and was discussed and debated on television and in print for weeks.

• Sweden, at the top of most global welfare rankings, has traditionally sought to be a safe haven by accepting waves of immigrants since World War II. The country, which grew accustomed to relatively low levels of crime, has witnessed a surge of bombings and riots in immigrant neighborhoods in the past decade.

• Sweden’s police chief last August lamented an “extremely serious” escalation of violence related to gang crime, urging society to “put its foot down.” He spoke after two people were murdered in Stockholm in a week and several police officers were injured during a riot in the southern city of Malmo. A 12-year-old girl had also been killed “in a criminal showdown” earlier that month.

• The country reported about 10 times more deadly shootings than the U.K. in the past year, adjusted for population size.

• The Afghan Taliban have decided upon three conditions to attend an eagerly awaited U.S.-proposed conference in Turkey: The conference must be short, the agenda should not include decision-making on critical issues, and the Taliban delegation should be low level, a senior Taliban leader told VOA Tuesday.

• In the week leading up to the event, the Instagram account created for the march received over 1,300 comments containing vile anti-Semitism, hate speech, calls for violence at the event, and death threats toward the organizers said Daniel Raab, one of the people behind the rally.

• The manifesto of Boko Haram rests on Islamic principles i.e. establishing Shariah or Islamic law in the region. A system that operates to preserve the rights of poor factions of the society and tends to promote or implement Islamic values. Hence, in this context, it negates westernization and its prospects. However, the rise of Boko Haram was based on anti-western agenda which portrayed that the existing government is un-Islamic and that western education is forbidden. Hence, the name Boko Haram itself delivered the notion that western culture or civilization is forbidden. Boko Haram has a unique political and religiously secular manifesto. Boko Haram was formed by Mohammad Yusuf, who preached his agenda of setting up a theocratic political system through his teachings derived from Islam. And countered the existing governmental setup of the Christians. The violent dynamics surged in 2009 when an uprising against the Nigerian government took the momentum that killed almost 800 people. Following the uprising, Mohammad Yusuf was killed and one of his lieutenants Abu Bakar Shekau took the lead.

Environment

• To acknowledge the realities of the climate crisis is the path to hope, towards finding a way to overcome them.

• “Despite the sector’s expertise in identifying, forecasting, and managing risk, it continues to support companies responsible for climate change, including those engaged in coal, tar sands, and Arctic oil and gas.”

• “This is a turning point in history,” said an attorney who noted that the ruling “may also have major consequences for other big polluters.”

Energy

• By Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams.

• Climate campaigners worldwide are celebrating after a Dutch court on Wednesday ordered fossil fuel giant Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions 45% by 2030, compared with 2019 levels—a historic ruling that activists hope is just the beginning of holding the oil and gas industry accountable for driving the climate emergency.

• “The outcome is a sign that Exxon’s morally inept and fiscally questionable long-term climate strategy is finally catching up with it,” wrote one journalist.

• New Mexico is facing more than $8 billion in cleanup costs for oil and gas wells, an enormous liability that taxpayers could be left to pick up if drillers go out of business or walk away from their obligations.

• Cleaning up old wells at the end of their operating lives can be expensive, and typically states require drillers to cover part of the cleanup cost at the outset, known as financial assurance requirements. The money is tapped later on when the well or pipeline must be dismantled and cleaned up.

• A startup called Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) has an unusual idea for helping clean up the aviation industry: replacing airplanes with blimps, at least for short-range flights.

• Cutting down on the number of planes traveling short distances — HAV plans to travel between cities like Vancouver and Seattle or Oslo and Stockholm — could help airlines drastically cut their carbon emissions, The Guardian reports. HAV, which secured funding from Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, says that its airships only emit about ten percent of the greenhouse gases of a passenger plane, and that number could shrink even further as the company works to electrify its fleet.

Wildlife/Nature

• The continued emphasis on “fuels reduction” as the cure for large blazes reminds me of Medieval doctors who practiced bloodletting to cure illness. If a patient lived, it was because the “bad” blood had been removed. If the patient died despite bloodletting, then obviously not enough bad blood was drawn.

• Bloodletting typically failed because it did not address the real medical issues causing illness. Similarly, thinning does not address the real cause of large fires.

Finance

• This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves and just say it: New York really is a city of 8 million people so desperate for an apartment they are willing to make massive offerings at the altar of big real estate to get one.

• “Remember that these are weapons of war and destruction that will be used to kill children, bomb hospitals, homes, and schools—lives literally hang in the balance.”

• The hack of the Colonial Pipeline has already made lots of news, and with that, the government is rushing to come up with new regulations, which will almost certainly be overkill. While the transparency aspect of the expected rules (requiring reporting of “cyber incidents” to the federal government) was more or less expected to come at some point no matter what, the other rules are likely to be fighting the last battle. There are constant changes to these kinds of attacks, and seeking just to prevent them is a fool’s errand.

• “This past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families—even when we are in the middle of a worldwide crisis.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “Rewarding Rahm Emanuel’s cover up of Laquan McDonald’s murder with an ambassadorship is not an act that reflects a value of or respect for Black lives.”

• Germany’s geopolitics was turbo-charged in 1923 when a German general, geographer, politician, professor and teacher of top-ranking Nazi, Rudolf Hess, founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal for Geopolitics). During the 1920s, the journal’s editor Karl Haushofer had been a student of Rudolf Hess. In 1933, he became Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Führer until his infamous flight to Scotland in 1941. The goal was to convince none other than the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to join Nazi-Germany’s invasion of the Soviet-Union. The effort failed, of course.

• Karl Haushofer might not be the inventor of term Lebensraum (living space) but he certainly was the one who shaped the term into a strategic plan and introduced the idea to Adolf Hitler. The relatively uneducated Hitler (who was born Adolf Schicklgruber in Austria’s rural hinterland) never attended university, never completed the typical German apprenticeship, never received any military training beyond being a relatively inconsequential foot-soldier during the Great War I (WWI).

• In being ousted from the third spot in the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House, Cheney has found a new morality. In her floor speech, she called Donald Trump’s canard of a stolen election a “threat America has never seen before.”  Opposing Trump’s interpretation of the result was a “duty”. “I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins in the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”  After her speech, she told reporters that she would “do everything” she could “to ensure that the former president never gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

• Cheney’s seemingly shabby treatment led such papers as the Washington Post to remark that truth was again under assault. “Truth is the issue upon which Cheney has made her stand – truth and her unwillingness to be silent for the supposed good of the team.”  Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes, saw the event as a “confirmation that the Republican party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal”.  Eric Lutz, writing in Vanity Fair, called the Cheney display “defiant”, laying “bare the cowardice of her colleagues who, with their vote on Wednesday, affirmed what had long been clear: The GOP is the cult of Trump now, and fealty the price of admission.”

• Lahore, Pakistan—I write to friends in India, and receive from them, messages of fear, of fatigue, narrating incidents of death and helplessness. I write to friends in Palestine, and they tell me that they are not OK, not safe, and they want the world to do something. I receive news from a friend who used to live in Kabul, and he tells me that the school bombings took place in his old neighborhood. I have become an antenna, receiving news of heartbreak and destruction, and the collapse of all sense of order. I transmit what I receive back into the world, not sure who might be listening. Where there were homes in Deir Yassein, you’ll see dense forests— That village was razed. There’s no sign of Arabic. I too, O Amichai, saw the dresses of beautiful women And everything else, just like you, in Death, Hebrew, and Arabic. They ask me to tell them what Shahid means— Listen: it means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic.

• When Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison took charge of the prosecution of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin for the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd, he said “we’re going to bring to bear all the resources necessary to achieve justice in this case.” Ellison did just that, organizing a team of lawyers that secured the historic conviction of Chauvin on a pair of murder charges. A year later, Ellison’s office is taking on another high-profile case involving the death of a Black man—20-year-old Daunte Wright—at the hands of a police officer. I spoke with Ellison, a former cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a longtime advocate for criminal justice reform, about these two cases, and about where the movement to address police violence and systemic racism stands one year after Floyd’s murder.

• Alarm bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior of the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie, refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression legislation across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new trend in American politics that threatens the foundations of our democracy itself.

• Last night, The Washington Post reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance empaneled a grand jury in his ongoing criminal investigation of the Trump Organization. It’s a huge step. There is now a real possibility that Trump, his family, or high-ranking officials in his organization will be indicted for financial crimes.

• Protests and vigils were held across the U.S. to mark one year since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death sparked a national uprising and global movement against systemic racism and police brutality. Elizabeth Hinton, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School, connects the Black Lives Matter protests to a long history of Black rebellion against police violence in her new book “America on Fire” and notes that the U.S. has had previous opportunities to address systemic racism and state violence, but change remains elusive. “Every time inequality and police violence is evaluated, all of these structural solutions are always suggested, and yet they’re never taken up,” Hinton says.

• Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld about the Arizona audit for the May 21, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• If there’s one characteristic that prominent cranks share, it’s an extreme sensitivity to science-, evidence-, and reality-based criticism, particularly if that criticism comes from someone with the credentials or knowledge to dismantle their misinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies. Part and parcel of that sensitivity is a propensity to try to use whatever means they can to silence such criticism. (Indeed, many of the very same cranks who decry “cancel culture” are among its most enthusiastic practitioners.) A favored technique to silence critics involves what I’ve long referred to as “legal thuggery.” Basically, legal thuggery involves using the legal system to intimidate, in this case, to intimidate your critics into silence. This sort of legal thuggery is easy, too, if you happen to be a wealthy quack who can afford lots of lawyers, as most skeptics are regular people for whom hiring a lawyer to defend themselves is a huge expense. That’s the point. That’s why cranks engage in such legal thuggery. It’s still going on, and I still detest it, which is why I will discuss three COVID-19 era examples.

• The European Commission is pushing for stronger rules around online disinformation, according to guidance released Wednesday.

• The guidance calls for reinforcing the European Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation with stronger commitments from the tech companies that have signed onto the code that was launched in 2018.

• The guidance notably urges the code to be updated to call for tech companies to demonetize content with disinformation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Summary: Three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published an article that supposedly detailed meetings Hunter Biden (son of presidential candidate Joe Biden) had with a Ukrainian energy firm several months before the then-Vice President allegedly pressured Ukraine government officials to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.

• The groups called on the social media giant to “repair this mistrust with our communities and ensure that we can count on Facebook and Instagram as free civic spaces and tools for holding governments accountable.”

• The vitality of social media during a time like this cannot be understated. Journalistic coverage from the ground is minimal—owing to a number of factors, including restrictions on movement by Israeli authorities—while, as the New York Times reported, misinformation is rife and has been repeated by otherwise reliable media sources. Israeli officials have even been caught spreading misinformation on social media.

• Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh has spent the past few weeks documenting content removals, and a coalition of more than twenty organizations, including EFF, have reached out to social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter. Among the demands are for the companies to immediately stop censoring—and reinstate—the accounts and content of Palestinian voices, to open an investigation into the takedowns, and to transparently and publicly share the results of those investigations.

• A brief history

• Large social-media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp lose legal protection for the user content posted on their platforms from today, and stand answerable to Indian civil and criminal laws just like any other ordinary citizen or local entity.

• Till yesterday, they enjoyed immunity when it came to the content posted by any third-party user on their platforms. The only obligation on them was to take down any illegal content that they noticed on their own, or when it was highlighted to them by the state, or the courts, or any responsible/aggrieved party. Now it’s a civil and criminal liability on them for any illegal post, be it in words, or a picture or a video.

• It was hearing a petition jointly filed by 40 residents of Peshawar, who sought orders for the respondents, including PTA and Federal Investigation Agency, to ban TikTok to the extent of violation of the constitutional provisions, which don’t allow acts contrary to Islamic code of life.

• Communications and Information Ministerial Regulation No. 5/2020, signed by minister Johnny G. Plate in November of last year, allows the ministry to remove prohibited content on digital platforms owned by the public, individuals or private companies, known as digital service providers (PSEs).

• The ministerial regulation, signed by Communication and Information Minister Johnny G. Plate in November, allows the ministry to remove prohibited content on digital platforms owned by the public, individual and private companies, known as digital service providers (PSEs).

• Almost a year after Beijing imposed a controversial national security law on the territory, the creative community has been left unsure about what is, or is not, legally permissible. And although the legislation, which outlaws sedition, secession and subversion, has largely been used against opposition activists, it has also cast a shadow of uncertainty over local artists, curators and gallery owners.

• “Hong Kong, right now, is the most dangerous place — more dangerous than Beijing,” said artist Kacey Wong, whose performances and installations were once a regular sight at the demonstrations that rocked the city from June 2019 until last summer.

• “In Beijing, everybody knows what they can talk about, and what cannot be mentioned. But in Hong Kong, nobody knows what the dangerous topics really are,” he said, adding: “(The law) changed everything — from creating artwork (to) freedom of expression. Anything deemed sensitive becomes dangerous, not only to the artist but also the viewer.”

• The draft is yet to undergo pre-legislative parliamentary scrutiny and its impact may not be evident for some time. Still, some experts told CPJ the bill’s exemptions for journalism would not be enough to mitigate the overall impact on digital speech. Worse, privacy groups say it could undermine end-to-end encryption, a safety feature for online communications that CPJ and others recommend for journalists and their sources.

• “Once a presumption takes root that online speech is dangerous, that will inevitably spread beyond individual users’ posts to online communication generally, including the press,” Graham Smith, an internet law expert who has critiqued the concept of an online duty of care, told CPJ by email this month.

• Non-compliance with rules would result in these social media companies losing their intermediary status that provides them exemptions and certain immunity from liabilities for any third-party information and data hosted by them.

• In other words, they could be liable for criminal action in case of complaints.

• The new rules require them to take down any content flagged by the authorities within 36 hours, and set up a robust mechanism to respond to complaints.

• The new IT rules also require significant social media intermediaries — providing services primarily in the nature of messaging — to enable identification of the “first originator” of information that undermines sovereignty of India, security of the state, or public order.

• The officers from India’s elite antiterrorism police unit descended after dusk on the New Delhi offices of Twitter, with television news cameras in tow. Their mission: Start an argument over fake news.

• The offices sat empty, closed amid India’s devastating coronavirus outbreak. And the police acknowledged that they were there to deliver nothing more legally binding than a notice disputing a warning label that Twitter had assigned to some tweets.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• days. I’m a Lyft driver with a journalist’s ear, and my passengers’ stories capture my attention. It’s not just my ear, though; I was once a congressional reporter.

• I left journalism for economic reasons, first to do other editorial work that paid more, then to drive for Lyft. When I started driving for Lyft, I thought, this is more like journalism than journalism is now.

• The journalist was accused of defaming the military last year and also faced a court case in this regard. According to the FIR, Mr Toor had allegedly indulged in propaganda against Pakistan and its institutions on social media for long.

• However, the Lahore High Court absolved him of the charges after the FIA police told the court that no evidence was found to support the charges.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It looks like app developers want to be cops. Late last week, a Los Angeles resident spotted a Citizen-app branded patrol car roaming the city. Citizen is yet another app that allows residents to send crime alerts and other news to each other, following in the steps of Ring’s Neighbors app and Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media service that only lets actual neighbors connect with each other.

• The post was originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Songs.Back in March 2020, ten-year-old Mila was approached by a boy in her school whose father told him to stay away from Chinese people.

• “It was my first experience of racism, and I didn’t really know how to respond,” said Mila, who told the boy she was Chinese, and he backed away.

• An editorial in the New York Times (5/18/21) condemning New York City Pride organizers for excluding police contingents from the annual parade is not just baffling, but extremely dangerous. In one piece, the Times editorial board disregards historical context, current affairs and the realities that queer people face today.

• Long after the interview was over, I had trouble shaking the quote. “It’s like we’re an invisible people,” Mike Kahikina had told me. I kept thinking about what he said, even weeks later.

• Invisible people.

• A study prepared by the Mapping Police Violence website noted that at least 1068 people were killed by U.S. police officers across the country, an average of three killings per day.

• za It also detailed that since Floyd was killed, 25 states saw a decrease, while 19 states saw an increase, and seven states saw no change in police killings compared to the same period last year.

• A coalition of more than 30 human rights and digital privacy rights groups called on Google to abandon its plans to establish a Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia over concerns about human rights violations.

• The groups, which include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and PEN America, wrote in their letter that Saudi Arabia’s record of tamping down on public dissent and its justice system that “flagrantly violates due process” made it unsafe for Google to set up a “cloud region” in the kingdom.

• I work at McDonald’s. And when I see those kinds of stories, I just have to shake my head. McDonald’s seems confused about how to attract new workers when there’s a very simple solution to their problem—one that workers like me have been demanding for years: Pay us a living wage.

• McDonald’s annual/quarterly gross profit history and growth rate from 2006 to 2021. Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services.

• McDonald’s gross profit for the quarter ending March 31, 2021 was $2.668B, a 13.94% increase year-over-year.

• With 37,000 locations across 120 countries, McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) is easily the biggest restaurant chain in the world. The fast food titan is also among the most profitable companies on the market. Despite a weak operating year in 2016, its 20% profit margin places it 9th from the top among the 30 members of the Dow.

• It might surprise you to learn that most of those earnings weren’t produced directly through the sales of trademark menu products like Quarter Pounders, Chicken McNuggets, or Big Macs. Instead, Mickey D’s market-thumping profitability is thanks to the rent, royalty income, and fees it collects from its army of franchisees.

• The marriage had been in disharmony for a long time. She had separated at the beginning of 2020, partly because of his jealousy. A big point of contention was her driving licence training. Telman A. insinuated that she was having an affair with the driving instructor. For this reason, he allegedly also set fire to the driving school car, a Hyundai.

• A Brooklyn man is facing hate crime charges after he allegedly destroyed a crucifix and burned an American flag at church and later set fire to a yeshiva and synagogue.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I have been on Freenode for about 20 years, since my earliest involvement with Debian in about 2001. When Debian moved to OFTC for its IRC presence way back in 2006, I hung around on Freenode somewhat since FOSDEM’s IRC channels were still there, as well as for a number of other channels that I was on at the time (not anymore though).

• This is now over and done with. What’s happening with Freenode is a shitstorm — one that could easily have been fixed if one particular person were to step down a few days ago, but by now is a lost cause.

Monopolies

• Amazon said Wednesday that it has struck a deal to acquire the historic movie studio MGM for $8.5 billion, bolstering its efforts to become a top player in Hollywood.

• On Tuesday, Amazon announced that it had reached a deal to purchase the film and TV goliath MGM for $8.45 billion — and leading antitrust figures in Congress aren’t happy. In a letter today, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sounded the alarm over the size and scope of the deal, calling on the Justice Department to investigate the acquisition before it finalizes.

Patents

• Five private practice attorneys tell Managing IP why they believe remote litigation will continue and what firms need to do differently to win cases

• In-house sources suggest parties will continue fighting SEP battles everywhere in Germany – except for Düsseldorf

Trademarks

• Parties must do their homework before initiating one of the Trademark Modernization Act’s new proceedings, but this may not be enough to deter bad actors

Copyrights

• Users of the social media app TikTok noticed a new female voice narrating their videos on Monday, about three weeks after a Canadian actor filed a lawsuit against the video-sharing platform for copyright violation.

• Bev Standing, a voice actor based in Welland, Ont., is suing TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, on the claim that recordings of her voice are being used without permission.

• The change comes about three weeks after a Canadian actor filed a lawsuit against ByteDance. The lawsuit for copyright violation alleges that ByteDance has used the Canadian’s voice without her permission.

• “They replaced me with another voice,” says Bev Standing, a voice actor from Ontario. She says she first learned about the replacement from an email a journalist sent. New videos on the official TikTok account feature the new voice – while older videos still feature Standing’s voice.

• According to legal experts, the move may be an acknowledgment that Standing suffered damages. However, that does not necessarily mean that ByteDance will opt to settle the case. Standing says she has been doing voice-overs for commercials, corporate videos, and more as a full-time freelancer since 2014.

• Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal concluded today that the country’s first pirate site blocking order can stay in place. The Court dismissed the appeal from Internet provider TekSavvy. According to the Court, site-blocking injunctions don’t violate the Copyright Act, freedom of speech, or net neutrality. While it’s not a perfect remedy, it trumps other available options.

• The EU’s Copyright Directive was passed back in 2019, and the two-year period for implementing the law in national legislation is almost up. The text’s contradictory requirements to stop infringing material from being posted online without imposing a general requirement to monitor users, which is not permitted under EU law, has proved difficult for governments to deal with. France aims to solve this by ignoring even the limited user protections laid down by the Directive. Germany has been having a rather fraught debate about how exactly Article 17, which implicitly requires upload filters, should be implemented. One good idea to allow users to “pre-flag” as legal the material they upload was jettisoned. That led to fears that the country’s implementation of Article 17 would be as bad as France’s. But the final version of the law does attempt to ensure that automated filters — now admitted as indispensable, despite earlier assurances they were optional — do not block user uploads that are not infringing on copyright. Communia explains:

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