● 01.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/1/2022: Scribus 1.5.8 and LXLE Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• This week has been a bit slow in releases, but we did got a few gems, including a major Wine release for your Linux gaming, a new VirtualBox release for your virtualization needs, as well as a new Scribus release for your desktop publishing and page layout needs.

• On the distro side of things, we got a new GeckoLinux ROLLING release for openSUSE Tumbleweed aficionados, a new Deepin Linux release for fans of this beautiful distro, and a new Ubuntu MATE release for the GPD Pocket 3 mini computer. Also, Ubuntu 21.04 reached end of life and EdeavourOS ARM now offers 64-bit installs for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Desktop/Laptop

• The GPD Pocket 3 is a fully-featured modular pocket PC and now you can happily run Linux on it with an officially released build of Ubuntu MATE. Something of a tradition for the MATE team who have produced builds for previous versions of the GPD devices.

Audiocasts/Shows

• SUSE had an awkward week; we breakdown the very mixed launch of SUSE Liberty Linux.

• Plus, we’ve cracked what’s driving Linux Distribution adoption these days.

Kernel Space

• The first release candidate for version 5.17 of the Linux kernel has rolled off the production line – despite fears that working from a laptop might complicate matters.

• Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds is currently on the road and, when announcing the release of Linux 5.16 predicted that the version 5.17 release merge window would be “somewhat painful” due to his travels, and use of a laptop – something Torvalds said “I generally try to avoid.”

• Torvalds’ laptop aversion comes from the fact that he likes to do lots of local testing on his beastly workstation powered by a 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper. Linus’ lappie appears not to match his desktop, so he ends up using more automated build testing in the cloud.

• “And so [i] really hope that everything has been properly cooking in linux-next so that there are no unnecessary issues that pop up when things hit my tree,” he wrote.

• The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux could soon be making it easier to transition older, end-of-life devices off official firmware packages and onto the likes of open-source Coreboot for capable aging PC hardware. This not only would make the system run on more free software but would extend the life of the hardware with firmware updates where the vendor has ceased their support.

• Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat stoked a community question, “Hypothetically, if a legal entity (like the LVFS) started distributing Coreboot firmware security updates for EOL hardware like the ThinkPad X220 (with the vendors blessing) how does that feel? You’d have to explicitly opt-in and it would be clear all OEM warranty is gone.”

Applications

• Scribus is powerful program that brings professional page layout to Linux, supporting professional publishing features like color separations, ICC color management, versatile PDF creation, as well as CMYK and spot colors.

• The new release, Scribus 1.5.8, is here with a focus on mostly fixing nasty issues present in previous releases and code optimizations that lead to improved reliability and speed of the software.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you’re not deeply involved with TLS, it probably seems that the state of public TLS today is much the way it used to be a decade ago, or even five years ago, including things like the fundamental problem with TLS on the web (which is that your browser trusts a ton of Certificate Authorities). This is not actually the case, for at least three reasons. Two of them are logistical changes, while the third is a dramatic change to the security of TLS in practice.

• Sudo user is the regular user in Linux which has admin or root privileges to perform administrative tasks. But, by default all regular users in Linux are not sudo users, root user has to manually assign sudo rights to the user by adding it to wheel group.

• In RHEL distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, a group with name ‘wheel’ is created during the installation and its entry is already defined in system’s sudoers file.

• The concept of NFS (Network File System) empowers a user on a client computer to have read and write privileges on shared file directories on a server computer.

• This over-the-network file-sharing concept is implementable by anyone due to its open-source attribute. Before this article guide teaches us how to implement the NFS protocol, we first need to understand some of the NFS footprints.

• Since it is the server computer that hosts the shareable files, it is also the one that decides the implementable depth of file-sharing permissions and access rights.

• This article guide assumes that you have access to an Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 server and a client computer. It also assumes that you have root or Sudo user access on both operating system environments.

• GNOME is a popular desktop used on many Linux distributions, including Debian. The GNOME Tweaks tool allows users to modify and change the cosmetics in their GNOME desktop environment, which is popular amongst users that are not satisfied entirely with the GUI.

• Some of the things you can do with GNOME Tweaks are edit font colors and scaling, disable animations for desktop speed improvement, change themes, manage GNOME extensions, bar changes, and much more.

• Depending on the installation you choose when installing Debian 11, this may already be installed on your desktop.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install GNOME Tweaks on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• Tkinter stands for “Tk interface”: the package with the same name on many Linux distributions provides the Python bindings for the Tcl/Tk GUI toolkit. Although other graphical toolkit can be used from Python, like Qt or GTK, Tkinter is the standard (the Python IDLE editor and development environment is written using this toolkit, for example) and probably the easiest to work with. In this tutorial we see the basic concepts behind the usage of Tkinter and how to create and interact with some of the most used widgets.

Games

• The logic behind the game is pretty simple, so I thought I’d code up an R version so that those of you who can’t get enough of it can play it on your own! The full code is available here.

• Valve is helping out developers with more funding to research open-source Radeon Linux GPU drivers for the Steam Deck handheld, with more testing of Mesa commits + Radeon GPU drivers.

• Charlie Turner, programming consultant for Igalia, created a merge request on FreeDesktop’s Mesa site for more dEQP runners. The agency itself “specializes in the growth of innovative projects and solutions” with the new request asking Valve to help with AMD Radeon GPU Linux drive testing, and since the Steam Deck is powered by an AMD RDNA 2-based GPU it makes sense for Valve to commit more resources to Radeon Linux GPU drivers.

• Quake II RTX from Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA just recently gained another big upgrade, this time with some AMD tech thanks to community-provided code. This is possible since it’s open source. Still quite surprising though but goes to show how people just want to make gaming better, regardless of hardware vendor politics.

• With the release of Quake II RTX 1.6.0 it didn’t just bring AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) but upgraded many parts of the game with new features too.

• Gaming on Chromebook is something that no one talks about, and rightly so. However, with the advent of cloud gaming platforms such as Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now, things have gotten a lot better. But now, Google is aiming to bring native desktop-level gaming to Chromebooks, thanks to a project called Borealis. It’s a new Linux container that will host Steam with all the packages, latest drivers, and dependencies for seamless gameplay, just like Windows PCs. So if you want to learn more about Borealis on Chromebook, follow our in-depth explainer on Steam gaming below.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• When you visit the official LXLE official site its mantra – ‘Revive that Old PC’ – is boldly captured. And this is exactly what LXLE aims to do.

• Based on the Ubuntu/Lubuntu LTS release, LXLE is a lightweight Linux distribution that is resource-friendly and ideal for old PCs or systems with low system specifications. In fact, LXLE features prominently among the best Linux distributions for old machines.

• Out of the box, LXLE ships with an optimized LXDE desktop environment, which is a lightweight and minimal desktop environment that is easy on system resources while providing a neat, elegant, and intuitive UI for a smooth experience.

Distributions

• Ubuntu Oneiric ubuntu-11.10-desktop-i386.iso, at 695MB, is the newest 32-bit graphical Ubuntu live image that will fit on a 700MB CD-R.

• If I was doing this again, I’d consider: Puppy Linux, far more up-to-date, supports 32-bit, fits on a CD, can choose to be based off Debian packages.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York. They sell computer hardware, middleware and software employing over 370,000 people.

• IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. But you can trace IBM’s history of open source far further back. They were one of the earliest champions of open source, backing influential communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, advocating open licenses, open governance, and open standards.

• IBM also collaborates with Linux organisations. For example, IBM works with Ubuntu in areas like containers, virtualization, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, big data analytics and DevOps to provide reference architectures, support solutions and cloud offerings, both for enterprise data centres and cloud service providers.

• The company is involved in many open source projects. For example, they helped to create the Apache Software Foundation, and were also a founder member of the OpenJS Foundation, responsible for the development of the Node.js platform, Appium, Dojo, jQuery and many other products.

• International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York. They sell computer hardware, middleware and software employing over 370,000 people.

• IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. But you can trace IBM’s history of open source far further back. They were one of the earliest champions of open source, backing influential communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, advocating open licenses, open governance, and open standards.

• Digital transformation has been the buzzword du jour for the last several years, and for good reason. With benefits from automation, improved workforce management, and better business insights, its value is clear. And whether it was expedited by the sudden need for remote work or building on initiatives already in place, the discussion around digitizing modern business won’t end anytime soon.

• But digital transformation can become problematic when it’s viewed as a fix-all for the enterprise. In fact, when not implemented properly it can cause problems from day-to-day frustrations to costly system errors and downtime.

• So how do businesses take advantage of the gains while avoiding the potential mishaps of digital transformation? Start by taking a hard look at some best practices – the do’s – along with common missteps – the don’ts.

• Experienced IT leaders know that skilled technology professionals are hard to find. And these days, they’re even harder to keep.

• It’s the anticipated Great Resignation writ large in record-high turnover numbers reported by technology organizations and functions. More than a third of respondents to an August 2021 survey conducted by Everest Group had seen their attrition rates increase more than 11 percent over the previous quarter, with the average rise in attrition across respondents coming in at 10.5 percent.

• Technology employees have never had more opportunities than they do right now to advance their skills online, network at virtual events, and work remotely without relocating to tech hubs. They can dip their toes in multiple pools and switch streams relatively easily. And after months of toiling to keep their organizations going amid turbulent times, the urge to seek out calmer (or more rewarding) seas is strong.

• If you administer a Git server, you know that lots of unexpected tasks come up over the lifecycle of a repository. Contributors commit to the wrong branch, a project manager might want to implement an approval process, developers may need a specific review process, you might call for certain actions to be taken after a successful push. There are lots of little convenience features that Git can provide, but to take advantage of them, you need to learn about Git hooks.

• Git hooks are shell scripts found in the hidden .git/hooks directory of a Git repository. These scripts trigger actions in response to specific events, so they can help you automate your development lifecycle.

• Although you may never have noticed them, every Git repository includes 12 sample scripts. Because they’re shell scripts, they’re extremely flexible, and there are even some Git-specific data you have access to within a Git repository.

• Entitlements add security to deployments in Red Hat services and Red Hat OpenShift. However, entitled builds require extra work. This article details the process step-by-step. We will start with getting the entitlements, certificate authority (CA), and configuration files, and end with a BuildConfig in OpenShift.

• Recently, I was engaged in a project where I had to create a Jenkins Maven agent with Selenium Server and Google Chrome. I realized that to install the Chrome client, I needed several repositories on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS. I followed the official OpenShift documentation and did other research to achieve the deployment. This article shows my process.

• Travis CI announced build support for the IBM Power architecture (ppc64le) in November 2019. Since then, the IBM Power Open Source Ecosystem Team, in partnership with Travis CI has striven to provide additional support for Power. As a result, we are happy to announce that Power builds now run faster and more reliably on Travis CI.

• I’ve probably had an ambient awareness of journalctl’s –since option to show the systemd journal since some particular time ever since I read enough of the manpage to find options like ‘-u’ (used to see only logs for a single unit) and ‘-b’ (used to select which system boot you want to start from). But for a long time I didn’t really use it, even when I mentioned it in my entry on ‘-u’. Recently that’s been changing and I’ve been finding myself using –since more and more often, generally in two different situations.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Admittedly, we’re not short of ways to control Spotify in Ubuntu. There is the MPRIS2 music applet in the notification shade, the app itself has player controls, and like most distros Ubuntu support keyboard media keys too (though mine don’t work).

• But this is also true of Rhythmbox, Ubuntu’s default music app. Yet that app also comes with a right-click “quick list” menu in its dock item that makes it easy to skip forward, back, or pause music entirely.

Devices/Embedded

• Coral Dev Board Micro is the latest iteration of Google’s Edge AI devkit with an NXP i.MX RT1176 Cortex-M7/M4 crossover processor/microcontroller coupled with the company’s 4 TOPS Edge TPU, a camera, and a microphone in a board that’s about the size of a Raspberry Pi Zero SBC.

• The new board follows the original NXP i.MX 8M-based Coral Dev board that was introduced in 2019, and Coral Dev Board mini based on MediaTek MT8167S processor launched in 2020, and keeps with the trend of providing more compact solutions with lower-end host processors for edge AI.

• At the end of my review of “RPI All-in-One” PC with Raspberry Pi 4, I noted the system also appeared to be compatible with NanoPi M4V2 single board computer. I’ve now tried it out, and assembling the board inside the 10.1-inch display is even easier than I initially thought. That means I now have a NanoPi M4V2 All-in-One PC running Ubuntu Hirsute or Debian Buster with XFCE desktop environment from Armbian, and most features work including the display and wireless connectivity, but I still have an issue with the touchscreen function.

• It’s hard to believe, but the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microprocessor has already been a part of our lives for an entire year. One of the most exciting aspects of the RP2040 is the potential for its use in third-party boards. Today we’re sharing one of the first RP2040-based 3D printer control boards we’ve ever seen, known as the BTT SKR Pico V1.0 Control Board by Big Tree Tech.

• The RP2040 is acting as the main processor for the control board. So even though the board has Pico in the name, it’s only using the RP2040 processor and not a complete Pico module.

Open Hardware/Modding

• While making devices more repairable is pretty much seen as universally a good thing, right? Unfortunately, engineering involves tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs that are seen as bad for repair (or are actually desirable in spite of it), or actually improves reliability. These are some things I suspect right to repair advocates forget.

• This article is intended to unify some disparate thoughts on the subject I’ve had on Lobsters comment, this blog (i.e. the ThinkPad one), etc. as one post. I intend to do this more often for other things…

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I was in college when I learned about the Linux operating system. That was also when I first heard about open source. Hoping to understand more about Linux and how it came to be, I got involved with a Linux user group called DGPLUG, where I learned the extent of open source projects. This was more than just an operating system. There was a whole world of collaborative coding out there.

• It didn’t take much. I quickly acquired a deep interest in writing code, meeting amazing people, and joining communities that motivated me to contribute to open source projects.

• I started to learn new programming languages and technologies. I also began implementing what I was learning in my Computer Science Bachelor course hands-on. I got involved with the Fedora community through IRC and contributed to the Fedora Infrastructure project codebase, Fedora Tests. I also got the opportunity to contribute to many other projects simultaneously as I came across more bugs and features, and I connected with developers worldwide.

• Atlassian Corporation Plc is a software company founded in 2002 that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. It employs over 7,000 people and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

• Atlassian produces a range of proprietary software including software for collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. Atlassian dominates several markets where it still has intense competition.

• Broadly speaking, they offer software in three large buckets: These are software development tools; help desk software, or IT service management; and workflow management software. When you think of Atlassian, think project management and collaboration tools.

• Many of their programs use a number of open source components. And their GitHub repositories hold lots of open source code. But their main range of software is proprietary. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Atlassian’s products.

Education

• Hello everyone! This blog post is a bit different from usual posts in that I’d like to make a very exciting announcement about an upcoming course launch.

• Part of my vision with R for Ecology is to make as accessible as possible to as many people as possible—especially ecologists and other scientists. Understanding how to work with, organize, visualize, and analyze data is essential for doing good science. Either way, I’m very fortunate to have partnered with a fantastic biologist and ecologist from Argentina named Joaquin Cochero who has done an outstanding job translating my entire Basics of R (for ecologists) course into Spanish!

• We’re off to a great start (book wise!) for 2022. Here’s 10 new additions to Big Book of R. Quite a few more paid versions of books in this round and they look good.

• Thanks to Burak Aydin, Manika Lamba, Mauricio Vargas Sepúlveda, Samrit Pramanik , Kurt Taylor Gaubatz for some of the additions.

Programming/Development

• The ldd utility is more vulnerable than you think. It’s frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong!

• In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it’s examined by ldd. I have also written a social engineering scenario on how you can get your sysadmin to unknowingly hand you his privileges.

• I researched this subject thoroughly and found that it’s almost completely undocumented. I have no idea how this could have gone unnoticed for such a long time. Here are the only few documents that mention this interesting behavior: 1, 2, 3, 4. [...]

• tl;dr: Lockfiles often protect you from malicious new versions of dependencies. When something bad happens, they empower you to know exactly which systems were affected and when, which is critical during incident response. This posts discusses “why lockfiles” and the details of setting them up properly across ~9 different package managers.

• It is common to want to parse long strings of digits into integer values. Because it is a common task, we want to optimize it as much as possible.

• In the blog post, Quickly parsing eight digits, I presented a very quick way to parse eight ASCII characters representing an integers (e.g., 12345678) into the corresponding binary value. I want to come back to it and explain it a bit more, to show that it is not magic. This works in most programming languages, but I will stick with C for this blog post.

Leftovers

• The BBC is facing a “demographic time bomb” as young people ignore its programmes at a time when the broadcaster must carry out swingeing cuts and its entire funding model is under threat.

• Only one in 20 of those aged 18-30 said that they watched any BBC television channels live every day, compared with close to half of the over-65s, according to a YouGov poll for this paper.

Education

• Whether to spark a child’s imagination or educate and inspire an adult to take action against light pollution, books are a fantastic tool in the fight to protect the night. So naturally, we’re always on the lookout for new books about dark skies and light pollution. Here are three recently released books that are on our reading list: [...]

• Had anyone at my reunion complained about the complacency of today’s students or bragged about how they got through school without taking on staggering debt, I could have reminded them that the class of ’84 was the last to have a higher percentage of grants than loans. Today’s imbalance leads too many students to buy the lie that the humanities are exclusively for rich kids. They worry that those in the 99 percent studying Aristotle or Virginia Woolf are destined for permanent residency in their parents’ basements and, if they are lucky, positions as baristas.

• The war on public education began when Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, gutted one of the best university systems in the U.S. Cutting funding for higher education by 20 percent and ending free tuition, Reagan famously said California “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” He also cut funding to public kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) schools in the state, devastating already poor and inner-city schools.

• Once he became president, Reagan tried to shut down the Department of Education. Failing that, he appointed William Bennett to head it. That heartless reactionary relentlessly attacked teachers’ unions.

• Reagan cut federal funding to education by half. The most destructive part of his legacy came from his creation of a so-called “blue ribbon” commission that produced a 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” The report promoted the lie that the U.S. educational system was a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

• This trend, in line with nationwide hiring patterns, is often decried as an existential threat to higher education. And it is true that the increasing presence of a class of underpaid and overworked lecturers operating without the guarantees of tenure indicates an ominous subordination of American higher education to the prerogatives of the market. But in California and elsewhere, nontenured faculty are here to stay. This workforce deserves its own protections and the opportunity to educate students with stability and support.

• In November, the UC system took a major step in this direction. After nearly three years of negotiations and nearly two without a contract, a deal reached Nov. 17 between the institution’s administration and UC-AFT — the union representing the University of California’s lecturers — averted a strike planned across the state-wide system. The union hailed the agreement signed with UC, as the “best contract in its history.” Lecturers received a 30% raise in wages over the six years of the contract, along with guarantees of greater job stability year over year.

• I took mathematics courses at a local university. Instead of writing in the evenings after work, I studied math. On a whim, I enrolled in a computer science course, and I was hooked. I loved the theory and its broad applicability. A computer scientist, I thought, could contribute to any field. It also helped that writing code reminded me of the good parts of writing fiction. They both begin with a goal. There are many ways to accomplish it, and the quality of the end-product lies in part on the virtue of those decisions. As a bonus, the functionality of a completed computer program can be verified. You won’t have one beta reader telling you to change the very thing another beta reader loved.

Hardware

• On Friday, Intel announced it would build the “largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet” here in the United States, on a 1,000-acre plot of land in New Albany, Ohio.

• The massive complex, which will include the construction of two chip factories in the near term, will be located in Licking County on a 1,000-acre site east of Columbus. In addition to the direct employment of 3,000 people, as many as 7,000 construction jobs and tens of thousands of additional jobs for suppliers, partners and other support-related businesses.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• For Michelle Leahy, it started with headaches, inflamed rashes on her arms and legs, and blisters in her mouth.

• Some students and staff at Sky Valley Education Center, an alternative public school in Monroe, also had strange symptoms: cognitive problems, skin cysts, girls as young as 6 suddenly hitting puberty.

• The November Navy fuel spill linked to the water contamination affecting thousands of military families in Hawaii was likely the result of “operator error,” a Navy official told lawmakers Tuesday.

• The Navy will also comply with the Hawaii Department of Health’s emergency order to drain the fuel tanks at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, which is at the center of the water crisis, officials said.

• The crisis has affected more than 9,000 Navy, Army and Air Force households at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and the Army’s Aliamanu Military Reservation and Red Hill communities, which are on the Navy water system, said Vice Adm. Yancy Lindsey, commander of Navy Installations Command.

• Anti-vaxxer disinformation activists are intensifying their attacks on medical efforts to combat the pandemic, utilizing pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion. One example is the perversion of the VAERS database, which is used to drum up opposition to vaccination against Covid-19. VAERS – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – is a data tool run by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. It was created in 1990 to provide citizens with one central location to report their experiences with potential side effects of vaccines. This database has become a key piece of “evidence” used by anti-vaxxers to cultivate public distrust of vaccines.

• The Hungarian government allowed the 4th vaccine against the Covid-19, in a bid to curb the fifth wave of the pandemic, Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s office declared in a press conference.

• “Anyone who asks can get the fourth vaccine,” Gulyás said. “Anyone can get his or her fourth vaccination following a medical consultation,” Gulyás added.

• Peter Staley fashions himself as an activist, because he used to be one, but the drug companies turned him a long time ago, and today he’s little more than a salesman covering for bad actors who are profiteering off of the AIDS crisis.

• Years ago, he started some websites like one called AidsMeds.com, is affiliated with Poz.com as a “blogger” and “editor” since the two organizations merged.

• The problem is that these websites refuse to point out the facts about HIV/AIDS medication, such as that it’s absolutely scandalous and morally bankrupt for such medicine to cost over $120 per pill.

• [...]

• The patents will make sure that we go forever and most people won’t see any of the usual price benefits of drugs going generic. I know many people with HIV, and none of them take anything that’s generic. As soon as drugs go generic, dirty doctors stop prescribing them.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• WhatsApp might be working on a feature that lets you migrate your chat history from Android to iOS, as reported by WABetaInfo via (Android Central).

• The feature was first spotted in the latest WhatsApp beta version 22.2.74 for iOS, and appears to corroborate WABetaInfo’s previous discovery in beta version 2.21.20.11 for Android. Both updates point towards a feature that may let you transfer your WhatsApp chats from Android to iOS using the Move to iOS app.

• An Oakland, California court has ordered Roblox YouTube creator Ruben Sim to stay off the popular gaming platform from which he’s been banned for several years, according to court documents obtained by Polygon.

• The Roblox Corporation filed a lawsuit against Sim in November, accusing the YouTuber of leading a “cybermob” that terrorized the platform. The company was originally looking for $1.6 million in damages, but decreased that amount to $150,000 in a dually agreed-upon stipulated order and final judgment by the court.

• A security vulnerability in Apple’s browsers for macOS, iOS and iPadOS can lead to information disclosure, researchers have warned. Apple has just marked the issue as “resolved,” but it will take some time for the fixes to roll out, they said, so users should implement mitigations.

• According to researchers at FingerprintJS, the bug is a same-origin policy violation. Typically, a web browser permits scripts on one web page to access data on a second web page only if both pages have the same origin/back-end server. Without this security policy in place, a snooper who manages to inject a malicious script into one website would be able to have free access to any data contained in other tabs the victim may have open in the browser, including access to online banking sessions, emails, healthcare portal data and other sensitive information.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The advisory was reportedly sent out twice last year to warn athletes about the possibility of digital surveillance while in China. “Every device, communication, transaction and online activity may be monitored,” the bulletin states. “Your device(s) may also be compromised with malicious software, which could negatively impact future use.” As noted by the WSJ, Great Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands have also cautioned athletes against bringing their personal electronics into the country.

• As the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gears up to host the 2022 Winter Olympics from Feb. 4, security researchers in Canada have highlighted “serious security flaws” in a compulsory app for all participants.

• The app, “MY2022″, is mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, and contains a “simple but devastating flaw” where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab reported.

• Following a complaint by noyb, the Information & Data Protection Commissioner (IDPC) imposed a fine of 65 000 € on the IT company C-Planet. The company had illegally collected data of 98% of Maltese voters, including political preferences and failed to take appropriate data-protection measures. C-Planet notified neither the users nor the data protection authority about the data breach.

• It reads like a fairly simple statement: „Data not collected“. Apple introduced such clear privacy labels for apps on its mobile operating system iOS over a year ago. They are supposed to show whether and which data the app passes on to its operators or third parties.

• A sizeable portion of apps claim not to collect any data from users. But many of these labels are clearly false, as a technical analysis shared exclusively with netzpolitik.org has shown. Computer scientist Konrad Kollnig from Oxford University examined 1,682 randomly selected apps from Apple’s App Store. 373 of the apps tested (22.2 percent) claim not to collect personal data. However, four out of five, 299 apps in total, contacted known tracking domains immediately after the first app launch and without gaining user consent. (Data to be published soon, more details on the method here.)

• Military families in the midst of moving continue to suffer as shipping disruptions leave them without their household goods for extended periods of time after they’ve arrived at their new duty stations.

• One Army wife, Valerie McNulty, deployed a brilliant solution to help track down her family’s household goods as they made a permanent change of station move from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Fort Drum, New York. Concerned about lost or delayed items, McNulty attached an Apple AirTag to one of the boxes prior to the move.

Defence/Aggression

• Human rights advocates reacted angrily Sunday to a leaked report suggesting that no Israeli soldiers are likely to be charged in connection with the fatal detention of an elderly Palestinian-American man by occupation forces in a West Bank town earlier this month.

• “Yet another example of why Israel cannot be trusted to investigate its own violations.”

• The emails show how a group of fringe election sleuths pressed state legislators on a plan to disrupt the 2020 election certification and potentially change the vote count in a battleground state that helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency. The emails also reveal that several Trump advisers, including campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis and legal adviser Bernie Kerik, were included in the discussion.

• Authorities in western China’s Sichuan province are beating and arresting Tibetan monks suspected of informing outside contacts about the destruction of a sacred statue, Tibetan sources say.

• The 99-foot tall Buddha which stood in Drago (in Chinese, Luhuo) county in the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Region was targeted for demolition in December by officials who said the statue had been built too high.

• The police were called at around 10 am. According to this relative, the 30-year-old was in possession of a knife and a Qur’ an and intended to “kill policemen and civilians”.He was so far not known for any alleged radicalisation, but was already known to the police for committing a number of offences.

• The video, she said, “demonstrates the immense focus ISIS is placing on Africa” and puts a “spotlight on Nigeria as one of its strongholds and projecting itself as an adaptive, enduring force to the world.”

• The 27-minute video also shows child fighters training in open fields and classrooms. In one scene, masked fighters who looked as young as 10 are seen in a classroom as an older scholar takes them through the Islamic State’s teachings and doctrines. In another scene, the fighters are seen training with rifles.

• Military sources told SaharaReporters that the terrorists mounted roadblocks in the Gubio Local Government Area on Wednesday, issuing tax receipts to travellers.

• SaharaReporters gathered that defaulters were forced by the insurgents to pay while the mobile phones of those who didn’t have money were seized.

Environment

• Environmental justice is a crucial component of the broader struggle for a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future. So is the end of the fossil fuel era; in fact, decarbonization and environmental justice go hand in hand.

• The blaze swept through an area with little or no fire history, according to the National Weather Service. “Pictures on social media suggest some pretty surreal fire behavior given the wet Oct and Dec that was observed across the region,” the National Weather Service said on Twitter.

• A section of California’s famous Highway 1 was closed Saturday morning as a fire burning near the Pacific Ocean prompted evacuations close to the state’s Big Sur region.

• Firefighters on Saturday were battling a wildfire that broke out in the rugged mountains along Big Sur, forcing hundreds of residents on this precarious stretch of the California coast to evacuate and authorities to shut its main roadway.

• The fire started Friday night in a steep canyon and quickly spread toward the sea, fanned by strong winds up to 50 mph. The blaze burned at least 2.3 square miles of brush and redwood trees, said Cecile Juliette, a spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

• The fire broke out Friday night in a steep canyon. Fanned by wind gusts of up to 50 mph (80 kph), it quickly burned at least 2.3 square miles (6 square kilometers) of brush and redwood trees, said Cecile Juliette, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

• We are not drowning, we are fighting” has become the rallying call for the Pacific Climate Warriors. From UN climate meetings to blockades of Australian coal ports, these young Indigenous defenders from twenty Pacific Island states are raising the alarm of global warming for low-lying atoll nations. Rejecting the narrative of victimization – “you don’t need my pain or tears to know that we’re in a crisis,” as Samoan Brianna Fruean puts it – they are challenging the fossil fuel industry and colonial giants such as Australia, responsible for the world’s highest per-capita carbon emissions.

Energy

• Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure. It exists – and is hundreds of years old.

• It is impossible to move an NFT bought on a proprietary blockchain to a private wallet. While that’s a savvy business move ensuring that the minter takes a share of any future sale of NFT trading cards — the smart contract being put into full corporate effect — this means that NFT collectors will have multiple wallets in the future with no way to collate their collection into one place.

• Twitter recently introduced the misguided feature of NFT avatars. The move has been championed by scammers and the duped, and met with howls of derision by everyone else. Twitter didn’t jump the shark, they launched it into space.

• Given NFTs consist only of a hashed URL to an image that can be arbitrarily changed, are backed by technology that’s easily and regularly manipulated, aren’t a legal contract, nor confer any ownership, their popularity is bizarre. But then, if people were informed, no blockchain-backed technology would be taken seriously.

• This should surprise no one who understands how cryptocurrency works. Blockchains are, at their core, simply append-only spreadsheets maintained across decentralized “peer-to-peer” networks, not unlike those used for torrenting pirated files. Just as torrents allow users to share files directly, cryptocurrency blockchains allow users to maintain a shared ledger of financial transactions without the need of a central server or managing authority. Users are thus able to make direct online transactions with one another as if they were trading cash.

Wildlife/Nature

• On Thursday morning, I got up to take my spouse to work. On the way back, I noticed a Husky dog dragging himself down the street by his front legs.

• I turned the car around and called 911, seeing that the dog was in trouble and that someone ran him over. I explained to the dispatcher where I was and asked that they please send animal control out to help the dog.

• Unfortunately, it was too late, and the dog’s injuries were far too severe. He suffered for about 45 more minutes before they could get down there, while looking in my eyes and occasionally howling because of the pain.

• He was dragging a leash with him that was connected to a stake that someone tied him into their yard with. The temperature was about 2 degrees F according to my car, and all I could do was take the leash off of him and wait with him.

• I called later to see if they were able to help him and was told he had to be euthanized.

• People who tie a dog up in the cold are not only assholes, but they’re breaking the law. That dog is their responsibility, and they should consider him their family and their friend. But there’s also something seriously wrong with whoever hit the dog and didn’t call the cops and at least report that they hit him.

• We live in a world full of criminals and people with no respect for anything, and it sickens me what has happened to this country of ours.

• Ever since I moved from Indiana to Illinois, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of depravity over here like I’ve never seen before. In Indiana, you tend to know your neighbors. Most people are at least polite.

• [...]

• I doubt whoever left that poor Husky dog on the road will ever get their day in court because our system is so overwhelmed with crime that the case will never get worked, and the state itself is off assisting murderers and stating that it’s not a crime if you do it quickly enough.

• I can’t imagine that a government like this would prioritize a dog if it doesn’t care about children.

• I wonder how Illinois can be so close to Indiana and yet so far away. Illinois is stacked from top to bottom with degenerates, and I actually really do miss my home state.

Finance

• Just like the trickle-down economics of a generation ago, stokeholder capitalism provides a moral justification for the pursuit of corporate self-interest while inequality gets worse and worse.

• The paper is meant to act as “the first step in a discussion,” and doesn’t advocate for actually creating a “central bank digital currency” (or CBDC). Still, the creation of a digital dollar would be a massive shift in how big a role the government would play in our finances. Potential downsides could include making commercial banks less attractive to consumers, and affect the Fed’s ability to influence the financial system. The Fed is now inviting comments, including on anything the paper may have missed.

• The Federal Reserve on Thursday released its long-awaited exploration of a digital dollar but took no position on the issuance of a central bank digital currency.

• Instead, the central bank’s 40-page document explores a plethora of issues and notes that public comment will be solicited.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Other surveys around that time told a similar story. In 2011, Time magazine reported a poll showing that the U.S. was going through “one of its longest sustained periods of unhappiness and pessimism ever,” adding that it was “hard to overstate what a fundamental change this represents.” Two-thirds of Americans believed the past decade was one of decline, not progress, for the U.S. (68%), and that the greatest threat to the long-term stability of the U.S. came from within, not from outside, the country (66%).

• On Thursday, the European Parliament voted to approve the initial draft of a bill that aims to curb Big Tech’s invasive advertising practices (via Bloomberg). The Parliament adopted the draft with 530 votes of approval, 78 against, and 80 absentations.

• The Digital Services Act, which was first introduced in 2020, will prevent platforms, like Google, Amazon, and the Meta-owned Facebook, from using sensitive information, such as sexual orientation, race, and religion for targeted ads. It will require services to give users the ability to easily opt out of tracking, and pressures platforms to remove illegal content and products online, including hate speech or counterfeit goods.

• Famous Turkish Twitch streamer Pelin Baynazoğlu, known by her nickname Pqueen, has announced that an investigation was launched against her over a dance move she made in one of her streams.

• Butler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. Later, in an essay in the socialist magazine Common Sense, Butler confessed to having been a “racketeer for capitalism,” elaborating that, as “a member of our country’s most agile military force,” he had served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” In 1936, Marine Corps informants sent to spy on the ex-general observed him speaking on a panel alongside self-identified Communists and reported that “the General appeared to us to be either insane or an out and out traitor.”

• Citing Kyrsten Sinema’s obstruction of her own party’s pro-democracy agenda, a pair of progressive U.S. lawmakers said Sunday that they support the Arizona Democratic Party’s decision to censure the stymying senator.

• “I think what the Arizona state party is saying is that ‘Kyrsten Sinema no longer reflects our values.’”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Moalimuu spent years working for the BBC, reporting on the all-too-frequent terrorist attacks and suicide bombings that have killed thousands of innocent people in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

• Ms Kabas was arrested on Saturday in Istanbul and a court ordered her to be jailed ahead of a trial.

• She is accused of targeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a proverb which she quoted on live television on an opposition-linked TV channel. She denies the charge.

• The charge carries a prison sentence of between one and four years.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Amending Missouri’s open records law to permit government agencies to withhold more information from the public — and charge more for any records that are turned over — is among Gov. Mike Parson’s priorities for the 2022 legislative session.

• The changes, which were outlined in a presentation to Parson’s cabinet that was obtained by The Independent through an open records request, include a proposal to allow government agencies to charge fees for the time attorneys spend reviewing records requested by the public.

• Such a change would reverse a recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling against Parson’s office that found attorney review time was not “research time” under the Sunshine Law and thus could not be charged.

• Led by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), more than 26 antiwar groups and 2,500 individual peace and justice advocates have cosponsored a statement (tinyurl.com/2p9fb4es) calling for the immediate release of publisher Julian Assange and commending him for his contributions toward global peace.

• In the year 2022, it is highly likely that the press will experience another wave of attacks in the region.

• Gauging from the 2021 Reporters Without Borders Index, the attacks and threats on media freedom are going to escalate.

• Only three Southern African countries made progress according to the 2021 Index, namely, Botswana, Malawi and Zambia, moving up by one, seven and five steps, respectively, compared to previous rankings.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The younger generation may be the first group in modern history that won’t do better financially than their parents. With tens or hundreds of thousands in student-loan debt, young adults find it almost impossible to purchase a home, get married and start a family. The debt burden, along with rising home prices and inflation, doesn’t leave them with sufficient funds to afford the lifestyle that Baby Boomers took for granted.

• Just three days after the news broke that Microsoft will buy Activision Blizzard, workers at a developer owned by the video game holdings company, Raven Software, announced that they were forming a union.

• Quality assurance workers at the Wisconsin-based developer, which is behind Call of Duty: War Zone and Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, have aligned themselves with labor giant the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and are calling their group the Game Workers Alliance Union. The CWA is also behind the union at Vodeo Games, recently voluntarily recognized by management, which the CWA called the first certified union at a video games studio in North America.

• In those two hours, Santiago drove home with Dymka’s body in the back seat and then returned to the crash site having never called 911 or attempted to render aid to the man, prosecutors say.

• “Put that body back where you hit it,” Annette Santiago allegedly told her son when he showed up at their home, according to prosecutors.

• He’s now facing 12 felony charges, including reckless vehicular homicide and endangering an injured victim. Guzman and Santiago’s mother were also charged with allegedly tampering with evidence and other offenses.

• The Taliban stormed an apartment in Kabul smashing the door in and arresting a woman rights activist and her three sisters, an eyewitness said Thursday. A Taliban statement appeared to blame the incident on a recent women’s protest, saying insulting Afghan values will no longer be tolerated.

• The activist, Tamana Zaryabi Paryani, was among about 25 women who took part in an anti-Taliban protest on Sunday against the compulsory Islamic headscarf, or hijab, for women. A person from the neighborhood who witnessed the arrest said about 10 armed men, claiming to be from the Taliban intelligence department, carried out the raid on Wednesday night.

• Shortly before she and her sisters were taken away, footage of Paryani was posted on social media, showing her frightened and breathless and screaming for help, saying the Taliban were banging on her door.

• Zarema Yangulbayeva, the 52-year-old mother of Abubakar Yangulbayev, a lawyer of the Committee Against Torture NGO, was taken from her apartment in Nizhny Novgorod on the evening of January 20 by masked men who introduced themselves as Chechen police officers.

• A civil activist and niece of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is being held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison following her detention last week after she took part in a celebration praising the widow of the ousted shah, her brother has told RFE/RL.

• Farideh Moradkhani, a daughter of Khamenei’s sister known for her activism against the death penalty, was detained on January 14 at her home in the Iranian capital.

• In mid-December 2020, the Minya Criminal Court acquitted the three defendants in the case of Thabet. An appeal was set forth in January 2021 and submitted in February 2021 for the Court of Cassation to challenge the ruling that set her assailants free. To date, no hearings have been set, no reparation has been provided, and no courts have sought to move the case forward.

• The past decade has been particularly brutal as the upheavals have left Christians in parts of Iraq, Syria and beyond under the control of Islamist militants. They were subject to the whims of their new rulers, who banned their religious practices, seized their properties and even singled them out for death at times.

• Over nine decades, Mr. al-Jisri went from being a member of a Christian community in Idlib that blended easily into the city’s social fabric to one of only three known Christians who remain there.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Internet provider WOW! must share the personal details of hundreds of subscribers with a group of filmmakers. The requirement, signed off by a Colorado federal court, is part of the discovery process in an ongoing legal battle. The targeted accounts are limited to the IP addresses that were most frequently flagged for alleged copyright infringements.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.