● 02.14.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/2/2022: KDE on ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 10:14 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• This week has been a bit slow on Linux news, probably because of the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday, but we had some big ones like the release of the KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 distribution, Firefox 97 web browser, OBS Studio 27.2 live streaming and recording software, as well as the KDE Frameworks 5.91 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02 software suites.

• On top of that, I take a look at the Fragments BitTorrent client as the Flatpak app of this week and the new Kalendar 1.0 calendar app for the Plasma desktop environment, and tell you all about the changes in the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-22 software update for your Linux phone or tablet. You can enjoy this and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for February 13th, 2022, below!

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux is the master of small computers, and this week it’s going to the next level. We chat with the creator of the $15 Linux box and share some significant updates for the Raspberry Pi.

Kernel Space

• Intel has revealed it plans to have its mysterious plans for software-defined silicon delivered in the next version of the Linux kernel.

• The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

• Intel later updated its SDSI code, but maintained silence on its full capabilities, said nothing about what processors it would work with, and even suggested it might not be related to a real product.

• The Register has never found that stance credible: the maintainers of the Linux kernel are not fond of having junk code inserted into the project, and SDSI is too complex and tantalizing an idea for it to be an Intel thought bubble.

• Welcome to the concluding chapter of this three-part blog series on the low latency Ubuntu kernel for industrial embedded systems.

• Each blog is standalone and can be read independently from the others, although you may want to start at the beginning for some continuity. If you need a quick refresher on userland and kernel space, we recommend you check Part I out first. In Part II, we looked at preemption in Linux, the timer interrupt frequency, and the config options adopted by the low latency Ubuntu kernel.

• If you are a bit rusty with these concepts, going back to Part I and Part II may help to refresh your memory. Otherwise, keep moving as you are almost at the end of your low latency journey!

Graphics Stack

• Vulkan post-processing layer vkBasalt allows Linux gamers to run various visual enhancement features, along with support for running various Reshade Fx shaders. A fantastic project that can really bring new life to older games, or to improve newer games that have a lack of good graphical tweaking options.

Benchmarks

• Intel Alder Lake is generally touted to run best under Windows 11 given the scheduling improvements in the new OS and the new Intel Thread Director technology that helps assign corresponding tasks to the P-cores and E-cores. However, now it looks like Linux could be the better OS of choice to extract the maximum performance from processors such as the Core i9-12900K.

• Since launch, Windows 11 was considered necessary for optimal performance of the Core i9-12900K. That changes now with the advent of Linux kernel 5.16 which brings better hybrid handling and other improvements. The Linux kernel 5.16 also comes with new FUTEX2 (fast user mutex) syscalls that should help with improved gaming performance, particularly for Windows games running on Wine.

Applications

• Mpd is a music player daemon and ncmpcpp is a music client. The client ncmpcpp runs in a terminal and connects to the daemon or server side to get the music. We start with reading the arch wiki of MPD and the arch wiki of NCMPCPP to get a general overview of what these applications are and how they can function. Google “ncmpcpp” and ask for images if you want to see what you can achieve in regards to the theming.

Instructionals/Technical

• Interested in running Xubuntu on your Raspberry PI, but you can’t find an installation image for it? That’s because the Xubuntu team doesn’t offer it for the Raspberry PI’s ARMv7/v8 architecture. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible. With a few tricks you can get this Ubuntu based and lightweight XFCE desktop distribution working on your Raspberry PI. It’s not even that much work. Read on for detailed instructions on getting Xubuntu running on your Raspberry PI.

• You can find many Nvidia tutorials on this website. I will always be restricted to the hardware in my possesion.

• Other users have reported this tool to work great. Let me bring it under your attention. There are however other tools out there. Look at the Arch wiki page to learn more about them.

• VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a protocol that enables one to access the graphical desktop of a remote PC over a network connection. In addition, it allows sending keyboard and mouse signals to the remote PC, thus making tasks like managing files, applying configurations, and installing software much more accessible.

• In this post we will give you a step-by-step guide on how to install VNC on Debian 10 or Debian 11, how to connect to your Debian machine via VNC, and how to install multiple popular desktop environments and switch between them.

• Before considering how to do that, what about the reverse situation? if the user edits /etc/uimanager and changes back to icon-on-desktop, when X starts, /root/.xinitrc calls a script that will remove all lines between “STARTICONS” and “ENDICONS” in /root/.jwmrc-tray. That script is also going to be subject to the potential out-of-order writing problem.

• Nmap, also known as Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool network administrators use to scan for vulnerabilities within their network and network discovery.

• Nmap allows finding devices running on their network and discovering open ports and services that, if not secure or hardened, can lead to potential hackers exploiting known vulnerabilities security risks.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and primary use Nmap on Rocky Linux 8 Workstation or Server.

• SSH or known by its full name Secure Shell Protocol, is a cryptographic network communication protocol that enables two computers to communicate securely over an unsecured network. SSH is highly used for remote login applications and command-line executables such as terminal applications.

• For users wishing to connect to servers or other computers with SSH, the client and the remote connection need to both have SSH installed and enabled for this to be possible.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and enable SSH on Rocky Linux 35 Workstation or Server and connect to a remote PC.

• Joplin is a free and open-source note-taking application that can be used on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. It’s been designed with both professionals in mind and consumers looking for an easy way to capture ideas anytime, anywhere without having to worry about running out of space again!

• The product has many features similar to those found within Evernote. Still, it offers more flexibility when editing your data – everything from font style choices down to color schemes is at the user’s disposal, meaning there isn’t one “perfect” option amongst them, which makes finding exactly what you’re after easier than ever before.

• For more information on the pervasive list of features Joplin offers, visit the official GitHub project page to learn more before installing.

• Vsftpd is a GPL licensed FTP server for UNIX systems, including Linux. It stands for Very Secure File Transfer Protocol Daemon. It is stable, secure and extremely fast.

• FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It has been a standard method for transferring files between computers for decades.

• In this guide we will learn how to install an SFTP server in Rocky linux 8 using vsftp for transferring files between client and server quickly and securely via the FTP protocol.

• Qlipper is a clipboard history for Linux systems, here we learn the steps to install Qlipper on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.

• Microsoft has already implemented a clipboard feature to give users access to recently copied items’ paths or files. Whereas in Linux, if you want the same, then Qlipper is one of the good options to go for. It offers a Clipboard that saves the history of items we have recently copied.

• This helps the user to get the history of copied items’ paths, which can be used again if he or she wants. Qlipper is a lightweight and cross-platform clipboard history applet, and will not consume many resources on your PC.

• The key task of Qlipper is to monitor and interact with the system’s Clipboard to save its recent data.

• It requires some configuration, but a rootless user can use Jenkins to create OCI-compliant images on OpenShift.

• TShark is designed as a CLI or command-line interface of Wireshark for capturing and analyzing packets right from the CLI. Most people are unaware of TShark as opposed to commonly used Wireshark. TShark comes included with Wireshark. This is particularly helpful when a GUI is not available. All the options used in Wireshark are also supported here. For e.g. captured packets can be stored in a file and later retrieved for analysis. The default capture file format is pcapng which is the same as used by Wireshark. The benefit of using TShark is that it can be included in scripts (it can be used inside a python script) and can be used on remote systems via SSH. The drawback is of course that it does not have a GUI. Like Wireshark, TShark is available for major operating systems: Linux, Mac OS, Windows.

• The LVM, as a storage model, has been widely used on machines with Linux architectures, including PCS, NAS, and servers. Its value is self-evident. As a widely used, mature software, the tutorials of how to use LVM are already all over the internet.

• However, these tutorials are all based on command-line tools. The command-line tool, while powerful and complete, is complex and very unintuitive, making it difficult for users to understand LVM, especially for beginners.

• Just like partitioning tools, various graphical or semi-graphical (character-based) tools make partitioning easy to read in a very intuitive way. Learning LVM concepts and operations through graphical tools also greatly reduces the cost of user learning.

• Let’s guide you on the LVM concepts & LVM managing through graphical tools.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VNC Server on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing (VNC), a system that used to remotely share and access the screen of computers. It enables users to access the remote computer’s graphical desktop and send mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to the remote system.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the VNC Server on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

• One might think that sudo is actually some binary deeply integrated into the kernel, relying on a special purpose-built system call to achieve its functionality. After all, it lets you use root without even providing the password for that account! But thanks to one bit inside file permissions, sudo can exist without any of this.

• In this post, you will learn how to install Nextcloud on Rocky Linux 8.

• As we all know, with Nextcloud, we can deploy our private cloud where we don’t have to trust our files to anyone.

• For this very reason, is that many companies have instances to share data between workers without trusting third parties that can steal data.

• So let’s go for it.

• NodeJS is an open-source JavaScript runtime created on Chrome’s V8 JS engine. It uses a non-blocking lightweight event-driven input-output model that makes it possible for asynchronous programming. It can be referred to as a serverless environment that runs JS-based scripts to build scalable apps.

• NodeJS is primarily known for building scalable and fast network apps. Developers know it as a programming language used for websites, event-driven servers, and active backend APIs. Therefore, NodeJS has been termed a “JavaScript everywhere” regime due to its ability to integrate app and web development around a single Programming language.

• ffmpeg was created by Fabrice Bellard the same creator as QEMU and QuickJS, the engine behind JSLinux.

• In addition to the conventional conversion commands that we use on a daily basis, let’s see 15 more utilities that can be good for you in many cases.

• I have used Linux for about 25 years and Unix for a few years before that. During that time, I have developed preferences for some tools that I use daily. One of the most important tools I use is the Vim editor.

• I started using Vi when I learned Solaris in the early ‘90s because I was told that it would always be available on any system, which is true in my experience. I have tried other editors, and they all do the job. However, I find that Vim works best for me, and I use it so much that my Vim muscle memory causes me to attempt to use its command keystrokes even with other editors.

• Plus, I just really like Vim.

• Many configuration files use Vi instead of Vim, and you can run the vi command. However, the vi command is a link to vim.

• Many Linux tools use editors that emulate or just call Nano, Emacs, or Vim. Some other tools allow users—like those with clear preferences—to link to their favorite editor. The two examples that affected me the most were Bash command-line editing, which defaults to Emacs, and the Alpine text-mode email client, which defaults to the Pico editor. In fact, the Pico editor was written explicitly for use in the Pine email client, which is the predecessor to Alpine.

• You use Kubernetes to orchestrate containers. It’s an easy description to say, but understanding what that actually means and how you accomplish it is another matter entirely. If you’re running or managing a Kubernetes cluster, then you know that Kubernetes consists of one computer that gets designated as the control plane, and lots of other computers that get designated as worker nodes. Each of these has a complex but robust stack making orchestration possible, and getting familiar with each component helps understand how it all works.

• You might have a situation where you want to remove multiple files that have a particular extension. This tutorial will help you do exactly that.

• Ansible provides hundreds of modules which are reusable standalone scripts that get executed by Ansible on your behalf. The Ansible debug module is a handy module that prints statements during playbook execution. Additionally, it can be used to debug expressions and variables without interfering with the playbook execution.

• In this guide, we are going to demonstrate how to use debug module in ansible playbook with examples.

• Wine is the ultimate solution for Linux users on distros like Ubuntu that still have an eye for the Windows operating system experience. With Wine’s compatible layer on Linux, it is possible to interact with your favorite Windows applications on a Linux environment.

• Wine’s advantage over virtual machines and emulators is that Windows API calls are translated into POSIX calls, disregarding the simulation of internal Windows logic (an approach by emulators and virtual machines).

• Wine’s approach in running Windows applications saves it from memory and performance penalties resulting in the seamless integration of Windows applications on your Ubuntu Desktop.

• Qlipper is a clipboard history for Linux systems, here we learn the steps to install Qlipper on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.

• Microsoft has already implemented a clipboard feature to give users access to recently copied items’ paths or files. Whereas in Linux, if you want the same, then Qlipper is one of the good options to go for. It offers a Clipboard that saves the history of items we have recently copied.

• This helps the user to get the history of copied items’ paths, which can be used again if he or she wants. Qlipper is a lightweight and cross-platform clipboard history applet, and will not consume many resources on your PC.

• The key task of Qlipper is to monitor and interact with the system’s Clipboard to save its recent data.

Games

• Sent in by a reader a while ago and one I’ve been meaning to try out properly, Super Auto Pets is a free to play auto-battler from Team Wood Games that’s delightfully good. A game that’s annoyingly moreish, as you’re going to want to play through just one more run.

• Auto-battling probably doesn’t need much of an introduction: you carefully build up a team of creatures, then proceed to turn-based battles that happen automatically without your direct input. In between each round you go back to the preparation area to sell creatures, level them up, buy new more advanced creatures or perhaps give them an extra bonus or two. Then it’s back to battling and repeat. Here the battles are one-dimensional though, so your positioning is a vital part of the strategy as they will fight at the front until one is down, then the next and so on.

• A biographical adventure set on an island like no other, Welcome to Elk from developer Triple Topping has a new update available that aims to make the experience on Linux with Steam Play Proton and the Steam Deck better.

• Running it on Linux is easy. S

• Want to build up a bigger collection of games to play with friends or a partner? Check out the Friendship Games Week that’s live now on Steam. Arranged by Frogsong Studios, the event runs until February 21.

• Featuring a mix of games that support split-screen, co-op, local multiplayer and more this is a hand-picked selection of some great picks and unknown gems to take a look over. An easy way for you to find something new to buy or stick on your wishlist. A number of included games are also on sale too so perhaps time to find a bargain.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After five years of making, root file operation finally lands in the Dolphin file manager of KDE Plasma desktop. Here’s how to use Dolphin with root access.

• KDE recently shared its monthly updates on the latest app developments and progress, as usual.

• While the Falkon 3.2 release was a significant upgrade, there were several other updates/bug fixes to other KDE applications.

• However, there was one interesting thing about it.

• [...]

• Considering the early developments for the ARM platform, I’d say it is good progress when compared to the number of devices available.

• As of now, the Raspberry Pi users and the PinePhone pro users can immediately benefit from new KDE applications.

• As we start to see more ARM-powered devices or laptops, you should expect almost everyone to start prepping for ARM.

Distributions

• Kali Linux, Debian-derived Linux Distribution keeps getting better. When I learned about this Linux Distribution a few years ago it had the reputation it has today and with time, many things about this Distro changed, fortunately for the better.

• Unlike Parrot OS at the time, Kali was heavy on hardware. And, even though to some that might still be the case the available options we have today make up for most of that. Depending on how you look at things the hardware requirements necessary to have this distro up and running can be justified I mean, what would one use Kali for with only 1GB of RAM and a single-core CPU with 1GHz speed? This obviously wouldn’t provide the best experience besides the fact that some of the tools on this OS perform better with the minimum requirements or better.

Reviews

• Slackware Linux is the world’s oldest surviving Linux distribution. The distribution is a slow moving project, often with several years between releases. The gap between Slackware 14.2 and the latest 15.0 release was about five and a half years, for example.

• Slackware has a well deserved reputation for stability and for having a simple technical design. A design which frequently ignores modern approaches to system management. Slackware still uses a text-based system installer, has 90s-era approaches to package management, and prefers editing text files over graphical tools when it comes time to adjust most configuration settings. The distribution’s official media does not offer a live desktop environment, though there is a community branch which provides live media for people who wish to test the distribution on their hardware. The project’s official release announcement acknowledges this slow-to-change style, noting Slackware is just now adopting PAM authentication (something most other Linux distributions have used since the 1990s) and continues to use the classic SysV init software instead of systemd: “We adopted PAM (finally) as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11.”

• In other words, while Slackware runs a lot of modern software such as KDE Plasma 5.15, version 5.15 of the Linux kernel, and PipeWire the underlying style and approach are still very much the same as they were 25 years ago.

• Slackware 15.0 is available for 32-bit and 64-bit builds of the x86 architecture. There is also an ARM branch of the project, though install media for it was not available on release day. The 64-bit (x86_64) build is a 3.6GB download.

• The Slackware media boots to a text screen where we can select kernel options. This is followed by a second text screen where we are given the chance to select a keyboard map. The install media then drops us at a console login prompt where we can sign in as root without a password. Above the login prompt is a helpful message letting us know we will need to format the disk and set up at least one partition, then run the setup command in order to get started.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Learn the commands to convert Almalinux into Rocky Linux server or desktop using the terminal with the help of an official script.

• With the announcement of RedHat that it is dropping the long-term support in CentOS 8, other developers came with their own similar Linux distro- Almalinux & Rocky Linux 8 are one of those. Well, both Almalinux & Rocky are based on RedHat Enterprise Linux with one-to-one binary compatibility.

• Although it is not necessary to move from Almalinux to Rocky because both are the same, except the developers behind them. Both are community enterprise Linux distributions and downstream to RHEL. Nevertheless, still due to any reason you want to switch from AlmaLinux to Rocky, the official developers of “Alma” provide a script that automates the migration process smoothly.

• Fedora gave me the opportunity to learn more about the Linux distro. Now I make applications for the Linux Fedora operating system. I’m sure with a little research I’ll be able to package for other Linux distros

• Change data capture (CDC) is a powerful data processing tool widely used in the industry, and provided by the open source Debezium project. CDC notifies your application whenever changes are made to a data set so that you can react promptly. This tutorial demonstrates how to use Debezium to monitor a MySQL database. As the data in the database changes, the resulting event streams are reflected in Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka.

• Debezium includes connectors for many types of data stores. In this tutorial, we will use the MySQL connector.

• Over the past two years, people have faced significant change in nearly every facet of their lives. Adjusting to this much change so quickly can be exhausting – making change fatigue a growing concern for many of us.

• As an IT leader, you need to proactively address this issue to maintain your teams’ health and productivity. After all, your company’s biggest asset is not your products, your services, or your capabilities ‒ it’s your people.

• In a recent Gartner survey of 274 HR leaders, 54 percent say their employees are fatigued from all the change. It’s driven by both large-scale, organization-wide changes and small day-to-day adjustments. What might seem like a minor change or system shift could be making a big impact on your team.

• [...]

• It’s critical to understand the amount of change your organization can effectively handle. In a recent Prosci survey, 73 percent of respondents said that their organizations were near, at, or beyond the change saturation point.

• Organizations that have reached that critical point of change saturation often begin to experience these negative effects: project priorities changing, bottlenecks emerging, progress and productivity slowing, client and customer complaints increasing.

• Internal emails show IBM executives calling older workers “dinobabies” and discussing plans to make them “an extinct species,” according to a Friday filing in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit against the company.

• The documents were submitted as evidence of IBM’s efforts “to oust older employees from its workforce,” and replace them with millennial workers, the plaintiff alleged. It’s the latest development in a legal battle that first began in 2018, when former employees sued IBM after the company fired tens of thousands of workers over 40-years-old.

• One high-ranking executive, whose name was redacted from the lawsuit, said IBM had a “dated maternal workforce.”

• “This is what must change,” the email continues, per the filing. “They really don’t understand social or engagement. Not digital natives. A real threat for us.”

• The exchanges are “highly incriminating” and “reflects age animus from IBM’s highest ranks,” plaintiff Shannon Liss-Riordan wrote. Liss-Riordan is a well-known employment lawyer who has represented workers in cases against Google, Amazon, and Uber.

Debian Family

• If you are a Linux enthusiast, you have a reason to rejoice. After three long years, Peppermint OS 11 is ready to grace your desktop again. With OS 11, Peppermint aims to deliver cutting-edge, open-source Linux computing, even for your low-end systems.

• Peppermint OS 11 makes a few tectonic changes since its predecessors, that are bound to impress you. Read on if you want to learn about the new features of Peppermint OS 11 before installing a copy of the distro.

• I am very happy to report that a new version of the VLC bittorrent plugin was just uploaded into debian. The changes since last time is mostly code clean in the download code. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing son. To test it, simply install it like this:

• apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent

Devices/Embedded

• Roundy is a board with a 1.28-inch round color LCD with 240 x 240 resolution that is offered with either a Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU or an ESP-12E WiFi module, with the variants respectively called RoundyPi and RoundyFi.

• Both boards come with a micro USB port for power and programming, a button for flashing the firmware, and six pins with power signals and four GPIOs. One difference is that the Raspberry Pi RP2040 board includes a MicroSD card for data storage.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The first Android 13 developer preview may have felt a bit underwhelming, but there’s a hidden gem with full virtualization possible on hardware such as the Google Pixel 6 smartphone.

• What that means is that it is now possible to run virtually any operating system including Windows 11, Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Arch Linux Arm on the Google Tensor-powered phone, and do so at near-native speed.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Adobe is a large multinational computer software company with over 22,000 employees. Its flagship products include Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, Acrobat DC, and the Portable Document Format (PDF). The products are wrapped up and marketed as the Creative Cloud, a subscription-only way of accessing more than 20 desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more.

• We are long-standing admirers of Adobe’s products. They develop many high quality proprietary programs. It’s true there are security and privacy concerns in relation to some of their products. And there’s considerable criticism attached to their pricing practices. But the real issue is Adobe Creative Cloud does not support Linux. And there’s no prospect of support forthcoming.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• As humans we’re bad at change; we much prefer what we know and actively protect the status quo. Like it or not, the uncertainty we’ve all experienced over the last two years has forced change upon us. This has challenged organisations to find real alternative solutions to new operational challenges, such as homeworking, and question many of the norms that had previously been ‘set in stone.’

• For most organisations, office document functionality underpins their productivity. We’ve all relied on it for years without giving it much thought – it was ‘set in stone.’ Yes, software updates and improvements in functionality have been introduced over the years, but the basic environment has remained familiar, which has helped maintain productivity.

• As its name suggests, office document software has been optimised for a traditional office environment. For most organisations pre-pandemic this meant manageable, predictable office buildings in which their staff gathered together to work. The need to enable and support widespread homeworking changed all of this.

• Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like the last two years, FOSDEM is and remains the largest and most important gathering of Open-Source developers in Europe. We’d like to express our gratitude to the community and the organisers. The Collabora team gave numerous talks in the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Missed a presentation? Below you will find links to all videos and to the downloads of the slides.

Leftovers

• Based upon reams of fascinating scientific and metaphysical research, Selbie connects the dots in a masterful blend of science and religion taken to the edge of multi-universes and beyond to the heart of the astral plane.

• Our existence is much more than a boring standardized physical life on Earth. Selbie offers an uplifting view of so much more with considerable science-based evidence as well as personal experiences by people of intellectual stature. Life on our planet is but one small leg of a much bigger journey, a phenomenal journey unlike anything ever experienced or ever dreamed, in as much as, we truly cannot die.

Science

• The wave made a splash in the scientific community for being proportionally the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded. Although it occurred in November 2020, the study confirming it was just released February 2 of this year.

• Stargazers were in for a surprise early this week when they spotted fiery tails shooting past in the skies. While they thought these were meteors that had entered Earth’s atmosphere, they turned out to be dead Starlink satellites. 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites launched last week returned to Earth in pieces as they burned up in the atmosphere.

• The 40 satellites were hit by a deadly geomagnetic storm that originated from the Sun last week and struck Earth’s magnetic field on February 4. The fiery demise of the satellites one after another was captured by a camera operated by the Sociedad de Astronomia del Caribe, a Puerto Rico-based nonprofit organisation.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• When the Food and Drug Administration announced in December that it would permanently allow the drugs used for medication abortion to be delivered through the mail, it seemed like a victory for abortion access—especially during the coronavirus pandemic, which has expanded the use of telemedicine for health care.

• In the face of accusations that Canadian officials have been too tolerant of anti-vax conspiracy theorists and anti-mandate advocates laying siege to public motorways in the country, law enforcement in Windsor, Ontario just before dawn Sunday finally began to make arrests and subsequently cleared the road leading to the U.S. border after days of protest.

• According to the Windsor Star:

Integrity/Availability

• Unfortunately, there is a gap between ECDLP difficulty and ECC security. None of these standards do a good job of ensuring ECC security. There are many attacks that break real-world ECC without solving ECDLP. The core problem is that if you implement the standard curves, chances are you’re doing it wrong: [...]

Proprietary

• I’ve covered a couple of web vulnerabilities that (mostly) aren’t, and now it’s time for a Windows specific one. A common finding from build reviews and CIS comparisons: unquoted spaces in service or run paths.

• When I reviewed Microsoft Edge last year, I found its performance and experience unparalleled among peers like Google Chrome. But one concern prevented me from accepting that default browser pop-up, and I suspected it could be a fatal dealbreaker.

• “On Edge, Microsoft constantly attempts to push you to use its in-house services,” I wrote and wondered whether Microsoft would get more aggressive once it claimed a larger piece of the browser market.

• Over six months later, Microsoft has, unfortunately, proven me right. Since that review, Edge’s popularity has soared, but so has the amount of bloatware. In the last couple of updates, Microsoft has outfitted Edge with a range of spammy features. The browser now offers loans to users and allows them to split online payments into installments. It has a new price tracker, mini games, a math solver, a reviews aggregator, and more.

• What’s worse, Microsoft has been actively abusing its Windows platform advantage to keep users from switching to other browsers. Not only is changing the default browser more complex and tedious than ever, but Microsoft force installed a ransomware-esque Windows update that launches a full-screen Edge ad users can’t skip or close. Microsoft was punished for pulling similar tricks decades ago with Internet Explorer, and I won’t be surprised if it comes under scrutiny again for its renewed browser ambitions.

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Cryptojacking and evolving ransomware attacks are not only sophisticated and harder to detect but are now also targeting Linux-based operating systems.

Defence/Aggression

• With the people of Afghanistan facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, U.S.-based peace activists—who largely blame the policies of their own government for inflicting pain on millions of innocent Afghans—are using Valentine’s Day on Monday to demand the Biden administration return billions of dollars of seized assets to the war-torn country before more lasting harm and “cruelty” is done.

• Under the banner of “Love to Afghanistan,” nationwide actions were scheduled for the weekend and localized vigils organized set for Monday (Feb. 14) by Peace Action, World Beyond War, and other humanitarian groups who argue that $7 billion frozen by the U.S. government and subsequently seized by an executive order issued Friday by President Joe Biden rightfully belongs to the Afghan people, who without it face an economy on the brink of collapse and a healthcare system and federal infrastructure without adequate support amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening food crisis.

• In the below article from Nya Dagbladet, the party’s leader, Mikail Yüksel, has promised that they will “take over” the southern Swedish region of Skåne, which includes Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city and a hotbed of Islamism and anti-Semitism. The article is translated by Fousesquawk.

• Several European and Asian countries have banned burqas, hijabs and veils, courting controversies, that to date, remain unresolved. As the controversy around the Karnataka hijab row flares up, here’s a look at countries that have put a ban on veils.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• Once found in abundance, Australia’s much-loved koalas have now been officially classified as ‘endangered’ after widespread bushfires, drought and land clearing destroyed much of their eucalyptus-rich habitat.

• Australia’s environment minister Sussan Ley on Friday announced that the government was upgrading the conservation status of the marsupials from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘endangered’ in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, based on the recommendation of the threatened species scientific committee.

• Instead of Super Bowl information, one small typo later and your search results are filled with owl content instead. And we’d like to encourage you to lean into the error. Because owls truly are “superb.”

Finance

• The billionaire owners of the NFL might like to think they have — in their annual Super Bowl extravaganza — the world’s biggest sports event. But the driving passion of more fans globally than any other sport remains what the world calls football and what Americans see as soccer.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York spent the weekend in Texas as she headlined rallies with a pair of progressive candidates vying to join her in Washington, D.C. next year by winning upcoming elections in the Lone Star State.

• With Democratic primary in Texas set for March 1, Ocasio-Cortez appeared at events for both Jessica Cisneros, challenging Democratic incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar in District 28, and Greg Casar, running for an open seat in the state’s newly-created District 35. Both districts stretch from Austin to areas in and around San Antonio.

• The tense standoff at the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, eased somewhat early in the day when Canadian police persuaded demonstrators to move the trucks they had used to barricade the entrance to the busy international crossing.

• But protesters reconvened nearby — with reinforcements — and were still choking off access from the Canadian side late Saturday, snarling traffic and commerce for a sixth day. About 180 remained late Saturday in the sub-freezing cold.

• The blockades are very much a rogue movement. They have been condemned by the Canadian Trucking Alliance and Canada’s Teamsters Union. About 90 percent of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated; comparatively few of those protesting are professional truck drivers. The protesters are not anti-lockdown. They are anti-vaccination. The spark for the protests was a requirement that truckers be vaccinated to cross the U.S.-Canada border. This is not a movement of “working class” protesters against remote, affluent elites. The burden of the protests has fallen on Ottawa residents, whose streets have been paralyzed, and Canadian autoworkers, who face factory shutdowns because of cross-border disruptions.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• But while the US government declassified the information about the alleged plot last week, it didn’t share any of its underlying evidence with the public. In a heated briefing room exchange last week, journalists demanded proof to support the claim, with one reporter accusing the State Department of veering into “Alex Jones territory.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Experts say India’s colonial-era laws are being used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to quash criticism and encourage self-censorship.

• Frederick starts by detailing certain censorial actions by “Big Tech” firms, which she defines as the “Big Five” of Alphabet (which owns Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (which owns Facebook), and Microsoft, plus companies like Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Netflix, “whose cultural and political impacts on public debate are important.” Indeed, some of the incidents detailed are troubling: Social media platforms blocking users from sharing a New York Post article about Hunter Biden just weeks before the 2020 election, YouTube suspending videos of politicians for simply discussing public health topics, etc. Obviously, none of these are First Amendment violations, as private companies can allow or disallow any speech they please, but these actions do detract from a culture of free speech.

• The crowd began throwing stones at the man and the officers, according to the local police.

• The mob, which included some 300 people, then hanged his body from a tree. Videos shared on social media showed a large crowd gathered at the site.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• A spate of journalist murders shows that Mexico isn’t just failing to protect its reporters but that lawlessness is a systemic problem and a legacy of the failed “war against drugs,” experts warn.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Leonard Peltier is a 77-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota Native American activist imprisoned for 46 years for a crime he says he did not commit. Amnesty International calls him a political prisoner. Peltier recently contracted COVID-19 inside the Coleman maximum security federal penitentiary in Florida, where prisoners have reportedly been denied vaccine booster shots.

• 1 in 3 Dalit students in US experienced caste discrimination, according to Equality Labs report, 2016. These efforts culminated in a landmark decision of CSU, the largest four-year public university in the US, with 23 campuses and close to half a million students, to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy in January.

• The Saturday incident took place in Jungle Dera village where hundreds of loc­als gathered after Magh­rib pra­yers following annou­n­cements that a man had torn some pages of the Holy Quran and later set them on fire.

• With no one ready to listen to the suspect, who rep­orte­dly claimed innocence, the villagers first hanged him with a tree and then hit him with bricks, until he died.

• The death of elderly Swiss photographer René Robert, ignored by passersby for nine hours after he collapsed on a cold Parisian street, has been a wake-up call to French authorities to the plight of the country’s homeless people, for whom such a fate is more likely.

• Maimane said there had been a systemic failure to create jobs through inclusive economic growth and a modernised basic education system.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• IFF has submitted comments pursuant to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) “Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Promoting Data Economy Through Establishment of Data Centres, Content Delivery Networks, and Interconnect Exchanges” (Consultation Paper). Our comments are threefold. They call for urgency in the creation of a multi-stakeholder body for the enforcement of net neutrality. We then caution against regulating CDNs given existing market efficiency. Finally, we urged the TRAI to recast focus towards telecom companies practises for data protection standards rather than adopting flawed technical systems of consent (eg. DEPA).

• [...]

• Given such framing, obvious issues of innovation that serve users, net neutrality and data protection emerge for consideration. We believe this is an important consultation and given it’s seriousness intend to also file counter-comments. At the same time we encourage members of the general public and, — academics, network engineers, technologists and digital rights groups to participate. Our submissions which are attached below fall within three primary buckets in which we have provided comments specific to digital rights. Broadly these concern questions on CDN regulation, issues of privacy and net neutrality.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• On January 20, 2012, a high-profile dawn raid by armed police to arrest Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and friends at his $30 million mansion. Herald senior writer David Fisher has covered the case . On the 10th anniversary of the raid, he looks back at what we learned – and what we still don’t know.

• Several copyright holders are urging the United States Trade Representative to help tackle the unbridled piracy that takes place in Iraq. They describe the country as a hotbed for online piracy services which are also exported to Europe and the US. Due to lacking copyright laws and systematic corruption, external pressure is needed, they argue.

• The MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment are pressing ahead with their campaign to eliminate as many pirate services from the web as possible. Their latest activities include the seizure of a number of pirate IPTV-related domains and additional pressure on Cloudflare and domain registry Tonic to hand over information they hold on yet more pirate site operators.

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