● 02.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/2/2022: Slax 11.2.0, OpenBSD 7.1 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re headed to Jill’s Museum to go on a Treasure Hunt! This one contains a multiverse of treasures with the COSMIC INFINITY powered by an Intel Pentium Pro! Then we’re going to chat about Inkscape’s latest version. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

Instructionals/Technical

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install PeaZip 8.5.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, Fedora 35, Debian, Manjaro Linux, OpenSUSE, and AlmaLinux 8 via the official repository and via Flatpak also.

• You can use a TeX/LaTeX editor for a variety of documents. Not just limited to scientific research, you can also add your code, start writing a book (academic/creative), or draft articles.

• An interactive solution with the option for preview, and several features, should come in handy if you regularly work with LaTeX documents.

• Kile is one such option by KDE, available for Linux and other platforms. In fact, it is one of the best LaTeX editors available for Linux, which we decided to highlight separately.

• MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.

• MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MariaDB 10.8 on AlmaLinux 8.

• FirewallD is software that provides the system firewall feature to protect AlmaLinux from unwanted access by disabling and enabling ports, services, or protocols. However, for users that are used to an interface such as Graphical User Interface (GUI), then the command line may seem difficult at first glance because there’s no visual representation and who are not comfortable learning the command line terminal to the possibility of having an unsecured system.

• However, you can install the FirewallD GUI. This sleek and simple design program is a perfect match for those who want easy access to what’s going on in their system without having too many bells and whistles to distract them from maintaining security.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and enable FirewallD and install FirewallD GUI on AlmaLinux 8 Workstation.

• In this tutorial we are going to install memcached on Ubuntu 21.10.

• Memcached is a free and open-source, high-performance distributed memory object caching system. It is use in speeding up dynamic web applications but enabling faster database loading time. It enables you to make better use of your memory by doing load distribution.

• The advantage of using Memcached is that, Its powerful, it promote quick deployment of needed applications, makes easy for development because of its cache and its API can easily integrate with other languages.

• From a easy point of view, Memcached allows you to take memory from parts of your system where you have more than you need and make it accessible, to areas where its needed.

• The best place to run Memcached is on dedicated hosts because you will not have to worry about other programs on the machine from interfering with the Memcached.

• Today, you will learn what a Nim programming language is, why we need Nim over other programming languages, and different ways to install Nim on your Linux system.

• Do you wish your Linux shell scripts would handle command-line options and arguments more gracefully? The Bash getopts builtin lets you parse command-line options with finesse—and it’s easy too. We show you how.

• Here are a few examples to show how you can use the search and replace feature in the powerful Vim editor.

• Lynis is a free and open-source security auditing tool and released as a GPL licensed project and is available for Linux and Unix-based Operating systems like MacOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and so on. People, in general, are unaware that we can also use Lynis for remote system auditing. In this way, we can install Lynis on one system and conduct an audit on other remote systems.

• Apache Guacamole is a free and open-source remote desktop gateway that allows you to connect to your computer/server remotely using different protocols such as SSH, RDP, and VNC. Apache Guacamole is maintained by Apache Software Foundation, and licensed with Apache License 2.0.

• Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. You can access Apache Guacamole using only a web browser from anywhere at any time. Using Apache Guacamole is recommended if you have multiple remote operating systems with different protocols, such as Windows with RDP, Linux system with VNC and SSH. In this tutorial, you’ll install and configure the Apache Guacamole to a Debian 11 Bullseye. This includes installing some packages dependencies and the Apache Tomcat 9, then building the Guacamole-server and installing the Java application, Guacamole web application. In the end, you’ll set up Nginx as a reverse proxy for the Guacamole web application that allows you to access your servers from anywhere, as long as you have a web browser.

• In Linux, terminal commands are the handiest and most useful things that one might be focusing on learning. If you’re a new or professional Linux user, you might have been using many commands to add or sum the results of more than one command in the shell. But, Linux offers you to join the output of two different commands and get the final output in one single output. The tee command in Linux is one of the most used and handy tools that you should learn for making your Linux journey quick and fast.

• For instance, if you want to download and extract a file on your Linux system, you can efficiently do that with a tee command by joining the wget command and the tar command. Knowing the pipe or tee command would be both fun and satisfactory to learn.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. SQLite does not run as a system service like other DBMS. So, it is known as a self-contained database manager that does not work like other DBMS, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the SQLite on a Fedora 35.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FastPanel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Fastpanel is a simple and powerful server management panel. It provides web-based intuitive, point-and-click interfaces for common tasks such as transferring files, installing applications, updating PHP versions, and creating email accounts.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the FastPanel alternative to cPanel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• GNOME has a tendency for minimalist design. It’s a beautiful desktop experience, and holds the honor of being the first free desktop that’s ever elicited vocalized admiration from someone looking over my shoulder as I use Linux. Then again (and pardon the armchair philosophizing), you can’t have minimalism without complexity, and KDE is well known for being very customizable. I thought it might be fun to put KDE configuration to the test and try to re-implement, at least superficially, the GNOME experience in the KDE Plasma Desktop.

• If you try this, do it in a temporary user account. These changes are relatively drastic, and undoing it to get back to your standard KDE layout can be a lot of work.

• How to install PHP-FPM with Apache on Ubuntu 20.04. There are two distinct options to run PHP using the web server. One is using the PHP’s CGI and the other one is FPM. FPM is a process manager to manage the FastCGI in PHP. Apache ships with mod_php by default and works with all major web servers. With mod_php there is a little performance issue because it locks out the process.

• In this guide you are learn how to setup PHP 8.1-FPM and configure it with Apache and also configure PHP variables.

• This setup can also be done on other VPS or dedicated or cloud VM’s. This setup is tested on Google Compute Engine but it works on any Ubuntu or Debian Linux distributions.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Stremio on Linux systems (ie) Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian, Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux, and other Linux distributions using official packages and Flatpak.

• It’s no doubt that Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari are the most commonly used web browsers around the globe. However, if you are in search of an exciting browsing experience with some oomph and lots of flexibility and privacy, then you should consider trying out the Vivaldi browser.

• Based on Chromium, Vivaldi is a multi-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. Initially, Vivaldi supported Windows and Linux only, but from Vivaldi 5.0 and later releases, support for Apple Mac and Android has been included. Unfortunately, we are yet to get a release for iOS.

• Vivaldi was first launched in 2016 and is still considered quite new on the block.

• PHP 8.1 is a significant update of the PHP language that will be “officially” released on November 25, 2021. This is a standard upgrade going forward from the existing PHP 8.0 release with the new PHP 8.1 is bringing enums, fibers, never return type, final class constants, intersection types, read-only properties amongst the long list of new features and changes.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Ondřej Surý Repository and install PHP 8.1 on your Debian 10 Buster desktop or server.

• The objective of this tutorial is to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. VirtualBox is a free and open source hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed and maintained by the Oracle Corporation.

• VirtualBox is a great way to install a guest operating system on your computer, if you either want to try a different operating system or just maintain a separate environment from your host system. You will learn how to install VirtualBox via both command line and GNOME GUI in this tutorial.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup an SFTP server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

• FTP is a great protocol for accessing and transferring files, but it has the shortcoming of being a clear text protocol. In other words, it’s not secure to use over an internet connection, since your credentials and data are transmitted without encryption. The ‘S’ in SFTP stands for ‘Secure’ and tunnels the FTP protocol through SSH, providing the encryption needed to establish a secure connection.

• The purpose of this tutorial is to show show several command line methods you can use to check file access and modification time on a Linux system.

• Check the examples below as we cover several tools for the job such as ls, date, stat, and find.

• The cp command on a Linux system is one of the most basic commands that many users will utilize every day, whether they are new to Linux or a system administrator.

• While the cp command is very basic, it comes packed with a lot of options. One option allows the user to copy a file while preserving the file permissions and ownership. In this tutorial, you’ll see how to do that.

Games

• Between 2022-02-15 and 2022-02-22 there were 19 new Steam games with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 227 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 8.4 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…

• Klei Entertainment are another developer working to ensure their games work well on the Steam Deck, with an update now available for Don’t Starve Together.

• Currently, as of when it was last tested (SteamDB), Don’t Starve Together was very close to being fully Deck Verified. However, it seems there were issues with needing to manually bring up the on-screen keyboard. Hopefully then, Klei has fixed that up which would mean it would go from Playable to Verified.

• While I absolutely love playing with my Valve Index, it has felt like for a while that Valve left things a bit too rough but a new SteamVR update is out now.

• We’re continuing on our fortnightly release schedule for alpha snapshots of Godot 4.0 – this time with 4.0 alpha 3. See past alpha releases for details (alpha 1, alpha 2).

• Be aware that during the alpha stage the engine is still not feature-complete or stable. There will likely be breaking changes between this release and the first beta release. Only the beta will mark the so-called “feature freeze”.

• As such, we do not recommend porting existing projects to this and other upcoming alpha releases unless you are prepared to do it again to fix future incompatibilities. However, if you can port some existing projects and demos to the new version, that may provide a lot of useful information about critical issues still left to fix.

• Most importantly: Make backups before opening any existing project in Godot 4.0 alpha builds. There is no easy way back once a project has been (partially) converted.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.24.2 is here just a week after KDE Plasma 5.24.1 and it appears to be a small update that further improves the new Overview effect for the Plasma X11 session so it won’t be triggered inappropriately from the lock screen when pressing the Meta key.

• The KDE developers also continue to improve the Plasma Wayland session, and, in this second point release, they fixed an issue where the virtual keyboard failed to appear even if it was correctly configured.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With a ten-day delay from the initially planned release date, the GNOME 42 beta release is now ready for early adoption and technology enthusiasts who want to be the first to get a taste of the new features and enhancements implemented in the upcoming desktop environment.

• Continuing the development cycle of GNOME 42, this beta release is here with more apps ported to the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita, the highly-anticipated built-in screenshot and screencast feature that replaces the GNOME Screenshot utility (which is not available in this release), as well as the new Appearance panel with support for Light and Dark styles.

Distributions

New Releases

• More than two years since the previous update, I am happy to announce the immediate availability of final Slax version 11.2.0. It has been an interesting journey, thanks everyone for your suggestions, help and testing.

• This release features EFI support for USB booting and complete update of all packages to the versions available in Debian Bullseye. Furthermore, it provides full AUFS support, so you can continue working with additional modules as like in previous Slax versions, add and/or remove modules on the fly. Changelog here

• The core of Slax remains similar like always, network connection can be now managed using connman, and most importantly, chrome is no longer a part of Slax, but you can still install it with a single click or two, as well as VLC video player.

• As you can imagine, Slax 11.2 is a major update of this portable distribution, which was once derived from Slackware Linux. Now, it’s based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses the lightweight Fluxbox window manager.

• The new release is derived from the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series and runs the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series. More specifically, Slax 11.2 is powered by Linux kernel 5.10.92.

• …in particular a black screen with AMD video that seems to be due to the kernel GPU driver. Maybe. This needs further investigation.

• Note, I did experiment with the 5.15.16 kernel, but have used 5.10.93 for this release.

BSD

• With the following commit, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 7.1-beta: [...]

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• The sophistication with which organizations approach enterprise open source — commercially-supported enterprise software created using an open source development model — has increased as it’s become more pervasive. Yet, we still see frequent misunderstandings in the following areas.

• Let’s examine five issues that are important for IT leaders to understand — and be able to discuss, inside their organizations.

• One of the most rewarding experiences you can have as a CIO is successfully transforming an IT organization to make a significant impact on an organization. This is one reason most CIOs accept a new opportunity: to embrace the challenge of taking a company to the next level.

• Your first 90 days as a new CIO are extremely important. You’ll have the attention of executive leadership and an open runway to chart a new course for IT and the company. To do this, you need to define an IT strategy and execution plan.

• The first step in implementing transformation is to define your approach. Lay out the steps necessary for you to understand the company, culture, IT environment, challenges, and strategic direction the company needs to go.

• There are tutorials that sometimes you think you do not need but come the moment gives us a headache. Today, you will learn how to get Python 3.10 on Rocky Linux 8 / Alma Linux 8 / Fedora 35 quickly and easily.

• gRPC is a very nice technology that allows the implementation of efficient APIs in a very efficient way. Thanks to gRPC and protobuf, you do not have to write much boilerplate code since the boilerplate code is generated automatically from the proto file. This works perfectly until both your client and server can perform gRPC calls. Luckily most of the languages have no issue with this. Still, the big exception is JavaScript (and other languages that will compile to JS, such as TypeScript) running in a browser.

• The issue with JavaScript in the browsers is that to implement gRPC, the gRPC library needs to handle the HTTP connection directly, and this is not allowed in browsers. There are, therefore, different ways to make gRPC API work with browsers. The two most famous ones are gRPC-Gateway and gRPC-Web.

• The community elected me as a representative in 2017 and not long after that Miller censored my blog on Planet Fedora. Planet Fedora mysteriously stopped showing the blogs of any independent volunteers in March 2021 during the harassment of Dr Richard Stallman. WeMakeFedora.org was launched at that time to provide the community with a voice.

• I nominated for the Fedora Council elections in October 2020. Miller censored my blog from Planet Fedora again in March 2021 at the same time as the bullying attacks on Dr Stallman.

• We have posted Matthew Miller’s complaint and draft response on Gitlab.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The new Linux kernel update patches five security vulnerabilities affecting all supported Ubuntu releases, including Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), as well as the Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM releases.

• These include CVE-2021-22600, a double-free vulnerability discovered in Linux kernel’s Packet network protocol implementation, as well as CVE-2021-4083, a race condition discovered by Google Project Zero’s Jann Horn in the Unix domain socket implementation. Both issues could allow a local attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money. Money to buy food, to purchase clothes, to pay our bills, as well as indulging in our other infinite wants and desires.

• While it can be a struggle to make ends meet, it is possible to make life easier through better money management. Financial management is about planning income and expenditure and making informed decisions that enable you to survive financially. With increasing financial turbulence it’s as important as ever to look after your finances, if only to make sure there are no nasty surprises when you receive your next bank statement.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Programming/Development

Perl/Raku

• PWC#153 is asking us to do two things that are almost comically simple, given we omit loops.

Python

Leftovers

Education

• A steady stream of polls warns that an alarming number of teachers share this view, with a quarter to half of educators reporting that they’re considering changing careers. One recent survey by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, found that the number of teachers contemplating quitting has spiked since the start of the school year. Nine out of 10 reported that burnout is a serious problem, as teachers stretch to accommodate vacancies or Covid-related absences. Black teachers were the most likely to say that they’re considering leaving.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• It happens today, too, even though the World Health Organization advises against naming pathogens for places to “minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.” By Feb. 11, 2020, the WHO had announced that the official name for the novel coronavirus just starting its spread around the world would be severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 – or SARS-CoV-2. The illness it caused would be called COVID-19, short for Coronavirus Disease of 2019.

• Yet some politicians, conservative journalists and otherspersisted in calling the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese virus,” or some variant of this term, such as the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” (after the Chinese city that first reported the virus), “Chinese flu” and “Kung flu.”

• A massive outpouring of grief and emotional tributes resulted Monday after news broke that Partners In Health co-founder and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Paul Farmer—renowned for his groundbreaking work in global public health—had died.

• Paul taught all those around him the power of accompaniment, love for one another, and solidarity.”

• Thousands of scientists and doctors in the United Kingdom on Monday rejected Prime Minister Boris Johnon’s assertion that it is time to begin “living with Covid” and demanded to know how his government is justifying its decision to end nearly all pandemic-related public health restrictions in the coming weeks, warning the policy change could worsen the spread of future variants.

• Writing to Patrick Vallance, Johnson’s chief scientific officer, and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, more than 2,900 physicians, epidemiologists, and other experts in science and public health called on the officials to share the “scientific advice underpinning” the new policy.

• If there are sentences that I never expected to write as part of a blog post, near the very top of the list has to be anything resembling “John Ioannidis uses the Kardashian Index to attack critics of the Great Barrington Declaration.” It’s a sentence so off-the-wall that, even in the most fevered flight of ideas that sometimes run through my fragile eggshell mind as I contemplate what I’m about to write in this and my personal blog, I could never have strung these words and thoughts together unaided unless I had actually seen John Ioannidis publish a paper in which he did, indeed, weaponize the Kardashian Index in order to attack the signatories of the John Snow Memorandum as, in essence, “science Kardashians,” which, to my utter disbelief, really happened last week in the form of a paper authored by John Ioannidis and no one else published in BMJ Open Access entitled ‘Citation impact and social media visibility of Great Barrington and John Snow signatories for COVID-19 strategy.“

• Are these the same organizers that brought us Canada’s “Freedom Convoy,” blocking the streets of the capital, Ottawa, for weeks and blocking border crossings to the U.S.? No, those organizers were arrested. Those trucks were confiscated. Those protesters have been debanked and uninsured. This is a whole new crop of American Made truckers.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• Last week the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced that its Technical Oversight Committee has voted to move its Chaos Mesh project, which applies chaos engineering techniques to cloud native deployment, from its entry level Sandbox to it’s Incubator.

• This indicated that the project has reached a level of maturity that should make it more attractive to enterprises that are leery of deploying software in early stages of development. Before the status change, however, Chaos Mesh was already being used in production by more than 50 organizations, including DataStax, Percona, and Prudential.

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Ubuntu has patched multiple vulnerabilities, some of which allow any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host. Two, in snap-confine (a SUID-root program that is installed by default on Ubuntu) were reported by security firm Qualys, which admitted that finding and exploiting them had been “extremely challenging (especially in a default installation of Ubuntu), because snap-confine uses a very defensive programming style, AppArmor profiles, seccomp filters, mount namespaces, and two Go helper programs.”

• Linux has been the underdog when it comes to popular consumer OS choices, but new research suggests that the platform outperforms Apple’s macOS and Microsoft’s Windows in two sections, security, and speed.

• New research suggests that Linux as a platform is more secure than Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS. Platform security is becoming a major concern among users, with Windows and macOS often believed to be relatively safer than Linux due to the regular security patches and updates. However, the latest report now suggests that Linux could actually be faster than both.

• Security vulnerabilities in operating platforms and other software is a major problem, given the growing prevalence of malware. Not only that, targeted hackings are also becoming a major issue for government agencies, politicians, journalists, and civil rights activists. Regular citizens are also often being targeted by cyber-criminals, so it is imperative for software vendors to patch security vulnerabilities in their products as soon as possible.

• Google’s Project Zero has published new research showing that Linux developers are faster than others at fixing security flaws. Surprisingly, developers seem to be working on maintaining Linux faster than Google’s own internal team. The Project Zero team studied fixed vulnerabilities reported between January 2019 and December 2021. They found that open-source programmers fixed Linux problems in an average of only 25 days. Additionally, Linux developers have been steadily reducing the number of days to patch security flaws. Back in 2019, developers patched flaws within a month’s time. Now, they often finish fixing bugs within two weeks.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Aleksey Lapshin: I have seen many products out there, and quite often, they have only one goal: to achieve business purposes. Of course, it is natural but not convenient for engineers. Going after success, designers or developers stop caring for users. And just imagine a guy that works day after day, all these long hours with the software designed not for him but only for financial objectives. Employees fall into stress and suffer while working with tools that are complicated, useless, and stingy with design.

• In the framework of the Prüm decisions, police forces have networked their files for fingerprints, DNA data and motor vehicle data across Europe. A new regulation is to extend this to faces. Now there is a threat of further tightening.

• The EU is using development aid funds to finance a deployable radar system for the Libyan coast guard. The force, known for its brutality, wants to use it to detect refugees crossing to Europe. Then they will be intercepted by three new patrol boats.

• Microsoft will force Windows 11 Pro users to create a Microsoft account and connect to the Internet for the initial setup process. The new requirements mirror those of Windows 11 Home, which has Internet connection and account required since its launch in October last year.

• Once the changes are implemented, Windows 11 will be the only major operating system that will require an account to gain access to basic system features. Apple’s macOS operating system lets you create a local account during setup, and similarly, Android takes you to the home screen without signing in. Even Chrome OS, a cloud-centric operating system, has a guest mode for basic use without an account.

• The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) amended the Unified License in December, 2021 to extend the period of retention of call records and internet usage data from one year to two year. Worried about the implications of this change on privacy, we wrote to the DoT asking them to recall the amendments and conduct a public consultation before introducing or implementing any similar amendment in the future.

• [...]

• As per Condition 5.1 of Unified License Agreement, the licensor, i.e., DoT, reserves the right to modify the terms and conditions of the license at any time, if it is expedient to do so for public interest, security of the state, or for proper conduct of telegraphs. However, the circulars do not specify which of the above conditions necessitated the present amendment. Moreover, such an amendment should only have been made after a public consultation and inviting insight from stakeholders, however this process was not adopted. On December 31, 2021, we had filed a right to information request with the DoT inquiring about these amendments, however in their response dated February 17, 2022, they failed to answer any of our questions satisfactorily.

Defence/Aggression

• This is a symptom of the much deeper problem: Donald Trump has planted authoritarianism across America like some kind of bizarre Johnny Appleseed, and only his humiliation and conviction will pull it out by the roots.

• Eight Republican senators have now come forward to defend the air-crew abusers, as astonishing as that may seem.  In doing so, they’re making common cause with thousands of authoritarian followers who’ve adopted Donald Trump as their behavioral role model.

• Yet when Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), pulled it out of the devolved government in Northern Ireland last week, collapsing the power sharing administration, Johnson made no comment. That should not have caught anybody by surprise, as the British Government’s actions and inactions over the past couple of years had already gone far to degrade the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which brought an end to the violence.

• Given that Sinn Féin is likely to emerge as the largest party in May’s Assembly election, and the DUP is opposed to the Northern Ireland Protocol, a power sharing executive in Belfast may never be resurrected. The delicate compromise between unionist and nationalists, Protestants and Catholics, which was one of the historic successes of British diplomacy, is falling apart and the British Government shows little sign of taking notice.

• CBMs are worth exploring. The idea behind them is that parties to a conflict take small but significant steps, reciprocally, to move away from a potential battlefield. Reducing tensions, preventing escalation of hostilities, and building mutual confidence in each side’s motives are the immediate objectives. There can be two-party or multiple-party CBMs. Agreement on CBMs does not resolve a conflict, but it lays the basis for positive momentum that might in the end result in a settlement. Of course each step of the way holds out the possibility of failure, either intentionally or accidentally. But that is also the beauty of CBMs: Since each step is small, any defect can be rectified or, if not, replaced with something more workable.

• CBMs depend to some extent on trust. Each side trusts that the other side will take a corresponding step back. As President Reagan once said when talking about arms control agreements with Russia, however, “trust but verify.” Thus, CBMs are always accompanied by verification components, such as on-the-spot international inspectors, surveillance technologies, and reporting procedures. CBMs have been effective in European troop deployments, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and the China-India border dispute. And they might work in the current crisis over Ukraine.

• Mainstream US media continues to celebrate the supposed strength of the US economy. Almost daily, headlines speak of hopeful numbers, sustainable growth, positive trends and constant gains. The reality on the ground, however, tells of something entirely different, which raises the questions: Are Americans being lied to? And for what purpose?

• As President Biden warns of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, France has secured a commitment from both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet at a summit in an effort to defuse the escalating tension. We speak to veteran journalist Katrina vanden Heuvel, whose latest article for The Washington Post, “A path out of the Ukraine crisis,” argues both leaders must work to avoid a catastrophic war. “There’s a bluffing that could be taken more lightly, except this is the most dangerous confrontation between the United States, NATO and Russia in decades,” says vanden Heuvel.

• Two Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicles were destroyed after allegedly crossing the border into Russian territory, state media reported on Monday, February 21, citing the press service of Russia’s Southern Military District.

• President Vladimir Putin says a “decision will be made today” on whether Russia will recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” two Kremlin-backed two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine.

• On Friday, February 18, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” announced that increased tensions in eastern Ukraine necessitated mass evacuations. Over the next three days, more than 60,000 people were relocated to Russia, according to official reports. In total, 43 Russian regions have agreed to take in evacuees. President Vladimir Putin has also ordered the Russian government to pay 10,000 rubles ($130) to each “refugee.” Be that as it may, confusion reigned at Russia’s reception centers over the weekend, as local authorities scrambled to accommodate the sudden influx of people. Several Russian regions have even declared a state of emergency. So far, evacuees are being put up in schools, hotels, summer camp facilities, and even makeshift tent camps. Meduza shares snapshots from the evacuation.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has informed French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that he intends to sign a decree recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” immediately.

• Vladimir Putin has officially recognized the independence of the self-proclaimed “republics” in eastern Ukraine. The Russian president signed the corresponding decree on Monday, February 21, following a lengthy address to the nation. The issue of recognizing the “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) and “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LNR) was also discussed at length during an extraordinary meeting of the Russian Security Council earlier in the day. Speaking at the meeting, Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev suggested that Moscow recognize the “historical” boundaries of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as the breakaway territories’ frontiers. However, this elides the fact that a significant portion of the territories the DNR and LNR claim remain under the control of the Ukrainian government.

• President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to carry out “peacekeeping functions” on the territory of the breakaway “republics” in eastern Ukraine.

• De facto leaders Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik have asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.

• So-called “stand your ground” laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws “should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.”

• The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws.

• This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…

• Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday formally recognized Donetsk and Luhansk—two self-proclaimed people’s republics in eastern Ukraine—as independent, a move opposed by the leadership of Ukraine and Western powers.

• U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday agreed “in principle” to hold a summit on Ukraine as global fears of a war involving the two nuclear-armed powers remain high.

• In a statement, the office of French President Emmanuel Macron—who spoke separately with Putin and Biden on Sunday—said that both leaders accepted the idea of the summit, though the precise details have yet to be agreed upon.

• Somalia’s al-Shabab militant group has an annual budget of $24 million to spend on purchasing weapons, a new report finds.

• The report by a Mogadishu-based research group, the Hiraal Institute, said the group uses various methods to procure weapons, including direct purchases from local black markets, and from arms traders contracted to buy and deliv­er weapons from abroad, mainly Yemen.

• Hiraal said the acquisition of firearms, ammunition, explosives and other lethal capacity weapons remains a priority for al-Shabab, with nearly a quarter of its budget going to such transactions.

Environment

• In the long run, several of the organisations – including the Coop supermarket – want print advertising completely abolished.

Energy

• I went on the feature climate as a major part of coverage in a very early website, Cascadia Planet, which went live in 1994, and focused my activism increasingly on the climate crisis from around 1996. Over the quarter century since, I have approached the issue from many directions, from writing high-level policy papers and co-authoring a couple of books (here and here), to participating in street-level direct action, even getting arrested a couple of times. I’ve helped grow a couple of climate groups and spur major federal energy research investments. I even was a defendant in a precedent-setting trial where we argued the first climate civil disobedience necessity defense in a U.S. courtroom.

• So after all these years, it grieves me deeply, as it does so many others, to see climate action falling short at all levels even as climate disruption intensifies. In fact, it seems that in the past seven years, the hottest in recorded history, the Earth has flipped into a new climate regime. Extremes including storms, floods, heat waves, droughts, wildfires and polar ice loss are surging.  A report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released last August confirmed this acceleration. But climate action is now stalled in Congress, and the requisite sense of urgency is lacking.

• Much fuss is rightly made of the $11 million fossil fuel companies are subsidised every single minute of every single day. We ask why we are subsidizing the cause of the climate crisis to the tune of $5.9 trillion a year when the cost of decarbonising our economies stands at $3.8 trillion a year. It’s hard to make sense of the asinine nature of our politics unless the word corruption is used. While fossil fuel interests pocket trillions of our hard-earned taxes and then corrupt our politicians further, there is another industry that is corrupting our politics while overseeing animal abuse and destroying the natural world at a rapid pace—animal agriculture.

• Fossil fuel companies in Europe are using an international treaty signed nearly three decades ago to challenge several governments’ ability to take climate action—exemplifying why, critics said Monday, the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty is a major impediment to transitioning away from planet-heating fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

• “Time to throw this treaty out.”

• There are always those who will want to profit from war or the threat of war, as unscrupulous as it may seem. And for the American oil and gas industry there is no exception.

• Senior figures in charge of the Church of England’s investments have close current or past ties to high-carbon companies including Shell, Drax and BP, DeSmog can report.

• The revelations come as the Church faces renewed pressure to fully divest from fossil fuels after its biannual meeting earlier this month, where climate campaigners expressed frustration at the Church’s ongoing stakes in oil and gas.

Finance

• The last few years have seen a new turn in the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the rest of the world. In the early 2000s, as China entered the World Trade Organization and made preparations for its first-ever Olympics, outsiders were optimistic that it would assimilate into a US-led world order, embracing global markets and retiring its old socialist economy. But those rosy predictions have faded since the 2008 financial crisis and the 2013 ascension of Xi Jinping as leader of the Chinese Communist Party. The idea of endless growth avowed by American liberals in the 1990s has been replaced by the zero-sum logic that China’s success will come at the expense of others. True or not, China has been successful: Its economy has continued to grow, not only from global trade but also through government-financed debt and infrastructure investment, both at home and abroad in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That China has embraced such an approach instead of the austerity programs and free market policies of the former Soviet states has made it clear to leaders in the United States and the European Union that China has emerged in the 21st century not only as a trading partner and an ally but as a potential rival.

• President Biden and his fellow Democrats need to learn to talk about inflation if they hope to maintain congressional majorities in this year’s midterm elections. They can’t deny that costs for consumers are rising at a jarring rate—up 7.5 percent compared to a year ago, according to the latest figures. But they can, and must, make the connection between surging prices and surging corporate profits.

• In 2019, when I implemented the first major Guaranteed Income pilot in any American city as Mayor of Stockton, people thought it was “crazy.” Yet today, more than 60 mayors across the country have now committed to guaranteed income as a tool to abolish poverty, with about half already running pilots in their own cities.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Salon published an excerpt, The TikTok Timebomb, from the Junk Food News chapter of this year’s book. Highbrow Magazine published another excerpt, How the Media Is Under Attack Throughout the World. And Savage Minds published a third book excerpt, Censorship by Proxy, Physical Violence, and Chilling Threats, based on Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff’s introduction to State of the Free Press 2022. You can also read a Q&A feature with Huff and Roth published by Truthout.

• Set in a reactionary climate, this presidential campaign is poised to descend into a racist and nationalistic quagmire by the time people cast their votes on 10 April, that is if it has not already.

• Even by the rancid nature of this particular campaign, a new low was reached last Sunday when the conservative candidate, Valérie Pécresse of Les Républicains, warned of the danger of a “Great Replacement” at a Paris rally.

• After 20 years of governments that have supported the Uribism movement—named after Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010—and with the eternal backdrop of the armed conflict, Colombia is not only playing for change but also for the future of an unfinished peace process.

• What Will the Electoral Process in Colombia Look Like?

• On the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we speak with the civil rights leader’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz about her family’s call for a federal probe into his murder, following the exoneration of two men who were wrongfully convicted. “We want to know who killed our father, and we want to make sure that it is properly recorded in history,” says Shabazz. “We want Congress to document the truth,” says Benjamin Crump, who represents the family of Malcolm X.

• Benjamin Norton is an independent journalist who focuses on Latin America; he’s also the founder of Multipolarista. Eugene Puryear has been a peace-and-justice organizer since his high-school days; he’s the author of “Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America,” and he writes at Breakthrough News.

• Advocates for civil rights are sounding the alarm after a Republican lawmaker in Florida filed an amendment to House Bill 1557—dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics—that would require schools to out LGBTQ students even if educators believe the disclosure will result in “abuse, abandonment, or neglect.”

• H.B. 1557 and its companion, S.B. 1834, would effectively prohibit teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in primary grades or at any level “in a manner that is not age-appropriate,” a term that remains undefined. It would also require all school districts’ trainings on “student support services” to adhere to the guidelines, standards, and frameworks established by the Florida Department of Education, which currently excludes anti-bullying resources meant to help prevent LGBTQ youth suicides.

• The parliamentary election campaign period officially kicked off on Saturday, which was immediately apparent from the fact that markets and squares were flooded with signature collectors that morning. As promised in my first campaign update, I’ll be summarizing major developments of the election every week in five bullet points. For this installment, I’ll be touching on the state of the nation speeches delivered by various party leaders, Péter Róna, a last-minute candidate swap, and a clash on Facebook between Orbán and Gyurcsány that made the needle jump on the election’s absurdity meter. Translation by Dominic Spadacene.

• This past weekend I was sitting in my hot tub that’s really just a bathtub that’s really just my neighbor’s bathtub that he lets me use when he’s out of town and doesn’t know I found his apartment key — and it occurred to me: I don’t think most Americans are happy with our political system. I don’t know why not.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The social network backed by ex-president Donald Trump — ironically, it’s called Truth Social — has hit the top of the Apple App Store rankings for free apps a little over 12 hours after it debuted.

• Pakistan is under fire for toughening its controversial cybercrime law to allow anyone to file a complaint against posting so-called fake news on Twitter and Facebook, and for increasing the prison term from three to five years for those found guilty.

• The changes to what is known as the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, introduced on Sunday through a presidential ordinance or decree, have made spreading fake news or defaming any person or state institution online an offense for which there is no bail.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Sometimes life has a way of making you realize things about yourself. Recently, I discovered that an urge of mine, almost four decades old, had been the very opposite of that of a rural Tennessee school board this January. In another life, I played a role in what could be thought of as the unbanning of the graphic novel Maus.

• The government has been facing severe criticism from opposition parties and various media and journalists’ bodies after President Arif Alvi promulgated an ordinance on Sunday to amend the Peca to regulate social media.

• “Imran Khan has made these draconian amendments to mentally enslave 220 million people of Pakistan,” she remarked, adding that the amendments were in violation of national and international human rights laws, media laws, Articles 19 and 19-A of the Constitution, which pertained to freedom of expression, and every other law that reinforced the idea of freedom of expression.

• Aurangzeb particularly highlighted two of the amendments, which she said were of significance.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• I will never get back the four months of my life I spent locked at least 22.5 hours a day in a 12 foot by 8 foot cell. I have nothing personally to gain from carrying on the legal fight – I was a civil prisoner and do not have a criminal record.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Former Minneapolis police officer Kim Potter was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday for fatally shooting Black driver Daunte Wright after mistaking her gun for a Taser. We speak to Benjamin Crump, attorney for the Wright family, about Judge Regina Chu’s sympathy expressed for Potter during closing statements and how white criminals tend to receive lighter sentences. “Police officers, when it comes to Black people, they always do the most,” says Crump. Crump also weighs in on other clients he currently represents, such as the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed Black jogger who was fatally shot in Georgia, and Z’Kye Husain, a Black teen who was racially profiled and violently arrested by police in a New Jersey mall.

• The third removed a drill from his bag and started to make a hole in the bottom of the boat.

• “What are you doing?!” the other two exclaimed in horror.

• Dr. Castro returned to Metro Manila in 2020 to care for her ailing mother, who has since passed away. On February 18, 2022, the police broke down the doors of the Castro family home and arrested Dr. Castro. Her family and lawyers report that she was initially held incommunicado, not receiving due process. She has been transported to Mindanao to face trumped-up charges of kidnapping and illegal detention. On the face of it, it is absurd to accuse this dedicated physician and public health practitioner of such crimes.

• Dr. Castro is just one of the countless advocates for social progress, including peasant and labor leaders, human rights and environmental activists, journalists, lawyers, and health workers who have been attacked, harassed, intimidated, or killed. In the Philippines those who stand up for the welfare of the common people are “red-tagged,” i.e. labeled as terrorist, communist, or both, by security forces or those in the government. Red-tagging stifles dissent by undermining democracy and due process and encourages assassinations and retaliations. The legal climate under the regime of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 is de facto martial law. Prior to these laws, Duterte’s failed “drug war” had claimed the lives of 30,000 Filipinos.

• Symbolic speech is non-verbal action that clearly conveys a specific message to anyone who sees and reads it. It can take the form of public protests, such as sit-ins and marches, demonstrations, wearing buttons, armbands or clothing items such as t-shirts, nudity, flag-waving, flag-burning, burning draft cards and bras, braille, sign language and even non-criminal actions that others might find offensive[1] (the universal one finger salute), to name a few.

• My friend, Alan Nicholson, and I were exchanging emails, and he raised an interesting question: Could the right to vote be an exercise of free speech?  I believe that Alan is correct, voting is the exercise of free speech.  I suggest that it is a form of symbolic speech.

• When my grandmother received “compensation” from the German government for her time spent in a labor camp she didn’t claim the relatively small amount given to her purely out of financial need (although that too played a part). No, she claimed it as a recognition of the part played by the German people in her own personal story of extreme suffering and human degradation. She claimed her small monthly check as a symbol that great wrongs were committed and that they should be publicly acknowledged as such. No amount of money could dilute her individual experience of the camps and the loss of her parents, but the fact of symbolic redress by those, who even though they might not have been directly responsible for her anguish, was a significant act of historical and spiritual closure.

• The money given to her was a complex exchange of memory, truthfulness, expiation, and guilt. It was a testament that what was done to her and her family members was outside the arc of common humanity and needed to begin to be set straight. And so it is too with the descendants of slaves in America.

• The historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States are under attack, it seems, from multiple directions. In recent weeks, numerous HBCUs have reported bomb threats against them. Such threats have hit institutions such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., and Alcorn State in Alcorn, Miss. It augurs poorly for the current state of race relations, as these schools have long served the Black American community. At the same time, a recent report from Forbes indicated the extent to which land-grant HBCUs—a significant number of these institutions—have been woefully underfunded by state governments since 1987. In both cases, we see a continuing attack on not just HBCUs but the very idea of semi-independent Black institutions within the United States.

• The SINTTIA victory in Silao comes after decades of hard-fought struggles by independent and democratic labor unions in Mexico that have challenged hostile and sometimes violent anti-unionization campaigns. Their efforts have confronted employers, corrupt and entrenched charro unions, and the system of neoliberal globalization itself, manifest in structures such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) that pit workers in Mexico against their counterparts in the United States and Canada. “These deals were about putting US manufacturing workers in direct competition with much-lower-paid workers in the developing world….” economist (and my colleague) Dean Baker has written. “This also put downward pressure on the wages of the manufacturing workers who kept their jobs, as well as on the wages of less-educated workers more generally, since manufacturing has historically been a source of relatively high-paying employment for workers without college degrees.”

• The effects of 28 years of NAFTA — and its successor, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement — on Mexico should surprise no one. As NAFTA was being debated in the early 1990s, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari claimed that the trade and investment arrangement would make Mexico a “first world” country and lift living standards up closer to those in the United States and Canada. But after 20 years, the poverty rate in Mexico was higher than in 1994 when NAFTA first went into effect.

• The “Freedom Convoy”—which for a week shut down trucking traffic at the Ambassador’s Bridge separating Detroit from Windsor, Canada, and led to a siege of Ottawa—has given a certain cohort of contrarian pundits a chance to chortle. Why are so many on the left refusing to support a truckers’ protest? Isn’t there hypocrisy here? Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, said, “This is the biggest labor action I recall seeing in my life and the Left is on the other side of it. It has to do with the shift in the Democratic Party which used to be the party of the working class and is now the party of the pajama class.” Alluding to criticisms of the convoy, Glenn Greenwald sarcastically tweeted, “Many people love ‘workers’ but not workers.”

Monopolies

Patents

• The European Union launched a legal challenge against China at the World Trade Organization on Friday, arguing that Chinese courts were preventing European companies from protecting their telecom technology patents.

• The European Commission, which filed the challenge on behalf of the EU’s 27 members, said EU companies were being deterred from going to a foreign court to safeguard their standard-essential patents (SEPs).

• The EU says that since August 2020, Chinese courts have been handing European companies’ “anti-suit injunctions” to prevent them from going to non-Chinese courts to legally protect the companies’ patents, and threatening fines if they do. The European Commission has filed these legal challenges against China with the World Trade Organization, and if the dispute isn’t settled in 60 days, the EU can escalate by requesting the organization set up a ruling panel.

• The European Commission did not specify the companies involved. China’s largest smartphone makers are Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Honor, formerly owned by Huawei. European SEP holders include Nokia and Ericsson.

• The commission said it had raised the issue on a number of occasions with China, without resolution.

• The bloc believes China is violating the terms of its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Rights [sic] (TRIPS) agreement with the WTO.

• European Commission Executive Vice-President and Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis said: “We must protect the EU’s vibrant high-tech industry, an engine for innovation that ensures our leading role in developing future innovative technologies. EU companies have a right to seek justice on fair terms when their technology is used illegally. That is why we are launching WTO consultations today.”

• More than 80 civil society organizations said Monday that in order to finally put a stop to the “endless cycle of death and disability” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. President Joe Biden should demand that the World Trade Organization convene an emergency session and swiftly approve a suspension of coronavirus vaccine patents.

• The coalition, led by the Trade Justice Education Fund, outlined its demands in a new letter to the White House ahead of Biden’s second planned global vaccine summit next month—a virtual gathering that will come as billions of people in poor countries still lack access to lifesaving shots.

Copyrights

• Three researchers who sought to intervene in a court case that will determine whether Sci-Hub will be blocked by ISPs in India have had their application rejected. They argued that blocking access to copyrighted research papers would affect their work and harm the public interest. The judge found that an intervention could not be made on that basis.

• Google’s voluntary anti-piracy measures have gradually expanded over the years, resulting in some unique responses. When Google removes an allegedly copyright-infringing URL from its search engine, it will disable ads on this URL as well. In addition, the search engine has added a “still-in-theaters/prerelease” tag for DMCA notices, so reported sites can be punished more severely.

• New week, new episode of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we are joined by Larissa Borck, Digital Curator at the Sörmlands Museum. As a trained cultural anthropologist with a strong network in the European digital cultural heritage sector, Larissa is passionate about opening up GLAM institutions by digital means. With a background in research about digitization of cultural heritage and management of museums, Larrissa connects both academic and practice fields.

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