● 03.04.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 5/3/2022: GNUnet 0.16.1 and Free Software in Ukraine

Posted in News Roundup at 9:35 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Linux, the open-source operating system that uses a penguin as its symbol, offers plenty of advantages yet it’s only rarely seen on private computers. The reason why is easily explained. “The normal PC user usually buys his computer with a pre-installed operating system such as Windows and usually has no incentive to go to the trouble of installing Linux,” says Keywan Tonekaboni, who writes desktop tips for an industry magazine. Here are four good reasons why you should consider getting the penguin onto your computer.

• Freedom and flexibility

• “Linux focuses on the freedom of the user,” says IT advice specialist Matthias Wellendorf. In principle, anyone can reprogram or further develop the system as they wish. “Free also means free of charge. The operating system can be downloaded free of charge and installed on any as many computers as you want,” Wellendorf says. Linux comes with work interfaces that differ only slightly from Windows in terms of appearance and operation.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The long-awaited review of Pop!_OS, the Linux distribution from the makers of System76 computers. Our impressions, our opinions and our observations.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Discourse on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Discourse is an open-source Internet forum (aka online message board). It is designed to work as a forum, chat software, or mailing list. It integrates easily with other platforms, and its functionality can be expanded with plugins. 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 Discourse on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• Before you begin, you’ll need to make sure your device is set up and ready to use Linux applications. To do so, check out this Command Line article on getting started with Linux on Chrome OS. All finished? Great. Let’s move on. To install xdemineur, just open up the Terminal app from your Chrome OS app launcher and paste the following command. To paste, simply right-click anywhere in the terminal after you have copied the code. Once it’s finished, you should find xdemineur in your app launcher. You can also launch it from the terminal by typing xdemineur and hitting enter. Easy, peasy.

• MySQL is one of the most popular relational database management systems that is a jackpot for attackers trying to sneak into the databases. A newly-installed MySQL database server can have many vulnerabilities and loopholes. Since data security is of great importance, it’s mandatory to understand every aspect of MySQL security. This article focuses on the auditing and security of your MySQL database and provides nine tips to harden its security.

• A file that has the .DEB file extension is a Debian software package file. They contain software to be installed on Debian or a Debian based operating system. Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish falls into that category, being based on Debian and capable of executing .DEB files. In this tutorial, we will go over the steps to install a DEB file on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and talk about some best practices along the way.

• In this guide, we are going to show you how to change your keyboard layout in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. This will allow you to access the characters of another language and enable switching between multiple keyboards if you would like.

• Today we are looking at how to install Pencil2D on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below. If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• A loop device is a pseudo-device which doesn’t correspond to a real, physical block device, but can be used to make a file appear and be treated like one. To manage loop devices on Linux, we can use the losetup command: the utility let us create new loop devices, detach them and retrieve information about existing ones. In this article we learn how to use losetup to perform the aforementioned actions.

• If you have looked at some of our Bash script examples across our website, or seen some others online to learn from, you may have noticed that all of the Bash scripts begin with a shebang. A shebang is on the first line and starts with two characters #!. Following these characters is the path to the interpreter that should be used to parse the rest of the script. In most cases, this will be the Bash shell, which has a default path of /bin/bash on Linux systems. But there are other interpreters that can be used, or even flags that we can use with them. In this tutorial, we will go over shebang usage in Bash scripting. We will cover some best practices and show you examples of how to use shebangs in your own shell scripts.

• LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite project of The Document Foundation. It is available on all Linux systems, including Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The LibreOffice suite includes applications for word processing, creating spreadsheets, creating and presenting slideshows, diagrams, database management system, and more. Sometimes it is installed by default on Ubuntu 22.04, depending which installation option you chose. In this tutorial you will learn how to install LibreOffice on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop.

• The default firewall on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish is ufw, with is short for “uncomplicated firewall.” Ufw is a frontend for the typical Linux iptables commands, but it is developed in such a way that basic firewall tasks can be performed without the knowledge of iptables. Ufw should already be installed on your Ubuntu 22.04 system, but if your firewall status says inactive, that means ufw is turned off and currently not enforcing any rules. In this tutorial, you will see how to activate the UFW firewall on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

• Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics format. It is a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to create their artwork, whether just starting or looking to get more creative with their work. It has many features that will help make any design come alive, including scalability and import/export options so it can be used anywhere! Other formats can be imported and exported, and Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes and text. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Inkscape on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three installations method of APT, Flatpak, and Snap to install the graphics editor using the command terminal.

• If you’re a fan of customization and on the lookout for ways to boost your productivity on Linux, then Cerebro is a must-have app for your computer. It’s essentially a search app for Linux—much like Spotlight on macOS—that lets you easily search your computer and perform various operations on it efficiently. So if you’ve switched from a Mac and always wanted a Spotlight-like search functionality on Linux, Cerebro can help you achieve just that. Follow along as we walk you through the steps to install and use Cerebro on Linux.

• Recently, on one of my systems, VirtualBox stopped working. No matter which virtual machine I tried to launch, it would throw the same error. The popup window would read: Failed to open a session for the virtual machine [Whatever the name is]. In the details box, it would say: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005). Weird. The message is cryptic and generic, and doesn’t really give you a clue as to might be wrong right away. Well, I set about troubleshooting, and after some trial and error, this little guide was born. Now, in all likelihood, it won’t solve ALL your problems (with the same error code), but you might get just enough guidance to figure out what in your specific system is not working. Follow me.

• Let’s go through the steps to install Homebrew (Linux brew) on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish to install packages available through its library. Open source Homebrew (package manager) is meant to install various packages easily on macOS as well as Linux. Although the Linux package manager offers a wide range of applications to install, however, still if you are an existing user of macOS and now switching to Linux – Homebrew can be an option to get a familiar command line to install packages. Homebrew in Linux is called “Linuxbrew”.

• Go through this guide to learn the commands for installing open source Blender 3D software on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish Linux. Blender is a free open-source 3D program that can be used to create 3D models, photorealistic images, and animations. We know such animations, for example, from films like Shrek or the Pixar productions Cars. Furthermore, Blender has a built-in game engine with which interactive content is possible and is fully programmable with Python. Blender is licensed under the “General Public License”, which means, among other things, that anyone can use the program free of charge. Although Blender is free, it is very powerful and comprehensive. It doesn’t have to hide behind expensive commercial products. For a glimpse of what Blender can do, check out Sintel, the latest short film made with Blender. This 3D graphics creator platform is constantly being developed by the Blender Foundation and a large community and the number of fans has continued to grow since the first release in 1998.

• The Linux operating system was invented by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds along with the Free Software Foundation in 1991. [False] [...] Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He wanted to create an academic version of Unix OS for free. [False]

Games

• Ready for some retro shooter action? Humble has a mighty fine Best of Boomer Shooters Bundle available now. As usual, here’s a rundown of what titles are in and what you can expect to see on Steam Deck and normal Linux desktops. Bundles will probably look like this for a while with many not going through Deck Verified yet.

• Valve’s Steam Deck is capable of being much more than a handheld game console. It doubles as a powerful Linux PC that could realistically be your daily driver. Because of that, some experienced PC gamers may feel completely out of their depth when booting into the Steam Deck’s desktop mode. It’s a potentially foreign land full of new acronyms and terminology, unfamiliar menus, and a strange concept known as The Terminal.

• This week Valve quietly released a new SteamOS image, but it’s not the one so many curious PC users (myself included) are waiting for. The 2.5GB image is for recovering, repairing or re-imaging your Steam Deck and not the highly anticipated, complete version of SteamOS 3.0 that you can install on any PC.

• It’s been a pretty crazy week for higher-end handheld PC gaming systems, with Valve’s Steam Deck launching just a week ago, with our lord and savior Gabe Newell hand-delivering consoles to the public like some kind of wandering demigod. Anyway, into the fold comes the OneXPlayer Mini AMD, which features a brand-new AMD CPU, in a smaller form factor than the likes of Valve’s long sold-out handheld console. But, is it going to be any good, and is it going to be worth jumping at this device, instead of getting yourself a Steam Deck? We’ll go through everything that you possibly need to know about getting one of these devices.

• In a surprise treat for ’90s first-person shooter fans, Doom series co-creator John Romero emerged this week with a brand-new map for the 1994 classic Doom II. While it’s priced somewhat high for this kind of content—€5 for a single old-school map—there’s a good reason. Romero makes clear in the release’s template file that this WAD’s sale is intended to “raise funds to support the Ukrainian people.” It can be purchased at his personal shop site, where he says all proceeds will go toward two humanitarian organizations: the Ukrainian Red Cross and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund. (On the non-charity front, Romero’s store also sells a bunch of Doom-era goodies.)

• In brief: Are you looking forward to playing Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck? You may want to temper those hopes; developer Bungie is warning that doing so could result in a ban from the looter shooter. Like Fortnite, Destiny 2 isn’t officially supported on the Arch Linux-based SteamOS used by Valve’s new handheld, and its developer doesn’t want people trying to circumvent the incompatibility measures. [...] There’s also a warning for anyone who tries to get Destiny 2 running on SteamOS: “Players who attempt to bypass Destiny 2 incompatibility will be met with a game ban.”

• Valve has officially released its PC gaming-focused portable handheld this week, and the flexible machine has garnered a fair bit of praise for its performance on local games. However, if you were hoping to play cloud games from Google Stadia and similar services on the Steam Deck, it seems you’re in for a rude surprise.

• Fans might be disappointed, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that Valve’s new handheld device runs on Steam OS 3.0, based on Arch Linux architecture. It is a custom build of Linux made out of Wine and Proton and does not support anti-cheats that run at the kernel level.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Looking for task manager or todo list app for Linux? ‘Getting Things GNOME’ is worth a try! There are quite a few task managing apps for Linux desktop. ‘Getting Things GNOME’ (GTG in short) is one of the best for the GNOME desktop. I’m using Gnome ToDo to write down what to do in next days. It’s easy to use, and has a good-looking UI that turns dark automatically according to sunrise / sunset. It’s so good until I found GTG.

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 25 to March 04.

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Testing Cockpit is not an easy task – each pull request gets tested by over 300 browser integration test cases on a dozen operating systems. Each per-OS test suite starts hundreds of virtual machines, and many of them exercise them quite hard: provoking crashes, rebooting, attaching storage or network devices, or changing boot loader arguments.

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• As an administrator, it can be difficult to get the right level of visibility across your infrastructure. With the Red Hat Virtualization monitoring portal and Grafana dashboards, you can understand your data, identify problems early, utilize your resources efficiently and much more! The portal includes 20 dashboards, and at least 150 panels to monitor the Red Hat Virtualization environment. Find more information about how to configure and use Grafana in Visualize and Monitor the Red Hat Virtualization Environment with Grafana. You might still be asking yourself: what exactly can Grafana do in Red Hat Virtualization? In this post, we cover six ways you can use Grafana to monitor and obtain metrics and logs from your Red Hat Virtualization system. Let’s dive in.

Devices/Embedded

• The Purism Librem 5 is a smartphone designed to run mainline GNU/Linux software with an emphasis on privacy and security. When the phone was first announced it was one of the most powerful devices of its type. But it was also one of the most expensive… and it’s only gotten more expensive since then. When Purism launched a crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 5 in 2017, backers could pre-order the phone for $599. The price has gone up several times since then, and now the Librem 5 costs more than twice as much.

• MangoPi has opened $39 preorders for a 40 x 40mm “MangoPi-Nezha MQ” SBC that runs Linux or RT-Smart on a 1GHz, RISC-V based Allwinner F133-A SoC with 64MB DDR2. The SBC supplies 2x Type-C, WiFi, MIPI-DSI, RGB touch, DVP camera, GPIO, and audio I/O. The MangoPi project from Beijing Wadora Technology Co. teased its MangoPi-MQ1 SBC last October with minimal details. The tiny RISC-V board has now arrived in a Crowd Supply campaign as the MangoPi-Nezha MQ. Equipped with the Allwinner F133-A (D1s), a spin-down of the Allwinner D1 that powers Sipeed’s LicheeRV SBC, the MangoPi-Nezha MQ is available for $39, with free global shipments starting on July 7. The SBC was originally intended to be sold for $10, but as we documented in our recent Linux hacker board catalog, prices are way up across the industry. MangoPi is also prepping a MangoPi MQ-Dual SBC with the same form factor and features as the MangoPi-Nezha MQ, but with a dual-core Cortex-A7 Allwinner T113-S3. There are also preliminary product pages for an Allwinner D1-based MQ-Pro SBC, as well as MangoPi A1 (Amlogic S905) and A1-Pro (hexa-core -A73 and -A53 Amlogic A311D) SBCs (see farther below).

• Shock. Disbelief. Somehow an Arduino hobbyist built a Space Invaders arcade game that was just 3.1 inches tall. A mere 80 millimeters in height — its joystick made from a tiny hypodermic needle. A video on YouTube proudly proclaimed it “the smallest fully-functional Space Invaders model in the world.”

• Adlink and Congatec have each unveiled Linux-ready COM-HPC Server and COM Express Type 7 modules based on Intel’s Ice Lake-D Xeon D-2700 and D1700 SoCs with up to 20x and 10x cores, respectively, and support for up to 48x PCIe and 8x 10GBASE-KR.

• In an earlier iteration of this I joked that it would be so funny if my Librem 5 1600 days after ordering – and this week I finally received the mail to confirm my address; and later another one that it’s likely going to be shipped in the coming two weeks. This is great! I am looking forward to having a second Librem 5 to test (and maybe showcase) distros side-by-side. It’s also bad, because it means that I will need to write one or more articles about the device – I promised this years ago. While writing itself is not necessarily bad, it certainly takes time (and should not be done hastily, as I may have learned again this week (see below)). And time is so scarce, especially now, as I am finally making progress on a road that should lead towards a LinuxPhoneApps.org launch: Fixing LINMOBapps performance was always a major goal. Hoping that the next mention of that project will be a link to a post on the LinuxPhoneApps.org website, I conclude this editorial with a plea for peace: May the world be as peaceful and boring as these weeks Mobile Linux news are!

• Apple has filed a patent application for a device that – wait for it – has the computer and the keyboard all in one unit. Mind. Blowing. Except for one thing: isn’t that what all computers used to look like? US Patent Application 20220057845 describes a “computer in an input device”, which is but one way of visualising this startling innovation. Another could be as an input device stuck on top of a computer. It’s a sort of philosophical conundrum. The patent poets at Apple wax lyrical, thusly: “A computing device can include an enclosure that defines an internal volume and an external surface. An input component can be positioned at the external surface. A processing unit and a memory can be communicatively coupled and disposed within the internal volume.”

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Earlier this week, open source gateway Scarf began limiting access to open source packages for Russian government and military entities, via its gateway. In the company’s announcement, Scarf CEO and founder Avi Press wrote that “Scarf will be blocking all package and container downloads originating from Russian Government sources until further notice.” The company is not the only one to make such a move this week, with Oracle suspending all operations in the Russian Federation, Hashicorp prohibiting access to its products, and Apple stopping all sales in Russia. There were numerous others, but Scarf’s actions stand out — in that the restriction here applies to open source, not proprietary, software. When it comes to open source software, the Open Source Initiative’s definition is quite clear: there must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.” Each of these criteria applies to the license of said open source software, while the distribution of that same software may be a different matter entirely, argues Press. “There’s a difference between the code and the repositories where we collaborate on the code, versus the distribution channels where that code gets distributed,” said Press in an interview. “Just because you have the free permission to pull down the source code itself, versus, say, pull down a Dockerized application so that I can spin up an entire infrastructure ecosystem within my firewall and it all just works at the click of the button, those are two completely different things. Having more control over that distribution channel, that doesn’t really impact the nature of what the scope of these licenses are talking about.” While Press agrees that bypassing such restrictions, at least when just one company is implementing them, can be somewhat trivial, he asserts that the open source community at large could make a difference by working together. “If we cut off the software supply chain at all these different levels, it could quickly get quite untenable,” said Press. “I think that really just underlines the idea that if there’s a lot of different parties creating and maintaining this kind of software that are all working together, it actually could really make a difference over time.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• There was a similar web tech compatibility check called Compat 2021 that began in 2019 and showed up last year. It focused on five pain points – CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, position: sticky, aspect-ratio, and CSS transforms – but did not include Apple or its WebKit team, at least publicly.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Matt Mullenweg speaks to WordPress contributors worldwide on this special edition of the WP Briefing podcast with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Join us to hear Matt’s thoughts on Ukraine.

• There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and safety is top of mind for everyone in the WordPress community. If you don’t know where to begin, or how to support your peers, Executive Director Josepha Chomphosy’s advice to the global community is to start small. Overall, February has been a busy month for WordPress. To begin with, it was thrilling to see the enthusiasm for the release of WordPress 5.9 Joséphine from January continue last month, and that’s not all. We have many exciting updates to share, so keep reading to learn about the latest achievements from the WordPress community.

FSF

GNU Projects

• This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.16.0.

Licensing/Legal

• ACS has called on the government to “go back to the drawing board” with its attempts to update existing copyright laws so they are more suitable to digital technology. In its response to a discussion paper about the Exposure Draft Copyright Amendment (Access Reform) Bill 2021, ACS said the government’s approach to copyright law fails to keep up with technology. “The proposed rules being discussed in this paper are generally solving problems more than a decade old but leave little leeway for interpretation with respect to new technologies,” ACS said in its submission to the discussion paper. “If we look at the proposed rules, for example, there seems little consideration given for software development, for web archival and transmission, for data mining and AI, for social media use or for copyleft licenses.”

Programming/Development

• When you think of important open-source projects you almost certainly recall Linux, the Apache Web Server, LibreOffice, and so on. And, that’s true. These are vital, but beneath these are the critical software libraries that empower hundreds of thousands of other programs. These are far less well known. That’s why the Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) and the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), recently put together a comprehensive survey, Census II of Free and Open Source Software – Application Libraries, of these under-the-hood critical programs.

• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science have teamed up to educate developers and security professionals on what the most widely used open-source application libraries are. The report, Census II, is a follow-up to Census I, which was conducted in 2015 to identify the packages in Debian Linux that were most critical to the operation and security of the kernel. According to the Linux Foundation, Census II allows for a more “complete picture of free and open source (FOSS) adoption.”

• Gallivm is the nir/tgsi-to-llvm translation layer in Gallium that LLVMpipe (and thus Lavapipe) uses to generate the JIT functions which make triangles. It’s very old code in that it predates me knowing how triangles work, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bugs. And Gallivm bugs are the worst bugs. For a long time, I’ve had SIGILL crashes on exactly one machine locally for the CTS glob dEQP-GLES31.functional.program_uniform.by*sampler2D_samplerCube*. These tests pass on everyone else’s machines including CI. Like I said, Gallivm bugs are the worst bugs.

• In this tutorial we are going to learn the best way to learn JavaScript as a beginner. JavaScript is the most popular programming of the web alongside HTNL and CSS. Have you wandered how you can start programming as a beginner? Programming is not the best medicine for most IT forks. As a technology enthusiast like me, I will choose other things other than programming. But for a programmer it comes with many benefits, working from home for example, flexible time, more benefits like pay. There is more to programming and the best way to start as a beginner is to start a frontend web developer.

Perl/Raku

Java

• The Apache NetBeans team is pleased to announce that Apache NetBeans 13 is released today on March 4, 2022. Apache NetBeans is a full IDE for Java SE, Java EE, PHP, JavaScript, HTML5 and more, including some support for Groovy and C/C++.

Leftovers

• Like much of my New England-bred elder millennial cohort, I first saw The Monkees as part of an afterschool cartoon block on local UHF station WLVI-56. Unlike much of my cohort, I hated it. The songs were cloying, and Micky and Davy’s toothy grins and loud, sing-songy speaking styles reminded me of the teachers in my special ed math class who talked down to me because I was a little behind in arithmetic. Since the other kids in my neighbor’s babysitting group loved the series, however, I had to get through it to see the Bugs Bunny cartoons I adored. I began to identify with the rangy, plainspoken guy in the green wool hat whose sarcastic asides and stoic, slightly irritated facial expressions suggested that he didn’t want to be here, either. Little did I know that the guy in the hat would be my Virgil, guiding me through pre-gentrification Downtown LA in a series of influential feature films. In today’s Tedium, I’m exploring Mike Nesmith’s second act as a film producer and distributor.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• Do you engage in open source-related tasks within your organization? You know that collaboration is key. Here are three ways to engage and network with your open source peers and leverage your organization’s open source program!

Security

• Following (now) multiple reports of the ransom cyber attack on NVIDIA servers, the hacking group LAPSUS$ now demands NVIDIA should release their drivers for Windows, MacOS and Linux as open source. Should NVIDIA fail to meet this demand, the group threatens to release chipset files, graphics, and silicon information for existing and upcoming GPUs. It is unclear what the stolen data contains, but the group confirmed that there are 250GB of hardware related data in their possession. Furthermore, the group confirmed they have evaluated NVIDIA position, which means that NVIDIA is might trying to communicate with the group to prevent future leaks.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Without a critical update, Amazon Alexa devices could wake themselves up and start executing audio commands issued by a remote attacker, according to infosec researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London. By exploiting a now-patched vulnerability, a malicious person with some access to a smart speaker could broadcast commands to itself or to other smart speakers nearby, allowing said miscreant to start “smart appliances within the household, buy unwanted items, tamper [with] linked calendars and eavesdrop on the [legitimate] user.”

Defence/Aggression

• The eruption of war between Russia and Ukraine appears to have given the CIA the pretext to launch a long-planned insurgency in the country, one poised to spread far beyond Ukraine’s borders with major implications for Biden’s “War on Domestic Terror” As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to escalate and dominate the world’s attention, the increasing evidence that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is and has been working to create and arm an insurgency in the country has received considerably little attention considering its likely consequences. This is particularly true given that former CIA officials and a former Secretary of State are now openly saying that the CIA is following the “models” of past CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria for its plans in Ukraine. Given that those countries have been ravaged by war as a direct result of those insurgencies, this bodes poorly for Ukraine. Yet, this insurgency is poised to have consequences that reach far beyond Ukraine. It increasingly appears that the CIA sees the insurgency it is creating as more than an opportunity to take its hybrid war against Russia ever closer to its borders. As this report will show, it appears the CIA is determined to manifest a prophecy propagated by its own ranks over the past two years. This prediction from former and current intelligence officials dates from at least early 2020 and holds that a “transnational white supremacist network” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of Covid-19 recedes.

Environment

Censorship/Free Speech

• I sent this to electoral-vote dot com as a comment. I noticed that Russia banned access to Facebook after Facebook banned all Russian ads. Then they banned Twitter. No doubt that Putin was angry about not being able to easily access Facebook and run ads designed to prop up the Republican Party with his troll farms, but also Putin doesn’t want the Russian public to know how badly the invasion of Ukraine is going, and that’s difficult to maintain when Ukraine is showing dead Russian soldiers and POWs on Telegram, Facebook, and Twitter.

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