● 04.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/04/2022: OpenStack and JWMDesk 3.5.1

Posted in News Roundup at 1:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

• OpenStack’s 25th release brings the usual crop of new features to the open-source cloud platform, including support for DPUs, better integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes, and a handy un-delete feature for file system shares.

• Way back in the early days of the Internet, web applications were hosted on specific server machines. That is, when you wanted to host a web application, you had to purchase a physical machine, install Linux or some other operating system on it, and then pay an Internet Service Provider to put your machine on their network. This process was both time-consuming and expensive, often costing hundreds of dollars a month just to rent the space where you install your own server.

• Cisco Systems revamped its Intersight hybrid cloud platform to include the management of Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines (VMs)…

Instructionals/Technical

• Learn the steps to install open-source KeePass Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the APT package manager.

• Every good language needs a powerful IDE to help programmers develop their applications correctly. Python is no exception because we have Wing at our disposal. Today you will learn how to install Wing Python IDE on a system like Ubuntu 20.04, but it should also work on any derivative of it.

• How to Fix “MySQL ERROR 1819 (HY000):” In Linux: your password does not satisfy the current policy requirements

• Are you having an error like the “your password does not satisfy the current policy requirements” message then you must be creating a MySQL user with a relatively weak password? You will see this error if you are using a password that does not meet the recommended password policy requirements.

Distributions

New Releases

• Actually, Easy 3.4.4 has JWMDesk 3.5.0.1 with some tweaks by me, that have now been incorporated, and refined by Roger, into 3.5.1.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

Debian Family

• LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Chromium

• Tomorrow will be four years to the day that I started this site. And every day since then I’ve kept coverage to Chrome OS and Chromebooks, along with the occasional bit about Chromebases or Chrome OS tablets. As Google’s effort to unbundle the Chrome browser from the Chrome OS platform nears completion, I think it’s time to include more Google Chrome browser coverage.

Standards/Consortia

• Michael Barker surveys some of the alternative APIs available on various platforms, discussing some of the implementation pitfalls. He also looks at the impact of using these APIs.

Leftovers

• In recent years, Johnson & Johnson has successfully defended itself against many of these baby powder claims but has also lost on occasion.

• After one baby powder trial in Oklahoma in 2018, J&J was eventually forced to pay 22 women with ovarian cancer more than $2 billion. That award survived an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

• But with most of the cases — including Wilt’s — still pending, the company found a way to stop the legal process in civil court, using a complex bankruptcy strategy known in legal circles as the “Texas two-step.”

• Consider this a PSA: The owner of the verified Twitter @willsmith account is not the disgraced actor Will Smith who just resigned from the Academy after slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards.

• The actor Will Smith does not have an official Twitter account.

Education

Hardware

• With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.

• Despite great progress over the past century, more than a billion people still don’t have access to clean drinking water today. Much of the water on Earth’s surface is polluted, but it’s not always easy to tell a dirty stream from a clean one. Professional kit for water analysis can be expensive, which is why [kutluhan_aktar] decided to design a portable, internet-connected water pollution monitor.

• If you’re looking to add a little more sci-fi authenticity to your gaming setup, you could do much worse than this functional control lever replica that [ZapWizard] has entered into the Hackaday.io Sci-Fi Contest.

• Restoring a vintage radio receiver has the potential to be a fun weekend project, but it pays to know what you’re up against. Especially in the case of vacuum tube electronics, running down gremlins in the circuits isn’t always a straightforward process (also, please mind the high voltage that is present in old vacuum tube equipment). [Mr Carlson] has a knack for getting old radios humming once again, and his repair of a 1960s General Electric barn find radio receiver is a thorough masterclass in vintage electronics servicing.

• This year’s Hackaday Prize is off to a roaring start. And that’s fantastic, because this year’s challenge is a particularly important one: reducing mankind’s footprint on the earth through better energy collection, better resource use, and keeping what we’ve already got running a little bit longer. Not only is this going to be the central challenge for the next century, but it’s also a playground for hackers like us.

• There are plenty of gaming laptops on the market these days, but none quite fit the requirements of one [ParticularlyPippin]. Thus, they set out on building their own portable computer, ending up with a rig in a briefcase with a decidedly cyberpunk feel.

• Doing the rounds among motorcycle enthusiasts for the last week has been a slightly unusual machine variously portrayed as running on water or sea water. This sounds like the stuff of the so-called “Free energy” fringe and definitely not the normal Hackaday fare, but it comes alongside pictures of a smiling teenager and what looks enough like a real motorcycle to have something behind it. So what’s going on? The answer is that it’s the student project of an Argentinian teenager [Santiago Herrera], and while it’s stretching it a bit to say it runs on sea water he’s certainly made a conventional motorcycle run on the oxygen-hydrogen mix produced from the electrolysis of water. The TikTok videos are in Spanish, but even for non-speakers it should be pretty clear what’s going on.

• When I want to charge my wireless mouse now, I don’t need to plug in a cord or place it on a dock. In fact, I don’t think about charging at all. It just… does. Because this past Christmas, a very generous brother-in-law effectively bought me a wireless mouse that charges itself.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The US House of Representatives voted Friday to approve a bill that would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. It’s a first step toward making the drug legal and attempting to undo some of the damage caused by punitive drug laws, particularly among communities of color. The voting happened along party lines, with 220 votes in favor and 204 opposed. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but advocates say with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, they’re more hopeful that the legislation will finally become law.

• And the court went even further. In March 1972, it ruled Michigan’s marijuana laws unconstitutional, and since the revised law that was passed the previous December didn’t go into effect until April 1, open consumption of marijuana was legal in Michigan for about three weeks that spring.

• [...]

• Then, on April 1, when the new law took effect, the first Hash Bash was held on the Diag “to let them know that we’d still be smoking even though they were putting this law back in,” Sinclair said.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Microsoft’s attempts to have a 2021 lawsuit’s claims regarding anti-competitive practices struck out were this week contested in UK courts.

• During the hearing on March 30-31, counsel for ValueLicensing requested Microsoft’s applications be dismissed. While the software giant appeared to accept that there were issues around competition law to be tried against its US and Ireland operations, its lawyers reckoned there weren’t reasonable grounds for a claim against its UK tentacle.

• According to legal website Law360, Microsoft’s lawyers said in court that its UK tentacle just marketed the licenses and “nothing else.”

Security

• Both Apple and Meta handed over users’ addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses in mid-2021 after being duped by these emergency requests, according to Bloomberg.

• EDRs, as the name suggests, are used by law enforcement agencies to obtain information from phone companies and technology service providers about particular customers, without needing a warrant or subpoena. But they are only to be used in very serious, life-or-death situations.

• As infosec journalist Brian Krebs first reported, some miscreants are using stolen police email accounts to send fake EDR requests to companies to obtain netizens’ info. There’s really no quick way for the service provider to know if the EDR request is legitimate, and once they receive an EDR they are under the gun to turn over the requested customer info.

• In its most insane attack yet against Microsoft, Google this week claimed that using Microsoft technologies made governments less secure. But it has no data to back up that claim at all.

• Viasat did not provide technical indicators-of-compromise nor a full incident response report, the researchers noted. Instead, the satellite biz said malicious commands disrupted modems in Ukraine and other European countries. The SentinelOne duo questioned how legitimate commands could cause this level of modem chaos. “Scalable disruption is more plausibly achieved by pushing an update, script, or executable,” the researchers said.

• They suggest the ukrop executable, which they dubbed AcidRain, could do the trick.

• [...]

• So, by destructive commands, Viasat meant: modems were commanded by their compromised support servers to run destructive malware.

• Apple has released updates for its mobile and desktop operating systems to patch security holes that may well have been exploited in the wild.

• On Thursday, the iPhone giant issued macOS Monterey 12.3.1; iOS 15.4.1 and iPadOS 15.4.1; tvOS 15.4.1; and watchOS 8.5.1 to address vulnerabilities in its software.

• U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has uncovered 66 new vulnerabilities that are exploited by attackers.

• The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has partnered with Linux Foundation Training & Certification to release a free online training course, Developing Secure Software. The two organisations say the training course will help elevate these security issues and improve access to cybersecurity training for everyone from developers to operations teams to end-users.

• The Linux Foundation’s SBOM contributions provided all of us a head start to begin addressing issues with software supply chain management. With widespread adoption, SBOM equips software projects and users to assess and address Spring4Shell as well as any other as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities and prepare us for what is undoubtedly a season of high-impact infrastructure software vulnerabilities.

• Clicking on links in emails from well-known brands can be dangerous because of brand abuse.

Privacy/Surveillance

• But asking someone if they’re vaccinated isn’t actually a HIPAA violation. That’s a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. “Does he deserve any rating as a patient? Not even one star,” Igbinadolor wrote, according to the notice of proposed determination outlining the violation. (For the curious, the redacted HIPAA-violating Google post is on page 3.)

• The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has accused an NSA employee of sharing top-secret national security information with an unnamed person who worked in the private sector.

• According to a DoJ announcement and the indictment, an NSA staffer named Mark Unkenholz “held a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance and had lawful access to classified information relating to the national defense.”

• The indictment alleges that on 13 occasions between 2018 and 2020, Unkenholz shared some of that information with a woman identified only as “RF” who was not entitled to see it. Unkenholz did so despite allegedly having “reason to believe [the info] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

Defence/Aggression

• It is tough for leftists to be on the same side as the mainstream. We can easily feel at those times that we’re missing something, that we’re letting down the struggle, that by ganging up even on an admittedly bad actor we’re helping strengthen the nemesis at home, allowing it to appear as the good guy. Ever since 1917, that has been the case with regards to the western Left and Russia. Before 1917, the Left saw the tsarist autocracy as the pinnacle of authoritarian reaction, an attitude that eased the path for the socialist parties of Russia’s enemies to embrace World War I. But ever since the Russian Revolution, the Left has been wary of joining with any western bourgeois condemnations of the country, despite its own often fierce objections to Stalinism or the clampdown on internal democracy.

• Last year, a former federal prison near Folkston, Georgia was emptied after President Biden signed an executive order phasing out the use of private prisons. So why is business now booming at the same facility for GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison firms? Because the administration has pulled a sneaky sleight-of-hand: Rather than fully halting the incarceration of people in such facilities, it has allowed them to simply be converted into immigration detention spaces.

• Dozens of progressive lawmakers in the United States and Japan are urging President Joe Biden to make a “sensible” shift and commit the U.S. to a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons “at any time or under any circumstances.”

• “It is never too late to commit to a no-first-use policy.”

• On the afternoon of Aug. 26, 17-year-old Shabir Ahmad Mohammadi huddled with his family by a mosque near the Kabul airport. It was one of the final days of the American evacuation from Afghanistan. Their time to flee was running out.

• Shabir volunteered to go to the airport alone. He hoped he could weave his slender frame through the crowds and persuade the American troops to help his family leave.

• The 2022 parliamentary election campaign is over, and on Sunday we will elect the next parliament. Hungarians are voting for individual constituency candidates and party lists, and – almost forgotten – they are also voting in the government-initiated referendum on „child protection”. The 2022 campaign was no ordinary one, with plans largely overturned by the Russian-Ukrainian war and a new campaign essentially starting at the end of February. But what was the main theme? What happened to the scandals? And what will the Hungarian voters be deciding about? Who do the polls show as the winner? As the campaign comes to a close, let us take a look at what campaign ’22 has brought.

• ‘The Shock Doctrine’ reveals how power elites under the pretence of crisis use the threat of impending or present doom and fear to introduce policies that satiate the needs of vested interests in society. She gives examples of paradigmatic shifts in policy in Chile, Russia, Britain and other states to show how policies that under ‘normal’ conditions would be resisted, but because a population has been subject to shock it is willing to or is amenable to further manipulation. This is happening in Finland concerning NATO membership.

• My phone rang off the hook as soon as the news hit. According to reporting from The Washington Post, internal White House phone records turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee included a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes. A lot can be said in 457 minutes.

• Comparisons to the 18.5-minute gap in a crucial President Richard Nixon recording were immediately obvious to me. After all, I was the prosecutor who cross-examined Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, about how that gap came to be. And I am not the only one to make that connection.

• Those similarities — and the differences — are illuminating as lawmakers continue to battle apparent obstruction in their investigation of the events leading up to and during the Capitol [insurrection].

Environment

• New readings showed the water in California’s mountain snowpack sat at 38% of average. That’s the lowest mark since the end of the last drought in 2015; only twice since 1988 has the level been lower.

• “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels and our dependence on them” said Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska as Russia, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers, was invading her country.

• Scientists with the United Nations weather agency on Friday expressed fresh concern over the climate crisis following recent extreme events in Antarctica—an area they say should not be taken “for granted.”

• “The Antarctic ice sheets hold almost 60 meters of potential sea-level rise. Understanding and properly monitoring the continent is therefore crucial for society’s future well-being.”

Energy

• The inclusion of gas in the EU sustainable investment taxonomy is incompatible with its own goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

• The European Union’s labelling of fossil gas as ‘sustainable’ undermines its own goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, goes against the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and exposes households to energy shortages, rising costs of living and economic instability.

• Any inclusion of fossil gas in the sustainable investment taxonomy will only serve to embed the status quo, rather than deliver the radical action that is needed to truly transform our economies, and the energy systems upon which they depend, and reach the critical goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees.

• A cryptocurrency, in the broadest sense, is a digital asset presented as a token or coin. While certain cryptocurrencies have entered the real world via traditional means of payment like credit cards, the vast majority remain completely intangible. The term “[cryptocurrency]” refers to the complex encryption required to create and handle digital currency and its operations throughout decentralized networks.

• Thanks to decades of car-centric policy in the United States, it is nearly impossible to get around in most cities and towns without a car. As a result, emissions from transportation have skyrocketed, and Americans have few alternatives when the price of gas rises.

Finance

• European Union lawmakers on Thursday backed tougher traceability rules for transfers of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in a move the industry said would erode privacy, hinder innovation and expose users to a higher risk of theft.

• The draft legislation, part of a broader fight against money laundering and financial crime, would require [cryptocurrency] firms to collect and share data on transactions in a business that has so far thrived on its anonymity.

• Russia says it will end cooperation with other nations on the International Space Station until the sanctions put on the country are lifted. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, announced in a thread on Twitter that the “restoration of normal relations between partners” on the ISS and other projects is only possible with the “complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions.”

• In translated versions of his tweets, Rogozin says he appealed the sanctions in letters to NASA, the European Space Agency, as well as the Canadian Space Agency. Rogozin also posted images of what appears to be each country’s response — the CSA confirmed the letter’s authenticity to The Verge but declined to comment any further. The Verge also reached out to NASA and the ESA but didn’t immediately hear back.

• Chinese search giant and AI cloud company Baidu has landed on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s provisional list of companies it might de-list because of opaque disclosures.

• The name of the law that permits such listings is the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA). The act requires some companies that issue securities in the USA to allow local auditors to understand how many of its shares are owned by governments, if governments exercise control over the company, and whether any officials or regulations are connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Fabrications Normalized

• If she is confirmed by the Senate next week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would become arguably the most accomplished Justice on the Supreme Court, and the first to have served as a public defender. It’s no surprise that the first Black woman nominated to the highest court in the country would face intense scrutiny in her confirmation hearings, and indeed, the questioning she endured was not only aggressive but often vicious.

• This is extremely significant because ACT was essentially founded by Microsoft more than two decades ago. When Microsoft got into antitrust trouble (over conduct that was laughably negligible compared to what we’ve seen from Apple and Google in recent years), it set up ACT according to none other than The New York Times, which wrote in June 2000 (according to a Wikipedia article): “[...] Microsoft has also created new trade groups, the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) [now called ACT | The App Association] and Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), to generate support for the company through Web sites and a sophisticated and largely hidden grassroots lobbying campaign.”

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz is the #1 Microsoft hater. I sometimes agreed with him on particular industry issues but he is really obsessed with Microsoft, while other companies are now the problem and Microsoft is on the right side of history with respect to app distribution. Dr. Schestowitz has written extensively about ACT’s (past) ties with Microsoft. On this page of his TechRights blog you can find a number of links going back to the late 2000s. For him it must be like hell freezing over to see Microsoft abandon ACT.

• I first encountered ACT when I was campaigning against a piece of software patentability legislation in Europe. At the time, Microsoft was very much in favor of strong patent enforcement, even including SEPs–but a few years later I already noticed that Microsoft was becoming more and more balanced, especially with respect to injunctive relief and, generally speaking, the balance between patent plaintiffs and defendants. As Microsoft became a moderate in patent policy, ACT changed direction, too, and warned against SEP abuse–after many years of taking a “the stronger, the merrier” position on anything involving patents, regardless of whether they are standard-essential or not.

• That about-face on SEPs must have attracted Apple to the group. Intel already had an interest in ACT’s advocacy when it faced some antitrust issues itself, and Intel–like Apple, to be fair–has also been very consistent about patents on industry standards.

• At some point, ACT renamed itself. ACT (Association for Competitive Technology) became ACT | The App Association–and in such contexts as Philips v. Thales they make submissions to courts that suggest it’s an IoT startup group. In reality, the way all those “members” became members appears to be that they just signed up for a newsletter, never paying any dues or undergoing the slightest vetting.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• For consumers, influencers are at once a walking advert and a trusted friend. For intermediaries that sit between them and brands, they are a hot commodity. For the brands’ corporate owners, they are becoming a conduit to millennial and Gen-Z consumers, who will be responsible for 70% of the $350bn or so in global spending on bling by 2025, according to Bain, a consultancy. And for regulators, they are the subject of ever closer scrutiny. On March 29th news reports surfaced that China’s paternalistic authorities are planning new curbs on how much money internet users can spend on tipping their favourite influencers, how much those influencers can earn from fans, and what they are allowed to post. Taken together, all this makes them impossible to ignore.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Elizabeth García Vilchis, a government spokesperson who presents the “Who’s who in the lies of the week” segment at President López Obrador’s morning press conferences, mocked media outlets and “experienced journalists” such as Joaquín López-Dóriga, Hannia Novell, Azucena Uresti and Carlos Loret de Mola for reporting on the supposed shootout without verifying that it actually occurred.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Investigators later discovered that the gun was someone else’s, Mata said. The person who originally brandished the weapon was arrested on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm, he said.

• A Bay Area college football player who disarmed a gunman was shot by police at a San Jose taqueria early Sunday, police confirmed.

• At about 3 a.m. Sunday, 20-year-old Oakland resident K’aun Green was eating at La Victoria Taqueria with his friend when a separate group started harassing him, attorney Adante Pointer told KGO on Tuesday.

• Smalls had led a walkout at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to protest working conditions at the Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse where he worked. He was fired the same day.

• The memo that contained those biting words was leaked just a few days later. But the words would stay with Smalls. They became the fuel that would drive him to lead one of the most dramatic and successful grassroots union drives in recent history.

• Not only acute questions such as obtaining work permits or residence permits in Germany, but also a very different highly important topic has now been addressed by WDR Cologne – namely: How do you get your second wife to Germany? The situation is explained in Arabic and German in the programme with the German-Iranian presenter Isabel Schayania, so that everyone is sure to understand.

• Almost a month after approving $1 billion in funds to address urgent needs in Afghanistan, the World Bank has reportedly suspended four projects after the Taliban denied girls the right to attend school beyond the sixth grade.

• International donors have struggled since the Taliban’s August 2021 takeover of Afghanistan to balance the needs of Afghans against concerns about inadvertently supporting (and funding) the Taliban.

• If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, its scorched-earth anti-union campaign last fall in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest.

• On August 5, 2019, the Government of India revoked Article 370 that gave special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, making it a centrally-administered union territory. Article 370 allowed the residents of the region to enjoy a certain degree of autonomy in political affairs compared to the rest of the country. Explaining the move to restrict the law in parliament, the government argued that the move would help overcome the corruption, terrorism and underdevelopment that had flourished there. Following this decision, the government imposed a complete communication blackout in Jammu and Kashmir. Reports suggest that local political leaders were detained, regional media curtailed, and public gatherings disallowed. Based on the limited information available, it appears that a few protests took place as restrictions were gradually lifted, though the ruling establishment disputes this.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• In a case that could help clarify when and how artists can make use of the work of others, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide a copyright dispute between a photographer and Andy Warhol’s estate over Warhol’s 1984 paintings of rock star Prince.

• The justices took up the Andy Warhol Foundation’s appeal of a lower court ruling that his paintings – based on a photo of Prince that photographer Lynn Goldsmith had shot for Newsweek magazine in 1981 – were not protected by the copyright law doctrine called fair use. This doctrine permits unlicensed use of copyright-protected works under certain circumstances.

• The RIAA’s legal campaign to crack down on tools and sites that utilize YouTube to provide unlicensed MP3 song downloads looks set to expand. A DMCA subpoena application filed in the United States reveals that the music industry group is trying to identify the operator of 320ytmp3.com, a huge YouTube-ripping service with an estimated 60 million visits per month.

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

----------

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