● 06.11.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/06/2022: Qt 6 in Debian

Posted in News Roundup at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Once upon a time, not quite back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, computer displays were CRTs and fundamentally operated by scanning an electron beam or beams back and forth over the screen. Usually the computer sent the display an analog stream of either monochrome or red, green, and blue intensity signals, and the display did all the work of scanning the electron beam(s) across the display. Initially, computer CRTs tended to work only at a single frequency of these signals, the horizontal and vertical scan rates. As the PC revolution got under way, good CRTs became multisync, which meant that they were able to work at a variety of scan rates. This was especially important to cope with the wide variety of resolutions and scan rates that were used by and supported by various PC graphics systems.

Applications

•  A rhythm game is a music-themed action video game that challenges a player’s sense of rhythm. Games in the genre typically focus on dance or the simulated performance of musical instruments.

• There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).

• Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action, together with links to relevant resources.

•  Most of our focus goes into avoiding the Linux terminal, at least, for new users comfortable with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs).

• While it is good to make things easy and convenient, there are a few reasons why you should not be afraid of dipping your toes into the Linux terminal.

• Here, I shall highlight some of them to encourage you to try a few things in the terminal that should help you eventually.

Instructionals/Technical

• The HTTP “core” documents were published on Monday, including a revision of HTTP semantics, caching, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and the brand-new HTTP/3. However, that’s not all that the HTTP community has been up to.

• Today the RFC Editor published another set of HTTP specifications. They reflect a variety of work that’s happened over the last few years; publication was held up by references to the core work, so many of these already have active implementations. Let’s take a quick look.

• When I started thinking about writing a post about web font loading my intention was to propose relatively sophisticated ideas that I’ve been playing with for a while. However, as I was trying to use them in real-world websites I realized that deployment of the more advanced techniques is de-facto impossible without the creation of new web standards.

• With that the TL;dr of this post is: Use font-display: optional. However, I and many others really like our custom fonts. See the rest of the post for how we can get our cake and eat it, too–with a tool that automatically makes fallback fonts behave like their respective custom font counterpart.

•  When you start using VIM for the first time, there will be a lot of commands or keybindings you need to memorize, and one of them is how to make cut, copy, and paste. It’s very intimidating for newcomers to use the vim editor, but it’s not as complicated as you think.

• There might be a situation when you are stuck with the vim editor. At that moment, you should know how to perform this basic task without any hassle.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Thunderbird Mail on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Thunderbird is a free email client that is easy to set up and use. With Thunderbird, you get an easy-to-use account setup Wizard that seamlessly allows you to set up your email account without having to provide your SMTP, IMAP, and SSL/TLS settings.

• 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 Thunderbird Mail on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Portainer on Debian 11/Debian 10. Portainer is a self-service container service delivery platform that provides container management GUI for Kubernetes, Docker and Swarm.

• Catch yourself typing git status a lot? Yeah, me too. There’s got to be an easier way, right? Luckily there is: fancy-git. It makes it possible to theme your Bash terminal prompt in a Git specific way. Most importantly, it shows the name of your Git branch in your Bash terminal prompt. This tutorial shows you how to install fancy-git, for showing the name of the Git branch and its status in your Bash terminal prompt.

Games

• Between 2022-06-04 and 2022-06-11 there were 10 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 174 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 5.7 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…

• The AYN Odin is a handheld game console with a 6 inch display, built-in game controllers, and an ARM-based processor. It ships with Android software, but we’ve already seen that it’s possible to load other operating systems like Windows on some models.

• Now you can do that without wiping Android first. Project Valhalla is a community-built set of tools that allows you to turn an AYN Odin into a dual-boot device capable of running Android, Windows, or maybe even Linux (although Linux support is still a work in progress).

• Valve has released another small update to the Steam Deck, this time focusing on some bugs and UI performance.

• Capcom has released a cloud gaming browser demo of the popular Resident Evil Village, so you can try it out in only a click and a few seconds waiting on pretty much any platform. As long as you’re using a Chromium-based browser, that is.

• The million-selling indie game Escape Simulator has expanded with a new Steampunk DLC now available to give you a lot more to play with.

• The Elder Scrolls Online is currently noted as Unsupported on Steam Deck but don’t let that stop you. Getting it running is actually pretty simple.

• Paradox have plenty more coming with the Hearts of Iron IV: By Blood Alone expansion announced, although there’s no date yet they’ve teased it.

• Interplay Entertainment along with Square One Games and Black Isle Studios have confirmed that Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II is coming to Steam along with Native Linux support.

•  The 1993 classic PC FPS game comes back to life in a project that shows how Linux can be bent to a developer’s will.

• id Software’s “Doom” revolutionized the PC game world when it first hit the market in 1993, and one developer has paid nearly thirty years later by releasing a Linux distribution that does nothing but run the classic genre-defining first-person shooter.

• The distribution was created by Shadly Salahuddin and is dubbed DoomLinux. By running a shell script from Salahuddin’s GitHub page, a user can build a small disk image that can run from a USB drive. It’s intended as a practical demonstration on how Linux distributions are put together.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• What’s the geekiest thing you could possibly write about? I’m not sure, but lengthy posts about your desktop and shell configuration is probably in the top ten. So let’s do that!

• I’m an incorrigible tinkerer and I’ve spent more of my life than I care to think of just tuning the look of my GUI environment. Much to my own surprise, I’ve now been running the same look – basically the FVWM2 defaults – for well over a year. My tweaking has instead been focused on doing more window management with the keyboard rather than the mouse, in part due to some problems with lateral epicondylitis (“tennis elbow” sounds so pedestrian).

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

•  Because that’s clearly the most important thing this week, right!?

• Anyway, Plasma 5.25 is going to be released in a few days, and it’ll be huge! Accordingly, feature work for 5.26 is starting to land alongside bugfixing for 5.25.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• I am looking at how to reduce the size of ‘easy.sfs’, which is currently 750MiB (in Easy 4.0). The jump in size is due to now using lz4-hc compression.

• Today I stumbled across discussion about samba in the Vanilla Dpup thread,

• I received an email from Rick, pointing out what should have been an obvious problem. But, I hadn’t noticed it until he drew my attention to it.

• [...]

• …what is wrong with that? Two things. Firstly, Osmo is in the tray, and that has a very sophisticated calendar. Secondly, the “Launch Osmo Calendar” brings up a window warning that Osmo is already running, and it may corrupt Osmo to launch a second instance.

BSD

• At the OpenBSD d2k17 hackathon, the rules were documented in a newly introduced airport(7) manual page: “New airports can only be added by OpenBSD developers who have visited an airport and thereby have verified its existence”. Once again, the more astute reader will not have missed the fact that the rules do not stipulate any flying requirements. Neither did henning@, who not long after airport.7 was committed, added an entry for XFW, (the Airbus factory) which he had visited but not flown from.

• RockPro64 is a beefy single-board computer made by a company that brought us awesome devices like Pinebook Pro (laptop), Pinecil (soldering iron), PineTime (smartwatch) and of course PinePhone. The board utilizes the same hexa-core processor as Pinebook Pro – Rockchip RK3399, and 4 gigabytes of LPDDR4 RAM.

• One of the distinct features of that computer is a PCI-express X4 socket. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use any video card there even with “stock” GNU/Linux – ARM64 GPU drivers for AMD/NVIDIA is just not there yet I assume. The slot is often being used for a network cards and SATA controllers – there is even an official case for RP64 with 3.5″ hard drives spots inside, quite handy for a homemade NAS or something of sorts.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• openSUSE Leap 15.4 was released on 8th June 2022.

• Leap is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) as it shares the same source. Therefore, you can switch a Leap instance to SLE and benefit from paid support without any hassle. This comes very handy in environments where you build and test on Leap but deploy on SLE — lift & shift can’t be any simpler.

• Leap 15.4 is a minor release but coinciding with this release, the openSUSE Project introduced a new version of Leap designed for containers and virtualised workloads. It’s called Leap Micro. The current version is 5.2.

• Leap Micro shares same source as SLE Micro.

• Another week is over and many people had the pleasure to meet in person at the openSUSE conference ’22 this year. I hear it was a great event, with lots of fun. Exactly, what the openSUSE community stands for. And as usual, the same openSUSE community also works without interruption on the rolling release: openSUSE Tumbleweed. In this week, we have seen daily snapshots (0602…0608).

Devices/Embedded

• The IoTFi is a development board designed for embedded applications that require 2G or 4G support. The device combines the RP2040 chip to handle user applications and the ESP32 for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The 2G model starts at ~$47 and the 4G variant ships for $114. The IoTFi was recently launched on Kickstarter and it has already achieved its funding goal.

• As previously mentioned, the RP2040 consists of two Arm Cortex-M0+ processors (up to 133MHz) and the ESP32-C3-32S that features a 32-bit RISC-V single-core processor (up to 160MHz). The ESP32-C3-32S also supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n (up to 150Mbps, 1T1R mode data). The datasheet for the  ESP32-C3-32S mentions that the chip supports BLE 5.0 (125Kbps – 2Mbps), however, the Kickstarter page states that the IotFi board has inbuilt Bluetooth 2.0.

• At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we believe everyone belongs in computer science, and that it is a much more varied field than is commonly assumed. One of the ways we want to promote inclusivity and highlight the variety of skills and interests needed in computer science is through our ‘I belong’ campaign. We do this because the tech sector lacks diversity. Similarly, in schools, there is underrepresentation of students in computing along the axes of gender, ethnicity, and economic situation. (See how researchers describe data from England, and data from the USA.)

Open Hardware/Modding

• I had an idea in the back of my mind : create a DIY low-power NAS based on a cheap SBC that can handle more than 2 drives (up to 6, preferably) without using USB. And it looks like this project is now completely possible! So… Let’s do it!

• Overall, this display is one of the best ‘TV’s I’ve used—even though it’s not, technically-speaking, a ‘television’. There isn’t any spyware, adware, or other janky software running on it, the colors and brightness are excellent, and most of all it just works.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

• There’s a growing split over how much room browsers should leave for ad blocking — and Chrome and Firefox have ended up on opposite sides of the fight.

• The rupture centers on a feature called Web Request, commonly used in ad blockers and crucial for any system that looks to block off a domain wholesale. Google has long had security concerns about Web Request and has worked to cut it out of the most recent extension standard, called Manifest V3, or MV3 for short. But, in a recent blog post, Mozilla made clear that Firefox will maintain support for Web Request, keeping the door open for the most sophisticated forms of ad blocking.

• Google’s strategy has been roundly criticized by privacy advocates — the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a vocal opponent — but the search company hasn’t been swayed. Though Firefox has a far smaller share of the desktop marketplace than Chrome, it could be a chance for Mozilla’s product to really define itself. For Google though, sticking with MV3 will have a huge impact on the overall role of ad blocking on the modern web.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Drupal is an open-source system used by millions of people and companies for content structuring and management.

• It’s a platform with a great number of themes and modules, which is why around 97% of its users rank it as one of the top-performing platforms in the industry.

• For a number of reasons, it turned out that Simple Jekyll Search would fit my blog better, as long as I gave up the idea of not using JavaScript.

Programming/Development

• The Java Native Interface (JNI) makes it possible to call Java from C++ and vice versa, and in Qt we have a pair of classes, QJniObject and QJniEnvironment, that provide convenient, Qt-friendly APIs. Until recently, I have had little opportunity to develop for Android, but porting Qt Speech to Qt 6 and the face-lift of its Android implementation gave me a chance to get some experience. I also wanted to experiment with some of the new capabilities we are planning to introduce after 6.4, which involved adding a few more callbacks and passing a few more parameters between C++ and Java.

• Even with the convenient Qt classes, calling APIs via JNI requires signature strings. This makes it time-consuming and error-prone to develop for the Android platform. After spending more time than I should have on putting together the correct strings, I wondered whether we could make developing against the JNI easier using modern C++.

• As announced some time ago on Debian Backport’s mailing list I will be backporting Qt 6 to Debian 11 “Bullseye”. This comprises the (so far) 29 source packages that compose Qt 6 and libassimp.

• The Qt Company wanted to let us Debian users also enjoy Qt 6 on Bullseye, so they contacted me (and by extension my employer ICS) to bring this forward. As said in the mail I sent to the backports list I’m making the commitment to maintain the packages myself, but I’m really happy the Qt Company asked me for this.

• What I find fascinating about this (besides the obvious implications for modern civilization) is that Tainter could have been writing about software.

• Anyone who’s worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it’s big, it’s complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to “fix” the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is… to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds.

• Concurrency is not very intuitive. You need to train your brain to consider what happens when multiple processes execute a certain code block at the same time. There are several issues I often encounter: [...]

Python

• After two long years of lockdowns, virtual meetups, quarantines, and general chaos, the Python community gathered en masse to Salt Lake City for PyCon 2022. Two of our engineers attended the conference, and we are happy to report that the Python community is not only alive and well but also thriving, with multiple speakers showing off projects they worked on during the pandemic.

• Here are some of the themes and highlights we enjoyed!

Leftovers

• These last few days have seen me ponder, many times, whether I should write about writing. Meta indeed. I have erred away from this subject matter because it feels like I should be writing about something more important. Consequential. As I write this paragraph, I am reminded that writing is a tool for me to think. I know this deep down but I often need a reminder. If I need to process something, why not write about that topic, even if it is not as impressive as all of the other pieces of writing I consume?

• Why not just write?

• So I love crows, well really all corvids, but especially crows. Something about their intelligence just amazes me, they know to fly towards the sound of a gunshot because it means a dead animal may be on the other side. One time I watched a crow drag an unopened bag of chips into the road so a car could drive over it and pop it open. He placed it exactly where the driver side wheels were and waited until someone hit it. He then flew into the road and dragged back the bag where he enjoyed his feast.

• [...]

• About 2 weeks ago we had two amazing experiences. On one walk, as we made it to the bench where we normally turn around, we saw a crow in a tree a little bit further down. I walked over to it, cawed and threw some feed on the ground. Then from behind us another crow came flying by and landed in the same tree. He or she was incessantly barking right at me, until I responded, where he or she looked at me in silence for a second and then started barking again. Whenever I reached for my bag this talkative fellow would be quiet and would only start up again when I stopped throwing down seed. As we walked away both crows followed us for a bit, the talkative one still barking. a couple days later we turned down this side street. I heard a few flaps behind me and I saw a familiar dark figure watching me from the tree above. He then swooped down closer to a power line a few feet lower. He watched and waited patiently, not barking like the previous pair. We threw down seed and started walking away, but instead of flying down and eating he continued to follow us! He’d jump from power line to power line, watching us as we continued to throw down food for him. Then another swooped down. This other crow flew at the one that followed us and chased him down to the end of the block, then came flying back to take the seed.

• What are you supposed to do when you no longer want to be friends with a person?

• Its not like I can tell him outright, plus he’s friends with all my friends so I don’t want to make group outings awkward. I’ve come to just really not care for him anymore. Maybe it was just having him be a few states north for a couple years, getting a break from his bullshit.

• He has a problem, you can’t challenge him. If you disagree, he will take it as an attack, and a conscious, premeditated attack at that. You can’t give him criticism, no matter how light, or he will take it as an attack. You can’t make a mistake which will inconvenience him, because he will immediately start yelling at you about how you didn’t properly communicate with him. You have to give into his demands or he will banish you from any friend group activities. I could no longer publicly associate with our mutual friend, Barry, because Barry criticized him for getting mad when we didn’t praise him enough. Not to mention his utter carelessness for any inconvenience he puts you in. You have to assume he’s going to be at least 30 minutes late. Oh and his constant favors, “can you feed my cat”, “can you pick me up some ramen”, “No pressure but can you do this for me”, “can you fix my window for me”. He moved to Sac a couple months ago and I just can’t take more than a few minutes of him.

Science

• What this means is the materials recovered from Ryugu are the most primitive humans have ever been able to analyze on Earth. They provide a portal to the very early days of the solar system, when the sun was only a fledgling star and the planets were only just starting to form. Though the study released Thursday is a major milestone in understanding Ryugu, it’s merely the first step in comprehending the solar system and our place in it.

Hardware

• It has been a long time since I blogged about the invaluable hard drive reliability data that Backblaze has been publishing quarterly since 2015, so I checked their blog and found Andy Klein’s Star Wars themed Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022, as well as his fascinating How Long Do Disk Drives Last?. Below the fold I comment on both.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• It is important to note that air quality concentrations can vary year to year, even as human-caused emissions continue to decline. In 2021, national average concentrations of 8-hour ozone averages, annual fine particle levels, and 1-hour sulfur dioxide averages increased slightly over 2020 levels. Variations in weather, and events such as dust storms and wildfires can have an impact on air quality in affected areas. Many environmental impacts associated with climate change can impact air quality particularly affecting the severity and timing of the wildfire season, including changes in temperature, precipitation, and drought.

• I’ve seen legislators in your country fail this test of conscience again and again. Do they not realize that once someone you grew up with is massacred so mercilessly nothing can be restored?

• It’s been almost five years since I deleted my Twitter account. I didn’t just delete the app or deactivate – I deleted my whole account and my entire tweet history, lighting a match and burning the bridge behind me.

• I don’t want to pretend to be some kind of seer, but since then, divesting yourself from social media has become a somewhat fashionable lifestyle choice. For a certain type of person, it’s the kind of pro-mental health, self-care kind of thing you might do along with going vegan or taking up Vispassana meditation. (To make it clear that I’m not above such intellectual trendiness, I’ve tried all those things too.)

• In this post, I want to talk honestly about the good and the bad that comes with deleting your Twitter account, from the perspective of a tech guy who’s plugged in to several different software communities (open source, web development, Node.js, etc.).

Proprietary

• Now, it’s not unusual for a feature to get killed, only to re-surface in a future release. But this has to be some sort of record.

• In a paper titled “PACMAN: Attacking Arm Pointer Authentication with Speculative Execution,” Joseph Ravichandran, ​​Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan describe how they were able to use speculative execution – the way in which modern processors perform calculations before they may or may not be needed to accelerate execution – to discern the pointer authentication Code that allows pointer modification on a protected system.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Even if Ziggo was allowed to process the data, BREIN wouldn’t have won the case. The court concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to show that the subscriber willingly made the books available for others to download. It’s possible that they were simply put online for personal use, without proper protection.

• “Contrary to what BREIN states, it is not certain that the IP address holder himself has infringed copyrights,” the court writes in a press release.

• Through one lens, it was a mundane musing between two CEOs of data companies talking about how awesome it would be to have more data on something. But in the context of experiments occurring in the tech industry around hiring practices, it was two influential CEOs encouraging other entrepreneurs to create a business that would be an absolute nightmare for workers, a type of credit score for workers that could be a permanent HR file that follows workers from one job to the next, and where a worker who struggles at one job may have trouble getting another. Youakim did not respond to multiple Motherboard interview requests to elaborate on the concept.

• You could ask for device IMEI and security patch versions, look at screen sizes or fonts, check for the presence of APIs that indicate human behavior, like interactive touch screen events and compare those to expected outcomes for the stated client. However, all of this data collection is expensive and, ultimately, not respectful of the end user. As a company that deeply cares about privacy and helping make the Internet better, we want to use as little data as possible without compromising the security of the services we provide.

• Another alternative is to use system-level APIs that offer device validation checks. This includes DeviceCheck on Apple platforms and SafetyNet on Android. Application services can use these client APIs with their own services to assert that the clients they’re communicating with are valid devices. However, adopting these APIs requires both application and server changes, and can be just as difficult to maintain as SDKs.

Confidentiality

• Seriously. Stop. If you have been using your secure password for 5 years and it hasn’t been compromised, it’s just as secure today as it was the day you came up with it.

• There is no need to reset a password just for the sake of it. By doing so we’re making passwords shittier and infinitely more insecure.

Defence/Aggression

• This was not a military coup d’état in which the generals of the armed forces employ their weaponry in order to remove the duly elected president or prime minister of a country. This was a self-coup, another form of coup d’état, in which a leader overrules the other branches of government in order to assume illegitimate and illegal power.

• Why, if the fact that the president was lying was accepted within the administration, did almost none of its members speak out? Another snippet of testimony, from Jared Kushner, offered a clue. In response to questioning from Ms Cheney, Mr Kushner, the president’s consigliere and, as Ms Trump’s husband, his son-in-law, said that he had indeed been aware that the team of the White House counsel was threatening to quit over Mr Trump’s allegations, but that he considered such threats to be “whining”. This was an administration without basic principle.

• This column is about the media, and this moment exemplifies America’s two parallel tracks of media. So if you watched Thursday night’s hearing by the House’s 1/6 committee, shown live by most of the major TV networks in the United States, let me tell you what I watched on right-wing TV at the same time.

• The committee hopes it all breaks through with most Americans, especially as fewer are blaming Trump as being responsible for the insurrection than they did immediately following it, partisan gaps becoming wider, and with conservative media doing all it can to circle the Trump wagons and downplay the committee’s findings.

• Here are four takeaways from the first day of the hearings: [...]

• The sites that would see cameras removed include its underground Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, as well as its facility in Isfahan, Grossi said.

• Talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have been stalled since April. The U.S. withdrew from the deal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump. The Biden administration has unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a U.S. return to the deal.

• Meanwhile, experts say Iran is nearing having enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to make one nuclear bomb.

• The IAEA’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, earlier this week said Iran had failed to provide credible explanations about the origins of undeclared nuclear material found at three locations.

• Grossi also said this week that Iran was close to having enough enriched uranium to produce an atomic bomb.

• Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian.” The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.

• Such Muslims may or may not be admirers of ISIS, Al-Qaeda or the various versions of the Muslim Brotherhood that today not only justify the conquering of non-Muslim peoples and lands but who celebrate tyrants and plunderers and unashamedly justify the destruction of churches and temples.

• While Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Shabab in Somalia compete with the Taliban of Afghanistan and the ruling Ayatollahs of Iran, we have the likes of President Erdogan in Turkey and the ousted Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who calls for a return to a 7th century Arabia.

• Even in the tiny island country of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Islamists have killed liberal Muslims who challenged the bearded clergy.

• The House panel heard on Thursday night from U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who it described as the first law enforcement officer to be injured in the Jan. 6 [insurrection].

• It also played video of her being violently slammed to the ground by protesters breaking through a barrier outside of the Capitol, knocking her unconscious — the first of several injuries she sustained that day.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On 23 May, the OSOR community joined the webinar on public procurement of open source software. It started with an overview of the soon-to-be-published updated Guidelines on Public Procurement of Open Source Software and was followed by presentations by Johan Linåker, senior researcher at the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE), Rasmus Frey, Head of Secretariat at OS2 (Denmark), and Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz, a legal expert and one of the authors of the original Guidelines on Public Procurement of Open Source Software. Links to the recording of the event and the supporting presentations are available at the bottom of this page.

• The updated Guidelines on Public Procurement of Open Source Software will provide readers with an outline of the European legislative and political framework that support public procurement processes, at both EU and national levels. The guidelines will also explore the good practices public administrations can leverage for each step of the public procurement process, divided into four steps: planning, preparation of tender documentation, evaluating and awarding, and managing the contract.

• John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell’s book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

• Lawyers are investigating Meta Platforms Inc’s outgoing operations chief Sheryl Sandberg’s use of company resources over several years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

• Several employees have been interviewed in connection with the investigation by Facebook-parent Meta, the WSJ reported, adding that the probe has been underway since at least last fall.

Finance

• On most Fridays, Hungary’s prime minister gives an interview on one of the state-owned radio stations. Since the independent media has not had a chance to interview him for many years, these weekly radio interviews are the only opportunity to find out what the leader of the country thinks about current events, how he sees his opponents and any issues at hand.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Misinformation/Disinformation

• As it turned out, the hearings would also have repeatedly required Fox to have broadcast flat contradictions of what many leading Fox News personalities have told their audiences in the past year and a half — including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Instead, their prime time shows continued without commercial interruption Thursday, offering an alternate reality to a hearing that showed vivid and bloody detail of a national crisis.

• They also did not point viewers to Fox’s coverage on the network’s other platforms.

• A federal judge in Texas on Friday dismissed the bankruptcy protection case of Infowars and two other companies controlled by Alex Jones, the result of an agreement between lawyers for the conspiracy theorist and parents of some of the children slain in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

• U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez approved the deal after a brief court hearing. The judge’s action allows the parents’ defamation lawsuits against Jones to continue in Texas and Connecticut, where trials are pending on how much he should pay families after judges in both states found Jones and his companies liable for damages.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Newly drafted proposals are laid out across 40 articles, including some that would target social media users and regulate digital media. If passed, the bill would consider digital media outlets as conventional media and subject them to the same rights and regulations as print and broadcast outlets, including the eligibility to apply for press cards and provisions around access to state advertising revenue.

• Skeptics of the proposed law say the bill could be used to pressure digital media before the upcoming elections in Turkey. The next presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled for June 2023, but the opposition parties are calling for snap elections, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rejected.

• The irony is rich: Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter copycat claiming it is “free from political discrimination,” has reportedly banned users who posted information from Thursday’s congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — in which the former president is a key player.

• That’s according to several posts on Twitter by users who claimed Truth Social was censoring them. Reps for Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns and operates Truth Social, did not respond to a request for comment.

• My longtime Princeton University colleague Joshua Katz, a distinguished classicist and linguistics scholar, was recently dismissed from his tenured position by Princeton in a case that has received international attention. I was Professor Katz’s official Adviser in Princeton’s disciplinary system through the course of the entire four-year long ordeal that resulted in his dismissal. In that capacity, I came to possess information that is privileged or confidential, and therefore cannot be shared. I will herein discuss only information that is already publicly known.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Senior US officials have conveyed to Saudi Arabia that the US is prepared to move forward with a “reset” of the relationship, and effectively move on from the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in order to repair ties with the key Middle East ally, senior US officials tell CNN.

• The planning for a reset is a dramatic about-face for President Joe Biden, who came into office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over Khashoggi’s murder. His administration also released an intelligence report last year that directly accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of orchestrating Khashoggi’s killing.

• Indigenous groups say both men have received threats for their work in the region, which has seen illegal fishing, logging, mining and drug trafficking.

• The Brazilian authorities have said they are hopeful of finding the two men alive, but have not ruled out any outcome, according to the AFP news agency.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Here’s a miserable story with a mostly happy ending, one that leaves us with work to do, sure, but also with clarity on what to do next and how to do it. It’s about Colorado’s HB22-1031, “Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs,” which Governor Jared Polis signed into law last week: [...]

• ShotSpotter’s primary purpose is to hear gunshots, but according to a report published by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last August, only 9.1 percent of alerts generated between January 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, actually resulted in police finding evidence of a gun crime. ​And a 2011 study commissioned by the company found that trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, fireworks, construction, trash pickup, and church bells, among other sounds, have all triggered false positive alerts, mistaking these sounds for gunshots.

• In its 2021 report, the OIG found that the very presence of ShotSpotter changed the behavior of police and how they worked in areas where ShotSpotter devices were present. The report found that CPD officers’ “generalized perceptions of the frequency of ShotSpotter alerts in a given area may be substantively changing policing behavior.”

• Local sources report that, during a trial that lasted no more than four hours, Judge Afshari tried to put pressure on the two women defendants with the promise of a lighter sentence if they blamed Rev Joseph of cajoling them into converting.

• Faced with their refusal, he threatened to increase their sentences. Using “harsh and sarcastic language”, he tried to “humiliate them and denigrate their beliefs”. When the defendants’ lawyer objected, he replied that he was “only joking.”

• The crackdown against this group of Christians is but the latest in a long series. Last month, another court imposed a 10-year sentence on another Iranian-Armenian, Anooshavan Avedian, for “propaganda contrary to and offensive to the holy religion of Islam”.

• In a witness video released by her lawyer, the officer appears to restrain Brown for nearly a minute before he releases her and she walks away.

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.