● 06.23.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/06/2022: digiKam 7.7 and Tails 5.1.1

Posted in News Roundup at 11:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Some highlights from Linus’ recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.

Applications

•  Lorien is a simple and open-source infinite canvas drawing/whiteboarding brainstorming tool written in the open-source Godot Game Engine.

• This tool is not like a standard tool that works on bitmap images like Photoshop, Krita, and Gimp; instead, it saves your drawn brushes as a collection of points and renders them at the runtime (kind of SVG), making it more performance-focused.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install a VNC server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Virtual Network Computing, or VNC, is a connection system that allows you to use your keyboard and mouse to interact with a graphical desktop environment on a remote server. VNC is working on GUI (Graphical User Interface) environments, it transmits movements of your mouse and keyboard input over the network using the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol.

• 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 VNC server on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Krita is a free and open-source graphics editing program for digital painting, 2D animation, or general image manipulation. It runs on Windows, macOS (both Intel 64bit), Linux hits, Android & Chrome OS and is one of the more popular paint applications for users with digital photos.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Krita on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the official PPA to install the command terminal’s digital editor.

• Wireshark is a powerful and popular network communication tool that allows viewing individual recorded data packets or sorting them according to specific content. This networking software lets you see what’s going on on your computer, and it helps take apart any encrypted messages being sent around it through analysis of their contents with ease!

• Some of the most common tasks Wireshark is used for amongst software users include troubleshooting networks with performance issues and cybersecurity tracing connecting, viewing contents of suspect network transactions, and identifying bursts of network traffic for further analysis.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install WireShark on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish Linux using the command line terminal.

• Insomnia is a free, open-source, cross-platform desktop application that makes interacting with GraphQL servers more straightforward than ever before. It provides you with gRPC and REST endpoints, so there’s no need to worry about which one will work best for your needs! One of the most common uses is to test GraphQL APIs and HTTP-based RESTful APIs.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Insomnia on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The tutorial will import the official repository and gpg key and update and remove software using the command line terminal.

• Google Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users; as you would know, installing MX Linux, like most Linux distributions, only install Mozilla Firefox. However, installing Google Chrome on Chrome is a straightforward task.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on MX Linux 21 release series in three alternative ways: stable, beta, or unstable versions, along with some essential command tips for users.

• Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991.

• Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS. Python can be used to develop desktop GUI applications and CGI scripts for the web. Also, it’s used for server-side scripting for Apache HTTP Server sites. Python is most popular for its elegance and simplicity.

• The major advantage of using Python is that there are very few keywords to learn and easy to understand. It’s a general-purpose programming language, which means it can be used in any field of software development with ease and adaptability.

• In the Linux Crash Course series, we’ll go over one important foundational Linux topic each episode. This series includes tutorials, demonstrations, and more!

• So you used a certain command but cannot remember its exact name anymore?

• You can use the ctrl+r keyboard shortcut in the terminal and reverse search through the shell history.

• This could work if you had used the command on the same system. But what if you used it on some other Linux system or just came across it in some forum or website?

• The good thing here is that there is a dedicated Linux command that lets you search with a string in the available commands on your system.

• As the saying goes “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail,” you should always be prepared with a data backup to avoid losing valuable data on your Linux PC or server.

• A backup strategy is a simple plan that prepares you to quickly and easily recover your important data in the shortest amount of time possible. Let’s look at how you can devise a backup and recovery plan for Linux that best suits your needs.

• To run some popular web applications we need a lightweight LAMP server installation, here we learn how to do that on Ubuntu 20.04 focal or 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish using a single command.

• LAMP sounds may be familiar but it is not for our table, instead, it is an acronym composed of the initial letters of the software Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This stack is quite common when it comes to creating a web server environment for installing popular PHP-based web applications such as WordPress. We can use LAMP to provide static or dynamic web content.

• In this guide, we explore how you can install and set up Rancher on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).

• Draw.io is a free and open-source cross-platform drawing software that can easily create various types of diagrams such as flowcharts or UML drawings for organizational structure analysis!

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Draw.io on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the default Ubuntu APT repository or installing the Flatpak third-party package manager to get a newer version binary.

• Insomnia is an open-source, cross-platform API client for GraphQL, REST, and gRPC. It’s a free cross-platform desktop application that takes the pain out of interacting with the designing HTTP-based APIs.

• Insomnia is an API client that allows you to send requests outside your terminal without writing code. What you need to know in the API world are the requests and endpoints.

• An Endpoint is a requestable URL. Think of it like this, you have a domain name and inside that domain name, there are a few routes pointers taking you to a certain page. For example, for nextgentips.com, we have an endpoint like category/monitoring.

• Use the default system repository to install Wireshark of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or 20.04 focal fossa Linux distros.

• The Sniffer Wireshark is available in all Linux distributions to easily install. Apart from it, the executable can be downloaded for Windows and Mac OS. This open-source application is very useful for network administrators. IT can record the traffic, where you can look at the contents of a data packet. The IP address of the target system is always logged. Wireshark, for example, can be used to expose notoriously programs using networks to perform some unusual tasks. You can also statistically evaluate the collected data traffic, for example by searching for particularly large packets or picking out addresses that are frequently accessed. A counter-test of who owns such an IP address may then put you on the trail of an attack.

• Wireshark logs the network traffic of the interfaces of the system on which it is installed. It can therefore examine all incoming and outgoing connections of the respective computer. At the same time, it also receives all data packets that are sent to all systems in the network (broadcasts).

• The good news first: The cluster configuration stays unchanged. SUSE updated the resource agents for SAP HANA to get the native systemd integration transparent for the cluster administration.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Magento on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Magento is a highly popular open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP and managed by Adobe Inc. The platform is flexible and has a large variety of features to build an online store. Magento offers a community and a commercial version of its platform the community version is free and is designed primarily for individuals and or small businesses. On the other hand, the enterprise version is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses and more of an enterprise environment.

• 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 Magento open-source e-commerce platform on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Whether on a flash-stick or internal drive, EasyOS is now laid out in the drive in the same way, in what we call a “frugal” install. Easy no longer knows what boot-manager or bootloader was used to boot it. In the case of the image file that you write to a flash-stick, the bootloader is now Limine, in a 7MiB fat12 esp partition, and Easy is in a 816MiB ext4 partition.

• When you execute a command in Linux, it generates a numeric return code. This happens whether you’re running the command directly from the shell, from a script, or even from an Ansible playbook. You can use those return codes to handle the result of that command properly.

• Composer is an application-level package manager for the PHP programming language similar to NPM for Node.Js or PIP for Python. Composer provides a standard format for managing all dependencies of PHP software and the required libraries by downloading all the required PHP packages for your project and managing them for you. It is used by most modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Drupal, Magento, and Symfony.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Composer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal, along with some basic usage examples working with composer.

• Apache, also known as Apache HTTP server, has been one of the most widely used web server applications globally for the past few decades. It is a free, open-source web application software maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache provides some powerful features with dynamically loadable modules, easy integration with other software, and handling of static files, among other popular features.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Apache Web Server on AlmaLinux 9 using the command line terminal for desktop or server and basic configuration and creating a TLS/SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt.

Games

• Between 2022-06-16 and 2022-06-23 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 298 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 8.4 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…

•  We have always had a fascination with board games, in part because they are a device of social interaction, they challenge the mind and, most importantly, they are great fun to play. Many students gather together to escape the horrors of the classroom, and indulge in a little escapism. The time provides an outlet for tension and rivalry.

• Board games help teach diplomacy, how to make and break alliances, bring families and friends together, and learn valuable lessons.

• 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.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m super excited to finally announce the start of the submission process for the brand new KDE Goals!

• KDE sets goals that help the community focus on important things that need to get done in collaboration across many teams. Over the years, the community has set goals to tackle issues with usability, made it easier for new contributors to start working on KDE projects, implemented new tech that will serve us for years to come, and much more.

• KDE Goals set a direction for the community and help concentrate efforts in areas deemed important by the KDE community itself. Every couple of years, new goals are selected to reflect the communities current priorities.

•  Krita 5.1 promises to introduce lots of goodies for digital artists using this powerful software to create art. Highlights include support for the JPEG-XL file format, improved support for the WebP, OpenEXR, Photoshop layered TIFF, and Photoshop files, support for PSD fill layers and color labels, support for ASE and ACB color palettes, as well as improved painting performance through the use of XSIMD

•  Coming about three and a half months after digiKam 7.6, the digiKam 7.7 release is here with support for the AOM AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) open, royalty-free video coding format, which is support for reading and writing in all bundles (AppImage, macOS, and Windows).

• digiKam 7.7 also appears to add read/write support for the JPEG-XL image format in all supported bundles, though JPEG-XL support was initially introduced in the digiKam 7.6 release, but there were some issues in handling animated JPEG-XL files which are now fixed.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• One of the longest-lived GUI operating systems in the world has its origins as an emergency project – specifically the means by which Acorn planned to rescue the original Archimedes operating system.

• This is according to the original Acorn Arthur project lead, Paul Fellows, who spoke about the creation of RISC OS at the RISC OS User Group Of London, ROUGOL [after some helpful arrangements made by Liam Proven – Ed].

• On Monday, your correspondent hosted and moderated a reunion of four of the original developers of Acorn’s RISC OS.

• Fellows explained that participating were “Paul Fellows (VidC controller, Palette, I2C interface, Real Time Clock and EEPROM), Tim Dobson (Fonts, Audio and Utilities), Richard Manby (Graphics and Desktop), and Stuart Swales (Fileswitch and Heap Manager).”

• Today, RISC OS is still rumbling along, and version 5 is now open source. But it wasn’t the original, planned operating system for Acorn’s Archimedes computer. That was going to be ARX, of which almost no trace exists today apart from a few Usenet posts. What information survives has been compiled into the Wikipedia article.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.

• The AlmaLinux Build System (ALBS) opening aims to increase project transparency and encourage collaboration and community contributions.

• After CentOS left the enterprise Linux scene as a free Red Hat replacement, various distributions attempted to fill in the gap. As a result, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have managed to break through and become the most popular Red Hat replacements.

• MicroShift, a small footprint Kubernetes/Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform implementation, can be configured with NVIDIA Container Runtime and provide containerized jobs with access to your system’s GPUs in order to use the CUDA API. The NVIDIA-GPU Operator can be used in the cluster to enforce the GPU as a requestable resource, just like memory and CPU. In this article, we will demonstrate this by running a few sample CUDA programs that are provided by NVIDIA within a MicroShift implementation.

• By the end of this article, you will know how to configure MicroShift with your NVIDIA drivers using the all-in-one image, and will have deployed several CUDA programs provided as containers.

Debian Family

• This release fixes a high severity security issue in tor, that affects performance and possibly anonymity.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• LightDM is a cross-desktop display manager that was developed by Canonical. It was used as the default display manager in Ubuntu from 11.10 to 17.04 after which it was replaced with GDM. It continues to be part of Ubuntu and other distributions and is used by the smaller desktops as a display manager.

• Since it was no longer the default display manager in Ubuntu development resources have reduced, but it continues to work. There is some bit rot that has occurred as things change around it.

• All development is done in GitHub. You are welcome to file issues and pull requests there. Discussion is done here on discourse.ubuntu.com. Note that even though this is the Ubuntu discourse, LightDM is still expected to work on other distributions and this is not an indication that this project only relates to Ubuntu.

• LightDM used to follow a release cycle that matches the Ubuntu release cycle. Currently no releases are being made, you can either use the most recent release or use the main git branch. The main branch should always be usable.

Devices/Embedded

• Custom synth projects are nothing new in the Raspberry Pi community but this open-source shader PCB known as Slimshader is definitely a breath of fresh air in the DIY synth world! Created by maker and developer Erik Oostveen, this project aims to provide custom visual effects to music in real-time.

• According to Oostveen, Slimshader is a GlslViewer-based, open-source PCB designed to display shader files with a Eurorack design. It offers both analog and HDMI output for video, allowing users to add visual effects to music in real-time. If you’re new to shaders, these are graphic simulations that respond to audio input.

• The Slimshader PCB was designed from scratch by Oostveen and features a graphics design printed across the top. It has a series of inputs available that can be used to program custom visual effects. On the reverse is a Raspberry Pi which powers the project. Slimshader has been tested and confirmed to operate with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and a Raspberry Pi 3B.

• A custom image file was created just for the Slimshader which, can be downloaded from a Google Drive link available on Oostveen’s website. Shaders can be displayed and modulated using audio input, potentiometers, low-frequency oscillators, voltage control and even via MIDI. Oostveen recommends glslsandbox for finding shaders to experiment with created by various artists who share their work online.

• Mekotronics R58 is a cost-optimized Rockchip RK3588 mini PC and SBC that sells for as little as $169 with 4GB and 32GB eMMC flash. The company has now sent me a model with 8GB RAM and 64GB flash for evaluation, and in the first part of the review, I’ll do an unboxing, check out the hardware more closely, and boot it up for a quick check.

• There’s no retail package so to speak with just a white box and a sticker reading “MINI 8+64G” indicating the RAM and storage capacity for the device.

• The mini PC ships with a 12V/3A power adapter and cord, an IR remote control with two AAA batteries, two WiFi antennas, an HDMI cable, and a USB-A to USB-C cable probably to flash the firmware if needed.

• [...]

• That would be Android operating system and more specifically Android 12 TV OS with support for Google Play.

• I’ve been slowly adding more and more devices and sensors to my home automation setup and it’s gotten to a stage where I now have a pretty significant number of apps to control them on my phone and iPad. I’ve also wanted to set up automations and routines between devices, but the interfacing across platforms and between brands isn’t usually available or is buggy at best.

• If you’ve done anything home automation related on a Raspberry Pi then you’ve probably heard of Home Assistant. It a free and open-source software package that is designed to be a central hub or control system for all of your smart home devices and it’s got a pretty substantial online community working on integration. So, for example, it allows you to do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do like use an Ikea motion sensor to turn on a Philips hue light. Something that isn’t supported by either ecosystem individually.

• So today I’m going to be installing Home Assistant onto a Raspberry Pi and I’m going to use a new laser cutter, the Atomstack X20 Pro, to laser cut a housing for it so that I can put it somewhere convenient in my house without it looking like a jumble of wires, dongles and PCBs.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Modern humans have forgone their tails in favor of walking upright, and this fact left maker Pengfei Zhang wondering what it would be like to have such an appendage. From this idea, she along with Sarvenaz Sardari and Xi Peng created the Cyber Tail, which integrates embedded electronics into a small device that moves with its wearer.

• The Cyber Tail’s design revolves around a central base that houses a set of four servo motors. In order to move the tail in various directions, each servo motor can either pull or release a single string, which causes the tail itself to bend, akin to how a finger works except in four possible directions. The Arduino Uno controlling these motions relies on an external IR sensor within a pair of glasses that detects whenever the user blinks.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

GNU Projects

• GNU Parallel 20220622 (‘Bongbong’) has been released.

Licensing / Legal

• We have seen an explosion in machine learning in the past decade, alongside an explosion in the popularity of free software. At the same time as FOSS has come to dominate software and found its place in almost all new software products, machine learning has increased dramatically in sophistication, facilitating more natural interactions between humans and computers. However, despite their parallel rise in computing, these two domains remain philosophically distant.

• Though some audaciously-named companies might suggest otherwise, the machine learning space has enjoyed almost none of the freedoms forwarded by the free and open source software movement. Much of the actual code related to machine learning is publicly available, and there are many public access research papers available for anyone to read. However, the key to machine learning is access to a high-quality dataset and heaps of computing power to process that data, and these two resources are still kept under lock and key by almost all participants in the space.1

• The essential barrier to entry for machine learning projects is overcoming these two problems, which are often very costly to secure. A high-quality, well tagged data set generally requires thousands of hours of labor to produce,2 a task which can potentially cost millions of dollars. Any approach which lowers this figure is thus very desirable, even if the cost is making ethical compromises. With Amazon, it takes the form of gig economy exploitation. With GitHub, it takes the form of disregarding the terms of free software licenses. In the process, they built a tool which facilitates the large-scale laundering of free software into non-free software by their customers, who GitHub offers plausible deniability through an inscrutable algorithm.

• Drew DeVault takes issue with GitHub’s “Copilot” offering and the licensing issues that it raises…

Programming/Development

• Lately someone emailed me asking how OpenCL memory migration works. To be specific, when and how to use the `clEnqueueMigrateMemObjects` API when using more then one device.

• Yeah, the description of it in Khronos’s documentation[1] is very unhelpful. Nor is this API used often. I also spent quite some time to understand what the documentation is talking about. But first, let’s read the documentation.

• I completely agree with the first sentence — there are benefits to using block-based programming in terms of reducing the need to memorize syntax and increasing usability. There is also evidence that secondary school students learn computing better in block-based programming than in text-based programming (see blog post). Blanchard, Gardner-McCune, and Anthony found (a Best Paper awardee from SIGCSE 2020) that university students learned better when they used both blocks and text than when they used blocks alone.

Perl / Raku

• You probably already know that Raku is a language intended to replace Perl 5. QBE is a compiler backend in the same vein as llvm, but much simpler. The Hare programming language uses QBE as an IR (intermediate representation).

Standards/Consortia

• Anchor texts are a very useful source of keywords for a search engine, and in an older version of the search engine, it used the text of such hyperlinks as a supplemental source for keywords, but due to a few redesigns, this feature has fallen off.

• Last few days has been spent working on trying to re-implement it in a new and more powerful fashion. This has largely been enabled by a crawler re-design from a few months ago, which offers the crawled data in a lot more useful fashion and allows a lot more flexible post-processing.

• It is easy enough to grab hyperlinks within the same domain that is being crawled and process them on the spot and assign the keywords to each document.

Leftovers

Science

• Latest effort would spend billions on a few universities, but skeptics give it long odds

• The development of new thin semiconductor materials requires a quantitative analysis of a large amount of reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) data, which is time consuming and requires expertise. To tackle this issue, scientists from Tokyo University of Science identify machine learning techniques that can help automate RHEED data analysis. Their findings could greatly accelerate semiconductor research and pave the way for faster, energy efficient electronic devices.

Linux Foundation

• The tech unemployment rate reached 2.1% in May. That was a slight drop from April, but with 623,627 tech job openings, that’s still a year-over-year increase of 52%. As good as that is, The Linux Foundation and the trusted learning platform edX’s 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report have found that for open source savvy job seekers, the market is even better than that.

• Cardano has announced that it is now a member of the Linux Foundation. According to a blog post, the Cardano Foundation has joined as a gold member, becoming the only nonprofit active at this level.

Security

• CISA has released its Cloud Security (CS) Technical Reference Architecture (TRA) to guide federal civilian departments and agencies in securely migrating to the cloud.

• HR and security leaders must deploy new strategies to attract, hire, and retain cyber professionals while looking for ways to leverage the transferable skills and potential of untapped talent.

• Demand for cybersecurity talent has reached an historic high: 63% of businesses say they have unfilled security positions, and 60% experienced difficulties retaining qualified cybersecurity professionals in 2021, according to the ISACA State of Cybersecurity 2022 report. And information security analyst jobs are expected to grow faster than the average for all other occupations.

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 217. This version includes the following changes:

• * Update test fixtures for GNU readelf 2.38 (now in Debian unstable).

• * Be more specific about the minimum required version of readelf (ie.

• binutils) as it appears that this “patch” level version change resulted in

• a change of output, not the “minor” version. (Closes: #1013348)

• * Don’t leak the (likely-temporary) pathname when comparing PDF documents.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firejail, and request-tracker4), Fedora (ghex, golang-github-emicklei-restful, and openssl1.1), Oracle (postgresql), Scientific Linux (postgresql), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (salt and tor), and Ubuntu (apache2 and squid, squid3).

• Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.

• Debian project funding

• Two [1, 2] projects are in the pipeline now. Tryton project is in a final phase. Gradle projects is fighting with technical difficulties.

• In May, we put aside 2233 EUR to fund Debian projects.

• We’re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.

• Atlassian software is constantly under attack, and often the source of many lost weekends for IT admins. Recently, a brand-new vulnerability has been discovered – CVE-2022-26134. This particular vulnerability is remotely exploitable, and has been listed as critical. In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss this vulnerability, as well as some of the struggles around Atlassian software in general.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Today, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce marked up the “American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” a bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced by Frank Pallone, Jr., (D-NJ), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) to establish a national standard to protect consumer data privacy.

• The bill would also impose restrictions on how businesses (like Facebook and Google) can collect, use, and share consumer data, as well as allow for federal, state, and individual enforcement to protect consumers’ rights. Public Knowledge urges the committee to continue strengthening this bill to ensure individuals’ privacy is protected.

• The following can be attributed to Sara Collins, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:

• “We are pleased to see the committee make such great strides in improving this bipartisan bill. Since the draft text was released, the bill’s data minimization provisions have been tightened and there is more clarity around what businesses can and cannot do with consumers’ data. This means that internet users don’t have to rely on a failed notice and consent regime for protection.

Environment

• Prepare to subsidise fossil fuel plants indefinitely. That is the message this morning as, in the wake of Coalition dithering, the new government grooms Australian energy customers for more of the same energy policy. It’s the Richard Wilkins solution. Callum Foote and Michael West report.

• Nine years of Coalition dithering on climate and energy have surely taken their toll. Way behind the eight-ball on transition to renewable energy, the new government is now grooming Australians to subsidise multinational fossil fuel corporations to keep their polluting coal and gas power stations running way into the future.

• The public grooming comes via Murdoch and Nine media this morning to extend the life of fossil fuel plants and entrench the power of the very same corporations which have just extorted the energy market operator AEMO by threatening to pull supply out of the grid unless richly compensated.

Energy

• A deep sea turbine off the coast of eastern Japan has proven capable of producing almost as much energy as a coal plant.

• Kairyu, a massive turbine prototype produced by Japanese machinery manufacturer IHI Corp, sits at least 100 feet underwater. Its anchor line allows it to flex its position to most effectively harness energy from the Kuroshio Current—one of the strongest ocean currents in the world.

• At first glance, Kairyu looks like an underwater jet. Its middle consists of a 66-foot fuselage, each side of which has a similarly-sized turbine cylinder attached. Both turbine cylinders contain power generators, control mechanisms, and measuring systems which correspond with their respective 36-foot turbine blades. The machine sends all generated energy up a series of cables for use on the country’s power grid.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) joined civil society’s wave of pressure to elevate the devastating impacts of internet shutdowns and highlight the need for their urgent global attention with the official launch of its highly anticipated Human Rights Council report, Internet shutdowns: trends, causes, legal implications and impacts on a range of human rights.

• “The dramatic real-life effects of shutdowns on the lives and human rights of millions of people are vastly underappreciated and deserve much greater attention from States, international organizations, businesses and civil society,” the report states, shining notable attention on economic, social, and cultural rights.

• Access Now welcomes the final report, and strongly supports the call for a new “collaborative mechanism for the systematic collection of information on mandated disruptions,” into which “States, civil society and companies all contribute.”

• “Initiating internet shutdowns are a choice that an increasing number of authorities make to suppress and oppress,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “These choices must be met with equal resistance. The new Human Rights Council report on internet shutdowns will help amplify the fight to #KeepItOn.”

Monopolies

Patents

• Within a few years, numerous inventions could involve artificial intelligence (AI), which could create one of the biggest threats patent systems have faced. Patent law is based on the assumption that inventors are human; it currently struggles to deal with an inventor that is a machine.

• Courts around the world are wrestling with this problem as patent applications naming an AI system as the inventor have been lodged in more than 100 countries. If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge. Rather than forcing old patent laws to accommodate new technology, we propose that national governments design bespoke IP law—AI-IP—that protects AI-generated inventions.

Copyrights

• Last week, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage rushed through the clause-by-clause review of Bill C-11 in a manner that should not be forgotten or normalized. Despite the absence of any actual deadline, the government insisted that just three two hour sessions be allocated to full clause-by-clause review of the bill. Once the government-imposed deadline arrived at 9:00 pm, the committee moved to voting on the remaining proposed amendments without any debate, discussion, questions for department officials, or public disclosure of what was being voted on. This week’s Law Bytes podcast features clips from a hearing that one Member of Parliament described as “an affront to democracy”.

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