● 07.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/07/2022: Libreboot 20220710 and Free/Libre Sports Games

Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Testing was carried out on a computer equipped with an Intel Core i9-12900K processor. Also in the configuration was an Asus ROG Strix Z690-E Gaming WiFi motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, a 500GB WD Black SN850 SSD, and an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

• For testing, we used Windows 11 Pro, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Linux 5.18 kernel and Intel Clear Linux (build 36580). During testing, more than a hundred tests were carried out, including graphics rendering, music and video transcoding, and other tasks. Some results look like this: [...]

• AMD has been developing exclusive Ryzen chips for select PC OEMs, like Lenovo. These Ryzen Pro processors use Microsoft’s Pluton security chip, although it seems that Pluton does limit OS compatibility, limiting these processors to the Windows OS.

Server

• While it is undeniable that cloud-based services are handy, there are people who would rather do it themselves. For many of us, it is because we want what we want the way we want it. For others, it is a distrust of leaving your personal data on someone’s server you don’t control. Umbrel is a Linux distribution just for people who want to self-host popular applications like NextCloud or Home Assistant. [ItsFoss] has a good review that points out some of the plusses and minuses of the early version of Umbrel.

Kernel Space

• At least four RDNA3/GFX11 architecture Device IDs are now being used by AMD Linux software engineers in most recent patches. It is clear that the usual prelaunch cycle has begun for AMD’s next graphics architecture, with the enablement for new processors gradually being deployed for Linux kernels, graphics drivers and repositories. This is how we end up with bits of information that can lead to some interesting RDNA3 architecture revelations.

Applications

• Libreboot is free (as in freedom) boot firmware, which initializes the hardware (e.g. memory controller, CPU, peripherals) in your computer so that software can run. Libreboot then starts a bootloader to load your operating system. It replaces the proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware typically found on a computer. Libreboot is compatible with specifical computer models that use the Intel/AMD x86 architecture. Libreboot works well with GNU+Linux and BSD operating systems.

• The last Libreboot release, version 20211122, was released on November 22nd in 2021. This new release, Libreboot 20220710, is released today on July 10th, 2022. This is intended to be a stable release, with some caveats.

• You can find this release in the stable directory on Libreboot release mirrors. If you check in the stable directory, you’ll still only find the 20160907 release in there, so please ensure that you check the testing directory!

• This is a bug fix release, relative to 20211122. No new boards or major features have been added, but several problems that existed in the previous release have now been fixed.

Instructionals/Technical

• Finally, as the last part of the blog series we will have a look at the network traffic observed. We will do this in two sections, the first one will cover a few things useful to know if we are in the situation that Wireshark can dissect the traffic for us. The second section will look into the situation where the dissection is not nicely done by Wireshark.

• The process of installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 3 is pretty straightforward, as they are fully supported upstream. However, the documentation is somewhat spread out and occasionally a bit outdated and/or confusing, so I thought it may be worthwhile to summarize my recent experience.

• Qmmp is a free and open-source audio player that is similar to Winamp. It is written in C++ using the Qt widget toolkit for the user interface, and it officially supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows. Qmmp has many features, including support for popular audio formats, themes, equalizer presets, Last.FM scrobbling, lyrics fetching, streaming from SHOUTcast and Icecast stations, skinned interfaces, and more.

• The player also supports plugins, which allow for further customization and functionality. Overall, Qmmp is a powerful and versatile audio player that is well worth checking out for anyone in search of an excellent alternative to Winamp.

• DeaDBeeF is an audio player software for Linux, Android, and other Unix-like operating systems and is free and open-source software, except on Android. DeaDBeeF is small in size but big on features. Its interface is customizable and supports themes, and it can play music from CDs and files in many different formats, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV.

• Some other great features include a built-in equalizer and support for plugins. One of the best things about DeaDBeeF is that it’s not resource-intensive and can be used on older computers without any issues. If you’re looking for a lightweight but feature-rich audio player, DeaDBeeF is worth checking out.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install DeaDBeeF Player on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.

• This tutorial will explain in step by step how you can install GNU PSPP on Ubuntu 22.04 and any other versions. This includes instructions for version 20.04 users and older/unsupported ones which cannot install PSPP using the normal way. Finally, this article accompanies our previous one Libre SPSS Alternatives for Ubuntu Users. Now let’s install it.

• Linux provides us the access control by file and directory permissions on three levels which are user, group, and other. These file permissions provide the basic level of security and access control.

• As I primarily use IRC now, I’ve deep dived into the world of IRC clients. So far, I’ve tried irssi, weechat, catgirl, ii. My favorites are weechat and catgirl, I’ll focus on the former here.

Games

• A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. This genre of games is popular in part because of the fantasy element; putting yourself in the place of a top class athlete on the world stage.

• Racing games are not covered in this article. We’ve compiled a dedicated round up to showcase fun free and open source Racing Games.

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

• Let’s explore the 9 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.

• Here’s one I somehow completely missed from last week. Humble Bundle has a Play with Pride bundle available with another set of great looking games. I’ll go over what you can expect from each on Linux and Steam Deck using both Deck Verified and ProtonDB reports, giving you an easy way to see if it’s worth picking up.

• If you’re like us, you never get tired of retro game-inspired projects, and the dynamic duo, [monsely], seem to love them too. Their Temperature-Sensitive Pac-Man/Ghost LED Matrix would make a great desktop display for any gaming enthusiast.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Devices/Embedded

• Seeed Studio recently released the compact XIAO ESP32C3 featuring the ESP32-C3 from Espressif Systems. The tiny device supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE and offers pads for external power supply. The XIAO ESP32C3 is available for pre-order at $4.99.

• According to the ESP32-C3 datasheet, the ESP32-C3 is a low power 32-bit RISC-V single-core processor with four stage pipeline with a max clock frequency up to 160MHz. This device also features a 32-bit multiplier, 32-bit divider and up to 32 vectored interrupts at seven priority levels.

• [Kevin O’Connor] writes to us about his project, can2040 – adding CAN support to the RP2040. The RP2040 doesn’t have a CAN peripheral, but [Kevin] wrote code for the RP2040’s PIO engine that can receive and send CAN packets. Now we can all benefit from his work by using this openly available CAN driver. This library is written in C, so it’s a good fit for the lower-level hackers among us, and in all likelihood, it wouldn’t be hard to make a MicroPython wrapper around it.

• [Dan Julio]’s gCore (short for Gadget Core) is aimed at making GUI-based portable and rechargeable gadgets much easier to develop. gCore is the result of [Dan]’s own need for a less tiresome way to develop such hardware.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Zap is an amazing web framework for building reactive modular web components, It looks a lot like Svelte, but embraces all aspects of the Dart language.

• With Zap, developers can build reactive web applications without the need to hustle with JavaScript, or any of its based framework.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Yesterday I ended up writing an impromptu guide to Bash error handling on a PR, so I decided to polish it a bit and turn it into an actual post.

• The goal: whenever our release script encounters an error, send a notification to a Slack channel. We won’t look into the latter part in this post, as it was handled by some Ruby code using the slack-notifier gem. Instead we’ll look into what was necessary to make this work in Bash.

Standards/Consortia

• Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and Intel are leading the WBA working group that wrote this report.

• So what will companies use deterministic Wi-Fi for? Some features and use cases include the ability to guarantee packet delivery and specific latencies as mentioned above. In industrial settings, especially for equipment that is acting autonomously, having defined and guaranteed latency is essential before decoupling it from a wire.

Leftovers

• On vacation, we went to see a laser show – one of the old school variety that combines multiple different lasers of many different colors together into a single beam, modulates them to create different colors, and sends it bouncing off galvos to the roof of a planetarium. To a musical score, naturally.

• Liberty Alliance’s map isn’t the first of its kind. Over the years, numerous right-wing groups have created rankings, watchlists, and cluster maps to keep track of the left’s alleged influence in healthcare and education as well as Corporate America.

• In 1996, when I was working in government, a colleague remarked on the then-fresh tragedy in which TWA Flight 800 exploded over the waters off Long Island. His “sources” had reason to know that Islamic terrorists had shot it down it with a missile.

• Janine Jackson interviewed Dave Zirin about the Supreme Court’s football prayer ruling for the July 1, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• You’ve got to love a language like German, where not only is it possible for a word or two to stand in for a complex concept, but you don’t even need to speak the language to make a good guess at what it all means. Of course when your project is a giant nose that mock-sneezes sanitizer into your hands, it doesn’t really matter that you call it Der niesende Desinfektionsmittelspender. Humor based on bodily functions is, after all, the universal language.

Education

• The broader problem may be that many of us no longer know how to relate to nature, because we see ourselves as being outside of it. People are so used to experiencing wildlife through the lens of social media or a wildlife series that we’ve come to see ourselves solely as spectators rather than participants when we enter actual wild places. However, let me be clear: When we visit parks with free-roaming wild animals, we have entered a wild area. And we have no special rights or protections, other than our own common sense.

Proprietary

• There are 2.3 million small businesses in Australia. While not all have an active or extensive online presence, digital transformation prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic has made every business increasingly dependent on the secure use of the internet.

• In its latest threat assessment, the Australian Cyber Security Centre reports that small organisations, sole traders, medium-sized businesses, schools and contributors in the supply chain are among the entities most affected by cybercrime and state-sponsored cyber operations. Cybercriminals seek financial gain or sensitive business information and personal data. Even if they are not direct targets, businesses may fall victim due to the spread of ransomware or a data breach.

Security

• The novel threat steals data and can affect all processes running on the OS, stealing information from different commands and utilities and then storing it on the affected machine.

Privacy/Surveillance

• But the surge faces risks as the facial-scanning system it offers to U.S. heavyweights Mastercard Inc and Visa Inc uses technology from SenseTime Group, a Chinese firm blacklisted by the United States over human rights concerns.

• The JCV-SenseTime partnership highlights SoftBank’s difficult balancing act as Son tries to position his conglomerate as a neutral player even while tensions mount between two key markets, the United States and China.

• China has been subject to the biggest data leak in history. Up until last week, when a member posting anonymously in a hacker forum offered to sell the data, a sizable online database believed to hold the personal information of up to a billion Chinese individuals had been left unprotected and open to the public.

• According to cybersecurity experts, the breach could be one of the greatest ever documented, illustrating the dangers of gathering and keeping enormous volumes of sensitive personal data online, particularly in a nation where authorities have open access to such data. Speaking on this massive data leak, here is what Stanislav Protassov, Acronis co-founder & Technology President had to say about the entirety of the situation.

• Governments eye TikTok nervously for different reasons. As the first consumer-facing app from China to take off in the West, TikTok is a source of pride in Beijing. But the app’s Chinese ownership makes politicians elsewhere uneasy about its tightening grip on their citizens’ attention. Users’ data could end up in the wrong hands, they fear, or their viewing could be moulded by Chinese propagandists. TikTok has already been banned in India, formerly its largest market. Other countries, including America, are considering their next move.

• The EU and U.S. are in the midst of negotiating a new data-transfer text that would allow companies like Meta to continue to ship data across the Atlantic irrespective of the Irish order. Brussels and Washington in March agreed to a preliminary deal at the political level, but negotiations on the legal fine print have stalled and a final deal is unlikely to be reached before the end of the year.

• A spokesperson for the Irish DPC confirmed that the draft decision had been sent to other European privacy regulators, who now have a month to give their input, but wouldn’t discuss details of the decision.

Defence/Aggression

• While Ukrainian authorities blamed Russian forces for the attack on a Ukrainian nursing home on March 11, accusing them of killing more than 50 vulnerable civilians in a brutal and unprovoked attack, the UN says the Ukraine’s armed forces also bear blame.

• Progressive Middle East watchers this week condemned the Biden administration’s targeting of 15 firms and people in at least five countries allegedly linked to the sale and shipment of Iranian petroleum products in violation of U.S. economic sanctions.

• Iranian Hewa Rahimpur, 29, who was living in Ilford, east London, was arrested in May suspected of being a leading figure in a network organising human trafficking via small boats and is facing extradition proceedings to send him to Belgium.

• Asked how much the gang was believed to be charging migrants to cross the Channel after lining up boats, engines and life jackets for them, Mr Farrimond said a “straight trip across the Channel” was estimated to be charged at between 2,500 and 3,500euros.

• Both men have been detained on suspicion of conspiring to facilitate illegal immigration, and remain in custody as NCA investigators continue their questioning.

• WNET, the PBS station distributing the 2021 documentary feature Amen-Amen-Amen: A Story of Our Times…

• Ann Wright reports on anti-NATO protests and declarations on the sidelines of the military alliance’s recent summit in Madrid.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Retired radio personality Rick Emerson is one such reader. He was floored by the book in high school, but it failed to pass the smell test as an adult. In 2015, he looked into the background of the book’s mysterious copyright holder, a UCLA-trained therapist named Beatrice Sparks. The result of his seven-year investigation is “Unmask Alice” (BenBella Books), out now —the first full unraveling of the “Go Ask Alice” myth. It’s a story of ambition, deceit and a gullible public, hungry for morality tales.

Environment

• Sadly, the baloney isn’t hard to detect.

• That $500 million investment in carbon removal? It represents about 0.1 percent of Alphabet, Microsoft, and Salesforce’s collective revenues last year. And it’s dwarfed by the nearly one trillion dollars that energy companies plan to put into new oil and gas projects — so-called “carbon bombs” each blasting more than a billion tons of carbon skyward — by 2030. Likewise, the 150,000 metric tons of carbon removal promised by Swiss Re and Boston Consulting is barely a sliver (0.00002 percent) of the extra 646 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas that those carbon bomb projects are expected to spew into the atmosphere — pollution that will cook the planet for centuries, unless it can be later removed.

• Thefts of catalytic converters — an antipollution car part laden with platinum, palladium and rhodium — have exploded since the pandemic began, fueled by a surge in the value of those metals. Thieves made off with 12 times as many catalytic converters, which sit exposed underneath most cars, in 2021 as they did in 2019, according to data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an organization that tracks these thefts.

Energy

• With a capacity of around 2.8 gigawatts, Ørsted has said the facility – named Hornsea 3 – will produce enough low-cost, clean energy to power 3.2 million homes in the UK, making a significant contribution to the British government’s ambition to have 50 gigawatts of offshore wind in operation by 2030.

• A dramatic video hidden for 6 months by the U.S. Navy of the 34 hours showing 20,000 gallons of jet fuel spraying into a Red Hill tunnel and disappearing into a floor drain that sent thousands of gallons into the water supply of 93,000 residents surfaced on July 5 after an undisclosed Navy employee made public a video that the Navy continued to maintain did not exist.

• Climate groups raised the alarm and put President Joe Biden on notice after the Bureau of Land Management opened the public comment period Friday for a proposed drilling project in the Alaskan Arctic that critics warn would unleash a dangerous “carbon bomb” and threaten pristine ecosystems if given approval by the federal government.

• “President Biden has set admirable ambitions for tackling the climate crisis but it could all be undermined if the Willow Project moves forward.”

Finance

• In the decades since the 1970s oil-price shocks sent inflation soaring and shackled economic growth, price stability was maintained even when growth was robust. Many policymakers and economists took a bow, proudly claiming that they had found the magic formula. Underpinning the so-called Great Moderation were independent central banks that could anchor inflationary expectations by credibly committing to raise interest rates whenever inflation reared its ugly head – or even act preemptively when necessary. Independence meant that central banks need not – and typically did not – worry about balancing the costs (generally lost output and jobs) against any putative benefits.

• We’re the richest country in the world, home to the richest people on the planet. We can, and we must, treat our workers with the dignity and respect they deserve. That starts with paying them a living wage.

• On April 12, Circle announced it had raised $400 million with investments from BlackRock, Fidelity, Marshall Wace and Fin Capital, noting BlackRock and Circle had entered into a “broader strategic partnership” that would include “exploring capital market applications for USDC” that would “drive the next evolution of Circle’s growth.” This would involve the establishment of a new, BlackRock-managed, government money market fund, the Circle Reserve Fund, through which BlackRock would become “a primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Why it matters: The erosion of trust in media is one of the most significant signs of deepening polarization in America.

• Political party affiliation has become the primary driver of opinions about the media’s trustworthiness, as Gallup has noted.

• Between the lines: Musk has already signed the deal, so if he backs out, today’s media fight will set the table for an epic legal fight.

• “Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” Musk’s lawyer, Mike Ringler, wrote.

• Legal experts say this may not be sufficient grounds to break off the $44 billion deal without Musk being on the hook for a hefty fine. In response to Musk’s letter, the chair of Twitter’s board said it planned to sue.

• Corporations are a major force in our lives, and a few digital superpowers act like consequential global actors, at times on par with governments. They have a responsibility beyond profits, whether any of us like it or not.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The Associated Press ran a fact check of a screenshot of a tweet circulating online that was purportedly written by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about Hillary Clinton, determining that the tweet was fake.

• Reuters has previously factchecked the use of the same phrase following the deaths of prominent figures (here), (here).

• [...]

• False. There is no evidence that the message depicted in the image came from an account owned by Shinzo Abe.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Sailor Moon’s North American syndication is a story that must be told from the separate perspectives of audiences in both America and Canada. When it came to dubbing Sailor Moon, Toei Animation (best known for Dragon Ball and One Piece) would place their trust in DiC — a decision that would go down in infamy and nearly cost the series its Western audience. Censorship, the cutting of five episodes and changes to character backstories would go on to create a beast that only bore a slight resemblance to what came before. Poor performance with US audiences eventually led to the cancelation of its original syndication after only airing up to the first half of the second season.

• Thankfully, Sailor Moon’s cancelation would not be the nail in the coffin for Western viewers, as the show was supported by the community DiC left behind. North of the United States, Sailor Moon’s popularity was substantially more pronounced, leaving Canadian fans confused at DiC’s decision. In response, a group called ‘Save our Sailors’ (or SOS for short) was formed to revive the English dub from the ashes. On December 14, 1996, SOS embarked on a ‘procott’ (the opposite of a boycott) of Strawberry Frosted Pop-Tarts to court sponsors for the English version of the anime, although the effectiveness of this campaign is debatable.

• A Facebook friend who doesn’t seem insane regularly shares instances of where Facebook deletes or hides her content.

• In many cases the reasons seem silly or arbitrary, like an AI that doesn’t really understand the content or get the joke. One shows a floating tent, captioned “Floating tent sleeps 4 and offers a cool new way to die while camping.” Other deletions seem more understandable, like the thumb with a face on it and a string tied around in a shape like a noose: it’s not explicitly about lynching, but it’s clearly intending to evoke that imagery. Poor taste, likely offensive, a bad joke, but is it censor-worthy?

• Facebook also often just gets it wrong…

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Dozens of members of the German federal parliament, the Bundestag, have issued a statement demanding the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Over the last few months, we have slowly awoken to a troubling new world. The unfamiliar America that is emerging has become post-Roe, post-gun control, post-safe schools, post-Supreme Court impartiality, post-majoritarian and possibly post-fair elections (we shall see in November and in 2024). The US, which has been teetering on the edge of a cliff for some time, is now starting to tip into an abyss of “minority rule medievalism.”

• The Prime Minister of Sri Lanka said he would resign on Saturday and the nation’s president was called on to do the same after anti-government demonstrators—following months of growing protest and anger over a boiling economic crisis—overran the presidential palace and other buildings of top officials.

• “Today we have fought for our freedom from the tyranny and the scoundrels and greedy politicians who have run our nation to ground zero.”

• After secret data collection on migrants, Frontex hires 250 new officers to profile travelers

• Court documents show that the judge overseeing the case affirmed that the comments made by Gililland’s professors constituted sex-based discrimination because they “advanced a stereotype about the kind of woman appropriate for the nursing profession.” Although the jury ultimately rejected Gililland’s Title IX claim, they deemed SWOCC had indeed breached a contract with a tuition-paying student by violating its non-discrimination policy, education records policy, and its policy on unlawful harassment.

• The software was built to connect Freshii patrons with cheap, outsourced workers based in countries thousands of kilometres away. The idea, the creators said, was to help franchise owners cut down on labour costs while keeping their doors open in case local staff called in sick.

• The pilot project went relatively unnoticed until April, when Percy’s business model sparked intense criticism from labour organizers and senior politicians after the Star revealed that some of those “virtual cashiers,” based in countries such as Nicaragua, are paid $3.75 (U.S.) an hour to perform the same tasks as Ontario workers who earn a minimum wage of $15 (CAD) an hour.

• Iranian authorities arrested an outspoken pro-reform activist, saying he conspired to act against state security, semi-official media in Iran reported Saturday.

• The arrest is the latest in a wave of detentions against the backdrop of escalating tensions with the West and Tehran’s rapid advancement of its nuclear work, while talks to revive the landmark 2015 atomic accord remain at a standstill.

• The semi-official Fars news agency said activist Mostafa Tajzadeh was taken into custody on Friday afternoon and charged with “gathering (to protest) and conspiracy to act against the country’s security.”

• The Taliban’s appointments fill holes left when thousands of Afghan civil servants fled the country last year. The calibre of the replacements is often questionable. The new Taliban counterpart of the medical director at one Kabul hospital at least has a degree in medicine. But at other hospitals, staff said the new Taliban appointees were fighters or village clerics with more interest in how women dressed than in public health.

• Nor are things much better at the highest levels of government. The cabinet is packed with ethnic-Pushtun Taliban stalwarts. Other groups are sidelined. Appointments “have favoured loyalty and seniority over competence”, notes a un report. Decision-making is unpredictable, say foreign officials who deal with the new government.

• Any hope that the demands of running a battered country might mellow the militants’ ideology was dashed last week, after the regime held a jirga, or grand council, of religious scholars. More than 3,000 clerics and notables—all men—were invited to Kabul for three days of confabulation. It was the biggest gabfest since the Taliban took power. Speculation was rife that the jirga would revisit the unpopular decision to stop girls going to secondary school. Marginalised ethnic groups as well as some inside the Taliban sought signs of compromise from a leadership they see as increasingly remote and autocratic.

• Amazon Labor Union, the worker-led union behind the victory at an Amazon warehouse in New York City in April, reached agreements to provide organizing and financial assistance for workers trying to unionize warehouses in Albany, NY. and Campbellsville, KY., who will affiliate as formal chapters of the union, ALU President Chris Smalls told ABC News.

• Last December Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the Supreme Court would retain its legitimacy if it overturned Roe v. Wade…

Monopolies

Patents

• The Congressional Budget Office said Friday that a pending proposal by Senate Democrats to allow Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies for lower prices would yield nearly $290 billion in savings and new revenue over ten years of implementation, a predictable yet crucial finding as lawmakers try to revitalize a legislative deal in the coming weeks.

• The Democratic effort to revitalize a broader reconciliation package that could be passed in the narrowly-split Senate without Republican votes is considered the best that can be achieved after Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tanked the much larger Build Back Better plan—one that included sweeping climate provisions and other social investments—last year.

Copyrights

• A group of film companies is suing VPN provider VeePN at a federal court in Virginia. The VPN service is accused of various forms of copyright infringement. Among other things, they argue that VeePN ‘promotes’ the use of pirate sites and Popcorn Time, while its services were advertised on the popular torrent site YTS.mx.

• If you read our articles, you’ll notice that we will usually feature images related to the subjects we talk about. If they came from another source and they’re not CC-licensed or similar then they are the property of someone else but we are using them under a doctrine known as fair use. Excerpts of copyrighted material may be used under fair use for the purposes of such things as journalistic reporting, so for example we can use a copyrighted picture of Captain America were we to write about Marvel superheroes. Some content owners still try to stop this, and it’s one of them that [Linus Tech Tips] has in their sights as they have published a guide to running Nintendo Switch games on a Steam Deck without they believe giving any justifiable cause for the notoriously litigious game giant to take action. It’s full of carefully blurred Nintendo IP, and there is no coverage of pirate software downloads.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

Technical

• I have two text UI games which I love. I had played them once, then I was playing them many times through time, and I can always play them again. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t played them for some time, because I’m feeling always like I am at home. One of that games I described almost a year ago in [Dwarf Fortress]. The second one is [ADOM].

• I don’t remember how I started to play. ADOM is so old that in my memories it’s convergent with the beginning of the PC’s gaming era. I must read about it in one Roguelike-games article. Why did I start to play the text UI game? Probably because I’m writing many simple text games of life in BASIC. With colorful ASCII characters. So the ADOM must had been looking very familiar to me. But all of this is unclear now. Especially that there were many games, with hi-res graphics mode, which I also want to play then. For unknown reasons, however, I played in ADOM.

• Part of my old computing challenge is to limit my bandwidth speed. I chose 1mb/s download and 500kb/s upload, as I can do everything I usually do, although with a bit more waiting and patience.

• We are used for everything to load instantly on the internet, which facilitates the big tech corporations interests, by making it possible for them to make addictive products or use techniques like infinite scrolling. Besides, not having everything load instantly can make you grow patience and it gives you time to think think before doing something on the internet, or gives you the nostalgic feeling of the internet before the 2010s. Most web programs are so heavy they don’t load with the speed caps I’ve put, so I suggest to you that if it a program doesn’t load with this speed, it should be removed from your workflow. Not everyone has access to good internet speed, and this facilitates discriminating against those that cannot afford or don’t have at all high internet speed, because they cannot load all the bloat of today’s web pages. We’ve become entitled to having everything instantly delivered to us, which is a form of instant gratification.

• I like the nuances of purple and all, the colors pop and help you to to easily distinguish the syntax when editing files. They aren’t as faint as Gruvbox, so it isn’t that relaxing at night, but together with Redshift I have no issue.

• Charitably, they might mean it as a worker’s right issue, that workers are getting underpaid because hacking on free software is so romantic, but I don’t care how much bathwater you wanna throw out. There’s just some things that are part of the treasure chest of life, reasons why I even open my eyes in the morning.

Science

• We’re living in times in which we’re constantly bombarded not just with information, but with literally everything. The psychology community calls them supra-stimuli.

• The same technique of advertising is virtually every industry at the moment. We can see this especially with technology and the notion that “progress is always good!” Every year, new products, more cores, bigger screen, +100 to any number in the specification sheet etc. and you buy it again and again, being promised illusory “improvements”. The “can’t live without the newest thing” mentality sets in, and voila, you’re a consumer that benefits the world’s largest corporations, all due to clever advertising.

Internet/Gemini

• In my previous post I espoused some thoughts on Docker and CI. In short: I hate Docker and think it’s a huge resource waste and many projects abuse CI. So just to give an example of a different way, here’s the Makefile that builds and deploys my own personal capsule.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. 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

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