● 07.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/07/2022: Many More Laptops With GNU/Linux (OEMs and Flex)

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• It is a sign of the times that one of [Dmitry’s] design criteria for his new Linux on a business card is to use parts you can actually find during the current component shortage. The resulting board uses a ATSAMD21 chip and emulates a MIPS machine in order to boot Linux.

• We like that in addition to the build details, [Dmitry] outlines a lot of the reasons for his decisions. There’s also a a fair amount of detail about how the whole system actually works. For example, by using a 0.8 mm PCB, the board can accept a USB-C cable with no additional connector. There is also a great explanation of the MIPS MMU and don’t forget that MIPS begat RISC-V, so many of the MIPS core details will apply to RISC-V as well (but not the MMU). You’ll also find some critiques of the ATSAMD21’s DMA system. It seems to save chip real estate, the DMA system stores configuration data in user memory which it has to load and unload every time you switch channels.

Desktop/Laptop

• Earlier this year, when TUXEDO Computers unveiled the TUXEDO Stellaris 15 Gen4 Linux laptop, the hardware vendor also introduced the TUXEDO Aquaris external water cooling system, but at that time it was only supported on TUXEDO Computers’ laptops shipping with the Windows operating system pre-installed.

• Of course, TUXEDO Computers promised that they will offer Linux support, and today the hardware vendor announced in-house developed Linux drivers for the TUXEDO Aquaris external water cooling system.

• Summer is getting hot and perhaps you want a new laptop to take somewhere cooler to do a little work and light gaming? Slimbook recently upgraded a bunch of their machines. This is all in addition to the recently announced KDE Slimbook 4 laptop.

• Google on Thursday officially released Chrome OS Flex, which aims to bring the web giant’s mega-browser operating system to a wider range of systems.

• Flex was unveiled in February as a version of Chrome OS that could run on any modern-ish Intel or AMD (sorry, not Arm) processor. Since that debut, the number of devices certified to run Chrome OS Flex has almost doubled, from some 250 to more than 400, according to Google.

• Among certified models are several MacBook Air devices, Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Acer, and Lenovo machines along with a laundry list of Dell machines. Google plans to continually certify older devices for Flex.

• To get the Chrome OS experience – which, as the name suggests, involves doing pretty much everything on your desktop through the Chrome browser – you would need to buy a Chromebook with it installed, or go through a bit of a convoluted process to put the OS on a system. Chrome OS Flex is supposed to make that easy, and work on a range of non-Chromebooks.

• It has been a while studying and working with the Chromecast Protocol. This protocol is proprietary, and officially only the Chrome browser, Android, and iOS platforms support casting to a Chromecast-enabled device. Now, Chromium is open source, and so is Android, but we would not want anything to do with Android for obvious reasons, not to mention this feature may be tucked away in Google Play Services. So we settle with Chromium which is written in C++. Thankfully almost all of the hard work was done by many other open source projects, notably Node CastV2. Not only this project provides a simple implementation for the Chromecast protocol but also a written explanation of the underlying stuff and how things actually work. All I need to figure out is how to implement that is C.

Kernel Space

• The kernel has thousands of configuration options, many of which can change the kernel’s behavior in subtle or surprising ways. Among those options is CONFIG_ANDROID, which one might expect to be relatively straightforward; its description reads, in its entirety: “Enable support for various drivers needed on the Android platform”. It turns out that this option does more than that, to the surprise of some users. That has led to a plan to remove this option, but that has brought a surprise or two of its own — and some disagreement — as well.

• The discussion started when Alex Xu reported a read-copy-update (RCU) error that was appearing on his system after resuming from suspend. Shortly thereafter, Xu realized that the problem was tied to the fact that his kernel had been built with CONFIG_ANDROID enabled; among other things, that option significantly reduces the time that can elapse before RCU starts putting out stall warnings.

• The CPU scheduler’s job has never been easy; it must find a way to allocate CPU time to all tasks in the system that is fair, allows all tasks to progress, and maximizes the throughput of the system as a whole. More recently, it has been called upon to satisfy another constraint: minimizing the system’s energy consumption. There is currently a patch set in circulation, posted by Vincent Donnefort with work from Dietmar Eggemann as well, that changes how this constraint is met. The actual change is small, but it illustrates how hard it can be to get the needed heuristics right.

• Reduction of energy use is, of course, a worthy goal; energy that is not wasted becomes available for the mining of more cryptocurrency, after all. There are some smaller considerations as well, such as environmental benefits, that justify the effort, but the proliferation of battery-powered devices has added more urgency to the task. If batteries can be made to last longer, doomscrolling interruptions will be fewer and users will be happier.

• These pressures have led to the addition of energy-aware scheduling to the kernel. When the scheduler considers the placement of tasks in the system, it will work to reduce the amount of energy consumed overall; this work includes running the CPUs at the power level that is the most efficient for the current load and powering down processors entirely when possible. For example, if a CPU that is currently running at a given power level can accept another task without having to move to a higher power level, it may make sense to move a task there from another CPU.

• The kernel does not lack for memory allocators, so one might well question the need for yet another one. As this patch set from Alexei Starovoitov makes clear, though, the BPF subsystem feels such a need. The proposed new allocator is intended to increase the reliability of allocations made within BPF programs, which might be run in just about any execution context.

• Allocating memory in the kernel can be tricky in the best of situations. Depending on the execution context at the time, the memory-management subsystem may or may not have various options available to find memory if an allocation request cannot be immediately satisfied. For example, memory can be freed by pushing its contents out to persistent storage, but if memory is requested from within a filesystem, calling back into that filesystem to write out data could cause deadlocks and is thus not an option. In many kernel contexts, it is not possible to sleep to wait for memory to become free. If the kernel is currently handling a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) from the CPU, the options are even more limited.

• Most kernel code is written to run within a specific context and with an awareness of the available memory-allocation options; that information is passed to the memory-management subsystem via the GFP flags supplied with allocation requests. When a specific function can be invoked in multiple contexts, it generally must allocate memory as if it were always running in the most restrictive possible context; this can be inconvenient for developers.

• Over the years, mechanisms like memory pools (“mempools”), which pre-allocate a certain amount of memory to ensure that it will be available when it is needed, have been developed to make life easier. Naturally, mempools quickly created a new problem: kernel developers adopted mempools as a way of insulating themselves from memory-allocation failures. Before long, much of the kernel’s memory was tied up in mempools and unavailable where it was actually needed. Over the years, a balance has mostly been found between overenthusiastic mempool use and being unable to allocate memory in critical situations.

• Some system administrators running Ubuntu 20.04 had a rough time on June 8, when Ubuntu published kernel packages containing a particularly nasty bug that was caused by an Ubuntu-specific patch to the kernel. The bug led to a kernel panic whenever a Docker container was started. Fixed packages were made available on June 10, but there are questions about what went wrong with handling the patch; in particular, it is surprising that kernel 5.13, which has been beyond its end-of-life for months, made it onto machines running Ubuntu 20.04, which is supposed to be a long-term support release.

• A regular feature of the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) has been an update on the state of embedded Linux from conference organizer Tim Bird. It has been quite a few years since I had the opportunity to sit in on one, so I took one at the 2022 Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Austin, Texas. OSSNA is an umbrella conference that contains ELC and a whole lot more these days. Bird gave a look at recent kernel features from an embedded perspective, talked a bit about some different technology areas and their impact on embedded Linux, and also tried to answer a question that Andrew Morton posed in a keynote at ELC in 2008.

• Among his many hats, Bird was the program committee chair for ELC and he is a principal software engineer at Sony Electronics. He started by saying that he was trying to squeeze a talk that he gives fairly regularly at other events down from its usual hour and a half—to 40 minutes. So he warned attendees that he would be moving fast. His goals with the talk were to introduce new technologies that have been added to the Linux kernel, so that attendees could perhaps incorporate them into their products, but also to start a conversation in the ecosystem about areas that need attention.

• There’s been a few devs in the past who’ve tried this. I’m not going to name names, because most of these projects were never completed. When it comes to SECCOMP, the online tutorials only explain how to whitelist the system calls themselves, so most people lose interest before figuring out how to filter arguments. The projects that got further along also had oversights like allowing the changing of setuid/setgid/sticky bits. So none of the current alternatives should be used. I believe this effort gets us much closer to having pledge() than ever before.

• Justine Tunney has created an implementation of the OpenBSD pledge() system call for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• Brief: Today you will learn the cause of the Termux package management issue, how to solve it, and other ways to solve it.

• If you have installed the Termux app from the Playstore, you might face the below error while upgrading or installing the package on an Android device.

• Get the steps to learn the ways to install Flowblade Video Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the command terminal.

• Flowblade Movie Editor is a free and open-source video editing software for Linux, available easily using the default system repository.

• With the video editor Flowblade, you can edit videos for free on Linux. The open-source software uses FFmpeg and can handle the video codecs supported by the library. It is a non-linear video editor that can handle multiple tracks, so you can use multiple tracks of video and audio to create a movie. Of course, you have to observe the copyright if the material is used by third parties, which was downloaded from YouTube with YouTube DL, for example.

• Here’s a little time-saver if you (like me) often need to edit text files as root in a graphical app on Ubuntu.

• Brief: Today you will learn what Termux is and its features and limitations. And how to install, uninstall and manage your packages in Termux. Then learn how to enable storage access on Termux and Enable Other Repositories on Termux.

• Nginx is an open-source, freely available HTTP server software. Additionally, it operates as a proxy server for email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP). Nginx also acts as a load balancer and reverse proxy for UDP, TCP, and HTTP servers. According to W3Tech, NGINX is currently the most widely used web server since it routinely outperforms Apache and other servers in benchmark tests assessing web server speed.

• This blog will demonstrate the method to set up Nginx server blocks on Ubuntu 22.04. Let’s get started!

• Odoo 15 is a web-based business application package that can be operated from a single console. Warehouse Management, Open Source CRM, Billing & Accounting, eCommerce, Website Builder, Human Resources, Project Management, Manufacturing, Purchase Management, Point of Sale, and Marketing are just a few of the business apps offered on Odoo 15.

• This blog will demonstrate the procedure of installing Odoo 15 on Ubuntu 22.04. Let’s get started.

• Samba is an open-source secure network file sharing system that allows Raspberry Pi users to easily share files between the Raspberry Pi and other devices like laptops or PCs. It works on the Network Attached Storage (NAS) protocol principle and is one of the easiest and quickest solutions for sharing files between multiple devices through the Internet.

• This tutorial presents a detailed guideline for setting up a Raspberry Pi Samba server to allow file sharing between your Raspberry Pi and other devices.

• Raspberry Pi is an amazing platform that allows users to play many games easily. The device processor has an excellent capability to handle games that require fewer memory resources so that you can smoothly run the game without reducing your device performance. You can run several games on your Raspberry Pi device, but those designed for a Linux environment are the ones you should try to play out on your device.

• Welcome to part 2 of our Raspberry Pi HAT tutorial series written by our resident Pi developers, Dave ‘waveform’ Jones and William ‘jawn-smith’ Wilson.

• In this post, they teach us how to build a handheld micro-Pong device with the Unicorn HAT Mini and follow it up with a system monitor on the Unicorn HAT HD.

• Check out part 1, where William got us started with the Unicorn pHAT and Dave shared his piwheels project dashboard!

• This is a guest post from William’s own blog, which he’s kindly allowed us to share here. Check out his site for more great Pi tutorials as well as some equally colorful 3D printing projects.

• That’s enough from me, over to William and Dave.

• if pacman gives an error message like:

• you will need to uninstall ‘wxgtk2′ and it’s dependents first (the only such parabola packages are ‘freefilesync’ and ‘odamex’)

• A listening port is a network port on which an application or process waiting for a connection or has established a connection. This helps the kernel to act when receiving packets with this specific port number.

• The listening port could be closed, listening, or in established states. Once service is started and listening to a port no other applications or services can use that port.

• In this guide, we learn how to check ports in use in Linux (Listening Ports). You can do this using ss, netstat, and lsof.

• Today we are looking at how to install Deltatraveler on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Terminal, Shell, TTY, and Console are terminologies that are often confusing and loosely used to mean the same thing. But it’s hardly the case. There are nuanced differences that exist between each of these components.

• In this guide, we flesh out the differences between these terminologies as they are used in UNIX/Linux systems.

• Data transfer is one of the most common operations carried out by users over the internet. When transmitting data, caution needs to be taken to ensure that data is transferred securely and not compromised.

• In this guide, we look at some of the secure data transfer protocols and explore the differences that exist between them.

• Hello, dear friends. Today, you will learn how to install Snap on CentOS 9 Stream. With this, you will be able to install many useful applications using this technology from Canonical.

• Snap is the self-sufficient package technology developed by Canonical. As expected, it comes integrated on Ubuntu, but it is also possible to install it in other distributions like CentOS 9 Stream.

• Flatpak is Snap’s natural competitor. Both offer packages that can be run on any distribution that supports them thanks to their box technology. That is to say that in a single package are incorporated all dependencies and libraries needed to run without affecting the system.

• File Lock PEA is a java-based encryption tool. It works excellent on Linux, especially if you’re not a fan of tools like VeraCrypt, GnuPG, and others. This guide will show you how to encrypt files on Linux with File Lock PEA.

• Hearts of Iron IV is a strategy game set during World War II. In the game, players take control of a nation during the war and fight to win. Here’s how to play Hearts of Iron IV on Linux.

• Battery Top is an excellent application that Linux users can install to monitor their laptop’s battery status. In this guide, we’ll go over how to install Battery Top on Linux and how to use it too.

• The Heroic Game Launcher is an open-source tool for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It allows users to download, launch and play video games from the Epic Games Store and GOG.com.

• This guide will cover downloading and installing the Heroic Games Launcher on Linux. We’ll also show you how to use it to game on your Linux system.

Games

• Not a big surprise but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge has managed to shift over a million in the first week after release. Developer Tribute Games confirmed the milestone yesterday on the official Twitter.

• Atari continue to get their classics revamped and remade for modern audiences, with the latest being Yars: Recharged that’s a reimagining of the 1982 Atari 2600 classic and best-seller Yars’ Revenge in partnership with Adamvision Studios and SneakyBox the same teams behind Gravitar: Recharged and Breakout: Recharged.

• Bottles is a thoroughly great application for managing Windows applications and games on Linux. It’s fast moving and a new release is out with their new default runner called Soda, which is based on Valve’s fork of Wine and Proton patches.

• More extra fixes have come trickling down from Valve with the Steam Deck Beta updated and a new release of Proton Experimental too so here’s what’s new.

• Armello, a grim fairy-tale board game from League of Geeks no longer advertises that it supports Linux and macOS due to their new party system that landed with the cross-play update.

• Focus Entertainment: Legends and Visions from Humble Bundle has some good looking games ready for picking, so here’s a run over how they will work on Linux desktop and Steam Deck. Using both the Deck Verified rating and ProtonDB, here’s a list of what’s available:

Distributions and Operating Systems

• CP/M did not support subdirectories, so it did not have a directory separator.

Arch Family

• wxWidgets 3.2 provides a Qt frontend in addition to the GTK3 one, so packages have been renamed from wxgtk- to wxwidgets-. The GTK2 frontend is no longer provided. If you have wxgtk2 installed, the upgrade will fail with

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” BETA release highlights about new features, improvements and how you can download and test.

Devices/Embedded

•  Orange Pi 5 (LTS) is an upcoming single board computer powered by Rockchip RK3588S cost-down octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor that should offer one of the best cost/performance ratios on the market once it is launched.

• The SBC is said to come with up to 32GB RAM, 32GB eMMC flash, offers HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 8K video outputs, up to two MIPI DSI display interfaces, three camera interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, and WiFi 6 connectivity, and a few USB ports plus a GPIO header.

Open Hardware/Modding

• You may have heard a lot about coding and how important it is for children to start learning about coding as early as possible. Computers have become part of our lives, and we’re not just talking about the laptop or desktop computer you might have in your home or on your desk at work. Your phone, your microwave, and your car are all controlled by computers, and those computers need instructions to tell them what to do. Coding, or computer programming, involves writing those instructions.

• As the Lead Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io, Alex Glow has an insider’s view of the technology that’s coming down the rails at us in the near future. Happily, she also makes it her business to share that knowledge, supporting a community of almost two million hardware tinkerers, inventors, and improvers. She’s also the brains behind a good few projects herself: she’s sent music into space, was an early adopter of the companion robot, makes projects with LEDs and PCBs, and… well, whatever she feels like really.

• Last month, Kontron unveiled their 3.5” Single Board Computer powered by a variety of Intel processors. The 3.5”- SBC-EKL can accommodate processors from the Atom X6000E series, the Celeron J6000/N6000 series and the Pentium J6000/N6000 series.

• The 3.5”- SBC-EKL is capable of supporting the following Intel processors…

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• Google Slides lets you create pitch decks, project presentations, training modules, and more. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

•  Several great options for checking disk usage on your Linux system have a graphical interface. Sometimes the visual representation of disk utilization is easier or newer users may not be as familiar with the various Linux commands that display storage information. I am a person who comprehends visual representations more easily than the printout on the command line.

• Here are several excellent GUI-based tools to help you understand how your storage capacity is used.

Programming/Development

• Recently I’ve been working with simple/trivial scripting languages, and I guess I finally reached a point where I thought “Lisp? Why not”. One of the reasons for recent experimentation was thinking about the kind of minimalism that makes implementing a language less work – being able to actually use the language to write itself.

• FORTH is my recurring example, because implementing it mostly means writing a virtual machine which consists of memory (“cells”) along with a pair of stacks, and some primitives for operating upon them. Once you have that groundwork in place you can layer the higher-level constructs (such as “for”, “if”, etc).

• Lisp allows a similar approach, albeit with slightly fewer low-level details required, and far less tortuous thinking. Lisp always feels higher-level to me anyway, given the explicit data-types (“list”, “string”, “number”, etc).

Java

• In Java, arrays can be single-dimensional, 2-dimensional, or multi-dimensional. Java’s two-dimensional arrays are arrays within some other arrays. The 2D arrays are also known as matrices and they keep the data in the form of a table i.e. columns and rows. A 2D array can be created by specifying a data type followed by an array name and two sets of square brackets. In java, there are multiple ways to print a 2D array such as using for-each loop, for-loop, etc.

• The multiplication operator * and the “multiplyExact()” method can be used to multiply two values in java. The multiplication operator performs multiplication on any numeric value such as int, float, or double. The multiplyExact() method deals with only integer and double type values. It takes two values, performs multiplication on them, and returns the resultant value. However, if the resultant value exceeds the limit/range, it throws an exception.

• As we know that arrays are very important for a programming language as they group the values of same data type in one variable so in Java array also play a vital role. When we create functions or methods we usually pass variables as arguments. But what if we want to return a large amount of data having same data type at once from a function or method?

• We can do that by returning an array where we want to use numerous values of the same data type without occupying the large memory space.

Leftovers

• Aral joins host Steve Boland to discuss decentralized social communication tools for nonprofit organizations (and everyone else!). Aral talks about federated communications tools (the Fediverse) like Mastodon (microblogging like Twitter but without corporate ownership), PixelFed (more image focused like Instagram) and many other ideas. Aral discusses the problematic relationship between charities seeking to have real engagement with audiences and how corporate platforms interfere at best, or undermine those efforts. Federate tools for communication and the small web in general puts more control in the hands of users and removes algorithms from the communications outreach loop for charities.

Hardware

• Sometimes a computer bleeds from its heart and reveals droplets of private information. That’s the case with the “Retbleed” hardware vulnerability made public today: This vulnerability occurs in the microprocessors that execute the instructions of a computer program and perform the corresponding calculations. In some cases, the processors – namely the central processing units (CPU) – also perform special calculations that shorten the computing time and speed up the overall computing process. In the process, they leave traces in the memory that hackers could exploit to gain unauthorized access to any information in the system – for example, they could steal encryption keys or security-relevant passwords. This is especially risky in cloud environments where multiple companies share computer systems. The National Center for Cyber Security in Bern, Switzerland considers the vulnerability serious because the affected processors are in use worldwide. However, the manufacturers have already taken initial measures to close the vulnerability.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• During a Friday sermon on July 8, imam Ahmet Gür in the Central Anatolian province of Konya called for violence against doctors in the face of a healthcare strike earlier in the week.

• “They have turned the killing of doctor against the state, nation. Yesterday, none of the hospitals were on duty. For example, you went to the hospital for your son to get an injection; otherwise, he will die. But the doctor tells you to go away since they are on a strike. Would you not kill him, beat him, swear at him? Let’s not give an opportunity to this. Let everyone be wise,” imam Gür said.

• Shortly afterwards, the imam’s video appeared on social media, stirring a huge reaction.

• COVID-19 cases are rising as the BA.5 Omicron variant puts more people in the hospital amid high rates of reinfection, which is the focus of a new piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong in The Atlantic that is headlined “Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?” Yong warns the premature rollback of protective policies, like mask mandates and public health funding, has left people more vulnerable to reinfection. Meanwhile, a concerning number of Americans continue to distrust the vaccine. Rather than focusing on community-based measures that will protect the most vulnerable first, “the Biden administration’s posture has been moving toward an era of individual responsibility,” says Yong.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Security researchers say the leaked database, apparently used by the police in Shanghai, had been left online and unsecured for months. It was exposed after an anonymous user posted in an online forum offering to sell the vast trove of data for 10 Bitcoin, or about $200,000. The New York Times confirmed parts of a sample of the database released by the anonymous user, who posted under the name ChinaDan.

• In addition to basic information like names, addresses and ID numbers, the sample also featured details that appeared to be drawn from external databases, like instructions for couriers on where to drop off deliveries, raising questions about how much information private companies share with the authorities. And, of particular concern for many, it also contained intensely personal information, such as police reports that included the names of people accused of rape and domestic violence, as well as private information about political dissidents.

• In the security world there is a concept called “Defense in Depth” that refers to setting up layers of defense so that if an attacker bypasses one layer there are other layers they must contend with. In physical security this might take the form of a lock on the outside door of an office building, a security guard inside the foyer who identifies a visitor, access to different floors in the building protected by keycards in the elevator, additional locked rooms or safes on a particular floor for particularly sensitive property, and security guards patrolling the building and reviewing security camera footage. In the digital world this might take the form of firewalls, network segmentation, multi-factor authentication, event log monitoring, and malware scanners.

• A similar approach, which I’ll call “Privacy in Depth” applies the same principles to privacy. When you have an attacker who is attempting to violate your privacy, you can assume that at some point they may be able to bypass one layer of defense, and if they do, you want to have additional layers available to protect your personal data. Protecting our customers’ privacy is a core tenet in our Social Purpose and in this post I will describe the layers of privacy defenses we have built into the Librem 14, Librem Mini, Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA product lines.

• Israeli malware maker NSO Group’s frequent targeting of iPhones has led to multiple rounds of patches, a federal lawsuit, and Apple instituting a notification program to inform customers their devices have been compromised.

Defence/Aggression

• According to the “Salzburger Nachrichten”, the investigators got on the boy’s trail thanks to tips from the American FBI. The user from Austria probably came to the attention of the US federal police during a worldwide internet monitoring for radical Islamist content. The student was placed in custody by the regional court because of the risk of escaping and the risk of committing the crime. According to the court’s decision at the time, it could not be replaced by less severe means as long as the accused did not “reduce his extremist views”.

• President Biden is in Israel as part of a four-day trip to the Middle East, where he reaffirmed his support for Israel despite growing disapproval among members of the Democratic Party over the state’s brutal treatment of Palestinians. The Biden administration faces criticism over plans to build a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem on land that was illegally confiscated by Israel from Palestinians in 1948, as well as the State Department’s whitewashed investigation of Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing, which multiple other independent investigations have determined was caused by an Israeli bullet. “By not engaging in dismantling the structures of discrimination and oppression … that Israel maintains, the United States is in fact supporting those structures,” says historian Rashid Khalidi, whose family is among the Palestinians whose seized lands are set to be used for the embassy.

• President Biden will be visiting the Palestinian territories and meeting President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday. Ahead of Biden’s trip, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh demanded Biden call out Israel over her killing while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken invited Shireen Abu Akleh’s family to visit the United States. “We will continue to call for justice, and we will continue to call on the U.S to carry out a transparent investigation by an independent body,” says Shireen Abu Akleh’s niece, Lina Abu Akleh. “In addition, we continue to call on the U.N. and the ICC to carry out an investigation and hold Israel accountable and put an end to this grotesque impunity that Israel continues to enjoy.” We speak with Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian American professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University.

• President Biden is set to meet with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday as part of a four-day visit to restore key relationships and build security cooperation in the Middle East. Human rights activists are outraged that the U.S. is willing to support a leader responsible for human rights violations including in the brutal war in Yemen, the state-sanctioned killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and more. One of Biden’s aims is to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production, an answer to pressures at home over skyrocketing gas prices from the Russian war in Ukraine. “If we’re willing to sacrifice for oil prices, there are much less heinous sacrifices to be making than to continue military support for the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A former CIA engineer has been convicted of espionage for leaking documents to WikiLeaks that exposed the agency as engaging in mass surveillance.

• The conviction of Joshua Schulte on eight spying and obstruction charges was announced in a Manhattan court on 13 June.

• The Vault 7 exploits were released beginning in March 2017 and continued until September that year.

Environment

Energy

• The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry and burned tires.

• Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures (GCGV), a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.

Finance

• The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Carried out between May and June 2022 “during the 2022 primary season of local and state elections, and congressional midterm elections,” CAIR’s survey collected 525 responses from voters who claimed to be Muslim, answering questions about various “social and policy issues” as well as political party affiliations and opinions.

• But the methodology was shoddy. Respondents were found by CAIR entirely through its own email lists and social media pages, with the resulting survey then speciously presented as a proper exercise in data analysis. This was not a survey of American Muslims, but mostly of American Islamists; and only those who subscribe to CAIR.

• One of the main factors that keeps a large audience on the app is the ‘For You’ page, an endless cycle of content, catered to the user and their interests, based on a plethora of deciding components. Firstly, the liking, commenting, and sharing of the video, as well as the watch time, and the number of times it has been rewatched. Thus, the algorithm grapples with this information and builds an idea of the content the user would appreciate, using categories based on hashtags of posts, the song utilized, and the actual account itself. Broken down bluntly as the TikTok rabbit hole by some, the app has become the perfect place to search for and explore new interests regarding content, regardless of how contrasting they are to previous suggestions.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Later in the afternoon, he issued a further public statement saying, “My heart aches for the pain suffered by this young child” and thanking law enforcement officers for getting the accused rapist off the streets. Yost did not offer any apology to the Indianapolis newspaper or even a reference to the vindication of The Star’s reporting.

• In, say, a reported story about a child who must travel out of state to receive an abortion because abortion is illegal after six weeks in the state where she lives, there are other reasons a publication might leave out identifying details.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Virta announced the deletion of her account in a tweet and also via a press release.

• Note: Access Now and 23 other organizations call for recent draft amendments to Indonesia’s Criminal Code to be repealed. These amendments risk curtailing civic freedoms – particularly the right to freedom of expression and information online through expanded defamation provisions. The Indonesian government must also conduct public consultations before adopting the draft amendments.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Assange faces 18 charges, 17 of which are charges under the US Espionage Act. All of the allegations against him stem from the publication of documents that WikiLeaks obtained from US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning in 2010.He has been jailed at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh since April 11, 2019, when the Ecuador government revoked his political asylum and allowed the British police to enter their London embassy and drag him to a police van.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “I’ve not yet found a single one that makes my life better,” said Mr. Perdue, 38, who lives in Queens. He added, “I spend more time working around these overlays than I actually do navigating the website.”

• Last year, over 700 accessibility advocates and web developers signed an open letter calling on organizations to stop using these tools, writing that the practical value of the new features was “largely overstated” and that the “overlays themselves may have accessibility problems.” The letter also noted that, like Mr. Perdue, many blind users already had screen readers or other software to help them while online.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• We’re moving to the Pacific Northwest on Saturday. We’ve signed the lease and paid first month’s rent on the new apartment already. I will not miss the Central California heat one bit. I’m honestly so excited to get out of here.

Technical

• Some quick news for the Old Computer Challenge!

• As it’s too tedious to monitor the time spent on the Internet, I’m now using a chronometer for the day… and stopped using Internet in small bursts. It’s also currently super hot where I live right now, so I don’t want to do much stuff with the computer…

• I can handle most of my computer needs offline. When I use Internet, it’s now for a solid 15 minutes, except when I connect from my phone for checking something quickly without starting my computer, I rarely need to connect it more than a minute.

Internet/Gemini

• A great thing about gemini is that gemtext documents tend to be very lightweight, and so it usually does not take very long to load them over Tor. So, assuming Tor does a reasonably good job at hiding your IP address, and throwing in all the built-in privacy benefits of Gemini, one can enjoy a comfortable feeling of privacy while browsing Gemini capsules. It is easy to torify Lagrange with torsocks, by simply running “torsocks lagrange”.

• I ran into a serious problem, however, in using a torified lagrange: for some unknown reason, the background task which handles refreshing your feeds will (apparently) lockup, causing the feeds never to finish refreshing, and driving one of your CPU cores to switch to space-heater mode (100% usage forever). This only happens once every few times you refresh your feeds, but since lagrange (1.13.6) is hardcoded to refresh your feeds every 16 minutes, then inevitably you will switch back to Lagrange to find that the feed refresher has gotten stuck in this infinite-loop-like behavior.

• i subscribe to the academic journal “Porn Studies”. Volume 8 Issue 4 was dedicated to the topic of “Deplatforming sex”.

• 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

----------

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