● 07.20.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/07/2022: GNOME 43 Alpha Release

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

•  Coming about four months after VirtualBox 6.1.34, the VirtualBox 6.1.36 release is here to introduce initial support for the Linux 5.18 kernel series, as well as for the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel. This means that you’ll now be able to install GNU/Linux distributions powered by either Linux 5.18 or 5.19 kernels on a virtual machine or install VirtualBox on a GNU/Linux distribution that runs one of these kernel branches

Instructionals/Technical

• Manjaro is a modern and user-friendly Arch-based Linux distribution that comes highly recommended for desktop lovers given its intuitive and elegant UI design.

• It is free and open source and comes with three officially supported editions namely Xfce, KDE Plasma, and GNOME. All the editions are fully customizable and you can configure them to suit your own taste. Manjaro is versatile and can be used for home, office, and gaming.

• In this post, we will cover how to install Ansible on Fedora 36 step by step.

• Ansible is a free and open-source agent less automation tool that manages remote Linux machines over ssh protocol. System on which ansible is installed is known as control node and remote machines which are managed by ansible are known managed nodes.

• TeamSpeak is a great application that uses VoIP to facilitate audio communication on a chat channel. Besides, it is a free voice conferencing application that supports Linux and other systems. It is an alternative to software like Discord. With TeamSpeak, you can get in touch with people via text and speech, especially for gamers who need to communicate among themselves.

• Moreover, TeamSpeak works for meetings, conferences, and online courses. There are different ways to install TeamSpeak on Linux, and we will cover two common methods in this guide.

• Wine, a most popular and powerful open source application for Linux, that used to run Windows-based applications and games on the Linux Platform without any trouble.

• WineHQ team recently announced a new development version of Wine 7.13 (release candidate for the upcoming releases). This new development build arrives with a number of new important features and 40+ bug fixes.

• The wine team, keep releasing their development builds almost on weekly basis and adding numerous new features and fixes. Each new version brings support for new applications and games, making Wine a most popular and must-have tool for every user, who wants to run Windows-based software on a Linux platform.

• The open-source Computer Vision Library is a popular computer vision library with bindings for different languages, including Java, Python, and C++. Furthermore, it supports other Operating Systems and has multiple applications, such as tracking moving objects, 3D-model extractions, facial recognition, and image analysis.

• For developers, OpenCV offers an extensive collection of algorithms, especially for 3D modelling, and things can’t get any better than when using the tool. If you are looking for how to install OpenCV on Ubuntu and spice your support vector projects or enhance algorithms, you are in the right place. This guide covers two easy ways of installing OpenCV.

• Compressed files save on bandwidth when sending them to someone. You can compress any files, and there are different tools, such as zip and tar. The compressed files get extracted to the current working directory unless you specify a different one. Besides, the different utilities have various options that you must add to aid in extracting archive files to specific folders.

• When using a decompressing tool, there is a way to specify a different directory for the extracted files. This guide will discuss how to create archive files and extract the contents to specific directories using unzip and tar in Linux.

• VLC is free and cross-platform software that supports different multimedia files, including DVDs and CDs. VLC supports various streaming protocols, and it is a great multimedia player to use. VLC is a common tool, especially for Windows users, and if you’ve recently switched to Linux and wondering how to install it on Linux, then you are in the right place.

• This guide covers two different ways of installing VLC on Linux, and we will be using Ubuntu for our examples. Nevertheless, the process is simple, and the concept is the same for all Linux systems.

• Yes, despite having 30 years of service, Perl is still making its mark in backend applications and complex configuration scripts. So don’t be surprised that it’s still so popular.

• Perl has been modernized and includes a Python-style package manager called CPAN. It also has a fairly large user community, which means that there is documentation everywhere.

• On top of this, it is highly flexible, so you can use it for almost any purpose while being fast and secure.

• Vim is an exceptional and widely used terminal-based text editor in the Linux community. A growing number of Linux users are slowly embracing the use of vim text editor to meet their file editing objectives.

• Not all Linux users are quick to embrace and stick to the default settings and configurations associated with apps like text editors. Some users prefer a colorful approach to the Linux lifestyle.

• This article is here to inform us that we can accomplish more than just text editing tasks with Vim. We should be able to set the Vim background colors to our desired preferences while perfecting our text editing skills.

Games

• Making a thoroughly difficult yet great strategy game even better, Into the Breach: Advanced Edition is out now for all owners as a free upgrade. If you love turn-based strategy games, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. I both dread and love it, since it sucks away so much time as I just want another run through when I fail and then it’s 2AM.

• Stray is a game about a lost cat in a cyberpunk city had become something of a viral hit even before release and it’s out now, with a Steam Deck Verified rating right away. Note: personal purchase.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

•  GNOME 43 alpha is the first major step in the six-month-long development cycle of the next major GNOME desktop release, GNOME 43, due out in late September 2022. The alpha version targets early adopters, but primarily for application developers who want to test their apps against the GNOME 43 stack

Distributions and Operating Systems

Devices/Embedded

• The ADTF3175 is a Time-of-Flight (ToF) optimized for 3D depth sensing and computer vision applications. The device features a 1MP CMOS indirect ToF with a depth range of 0.4 to 4m with ±3mm accuracy. ADI expressed these features can be useful in applications such as industrial robotics, healthcare and augmented reality.

• This 3D camera module is based on the ADSD3100 which is a 1MP CMOS ToF-based 3D depth and 2D visual light imager. The ADSD3100 includes an ADC, pixel biasing circuitry and sensor control logic built in the chip to make it cost effective and ease product integration.

Open Hardware/Modding

• There was a time, not so long ago, when folks who wanted to make their own custom PCBs would have found themselves in the market for a bucket of acid and a second-hand laser printer. These days, all you have to do is click a few buttons in your EDA program of choice and send the files off for fabrication. It’s easy, cheap, and nobody ends up with chemical burns.

• For prototype electronics projects, most of us have a pile of resistors of various values stored somewhere on our tool bench. There are different methods of organizing them for easy access and identification, but for true efficiency a resistance substitution box can be used on the breadboard to quickly change resistance values at a single point in a circuit. Until now it seemed this would be the pinnacle of quickly selecting differently-sized resistors, but thanks to this programmable resistor bank there’s an even better option available now.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

•  Qt Creator 8 is here about four months after Qt Creator 7 and introduces new experimental plugins to support the Coco code coverage analysis tool by displaying code coverage as annotations in Qt Creator’s code editor, as well as GitLab, allowing you to browse and clone projects, or to connect your checkouts to receive event notifications in the Version Control view.

• Design Thinking has been getting a lot of attention over the past few years as a way to enhance your problem solving, ensure learning goals are met, and increase team engagement. As a concept, it’s all about problem solving, but it’s designed to break down existing approaches and norms. Over the past few decades, teams have developed standardized ways of approaching problems. Agile teams, for example, take retrospectives as a means to both troubleshoot and brainstorm new ways of working. Lean has evolved a set of root cause analysis tooling and techniques to allow for the bottoming out of problems.

• A problem solving and brainstorming session needs the freedom to shift perspective away from current thinking. That thinking can be hampered by the familiarity with tooling, the team affinity for certain approaches or tools, the “evangelistic” approach to processes, and the mantra of this is how we have always done it, which is rooted in people’s innate resistance to change. Design Thinking is an approach to allow people to see beyond basic human tendencies. It allows people to awaken to alternative approaches that can help uncover unmet and unspoken needs, and to bring new perspectives to the challenges at hand.

• React is a UI framework built on top of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, where JavaScript (JS) is responsible for most of the logic. If you have knowledge of variables, data types, array functions, callbacks, scopes, string methods, loops, and other JS DOM manipulation-related topics, these will tremendously speed up the pace of learning ReactJS.

• Your concept of modern JavaScript will dictate the pace of how soon you can get going with ReactJS. You don’t need to be a JavaScript expert to start your ReactJS journey, but just as knowledge of ingredients is a must for any chef hoping to master cooking, the same is true for learning ReactJS. It’s a modern JavaScript UI library, so you need to know some JavaScript. The question is, how much?

Leftovers

• Published in 1978, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance holds a sacred place in gay literary history for its seductive glimpse of post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS New York City. Dancer’s world is idyllic: The men are handsome; the music pulsates; the drugs are bountiful; the baths are overflowing; and the poppers—they still come in glass capsules you pop! The novel is told in epistolary form, the narrative revealed in letters between an unnamed writer living in New York City and his friend Paul, a gay man who has fled city life for the South. Embedded amid this exchange is the platonic love story of two party queens: Sutherland, famous for his campy outfits, excessive drug use, and undesirably small penis, and Malone, a heartthrob, ingénue, and hustler who, by the novel’s end, has grown weary of his drug-and-sex-fueled life. Described in the letters to Paul as a story about “doomed queens,” the novel unsurprisingly ends in tragedy. Yet despite Dancer’s critique of the era’s gay male sexual culture, it has nonetheless achieved a cult following for its breezy scenes of cruising—what many see as a fictional utopia safeguarded from AIDS.

• Jyoti Thottam has worn many hats as a journalist: business reporter, foreign correspondent, and now deputy op-ed editor at The New York Times. In her first book, Sisters of Mokama, Thottam explores the journey of a group of Appalachian nuns who established a Nazareth Hospital in 1947 in the east Indian state of Bihar, one of the regions hardest hit by Partition—the period when the British finally left India, leaving it to be bloodily divided into independent nation states, today known as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Thottam has a personal connection to this story: Her mother traveled from her home state in India to this very hospital in Bihar to receive training as a nurse.

• Frida Berrigan shares her thoughts on what, including libraries (and their embattled librarians), she still loves about our disturbed country.

Hardware

• Sometimes a gizmo seems too cheap to be true. You know there’s just no way it’ll work as advertised — but sometimes it’s fun to find out. Thankfully, if that gadget happens to be a MILESEEY PF210 Hunting Laser Rangefinder, [Phil] has got you covered. He recently got his hands on one (for less than 100 euros, which is wild for a laser rangefinder) and decided to see just how useful it actually was.

• Have you ever observed the project of another hacker and thought to yourself “I have got to have one of those!”? If so, you’re in good company with hacker [garberPark], the maker of the unusual chain clock seen in the video below the break.

• If you live in a home with a garage door opener, you may have experienced one or more inevitable moments. You pull up to your home, you press the button on the garage door opener, and… nothing. Or you can’t find the garage door opener. Or you have to mash the button repeatedly to get a response. Or… you get the idea. Thanks to [Core Electronics] however, you now have the basis for using a much better device to control your own garage door: Your phone. You can see the tutorial on the web or in video format below the break.

• The aptly-named [chip-red-pill] team is offering you a chance to go down the Intel rabbit hole. If you learned how to build CPUs back in the 1970s, you would learn that your instruction decoder would, for example, note a register to register move and then light up one register to write to a common bus and another register to read from the common bus. These days, it isn’t that simple. In addition to compiling to an underlying instruction set, processors rarely encode instructions in hardware anymore. Instead, each instruction has microcode that causes the right things to happen at the right time. But Intel encrypts their microcode. Of course, what can be encrypted can also be decrypted.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Associations of foreign nationals are kept in a central register in Germany. Members of Kurdish foundations are subject to special surveillance. However, a corresponding decree from 1994 can not be found anymore.

• Throughout the past several years, digital apps that track all manner of bio-information, such as food intake, heart rate, daily step count, and more haved rapidly gained popularity. In addition, many people who can give birth have found period-tracking apps helpful in determining when they will get their periods, when they are most fertile, as well as keeping track of the severity of their menstruation symptoms. However, with the recent fall of Roe v. Wade and heightened scrutiny on those who can bear children, the dangers of tracking one’s period via a digital app has many users worried — and not without good reason.

• Author and law professor Maurice Stucke warns that as fundamental privacy rights vanish, your personal data can and will be used against you.

Defence/Aggression

• President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran on Tuesday is invested with great importance, as Iran is becoming one of the most consequential relationships for Russia

• John Bolton admitted to CNN that he “helped plan coups d’etat” abroad, including Venezuela.

• Well before the House select committee’s January 6 investigation began, trust in the classic American system of checks and balances as reliable protection against executive (or, more recently, Supreme Court) abuses of power had already fallen into a state of disgrace. A domestically shackled Biden presidency, a Congress unable to act, and a Supreme Court that seems ever more like an autocratic governing body has left American “democracy” looking grim indeed.

• Outraged residents of Uvalde, Texas, confronted members of the city’s school board Monday, nearly two months after an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 fourth graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. The school board’s meeting came a day after a Texas House panel released a damning report that identified multiple “systemic failures’’ in the response by local, state and federal law enforcement to the school massacre, finding it took nearly 400 officers more than an hour to confront the gunman after they rushed to the school. For more, we speak with Roland Gutierrez, state senator for Texas’s 19th District, which includes Uvalde. “Texas is in a crisis of neglect of infinite proportions, and Greg Abbott is doing nothing about it,” says Gutierrez, who is calling on the Texas governor to call a special session to raise the minimum age to buy AR-15 guns, as well as properly fund the victims’ funerals — none of which Abbott has attended.

• The U.S. National Archives on Tuesday asked the Secret Service to investigate the “potential unauthorized deletion” of agents’ text messages sent the day of and before the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

• “It is especially distressing to see such behavior from a federal agency that had such critical duties during the attack on the Capitol.”

• The FBI’s shift from law enforcement to counter-terrorism began shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, but really took off about a decade later, when it got into the business of radicalizing internet randos to turn them into “terrorists” worth hitting with material support charges.

• The US is likely to dangle greater defence cooperation and capital, while China will pledge continued support for the Philippines’ infrastructure plans

• The failed wars and efforts of foreign powers in Afghanistan have destroyed this conceit. Lengthy engagements, often using special forces operating in hostile terrain, have been marked by vicious encounters and hostile retribution. Australia’s Special Air Services supplied a very conspicuous example. The 2020 report by New South Wales Court of Appeal Justice Paul Brereton on the alleged murders of Afghan non-combatants was an ice bath for moralists claiming they were fighting the good fight.

• Known rather dully as the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, Brereton claimed that 39 alleged non-combatant murders were perpetrated by Australian special service units during their tours of duty. The report was inspired, in no small way, by the work of consultant Samantha Crompvoets, a sociologist commissioned by the Special Operations Commander of Australia (SOCAUST) to conduct a “cultural review” of the Special Operations Command in mid-2015.

• On May 20, the Russian Defense Ministry declared that the entire city of Mariupol, including the Azovstal steel plant, was under Russian military control. According to the ministry, over 2,000 Azovstal defenders had surrendered to Russian troops. Soon after, Mariupolites began returning to the devastated city. Two months later, many of them still have to cook their meals over open fires and spend each morning waiting in line for potable water. Belarusian news outlet Zerkalo spoke with people who have remained in or near Mariupol since February 24 about what it’s like to live in a war-torn city that’s been captured by foreign troops. With the Zerkalo team’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of their article.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Notes: Michael McCray and Marcel Reid are the co-founders of the International Association of Whistleblowers and co-organizers of the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival. McCray is also General Counsel for the Federally Employed Women Legal Education Fund. Reid is a former member of the Pacifica Radio National Board. Marsha Warfield is a nationally-known, comedian and actress, and will be hosting some events at the Whistleblower Summit. Gimena Sanchez is a staff member at the Washington Office on Latin America.

• Documents shared with MintPress reveal that Valent Projects – a shadowy communications firm that advises social media platforms such as Facebook…

Environment

• As the climate crisis continued to wreak deadly havoc across the globe on Tuesday, progressive stalwarts Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal led a group of 27 House Democrats in urging the Biden administration to immediately end new fossil fuel leasing on public lands and waters and to begin phasing out oil and gas production on federally owned property.

• “Fighting climate change means no new fossil fuel leases, not now, not ever.”

• Over the past few years, fossil fuel combustion has been responsible for approximately 73 percent of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions and 89 percent of the world’s emissions. As these emissions have accumulated in the atmosphere, they have increased global average temperatures by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times—almost 10 percent—and with them the intensity and frequency of costly natural disasters. In 2020 alone, the U.S. spent $145 billion on disaster recovery—more than the federal government spent on transportation that year. While taxpayers have been forced to pick up the tab for the climate crisis, fossil fuel companies have continued to prosper. In 2021, leading fossil fuel companies made $205 billion in profits, of which their executives pocketed $394 million.

• As the United Kingdom endures its hottest day on record amid Europe’s unprecedented and ongoing heatwave, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg warned Tuesday that the worst is yet to come—unless people around the world work together to dislodge the profit-maximizing economic system that is endangering life on Earth.

• “This is not ‘the new normal,’” Thunberg wrote on social media. “The climate crisis will continue to escalate and get worse as long as we stick our heads in the sand and prioritize profit and greed over people and planet. We are still sleepwalking towards the edge.”

• Corporate Fantasies on a Planet That’s Not Waiting Until 2040

• A recent Times opinion video rightly takes down idealistic-sounding pledges recently made by CEOs of some of the world’s largest corporations at the World Economic Forum. Commanding heights business promises of “net zero” carbon emissions and a new “environmental capitalism” wherein “economic growth and global trade” continue without climate ruin amount to what Times video producer Agnes Walton and filmmaker Kristopher Knight call “corporate fantasies.”

• While the desperate calls for new laws to combat on-going atmospheric pollutants ring out across the globe, they are unfortunately ignored by societies resistant to necessary change. As the mega-drought ravages the American West, a long-standing law determining water allocation has come into sharp focus. And from all evidence, Western water law with its Doctrine of Prior Appropriation will fall to the needs of millions of people.

• Western water law, in simplest terms, says “first in time, first in right.” In other words, to keep the early settlers of the West from killing each other over who diverted water from the rivers and streams, a system of “water rights” was instituted. Those who sought to divert water, be it for irrigation, mining, or domestic use, were required to post — and record — the amount of water they “claimed,” the point of diversion, and the amount. The earliest “senior” rights took precedence over later claims and the system worked — at least marginally.

• The United States is a global outlier on multiple fronts. It is the only country in the developed world without a universal healthcare system. It ranks number one in firearms per capita and has the second highest firearm homicide rate in the world. The U.S. is also a childcare outlier (developed countries contribute an average of $14000 on childcare for 2 and under, compared with $400 in the U.S.) and now a global outlier on abortion rights.

• This week, the International Olympic Committee rolled into Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Olympics, to hobnob with the city’s political elites. With IOC President Thomas Bach on hand, along with Nicole Hoevertsz, the IOC executive board member and former Olympic synchronized swimmer from Aruba who is chairing the Los Angeles 2028 IOC Coordination Commission, they announced the dates for the LA Olympics and Paralympics. Standing in front of a swim stadium, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti expressed his excitement. It was a set-piece spectacle under the California sun.

Energy

• When it comes to renewable energy, there are many great sources. Whether it’s solar, wind, or something else, though, we need a lot of it. Factories around the globe are rising to the challenge to provide what we need.

• A sweeping, multiyear assessment of the Australian environment published Tuesday warns that the continent’s biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate as the climate crisis intensifies, wreaking havoc through rapidly warming temperatures, more frequent and damaging extreme weather events, and ocean acidification.

• The report was originally turned over to the fossil fuel-friendly government of former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison back in December 2021. But the right-wing government opted not to release it ahead of the 2022 elections in May, when voters swept Morrison from power in favor of the Labor Party.

Wildlife/Nature

• Nearly two dozen congressional Democrats on Tuesday pressured the Biden administration to push for an independent investigation into the June murders of Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in Brazil’s Javari Valley, and to improve U.S. policy related to the region.

• “This human-level tragedy is a symptom of a broader assault on the Amazon rainforest.”

• I am all for solar and wind alternatives to the Earth-warming fossil fuels. The faster they replace  dangerous petroleum, natural gas, and coal, the better. The world is in real danger from anthropogenic climate chaos. Climate nemesis is hanging over the planet like the sword of Damokles.

• Nevertheless, Greece has been abusing solar and wind energy. Instead of placing solar panels on the roofs of houses and buildings, the local Greek municipal governments and the Ministry of the Environment are licensing private companies to install solar panel arrays on archaeological sites, wetlands, valleys, and mountains.

Finance

• The big problem with Stryker’s argument is that it assumes that the working class will somehow benefit from having more manufacturing jobs. This would have been true twenty years ago when non-college educated workers in manufacturing enjoyed a substantial pay premium over workers employed in other sectors. It is no longer true today.

• Due to our trade deals (especially Clinton’s), which cost millions of manufacturing jobs, the sector no longer offers any substantial pay premium over employment in other sectors. At the most basic level, the average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing is now less than 92.0 percent of the average for the private sector as a whole.[1]

• On billboards, postcards and signs nailed to telephone poles, a familiar proposition appears: Businesses will buy properties no matter how much work they might need.

• Selling to these buyers can sometimes be a good option for a homeowner. But some experts have referred to certain aggressive uses of this sales practice, which frequently involves senior citizens, as “equity theft.”

• The AFL-CIO’s latest annual analysis of top executive pay was published Monday with the following conclusion: “CEOs, not working people, are causing inflation.”

• In recent months, corporate bosses and top Federal Reserve officials have pointed to workers’ wages as a factor in surging prices, which have pushed overall inflation in the United States to a four-decade high.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There could be few greater ironies in contemporary American politics than that of the Republican Party—which never misses a chance to decry socialism—holding its 2024 national convention in the only major American city to elect three Socialist Party mayors.

• Things move fast in the Delaware Chancery Court and if you blink, you just might miss it. A week and a half ago, you’ll recall, Musk sought to terminate the deal using the exact pretextual excuses most of us assumed he would be using, and which he telegraphed in his letter to Twitter. Days later, Twitter sued Musk in the Delaware Chancery Court, which is somewhat well known for its relatively rapid docket pace. As part of the complaint, seeking to force Musk to complete the deal, Twitter sought an expedited trial schedule, asking for the trial to happen in September. The filing also laid out, in pretty plain English, just how much Musk’s claims were absolute bullshit and have nothing to do with the crux of the agreement.

• Pro-Israel lobby groups have spent “shocking” amounts of money to change the course of multiple Democratic congressional primaries over the past year alone, reports our guest Peter Beinart. The latest is in Maryland, where former Congressmember Donna Edwards is being outspent sevenfold by corporate attorney Glenn Ivey in her bid to win back her old seat in the state’s 4th Congressional District. Beinart, the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, says the AIPAC-led PACs disguise their attack ads with local issues but in reality are designed to oust candidates who take stances in support of Palestinian rights and working people.

• Brazilian presidential frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Tuesday accused President Jair Bolsonaro of lying 20 times during a meeting with international diplomats in which the far-right incumbent repeated his baseless attacks on the integrity of the nation’s election system.

• “The threat to Brazil is not the electronic voting machines, but the president.”

• Last week, Senator Manchin blindsided his Democratic colleagues when he reversed course on his previous demands that their agenda be focused on tax reform and declared that he would not vote to raise taxes on the rich or massive corporations. In doing so, he dashed Democrats’ hopes to pass any sort of meaningful tax legislation before November. He also ironically proved, by showing the country just how shamelessly he is controlled by his wealthy donors and peers, just how important it is for us to tax the rich.

• Devil Incarnate

• Certain things we can stipulate: 1) That the senator from West Virginia is corrupt and a liar. He makes no bones about voting to support the industry that gave him his fortune; and he has broken multiple promises to his colleagues that he would, in the end, support Biden’s signature initiative, Build Back Better. 2) That Manchin’s refusal to support any climate change legislation in BBB is the height of irresponsibility.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday endorsed Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes’ bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, whose efforts to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election have recently drawn scrutiny from the House January 6 committee.

• “As the son of a public school teacher and UAW assembly line worker, Mandela Barnes knows the struggles of the working class,” Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. “His agenda advances the interests of working families, not the billionaire class.”

• As a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Trinidad was in charge of political education and propaganda. He was captured in Ecuador in 2003, with CIA assistance. He had been conferring there with a United Nations official about the release of FARC-held prisoners.

• Transferred to Colombia, Trinidad was a high-profile prisoner.  He had family connections with upper elements of Colombian society and had been a lead FARC negotiator in peace talks with Colombia’s government from 1998 to 2002. The Colombian government and its U.S. ally might have detected a propaganda advantage in a public trial and severe punishment. Putting him away, out of sight, as a prisoner of war in Colombia would have offered little gain.

• If you are tired of waiting for Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict Donald Trump for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, obstruction of Congress, or any other crime involving the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, I have some words of consolation: Steve Bannon’s trial for contempt of Congress has begun. If convicted, he will likely go to jail.

• The results turned out to be somewhat inconclusive.

• Macron is the first president not have an absolute majority in Parliament since 1977, and since none of the 4 main alliances won a majority, France has a hung parliament for the first time since 1988.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Keppler’s article typified the moral panic over fake news, or disinformation, which began during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and was magnified during Donald Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 global pandemic. In response to these fears, the federal government and private industry have collaborated to determine what is truth for the public. Through public denouncements, hearings, and the threat of regulation and or trust-busting, federal lawmakers have repeatedly pressured Big Tech to remove or censor content from their platforms that they deem false.

Censorship/Free Speech

• California has officially joined the growing list of states attempting to regulate how social media companies run their platforms. The state’s proposed legislation, however, faces a major legal obstacle: the Constitution.

• Educators and educational organizations and institutions would be wise to refuse any endorsement of the NewsGuard browser extension. The extension, branded as the “Internet Trust Tool,” distracts from the ways in which Newsguard’s leadership and mission operate counter to the principles of democratic education and interests of organized labor. At best, NewsGuard is a questionable tool for information seeking, research, and literacy, and is at odds with the long term interests of students and faculty. Continue reading this article here.

• About a week ago, a Florida judge decided a local law superseded the First Amendment. The judge granted an injunction to law enforcement officers, barring a Florida newspaper from publishing their names.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Like its namesake led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign is working to end the violence being inflicted every day by a soulless economic-political system. The night before the march, at a somber, tearful vigil in front of the Lincoln Memorial, marchers gathered to mourn the victims of the past two horrific years, including more than a million Americans dead of Covid-19, along with countless more deaths from poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and ecological degradation. Rev. Barber solemnly declared this tide of death, mostly preventable, to be a case of “policy murder” that must be stopped.

• A day earlier, the campaign’s other co-chair, Rev. Liz Theoharis, also decried the violence being inflicted on Americans, telling members of Congress that

• Much of what Americans know about Rachel Robinson—who turned 100 today, on July 19—is what they’ve seen in the two major Hollywood films about Jackie. She was portrayed by Ruby Dee in the 1950 film, The Jackie Robinson Story, and by Nicole Beharie in the 2013 hit movie, 42. Both films depict Rachel as Jackie’s supporter, cheerleader, and helpmate, the person who comforted him when he faced abuse, and encouraged him when he was feeling discouraged.

• When I was the age that my daughter is now, my favorite sweatshirt had the words “Choice, Choice, Choice, Choice” in rainbow letters across its front. My mom got me that sweatshirt at a 1989 rally in response to Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade. And though many adults in the Wisconsin neighborhood where I grew up thought that message inappropriate for a 13 year old, I wore it proudly. Even then, I understood that it spoke not just to a person’s right to an abortion, but also to the respect and dignity that should be afforded every human being.

• Janine Jackson: In their story last May headlined, “Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade,” the New York Times told readers that with consideration of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court was plunging “back into the contentious debate over abortion.”

• Several members of Congress were among the demonstrators arrested outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday while protesting right-wing justices’ recent ruling against the constitutional right to abortion.

• “I will do whatever it takes, including putting my body on the line, to protect our reproductive rights.”

• For thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders in the fight for freedom and innovation online. EFF’s annual Pioneer Award Ceremony celebrated the longtime stalwarts working on behalf of technology users, both in the public eye and behind the scenes. Honorees included visionary activist Aaron Swartz, human rights and security researchers The Citizen Lab, media activist Malkia Devich-Cyril, cyberpunk author William Gibson, and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. We are forever grateful to all of our past Pioneers!

• This year, we’re taking a new step to recognize the ways in which the digital world has fused with modern life. We invite you to celebrate the first annual EFF Awards.

• The internet is not simply a frontier to conquer. It’s a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving tool for communication, creativity, and human potential. Together we carry—and must always steward—the movement to protect civil liberties and human rights online. Will you help us spotlight some of the latest and most impactful work towards a better digital future?

• A Patron of Economic Update asks: “Workers are organizing and Trade Unionism is on the rise in the UK and around the world…”…

• In 2019 Delta distributed pamphlets to flight attendants and ramp service workers warning that union fees would cost $700 dollars per year. But here’s what they didn’t mention: unionized workers earn $700 more per month.Weird how they left that part out, isn’t it?Amazon wallpapered its warehouses with anti-union ads. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz claimed he had no choice but to exclude workers at unionizing stores from new employee benefits.Apparently when you’re the boss you can just make stuff up.Two: Your employer hires fancy anti-union firms, lawyers, and consultants.The company claims it can’t afford to raise workers’ pay but spends millions on anti-union consultants. You might hear your bosses call this “Union Avoidance,” but it basically just means “Union busting, in a suit.”Three: Delay, delay, delay.It’s illegal for employers to cancel a vote on whether to unionize. But they skirt the law to keep that vote from happening as long as possible.And while they’re delaying, they play dirty tricks to stop a union’s momentum. Before a recent labor election in Buffalo, Starbucks flooded stores with managers to pressure workers. One Starbucks employee reported he was told to go to a meeting, only to be greeted by six managers pressuring him to reject the union.So that’s how many managers it takes to screw over an employee.Four: If none of these union-busting tactics work, your employer might just break the law.Starbucks recently fired more than twenty union leaders. Amazon fired a union leader for missing work – even though he was on leave to care for a COVID-stricken family member. U.S. employers are charged with violating federal law in over 40% of all union election campaigns.I’m sorry, I just have to pause for a second here. 40% of the time? Really? If I broke the law 40% of the time, I’d be in jail quicker than you can say “Pinkerton!”Are companies allowed to skirt the law like this? No! But labor laws take a long time to enforce – if they’re enforced at all. And the worst that can happen is a corporation has to rehire a worker who it illegally fired and provide back pay. No wonder some companies decide that breaking the law is cheaper than following it. It’s simply a “cost of doing business” for a giant corporation like Amazon.But here’s some good news: A bill called “The PRO Act” would strengthen protections for union organizers and make many kinds of “union avoidance” illegal. Call your lawmakers and ask them to support it today.They won’t just be on the right side of history. They’ll be on the right side of public opinion. A majority of Americans, including 77% of young people, support the right to join a union. Workers at Starbucks and Amazon have refused to be intimidated and have started to unionize. All over the country, American workers are growing wise to corporate union-busting tricks.Big corporations are fighting dirty to keep their workers from organizing – and they’re still losing. Imagine what could happen if they had to fight fair.

• We speak with pioneering scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about the growing Republican effort to ban critical race theory — an academic field that conservatives have invoked as a catchall phrase to censor a variety of curriculums focusing on antiracism, sex and gender. Crenshaw has launched what she calls a “counterterrorism offensive” against the Republican efforts with a “summer school” inspired by the Freedom Summer movement of the 1960s. The school debunks the “bothsidesism” debate Crenshaw says is upheld by mainstream media, and highlights the importance of critical race theory in building a multiracial democracy. “There’s no daylight between the protection of our democracy and the protection of antiracism,” says Crenshaw.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Yesterday, we released a new report from the Copia Institute, written by Karl Bode, about the state of broadband competition and the great potential of an open access fiber model: Just A Click Away: Broadband Competition In America. On today’s episode, Karl joins the podcast to dig into the details of the report and explain how a better future of US broadband is possible and attainable.

• As we’ve long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history.

Monopolies

Patents

• Hundreds of people affected by the United States’ sky-high insulin prices and more than two dozen progressive advocacy groups on Monday told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that it would be an “enormous mistake” to exclude insulin-related provisions from an emerging reconciliation bill.

• “Excluding insulin from drug pricing reform would be a slap in the face for the millions of Americans who rely on this lifesaving medicine to manage their diabetes.”

• If I gave you a million dollars to invent a better mousetrap, and told you that if you succeeded you could keep any and all profits…

Trademarks

• There are a great many things that tend to annoy me about the sorts of trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt. Overly aggressive parties policing trademarks in ways that extend far beyond the reasonable. A USPTO that seems all too happy to grant trademarks for things that it simply shouldn’t have, causing all kinds of chaos.

Copyrights

• Anti-piracy group IBCAP is today celebrating a $5.7m win against a seller of pirate IPTV devices in the United States. But despite being sued at the same time, the major pirate IPTV operation behind the device seller appears to be intact. And with alleged influence among officials in a Middle-Eastern government, that may continue to be the case.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• My recent retro coding on the Amiga got me thinking [far too much] about another idea I’ve been cogitating on for a while: what shape would a”virtual console” for my own stuff take?

• [...]

• So, nothing too complicated, but it’d be nice to leverage an existing library for the windowing and event handling. I want to use straight C, so I had a look at SFML and SDL2.

• SFML is modern, clean, well supported and has great platform coverage, but, it’s focused more on OpenGL & HW Accelerated contexts. I want a strictly indexed colour (fixed colour palette) workflow, so SDL2 – surprisingly – suits my needs better. It’s easy to have an indexed colour, SDL_Surface based setup, that can be pushed over to accelerated SDL_Textures at runtime. And the other plus: SDL is already 20 years old. I suspect it’ll still be around in another 20. Especially given how many other game engines use it, under the hood.

• 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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