● 07.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/07/2022: Gnuastro 0.18, Vulkan Beta Driver 515.49.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Need a really powerful laptop with top-tier Linux support? System76 has refreshed the Oryx Pro and here’s all the details.

• This is their popular flagship NVIDIA graphics laptop that now sports a new 12th Gen Intel Core processor with the i7-12700H giving an impressive 14 cores with 20 threads. Not only that, you’re also getting an open source friendly laptop too since System76 continue to support their open firmware and open source embedded controller firmware. The graphics options have been bumped up too from the previous having an RTX 3070 or 3080, users can now configure the Oryx Pro with an RTX 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics.

• The Dell XPS 13 Plus may have the specs and design to compete with the best Windows laptops, but some prefer to have the machine run Linux. At the moment, the Developer Edition of the laptop ships with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but the device is now certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Starting in August, the XPS 13 Plus will ship with the newer version of Ubuntu. An update to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will also roll out automatically to any of the laptops that have already shipped.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS improves stability and performance and includes new features, including GNOME 42. The OS also works with Active Directory, which is important for enterprise users. It will receive up to 10 years of software updates as well. A complete changelog for Ubuntu 22.04 outlines all of the improvements.

• The device is the latest result of Dell and Canonical’s ten-year Project Sputnik, which aims to create high-end Dell systems with Ubuntu preinstalled

• As part of its commitment to strengthening its technology industry, the American technology company Dell has revealed today its plans to launch Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS-certified XPS Plus 13 Developer Edition next month, August 2022.

• According to the tech giant, the new XPS “Developer Edition” will be launched in some selected European markets like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and others, and immediately begins selling the XPS Plus 13 notebooks same month in the region mentioned

• The laptop is powered by Intel’s latest 12th generation Core processor and can accommodate up to 32GB of 5200MHz LPDDR5 memory. In terms of storage, the notebook supports PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs and comes with a four-speaker array that supports up to 4K + OLED screens.

• Dell’s XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition is the first laptop to be certified for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS version of Linux, Canonical announced. That means you can buy one starting in August with Ubuntu pre-installed, while current owners of the XPS 13 Plus model sold with Windows 11 can download and install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “and receive the same hardware-optimized experience.”

• The Ubuntu certification means all components will “work as expected” and the LTS (long-term support) designation means it will be supported for at least 10 years with “Base Package” maintenance and security updates. It also includes specific software or drivers different from the default distribution where required, installed automatically in the optimal configuration, according to Canonical.

Audiocasts/Shows

• I’ve covered a bunch of Arch Linux installers and every time I do I get a very similar question, does Arch Linux actually need a guided installer or is the install guide perfectly fine.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has released a fresh upgrade to their special developer-focused Vulkan Beta Drivers with version 515.49.10.

Applications

•  One of the leitmotifs that’s running through our minds is whether Linux really needs more music players. If it’s just a fork of an existing project, we’d agree that this wouldn’t be an enticing prospect. After all, in this field audiophiles are granted a huge array of fine music players. We cover our favorites in this roundup.

• What caught our eye about Mélodie? It was predominately because it’s billed as a no frills music player. Too many music players are burdened with tons of features that aren’t really that useful or interesting. Let’s see if Mélodie has what it takes to become our default music player.

Instructionals/Technical

• Losing passwords may create serious issues by completely locking down your database access.

• Recently, I installed MySQL on my system and tried to change the password to improve security. While performing the steps, unintentionally, I misplaced my MySQL database password and lost access.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install GoLand on Pop!_OS 22.04.

• Today we are looking at how to install Factorio 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.

• User wishing to install OMLx (any version) with no root password. Calamares issues an error “Installation Failed” “Cannot disable root account”. This issue is fixed in Cooker, the fix should be in Rolling soon as well as in the next version of Rock.

• If you are using Ubuntu 22.04, you might have received this notification.

• It notifies you that the Firefox update is pending and asks you to close the app to avoid disruption.

• So, like a good obedient Ubuntu user, you close the Firefox browser when you have saved or finished your work.

• You think that Firefox was updated in the background and restarting the browser will run the newer version.

• Only, that is not the case here.

• As a system administrator or a regular user, you may want to know the available network interface in your Linux system. It is often used to know the interface name, and its status, and to manage network configurations.

• In this tutorial, we learn how to list network interfaces on the Linux system.

• We are all certainly familiar with the popularity of image file formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Well, Google came up with a standard image file format replacement for the likes of JPEG, PNG, and GIF and gave it the name WebP.

• So what makes WebP a preference over the other mentioned image file formats? Firstly, WebP’s design offers better lossless and lossy compression in comparison to web image attributes offered by other image file formats. Also, web developers and webmasters benefit from faster web sessions due to the use of WebP to create smaller and richer images.

• The sysctl is a helpful tool for any Linux administrator. It allows the reading and writing of sysctl variables. With it, you can modify the kernel parameters of your system at runtime. The Linux kernel is the operating system’s core, controlling different system services. The kernel parameters can be set at three instances, during the building of the kernel, at system boot, and at runtime. The /proc/sys/ contains the kernel parameters. We will see how to use the sysctl command to modify the Linux kernel parameters

• HTTrack is a very useful website copier. It lets the users download any of their desired websites from the Internet to their local systems. In this manner, they can access those websites without an Internet connection. Because of which you can also call HTTrack an offline browser. In this guide, we will show you how you can install HTTrack on the Ubuntu 22.04 system.

• Talking about FTP clients, there is no shortage of available options on Ubuntu 22.04. Though variety is nice, it can make choosing very difficult. With this guide, I hope to make the decision much easier for you as we look at one of the most popular FTP clients available, i.e., FileZilla, and how you can install it on Ubuntu 22.04.

• FileZilla is a popular choice for FTP and SFTP. This means you can transfer files without needing to zip them up, as it comes loaded with features. It is also good enough to be used as a general file manager. Last, it works on Windows, Linux, and macOS alike.

• If you want to learn how to install FileZilla on older Ubuntu 20.04, head to this link.

• If you want a step-by-step guide on how to install FileZilla on Debian 10, you can check this link.

• If you want to know how to install FileZilla on Ubuntu 22.04, keep reading.

• Occasionally, installing fresh packages daily may be necessary when working in a Linux environment. To install new software, you must determine how much RAM is available. Therefore, you should be able to examine the RAM or memory installed and available on your system.

• This post will examine a few key commands for CentOS 8 that help determine how much memory or RAM is available.

Games

• Do you love classic 90s rail shooters like Star Fox? You should take a look at Ex-Zodiac, which just hit Early Access. Built in Godot Engine it comes with Native Linux support right away and it’s looking good, it also works great on the Steam Deck too and feels like a really good fit there.

• Love your building, economic and tycoon sims? Check out the new Railway Empire Complete Collection Bundle. This is a Native Linux game that also has a Playable rating for the Steam Deck.

• Hey look, some good news about NFTs for once! Mojang has put out a new guide on the rules surrounding NFTs and blockchain.

• MangoHud is a great performance overlay for Linux, one that’s used on the Steam Deck too and GOverlay helps you configure it really easily. A new release is out with GOverlay 0.9. The developer mentioned this release was due for a while but they ended up catching COVID, lost access to their GitHub and more but it’s here now.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• One of the biggest issues with many Linux reviews is the confusion between a distro and a DE. A DE is the graphical interface and general workflow the user is greeted with. For those new to Linux, think of the difference between macOS and Windows, or Windows XP and Windows 11. While they share many similarities, there are obvious differences in how they look and function that have nothing to do with the inner workings of the operating system (OS).

• The same is true on Linux. DEs arguably have more impact on the user experience than the underlying distro. In fact, many distros ship with the option to use different DEs, greatly changing the overall experience of working with that distro.

Distributions and Operating Systems

•  If you’re a casual user who just wants a reliable OS that helps you be more productive, here are some top distro recommendations.

• There are hundreds of versions of Linux. For some people, this sounds like fun. For others, this sounds like a waste of time. Who wants to bother wading through all of those options when they just want something that works?

• While there isn’t one “best” version of Linux, here are three options that you can’t go wrong with. Each is well-established, comes with corporate backing, and has a substantial community. If three is two options too many, go with the first one, and turn to the other two if you run into any issues.

EasyOS

• Roger (radky in the forum) has bumped Pup-SysInfo to version 3.5…

• Roger (radky in the forum) has bumped JWMDesk, now version 3.5.4. EasyOS 4.2.7 has JWMDesk 3.5.2.

BSD

• (Regular readers will know what comes next…)

Debian Family

• According to the Debian people tracker, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Thawte Consulting, is formally removed from Debian today.

• I previously covered the first round of mass resignations from Debian in June. The mass resignations have continued. Eight more people departed shortly after my last blog and another five were removed from the Debian keyring today.

• That is a total of thirty Debian Developers resigned/removed in approximately three months. This is an unprecedent exodus from the Debian community.

• It is pure coincidence that these resignations have occurred while Debian funds are being used to pay lawyers to defame volunteers and censor web sites about Debian.

• It is pure coincidence that volunteers are now picking through emails from the early days of Ubuntu, between 2004 and 2010, to determine the connection between pressure from Ubuntu and the suicide of Frans Pop in 2010.

• More than 15 years ago, Ubuntu was chosen as the base for the internal Linux distribution, as it was user-friendly, easy to use, and had lots of fancy extras. The Long Term Support (LTS) releases were picked as it was valued that Canonical provided 2+ years of security updates.

• However, this two year release cycle for LTS releases also meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100.000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS. The complex nature of workloads run on corporate machines meant that reinstalling and fully customizing machines could be a difficult and time consuming operation. The productivity hit of having all engineers configure their workspace from scratch every two years was not a financially responsible option.

• [...]

• When we designed gLinux Rodete (Rolling Debian Testing), we aimed at removing the two year upgrade cycle and instead spread out the load on the team throughout time. The general move to CI/CD in the industry has shown that smaller incremental changes are easier to control and rollback. Rolling releases with Linux distributions today are getting more common (Arch Linux, NixOS).

Devices/Embedded

• Banana Pi BPI-W3 is yet another upcoming Rockchip RK3588 SBC but with a different set of features, notably the presence of two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a PCIe x4 slot, and a SATA port, besides to more common dual HDMI output, HDMI input, USB 2.0/3.0 ports, etc…

• The board layout is somewhat similar to the company’s BPI-RK3588 SBC but with a system-on-module, and instead, the Rockchip RK3588 processor is soldered directly onto the board together with 8GB LPDDR4, and 32GB eMMC flash.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Theengs is a manufacturer agnostic open-source set of tools to decode BLE sensors and integrate those into smart home and IoT solutions such as Home Assistant with notably support for autodiscovery to automatically create the sensor.

• Theengs can be installed on various hardware from ESP32 to an Android phone or a Raspberry Pi SBC, and the solution currently supports close to forty BLE sensors from various companies including Xiaomi, Honeywell, and RuuviTag.

• The ESP32-C3-DevKit-RUST-1 is a development board that features the RISC-V architecture through the single-core ESP32-C3 System-on-Chip (SoC). In addition to wireless connectivity, this dev kit offers a 6-DoF IMU, a Li-Ion battery charger and it can be programmed with Rust.

• The RISC-V based processor found on this board has been seen recently in other platforms, i.e. the XIAO ESP32C3 and the ICE-V Wireless. For reference, the processor used is a 32-bit RISC-V single core processor with a maximum frequency of 160MHz.

• Consumer IoT (Internet of Things) devices provide convenience and the consequences of a failure are minimal. But industrial IoT (IIoT) devices monitor complex and expensive machinery. When that machinery fails, it can cost serious money. For that reason, it is important that technicians get alerts as soon as an abnormality in operation occurs. That’s why Tomasz Szydlo at AGH University of Science and Technology in Poland researched IIoT anomaly detection techniques for low-cost microcontrollers.

• When you only have a single sensor value to monitor, it is easy to detect an anomaly. For example, it is easy for your car to identify when engine temperature exceeds an acceptable range and then turn on a warning light. But this becomes a serious challenge when a complex machine has many sensors with values that vary depending on conditions and jobs — like a car engine becoming hot because of hard acceleration or high ambient temperatures, as opposed to a cooling problem.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The education sector has had to make many adjustments in the past years due to the covid-19 pandemic, new GDPR regulations, and more innovative ways of teaching instruction and learning in general.

• Switching to online learning has its benefits, however it comes with its own hurdles and loops to jump through. A major one of those being making sure the programs in use are data and privacy compliant.

• Between fall 2020 and spring 2021, the Baden-Württemberg state in Germany who has relied on Microsoft 365 products, instigated a pilot operation to test 365’s data protection configurations and standards due to some complaints from schools about data compliance. Even after eliminating certain functionalities and implementing additional security, the pilot test failed to deliver a data compliant solution for teachers, students, and parents.

Events

• ONE Summit is the ONE networking technology event connecting Access, Edge, Core and Cloud. It brings together technical and business decision makers for in-depth, interactive conversations around cutting-edge innovations and the operational support necessary to leverage them.

• Third city to host free software related scientific research program for high school students

• Starting this past Monday in Austin, TX, The Institute for Computing in Research will host 6 local high school students for research internships in the fields of physics, computer science, linguistics, and cognitive science. By combining scientific research and a focus on using free software, students will learn from both their scientific fields, as well as getting involved with free software communities. Austin joins Portland, OR and Santa Fe, NM as the newest city to offer research internships. This will be Portland’s second year operating and Santa Fe, NM’s fourth year.

• The Institute for Computing in Research is one of the group of Software Freedom Conservancy’s member projects that seeks to upend the historical exclusion that has prevented people from seeking opportunities in the technology sector. Along with projects like Outreachy, The Institute for Computing in Research leads the way by providing equitable ways to connect people with communities, training and financial compensation for internships using free software.

FSF

• Twice every year, the FSF sets aside time and resources to reach out and bring updates from each team. This spring, we did just that. We also set ourselves a fundraising goal of $67,000, which we later decided to stretch to $70,000. Now, we are proud to announce that we reached our stretch goal, and even a bit beyond. We raised a total of $86,000, all thanks to community support. It is worth noting that we received donations in various forms — even a vehicle donation! (Yes, you can do that, and, yes, it helps.) Now that the spring appeal is officially over, we want to take a moment to highlight a few things we did during this time.

GNU Projects

Licensing / Legal

• Regarding computer programs (source code and object code) the policy refers to the European Union Public Licence (EUPL, Swedish version) and refers to the Joinup Licensing Assistant (JLA) for providing information about the open source licences content and compatibility.

Programming/Development

• You just followed a guide to start your Tekton pipeline (or task) when a merge request is created or updated on your GitLab project. So you configured GitLab to send merge request events as webhooks. And you deployed some Tekton components:

• Then you notice that any event in your merge request (a new comment, a tag change) triggers the pipeline. That’s not the behavior you desire. You don’t need to build a comment or a tag, after all. You only want the pipeline to run when there is actual new code to build. Here’s how I use Tekton’s CEL Interceptor to create conditionals for my pipelines.

• Common Expression Language (CEL) is an expression language created by Google. It allows to define constraints that can be used to validate input data.

Perl / Raku

• “The array variable is used in any programming language to store multiple data. The PERL array can contain different types of data such as numbers, strings, Boolean, etc. The “@” symbol is used to declare an array in PERL, and the “$” symbol is used to read the value of the particular array index. The command-line argument values are stored in the PERL array named @ARGV. The uses of the PERL array of the numeric index have been shown in this tutorial.”

• “Sometimes, it requires executing one or more statements based on a particular condition. This problem can be solved by using the “if” statement. It is a very useful statement for any programming language. The ways of using different types of “if” statements in the PERL script have been shown in this tutorial.”

• “The loop is used to iterate some statements multiple times. The foreach loop is one of the useful loops of PERL. This loop is mainly used for iterating the array of values that contains the list of data. It can be used for other purposes also, such as reading file content, controlling the iteration using different keywords, etc. Different uses of the foreach loop have been shown in this tutorial.”

• “The length of an array indicates the number of elements of the particular array. Many ways exist in PERL to calculate the array length. When the length of the array is calculated by using the “@” symbol, then it is called an implicit scalar conversion. When the length of the array is calculated by using the scalar keyword, then it is called an explicit scalar conversion. The “#” symbol can also be used to count the length of the array. Different ways of counting the array length and using it in the PERL scripts have been shown in this tutorial.

• Different ways of counting the array length have been described in the next part of this tutorial by using examples.”

• In the year 2000, the world was a different place. Y2K was still fresh in our memories, many of us had just partied like it was 1999 and Mark Fowler had given up eating chocolate.

• Even though there would be no chocolate in the near term, Mark still wanted to enjoy opening 24 to 25 new doors in December. And so the The Perl Advent Calendar was born. You may be surprised to know that the first post, from Dec 1, 2000, wasn’t a whimsical blog post about Santa, elves and reindeer, but rather just the documentation for Data::Dumper.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• This page is a compilation of common mistakes made by bash users. Each example is flawed in some way.

Rust

Leftovers

• Except it didn’t take a few months and $15k. It took eight months, $46k, and a lot of headache.

• Now that the project is over, I’m revisiting what mistakes I made that let this project spiral so far out of control.

• For the past several years, Design Thinking has been providing a way to enhance problem solving within teams, to ensure learning goals are met, and to increase team engagement. In our previous article, we discussed the problem with processes. In this article, we’re going to describe how we made work more engaging.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• YouTube says it will begin removing “instructions for unsafe abortion methods” or content that “promotes false claims about abortion safety.” The company made the announcement on Twitter, saying it falls under its medical misinformation policy. It’s also adding an information panel to related videos that will offer health information about abortion from the National Library of Medicine, similar to what it’s done for vaccines and some other topics.

• “In the first year after a non-fatal firearm injury, survivors experienced a 40% increase in physical pain or other forms of pain syndromes; a 50% increase in psychiatric disorders; and an 85% increase in substance use disorders,” Dr. Song says, while on break from his rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he practices internal medicine. He adds more research is needed as to exactly why those addiction numbers and other disorders go up so dramatically.

• “These results are disturbing and we, as a research team, found them quite striking, as well,” he says. “The ripple effects are quite profound and meaningful for both survivors and family members and, I would argue, clinically and economically substantial.”

• And those effects aren’t just on those injured by bullets. The study shows family members of survivors, too, can carry massive physical and mental burdens.

• In particular, said Andersen, negative experiences such as parental unemployment, crime, mental illness, and death can have a long-term impact on the adolescent brain. On the flip side, however, the sensitivity of the adolescent brain provides an opportunity to address early childhood trauma.

Proprietary

• This indiscriminate nature is compounded by the fact cyber-attacks are generally difficult to contain. For example, cyber warfare between nation states is a threat to every organisation – not just those deemed to be in the firing line. We saw this with the NotPetya attack in 2017 – an attack on a specific utility company – which impacted multiple unrelated organisations through an entirely organic spread of the chaos. Attack types also continue to evolve. For example, the LokiLocker attack was one of the first reported strains of ransomware to include a disk wiper functionality. This means organisations are not only held to ransom by having services suspended and threats of data extortion. Now they are being threatened with losing vast swathes of data completely if they do not pay up.

• Glenn Maiden, director of threat intelligence, Australia and New Zealand, Fortinet, said, “While cybercriminals are becoming more creative with their approaches, the risk to businesses from the likes of ransomware, for example, goes beyond mere disruption. The biggest risk is data access and exposure, further driving the need for leaders to bring security into the very base levels of the organisation. There’s never a guarantee that cybercriminals will safeguard data once its accessed, even if ransoms are paid, so it’s essential that business leaders invest in greater data protection at every level.”

• Kaspersky states that Luna underlines the recent trend for cross-platform ransomware, with languages like Golang and Rust being heavily implemented by modern ransomware gangs in the past year.

• A notable example includes BlackCat and Hive, the latter using both Go and Rust. These languages are platform independent, so the ransomware written using them can be easily ported from one platform to another.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• According to a research by Consumer Reports in 2021, some of the popular mental health apps were sharing data with Meta and other companies, and tracking for targeted advertising. The third parties can combine this information with other data points like gender, hobbies and location to determine which ads are shown on their platform or on other websites.

• The $3.9 billion deal is Amazon’s latest acquisition in the health care industry. In 2018, it acquired PillPack, an online pharmacy.

Defence/Aggression

• “In a few days we were able to enrich uranium up to 60% and we can easily produce 90% enriched uranium … Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one,” Kharrazi said.

• Iran is already enriching to up to 60%, far above a cap of 3.67% under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Uranium enriched to 90% is suitable for a nuclear bomb.

• The biggest takeaway wasn’t simply that Trump didn’t do anything to stop the attack, it was, as Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) put it at the top of the hearing, he chose to not do anything. Instead, Trump holed up in the White House dining room, watching the attack unfold on Fox News and rebuffing efforts from everyone around him — from administration officials to family members — to call off his supporters. He even encouraged them, attacking Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter for refusing to illegally stop the certification of the 2020 election results, and, according to a White House security official, leading Pence’s security detail to fear for their lives.

• Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, two administration figures who were in the White House on Jan. 6 and resigned later that day, testified during the hearing. “I thought that Jan. 6, 2021 was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history,” Matthews said, “and President Trump was treating it as a celebratory occasion.”

• Committee members are furious over the Secret Service’s explanation.

• “We have concerns about a system migration that we have been told resulted in the erasure of Secret Service cell phone data. The U.S. Secret Service system migration process went forward on January 27, 2021, just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps from a violent mob hunting for him,” Chairman Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., wrote in a joint statement Wednesday.

• The “procedure for preserving content prior to this purge appears to have been contrary to federal records retention requirements and may represent a possible violation of the Federal Records Act,” they said.

• Chairman Bennie Thompson, leading off the hearing remotely as he recovers from COVID-19, called for accountability at every level of what the committee has described as Trump’s “attempted coup.”

• The panel detailed the 187 minutes that passed between Trump’s speech at the Ellipse and his taped statement telling his supporters still storming the Capitol to leave.

• In sometimes explosive testimony, witnesses appearing in the hearing room and in prerecorded testimony detailed an urgent effort to convince Trump to speak publicly to help stop the violence — and Trump declining to act — throughout those three hours and seven minutes.

• Even the following day, when Trump recorded a video in which he referred to the riot as “heinous,” he refused to refute the lie that inspired the insurrection, according to outtakes shown at Thursday’s hearing.

• The hearing, which is expected to be the committee’s last until September, featured new footage and audio clips that shed further light on Trump’s reaction to the violence and on what was happening inside the Capitol as the riots escalated.

• (…) In fact, shortly before 3 a.m., the fire brigade was called for stabbings in the cœur de Maine district and asked the police for reinforcements. When the rescue workers arrived, the three victims were still alive. “They found a large and sometimes aggressive crowd throwing projectiles at the emergency services. Three persons, each of whom had been stabbed in the chest, were attended to by the rescuers as they had suffered cardiac arrest,” the prosecution adds. They died shortly afterwards. Le Parisien [...]

• In today’s Africa, radical Islam seems to have not only overcome hurdles raised by the Western powers and regional governments but become a growing threat to countries where it was almost nonexistent, irrelevant or marginal a few years ago. The Islamic State (IS) and other groups have targeted unstable regimes that have experienced repeated coups d’états, conflicts with Western military powers, economic decline and divisions between tribes, sects, and religions. The Islamists have found fertile ground in such countries. Recruitment is easy, indoctrination is even easier and consolidation has never been more straightforward.

• As a result, the attacks perpetrated by Islamists have increased in audacity and their range of targets, sowing havoc and fear in areas that central governments have traditionally neglected. As a result, local populations have left their homes, leaving the areas under the total control of the Islamists. The refugees have then flocked to the capital cities, creating severe humanitarian and political crises.

• Legal experts who have spoken with Teen Vogue say they’re concerned by the outcome of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, noting that the decision not only overturns decades of legal precedent, but is also an encroachment by religious conservatives into our secular governmental institutions. “With three justices appointed by President Trump, that Supreme Court now has a deeply conservative majority, and one of its main goals is demolishing the separation of church and state,” Schwartzman says. “The Court’s decision in Bremerton is part of that larger project. A lot of kids are going to be pressured by their coaches and teachers into participating in religious practices that they don’t agree with, and the conservative justices aren’t concerned about that.”

Environment

• Yesterday, on the island of Lolland, the temperature reached 35.9 degrees – the second-highest temperature ever recorded in Denmark and the highest recorded in July.

• By failing to directly address the root of the climate problem—the overuse of fossil fuels—the Biden administration will be unable to curb the impacts of climate change, costing countless lives and taxpayer money in the future. The action needed is to reduce energy usage, not facilitate its mass consumption. This week’s lackluster actions may be better than nothing, but we need much, much more.

• Gallup polling over the past few decades has found that Americans pretty consistently want the government to prioritize environmental protection, even if it slows economic growth. A majority are concerned about global warming and are increasingly likely to think it will pose a serious threat in their lifetime.

Energy

• You already negated all of humanity’s efforts to develop renewable energy. Please stop heating the planet where my children will have to live.

• Since websockets is released under an open-source license, you can use it for any purpose you like. However, I won’t spend any of my time to help you.

• I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.

• Customs has seized bitcoins in connection with investigations into offences related to narcotics and doping substances. In addition to the bitcoins that have now been realised, there are about 90 bitcoins in Customs’ possession awaiting a valid judgement of forfeiture. Customs has also seized other cryptocurrencies, but since the preliminary investigation into these cases is ongoing, the currencies or their amounts cannot be revealed in detail.

• So what have we learned here, friends? First of all, don’t do illegal things. Second, don’t do them on a public blockchain where anyone can look. Third, Coinbase definitely reads [cryptocurrency] Twitter. Fourth, so do the feds. Fifth, when one of your employees is indicted for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the most important time to note that tokens aren’t securities is right after the indictment is unsealed.

Wildlife/Nature

• The group estimates that the population of monarch butterflies in North America has declined between 22% and 72% over 10 years, depending on the measurement method.

• “What we’re worried about is the rate of decline,” said Nick Haddad, a conservation biologist at Michigan State University. “It’s very easy to imagine how very quickly this butterfly could become even more imperiled.”

• Haddad, who was not directly involved in the listing, estimates that the population of monarch butterflies he studies in the eastern United States has declined between 85% and 95% since the 1990s.

• It said that the monarch, which travels thousands of kilometers from the United States and Canada to spend winters in the comparatively mild climes of central Mexico, is threatened by habitat destruction and climate change.

Finance

• It was an introduction for many fans to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” program, in which “platinum tickets” — which may be placed anywhere in the arena, from the front section to the back rows — fluctuate in price, in what is said to be ongoing reaction to demand. The system lets ticket prices quickly rise to a level it’s believed resellers would get for them, keeping that extra money in-house for the artist and promoter. But as Wednesday’s ticket sales went on and went up, even some concert veterans who know and accept the idea of variable pricing wondered: Would even scalpers ask close to $5,000 for a good but not directly front-of-house seat?

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• If you’re the type of person who would rather see social media posts organized by when they’re actually, you know, posted, you’ve probably fumed at the Facebook algorithm’s choice to prioritize whatever posts its chooses. No longer. Today, Facebook implemented a Feeds tab where you can see your friends’ posts as they happen.

• The video in question is 59 seconds long and draws attention to official attacks on four individuals who have been singled out for their free speech activities. The video was posted as part of the SEP’s campaign in defence of Dr David Berger, an Australian general practitioner who has been targeted for opposing the official “let it rip” program of mass COVID infection.

• After the 12-hour ban had elapsed, Thursday night Australian time, the SEP account remained locked. A message from Twitter administrators declared that the sanction had been imposed for, “Violating our rules against posting or sharing privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their express consent.”

• After all, the huge number does not mean that there are almost 30 million potential victims. In fact, this number is not suitable to even approximate that. Without further explanation, such numbers create a grossly distorted picture of the known extent of sexualized violence against minors online. Here comes an overview of what’s really behind the numbers – and what’s not.

• The global [Internet]—a vast matrix of telecommunications, fiber optics, and satellite networks—is in large part a creation of the United States. The technologies that underpin the [Internet] grew out of federal research projects, and U.S. companies innovated, commercialized, and globalized the technology. The [Internet]’s basic structure—a reliance on the private sector and the technical community, relatively light regulatory oversight, and the protection of speech and the promotion of the free flow of information—reflected American values.

• Moreover, U.S. strategic, economic, political, and foreign policy interests were served by the global, open [Internet]. Washington long believed that its vision of the [Internet] would ultimately prevail and that other countries would be forced to adjust to or miss out on the benefits of a global and open [Internet].

Censorship/Free Speech

• Researchers at an Internet Governance Forum event Thursday recommended the use of third-party software that filters out harmful content on the internet, in an effort to combat what they say are social media algorithms that feed them content they don’t want to see.

• Users of social media sites often don’t know what algorithms are filtering the information they consume, said Steve DelBianco, CEO of NetChoice, a trade association that represents the technology industry. Most algorithms function to maximize user engagement by manipulating their emotions, which is particularly worrisome, he said.

• Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a Christian university student in northern Nigeria, was attacked and killed in May by a mob of Muslim students and Islamic extremists. School officials and security officers at the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, Nigeria, were unable to save her from the mob who hunted her down after it was alleged that she had committed blasphemy against Islam in a posting in a WhatsApp group.

• The killing provoked outrage across Nigeria and calls for the arrest of the perpetrators. But the arrest of the alleged ringleaders of the violence in turn provoked more protests demanding the release of the suspects.

• “In the raid, the police arrested the individual who was the suspect in the video that was transmitted and he admitted to uploading the video lasting four minutes and 14 seconds.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• I left Afghanistan today after three days of cat-and-mouse with Taliban intelligence agents, who detained, abused, and threatened me and forced me to issue a barely literate retraction of reports they said had broken their laws and offended Afghan culture. If I did not, they said, they’d send me to jail. At one point, they surrounded me and demanded I accompany them to prison. Throughout, a man with a gun was never far away.

• Since the frenzy of Big Media consolidation that rocked the 1980s, journalists, media figures and scholars have been issuing such warnings. Yet, for decades, the number of newspapers has kept shrinking—and a report from Northwestern University confirms the severity of the trend. The United States has already lost a quarter of the newspapers that existed even in 2005; each week, two more shut down.

• Those who live in news deserts are forced to turn to national news sources and social media platforms. The former often fails to provide any information about their local communities, while the latter often profits from misinformation.

• This warped information landscape has coincided with an unprecedented erosion of trust. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 16 percent of Americans reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers — the lowest rate Gallup has ever recorded.

Civil Rights/Policing

• And while torture is no longer a permissible method of inducing guilty pleas in America’s criminal justice system, just about everything else is. This includes pretrial detention designed to enervate and immiserate the accused while making it more difficult to participate in their own defense; threatening to indict a defendant’s family members in order to exert plea leverage (a practice that is widespread and has been specifically authorized by American courts; and profligate use of the so‐​called “trial penalty”—that is, the differential between the comparatively light sentence offered if the defendant pleads guilty and the vastly more punitive sentence threatened should the defendant exercise her constitutional right to a jury trial and lose. To take just one example, federal prosecutors in the ongoing “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal that netted a number of Hollywood celebrities have been threatening defendants with a 20‐​year prison sentence while offering two months to those who plead guilty—a 12,000 percent markup for exercising their right to trial.

• “Nine teachers were sent to jail in past one year. One was bludgeoned to death with cricket stumps. Two were garlanded with shoes in public and humiliated. In all these cases, the victims were accused of blasphemy,” he added.

• The World Hindu Federation leader said in the latest incident three days ago, the miscreants had vandalised a temple and shops and houses of the Hindus at Sahapara village in Narail district. He said the attack was perpetrated over an alleged objectionable Facebook post.

• “Not a single perpetrator has been punished yet. There is also no trial despite the numerous incidents of atrocities against Hindus, Buddhists and ethnic minorities in Bangladesh,” Mitra lamented.

• “We want to be a national leader in animal welfare,” explains Jérôme Lebec, the general manager of Société Vitréenne d’Abattage (SVA), a subsidiary of AgroMousquetaires. The two slaughterhouses of the agro-industrial group in Vitré (Ille-et-Vilaine) and Trémorel (Côtes-d’Armor) have stopped slaughtering animals without using anaesthetic since July 1. In other words, their ritual slaughter.

• “Over the years, they have changed this a couple of times and even discussed corporal punishment for dog owners. But their plan didn’t get anywhere”

• Authorities have recently been clamping down on pet ownership in Iran, with a new wave of arrests of pet owners and seizures of their animals in Iranian capital city, Tehran, the British broadcaster said.

• During the Eid holidays, I came across a piece of news which shocked and disgusted me to the core. I found out that three individuals in Faisalabad belonging to the Ahmadi community were arrested for performing the Islamic ritual of animal sacrifice in their homes during Eidul Azha. According to the FIR, their actions “hurt Muslim sentiments”, and therefore the “culprits” were arrested and charged under Section 298-C (which prohibits any person of the Ahmadi sect from calling himself a Muslim or preaching or propagating his faith) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).

• The job at Walmart isn’t even in management, and doesn’t require any sort of college degree.

• This is how much government values educating your children.

• Lurching us closer and closer to the movie Idiocracy, eventually nobody will bother teaching your kids because sweeping floors and stocking canned beans at Walmart pays then 33% more money per year than dealing with your snot-nosed brats and juvenile delinquents all day. The teacher who went to Walmart praised Walmart for not just the much higher pay, but the fact that he “only” has to work 45 hour weeks now, compared to 60 as a teacher.

• College degrees in America have gotten very expensive, mostly because the schools are ran by lots of overpaid administrators who are only there because politicians are running the universities.

• They’ve completely scooped out the brains of the Community Colleges in Illinois and turned them from trade schools to outlets for woke liberal and Chinese propaganda. When my spouse was studying there, they were essentially billing us $10,000 a year so he could read Trevor Noah bitching about White people all the goddamned time.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The era of the global [Internet] is over. Washington has worked closely over the last three decades with the private sector and allies to promote a vision of a global, open, secure, and interoperable [Internet], but the reality of cyberspace is now starkly different. The [Internet] is more fragmented, less free, and more dangerous. Moreover, U.S. policymakers have long assumed that the global, open [Internet] served American strategic, economic, political, and foreign policy interests. They believed that authoritarian, closed systems would struggle to hold back the challenges, both domestic and international, that a global network would present. This has not proved to be the case.

• The early advantages the United States and its allies held in cyberspace have largely disappeared. The United States is asymmetrically vulnerable because of high levels of digitization and strong protections for free speech. Adversaries have adapted more rapidly than anticipated. They have a clear vision of their goals in cyberspace, developing and implementing strategies in pursuit of their interests, and have made it more difficult for the United States to operate unchallenged in this domain.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Recently, I fell in love with a girl. The experience was like riding a delightfully terrifying roller coaster that came to a screeching halt with me metaphorically in a neck brace.

• Yes, I got turned down. This was my first ever confession.

• For a while, I sobbed. For the next while, I ached. Then, I began to feel shaky—was something wrong with me? If she didn’t want to be with me, then I was unworthy, unlovable. Friends urged me to look at it differently. Right place, wrong time, perhaps. Just not a good fit.

• Most of them are stupid, since they mostly make me wonder how people would live up for more than 5 seconds if one of the rules they care about for practically no reason is being broken. Also it’s as if they would put their energy into things that would be gone right after the moment (such as dancing, screaming etc) instead of something more “boring” that typically lasts for a longer period of time, which also benifits one’s thinking and stability, since not brusting out energy immediately would result in learning how to be emotionally positive, while keeping things into themselves.

• We got all of the heavy items moved. I absolutely love the place we’re moving to. It’s a beautiful area, the apartment is nicer than our current place, and the rent is 25% cheaper.

• Getting home was a bitch. We didn’t have our car, Grayhound cancelled our bus trips TWICE, and we had to resort to booking a flight (which of course was canceled and re-scheduled by the airline).

Technical

• I like to try out languages from time to time. I’ve dabbled in a lot of different ones, some modern and some very old, and find it fascinating how after the first few experiments each succeeding language becomes easier to learn. That’s not the point of this post, although it’s always a fascinating subject. Rather, it’s merely what got me thinking about tooling today.

• I’ve got a bit of a history with Gtk+. My first graphical programs were written back when I was running Puppy Linux and contributing to it regularly. Back then, we used gtkdialog and abused shell scripting to the extreme. I consider that path a bit of a dead end, but it made the concepts familiar when I revisited writing graphical applications later on, this time in compiled languages. I’ve played around with Gtk+ in Python, C, Go, Fortran, Zig and most commonly in Rust. But recently I thought that I would try out Vala, as it seems to be almost purpose built for the task (being based around Glib and GObject). It’s actually quite a nice language for the task, although I wouldn’t reach for it in any other context. Having actual namespaces makes the code more readable than C, and the amount of boilerplate is also reduced.

• I guess you’ve heard about those special days such as No-Facebook day

• or no-phone day. I don’t even remember when is the no-Facebook day.

• I decided recntly to have a no-Quora week because of upvotes I had

• received. I mean that I solve some quartic equation using a great tool

• named LibreOffice Calc, and I receive upvotes. But, something is wrong with

• those upvotes because when I look at the profiles of hte upvoters, I see

• that they use women’s names, and I watch their profile, and see invitations

• to watch nude pics. What do they have to do with math?

Science

• The last few weeks I’ve been doing exercises from “Introduction to Electrodynamics” by David J. Griffiths. The mathematics of electromagnetism is very calculus-heavy and calculus is one of the subjects I struggled a lot with at university. So I have had to backtrack a lot to relearn some calculus, especially integration techniques.

• Integration feels more difficult than differentiation to me. Differentiation seems to be very “divide an conquer” in nature. To differentiate a compound expression you differentiate its parts and combine the results. In integration it seems much less obvious to me which rule (or “trick”) to apply at which situation. I don’t if this is because of the mathematics itself or my inexperience. Maybe which rule to apply can be determined “mechanically”, but I don’t know how yet. Or maybe it really is “chaotic” in nature and one simply has to get familiar with lots of particular cases by training.

• Recently, I have been watching videos about aircraft accidents. This

• can be seen by people as strange but I got interested after listening

• to the yearly product safety training. There is a great person who

• puts out great videos which are clear, concise and conscientious.

• Their channel is called Green Dot Aviation [1]. Each video basically

• covers an accident and goes through the steps which lead to the

• accident. Most of the videos I had seen seemed to be due to pilot

• errors or human factor issues.

• As far as “fault” go, I keep falling into the mind trap of conflating “who caused it” with “who can fix it”. Ultimately what matters is who can fix it.

• And we don’t know who will—I agree that Industry and Politicians are more powerful than Consumers but neither of those three blobs are sapient, willful, soulful people. They’re evolved macroorganisms operating according to their own pressures and processes.

Internet/Gemini

• One of the biggest criticisms of Google and other big search engines is that they put too much emphasis on popularity. To call this searching by *relevance* is disingenuous, because popularity has hardly anything to do with the relevance of the search, and ends up rewarding corporations, trends, and ad-based sites. Algorithms based on popularity or link counts assume that people *want* the most popular or “authoritative” pages. But the biggest mistake is presuming that more “authoritative” pages are ones that are being linked to the most, especially when making this presumption on the internet where false information spreads like wildfire. The fact that the SALSA paper calls this ranking “authoritative” reveals how SALSA views link-based ranking. If there was no association between the ranking and how it is viewed as authority, then they would not have used that particular word to describe their ranking system. That word was intentionally used in the paper.

• [...]

• Search Engines need to undergo much more criticism than they are now, and Geminispace provides us the opportunity to do this at a time when the space is not overcome by corporations and giant capsules that dominate the space. The goal of this article is to question existing ranking algorithms and detail the issues with them.

• [....]

• I reject the notion that this will provide decent search results on logic and theory grounds. This system is very easy to abuse, and ends up prioritizing the big corporations, capitalistic sites, and trending pages over everything else.

• [...]

• There is also a circular problem with this system. New sites automatically get a very low ranking, which reduces their discoverability, and consequently reduces the ability for them to get links from other pages to boost their rankings. One’s current ranking affects one’s future ranking…

• [...]

• PageRank is a similar link-based ranking system, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the Google Search Engine in the late 1990s. The patent expired in 2019. Google still uses PageRank, but has since introduced other algorithm updates on top of it, including Google Panda.

• [...]

• Many search engines try to combat this by trying to detect these link farms, but this then introduces the possibility of false positives.

• Currently, as far as I am aware, TLGS and Kennedy are both prone to this. AuraGem and GUS are not.

• 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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