● 07.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/07/2022: ‘Linux’ Foundation is Greenwashing Microsoft

Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Preview of just some of the coverage coming to LearnLinuxTV for #SCaLE19x.

• This shows how to unlock the steam deck and the HOLO OS that comes with it. This makes the ENTIRE OS writable and so you can install any program that you want.

• System Administrators keep our servers running, and they do this so well that you might not even be aware that there were ever problems that needed solving. On System Administrator Appreciation Day, we celebrate the people out there that spend countless hours installing patches, resetting passwords, monitoring reliability, saving their companies from the latest cyber threats, and more!

• System Administrators are the heroes we need, and in today’s episode of Enterprise Linux Security, we celebrate Sysadmin Day 2022 and the many people that work tirelessly to keep our servers running.

Applications

• A dock has been an important part of the Linux desktop experience for decades. It provides a handy way of quickly accessing your favorite, frequently used applications.

• Unfortunately, the popular desktop environment GNOME doesn’t provide a dock.

• Fret not. You can always install a Docking application on your Linux desktop.

• And this is not just limited to GNOME. If you don’t like the dock provided by your distribution and the desktop environment, you can replace it with another one of your choices.

• Speaking of choices, let me share some of my favorite docks that will help you change the default look of your desktop Linux.

•  It may not be as popular as Snap or FlatPak, but there are some great AppImage Linux apps.

• While most of you probably know of Flatpaks and Snaps, you may not have heard much about AppImage. It might even surprise you to know that it’s been around quite a bit longer than the other Linux universal package formats.

• When apps are released as Snaps or Flatpaks, there’s usually accompanying articles, videos, and social media posts, whereas when apps release as AppImage, there seems to be little to no fanfare.

•  Apple Dictionary is a small utility that lets users easily get definitions of words and phrases from a variety of sources.

• While Apple Dictionary free to use, it’s proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

• On all of the machines that I can readily get statistics for, individual IO seems more common by count and to be responsible for more IO size than aggregated IO. However, aggregated IO is often large enough in both count and especially size to matter; it’s clear to me that you can’t just ignore aggregated IO. Asynchronous writes seem to especially benefit from aggregation. All of this is on SSD based pools, often using large files, and I don’t understand how the non-rotating aggregation limit is interacting with the 128 KB default ZFS recordsize.

• Manjaro 21, codenamed ‘Ruah‘ is the latest release of Manjaro which is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It features major improvements and enhancements including new versions of desktop environments – Xfce, GNOME, and KDE.

• In this guide, we walk you through the installation of Manjaro 21 GNOME Edition.

• The VLC media player is arguably one of the most widely used media players. It is a multi-platform media player and framework that supports a wide range of multimedia files and streaming protocols.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VLC and examine some of the tips you can use to make the most out of the popular and feature-rich VLC media player on the Linux desktop.

• After the success of our RHCSA / RHCE and LFCS / LFCE certification books, we are now happy to present “Learn Linux In One Week”.

• This ebook will walk you through the beginnings of Linux and the contributions of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman to performing secure file transfers over a network. You’ll learn how to manage users and groups, and to write shell scripts to help automate system administration tasks.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Barrier on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The barrier is free and open-source making it easy to share a mouse & keyboard, over a local network, between machines running Windows, Linux, and macOS. The barrier was forked from Symless’s Synergy 1.9 codebase. Synergy was a commercialized reimplementation of the original CosmoSynergy written by Chris Schoeneman.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Barrier on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Playing games on Linux has never been easier than it is now because of Steam Play support for Linux and tools like Steam Proton.

• Previously there was no way for Linux users to play Windows games unless developers had developed a Linux native version. But, with Steam Proton, Linux users can download and play Windows games.

• Some of these games will run natively and some will need minor tweaks to run on Linux based system. Steam Proton has an associated community website that displayed data collected from users about the compatibility status of different games with Proton. Users share exactly the system configurations they used to run a game so you can find out if you are in a position to try and run a game with tweaks or not.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Citra Nintendo 3DS Emulator on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Citra is an experimental open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++. This emulator has been developed keeping in mind that it has portability since it has actively maintained compilations for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Citra Nintendo 3DS Emulator on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Terraform is an open-source, infrastructure as code, software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language, or optionally JSON.

• Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files. It allows you to compose infrastructure as code in a Terraform file using HCL to provision resources from any infrastructure provider.

• Many people that use VirtualBox, at some point come across a problem they have not encountered before.

• In this article, I want to cover as many issues that may arise and how to fix them. This may be hum drum to some, but I’m sure there may be some tidbits in here that can be useful. The first part of the article is more basic than the second part.

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

• Today we are looking at how to install Godot Game Engine 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.

• Once you have installed the Fedora system on your VirtualBox or hardware, there may be a possibility you will access your system remotely through the SSH service, and when you try to access it, you may find the error “ssh: connect to host 192.168.40.120 port 22: No route to host.”

• And when you try to check the status of the SSH service in your Fedora, you may get another error: “Unit ssh.service could not be found.”

• If you are also facing a similar kind of issue or you want to install an OpenSSH server on Fedora, then this article can be helpful to fix the above issue.

• The handy tools and commands provided by the Linux operating system make it possible to achieve/accomplish numerous file manipulation objectives. Under Linux file management, you might need to swap two files for one reason or another.

• When we talk of swapping two files on a Linux operating system environment, it does not exactly translate to swapping/exchanging the location of these two files but their actual content.

• To better understand the objective of this tutorial, consider the existence of the following files under a Linux operating system environment.

• If a file stores data in contiguous bytes format, a program trying to read this file will need to be instructed on how to read it since such files do not directly define a compatible method for reading their associated content.

• This type of file is called a binary file. Opening such a file on a normal text editor program will only display unreadable characters. It is because binary data store data as bytes and not as textual characters.

• The headers of a binary file are accompanied by an instruction set that reveals how its stored data should be read. Since binary files can store any data type, we can broadly classify all file types as either binary or text.

• The LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a program that aims to create a lightweight and fast desktop environment. This software is a meta-package that relies on the LXDE’s core and recommended components such as lxde-core, lxappearance, lxinput, lxsession-edit, gpicview, mousepad, lxterminal, galculator, lxrandr, and xarchiver. LXDE is optimized for devices with limited resources, including older resource-constrained PCs, newer netbooks, and other compact computers.

• This tutorial guide will illustrate how to install LXDE on an existing Debian 11 Bullseye installation. Therefore, to learn more, keep reading this article guide.

• Thunar is an X11 file manager based on the GTK+ 2 widget toolkit. Since version 4.4, it has been the primary file manager in Xfce. Thunar is a contemporary, lightweight file manager that ships with the Xfce desktop environment as the default file manager. It was created to be quicker and more responsive than existing file managers for Linux computers. Thunar is a simple and easy-to-use user interface that may be expanded with plugins.

• This tutorial guide will demonstrate how to download, install, set up, and use the Thunar file manager on Debian 11 Bullseye. Below are the essential features of Thunar that you ought to know.

• On Debian 11, there are three ways to install the Thunar file manager. Apt-get, apt, and aptitude. Each method will be described in detail in the sections that follow. You may select one of them that suits you more.

• This tutorial guide will demonstrate how to download, install, set up, and use the Thunar file manager on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• When you receive PDF files in Telegram Desktop, you might be disappointed when it opens in the wrong application not in your PDF reader. For example, in Kubuntu, it wrongly opens PDF with LibreOffice Draw, while it should be Okular. In other cases, it may instead opens PDF with web browser. We will show you how to fix this issue quickly.

Games

• Recently I showed off Halo Infinite running quite nicely online on the Steam Deck and now GE-Proton 7-27 that just went up makes the process even smoother and the campaign and videos now work too. This is another great step forwards.

• Bottles is the free and open source app that allows you to easily manage Wine, the Windows compatibility layer on Steam Deck and Linux. Another new version is live, with a whole new versioning system to help you roll back changes.

• Starship Troopers is back! While I’m probably more of a fan of Robocop when it comes from the same director, Paul Verhoeven, I have to admit that Starship Troopers was brilliantly made back when it was released. Fighting aliens on other planets is one thing (Avatar anyone?), but when the enemy is a truly insect-like alien, things get scary really fast as swarms of them attack your human forts and dismember everyone in sight. In a sense, this is the ultimate merciless enemy: insects have no remorse, no feelings, and no individuality. Starship Troopers demonstrates that humans would fare very poorly against such adversaries even with superior firepower and technology.

• Using a game engine helps a lot. It solves a lot of problems that you don’t want to deal with in 48 hours or, probably, never.

• I chose Godot and liked it a lot: Python-like language seems like a better fit for casual scripting than C#, and apparently it has much better HTML export than Unity.

• One we apparently missed that arrived with Native Linux support back in May, Voodoo Detective is a Monkey Island inspired point-and-click adventure from Short Sleeve Studio. It has a Very Positive user rating on Steam, so seems like it’s worth a highlight if you’re after something new.

• Cave Monsters has released their detective adventure game Lord Winklebottom Investigates with Native Linux support. Inspired by Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, you will find a classic British murder mystery set in the 1920s. Setting itself apart, it features a quirky animal cast with the protagonist being a giraffe detective.

• Valve has released the latest update to Proton Experimental, the special version of Proton you can use that has the latest updates bringing more game compatibility to Linux and Steam Deck.

• Yes this is a real thing, DOOM modders will quite literally do anything and I’m here loving it. You can now play DOOM as the cat from Stray.

• Just King is going to be my next game to be fixated on. It’s ridiculously cheap and offers up gameplay where you keep wanting to come back for more. Note: personal purchase.

• The game store itch.io is running another Creator Day, this is where they don’t take any cut from developers. Developers will then get all of the proceeds from each sale (minus any required fees and taxes).

• Looking for your next RPG-shooter hybrid with online co-op? OUTRIDERS from People Can Fly recently released the WORLDSLAYER expansion and it’s now actually Playable on the Steam Deck (and Linux desktop too). Previously it had problems with Easy Anti-Cheat but that is no longer an issue.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fraunhofer is a member of the MPEG-LA patent troll, and other patent trolls. It is a patent troll.

• They are giving you software and threatening to see you in court if you use it without paying a ransom to someone. This is blackmail.

• You may remember Fraunhofer from the late 90s and early 2000s threat letters sent out around the time that Napster made MP3 popular, which said that they intended to collect royalties from or sue people for using MP3 or offering people encoders (such as LAME) or decoders which could play the files back.

• They specifically demanded “$25,000 per year” in one case, from one open source MP3 encoder project called 8hz MP3, knowing it would ruin them, and that they would decide to shut down the project instead.

• (Although the article plays up MP3 “Pro” and Microsoft WMA, nobody took them seriously. The only serious usage WMA ever got was some music “stores” that failed and destroyed your entire library with the Digital Restrictions Malware when they did. Walmart even had one!)

• This resulted in a number of responses.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

•  Linux Mint 21, codenamed “Vanessa,” is a major update coming to Mint users in summer 2022. The first beta release was on July 14, 2022. Here’s a rundown of what’s new in this version—the changes, improvements, and new features.

• Vanessa is the first release of the Linux Mint 21 “V” series, having a long-term support plan lasting till 2027. As you’ll see, the coming improvements and new updates make the latest Linux Mint more efficient and advanced than its predecessors.

Devices/Embedded

• SolidRun has launched two SolidWAN Linux-based system-level solutions for software-defined wide area networks and network security applications with the SolidWAN Single LX2162 based on NXP LX2162 16-core Cortex-A72 SoC designed for small offices (SoHo) and SMBs, and the SolidWAN Dual LX2160 equipped with two NXP LX2160A 16-core Cortex-A72 networking processors targetting enterprise and edge data center applications.

• The compact SolidWAN LX2162A features SolidRun LX2-Lite system-on-module with the NXP CPU, memory, and storage, and targets applications such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) or WAN Edge Gateways in small offices or home offices. Alternatively, SolidRun also offers the earlier quad-core Clearfog CN9130 Base and Clearfog CN9130 Pro fanless solutions with 1GbE/2.5GbE/10GbE software-defined dedicated Ethernet ports that are now part of the SolidWAN offerings. More details about LX2162A can be found on SolidRun’s documentation website, but somehow there’s no info about the software yet.

• Forget binary sleep and wake. When we ask a fitness tracker to measure heart rate or a battery-powered earbud to have an always-on listen mode without requiring a fresh charge every hour, we’re taking advantage of ambient mode. As we are when we leverage the face detection sensors on our phones that wait until our face is detected before “waking up” a primary processor for the heavy lifting of facial recognition. Its use cases like these that are driving the rise of “ambient mode” in processors.

• SeeedStudio has unveiled the reComputer J101 and J202 which are compatible with the 260-pin SODIMM modules from NVIDIA. The company specified the J101 and the J202 feature a similar functional design and the same size as the NVIDIA development kits.

• According to the product page, the design of reComputer J101 it’s based on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit while the reComputer J202 mirrors the design of the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Developer Kit.

• Welcome to the June & July combined edition of the monthly State of IoT series.

• Let’s dive straight into the most prominent news across the IoT landscape from the last two months.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The goal of this project was to provide a solid alternative at a very low price, says Daniele. “Raspberry Pi Pico understands the protocol used to communicate with memory cards and convinces the PlayStation into believing an original memory card is plugged in. Development boards, such as these ones, were particularly interesting because they were quite powerful yet very cheap, and allowed me to set up my personal server to test all sorts of applications.”

• Now TIC-80 is open source. Well, at least the basic version. There’s a PRO version too, though I don’t know that I’d ever need it. The main problem is documentation and, from an ideological standpoint, opacity regarding guardianship. I’ve looked around the website and have been left with questions.

• Raspberry PI Pico W brings connectivity to your projects. Mosquitto is one of the most reliable, simple and fast communications for IoT projects. For this reason, MQTT and Raspberry PI Pico W will surely give you great flexibility for your Smart Things projects

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 104 doesn’t look like a big release, but it may be an important release for Linux laptop users as it enables a long-anticipated feature, namely a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture to navigate forward and backward using a touchpad, which now works out-of-the-box without holding down the Alt key.

• The two-finger swipe back/forward gesture was available in the Firefox web browser since version 4.0, which was released back in 2011 as the first 64-bit build for Linux, but you needed to hold down the Alt key to use it.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Here are the slides I presented for a ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup in July 2022, hosted by Altinity. They are about Akvorado, a network flow collector and visualizer, and notably on how it relies on ClickHouse, a column-oriented database.

Programming/Development

• What if you could use a Lisp inside a spreadsheet? Or another functional language? Or maybe even a general purpose language?

• If you’re an IT or software team that uses Python along with corporate system certificates, an internal CA, or internal PyPI repository: please read on to help improve Python. If you know one or more teams that fits this description: forward them this article! We need lots of people to try the new pip feature to test our implementation of system trust stores in Python.

• For the past few years, Posit (formerly RStudio) has been shifting from R-exclusive tooling to a language agnostic ecosystem. Much to our enjoyment, we’ve seen the RStudio IDE grow to be more Python-friendly and the Posit data science ecosystem become “A Single Home for R & Python.”

• So while you will see our name change in a bunch of places (including our main corporate website), we are still continuing on the same path. That path has widened as we have succeeded in the original mission, and we are excited at the chance to bring what we all love so much about the R community to everyone.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• No one wants to write bad code, but inevitably bugs will be created. Most modern languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, etc., automatically print a stack trace when they encounter an unhandled exception, but not shell scripts. It would make it much easier to find and fix bugs in shell scripts if you could print a stack trace, and, with a little work, you can.

• Shell scripts can span multiple files, and well-written code is further broken down into functions. Tracing issues when something goes wrong in a shell script can be difficult when these scripts get large enough. A stack trace that walks the code backward from the error to the beginning can show you where your code failed and give you a better understanding of why so you can fix it properly.

• To implement the stack trace, I use the trap in the following manner at the beginning of my script:

• This example accomplishes a few things, but I’ll address the second one, trap ‘ERRO_LINENO=$LINENO’ ERR, first. This line ensures the script traps all commands that exit with a non-zero exit code (i.e., an error), and saves the line number of the command in the file where the error was signaled. This is not captured on exit.

Rust

• In my previous article about rustup, I showed you how to install the Rust toolchain. Well, what good is the toolchain if you won’t be using it to get more hands-on with Rust? Learning any language involves reading existing code and writing a lot of sample programs. That’s a good way to become proficient in a language. However, there’s a third way: debugging code.

• Learning through debugging involves trying to compile a pre-written (buggy) sample program, understanding the errors generated by the compiler, fixing the sample code, and then re-compiling it. Repeat that process until the code successfully compiles and runs.

• Rustlings is an open source project by the Rust team that helps you learn Rust through the process of debugging. It also provides you with a lot of hints along the way. If you’re a beginner to Rust and have either started or completed reading the Rust book, then rustlings is the ideal next step. Rustlings helps you apply what you’ve learned from the book, and move to working on bigger projects.

Standards/Consortia

• I’ve wanted to share these thoughts for a while, but stitching them into a coherent piece of writing seemed too much to overcome. However, with some prodding I decided to go ahead and hit “publish”.

• I’ve been in the world of HTML emails lately so the wounds are still fresh — maybe too fresh. Perhaps these are more feelings than thoughts. But I don’t care, it’s how I feel.

• Maybe you do too.

Leftovers

• I do a lot of research for my job and over time built a vocabulary for researching concepts. This one comes up a lot so I figured I’d get it written down.

• Information camouflage is when piece of information A has a name similar to another, very different, much more popular piece B. This makes searching for A difficult because you always get results for B instead.

• The change in the landscape is subtle as one travels from Burlington to the New York suburbs. The woods and fields of Vermont are occasionally interrupted by small and smaller towns along the track, Indeed, it isn’t until one is south of Greenfield, Massachusetts that industrial structures and houses began to dominate the scenery. Even then, there are still enough woods on both sides of the train a passenger can ignore the impending aesthetic dissonance that describes the dystopian reality of the eastern seaboard. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the passengers boarding at each stop. The styles become more urban. Fades in the haircuts, a brutal razor’s edge taken to the skull in an attempt to reflect or blend in to an urban architecture defined by angles or just an attempt to blend in with a fad I’m unaware of, I’m not certain. Conversations become louder and one cannot help but hear personal issues they might rather not. It’s almost like riding a city bus where neighbors play out their disputes and their affairs, teenagers their loves and nonsense, and people complain about the weather no matter what it is. By the time the train is in the tunnel that leads into Manhattan’s Penn Station, the ride is more like a ride on the D Train heading north from West 4th than an interstate train collecting and dispersing its human cargo up and down the coast.

• Certain towns along the way take one back to how it used to be. Bellows Falls, VT is one such place. The waters of the Connecticut River slowed by the walls that fence it in through the town, one can almost hear the water wheels turning crushing grain or powering looms. The industrial revolution that moved New Englanders off the farms and out of the shacks to fill the pockets of the bankers down river with more money then the workers would ever see in a dozen lifetimes of wage slavery. It turned the towns upside down, fed the tavern owners, freed the children from the structures of home and church and replaced them with the oppression of capitalism and its measly rewards the bosses call a payday—a ritual they begrudgingly go along with despite the greed capitalism encourages.

Hardware

• Global smartphone sales fell to 287 million units in the second quarter of 2022, a drop of 9% year-on-year and the lowest figure since the second quarter of 2020 when the pandemic first hit, the technology analyst firm Canalys says.

• Another company, IDC, said the figure was 286 million units and represented a drop of 8.7%, about 3.5% lower than forecast.

• Canalys said Samsung (61.8 million units, 21% share) led the market followed by Apple (49.5 million units, 17% share) and Xiaomi (39.6 million units). Oppo and vivo made up the top five, with 27.3 million units and 25.4 million units respectively.

• “What started out as a supply-constrained industry earlier this year has turned into a demand-constrained market,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Tracker team.

• {loadposition sam08}”While supply improved as capacity and production was ramped up, roaring inflation and economic uncertainty has seriously dampened consumer spending and increased inventory across all regions.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia’s attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity.

• You may wonder why former President Harry Truman is sitting close by while President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Medicare and Medicaid into law in the iconic 1965 photograph. Or why Harry Truman received the first-ever Medicare card. The reason is that Truman first proposed a Medicare-like system in 1945—but it took two decades, another Democratic president, and a Democratic supermajority in Congress to overcome opposition from political conservatives and the health industry. As we celebrate 57 years of Medicare and Medicaid successes on July 30th, it is vexing that these two vital programs continue to be in the cross-hairs of GOP opponents.

• The bad news keeps coming, seemingly at an ever-increasing rate: The war in Ukraine; frequent mass shootings; global heating with its concomitant fires and droughts; high rates of overdose deaths and suicide; the overturning of Roe v. Wade and all it portends for women’s autonomy and rights; inflation; the persistence of COVID variants; and growing extinction rates (even the Monarch Butterfly has been listed as an endangered species), to name a few.

• Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2012. That’s an entire decade ago. Who knew the learning curve for cops would be so extreme?

Proprietary

• According to regulatory filings, the company had about 10,000 employees at the end of 2021, twice the amount they had before the pandemic. The cuts amount to 10 per cent of the company’s workforce.

• In the previous article I ported all my AWS infrastructure to Terraform. But in doing so, I was left tracking all my Terraform state in a terraform.tfstate file. This has a number of problems.

• This blog post is a lightly edited transcript from my most recent YouTube video, in which I explain some of Starlink’s growing pains: slower speeds due to oversubscription, design challenges with their v2 hardware, and a major bet on much larger v2 sats and a rocket (Starship) that has yet to complete an orbital flight.

• Technology companies were right to care so much about vendor lock-in in the last two decades. In the past, developers were burned by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle services, often with few alternatives and price gouging. But to align your strategy so vehemently against the same type of lock-in in the cloud era would be wrong.

• Vendor lock-in still exists (switching costs will always be one core driver of competitive advantage), but the calculation is much different. Lock-in is a trade-off between portability/optionality and velocity.

Linux Foundation

• OpenGEH ( GEH stands for Green Energy Hub ) enables fast, flexible settlement and hourly measurements of production and consumption of electricity. OpenGEH seeks to help utilities to onboard increased levels of renewables by reducing the administrative barriers of market-based coordination. By utilizing a modern DataHub, built on a modular and microservices architecture, OpenGEH is able to store billions of data points covering the entire workflow triggered by the production and consumption of electricity.

• [...]

• Initially built in partnership with Microsoft, Energinet

Security

• Kaspersky describes a UEFI-implant used to attack Windows systems. Based on it appearing to require patching of the system firmware image, they hypothesise that it’s propagated by manually dumping the contents of the system flash, modifying it, and then reflashing it back to the board. This probably requires physical access to the board, so it’s not especially terrifying – if you’re in a situation where someone’s sufficiently enthusiastic about targeting you that they’re reflashing your computer by hand, it’s likely that you’re going to have a bad time regardless.

• In cybersecurity and digital forensics, penetration testing plays a crucial role in identifying and mitigating exploitable vulnerabilities in a system. A number of tools have been developed to help pentesters efficiently conduct penetrations tests, one of which is Kali Linux.

• The developers of LibreOffice have released updates for the open source Office suite to patch three security issues.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• In 2018 I helped the Internet Archive get a two-year Mellon Foundation grant aimed at preserving the “long tail” of academic literature from small publishers, which is often at great risk of loss. In 2020 I wrote The Scholarly Record At The Internet Archive explaining the basic idea: [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

• The law of contempt, like the criminal law, can be stretched to save those who chastise judges for flaying Nupur Sharma in their court rooms while ignoring the unjustified comments in the judgment which resulted in the arrest of activists like Teesta Setalvad.

• Predictably, this is why the attorney general of India KK Venugopal refused to sanction the prosecution of those dignitaries for criticising Justice Surya Kant for his so-called intemperate remarks against Nupur Sharma, which is a gross violation of the fundamental rights in Part III of the Constitution.

• Microleaves, a ten-year-old proxy service that lets customers route their web traffic through millions of Microsoft Windows computers, recently fixed a vulnerability in their website that exposed their entire user database. Microleaves claims its proxy software is installed with user consent, but data exposed in the breach shows the service has a lengthy history of being supplied with new proxies by affiliates incentivized to distribute the software any which way they can — such as by secretly bundling it with other titles.

• The debate around the ADPPA’s preemption provisions has centered largely on whether or not it’s stronger than current state privacy laws, therefore lowering the bar for the country right now. But that’s only part of the issue: we must also look to the future. So the ADPPA’s current preemption language is bad for everyone in the country—not only those who happen to live in one of the states that have passed data privacy statutes.

• At least five states have enacted comprehensive consumer data privacy statutes in the past few years: Connecticut, Utah, Colorado, Virginia, and California. Like ADPPA, these laws govern how companies can collect, use, store, or share data, and they allow people to access, delete, or stop sale of their data. EFF wanted more from these laws, but they nonetheless demonstrate the ongoing commitment of state legislators to protect their residents’ data privacy. Some provisions of these state laws are stronger than parallel features of ADPPA. But the ADPPA would preempt them all.

• Of course, current state and local protection of data privacy extends far beyond these recent comprehensive statutes. For example, ADPPA would roll back rights to data privacy that states have enshrined in their state constitutions. Based on the text of the current bill, ADPPA also endangers state privacy rules that address just some types of businesses, such as broadband providers or data brokers.

• For years, the anonymity service Tor has been the best way to stay private online and dodge web censorship. Much to the ire of governments and law enforcement agencies, Tor encrypts your web traffic and sends it through a chain of computers, making it very hard for people to track you online. Authoritarian governments see it as a particular threat to their longevity, and in recent months, Russia has stepped up its long-term ambition to block Tor—although not without a fight.

• In December 2021, Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, enacted a 4-year-old court order that allows it to order internet service providers (ISPs) to block the Tor Project website, where the Tor Browser can be downloaded, and restrict access to its services. Since then, censors have been locked in a battle with Tor’s technical team and users in Russia, who are pushing to keep the Tor network online and allow people to access the uncensored web, which is otherwise heavily restricted in the country.

• Russia’s efforts to block Tor come in two flavors: the technical and the political. So far, Tor has had some success on both fronts. It has found ways to avoid Russian blocking efforts, and this month, it was removed from Russia’s list of blocked websites following a legal challenge. (Although this doesn’t mean blocking efforts will instantly end.)

Defence/Aggression

• The legal prohibition on non-Muslims visiting Mecca is based on a Koranic injunction (Surah 9, verse 28). Since Muslims believe that the Koran is the word of God, no human authority, whether religious or political, can change this ruling. Non-Muslims who enter Mecca are therefore defiling Islam’s most important holy place, as Tamary did.

• To complicate matters, Islam has no pope-like central figure. So, even if the Saudis decided to table the issue for the time being, others—such as a “lone wolf” terrorist—perhaps opposed to the Saudi regime, could take up the charge to defend the honor of Islam. Indeed, throughout the history of Islam, individual Muslims and sects have interpreted the Koran as they chose, resulting in insurrections and assassinations that have often threatened Muslim regimes. This means that extremists might try to take revenge against Tamary personally.

• Last week, Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Vlasenko published what appeared to be a scan of a presidential decree depriving ten people of citizenship. The fact that billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky was included on the list caused a sensation. The Ukrainian authorities have yet to provide clear confirmation as to whether the document is real. Regardless, journalist Konstantin Skorkin, a contributor for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes that the document speaks to a behind-the-scenes struggle in the highest echelons of power in Kyiv. Indeed, when he was elected in 2019, Zelensky’s critics dubbed him “Kolomoisky’s puppet.” But in the years since, he has been working consistently to rid Ukrainian politics of oligarchic influence — all while strengthening his personal power.

• After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it didn’t take United Russia General Secretary Andrey Turchak long to realize that Vladimir Putin’s obsession with the Donbas region was here to stay. In a bid to secure his own political future as well as that of the party — whose approval ratings are in decline — Turchak decided to go all-in on consolidating United Russia’s influence in Ukraine’s occupied territories.

• As countries around the globe add armed drones to their arsenals, federal lawmakers are pressing the Biden administration to investigate how U.S. parts and technology ended up in what has fast become one of the most popular models on the world market: Turkey’s TB2.

• Manufactured by the Turkish firm Baykar Technology, the TB2 can hover high above a battlefield and strike targets with laser-guided missiles. Baykar has maintained that the TB2s are domestically produced, with nearly all of the parts coming from within Turkey. But, as ProPublica reported this month, wreckage from downed drones in multiple conflicts has shown otherwise. A range of components were made by manufacturers in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

• We look at how the Russian war in Ukraine is impacting the Russian people, with many Russian dissidents who oppose the invasion choosing to flee abroad after facing violent crackdowns at home. Ilya Budraitskis is a Russian historian and political writer who left his home in Moscow after the war in Ukraine began, and recently launched the media outlet Posle. Meanwhile, Putin’s Russia looks like an extremely “conformist” society, where “some 200 kilometers from your home you have a full-scale war with the army of your country that started this war, and you pretend not to follow the news, not to disturb your normal way of life with this terrifying information,” says Budraitskis.

• The war in Ukraine has lasted for more than five months. As the bloodletting and destruction continue, the West faces rising inflation, and many economists warn that recessions may be coming. With winter coming, Europe is panicking about gas supplies. And on the military front, there are fears that the war could spread or escalate, spiraling into a clash between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

• The overnight train from Novocherkassk to Crimea left just before 6 p.m. I had an early dinner at my guest house and set off on the bicycle for the station, which, while in no way busy, was still in a state of confusion. The electronic departure board was not working, and the dispatcher announcing the trains kept changing the platform for my train, as if calling a Square Dance.

• Twice I had to drag my bike and bags up the staircases and over the tracks until I finally came back to the original platform. When the long string of Pullmans (well, the Russian equivalent) pulled into the station, I was at the wrong end of the platform, which meant another sprint while pushing the bicycle to get to my sleeping car.

• He posted: “It is days like today in the USA when I have an internal ethical struggle with my job … the job I’ve had for 20+ years … the job I love and find so rewarding … the job that has shown me the world and taught me so much about life – outreaching to and recruiting international students to come to this country for a powerful educational experience and a valuable higher education degree.

• “I feel guilty sometimes, working with students and families in their pursuit to come to America to experience our culture. Why would anyone want to come here right now? We have some major issues to work out as a society and as a country that the entire world is watching closely.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Two whistleblowers who worked at United States Penitentiary Atlanta testified at a US Senate hearing and described rampant abuse and corruption that has plagued the medium-security prison in Georgia for several years.The hearing on July 26 was part of an investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into USP Atlanta, which is a facility for pretrial detainees. So far, the investigation has focused on civil rights violations, prison staff misconduct, the flow of contraband and narcotics, and the high rate of suicides. According to Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is the chair of the subcommitee, “The investigation has revealed that gross misconduct persisted at this facility for at least nine years, and that much of the damning information revealing misconduct, abuse, and corruption was known to BOP and accessible to BOP leadership during that period.”The subcommittee invited outgoing BOP Director Michael Carvajal to testify, but the Justice Department initially declined to make Carvajal available. Only after the subcommittee issued a subpoena, which was later withdrawn, did the BOP director agree to appear before senators.

• Terri Whitehead worked for BOP for 30 years before she was forced into retirement in December 2021. She was a staff member at USP Atlanta from August 2020 until she retired.There are around 600 beds in the Detention Center Unit. When Whitehead arrived at USP Atlanta, she noticed the unit had “mold on the ceilings and walls, an infestation of roaches and rats, cats roaming the hallways, holes in the ceiling (ceiling tiles and drywall missing), graffiti on the walls, elevators not working, three inmates sleeping in two-man cells, inadequate food portions, not enough laundry (jump suits, towels, rags, underwear, socks), standing water on the floor, and no assigned COVID-19 isolation or quarantine areas.”In early 2021, Whitehead became the USP Atlanta’s acting associate warden. “I was appalled to learn of USP Atlanta’s repeated bureaucratic failures to deal with infestations of rodents in food preparation areas,” Whitehead recalled [PDF]. “I was contacted, via email, by the Southeast Regional Office food service administrator, who indicated someone had reported cats and rats inside of inmate food preparation areas.”“I then met with the food service staff management who told me rat infestation had been a recurring problem and food service staff intentionally left doors open so that cats could catch the rats. Rats were getting into inmate food.”Whitehead added, “I was told USP Atlanta had no professional pest control program because two management officials did not agree which department budget would pay for the pest control service.” She does not know if officials at the prison ever took care of the rodents—or the cats.A major incident occurred in July 2021 when “over 700 cell phones and numerous hard contraband items and illegal drugs were found inside USP-Atlanta.” Detainees were moved to other prisons, and according to Whitehead, “approximately 40 management officials” were transferred as well. Yet none of the 432 staff members were apparently punished.  Whitehead wrote discipline memos urging investigations into misconduct by other institutions, but they went nowhere. She was “rewarded” for her efforts to enforce policies and procedures with a dismissal. The BOP tried to relocate her to Texas so she retired earlier than she had planned.

Environment

• More than 700 pages of legislative text negotiated principally by Sen. Joe Manchin—one of the fossil fuel industry’s closest allies in Congress—are bound to contain provisions that are appalling to climate advocates and communities on the frontlines of the planetary emergency.

• That is certainly the case with the newly revealed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which green groups characterized as a mixture of potentially “transformative investments” in renewable energy and alarming giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, the primary driver of the climate crisis. The combination has left climate groups grappling with whether the good outweighs the bad—a question with massive implications for the planet.

• Climate advocates made clear Thursday that they have no intention of dropping their calls for U.S. President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency after Democratic leaders cut a legislative deal with Sen. Joe Manchin that includes tens of billions of dollars in green energy investments.

• “The climate doesn’t give out prizes for getting 70% of the way there,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, referring to estimates that Senate Democrats’ newly proposed bill, if passed, would bring the U.S. significantly closer to meeting Biden’s goal of cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade.

Energy

• I’m a retired software engineer so I focus here on the technological risks. I have no positions in cryptocurrencies or related companies. Nearly a quarter-century ago I started work at Stanford on a decentralized peer-to-peer consensus system using Proof-of-Work. It won a Best Paper award five years before Satoshi Namakoto published the Bitcoin protocol.

• This discussion is badly framed; the term “digital asset” is counter-productive. My checking accounts are digital assets. What you want to talk about are “cryptocurrencies” or “digital ledger technologies” or “blockchains”, but these terms cover two completely different technologies: [...]

• Proposals to boost transparency in the carbon offset market could shine a light on brokers who buy credits cheaply from Indigenous communities before selling them to companies at inflated prices.

• The measures form part of a wide-ranging package drafted by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, a governance body aiming to boost the quality of carbon offsets. The proposals were published this week, beginning a 60-day public consultation.

• Airbus‘ unmanned glider has been flying for 42 days without landing; no aircraft has been in the air without refueling for such a long time. As a flying Internet node, the drone could replace 250 cell towers. But there is interest mainly from the military.

• Eight years after allowing a shale gas company to drill beneath Deer Lakes County Park for methane gas, the Pennsylvania county home to Pittsburgh has banned all industrial activity in the area’s eight other parks — despite a veto from the county executive.

• It’s the first such move at the county level in the state, one fracking opponents term a milestone in a state where the fracking industry almost always gets its way.

• The oil and gas industry, one of the most powerful corporate forces in American politics, has spent more than $200 million over the past year and a half to stop Congress from slashing carbon emissions as evidence of their catastrophic impact—from deadly heatwaves to massive wildfires—continues to accumulate in stunning fashion.

• That topline estimate of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying outlays and congressional election spending in the U.S. was calculated by Climate Power, which provided its findings exclusively to Common Dreams.

• Californians may have gotten temporary relief recently when gas prices finally fell to about $6 a gallon this month, down from as high as $8 per gallon in June in Los Angeles County. Inflation has rocked the economy, soaring 9.1% from a year ago in June.

• Economic and climate justice advocates on Thursday reiterated their demands for far-reaching energy reforms after Europe’s two biggest fossil fuel corporations reported more than $21 billion in combined second-quarter profits and announced plans to buy back a combined $8 billion in shares in the third quarter—all while continuing to receive billions in public subsidies each year to wreck the planet.

• British venture Shell posted a record-breaking $11.5 billion in profits from April through June, more than doubling its Q2 earnings compared with 2021 ($5.5 billion) and surpassing the previous quarterly high of $9.1 billion set during the first three months of 2022, which was nearly triple last year’s Q1 net income of $3.2 billion.

• I was on the banks of a pond off Mount Tremper, in the Catskill Mountains of New York, with my daughters Josie and Léa and Josie’s friend Ito, on a Sunday not long ago, a day of high wind and pouring sun in big blue sky.

• The sunlight, the wind on the pond, the shifting breezes threw the surface of the water this way and that, so that the rippling liquid burst in traceries of fire, golden treasures, scintillations, waves of diamonds and crystals one after the other as if in rhythms of the sea.

Wildlife/Nature

• It’s a disturbing discovery, but first a look at the marine food web, starting with the lowest organisms: (1) phytoplankton – plant-like plankton: green algae, diatoms, and dinoflagellates eaten by (2) zooplankton – microorganisms: crustaceans, rotifers, insect larvae and mites eaten by (3) small fish: anchovies, sardines, shrimp, squid, krill eaten by (4) bigger fish: sturgeon, sunfish, sharks, manta rays eaten by (5) mammals: seals, dolphins, polar bears, and last but certainly not least, humans at an increasingly wobbly end of the food chain.

• At the bottom of the food web phytoplankton generically serves as the most significant resource of marine life simply because nothing else eats if phytoplankton doesn’t exist. Moreover, phytoplankton performs photosynthesis, converting sunrays to energy, absorbs CO2, and serves as a major source, producing oxygen for the biosphere.

Finance

• The following interview originally appeared in German at Telepolis but this is the first publication of the English translation.

• Four large corporate landlords filed nearly 15,000 eviction actions in the first 16 months of the pandemic, with some executives and property managers engaging in harassment and deception of their tenants and deliberately inflicting cruelty on people who had been unable to pay their rent.

• The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a new report Thursday following a yearlong investigation into the eviction practices of Pretium Partners, Invitation Homes, Ventron Management, and the Siegel Group, all of which were thriving financially when the committee began examining its practices.

• + Ticket prices for Springsteen’s Born to Run tour in 1975 averaged about $8 for general admission. ($7.50 in Upper Darby, PA, when he played venues that small.) The minimum wage was $2.10 per hour. So a kid had to work less than half a day to earn enough to go to the gig. Today the minimum wage is a miserly $7.25 an hour. But the price of tickets for this fall’s Springsteen tour ranges from $100 to more than $5000 a piece. The cheapest price I could find for the Portland show was a restricted view seat from behind the stage selling for $136–which means that a Springsteen fan who works at a minimum wage job (assuming he has any left) would have to work nearly 3 full days to buy a crappy ticket. Landau said the absurd ticket prices were “a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.” They call him the boss for a reason. Now go tell Tom Joad the news.

• + Given the extortionate price of these tickets, it might be fair to ask just how much more money does Springsteen need? Forbes calculated his yearly income while touring at $81 million. And  that was before he sold his entire catalogue to Sony for $550 million.

• To be clear, the bill does some good things. It has funding both to subsidize manufacturing capacity for semiconductors in the United States and also for further research in developing better chips in the future. Both of these are positive developments even if the benefits of the former are overstated.

• It was common in the pandemic days to tout the supply chain problems as evidence that we needed more manufacturing in the United States in a variety of areas. However, that story ignored several factors.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Chief Justice of India NV Ramana has pointed to mediocrity and mischief in the media which pose a grave threat to democracy. He said, “New media tools have enormous amplifying ability but appear incapable of distinguishing between the right and the wrong, the good and the bad and the real and the fake. Media trials cannot be a guiding factor in deciding cases. Of late, we see the media running kangaroo courts, at times on issues even experienced judges find difficult to decide. Ill-informed and agenda-driven debates on issues involving justice delivery are proving detrimental to the health of democracy.” Along with the additional pressures created by social media, the Chief Justice unambiguously said, “biased views being propagated by the media are affecting the people, weakening democracy, and harming the system.” It is absolutely impossible to differ with the honourable Chief Justice, as the media’s character has doubtless changed for the worse — and dangerously so. Mediocrity can be explained in terms of inadequate resources, but what about mischief? [...]

• Biden’s on a mission! He’s working the phones, twisting arms, giving speeches, and otherwise campaigning for a cause. Only it’s not abortion rights or climate survival, stopping gun violence, or protecting voter rights. Rather, he’s busy creating a Cold War–like network of alliances to defend the “rules-based world order” against rogue states like Russia and China.

• The approach became even more personal a day or two later when the same lure line was attributed to Jill Biden, cast in the role of a political party team player. The First Lady went on to expatiate upon the cynical view that Democrats are so desperate for a chance to interact with the President that they would fall for any come on, however absurd. In her  astonishing words: “Throughout the years, I’ve learned that there are at least three things that can make Joe smile from ear to ear: Our kids and grandkids, chocolate chip ice cream, and getting to talk one-on-one with Americans like you, Richard.”

• And continues, “Having the chance to hear your hopes and dreams grounds Joe and motivates him to keep fighting the hard battles. That’s why Joe would love nothing more than to give you a call soon.” Then come what the message was really about—nothing more or less than a crass appeal for money coupled with a sly ‘confession’ that, after all, receiving a call from Biden was as unlikely as Donald Trump committing civil disobedience as a consequence of becoming an ardent anti-nuclear activist.

• Liberal comedian Jon Stewart chastised the GOP on Thursday, less than 24 hours after Senate Republicans tanked a bill that would have expanded healthcare access for U.S. military veterans exposed to Agent Orange and toxic burn pits—a move that was made in retaliation for Democrats reviving their reconciliation package following the passage of bipartisan legislation designed to boost domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing.

• “Fuck the Republican caucus and their empty promise to our veterans.”

• Political and diplomatic platitudes aside, the current American administration has done the exact opposite as indicated in Biden’s words and actions. Alleging that the US commitment to a two-state solution “has not changed”, Biden dismissed his Administration’s interest in trying to achieve such a goal by declaring that the “ground is not ripe” for negotiations.

• Considering that the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly announced its readiness to return to negotiations, one can only assume that the process is being stalled due to Israel’s intransigence. Indeed, none of Israel’s top leaders or major parties champion negotiations, or the so-called peace process, as a strategic objective.

• They don’t all chat; and those who do don’t always follow my leads into politics and society. But enough of the 8,000-plus passengers I’ve driven in four years have gone with me that I can draw some firm conclusions.

• First, I can say with 100% certainty that, when conversations do turn political, they all respond with reflexive nods of recognition when I say: “The overriding problem in America today is that all of the resources go to the handful at the top, and the rest of us are left to fight for the scraps.”

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Conspiracy theories aren’t a new phenomenon, and neither is people acting out on them in real life. But Jared Holt, an extremism researched with the Institute for Strategic Dialog, said the Guidestones are a perfect example of how pervasive conspiracy thinking has become.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Press and Registration of Books (PRB) Act, 1867, which regulates newspapers and printing presses in India, is intended to be replaced by this proposed bill. The cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is reportedly expected to pass this bill soon. Since there is currently no procedure in place to register digital news portals like newspapers, this bill intends to do so with the Press Registrar General, which would be the equivalent of India’s current Registrar of Newspapers. It is intended to require digital news providers to submit an application for registration within 90 days of the law taking effect. For the first time in India, there will be rules governing digital media, which will be under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting if the bill is approved.

• Former Russian TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova was fined 50,000 roubles ($820) on Thursday after being found guilty of discrediting the country’s armed forces in social media posts condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

• The ruling was passed after a short hearing in a Moscow administrative court. Ovsyannikova rejected the proceedings against her as “absurd”.

• Ovsyannikova published a post on Instagram saying she was taken to the police station in the capital’s Krasnoselsky district.

• She later wrote she had been charged with “discrediting the actions of the army of Russia” during an interview she gave near the Basmanny Court of Moscow in support of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who is being held in pretrial detention for allegedly spreading false information about the Russian military.

• Now she has appeared in court over subsequent social media posts in which she said that those responsible for the invasion of Ukraine should be standing in the dock before an international tribunal.

• During the trial, Ms Ovsyannikova said she did not understand why she was on trial, telling the court: “What’s going on here is absurd. War is horror, blood and shame.”

• In March, Ms Ovsyannikova shot to prominence for interrupting a live TV broadcast to denounce Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

• After sending troops to Ukraine, Moscow adopted laws imposing sentences of up to 15 years in prison for spreading information about the military deemed false by the authorities.

• After the heinous beheading of Kanhiya Lal in Udaipur, the incidents of death threats and controversial posts on social media are being reported in various parts of Rajasthan. Five persons have been arrested in the Hanumangarh district for circulating objectional content on social media.

• The [Internet] services were suspended in the state for three days after the Udaipur incident. Internet and other services were restored in a phased manner on Monday, however, as soon as they were restored, the cases of threats and objectionable content also started coming to the fore on social media

• Last month, we wrote about how Devin Nunes had lost yet another of his many, many SLAPP suits against various critics online for being mildly critical of the former congressman, who seems to have the thinnest skin imaginable. As you’ll recall, Nunes’ chronic SLAPP infatuation began a little over three years ago with a lawsuit against a satirical online cow who mocked him. While most people don’t realize it, that lawsuit is still going on (other defendants, namely Twitter and Liz Mair have gotten out of it), but technically the suit against the cow lives on, in part because Nunes and his lawyer, Steven Biss, have claimed they’re unable to identify the cow.

• As reported by Vice and followed up on by Wired, posts about abortion receive intense scrutiny online. The difference, one activist told Vice, is simply that more people are seeing their posts removed than before.

• Vice found that the truthful sentence “abortion pills can be mailed” triggered a flag as violating Facebook’s rules about “buying, selling, or exchanging non-medical drugs.” A moderator running a group on Facebook connecting people seeking information about abortions told Wired she has always had to carefully monitor posts to avoid the group being removed entirely, with clear rules about what can be posted—any links are banned, for instance.

• The moderator expressed a frustration we’ve heard constantly about community guidelines: that they have no idea what the lines actually are and find things suddenly shifting with no warning.

• As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, many in Western countries are expressing their opposition to the war by becoming hostile to Russian culture. Nina Khrushcheva argues that Russian music, films, books and art are not the right targets for antiwar activism in her latest article, “Don’t Cancel Russian Culture.” If Russians feel that the West is inhibiting Russian culture, “they will blame the West more than they blame the oppressive regime that is there in Russia,” says Khrushcheva, professor at The New School and great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Meanwhile, Russia is cracking down on cultural producers who dare to oppose the invasion.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Journalists at ProPublica and NBC News would like to connect with people whose parental rights have been terminated in the past decade.

• We want to understand how your case was handled by your state’s child welfare agency and courts, and what types of services you were provided to help reunite your family.

• Swatting is truly heinous. People angry about video game playing somehow believe they’re justified in attempting to end their opponents’ lives, literally. Toxic sub-humans who can’t handle losing turn to secondhand killing to get their revenge. Absolutely abhorrent behavior that plays into law enforcement’s shoot-first, handcuff-the-corpse-later warrior mentality.

• There is, however, at least one glimmer of hope for democracy, and it comes from a source that might initially, to many people, seem rather unrelated: a renascent labor movement.

• Given that the primary role of unions is to advocate for the interests of their members on the job, one might wonder how they could play an essential part in protecting and revitalizing the very different institution of political democracy. How can organizations with such a particular mission, a seemingly narrow economic one, serve as a buttress for the universal interest of democracy itself? Actually, according to polls, two thirds of Americans approve of labor unions, suggesting they understand what a constructive force unions are. If people knew the real history of organized labor, however, the number would probably be close to 90 percent.

• When an Army veteran was looking for somewhere to get an online aviation degree a couple of years ago in hopes of becoming a pilot, Liberty University advertised having the speed and flexibility she needed: accelerated eight-week courses with start times throughout the year and 52 affiliated flight schools around the country where she could get the required flight training. She signed up for the program, paying with the GI Bill benefits that have made military veterans such a reliable source of revenue for Liberty and other universities with large online programs.

• But when her husband, who was still on active duty, learned he would be transferred from Georgia to Hawaii, she discovered that the lone Liberty flight affiliate on Oahu, George’s Aviation Services in Honolulu, did not offer the accelerated courses Liberty had touted. This meant that it would take her double the time to complete her program, two years rather than one, and would cost U.S. taxpayers more along the way, she stated in a complaint she filed with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

• ShotSpotter has made a name for itself (and not a good one!) by telling cops its sensors and mics can convert soundwaves into actionable intel. It has become beloved by some cops, perhaps in part for being willing to alter its reports to reflect what cops want to believe happened, rather than what actually may have happened.

• As next month marks one year since the United States officially withdrew from Afghanistan, we look at the Taliban-ruled country’s devastating economic and humanitarian crisis that has unfolded since. Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary describes the dire situation as “an epic failure by the Taliban as the de facto rulers in terms of not stopping their crackdown against the Afghan people” while they cope with flash floods, food shortages and more. He adds that the U.S. exit deal with the Taliban “completely sidelined the previous government” and failed to kickstart a peace process, contributing to instability in the country.

• Are you fucking kidding me?

• “Particularly since the 1930s, the connection of PSYOP with ideology and mass communication has made it a constant strategic element of international politics.” — An Overview of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (1989)

• Newport, Rhode Island—Pete Seeger was one of the handful of visionaries who started the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, at a time when elite venues refused to allow the father of American folk music anywhere near a microphone. So it was only fitting that the US Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Seeger last week on the eve of the festival, in a special ceremony where musicians and fans honored the singer for his music and his activism.

• U.S. Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Ilhan Omar joined progressive groups outside the Supreme Court on Thursday to deliver over 1.2 million petition signatures demanding the impeachment of Justice Clarence Thomas.

• “This issue is even bigger than impeaching Thomas. We need to reform this broken court.”

• As we careen from one crisis to the next, focused on political struggles that seem to rarely produce even short-term solutions, it’s easy to avoid big questions that have no easy answers. Here’s a good one: What is the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet for Homo sapiens?

• Labor experts and advocates on Wednesday expressed disbelief and outrage as the details of an “unconscionable” new bill purporting to expand “flexibility and choice” in workplaces came to light, condemning Democratic co-sponsor Rep. Henry Cuellar for proposing the gutting of minimum wage protections.

• “This bill would allow employers to trample on the rights of an untold numbers of workers.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Every great thing has its end, and the extra services I launched along with icanhazip.com are no exception. I started icanhazip.com way back in 2009 and detailed much of the history when I transferred ownership to Cloudflare.

• The extra services, such as icanhazptr.com, icanhaztrace.com, and icanhaztraceroute.com, came online in 2013 and they weren’t part of the Cloudflare transfer. These services add extra challenges since they need IPv6 connectivity and they don’t play well with containers. Relative to icanhazip.com, these services receive very little traffic.

• As much as I’d like to keep running these sites, the extra services will go offline on August 17, 2022.

• You might recall that the FCC under both Trump and Biden has made a big deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Huawei gear from their networks, under the allegation that the gear is used to spy on Americans. You’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly.

• I’ve spilled many words on these pages talking about the outsized importance live sports has on the adoption of streaming as a primary entertainment platform compared with traditional cable. While cord-cutting is very much a thing, the vine that terrestrial cable is clinging to keeping it all from falling over the cliff remains live sports. Major sporting leagues in America have typically woven a complicated web of broadcasting rights, whether with local broadcast stations, cable channels, or even with some teams that own their own channels. That complicated web is what keeps blackout rules for MLB.TV in place, as well as what keeps the implementation of true streaming of everything impossible.

Monopolies

• Advocates for the problematic American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) (which includes groups and organizations I often agree with and work with) keep insisting that they have the votes to pass the bill and demanding that Senator Chuck Schumer bring it to the floor for a vote. Schumer, who correctly has no interest in wasting floor time on a controversial bill that won’t pass, has now admitted that the votes just aren’t there to pass it.

Patents

• Health equity campaigners on Thursday called for a fairer system of developing and distributing Covid-19 medications after pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced record second-quarter revenue, more than half of which is attributable to sales of coronavirus vaccines and treatments that remain out of reach for much of the Global South.

• “Millions of people in low- and middle-income countries faced death and devastation without access to vaccines while Pfizer sold doses to the highest bidders.”

Software Patents

Copyrights

• ISP Bright House and several music companies go to trial next week. In preparation, a Florida federal court has set some rules for what can and what can’t be brought up before the jury. Among other things, the ISP is allowed to argue that terminating accounts of persistent pirates is disproportional. However, the ISP can’t freely argue that Internet access is a human right.

• Following an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, five people have been charged with distributing pirate IPTV services. RCMP officers raided GaloTV (Soltv) in 2021, seizing hundreds of set-top boxes, receivers and broadcasting devices. One of the men was previously sued by DISH and agreed to settle a civil suit for more than half a billion dollars.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve been wanting to start playing tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) again. I used to play them a lot in high school and college, but until I joined a remote game for a podcast a few years ago, it had been close to 20 years since I had played one. COVID lockdowns gave me the urge to play remotely, but I was so busy at home I didn’t ever get around to it, though I did buy some TTRPG products, in digital media form.

• The thing about TTRPG rulebooks and supplements, which has been true since the 90s, AD&D 2d edition, and the White Wolf World of Darkness games, is that they are mostly printed on glossy paper, with lots of color illustrations and really intensive layout. Two columns of text, interrupted in fancy shapes by illustrations running in from the sides. Some independent games are simpler, but this is the standard that most games aspire to, and with D&D 5e, it’s especially intense.

• I’ve spoken a lot about AstroBotany on here. It’s awesome.

• My plant is currently getting increasingly closer to 600th generation, and I can and do harvest it several times a day. But harvesting is a pretty big operation with many gemini requests, each one carrying with it a TLS handshake.

Politics

• There seems to be a lot of arguing in the mainstream news about what we are experiencing.

• Is this a recession? Macro numbers seem to indicate yes. And yet, unemployment is not going through the roof, as it should. In fact, businesses of all kinds cannot hire enough employees. Salaries and wages are going through the roof too, contributing to the final, more obvious stages of monetary inflation (started with the massive money-dump directly into billionaires’ pockets). And yet, the world is running out of employees.

• So some are saying “no, this is not a recession — look at unemployment numbers”. I don’t think this is a valid argument, as mainstream statistics are completely off-mark.

• In the US, the numbers come from those claiming unemployment benefits from the government. After a while, many give up and are no longer counted. What do these people do? They don’t crawl under a rock and die, right?

Technical

• “Why not?” indeed. The language has been called an “overlooked gem” and it is both a low-level language, capable of building operating systems, and a high-level language, defined in terms of basic data types and operations that are not inherently bound to machine sizes such as 32-bit and so on. CHARs typically are thought of as 8-bit, but the language doesn’t require that; a particular implementation could use unicode-able CHARs (the JVC ‘oberonc’ compiler does, for instance).

• It explicitly has the Dijkstra “DO Guard -> Statement { [] Guard -> Statement } OD” construct, visible within Oberon(07)’s WHILE statement!

• Yup, any day now, it’ll be “there’s an AI for that!” instead of last decade’s “there’s an App for that!”.

• Two years ago I wrote about writing. I thought the main barrier that kept most people from writing was environmental distractions. I claimed “stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, or other mental issues” played a role, but often the issue was “whether or not you chose the right font, whether that section should be in italics, or if that paragraph should be colored red for emphases [sic]“. Those might have been my excuses for not writing then, but its far from my main inhibition now.

• Dumbphones are becoming extremely hard to come by in the US. 3G networks were shut down, so an entire class of devices are obsolete here. Many carriers are selling Kyocera and other dumbphone devices at extreme prices ($200+), while giving away overkill smartphones for free (one can only imagine that there is some kind of incentive structure at play there…).

• KaiOS devices are a bit scary, as KaiOS has huge Google investment, and they are becoming almost functional smartphones with quite a lot of functionality and apps – distractions and news are what we’re trying to get away from.

• This is nice and easy because encryption is the default. On the “people” section on the left side, click the plus icon. Search for a person’s name, or enter their full @username:matrix.org handle into the box. Click Go. All done!

• If you like encryption – most people do – then you don’t need to read the rest of this post.

• Your immediate thought may be why I’m trying to use an NVIDIA card with Wayland. The simple answer is I’ve been stuck with a GTX 1060 for the past 5 years with no money to buy an AMD card. Nouveau is a non-starter as the Pascal series of cards does not support reclocking and will occasionally lock up the system.

• As of driver version 515.57 with GNOME 42, I have a mostly stable experience on Wayland. Emphasis on “mostly”. Going from not being able to even log into the desktop to a functional experience is a major improvement, however I semi-regularly experience freezes with perplexing errors…

Science

• The Jewish Agency for Israel predates the existence of the modern state of Israel. Established in 1929, the organization focuses primarily on fostering the immigration of Jews in diaspora to the Land of Israel. The agency has had a presence in Russia since 1989, before the USSR’s collapse. Today, it operates branches in nine cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. But rising hostility to foreign entities and growing concerns about the loss of its highest-skilled laborers now threatens the Jewish Agency’s future in Russia. Meduza summarizes a new report by the BBC about the organization’s troubles in the country.

Internet/Gemini

• Growing up I was very active, but very cautious, on the internet of the late 90′s/early 00′s. I was anonymous in the extreme. I didn’t give any demographic or location information whatsoever. But I had some really interesting conversations online… religion, science, anything and everything. People were interesting, and interested.

• Then I grew up some more, shrugged off the anonymity, signed up for Facebook when it expanded to some more .edu’s early on. Things started getting weird online, though. Hard to put your finger on, but, strange. I deleted Facebook a couple years in, avoided most of the other services, and let my online presence eventually turn into just… a sort of resume. Things got weirder online, and the weirdness and negativity leaked into the real world too. I turtled more, became a hermit online. Didn’t want to get pulled into all that.

• Lupa[1] provides constant basic statistics about the Gemini network. Stats like how many servers are online, number of virtual hosts, TLS distribution, etc.. It’s a really cool project. It got me asking.. what kinds of information can I extract from TLGS’ index? Furthermore, I want to provide some more information for Gemini users. Helping us to understand the network we love.

• [...]

• First, I need to get the index from PostgreSQL into SQLite. ROOT’s RDataFrame should support PostgreSQL in the future. But for now SQLite is the best option we have. The table format can be directly extracted from the source code of `tlgs_ctl` and use with minimal modification. Dumping the actual data is more complicated. What’s generated by `pg_dump` is quite close to what SQLite can handle. But some changes are needed. I ended creating my own command to remove unsupported commands. And generates “dump.sql” as output.

Programming

• At it’s simplest, an enum is almost an algabraic data type. In C however enums are little more than an integer constant. If one looks at Zig’s error handling, we see that errors are implemented as error unions. That is, the function is able to return either the intended return value or the error. Zig also has tagged unions, which in code look like an enum wrapping a union. This is what is really meant by the term Algabraic Data Types. A type that can be one of several things with a tag to determine unequivically what type it is

• The circles mode in osu! is a somewhat fun game. I want to play it casually from time to time, and enjoy myself, without taking it seriously. But the game has always fought back against me whenever I’ve tried to play it more. The life bar is strangely aggressive on some songs and the scoring system places a huge amount of emphasis on combo, to the point where accidentally missing a single note will make your score worthless, no matter what else happened in that attempt.

• Something I love to do in rhythm games is improve upon my past scores, but the combo system makes this difficult and frustrating. “Improving” in the circles mode of osu! means “getting lucky and not missing for longer chains”. Some people may find satisfaction in playing easier songs and striving for a full combo, but I find it much more fun to play more difficult and intense songs and try to get a certain % score on them.

• 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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