● 08.20.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/08/2022: KDE’s Latest Features and Good Documentation in OpenBSD

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• For a long time, Linux was only thought to be suitable for servers and was not widely used on desktop computers. Over the past few years, its usability and user interface have progressively improved. Today, Linux is user-friendly to take the role of Windows or Mac on desktops. Thousands of people use it every day all across the world. In this article, let’s look into five reasons why you should use Linux.

• [...]

• Tens of thousands of eyes are checking the source code for mistakes that could expose any vulnerability in the system, even if you aren’t. Linux is therefore the OS of choice for those who value their privacy.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are here to bring you the best stories and hacks from the previous week (and maybe a little older). Things kick off with news that the Early Bird tickets for the 2022 Hackaday Supercon tickets sold out in only two hours — a good sign that the community is just as excited as we are about the November event. But don’t worry, regular admission tickets are now available for those who couldn’t grab one out of the first batch.

Applications

• As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and while that’s not always the case with terminal commands and code, it still holds true for the graphical desktop. Screenshots capture precisely what’s on your screen. I love taking them to have a record of who attends meetings, so I don’t have to write it down at the moment. Or to capture a bug when doing UI testing. We all take them for different reasons, though, and there are more ways to take a screenshot than you might at first think.

• I started thinking about screenshots after Jim Hall wrote an article listing GNOME screenshots, GIMP, and Firefox as the ways he often takes screenshots. And yet that’s just the beginning, as I quickly found out when I asked Opensource.com authors how they each take screenshots.

Instructionals/Technical

• I will use a server in a colo. The hostnames will point at that server. Let’s call it my portal. I will configure Nginx on the portal to relay to my home servers. The connection between the portal and my basement will be maintained by the server at home and Wireguard will be involved.

• Now, contrary to real lifeTM, ssh(1) can automatically find a key without much fiddling with a keyring. See man 5 ssh_config, and the ssh TOKENS.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Git on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system created to manage everything from small to massive projects with speed and efficiency. Using Git, you can collaborate with the other developers, upload the new changes, keep track of the changes, and many more.

• 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 Git on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• I have been using Proxmox for a couple months now. Currently, I am hosting multiple Proxmox containers and virtual machines in my Proxmox server. As the number of containers and VMs is growing gradually, I needed an additional storage. So I bought a new 1 TB SSD and migrated a few containers and VMs to the new storage disk. If you ever been in a situation like this, just follow the steps given below to move Proxmox Containers and VMs to a different disk.

• Telegram is not some unknown app, already millions of users using it to chat and share their thoughts with others. Just like Whatsapp, smartphone users can easily install it on their smartphones as well as on desktops. You can share or download images, videos, documents and files very easily via it. Further, it is also possible to make video and voice calls and create polls, groups, and channels to connect. Telegram is particularly popular because of the latter function.

• One of the popular features that make Telegram popular is its subscription system for channels, which works similarly to YouTube: according to your interests, you can subscribe to channels on Telegram. If the channel operator posts new content, you can see it in the chat overview. Users can easily select posted content and forward it to family and friends. This makes it clear from which user or channel the content originally comes.

• While Vim is a text editor designed to be used just by using keyboard shortcuts, browser extensions like Vimium let you navigate the web using similar keybindings without ever touching the mouse. Using Vim shortcuts on your browser can help you get things done faster and more efficiently. In this article, I will show you how to use and configure Vimium on your favorite browser.

• If you’ve used Linux for any length of time, you’d know how important Linux file permissions are. But what about permissions for when you create new files? A utility called umask lets you set default file permissions for new files on Linux.

• No usage documentation, however, posting this for historical purposes…

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface. It is a very beginner-friendly text editor, which is why it is most preferred by newbies. However, despite being a simple text editor, it can still work well for text and source code editing.

• 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 GNU nano 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.

Games

• Rollerdrome is a thoroughly odd blending of mechanics and style found in the likes of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, a little Jet Set Radio and Max Payne. This is easily one of my biggest surprises so far this year. Runs great on Linux with Proton and Steam Deck Playable.

• Did you enjoy Into the Breach and other similar small-scale strategy games? Tactical battler Tyrant’s Blessing has released along with Native Linux support and it’s Steam Deck Verified. Swapping out mechs for fantasy, Tyrant’s Blessing has a really sweet style to it that instantly draws your attention.

• Roadwarden is an illustrated text adventure that I’ve played the demo of a few times through its development, and it’s finally getting a release. The developer has announced it release with Native Linux support on September 8.

• Here is your daily dose of what the heck? YouTube and the mighty algorithm decided for no apparent reason, that my Steam Deck video was “harmful and dangerous”.

• As time goes on, more developers are tweaking their games to improve the Steam Deck experience and Witchtastic looks like a fun co-op game to try out. What is it? Witchtastic is a 2-4 player co-op game about brewing and delivering magic potions as fast as possible. In a number of ways, the franticness and design is a lot like the Overcooked series.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Dolphin now has a dedicated “Selection Mode” you can optionally use to make the process of selecting items easier with a touchscreen or when using the default single-click setting! It even shows a toolbar of contextually-relevant actions you can perform on the selected items! When using a mouse and keyboard, you can quickly enter and exit it by pressing the spacebar, presssing-and-holding on an item in the view, or using an item in the menu. It’s completely optional, so if you like selecting files the old fashioned way, you don’t have to use it at all.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• Linux Mint 21 ‘Vanessa’ is a fantastic upgrade.

• If you haven’t upgraded yet, you can follow our step-by-step tutorial to get help.

• But should you proceed to upgrade? Is Linux Mint 21 good enough for users? Does it have any quirks that you should know of?

• Here, let me highlight some important information to help you decide whether you should give it a try or not.

• [...]

• Linux Mint 21 includes some big under-the-hood refinements, especially, for the Cinnamon edition.

New Releases

• We are proud to announce the release of Neptune 7.5 (“Ada”) the first service release of the Neptune 7 series.

• This version comes with the updates provided by Debian 11.4 (“Bullseye”) that offer the latest and greatest in terms of security. We updated the Linux Kernel to version 5.18 to provide better support for modern hardware aswell as fixing some bugs with existing hardware support. We put effort in optimizing the performance of Neptune by providing tweaks to kernel that speed up the write speed on USB thumb drives for example.

BSD

• The OpenBSD operating system is known to be secure, but also for having an accurate and excellent documentation. In this text, I’ll try to figure out what makes the OpenBSD documentation so great.

Slackware Family

• I added fresh packages for LibreOffice Community Edition 7.4.0 which was released a few days ago. According to the Document Foundation blog post, the focus is on improving MS Office document format interoperability and helping people migrate from MS Office to LibreOffice.

• Note that I compiled these new packages on Slackware 15.0. If you install them on Slackware -current you will also need to download ‘icu4c-compat‘ and boost-compat from my repository and install them. They are two compatibility packages containing older versions of the icu4c and boost libraries, in particular the versions that are part of Slackware 15.0 but no longer part of -current.

• Get libreoffice packages from my own Europe-based server: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ or my US-based server: https://us.slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ ;or any mirror if you wait a day, for instance https://slackware.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ . These servers all offer rsync access if you prefer that to http.

Fedora Family / IBM

• A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market — and to do so, it’s taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat.

• Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. Today, Godot claims some 1,500 contributors, and is considered one of the world’s top open source projects by various metrics. Godot has been used in high-profile games such as the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster, published by Sega last year as the first major mainstream game powered by Godot. But Tesla, too, has apparently used Godot to power some of the more graphically intensive animations in its mobile app.

• Among Godot’s founding creators is Juan Linietsky, who has served as head of development for the Godot project for the past 13 years, and who will now serve as CEO of W4 Games, a new venture that’s setting out to take Godot to the next level.

• [...]

• In simple terms, a game engine serves up the basic building blocks required for developers to create games, and may include anything from renderers for 2D or 3D graphics to scripting and memory management. It’s basically a software framework that developers can use and reuse without having to redesign the wheel with each new game they create.

Debian Family

• The revelation that Frans Pop resigned the night before Debian Day has shaken the way people view his decision to end his life. It is hard to eliminate the role of Debian in the death.

• [...]

• Looking at the chart, we can see Ubuntu development commenced secretly in early 2004. Frans Pop joined the debian-private mailing list in June 2005.

• I think anybody who gets 1,000 emails in a month will remember that. It may well have come to mind for Frans and other volunteers in August 2010. That is when Ubuntu developers simultaneously began the pushing for DEP-5 and the pushing for Constantly Usable Testing (CUT). That is when Frans decided enough was enough.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Aimed at developers that want to get their feet wet working with RISC-V architecture, when the board first launched late last year it supported Fedora Linux, Yocto, Buildroot, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr. Now you can also run Ubuntu on VisionFive boards.

• Box86 and Box64 are two pieces of software that allow apps made for X86 to run on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi. It also aims to be both simple to use and able to run on low-end devices. Above all else, it is a completely open-source project, meaning that it has the full support of the community behind it. However, one man is at the forefront of this effort, and I had the pleasure to have a chat with him about what Box86 and Box64 are, their origins, and what the future holds for the project.

• With the built-in WiFi chip, we can create a very cheap Raspberry PI Pico W web server running MicroPython, to host very simple HTML pages and create small and inexpensive websites

• The IoT Redboard by SparkFun features a ES32 WROOM module enabled with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. This development kit also provides an SD Card for data logging, a USB type-C, a Qwiic connector, a battery gauge and several other peripherals.

• The ESP32 module found in the IoT Redboard is the ESP32-D0WD-V3 which features a dual-core Xtensa LX6 MCU. The base frequency starts at 80MHz and it can be adjusted up to 240MHz. The LX6 MCU has also been seen in other boards already (i.e. BomberCat, FireBeetle 2). According to the product page, the device includes 448KB ROM, 520 SRAM and 16KB SRAM in RTC.

• A couple of months ago, we wrote about the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3E (CM3E) equipped with the Raspberry Pi RP3A0 SiP found in the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board. It looks like an OEM product from Raspberry Pi trading, and as such is close to impossible to purchase.

• But if somehow, you’d like to have the guts of the Pi Zero 2 W into CM3 module form factor, Waveshare has designed the Zero-to-CM3 adapter for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that should be compatible with most carrier boards designed for Raspberry Pi CM3 or CM3+.

• The Motor SHIM features a DRV8833 dual H-bridge motor driver. This means it can drive a maximum of two motors – the rival Kitronik Robotics Board can handle four, but then it is considerably larger.

• Rather than screw terminals, the Motor SHIM features two small two-pin JST-ZH connectors. For each, just plug in one end of a cable (not supplied), and the other end into a Motor Connector SHIM on a micro metal-gear motor. You can also buy motors with the JST‑ZH connector pre-soldered – to the top or side, depending on your mounting preference. Note that the Motor SHIM won’t work with motors equipped with six-pin Micro Metal Motor Encoders, however.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Just over six months on from version 7.3, LibreOffice 7.4 Community has arrived, boasting improvements in Microsoft Office compatibility.

• File compatibility has long been a significant roadblock for users and organizations seeking an alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity suite.

• “Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they hide a large amount of artificial complexity,” sniffed the LibreOffice crew. “This causes handling issues with LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the OpenDocument Format).”

• Today we are looking at how to install LibreOffice 7.4 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.

Programming/Development

• This guide shows you how to add a fade in / fade out effect to a control in QML. There are a lot of built in animations in Qt/QML, but no fade in/fade out. Using a state machine and a SequentialAnimation, we can first animate the opacity, then set the visibility, achieving a fade in / fade out effect. Other ways like a PropertyAnimation are also available but are less expressive or configurable.

• I was trying to implement the Fisher-Yates algorithm earlier this evening. This algorithm lets you randomly shuffle the contents of a list. I wanted to provide a list of songs and return a shuffled list. I decided to use Lisp for this since I don’t know much Lisp and I want to build my skills.

• The deal is still pending approval and is expected to close next year, but public documents courtesy of Brazil’s regulatory body CADE revealed last week just how strongly Microsoft and PlayStation owner Sony feel about the other’s competitive strategies for their respective console brands.

Leftovers

• Despite the extremely disheartening developments across the spectrum of worldly life, despair and defeat are –while understandable–not inevitable. That is the good news. We are never obliged to surrender the best of our humanity, even as things around us devolve. But in order to find our footing, it is important to begin by seeing the current reality without fear or illusion. We can be fairly certain that the tipping points have now tipped, that we are in for an epic unraveling. The planet is on fire and under water, plagues are on the loose, croplands are becoming barren, rivers going dry. Further, the shreds of sane governance that might have kept us afloat a little longer are going down in flames. The omnicidal fascists, waiting impatiently in the wings for their moment on center stage, are almost certain to speed us ever more swiftly toward the end of life as we have known it.

• Personally, I believe in miracles because I have seen a couple in my day. I never rule them out entirely, and my fingers are crossed that we will get lucky. However, only a fool would count on divine intervention. Particularly after we repeatedly and decisively failed to heed all the wisdom so generously handed to us, such that we might save ourselves. It is a good time, then, to start learning how to die. Maybe you won’t need to leave life –as an individual—right now, maybe you can find a way to secure the futures of your loved ones, your kids and grandkids. But we all live together on a dying planet and we are assuredly going to witness continued decline and demise on many fronts.

• That purveyor of excess, Baz Luhrmann strung an unforgettable series of tableaux dansants together in Strictly Ballroom, then showed how unwatchtably precious he could be when he turned from the send-up to the serious in his Romeo and Juliet. There’s no shortage of dancing in Shakespeare, but directors undertake to stage it at their own peril: the theatrical possibilities are limitless, but proportional to the risk of failure. That is probably a fair description of dancing itself: the threat of falling flat on your face is both figurative and literal.

• Among the best of all dance scenes is in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman of 1925. The impecunious college boy’s tuxedo is not yet ready when the big ball begins so he has to drag his aged tailor along to the party in order to finish the outfit as surreptitiously as possible during the dancing itself, the spectacle ending in the pantless public humiliation of our hapless hero.

• The protagonist is a decidedly modern character in terms of his dissolution.  There is contained within him a particle of the anomie and listlessness of a modern world; in a Nietzschean-like fashion, it is all too easy for this often vacillating and timid priest to imagine that God is dead.  The moment of nihilism is encouraged by the darkness which falls over the desert at night, the elemental shadows of the forest, and the sense of this small rotund figure making his way through the murky blackness, a blind creature groping its way toward an uncanny fate: ‘It was evening and forest; monkeys crashed invisibly among the trees with an effect of clumsiness and recklessness, and what were probably snakes hissed away like match-flames through the grass. He wasn’t afraid of them. They were a form of life, and he could feel life retreating from him all the time.’[2]  There are times in the novel when the world itself is regarded from the same lonely, lofty purview: ‘it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.’[3]

• The stark poetry, the sense of a vast cosmological loneliness acts to throw into relief the priest’s own struggle.  Here he is, pressing through the dismal darkness, encountering the fleeting, haunting faces of the impoverished peasants, trying to survive and yet it is in this condition – reduced to an elemental sense of being, stripped of all artifice and privilege – where he most explicitly and violently encounters the most fundamental questions of his existence. In the shadowy hinterlands between life and death it is there where the cardinal elements of his personality – his strengths and frailties – are revealed, laid bare, in all their truth.  As a priest with a comfortable life, both content and privileged, his was an existence taken for granted, a complacent existence – and despite the eloquence of his proselytising – in many ways a thoughtless one.  Now such privilege is removed from him by the brutal mechanics of fate – moving through the isolation and harshness of the plains and mountains, he is compelled to fall through a different type of darkness.  An inner darkness, where he must confront nakedly every unsavoury and pious act of his past, where he is forced to question his faith and to discover those moments in his personal history that might provide the clue to some kind of redemption in the meagre amount of time he has left.

• I have a problem with electrical outlets, at least of the American three-pronged variety—every time I look at them, I see a face looking back at me, in shock at what I’m about to do next. The outlet looks like it’s seen some things. It’s fascinating to me that when they designed this power outlet style they looked at their options and the best they could come up with was constant shock. So, I know that power outlets differ in different countries, and more importantly, I know why. But what about power outlets that don’t follow any modern standards, or are so obscure that you might do a double-take when trying to figure out what they’re for? (If you live in an old house, you know what I mean.) Today’s Tedium, in an effort to give the poor shocked guy a break, dives into power outlet variants that run current outside of the norm. We do ten a lot, but just to change things up, let’s make it seven.

Science

• Working with the University of Science and Technology of China and the Jinan Institute of Quantum Technology (opens in new tab), the researchers showed that the entangled quantum memories could maintain coherence even when they have an urban environment between them. It is because it was already a known element of entanglement – the process where two quantum units (such as qubits or quantum memories) correlate so that their states – and thus, content – can’t be described separately.

Education

• In the September 2022 episode of the ‘Meet The Education Researcher’ podcast, Neil Selwyn spoke with Dr. Marie Heath (Loyola University) about her work encouraging an informed ‘techno-scepticism’ around the social, political, cultural and economic dimensions of technology in schools. Originally a high school Social Studies teacher, Marie is part of the ‘Civics Of Technology’ initiative, and is involved in various research and writing projects concerned with supporting teacher activism and community scrutiny of EdTech (nb. this text has been lightly edited for clarity)

• The world is broken. But instead of giving up, instead of resigning, teachers need to pivot to make teaching an act of defiance, a declaration that the only way forward is through lessons that teach students to remember joy, to activate their muscles of imagination, kindness, laughter, playfulness, and solidarity.

• This summer, I made the difficult decision to take a leave of absence from teaching. For the first time in 11 years, I won’t be meeting new students this September. This isn’t the choice I wanted to make, but one I felt forced into as an immunocompromised transplant recipient and new parent facing a year of Covid-19 waves without mitigations or accommodations.

• As the fourth pandemic school year approaches, the US has converged on a single goal: schools must return to normal. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona hailed the arrival of new CDC guidance for “minimizing the impact of COVID-19″ which, he wrote, “should give students, parents and educators the confidence they need to head back to school with a sense of joy & optimism.”

Hardware

• Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.

• Anyone who’s anyone on the internet these days occasionally streams content online. Whether that’s the occasional livestream on YouTube or an every day video game session on Twitch, it’s definitely a trend that’s here to stay. If you want to take your streaming session on the go, though, you’ll need some specialized hardware like [Melissa] built into this livestreaming backpack.

• No matter how often you wash your hands, ABS keycaps will eventually exhibit shine wherever you strike them the most. And that’s the problem right there: the shine might be okay if it were somehow uniform across the surface of the keycaps, but instead it just tends to make one feel seen. And since there’s really nothing you can do except to replace your keycaps (or start with PBT), you might as well embrace the shine, right?

• Pantographs were once used as simple mechanical devices for a range of tasks, including duplicating simple line drawings. [Tim] decided to make a modern electronic version that spits out G-Code instead.

• In certain parts of the world, cooking meat in a regionally-specific way is a critical part of the local culture. From barbeque in the American south to boerewors and braaivleis in South Africa to Montréal smoked meat in French Canada, almost every location has its cookout specialty. So much so that various manufacturers of the tools used for these foods include all kinds of gadgets to monitor the sometimes days-long process of cooking various cuts of meat. [megamarco833]’s smoker, though, includes some tools of his own design.

• Rǒta counts things. That’s it, really — what a cheap little mechanical counter does with a thumb press, or what you can do by counting on your fingers and toes, that’s pretty much all that Rǒta does. But it does it with style.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• It’s hurricane season. Here in Louisiana, we’re bracing ourselves for another devastating storm. Predictions are that this year will be as brutal as 2005, when Katrina walloped our coast. Down here, tensions rise in late summer: Warm ocean waters driven by a changing climate can turn a Category 2 storm into a 3 or 4 remarkably fast and with little warning. Last August, Hurricane Ida showed no mercy, tearing off roofs and displacing thousands. Six months later, I was still gutting homes.

• Advocates for a more just healthcare system responded with alarm to Thursday reporting that the Biden administration is taking steps to stop paying for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments in the coming months, a move critics fear will lead to higher prices and more expensive coverage, enriching pharmaceutical and insurance giants at the expense of patients.

• “Recipe for disaster, unless you are a pharmaceutical company or other profit center in the healthcare market.”

• In Puerto Rico, our elected officials have told us for decades that a job in the pharmaceutical industry can be a source of stability and decent wages. But for many Puerto Ricans working for Big Pharma, that’s a fantasy.

Proprietary

• He said the Police and Border Guard Board (PPA), the Tax and Customs Board (EMTA), postal service Omniva and the Smart-ID website were among those targeted over the past 48 hours.

• Fleming said Russia had deployed WhisperGate malware to destroy and deface Ukrainian government systems.

• More than 50 per cent of enterprises in India have significantly increased their information and communications technology (ICT) budget this year compared to 2021, a report showed on Thursday, as cybersecurity becomes the key concern for firms in the country.

• The uptick is due to the ongoing digital initiatives by the Indian government and a surge in the use of digital technologies due to Covid-19, reveals GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Apps can inject their JavaScript code into websites, allowing them to monitor how the user is interacting with the app. This can include information on every button or link you tap, keyboard inputs and if screenshots were taken, though each app will vary in what information it collects.

• Today, the vast majority of websites and emails that you encounter contain some form of tracking. Third-party cookies let advertisers follow you around the web; tracking pixels in emails confirm whether you’ve opened them; tracking links ensure websites know what you click; some websites even collect data on forms you’ve never actually submitted; still others share detailed interactions, such as appointments you’ve booked, with companies like Facebook. Each of these types of technology works by turning your actions into data: websites with tracking collect and store data about the site you are on, when, and what you are doing there; emails with tracking collect and store data about which email you opened and how you interacted with it.

• All of this amounts to an incredible amount of data about you being collected without your permission. That data doesn’t all end up in one place—sometimes it’s collected by individual websites, sometimes by ad tech companies, and sometimes by third-parties you’ve never heard of. But regardless of who has the data, it amounts to a massive violation of user privacy that can have far-reaching consequences. Choosing to collect the data of supporters, clients and visitors isn’t just a marketing, monetary or ideological decision: it’s a decision that puts  people in danger. In a post-Roe world, for example, law enforcement might use internet search histories, online purchases, tracked locations, and other parts of a person’s digital trail  as evidence of criminal intent – indeed, they already have.

• If you are a nonprofit organization, you may be part of the problem. Unfortunately, a 2021 report from The Markup showed that many nonprofits don’t take threats to privacy seriously. That may be changing: Planned Parenthood, for example, has suspended the use of marketing trackers on some portions of their website in response to the dangers they could create for people seeking information on abortions. Hey Jane, an online provider of abortion pills, has also removed the Meta (Facebook) tracking pixel.

• There’s no better way to admit you’re a pariah than skipping out on a celebration of your specific talents. Roman Polanski has passed on attending awards ceremonies out of fear of being extradited to face criminal charges related to the drugging and raping of a 13-year-old girl. Polanski remains a (cautiously) celebrated film director and continues to find work, but will not show up to collect awards because he (correctly) fears direct criticism, if not an actual arrest.

• This post was inspired by a Benedict Evans’ tweet.

Defence/Aggression

• House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) demanded Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Truth Social, Rumble, Gettr, Telegram and Gab respond with details about their policies and data on the threats.

• The request comes after researchers have identified an uptick in violent posts targeting FBI agents since the search at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

• “We agreed with the secretary general the conditions of a possible mission by the IAEA to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, in a legal way, via territory free from occupiers,” Zelenskiy told reporters.

• “Russia should immediately and unconditionally withdraw its forces from territory of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, as well as stopping any provocations and shelling,” he said.

• The footage shows one of the six turbine rooms located on the western side of the nuclear plant, located in the southeastern city of Enerhodar. Each turbine hall is connected and built into a large building that houses a nuclear reactor.

• Beijing’s critics have long offered up Hambantota as the classic example of what they call a Chinese debt trap. Now, with Sri Lanka bankrupt and politically unstable, they’re flagging it as a worrying example of how China might use that infrastructure for military purposes.

• So what can individual Americans do to curb Iran’s support for terrorism, and prevent a dangerous region from becoming even more dangerous? Track your investments.

• National security agency the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) claims extremists are targeting the vulnerable.

• “They’ll do this through the use of videos that might start out being a bit humorous … and grow more and more racist and more and more violent until young people are quite desensitised to the violence they are seeing,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil told 7NEWS.

• People at the Emporia shopping mall in the southern city of Malmo fled in panic after hearing around 20 shots being fired, Swedish outlet TV4 said.

• Police have arrested a teenage boy and believe the shooting is related to gang [sic] tensions.

• On the evening of August 19, air defenses were triggered in the Crimean city of Yevpatoria, according to Oleg Kriuchkov, an advisor to the Moscow-backed head of Crimea. “Crimea is well protected,” he said on Telegram.

• On August 15, the Russian investigative news outlet iStories released an investigation that included interviews with multiple soldiers involved in crimes against civilians in the Ukrainian village of Andriivka. After the article was published, other soldiers from the same brigade contacted the journalists to confirm the accounts, as well as to report that hundreds of their fellow servicemen are being denied their right to resign from the army. With permission, Meduza is publishing a translated summary of the new report.

• In February and March, when the Ukrainian village of Andriivka was under Russian occupation, Russian troops reportedly killed at least 14 civilians; three more died as a result of shelling. After investigating the circumstances of each death, Schemes, a project from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service, has released an online map charting the killings and an investigative film called “Andriivka: The Tragedy of One Village.” With permission, Meduza is publishing translated summaries of the victims’ stories.

• Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used to cosmeticize Nazi Germany’s atrocities and promote Aryan superiority have sports and an otherwise despised government collaborated so blatantly to enhance their joint international standings.

• Conflict monitors on Friday drew attention to a series of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia in recent months, attacks that have received relatively little attention in the American corporate media despite having reportedly killed more than 20 people.

• “Bottom line, it’s been a long time since the United States was not bombing Somalia.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the release of a 2019 memorandum about whether then-President Donald Trump obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)—the watchdog fighting to reveal the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) memo prepared for then-Attorney General Bill Barr—celebrated the ruling as a win.

Environment

• The new method appears to be safer and more energy-efficient. The Northwestern scientists added PFAS molecules to a solution of lye and dimethyl sulfoxide and exposed them to temperatures of up to 248 degrees Fahrenheit. The chemicals degraded into fluoride ions and other harmless byproducts.

Energy

• The problem for Ethereum that will motivate a hard fork is that, even more than it was in 2017, Proof-of-Work mining is a capital-intensive industry. After what Ethereum calls “the merge” there will be a large investment in GPUs and ASICs that can no longer earn a return mining Ethereum. Olga Kharif reports in Crypto Miner Pushback Suggests Ethereum Offshoots Are Coming that: [...]

• Russian energy giant Gazprom announced on Friday that gas deliveries to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will be halted for three days at the end of August.

Wildlife/Nature

• Moazu Kromah, a Uganda resident, was extradited from the west African country to the United States in June 2019, pleading guilty in March of this year to one count of conspiracy to commit wildlife trafficking and two counts of wildlife trafficking, the office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, said in a statement.

• Tanzania hopes to offer full [Internet] connectivity up to the summit of the mountain by the end of this year.

• In 2000, The Onion published a provocative thought experiment: How quickly would humans fall from the top of the animal kingdom if dolphins, who have a greater cranial capacity than us and are arguably more sadistic, had the ability to grab things? At the time, it seemed funny.

• However, 20 years later, two marine biologists made a creepy discovery regarding cannibalistic squid that are exceptionally well-equipped at grasping things with their teeth-covered tentacles: The squid use human-like syntax to communicate with changing pigmentation patterns. Now, who’s laughing?

Finance

• On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” Columbia Law School professor Kathryn Judge talks to Robert Scheer about the exploitation of monster behemoth retail companies revealed in her new book “Direct.”

• An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes.

• Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process last week and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, choosing instead to condemn the package’s relatively modest but popular tax reforms.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The DOJ has long used powerful laws like the Espionage Act to target our most vulnerable whistleblowers and truth-tellers, and the ongoing records dispute with a former president is an almost unheard-of course correction. However, given the department’s history, we should be deeply concerned about any failure to hold Trump accountable for violations of the law precisely because he is the former president.

• By every measure, if the allegations being investigated by the DOJ are true, Trump would be an ideal candidate for prosecution for violating the Espionage Act.

• First, on average, about 42 people are reportedly killed every day in America, by just guns alone (meaning significantly more people are killed every day by all methods). The overwhelming majority of these — victims of black-on-black violence — receive zero mention in the media.

• Republicans recognize that the fundamental issue of the 2022 midterm elections is whether the United States will continue as a constitutional republic or warp into an authoritarian state where the rule of law and the will of the people are casually disregarded. The question is whether Democrats understand that this is what the election is about, and whether they will fight as hard to defend democratic norms as Republicans are fighting to dismantle them.

• Liz Cheney’s electoral defeat is not the fall of an American hero. She’s not going anywhere, and she’s no hero. The good she is doing on the January 6 Committee is almost certainly being done for less than admirable purposes. To ignore that fact is to overlook another front in the war on democracy.

• The team, which is made up of U.S. military and civilian personnel, worked alongside Croatian intelligence and cybersecurity officials to look for malicious cyber activity and vulnerabilities.

• Kenya is facing a political crisis following last week’s presidential election, with the apparent runner-up rejecting the results of the vote and the apparent president-elect announcing plans to form a new government. We speak with Nairobi-based writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola, who says the Kenyan elections yield “terrible candidates,” with the most recent election results following a decades-long tradition of election interference and miscommunication. “There’s always been a reason to doubt the results,” says Nyabola. She also discusses how the digital age has uplifted election systems like Kenya’s as examples of how to thwart democracy for the West, and the impact of the drought in the Horn of Africa, where the United States says more than 18 million people are facing severe hunger.

• Ron DeSantis likes to pretend that he’s in favor of free speech. He talks about free speech quite frequently. But the fact is that he’s a garden variety authoritarian censor in a cheap suit. He keeps passing culture war pro-censorship bills that try to stifle the free speech rights of his critics — quintessential anti-1st Amendment censorship. And each time people, rightly, sue to protect their rights. And each time, DeSantis has to waste taxpayer money to defend his indefensible bills. And each time he loses as courts point out that, dude, the 1st Amendment doesn’t allow you to do that shit.

• These results were enough to inspire columnist Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post (7/26/22) to produce another one of his disingenuous rants against the “mainstream media” (Washington Post, 1/6/22). “Why do people believe the ‘Big Lie’?” he asks. Answer: “Because Americans don’t trust the media.” He argues that because the media have lost public confidence, they are the reason that roughly one-third of Americans overall, including two-thirds of Republicans, believe the Big Lie—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen (Atlantic, 4/18/22).

• As signaled by the headline, the article framed the loss of US occupation as an unfortunate setback for the country—although in reality the US has been and remains the primary force of “chaos” and “uncertainty” in Afghanistan.

• Truth is an alien concept to former President Donald Trump. As the old saying goes, “He lies when the truth will serve.”

• The open Democratic primary for New York’s new 10th Congressional District has been as wild and bitter as anticipated, a pile-up of at least six prominent contenders who are desperately vying to represent some of the most prestigious turf in America. The outcome could be a gut punch for progressives, who are currently on the outside looking in as a multimillionaire ex-prosecutor leads the field with only days to go until the August 23 primary.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Meta spokesperson Aaron Simpson told AFP that the group’s accounts at Facebook and Instagram were shuttered on Wednesday. The ban came after repeated violations of Meta’s misinformation rules.

• In August 2022, a Texas jury ruled that internet personality Alex Jones pay $49 million for defaming the parents of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre. Starting a decade earlier, Jones had claimed that the shooting was a hoax. He argued that crisis actors played the victims and the children never existed. The decision was met with relief from the loved ones of the victims and ideological opponents of Jones.

Censorship/Free Speech

• More than a dozen acclaimed writers, including friends and colleagues of Rushdie, spoke at the steps of the New York Public Library for the event, which organizers said the novelist had been invited to watch from the hospital.

• Meanwhile, the struggle for free speech, of which Sir Salman became an accidental champion—deciding it was a cause worth dying for, if he had to—is as fierce and pressing as ever, if also more complex, waged on new fronts and against suave foes as well as the murderous sort. Now, as in the aftermath of the fatwa, the battle lines are wavier than they ought to be. Then, some politicians and thinkers were forced to choose between principles: a non-judgmental multiculturalism and what ought to have been an inviolable commitment to free expression, even or especially when it causes offence. Some got the hierarchy wrong, tolerating intolerance and criticising an author they should have shielded. “Good men would give in to fear and call it respect,” Sir Salman wrote. Some still do.

• Commenting on Twitter in the days after last week’s attack on Rushdie, Iranian American writer Roya Hakakian criticized a response by a U.S. official. Later, while posting a link to Carter’s 1989 op-ed, she attributed what she called the abandonment of Rushdie and free speech to “the elites in 1989″ and tweeted, “it’s the elites today, too, all laying the building blocks of the unsightly cancel culture of today.”

• On Friday night, when I heard that Rushdie had been stabbed, my sorrow was twofold: I felt saddened by the horrific injury of an exceptionally talented man whose mind and imagination I knew intimately through his writing; and saddened by the world we live in—a world in which the diplomatic immunity granted to every creative-ambassador of the kingdom of imagination, which I had always viewed as a solid fact, was crumbling. When literature departments refuse to teach Lolita, conferences on Dostoevsky are cancelled over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Oscar winners feel comfortable slapping standup comedians on live television, journalists and cartoonists can be killed because they publish a thought or joke that offends their readers, it is a dangerous world for both artists and art itself. It’s a two-way street: a writer is stabbed because of ideas and fantasies he shares in a work of fiction, while a creative artist’s problematic conduct in religious, moral or political realms is punished by boycotting art that harms no one. And, unlike in the past, when artistic freedom was curtailed by totalitarian regimes and religious movements, today it is under attack from all fronts, including the liberal community, which is willing to police art by means of shaming and boycotting. In this reality, no artistic creator or creation is safe. Art has ceased to be a city of refuge unrestricted by pragmatism and agendas, and has become instead a battlefield in which artists who express ideas that infuriate someone might find themselves or their works bloodied.

• There are a bunch of moving parts involved in this case that I really wasn’t planning on covering — but something quite amusing happened and I can’t resist. The basics are fairly straightforward: there’s an outfit named “Business Casual” that makes videos, apparently sometimes discussing historical events and whatnot. One part of the videos is that they create “parallax” images, in which they take apart old public domain photos and give them a sort of 3D feel (sometimes creating new images entirely). RT Arabic (the Arabic language wing of RT — i.e., Russia Today — owned by the state funded TV-Novosti) apparently used some snippets of these parallax images from a couple of Business Casual videos. Business Casual filed DMCA takedowns, causing the RT Arabic channel to get some copyright strikes, and even had the account briefly taken down, though it was then reinstated.

• Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, announced it was taking “coercive measures” against TikTok, Telegram, Zoom, Discord, and Pinterest on Friday. Search engines will now be required to inform users that the companies stand in violation of Russian law.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Two grim anniversaries demonstrate how journalists around the world increasingly face violence, but leaders—including President Biden—have been slow to act.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Nurses at Maine Medical Center have voted by an overwhelming margin to keep the union that they opted to join last year, fending off a decertification effort backed by a right-wing legal group dedicated to rolling back workers’ ability to organize and bargain collectively.

• The vote, held in person on August 17 and 18, favored the union even more heavily than the initial 1,001 to 750 vote in 2021.

• On closer inspection, however, the emancipation of women is not all it seems.

• First, it’s hard to discuss women’s freedom while Saudi Arabia prosecutes women (and men) as terrorists for so much as dabbling in politics. Just last week, Salma al-Shehab, a Ph.D. student and mother of two, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for using her Twitter account in support of dissidents.

• According to the CESOP study, the economic benefits brought about by the presence of foreign tourists and residents have taken precedence over the preservation of social values and customs and traditions in certain parts of Oaxaca city. However, there has been scant consideration of the negative impacts the outsiders generate, the researchers said, among which are higher rents and food prices, noise pollution due to the influx of new businesses (which have taken the place of older, more traditional ones), insecurity, changes to the urban landscape and “symbolic dispossession,” as some locals have been priced out of neighborhoods where they formerly lived.

• With Roe now overturned, lessons learned from the Green Wave, the feminist movement working on reproductive rights that began in Argentina & spread through & beyond Latin America, could inspire the fight against anti-abortion laws in the US and worldwide.

• A coalition of immigrant rights organizations have sued the data broker LexisNexis for collecting detailed personal information on millions of people and then selling it to governmental entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawsuit alleges LexisNexis has helped create “a massive surveillance state with files on almost every adult U.S. consumer,” and accuses ICE of using information collected by LexisNexis to circumvent local policies in sanctuary cities. We speak with Cinthya Rodriguez, organizer with the immigrant justice group Mijente, who explains how “one of the biggest data brokers in the world” is “getting rich off of the backs of community members,” particularly among immigrant communities of color and activists.

• A Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana issued a permanent injunction Thursday against President Joe Biden’s moratorium on oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters, a decision that came just 24 hours after a different court ruled that the administration’s long-blocked drilling freeze could take effect.

• Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, the same judge who temporarily halted Biden’s lease sale moratorium last year, sided Thursday with the 13 fossil fuel industry-friendly Republican attorneys general who sued to block the pause.

• U.S. Rep Rashida Tlaib on Friday urged the Biden administration to “hold Israel accountable” after the country’s forces raided and shuttered the offices of seven Palestinian human rights groups in the occupied West Bank, a move that drew international outrage.

• “Exactly 100 days since American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated by an Israeli sniper, the apartheid government moved to shut down seven human rights organizations at the core in fighting for the lives, liberties, and freedoms of millions of Palestinians,” Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, said in a statement.

• Israeli forces raided and closed the offices of seven Palestinian civil society rights groups in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, six of which Israeli authorities had designated as terrorist groups last year. The raid came as the United Nations condemned Israel for killing 19 Palestinian children in recent weeks, and 100 days after Israeli forces shot dead Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp. We speak to Sahar Francis and Brad Parker, with two of the human rights groups Israel raided. Parker, senior adviser for policy and advocacy at Defense for Children International – Palestine, describes how 100 Israeli soldiers gathered outside his organization’s building before dozens broke into the offices to confiscate items and files, sealed the building and left behind notices declaring the organization unlawful. He calls the raid “part of a years-long campaign to delegitimize and essentially criminalize the work that we do to expose grave violations against Palestinians at the hands of Israeli authorities.” In Ramallah, Sahar Francis of Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association says the attack “aims to silence us.”

• There is no doubt civil asset forfeiture perverts law enforcement’s incentives. When a government agency can directly profit from seizing people’s property, it will do this as often as it can. And when the justice system is skewed against people seeking to have their property returned, it greases the wheels for abuse.

• Michiganders who support reproductive freedom breathed a sigh of relief Friday after Oakland County Circuit Judge Jacob Cunningham issued a preliminary injunction targeting the state’s 1931 abortion ban—which some prosecutors sought to enforce after the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade.

• “Let’s take that collective breath together and fight like hell.”

• Despite the extremely disheartening developments across the spectrum of worldly life, despair and defeat are—while understandable—not inevitable. That is the good news. We are never obliged to surrender the best of our humanity, even as things around us devolve. But in order to find our footing, it is important to begin by seeing the current reality without fear or illusion. We can be fairly certain that the tipping points have now tipped, that we are in for an epic unraveling. The planet is on fire and under water, plagues are on the loose, croplands are becoming barren, rivers going dry. Further, the shreds of sane governance that might have kept us afloat a little longer are going down in flames. The omnicidal fascists, waiting impatiently in the wings for their moment on center stage, are almost certain to speed us ever more swiftly toward the end of life as we have known it.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Title II specifies authority given to the FCC to regulate “common carriers” – utilities such as landline phones, telecommunication services, and electricity. Currently, VoIP services are not included in any specific classification. Instead, the FCC relies on rules based on its ancillary authority given under Title I of the Communications Act, which provides less regulatory authority to the commission.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Following through on a request by the Biden administration to defend right to repair, the FTC recently demanded that Harley Davidson and Westinghouse stop voiding customer warranties over repairs. An FTC announcement noted how both companies told consumers that using cheaper, third-party parts or repair shops to repair equipment violated warranty in a bid to monopolize repair.

Monopolies

• The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching dual investigations into Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of videogame maker Activision Blizzard, and Amazon’s competitive practices related to its Marketplace platform.

• In January 2022, Microsoft announced it was planning to purchase Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, making it potentially Microsoft’s biggest-ever acquisition at $26 billion more than the company paid for LinkedIn in 2016.

Copyrights

• HBO and Sesame Street have been connected for years; WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery) locked in a big five-year deal in 2019 to exclusively stream new episodes of the show, and Sesame Street first began airing on HBO in 2016.

• Game developer Bungie has successfully defeated a motion to dismiss several AimJunkies defendants from the ongoing copyright and cheating battle. After the original complaint failed to show that the ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ infringed any copyrights, the court found the amended complaint sufficient to move the case forward.

• Let’s be clear about this upfront: MUSO is a European copyright enforcement group with all the negative trappings that come along with that industry. That being said, MUSO has also distinguished itself from other piracy tracking groups by making some forward-thinking statements that don’t track with the copyright industries, such as coming out against the use of DRM or when it essentially told copyright holders to fix their business models to start bringing pirates in as customers.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• That’s it! I’ve finally ordered a smartphone because Generation 2

• and 3 someday soon will not be supported anymore. I have no choice.

• They do not conform to society standards and rather think for themselves.

• I’m feeling so tired that I’m almost in autopilot mode. Not so bad as a few weeks ago (much better actually) but still tired. I don’t have a decent vacation in years. I think that helps me with the recent dislike for new technologies and stuff. Head feels full.

• At least I’m finally learning something new for a job interview and I’m liking it a lot (Java Spring Boot). V

• Recently I bought a copy of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” from my local bookstore. It was around $20 and a good investment. Two years ago, I read both Stephen King’s magnum opus “It” as well as Tolkien’s masterpiece, “The Lord Of The Rings”. Through these I learned of the excitement that arises when reading an extremely long and detailed novel, of the potential of humanity. They are impressive tomes and I display them with pride. Dune, I felt, would be yet another book worth buying and adding to my ever-growing collection of literature. There are few other books I treat with reverence, although I may buy William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” soon. It strikes my fancy as yet another incredibly formative piece.

Politics

• I learned about an anti-capitalist, anti-big tech, environmentalist, hacking-oriented bookstore called Iffy Books, and I got super excited so I got a bunch of books from them. I’m hoping to go to their permacomputing workshop in a couple days as well.

Technical

• My work gave me a wifi hotspot that has recently been throttled by the ISP, so naturally I’m doing my best to conserve data as much as I can. I’ve kinda run out of stuff to do because I’m limited by the tools and supplies I have rn, so whatever.

• A Lenovo laptop with Arch. It’s my daily driver. If my memory serves we well, it’s 13 years old. Its battery is dead, its keyboard is dead, but otherwise it works flawlessly and I almost never feel restrained by its computing power. I attach a second screen to it via a VGA cable.

• Alright, because I do not want to see anyone’s server getting exploited or anything in that category, please run your scripts in chroot! I will use Josia’s SSH notes as an example here, as my own version is not yet quite done, lots of improvements to make. This will be a step-by-step guide on how to fully securely deploy it in a chroot.

• If a command is prefixed by “[root@altesq]” it means you must run it as root, if it prefixed by “[evenfire@altesq]” you must run it as a normal user. The root user is only used for representation purposes, you should run the root commands with sudo, doas or any alternative.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

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