● 08.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/08/2022: Celluloid 0.24 and New StarBook Mk VI

Posted in News Roundup at 5:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week we saw the release of a lot of goodies for everyone, starting with the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite and KDE Gear 22.08 software suite, and continuing with Ubuntu’s availability on the VisionFive RISC-V development board, a new Manjaro Linux release for ARM devices, and a new Proton release for Linux gamers.

• On top of that, Mozilla Thunderbird 91 users were finally able to upgrade to Thunderbird 102, GNOME fans were able to test drive the beta release of the upcoming GNOME 43 desktop environment, and those in the market of a new Linux laptop were able to pre-order the brand-new StarBook MK VI from Star Labs.

Desktop/Laptop

• Star Labs has recently launched the StarBook Mk VI which can accommodate the Ryzen 7 58000U and supports several Linux distributions. Additionally, the Starbook can integrate Intel 12th gen processors (i.e. i3-1220P, i7-1260P).

• The StarBook Mk VI can be configured to integrate one of the three following processors…

Instructionals/Technical

• In a previous article, I described how to create a SaaS platform in a Kubernetes cluster. This article takes a detailed look inside the demonstration project that accompanied that earlier article. The demonstration project is the code base shared by all tenants using the SaaS platform. This article describes the structure of the demonstration application. You’ll also see how to get the code up and running for multiple containerized tenants in a Kubernetes cluster, and how to expose the service to clients.

• A key aspect of SaaS architecture is a generic code base used by all tenants running in the Kubernetes cluster. The application logic used by each tenant is encapsulated in a Linux container image that’s declared within the definition of the tenant’s Kubernetes deployment. We’ll see multiple examples of this generic approach and its benefits in this article.

• The Linux container for each tenant is configured by setting a standard set of environment variables to values specific to that tenant. As shown in the previous article, adding a new tenant to the SaaS platform involves nothing more than setting up a database and creating a Kubernetes Secret, deployment, service, and route resources, all of which are assigned to a Kubernetes namespace created especially for the tenant. The result is that a single code base can support any number of tenants.

• There are thousands of commands that you can learn to use on a Linux system, but most users will find themselves executing the same few commands over and over. For users looking for a way to get started, we have compiled 20 of the most important Linux commands you need to know. These commands are some of the most useful, common, and essential tools that you will need in order to administer your Linux system or perform everyday tasks.

• Every Linux distro has inherent access to a terminal, though the interface may look different depending on your desktop environment or configuration. Join us in this tutorial to learn about the 20 most important Linux commands. By the end, you will know enough to begin navigating your Linux terminal.

• At any given moment your Linux system is running multiple processes simultaneously. Some of these processes have access to your network if they are being used to upload or download data. These processes typically bind themselves to a particular port number, and this can allow us to kill the process based on a port number.

• The kill command is one way that system administrators can stop a process from running. However, the kill command only accepts a process ID as an argument. The pkill and killall commands are two more options, but these accept process names as arguments.

• In order to kill a process based on its port number, we will need to use the fuser command, or use other command line tools in conjunction with the usual kill command. In this tutorial, we will show you multiple ways to kill a process based on its port number in Linux.

• The environment variables on a Linux system contain changing values that are referenced mainly by scripts and system programs. Environment variables differ from shell variables, because they can be accessed by any user or process across the entire system. In this tutorial, you will learn how to print environment variables on Linux.

• At one point, Desktop Dimmer was a popular application to control screen brightness. However, the Desktop Dimmer application is now outdated and no longer works in Linux Mint 21. The best possible alternative to the Desktop Dimmer application is Brightness Controller, a graphical user interface (GUI) based application that works like Desktop Dimmer to help us control screen brightness. While Brightness Controller may not be an exact replacement for Desktop Dimmer, it does offer similar functionality. It is currently the best option for those looking for a screen brightness controller.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Brightness Controller on Linux Mint 21 release series using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.

• Curl has made data transfer between two machines connected on the same network much easier. As curl command adheres to a specific URL syntax to successfully transfer data over a network.

• By default, no user interaction is needed during the execution of the curl command. Out of the numerous protocols it supports, the prominent ones are HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, SCP, SMTP, SMTPS, FTP, FTPS, and FILE.

• This article will walk us through some essential curl-related commands that can be useful to developers seeking a breakthrough under a Linux operating system environment.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Celluloid is a front-end for mpv (an open-source media player for the command-line).

• If you want to avoid bothering with the technical details, Celluloid is one of the best video players for Linux. Many Linux distributions offer Celluloid pre-installed as the default video player, among other essential packages.

• With Celluloid v0.24 release, it finally uses libadwaita along with other refinements.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In theory the Ubuntu 22.04 server installer will cope with reused disks that already have partitions on them, perhaps partly because some vendors ship server systems with pre-partitioned drives. In my experience, this can often work fine in practice. But every so often, things go wrong, and the installer will give you an opaque message that it crashed after you did network setup (sometimes, after you picked the Ubuntu mirror to use), before getting to disk selection and partitioning. These crashes seem especially common if you have disks with previous software RAIDs on them, either complete or merely one disk out of several.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The prototype was used by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1976 to demonstrate the Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world, Boston-based RR Auction said in a statement.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Many developers struggle with work-life balance. They are overloaded with regular tasks and frequently called upon to solve urgent customer issues. Yet many developers, like me, have ideas they want to promote if only they had time to do so. Sometimes these pet ideas do not make it through the product management feature-selection process. Other times, a developer does not have time to complete the solution end-to-end on their own, yet they know if it could somehow be implemented, the project would benefit.

• This is where mentoring comes in. Mentorship has many benefits: It helps the mentee’s personal development, and it can improve the mentor’s self-confidence and leadership skills. I discussed these benefits in an interview about skillful mentoring in the Red Hat Research Quarterly that includes many tips for a rewarding mentor relationship.

• However, in the scenario I just described, mentorship has another very practical benefit: It helps with enrolling developers in the projects the mentor-developer wants to promote. In this article, I will explain how you can use mentoring as a power multiplier in the open source software (OSS) world and create a multi-win situation by mentoring people who further contribute to the open source community.

• This article is based on my experience mentoring students as part of the collaboration between my organization and Reichman University, but it can apply to any mentorship situation.

Programming/Development

• Cryptographic agility is a vaguely defined property, but is commonly understood to mean, “Able to quickly swap between cryptographic primitives in response to new attacks.”

• (1) After playing this for 3 years, I’ve learned that you have to learn about your team mates styles, and this can only happen if you consistently play with the same folks. So playing with random people makes that impossible. (2) If you do stumble upon a stranger who is a great player, they probably… don’t think the same about you. The large supply of players on the internet means that it’s better to move on and try new team players, than to keep playing with someone with worse skills than you. This means that everyone who plays Apex with strangers is just constantly on the outlook of great team mates, and those great players don’t want to commit to anyone who is worse than them. You’re left with 3 options: either you keep on playing with mediocre players, and rarely win; or you climb up to the top 100 players, become a pro and develop friendships with the pros; or you play only with friends who want to commit to teamwork with you.

• tldr: Announcing a rewrite of Ema (a static site generator in Haskell with hot reload destined to develop an unique kind of apps) with support for generic route encoders and composability.

Standards/Consortia

• Some sites have a feed, but don’t tell you about it. The good news is that the feed can often be guessed. If the website was “example.com”, these are the most likely places to find its feed: [...]

Leftovers

• [AJ] and [Joe], collectively the [Knight Rider Historians] are bringing back one of the most iconic vehicles of the 1980’s. Everyone remembers KITT driving into the F.L.A.G. truck. Even the Mythbusters re-enacted the stunt back in 2007. [KRH] managed to track down the original tractor and trailer from the show. They’re restoring both, part of that process means uncovering the Hollywood hacks used to make the car-driving-into-trailer stunt work.

• Although 3D printers are great, people tend to use them as a universal hammer wherein almost everything becomes a nail that’s just begging to be struck. So as hacker appetites become finicky with the same old fare, it’s refreshing to see an enclosure restoration done in such an old-school fashion. To wit: [Doidão Santos]’ classic repair of the crumbling side fairings on a vintage amplifier.

Science

• It’s quite probable that any of you who have built a keyboard will have done so using a matrix of keys connected to a microcontroller, or if you are old-school, a microprocessor. A CPU can scan the keyboard matrix with ease, and pass whatever is typed either to whatever software it is running, or to a host computer. There was a time however when available CPUs were not considered powerful enough to do all this and also perform a useful task, so a keyboard would have its own decoder chip that would output ASCII over a parallel interface. It’s an era [John Calhoun] harks back to with Adam74, a little ASCII terminal which takes its input from that 7-bit parallel port.

• Now, a new study in Science Advances adds to these findings and reports that “knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues.” In the study, the researchers first asked 3,200 participants through online surveys how much they think they know (subjective knowledge) using a 7-point scale about each of seven scientific topics ranging from “vague understanding” to “thorough understanding.” To prime participants, the researchers provide a complex explanation of how a crossbow is constructed and works (level 7 knowledge) compared to the case where a person can identify a crossbow and know that it shoots arrows (level 1 knowledge). Then each participant was randomly assigned to answer a question about their degree of acceptance of one of the seven different issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus.

Education

Hardware

• One of the many functions a digital oscilloscope offers over its analog ancestors is a trigger button. Alongside the usual electronic means of triggering the instrument, you can reach over and press a button to “freeze-frame” the action and preserve the trace. Sometimes doing it repeatedly it can become a chore to reach for the ‘scope. That’s where [Kevin Santo Cappuccio]’s remote trigger button comes in.

• Seeing some old Zilog 16-bit chips on eBay recently, [Scott Baker] was curious enough to snap them up and build himself a Z8000 computer. It started as a two-board solution, then he added a display module. Instead of layering the boards vertically à la a PC/104 stack, [Scott] decided to build them flat. His first backplane was triangular, but he opted for a square to accommodate one more expansion board in the future. The assembled contraption resembles a clover, hence the name Clover Computer.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Google has an automated tool to detect abusive images of children. But the system can get it wrong, and the consequences are serious.

• A concerned father says that after using his Android smartphone to take photos of an infection on his toddler’s groin, Google flagged the images as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a report from The New York Times. The company closed his accounts and filed a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and spurred a police investigation, highlighting the complications of trying to tell the difference between potential abuse and an innocent photo once it becomes part of a user’s digital library, whether on their personal device or in cloud storage.

• The global cost of violence against women had been estimated at $1.5 trillion, a figure that is bound to increase as the pandemic progresses. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, the number of domestic violence cases rose by 25-33 percent globally in 2020 compared to 2019. The United Nations group UN Women reports that incidents of domestic violence increased 300 percent in Hubei, China; 25 percent in Argentina; 30 percent in Cyprus; and 50 percent in Brazil.

Proprietary

• People love to rag on Google Chrome for being a bloated browser that eats up your computer’s resources. Well, Microsoft Edge has become even worse.

• Courts have heard allegations that Post Office bosses knew Horizon was flawed but still proceeded with prosecutions. Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom called for those responsible “to be held fully to account,” saying: “The fact that Horizon could not be relied upon was known to some people – including, we now learn, the then prime minister – from a very early stage.

• “This makes it all the more dreadful that so many people in authority ignored the protestations of the sub-postmasters and humiliated, prosecuted, bankrupted and imprisoned them.”

• The resulting data set was used to train a neural network to categorise the toxicity of the remaining posts.

• The algorithm found 2 per cent of posts and 6 per cent of comments were highly toxic. A further 7 per cent of posts and 11.5 per cent of comments were slightly toxic, with the remainder of posts and comments classed as not toxic. Highly toxic posts included direct insults and swear words, slightly toxic posts included milder insults (such as “hideous”), while not toxic posts contained neither.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Pegasus spyware is used to infiltrate mobile phones and extract data or activate cameras or microphones.

• The mortgage lending company that faced criticism late last year for summarily laying off 900 people over Zoom is “teaming up” with Palantir Technologies, the big-data software company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the companies announced Wednesday.

• In her first comments since Meta’s announcement, Ms Patel says that the Government wants to work with the tech giant to protect children, citing proposals by UK spy chiefs that would allow technology giants to scan online messages and pick up child abuse material without sacrificing privacy rights.b2

Defence/Aggression

• Driving the news: The candidate, Luis Miguel, tweeted on Thursday, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight! Let freedom ring!”

• The clans control large zones of Swedish cities and towns, effectively lawless areas that police increasingly fear approaching. The crime families, which have thousands of foot soldiers, have been allowed to operate with virtual impunity for years. Swedish judges and prosecutors have been unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution. Furthermore, police are terrorized by them and often pressured by the state to remain silent.

• Rajni Bala was shot in the head by anti-India militants, police said.

• It’s widely believed that she was targeted because she was a Hindu, a minority in the country’s only Muslim majority region. There has been a wave of Hindu killings in the past year – the latest just last week. Sunil Kumar Bhat was shot dead in an apple orchard in the Shopian area of south Kashmir.

• Rajni’s family say they had tried to move out of Kashmir before the attack on her.

• But the reality of what happened was much more complicated and harder to comprehend. Police arrested Muhammed Syed, a Muslim and known community member, this month. Syed, 51, was charged in two killings, and authorities say they are gathering evidence to charge him in the two others. Syed’s motive is still unclear, and Syed, a married father of six, has denied involvement in the killings.

• Police said during house searches of the two Imams, lots of incriminating material related to AQIS, Jihadi literature, posters, books among other documents were seized along with mobile phones, SIM cards and ID cards.

• The attack followed Islamic militants’ kidnapping of 21 Christian women on June 21 in nearby Kasan Kogi village. The Rev. Ezekiel Garba, pastor of Chapel of Good News Church in Kasan Kogi village, told Christian Solidarity International’s Nigeria Report that his wife was among those held captive.

• One of the reasons that anti-Trump supporters are so hopping mad over Trump’s taking of the Fifth is what lawyers call a “perjury trap.” The idea is to get a person to talk and talk and talk, in the hope of then finding places where he didn’t tell the truth, and then charge him with perjury. In fact, oftentimes the person isn’t even charged with the substantive offense for which he was being investigated. He’s only charged with lying about certain aspects of the situation while he was talking or testifying.

• The latest, including: – The assassination of Alexander Dugin’s daughter – Who is Dugin? Why do his ideas matter in understanding Russia? – Theories behind the attack – Wagner base attacked by Ukraine after social media blunder – Wagner recruiting in Russian prisons for Ukraine service

• The fate of survivors would be bleak. Strath, who was head of the cabinet office central war plans secretariat, said that they would suffer from “disease, starvation, and the unimaginable psychological effects of nuclear bombardment.”

• This was a bit much given how she had done little by way of condemning Trump for any earlier misdeeds even as the GOP was being transformed.  As a matter of fact, her voting record for Trump’s proposals comes in at an astonishing, distinctly non-dissenting 93%.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that it instructed Trump administration personnel to wipe their agency-issued cell phones when leaving their posts — a practice that persisted even after the agency received public records requests for senior ICE officials’ text messages regarding an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

• The agency made these admissions in new filings in the lawsuit brought by American Oversight and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts for the release of records concerning the criminal prosecution of a Massachusetts state court judge who allegedly allowed a defendant to avoid ICE detention in 2018.

Environment

• The Persian Gulf is one of the few places in the world ever to record a wet bulb temperature that exceeds the threshold of human survivability, 35C. Since 2005, there have been nine separate occasions of this on record.

• A wet bulb temperature of 35C means the body can no longer cool itself to a temperature that can maintain normal functions.

• Daily demand for water in England and Wales was 14 billion litres (three billion gallons), in 2018.

• But each day, another three billion litres was lost through leakage, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report.

• Despite hosepipe bans being triggered across the country, analysis of data from industry regulator Ofwat found the amount lost from leaks last year was enough to water 4.5 billion gardens for 15 minutes apiece, based on one hose pipe using 1,000 litres per hour on average.

• Each fish will be moved nearby to the River IJssel, a Dutch branch of the drought-hit River Rhine that until recently had fed the lake with fresh water.

• Prisons concentrate hundreds or thousands of people in buildings that were designed without planning for extreme heat and heat waves. Prison building materials and designs can increase exposure to heat for people inside.

• Poet Robert Frost asked if the world would end by fire or ice. It turns out that it is both, the fire of global heating and the melting of Earth’s surface ice and resultant biblical floods. Nowhere is this more clear than in Iraq.

Energy

• The Mistral will also be the last model to have Bugatti’s famous W16 16-cylinder engine. Mate Rimac, CEO of Bugatti-Rimac, the company that now owns the Bugatti brand, said future Bugatti models will be hybrids. It is unclear what sort of gas engine those future models will have, but it will not be the same W16 that, with various developments and improvements, has powered every modern Bugatti car since 2005.

• The grand tourer is based on a yet-unknown EV architecture, with all-wheel-drive capability, and powerful electric motors allowing a 0-96 km/h (0-60 mph) acceleration in 2.99 seconds and a projected top speed of 250 km/h (155 mph). According to DeLorean, the estimated range is 300 miles (483 km) thanks to a 100 kWh battery. The Alpha5 will also come fitted with a multi-mode adaptive suspension.

• Travelling inside Germany with an electric car was basically perfect. The most efficient way would involve driving fast and hard with top speed of even 180 km/h (where possible due to speed limits and traffic). BMW i4 is very efficient at high speeds with consumption maxing out at 28 kWh/100km when you actually drive at this speed all the time. In real situation in this trip we saw consumption of 20.8-22.2 kWh/100km in the first legs of the trip. The more traffic there is, the more speed limits and roadworks, the lower is the average speed and also the lower the consumption. With this kind of consumption we could comfortably drive 2 hours as fast as we could and then pick any fast charger along the route and in 26 minutes at a charger (50 kWh charged total) we’d be ready to drive for another 2 hours. This lines up very well with recommended rest stops for biological reasons (bathroom, water or coffee, a bit of movement to get blood circulating) and very close to what I had to do anyway with a gasoline car. With a gasoline car I had to refuel first, then park, then go to bathroom and so on. With an electric car I can do all of that while the car is charging and in the end the total time for a stop is very similar. Also not that there was a crazy heat wave going on and temperature outside was at about 34C minimum the whole day and hitting 40C at one point of the trip, so a lot of power was used for cooling. The car has a heat pump standard, but it still was working hard to keep us cool in the sun.

• The highschooler had heard of a type of electric motor—the synchronous reluctance motor—that doesn’t use these rare-earth materials. This kind of motor is currently used for pumps and fans, but it isn’t powerful enough by itself to be used in an electric vehicle. So, Sansone started brainstorming ways he could improve its performance.

• Over the course of a year, Sansone created a prototype of a novel synchronous reluctance motor that had greater rotational force—or torque—and efficiency than existing ones. The prototype was made from 3-D printed plastic, copper wires and a steel rotor and tested using a variety of meters to measure power and a laser tachometer to determine the motor’s rotational speed. His work earned him first prize, and $75,000 in winnings, at this year’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the largest international high school STEM competition.

Wildlife/Nature

• “That really spread-eagling position is not a worry — they’re just cooling themselves,” she said. “However lethargic and immobile they look, they’re fine.”

Finance

• Climate activists and grassroots organizers are wrestling with the contradictions embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law by President Biden on August 16. The IRA is undoubtedly the U.S. federal government’s largest-ever investment in clean energy and climate action, but it also commits to major investments in sustaining dirty fossil fuels, relies on profit-driven markets to deliver climate benefits, and banks on industry-backed solutions like ​”carbon capture” to magically produce technological feats that so far have failed.

• “What you are doing is what people all over this country are beginning to do,” the Vermont Independent said through a megaphone.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This requires a critical analysis. Let’s look at a few elements.

• “We cannot assume that the politics of transaction will turn out the votes when Americans are longing for the politics of transformation.”

• Heads of state who stayed home

• Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) said in a series of tweets that director general Khaled Quzmar was in the custody of the agency, known as Shin Bet or Shabak, “as Israeli authorities again escalate attacks” against it and other civil society groups.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Suspected members of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) shot their way onto the site of St. Agnes Catholic Church in Dinya village, in Taraba state’s Gassol County, at about 10 p.m. and abducted the catechist, Gideon Tsehemba, said the Rev. Lawrence Awua, the parish priest.

• Activists and lawyers consider the sentence against Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two and a researcher at Leeds University in Britain, shocking even by Saudi standards of justice….

• Policing these incidents by means of easily accessible QR codes has been branded “totalitarian surveillance” by critics who have raised concerns about a potential “culture of denunciation”.

• Students who feel they have suffered or seen a microaggression have been able to scan QR codes that give instant access to “Lamda’s Micro-Aggression Reporting Form”.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Murdoch’s complaints arose from a June 29th piece driven by revelations about the activities of former President Donald Trump and his allies ahead of the insurrection at the U.S. Congress last year.

• Crikey’s political editor said Fox was among Trump’s top allies, and concluded a column by calling Murdoch and his father Rupert “unindicted co-conspirators” in the siege because of the incendiary rhetoric Fox often aired.

• But, he said, “We caution against such large-scale clampdown of broadcast stations in disregard to security issues and the attendant consequence. We cannot afford the unpleasant outcome of such media blackout at this time.

• “I’m flabbergasted that this extraordinary travesty is taking place under our noses, but Julian is still in Belmarsh Prison and he’s still en route to being extradited to the United States so that the government of the United States can kill him in private,” the 78-year-old music icon said outside the Department of Justice.

• He appealed to the US attorney general by name to drop the charges against the publisher.

• The security officers then called Taliban intelligence; around 50 armed intelligence operatives arrived, who blindfolded Shearer and Faizbakhsh and transferred them to an unknown location, the journalists familiar with the case said.

• CPJ was not able to verify the reason for the detention of Shearer and Faizbakhsh or where they were being held.

• On Monday, August 15, two armed Taliban members beat Raufi, an anchor and reporter with Afghanistan’s independent Ariana News TV station, while he was recording the aftermath of an explosion in front of Ariana’s headquarters in the Bayat Media Center in the capital of Kabul, according to media reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

• The men confiscated the mobile phone Raufi was using to film the incident and one of the men slapped him in the face, causing his mouth to bleed. Raufi told CPJ that he had identified himself as a journalist and shown his press ID card when one of the men beat him for several minutes with a rifle, on his head, shoulder, back, and legs.

• According to Tatar-Inform, the searches were linked to the journalists’ articles covering Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine.

• President Vladimir Putin in March signed a law that calls for lengthy prison terms for distributing “deliberately false information” about Russian military operations as the Kremlin seeks to control the narrative about its war in Ukraine.

• WikiLeaks exposed the killers and their keepers from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrikes in which air-to-ground attacks deploying U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters killed innocent civilians and journalists. Three years after this horrific incident, the world was aware of its inherent right to know when WikiLeaks released 39 minutes of “classified” footage of the slaughter of 18 innocents.

• The plaintiffs, all of whom are American citizens, said in their complaint they visited Assange while he was living under political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. They were required to surrender their phones and other devices. They allege that without their knowledge or consent, employees of Undercover Global copied information stored on their devices.

• They allege further that the security company then provided that information to the CIA with Pompeo’s approval. Pompeo later would work as the U.S. secretary of state in the Trump administration from 2018 to 2021.

• Katie Halper interviews Bob Scheer about the future of journalism, countries lying about foreign policy, and more.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Using technology in schools enriches the classroom experience, but for many students with disabilities, materials may still be out of reach even when they’re connected online. Some states are taking proactive steps to ensure that digital tools used in K-12 schools are compliant with World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which means students with blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement and other disabilities can still engage with the same online materials as their peers. As part of a growing trend, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey have all recently passed legislation that requires digital tools used in schools to be compliant with WCAG 2.1. Screen readers, text-to-speech technology, and sufficient contrast ratios on web pages are just some of the accessibility measures that are needed for digital providers to comply with this regulation. Michigan can be a leader in accessibility and should consider legislation similar to what has been passed in other states.

• Kerala Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) general secretary in-charge PMA Salam sparked controversy by claiming that it is ”dangerous” to allow boys and girls to sit together in school classrooms. This comes amid state government efforts to introduce a gender-neutral education system in the state.

• “It is dangerous. What is the need for girls and boys to sit together in classrooms? Why are you forcing them or creating such opportunities? It will only cause problems. Students will deviate from studies,” Salam said, while criticising the Kerala government’s gender-neutral policies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• When .au direct was launched on 24 March 2022, the holders of names in the com.au, net.au and other Australian namespaces were given the opportunity to register the .au direct equivalent.

• Holders in each namespace were given equal priority, so the holders of example.com.au, example.net.au and example.id.au had an equal claim to example.au. If more than one of them wanted it, then they each had to pay the registration fee to stop it going to one of the others, but the name is not made available until there is only one claimant.

• Priority applications must be made by 20 September 2022, after which it’s ‘first in, best dressed’.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• I have spent the day today working on DPI support. This includes the DPI setting of the Operating System which is used to scale all user-interfaces, as well as HiDPI displays that would naturally have this setting set above 100%.

• If you look at some of the previous images of Horus in my Gemlog, you might notice some bluriness. This was due to the face that I had not turned on HiDPI Awareness in the Windows application, which meant that Horus’ whole interface, including fonts, were being drawn at a low resolution and then scaled up based on the system’s DPI.

• 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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