● 11.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/11/2022: AlmaLinux 8.7, PipeWire 0.3.60, and PostgreSQL 15.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We have finally added a set of dark mode defaults to the customization options for the site for those who prefer the dark side. Thanks to all the readers who have asked for this; apologies for taking so long to do it. The defaults seem good, but we are not dark-mode users, so please let us know if you have suggestions for improvements.

Desktop/Laptop

• Roughly four years ago, I started my Linux-only adventure with the Slimbook machine, for which I’ve written some fourteen individual usability reports. Things are going quite well there. Now, we’re taking it up one notch. A “gaming” rig, with Nvidia graphics and even more common desktopy stuff. From this early test, I’m quite happy, and for me to be happy about technology takes quite some effort. I feel, for the first time ever, that it might be possible, even enjoyable, for me to leave the Windows desktop behind without any great suffering or major loss of functionality. On that bubbly note, let us bid each other farewell. The testing shall continue.

Server

• In the November 2022 survey we received responses from 1,135,089,912 sites across 271,689,143 domains and 12,306,625 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 4.7 million sites, a loss of 194,480 domains, and a gain of 6,685 web-facing computers.

• The biggest growth this month comes from Cloudflare, with it gaining 8.3 million sites (+8.91%) and 490,000 domains (+1.94%). Cloudflare now accounts for 8.93% of all sites seen by Netcraft, up by 0.70pp since October.

• nginx saw significant losses in its number of sites and domains this month. It lost 8.5 million sites (-2.75%) and 490,000 domains (-0.66%). However, nginx still holds its strong lead as the most widely used web server software, with a market share of 26.51% sites. Apache has the second largest number of sites, with a market share of 21.40%.

• LiteSpeed continues its strong growth — this month it gained 720,000 sites (+1.28%) and 110,000 domains (+1.32%). This brings its market share of sites from 4.97% to 5.01% (+0.04pp).

• Following its web-wide trend, Cloudflare has also seen growth in the top million sites. Since October, it gained 1,733 of the top million sites, with its market share increasing from 20.83% to 21.00% (+0.17pp). Meanwhile, both Apache and nginx have lost market share in the top million sites, with Apache down from 21.72% to 21.66% (-0.06pp) and nginx down from 21.36% to 21.21% (-0.15pp).

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Budgie 22.10.

• So we are up with another Steam Deck review reaction. This guy claims its an absolutely honest review? Well lets find out?

• In this second issue of FreeBSD User, a Videozine for the FreeBSD Community, we have some headline news, a look at using the Raspberry Pi for a week with FreeBSD and saving electric with the Raspberry Pi 400 & FreeBSD., we check out some fun games on FreeBSD, and a look at 5 Photo editors for FreeBSD plus some comments. This is still a new project, improving and changing (or indeed regressing) , if you have any ideas, or suggestions then please drop a message in the comment section of the video. To those regular viewers there may be videos you have seen before, but as I get the handle of this, I will be putting new and exclusive content into the magazine.

• During All Things Open this year, I gave a talk on Linux Mythbusting, and it was a ton of fun! In this video, this talk is being made available for everyone to watch, so be sure to check this out. Myths regarding Linux adoption, compatibility, and more will be covered.

Kernel Space

• If you enjoy using upstream Linux kernel in your Raspberry Pi system or just want to give a try in the freshest kernel graphics drivers there, the good news is that now you can compile and boot the V3D driver from the mainline in your Raspberry Pi 4. Thanks to the work of Stefan, Peter and Nicolas [1] [2], the V3D enablement reached the Linux kernel mainline. That means hacking and using new features available in the upstream V3D driver directly from the source.

• However, even for those used to compiling and installing a custom kernel in the Raspberry Pi, there are some quirks to getting the mainline v3d module available in 32-bit and 64-bit systems. I’ve quickly summarized how to compile and install upstream kernel versions (>=6.0) in this short blog post.

Applications

• This is a bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

• Data compression is the process of storing data in a format that uses less space than the original representation would use. Compressing data can be very useful particularly in the field of communications as it enables devices to transmit or store data in fewer bits. Besides reducing transmission bandwidth, compression increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive or other storage device.

• There are 2 main types of compression. Lossy compression is a data encoding method which reduces a file by discarding certain information. When the file is uncompressed, not all of the original information will be recovered. Lossy compression is typically used to compress video, audio and images, as well as internet telephony. The fact that information is lost during compression will often be unnoticeable to most users. Lossy compression techniques are used in all DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and most multimedia available on the internet.

• Images take up massive amounts of internet bandwidth because they often have large file sizes. They are the most popular resource type on the web. According to the HTTP Archive, 60% of the data transferred to fetch a web page is images composed of JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. 45% of the images seen on sites crawled by HTTP Archive are JPEGs.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you want to log in to your Linux desktop automatically after boot, consider enabling the auto-login feature on Linux Mint.

• It’s certainly annoying when you leave your Mint desktop idle for a couple of minutes only to be welcomed by a login screen asking you to enter your password again. What if you’re the only one using the computer and don’t want to type your lengthy and secure password every time you want to log in?

• Luckily, Linux Mint offers an easy, graphical way to enable or disable automatic login. We’ll show you how.

• Here’s how to install the LibreOffice Base database module in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

• In this beginner-friendly tutorial, we’re going to show you how to count files in a directory on Linux.

• For this tutorial, you’ll need access to the Terminal (open it with CTRL + ALT + T) or SSH access to a server. This tutorial will only include instructions for the CLI. If you want to count the files in a directory via the GUI (Graphical User Interface) just right-click on the directory and click on Properties. You’ll get a window with stats about that directory, including the number of files.

• If you have a busy life, you have little time to manually go through all your favorite blogs, websites, and YouTube channels every day to see if there are any updates. If you want to organize your digital life more efficiently, you can do that by automating certain processes and bringing updates to you instead of collecting them yourself. That’s why I really like the benefits that RSS Feed functionality has to offer. For my articles for RealLinuxUser.com, I often get inspired by other websites, blogs, and also YouTube channels. And I know that many of us would like to be more efficiently informed about updates from our favorite YouTube channels, without actively going through all the channels ourselves. In this article, I will therefore explain how to add RSS Feeds for your favorite YouTube channels to Thunderbird Mail. But it works exactly the same for other RSS Feed applications if you want to use a dedicated RSS app.

• Microsoft Edge is a popular browser choice for those who prefer fast browsers that are based on a chromium-based engine. Unlike Chrome, it disables third-party tracking by default, the same as Firefox does. Fedora desktop users can now install Microsoft Edge as an alternative browser to Firefox. The official RPM contains a stable, beta, and development (nightly) version of the browser. Microsoft Edge is a great choice for users who value privacy and speed. With the official RPM, Fedora users can easily install and use Microsoft Edge on their desktop computers.

• Tutorial to install the Telegram messaging app on Fedora Linux such as 37/36/35 to start chatting and access media from various channel groups.

• Telegram is a free messenger for smartphones like WhatsApp. Users log in with their mobile numbers and can chat with each other and share pictures, videos, documents, and files or download them very easily. In addition, video and voice calls can be made, as well as surveys, groups, and channels can be created to network with each other. Especially because of the latter function, Telegram is particularly popular.

• Well, installing applications in Windows and macOS is quite simple but when it comes to Linux users, are not much familiar with how to do that. Therefore, for those who are using Fedora Linux and want the Telegram app, then the steps given here can be used.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenMRS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenMRS is an enterprise electronic medical record system framework that allows the exchange of patient data with other medical information systems. It is written in Java and provides a web interface to manage electronic medical records.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the OpenMRS 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.

WINE or Emulation

• DXVK, the popular open-source Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10 and 11 that allows you to run 3D apps and games designed for Windows on GNU/Linux systems through Wine, has been updated today to version 2.0, a major release that introduces important changes and improvements.

• As expected from a new DXVK update, version 2.0 also brings improvements for numerous games including Alan Wake, Alice Madness Returns, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Beyond Good and Evil, Dragon Age Origins, Empire: Total War, Final Fantasy XV, GTA IV, Heroes Of Annihilated Empires, Limit King Of Fighters XIII, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, SiN Episodes: Emergence, Sonic Generations, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, The Ship, Warhammer Online, and Ys Seven.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• A project within openSUSE that I think is absolutely fantastic is called the “openSUSE Package Installer.” This allows you to install packages from various third party vendors such as the “Packman” repository or other “community repositories” of the openSUSE Build Service. What this means is, the multi-step process of adding repositories and installing the desired software can be greatly simplified, at least, from a user perspective.

• Bottom Line Up Front: OPI is absolutely fantastic and makes short work of installing software available through the Open Build Service. This is a tool that I now use to quickly search and install the software I need to get my computer to do the things I want it to do. It probably won’t change my procedures for all the bits of software I install but it sure will make short work of future software searches.

Fedora Family / IBM

• AlmaLinux 8.7 is here six months after the AlmaLinux 8.6 release based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 operating system, with which is 1:1 binary compatible. This release is powered by Linux kernel 4.18.0-423.el8 and it’s supported on 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.

• Highlights include improved defense information system agency (DISA) technical guides, important security updates to the Network Security Services (NSS) libraries that change the minimum key size for all RSA operations from 128 to 1023 bits, as well as updates and improvements to infrastructure services and dynamic programming languages.

• Hello Community! The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is proud to announce general availability of AlmaLinux OS 8.7 codenamed “Stone Smilodon.”

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical is working on a new training and skills-testing scheme, currently codenamed CUE, to help people without formal certifications to show that they’ve got what it takes.

• In a talk titled The Problem of “Street Cred” at this week’s Ubuntu Summit in Prague, Adrianna Frick from Canonical’s credentials and curriculum team presented it’s proposed skills-testing and training scheme CUE: Canonical Ubuntu Essentials.q

Open Hardware/Modding

• At Arduino we like to experiment with new technologies to figure out if we can use them to improve the tools we make for our users. We’ve recently been experimenting with the Python language as a possible extension for our programming platforms, considering how it has become the number one language for many types of users. Specifically we’re looking at MicroPython, the version of Python that runs on microcontrollers. We’ve created a partnership with OpenMV, which ported their computer vision oriented virtual machine to some of our products and enabled us to do incredible stuff with the Nicla Vision (for example).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Sick of Twitter? Fed up with Facebook? Online abuse and NSFW content getting you down? Just want to exchange ideas away from the glare of people who oppose you?

• Mastodon is the answer. And thanks to its open-source nature, it is possible to set up your own Mastodon instance, enabling conversation on any topic and giving your users some safety and privacy from trolls of all kinds.

Events

• Making our grand debut, Collabora will be attending electronica next week in Munich for the first time! Diving into the world of electronics alongside the leading examples of the industry, we’re excited to partake on all fronts. Taking place from November 15 to 18 at the Trade Fair Center Messe München, we’ll have a booth to showcase our demos at B4.428.

• Drop by and our engineers will be delighted to walk you through one of our three demos. Highlighting different projects from our multimedia, machine learning and core teams, you’ll gain a behind-the-scenes look at different solutions we’ve developed.

• As every six months for the last two years, a new virtual edition of the Yocto Project Summit is coming, and its schedule has been announced.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• curl offered the -d / –data option already in its first release back in 1998. curl 4.0. A trusted old friend.

• curl also has some companion versions of this option that work slightly differently, but they all have the common feature that they append data to the the request body. Put simply: with these options users construct the body contents to POST. Very useful and powerful. Still today one of the most commonly used curl options, for apparent reasons.

• [...]

• This new friend we call –url-query makes -G rather pointless, as this is a more powerful option that does everything -G ever did and a lot more. We will of course still keep -G supported and working. Because that is how we work.

• A boring fact of life is that new versions of curl trickle out into the world rather slowly to ordinary users. Because of this, we can be certain that scripts and users all over will need to keep using -G for yet another undefined period of time.

Mozilla

• In a coming release of the Thunderbird 102.x series, we will be making some changes to the way we handle OAuth2 authorization with Microsoft accounts, and this may involve some extra work for users currently using Microsoft-hosted accounts through their employer or educational institution.

• In order to meet Microsoft’s requirements for publisher verification, it is necessary for us to switch to a new Azure application and application ID. However, some of these accounts are configured to require administrators to approve any applications accessing email.

• Parenting has never been easy. But with a generation growing up with groundbreaking technology, families are facing new challenges along with opportunities as children interact with screens everywhere they go — while learning at school, playing with friends and for on-the-go entertainment.

• We are previewing a new Mozilla Firefox survey conducted in partnership with YouGov to better understand families’ needs in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom that we will release fully in January 2023. We wanted to hear parents’ thoughts around online safety, as well as their biggest concerns and questions when their kids navigate through the sticky parts of the web before getting to the good stuff.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of PostgreSQL, including 15.1, 14.6, 13.9, 12.13, 11.18, and 10.23. This release fixes 25 bugs reported over the last several months.

• This is the final release of PostgreSQL 10. PostgreSQL 10 will no longer receive security and bug fixes. If you are running PostgreSQL 10 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.4.2 was released on October 13

Funding

• Fastly is a cloud platform that provides edge services such as CDN, WAF, Bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and more.

• They provide incredibly high-performance solutions that enterprises around the world use.

Programming/Development

• Every now and then, when I submit some code for a code review, people tell me that I forgot qAsConst.

• Now I have one more enemy, namely: Clazy! It has also started saying this, and I guess it’s about time for me to figure out what is going on. When do I need qAsConst and why do I need to know these things?

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 9 RC!

• Go is an open source programming language that combines a dynamic language’s ease of use with the reliability and performance of a statically typed, compiled language.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Apparently, even though I have 60% hearing loss I would be given a certificate of 40% hearing loss and they call it Temporary Progressive Loss. I saw almost all the people who had come, many of them having far severe defencies than me getting the same/similar certificate.

Security

• Google has resolved a high-severity security issue affecting all Pixel smartphones that could be trivially exploited to unlock the devices.

• The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-20465 and reported by security researcher David Schütz in June 2022, was remediated as part of the search giant’s monthly Android update for November 2022.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (libjettison-java and xorg-server), Slackware (sysstat and xfce4), SUSE (python3 and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox).

• Citrix has released security updates to address a critical authentication bypass flaw in the application delivery controller (ADC) and Gateway products that could be exploited to take control of affected systems.

• Today CISA published its guide on Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC), a vulnerability management methodology that assesses vulnerabilities and prioritizes remediation efforts based on exploitation status, impacts to safety, and prevalence of the affected product in a singular system.

• Even more troublingly, such malicious libraries can be incorporated into other open source projects and published on GitHub, effectively broadening the scope and scale of the attacks.

• A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

• CISA has released twenty (20) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on November 10, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

• CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have updated joint Cybersecurity Advisory AA22-228A: Threat Actors Exploiting Multiple CVEs Against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, originally released August 16, 2022.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, nonprofit Firefox and others allow the company, TrustCor Systems, to act as what’s known as a root certificate authority, a powerful spot in the internet’s infrastructure that guarantees websites are not fake, guiding users to them seamlessly. The company’s Panamanian registration records show that it has the identical slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware maker identified this year as an affiliate of Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which public contracting records and company documents show has sold communication interception services to U.S. government agencies for more than a decade. One of those TrustCor partners has the same name as a holding company managed by Raymond Saulino, who was quoted in a 2010 Wired article as a spokesman for Packet Forensics. Saulino also surfaced in 2021 as a contact for another company, Global Resource Systems, that caused speculation in the tech world when it briefly activated and ran more than 100 million previously dormant IP addresses assigned decades earlier to the Pentagon. The Pentagon reclaimed the digital territory months later, and it remains unclear what the brief transfer was about, but researchers said the activation of those IP addresses could have given the military access to a huge amount of internet traffic without revealing that the government was receiving it.

• Cory Doctorow does a great job explaining the context and the general security issues.

• A previous version of this thread reported that Trustcor has the same officers as Packet Forensics; they do not; they have the same officers as Measurement Systems. I regret the error.

• I’ve got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say “trust no one,” a philosophy more formally known as “Zero Trust,” that holds that certain elements of your security should never be delegated to any third party.

• The problem is, it’s trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

• But how do you know your compiler is trustworthy? When Unix/C co-creator Ken Thompson received the Turing Prize, he either admitted or joked that he had hidden back doors in the compiler he’d written, which was used to compile all of the other compilers….

• Draft European Parliament report proposes halt on use of surveillance software across 27-member bloc

• [...]

• A Europe-wide moratorium on surveillance software such as NSO Group’s Pegasus and similar products is needed to clamp down on abuses, according to a draft report from European Union lawmakers published Tuesday.

• The report was authored by Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, who chairs a special committee that has been investigating the use of spyware in the 27 EU countries.

• “In a democracy, putting people under surveillance should be an exception and there should be rules,” Ms. in ‘t Veld said.

• [...]

• NSO Group didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a European Parliament hearing this summer, a representative from the company said that it has sold the software to at least five EU member countries.

• Last year, the Biden administration placed NSO Group on an export prohibition list, preventing it from obtaining certain technology from the U.S. and making it more difficult for the company to seek international customers. The move followed investigations from a consortium of news outlets into NSO Group’s sale of Pegasus to dozens of government and law-enforcement customers around the world for spying on journalists, politicians and human rights activists.

• Researchers have pointed to governments outside Europe that use Pegasus to extract information from phones. Citizen Lab said in January that around 35 journalists and activists in El Salvador were targeted with the spyware, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Israeli police have said that they use various types of spyware including one developed by NSO Group.

Finance

• “The golden age of globalisation, in 1990-2010, was something to behold,” wrote The Economist in a January, 2019 article. “Commerce soared as the cost of shifting goods in ships and planes fell, phone calls got cheaper, tariffs were cut and the financial system liberalised.” The very nature of the global firm was transformed during these two decades, with The Globally Integrated Enterprise destined to become the corporate model of the future, said IBM CEO Sam Palmisano in a 2006 Foreign Affairs article.

• But, then global trade started slow down. “After the go-go 1990s and 2000s the pace of economic integration stalled in the 2010s, as firms grappled with the aftershocks of a financial crisis, a populist revolt against open borders and President Donald Trump’s trade war,” wrote The Economist in its June 18, 2022 lead article. “The flow of goods and capital stagnated. Many bosses postponed big decisions on investing abroad: just-in-time gave way to wait-and-see. No one knew if globalisation faced a blip or extinction.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• The undersigned civil society organizations demand that the Libyan House of Representatives repeal the Anti-Cybercrime Law n°5/2022 issued on September 27th, 2022. We call for the law not to be applied, as it directly undermines human rights and fundamental rights, namely freedom of expression and opinion, and the rights to peaceful assembly, privacy, and personal data protection. The law also regularizes the Executive’s comprehensive, warrantless surveillance over the digital spaces and allows them to censor websites and content.

• Following its ratification on October 26, 2021, the Libyan House of Representatives decided to bring into force the Anti-Cybercrime Law by officially publishing it on September 27, 2022. This happened without prior notice and in complete disregard of demands from civil society organizations and four UN Special Rapporteurs for the law to be withdrawn. The law in question infringes on fundamental human rights principles, as well as Libya’s international commitments, as its drafting process did not include stakeholder dialogue and engagement.

• Libya’s House of Representatives did not publicly share the law until a few days after it came into force, when it was posted on its Facebook page. Before this it was only available as a leaked draft on social media. The following statement highlights our main concerns regarding the risks of this law.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Around the world, governments and tech companies alike tout artificial intelligence (AI) and forms of automated decision-making (ADM) as cheap, convenient, and fast fixes for a range of societal challenges – from moderating illegal content on social media or scanning medical images for signs of diseases, to detecting fraud and tracking down tax evaders.

• Yet at the same time, scandals over the abuse and misuse of AI systems just keep piling up. Automated content moderation systems, which are constantly presented as the silver-bullet solution to the complex problems of illegal content online, have been shown to be flawed, limited, and prone to dangerous errors. But the dangers aren’t restricted to online spaces. In the Netherlands, tax authorities implemented an algorithm to detect benefits fraud, but in doing so, falsely accused and penalised thousands of people, many of whom were minorities or from low-income backgrounds. These examples beg the question: how can we ensure that uses of AI systems respect or even extend fundamental human rights?

• Fortunately, the conversation has shifted away from vague, non-binding ethical guidelines, and various governments are proposing concrete regulations, such as the EU’s proposed AI Act, instead. There is also growing recognition of the need for other human-rights based approaches to AI governance – including the use of human rights impact assessments (HRIAs). In our new report, we explore the role of HRIAs in AI governance, and offer recommendations for how they can be used to ensure that AI systems are developed and deployed in a rights-respecting manner.

• Alaa Abd El-Fattah must be set free. Amid a total local blackout on his precarious health situation, Access Now and civil society from around the globe are incredibly alarmed by the news that the British-Egyptian activist is receiving medical intervention without authorities informing his family or lawyer as he languishes through a hunger and water strike in his prison cell. It is unclear if this means Alaa is being force-fed, a medically dangerous and violent act of torture.

• “Keeping Alaa alive with the intent to cement and prolong his torture is a depraved and inhumane act of vengeance by a regime hellbent on wiping out any trace of the 2011 revolution,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy and Advocacy Mananger at Access Now. “The UK government must immediately intervene to free Alaa and end this cruelty.”

• As the Egyptian government tightens ranks, Alaa’s family, and the whole world, need proof of life now. While information on Alaa’s current situation is sparse due to authorities blocking his visitation, his sister, Mona Seif, Tweeted about an interaction with prison staff, who reportedly stated, “Medical intervention has been taken with Alaa, with the knowledge of judicial entities.” Alaa’s lawyer reported today, November 10, that he had been granted a visit, but was subsequently denied access to the prison.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Take a step back and imagine the world without the Internet. No social media, websites, e-commerce stores, or online chat rooms. The world would be a little blank for many of us.

• Actually, people did live before the Internet came into existence. However, its presence revolutionized the globe and rapidly created immense opportunities.

• So, who invented the Internet? When was the Internet invented? What was the very first message transmitted over the network? All these questions come to our minds at least once.

Monopolies

• CISPE has filed a complaint, urging the European Commission to open a formal investigation into how Microsoft is allegedly “irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments.”

• Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a new policy statement outlining the agency’s powers to address “unfair methods of competition” under Section 5 of the FTC Act, clearing the way for new agency action to curb anti-competitive behavior in Big Tech and across the economy.

• The announcement follows the agency’s move last year to rescind its 2015 competition policy statement that had curtailed the FTC’s ability to create competition rules and limited the kinds of enforcement actions it could bring against dominant firms that engaged in anti-competitive practices. Public Knowledge previously applauded the decision to rescind that policy statement, suggesting that a new statement would prove an important next step. Now, we have that new statement.

Copyrights

• One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the worst copyright law so far – are being taken up elsewhere. One I didn’t include, because its story is still unfolding, is Canada’s Bill C-18: “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada”.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• People in my office are fairly international. Today I happen to be sitting between two French people.

• Suddenly behind me I hear “Superbe!”

• Then the one on the other side comes back to his desk and makes a world-weary exclamation that I don’t *think* is actual words but sounds like “Eyeore!”

Technical

• I play an arcade music game by Konami called “Sound Voltex”, which I first picked up in 2015. The game’s song charts feature difficulty ratings that range from 1 to 20. Though I’ve now been playing the game for seven and a half years, I still haven’t managed to beat any level-20 charts yet.

• A close friend of mine began playing Sound Voltex, which is often shortened to SDVX, about three and a half years ago. He now regularly clears some of the highest-rated charts. This has bothered me a lot in the past. I’d get frustrated at my own inability to progress, and I’d feel jealous of his skills. What bothered me more, however, was that I was one of the only SDVX players in my area back in 2015, so people often came to me when they were curious about the game or wanted to share scores and tips. Now everyone talks to him instead.

Programming and More

• I know I do a lot of Emacs proselytizing on this phlog, and I’m sure the vanishingly small number of people who read my stuff are sick of it, but I read this post on uninformative.de [1] and it struck such a chord of familiarity that I can’t hold myself back.

• The post describes how the author, frustrated with the declining support for X11, is hunting for new ways to continue remaining in control of their computer. Not control in the philosophical free software is freedom sense (although this is obviously of paramount importance!) but in the very practical but somewhat orthogonal sense of being _easily_ able to completely customize their interaction with their computer that was previously afforded by the relative ease of writing X11 window managers.

• So, this is my first gemlog item on the English variant of my capsule. I’d like to tell you how I packaged Nitter for Gentoo.

• [...]

• The problem was their package manager/build system, called Nimble. It didn’t work in network-sandboxed environments, didn’t have staged installation support and there was no way to tell if build/test stage could be run without invoking these commands.

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