● 12.12.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/12/2022: OpenMandriva ROME 22.12 Platinum Candidate, GNU Linux-Libre 6.1, Kdenlive 22.12, Firefox 108, and EasyOS Bugfix Release

Posted in News Roundup at 1:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week was packed with lots of goodies, mostly software releases, but also some distro updates and other stuff. Linux kernel 6.1 is the highlight of this week and rest assured that it will arrive soon in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.

• Blender, Audacity, digiKam, Tor Browser, OpenShot, KDE Gear, and KDE Frameworks software all received new versions with many exciting changes, and KaOS Linux and Armbian distros have new versions as well. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for December 11th, 2022.

• Launch Heavy carries a hefty price tagMechanical keyboards often need to pay more attention to Linux support because manufacturers see developers as…

UNIX

• Back in the ’90s and very early 2000s, a whole market segment of computers existed that we don’t really talk about anymore today: the UNIX workstation. They were non-x86 machines running one of the many commercial UNIX variants, and were used for the very high end of computing. They were expensive, unique, different, and quite often incredibly overengineered.

• Countless companies made and sold these UNIX workstation. SGI was a big player in this market, with their fancy, colourful machines with MIPS processors running IRIX. There was also Sun Microsystems (and Oracle in the tail end), selling ever more powerful UltraSPARC workstations running Solaris. Industry legend DEC sold Alpha machines running Digital UNIX (later renamed to Tru64 UNIX when DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998). IBM of course also sold UNIX workstations, powered by their PowerPC architecture and AIX operating system.

• As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel’s Itanium – which didn’t exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history.

• Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems?

Server

• Canonical Kubernetes 1.26 is now generally available for both distributions, Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s, following the release of upstream Kubernetes on the 8th of December.We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.  This blog is a quick overview of the latest development highlights available in Canonical Kubernetes 1.26 as well as a look at our favourite upstream enhancements.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today, I’m going to be taking a quick first look at the recently released Deepin 20.8. This is a Debian-based distro that features its own desktop environment and suite of custom applications. And it’s absolutely gorgeous!

• We complete a year-long journey and discover some unspoken truths about a great Linux distro. Plus one small, and one major update on our GrapheneOS adventure.

• 1. back up what you care about 2. back up stuff that isn’t backed up 3. back up what you can in the way you can, but BE CONSISTENT 4. make it easy 5. use a supported backup application 6. know how to recover 7. off-site is best 8. encrypted data is best 9. rotate your backups, monitor disk space 10. check in on your backups

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has officially released the Linux kernel 6.1, and as usual there’s absolutely tons of new features and fixes.

• Linux Torvalds has pushed out version 6.1 of the Linux kernel, with initial Rust support being one of the headline features.

• Linux kernel development has been done exclusively in C until now. The addition of Rust could open new doors, making it easier for other developers to contribute to the open source project.

• Linus Torvalds is happy with some early pull requests after blasting developers for late submissions, and says he’ll maintain strict rules to keep the merge window calm as the holiday season approaches.

• Linus Torvalds is giving Santa Claus competition as the FOSS-lovin’ Finn is putting the best possible present under the tree this festive season: a brand new Linux kernel.

• Yes, Linux kernel 6.1 is here, ready to power the world’s servers, desktops, smartphones, switches, routers, and everything in between. Announcing the arrival on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Linus Torvalds says: “So here we are, a week late, but last week was nice and slow, and I’m much happier about the state of 6.1 than I was a couple of weeks ago”.

• The Linux kernel is developed and maintained by a worldwide community of engineers and enthusiasts. While a great number of those who contribute to the Linux kernel as part of their day job others choose to do so in their free time, of their own accord, and on their own terms.

• Let’s take a closer look at what those awesome folks have been up to recently…

• Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has released version 6.1 of the project, and warned that “the merge window from Hell” has now opened.

• Each release of the Linux kernel is followed by two weeks in which contributors submit code they’d like to see in the next version. The release of Linux 6.1 today means that window closes on December 26 – the day after a certain popular holiday.

• Torvalds today revealed that he’s travelling ahead of that holiday, so has even less time than usual to tee up the next cut of the kernel.

• He’s therefore laid down the law to would-be contributors.

• “I want to re-iterate that I’m going to be pretty strict about the merge window rules,” he wrote. “The rules are that the pull requests sent to me during the merge window should have been ready _before_ the merge window, and have seen some time in Linux-next. No last-minute batch of experimental new development that hasn’t been seen by our test automation.”

• Linux-next is the staging area the kernel dev team uses to queue up code that has been flagged as destined for the next kernel release, and therefore gets some attention before the merge window commences.

• Meanwhile, Linux 6.1 also includes “support for destructive BPF programs, some significant io_uring performance improvements, better user-space control over transparent huge-page creation, improved memory-tiering support.”

• Linux Kernel 6.1 is finally here, and it comes bearing early Christmas gifts in the form of improvements and support for new hardware. 🎄

• It comes a few months after the release of Linux Kernel 6.0, where the naming scheme was changed from 5.x.x to 6.x in favor of a less confusing alternative.

• As usual, the last kernel release of the year may be considered a long-term release version that gets support for a couple of years.

• Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 6.1 on Dec 11, 2022, as the final mainline Kernel release of 2022. For many reasons, this release is important.

• Perhaps the most important one is the initial Rust language support in mainline Kernel for better security and memory-safe codes in the coming days. Which is bound to reduce the number of Kernel vulnerabilities the more we move towards Rust from C.

• This is what’s new.

• Linux 6.1 has been released yesterday, a week later than expected. Head over to LWN (part 1, part 2) or KernelNewbies for an overview of the major features merged in this release.

• Based on the Linux 6.1 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 6.1 kernel is here to adjust several drivers that needed deblobbing or due to code rearrangement, including AMDGPU and i915 DRM, brcmfmac, Intel ACPI sound, r8188eu, and rtw8852c Wi-Fi.

• Also deblobbed was the rtw8852b Wi-Fi driver, and the cleaning up code of the drivers for TM6000 TV cards, as well as AV7110, SP-8870, and CPiA2-based budget media cards have been adjusted due to the fact that they’ve been moved upstream to a deprecated directory.

Applications

• Openshot video editor announced the new major 3.0.0 release this weekend. Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 22.10.

• Openshot 3.0.0 added ability to export multiple video clips into their own video files, in their original profile / format, though I didn’t find out how to do this trick in the Linux build 😄.

• The new release fixed many stability issues, reduced memory footprint, and improved video preview to have smoother video preview and fewer freezes and pauses during previewing. Also, it improved the icons, cursors, logos, as well as the maths to add fully supports high DPI displays and monitors, such as 4K monitors. User guide has been improved with updated screenshots and PDF output support.

• Version 3.0 of the OpenShot video editor is out.

• Ranger is a terminal-based file manager that uses Vim-like keyboard commands. If you’re working in a terminal all day, running Sed and Awk commands and using Vim, then you might want a way to manage files without leaving the comforting glow of your amber-on-black screen. There are, of course, the ls and cd commands, but sometimes you want to “walk through” your system, or maybe you want to mimic a graphical experience without the graphics.

• Another reason for buying it is to test EasyOS. All of my other computers are Intel-based. Except for one that has an Intel GPU on the motherboard and a Radeon card plugged in.

• I was half-hoping that there might be some issues with the hardware, that I could work-on, but EasyOS 4.5.3 runs fine, no issues whatsoever. Video works nice, automatically using the Xorg amdgpu driver.

• There was a problem with EasyShare reporting multiple network connection, when in fact there was only one.

• PhilH sent fixes for PupRadio, have bumped it from 1.0 to 1.1.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this post, we will cover how to install cri-o on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS step-by-step.

• In this tutorial, we will cover how to block certain packages from being installed or upgraded and how to block specific versions of packages…

• urBackup is an open-source client/server backup system.

• This simple tutorial shows how to install get-iplayer and use it to download TV and radio programmes from BBC iPlayer/BBC Sounds for offline playback.

• get-iplayer is a free and open-source app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. With it, you can searches and downloads your favorite BBC TV / radio programmes. Then play locally and legally in 30 days.

• NOTE: For legal reason, you need a TV licence to download BBC TV/radio programmes! And, you have to delete them after 30 days of legal play!

• There are times when it is just quicker, easier or even necessary to use a graphical application, and there are also times when you may be away from the computer that has your crucial applications installed.

• Whatever the scenario, Linux and other operating systems running an X server have the ability to forward a graphical application through SSH. Following a few simple steps, you can run a remote application in all of its full graphical glory.

• In a bid to make the Ubuntu default file manager easier to use, a new feature called Folder’s Color can be installed. Now you can better tell what’s what in your file manager.

• If you’re managing a Linux server, you may be wondering how to configure Postfix to send emails from external SMTP servers. Postfix is a popular open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) used to route and deliver email on Linux. While setting up Postfix to send and receive email is not difficult, using external SMTP servers can be a bit more complicated.

• In this article, we’ll walk you through how to configure Postfix to send emails from external SMTP servers.

• Apache benchmarking is the process of testing the performance and scalability of an Apache web server by simulating multiple concurrent clients accessing the server. This is typically done using the ApacheBench (ab) tool, which is a command-line utility that comes bundled with the Apache HTTP Server.

• You think you always interacted with Bash? Wrong; under the hood, there was a savior to provide you speed and better efficiency, known as Dash.

• Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel at Y Combinator call these ideas “Tarpit Ideas” (a much better term, much better than my “Flying-Car Syndrome”). There’s probably no other institution that has seen more nascent startup pitches than Y Combinator, so they are in a unique position to think about this. Some notes on some of the ideas they touch upon in their conversation, “Avoid These Tempting Startup Ideas.”

• There are a bunch of programs out there, that can get you connected to a serial port of a switch, but using screen was the best and easiest solution I’ve found. Works perfectly in the CLI, can be run in the background, and easy to set up – if it is not already installed.

• Our Prometheus system does a bunch of DNS lookups through Blackbox for various purposes. We check that our own DNS servers correctly resolve various things from our domain (and harvest the SOA values in the process so we can verify that everything is in sync), we check that our secondaries properly have our stuff, we check that our internal forwarding resolvers can resolve outside domains, and we check that some outside public DNS servers can resolve things in our domain as a sanity check.

• You are already familiar with the directory structure in Linux. It is like the roots of a tree.

• If you see messages like this when running APT updated on Debian/Ubuntu systems:

• W: https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/jammy/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details. This is because using apt-key – particularly the mechanism where it dumps all its keys into one large file (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg) – is a bad idea and deprecated. Apt-Key trusts all those keys, for anything that apt is doing – not just for the particular repository that they key belongs to – anything!

• Afaik, the only way to fix this is currently by hand.

• Want to use your Raspberry Pi device for creating GUI applications? Install Kivy. It is an open-source Python framework that lets you develop cross-platform applications for mobile, Windows, macOS and Linux systems. Though Kivy uses the official Kivy language, it can be run efficiently on any Python IDE since it is already integrated with Python.

• This article will teach you how to install and use Kivy on a Raspberry Pi system.

• Want to use a Raspberry Pi device to run PlayStation Portable games? You should need a PSP emulator for that. Though different emulators like RetroPie, Recalbox and Lakka are designed for running games, including PSP. But, installing an emulator as an application can be helpful in case the device isn’t only associated with gaming purposes.

• In this guide, we will explain how to easily install the PlayStation Portable (PSP) emulator on Raspberry Pi and start running games.

• I had bought a Thinkpad E470 laptop back in 2018 which was lying unused for quite some time. Recently when I wanted to use it, I found that the keyboard is not working, especially some keys and after some time the laptop will hang in Lenovo boot screen. I came back to Bangalore almost after 2 years from my hometown (WFH due to Covid) and thought it was the right time to get my laptop back to normal working state. After getting the keyboard replaced I noticed that 1TB HDD is no longer fast enough for my taste!. I’ve to admit I never thought I would start disliking HDD so quickly thanks to modern SSD based work laptops. So as a second upgrade I got the HDD removed from my laptop and got a 240G SSD. Yeah I know its reduction from my original size but I intend to continue using my old HDD via USB SATA enclosure as an external HDD which can house the extra data which I need to save.

• The C shell (or CSH) is one of the earliest UNIX/Linux shell interpreters, developed by Bill Joy at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1970s, inspired by the C programming language.

• Along with Bash and Korn Shell, these three were the most popular shell interpreters in the early 1990s and distributed as the default login shell in most UNIX/Linux systems.

• On systems like macOS or Red Hat, instead of C shell, you will find its extended version, Tcsh (also known as “tee-see-shell” or “tee-shell“), as a symbolic link pointing towards its original source.

• The “t” in “tcsh” comes from the “T” in the TENEX operating system, and many features were taken from this OS as inspiration by the author of Tcsh while studying at Carnegie Mellon University.

• The Tcsh added features are enhanced history substitution (which allows you to execute previously entered commands using the “↑” and “↓” keys), spelling correction, and word completion (press the tab button to autocomplete).

• You might have heard of the Bash shell (or even ZSH or Fish), whose popularity has overshadowed other shells to the point that most Linux users think they are the only shell interpreters available for Linux.

• But before they came into existence, there was another shell that developed a strong foundation for modern shells.

• To print an array in Rust, you can use the println! macro, which is a built-in macro in the Rust standard library. The println! macro takes a format string and a list of arguments, and prints the formatted string to the standard output.

• To delete a Git branch locally, you can use the git branch command with the -d option followed by the name of the branch you want to delete.

• PPAs are additional repositories meant to add on Ubuntu-based systems for installing any third-party packages or software not available through the official system repository. PPA stands for Personal Package Archives (PPAs) and is often used to distribute pre-release software so that it can be tested.

• LAMP is the common software stack used in Linux systems to create a web server along with PHP and MySQL server applications. However, sometimes, especially if someone is a beginner and has done some wrong setting then he or she would want to reinstall the LAMP. However, before that, it is better to completely remove the existing LAMP stack from your Linux systems such as Ubuntu or Debian before installing it again.

• To completely uninstall a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server and start fresh, here are the steps you will need to perform on your Linux system. The given steps are performed on Ubuntu or Debian systems.

• The ip command is a networking command-line utility that is used to assign an IP address to a network interface or configure useful network variables in Linux.

• In programming languages, Loops are essential components and are used when you want to repeat code over and over again until a specified condition is met.

• In Bash scripting, loops play much the same role and are used to automate repetitive tasks just like in programming languages.

• In Bash scripting, there are 3 types of loops: for loop, while loop, and until loop. The three are used to iterate over a list of values and perform a given set of commands.

• In this guide, we will focus on the Bash For Loop in Linux.

• Transitioning your data from Docker to Podman is not very difficult to do if you understand container transports.

• Raspberry Pi is a device that enables users to perform any activity, whether related to any computational task or using it for playing games. If you have the device, you can utilize it for multiple purposes. Users interested in playing video files on the Raspberry Pi terminal can do it easily by installing a lightweight media player called “mplayer”. It uses the command-line terminal to run your video files on the Raspberry Pi system.

• This article is a detailed guide to play video from the terminal on Raspberry Pi using MPlayer.

• Many Java programmers use Cryostat to monitor and report statistics on their applications. Since its early days, Cryostat has performed the discovery of target Java Virtual Machine (JVM) applications in various ways. This article demonstrates how you can fully customize your application selection with Cryostat 2.2.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Flatpak on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Flatpak is a technology that allows you to install and run applications on Linux-based operating systems, whereas Flathub is a growing collection of apps that can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. It’s similar to the Snap package manager, but it has some key differences.

• 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 Flatpak on a Fedora 37.

• Arduino IDE is a versatile and open-source platform that can program multiple boards. It is one of the most popular IDEs available to program microcontroller boards. Using Arduino IDE, we can compile and upload programs to boards and see real time results in the serial monitor.

• While programming with Arduino IDE we might need to switch between different devices and PCs. For that the conventional Arduino IDE is not that fast. To solve this, we can use Portable Arduino IDE and transfer entire IDE files including libraries to any computer without affecting the remaining system files. This article will cover how we can set up a portable Arduino IDE installation on a PC.

• AnyDesk is a remote desktop software that allows you to connect to your computer remotely and work from anywhere without being limited by the location of an internet connection. It is a cross-platform software that provides secure remote access for file transfers or VPN features but also works well as just another tool in professionals’ arsenal when they need more control over what’s going on their machine than someone else might offer them – whether it be family members who don’t understand how technology works yet; company executives looking at data differently because these people have much bigger picture views.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install AnyDesk on Fedora 37/36/35 workstation desktop. The tutorial will create and import the official repository with cli commands, show you a tip on fixing a common error faced by Fedora users currently that seems to affect all Distributions of Fedora to date, and install the software.

• Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board that does not have any internal storage, it uses an external storage device, and obviously larger storage costs you more and you cannot keep changing your storage device because the Raspberry Pi OS is also present on the storage device. So, replacing the storage device means you need to reinstall the OS too. If you are facing space issues then instead of changing the storage device it is recommended to free up some space on disk. In this article, we will present how to free up disk space on Raspberry Pi.

• This article covers the definition of a Deb package (file), its installation on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Debian distributions, and also shows how to remove deb packages afterward.

• Great news, Linus Torvalds has Linux Kernel 6.1 on Dec 11, 2022, and brings initial Rust language support in mainline Kernel for better security and memory-safe code, which has been hyped about for a while. Besides the usual performance enhancements, Linux Kernel 6.1 would be desired but primarily for users with new hardware that is unsupported or has current known issues in your existing Kernel. Certain Linux distributions, such as Rocky Linux, focus on long-term stability, so you will need to use a third party to install the latest Kernel and keep up-to-date with the minor updates that will come out almost daily to weekly with any new kernel and the best option to do this is with ELRepo.

• As discussed in the introduction, the best option is to use the ELRepo repository, which has an excellent reputation amongst EL9 and EL8 distributions such as AlmaLinux, CentOS, Oracle, etc. The following tutorial will show you how to import the ELRepo for Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8 desktop or server using cli commands for the users that require to update their Kernel for better hardware support.

• ArchBang is a minimal and lightweight Arch Linux based distribution. It uses the i3 window manager. With its minimal nature, ArchBang can help you revive your old computer or low-end devices.

• Ubuntu users commonly use Firefox and perhaps a secondary browser such as Chromium Browser, Google Chrome, Opera, or Vivaldi browsers, to name a few. However, the Pale Moon browser is an option for users that have been using the internet for quite a while and may prefer its design more than anything else.

• Pale Moon is a web browser built on an independently developed source that was forked from Firefox/Mozilla many years ago and offers features and optimizations to improve stability along with the balance of features and performance to satisfy the needs for general use while still evolving technology on Web standards.

• As per the introduction, you will learn how to install Pale Moon Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fosa desktop using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.

• OBS Studio is a free, lightweight open-source, cross-platform screencasting software for screen recording, camera image, and sound record that works well on Fedora Linux. OBS Studio also makes it easier for those new to the world of live streaming as it is designed to be simple to use, comes with plugins and scripts that can be installed and is considered one of the best free, open-source software of its nature.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install OBS Studio on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux by importing the RPM Fusion Repository that contains the latest stable version and updating and removing the software in the future.

• Carbonio Community Edition (Carbonio CE) is an open source no-cost email and collaboration platform by Zextras. It provides privacy for organizations seeking digital sovereignty by using on-premises self-hosted servers. Using self-hosted servers offers a deeper level of control over infrastructure and data. However, it requires more attention to server configurations and infrastructure management to guarantee data sovereignty. Tasks done by system administrators play an important role in this matter. This makes administrative tasks a crucial part of achieving digital sovereignty, therefore, an administrative console dedicated to such tasks becomes extremely valuable to facilitate sysadmins’ everyday jobs.

• This is why Zextras launched the first release of its own admin panel for Carbonio CE on October 2022. For Carbonio CE system administrators, it is the first step toward the creation of an all-inclusive admin console.

Games

• Seems like the upcoming Steam release of The Last of Us Part I should work well on Steam Deck, as not only are Valve already teasing it, the Co-President of developer Naughty Dog talked about it too.

• Naev is a reasonably well known free and open source 2D space sim, one that’s about to get a whole lot bigger with the v0.10 release now in Beta (specifically, it’s on its second Beta).

• From South Korean developer icefill comes Crawl Tactics, a new turn-based game that blends together elements of a roguelike and a tactical RPG into something unique. You’ve no doubt played a few of these smaller tactical RPGs and various strategy games, so it may look a bit familiar on the surface.

• Love more casual games? The “slice-of-life sim” named The Garden Path is getting closer and a new trailer is up.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of version 22.12. This development cycle comes with more than 350 commits, bringing new features, bug fixes and preparing the code base for exciting changes that we expect in the near future.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Earlier in 2022, Lunduke predicted that the Haiku Operating System would become viable for daily use by many people (Lunduke included) by the end of the calendar year. Magically on schedule, Haiku now has a viable web browser (GNOME Web / Epiphany) ported and functional.

New Releases

• It is over two years since the last official release of Puppy was announced on Distrowatch. There have been plenty of releases since then, and derivatives; however, none has been presented to Distrowatch as the latest “official” Puppy.

• This is another bug-fix release since version 4.5.

• [...]

• Hopefully 4.5.3 is bug-free enough to let it rest awhile, as I enjoy the summer weather here. Also, want to keep playing with building the new Kirkstone-series in OpenEmbedded.

BSD

• FreeBSD 12.4 was released a few days back with several updates and improvements. Here’s a release roundup.

• FreeBSD 12.4 is the 5th release of the current 12 stable series and coming up after a year’s package updates, improvements and bug fixes.

• This is what’s new.

• A rewritten version of vmd(8)’s BIOS memory map handling could soon be appearing in -current.

• Chris Baird created Ersatz-Emacs, starting with MicroEMACS 3.6 as released to mod.sources and the Public Domain by Daniel Lawrence in 1986, and was itself based on the work of Steve Wilhite and George Jones to MicroEMACS 2.0 (then also public domain) by Dave Conroy.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• OpenMandriva Team releases ROME 22.12 Platinum Candidate.

• ROME is the rolling release designed for individual users, it will receive the most up to date packages including recent security and bug fix upgrades.

• Some of the major changes since ROME Gold Candidate:

• Kernel 6.0.10 (clang compiled kernel as default, with the option to install GCC compiled kernel easily from the om-welcome module) KDE Frameworks 5.100.0, Plasma Desktop 5.26.4, KDE Gear 22.08.3 LibreOffice suite 7.4.3.2, VLC 3.0.18, Chromium Browser Stable 107.0, Krita 5.1.3 LLVM/Clang 15.0.6, systemd 252 More software upgraded to the latest version.

• KDE Frameworks updated to 5.101.0 for PCLinuxOS.

• https://kde.org/announcements/frameworks/5/5.101.0/

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Users of openSUSE Leap 15.3 will not be receiving security and maintenance updates once the version goes EOL (end of life) on the last day of 2022.

• Marcus Meissner gave users advanced notice on the announcements mailing list on Nov. 30, but the lifecycle of Leap is frequently communicated to users.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

• Containers are a popular way to distribute and run software on Linux. One of the tools included in Fedora Linux to work with containers is the Pod Manager tool, also known as Podman. This article describes the use of the Ansible Podman Linux System Roles to automate container management.

• With Podman, you can quickly and easily download container images and run containers. For more information on Podman, check out the Getting Started section on the podman.io site.

• While Podman is very easy to use, many people are interested in automating Podman for a variety of reasons. For example, maybe you have multiple Fedora Linux systems that you would like to deploy a container workload across, or perhaps you’re a developer and would like to setup an automated process to deploy containers on your local workstation for testing purposes. Whether you are working with containers on a single system, or need to manage containers across a number of systems, automation can be critical to being efficient and saving time.

• Another great Fedora release and another great Fedora Release Party!

• After a (sadly) long break, we are back. University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sciences was once again home for a day for all Fedora, Linux and FOSS enthusiasts. Since our last Release Party for Fedora 31 in December 2019 a lot has changed, but our message and drive did not. We are still striving to build a strong community around Fedora!

• In total, we had five awesome talks. After the welcome, I was first to present what is new about Fedora 37 and what has changed since our last meet. We had a lot of new faces so a short introduction to Fedora was also in order.

• The second talk was given by our Faculty colleague Dusan Simic, and the talk was about Toolbox and how it can be used for isolated clean development environments. A very useful talk for our students, for sure.

• Microservices today are often deployed on a platform such as Kubernetes, which orchestrates the deployment and management of containerized applications. Microservices, however, don’t exist in a vacuum. They typically communicate with other services, such as databases, message brokers, or other microservices. Therefore, an application usually consists of multiple services that form a complete solution.

• But, as a developer, how do you develop and test an individual microservice that is part of a larger system? This article examines some common inner-loop development cycle challenges and shows how Quarkus and other technologies help solve some of these challenges.

• We asked our community of IT leaders what they see on the horizon for 2023; Edge, digital transformation, Metaverse, the IT skills gap, and more were of note.

• What opportunities are you most excited about as technology reshapes our businesses and lives? Whatever your focus is, the year ahead holds a lot of promise for IT leaders and their teams

• At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (henceforth just KubeCon), which the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) runs, the approximately 7,500 in-person attendees could walk up to dozens of security vendor booths, and that’s not even counting the security products and demos on display at the booths of larger multi-product vendors.

Devices/Embedded

• Machdyne recently unveiled two general-purpose computers built around the Lattice ECP5 FPGA. The Noir and the Konfekt boards are equipped with 2MB NOR flash, 1x MicroSD card reader, 1x USB-C port, etc. Both boards can run Linux as well.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The 12 days of Dev Boards Sale is happening now, with up to 40 percent off product lines like the Artemis, Thing Plus, Raspberry Pi, RedBoard, and Qwiic Shields. This is a great opportunity to save on the development boards you need for your next project. Don’t miss out on these amazing discounts, shop now while supplies last. To learn more about the sale and shipping times read the rules below.

• We need to have a serious discussion about bullying within the computer nerd world. Because it has gotten absolutely way out of hand.

• Case in point: The mass bullying campaign that is currently being waged against, of all organizations, Raspberry Pi. The adorable little ARM-based, single-board computers that took the Linux, Maker, and computer nerd worlds by storm back in 2012.

• While this is certainly not the only example of bullying happening within Computer Nerd-dom, it is the most recent. And it has been both brutal and cruel. So we’re going to talk about it.

• [...]

• In a brief interview with Buzzfeed, Liz Upton (co-founder of Raspberry Pi), told Buzzfeed that both the new hire, and their social media person, had been doxxed and received death threats.

• From Upton during that interview: “I think what we’re looking at is a dogpile that’s being organized somewhere. There’s obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere. I don’t think this is organic, but it’s very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved.”

• For the first time in a couple of years of semiconductor supply chain hell, we’ve got some good news for you.

• The Pixhawk RPI CM4 Baseboard from Holybro is a Flight Controller platform supporting an RPi CM4 and the new Pixhawk 5X & 6X. The Baseboard provides support for Pixhawk/Ardupilot protocols (i.e. GPS, Telemetry, CAN, etc.) in addition to a Mini HDMI port, a CSI connector and dedicated power ports for the FC and the RPI CM4.

• As I have previously mentioned, development of OTH radar proceeded in the USSR more or less in synchronization to developments on this side of the iron curtain. It’s a bit difficult to nail down the Soviet history exactly due to a combination of lingering Cold War secrecy and the language barrier, but it appears that the USSR may have developed their first functional OTH radar somewhat before the US, at least as a pilot project. Soviet OTH radar did not become well known to the western world, though, until the commissioning of their first full-scale ballistic missile surveillance radar in 1972. This would become known as Duga-1.

• All these projects, though—at least, all that are known of—have a slightly unimaginative feel to them. They are to the world of naval warfare what machines like the Predator and Reaper drones made by General Atomics are to aerial combat, namely redesigned, uncrewed versions of the existing way of doing things. What Ukraine seems to have demonstrated is the naval equivalent of the quadcopter. And that may make naval warfare asymmetric in a way which governments are unprepared to deal with.

• None of the Ukrainian boat’s underlying technologies would be out of reach for a small military power or a reasonably competent non-state group. According to an analysis by Mr Sutton of available images, its engine appears to be from a Sea-Doo jet ski. Its bow-mounted camera looks like a device that cyclists might strap to their helmets (it has a larger one, pictured, mounted amidships). And its satellite receiver bears a strong resemblance to the Starlink terminals supplied by SpaceX.

• Welcome to the combined October & November edition of the monthly State of IoT series.

• These past couple of months were packed with news and announcements. Let’s dive straight in!

• With modern microcontrollers, the process of interfacing with the analogue world is easy. Simply enable the on-board DAC or ADC, and talk to the world. If you’ve ever done this with a slightly older microprocessor, you might have encountered the DAC and ADC as chips in their own right, but how about the earliest generation of microprocessors? In those days, if an analogue component was needed, the circuit which would later be integrated on chip would have to be made from scratch. So it is that [Florian Wilhelm Dirnberger] has built a very old-style 6-bit DAC, using a circuit that would have been familiar back in the early 1970s.

• Hackers frequently find themselves reverse-engineering or interfacing to existing hardware and devices, and when that interface needs to be a physical one, it really pays to be able to take accurate measurements.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Also: Nemo Mobile is all in on #adventofcode, postmarketOS 22.12 is coming closer, autofocus coming to the Librem 5 camera.

• Android and iOS smartphones are the most popular ones around the world. However, many of you look for something more “open” and better at privacy. If you use Android, you forfeit your privacy. Apple’s iOS is a little better on that – but again – it’s a “walled garden”.

• That’s why Linux phones are becoming popular nowadays because they contain many options for developers and end users. Although various types of Linux phones are currently available, it still becomes confusing to choose the best one. Looking at the trends of 2022, here are some of the Linux Phones which may become more mainstream in 2023.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Komodo IDE is a popular integrated development environment for dynamic programming languages that was introduced back in May 2000.

• Used by many programmers around the world, it has proved to be quite helpful over the years.

• Unfortunately, all good things end.

• This is the case with Komodo IDE, it has now been retired, and all development has ceased.

• But there’s a silver lining to this

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• The latest Tor Browser is a specially packaged version of Firefox 102 ESR which does all the hard work of setting up a TOR connection.

• Version 12 of the Tor Browser is a specially packaged version of Firefox 102, the current Extended Support Release (ESR) and already one of the more secure browser choices. Available for Windows, Linux, and macOS (as a special fat binary that runs natively on both x86-64 and Arm Macs), the Tor Browser bundles together the web browser and a client for The Onion Router, or TOR for short.

• Firefox 108 entered public beta testing on November 15th, when Mozilla promoted the Firefox 107 release to the stable channel. During the beta testing phase, it received a total of nine beta versions, similar to all the previous releases since Firefox hit the 100 version number.

• Firefox 108 isn’t a big update, but it does bring a few interesting enhancements, starting with support for the WebMIDI API, which makes it easier for musicians to interact with MIDI musical instruments using the Web.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• PgBouncer 1.18.0 has been released. This release contains additions to the SHOW commands of PgBouncer and some cumulative bug fixes.

Licensing / Legal

• Stockfish is is a Free Software chess engine licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL-3.0). It was created in 2004 and, through its strong community support, is now the strongest chess engine available to the public. ChessBase is a German software company that develops and sells proprietary chess software.

• In 2021, Stockfish filed a lawsuit against ChessBase GmbH, alleging that ChessBase had distributed to customers software products under proprietary licenses despite them being derivative works of Stockfish. The most notable derivatives were the Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6 software distributed by ChessBase. By doing so, Stockfish alleged that ChessBase has violated central obligations of the GPL-3.0, which ensures that users of the software are informed of their rights. Despite leading developers with Stockfish terminating their licensing of Stockfish to ChessBase, ChessBase continued to distribute a number of Stockfish derivatives.

• This suit is notable as it is among the first of its type to involve a permanent termination of a Free Software license to a specific party. Additionally, Stockfish did not seek damages or other forms of financial compensation in their lawsuit, but rather pressed the court only for judicial actions that would result in the enforcement of the GPL-3.0.

Programming/Development

• The Git rebase command combines two source code branches into one. The Git merge command does that too. We explain what rebase does, how it’s used, and when to use merge instead.

• Good day, hackfolk. Today’s note tries to extend our semi-space collector with support for ephemerons. Spoiler alert: we fail in a subtle and interesting way. See if you can spot it before the end

• Recall that, as we concluded in an earlier article, a memory manager needs to incorporate ephemerons as a core part of the tracing algorithm. Ephemerons are not macro-expressible in terms of object trace functions.

• Qt Installer Framework and Qt Online Installer 4.5.1 have been released today.

• …to parse the input into nicely-organized Rust data structures: [...]

• In yesterday’s Advent of Code (mild spoilers ahead), there was a section where one had to figure out how far the elves can see, based on the height of a line of trees in that direction. The answer was to be given in the number of trees they see.

• Before we begin, let me give you an idea of where I am coming from and what my experiences are based on. Just to get it out of the way, I’m currently an Emacs user. That said, I have used a lot of text/code editors, all the way from Notepad to JetBrains IDEs(well, in the past) or even the Borland C++ editor which looked like this running on DOS.

• Why GoToSocial and not Mastodon? The latter scares me: it has too many moving parts for my taste, and the former is one of these lovely single Go binaries – sufficient reason to chose it in spite of the project’s warning: [...]

• From time to time it’s useful to know who are main authors of some piece of a project. Admittedly most of the time I want to check who are the top contributors to some Git repository I’d use a web interface for this (e.g. GitHub). Probably because I never bothered to remember the magic incantations to do this with the git command-line interface and probably because statistics often look better when you have a have richer UI toolkit to render them. That being said, today I was reminded how easy it is to cover the basics with the command-line. If we want a list of the top 10 contributors (in terms of commits) we can get it like this:1

• Echidna is a property-based fuzzer built by Trail of Bits that is widely used in smart contract bug hunting. (See its README for a list of notable uses of Echidna and some of the vulnerabilities it has found.) It lies in the category of “smart fuzzers,” which use the ABI of a contract and perform static analysis of its source code to make decisions on how best to generate input data.

• Still, there is only so much time you can delay upgrading, and for Python 3.7, the time to upgrade is over the next few months. Python 3.7 is reaching its end of life as of June 2023.

• No more bug fixes.

• No more security fixes.

• In the last decade, product managers of digital products have managed to create mind-blowing smartphones, self-driving cars, and virtual reality devices without product analytics. So, why would product managers need to change their way of working now?

• Many of you may have heard of ChatGPT, a dazzling new AI tool. We are hearing lots of gushing praise for the tool. Well, how well does it do in data science contexts? I tried a few queries here, and found interesting results.

• I first requested, “Write an R function that returns every other element of a vector x, starting with the third.” I won’t show the code here, but suffice it to say that it worked! It did give me correct code.

• Next, “In R’s built-in dataset CO2, fit a linear regression with ‘uptake’ as the outcome variable, and find the standard error of the intercept term.” Alas, it begged ignorance: “…I do not have the ability to perform calculations or access specific datasets…” Not really true; unfortunately, ChatGPT was not able to pick up the key phrase, “built-in.”

Ray Tracing

• Portal with RTX is launching December 8th, bringing full ray tracing and DLSS 3 to one of the best video games of all time. Wishlist on Steam now.

R

• Ho ho ho, it is the most wonderful time of the year: Advent of code!

• AOC is a yearly collection of programming puzzles throughout the first 25 days of December. I like it… so much so that I wrote an R package for completing my puzzles using the structure of an R package. The puzzles start out easy and get progressively more elaborate or devious in their requirements. But I am going to talk about an easy puzzle in this post, and specifically, one little trick I used in my solution.

• Day 2 of 2022 requires us to score games of Rock Paper Scissors. The moves are encoded using letters, where our opponent’s moves are coded as A, B, C and ours are coded as X, Y, Z.

• The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explain why using it is not always a good idea.

• I really enjoy using targets for all of my data analysis projects, especially because it helps me structure all of the projects nicely in the same folder. For targets projects, I often produce several figures using ggplot2. However, there are no formal recommendations for saving ggplot2 objects (as opposed to static images) in a targets workflow.

• I want to keep my plots accessible to be able to revisit them any time and to assemble them with patchwork into more complex figures for a potential paper. In a regular project I generate 10 to 20 figures, some only diagnostic ones and some polished ones for the finished manuscript. I do revisit the list of figures often, as co-authors or reviewers ask me for more detailed analyses and visualizations.

• In most cases, I don’t know before hand the sizes of the figures nor their formats, so I like to save the ggplot2 plots as R objects and not images in my targets workflow. I sometimes edit them for a presentation, a paper, or a poster, so I like the flexibility of saving them as R objects. This allows me to change their aspect ratio or their style on the fly without having to re-create them.

• How to test the significance of a mediation effect?, To perform a sobel test in R is covered in this lesson.

• Using R to run a Sobel test We can use the bda package to run a sobel test in R.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• It can frustrate to work on complex commands in the terminal. I’ll present you some tips on how to manage them. If you have another tip, I’d appreciate a quick message.

• Many Unix shells have some command line argument that tells them that they are a login shell; for example, Bash has ‘-l’ (also ‘–login’), and I think that ‘-l’ has become the de facto standard. However, this argument is not how Unix programs like sshd and login actually tell your shell that it’s a login shell; instead, for a long time, a login shell has a ‘-’ as the first character of its program name, or to put it another way, argv[0][0] is ‘-’.

Rust

• I spent this day of learning on evaluating the three popular high-level Rust frameworks for HTTP/websocket servers. At some point we want/need to rewrite Cockpit’s web server, and Rust feels like a natural choice for this (besides Python).

• [...]

• I started with warp, as this seemed to be the most “modern” framework. I liked its idea about building everything from filters, as it is functional and flexible. You can see the implementation in the warp-server directory of my “learn rust” project. It implements /hello, /dir (without compression support, as warp::fs::dir does not support that), and the two websocket routes.

Leftovers

• In fact, I enjoyed using it so much that I decided I should find out more about the story. In 2004 the company that sold the DataRover had gone under several years prior and the company that first released them in 1997 was being liquidated, an odd little corporation named General Magic and as whimsical as the environments they made. I found a boxed example of the first of the Magic Cap line, a Sony Magic Link, and demonstrated them together in 2005 at Vintage Computer Festival 8.0. People liked them there too. The devices were approachable and intuitive. They were so cheap at the time I ended up grabbing three more Rovers, one in its original box.

• But the story was even wilder than what I learned at the time, and the downstream influence of the company’s employees still reverberates in Silicon Valley today. There was even a movie made about them, grabs of which I’ve used here under fair use. That prompted me to get the DataRover back out again, still peacefully charging under the desk with its games and software intact, to see what we could do to make Magic Cap and my trusty old Rover relevant again in a modern world.

• My original intention was to do a brief introduction to the units and then talk more about how you can program one, but there’s so much history here and so much we can say about these unique devices that first I’m going to spend this entire entry talking about the hardware (the first and last entries in the line), the technology and the company. In an upcoming post we’re going to sit down and program one. Buckle up, because it’s time for quite a tale.

• Nick Mead is a multifaceted Brit living in Brentwood, Los Angeles. It must have been freezing for him standing next to those mock wooden cabins by Trafalgar Square selling Christmas fare to punters German-style. Seeing Nick was warming enough for me, though. We share many prized times together: in New York, including one hilarious so-called internationalist episode at the Algonquin Hotel; in Paris, where more than one’s fair share of a city was explored; and, finally, here again in London. (Though not this time, we always had two high-profile friends with us in each of those cities, too.) Nick had recently endured a plateau fracture of the tibia and Rolando fracture of the metacarpal of his left thumb in the crash. ‘But if you’re coming off your bike you can do a whole lot worse than come off close to one of the best orthopaedic hospitals in the world, which happens to be the UCLA hospital in Westwood,’ he said. He was riding a motorbike gifted to him by the late Aging Rebel, real name Donald Charles Davis, who famously wrote about the outlaw motorcycle world in books such as ‘Twilight Of The Outlaws’ and ‘Dispatches from the Outlaw Motorcycle Frontier’. London itself even featured at the site of the crash. As Nick came to — in a mangled heap in the middle of the road — the fireman leaning over noticed the accent. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked Nick. ‘North London,’ said Nick, otherwise motionless. Amazingly, the fireman was a North Londoner too. ‘Spurs or Arsenal?’ the fireman asked, of Nick’s football team. ‘Arsenal,’ said Nick. Naturally, the fireman, being a playful Spurs fan, threatened with a smile not to help.

• Nick is from Kentish Town in London. When not crashing motorbikes, he is a writer and filmmaker and photographer and artist who has worked with everyone from Motörhead to contemporary dance legend Pina Bausch, producing Peter Lindbergh’s film ‘Der Fentsterputzer.’ I was only able to see him because he was briefly back in the UK to finish writing an 8-part series on tragic British film legend Carol White, plus another 8-parter on a band from the 80s. Nick is on a roll. He is also one of those rare people who can turn out a script like it’s second-nature. The first Nick Mead script I read was ten years ago after I introduced him to Paris-based producer James Velaise. I am reading another now which is incredibly promising. In both, not a single technical knot, only pure advancement of plot. It was Nick’s recent documentary ‘Clarence Clemons: Who Do I Think I Am?’ about Bruce Springsteen’s well loved late sax player that won him a small but potent home-based Golden Trellick — ‘the only award I’ve ever actually wanted’ — and it was when the film was picked up by Netflix that this latest spout of commissioned scripts began. What I think I enjoyed most in the Clemons film was the fact his first question to Bill Clinton had to be: ‘Who are you and what do you do?’

• In Tver, on one of the city’s New Year’s trees, a homemade garland appeared with “enemies of the people” — paper cut-outs with pasted-on photos of the presidents of Ukraine, the US, and France, and the artists Alla Pugacheva and Maxim Galkin, among others.

• Michael Peck – Diablo Canyon’s senior resident safety inspector from 2007-2012 – tells me the plant should’ve been shut down years ago due to a faulty licensing process that disregarded crucial seismic dataindicating the plant is vulnerable to a Fukushima type of nightmare.

• Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant suffered a catastrophic triple meltdown and radiation release in 2011 when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami that topped protective sea walls and overwhelmed the reactors. 150,000 people were evacuated as radioactivity spewed into the air and ocean. The catastrophe – deemed a man-made disaster due to regulatory collusion – was the direct cause of nearly 4,000 deaths and remains an ongoing calamity; disposal of vast quantities of radioactive wastewater stored onsite remains an intractable problem.

Science

• It’s consistently cold enough that snow doesn’t melt. It accumulates everywhere, and new snow keeps falling to cover the dirty snow underneath. There are drifts several feet high around the edges of buildings and roads.

• Part of the work during Winfly is digging out or thawing out infrastructure that went unused during the winter. Buildings are de-winterized, culverts are dug out. Trucks rumble along roads, carrying piles of snow to the outskirts of town.

• Here’s a selection of my favorite town photos from Winfly, highlighting the snowcover: [...]

Education

• I used an approach like this when studying. The thing I loved about was that it grew organically without defining a formal structure, but was still simple to navigate and use. Most of my teachers thought it looked chaotic and disorganised, but I remember my year 12 chemistry teacher being extremely interested. Of course, one of his parents were German too!

• Labor rights advocates nationwide celebrated after part-time faculty at the New School in New York City reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement with the higher education institution late Saturday, ending a strike that has spanned more than three weeks.

• “Collective action and worker solidarity wins!”

Hardware

• [Kyle Owen], collector of antique tech, decided to try his hand at music arrangement — for the PDP-8 computer, that is (listen to the video below the break). He’s using a program submitted by Richard Wilson to the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society (DECUS) in 1976, appropriately named MUSIC. It runs on OS/8 and is written in the PDP-8 assembly language PAL8. Using the syntax of MUSIC, [Kyle] arranged Gershon Kingsley’s famous Moog synthesizer hit “Popcorn” (the Hot Butter version from 1972).

• PICMG has announced that the COM-HPC Mini form factor’s pinout and dimensions definitions were finalized, with the tiny credit card-sized modules able to handle PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 interfaces, of course, depending on whether the selected CPU supports those.

• The COM-HPC “High-Performance Computing” form factor was created a few years ago due to the lack of interfaces on the COM Express form factor with “only” 440-pins and potential issues to handle PCIe Gen 4 clock speeds and throughputs. So far, we had COM-HPC Client Type modules from 95 x 120mm (Size A) to 160 x 120mm (Size C) and Server Type modules with either 160 x 160mm (Size D) or 200 x 160mm (Size E) dimensions. The COM-HPC Mini brings a smaller (95 x 60 mm) credit card-sized form factor to the COM-HPC standard.

• Although there are a variety of programmes, there’s no “smarts” here. It isn’t like the YumAsia Mini Panda Rice Cooker which knows exactly when the rice is cooked. You have to wait and watch things cook. Like a 20th Century person! Similarly, there’s no WiFi connection – so you have to use the built in timer-delay rather than use an app like a normal person. Eugh!

• [David Murray], aka The 8-Bit Guy, did an interesting video (embedded below the break) on the time line of PC graphics cards from CGA through to EGA. Not only does he explain the different offerings of the day, but also proceeds to demonstrate most of them.

• You probably recognize that dreadful feeling when you reboot a gadget after updating its firmware, only to be greeted by a blank screen and an unresponsive device. This apparently happened to the previous owner of a bricked RGB laser projector that [Buy It Fix It] got his hands on: it briefly flashed its laser on power-up but otherwise remained completely dead.

• Sometimes, with patience and luck, one can score a sweet deal on machinery. But for tools that weigh many hundreds of pounds? Buying it is only the beginning of the story. [Ben Katz] recently got a lathe and shared a peek at what was involved in moving a small (but still roughly 800 pound) Clausing 4901 lathe into its new home and getting it operational.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• My teenaged daughter sleeps with her earbuds. Every night, she nestles in to her bed and heads to dreamland with an endless scroll of TikToks streaming straight into her head. “That can’t be good,” I think. And then in the morning I head out the door, plonk my own earbuds in, and crank up the volume to drown out the breakdancers and mariachi bands on the subway, the jackhammers on the street and the sirens whizzing by. I used to reflexively watch TV with closed captioning to enhance my ability to catch overlapping dialogue or subtle accents. But lately, as I lean a little closer to the screen with every episode of “Jeopardy!” and press the volume a notch higher, I’m starting to wonder if, in trying to muffle the cacophony of my daily life, I’ve only created a worse problem.

• “All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

• Those concerns are similar to ones he raised during congressional appearances last month when the issue came up. And they’re being voiced during ongoing dialogue in Washington about the app.

Proprietary

• I’ve been ridiculously burned out for a while now but I’m taking the month off to recover and that’s giving me an opportunity to catch up on a lot of stuff. This has included me actually writing some code to work with the Pluton in my Thinkpad Z13. I’ve learned some more stuff in the process, but based on everything I know I’d still say that in its current form Pluton isn’t a threat to free software.

• [...]

• One key point from this recently published Microsoft doc is that the whole “Microsoft can update Pluton firmware” thing does just seem to be the ability for the OS to push new code to the chip at runtime. That means Microsoft can’t arbitrarily push new firmware to the chip – the OS needs to be involved. This is unsurprising, but it’s nice to see some stronger confirmation of that.

• Anyway. tl;dr – Pluton can (now) be used as a regular TPM. Pluton also exposes some additional functionality which is not yet clear, but there’s no obvious mechanism for it to compromise user privacy or restrict what users can run on a Free operating system. The Pluton firmware update mechanism appears to be OS mediated, so users who control their OS can simply choose not to opt in to that.

• The idea for the CMS implementation ended up relying on Google Docs. The person writing the articles would create a new document in a specific Google Drive folder. The title of the document would be used as the title of the article, and the content would be shown as-is on the web page. To support localization, there was one subfolder for every language as well.

• The backend service would periodically query the contents of the shared Google Drive folder. If new posts were found, it would export them into HTML and store them on the backend. If I recall correctly, it might have also done some sanitization or tweaks to overcome some limitations related to this setup.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Niti Aayog published the third paper in its series of publications on Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) titled, ““Responsible AI for All: Adopting the Framework – A use case approach on Facial Recognition Technology”. The deadline for submission of comments on the paper was November 30, 2022. Read a summary of our response, which has been drafted in collaboration with Prof. Anupam Guha of IIT Bombay, below.

• [...]

• a. Failure to assess the harms of use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies

• According to Internet Freedom Foundation’s Project Panoptic, there are at least 29 ongoing facial recognition technology (FRT) projects which are being helmed by state and city police departments throughout the country for investigation and surveillance purposes. These projects are in addition to the national FRT project being developed by the National Crime Records Bureau, which is touted to be “world’s biggest” FRT system. However, the paper fails to satisfactorily address this use, which as we will show below, is the most harmful use of FRT.

• The paper suggests “establishing a data protection regime” as an actionable recommendation to ensure responsible use of FRT in future applications. At present, India does not have a data protection law and the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 allows the Union government to provide blanket exemptions for selected government agencies under Clause 18(1)(a). It is likely that if this bill is passed in its present form, the Union government will exempt law enforcement agencies from the purview of the bill since the exemption can be granted in the “interests of sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, maintenance of public order or preventing incitement to any cognizable offence”, all of which are purposes related to security and law enforcement. The paper states such exemptions to state agencies should not be provided. However, even if the suggested recommendations are followed, use of FRT by law enforcement agencies will remain harmful since the institutions of policing and law enforcement in India are inherently flawed and any violation will have a disproportionate and irreversible effect on the fundamental rights of citizens.

Defence/Aggression

• The Department of Defence has refused to comment on how many American troops are stationed in Australia, who pays for it, or even why

• Basic services like electricity and telecoms have been restored to key parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region following the signing of a cease-fire deal a month ago, but most areas are still cut off from the world.

• The agreement signed Nov. 2 requires Ethiopia’s federal government to restore basic services to Tigray, which has been mostly without phone, internet and banking services since war erupted two years ago. Power has also been disrupted to the region of more than 5 million people.

• I believe the Ukraine war media coverage is worse than in any other war I have witnessed because, for Europeans, fighting is closer to home and emotions are more fully engaged. Demonisation of Russia is total, which may be deserved, but is not a good approach for finding out what is really happening.

• There is a strong public appetite for any news suggesting that the Russians are fed up the war and want to throw in the towel. The British Ministry of Defence said recently that an independent media outlet claiming access to polling by the Federal Protective Service showed that 55 per cent of Russians favour peace talks with Ukraine and only 25 per cent favour continuing the war. Maybe so, but one needs to know a good deal more about the poll to take it at face value.

• Griner, a two-time Olympic champion, was detained in February this year at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport possessing cartridges for vapes with hashish oil.  Her argument was that these had been prescribed.  The court was not convinced, sentencing her to a brutal nine-year prison sentence for drug smuggling.

• Bout, invested with Satanic-like qualities of influence by US authorities and Hollywood, where his role is given a celluloid form by Nicolas Cage, was convicted in 2011 on four charges that included conspiring to kill US citizens.

• Ever since then, time and again, I’ve envisioned writing the story of its ultimate closure, its last days. Today, eyeing the moves made by the Biden administration, it seems reasonable to review the past record of that prison’s seemingly never-ending existence, the failure of three presidents to close it, and what if anything is new when it comes to one of the more striking scenes of ongoing injustice in American history.

• Pentagon leaders just did exactly that.

• This month news broke that the agency once again failed to pass a basic audit showing that it knows where its money goes. And instead of holding out for any kind of accountability, Congress stands ready to give a big raise to an agency that failed to account for more than 60 percent of its assets.

• Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov threatened Monday to send residents who “were involved” in a recent altercation between a Special Rapid Response Unit [SOBR] officer and a traffic police officer in the town of Urus-Martan to fight in Ukraine.

• St. Petersburg resident Kirill Berezin, who was drafted but refused to take up arms, fled his unit, and demanded to be transferred to alternative service, has been sent to the rear, says BBC’s Russian Service.

• Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net, posted photos and videos, which he claims are “from the official archive of the IK-4 of the Federal Penitentiary Service in the Kaluga region.”

• A missile attack hit the city of Melitopol, in Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory, on the evening of December 10. Ukrainian Mayor Ivan Fyodorov posted about serious fires in the western and southern parts of the city. According to Fyodorov, the strike was launched at a Russian military collection point, and Russian losses reached 200 people.

• Denys Shmyhal, head of the Ukrainian government, reports that after Russian troops carried out an eighth round of massive missile strikes, all of the thermal and hydroelectric power stations in Ukraine have been damaged.

• Members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol are expected to finalize decisions on criminal referrals during a virtual meeting Sunday afternoon.

• CBS News’ Margaret Brennan inquired about the panel’s plans earlier Sunday, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—a member of the subcommittee created to deal with outstanding issues, including potential referrals—to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)—appeared on “Face the Nation.”

• A fire broke out Monday morning at the Stroypark shopping center in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Money-laundering whistleblower Troy Stolz is in court this week against pokies lobby group ClubsNSW. Whistleblowers David McBride and Jeff Morris were there to support him. Callum Foote reports.

• Troy Stolz has finally got his day in court this week. Along with YouTuber Jordan Shanks, the former compliance officer – who is dying of cancer – is subject to a private criminal prosecution by powerful clubs pokies peak body ClubsNSW.

• Stolz is also suing ClubsNSW for defamation after he blew the whistle on the lack of compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism finance laws.

• The Federal Court heard on Monday that on November 2019, after Stolz left ClubsNSW, the organisation sent an email to all CEOs and directors of clubs with which it was associated.

• The Court was gripped by high drama in Troy Stolz’s case against ClubsNSW today as the Australian Government Solicitor contacted parties over pokies lobby claims the whistleblower breached confidence in contacting MP Andrew Wilkie’s office. Callum Foote and Michael West report.

• After four days of the dying whistleblower being hammered by ClubsNSW lawyers in the witness box, it was sweet news for Troy Stolz. The Australian Government Solicitor contacted parties in Stolz’s defamation case against the powerful pokies lobby today. The AGS was concerned that ClubsNSW was wrong in its claim that Stolz had breached confidence by informing MP Andrew Wilkie about money laundering in clubs.

• Communications with a Member of Parliament are privileged. Troy Stolz had been a compliance officer for ClubsNSW. He contacted MP Wilkie’s office as a whistleblower. In an extraordinary development, the AGS is expected to make submissions in the Stolz case next week.

Environment

• The pipeline failure 3 miles east of Washington, Kansas, on Wednesday caused an estimated 14,000 barrels of crude, or 588,000 gallons of a form of crude known as tar sands oil, to spill into Mill Creek, a natural waterway, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration of the U.S. Transportation Department.

• The administration has ordered the affected section of pipeline, about 160 miles north of Wichita, closed until corrective action can be completed.

• Eleven new climate reports detail the urgency of the problem, the shortfalls of current commitments, and new opportunities for action — just as the COP27 meeting in Egypt proceeds.

Energy

• France has implemented a ban on domestic short-haul air routes. The decision is only made possible by the country’s history of investment in high-speed rail.

• The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.

• The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country’s 2021 Climate Law and were first proposed by France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate – a citizens’ assembly tasked with finding ways to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

• That means only three routes will currently fall under the ban: journeys between Paris-Orly and Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon.

• Initially, the measure will affect routes between Paris Orly airport and Nantes, Lyon, and Bordeaux. It will be valid for three years and then it’ll be reassessed by the Commission.

• National Cabinet is to consider capping the gas price at $12 when National Cabinet meets Friday. At that high price, the government is gifting super profits to the gas cartel at the expense of Australian customers and industry. A price of $7, new research shows, still leaves solid profits for gas producers. Is $12 the gas cartel number? Rex Patrick writes.

• National Cabinet will meet this Friday to discuss putting a $12 per gigajoule price cap on gas. But a new report released by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) shows that the right price for a cap is $7 dollar, not $12. The research will be released today.

• Coupled with the Labor Government’s six months of equivocation and inaction on high energy prices, and a gas cartel that have exploited that hesitation and delay to normalise extraordinarily high gas prices, a $12 cap might seem like a win for Australian consumers and industry, but it won’t be. $12 will be a price that plays into the hands of the cartel.

Wildlife/Nature

• In his narration for the Netflix series Our Great National Parks, former US President Barack Obama describes a sloth as harboring “an entire micro-kingdom” in his fur. “Researching him will help fight cancer, malaria, and antibiotic-resistant superbugs,” he notes, before concluding that, “This sleepy sloth might just save us all.”

Finance

• Hungary’s inflation could be between 15% and 18% next year, the governor of the country’s central bank, György Matolcsy said on Monday. Matolcsy criticized the Orban government’s economic policies, such as the price caps imposed on essential food items and fuel. According to Reuters, Matolcsy told a parliamentary committee that “all price caps should be phased out immediately.

• “We, the NBH have warned that the government’s crisis management strategy of the past half year has been wrong,” the governor said. “We have said this to the government several times,” referring to the price caps.  Matolcsy rarely criticized Viktor Orban’s policies before and was known as an ally to the prime minister.

• “There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference—this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.” On November 30, the stock market rallied when he said smaller interest rate increases are likely ahead and could start in December. But rates will still be increased, not cut. “By any standard, inflation remains much too high,” Powell said. “We will stay the course until the job is done.”

• With that, Britain was free from the illusionary shackles of the supposedly un-democratic EU. Self-determination and democracy were put back into the hands of the British people. Strangely, the UK’s current prime minister – Rishi Sunak – was not democratically elected by the British people, nor was his predecessor Liz Truss – both conservatives.

• Well, at least Brexit stopped the migration of undocumented individuals by boat across the English Channel, right? Not quite. In fact, the opposite happened after Brexit. In 2022, up to November, more than 40,000 people had crossed the Channel in small boats. This was the highest number since these figures began to be collected in 2018. In 2021, the total was 28,526 people, while in 2020 it was 8,404.

• There’s a lot to be troubled about in America, but one long-term and often overlooked injustice may be the most damaging affront to our nation’s people.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The mask is being lifted from the face of Israel’s apartheid state, exposing a grinning death’s head that portends the obliteration of the few restraints against the killing of the Palestinians.

• While the White House and Democratic congressional leadership are publicly hoping U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s departure from the party won’t change much in Washington, D.C., progressives in her home state of Arizona and across the nation are already pushing to replace the newly declared Independent if she runs for reelection in 2024.

• The “Primary Sinema” campaign rebranded on Saturday as “Replace Sinema” following the senator’s Friday announcement—which came just days after Democrats secured 51 seats in the Senate with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) winning his second crucial runoff in as many years.

• A subsection of the Raspberry Pi community expressed concern about the blasé way the company presented intrusive covert surveillance. (The news caused particular ire on Mastodon, leading some to describe Roberts as the burgeoning social media platform’s first “main character.”)

• “You’re basically telling me and people like me who do privacy work and activist work that you’re anti-that,” Bowser said. “You’re alienating a large chunk of your customers by going pro-cop. The company clearly doesn’t know how their products are being used in the world. A lot of people who use it are anti-authoritarian, anti-surveillance, and don’t like police brutality. And they’re actively building tools using the Raspberry Pi and others against those things.”

• [...]

• “I think what we’re looking at is a dogpile that’s being organized somewhere,” Upton said. “There’s obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere.” She did not provide evidence to support that claim. “I don’t think this is organic, but it’s very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved,” she said. Upton claimed both Roberts and Raspberry Pi’s social media manager have been doxxed and received death threats.

• What makes this all even more terrible, is that this isn’t the only example of extreme bullying to happen within the Tech World. Not by a long-shot.

• Prominent software developers, executives, journalists, and others have been regularly attacked by bullies. Oftentimes mobs of bullies. In fact, it happens so often, we have become mostly blind to it.

• Washington power users feel conflicted because, beyond just patronizing a company with a problematic owner, they are creating much of the content that makes Twitter valuable, making some feel more like collaborators than consumers.

• While some have completely wiped their accounts, other stars and notable names seem to have just stopped tweeting and using their accounts altogether. In a November report, a digital strategist and podcaster told The Hollywood Reporter they are recommending clients to keep their accounts and not use them. “You can say that you’re going to sunset the platform in its current state or not post anymore past a specific date but I don’t recommend deleting entirely because you’re never going to get that audience back. I’m telling everyone to sit tight — for now,” Wynter Mitchell Rohrbaugh told THR.

• Twitter has not crashed and burned yet, but it has changed since the Elon acquisition. “Infosec twitter” has migrated to several mastodon instances among the “fediverse.” Today, it is harder to find engaging novel content from technical sources. For that reason I am not looking at Twitter as much and in a way I am a little happier overall. Weird, right?

• Consider email. Almost everyone is on GMail, O365, or one of a limited number of big email providers. Even if you’re a digital extremist and have your own domain name, you almost certainly don’t run your own email server. It’s just too complicated and no one wants a full-time unpaid job keeping up with the admin of configuring, patching, and defending their mail.

• Similarly, I doubt anyone wants to spend much more than a couple of hours per year setting up and maintaining their federated social network app.

• In the House of Representatives, his most adherent loyalists are the self-proclaimed MAGA Squad in the Republican Freedom Caucus. The Washington Post described them as the “Trump loyalists within the Freedom Caucus known as the ‘MAGA Squad,’ including Paul Gosar, Margery Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, Scott Perry, and  Lauren Boebert.”

• The emphasis on personal loyalty to any US President skids off a democratic government’s rails. Allegiance to a leader is the core belief that has sustained authoritarian rule in other countries. I’ve noted before that Trump Disrupts the Distinction Between Personal Loyalty & Constitutional Allegiance.

• Sometimes I feel like screaming at the mainstream media for failing to alert people to crucial (although complicated) issues affecting our democracy coming from different parts of government simultaneously.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• It’s the makeover of all makeovers, the new attempt to soften Peter Dutton’s image.

• The Taliban’s education minister has said that its members should not be required to take exams to become faculty in Afghanistan’s universities – prompting outcry among lecturers.

• In a recent speech at Herat University in Afghanistan, Mawlawi Mohammad Neda Nadim said that Taliban commanders who seek to teach at universities should be judged on having overcome “hardship and jihad”, the BBC’s Persian news service reported.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Iran on Monday said it carried out its second execution of a prisoner connected to the nationwide protests that began in September.

• The Mizan news agency run by Iran’s judiciary said Majidreza Rahnavard was publicly hanged Monday in the city of Mashhad.

• Between December 5 and December 11, Russian authorities blocked 14,800 new websites, according to the NGO Roskomsvoboda. The majority of the blockages this month have been the result of court decisions.

• Russia’s Health Ministry has released new guidelines for the language doctors should use while speaking to patients during virtual appointments. The document was published on the website of the ministry’s Central Research Institute Public Health Information and Organization.

• Access Now, a non-profit, and the #KeepItOn coalition global network of over 280 organisations working to end Internet shutdowns – have demanded unhindered Internet access to all people across Bangladesh, at all times.

• The civil society organisation from 105 countries, in an open letter, have called on the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), relevant authorities and telecommunication and Internet service providers to not take any actions, including during protests, that would interfere with Internet access.

• They also urged to immediately end any current restrictions.

• “The government of Bangladesh must not use Internet interference to control narratives, or deny people political participation,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn campaign manager at Access Now.

• Despite global civil society pressure to ensure internet access across Bangladesh, services have been throttled throughout public protests, on International Human Rights Day.

• The government of Bangladesh must immediately restore full internet access to all, and commit to stopping the undemocratic practice of internet shutdowns.

• A spokesperson for the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission reportedly stated the authority had not interfered with internet access, claiming “it is a technical issue.” However, similar disruptions in mobile services were reported during protests in November, suggesting that the throttling is deliberate.

• Since 2021, the Myanmar military has waged parallel coups offline and online, as it implements tactics to surveil, target and deny people their digital agency. These have ranged from introducing significant price hikes on SIM cards and internet services – making it prohibitively expensive for many to access the internet – to regulatory attempts which will enshrine in law the death of online civic space in Myanmar.

• Internet shutdowns and mobile communications blackouts have plunged whole communities into darkness, and the military now has complete dominance over the telecommunications sector, setting the stage for unfettered surveillance unprecedented in the country’s history. And the deadline to complete its mission? The 2023 general election.

• A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined local resident Ivan Losev 30,000 rubles (about $480) for posts he made on social media, including one in which he described a dream he had about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Sibir.Realii, RFE/RL’s Siberian affiliate. Losev was hit with misdemeanor charges of “discrediting” the Russian army.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Red Team Blues is my first noir novel, a detective story whose hero is Marty Hench, a Silicon Valley forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years unwinding every finance scam tech, and who, on the eve of his retirement, is roped into a bloody, deadly cryptocurrency heist.

• This is one of my lockdown books (I have seven books forthcoming as of this writing), and it was a wild ride to write. I love noir fiction, but it has an odious side: the prototypical noir hero is a veteran (in early noir, he’ll be a WWI vet in the interwar years; in later noir, he’s a WWII vet in the 50s or 60s), who has come home to a changed and fallen world.

• Everywhere these heroes look, the wrong people are participating in society as his equal: queers, women, people of color. The foundational vibe of noir – a simmering rage at the state of the world – is grounded in incredible, reactionary bigotry.

• Since the very first month of the year, there have been digital attacks against the press in Latin America. Outrageous revelations about the use of Pegasus spyware in El Salvador set the tone for the kind of difficulties journalists and the press would face during 2022, not only in said country but also across the region.

• When content is inconvenient for groups in power, such as authorities, companies, and organized crime groups, the press becomes a target of attacks. On top of this, corruption and blurred division of powers in some countries make it hard to know for certain who is on the other side and whether it will be possible to get some transparency, protection, and justice in the struggle to vindicate violated rights.

• While the scope of new technologies has been useful to promote human rights, it has also facilitated attacks against and the silencing, both personally and systematically, of journalists and the media in general. Both targets are interrelated but are affected in different ways.

Civil Rights/Policing

• One of the giants of the American Left, activist, lawyer and eminent historian, Staughton Lynd, died Nov. 17 in Warren, Ohio. He was 92. In a career that took him from the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the first organized Vietnam War protests to a national campaign to save shuttered steel mills in the Rust Belt, he straddled the worlds of the Labor Left of the early 20th century and the New Left of the ’60s and ’70s.

• Indeed, the government faces no imminent threat but seems cognizant of the imperative need to address the hijab policy to pacify the protestors. As the protests continue, many women are walking on the streets of cities across Iran, especially in Tehran, without head coverings.

• There is a long history of Western countries fueling public unrest in Iran. Regime change agenda must be there in the western calculus but, curiously, Washington is also signaling interest in reaching an accommodation with Tehran under certain conditions relating to the regime’s foreign and security policies in the present international milieu.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As Executive Director of accessnow.org, Brett has a unique insight into the role of human rights in the digital age. Nelly just needs to work out who stole her identity in the latest cyber attack. Hard core data with a dash of downloadable humour.

• You’ve probably never heard of Gigi Sohn, but America needs her and we need her now. This is a call to immediate action to restore Net Neutrality and stop a tiny slice of corporate America from spying on us and our lives.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• There were two competing visions at the dawn of the modern digital era: in one camp, you had people who saw computers as a way to empower people to push back against corporate and state control; in the other camp, there were the people who wanted to use computers to transfer power from the public to corporations or governments.

• I’ve always been baffled by the technologists who pursued control over liberation: surely their own formative experiences were of the liberatory power of technology. After experiencing that power, how could these Vichy nerds lend their skills to the project of forging digital shackles?

• [...]

• The BPDG’s mission was to create a standard for a Broadcast Flag a single bit that would be included in the headers for video files. If the flag was present, any device that encountered the video would have to restrict its playback, checking to see whether and under what circumstances that playback could occur.

• In order to make this work, the group – an alliance of giant corporations from consumer electronics, IT, broadcast/cable/satellite and movies – would get a friendly lawmaker (Billy Tauzin, one of the dirtiest Congressmen who ever held office) to pass a law that required anyone building a video-capable device to seek out and respond to the flag.

• As part of this proposal, all video-capable devices would also need to be “resistant to end-user modification” – that is, they’d have to have enough Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to trigger Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which banned removing copyright locks on penalty of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

• Strip away all the acronyms and obfuscation and here’s what that meant: if this group got their way, every computer would only run proprietary software (no free software/open source allowed) and if you tried to reverse-engineer it to change it to do your bidding in any way, you could be sent to prison for five years.

• When I open up <music streaming app of choice>, more often than not I either “go with what I know” and play something I’ve heard a million times, or pull up a random playlist with a thousand songs on it and a “general vibe.”

• It’s not curation, it’s consumption.

• While the young market is of great appeal to streamers wanting to venture into the Middle East, many industry heads have mentioned the difficulties in setting up subscription tiers as one of the biggest challenges in the region. “The consumer in the Middle East is used to getting extremely high-quality content; they have the ability to pay, but because they’ve been getting high-quality content for free for years, they don’t want to,” continued D’Silva, concluding by saying, “It’s hard to grow a streaming ecosystem when there’s no subscription.”

Monopolies

• Remember the big news back in January that Microsoft was acquiring Activision Blizzard? Well, the FTC aren’t happy about it and are trying to block it.

• When a superdense, concentrated mass forms a black hole, the laws of physics around it change, giving rise to an eldritch zone where the normal rules don’t apply. When corporations form a concentrated industry, the laws of economics likewise change.

• Take copyright: when I was a baby writer, there were dozens of comparably sized New York publishers. The writers who mentored me could shop their rights around to lots of houses, which enabled them to subdivide those rights.

• For example, they could separately sell paperback and hardcover rights, getting paid twice for the same book. Under those circumstances, giving authors broader copyrights and easier enforcement systems could directly translate into more groceries on those authors’ tables and more gas in their cars’ tanks.

• But today, publishing has dwindled to five giant houses (possibly four soon, depending on whether Penguin Random House successfully appeals its blocked merger with Simon and Schuster). Under these conditions, giving exploited authors more copyright is like giving bullied schoolkids more lunch-money.

Copyrights

• YouTube Vanced was an alternative YouTube app that removed all advertising and enabled background play, among other things. Due to legal issues, Vanced shut down earlier this year but was soon replaced by ReVanced, a new project with similar functionality. Following two copyright complaints that have nothing to do with YouTube, ReVanced says it will implement a few changes.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• These last few months have been some of the longest and hardest of my life. And that is my excuse for not posting to gopher since summer.

• // A personal gemlog about how I’ve found a missing part of my life: the LGBTQ+ community. This may get a bit over sharing and talks a lot about my transition, queer issues, etc. This isnt something I read a lot about here. And I’ve drafted many attempts to talk about this with different framing. But this is the only way I think I can properly convey what I want to say.

• Hey, everyone! In my previous post, I wrote about how great I was doing. Unfortunately, things ended up turning out terrible. So terrible, that I almost failed most of my subjects again; however, I somehow managed to save them all the last school week. This is the story of how I saved the semester, and even with good grades. This post was inspired by Joel’s.

• One cup of green tea and waffles with whipped cream please.

• I was running down a flight of stairs. They were endless.

• Some guy was sitting in the middle of the stairs with a giant laptop with 4 screens.

• I didn’t see him on time and stomped right through his laptop.

• Well. I just discovered gemini protocol 2 days ago and I sort of fell in love with the process for now. Not sure where I’ll get with this capsule, maybe I will do some other capsules as well. Indeed, I really apprecieate RP and I’m already thinking about it. Why not bringing some of my RPeist friends and start something on gemini ? I saw there are some, I’m part of certain and some are quite interesting. But yeah, just a random idea I got.

Technical

• I brought out the enTourage pocket eDGe (ebook reader) this evening from the archives. It has been awhile since I used this device. I try to keep some charge in it, and it still seems to be handling well for its age. This was a quirky device when it came out, having 2 screens, one resistive LCD and the other an eink display. There seemed to be more odd-ball kinds of devices before than now. These days, they all seem basically the same. I think the world needs a better selection of odd-ball devices.

• This site has been revamped!

• I’ve removed all non-tech stuff and test files over here and changed some paths as well.

• Also I’m rewriting the code for the NASA APOD app because is not working as expected.

• All of this is for tabletop RPGs, both adventure games and story games, but I’m gonna use examples from other activities, board games, video games, movies.

Internet/Gemini

• Well, basically, almost everything that is online, apps, web, social media, video games, arts—as long as it is connected to the world (or part of it)—

• On the other hand, I don’t consider technology’s use to be a part of it because it represents too many things to me. I was born in the late 1990s and had my first computer at the age of five. Therefore, I grew up with tech and digital things, and it is basically my life. But “online life” represents to me what is connected online, which may seem obvious.

• Also, my “rules” seem a bit too much sometimes, but they are what I needed to avoid becoming 100% time-dependent or addicted. I found it perfect for me, and indeed, it has helped me a lot to keep my brain cells alive since I applied it a couple years ago. I still enjoy surfing a lot. I do not even try to leave the web or my presence on social medias, which I still use a lot. I just needed to control my way of consuming it.

• 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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