● 02.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/02/2023: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 and GIMP 2.10.34 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Indiegogo recently featured two Mini-PCs integrating the Rockchip RK3568 multi-core processor. The PlanetPC XR series Mini-PCs can be configured with up to 32GB RAM, 256GB Flash, 2x GbE, Wi-Fi/BL connectivity, SSD support and both models run on Ubuntu 20.04.

• The XR1 is described as an entry level Mini-PC integrating a Quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 RK3568 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, an ARM G52 2EE GPU and a [email protected] NPU.

• Computers come in all shapes and sizes, where there are some who prefer having a PC with a large chassis for better cooling, the ability to fit larger motherboards and GPUs, while others might prefer something small that can just sit on their desk and don’t take up too much room.

• If you are in the market for a Linux mini PC you might be interested in a new Indiegogo crowd funding campaign launched by the team at Planets Computers based in the United Kingdom. Their latest creation features a 16 LED RGB light array and integrated HD color touchscreen together with microphone and stereo speakers.

• Before pledging your funds however it might be worth your while checking out the previous projects by the company which still seem to be outstanding for some even years after funding was successfully raised. If you are still interested in risking your hard earned cash more details are available over on the official Indiegogo project page by following the link below.

• Choosing an operating system is one of the most important decisions a user has to make. And whereas it is pretty easy when it comes to mobile devices – you are basically forced to use iOS on iPhones or Android on (almost) every other phone – on the desktop the case is not that simple.

• In a nutshell, the OS market gives you 3 main options: Windows, MacOS and Linux. Of course, every ‘family’ of operating systems has many distinctive versions, but to put it simply, it is safe to say that within a Windows or Linux brand, all of them are based on the same virtues and their heart pumps similar digital blood.

• This is a list of reviews of System76 laptop and desktop computers by different authors for five years from 2009 to 2014. We managed to collect reviews of several System76 models ranging from Serval, Galago, Gazelle, Lemur, Pangolin, to Bonobo Pro with various Intel technologies from Core 2 Duo to generations of i7 with various graphics processors from HD Graphics, Iris Pro to NVIDIA GTX Mobile. We summarized every review by its specifications, battery hour, and the author’s conclusion and linked to every original website so you can read further. We hope this really helps everyone considering then purchasing GNU/Linux-preinstalled branded computers suitable for them. Please read on and look forward for the next collection too. Happy reading!

• Need some power in a small box with full Linux support? The Kubuntu Focus team recently revealed their second-generation Focus NX. This is a small form factor desktop that comes with Kubuntu (KDE Plasma desktop) 22.04 LTS.

Server

• You know that climate change is a problem when a supercomputer to do short-term prediction of the formation of linear rainbands and the torrential downpours that they cause is 3.4X as powerful as the machines that do the day-to-day weather forecasting in a country.

Audiocasts/Shows

• With countless distributions of Linux available, which one should you pick for your computer?

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Notepadqq on Linux Lite 6.2.

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Athena OS 2023.02.20.

Kernel Space

• The Asahi Linux project has posted an update and reality check on the status of Linux support for Apple’s M1 hardware.

• There is an ongoing news cycle about Linux 6.2 being the first kernel to support the M1, started by ZDNET. This article is misleading and borderline false.

• You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don’t get your hopes up.

• It’s an odd thing to see the leaders of an impressive open source project ask the press and their followers to please calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.

• But that’s the situation the Asahi Linux team finds itself in after many reports last week that the recently issued Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux “ready to run” on Apple’s M-series hardware. It is true that upstream support for Apple’s M1 chips is present in 6.2 and that the 6.2 kernel will gradually make its way into many popular distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. Work on Apple’s integrated GPU by the four-person Asahi core team has come remarkably far. And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air.

• But the builders of the one Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everybody to please just give it a moment.

• ZNS stands for ‘Zoned Namespaces’; it is a relatively new command set for NVMe SSDs that exposes a zoned block storage interface between the host and the SSD, allowing it to align the data better.

• To complement that, a new Linux file system ‘SSDFS’ has been proposed to be included in the kernel by a developer that aims to leverage ZNS for lower I/O latency, reduced write amplification, prolonged SSD lifetime, and more.

• Let’s take a look at it.

• If you’re searching for an exceptional Linux kernel distribution that will guarantee a steady and efficient desktop experience, look no further than XanMod.

Applications

• Dubbed “Von Neumann,” FFmpeg 6.0 is here more than a year after FFmpeg 5.0 “Lorentz” and introduces several new features like support for the Radiance HDR (RGBE) image format, VA-API (Video Acceleration API) decoding and encoding for 10bit and 12bit 422/444 HEVC and VP9 streams, as well as a new mode to the cropdetect filter to allow it to detect crop-area based on motion vectors and edges.

• FFmpeg 6.0 also introduces support for the WBMP (Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap) image format, NVEC AV1 encoding support, oneVPL support for QSV, and support for the filtergraph syntax in FFmpeg’s command line interface to pass file contents as option values by prefixing the option name with ‘/’.

Instructionals/Technical

• Are you a web developer looking for ways to enhance your PHP scripts with image manipulation capabilities? If so, then the Imagick PHP module is likely one of the tools you should add to your arsenal.

• Introduction Robotics is one of the fastest-growing areas which will change everything around us and also it not showing any signs of slowing down.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up an IKEv2 IPSec VPN using strongSwan using EAP-MSCHAPv2 authentication along with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on a Rocky Linux 9 server. You will also learn how to connect to the VPN using Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android clients.

• Cinnamon is a free, open-source desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team. It is based on the GNOME desktop environment but comes with a unique and intuitive user interface designed to be user-friendly and customizable.

• Secure Shell, commonly called SSH, is a network protocol that allows secure remote access and management of Linux servers. Its strong encryption and authentication features have gained popularity over older unsecure methods such as Telnet and FTP.

• GitLab is a web-based Git repository management tool that provides a complete DevOps platform, enabling teams to collaborate on projects easily. It is an open-source application that offers various features, such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), version control, and issue tracking.

• MySQL Tuner is a popular open-source tool for analyzing and optimizing the performance of MySQL servers. The tool provides recommendations for improving the configuration of your MySQL server based on its analysis of key metrics and statistics.

• Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool that has gained widespread popularity for its ability to streamline communication and increase productivity in the workplace.

• The latest KDE Plasma Desktop 5.27 was released 2 weeks ago. (K)Ubuntu 22.10 based systems can now get it via KUbuntu Backport PPA. And, KUbuntu 23.04 will ship with Plasma 5.27 by default.

• Python 3.8 is an older release of the Python programming language that is now in security maintenance. Despite being an older release, Python 3.8 is still widely used and is known for its simplicity, flexibility, and readability.

• Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting system that helps you track the performance and health of your systems, applications, and services. Originally developed at SoundCloud, Prometheus has become one of the most popular monitoring tools in the industry, used by companies such as Airbnb, DigitalOcean, and Red Hat.

• If you’ve ever spent time browsing a Linux community on Reddit, Twitter, or other social networks, you might have noticed some beautifully-made screenshots of sleek-looking systems where the time, date, and other information about the system are on full display in the desktop. To do this on your system, you need to to master one of the most useful applications in Linux: Conky.

• Your privacy is important and nearly every Linux distribution is filled with features, tricks, and underpinnings that take the security of your information very seriously. Take, for instance, the idea of the guest session.

• The concept is a special login for your operating system that allows others to use the machine, without having access to any of your data. At the same time, no information would be saved between guest sessions. In other words, anyone could use your computer, and — once they logged out of the guest session — any and all data collected during the session would be automatically trashed.

• Unlike other laptop lineups, the HP Dragonfly Pro series uses both ChromeOS and Windows 11. There’s the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook which runs ChromeOS, and then the HP Dragonfly Pro, which runs Windows. But what about Linux? While you can run Linux on both of these great HP laptops, you’ll need some workarounds.

• On the standard HP Dragonfly Pro, you can virtualize Linux, run Linux apps with the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or try to run it in place of Windows with the risk of driver issues and certain parts of your device not running right. Then, with the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, you can run Linux apps on top of ChromeOS apps. Here’s everything else you need to know.

• If you’ve ever spent time browsing a Linux community on Reddit, Twitter, or other social networks, you might have noticed some beautifully-made screenshots of sleek-looking systems where the time, date, and other information about the system are on full display in the desktop. To do this on your system, you need to to master one of the most useful applications in Linux: Conky.

WINE or Emulation

• ScummVM 2.7.0, The Real Slim Shader, is officially out now bringing more compatibility for retro titles to modern platforms so here’s what’s new. What exactly is ScummVM? To put it simply: it’s a whole set of different open source game engines under one roof, with each focusing on a different type of retro games.

Games

• Return to Part 1: Dumpster Diving

• Beat Hazard 3 is a music-driven twin-stick shooter currently in Early Access, and it should now play a whole lot better on Steam Deck. Released initially back in November 2022, it still has a good while left in Early Access so more work is to be done but some fun stuff landed recently.

• Free, open source and getting better all the time. Tabletop Club has a fresh Beta release available with a whole lot of fixes and improvements.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Coming only a week after KDE Plasma 5.27.1, the KDE Plasma 5.27.2 point release is here to improve the first-time setup experience of your Plasma desktop by omitting apps that are pinned to the Task Manager by default but aren’t installed on your GNU/Linux distribution so you won’t end up with broken icons.

• KDE Plasma 5.27.2 also brings lots of improvements for the Plasma Wayland session, including a fix for a recent regression causing line artifacts to appear around panels when using a fractional scale factor, as well as support for correctly rendering the mouse cursor in XWayland-using apps when using a fractional scale factor.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• On February 27th 2023, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 1.03 update (32 and 64 bits), based on the Debian 11.6 Bullseye distribution and supporting both Xfce and LXQt desktop environments.

• This distribution was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution’s name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware, in order to reduce the waste induced by the over-consumption of raw materials.

• This new update of our distribution adds the CTparental control, as well as a script to help install and configure it. This will greatly simplify the deployment of CTparental for the parents who want to protect their children against unsuitable content on the Internet, see our tutorial presenting the parental control.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Making the rounds recently is a proposal being made to add in payments, donations and subscriptions options to Flathub.

• G42 Cloud, the UAE’s leading Cloud provider, announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on G42 Cloud. This collaboration will enable public sector and regional enterprises to seamlessly move their Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift workloads to G42 Cloud. As part of the engagement G42 Cloud has become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider.

• The collaboration will further enhance G42 Cloud’s portfolio through the addition of Red Hat open hybrid cloud technologies. Customers can now utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on G42 Cloud infrastructure in order to create an enterprise offering with enhanced security capabilities for regional customers.

Debian Family

• Two of the most popular projects providing images for Arm and RISC-V single board computers have released new updates with Armbian 23.02 adding Linux 6.1-based Debian and Ubuntu images, and DietPi 8.14 adding experimental RISC-V support for the StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC and new Arm boards.

• Linux 6.1 is the latest LTS kernel, so Armbian is now providing Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy and Debian 11 Bullseye images based on Linux 6.1.y for boards that support it, as well as the first development images based on Debian 12 Bookworm and Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar.

• I could not find any new boards added in the changelog, but the release brings several improvements and bug fixes to some of the already supported SBCs including the Raspberry Pi 3, Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS, ROCK Pi S, ROCK Pi 4, NanoPi R2S, NanoPi NEO3, and Banana Pi BPI-M2 Pro. The announcement also highlights that Armbian OS works well on RK3588 with official support for Radxa Rock 5 and Orange Pi 5, albeit some are still using Linux 5.10.x.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria”, the devs promise better support for Flatpak apps, as well as for apps using GNOME’s libadwaita library by implementing support for the xdg-desktop-portal desktop integration portal and frontend service for Flatpak and other similar containment frameworks.

• This change will make Flatpak and libadwaita-based apps work seamlessly on all supported desktop environments, including Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE, even if they’re usually written only for the GNOME desktop environment, and support features like dark mode and screenshots.

• When the latest point release of Canonical’s Ubuntu desktop operating system was made available, it made me realize that this particular take on Linux (as well as the mother of all distributions… Debian) is totally antithetical to much of society.

• Let me illustrate this by way of a mobile phone metaphor. For a very long time, anyone who designed, created, and manufactured smartphones understood that every release had to have a serious “wow” factor. Without that, no one would pay attention. Why? Because society wants to be wowed, wooed, and impressed. Society is always looking for the “latest and greatest,” the thing that makes the biggest splash and has the most impressive set of new features.

• Those who embrace technology came to expect projects to come out with new features that would blow them away. They wanted pomp, circumstance, and cake (because who doesn’t want cake?).

• Backup and recovery are crucial components of any data management strategy, regardless of whether you’re dealing with personal files, business data, or mission-critical applications. Accidental deletion, hardware failure, theft, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters are some factors that can lead to data loss. The consequences can be severe, ranging from the inconvenience and financial losses to reputation damage and legal liabilities.

• Gaming on Linux has come a long way in recent years, and Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions for gaming enthusiasts. With the right setup, Ubuntu can provide an excellent gaming experience, offering access to a broad range of games, including popular titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Rocket League.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 776 for the week of February 19 – 25, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

Open Hardware/Modding

• KiCAD is a professional free software application for electronic design automation (EDA). It is mainly used for electronic purposes like designing schematics, electronic circuits and drawing printed circuit board (PCB). Drawing circuitry with electronic components like resistors, capacitors, diode, switch etc. is easy with KiCAD. It includes important tools to create a bill of materials (BoM), artwork, Gerber files, and 3D views of the PCB and its components. It is licensed under GNU GPLv3 or later license. Its website is https://www.kicad.org.

• The TRS-80 Model 102 is a classic computer from the mid-1980s and with the help of a Raspberry Pi and an ESP32 it is capable of much more exciting things.

• Portability is one of the great benefits of owning a small, yet powerful, computer such as Raspberry Pi. So long as you have a screen and keyboard to hand, you can pop one into your bag and take it on your travels. Or, as Nicholas Hacault has shown, you can actually make Raspberry Pi a feature of your bag and gain instant access to it wherever you go.

• Nicholas came up with the idea when he was looking for a way of transporting a Linux device. At first, he considered running a virtual machine on his laptop. “But that sounded like too easy a solution,” he says. “Since I was already bringing a bag to school, I figured that a backpack would be the perfect housing for my project.” With the idea in the bag, he was ready to get going.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The annual Xen Project Developer and Design Summit 2023 will be held 24-26 June.

• Homebrew is a handy tool if you work in a terminal window on a Mac, which lets you quickly and easily install a wide variety of familiar tools from the wider FOSS world.

• The add-on package manager doesn’t need superuser permissions and installs programs into your home directory: it “does for macOS what apt-get does for Debian”. The new version 4.0.0 is faster than before, especially when it comes to the update process.

• Back late last year, Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis blogged about a whole lot of work going into getting full Wayland support for Wine and now a big first step towards it being included in Wine is happening.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Today we’re talking to Ximena Alcaman, who is working on LibreOffice installer improvements as part of the Outreachy programme. Outreachy provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living.

• Ximena is working alongside Rachael Odetayo on the LibreOffice installer, and is being mentored by Marina Latini and Jussi Pakkanen, with support from sponsors SUSE and The Document Foundation. Let’s learn more…

• LibreOffice is a cross-platform, free libre open source software (FOSS) office suite from Germany developed by worldwide community under stewardship of a non-profit organization. It was originally developed from OpenOffice.org in 2010, first released in 2011 and the latest version 7.5 released in 2023. It is consisted of six applications namely Base (database), Calc (spreadsheet), Draw (illustrator), Impress (presentation), Math (equation editor), and Writer (word processor). It is mostly viewed as an alternative to Microsoft Office or Google Docs. It is the de facto office suite on all GNU/Linux operating systems especially Ubuntu. Its website is https://libreoffice.org.

• Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14 is a Maintenance release, incorporating bug fixes and little enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 or earlier are advised to upgrade. You can download Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14 here. Windows 10 and 11 users can now also get Apache OpenOffice for selected languages in the “Microsoft Store” App.

• Please review these Release Notes to learn what is new in this version, as well as important remarks concerning known issues and their workarounds.

• Only use the original website “https://www.openoffice.org/download/” to download. The installed software can be verified with the About box (see menu “Help – About OpenOffice”) by comparing the numbers with the reference data on the download webpage (see the text in the light green box). For Apache OpenOffice 4.1.14 it has to be “AOO4114m1 | Build ID 9811 | Rev. a0d24fb625″.

GNU Projects

Licensing / Legal

• Microsoft and OpenAI are far from alone in scraping copyrighted material from the web to train AI systems for profit. Many text-to-image AI, like the open-source program Stable Diffusion, were created in exactly the same way. The firms behind these programs insist that their use of this data is covered in the US by fair use doctrine. But legal experts say this is far from settled law and that litigation like Butterick’s class action lawsuit could upend the tenuously defined status quo.

• To find out more about the motivations and reasoning behind the lawsuit, we spoke to Butterick (MB), Manfredi (TM), and Zirpoli (CZ), who explained why they think we’re in the Napster-era of AI and why letting Microsoft use other’s code without attribution could kill the open source movement.

Programming/Development

• So, 2022 was a successful year for Qt – and we highlight the Qt 6.3 and Qt 6.4 releases, Qt World Summit, and Qt Contributor Summit.

• And our community members keep up with the activity by writing diligent bug reports, contributing patches, giving technical advice, or helping out other users in forums and mailing lists.

• The Gin framework is one of the popular web packages in the Go ecosystem for building web applications. Gin provides most of the functionalities you’ll need in a web framework featuring a martini-like API with high performance and easy error management.

Perl / Raku

• Welcome to the official documentation of the Raku™ programming language!

Standards/Consortia

• If my current position as a writer on The Michigan Daily’s Arts section hasn’t already made it obvious, I love art. Whether it’s books, music, movies, TV shows or anything in between, chances are that I have made the media I consume a part of my personality at some point in my life.

Leftovers

• Today is the 20th anniversary of the first-ever public post on this blog (Spoiler: Not that interesting). Some posts mark milestones: Is This Thing On? (one day), One ongoing Year, 730 ongoing Days, Thirty-six ongoing Months, and for the ten-year mark, Birthday!

• I just re-read that last ten-years note and I think it’s good. If you care about this subject at all, do me a favor and go read it. I’ll wait. Then, a few more words about doing this in 2023 and into the future.

Hardware

• Shipping industry sources say the flow of goods has reversed direction, with more entering ports than leaving.

• As sales of CPUs decrease, shipments of discrete desktop graphics cards increase in Q4 2022, says Jon Peddie Research.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Hong Kong’s long-standing Covid-19 mask mandate will be scrapped from Wednesday, Chief Executive John Lee has announced.

• Masks will still need to be worn at high-risk places including hospitals.

• Visitors and staff at Hong Kong’s public hospitals and elderly care homes will no longer need to present a negative result from a Covid-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test from Wednesday, the government has announced.

• Macau’s Covid-19 mask mandate has been partially lifted, leaving Hong Kong as one of the few remaining places across the globe to enforce a mask mandate in all public settings, according to an expert from the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

• This is a question that keeps cropping up in Hong Kong, which is currently one of the last places in the world where universal mask wearing in all public settings is compulsory.

• But the food stalls are hurting families who run small food shops to make ends meet

• North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un has called for stronger public solidarity behind his leadership to significantly increase grain production

• The Danish Health Authority (Sundhedsstyrelsen) no longer recommends the Covid-19 therapeutic medicine Lagevrio, citing the medicine’s lack of effectiveness.

• Metagenomic sequencing can help detect unknown pathogens, but its widespread use faces challenges.

• The lab leak theory may turn out to be true, but we’re nowhere near being able to say that right now.

• Over half of Finns have developed hybrid immunity to the coronavirus by the end of 2022 through a combination of vaccination and natural infection, according to a study conducted by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). This hybrid immunity provides long-lasting, high protection against severe disease.

• THL has been monitoring the occurrence of antibodies produced in response to coronavirus infection in the population since April 2020.

• Dhruv Khullar examines what strategies worked to control the virus, and talks to the C.D.C.’s director, Rochelle Walensky, about the issue of misinformation.

• Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Santos said that he had “no idea” how the Wuhan job wound up on his C.V.

• Fertilizers filled with the nutrient boosted our ability to feed the planet. Today, they’re creating vast and growing dead zones in our lakes and seas.

Proprietary

• Ransomware attacks have crossed a red line for many countries with continued merciless attacks. The threat to national economies and critical infrastructure marked a turning point. Governments are fighting back, and one of the strategies now routinely employed is infiltrating the servers and infrastructure of ransomware gangs. A recent offensive action against a top ransomware gang shows it can be a powerful tool both to rattle ransomware groups and provide real-time help to victims.

• But what happens if a customer needs the performance of a whole box, most of the time? Then they’re paying $1,400/month for $1,000′s worth of computing. Or maybe, because they’re reserving the whole box, they’ll get a deal at $1,250/month by committing to a whole year. That deal is far less obviously good on both sides. It’s basically a credit agreement at a 25% APR. Tread wisely!

• Enter serverless. It’s the same financial mechanics as above, but you can slice the server far more thinly. Instead of renting out your one big server to seven customers at $200/month, you rent out individual function executions to 100 customers at $20/month. This now clears $1,000/month in profit instead of just $400/month. No wonder cloud providers love serverless!

• This is a problem. Amazon doesn’t reserve bucket names after they’re abandoned. Which means digital miscreants can claim them.

• Why did it take 553 days from discovery to notify patients? Is the delay acceptable? Applying the standards for HIPAA-covered entities, and having reported on many breaches by now, DataBreaches believes a delay that long is not acceptable unless there are factors we do not know about in play. DataBreaches sent inquiries to both DHMS and their external counsel at Wilson Elser to ask for an explanation for the serious delay. No replies have been received.

Security

• A hacker group took nine Danish hospital websites offline on Sunday afternoon, following a similar attack on Danish airports last Wednesday, and another in Sweden.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (apr-util, freeradius, mono, nodejs, php7.3, php7.4, and python-cryptography), Fedora (epiphany, haproxy, and podman), SUSE (chromium, libraw, php7, php74, python-pip, and rubygem-activerecord-4_2), and Ubuntu (apr, clamav, curl, intel-microcode, nss, openvswitch, webkit2gtk, and zoneminder).

Privacy/Surveillance

• A number of governments are trying to mandate surveillance software in devices that support end-to-end encrypted chat; the EU’s CSA Regulation and the UK’s Online Safety bill being two prominent current examples.

• Operators will use the tech on small drones to help them with intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and identifying targets.

• Dutch police hacked and shutdown Exclu, a phone network used by alleged criminals. A promotional video shows professional fighters promoting the phones.

• The ‘Camera Shy Hoodie’ renders its wearer anonymous to night vision surveillance cameras, using infrared LEDs usually found in the cameras themselves.

Defence/Aggression

• Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Monday counted the cost of deadly violence and arson by Israeli settlers targeting a town where two Israeli brothers were killed.

• Moldova’s intelligence agency said on February 27 that two foreign nationals have been expelled from the country and banned from returning for 10 years after they were caught carrying out “subversive actions” to destabilize Moldova.

• The Canadian government has imposed sanctions on 12 senior officials from Iran’s IRGC and Law Enforcement Forces for “gross violations of human rights” in a deadly crackdown on protesters angered by the death of a young woman while in police custody for allegedly wearing a head scarf improperly.

• Canada is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app

• Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says talks with Sweden and Finland over their NATO membership bids would resume on March 9, although he said Sweden had still not fulfilled its obligations under a memorandum signed last year.

• “We need a ceasefire and the start of peace talks, Hungary calls for peace in all international forums,” Viktor Orban said.

• Washington set sanctions using non-existent shipments of Chinese arms to Russia as a pretext.

• Hungary is calling for a UN investigation into the “scandalous” attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that journalist Seymour Hersh has asserted were destroyed by the United States. The pipelines, which connected Russia to Germany, were sabotaged last September, leading to a state of dependence on US energy and prompting European countries to support the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

• Nearly a year ago I was writing a trilogy of articles for Helsinki Times outlining the problems and risks for Finland joining NATO.

• Groupthink clearly prevailed when making the decision to join. Irving Janis who developed the concept years before warned that when decision makers look inward and invest in a perspective that is biased in favour of their own world view without sufficient recognition of other viewpoints, then it leads to poor and damaging decisions.

• The civilian service says it attributes the spike in applications to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

• Turkey may separate Finnish and Swedish membership bids, according to Reuters.

Environment

• On current trends, plastic use will nearly double from 2019 across G20 countries by 2050, reaching 451 million tonnes each year, according to the report, jointly produced by Economist Impact and The Nippon Foundation.

• In 1950, only two million tonnes of plastic were produced worldwide.

• “The findings highlight the level of ambition and the sense of urgency needed at the negotiation table,” co-author Gillian Parker told AFP.

• They released sediment containing toxic substances that could potentially kill off several maritime populations, including Baltic Sea cod and porpoises, which both had breeding grounds close to the blast zones.

• Antarctic sea ice likely shrunk to a record low last week, US researchers said Monday, its lowest extent in the 45 years of satellite record-keeping.

• The financial market regulator says Mercer was investing in companies such as BHP and AGL while marketing an investment product as being suitable for members who “are deeply committed to sustainability”.

Energy/Transportation

• The Australian Government looks set to review its National Hydrogen Strategy in response to global policy changes to support the hydrogen industry.

• Canada-based Li-Cycle Holdings said that it received a conditional commitment for a $375 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, through DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program.

• Sabotage at the Nord Stream pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm last year may have resulted in increased pollution which threats natural habitats, a study has found.

• Bills for gas and electricity look likely to go up from 1 April – and Which? is

• calling on the government not to change the energy price guarantee

Finance

• The Albanese government has set the scene for trimming back super tax concessions with new costings showing the tax breaks are collectively worth up to $50 billion a year and largely flow to high income earners.

• You know, for a little while it looked like those hippies’ dreams of one global village had come true. Some of us grew up in the ‘we are the world’ era and really believed Lucky Dube when he said ‘we gotta stand together as one.’

• Alcohol is set to get more expensive and tax declaration season gets under way. Here’s more on that and everything else that changes in Sweden in March 2023.

• After delivering a union petition with over 1,000 signatures, the company’s subcontractors will now earn Alphabet’s minimum standard wage.

• Tax on super earnings over $3 million will go from 15 per cent to 30 per cent, commencing in two years time.

• A report shows the total cost of concessions around super will be worth almost $51 billion this financial year, with the bulk of the tax breaks flowing to high-income earners.

• Yle’s investigative team found that Boris Rotenberg has not submitted all of the ownership notifications that he should have.

• If negotiations are unresolved, threatened strikes may cause lengthy disruptions of public transport services across the country, starting this week.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• How about Orange? (Trump and Trump-related impersonators only.) Or Blue Sweater/Glasses? (For @georgesantosreallyIswear.) A Shouts & Murmurs by Bill Scheft.

• President Emmanuel Macron on Monday outlined France’s new strategy for Africa, where anti-French sentiment runs high in some of its former colonies. Ahead of a visit to Gabon, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Macron said that France needs to demonstrate a “profound humility” in Africa.

• Tensions rose Monday during the counting of Nigeria’s hotly contested presidential election when representatives from the parties of the two main opposition candidates walked out in anger from the center where state-by-state results were being announced.

• Britain and the European Union announced a new deal for post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland on Monday in a bid to end a row that has overshadowed their ties since Brexit.

• US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in Kyiv on a surprise visit to highlight US economic support on Monday as a deadly Russian drone attack targeted the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi. The UN Human Rights Council convened for its annual session in Geneva as the UN chief warned that the invasion of Ukraine had led to “massive violations of human rights”.

• Data reveals large drops in UK regional print circulation, although some brands’ online audiences have grown.

• Jonathan Levy is stepping up after head of Sky News John Ryley’s departure.

• Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and side effects. In the end, all the effective ones would destroy the free Internet as we know it.

• Twitter has laid off hundreds of workers in another chaotic incident, some of whom were die-hard loyalists to Musk’s new regime.

• The Biden Administration calls for greater financial transparency around the world. This country could use more of it, too.

• Fox Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath that some Fox hosts “endorsed” the notion…

Censorship/Free Speech

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Monday that gives him control of Walt Disney World’s self-governing district, making good on his threats to punish the company over its opposition to his so-called Don’t Say Gay law.

• On February 10, government security agents arrested the satirical comedian Junior Nkole in central Kinshasa in the latest attack on freedom of expression in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Nkole’s relatives told Human Rights Watch that he and his brother Serge Nkole were waiting for a meeting with a business contact in the restaurant of the Hotel Mayotte. At around 10:00 a.m., in what appears to have been a trap, a dozen men in plainclothes who turned out to be officers of Congo’s National Intelligence Agency (Agence nationale de renseignements, ANR) showed up. They beat the two, forced them into an SUV with tinted windows, and took them to an ANR office. The authorities released Serge a few hours later, but Junior remains in detention.

• Belarusian prosecutors have demanded lengthy prison terms and hefty fines for Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya and four other opposition leaders living outside the country.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Many foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are forced to work in terrible conditions, often with highly abusive employers. However, they are trapped because of a system that allows Saudi’s staff ro nexties their working rights in the country to the employer. Enter the dalalas — middlemen who prowl Facebook offering desperate women help to flee their terrible employers for better jobs and improved working conditions.

• A former police officer has been convicted under the colonial-era sedition law over Facebook comments about the death of a marine officer. Chui Chun-man appeared before Acting Principal Magistrate Veronica Heung at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Monday. Heung is one of the city’s handpicked national security judges.

• Facebook commentator, provincial party officials latest to be targeted in efforts to gain ruling party support.

• Critics say the junta wants to isolate Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint from the outside world.

• After 11 years in Sweden, James, a British citizen working in the building industry, found out he no longer had residency in Sweden after calling the Migration Agency to ask about a rejected application for parental leave.

• ‘Take It Down,’ a new initiative by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, creates a hash from non-consensual images of minors without requiring them to upload anything.

• The US Department of Labor (DOL) Monday announced new measures aimed at combatting child labor and, in particular, the exploitation of migrant child labor.

• The UK’s Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 came into force Monday, raising the legal age of marriage from 16 to 18 in England and Wales. The act amended the Marriage Act 1949, which regulates marriages in the two countries.

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tunisia Director Salsabil Chellali Monday urged Tunisian authorities to reinstate dismissed judges and prosecutors and remove all measures used to subdue judicial authority. President Kais Saied dismissed 57 magistrates last year as part of an “anti-corruption” crusade.

• Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Sunday reported that Russia is illegally detaining 180 political prisoners in occupied Crimea. Dmytro Lubinets’ report comes as the country marks the ninth anniversary of Russia’s occupation of the peninsula.

• The Government introduced a new Holocaust Memorial Bill to Parliament last week on February 23rd. The bill, called the Holocaust Memorial Act 2023, was launched under section 19(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998. T

• Although flows of irregular migrants have ebbed recently, the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service (VSAT) believes that the existing state of emergency in border areas should be extended.

• A destroyed Russian tank displayed in front of the Cathedral Square in Vilnius attracts not only Ukraine’s supporters. A fight broke out after a group of people laid flowers on the tank on Sunday evening.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Without the longstanding interpretation of Section 230 as providing broad protections to digital intermediaries and their users, the digital economy, built on user interactions with an enormous variety of content, could not continue to exist.

• We shouldn’t read too much into the oral arguments heard this week, and they’re not a firm indication of how the court will rule (likely by summer). However, the questions the justices ask can signal how the court is thinking about a case, and we can extrapolate what might happen with more confidence. I’ve broken down some of those more probable scenarios below.

• We owe the cultural evolution of the internet to the likes of ‘Two Girls, One Cup,’ ‘Goatse,’ and ‘Tubgirl.’

• Last Thursday, EU industry chief Thierry Breton launched a 12-week consultation on its “fair share” proposals, under which Big Tech platforms would bear more of the costs of the systems which give them access to consumers.

Monopolies

Patents

• Unified Patents provided comments to the USPTO’s RFC on USPTO Initiatives To Ensure the Robustness and Reliability of Patent Rights and those were recently published.

• Outstanding solutions highlight the potential of machine learning for identifying sustainable innovation in the field of plastics.

• First two countries implement filing tool

Trademarks

• The TTAB recently ruled on the appeals from the three Section 2(e)(1) mere descriptiveness refusals summarized below. Let’s see how you do with them. Results will be found in the first comment.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• My support worker is excellent. They’re 26, a kinky enm nonbinary/transmasc dyke; i’ll refer to them as ‘Z’. Z’s been doing this sort of work for at least a few years now. They often have lived experience of the sort of issues i blab about, and i regularly find that i don’t need to explain certain things because it’s very clear to me that they _get it_, that they very much know what i’m talking about. i’m very grateful for this, given my decades of shitty experiences with various health and allied workers.

• During our session today, Z mentioned a recent experience with one of their other clients (without, of course, giving any identifying information). The client is 19, and told Z that Z is ‘queerphobic’ and ‘transphobic’, and that they thus want to take a few weeks’ break from seeing Z. Why? Because in the short period since their last session with Z, they’d changed and/or added identities and/or pronouns, and Z hadn’t somehow automatically known this, and had thus got language wrong. According to the client, Z “should be able to keep up”.

• i don’t feel i ‘belong’ to the queer/tgd communities. i am, of course, a ‘member’ of those communities by virtue of being queer and transgenderqueer. But decades of experience and activism involving these communities have led me to feel that they project themselves in ways i don’t, and can’t, relate to. In some cases, they can feel actively marginalising.

• The primary example of this is being ‘fabulous’, i.e. outgoing and colourful (both literally and figuratively). Both the queer and tgd communities are apparently _very_ invested in representing themselves as ‘fabulous’. No, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone being ‘fabulous’; i’m here for it. Yes, i understand this is at least partly a response to being expected (at best) to remain in the closet, instead being ‘out, loud and proud’.

• What was the last book you read?

• Why did you choose it? What did you get from reading it?

• Under what circumstances would you recommend it to someone else?

• On work days a Casio F-91W wristwatch, draped over the clock radio, beeps me awake at 0415. It cost $15 at walmart, survived a month under mud, water, & snow when I lost it in the backyard. Its battery lasts 10 years and is replacable. It goes on my wrist before I leave the house.

• Shower, eggs & greens, maybe yoga, scrubs on, chant a psalm because it’s Lent, drive 100km to hospital for work. I listen to St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica on a busted old offline Android discard- ed by my friend Kirsa on the way. Thanks Librivox & VLC.

Technical

• Here is a set of SSH client configurations I usually use and find useful.

• 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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