● 03.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/03/2023: Release of MAAS 3.3 and Chaos at EUIPO/EPO (Connected to Abuses)

Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge.

Instructionals/Technical

• $ convert file.png -background transparent -gravity Center -extent 1:1# -scale 32 file-32px.png

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain how to install Joomla on AlmaLinux OS.

• Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and used for creating websites. Joomla offers a variety of features such as caching, blogs, support for different languages and etc. The data is stored in the MySQL database. In this tutorial, we will install Joomla with the LAMP stack.

• Installing Joomla on AlmaLinux is a straightforward process and may take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get started!

• In this tutorial, we will set up and integrate sudoers to the OpenLDAP server. With this, you will have a centralized user and sudo privileges management on your OpenLDAP server allowing the installation on the client side faster. Any SSSD service on the client machine configured with a sudo authentication source allows OpenLDAP users to execute sudo.

• In this tutorial, we will discuss what is XCP-ng, and the key features of XCP-ng and finally how to install XCP-ng Hypervisor using ISO image file.

Games

• Quick post for this time.

• Seems my game, Penance has been uploaded on Steam by someone who I don’t know, completely without my permission. They’re selling my free game and of course I’m not gonna get any money from their sales.

• While the Epic Games Store doesn’t support Linux or Steam Deck officially, this industry news is something we should all know about with Epic now opening up self-publishing along with some new rules for their store.

• Transport Fever 2 is going strong since the release in 2019. They just launched a console version, and upgraded the PC release with some massive improvements too.

• Do any of you remember OpenHV? Back in 2020, it was announced as an OpenRA-based free and open source RTS, based on designs from Daniel Cook that never made it into a game planned to be called Hard Vacuum but now it’s here and it has a massive upgrade.

• Need a fresh party game with simple controls and plenty of mini-games to play? Starship Olympics is free, open source and worth a go. They recently released the first Alpha build, which comes with a whole bunch of improvements and overhauls compared to their earlier releases I covered here some time ago. It was originally called SuperStarfighter.

• Atari teamed up with SneakyBox to revamp another classic, with Caverns of Mars: Recharged officially out now with Native Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Call for proposal ends Thursday the 30th of March

*

• There’s still a few weeks, but time is really running out.

*  

• I’m sure there’s lots of interesting things you have to talk about Qt, KDE, C++, Community Management or other million things so head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2023/cfp/ or over to https://conf.kde.org/event/5/abstracts/ if you want to skip the nicely worded page that encourages you to submit a talk

• Here’s the usual bi-monthly update from KDE’s personal information management applications team. Since the last report 25 people contributed about 1300 code changes, focusing on bugfixes and infrastructure improvements for the 22.12 maintenance releases as well as preparing for the transition to Qt 6.

• We’ll finally have an in-person sprint again, after the last one planned for April 2020 fell victim to the pandemic. The sprint will be held in Toulouse, on April 1st/2nd.

• With the first release on top of Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 expected for later this year, a lot of work again went into preparing for that. Many parts are meanwhile working and usable in a Qt 6 build already. The install layout has also been adjusted to allow PIM components from both a Qt 5 and a Qt 6 to co-exist, which is especially relevant for the more widely used libraries.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In this blog, you will learn about some of the new features now available in the latest MAAS release.

Open Hardware/Modding

• LED accent lighting is very trendy right now, as it can add quite a lot of visual interest to a room without introducing clutter. But commercial products are often either very expensive or subpar in quality and capability. Fortunately for makers, this kind of project is perfect for a DIY weekend build.

• Ping pong is one of the most popular sports in the world, but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to find people to practice with. Lone players are typically forced to practice by using return boards (or one half of the table flipped up), but that is overly predictable.

• You may have heard about Portenta X8 for its flexibility of usage of Linux combined with real-time applications through the Arduino environment. But now, a new set of features have been added to Portenta X8 thanks to its brand-new Arduino Python container. Update your board with the latest image (here is a tutorial showing how to do so) and start exploiting a wide range of unique functionalities: [...]

• The three Acer C720 Chromebooks I wrote about in:

• 2014′s A Note of Thanks,2017′s Travels with a Chromebook,and 2021′s Chromebook Linux Update

• are all still running Linux just fine despite the one I’m typing on being more than 8 years old. Below the fold I have some good news and some no-so-good news.

• BeagleBoard recently presented the BeaglePlay Single Board Computer based on the TI AM6254 Multi-core processor  and the BeagleConnect Freedom equipped with the TI CC1352P7 microcontroller supporting 2.4GHz/Sub 1GHz wireless protocols.

• Outwardly it is almost identical to the 12 Megapixel High Quality Camera, and like that camera it accepts C and CS mount lenses, or most anything else with the appropriate adapter.

• If you need to capture high speed subjects, then the Global Shutter Camera is for you. Mainstream users are best sticking with the High Quality Camera.

• Despite the challenges associated with rolling shutter artefacts, our existing cameras are widely used in hobbyist and industrial machine vision applications. And we’ve seen some real ingenuity: to compensate for artefacts when imaging products on a high-speed conveyor belt, one of our industrial customers ended up training their models using pre-sheared input data.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSSH 9.3p1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

• As a chat tool, Signal is better than many other. But it’s centralised. And, sooner or later, a centralised service faces you with a choice: either you comply with a rule you don’t agree, either you lose everything.

• With every centralised service, the question is not if it will ever happen. The question is “when”.

• Either you conform to the norm, either you are too different to have your existence acknowledges.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

Education

• The 20th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 20x) will feature keynotes from notables such as Ken Thompson, the creator of Unix, said Ilan Rabinovich, one of the co-founders and conference chair for the SCALE, in this edition of The New Stack Makers.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• An agreement between the publisher Wiley and the Big Ten Academic Alliance is offering new subsidized open access publishing options for U-M authors.

Programming/Development

• The philosophy and implementation of code comments varies widely in the industry, and some view comment density as a proxy for code quality.2 I’ll state my views here, but will note that yours may differ and I find that acceptable; I am not here to suggest that your strategy is wrong and I will happily adopt it when I write a patch for your codebase.

• In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a local and a remote cache to improve Bazel build performance. You’ll also understand the pros and cons of caching information.

• Austral is a new systems programming language. It features linear types for safe, compile-time memory and resource management; capability-based security to prevent supply chain attacks; and strong modularity. It is designed with fits-in-head simplicity as the goal.

Perl / Raku

Python

• Python 3.12 is still in development. This release, 3.12.0a6 is the sixth of seven planned alpha releases.

• Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process.

• During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2023-05-08) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2023-07-31). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Java

• In Java, objects can be classified as either mutable or immutable based on whether their state can be changed or not. A mutable object is one whose state can be modified after its creation. For example, an array can have its elements added, removed or modified after it has been created.

Leftovers

• Now… I know that self-hosting at home has always been possible, but there are a few pieces that came together to make it worth a shot: [...]

• The feature-rich web has a lot of advantages; the best web-apps are easy to learn, which is great since the learnability threshold is a huge problem with the wonderful world of Unix and worse-is-better that a lot of us are so enamored with. I remember when gratis webmail was first made widely available and how it made email accessible to a lot of people who didn’t have access to it before: not only to library users, students and other people without ISPs, but also to people who couldn’t figure out how to use their ISP email (or to use it when they were away from home).

• But there are also a couple of problems with the feature-rich web: [...]

Science

• The Middle East is full of groundbreaking archaeological discoveries. What intrigued our correspondent wasn’t what this team uncovered, but who uncovered it.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Oklahoma voters have rejected a move to allow the recreational use of marijuana for those over 21. Oklahoma already has a robust medical marijuana program. The proposal was opposed by various religious leaders, law enforcement, and prosecutors.

• As soon as the pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020, one thing became abundantly clear: The world was woefully unprepared to withstand it.

• The spike has been attributed to an increase in international travel, and one-third of the cases were children.

• Last November, Biomass Resin opened a factory in Namie to turn locally-grown rice into pellets.

• A former high school teacher awarded a six-figure payout after years on workers’ compensation for a mental health injury says she felt constantly punished by the system and would have been happier to see the problem resolved so she could return to work.

• Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of all Americans, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks—and mask mandates—decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread.

• Also, protests in Georgia and armed villagers in Kashmir.

Proprietary

• The most prominent strain of A.I. encodes a flawed conception of language and knowledge.

Security

• We are very happy to release the second candidate of what will become dnsdist 1.8.0! This release contains fixes for a few issues that were found in the first release candidate, the most important one being that dnsdist was responding from the wrong source IP address in some setups, which was reported by multiple users.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• A lively discussion of operational issues and best practices that help to secure global Internet routing.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Since the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, travel bans have been imposed on left-wing activists – but this was first introduced against football fans. Now the German Federal Police prevented the chairman of the VVN-BdA from leaving the country at the airport.

• According to the new State of Cyber Threat Intelligence report from risk intelligence firm Flashpoint a growing body of evidence demonstrates just how extensively cyber threats are overlapping, intersecting, and relating—“from the resilient nature of the illicit communities where cybercriminals operate to the to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) cyber threat actors use to execute their attacks”.

• Flashpoint examines why these threats—from the online spaces in which cybercriminals operate to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they use to execute their attacks—are cyclical and what that means from an intelligence and security perspective.

Defence/Aggression

• Anthony Albanese is set to announce Australia will acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines based primarily on a new British design.

• Earlier NATO’S secretary general said the rest of the Ukrainian city could eventually fall to the invading army.

• President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.

• Yuriy Lutsenko’s assignment as the commander of a platoon of drone operators near the embattled city of Bakhmut was short-lived.

• ADF STAFF Ugandan military officers will soon have the opportunity to pursue a doctorate in Defense…

• Hungarian politicians visit Helsinki as Hungary prepares to finalise its decision on Finland’s application to join Nato.

• Retired Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton breaks down how some weapons could make a difference in the battle over the key Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

• Students at the school have been offered crisis support following the incident during a home economics class on Wednesday morning.

• The exercises will involve practising responses to “a civil-military scenario, set in a hybrid environment,” the defence alliance says. But no troops are involved.

• What does it take to win a war? In a tour of Ukraine’s long eastern front, fighters say they still have determination and hope. What they need is more and better weapons.

• The review, undertaken after a specialized unit killed Breonna Taylor in a botched raid in 2020, paints a damning portrait of a department in crisis.

• China sees a partnership with Russia as a way to challenge, and potentially weaken, the United States, a new threat assessment said.

• Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Germany was waiting for further investigations, after reports in The New York Times and other news outlets.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Roman Badanin, an independent Russian journalist who left Russia after facing the threat of a prison sentence, discusses his investigation into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s secret, lavish lifestyle and details about his reputed girlfriend.

• To dismiss the lawsuit as “noise” even as the clear consensus emerges among legal experts that his company is in danger of losing in court is an interesting choice of words. The question is, could this CEO truly believe the threat Fox faces is immaterial, or is he just projecting an air of confidence as false as just about every word that comes out of Tucker Carlson’s mouth?

• I’d be inclined to believe the latter, but when it comes to the Murdochs, the former question has to be seriously considered. Because Lachlan Murdoch knows all too well the incredible ability his father has demonstrated over his own career for evading the consequences of scandals that seem on the verge of cratering his empire.

Environment

• Contamination by dioxins — toxic chemicals known to cause cancer, disrupt the immune system and cause reproductive harms — have been at the center of notorious environmental cleanups from Times Beach, Missouri to Love Canal, New York to “Mount Dioxin” in Pensacola, Florida.

• Dioxins don’t break down easily. Once in the food chain, the compounds tend to accumulate in people and animals. In key ways, the smoke-belching fire in East Palestine offered the right recipe to create these compounds, experts say.

• Smoke from monster wildfires caused a chemical reaction that widened the ozone hole by 10 per cent, researchers say.

• American and European officials are trying to reach agreement on the outlines of a limited trade deal that could help resolve a major rift over America’s new climate legislation.

Energy/Transportation

• It could limit India’s ability to address surging electricity demand when solar energy is not available.

• Crypto-focused lender Silvergate said it is winding down operations and will liquidate the bank after being financially pummeled by turmoil in digital assets.

• G.O.P. elites are simply lagging behind their states.

Wildlife/Nature

• Laborers looking to carve out small farms in the Amazon at the Brazilian government’s behest have run afoul of big ranching, mining, and timber companies that exploit both land and workers.

• People who maintain bird feeders are trading seeds for delight. Sometimes that exchange is inconvenient, and sometimes it’s unexpectedly life-giving.

Finance

• While most of the world is experiencing price increases it hasn’t seen since the 1980s, China is having the opposite problem.

• One of the most popular banks for cryptocurrency companies, Silvergate Bank, announced March 8 that it’s winding down, largely a consequence of a faltering crypto market and the failure of its most high-profile client, FTX.

• US president Joe Biden plans to increase taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year. The plan is part of a new budget the White House intends to unveil on Thursday.

• US president Joe Biden is expected to propose his third budget on Thursday (March 9), teeing up a fight with Republicans over a raft of tax hikes intended to reduce the deficit by $2 trillion over the next decade.

• The Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) wants work-based immigration to double by the end of the next parliamentary term.

• Adidas has warned that it could suffer its first annual operating loss in more than three decades this year, mostly because it may have to write off the entire range of Yeezy-branded clothing and sneakers.

• After severing business ties with the rapper Ye, Adidas said it would cut its dividend and declared 2023 a “transition year.”

• New laws requiring wage disclosure are meant to promote equality between male and female employees. Yet a faster route might lie in fostering qualities from both genders.

• “What exactly is ‘artificial intelligence’ anyway? It’s an ambiguous term with many possible definitions,” Atleson writes. “But one thing is for sure: It’s a marketing term. Right now it’s a hot one. And at the FTC, one thing we know about hot marketing terms is that some advertisers won’t be able to stop themselves from overusing and abusing them.”

• In other words: The feds are keeping a close eye on those AI claims.

• Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. He joins me for an in-depth conversation about the book “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The government just revealed that one of Douglass Mackey’s co-conspirators pled guilty and has been a cooperating witness in other investigations since.

• Tucker Carlson has claimed he has access to lots of evidence that others have not reviewed.

• • Opinion: Tucker Carlson’s spin on Jan. 6 is a lie — I should know. I was there

• The Biden administration rarely criticizes conservative media stars by name, but a deputy press secretary declared that Mr. Carlson “is not credible.”

• Fox News conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson began airing footage this week of the January 6th insurrection, which House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gifted to him exclusively. And just as I anticipated, the footage was manipulated and selectively edited to fit an extreme MAGA narrative espoused by Carlson, former President Donald Trump and the leaders of the new Republican House majority.

• Jewish American leaders are denouncing a proposal by the country’s right-wing government to weaken the power of the country’s judiciary, in ways that some call unusually forceful.

• Democrats accused the House majority of choosing witnesses to advance a false narrative after former Twitter executives testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month that they did not have knowledge of Democrats making direct demands to remove content.

• The Biden administration unveiled its National Cybersecurity Strategy last week: a groundbreaking policy proposal that marks an abrupt departure from a three-decade status quo in which the U.S. government let industry set its own rules for software and hardware under the right-sounding rubric of a “public-private partnership” for cyber.

• The strategy recognizes that the “industry secure thyself” approach failed. The plan pointed out that markets impose inadequate costs on—and often reward—those entities that introduce vulnerable products or services into the digital ecosystem. Those poor software security practices “greatly increase systemic risk across the digital ecosystem and leave American citizens bearing the ultimate cost,” the Biden administration argued in its report. That’s why the strategy looks to shift liability from consumers and businesses to “those entities that fail to take reasonable precautions to secure their software.”

• Section 230 protects platforms from being treated as a publisher or speaker of information originating from a third party, thus shielding it from liability for the posts of the latter. Mary Anne Franks, professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law, argued that there is a difference between protecting free speech and protecting information and the harmful dissemination of that information.

• That’s why the company today unveiled “Project Clover,” a strategy it says will create a “secure enclave for European TikTok user data,” at a cost of about $1.3 billion. The company will now store its data on servers in Ireland and Norway.

• [...]

• A third-party European cybersecurity company will oversee any exchange of data. It will monitor and audit data flows and be responsible for reporting any incidents that might happen. The identity of the third party has not yet been announced.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Last summer, I became a somewhat infamous figure on TikTok when a video I posted pitching myself to be on “Saturday Night Live” went viral — but not in the way I’d hoped. At first I was mocked en masse and parodied, but the conversation quickly veered into vitriol and outright venom, resulting in a lengthy bullying campaign that included calls for me to kill myself.

• The Federal Communications Commission’s oversight of Fox’s broadcast licenses means it could bring its power to bear on Murdoch for his admission that he could have stopped Fox News from spreading misleading claims about Dominion Voting Systems, which by extension helped spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

• For the majority of Americans who believe in democracy and loathe both Fox News and Donald Trump, it’s been an endless delight to follow the ongoing release of internal Fox News communications, stemming from their legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion filed another court document in their $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox on Tuesday, and somehow, it’s even funnier than the last couple. While Fox anchors acted like Trump was their messiah on-air, behind the scenes they hated him for putting them in a situation where they had to choose between backing the Big Lie or losing their viewers.

• “Moldova [has been] facing these Russian information ops and other kind of hybrid interference [since] far before that was cool,” he said.

• Today, these pro-Russian narratives are pushed heavily by news outlets, politicians, online influencers and social media ads. Or, as Paşa put it: “From very serious evening talk shows on political subjects to TikTok.”

• White supremacist propaganda incidents reached a record high of 6,751 last year, the ADL said in its annual assessment of propaganda activity. That figure is up 38% from the previous high of 4,876 cases in 2021.

• The propaganda activity included the mass distribution of racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ flyers, stickers, banners and posters; creation of graffiti; and laser projections on buildings and stadiums, the ADL said.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Donning a sassy piece of silk lingerie, a male model grooves to the beat and forms a heart shape with his fingers during a livestreaming session on Douyin, one of China’s most popular video-sharing platforms.

• Critics of proposed legislation targeting “foreign agents” say the law brings the country closer to Russia.

• Galina Timchenko, founder of the dissident news site Meduza, has adapted as the information noose has tightened since the invasion of Ukraine.

• We need to talk about what level of the first amendment is necessary in a new world of technology, said Bergman. This discussion happens primarily in an open litigation process, he said, which is not now available for those that are caused harm by these products.

• It said he managed to phone his sister to tell her he had been arrested but it was not clear where he was being held.

• Pourtabatabaei had criticized the lack of any reaction from the authorities in Qom to the first reported cases of poisoning, it added.

• The mysterious poisonings have intensified tensions in Iran almost six months into the protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested for allegedly violating the mandatory dress code for women.

• But more importantly, Canadian digital creators are not loopholes and characterizing efforts to address their concerns as such is a stain on the Heritage Minister. They may not belong to well established lobby groups, make political donations, or hold lavish conferences that provide politicians with big platforms, but their careers and livelihoods are not for this government or this minister to put at risk. For months, they have made their case before MPs and Senators. Many of these creators, participating in a political process for the first time, engaged in the hope that the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the government would demonstrate some concern for their concerns. The Senate took the time to hear them and agreed that this was not about siding with tech companies, but about siding with Canadian creators. For Rodriguez, government MPs, and representatives from the NDP and Bloc to ignore them and reject the Senate fix that would have little negative consequence for anyone else is shameful. And for other creator groups such as the DOC, CMPA, and SOCAN to throw their fellow creators under the bus is unconscionable.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Civil Rights/Policing

• Ghassan al-Sharbi had been held by U.S. forces for more than two decades without trial. Prosecutors abandoned early efforts to charge him.

• A reinvestigation concluded detectives knew they were different people but were intent on arresting the defendant and used the faulty identification procedure as pretext, prosecutors said.

• On the face of it, the Twitter profile of a person calling herself Sara Shokouhi looks like any other earnest Middle East-focused researcher. Her tweets are a litany of retweets of various voices protesting the Iranian government. Her bio claims she’s completed a PhD from Northwestern State University of Louisiana. At the top of her profile, the person calling herself Sara Shokouhi peers into the camera with her hands folded over a stack of books.

• In reality, Shokouhi is a persona manufactured by Iranian-linked hackers to target a number of different Iran-focused researchers, according to a report released Thursday by Secureworks. The woman in her photos is in fact a Russia-based psychologist and tarot card reader.

• As the role of artificial intelligence appears to continue growing in our daily lives, it’s taking people’s likeness along with it. This week, hundreds of deepfaked videos featuring faces that looked exactly like Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson ran across Facebook and Instagram as part of an apparent advertising campaign for an AI deepfake app called FaceMega.

• Ms Muradi, 27, who is from Afghanistan, has been studying in India for two years. She recently made headlines when she received a gold medal for topping a master’s course in public administration at her university in the western state of Gujarat.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Gigi Sohn, who was first nominated by President Biden in October 2021, said she had faced “unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks” on her character and career.

Monopolies

Patents

• The pending Supreme Court case of Amgen v. Sanofi focuses on a broadly claimed genus and asks whether the disclosure is sufficiently detailed.  The Federal Circuit’s recent UMN v. Gilead is the flip-side.

• The magic solution to these EPO home-made shortages of office space might appear to be more teleworking, but plausible calculations by the Local Staff Committee of Munich have shown that the result of these closures will be that at least two thirds of the Munich desks will have to be converted into an “office for the day”.

• Whether this is the ideal mode of working for examiners is, at least in my view, highly doubtful, but I will not repeat here what I wrote earlier about the EPO’s New Normal. The matter is even further complicated by the fact that the EPO urgently needs more examiners to cope with the increased (and still increasing) number of applications. The current drop in final decisions in examination proceedings (grants or refusals) is indeed worrying, as reported here.

• Before this gloomy backdrop it is reassuring to read that humor at the EPO has not been completely lost. The enclosed letter of an anonymous EPO family member is pure gold. Have fun!

Copyrights

• The survey aimed to discover why only around 20 percent of music composers in Finland are female or non-binary, while half of the country’s music students are women.

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