● 04.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 05/04/2023: Fentanylware (TikTok) Fined for Abuse and German Court Orders Takedown of Free Software (Youtube-dl)

Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• Recently, I covered how you can use the number of arguments in bash that involved the use of the $# variable which is one of the special variables of bash.

• Unless you’re in a bad situation, your systems are almost always working; your backups are happening properly, your machines are up, your disks aren’t dangerously full, and so on. Actual failures are a small percentage of the time. This means that even with a very low false positive rate on a percentage basis, almost all of the time your tests are raising some sort of alert, they’re giving you noise, a false alert. This gives you the security alert problem; it will be very easy to get habituated to ignoring or downplaying the warning messages. The very rare occasion when they’re warning you about a real problem will be drowned out by the noise of non-problems.

• As a system administrator, it can feel morally wrong to not send out a warning if we detect something potentially broken. But here again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s better to reliably generate warnings that people will notice and heed when something is definitely broken, even if this doesn’t send warnings in some situations when you can’t be sure.

• I was curious about how I could generate screenshots for my personal website. I knew this would involve headless browsers, a technology wherein a browser renders a page programmatically without a user-facing representation available. I had not yet used headless browsers, so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to build my knowledge.

• Virtual Private Networks (VPN) offers anonymity, security, and privacy online. There are typically two types of VPN connections. The most popular is a VPN service, provided by a third-party company, and typically requires a paid subscription. The second type is a private VPN, installed and configured manually by an individual or workplace.

• Setting up your own private VPN can seem like a daunting task. However, there is an easy way to set up your own VPN server using a pre-configured solution from Turnkey Linux. So how can you install a private VPN at home or at your workplace?

• Linux memory management is an essential aspect of every System Administrator to improve the performance of a Linux system.

• The post How to Add Swap Space on Ubuntu Linux first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

• One of the simplest ways of watching against out-of-memory problems in applications is to increase some swap size in your server.

• Nginx is the fastest growing Webserver today on public internet-facing servers due to its free open-source modular model, high performance, stability, simple configurations files, asynchronous architecture (event-driven), and low resources needed to run.

• Developed by Google with the main objective of making loading times faster across the internet, WebP (pronounced “weppy”) is a modern image format and a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. Compared

Games

• Up for even more games to add to your collection? Humble Choice for April 2023 has some interesting games included. To save you clicking around, I’ll list each game along with what to expect from them on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

• Paradox Interactive confirmed today the Crusader Kings III: Tours and Tournaments DLC will release on May 11th along with a major free update for all players.

• It’s official, Valve put The Last of Us Part 1 through Deck Verified and gave it an Unsupported status on Steam Deck. Not really a good look for either Valve or Naughty Dog.

• Heroic Games Launcher has a brand new release available for helping you manage Epic Games, GOG and more on Steam Deck and Linux desktop. Easily one of my favourite open source projects! It doesn’t just help you deal with Epic and GOG though, since you can add anything else into it too.

• The hardcore FPS Hell Let Loose had a 2023 roadmap reveal, and they’ve confirmed they’re planning to add Steam Deck support.

• More companies are beginning to see there is a market for a PC gaming handheld, with Asus planning to release the ROG Ally. Initially, this seemed like an April Fools joke but it turned out to be real.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the installer for Debian 12 “Bookworm”.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In their monthly update post, the Linux Mint team gave a sneak peek of what’s in store for the upcoming release, Linux Mint 21.2. One of the exciting new features that caught the eye was the introduction of “styles” in the Cinnamon desktop.

• The next iteration of Cinnamon will present a novel concept known as “styles”. Styles come in three modes: mixed, dark, and light, and each of these modes can have colour “variants”. A variant is a combination of themes that blend together. The goal of styles, modes, and variants is to make it easier to switch to a beautiful-looking interface and quickly browse through available options. You won’t have to find matching elements because styles will do that for you, no matter how many individual themes you have installed.

• Read more here.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Adafruit Feather RP2040 RFM69 Packet Radio is a compact board providing up to 21x GPIOs, 1x STEMMA connector, LiPo connector and it’s compatible with Arduino/CircuitPython. According to the product page, this new Feather module is based on the Adafruit Feather RP2040 board launched last year.

• More than two years ago, I blogged about the use of the Raspberry Pi as an HDMI camera for the ATEM Mini. Although I have been using such a camera since then as my main Zoom camera, I wasn’t always happy with the image quality. The main problem was that the previous Raspberry Pi cameras had a fixed focus and it was quite hard to find the perfect focus.

• But with the new version 3 camera module with auto-focus, this should all be solved… and… it is!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Well, it can. There is a technique audio engineers called “audio ducking”. It does the reverse: Whenever you speak into your microphone, it reduces the volume on another channel, to ensure it can’t go so loud you won’t be audible anymore. That’s basically the reverse of what we thought to do.

• OBS also has this feature, however it is very nerdily named. It is hidden in its “Compressor” filter. Here’s how to use it for audio ducking in 3 simple steps: [...]

• We analyzed our picks for the top eight open-source project management software of 2023, including their features, cost, pros and cons. We also outline the steps to follow when shopping for open-source project management tools.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• If you hover the mouse over a link in Firefox (or pretty much any other browser), the browser will show you the URL of the link target so you can see where you’ll wind up if you click the link; this URL target appears down at the bottom of the page. Well, in theory, since there are a lot of things that can happen in between your click on a link and where you wind up. In Firefox, as far as I know that URL target is rendered in the browser’s default user interface (UI) font and font size, which is normally your platform default. On Unix, Firefox uses GTK so this is the GTK system font default. Suppose, not hypothetically, that you would like the font of this URL target to be bigger so it’s easier to read.

Leftovers

Education

• The challenges for small island states are not only about small domestic markets and small numbers of ICT suppliers. Often people do not know how to take advantage of the technologies. There is often a lack of awareness of the advantages of connecting, a lack of relevant local content online in the local language and a much higher cost of connection than in most countries. Many small island states states rely on satellite connections, and a small domestic market does not offer industry enough return on investment—nothing like the large urban areas. Industry therefore needs to be incentivised; regulatory frameworks need to be harmonised. Regional cooperation is key to creating a larger community with harmonised regimes, including spectrum management and incentives to encourage investment.

• As mass anti-government protests have been going on since the murder of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini by the morality police in Tehran in September 2022, poisoning attacks against girls’ schools and dormitories have increased in recent months.

• Poisoning attacks are considered as part of a government plan to suppress the popular protests.

Hardware

• In this blog post, I explain string operations in the 8086, analyze the microcode that it used, and discuss the hardware circuitry that helped it out. My analysis is based on reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos. The photo below shows the chip under a microscope. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this post are darker. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below. The BIU handles memory accesses, while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions. The microcode ROM at the lower right controls the process.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A recent study of popcorn bags in America and Indonesia found PFAS, or forever chemicals, in all of them

Proprietary

• If you’re wondering why Microsoft’s Visual Studio App Center isn’t working, it’s not just you: The service’s login portal went down yesterday a little before 2200 UTC, and as of writing – nearly 18 hours on – Microsoft says the issue still hasn’t been fully resolved.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Initial tests carried out by the Washington Post, however, found its performance lacking. Turnitin was good at detecting AI-generated text when the whole input had been created by ChatGPT, but struggled with a mixture between human and machine-written sentences. It also incorrectly flagged parts of an essay written by a student as AI-generated.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The British watchdog, which was investigating data breaches between May 2018 and July 2020, said TikTok allowed as many as 1.4 million children in the U.K. under 13 to use the app in 2020, despite the platform’s own rules prohibiting children that young from setting up accounts.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office said TikTok had inappropriately allowed up to 1.4 million children under the age of 13 to use the service in 2020, violating British data protection rules that require parental consent for organizations to use children’s personal information. TikTok failed to obtain that consent, regulators said, even though it should have been aware that younger children were using the service.

• The British investigation found that the video-sharing app did not do enough to identify underage users or remove them from the platform, even though TikTok had rules barring children under 13 from creating accounts. TikTok failed to take adequate action, regulators said, even after some senior employees at the video-sharing platform raised concerns internally about underage children using the app.

• Britain’s data protection authority today hit the beleaguered Chinese social media company TikTok with a $15.9 million (£12.7m) fine, accusing the app of breaching data protection rules.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office, or ICO, said TikTok had allowed about 1.4 million children under the age of 13 to use the app. The firm was said to have used the data without the parents of the children giving their consent, even after some older employees had raised concerns about young people using the app.

• Central to the ICO’s decision to fine TikTok are the estimated 1.4 million UK children under 13 years of age, who were allowed to sign up for the platform in 2020, despite the company’s own rules barring such use.

• That’s a violation of UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (similar to the EU’s GDPR), the ICO said in a statement. The UK GDPR requires that companies that use personal data to offer services to children under 13 need a parent or guardian’s permission to do so. The regulator also noted that “senior employees” at TikTok were aware of underage users on the platform, and did not respond adequately to the issue.

• This ban follows the introduction of U.S. Senate Bill 686 otherwise known as the RESTRICT Act. It not only includes the banning of TikTok, but it would also give the government access to our digital devices and networks including home cameras. This act also potentially poses a threat to our right to privacy and gives the government a lot more control over our everyday lives than most of us may be comfortable with.

• With that being said, why not ban Twitter? This social media app also collects information on its users and was fined over $150 million in 2022 after it allegedly broke its privacy policy. Or Facebook? It had a $5 billion penalty imposed on them by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a series of new privacy regulations in 2019 due to privacy issues. Also, what about Instagram? According to Cybernews, it’s sharing almost eighty percent of your personal information with third parties.

• It’s one of the most addictive apps on our smartphones – but Instagram turns out to be a privacy nightmare for those who are using it. That’s the findings of a new analysis of the most invasive apps used commonly by users by cyber business pCloud. pCloud used the range of new privacy labels rolled out by Apple through its App Store, designed to help consumers decide what they should be wary of, to see how much of a user’s private data is gathered and shared with others.

Defence/Aggression

• The three officials said China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration’s efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.

• A US intelligence official told CNN on Monday that “although analysis of the wreckage of the High Altitude Balloon remains ongoing, thus far, its flight over the United States does not appear to have provided critical new insights to the People’s Republic of China.”

• The US also knew what the balloon’s path would be and was able to protect sensitive sites and censor some signals before the balloon was able to pick them up, officials have said.

• In the latest example of public punishments carried out by the Taliban, two men were forced to wear a chador, a full-length hijab traditionally worn by women as a form of public “humiliation”. But other punishments meted out by the Taliban have been far more violent, including flagellations and public executions. While Afghan activists have documented dozens of public punishments since October 2022, video evidence of them is scarce – only two videos document these brutal tactics.

• Finland is formally joining NATO on Tuesday in a move that doubles the military alliance’s border with Russia. Finland and Russia share an 800-mile border. Finland is joining NATO a week after Turkey’s parliament voted to ratify the Nordic country’s membership. Turkey and Hungary have yet to approve Sweden as a member of NATO, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accusing Stockholm of harboring Kurdish dissidents he considers terrorists. Finland and Sweden had applied to join NATO in May 2022, just months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For more on NATO’s expansion, we host a discussion between Reiner Braun, former executive director of the International Peace Bureau and longtime German peace activist, and Atte Erik Harjanne, a member of the Finnish Parliament for the Green League.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• To meet the Paris climate agreement, the Dutch airport is introducing a few new regulations for overnight flights and private jets.

• In order to reduce noise pollution, the Dutch airport Schiphol will no longer allow commercial or cargo flights to depart between midnight and 6am or land between midnight and 5am.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• Activists from a coalition of over 150 environmental justice groups rallied and marched in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to demand that the Biden administration “quit delaying rules to curb harmful pollution that kills thousands of Americans every year.”

• Climate campaigners on Tuesday remained resolute in their fight against ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project in Alaska—even after a federal judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction sought by environmental and Indigenous groups behind a pair of legal challenges.

Overpopulation

• The Earth’s first billion people milestone took from the beginning of human history until the 1800s to be achieved. Then, due to the industrial revolution, humanity reached the second billion mark by 1930 (taking only 130 years), reached the third billion in 1960 (only took 30 years), then reached the fourth billion by 1974 (only took 14 years), and the fifth billion by 1987 (only took 13 years). We hit 6 billion in 1999 (which took 12 years) and hit 7 billion in 2011 (which took about 12 years). At the current growth rate, the world population will reach 9 billion by 2037 and 10 billion by 2057.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement Tuesday that based on intelligence and security agencies’ advice, that ban would come into effect “as soon as practicable.”

• The so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners — the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand — have taken similar steps.

• Much has been written about the end of this type of verification – which Twitter invented and is now used almost universally online – and the type of audience Twitter now serves (as Emma Haslett wrote for the New Statesman, Twitter is becoming an “Internet of Losers”, where the desperate and status-obsessed get a taste of faux-fame because they can afford it). With this new era of Twitter advancing, and the platform as we knew it coming to an end, what, as a culture, are we losing?

• In Russia, technology was one of the few sectors where people felt they could succeed on merit instead of connections. The industry also maintained a spirit of openness: Russian entrepreneurs won international funding and made deals all over the world. For a time, the Kremlin seemed to embrace this openness too, inviting international companies to invest in Russia.

• But cracks in Russia’s tech industry started appearing well before the war. For more than a decade, the government has attempted to put Russia’s [Internet] and its most powerful tech companies in a tight grip, threatening an industry that once promised to bring the country into the future. Experts MIT Technology Review spoke with say Russia’s war against Ukraine only accelerated the damage that was already being done, further pushing the country’s biggest tech companies into isolation and chaos and corralling its citizens into its tightly controlled domestic [Internet], where news comes from official government sources and free speech is severely curtailed.

• A crucial election in Wisconsin on Tuesday will decide the fate of democracy in the state and have major ramifications for the 2024 presidential election, says reporter Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. At stake is a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which currently has a 4-3 conservative majority. Although technically nonpartisan, the election is a showdown between Democratic-backed Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Republican-backed former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly. Berman says the outcome of the race could determine if abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of voting laws and redistricting. “Every time the state Supreme Court under conservative control has been asked whether or not they want to expand democracy or constrict democracy, they have fallen on the side of constricting democracy,” says Berman.

• On the day of Donald Trump’s historic arraignment in New York, making him the first former president ever to be criminally charged, we speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades. Trump is said to face 34 felony counts for falsifying business records. The case centers in part on hush-money payments Trump made during the 2016 presidential campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels. After his appearance before a judge in Manhattan, where he is expected to plead not guilty to all charges, Trump will fly back to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he will speak publicly later in the day. “Hopefully this is the beginning of a revival and a renewal of American democracy,” says Johnston, co-founder of the news site DCReport and author of The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Johnston also teaches at Syracuse University College of Law.

• The historic arraignment of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday highlighted how infrequently American political leaders are held accountable for any crimes.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• And it’s this criticism of the military authorities that makes war correspondents stand out from the all-pervasive Kremlin-controlled propaganda, which routinely embellishes progress of the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Censorship/Free Speech

• bA Swedish court Tuesday overturned a police move to ban two Quran burning protests, as five suspected Islamists were arrested for plotting a “terrorist act” over a similar demonstration.

• Twitter has been accused of bowing to government pressure in India by blocking scores of prominent journalists, politicians and activists from its platform in recent weeks.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Journal denies the espionage charges against Gershkovich.

• Tucker added: “The legal avenue is one of several avenues we are working to advocate for Evan’s release. We continue to work with the White House, State Department and relevant U.S. government officials to secure Evan’s release.”

• What was interesting regarding that whole saga is what happened in between the episodes. Presidential spokesperson, George Charamba, using one of his many Twitter accounts threatened journalists covering the Al Jazeera documentary. He tweeted, [...]

Civil Rights/Policing

• For the first time since such killings have been tracked, more than 400 human rights defenders were murdered worldwide last year, with nearly half of these targeted killings occurring in Colombia, a report published Tuesday revealed.

• Not two days after former CEO Howard Schultz was dragged before a U.S. Senate committee and aggressively questioned before the cameras, the Seattle-based coffee chain fired three of its local employees who were active leaders in the unionization movement.

• In particular, Starbucks late on Friday fired Lexi Rizzo, a longtime shift supervisor at the company’s Genesee Street store in Cheektowaga, who had led the labor campaign at that location that won one of the first unionization votes at a Starbucks store.

• After pushing in-person work, McDonald’s sent corporate employees home this week so the company could conduct layoffs remotely—a “new tactic” that could become common in the hybrid era, HR experts say.

• [...] The UN mission expressed “serious concern” after its female staffers were prevented from reporting to work in Nangarhar Province. [...]

• Taliban officials in Afghanistan have informed the United Nations they are banning women from working for the organization in Afghanistan, the U.N. said Tuesday about the group’s latest edict restricting the rights and movements of women in that country.

• Rights advocate Bernice King, a daughter of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, expressed hope on the 55th anniversary of her father’s assassination Tuesday that U.S. students leading gun control demonstrations will take inspiration from civil rights protesters who forced change through prolonged direct action.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened and nothing had changed.

Twitter

• As you’ll recall, it became apparent pretty much immediately after Elon Musk took over Twitter that he had zero idea that the company was under an FTC consent decree that had just been renewed months earlier, and which had some fairly stringent rules regarding data privacy and how the company rolled out new features. Sometimes it pays to, you know, do some due diligence?

• Elon Musk’s Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original “blue checks”—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be for sale, just as they were briefly, when Musk took control. April 1 is a date that makes it hard to take anything seriously but, since this isn’t the first time Twitter’s tried this, let’s delve into the problems that selling verifications poses.

Copyrights

• Nigeria’s new law is important because the country is already a leader in Africa, and is predicted to become one of the world’s top economies. What happens in Nigeria matters, because it sets an important precedent for other rising nations looking to update their outdated copyright laws to maximise the benefits of the digital world by adopting open norms.

• Universal Music Publishing Group issued a DMCA takedown notice against Youtuber Grandayy, claiming that the video, which uses an AI-generated version of Eminem’s voice to sing a ChatGPT-generated song about cats, infringes on its copyright.

• A German court has ordered hosting provider Uberspace to take the website of the open-source youtube-dl software offline. The ruling is the result of a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by Sony, Warner and Universal last year. Uberspace will appeal the verdict and, meanwhile, youtube-dl’s code remains available on GitHub.

• In 2015, the operators of ‘pirate’ download site Series.ly were arrested in Spain following copyright infringement complaints from rightsholders in the U.S. After a court acquitted the men of criminal wrongdoing in 2022, the rightsholders filed an appeal. The men have now been acquitted for a second time, eight years after being arrested.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• March started traveling in our Caribbean cruise between Colombia and Panamá and for a full week we continued to Costa Rica, Bahamas, and back to Miami. From there we spent a week in New Orleans (where I worked a couple days) and finally another week in Orlando where I had the Elastic Engineering All Hands. After the meeting we drove down to Miami again to get our flight back to Valencia.

• Saw a few good discussions about systemd, thought I’d explain my beef with it too.

• In the middle of last year I was applying for a new job. Found a pretty amazing new position open up at Canonical and threw my hat into the ring. Over 2 months of interviews, essays, and brain tests. Made it all the way to the last interview and turned out I just didn’t have the exact expertise they were looking for. Oh well, found a job I enjoy so no big deal. Through the whole process I was expecting to get some questions on my views of technology, the ways business and teams run, etc. Finally after maybe the 5th or 6th interview I finally got the dreaded “so what do you think about systemd?”

• I’ve been running Linux since the mid 90′s. When my parents upgraded our 486 to a Pentium I got a bunch of floppies from a friend at school and installed a build of RedHat he had picked up a computer convention. Since then I’ve only run Windows or OSX when it was provided as a work platform, rather when it was out of my control. In college I got a degree in Computer Engineering (half CS and half Electrical Engineering). My focus was on Hardware / Software interoperability. Designing operating systems, designing CPUs, etc. My first job was building communications hardware. Some on ARM processors where I could run Linux and others where I had to create custom operating systems. From the power button to sending packets out was my bread and butter.

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