Tech Freedom

Telegram
tech freedom
Menu

Weekend Edition 42: No More Fed Social Media Collusion?

by admin FOSS News, Tech Freedom, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 42: No More Collusion?

Judge Rules that Feds Need to Back off of Social Media

Twitter to Sue Meta?

French Police Now Officially and Openly Spy on Citizens

Navy Hacks Teams

Cloud Huge Target Still

Chatbots Old News?

OpenAI Gets Sued

AI Ready to Take Your Job?

OpenAI Is Dedicated to Handling the Emergence of “Superintelligent AI”

Weekend Edition, Tech News, Technology, Podcast, Censorship, Twitter, Meta, MS Teams Hacked, AI

#weekendedition #technews #technology #podcast #twitter #meta #threads #msteams #AI

WE 1 – Judge Doughty Smacks Feds Down For Ignoring First Amendment

In his ruling on the case brought by the AGs of Missouri and Louisiana against the Federal Gov’t, the judge stated that, based on the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, the government likely colluded with big tech firms to censor Americans’ social media posting, specifically around the convid plan/scamdemic (not that we didn’t know this, but now a federal judge has said it in a ruling). I can’t wrap my head around the blatant abuse of the constitution from both wings of the establishment bird that is congress. I could get into “conspiracy theories” here, but I don’t want to waste the time when they have essentially been shown true at most turns. Suffice it to say that the social media giants weren’t purely selectively applying their arbitrary “community standards” through the manufactured crisis of the last 3 years or so. Elon kinda showed us that in the “Twitter Files”, but anyone who actually cared and paid attention had that sense early on. After all, the Narrative needed armor and strong protection from the powers that be, because otherwise it would have fallen apart far too quickly to be useful in their Hegelian dialectic (manufactured problem, ginned up fear, provided -almost magical- solution). People were scared to death, and these establishment mafia types just soaked it in, because it equaled unprecedented power over we the people. But I digress… Judge Doughty publicly confirmed what most of us suspected and ordered the Feds to stop contacting social media companies to censor we the people. That is huge, you can guarantee that these jokers will appeal somehow via some crazy loophole, and try to change the venue so that they’ll be dealing with a judge who is more friendly to the notion of shredding the most important of the Bill of Rights, aka more “progressive” in their legal theory. I hope the Judge was thorough enough in his 155 page ruling that any potential loopholes are non-extant. Of course the WH weighed in, saying that “while social media companies should make ‘independent choices’ about the information they present, they ‘have a critical responsibility to ‘take account of the effects their platforms have on the American people’’”. I think that they, and the DOJ, are reeling from this ruling, and We The People should savor this victory and enjoy the potential of a little more freedom of speech as we seek to remedy the larger problems in our country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66106067 

WE 2 – More Noise from the Dirty Blue Bird

Twatter is now claiming that Meta stole industry secrets by snapping up former Twatter engineers after they were fired last Fall/Winter, and that Threads is too close to Twitter to not be a literal copyright infringement issue. They have now threatened to sue a handful of times over the perceived similarities between the extant Twatter app and the new Threads app from Meta. This sounds like more marketing noise, because I think that Elon, like Trump, understands that any PR is good PR. He is keeping both platforms from and center in the public eye, and drawing more attention to both from the normies who would use either. I have no personal interest in either, as if I wanted to micro-blog, I would just jump on Mastodon. If you think about it, that is how I use Truth, Telegram, and Gab anyway, I don’t need another platform to worry about, particularly not one which has already been shown to be censorious and is connected with an outfit like Meta, whose whole raison’d’etre is to gather data about its users for advertising and 5-Eyes spy agencies. No thanks, I conscientiously object to that battlefield. Not worth it. I know, I was somewhat glowing in my discussion of Threads a few weeks ago, but I can’t in good conscience jump onto any platform owned by Meta. I won’t do it. My data is too valuable, my privacy matters too much to me. What do you guys think?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66129215 

WE 3 – Well, So Much for the ‘Liberty’ Part of the Slogan from the French Revolution…

France is in the process of pushing legislation through their version of congress which is more or less an omnibus bill to reform their federal police force. Yes, France only has the one police force organization, sure, each municipality has its representatives from the national force, but it is one thing, kind of like if the FBI ran all law enforcement in our country, rather than needing to work with state, county, and city level police departments. That, in itself, is a terrifying enough thought (at least for me). However, the politicians are working to shove this gem through which will allow state-level surveillance of its own people. VPNs can’t protect the French people from this invasion of whatever amount of privacy they thought they had before. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum are vocally opposed to this, as it is. Even people in Macron’s own party are trying to get an amendment done to limit the timeframe and scope of the invasion, including protecting themselves, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and judges from its reach. I’m sorry, you want to give your police a more or less blank check to spy on your people, but you want to be excluded? No, sir, life should not work that way. You don’t get a free pass like our legislators did with Zero Care in 2011-12. If it is good for your people, it is good for you, too. How does one become a suspect in a crime? How is this not just a blatant grab for power and control? They will be able to grab geolocation data from all of the devices of any person suspected of a crime which would net at least a 5 year jail sentence. That is terrifying, but I have to wonder how that fits with the EU’s GDPR, which France is a part of. It seems like the –actual- French are at a loss with these foreign rioters shredding their country, and at least to some extent, this feels like a bit of a kneejerk reaction. Then again, France has had a history of riots before the current flood of un-assimilated refugees from Africa hit as well. I don’t know what to think about this. What do you guys think about the current riots and this portion of the reform bill? Do you think that if it makes it through without alteration that it could, in some form, be exported here?

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/france-grants-police-power-to-spy-on-citizens-through-phones 

WE 4 – Navy Hacks MS Teams… Ruh roh, raggy…

Ok, so what happened, here? Is Teams actually secure? Big questions… First things first, the US Navy’s Red Team used a known bug within Teams to develop a tool to inject an external file into a company’s business account for Teams. The tool was written in Python and is called TeamsPhisher. It can be used autonomously, once the message is written and payload is attached. In order for it to work, your account organization has to have the accept external messages feature enabled and be linked to a SharePoint instance. The tool will send the payload, bypass the warning message, and link the malicious file to your SharePoint account. MSFT has stated that they are aware of the issue and the tool, but are unconcerned, as to them, it doesn’t pose enough of a threat to them or their users. Wait a minute, I know why they are so cool about this, SharePoint scans all files (even allegedly encrypted ones) which are uploaded to SharePoint, so if an infected file were uploaded there, it would likely be neutralized or deleted before it had a chance to do anything nefarious. (I talked about that last week, if I recall). Needless to say, I think that as long as you have external access turned off, you’re pretty safe from TeamsPhisher. Also, if you receive unexpected messages from someone you don’t know, you should not open them anyway. Even unexpected messages from someone you do know should be confirmed to have actually come from that person, trust, but verify, people.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-us-navy-has-hacked-microsoft-teams-to-send-malware 

WE 5 – Is Your Cloud Safe?

Well, is it? Do you encrypt all of your files before you transfer them? If not, your cloud is likely vulnerable to attack. You also need to bring in on-premises multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure your access to your cloud and on-premises data. Anything stored anywhere other than on the physical device/terminal/machine you are using should be protected by MFA and encryption. Ideally, even the data on your physical device should be protected via encryption, that way it takes more than just your user password to access your data. If it is encrypted on your system, there is less likelihood that you’ll transfer it in plain text to begin with. Does this make it less convenient? Yes. Is the pain worth it? If security and privacy matter to you, if your data (whether personal or company/ client data)matters to you, then the answer should be a resounding, “Yes”. Then again, if you transfer encrypted files onto SharePoint, they may as well not be encrypted, as MSFT will scrape your password and or keys and scan the file as soon as you upload it anyway, just in case there is something hinky in it. If it sounds like I am going easy on them for this, I am not. I just mentioned it in the last story anyway. Ultimately, if you are using any cloud, you are storing data on a piece of hardware you do NOT own. That is the definition of “cloud computing”. I’m all about helping you to create your own solutions where feasible at all, away from the prying eyes of ad agencies, Big Tech, and intelligence communities around the world. Take responsibility. Quit outsourcing your thinking because it is easier and more convenient to do so. Can it be costly? Yes. I won’t pretend that it is a free solution, after all, in the words of Robert Heinlein, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” (TANSTAAFL). I have solutions on tap for you, though, and it is certainly doable.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloud-remains-the-biggest-target-for-cyberattacks 

WE 6 – Are We “Over” Chatbots?

For the first time in the 8 months, since the public release of ChatGPT, there was a slight decline in traffic in the last month. Not merely for the chatGPT direct portal, but even for Bing Search and character.ai, a competitor for the biggest chatbot. Even Bard isn’t seeing growth from May-June. I am actually happy to see this, hopefully the trend continues as people realize that it isn’t as epically awesome as they initially thought. It isn’t. It “hallucinates” entire news stories and even manufactures people from nothing to support its assertions. If you are using it for anything significant, never simply trust its results. Verify them, cross check them… Fact-check them. I have always said that these tools CAN be a good starting point for projects, not that I suggest you use them, but as long as kept in perspective and not fed any sensitive or private information, they can be useful. Also, keep in mind that most of the major ones are directly linked with Big Tech (Microsoft [owns a huge chunk of OpenAI and hosts most of the compute for chatGPT in the Azure cloud] and Google [Bard]). Then there are also major privacy issues (on top of those facts) with these bots, which we will talk about in the next story.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/are-we-sick-of-ai-chatbots-already-chatgpt-site-sees-traffic-dip 

WE 7 – OpenAI Gets Sued Over Mishandling Private User Data

Uh oh, is the jig up for Altman and company? Clarkson Law has just served a class action lawsuit to test the theory that the ways in which OpenAI gathers data through web scraping and other means constitute a breach of privacy law for the people and organizations who posted their thoughts and work on the web, because unless the content was explicitly free domain or copyright-free. However, if material is copyrighted, and is used to train these bots, this case seeks recompense for the creators of said content from the company. It also seek a temporary injunction against the company, that it would have to shut down the commercial side of ChatGPT until the case is decided. I think this is a good idea. Only information that is free domain should be free game for AI companies to scrape and train their AI bots with, not just every little thing. Intellectual property matters, at least last I checked, here in the US. This isn’t the CCP yet. I think that this is an interesting case to watch closely, moving forward. I will do so, whenever there is more news on it.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-for-using-stolen-data-violating-your-privacy-with-chatgpt 

WE 8 – Is AI Coming for Your Job?

Some industries seem to be more in jeopardy than others, such as healthcare or even automotive. Personally, I could see an AI do well in automotive, as long as it has full diagnostic data available on the vehicles it is tasked with repairing, and has solid databases for determining what that data indicates in terms of problems. As for healthcare, similar, but I don’t trust it with my personal health or data. That is too much information to give to a faceless algorithm, thank you. Then again, I haven’t gone to a doctor’s appointment for myself in close to ten years, so they don’t have any recent data from me, anyway. Let’s say a collective hell no to AI healthcare. There are reports out there from various industries indicating that many business sectors are looking to save money on HR by employing these AI tools. I can understand that impulse, however, I don’t think that it will have long-term effects at this time. Maybe I’m wrong and horribly biased against the technological tools here, but this is my sense right now. It has made a splash, and many large and medium companies have jumped on the bandwagon with it, but I think that the interest is waning, and people want to talk to another flash and blood person, not some soulless AI chatbot.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-is-coming-for-our-jobs-but-which-ones 

WE 9 – OpenAI Aims to Stop “Superintelligent AI”

LMAO!!!! Sorry, I think this is a joke, guys, OpenAI is so much more concerned with future developments than they are with your privacy and intellectual property rights. They are devoting 20% of their considerable cloud compute resources to researching how to stymie a possible superintelligent (more intelligent than most humans) general AI that may emerge in 5-10 years. General AIs don’t fully exist yet, as far as we know. I doubt they will be for some time, to be honest. Maybe I need to plead some level of ignorance here, but I don’t see this happening that quickly. The LLMs out there now are anything but intelligent. They don’t understand what they’re spitting out. What OpenAI is signaling here is that they are afraid of general AI’s which at least at unavailable to the public at this point. Why are they magnifying this non-issue? I know that on one hand, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but if what is there, now is as pathetic as it is, then why are we scared of something that is so far off? Could it be closer than we think? What do you think?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/openais-latest-goal-prevent-superintelligent-ai-from-killing-us-all 

Stephan’s Linux Story

by admin Featured Basics, Big Show, FOSS News, Guest Post, Tech Freedom

FOSS News Big Show 7 - An Intro to Stephan Olvera's Linux Story

I inherited Windows OS computers for 20 years of my life and knew nothing else.

There was no need to question what my family and every other family used.

Hence when those family computers began to break down – we simply bought a new one.

Simple.

I already had a good hardware laptop that lasted over 10 years yet the OpenGL was outdated after all that time had passed. I didn’t know that until after I spent a grueling 2 days getting Windows from Vista to 7.

Software was upgrading so I decided to upgrade; unfortunately – I saw the tyranny of Windows.

Never occurred to me until 2018 that something nefarious was going on with the Task Manager.

I read all the articles I could find, tried all the methods yet could never get the Manager to comply with my commands; I was always overridden. CPU running at 100% always.

Windows OS was effectively killing my computers. There was also lag from over-used threads.

It didn’t help that the hardware being used had fragile fans too.

My family and friends knew little of OS swapping yet I began to realize I had to leave Windows forever. Apple didn’t seem much better hence didn’t take long to find mention of Linux.

Problem was…  what Distro to use? T’was obvious from forums that it mattered yet I knew nothing.

After losing my last two laptops (one lasted 11 years while the other only 3 yet lost both at the same time and left me without a work-station). I spent the next 3 months scouring the net for info on Linux and hardware that worked well with Linux.

I eventually ended up realizing that certain videos explained the different Linux Distros and I ended up realizing that Manjaro was the one suitable for the demands of my work and my inexperience with Linux.

Even before I swapped to Linux. I realized that I couldn’t keep using proprietary art software especially when corporations were going with subscription models and I needed something more open-source.

Hence even while I was still on Windows; I re-learned my key-shortcut methods using new apps as I knew that this was going to be worthwhile later in life as I would find ways to swap over to only open source on as many aspects of my daily work life as possible.

This would give me freedom I had never known on Windows. The fact that my CPU is no longer tyrannically forced to run at 100%, my fans barely have to work compared to before, my current laptop never overheats while performing simple tasks, I’m able to use apps that are more economic on storage and ram usage, the entire work-flow is more stable overall. A true upgrade.

The early days of my decision to swap over to Linux was fraught with fear and dread that I would get all the required components to function in steps required.

Glad to say that the various Linux Distro forums really helped as I eventually made my way reading more and more into Manjaro related tech support on how to make the swap.

I didn’t communicate with any Linux experts. I merely kept watching videos, kept reading various forums, kept the non-stop re-search as I grew in confidence that I could make the jump.

Even after I had acquired my hardware (with Windows pre-installed of course; had to find videos and forums on how to get pesky Windows outta my laptop); t’was a challenge making sure I hadn’t forgotten any important steps hence I went over the check-list again and again.

I eventually installed Manjaro correctly and after many tense moments later… success!

Of course; t’was not over yet! I had to learn some basic command-line phrases to get the repository mirrors made available correctly, make sure to write the update method that I needed, and study the apps that were available and well-supported within the Distro Repository.

Hence; t’was much work however well worth it. No more Windows, no more hassle ever since.

Of course… Linux has it’s challenges when trying to make games function however as a creative type; I knew that I was comfortable learning that too and went looking into compatibility tools.

I had noticed over the years that Open-Source, Donation-Based, Contribution-Community types of software seem to have an advantage in the sense that well-supported apps can get tools that are more needed sooner potentially and the ability to learn from related blogs and news helps much.

I’ve also noticed that more and more Pc-game players note of using Linux Distros hence I realized that I wanted to support them by learning more about the motives that move people to swap over to Linux. I appreciate all the tools that are being updated based on the feedback that just seems to flow much better in the Open-Source community of forums overall.

And while nothing is perfect in life; the fact I don’t have to deal with a tyrannical overlord that spies, destroys, and overrides the demands of my work during daily tasks is a breath of fresh life.

I still want to support Windows gamers in my future projects however I have no desire to return to Windows for my main work-stations. Only on the side to test builds when needed.

As for now. Linux gets the job I need done and that’s all that matters for my needs currently.

I have seen others who see little need to swap to Linux. Sometimes it’s a just a matter of efficiency if that’s what you need. I understand Windows is very compatible however it’s exchanged at a cost of privacy, reliability, and longevity.

That’s why I encourage anyone that if Windows or another troublesome OS is bearing down too heavily on you. Try and find a user-friendly Linux Distro; you will not be disappointed if willing to learn and sweat as I did discovering the simplicity of basic commands and faster update cycles. Have a blessed day!

By Stephan “Steffire” Olvera

Weekend Edition 41 – AI News Bonanza & Elon Not So Pro Free Speech…

by admin FOSS News, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 41

It Was Only a Matter of Time… AI Child Abuse Images A Problem.
Regulation Coming? Probably
Thinking About Having ChatGPT Write Something Important?
Baidu AI Better Than ChatGPT?
AI Certification From MS?
More Stringent Export Rules Coming Soon
Musk Not So Free Speech-Friendly After All?



WE 1 – Only A Matter Of Time… I Wish I Didn’t Have to Write This Piece
Well, the UK has discovered that there is a huge community of people who are using tools like Stable Diffusion and its OSS counterparts to create images which should never have had any reason to exist. Not only porn, which is kind of a foregone conclusion at this point, but child porn. They call it CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Materials), and it will get you banned from many of those tools if you try to create it using them. They have found that Patreon has not been effective in their stated policy of 0 tolerance for these kinds of materials. Authorities have noted a number of creators on the platform who sell subscription access to these sorts of materials on the platform. The report, by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has made the rounds and made it to GCHQ, which is the heart of the UK’s intelligence, security, and cyber efforts. Hey commented that “Child sexual abuse offenders adopt all technologies and some believe the future of child sexual abuse material lies in AI-generated content.” I would push back and say that it is just as much the present as it is the future. This story shouldn’t need to be written because there should never be a reason for anyone to create any porn, much less depictions (whether real or not) of stealing the innocence of a child. However, it is a pretty accurate barometer of a society or civilization has become depraved enough for such things to be commonplace at all. This version of humanity needs an overhaul. These sorts of behaviors need swift justice with no mercy. It must be eradicated. Beyond that, society needs a heart transplant, the heart of stone which has been carefully cultivated by the Powers & Principalities and their semi-human minions, for a heart of human flesh, brought back to life by the 7 Spirits of God. We need a baptism in fire and the Real. Only that can wipe out the heart issues which lead to the creation and consumption of any kind of erotic materials. Brief soapbox sermon coming…
Hear me clearly, I am not saying that the human body is something to be hidden away or to become ashamed of. What I am saying is that the objectification of another human being is wrong. No one deserves to be reduced that way. God made our bodies beautiful and made reproduction an enjoyable experience, one which knits two people into one over a lifetime. That is why it is so destructive to allow ourselves to engage with lust rather than to grow into the Real of love. When we step back from those tendencies and allow Love to break through our shells and humble us, then we can see healing and freedom. When we choose to relate to others as fellow humans rather than as objects to manipulate and use in some way which demeans them (and ourselves), then porn and lust will no longer be the strongholds that they currently are. Celebrate and appreciate the beauty of others, God made it, but choose to see the person, not just your attraction to the perception you have of them.
Back to the story, though, here’s the cycle that investigators have seen: create CSAM images, share the tame ones on platforms like Pixiv, which is hosted in Japan, where such things are not illegal, then link to subscription platforms for the nastier stuff. Send other users to platforms like Patreon where the darkest stuff is behind a paywall (same old story as e-THOTs and cam performers). It is hard to put a dent in these things when it is legal in places such as Japan (think about hentai, much of which is related to abusing children… That is big money industry, y’all). Does this sort of thing fall under the aegis of free speech, or is it something which is right for governments to shut down? I think I already stated my strong opinion above, but what do y’all think?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65932372

WE 2 – Google Talking AI Regulation with EU
You know me well enough by now, I think, that you probably know more or less what I’m likely to say about this, however, here I go anyway. Small gov’t = more freedom, more freedom = better life in general for we the people. More regulations, whether necessary to put a check on unethical and evil individuals and corporations are always a double-edged sword. They cut both ways. As with the previous story, there needs to be a heart change, but that can only come from surrender to Jesus Christ. Until then, until there is a revival of genuine relationship with God, bigger gov’t, which comes through more extensive regulations and less freedom for we the people is an unfortunate necessity, if we stay within the current system. So, what is being talked about? Government agencies being formed to more or less audit all new AI models and tools before commercial release, trying to put a check on the ridiculous pace of development on these tools and platforms, and other similar things. On the surface, aside from the almost hysteria that is fueled by things like the open letter from industry insiders back in March, it looks like a positive thing, but as I said before, more regulations = less freedom. If you are afraid of the technology, simply refuse to use it. It is still possible. If you are concerned about things like privacy more than “AI taking over the world”, then use FOSS models which you can set up an instance for and control what goes in so that what comes out is under your control and is free. As for recompensed the copyright issues, that is a tricky thing. We need to make sure that human creatives are for their intellectual labors, no matter what AI uses their work to learn from. Perhaps a rule about AI permutations of a creator’s work need to obtain some royalties of some sort. I don’t know. This is all very murky, to me.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/28/google-has-had-productive-talks-with-eu-on-ai-act-cloud-boss-says.html




WE 3 – A Couple of Lawyers Got Caught…
Bozos decided to use chatGPT to draft legal papers. Oops. They are colleagues from an NYC law firm, Levidow, Levidow, & Schwartz. I could make a joke about certain ethnicities and lawyers being unethical, but I don’t think I will. On separate cases, these geniuses decided to not only roll the dice and chance their whole documents being the product of a string of so-called “hallucinations” from chatGPT, but then doubled down and lied to the court repeatedly about it. These lazy, unethical attorneys should probably be run out of the profession for being lazy and immoral enough to not check the documents before submitting them, then lying to the court about the imaginary case law cited. #smh y’all. So they get bad publicity and a low ball fine of $5k apiece. I can’t even. Big shock that Peter LoDuca and Steven A. Schwartz (both of whom sound to be from a particular people group) would try to BS the court to get something positive for their clients. Half of the legal profession is based on sophistry, which basically means artfully disguised lying. I’m not saying that all lawyers are liars, but the profession has that reputation for a reason.
https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-lawyers-fined-5000-fake-cases-1850569981

WE 4 – Could Baidu’s Ernie Be Better Than ChatGPT?
Well, according to Chinese State media, it very well may be already. If true, and the published results for Ernie 3.5 are real, then it is quite impressive. However, until those results are reproduced independently, I do not put much weight behind them. Ernie is not available officially in English, but could be. So much speculation in this piece that I struggle to take it seriously. Baidu, for all accounts and purposes, IS Google behind the Great Firewall of China, and it has a full suite of apps & services, just as Google does everywhere else. This article salivates at the thought of CCP controlled “competition” for Google, which still holds 90% of the world’s search traffic. This needs to change, y’all. We can put a dent in it by choosing to stop using it. Sure, it will take conscious effort from FAR more people than will ever see this blog, but it can be and needs to be done. This giant needs to learn that it can’t be evil if it is going to continue growing the way it needs to in order to keep its market cap. It will be a hard thing for to write to ever praise Google for anything, until they fix their whole business model.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chinas-baidu-ai-is-better-than-chatgpt-heres-why


WE 5 – MS Seems to Be the Early Bird Here…
Microsoft is launching a free, basic intro-to-AI concepts certification program. May seem slightly overkill, as it is very easy to create prompts for chatGPT which get you close to what you want. However, the corporation is a trusted name in the computing space, and the course seems to promise help in refining your prompts to get what you want even more easily. Do you think this is necessary or even beneficial? Have you or your employer jumped on the bandwagon? I’ve only used generative AI directly twice, other than the summaries in Brave Search, which I actually don’t use much anymore because of that feature and due to the fact that I’ve noticed left-bias creeping into their results. I have largely switched to Qwant these days. But I digress. What do you guys think about this move from Microsoft?

https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-is-already-offering-a-generative-ai-certification-program-160023724.html

WE 6 – US Harshing Even More on China’s AI Vibes
New regulations banning or at least even more severely limiting the export of processors which could be used to beef up AI to China are going into effect soon. Nvidia, the maker of some of the best AI chips in the world, has already seen a stock valuation hit from the announcement. The chip which Nvidia hamstrung so that they could sell it to China, the A800, looks like it is unlikely to make the cut under the new regulations. Remember last fall, when I covered the introduction of the current regulatory framework? The basic idea is that Depends’ handlers do not want the CCP gaining any more ground on the ailing US tech and military sectors (due to intentional failures in our educational system, in my opinion), so they are seeking to kneecap the CCP by cutting off its supply of US chips. Sure, they are also looking to invest Biden Bucks in tech mega corps who make these chips (NVIDIA, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD), but without the gains in education that we need in order to lead in creating innovation the way we have for the last 50-60 years, since the transistor became a thing. Our problem is a long-term one, and simply cutting supply for our rivals won’t solve the problems we face, currently. This is an issue which is pervasive and systemic, as well as being intentionally created through forcing students to adopt “rightthink” rather than simply teaching them facts and critical thinking skills and letting them be. So much brainpower has been wasted on teaching people WHAT to think, rather than HOW to think, that there isn’t enough left over for real thought and innovation which is actually necessary for our nation and our world to thrive into the future. These things need to be purged from our education system so that real, true things can be taught, and kids can grow up to think critically and logically for themselves, but I digress. What do you guys think about trying to slap a bandaid on a gaping wound like this?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-mulls-even-tighter-restrictions-to-stop-ai-chips-from-reaching-china

WE 7 – Wait, Elon Isn’t the Champion of Free Speech?
Nope. He’s just a guy who has gotten filthy rich on government subsidies and programs which benefit the companies he has either started or purchased. He has profited immensely from the “Green” scam which has so many people convinced that Teslas are the greatest thing since sliced bread. He is also a fat cat based on his contracts with NASA for the Falcon and Falcon heavy rockets from SpaceX. I’ve never been on the Elon hype train, guys. You know that if you’ve watched my videos for any amount of time. I’m tired of talking about this clown. He was smart enough to get involved with PayPal in the early days, along with Peter Thiel, and others. That was what netted him his first billion. After that, he bought Tesla, founded SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. So, not only has Elon’s leadership led to an INCREASE in censorship on the behest of gov’t actors, but he has arbitrarily shut down conversations and forms of speech that he decides he doesn’t like, for instance, now it is a ban-able offense to use the term “cis” on Twitter. That one makes me laugh, actually. However, the writer of this article makes a valid point that Elon’s “free speech absolutism” is, or at least appears to be little more than a joke at this point, only worthy of being memed in the the ground (my addition). I’ve never trusted the man. Honestly, 5 or 6 years ago, I’d drool whenever I saw a Tesla go by. Not any more. The shine has worn off “bigly”, now, I actually have to suppress a desire to call the person who bought it an idiot. Could it be that he is showcasing how arbitrary any limitations on speech really are? Maybe, and while I don’t trust him, I still have a deeply ingrained desire to see the best in others until they prove that they are unworthy of that beneficial doubt. Elon has yet to do that in my book. I am deeply suspicious of him, though, and I do not see that changing anytime soon.
https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-users-1850570720

Big Show 6

by admin Big Show, Distro News, FOSS Fun, Foss News, FOSS News, Tech Freedom

FOSS News Big Show 6

Big Show 6

 

Distro News

  • Nitrux Updating
  • New Linux Mint Beta
  • Freedom Consultation
  • RedHat Locks Down RHEL Stream Source Code

#distronews #TechFreedom #FOSSNews #NUTS #LinuxMint #RedHat

Distro News, Tech Freedom, FOSS News, NUTS, Linux Mint, Red Hat

FOSS News

  • OBS Studio Update
  • 4 Best Google Docs Alternatives
  • Degoogled
  • KDE 5.27.6

#FOSSNews #OBS #nomoregoogle #kdeupdates #TechFreedom

FOSS News, OBS update, Top 4 Google Docs Alts, KDE update, Tech Freedom

FOSS Fun

  • Xonotic Update
  • SDL 2.28 Released
  • Freedom Overhaul
  • DREAMM, Now with Linux Support

#FOSSFun #xonotic #sdl #dreamm #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

FOSS Fun, Xonotic Update, New SDL, DREAMM, Tech Freedom, FOSS News

 

#BigShow #FOSSNews #DistroNews #TechFreedom #LinnuxMint #RedHat #OBS #KDE #xonotic #SDL #DREAMM

Big Show, FOSS News, Distro News, FOSS Fun, Linux Mint, Red Hat, DREAMM, Tech Freedom

 

Distro News

DN 1 – NUTS

Nitrux Update Tool System released to help you update your immutable installs. Aww NUTS… Sorry, I had to. Let’s take a look at NUTS, shall we? It is a CLI tool meant to enable much simpler upgrading, which to date, has meant downloading the newest ISO, burning it to a flash drive, booting into the live environment, then carefully avoiding your home partition when reinstalling the OS. This tool allows you to skip that tedious process. It is not currently available in releases, but you can install it using git. I love the idea of the OS, and immutability is a huge buzz word right now for a good reason. However, it is not ready in terms of their desktop UI tweaks to KDE, much less their Mauikit and Maui Desktop. I do not suggest anyone use Nitrux right now because of those UI issues, but other than that, the fundaments of the distro are super solid.

If you are using it, here is how to grab the NUTS package and use it:

git clone –depth=1 https://github.com/Nitrux/nuts.git $HOME/nuts

sudo cp $HOME/nuts/usr/bin/nuts /usr/bin

sudo cp $HOME/nuts/etc/nuts.conf /etc

 

Once installed, use

sudo nuts to update your system

Or sudo nuts restore to use a backup which gets built automatically before you you actually update with the sudo nuts command

https://9to5linux.com/nitrux-devs-make-it-easier-to-upgrade-your-immutable-nitrux-os-installations 

 

DN 2 – New Linux Mint Beta

LM 21.2 “Victoria” has a new beta release. Mainstream Linux Mint is still based on Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish, but this packs a whole raft of good stuff, in particular for the Cinnamon Desktop. Let’s preview what’s new, then shall we?

  • support for touchpad and touchscreen gestures (huge, here… About time)
  • a global Dark Mode setting for supporting GTK4/libadwaita apps
  • XDG Desktop Portal support to provide users with better compatibility for Flatpak apps
  • support for accent colors
  • a faster Nemo file manager with new folder icons
  • revamped tooltips and notifications

In terms of the OS itself, though, what is new with this next point release?

  • a much-improved login manager
  • better keyboard navigation
  • support for Wayland sessions
  • support for LXQt/Pademelon badges
  • a configurable layout for the Onboard on-screen keyboard
  • a scrollable session list
  • support for multiple keyboard layouts
  • better touchpad support with automatic detection and enablement of tap-to-click
  • Other Misc things
  • Full support for HEIF and AVIF images
  • update the in-house built Xreader document viewer app to properly support Adobe Illustrator documents
  • Update to Pix image viewer app with a rebase on the gThumb 3.12.2 image viewer.
  • Software Manager app
  • UI refresh
  • better scoring/sorting algorithms
  • tuned package list.
  • Warpinator app received support for the Landlock and Bubblewrap technologies to implement folder isolation

This is a whole lot for the very conservative Mint Team, considering this is just a point release not a full upgrade, ie from 21 to 22 (which is unlikely until sometime next year, after the next LTS version of Ubuntu is released in April, 2024). As an aside, if you want to try Linux Mint out, I strongly suggest that you go for the Debian Edition, which very much allows you to avoid all of the missteps with Canonical. Given, even mainstream Mint cuts out Snaps and much of the other stupidity from upstream, but it also isn’t as fast as the Debian Edition. In fact, I think that LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) should be the default iteration for that distribution, rather than the original Ubuntu-based version because of the lack of Canonical mess and because it is just faster.

 

https://9to5linux.com/linux-mint-21-2-beta-is-now-available-for-download-with-cinnamon-5-8 

 

Freedom Consultation

Free Call

Actionable steps to set you free

https://techfreedom.pro/freedom-consultation 

 

DN 3 – Red Hat Goes Full Nazi, or Did They?

Ok, so until now, everything was more or less a free for all for any developer or team (Euro, Alma, Rocky, Etc) to access the open source codebase for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but now the team at Red Hat has decided that they want to exercise some oversight or something (is this a frog in a pot kind of situation, though?) in terms of who and how many access their code base. I have to admit that I got click-baited by the It’s FOSS headline on this piece. Once I really read the article, though, I realized my initial reaction was unwarranted. Lots of questions about how this will shake out, however, for now it doesn’t appear to be that bad. Some overreacted, as I did at first, but according to gloriouseggroll, who works for Red Hat, this change is not so much meant to cut off access to the code, but it can make it inconvenient. Developers of RHEL-based distros simply need to sign up for a free developer account and life can go on as per normal. How much will this affect distros like Alma and Rocky Linux? It looks like not much in the immediate future, but who knows how much this change will feed into real lockdowns at Red Hat? Only time will tell. Let’s hope that RHEL doesn’t almost go proprietary and totally screw over anyone who depends on one of these binary-compatible distributions, not to mention the teams behind these distributions.

 

https://news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-restricts-source-code/ 

 

FOSS News

 

FN 1 – OBS Studio 29.1.3 Released

So we have a new minor release out for the popular screen capture and streaming tool. I use this whenever I make a video or stream, so I get happy whenever they put out an update. What’s new?

  • Many bugs squashed
  • Source Record plugin by fixing a crash that occurred when properties are deleted in the callback
  • improves the AMF (Advanced Media Framework) encoder’s reconfiguration and dynamic bitrate as they didn’t work in previous releases (AMF is the AMD encoder)
  • AMF preset fallback to take into account the GPU reported throughput
  • Also fixed window and game capture issues
  • Also fixed audio settings issues
  • Also fixed service selection issues
  • crash with Freetype 2 text sources when non-ASCII text is used, and fixes other crashes in obs-websockets and Lua scripts.
  • Properties dialogs now closeable by hitting the cancel button
  • Fixed keyboard shortcuts weren’t displayed for some context menu items
  • the View menu’s “Source Toolbar” checkable menu item wouldn’t update when the “Show Source Toolbar” and “Hide Source Toolbar” hotkeys were used.
  • Fixed a bug where switching between “Fade” and “Fade to Black” for a quick transition would fail to work correctly
  • fixed an issue where unnecessary undo/redo entries were being created for text sources
  • fixed a bug where the placeholder text for “Group” would not be correctly localized when adding a new group.

Basically, a whole host of bug fixes, which I’ve come to expect with this project. OBS is a great FOSS project and deserves whatever support it can get.

https://9to5linux.com/obs-studio-29-1-3-improves-the-source-record-plugin-amf-encoder-and-more 

 

FN 2 – Tired of Volunteering Your Data to Big Tech?

This is a top 4 piece. Top 4 alternatives to using Google Docs. The first 3 make perfect sense for general use, but I don’t know that I agree that #4 needed to be on a general purpose list like this. The first one is OnlyOffice, which is designed to be self-hosted in a private cloud, but can just be used locally as well. The second is CryptPad, the third is EtherPad, and the fourth is CurveNote, which is designed for scientific use and as a CMS for scientific teams.

OnlyOffice Docs

Is a fully FOSS, MS Office compatible office suite which enables you to connect with a private cloud or simply create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations locally. I use this on the daily. It generally just works, and is available cross-platform. One thing to keep in mind is that it will struggle to connect if you are using the flatpak version, as it has yet to be updated to the latest version. If you are working from a distro-specific package (AUR, DEB, etc), you are probably fine, and it will connect as soon as you tell it where to connect to. One thing that I wish was different would be that if it recognizes that you are in a given region, then it would default to measurements and layouts and page dimensions which reflect that region.  Other than that, this is an excellent option for both local and cloud based work. https://www.onlyoffice.com/ 

 

 

CryptPad

I’ve done a how-to on the best way to install CryptPad on your own server before. It is not as easy to integrate with nextcloud as OnlyOffice is, but on the other hand, it is end-to-end encrypted by default, so if you are collaborating on something which is of a sensitive nature, then CryptPad may be a better solution for you. It also has the ability to work with documents, notes, spreadsheets, and presentations in its entirely web-based editors. You have the option to self-host (but that can be a pain, see my video on it here: https://rumble.com/v29wpc2-free-your-pc-friday-special-interwebz-news-and-how-tos.html) or use their French servers to store your files. This option not only gives you the protection of GDPR from the EU, but the extra layer of privacy laws present in France. You can choose to use it entirely for free, and without an account, but if you do that, then you won’t be able to collaborate with anyone. If you sign up for an account, you get a gig of storage for free and can start to collaborate with other users. If you pay a bit, then that storage level goes up, and your support urgency level goes up as well. https://cryptpad.fr 

 

EtherPad

Is purely web-based just like CryptPad, but only does text editing, and is not end-to-end encrypted. It is also purely self-hosted. If you want to try it out, you’ll have to stick it on your own server, which you can do by following these directions: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite#installation or you can hop on someone else’s instance, of which, here is a list: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-That-Run-Etherpad, apparently.

 

Finally, we have Curvenote, which is more than a collaboration suite, as it is designed to be a content management system, or CMS, for scientists, engineers, or other technical professions. This is not technically FOSS, though it is freemium. That is, it has a free tier to whet your appetite, but it is limited to  1 private project and getting community based support, rather than unlimited private projects and dedicated support from the team who create the software. The paid plans start at $9/month https://curvenote.com/pricing 

 

So, as you can see, each of these options have their distinct benefits and drawbacks, as well as a likely intended audience. The most accessible one, in my opinion, is OnlyOffice. The most secure one is easily CryptPad. Etherpad is the simplest of them, where Curvenote is likely the most specifically targeted one of the bunch.

https://www.tecmint.com/google-docs-alternatives/ 

 

Degoogled

Want to learn how to cut the umbilical to Mountain View, CA? Take a look at the blogs linked here. If you just want a Freed Phone, you can order one there as well.

https://techfreedom.pro/degoogled 

 

FN 3 – KDE Plasma 5.27.6 Out Now

So what, you may be asking… I can understand that attitude, but bear with me, this update is significant. It improves both the wayland and x11 sessions. For Wayland, it fixes a bug where after a screen has gone to sleep and wakes up, the mouse cursor looks weird in xwayland windows, and that fractional scaling would often produce visual glitches. For x11, drag & drop files to take manager task actions have been improved, krunner searches for short character strings have also been improved. System settings has better keyboard navigation (about time), now you can actually use the arrow keys to get around, rather than having to tab through the sidebar menu. They’ve also improved the magic lamp animation for minimizing windows so it works right with floating panels, hidden panels, and multi-screen setups. They’ve also lavished more love on flatpak support in the form of proper support within Discover so they actually show up when you search for them, the correct version also appears when you are trying to update a flatpak. This is a significant bump in quality of life, if you have adopted the flatpak way of life. A couple of other bugs got squashed in Discover as well in regard to the weird error messages about metadata URIs, as well as to make the Software Sources button appear properly in the settings window. The Login Screen in Settings now shows you error messages which occur in SDDM, fixed a KRunner crash, and updates the “add new page” dialog in the System Monitor app so that it handles non-English translations better. A significant bug caused by simply moving windows around was fixed. Many other things were fixed, as well, so if you want a full list, take a look at the article this section was based on or take a look at the changelog, here: https://kde.org/announcements/changelogs/plasma/5/5.27.5-5.27.6/.

https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-5-27-6-is-out-to-improve-plasma-wayland-session-support-for-flatpak-apps 

 

FF 1 – Good Old Xonotic Got an Update

Xonotic is a Quake 3 –esque arena shooter based on the Nexuiz project. This update brings some fixes for the AI and performance, some new updates to vfx, and introduces a couple of new maps and a few new game modes:

Mayhem – Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch where players spawn with all weapons and full health / armour. Score is given 75% based on damage and 25% based on frags. (this sounds like a fun wrinkle)

Survival – A few randomly selected players must frag all survivors, without being identified. (hmmm… Sneak around and hunt everyone…)

Team Keepaway – A team variant of the free for all, where points are awarded to the team in possession of a ball for each kill. (get the ball, and pray your team is more efficient than the other one)

If you want to see the changelog: https://xonotic.org/posts/2023/xonotic-0-8-6-release/ 

 

 

FF 2 – SDL 2.28 Released

SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) provides low level access to things like mice, keyboards, joysticks, audio hardware, and GPUs in an open source, cross platform manner. This is crucial for things like Linux gaming, and has been used by just about everyone in the gaming space at one time or another: Valve, Unity Engine, games & emulators, and others. Many bug fixes and other improvements will come with this version, most of which are above my paygrade, as I do not have any kind of grasp on low level programming languages. What you need to know is that a) this should make gaming better and b) this is the last major release in the SDL 2 series and they are now focused on big things for SDL 3.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/06/sdl-2280-released-and-goes-into-maintenance-mode-now-focusing-on-sdl-3/ 

 

 

Freedom Overhaul

This is the full package. A whole-life exit from Big Tech. Migration from Windows or MacOS to Linux. Migration from iOS or stock Android to Graphene OS. Migration from Big Tech email and collaboration tools to ones which will honor your right to privacy.

https://techfreedom.pro/product/freedom-overhaul/ 

 

FF 3 – Ever Heard of DREAMM?

It is another emulator, but this one specializes in classic LucasArts games. They’ve released a new version which added a whole slew of new (old) games and initial Linux support, so you should be able to play your old Jedi Knight games (among others) on Linux better than you can with ScummVM. Sound like a good time? Need a 90s and aughts LucasArts nostalgia hit? Take a look here. https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/ 

 

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/06/classic-lucasarts-games-emulator-dreamm-adds-early-linux-support/ 

 

Weekend Edition 40

by admin Featured FOSS News, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 40

Weekend Edition 40

FTC Goes After Amazon

AST Space 4G

AI News

Google Points Fingers at MSFT

Meta News

Twitter News

 

 

#weekendedition #FOSSNews #FTC #amazon #AI #cellsatellites #Google #Microsoft #Meta #Twitter #TechFreedom

Weekend Edition, FOSS News, Tech Freedom, AI, Big Tech


 

WE 1 – FTC Investigating Prime Dark Patterns

Now that Big Daddy Bezos/ Lex Luthor is out of the way, the FTC can slap Amazon around all they want. Have you ever tried to end your Amazon Prime subscription? It takes some doing, let me tell you. They have so many services bundled under the Prime brand, from shipping to music, to photos, to video, etc, that gets shown to users who try to end their subscriptions that it is difficult to navigate to actually get done what you meant to do. They strike me as desperate for Prime customers, when not only do they make it difficult to order anything without at least a “free trial” (I was sucked into this over 10 years ago), but then make it absolutely labyrinthine to actually end your subscription. This is wrong. This complaint alleges that there are engineers with a conscience, or at least who fear the color of law, who have tried to fix these issues, but either found their ideas slow-walked, ignored, or actively undone when efforts were made. Executives seem unwilling to move away from this manipulative model of doing business (perhaps because it is effective at making sure that people stay subscribed and hooked into their data-mining efforts) in spite of the fact that it is illegal. Perhaps they think that their legal team and lobby in DC can shield them from any real harm, here. I don’t know.

What do you guys think?

 

https://www.pcmag.com/news/ftc-amazon-tricked-millions-into-signing-up-for-prime-subscriptions 

 

WE 2 – AST BlueWalker 3 4G Satellite Tested

What is that? AST, a satellite communications firm has launched and tested their first 4G-capable solar-powered satellite. The BlueWalker 3 is a low-earth orbit satellite which is more or less a giant 4G cell tower in space. Back in April they tested voice capabilities via a trans-pacific phone call, from TX to Tokyo. This month, they tested data transfer speeds in rural Hawaii, and with off-the-shelf phones, were able to pull down 10 mb/s from the satellite. Sure, that isn’t earth-shattering speed, but it is far better in rural areas than what is currently available. These are improvements, to be sure, meant to cover about 300k sq mi per satellite. AST and AT&T are not to be the only names in the game, but are poised to be the first to offer it as a commercial service. There are others who are gunning to join the space-based mobile access game: Apple, SpaceX, and T-Mobile. How hot are these towers? They also say that they are planning to roll out 5G (which is cannot be the fastest mm-wave varieties, as the frequencies necessary to achieve that throughput couldn’t make it to earth from space anyway) soon, which really means mid-band 4G, but beam-formed and with multiple streams combined into one signal to boost throughput. In regard to mm-wave 5G, the current tech can’t even make it through a pane of glass, much less a brick wall, hell, too much moisture in the air can attenuate the signal to the point where it is pointless. Too many unanswered questions about WiFi technology and the effect of these frequencies on living tissue. On one hand, this is kind of cool, and if we could get the latency down and the throughput significantly higher (see Starlink), this could get all of those unsightly towers off of the ground, perhaps.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/asts-bluewalker-satellite-successfully-delivers-10mbps-download-speeds 

 

WE 3 – AI News

3a – AI Battle Royale

UC Berkeley (UCB) founded the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS Org) to find out which of the LLMs is best currently. This research group is comprised of 10 Data science professors and students from UCB and UCSD (UC San Diego), as well as CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). This group has set up a blind testing arena where user prompts get sent to two of the models at once, so that the results show up side by side, and the user evaluates them. Unsurprisingly, the most advanced of the LLMs, GPT4, is the winner, but not by as much as you might think. There is an accessibility (aside from a raft of other things) issue, in that it is locked behind a $20/mo pay wall, where the others are freely available. They use the Elo rating system, which if you are a chess nerd, you’ll be familiar with. It is the comparative rating system used to rank players in chess and other similar games. Basically, it is a self-correcting rating system which will eventually produce accurate scores for the members of the dataset, whether chess players or, in this case, AI large language models. It is only 30 points ahead of Claude, which is waitlisted and has been developed by Anthropic.

I do not trust generative AI, but am not afraid of it, unlike many seem to be, including one of the professors overseeing this research group. His (Dr. Zhang’s) two issues are actually similar to mine, though: 1) he is concerned for data privacy and 2) incentives for human content creators to actually produce higher-quality content. I have been screaming about privacy in this regard since chatGPT burst onto the scene 8-9 months ago now. Not only can these tools access anything that is publicly available online, but you are giving it YOUR information whenever you use one, which it then incorporates into its own training algorithms. His second problem is one that I don’t know that I’ve thought about, but makes sense to me: if AIs can create admixtures of content which closely mimic human content, but said content is based on garbage articles and blog posts, then why should humans strive to produce anything better? Where’s the incentive to push oneself to make something truly good if some AI can mass-produce fluff pieces at will and bring the whole enterprise down several pegs while it is at it?

 

https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-bard-or-bing-40k-people-voted-for-the-best-generative-ai-model 

 

WE 3b – Thinking Like a Pirate? Don’t.

Apparently some enterprising individuals have taken to asking chatbots for Windows license serial numbers to activate Windows on their machines. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, it doesn’t. This article more or less advises you not to bother, and I would add that if you want a free OS, just make the switch to Linux. Most of your games and apps will probably work just fine, anyway (barring the Adobe Suite, MS Office, and a handful of popular games). Avoid the problem and the spying altogether by making the switch. Yes, it does have a learning curve, but I think you’ll find that it isn’t as steep as in years gone by. So why does the article say not to try the chatbot route to get a free activation code for Windoesn’t?

  1. It is not guaranteed to work, as apparently GPT 3.5 or 4 simply pulls generic installation codes (which MS so generously provides for free, so that you can test their OS, but not activate it to get full functionality). Even if it all works at first, the install works, and your system even activates, these free codes have been proven in the past to be phased out randomly, anyway.
  2. It is illegal. This is piracy, people. As much as I hate MS, I can’t encourage you to break the law.

As I was saying, though, unless you are tied down to one of these proprietary app suites or games, why stick with Windoesn’t, anyway, when they are only getting more and more invasive to your privacy as each new version is released? Why take the chance of being left out in the cold by a bad, or fraudulent code? Why risk fines or imprisonment for software piracy? Don’t do it. It isn’t worth it.

https://www.techradar.com/news/dont-ask-chatgpt-or-google-bard-for-a-windows-11-key-heres-why 

 

We 4 – Google Whines About Microsoft Azure

Amid years of legal battles with regulators in the US, Europe, and India, Google has taken the opportunity provided by a general request from the FTC regarding anti-competitive practices from Microsoft’s corner of the Cloud space. So, like a problem child who sees an opportunity to point the finger and deflect blame from themselves onto another sibling (though MS has been historically far from being a golden child [remember the anti-trust cases of the 90’s and 00’s?]) who is not currently in as much trouble, Google takes advantage and fires off this series of allegations which have also been leveled against Google’s cloud division itself, repeatedly, over the last several years. I’ve talked about some of the fines which the giant has faced from different countries over their own practices, and how they make it very hard for you to leave their services once you start using them, whether through license agreements, proprietary software stacks or implementations. We know that Azure is very similar, as is AWS. ALL of the big boys pull these stunts to lock clients into their respective ecosystems. That needs to change. 10 years ago. Not today, not tomorrow, 10 years ago, at the beginning of the cloud revolution. These monsters need to be slain and dismembered so that a freer, more private internet can grow in their place. Let me give you a little advice: if you have an app or some other sort of web-based service, don’t use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to handle the infrastructure. Easier said than done, as with any economy of scale situation, the smaller competitors often cannot keep up with prices or offerings in comparison with MS, Oracle (whom Google also singled out in its letter), AWS, or Google Cloud. However, most of the smaller outfits out there also tend to be more committed to fair competition, even if it hurts their bottom line. One such small provider is Altha Tech, out of Mt. Airy, NC. The owner, Jared Heath, is all in on FOSS wherever practical, and will never lock you in to exclusive or proprietary agreements.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/google-accuses-microsoft-of-anticompetitive-practices-in-azure-cloud.html 

 

WE 5 – Mainstream Social Media News

WE 5a – Meta Allows too Much Free Speech

Remember the Brazilian Election situation? The one where Lula (the overt communist) seems to have Biden’d the far more popular nationalist Jair Bolsonaro? Well there was a video calling for “insurrectionist action” back in January which Meta decided to leave “up” rather than censoring it, as it did with many similar posts in late 2020- early 2021 in regard to Resident Depends and Kneepad Harris “beating” President Trump in the 2020 US election from Depends’ basement. The article’s writer shows herself to be a good wokist drone by whining about how Facebook was a “home for right-wing conspiracy theorists and organizers” during the weeks between November 4 and January 6, allowing more than 650,000 posts questioning or organizing against the results of that (s)election. Lo and behold, I looked up a bio for the writer, and she writes for the NYT, WaPo, and other propaganda rags as well as writing about tech on Engadget. Impressive resume. No independent thought though.

https://www.engadget.com/metas-oversight-board-says-the-companys-rules-are-slowly-changing-for-the-better-100059192.html 

 

WE 5b – Meta Plans Twitter Competitor to Integrate Tightly With Instagram

Elon is big mad about this. This new competitor will have an SSO with Instagram and be interoperable with mastodon and other ActivityPub decentralized platforms. This development process was commenced in January, and sounds like it will be ready by the end of the summer. This has triggered a public spat between Zuck and Musk which even has resulted in Musk suggesting that they should have a physical “cage match” in Las Vegas. That is hilarious. Two nerds trying to fight in some sort of MMA style. Probably even more awkward than the time when Linus Sebastian from LTT had a fight with one of his workers last year. Anyway… Such a stupid stunt, if it happens. At any rate, that is more or less the end of that story for now. We’ll see if anything more develops, here. Lol.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/22/musk-zuckerberg-cage-match-what-to-know-about-metas-twitter-clone.html 

 

WE 5c – Twitter to Start Paying Google Again…

Well, well, well… Until Yaccarino came on board, there was probably going to be an even bigger mess internally at the dirty, blue bird. Most of their in0house tools were and have been hosted on the Google cloud infrastructure since 2018. This arrangement costs Twitter $200-300 million per year. Musk had been trying to cut costs, saw that, and said, we can do it ourselves, or something like that, and had refused to pay the bill since he bought the company last November. Yaccarino came in and is reworking the deal in a much broader partnership… Hmm, including Google ads on Twitter, among other things, including Google having the right to use the paid Twitter API. Google claims that it “struggled to get ahold of” Musk to talk about the back bills, etc, but now it would seem that all is hunky dory in big tech land again. Not much to say here, other than that Yaccarino does seem to be very good for Twitter in a business sense.

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-paying-its-google-cloud-bill-again-213824844.html 

 

WE 5d – Will Elon Continue to Blow Up the Dirty Blue Bird?

Was this a Glass Cliff Hire with Yaccarino? Only time will tell. Elon will be Elon. He seems a bigger troll than Obi Wan and Dooku put together… Almost as big of a troll as DJT. Will this become another situation like Carly Fiorina at HP 10 years ago? Will Elon actually let her make his toy make business sense again, or will this Australian threat about hate speech on the platform become indicative of the death of the dirty blue bird? Only time will tell. What is a glass cliff hire? It is a situation when a company is in a bad place, then hires a female/+ minority to right the ship, so to speak, to take pressure off of the rest of the C-suite executives and board members who were actually the problem. As I said a few times already, the truth will take time to be shown, here. I don’t trust Elon, and certainly don’t trust this new WEF lackey CEO. Then again, it doesn’t matter much, as I never used the platform. I see that it has been a haven for the worst kinds of corruption, from pedophilia and other forms of exploitation to more general human trafficking and other dark things which were only exacerbated by the ways in which censorship has been wielded on the platform. I’d almost rather see it burn to the ground to be replaced by something more free and open. The problem with that is that that is probably too idealistic of me to expect or hope for, particularly without a massive change within humanity and the user base of social media in general, first.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/twitter/elon-continues-to-drag-twitter-through-the-mud-and-could-face-fines-as-a-result 

 

What can we say? This last few weeks have been eventful, haven’t they? You understand what cloud computing is, right? Cloud computing = keeping and manipulating your data on someone else’s hardware. That is inherently lacking privacy, and can keep you in a bad deal if you sign up with one of the big guys (GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, or ORCL) to host and manage something like the backend for an app you are developing. They all do it. Google has caught more flack than the rest lately, though Amazon has gotten some regulatory tough love for it over in the UK as well, as has Azure. These giants see your data as a commodity, guys. I’ve said it many times, but it has come out again recently that MS snoops on your files in OneDrive and SharePoint by scraping your passwords from your MS account. Why are you still in that abusive relationship? Why allow yourself to continue being gas lit by these monsters? Learn to take control and regain your privacy piece by piece with Tech Freedom.

Back to the space-based cell phone service thing, though, I have to wonder what the amplitude of the waves has to be in order for the signal to travel over 300 miles. Those have to be some very powerful transmitters, since a typical cell tower can only reach a MAXIMUM of 75 miles, but most of the time can only reach UP TO 25 miles. Most are far closer together than that, though: 1-3 miles apart, and if you’re somewhere like downtown LA or NYC, that is more like .25- 1 mile effective range before it hands off the signal to a new tower. I also wonder about the latency of the data, or how much extra lag that would necessarily introduce to the equation. Cool, but too many unanswered questions in my mind.

I have to laugh at the comments made about there being “too much” free speech on Facebook/Meta in that piece on Engadget. It was well-written, but a junk premise. Will Elon and Mark duke it out in the octagon over Project 92? I doubt it, but all of this nonsense got us talking about the new product, didn’t it?

Does Yaccarino make business sense for Twitter? She seems to be making some good commonsense moves right now, but I trust her less than I trust Elon, so take that for what it is worth. Was she hired to actually right the ship, so to speak, or just to deflect from the owner’s antics and stunts? Only time will tell.

FOSS News – Big Show 5

by admin Big Show, Distro News, FOSS Fun, Foss News, Linux, Tech Freedom

FOSS News Big Show 5

FOSS News 5 – Big Show 

Distro News

Ubuntu PSA

Debian Bookworm Released

Ultramarine Linux

Freedom Consultation

openSUSE 15.543,254

 

 

FOSS News

postmarketOS 23.06

OnlyOffice 7.4 Out

Degoogled

Linux Founder Opinionated (not really news)

 

FOSS Fun

Big Steam Client Updates

AMD Moving Toward FOSS

Freed Computer/ Free Your PC

Better Wayland Support for NVIDIA

 

#FOSSNews #Linuxnews #Linux #Distros #releaseenws #torvalds #libertarian #steam #AMD #NVIDIA #TechFreedom

FOSS News, Linux, FOOS releases, Torvalds a “wokist”, talk, FOSS Fun, Tech Freedom

 

DN 1: Ubuntu Update PSA

Kinetic Kudu support ending July 20. Upgrade your systems now to Lunar Lobster, if you want to continue receiving security updates. That is all.

https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-22-10-kinetic-kudu-to-reach-end-of-life-on-july-20th-2023 

 

DN 2: Debian Bookworm Out Now

Lots of big things in this major update, which will be supported until December of 2028. The biggest of which is that they are adding new non-free repositories to the default mix: non-free-firmware is the newest and most important of these, as it contains things like NVIDIA and Broadcom drivers which many of us need in order to easily get our systems running properly. It will ship with the latest LTS kernel (but you can always choose to install a different, newer kernel if you need to), APFS support (huge), ntfs2btrfs (to easily convert NTFS drives to BTRFS), a new malloc implementation developed by Microsoft (yikes)(malloc stands for Memory Allocation), and many other things, such as: secure boot functionality on ARM with UEFI support, a new shiny-server package to simplify scientific web apps using the R language, and an update to GCC 12.2. They have also created all-new artwork, called Emerald. Aside from that, they have over 64,400 packages in the Debian repos, nearly 11,100 new packages were added, about 43,250 were updated, and close to 6,300 were removed. That is a crazy string of stats, but that is what you get with Debian, as it is the daddy of the 800 lb gorilla, Ubuntu, and the granddaddy of distros like Pop!OS and Mint. It is the most commonly used server distro as well. Beware if you are dual-boot kind of person, as they have deprecated os-prober to check for other OSes present on a system. You will need to use dpkg-reconfigure in order to tell GRUB that you have another OS on the system after you get set up with Bookworm.

It is available as live images with KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, GNOME 43, Xfce 4.18, Cinnamon 5.6, MATE 1.26, LXDE 11, and LXQt 1.2.0 (but these are only available for 64-bit systems).

Debian is not sexy, but it generally just works and is simply stable, perfect for production environments and servers. You can download it here: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/12.0.0/ 

https://9to5linux.com/debian-12-bookworm-officially-released-heres-whats-new 


 

Freedom Consultation

Free call.

60-90 minutes.

Q&A

Leave with Actionable Steps to take, whether you work with me or not.

Schedule today.

 

https://techfreedom.pro/freedom-consultation

#distromonday #freedom #consultation #Linux #degoogleyourlife #TechFreedom

 

DN 3: Ultramarine Linux

What is that? It is Fedora with some tweaks: the Pop!OS system scheduler (however this is only fully implemented in the GNOME flavor). It comes in KDE, GNOME, Budgie, and Pantheon flavors, by the way. Its primary version is Budgie, though. You might like Budgie, but it’s not my cuppa tea. This one is vaguely interesting to me because it is a slight Frankenstein’s monster of Linux distros; with elements from Fedora (most of the core), Pop!OS (system scheduler), and even Solus (its flagship desktop). If you want to check it out, you can do so by downloading it from their site: https://ultramarine-linux.org/download/.

https://9to5linux.com/ultramarine-linux-38-launches-with-system76s-scheduler-based-on-fedora-38 

 

DN 4: openSUSE Leap 15.5

This is the point-release version of openSUSE Tumbleweed, and is a bit of an odd duck, really. It is apparently a favorite of system admins and developers, but I fail to see why with the way it seems cobbled together in a more odd way than most distributions are. Connor used Tumbleweed for about a month or so, and enjoyed it, but then got majorly turned off when he noticed the way systemd worked in that distro. So here are some of the highlights: KDE 5.27, added default repositories for OpenH264 video codecs, VIM 9.0, Fully functional Python 3.11 stack, in parallel to the system Python (python36), Improvements to the Kate text editor, Fixes for crashes on Kdenlive, Qt 5.15 LTS netavark 1.5.0, Flatpak 1.14.4, fwupd 1.8.6, Ugrep 3.11.0, Network Manager 1.38.6, Mozilla Firefox 102.9.0, and Thunderbird 102.8.0. 

You can peruse the release notes here: https://en.opensuse.org/Release_announcement_15.5?ref=news.itsfoss.com 

Or download the latest here: https://get.opensuse.org/leap/15.5/?ref=news.itsfoss.com 

Or read the article this piece is based on here: https://news.itsfoss.com/opensuse-15-5-leap/ 

 

FN 1: A Glance at Linux Mobile

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen both a new Mobian and a new postmarketOS release, both of which look to be excellent. Each one target different aspects, and approach the problems in keeping with their respective root distros: Debian and Alpine, respectively. Mobian released a new stable version based on Bookworm, just as it was released for the rest of us. It seems to promise more package stability than a slightly more rolling style release like Alpine. Bookworm sounds like an excellent base for Mobian, as the developers feel that it is the first one that is really mobile-friendly. That is something, y’all. Mobian sounds like a very sensible option, but as with Debian, if something just doesn’t work in that release, you’re kinda stuck until the next major update. On the other hand, if it just works for you, and that is what you need, then Mobian may be a good option for you. Take a look at Mobian here: https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/06/10/bookworm/ 

PostmarketOS, with its Alpine base, is systemd-free, and has a stable release roughly biennially along with Alpine. It is tiny on its own, and supports most if not all of the major, functional mobile DE options: Phosh, Plasma Mobile, GNOME Mobile Shell 44, and Sxmo. I am pretty excited about GNOME Mobile, if I’m honest. I don’t think that KDE is suited well for touch screens, as much as it pains me to admit. Glance at postmarketOS here:  https://postmarketos.org/ 

Capyloon (FirefoxOS descendant), PureOS, and the Manjaro Mobile flavors have all each had releases as well. PureOS is based on Bookworm, but has some special sauce baked in for the Librem 5 to work as well as it does. Take a look here: https://capyloon.org/releases.html#jun-09-2023 

Manjaro Mobile is still in beta for both the Plasma and Phosh flavorings. Check out the Phosh one here: https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/phosh/releases and the Plasma flavor here: https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/plasma-mobile/releases 

Capyloon is built on top of Mobian, but functions a bit like ChromeOS, only with a Firefox base. This release introduces a feature called Web Tiles to replace classical web apps, and here are the highlights about them:

  • Immutable: a Tile is a bundle of resources identified using content addressing. Our current implementation uses a tile:// protocol which is similar to the ipfs:// one.
  • Safe by default: a tile can’t fetch foreign content. This is enforced by a default CSP applied to all tile:// url loads.
  • Powerful: because they can’t leak data to external parties, tiles can be granted access to what are usually considered “dangerous” APIs.
  • Installable and usable offline: being content addressed and local-only, tiles are naturally suited for offline use.
  • Composable: being installed, tiles can register Web Activities like other installed Capyloon apps. This make them ideal candidates to bridge the Http web with new capabilities.

Capyloon also now has prebuilt images for both the Pinephone Pro and the Librem 5. Check out Capyloon here: https://capyloon.org/releases.html#jun-09-2023 

 

https://linmob.net/weekly-update-23-2023/ 

https://9to5linux.com/postmarketos-23-06-arrives-for-linux-phones-and-tablets-with-gnome-mobile 

 

FN 2: OnlyOffice 7.4 Out Now

I use this office suite myself, these days. I find Libre Office a bit cludgy, but wish that OnlyOffice had more tweakability at the same time, though. The overall approaches seem to be analogous to GNOME vs KDE, where GNOME is functional, but you have to learn it more or less as-is (barring extensions and the like) [that is OnlyOffice], and KDE is functional but exposes all of the possible levers and knobs and can be a bit awkward sometimes because of it [Libre Office]. So what are some highlights with this update?

  • Drawing Support
  • Is what it sounds like, you get to draw in your documents now, if you have a touchscreen device
  • Save Docs/Sheets as Images
  • Save as either jpg or png, to make sharing docs easier via social media.
  • Plugins Upgrade
  • Unlimited windows… Not helpful to me, but perhaps to some
  • Spreadsheet Improvements
  • Various chart improvements, as well as editing protection built right in
  • Radar Charts
  • New type of chart, might be easier to use than some others, particularly for multivariate datasets
  • Combine Documents
  • Merge two document versions into one, with tracked changes being carried over which you can either accept or reject at will.
  • Save Objects as Pictures
  • Save charts and other objects as pictures with transparent backgrounds
  • And more

https://news.itsfoss.com/onlyoffice-7-4-release/ 

 

Tech Freedom Freed Phones

Google Pixel 5+ device with Graphene OS and all you need in order to pick it up and use your phone more privately.

https://techfreedom.pro/degoogled/

#degoogleyourlife #grapheneOS #privacy #security #TechFreedom

 

 

FN 3: Linus Torvalds Not a Conservative (duh)

Ok, so I know that many people who watch my content are conservatives, and it may shock you that the man behind the OS I champion is anything but conservative in his social and political stances. He railed against the NYT for having a poor web experience and requiring people to call in to cancel, then someone commented about woke communist ideologies, and Linus went OFF. He has always been very opinionated, and had this almost autistic bluntness about him. Let’s take a look at the exchange:

Well, Mr. Torvalds minces few words here, huh? Let’s face it, he has chosen to not work in the context of most of the software development world because he has a distaste for capitalism and the greed implied by it. He has done this for 30+ years. That sounds pretty communistic to me. He also sounds like a man who has a very loose morality, other than in that regard. He is a nerd without God, so why would he have issues with any of the moral failings he mentioned in his tirade, here? If there is no God, then abortion is and should be a matter of the woman’s choice, similar to LGBT+ demonizations. As for guns in America, I have to wonder who qualifies as “a moron with a pulse” in his book. All in all, this feels fairly anarchical, other than the need for a strong gov’t to handle the gun licensure issues he sees. Not the point of highlighting this exchange, though. I knew that Linus was not a conservative, and I don’t need him to be. As long as he stays all about freedom within reason, I will continue to use and encourage others to use the OS that he has created the kernel for for 32 years now.

https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/ 

 

How to install GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone:

 

https://rumble.com/v179s8e-how-to-degoogle-your-pixel-3-xl-with-grapheneos.html?mref=2jfr3&mc=anr3y 

 

#TechFreedom #techtips #howto #tutorial #Truth

 

 

How to install GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone:

 

https://tv.gab.com/channel/tech_freedom/view/how-to-degoogle-your-pixel-3xl-629bcda174999572f23b5032 

 

#definitionsthursday #TechFreedom #techtips #howto #tutorial

 

 

FOSS Fun

 

FF 1 – Steam Client Update for Linux

Lots of really good stuff here, though I hardly remember the Steam interface at this point… I never play games that need Steam these days. At least not until some major things change in our lives. Let’s talk highlights, shall we?

  • Refreshed UI Design
  • Enable client hardware acceleration
  • Caveats: not on NVIDIA GPUs, as it can cause x11 to crash
  • New Compatibility tab to make switching versions of Proton and WINE easier
  • Improved flatpak app support
  • Better KDE support
  • Uses global scaling factor to determine what the scaling should be for Steam
  • New game overview panel in the in-game overlay
  • And more

Sounds like good stuff for Linux gamers, here.

https://9to5linux.com/steam-client-now-lets-you-enable-hardware-acceleration-on-linux 

 

 

FF 2 – NVIDIA Drivers: Now With Better Wayland Support

NVIDIA has released the 535.54.03 driver which should help your system do wayland better, thanks to the updated linux-dmabuf Wayland protocol. Also helps out those with AMD integrated GPUs (Ryzen laptops with NVIDIA GPUs in them) by fixing a bug in PRIME render offloading which essentially broke the feature. Also enables Extended Dynamic Boost support on AMD-powered laptops with older Renoir and Cezanne chipsets, suspend/resume support when using GSP firmware, as well as the ability to sync a Quadro Sync II graphics card to different House Sync signal rates. If you want a list of further changes, take a look at: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/06/nvidia-driver-535-54-03-stable-linux/ 

Otherwise, take a look at: https://9to5linux.com/nvidia-535-54-03-linux-graphics-driver-released-with-better-wayland-support  

Sounds like we should be getting better Wayland support and a whole host of other bugs squashed in this updated driver release. All good.

Freed Computer

 

https://techfreedom.pro/freed-computer/ 

https://techfreedom.pro/free-your-pc 

 

#freedcomputer #linux #nospying #safe #TechFreedom #Truth

 

 

FF 3 – AMD Moving Toward Open Source with Open Arms

I think I mentioned this development when it was first announced a couple of months back. I am all for this. Intel needs to take notes. This is the future, boys & girls. AMD is committing further to migrating from AGESA (their proprietary firmware for their CPUs) to openSIL. They have now released their first proof of concept to GitHub for the community to pick through and improve. The goal at the moment, is to implement openSIL over AGESA sometime in 2026, so we are a few years out still. This process means that at the end of it, AMD should be more secure than Intel, as if they go full-open source, here, we won’t have any IME type nonsense in AMD chips anymore. That excites me. No more firmware backdoors… Doesn’t mean that there won’t still be silicon-level back doors, though. One step at a time, Matt.

 

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/06/amd-reveals-initial-open-source-opensil-code-to-replace-agesa-firmware/ 

 

 

 

 

 

What Do You Need to Know about Tech Freedom?

https://rumble.com/v19elx6-10-things-about-tech-freedom.html?mref=2jfr3&mc=anr3y 

#TechFreedom #top10 #explainer #wifeysauce

 

 

 

 

Weekend Edition 39

by admin FOSS News, Tech Freedom, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 39: All Game, All the Time

Amazon Fined $25 mn over Child Privacy Violations
· FTC sued tech giant over violations related to both Alexa and the Ring doorbells
o Alexa voice data was not being deleted as claimed, but being kept to make the AI database stronger
§ Kept for years, ignoring parents’ requests to delete data
o Ring was accused of similar issues
§ One employee decided to watch 1000’s of individual videos recorded by cameras in intimate areas, specifically belonging to female customers, and only stopped after caught by a coworker.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65772154


Spaces Glitches During DeSanctimonious’ Presidential Announcement
· Could’ve seen that coming with the issues that Twitter has been having since Musk bought it
· Spaces is based on Periscope (ahhh, now I know why I was never comfy on Periscope, no matter how much my wife pushed me to get on it)
o This means that the infrastructure is spread across multiple providers and was not meant for this kind of call, a few hundred, sure, but 500k on a call? No.
o Musk SHOULD have known this before he embarrassed himself, his company and Candidate Meatball.
§ Was there some bigger reason why, here?
· Maybe he knew that it would be a problem, but was so excited about the platform being used and live-tested that he ignored the issues before hand.
· Maybe he wanted to embarrass Meatball
· Maybe he just doesn’t care at this point…
· Maybe he understands the Trump philosophy of “any PR is good PR”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-meltdown/index.html

AI!!!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!!! WE’RE GONNA DIE!!!! PANIC!!!!
· Why are we being focused on this?
· As I have said before, current generation, publicly available AI’s could NEVER do what these doomers are saying they could.
o They sound credible as they are the apparently leaders in the field, but I would be more concerned with misinformation that gets pawned off as real and true
§ I talked about Jonathan Turley’s experience with this a couple of months ago now, where chatGPT actually made up a whole network of stories to make it look like its assertions about the law expert were true.
§ Bottom line: be careful
· Some, like me, are more skeptical about the alleged powers of AI
o biases
o Imitation of humans (copyright issues, along with other IP issues)
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65746524

Microsoft Calls for New Regulatory Body in US Around AI
· Brad Smith, president of MSFT spoke for an hour, largely about these issues
· Ughhhhh
· Microsoft calling for AI regulation is like a crackhead saying that we need to beef up the DEA
· My thoughts about government
· My thoughts about their proposals
o new rules for AI should include revamped export controls tailor-made for the AI age to prevent the technology from being abused by sanctioned entities.
§ Ok… How much will this cost?
· Freedom
· Finances
o government should mandate redundant AI circuit breakers that would allow algorithms to be shut off by critical infrastructure providers or from within the data centers they depend on.
§ Abuse?
§ Devil’s Advocate
o Regulations should apply to everything from the data centers that train large language models to the end users such as banks, hospitals and others that may apply the technology toward making life-altering decisions
§ May be necessary, but yikes…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/tech/microsoft-ai-regulation-calls/index.html

Metaverse Getting Ready?
· Hype
o The “future”
o Heart-eyes, star-eyes
o Everyone will be here in the future
· Reality
o Not even close to ready
o “foundation” may be maturing
§ Just a skeleton with precious little flesh on it
· Author
o Coined term in 1992 novel “Snow Crash”
o Been working in the space for last few years
o Pushing it, hyping it
· My reaction
o Oh brother
o Hmmm
o Nah
§ Privacy
§ Security
§ Centralization?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/the-man-who-named-the-metaverse-is-optimistic-despite-waning-hype/

CA Law May Lead Meta to Pull News from Your Feed in CA
· Law
o Big money, big news
o Doesn’t seem to help those it claims to (local news outlets)
· Meta’s reaction
· Other reactions
· My thoughts
o *eyeroll*
o Meta has tried this before and not stuck to it
o Doesn’t change much, ultimately, and adds more bureaucracy to a state that is already over-burdened by onerous regulations
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/tech/meta-threatens-to-pull-california-news/index.html

NVidia Making a Killing Amid AI Frenzy
· Stock up 110% this year after a bump of 28% last quarter
o Insane profits: +26% to $2 bn last quarter, Sales up 19% to $7.2 bn for the quarter
· Why?
o AI
o Heavy, powerful compute needed that CPU can’t handle, and GPU is actually more efficient at those sorts of calculations.
· My reaction
o Ok… I still say we all need to ditch the Green Monster asap
o Good for them, but…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/05/30/nvidia-shares-stock-prices-soar/70264847007/

Weekend Edition 38

by admin FOSS News, Tech Freedom, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 38

Weekend Edition 38: Spam Calls, META News, Tik Tok & AI
Nearly All US State AGs Have Sued Avid Telecom
Apple to Do More Chip Fab in US
Bad News for Meta
TikTok Sues Montana, Residents Struggle
Microsoft says, “AI ALL THE THINGS”!
AI Image Gen in Photoshop Now A Thing

#weekendedition #technews #spamcalls #robocalls #Meta #AI #TikTok #Microsoft #Adobe #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 38.1 – Remember Avid Telecom? You Probably Don’t…
I covered the likelihood of this suit being brought last fall, well, now it’s real. They are being sued by all but two of the US state-level Attorneys General. That is a HUGE lawsuit. What do they allege that Avid did or does? Why, serve as a clearing house for do-not-call list numbers and infrastructure backbone for those who would want to abuse said lists. Perhaps you have noticed an uptick in robocalls over the last several years, particularly scam-related ones… If you have, there is a strong chance that these people had a hand in it. Avid Telecom is a VOIP provider who claims to have committed no wrongdoing, so will “Defend itself vigorously and vindicate its rights and reputation through the legal process.” We’ll see. Usually State AG’s don’t dogpile on a case like this if they think it’s a nothingburger. They seem to have done business with a number of scam outfits, covering the following areas: Social Security Administration, Medicare, auto warranties, Amazon, credit card interest rate reduction and more. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that, just wow. As far as I know, I am on the Nat’l DNC registry, and I have certainly received calls in those areas in the last few years, and an increased number of them, at that. The robocalling aspect of cold calling when I did real estate always struck me as sheisty and super shady. I, for a short time, paid an outfit to do followup for me. I still regret that. It was wrong, even though as far as I know, they actually had people doing the calling, with scripts and such, not just recordings, but idk. I’m glad to not be in that space any more.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/23/avid-telecom-facilitated-billions-of-spam-calls-state-ags-allege.html
#weekendedition #robocalls #avidtelecom #scammers #justice #US #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 38.2 – Broadcom Benefits from Increased US/ CCP Tensions
Well well well… Apple comes crawling back to the US as they ramp up alternative manufacturing sources for their specialty silicon thanks to the increased tensions between the US and the CCP, among other things. Broadcom, famously the manufacturer of modems and WiFi chips. Now, they join TSMC in benefiting directly from AAPL’s urgent need to get away from Chinese manufacturing for their devices, also moving some other pieces to India & Vietnam, aside from the US. Wise move getting away from the CCP, just a bit. I’ve always thought that while more expensive and complex, it makes more long term sense to not have all of one’s eggs in one basket anyway, so to speak. I may not like the company or its products because I do not agree with their ultra-closed ecosystem or ability to spy on you at will, but can admire a good business move when I see one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65692276
#weekendedition #technews #apple #diversity #broadcom #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 38.3 – Meta’s Getting Slammed… Burn, baby, burn.
3.1 – Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner pile drives Meta with $1.3 billion Fine
OOf. Big, huge-normous, gargantuan OOOFF. Due to GDPR violations, the Menlo Park, CA-based tech giant is getting fined tot he tune of more than $1 billion. I guess GDPR ain’t no joke. Other notable Tech fines related to the GDPR since it was put into place 5 years ago were an $887 million fine levied against Amazon by Luxembourg and a $267 million fine against WhatsApp in Ireland. Not only are they being fined, but it looks like they will need to move all European data to European data centers, rather than shipping it back across the Pond to the US. As much as I hate the onerous nature of big Gov, it kinda takes something like the EU to stand up to a behemoth like Meta and do anything worthwhile. Why does it take that? Why can’t class action suits do the work that needs done? Why haven’t more people ditched Meta and its platforms, which are designed to addict you and compromise your privacy?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/24/irish-data-regulator-defends-1point3-billion-meta-fine.html
#weekendedition #meta #gdpr #fines #EU #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

3.2 – More Layoffs for Meta
I am tempted to dance a jig about this, however, I find my enthusiasm tempered significantly, as these workers (no matter how superfluous their positions may have been) are people, many of whom likely have families depending on them. I cannot exult in families losing income, however, that said, losing 20k+ workers in the space of 8 months is not a good look for any business. On the other hand, their falsely inflated stock market numbers (along with everyone else’s, due to the reality of brandon-flation). That all said, though, the numbers for Meta are truly shocking, after cratering hard last year, until Zuck announced this “year of efficiency”, in November. The stock seems to have rebounded to something close to where it was before its sharp decline last year. Reality Labs and the Metaverse projects are still absolutely hemorrhaging money, yet investors seem happy to throw money at them, nonetheless. Well, they did show growth in revenues for the first time in a year, even if only 3%. When you are talking about revenues in the 10s of billions, 3% is actually significant. To the tune of nearly $1 billion. Still trying to wrap my head around just how gargantuan Meta is. Laying off over 20k people, making almost a cool billion in spite of losing money again on their most audacious set of projects. Wow.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/24/meta-layoffs-latest-round-of-cuts-focuses-on-business-groups.html
#meta #weekendedition #recovery #austerity #layoffs #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

3.3 – Meta Loses Millions in Forced Sale of Giphy
Why’d they go and do that? Well, once again, big, bad EU regulators to the “rescue” forcing the giant to sell the meme and gif search platform which they bought a mere 3 years ago, for barely 1/8 what they paid for it. Why? Because the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority decided that Meta owning it disadvantaged other social media platforms. Who bought it, though? Why, Shutterstock, of course. While Meta bought it for somewhere right around $400 million, they were forced to sell it by the CMA for a mere $53 million. They tried to make the case that giphy isn’t nearly as popular as it was because the younger sets think of gifs as “cringe” or “boomer stuff”, but the reality is that Giphy still gets searched 1.3 billion times per day, with around 15 billion views on shared content per day. That doesn’t sound like much of a decline to me… Who knows, though?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65684986
#weekendedition #meta #giphy #CMA #UK #regulator #losing #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

WE 38.4 – TikTok Vs The Big Sky State
4.1 – TikTok Sues Montana Over Ban
Of course the platform strongly objects to this move. I am not a fan of it, either. I hear where they think they are coming from, and I want to believe that it is a good place of trying to protect the public, but to pull the run out from under people like that is cruel and borderline vindictive. I may overreacting right now. However, I do strongly believe in the First Amendment. I also believe that any government big enough to deprive individuals of their guaranteed liberties and rights is too big. We are there. Been there for a number of years, probably longer than I’ve been alive. The sad reality is that what John Adams said about our constitution and system of government is true. We have seen it coming apart at the seams as it has gotten further and further away from Christian morality and ethics, and these so-called representatives of ours are just avatars of that. If we, as a nation, were upright, then our leaders would be too. I’m not saying that they are perfect avatars for us, but how many of us would be able to keep ourselves pure in the cesspool that is Washington (or any State capital, for that matter)? I don’t trust myself that I could resist the lobbies and special interests. But I digress, where was I, oh yes, banning tools for the expression of free speech. Overall, it doesn’t comport well with the Constitution. If we are concerned for privacy, then people need to learn how to think about social media, rather than being told by it what to think. People also need to learn how to think about privacy. This issue reminds me of a visual novel I once read, called Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story. It is set a few years into the future, now, but was developed over 10 years ago. The crux of the story is that the students of this high school lit teacher used a school-wide messaging system to play an elaborate hoax on him through “private” messages that they knew he could see. So it dealt with different generations and their understandings of privacy. The kids understood different types of privacy, where the teacher only understood that there are certain things that should never be shared online, so the prank was very effective at messing with his head. Are we to the point where we legitimately have no privacy and don’t care? If so, then let me know so I can move on to a different line of work. If not, then let’s get down to business and lock these entitled pricks [them] out of our lives, shall we? Just a thought.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65677768

#weekendedition #tiktok #montana #ban #sued #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

4.2 – Montana Residents left Wondering What’s Next
Many in Montana have found it to be a lifeline of sorts. Some are creators, others have started businesses based on their content which need to grow via TikTok, as there are so many eyeballs there so much of the time. It makes advertising dollars stretch much further on this platform than on older, more established ones like Meta or Twitter because it is so active on TikTok. Starting to wonder if it is holding me back not being on TikTok. I don’t know… It could just be that I nerd at too high a level and rarely come down from there. What do you guys and gals think? Anyway, this article sites a handful of Montanans who have the majority of their businesses centered around the platform. Knowing that one’s reach within one’s state is going to be artificially & governmentally limited has to leave you feeling frustrated and a bit scared. One of the users had entirely based her business on TikTok, and is afraid of losing it if this ban ever actually sees the light of day (press X to doubt…), to which I say, diversify. One should never relegate one’s business to a single platform on social media. So here’s a thought: download your TikTok videos and then share them on other platforms (same goes for the smarter painter in the article, already looking at diversifying with unique content and a professional videographer). See what happens if you try that. I don’t think there are hard and fast rules about content sharing from TikTok (seems like that would hurt the platform to disallow that).

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/21/tech/montana-tiktok-users/index.html
#weekendedition #tiktok #montana #users #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 38.5 – AI This Week
5.1 – Microsoft to Integrate AI in Windows & Office Suite
Uhhh, yikes… Oh hell no. Let me sound the clarion call, people. It is time to ditch Microsoft’s spyware (oops, software) stack. They can already snoop every keystroke and mouse click you make on your computer. When they shove Windows 11 down your throat with the newest update, you’ll get Windows Copilot, which is basically ChatGPT rolled directly into your system. In talking to a friend who is a sysadmin about it, he doesn’t see it as being any worse than running Windows anyway. He uses it to remote setup new machines all of the time. So in the context of an IT dept where Windows still rules the roost, it seems to be a net benefit for the teams involved. On the other hand, do you remember Cortana? If you were ever concerned with Cortana, this is an even worse privacy violation. On the other hand, Windows itself has become an even worse privacy violator in the meantime. Cortana genuinely sucked, and I always suggested to people to disable that piece of trash. This looks like it should actually function to make your computer more user-friendly, which I actually admire a bit, but where is all that data going? Oh yeah, back to Redmond, WA. Do you want to increase your awareness that you are a digital serf? Use this new feature. This is Microsoft’s ever so gentle way of reminding you that your computer is not really your computer, anymore. Sure, you paid (or are paying) for it, but as long as you run their spyware (err… OS) and other software, all your data is belong to them. Does that make you uncomfortable? Come on over to Linux and be freer. I can help you to find a good distro that won’t spy on you (most won’t, but also most run systemd, which is growing more invasive by the day, so we will look around and see what might work for you among options which do not use it). I, unfortunately, am no longer comfortable suggesting mainstream distros due to the presence of systemd. That goes against convention, yes, because you want to make as close to 100% certain, when using FOSS things, that it is solid and has a good sized community using and working with it so you can get help when you need it. If you want to research these, here is a decent article from ItsFOSS: https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/. My word of advice when looking at these is stick close to mainstream if you want something that will be user friendly.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/technologylive/2023/05/23/microsoft-copilot-365-ai-windows-11-launch/70246861007/
#weekendedition #microsoft #copilot #datagrab #spyware #trylinux #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

5.2 – Adobe Adds AI Image Generator to PhotoShop
More AI for the things. Oh joy. Well, it has been in limited beta for a few months, but they are going to roll the feature out to everybody now. They are going to use their own set of images to train it, rather than allowing it, like DALL-E, to simply scour the interwebz for data to transform images in keeping with your prompts. They hope that that will keep the copyright hounds at bay, as they own those images. They are rightly concerned over this, as Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, was sued by Getty Images back in January because some of their databases were used in training the AI, without permission or licensing. Adobe is anxious to avoid that issue, so its dataset is naturally smaller. You all know how I feel about AI by now… If you can control it and keep the data local, I don’t have much problem with using it as a tool. However, if you want to replace your brain with it, or use it everywhere, I would caution you to slow your roll. If privacy is even a concern for you, take your time to understand whatever you can of these tools before you blindly rush to adopt them.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/tech/photoshop-generative-ai/index.html
#weekendedition #adobe #firefly #AI #imagegenerator #photoshop #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

FOSS News Big Show 3: Jared Heath of Altha Technologies, Inc.

by admin Big Show, Distro News, FOSS Fun, Foss News, FOSS News, Tech Freedom

FOSS News Big Show 3: Jared Heath of Altha Technologies, Inc.

Distro News
Rocky & Alma Linux 9.2 Out Now
Tails 5.13
Freespire 9.5
FOSS News
PSA: Linux 62 is EOL
KDE News
Interview with Jared Heath of Altha Technologies, Inc.

FOSS Fun
Lutris 0.5.3
Changes at Codeweavers
New DXVK Released

Today, I’ll be chatting with Jared Heath, who is the founder and CEO of Altha Technology, Inc., out of Mount Airy, North Carolina. He is a USMC veteran and all around nerd. Altha Technology was founded in 2016, with the clear mission to help people be more censorship-resistant. The motto at Altha Tech is “Protect the data, Own the data, Serve the Data”. Jared and his team manage their own infrastructure in Mount Airy. They depend on FOSS tools to make their business run, as well as their customers’ interests keep moving toward their goals. They are an excellent alternative to big hosting companies who will never infringe on your rights to Free Speech. He’ll be riding shotgun for the majority of the show, commenting as things pop into his head in regard to the topics at hand, then partway through, we will have a conversation about him and his company.

Distro News
DN 1 – Version 9.2 Released for Alma and Rocky Linux
As promised and expected, Alma Linux & Rocky Linux each got refreshes, based on the RHEL which forms their shared foundation. Last week, we mentioned that RHEL got an update, now its free downstream distros also got the love. More or less it is the same stuff that we talked through in the notes last week, but if you want more information, as usual, feel free to look in the description for the link to the article. In short, lots of good stuff, here, for the server/enterprise/business crowd. The primary differences with these downstream options is that they are purely community based, not paid options through Red Hat. As a small business person, that should appeal: a free, enterprise-focused OS.

https://9to5linux.com/almalinux-os-9-2-and-rocky-linux-9-2-are-out-now-as-rhel-9-2-alternatives
#distronews #FOSSNews #RHEL #almalinux #RockyLinux

DN 2 – Tails 5.13
This month’s iteration from the team at Tails enables LUKS 2 for new installs with persistent storage. That is the biggest change for this month, next month, they will roll out the ability to switch from LUKS 1 to LUKS 2 on existing installs. What’s the benefit of LUKS 2 vs LUKS 1? It is more secure and more flexible. LUKS 2 can store 4x as many keys as LUKS 1, it offers password-based key derivation functions (PBKDF) which allows for greater security. The newer standard also creates a larger unencrypted header area, which is what allows for the greater number of keys to be stored, but I digress. I have to admit that there is much about this topic that I do not understand, as I’ve never really done much with encryption on my own machines. Back to Tails, though, their cURL download tool now runs through Tor all the time, so you can easily use it for investigations without being easily tracked as you work. If you want to take a look at an exhaustive list of updates and changes, you should peruse their changelog (https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog). Here is a shortlist, though:
• Tor Browser 12.0.6 anonymous web browser by default
• Mozilla Firefox 102.11 ESR,
• Updated Unsafe Browser feature
• Updated documentation
• Updated Welcome Screen
• Several bug fixes
If you are set on being nigh untrackable online, you can use this, the same OS as Ed Snowden. Not sure how much of a ringing endorsement that is, I still don’t know how much I trust him, though I suppose he must know what he’s talking about in terms of privacy.
https://9to5linux.com/tails-5-13-enables-luks2-by-default-for-persistent-storage-and-encrypted-volumes
#distromonday #Tails #Linux #privacy #encryption #FOSSNews #TechFreedom #BigShow

Freedom Consultation
Free call.
60-90 minutes.
Q&A
Leave with Actionable Steps to take, whether you work with me or not.
Schedule today.

https://techfreedom.pro/freedom-consultation
#distromonday #freedom #consultation #Linux #degoogleyourlife #TechFreedom

DN 3 – FreeSpire 9.5 Out Now
Freespire is an Ubuntu 22.04LTS derivative. It has been meticulously designed to appeal to the group of people (perhaps like you), who are comfortable with Windows 10 in terms of UI. It has a heavily customized GNOME desktop built to look almost identical to the aforementioned OS. If you are looking for an easier entry point into Linux, this could be your ticket. It used to run Xfce, but they found that they could more easily tweak the UI to match customer feedback with GNOME, so they went that direction instead. What else changed?
• Latest Ubuntu upstream security patches (as of 5/5/23)
• Fixed many bugs and issues
◦ Python 3 apps should no longer crash or refuse to start,
◦ proper resolutions are now displayed on HDMI connections
◦ Bluetooth headset microphones should now work correctly (I wish the rest of the Linux world would fix this issue… I’ve never been able to reliably use bt headset microphones, could someone just make this work, please?)
◦ Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge web apps now show in the applications menu
◦ Zoom calls no longer crash when using Bluetooth audio devices.
• Out of the box flatpak support, with a handful of key inclusions that are missing from Ubuntu itself: OnlyOffice Desktop Editors, balenaEtcher, and Midnight Commander
The only things that I’d want to see change here are a total rebase on anything other than Ubuntu, and a migration away from systemd. These things go for most other distros as well, though.
https://9to5linux.com/ubuntu-based-freespire-9-5-brings-custom-gnome-ui-to-resemble-windows-10s-look
#distromonday #freespire #Linux #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

FOSS News
FN 1 – PSA: Linux 62 is Now EOL
Linux 62 series, we hardly knew ye. Nah, non LTS kernel series only get supported for 3 months or so. It is time to either go back to the Linux 61 LTS or update to the latest Linux 63 series, if you want to continue getting security updates and the like. Just wanted to make sure that you guys and gals who are already in the Linux space know about this.
https://9to5linux.com/linux-kernel-6-2-reaches-end-of-life-users-urged-to-upgrade-to-linux-kernel-6-3
#FOSSNews #PSA #updates #Linux #news #developmentmarcheson #TechFreedom


FN 2 – KDE News Triple Header
2.1 – KDE Frameworks 5.106
Here’s the monthly (roughly) update for Qt and related apps, this one has some good stuff in it, as usual.
• support for the small monochrome versions of the “MS-DOS Executable” icons in the Breeze icon theme to respect the active color scheme
• improved Display Configuration widget and OSD icons with consistent stroke widths and levels of detail
• icons for .abc Alembic files
• new icons for the pixelate and blur tools in Spectacle
• a new icon for the Partition Manager app
• improves the Plasma Browser Integration to fix a Plasma crash that occurred when playing certain YouTube videos and also when using a proxy
• Fixed bug with Right to Left scripts causing errors with windows (talked about this last week, when we covered Plasma 5.27.5)
• Can now convert to and from kilometers per hour using the “kph” keyword
• Improves dragging from empty areas of the toolbar in the Plasma Discover package manager and many other Kirigami-based apps
• Dolphin bugs squashed
◦ prevent a major source of crashes when copying files
◦ folders fail to update in real-time when contents are modified in another application
• improved middle-clicking on various things like KWin-drawn titlebars
• fix for an issue that could cause KDE apps and the Plasma desktop to hang when using them to move a lot of files at the same time
• Among other things, if you want more detail, check out the changelog here: (https://kde.org/announcements/frameworks/5/5.106.0/)
https://9to5linux.com/kde-frameworks-5-106-improves-breeze-icons-plasma-browser-integration-and-more


2.2 – KDE Gear 23.04.1
What’s new in KDE Gear? Why, improvements for many significant KDE apps, such as:

• Kdenlive
◦ fixed an issue causing project files to be corrupted when opened
◦ a recent regression where sequence clip duration was not updated
◦ Fixed various sequence issues
◦ Fixed a crash when the speech engine was left configured
◦ Fixed a concurrency crash in thumbnails
• Spectacle
◦ fixed the Rectangular Region selector to work as expected on multi-monitor setups where one of the displays has a scale factor below 100%.
◦ Spectacle will no longer affect the window below it when it’s closed with the Esc key
• Dolphin on x11
◦ no longer see an already-open instance of Dolphin in a different workspace or activity becoming focused and switched to when using the “Open containing folder” functionality in various KDE apps
▪ Coming soon for Wayland sessions as well
• Skanpage
◦ UI improvements as well to force the “rotate image” buttons to actually rotate the image in the expected directions
◦ OCR language list view is now scrollable when needed
• Filelight
◦ no longer fail to launch when your disk is full, , ,.
• KItinerary
◦ adds support to the library to handle the German language variant of Vueling boarding groups
• Neochat
◦ improves Qt 6 support for NeoChat
• KDE Minuet support for Wayland
◦ improved windowing
• If you want to know more, take a look at the changelog here (https://kde.org/announcements/changelogs/gear/23.04.1/)
https://9to5linux.com/kde-gear-23-04-1-is-out-to-improve-kdenlive-spectacle-dolphin-and-more

2.3 – KDE 6
At a joint sprint event in Germany, the KDE team and Tuxedo Computers teamed up to work on Plasma 6. There are some really big changes coming down the pipeline, guys. I am excited about these. The first thing that should have been on the list in the article linked below was the change in release cadence. I think that will not only make KDE more stable, but it will allow the devs to apply a significant amount more polish to the environment between releases. Once it is released, they are moving to a more deliberate 2 releases per year cadence. Sure, that means that there won’t be as many of these update pieces to cover, but when they do happen, they may take up lots of space to cover adequately. My question there, though, is does that mean that Gear and Frameworks will also slow down that much, or just the DE itself?
Other than that, there will be some significant changes made in terms of quality of life:
• Defaulting to double click for opening files in Dolphin (should have been a standard default the whole time, afaic).
• Floating panel is now a default, to differentiate between KDE and Windows, which seems to have stolen KDE’s homework yet again.
• Default to Wayland rather than x11
◦ Not great for NVidia users, but those issues look to be fixable by whenever they release Plasma 6, which is excellent
• new default Task Switcher
• no more scrolling on the desktop to switch virtual desktops,
• clicking in the scrollbar track jumps the scrollbar to that location,
• a wallpaper page in System Settings
• unified desktop plugins
• better handling for keyboard backlighting
Unfortunately there is still no fixed date for the release of Plasma 6 at this time. I will keep you apprised as more information comes out. One thing I really hope for in 6 is that they fix 2-in-1 & touchscreen support. If they do, I will gladly switch back to KDE on my primary work machine (a surface pro 5).
https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-6-to-ship-with-floating-panel-by-default-double-click-for-opening-files

#FOSSnews #bigshow #KDE #updates #fixes #TechFreedom
Want to learn more about how to degoogle your phone and why?

Degoogled

#TechFreedom #degoogled #degoogleyourlife #defintionsday #Truth
FN 3 – Interview with Jared Heath
Well, now that we have talked about KDE and a few distros, let’s chat with Jared about his company and learn a bit more about him, his team, and what all they offer.
So, Jared, why should we care about you and Altha Tech?
What is Altha Tech?
What got you into tech to begin with?
Why did you start Altha Tech?
What is your vision for Altha Tech?
How can people reach out to Altha Tech?
How’d you come up with the name of the company?

#interview #bigshow #TechFreedom #FOSSNews

FF 1 – Lutris Updates
Lutris, if you’re unaware, is a game management/ library system. They’re constantly working on making it better, and the big deal with this update is the ability to directly use proton from Lutris. It is apparently just a compatibility check, so don’t expect perfection at this point, but cool, either way. Here’s the rest of the highlights:

• Add drag and drop on the main window. Dropped files will be matched No-Intro, Redump and TOSEC checksums.
• Add support for ModDB links in installers (moddb python module required).
• Added “Missing” sidebar option for games whose directory is missing.
• Re-style the configuration, preferences, installer and add-games windows.
• Group configuration options into sections.
• Added checkbox to stop asking for the launch config for a game.
• Added checkbox to sort installed games first. (about time)
• Support for launch-configs in shortcuts and the command line.
• Show platform badges on banners and cover-art. (good)
• Installing games from setup files can now use different presets (Win98, 3DFX, …). (oooh)
• Add filter field to runner list.
• Show game count in search bar.
• Workaround Humble Bundle authentication issues by allowing importing cookies from Firefox.
• Add Itch.io integration.
• Add Battle.net integration (protobuf dependency required).
• Improve detection of DOSBox games on GOG.
• Added “Unspecified” Vulkan ICD option.
• Removed ResidualVM (now merged into ScummVM)
• Detect obsolete Vulkan drivers and default to DXVK 1.x for them.
• Improved High-DPI support for custom media.
• Performance improvements.
Good stuff, overall. I would say that the direct proton compatibility will, once it is mature, make a huge difference for a growing number of games.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/lutris-v0513-adds-proton-support-itch-and-battlenet-integration/
#FOSSNews #BigShow #FOSSFun #Lutris #TechFreedom
FF 2 – Codeweavers (creators of WINE) Change Corporate Governance Model
CodeWeavers is having a bit of a shakeup in how the company is being run. They are moving from a traditional ownership model to an employee trust model, so that employees get to make decisions about the direction of the company, and also get to benefit directly from it. This sounds like a win-win for them, we’ll see how it goes. As long as WINE/ Proton/ Crossover stay solid, or even get better, this is a good move for the community. If they deteriorate, then not so much. Not sure that I would ever do that with my company, but then, it barely exists as more than an aspiration at this point. On the other hand, my desire, when I hire people, is to provide them with a living wage, so that they don’t have to worry about anything, and can just work happily without that stress on them. Big dreams.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/codeweavers-partners-of-valve-on-proton-move-to-an-employee-ownership-trust/
#FOSSNews #codeweavers #WINE #proton #changes #TechFreedom

Freed Computer

https://techfreedom.pro/freed-computer/
https://techfreedom.pro/free-your-pc

#freedcomputer #linux #nospying #safe #TechFreedom #Truth

FF 3 – New Version of DXVK? Yes Please.
The latest, v 2.2, ships with some tasty additions. Let’s list them, shall we?

• D3D11On12
◦ Makes it so that DX11 games get rendered as though they were DX12 titles, which is better for Vulkan to manage, if I’m not mistaken. In order to use it though, you’ll need a recent vkd3d-proton build and it uses the D3D11On12CreateDevice and ID3D11On12Device interfaces
• D3D9 partial presentation
◦ This feature enables DXVK to present parts of a window by copying the contents of the back buffer to system memory and then drawing them into the window on the CPU.
▪ What’s that mean? Better compatibility for some game launchers and visual novels, but at a performance penalty
• Game fixes
◦ Jade Empire
◦ Sid Meier’s Pirates
◦ Total War: Shogun 2
◦ Battle Fantasia Revised Edition
◦ Cold Fear
◦ Dawn of Magic 2
◦ DC Universe Online
◦ Far Cry 2
◦ Halo: The Master Chief Collection
◦ Warhammer 40K: Space Marine
• Other fixes
◦ a regression that occurred when rendering YUY2 or UYUY texture formats
◦ some Vulkan validation errors
◦ improved usage of some VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 features
◦ improved enumeration of DXGI outputs on systems with multiple graphics cards
◦ improved memory usage in cases where games create unused D3D11 devices
You could potentially grab it now from the project’s GitHub, then compile from source on your machine, or if you don’t play any of the titles on the list, you could just wait for it to be available in your distro’s repositories. As an aside, when will MS abandon DX, anyway? Sure, it has become a defacto set of protocols, but it has always been a pain in the hind parts to work with, and it makes it harder for FOSS to be legit in terms of gaming. *thinks to self* Maybe that is why they haven’t… Because even though Vulkan works better and is easier to work with, MS doesn’t control it, and that is intolerable for those sociopaths.

DXVK 2.2 Released with D3D11On12 Support, D3D9 Partial Presentation

#FOSSNews #FOSSFun #linuxgaming #dxvk #TechFreedom

Weekend Edition 37

by admin FOSS News, Tech Freedom, Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition 37

WE 37.1 – Well, that Sure Lasted a Long Time…
Not much to say here, but I started covering it, so I’m gonna continue. Elizabeth Holmes got a extra month of freedom, but not what she was gunning for, which would have kept her out of prison until her appeal, which as far as I know has yet to be scheduled. The disgraced fraudster-CEO of Theranos was originally due to report at the end of last month. Her legal team is still attempting to appeal on her behalf, and I don’t know enough of the specifics to guess in any educated way whether she will have a shot, or if it will legitimately even be heard on her behalf. My hunch is that the appeal will likely be granted, but nothing will change for her. Why? She defrauded the Big Boys, not just a bunch of Main St mom & pop type investors.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/disgraced-theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-will-report-to-jail-on-may-30.html
#weekendedition #theranos #elizabethholmes #justice #US #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.2 – Google to Delete Accounts Unused for Last 2 Years
Good. Purge it, fools. Their excuse, other than needing to maintain space for all that data is that those kinds of accounts are more likely to have been breached in hack attacks, as they lack (or are FAR less likely to have extra layers of security) 2FA, for whatever 2FA is worth. SMS 2-Factor Authentication is inherently insecure, just as the SMS system is, it can be intercepted and easily read by man in the middle type attacks. If you are going to use, it get it set up with an app like Authy or Aegis, as those codes are harder to get at than SMS ones are. So, if you still have a Google account at this point, why? We know that we are the commodity with them, and that they scrape all search, YT, drive contents, and emails for pertinent ad data, so, other than the drug called convenience, why are you still on that platform? If you need business collaboration tools, and want to regain some privacy, check out Zoho for a drop-in replacement that may have more than what you need (probably does). If you want a more free experience with videos, take a look at Rumble, BitChute, Odysee/LBRY, or even GabTV. If you want even more control of your videos, take a look at setting up a peertube instance, or joining someone else’s. If you have something important there, all you have to do is sign in and watch a YouTube video, search for something, download and app, do something in Docs/ Drive, or read/ send an email. The deadline for this is not for 6.5 months though, so you have plenty of time to worry about it, if you are going to. My suggestion, though, is to look at my tutorial on how to get your data back from Google: https://rumble.com/v116bgp-tutorial-on-rescuing-your-data-from-google.html?mref=2jfr3&mc=anr3y , then take the time to set up an account with a provider like Zoho or Proton or Tutanota, who actually respects your privacy.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-will-delete-inactive-accounts-heres-how-to-save-yours/
#weekendedition #technews #google #letitgo #accountdeletion #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.3 – EU Regulators Rubber Stamp Microsoft’s Takeover of Activision… With Provisons
The European Commission has greenlit the merger, but as reported last week, the Uk regulator did not, and the US FTC seems unlikely to go along with it, over concerns that MSFT would then control too much of the gaming industry, specifically in terms of cloud gaming. That kind of game streaming is sketchy to me anyway. I understand the appeal, don’t get me wrong. It allows people with lesser machines to play while outsourcing the heavy lifting to another machine. Usually you have to own both machines, but not always. As with anything cloud based, game streaming has inherent privacy issues, most gamers likely don’t care, because they just want to play their games. This merger would make Microsoft into the 3rd largest game studio in the world, just behind Nintendo and Sony. Is that a good thing? Should we laud this massing of economic power in one of the most vile companies on the planet? I don’t think so. This feels like an overall net-negative move, a lose-lose for the consumers and the industry as a whole. This means that not only will games likely carry more MS spyware in them, but the woke-itis will get that much worse. I don’t think that the FTC is likely to approve this, anyway, but we’ll have to wait and see.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/microsofts-69b-deal-to-buy-activision-gets-eu-approval-what-to-know/
#weekendedition #microsoft #activision #merger #EU #rubberstamp #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.4 – Elon to Be Subpoenaed in Epstein- JPM Chase Suit
Oh boy, all those nights partying with the Epstein crowd might just bite the Twitter owner in the backside here. Here’s the skinny: Tesla used to bank with JPM Chase, but stopped doing so after Musk & Co felt that the bank had “let them down” in some significant way. Epstein claimed that he advised Musk on something in 2018, which, since, Musk has flatly denied, saying that “that cretin” (meaning Epstein) “never advised me on anything”. Sounds like a whole lot of unnecessary drama, but a judge has ok-ed the request of the AG from the Virgin Islands to require Tesla to surrender any records pertaining to the alleged connection with JPM Chase and Epstein. We’ll see if there is anything worth sharing, or if, as Musk and Tesla have claimed since, he actually never had anything to do with Jeff Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell. Sure, he might have had a conversation with her at a Vanity Fair soiree years ago, and someone snapped a picture of it, but that, he claims, is the extent of his relationship with her. Hmmm… That is all I can say right now, just hmmm…
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/tesla-elon-musk-subpoena-jpmorgan-epstein.html
#weekendedition #elon #epstein #maxwell #jpmchase #subpoena #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.5 – Big Sky State to Ban App Stores from Distributing TikTok
Well, Montana legislators and executives just decided that TikTok poses enough of a threat to warrant starting to ban the Play Store and the App Store from allowing MT residents to download the app. The first domino has fallen. That ban will, unless overturned by a judge, go into effect on Jan 1, 2024. This is simply a restriction on NEW downloads of the app, not current users. I am still unconvinced that TikTok is any worse than YT or any other social media app. They are all geared to collect data about you and keep your attention so that they can keep mining the data, which makes them the money. They all have algorithms which incentivize people to pay more attention to them, as well as pushing certain content more than other kinds of content, whether overtly to mold opinion or not. If you ban one, then ban the rest. Just wipe the slate clean. Half-measures will never succeed in the end. Do I actually believe what I just said? Somewhat. If gov’t is going to ban one thing, then why not ban the rest? My sense is that the best option (which almost certainly won’t be taken) is that the public needs to be educated on how to think about social media and how to deal with it more healthily, so that influence operations on social media will be less effective. That a) takes too much effort and b) undermines the US intelligence community, which uses social media to spy on us.
https://news.sky.com/story/tiktok-montana-becomes-first-us-state-to-ban-video-sharing-app-on-personal-devices-12883467
#weekendedition #tiktok #montana #banhammer #meh #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.6 – Amazon Still Thinks They’re an AI Leader
Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. What we know now, is that Alexa was on the leading edge when it came to voice assistants almost 10 years ago. They are trying to improve it, the LLM that it is based on, as well as seeking to roll a text based generative AI into the Amazon Shopping experience. This just feels like a desperate, “Hey look at us, we’re still in this conversation, too” from Amazon. Do something, release something impressive, or lose relevance. That is the nature of tech. Talk is cheap. I don’t know that I want them to improve their AI stuff any further than it already has been, as if you use Amazon, it likely knows more about you and your preferences than you do already. If that is cool with you because it makes it easier to shop for things, then by all means, keep using all of their AI crap. Personally, if I could exit the Amazon system effectively, I would. I have not found a way to replace all of their services that we use, so I haven’t. We do not use Alexa on purpose, as we do not trust that “always listening” feature in our home. My wife was the first one to question that, as I used to just be an uncritical “ooooh, shiny object” kind of tech adopter, whenever I could afford it (which was not very often). She was never comfortable with voice-controlled or “smart” anything. Good call, babe.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/amazons-alexa-head-defends-companys-work-on-ai-amid-chatgpt-boom.html
#weekendedition #amazon #AI #alexa #FOSSNews #TechFreedom

WE 37.7 Open AI & Congress
This last week, Sam Altman testified before a Senate sub-committee. He actually agreed with them that AI needs to be regulated, which is a bit odd, considering that most tech CEOs, when called before Congress usually try to fight whatever regulation is being explored in relation to them or their products. This doesn’t surprise me much, as he was one of the signatories, as well as the professor from NYU who also testified, on that open letter from March, which called for a moratorium on developing these advanced AI models, due to what more or less amounts to fear porn. If I’m proven wrong, and we are seeing the birth of SkyNet or The Matrix or something, I will gladly eat crow. I do NOT, however, think that we are there, at least not with the versions that John Q. Public is allowed to see right now. I have no inside knowledge (just to be clear) about those sorts of secret projects, but I would almost stake my life on their existence.
At the beginning of the proceedings, Altman demonstrated a rather creepy sideshow trick: they had trained an AI on Sen. Blumenthal’s voice and speeches, and had it present an opening speech, which was eerily true to life. I know that they can be used to mimic people, in fact, we’ve seen AI generated videos before, not to mention filters which can make anyone look and/or sound like anyone else. Those videos have been floating around for a few years now, but now, all you need is a computer with an internet connection to create something like that, whereas before, it took all sorts of crazy motion capture and voice synth tech to pull off the same thing. One could be made to say literally anything, and it is harder and harder to detect the forgeries, because they have gotten so good. What do you guys think about this? Good? Bad? Terrifying? Ultimately beneficial?
The fact that Altman was in agreement that something needed to be done at a federal level about curbing the possibilities for abuse strikes me as altogether odd. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? This whole thing is starting to smell like a psyop to me. Whenever both parties in congress and all involved parties in a hearing, as well as the breathless media all agree on something, that is almost never a good sign.

https://news.sky.com/story/senator-richard-blumenthals-chilling-warning-after-ai-generated-speech-convincingly-imitates-him-at-congress-hearing-12882342
https://news.sky.com/story/boss-of-ai-firms-worst-fears-are-more-worrying-than-creepy-senate-party-trick-12882348
#weeekendedition #AI #openAI #samaltman #fishy #blumenthal #FOSSNews #TechFreedom