What exactly is edge computing? Edge computing is a variant of cloud computing, with your infrastructure services – compute, storage, and networking – placed physically closer to the field devices that generate data. Edge computing allows you to place applications and services closer to the source of the data, which gives you the dual benefit of lower latency and lower Internet traffic. Lower latency boosts the performance of field devices by enabling them to not only respond quicker, but to also respond to more events. And lowering Internet traffic helps reduce costs and increase overall throughput – your core datacenter can support more field devices. Whether an application or service lives in the edge cloud or the core datacenter will depend on the use case.
How can you create an edge cloud? Edge clouds should have at least two layers – both layers will maximise operational effectiveness and developer productivity – and each layer is constructed differently.
DevOps teams appreciate using DevOps processes, especially in multi- and hybrid cloud infrastructures, for many reasons. For one thing, DevOps breaks down barriers and enables agile software development and continuous delivery of IT operations. It is also popular in enterprises because it helps accelerate business outcomes through digital transformation.
The game is changing for the IT ops community, which means the rules of the past make less and less sense. Organizations need accurate, understandable, and actionable metrics in the right context to measure operations performance and drive critical business transformation.
The more customers use modern tools and the more variation in the types of incidents they manage, the less sense it makes to smash all those different incidents into one bucket to compute an average resolution time that will represent ops performance, which is what IT has been doing for a long time.
With the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, there is a new set of container tools which allow users to find, run, build, and share containers. This set of tools allows you to start simple with podman, and adopt more sophisticated tools (buildah, and skopeo) as you discover advanced use cases. They are released in two streams, fast and stable, to meet developer and operations use cases. Finally, these tools are compliant with the same Open Containers Initiative (OCI) standards, just like Docker, allowing you go build once, and run anywhere.
This week we’ve been installing macOS and Windows on a Macbook Pro and a Dell XPS 15. We discuss Running Challenges, bring you some command line love and go over all your feedback.
It’s Season 12 Episode 14 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Mark Johnson, Martin Wimpress and Laura Cowen are connected and speaking to your brain.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the Mona Lisa is bobbins, it is important to have your privacy policy meet the overall goals you’re pushing, and:
Am5x86 based retro UNIX build log, setting up services in a FreeNAS Jail, first taste of DragonflyBSD, streaming Netflix on NetBSD, NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini, Hammer vs Hammer2, and more.
While just being a few days into the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.3, it's certainly another busy cycle even when considering the summer months tend to be a bit slower for developers.
Kernel Address Space Isolation is an experimental feature in development by Oracle in aiming to prevent leaking sensitive data from Intel Hyper Threading due to speculative execution attacks like L1TF.
While disabling Intel Hyper Threading has become recommended for fending off newer speculative execution attacks, obviously many don't want to lose out on those extra threads. In particular, data centers and public cloud providers certainly don't want to give up on Hyper Threading as it will hurt their margins hard. Oracle began working on address space isolation for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) but now that has evolved into Kernel Address Space Isolation as a generic address-space isolation framework and KVM simply being one of the consumers of this framework.
Weeks ahead of SIGGRAPH and days ahead of the LLVM 9.0 code branching, a number of big "GFX908" commits have been landing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over the past day.
GFX908 is an unreleased product we haven't seen much driver activity on to date. Yes, GFX9 is Vega, but AMD has previously communicated that Vega will live on for select workstation/compute products and that was also reiterated back during the Navi media briefings last month.
The GPU Performance API is their cross-platform library for accessing the hardware's performance counters and being able to analyze performance/execution characteristics. GPA pairs nicely with their other open-source tooling like CodeXL and the Compute Profiler for finding bottlenecks and other areas for optimization.
It's on a daily basis we are seeing improvements to the newly-added Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Today brings geometry shader support for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver.
AMD's official Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, has yet to publish its (open-source) Navi support but that is hopefully just days away. Meanwhile RADV is off to the races in aiming for good Navi/GFX10 support with the Mesa 19.2 release due out at the end of next month.
An Intel open-source developer contributed support to Wayland's reference Weston compositor for enabling HDCP support on a per-output basis using a new allow_hdcp option.
From the weston.ini configuration file, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection can be enabled per-output via the "allow_hdcp" option within each output section. HDCP otherwise is always enabled by default for the display outputs.
It's been (and still is) a particularly busy few weeks for benchmarking. For those curious about the Raspberry Pi 4 performance that was announced at the end of June along with Raspbian 10, here are our initial performance benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in 2GB and 4GB variants compared to various other ARM SBCs.
In case you missed the original announcement, the Raspberry Pi 4 features a quad-core Cortex-A72 CPU clocked up to 1.4GHz, new 1GB / 2GB / 4GB versions, dual HDMI outputs and can handle up to 4K displays with the new Broadcom VC4 hardware using their V3D open-source driver stack, full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi, two USB 3.0 ports complementing two USB 2.0 ports, and various other improvements.
The majority of people on the internet have email accounts from big companies, such as Google, that do not respect your privacy. Thankfully, there are privacy conscience alternatives like Tutanota and ProtonMail. The problems is that not all of them have a desktop client. Today, we will look at a project that seeks to solve that problem for you. Let’s take a look at ElectronMail.
CD audio grabbers are designed to extract (“rip”) the raw digital audio (in a format commonly called CDDA) from a compact disc to a file or other output. This type of software enables a user to encode the digital audio into a variety of formats, and download and upload disc info from freedb, an internet compact disc database.
I recently wrote a review of abcde, a console based CD ripping software. I’ve received a few contacts asking me to take a look at a good graphical CD ripper. fre:ac instantly sprung to mind.
This overview looks at the latest preview release. This release adds a new component system which has aided the inclusion of additional codecs.
fre:ac depends on the BoCA audio component framework and the smooth class library. The software is written in C++.
In this article, I want to look at a GIS option available for Linux—specifically, a program called SAGA (System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses). SAGA was developed at the Department of Physical Geography in Germany. It is built with a plugin module architecture, where various functions are provided by individual modules. A very complete API is available to allow users to extend SAGA's functionality with newly written modules. I take a very cursory look at SAGA here and describe a few things you might want to do with it.
As a system administrator, part of your responsibility is to help users manage their data. One of the vital aspects of doing that is to ensure your organization has a good backup plan, and that your users either make their backups regularly, or else don’t have to because you’ve automated the process.
However, sometimes the worst happens. A file gets deleted by mistake, a filesystem becomes corrupt, or a partition gets lost, and for whatever reason, the backups don’t contain what you need.
As we discussed in How to prevent and recover from accidental file deletion in Linux, before trying to recover lost data, you must find out why the data is missing in the first place. It’s possible that a user has simply misplaced the file, or that there is a backup that the user isn’t aware of. But if a user has indeed removed a file with no backups, then you know you need to recover a deleted file. If a partition table has become scrambled, though, then the files aren’t really lost at all, and you might want to consider using TestDisk to recover the partition table, or the partition itself.
What happens if your file or partition recovery isn’t successful, or is only in part? Then it’s time for Scalpel. Scalpel performs file carving operations based on patterns describing unique file types. It looks for these patterns based on binary strings and regular expressions, and then extracts the file accordingly.
The Free and Open-Source alternative to Microsoft’s widely popular Office Suite of apps is evolving and the latest update is rather controversial. Other than dropping support for 32 bit operating systems, it picks up a bunch of new tricks.
WPS Office 11.1.0.8722 features a stack of iterative improvements, but no major new features to speak of, besides the ability to open and display PDF documents natively.
Wing 7 introduces an improved code warnings and code quality inspection system that includes built-in error detection and tight integration with Pylint, pep8, and mypy. This release also adds a new data frame and array viewer, a MATLAB keyboard personality, easy inline debug data display with Shift-Space, improved stack data display, support for PEP 3134 chained exceptions, callouts for search and other code navigation features, four new color palettes, improved bookmarking, a high-level configuration menu, magnified presentation mode, a new update manager, stepping over import internals, simplified remote agent installation, and much more.
Lots of desktop keyboards have media playback buttons the user can use to pause, stop, skip and play music with the press of a button. For the most part, the Linux kernel, and Linux operating systems have support for these devices, due to increased Linux driver development over the years. That said, not every single keyboard’s media keys are supported out of the box, and that’s a real shame.
If you’re looking to get your play, pause, stop, and skip buttons on the keyboard to work with your favorite open-source media players, you’ve come to the right place. Follow along as we show you how to fix media keys not working on Linux!
What is Docker? Docker is a free and open source software tool that can be used to pack, ship and run any application as a container. It has not any packaging system or frameworks, it can be run from anywhere from a small computer to large servers. You can easily deploy and scale your applications, databases and other services without depending on any provider.
In this tutorial, we will show you the method to install the Nagios monitoring tool on Redhat operating system. Nagios or Nagios Core is an open-source IT monitoring, server, network monitoring, and application monitoring tool. You can monitor servers, switches, applications, and services.
The world of things falls into three categories - the things you don't want to do but have to, the things you want to do but can't and the things you can do. Skinning your KDE desktop to look like macOS falls in the third category. It serves no higher purpose, philosophical or existential, but it is something that Plasma users have the option to try, and try they will.
I've dabbled in the Mac transformation packs for many years now. The original Macbuntu test was the best. Ever since, the subsequent attempts came out somewhat short. However, I've always done this on Gnome- and Unity-based desktops, never Plasma. Well, that's about to change. We're attempting the unattemptable.
In this age, very few people use CDs and DVDs to install a new operating system on computers. The USB thumb drive has replaced bootable CDs and DVDs. It is cheaper as you can reuse the USB thumb drive over and over again. It is also simpler. There are many ways to make a bootable USB thumb drive on Windows and Linux.
In this article, I am going to show you how to create a Debian 10 Buster (the new kid in town) bootable USB thumb drive on Windows and Linux.
With the help of the HISTTIMEFORMAT Bash variable you can show the date and time when each command was executed. This can be useful in various occasions, including to remember which commands you ran in a specific time-frame, to undo various operations, and so on.
It's worth noting that if this variable is set, the time stamps are written to the history file so they are preserved across shell sessions. So the first time you enable it, you won't see the correct date and time for your previously used commands.
Debian 10 Buster was released recently. Debian 10 comes with Linux Kernel 4.19, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, Cinnamon 3.8, LXDE 0.99.2, LxQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, Xfce 4.12 and many more. Debian 10 also comes with awesome new artworks.
Debian may be your daily driver. So, you may have a lot of important files and softwares in your Debian 9 installation. In that case, you can simply upgrade your existing Debian 9 installation to Debian 10.
In this article, I am going to show you how to upgrade your existing Debian 9 Stretch installation to Debian 10 Buster.
The controls of Vim circulate around keyboard and the keyboard only. This is especially useful when you’re dealing with code and tasks that require full focus. The “keyboard-only” nature allows more focus headroom for your code. Well, you’re free to interact using the mouse.
Say, you’re working with a file that requires keeping an eye on multiple parts of the file. For programming, that’s a common scenario. There are also other scenarios when a split view can be useful. Yes, let’s check out how to split view and edit on Vim.
Comedy cosmic horror adventure, Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure, from developer Stuck In Attic now has a release date! Another game that was funded thanks to the help of people on Kickstarter, where Stuck In Attic managed to get CHF (Swiss franc) 53,862 from 1,929 backers.
I will be honest, unicycling is not something that comes to mind when I think about any kind of sports but it's apparently quite big. So big in fact, a game is being made called Street Uni X as a homage to classic sports games.
Street Uni X plans to include some of the top street-unicyclists from around the world and have a bunch of tricks from the "street/trials/flatland unicycling disciplines". It will have videos of those included stars to unlock, as well as additional levels to unlock, secret characters, secret parts of levels to find and so on.
It's Friday, which means the weekend is almost ready to crash into our lives once again. Here's a few tips in case you need a new game or two to try out.
First of all, on Steam you can pick up Age of Wonders 3 which supports Linux for free and keep it. The deal lasts until July 15th. Anyone who has Age of Wonders 3, will also then be eligible for 10% off on Age of Wonders: Planetfall’s Premium Edition, although that title will not be supporting Linux (may work in Steam Play).
Looking to test the waters with Linux gaming and don't want to lose access to your favourite Windows games? Here's a simple no-nonsense guide to actually using Steam Play.
Developer Falkenbrew notified us of a new demo available for their crazy twin-stick shooter Devader, as they're looking for feedback on it.
If you've not heard of Devader before, it's one that captured my interest a while ago due to the way it's being designed. The developer confessed they're "not an artist" so they came up with a way to make seriously cool, weird and sometimes quite freakish enemies which you can read more about here. The results are seriously impressive and while the gameplay feels similar to other twin-stick shooters, the design is firmly unique.
Easily in my top five releases this year, Streets of Rogue from Matt Dabrowski and tinyBuild has now left Early Access with Linux support in good shape.
Streets of Rogue is pretty difficult to describe accurately. You're part of The Resistance, who are trying to take down the Mayor. How you go about doing that, is entirely your choice. You can run through every level guns blazing, you can sneak and hack, you can put everyone to sleep or take over their body. There's choices within choices with a sprinkle of absolute chaos.
Some good news for fans of high quality puzzle games, as Zachtronics entire library is now available to purchase on itch.io.
Like most companies, much of what Valve (the company behind the hugely popular Steam game store) tinkers with behind the scenes never sees the light of day. Concepts are born, torn apart and rebuilt, and sometimes tossed away without anyone outside the company ever seeing a hint of it.
Seems Valve is trying to change that, giving users an opportunity to provide feedback on potential new features before they’re fully baked. The company has just debuted a new project it calls “Steam Labs,” which will give super-early adopters an early peek at concepts that may or may not eventually make it into Valve’s Steam game store.
Valve emailed in today to let us know about the new Steam Labs, a dedicated section on Steam for Valve to show off some experiments they're doing and for you to test and break them.
Steam Labs was announced today with three initial experiments: Micro Trailers, The Interactive Recommender, and The Automated Show. Micro Trailers are six-second game trailers, The Interactive Recommender uses machine learning to show game titles you might like, and The Automated Show is a showpiece for secondary displays for highlighting different games.
I've managed to get hardware video encoding and decoding using VAAPI working with waypipe, although of course the hardware codecs are less flexible and introduce additional restrictions on the image formats and dimensions. For example, buffers currently need to have an XRGB8888 pixel format (or a standard permutation thereof), as the Intel/AMD VAAPI implementations otherwise do not appear to support hardware conversions from the RGB color space to the YUV color space used by video formats, and in the other direction. It's also best if the buffers have 64-byte aligned strides, and 16-pixel aligned widths and heights. The result of this can run significantly faster than encoding with libx264, although to maintain the same level of visual quality the bitrate must be increased.
For games, using video compression with waypipe is probably worth the tradeoffs now. In some instances, it can even be faster. A 1024 by 768 SuperTuxKart window during a race, running with linear-format DMABUFs, losslessly replicated without compression via ssh on localhost, requires about 130MB/s of bandwidth and runs at about 40 FPS. (Using LZ4 or Zstd for compression would reduce bandwidth, but on localhost or a very fast network would take more time than would be saved by the bandwidth reduction.)
Until now, anyone that has wanted to install Nvidia binary driver updates on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has needed to make use of a separate PPA, futz around with random packages distributed online, or install the driver manually, by hand, the old-fashioned way.
But not any more.
Word on the street is that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users can now install the latest releases of the proprietary Nvidia driver through the regular Ubuntu updates channel.
The magic is made possible by the SRU (Stable Release Update) initiative. It’s this endeavour that keeps other apps, like Mozilla Firefox and Chromium, up to date on long-term support releases.
Good news everyone! Canonical will now be offering NVIDIA users up to date graphics drivers without the need to resort to a PPA or anything else.
Since this will be for the Ubuntu LTS releases, this means other Linux distributions based on Ubuntu like Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS and probably many others will also get these updated NVIDIA drivers too—hooray!
This is really great, as PPAs are not exactly user friendly and sometimes they don't get the testing they truly need when serving so many people. Having the Ubuntu team push out NVIDIA driver updates via an SRU (Stable Release Update), which is the same procedure they use to get you newer Firefox version, is a good way to do it.
Launched on April 18th, 2019, the KDE Applications 19.04 open-source software suite series received a total of three maintenance updates, the last one being released today as KDE Applications 19.04.3, which fixes some remaining issues but also marks the end of life of KDE Applications 19.04.
KDE Applications 19.04.3 brings numerous changes across various of the included applications, but the most important changes are the fact that the Konqueror and Kontact apps no longer crash on exit when QtWebEngine 5.13 is used and the Python importer in the Umbrello UML app now supports parameters with default arguments.
While the team is out for a much deserved summer break the last minor release post-refactoring is out with another huge amount of fixes. The highlights include fixing compositing and speed effect regressions, thumbnail display issues of clips in the timeline and many Windows fixes. With this release we finished polishing the rough edges and now we can focus on adding new features while fixing other small details left. As usual you can get the latest AppImage from our download page.
Speaking of that, the next major release is less than a month away and it already has some cool new features implemented like changing the speed of a clip by ctrl + resize and pressing shift and hover over a thumb of a clip in the Project Bin to preview it. We’ve also bumped the Qt version to 5.12.4 and updated to the latest MLT. You can grab it from here to test it. Also planned is finishing the 3 point editing workflow and improvements to the speed effect. Stay tuned for more info soon.
The Kdenlive video editor has a sizeable new bug fix update out.
Kdenlive 19.04.3 serves as the third point release in the ‘refactored’ Kdenlive 19.04.x series. It’s also expected to be the final minor update, as a new “major release” is said to be less than a month away.
“With this release we finished polishing the rough edges and now we can focus on adding new features while fixing other small details left,” the team writes of the release.
Among the 70 or so bugs that Kdenlive 19.04.3 fixes are issues related to keyframe management; opening projects files with missing proxy clips; and handling timeline previews.
Several KDE releases came this week. KDE Applications 19.04.3 was released yesterday. This release contains more than 60 bugfixes and translation updates. See the full changelog for details.
KDE Plasma 5.16.3 also was released. This update comes just two weeks after the 5.16 release and contains several bugfixes and new translations. See the full Changelog for specifics.
And, Kdenlive 19.04.3 was released today. This release contains a ton of fixes, including "fixing compositing and speed effect regressions, thumbnail display issues of clips in the timeline and many Windows fixes. You can get the AppImage from the download page.
Also, being free and open source software, Krita allowed us to take time to work without the pressure of a subscription service. That accessibility is something we think is valuable to allow artists to take time to learn their craft without worry of a financial burden.
In my slightly infamous email to fedora-devel I stated that I would turn off the snapd support in the gnome-software package for Fedora 31. A lot of people agreed with the technical reasons, but failed to understand the bigger picture and asked me to explain myself.
I wanted to tell a little, fictional, story:
In 2012 the ISO institute started working on a cross-vendor petrol reference vehicle to reduce the amount of R&D different companies had to do to build and sell a modern, and safe, saloon car.
have been involved GNOME for a long time. My first commits to GTK are from sometime around 2002. GTK is where I spend most of my development and project maintenance time. But I’ve been involved in many other parts of GNOME at one point or another, from GLib to GNOME Software. Apart from writing code and fixing bugs, I am a member of the release team, and do a few of the GNOME releases every cycle. In recent years, I’ve often done the .0 stable releases.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.10.1 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
Today we are looking at Sparky 4.11 LXDE. It comes with the LXDE desktop environment which Lubuntu previously used, but it is no longer in development, the last release was two years ago but it is great to still have a supported Linux Distro which is using it.
The main feature, of this release, is that it changed the repository from Debian Stable to Old-Stable, so still, Debian 9 which tells me that they won't keep it going for long, but it will still be supported for 2 years, like Debian 9.
It uses about 300 MB of ram when idling and Linux Kernel 4.9 which is dated but playing with the distro, the apps can be a bit slow to open up the first time but perfectly workable and for old machines or any machine for which you want to use all the system resources for your work and the minimum for your system.
Earlier this week, Mozilla released version 68 of the Firefox web browser. Firefox is the default web browser in Fedora, and this update is now available in the official Fedora repositories.
This Firefox release provides a range of bug fixes and enhancements, including:
Better handling when using dark GTK themes (like Adwaita Dark). Previously, running a dark theme may have caused issues where user interface elements on a rendered webpage (like forms) are rendered in the dark theme, on a white background. Firefox 68 resolves these issues. Refer to these two Mozilla bugzilla tickets for more information. The about:addons special page has two new features to keep you safer when installing extensions and themes in Firefox. First is the ability to report security and stability issues with addons directly in the about:addons page. Additionally, about:addons now has a list of secure and stable extensions and themes that have been vetted by the Recommended Extensions program.
Fedora Silverblue is becoming more and more popular inside and outside the Fedora world. So based on feedback from the community, here are answers to some interesting questions about the project. If you do have any other Silverblue related questions, please leave it in the comments section and we will try to answer them in a future article.
Silverblue is a codename for the new generation of the desktop operating system, previously known as Atomic Workstation. The operating system is delivered in images that are created by utilizing the rpm-ostree project. The main benefits of the system are speed, security, atomic updates and immutability.
We recently saw a merge proposal from Canonical to replace gnome-software snap with their own Snap Store. Along the similar lines, Red Hat’s Richard Hughes has announced that Fedora will disable snap plugin for GNOME Software. His announcement comes just a day after this.
Fedora will disable the snap plugin in its next major update release, according to Hughes. He mentions that the existing snap plugin is not very well tested and it causes general UX of GNOME software to degrade.
In the early hours of Sunday morning (my time), Debian 10 (buster) was released. It’s amazing to be a part of an organisation where so many people work so hard to pull together and make something like this happen. Creating and supporting a stable release can be tedious work, but it’s essential for any kind of large-scale or long-term deployments. I feel honored to have had a small part in this release
My primary focus area for this release was to get Debian live images in a good shape. It’s not perfect yet, but I think we made some headway. The out of box experiences for the desktop environments on live images are better, and we added a new graphical installer that makes Debian easier to install for the average laptop/desktop user. For the bullseye release I intend to ramp up quality efforts and have a bunch of ideas to make that happen, but more on that another time.
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
First of all I want to thank Debian’s Release Team. Whenever there was something to unblock for Buster, I always got feedback within hours and in almost all cases the package could just migrate to testing. Good communication and clear rules helped a lot to make the whole freeze a great experience.
If you are relatively new to using Linux, Debian's design decisions will not pose obstacles to using it. If you insist on speedier application updates, you might spend excessive time grabbing newer versions from .deb repositories that are outside Buster's reach.
Get Debian 10 Buster ISO downloads here.
You will have plenty of time to resolve those issues. The developers have a long slog to the release of Debian 11, aka "Bullseye."
I can only hope that the next Debian upgrade comes a lot closer to hitting an improved bull's-eye that is less boring.
The glaring omission here is any kind of micro-HDMI cable or adapter. There are still no such cables in stock at the Pi-Shop (which probably also explains why there wasn't one included in this starter kit), so I had also ordered an adapter.
There is a limitation when using the micro-HDMI adapter, which is perhaps not obvious from just looking at these pictures. Because the two micro-HDMI connectors are relatively close together on the board, it is not possible to use two adapters side by side - there's just not enough room for the HDMI heads of both of them.
With the shortage of Gemini Lake processors, some manufacturers have taken to releasing new mini PCs using older CPUs.
WinSystems’ Linux-friendly “SYS-ITX-N-3800” is an Intel Bay Trail based industrial mini-PC with dual GbE ports, SATA, DP, USB 3.0, mini-PCIe, and -25 to 60€°C support.
WinSystems has launched a fanless, Nano-ITX form-factor industrial computer that runs Linux, Windows 10, or Windows 10 IoT on Intel’s dual-core, 1.75GHz Atom E3827 or quad-core, 1.91GHz Atom E3845 Bay Trail processors. The specs don’t match up perfectly, but the SYS-ITX-N-3800 mini-PC might be built around a variation of the company’s SBC35-CC405 Nano-ITX SBC.
Get ready! SUSECON 2020 is coming to Dublin, Ireland, March 23-27, 2020 at the Convention Centre Dublin!
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The first question that everyone asks is “how did you let this happen?” At a high level, the story seems simple: we let the certificate expire. This seems like a simple failure of planning, but upon further investigation it turns out to be more complicated: the team responsible for the system which generated the signatures knew that the certificate was expiring but thought (incorrectly) that Firefox ignored the expiration dates. Part of the reason for this misunderstanding was that in a previous incident we had disabled end-entity certificate checking, and this led to confusion about the status of intermediate certificate checking. Moreover, the Firefox QA plan didn’t incorporate testing for certificate expiration (or generalized testing of how the browser will behave at future dates) and therefore the problem wasn’t detected. This seems to have been a fundamental oversight in our test plan.
The old Cloudera developed and distributed its Hadoop stack using a mix of open source and proprietary methods and licenses. But the new Cloudera will be.
Although billed as a “merger of relative equals,” last fall’s combination of Cloudera Inc. and Hortonworks Inc. was by all accounts a Cloudera acquisition of its smaller big-data rival. But it now appears that Hortonworks’ open-source business model has won the day. Cloudera Wednesday quietly announced changes to its licensing policy that will make its entire product portfolio available under open-source terms, effectively adopting Hortonworks’ business model.
The move has important implications for the industry’s ongoing debate about how business models can be built upon a foundation of free software. Although Cloudera is a major contributor to open-source projects, its decade-old business has always been based on selling licensed software.
With an upgraded kernel and userland, FreeBSD 11.3 is now available for the general audience.
Starting with an introduction, FreeBSD is an operating system based on the Berkley Software Distribution?s UNIX. The OS is also known for its advanced networking, security, and compatibility. Accordingly, alongside regular users, you?ll find computer scientists, ISPs, and researchers using this operating system as well.
Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to make the trip from Toronto to Ottawa to attend BSDCan 2019 and the FreeBSD developer summit. Following the conference, I also made it to a small hackathon held at the University of Waterloo. I work from home, which can create a sense of isolation despite the ability to easily communicate with colleagues over the Internet; conferences are thus an important way to recharge my enthusiasm for working on FreeBSD. This year’s BSDCan was not a disappointment: I attended a number of interesting talks, collaborated on some designs for future projects, and helped review and debug some code.
Separate from the Linux boot issue affecting AMD Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors that has been attributed to RdRand, DragonFlyBSD is the first BSD at least we've seen getting a separate fix to be able to boot these new AMD processors.
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon who has been mesmerized by the AMD Threadripper performance for the past year now has his hands on new Zen 2 hardware. But it turns out the current DragonFlyBSD releases can't boot with these processors due to a separate problem from what we've seen on the Linux side.
This week, I resigned from the GNU Tools Engineer position I've held at Red Hat since February, 2000. lieN gnortsmrA might boldly put it as "A giant leap for a man, but an insignificant step for humankind."
If only I'd quit over an imposition of non-Free Software on me, over the increasingly clouded business, over some great new opportunity to make a difference, it might have ended up being more than a negligible blip within the Free Software community, nevermind the grand scheme of things. Alas, it was just rotten office politics on a global scale, after a misunderstanding blown way out of proportion, that resulted in an unbearable situation for me.
For loop is used to iterate over any iterable object, accessing one item at a time and making it available inside the for loop body.
Sometimes existing templates tags are not enough for rebellious developers. They need to create custom template tags to use.
Our API supports lots of common PythonAnywhere operations, like creating and managing consoles, scheduled and always-on tasks, and websites. We recently added support for reading/writing files; this blog post gives a brief overview of how you can use it to do that.
When I decided I wanted to play with color this summer, I thought about the fact that colors are usually depicted on a color wheel. This is usually with pigment colors rather than light, and you lose any sense of the variation in color brightness or luminosity.
As an alternative to the color wheel, I came up with the idea of displaying the RGB spectrum on the surfaces of a cube using a series of graphs. RGB values would be depicted on a three-dimensional graph with X-, Y-, and Z-axes. For example, a surface would keep B (or blue) at 0 and the remaining axes would show what happens as I plot values as colors for R (red) and G (green) from 0 to 255.
It turns out this is not very difficult to do using Scribus and its Python Scripter capability. I can create RGB colors, make rectangles showing the colors, and arrange them in a 2D format. I decided to make value jumps of 5 for the colors and make rectangles measuring 5 points on a side. Thus, for each 2D graph, I would make about 250 colors, and the cube would measure 250 points to a side, or 3.5 inches.
In my new pandas video, you're going to learn 25 tricks that will help you to work faster, write better code, and impress your friends. These are the most useful tricks I've learned from 5 years of teaching Python's pandas library.
Each trick is about a minute long, so you're going to learn a ton of new pandas skills in less than 30 minutes!
In this webinar sponsored by the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC), I outline a brief history of GPU analytics and the problems that using GPU analytics solves relative to using other parallel computation methods such as Hadoop. I also demonstrate how OmniSci fits into the broader GPU-accelerated data science workflow, with examples provided using Python.
The planned landing site for Chandryaan 2 is just 220 miles (350 kilometres) from the rim of the South-Pole Aitken basin - the same massive crater on the far side of the Moon under which scientists recently discovered evidence of a "large excess of mass."
The rover is carrying an X-ray spectrometer that could analyze the composition of the Aitken basin crust to find clues about its origin story.
To find out what the building was used for, researchers from Russian Academy of Sciences, Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Dagestan State University used a non-invasive technique to create a picture of the buried building. By understanding its structure, they would be able to get a better idea of its former use.
The team placed several detectors inside the building and used nuclear emulsions to create the first images of it. Nuclear emulsion is where photographic plates are used to record the passage of the charged particles that pass through it. Results of the "scan" showed the building was in the shape of a cross—giving weight to the idea it was a church. It was found to be 36 foot high, 50 foot in length (north to south) and 44 foot wide (east to west). The arms of the "cross" were 16 foot wide and 13 foot long.
The paper presents the test experiment to investigate one of UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) world heritage objects, an archaeological site in the Naryn-Kala citadel (Derbent, Republic of Dagestan, Russian Federation) hidden under the ground’s surface. The function of the site could be revealed by the muon radiography studies. Several nuclear emulsion detectors were exposed for two months inside the site at a depth about 10 m from the modern surface. The use of nuclear emulsions as probing radiation detectors combined with the potential of modern image analysis methods provides for a uniquely high resolution capacity of recording instrumentation and 3D reconstruction of the internal structure of the investigated object. Here we present the experiment and data analysis details and the first results.
It is not a novel observation that computers have become so powerful that a reasonably recent system has a relatively long life before obsolescence. This is in stark contrast to the period between the nineties and the teens where it was not uncommon for users with even moderate needs from their computers to upgrade every few years.
This upgrade cycle was mainly driven by huge advances in processing power, memory capacity and ballooning data storage capability. Of course the software engineers used up more and more of the available resources and with each new release ensured users needed to update to have a reasonable experience.
And then sometime in the early teens this cycle slowed almost as quickly as it had begun as systems had become "good enough". I experienced this at a time I was relocating for a new job and had moved most of my computer use to my laptop which was just as powerful as my desktop but was far more flexible.
As a software engineer I used to have a pretty good computer for myself but I was never prepared to spend the money on "top of the range" equipment because it would always be obsolete and generally I had access to much more powerful servers if I needed more resources for a specific task.
The U.S. Coast Guard has issued an official warning to owners of ships that cybersecurity at sea needs updating, and updating urgently. In the Marine Safety Alert published June 8, the Coast Guard "strongly encourages" that cybersecurity assessments are conducted to "better understand the extent of their cyber vulnerabilities." This follows an interagency investigation, led by the Coast Guard, into a "significant cyber incident" that had exposed critical control systems of a deep draft vessel bound for the Port of New York in February 2019 to what it called "significant vulnerabilities."
The ship's network was mainly used for official business, including updating electronic charts, managing cargo data and communicating with shore-side facilities, pilots, agents and the Coast Guard, according to the report.
BBC News has not been told how much money was involved in the ransom payment or when it was paid.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said it was a "matter for the victim" as to whether a ransom had been paid.
Luxembourg-based laboratory testing services giant Eurofins Scientific reportedly paid the ransom demanded by cybercriminals following a successful ransomware attack that led to the company taking offline many of its systems and servers.
Eurofins didn’t disclose how much it paid to retrieve its information but the money was likely paid between June 10, when Eurofins issued a statement about the attack, and June 24 when it published an update saying it had “identified the variant of the malware used” in the attack and had strengthened its cybersecurity.
OpenZFS is the powerful file system at the heart of every storage system that iXsystems sells and of its many features, snapshots can provide fast and effective recovery from ransomware attacks at both the individual user and enterprise level as I talked about in 2015. As a copy-on-write file system, OpenZFS provides efficient and consistent snapshots of your data at any given point in time. Each snapshot only includes the precise delta of changes between any two points in time and can be cloned to provide writable copies of any previous state without losing the original copy. Snapshots also provide the basis of OpenZFS replication or backing up of your data to local and remote systems. Because an OpenZFS snapshot takes place at the block level of the file system, it is immune to any file-level encryption by ransomware that occurs over it. A carefully-planned snapshot, replication, retention, and restoration strategy can provide the low-level isolation you need to enable your storage infrastructure to quickly recover from ransomware attacks.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dbus), Debian (firefox-esr, python3.4, and redis), Mageia (ffmpeg), Oracle (firefox, libvirt, and qemu), Red Hat (firefox and virt:8.0.0), Scientific Linux (firefox), and SUSE (kernel).
A new analysis of employment information of Huawei personnel appears to show deeper links between the technology giant and China's military and intelligence bodies than previously acknowledged by the firm.
One CV describes an individual who held a dual role at Huawei and an organization linked to the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
We’ve all heard the dodgy arguments: ‘the science is uncertain’, ‘climate change is natural, not down to humans’, ‘science has been hijacked by politics’… Now a new cache of documents sheds light on the origins of the disinformation.
In another verse of a now familiar refrain, a fossil fuel industry group in the 1990s publicly promoted arguments to undermine confidence in climate science while internally acknowledging their products where driving up temperatures.
San Francisco is changing, and not everyone is happy about it. Many long-term residents feel pushed out by the city’s flood of high-tech jobs and start-up cash, a situation that caused The Washington Post to proclaim that the “city of love” had broken America’s heart.
It’s not the first such story. Locals have penned their own defenses, but no one doubts the cultural bedrock — not to mention the actual landscape — beneath San Francisco is shifting.
[...]
Coyotes, she’s found, don’t have much trouble figuring out how to navigate a changing urban landscape. In San Francisco, despite the high-rises looming ever taller and new condos filling empty lots, coyotes are finding space.
And that’s true across the country. These days you can find coyotes in most cities in the United States, according to the Urban Coyote Initiative.
Kessler says public opinion of coyotes has improved in recent years, but that’s come with another set of problems. We talked with her about what she’s learned, how San Francisco’s coyotes are coping with a changing city, and the value of making space for wildlife in urban areas.
Whatever the source of Trump’s sudden ire for crypto, one crowd is not particularly happy: the alt-right, which has enough libertarian and more broadly anti-government strains in its movement to align with crypto enthusiasts. (Also, payment processors have begun taking sides in the deplatforming debate, banning sites known to promote white supremacy, violence, and neo Nazism. So that’s also made crypto popular with the online breeding grounds for those movements.)
The process consumes enormous amounts of energy, and cheap electricity is a must. One of the most popular machines, Bitmain’s AntMiner S15, draws about 1,600 watts of power. That’s about equal to the energy consumption of a microwave oven. But mining machines aren’t used on occasion. To optimize the chance of earning coins, the top mining operators run hundreds or thousands of miners 24/7. Imagine your electricity bill if you were constantly zapping instant oatmeal in hundreds of microwaves all day, every day. In Rockdale, Bitmain’s planned facility was supposed to consume 500 megawatts, enough to power more than 400,000 average US homes.
Rockdale was hardly the only, or first, place that caught the bitcoin bug, as its value soared 20-fold in 2017, to $20,000 that December. Central Washington, with its cheap hydropower, was a natural draw; by 2018, there were more than 50 mining operations in the region. Dennis Bolz, a commissioner for the Chelan County Public Utility District, recalls a Japanese businessman flying in on a private jet and announcing he wanted energy on the spot. “It was like a gold rush,” Bolz says.
Late Thursday, President Donald Trump unleashed a three-tweet squall declaring himself “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies,” and referring to the use of “unregu€lated digital assets” for “drug trade and other illegal activities.” He included Libra in that category, saying the platform "will have little standing or dependability" and would fall prey to similar dependability issues. He suggested Facebook would need to acquire a banking charter to proceed with its efforts. Trump concluded with a patriotic message about the global primacy of the US dollar, suggesting he’s not comfortable with Libra or other cryptocurrencies becoming rivals.
The German government is finally getting around to fining social media companies for violating its absurd "hate speech" law. The law, which took effect January 1, 2018, wasn't even able to make it a week without causing collateral damage.
Unable to construct a machine capable of killing fascists, the German parliament built one that kills satire. Shortly, after it took effect, the hate speech law took down tweets from a long-running German satirical magazine. More debacles followed -- so many that the German equivalent of the alt-right was able to score political points on government censorship, even as they called for government censorship in the other direction.
The new law turned social media companies into ATMs with its demand that something as nebulous as "hate speech" be removed with extreme haste lest its principals and moderation teams be fined personally for stuff German assholes posted to the internet.
So we just wrote about the 2nd Circuit Appeals court affirming a victory for the Knight 1st Amendment Center against Donald Trump, making it clear that he cannot block followers on social media. As we noted, the case is very fact specific, and people shouldn't read too much into it. But, in general, it does find that if someone is a public official, using social media for official government purposes, and creating an open public forum out of that, they cannot block followers based on the views of those followers -- as that is the state engaging in impermissible viewpoint discrimination.
Some Trump supporters then spun that around on the other side of the aisle, picking out the fact that freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has blocked people on Twitter as well. Indeed, as Scott Greenfield points out, in the wake of the 2nd Circuit ruling, former NY State Assemblyman Dov Hikind has already sued Ocasio-Cortez, pointing out that she has him blocked on Twitter.
Today EPIC filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that the videoconferencing company Zoom has committed unfair and deceptive practices in violation of the FTC Act. According to EPIC, Zoom intentionally designed its web conferencing service to bypass browser security settings and remotely enable a user's web camera without the knowledge or consent of the user. As a result, Zoom exposed users to the risk of remote surveillance, unwanted videocalls, and denial-of-service attacks. EPIC has brought many similar consumer privacy complaints to the FTC, including the complaint that led to the FTC consent order against Facebook and the complaint that led to the FTC consent order against Google. EPIC cited the Google order, which produced a $22.5 m fine, in the complaint concerning Zoom.
As the result of an EPIC lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security has suspended a controversial effort to track journalists, news outlets, and social media accounts. The "Media Monitoring Services" platform would have included an "unlimited" database of personal information from journalists and media influencers, including location data, contact information, employer affiliations, and past content. EPIC filed suit last year to block the program, arguing that the DHS had failed to complete required Privacy Impact Assessments. In a settlement with EPIC, the agency acknowledged that it was not using the proposed system and agreed to complete required Privacy Impact Assessments before collecting personal data in the future. EPIC also obtained records showing that the DHS ignored the harms that media monitoring would have caused to privacy and press freedoms.
A photo of police escorting a burqa-clad woman in handcuffs has been shared tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram which claim she was arrested in Australia for wearing a burqa. The claim is false; the photo is actually a 2015 AFP image of a woman who was arrested in Spain for allegedly recruiting other women to join Islamic State.
The photo has been shared more than 37,000 times after it was published in this Facebook post on March 27, 2019.
While we are well aware that both RT and Sputnik have broadcast disinformation, some of which has undermined democratic elections and put journalists at risk, we do not believe excluding them from covering the conference is an appropriate response. To the contrary, for the British government to deny access to RT and Sputnik, or any other news outlet, based on its determination that they constitute propaganda actually empowers autocratic governments around the world who use a similar rationale to justify repression of critical journalism.
At a gathering of reporters, activists, and foreign leaders at the Global Conference for Media Freedom, in London, the journalist’s death was on center stage. “When Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post columnist, was tortured to death and dismembered by Saudi Arabian officials in Istanbul, world leaders responded with little more than a collective shrug,” Amal Clooney, the British Foreign Office’s special envoy on media freedom, told the conference’s 1,000 attendees. “Signing pledges and making speeches is not enough,” she added.
Among those in the audience was Agnès Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, and the director of the Global Freedom of Expression Project at Columbia University. Callamard was the author of the UN report that linked MbS to Khashoggi’s killing. In an interview with The Atlantic, she shared her thoughts on what justice for Khashoggi should look like, how governments can better protect journalists, and the role these conferences can play.
This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity. [...]
“The vast majority of these murders go unpunished,” she said, adding that “world leaders responded with little more than a collective shrug” to Khashoggi’s killing by agents close to the Saudi crown prince.
[...]
Clooney also took aim at Trump, saying “the country of James Madison” — one of America’s founding fathers and a champion of a free press — “has a leader today who vilifies the media.”
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is hosting a Global Conference for Media Freedom in London today. Meanwhile, 400 miles away in Strasbourg UK government lawyers are fighting for the right to continue spying on the press.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism today brings a case to the highest human rights court in Europe against the UK intelligence agencies’ mass snooping on press and public and the severe impingement on media freedom that this surveillance entails.
The case is being heard in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) at the same time as Hunt hosts an event with 1,000 media and civil society representatives from across the world aimed at fighting for the protection of journalism and journalists’ sources.
Assange is being held in Britain’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison. He faces the prospect of extradition to the US on 17 Espionage Act charges carrying a maximum sentence of 175 years imprisonment for WikiLeaks’ exposure of US war crimes and global diplomatic intrigues.
Her husband, James Norwich Arbuthnot, is a Conservative member of the House of Lords. He is intimately connected with the British armed forces and security services, whose criminal operations were exposed by WikiLeaks. As a Tory MP, Lord Arbuthnot was between 2005 and 2014 the chair of the Defence Select Committee, the body overseeing the Ministry of Defence and Britain’s armed forces. His watch covered ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria. He is currently co-chair of the UK advisory board for defence manufacturer Thales and is an advisory board member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). Lord Arbuthnot is also a former director at security and intelligence consultancy firm SC Strategy, where he worked for two years alongside co-directors Lord Carlile and Sir John Scarlett. Carlile is a prominent defender of MI5 who supported the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (nicknamed the Snoopers’ Charter) enabling the British state to access internet connection records without a warrant. He argued that Edward Snowden’s exposures of illegal mass state surveillance “amounted to a criminal act.’’ He oversaw the implementation of anti-terror legislation and reviewed national security procedures in Northern Ireland. Scarlett is former head of MI6 and chair of the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). He oversaw the production of a report arguing for the right of the secret services to “collect bulk communications data” and was responsible for compiling the “dodgy dossier” on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The activities of Lord Arbuthnot and his colleagues were the subject of thousands of WikiLeaks disclosures. There are almost 2,000 references in the WikiLeaks’ database to Thales and nearly 450 to RUSI. Lord Arbuthnot himself can be found in over 50 entries. As Assange’s legal team and UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer have argued, this “strong conflict of interest” requires Lady Arbuthnot to stand down from Assange’s case. Her husband’s entire political life has been dedicated to crushing the sort of transparency and accountability advocated by WikiLeaks.
When the CIA and other agencies in the United States government pushed for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) in 1981, it was crafted to exclude “covert agents” who resided in the U.S.
There was consideration by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of how the legislation might “chill or stifle public criticism of intelligence activities or public debate concerning intelligence policy.”
More than three decades later, the CIA is apparently unsatisfied with the protections the bill granted “covert agents. It has enlisted a select group of senators and representatives to help expand the universe of individuals who are protected, making members of the press who cover intelligence matters more vulnerable to prosecution.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, was involved in adding language to expand the IIPA to the Intelligence Authorization Act moving through Congress.
“Schiff is once again putting the interests of the intelligence agencies in concealing their misdeeds ahead of protecting the rights of ordinary Americans by criminalizing routine reporting by the press on national security issues and undermining congressional oversight in his Intelligence Authorization bill,” declared Daniel Schuman, who is the policy director for Demand Progress.
This is the most common form of interoperability. Company A makes a product and Company B makes a thing that works with that product, but doesn't talk to Company A about it. Company A doesn't know or care to know about Company B's add-on.
Think of a car's cigarette lighter: these started in the 1920s as aftermarket accessories that car owners could have installed at a garage; over time they became popular enough that they came standard in every car. Eventually, third-party companies began to manufacture DC power adapters that plugged into the lighter receptacle, drawing power from the car engine's alternator. This became widespread enough that it was eventually standardized as ANSI/SAE J563.
Standardization paved the way for a variety of innovative new products that could be made by third-party manufacturers who did not have to coordinate with (or seek permission from) automotive companies before bringing them to market. These are now ubiquitous, and you can find fishbowls full of USB chargers that fit your car-lighter receptacle at most gas stations for $0.50-$1.00. Some cars now come with standard USB ports (though for complicated reasons, these tend not to be very good chargers), but your auto manufacturer doesn't care if you buy one of those $0.50 chargers and use it with your phone. It's your car, it's your car-lighter, it's your business.
Last year AT&T defeated the DOJ's challenge to the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his original 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality and neutered FCC oversight to dominate smaller competitors and tilt the entire internet ecosystem in its favor.
While the DOJ lost its original case, it was quick to appeal late last year, highlighting how within weeks of the deal AT&T had jacked up prices on consumers and competitors like Dish Network, which says it was forced to pull HBO from its lineup because it could no longer afford the higher rates.
For a decade we've pointed out how broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused anti-competitively. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its streaming video service (DirecTV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.
For years, ISPs have slowly deployed these unnecessary limits, hoping consumers wouldn't notice they're the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water. But as higher-bandwidth services like 4K video streaming have arrived, consumers have started to notice the unnecessary limits in greater numbers. But, however tight caps may become with 4K Netflix, that's nothing compared to what's going to happen as companies like Google begin pushing game streaming services like Stadia, which eliminate local game hardware, move all processing power to the cloud, and then stream everything to the end user.
Early analysis suggests that at full 4K, users will burn through Comcast's monthly 1 terabyte usage cap in a matter of just three days. Many ISPs have far lower caps; AT&T for example imposes a 150 GB monthly cap on the majority of its DSL customers, who then have to pay $10 per each additional 50 GB of data consumed. It's fairly obvious that as game streaming expands, users are going to be looking at some significant sticker shock (which, from the ISP perspective, was the whole point).
As we've discussed previously, the past several years have seen the major music industry players paint an entirely new anti-piracy target on the backs of stream-ripping sites. These sites, which allow users to plug in the address for a YouTube video and get an audio rip outputted, are quite often used to generate audio files of copyrighted materials. This, however, is most certainly not their only use. In fact, there are many legitimate uses for these sites. I, myself, often use them to convert publicly available lectures and educational material put out by everything from universities to technology manufacturers so that I can listen to them while on the go. In this way, the music industry is once again taking a tool that can be but is not always used for copyright infringement and attempting to carpet bomb them all to hell.
