Purism launches their first Linux mini PC with Librem Mini powered by an Intel Core i7-8565U Whiskey Lake processor earlier this year, and now the company has unveiled an updated model with the same features, except that Librem Mini v2 mini PC features a slightly more powerful 10th generation Intel Core i7-10510U Comet Lake processor for the same $699 price tag.
How many times has it happen already when your older Intel i3 laptops need to be sold or exchanged. Most of the time you will get a terrible deal on e-commerce websites that will buy your old laptop in exchange for a price that is unacceptable to many. Just like you who is reading this we as well take care of our older laptops and if Windows 10 was not such a resource-heavy OS then there would have been no issue. Sadly, Windows 10 seems to be on a path of expansion and chances are that in a few updates, not even the current Intel i3 10th Gen processors will be able to handle it anymore.
But lament not for there is hope still and it is a Linux-based hope. If you haven’t heard of it then you’re not alone. Linux Lite is a lightweight OS made for older or very low specced systems. It is so lightweight that you just need a 1.5GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 20GB of storage. That’s it and you will have your old laptop up and running like it is new. One of the things that made Linux Lite seem like a viable replacement for Windows is the fact that there is a smooth transition between the UI of Linux Lite and of Windows.
HBO Max representatives did not respond to a request for comment on whether the service had enabled the VMP requirement under Widevine, which is what broke CBS All Access for Linux users in January of this year.
We never did hear anything more from HBO Max, but as reader etarts pointed out to us this week, someone eventually fixed the issue with Widevine. The service is once again handing out licenses to Linux subscribers whose browsers support Widevine encryption. The full, proprietary Google Chrome browser supports Widevine (which is a Google protocol) by default; it can also be enabled relatively easily on Chromium and on Mozilla Firefox.
It's worth noting that, although access is restored for Linux users now—and we're grateful to whoever finally did that—Linux PCs are still not on HBO Max's list of supported devices.
A Cloud Guru (ACG) in September released the "State of Cloud Learning" report which shows that cloud expertise, measured via certifications and hands-on proficiency, is growing in value for both companies and the individuals who work for them.
ACG analyzed cloud learning priorities among enterprise teams and individual learners. The report found widespread intent to accelerate cloud adoption and a surge in demand for Azure-related content.
More than 90 percent of IT leaders surveyed expect to expand their cloud services in the next one to three years. Despite this testament to the benefits of cloud adoption, enterprises may find a lack of qualified IT workers to fill those positions.
A related story focusing on ACG's corporate actions to help fill that growing gap in trained Linux technicians details the company's recent launch of its new flagship cloud training platform this summer. That platform addresses the shortage of tech workers needing Linux-based cloud training. It offers a comprehensive, hands-on solution through a cloud-based learning platform.
ACG's research for the report incorporated analysis of more than three million hours of its usage data and surveyed 26,000 cloud learners -- including IT leaders, engineers, and developers. It uncovers how the industry is thinking about the most popular cloud learning platforms, the barriers to growth in cloud expertise, and the future of cloud skills development.
Speaking at the Linux Foundation’s virtual Open-Source Summit Europe, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, Greg Kroah-Hartman, unveiled that Linux 5.10 will be the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release. The existing LTS kernel is Linux 5.4 which was released in November 2019 and receives updates until December 2025.
Going by the last two LTS kernel releases, it’s expected that Linux 5.10 will be tended to until December 2026. The first release candidate of Linux 5.10 was released this past weekend and with several more to come, we should expect the stable version sometime in December.
Given Intel's very fresh Tiger Lake platform, our latest benchmarking with the Core i7-1165G7 within the Dell XPS 9310 is seeing if running the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel means any performance or power changes for this latest-generation Intel mobile CPU with Xe/Gen12 graphics.
Linux 5.10 has many new features and improvements for this kernel that should debut as stable in December. When it comes to Tiger Lake specifically with Linux 5.10 there is the continued Gen12/Xe graphics work with the open-source Intel DRM driver as the main area seeing attention this cycle... In particular one item that came to mind and motivating this testing was the merging of Tiger Lake HOBL support. HOBL is short for "Hours of Battery Life" and thus curious what this means for the power consumption on Linux 5.10 relative to Linux 5.9.
Western Digital’s composable OpenFlex flash storage system now supports Kubernetes storage, courtesy of Linbit’s LINSTOR software.
OpenFlex is a physical chassis, containing SSDs or disk drives, which is addressed as an NVMe target device. It’s basically an NVMe-oF JBOD (Just a bunch of drives) and needs additional software to link it to containerised environments.
Manfred Berger, WD’s senior manager for business development, platforms, said in a statement: “With Linbit’s LINSTOR software added to our OpenFlex offering, the software-defined-storage solution combines the advantages of SDS systems, Linux OS features and composable hardware so that organisations have the confidence they need in their Kubernetes environments.”
The Embedded Linux Conference Europe took place online last week. While we definitely missed the experience of an in-person event, we strongly participated to this conference with no less than 7 talks on various topics showing Bootlin expertise in different fields: Linux kernel development in networking, multimedia and storage, but also build systems and tooling. We’re happy to be publishing now the slides and videos of our talks.
Quite a huge milestone for the in-development open source OpenXR runtime Monado, as Collabora have announced a fresh milestone in its life. Note: OpenXR is the open standard for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)—collectively known as XR.
Collabora sure are busy. Not only are some of their engineers working with Valve directly on things like the Steam Linux Runtime Container, along with Linux Kernel work, they're also developing Monado. As quick primer for those needing to be brought up to speed: "Monado is the first OpenXR runtime for GNU/Linux. Monado aims to jump-start development of an open source XR ecosystem and provide the fundamental building blocks for device vendors to target the GNU/Linux platform.".
Recently Collabora took part in an OpenXR webinar hosted by The Khronos Group, where they showed off recent work.
We talked about the state of X.org earlier this week, and the wider discussion was picked up by Adam Jackson, who works at Red Hat as the X.Org Server release manager, and has been heavily involved with X development for many years.
Since our previous update on Panfrost, the open source stack for Arm's Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, we've focused on taking our driver from its reverse-engineered origins on Midgard to a mature stack. We've overhauled both the Gallium driver and the backend compiler, and as a result, Mesa 20.3 -- scheduled for release at the end-of-the-month -- will feature some Bifrost support out-of-the-box.
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For those of you with GPUs like Mali T860, Panfrost's support for Midgard has improved as well. Though the Bifrost compiler is a separate code base, the improvements via GenXML benefit Midgard. Beyond that, over the summer we added support for Arm FrameBuffer Compression (AFBC) as a significant optimization for certain workloads.
Recent builds of Mesa will automatically compress framebuffer objects to save memory bandwidth, improve performance, and reduce power. Panfrost is even smart enough to compress textures as AFBC on the fly when it makes sense to do so, improving texturing performance for applications that do not support compressed texture formats like ETC directly. In the future, Panfrost will be able to compress the framebuffer itself en route to the display if paired with a compatible display controller, further reducing bandwidth on high resolution monitors. AFBC work was conducted on a Midgard GPU, but will be extended to Bifrost in the future.
The Midgard compiler also saw a flurry of activity, improving its scheduler to optimize for register pressure, supporting atomic operations and atomic counters, and fixing a long-tail of bugs.
Alyssa Rosenzweig reports on the progress of the Panfrost driver. "Since our previous update on Panfrost, the open source stack for Arm's Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, we've focused on taking our driver from its reverse-engineered origins on Midgard to a mature stack. We've overhauled both the Gallium driver and the backend compiler, and as a result, Mesa 20.3 -- scheduled for release at the end-of-the-month -- will feature some Bifrost support out-of-the-box."
With Mesa 20.3 that should be released as stable in December there is working Arm Bifrost graphics support for the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D while looking past that this Arm Mali driver is going to be focusing on better performance and desktop OpenGL 3.1 support.
The Mesa Gallium3D Panfrost code has been working on support for newer Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics support to complement the driver's Midgard support. There's also been continued Panfrost DRM kernel driver work too.
AMD mentioned Fine-Grain Clock Gating as one of the new features for the Radeon RX 6000 series with "Big Navi" but it will also be present with the next-gen Van Gogh APU too. The Linux driver patches for bringing up FGCG are under review.
Fine-Grain Clock Gating was mentioned as part of AMD's work on achieving a ~50% generational performance-per-Watt improvement. This complements the existing AMD Radeon support (and driver coverage) for medium grain clock gating, coarse grain clock gating, and other clock gating features for basically cutting down the GPU power usage to areas of the chip when not in use. With fine-grain clock gating it's sounding like the GPU will be much more aggressive in its handling to conserve every bit of power possible.
Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.
The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 450.80.02 released on September 30 from their "long lived" series or 455.38 released on October 30 from their "short lived" series. Confused?
It is no secret in today’s time and age where visual media and subject matter rule the roost when it comes to the field of content creation. It has been long since proved that audiences react far more and better to imagery and visual content rather than content that is presented in plain text. And in the realm of visual content itself, it is the language of motion pictures and videos that have reigned supreme over the rest. Therefore, it is only logical that today’s leading content creators and brands are increasingly focused on churning out top-notch video content with the help of leading applications like InVideo for their prominent advertising and brand messaging campaigns.
Thus, it becomes highly essential for these people to narrow in on the best crop of video editing softwares available out there. After all, visualizing and composing good video content is only half the job done. The other half lies in the successful presentation and effective editing of the said content. Only then will the final output have the potential to create the desired impact on its viewer that it is intended to in the first place. Keeping in mind the importance of this process, the following segment has been written to shed some light on the best free video editing softwares for Linux.
As you'd expect there is vim plugin to use vifm as a file picker and if you're the sort of the person who wants everything to be vim like this might possibly be the best vim file picker you can find, but I'll that descision up to you to decide.
When you need to search the Web from the terminal, S can be a helpful tool. It supports many search engines with a simple command.
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It’s worth noting that we used the same trick in the past to add similar search functionality not only to Peppermint Linux but also to the popular clipboard manager Clipman.
Although the approach was precisely the same, S-search comes with dozens of such URLs for many popular sites baked in and is accessible from the terminal. This combination renders it quite useful since it allows you to search for anything on a whim.
I released version 2.5 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter.
Learn the simple steps to install and setup the Prestashop e-commerce platform on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 LTS Linux server running on localhost or cloud hosting such as AWS, Google, DigitalCloud, etc.
PrestaShop is an open-source and free to use e-commerce platform that has been written in PHP and suitable to all size of business those want their products to be sold online. However, the appropriate developer and support are necessary.
This free e-commerce platform is available in two versions community and premium that is hosted and managed by the developers itself. The hosting is provided IONOS. Well, for those who want to host the Prestashop own their own cloud hosting platforms, and have technical knowledge; the community edition is good to go. Whereas, all functions and modules which are not free, you have to purchase them for a fee. Also, the pre-build modules help a lot to extend the functions of Prestashop as required. Therefore, you don’t have to spend any money on features that you don’t need in the end.
October 2020 was a collosal month here at Enable Sysadmin. We smashed every record previously set with some very impressive numbers. We published 36 articles from 22 different authors, earning north of 429k pageviews and 312k unique visitors.
We covered a vast array of technologies and interest areas; from command line tips and tricks, YAML, systemctl, and ssh, to Linux/Windows collaborations and sysadmin career advice. We are confident that you will find something of interest to you.
If you are interested in a chance to be featured in next months top 10, feel free to reach out to the team and submit a draft of your own or submit a proposal to enable-sysadmin@redhat.com.
In our previous article, we got acquainted with Amazon ECS service theoretically. In this article, we will walk you through steps to create a new ECS cluster.
Today we are looking at how to install Mixpad on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this video, I will briefly go over some of the settings that I have in my Fish configuration file (config.fish). I will also discuss some cool functions that you can add to your config. And everything I do here is done without using oh-my-fish.
In October of this year, VMware announced the ability to run ESXi on 64-bit Arm processors. This was further enabled through VMware’s Project Monterey and Arm’s Project Cassini. Arm-based devices include SmartNICs and Raspberry Pi devices. Now through a VMware Fling (a VMware program sponsored through the Office of the CTO designed to offer early-stage software to the VMware community) users can leverage ESXi on a Raspberry Pi. Here, we give the user an easy step by step guide on how to get started.
CouchDB is a web-based non relational database managemnet tool. In this post, we will see how to install CouchDB on various Linux.
This is the fourth chapter of RHCE Ansible EX 294 exam preparation series and you'll learn about variables, facts and registers in this chapter. It will be available to non-members after a week.
Don't fear the command line. Embrace it with these 10 starter commands.
We all have our own preferences when it comes to choosing a media player for our systems. Some prefer the VLC Media player, which is an open source and cross-platform software that acts as a media client for playing a vast majority of media file formats. Then there is the popular Windows Media Player that is a multimedia player owned by the Microsoft Corporation, that has its own unique features.
If you are new to Linux, you might find yourself looking for an alternative to the Windows Media Player that you can use on your Debian. Unfortunately, there is hardly any alternative to the Windows Media player that gives you the comfort of that same look and feel. No doubt there are extremely efficient media players available for Debian like VLC, Amarok, Smplayer and XBMC Media Center. However, there is one workaround that might help you have a media player that sets well on Debian and gives you the visual experience of the Windows Media Player. The solution is to make use of the Skins feature of the VLC Media Player. These skins on VLC help you in theming it according to your preference.
There can be any number of reasons like you want to access a server or run a command from a script that runs automatically using crontab etc or you are just lazy. Whatever the case, one thing is for sure that THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST UNSAFE WAYS TO ACCESS SERVERS as you are giving away the username & password to anyone having access to the system as the commands are stored in history & one can also see the passwords in a script.
There are other ways to SSH servers securely without having to enter the username & password. For that we can use SSH keys, public/private ssh keys allow a server to authenticate the server credentials with the use of certificates & we are not required to enter any usernames or passwords (though we can use pass-phrase also for certificates). You can refer to the article below to setup PASSWORDLESS SSH AUTHENTICATION.
But even if you need to use a one-liner command to use ssh command with the password, then read the article ahead. We will discuss two ways how to use ssh command with a password in a single line.
Let’s encrypt is non-profit, free, and open certificate authority, or CA that is run by Internet Security Research Group or ISRG. Let’s Encrypt provides a TLS certificate & provide certificate for 90 days, which can then be renewed at any point during these 90 days without any charge what-so-ever.
The main aim of Let’s Encrypt is to make the internet secure by making SSL certificates accessible to all with ease. In this tutorial, we will learn to create a free SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt in Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE is a well-known desktop environment for Unix-like systems designed for users who wants to have a nice desktop environment for their machines, It is one of the most used desktop interfaces out there.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
We are all get used to beautiful email clients. Smartphones, computers and tablets are plenty of open source email management software to make life really easy and communicate with high value tools.
But sometimes, when some nerds (like me) love working with terminal, an email client inside your terminal ca save looking continuously on another screen to check messages arrived.
One of most known solution to this need is Mutt. This is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems.
The Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a command-line tool to interact with your Android device from your computer. ADB commands enable you to perform a wide range of tasks, including some that would be difficult or even impossible to achieve without ADB. In this article we cover nine essential ADB commands that every Android user should know.
Bolt is a free, open-source, lightweight and simple content management system based on PHP. It is designed for ease of use and helps you to create powerful and dynamic content websites easily. It is built on Silex microframework and is a great alternative for those looking for a modern PHP system. It is created using modern open-source libraries and is best suited to build sites in HTML5 with modern markup.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bolt CMS with Nginx and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04.
Cacti is a free, open-source and powerful web-based network monitoring and graphing tool. It is used to monitor system performance, CPU load and network bandwidth utilization in a graph format. It allows you to poll services at predetermined intervals and graph the resulting data. It is a complete frontend to RRDTool, written in PHP and uses MySQL database to stores all of the necessary information.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to install Cacti monitoring tool on CentOS 8.
There are different techniques that we can use to handle errors in bash/shell scripting. Let us see each of these techniques one by one.
The easiest way to prevent errors is to first to run your command in the terminal. And, if the command in the terminal runs as expected, then you should add it to your script. Let’s look at the different ways you can debug and handle errors in Bash.
Curious how to containerize your Linux applications? Learn by example, and understand the challenges of various application types and how to overcome them.
Understand how the Kubernetes scheduler discovers new pods and assigns them to nodes.
Set up a local development environment or just try out the container orchestration platform with these tools.
We haven't heard much of traditional Linux gaming on any ARM-powered Qualcomm notebooks as it would rely on the likes of Hangover for running Windows x86_64 games on ARM, but the Turnip Vulkan driver within Mesa has a necessary feature for now being able to run DXVK with the Direct3D 10_1 (v10.1) feature level.
Long-standing Mesa contributor Connor Abbott has added support for geometry streams to the Turnip open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware. Turnip remains the unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm as Freedreno is to OpenGL. The geometry streams support relies as well on some recently reverse engineered registers with the Adreno GPU.
Love ASUS hardware and their ASUS ROG tech? Well it seems Linux Kernel 5.11 will be pulling in some better support for their keyboards.
Developer Luke Jones messaged us about their work a while ago, which we talked a little about here. It's all unofficial, and done by community developers since ASUS won't do it themselves. Jones mentioned they now have a newer set of projects up on GitLab now to cover most of it, and they're slowly getting bits upstreamed into Linux properly.
RageSquid and No More Robots recently gave the extreme sports game Descenders quite a big free content upgrade, which includes plenty of fancy new extras.
Firstly, they worked with some community modders to pull in some of the most popular community content as official like the Aloda Lakes, Descenders Island, The Sanctuary, MegaPark, Kushmuck4x, Idarkopf tracks. Additionally, they added in BikeOut 4 and New Lexico which are two new original maps.
I'm a big fan of the BikeOut levels, as they're totally different to what Descenders was originally made for and they're pretty amusing as you get bashed around.
There's another interesting talk coming up this month that you might want to check out, with open source consulting firm Collabora chatting about their work with Valve.
If you missed our previous articles on it, the Linux Application Summit 2020 will be taking place between November 12 - 14 and it will be entirely online this year for obvious reasons (COVID19). Registration is free, so anyone can watch the talks live (but you do need to register for it).
Feel the need to run some classic PlayStation 2 games? It's set to get a lot easier, as the RetroArch team have reported on their work with PCSX2. They've had a bounty open to pay someone to do it since 2018, with it currently sat at $915. The good news is that progress appears to be good!
The RetroArch team noted it's getting "quite usable" and it shouldn't be too much longer until it gets a first release with support for libretro and RetroArch so you can have another emulator under one roof. User aliaspider has been doing a lot of the work, which you can follow the conversation of on GitHub. It currently only supports 64bit and OpenGL / Direct3D 11 with OpenGL having more features supported. It seems Android and macOS are not currently planned for the PCSX2 emulator core.
After a new VR game that's supported on Linux? There's not a lot to pick from but you can now add Groove Gunner to your collection.
Groove Gunner’s unique take on the VR Rhythm genre challenges players with a mix of shooting and blocking. A true test of skill as you move, shoot and block to the beat. BitCutter Studios reached out to us before about it, and they did some early testing with members of our community which was really great to see. While it's in Early Access, it shouldn't be for long. They're estimating only a couple of months to get it finished and polished up enough for a full release.
The upcoming KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment is under development. And the feature updates and other changes are getting visible, slowly. Here are the top upcoming features and release date.
The KDE Plasma team currently is busy working on the bug fix releases for the last major KDE Plasma 5.20 which was an outstanding release with many new features. And it seems the next KDE Plasma 5.21 also going to be another important release.
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The current KDE Plasma 5.20 is going via the bug fix phase at the moment. The last bugfix release of current KDE Plasma 5.20.9 is expected around mid-January 2021. This would make way for the KDE Plasma 5.21 release.
These are the features that are known at the moment for KDE Plasma 5.21. I will keep this post updated as more features are getting visible.
Plasma System Monitor is a brand new UI for monitoring system resources. It is built on top of Kirigami and a new system statistics service called "KSystemStats" that was debuted in Plasma 5.19. It shares a lot of code with the new system monitor applets that were also introduced in Plasma 5.19. It is meant to be a successor to KSysGuard.
A brand new system monitoring app is in development for the KDE Plasma desktop — and it looks pretty decent already.
It’s called ‘Plasma System Monitor’ and it has been built using the modern and responsive Kirigami interface framework.
Not that creating an entirely new hub for stats fans to fixate on was the initial plan, here.
Arjen Hiemstra is leading development on the new tool but says his original idea was to “create a new set of system monitor widgets for Plasma desktop”. But when he noticed that the Plasma desktop’s incumbent activity monitor was also in need of a refresh he changed tack.
New system monitor widgets did ship in Plasma 5.19 and it is the plumping laid down to power that that has helped pave the way for this tool.
I thought this was going to be the last blog post about Tracker 3.0, but it got rather long and I decided to turn this appraisal of the project and its design into a post of its own. So, get ready for some praise and some criticism!
To criticise the design and implementation of a software project we first need to understand the project requirements. What it is trying to do? I’ve written some goals and non-goals for the Tracker search engine, and proposed them for inclusion in the README. Now I’m going to compare the goals with the reality. I am of course a biased observer, and I welcome you to make your own assessment, but let’s dive in!
Vivaldi is a new web browser based on Chromium that is built by an Opera founder. It’s aimed mostly at power users, but it can be used by anyone.
Slimjet is built on top of the Chromium open-source project on which Google Chrome is also based. It enjoys the same speed and reliablity provided by the underlying blink engine as Google Chrome. However, many additional features and options have been added in Slimjet to make it more powerful, intelligent and customizable than Chrome. In addition to that, Slimjet DOES NOT send any usage statistics back to Google’s server like Google Chrome, which is a growing concern for many Chrome users due to the ubiquitous presence and reach of the advertising empire.
Work continues on OMLx 4.2. It is anticipated that Beta release should be happening in the next week or two.
Based on Slackware64-current. Keeping up with wholesale library changes (especially python) and kernels, etc... (Will there ever be a Slackware 15?) Edited some utilities to adjust to new libs. Tighten up the UI/mime/icons.
Both these desktop releases use the GNOME desktop as their default - and yet both handle it so differently. Here's my thoughts on the distinct direction and target userbase of each. This isn't a full review or deep dive of Ubuntu 20.10 or Fedora 33, merely my observations as I play around with the two.
Fedora 33 was released recently, and I decided to take a look at it and give it a review. Unfortunately, I came away less than impressed and in this review I talk about some of the things that I felt could've been better.
promoted to other streams the Fedora CoreOS and QA teams have organized a test day on Friday, November 06, 2020 (results accepted through Thursday, November 12). Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
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The wiki page for the test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results.
Join the thousands of developers that have been using the all-new, hot releases of data sets and notebooks on the IBM€® Data Asset eXchange (DAX) this fall! DAX is an online center for engineers, researchers, and data scientists to find open and licensed data sets and to help them analyze these data sets using Jupyter Notebooks and other technologies. Since its beginning in 2019, the Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) group has been continuously adding new content.
In this 33rd edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in October 2020.
DevNation Tech Talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions plus code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Argo CD and Tekton from Siamak Sadeghianfar and Burr Sutter.
Tekton Pipelines is an open source project that provides a Kubernetes-native, lightweight, easy-to-manage serverless CI/CD framework. Tekton is built for Kubernetes and runs delivery pipelines in pods to scale on-demand, allowing teams to fully control their pipelines and dependencies. Argo CD is a declarative GitOps Operator that makes continuous delivery possible by using Git as a source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications.
In this session, you will learn how to combine the power of Tekton Pipelines with Argo CD for a declarative approach to CI/CD based on GitOps principles.
FOSDEM creates 600+ videos on a yearly basis. There is no way I am going to manually upload 600+ videos through your webinterface, so we use the API you provide, using a script written by Stefano Rivera. This script grabs video filenames and metadata from a YAML file, and then uses your APIs to upload said videos with said metadata. It works quite well. I run it from cron, and it uploads files until the quota is exhausted, then waits until the next time the cron job runs. It runs so well, that the first time we used it, we could upload 50+ videos on a daily basis, and so the uploads were done as soon as all the videos were created, which was a few months after the event. Cool!
The second time we used the script, it did not work at all. We asked one of our key note speakers who happened to be some hotshot at your company, to help us out. He contacted the YouTube people, and whatever had been broken was quickly fixed, so yay, uploads worked again.
I found out later that this is actually a normal thing if you don't use your API quota for 90 days or more. Because it's happened to us every bloody year.
For the 2020 event, rather than going through back channels (which happened to be unavailable this edition), I tried to use your normal ways of unblocking the API project. This involves creating a screencast of a bloody command line script and describing various things that don't apply to FOSDEM and ghaah shoot me now so meh, I created a new API project instead, and had the uploads go through that. Doing so gives me a limited quota that only allows about 5 or 6 videos per day, but that's fine, it gives people subscribed to our channel the time to actually watch all the videos while they're being uploaded, rather than being presented with a boatload of videos that they can never watch in a day. Also it doesn't overload subscribers, so yay.
I have been following the evolution of IPv6 ever since the KAME project produced the first IPv6 implementation. I have also been keeping track of the IPv4 address depletion.
Around the time the IPv6 Day was organized in 2011, I started investigating the situation of IPv6 support at local ISPs.
Well, never mind all those rumors about Finland being some high-tech mecca. Back then, no ISP went beyond testing their routers for IPv6 compatibility and producing white papers on what their limited test deployments accomplished.
Not that it matters much, in practice. Most IPv6 documentation out there, including Debian's own, still focuses on configuring transitional mechanisms, especially how to connect to a public IPv6 tunnel broker.
Relocating to a new flat and rethinking my home network to match gave me an opportunity to revisit the topic. Much to my delight, my current ISP offers native IPv6.
This prompted me to go back and read up on IPv6 one more time. One important detail:
Ever since Linus decided to flip the network interface enumeration order in the Linux kernel, I had been relying on udev's persistent network interface rules to maintain some semblance of consistency in the NIC naming scheme of my hosts. It has never been a totally satisfactory method, since it required manually editing the file to list the MAC addresses of all Ethernet cards and WiFi dongles likely to appear on that host to consistently use an easy-to-remember name that I could adopt for ifupdown configuration files.
Enter predictable interface names. What started as a Linux kernel module project at Dell was eventually re-implemented in systemd. However, clear documentation on the naming scheme had been difficult to find and udev's persistent network interface rules gave me what I needed, so I postponed the transition for years. Relocating to a new flat and rethinking my home network to match gave me an opportunity to revisit the topic.
A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet.
This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP.
I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts.
Prefer installing Chromium web browser via deb over the snap package? Linux Mint 20 now includes the browser (Chromium 86 so far) in its own repository for both Ubuntu based and LMDE editions.
Since Ubuntu 20.04, chromium browser in the main repository is a dummy package. It’s redirected to the SNAP (containerized software package) when you trying to install it.
Linux Mint is a very popular Linux desktop distribution. I use the latest version, Mint 20, on my production desktops. That's partly because, while it's based on Debian Linux and Ubuntu, it takes its own path. The best example of that is Mint's excellent homebrew desktop interface, Cinnamon. Now, Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google's open-source Chromium web browser.
The big deal here is that Canonical said in October 2019 that Chromium, the open-source browser which shares code with Google Chrome, would transition to be packaged solely as a snap, meaning a package designed for the Snap Store, managed by Canonical.
The company said at the time that "maintaining a single release of Chromium is a significant time investment for the Ubuntu Desktop," especially as Google rolls out a new version every six weeks, with security releases in between.
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Google does offer its Chrome browser as a .deb package, but Chrome is not open source, making Chromium a more attractive proposition for Linux users.
The new Mint-built Chromium shows that the team is serious about enabling its users to manage without the Snap store, though as a user commented, the problem could recur with other packages. "Can I very politely bring up the other SNAP cornering? FWUPD requires SNAP," said a user, referring to an open-source tool for managing firmware updates.
The notion of building applications into containerised packages is not going away. "The effort that is going into having application developers be able to target a single runtime or that works across distributions, I think is absolutely fantastic, and it's something that's been missing for many many years on Linux systems," said Gnome Foundation executive director Neil McGovern, speaking to The Register recently, though he expressed similar misgivings to those of Lefebvre, saying: "I do have a concern that the Snap Store is entirely gated by Canonical."
Linux Mint is a great Ubuntu-based operating system, although there have been concerns about the project's financing and the morale of the developers. Over time, the small development team made some wise decisions, such as killing the KDE variant of the operating system. I think they should kill the Mate and Xfce versions and focus strictly on Cinnamon, but I digress.
Sadly, the team seems ready to make another poor decision, foolishly wasting its limited resources on an IPTV player for some reason. Called "Hypnotix," no one was asking for such a thing from the Mint Team, and it isn't clear why they are bothering. While only a "prototype" (aka Alpha) application for now, the developers are considering making it a part of Linux Mint. But why?
The team behind the Vanilla Framework has a background in development, UX and Visual Design. We all care about accessibility, but none of us is an accessibility expert.
We were interested in evaluating how well the framework complies with accessibility standards. We decided to start with an internal audit, fix any issues we find, then look for a third-party service to evaluate the framework from the perspective of real-world users with disabilities
If you are in the market for a affordable mini PC you may be interested to know that the previously unveiled Orange Pi Zero 2 mini PC is now available to purchase priced from just $16. The Orange Pi Zero2 mini PC supports both android 10 or Linux such as Ubuntu, or Debian operating systems, and is powered by an Allwinner H6 processor supported by up to 1GB DDR3 and offers HDMI 2.0 video output, USB 3.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet, and WiFi connectivity.
“The Orange Pi Zero 2 mini PC is equipped with 26-pin and 13-pin headers with I2C, SPI, UART, USB host, and audio connections. You can also plug an IR receiver into the 13-pin header if you want to use an infrared remote control.”
Last year the Raspberry Pi, around 40 times as powerful as the original Pi, joined the line. The goal is for it to lead to use that emulates a legacy PC.
With the global health crisis and people finding themselves stuck at home for school and/or work, there has been an uptick in use for the Raspberry 4 this year.
Now that computers are being pushed back into the home, there may not be as much room for them, leading to a need for something that takes up less real estate. Tablets may do all this for you, but certain education curriculum and work situations need more than a tablet.
The kit looks like the way to go. It has a retail of $100 (though I can’t find anyone selling it at this time) which comes with an official power supply, mouse, HDMI cable and perhaps, most importantly, a beautiful manual that is loaded with pages of all kinds of informative educational excitement. This is essentially an educational tool that comes with a real manual like the days of old. For me, the manual is key. Thumbing through the pages documentation, running my fingers down the inner spine of the book encourage it to stay open and explore all that it has to offer. There is something about that smell of a freshly bound book that makes an experience real and memorable (I realize, I am dreaming here).
The build quality looks more than adequate. I would absolutely gauge my expectations around the $100 mark and wouldn’t try to compare this with a modern Dell Latitude in fit, function and performance. That would be completely ridiculous. Based on other reviews, they keyboard looks to be just 5% from perfect which is more than adequate for me and especially more than adequate as an educational tool.
All the connections are on the back, like in good all-in-one Commodore 64 fashion and is nicely shrouded to protect against accidental shorting of pins or parts on the board. It doesn’t protect against everything but would protect against most accidental clumsiness.
Perhaps most important of all, this is spearhead into he inspiration of future generations to develop and create solutions. It is that first computer you can feel good about giving a child that he or she can take the time to learn and create. This is the beginning of something that is far better than having them plunk away on a phone or tablet being entertained like mindless automatons. This can be used to just just consume but to create and give to the world in which we live.
ComfilePi has updated its industrial, IP65-protected “ComfilePi” panel PCs with a Raspberry Pi CM3+ in a variety of 7, 10.1-, 10.2, and 15-inch configurations with new features like eMMC and an exposed heatsink.
Last week, ComfilePi announced a ComfilePi CPi-BV070WR variation on its similarly 7-inch ComfilePi CPi-A070WR panel PC that advances from a Raspberry Pi CM3+ Compute Module 3 (CM3) to a Raspberry Pi CM3+. The CPi-BV070WR also adds eMMC storage options and a larger, externally exposed heatsink.
Development of autonomous machines is an exploding field, as machine learning spreads from the data center and cloud, to edge end-point devices that are becoming far more capable and useful with machine vision and inferencing technologies. Robotics alone has revolutionized manufacturing, warehousing and many other industries. As such, NVIDIA has kept a keen focus on edge AI and ML, offering its Jetson and Jetson Nano small form factor computing solutions that take advantage of the company’s GPU acceleration platforms combined with its CUDA programming model that’s ubiquitous in data center AI applications as well. Historically, NVIDIA’s Jetson developer kit solutions have ranged in price, from the company’s more powerful Jetson Xavier NX platform at $399, to its lower cost Jetson Nano kit at $99. However, more recently, the company decided to lower the barrier to entry even further with the announcement of its Jetson Nano 2GB dev kit.
While you may or may not have frozen ponds where you live, if you have an available smooth surface you can still enjoy a game of floor hockey with this brilliantly illuminated puck.
Yuksel Temiz’s 3D-printed device features a 12-LED ring inside, which shines brightly through the top of its translucent body and reacts to acceleration. Control is via an Arduino Nano along with an MPU-6050 IMU for sensing.
The Codasip Bk5 processor is based on the RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA). Bk5 features a single 5-stage in-order execution processor pipeline, optional caches, dynamic branch prediction, JTAG and RISC-V debug, and industry standard bus interfaces (AMBA). It also includes support for privilege-mode standard extension, memory protection unit and TCM, allowing it to easily run a variety of free and commercial RTOSs. The Bk5-64 variant with 64-bit address space and data support is ideal for modern data-intensive applications like storage, networking, AI, and IoT. Bk5 is fully configurable and extensible in compliance with the RISC-V standard.
Human Anatomy is a basic element for medical education curriculum. It's part of the basic sciences that every med student should study, such as human physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, histology, pathology, pharmacology and of course anatomy.
Anatomy (ana- = "up", tom = "to cut") is a study of body structure, it focuses on studying body structures, describe forms, level, relations and positions. There are 78 organs in the human body, five are considered vital for survivals which are: heart, brain, kidneys, liver and lungs.
Organs are classified into systems which are integumentary, skeletal, muscular, nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, urinary and reproductive systems.
I am interested in Anatomy even before I get into med school, often take out anatomy atlases from my father's library just to spend hours looking into them as a kid.
More than 90% of all smartphones around the world are powered by android, which comes with the Google Play store by default for downloading various apps and programs.
While Google Play is great and all, it is still a proprietary software, and requires a Google account with an active login to use it. Moreover, all the apps you download are linked to your Google account, beside the searches you do. Creating many privacy concerns for many folks out there.
Luckily, one does not need to use the Google Play program in order to download the games and apps he/she needs. There are many unofficial Google Play “clients” out there which allow users to download the apps they want without having to use Google Play or own a Google account.
One of the best open source Google Play alternatives out there is AuroraStore, which we’ll review today to take a closer look.
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a standard HTTP response header for sites to tell the client that for a specified period of time into the future, that host is not to be accessed with plain HTTP but only using HTTPS. Documented in RFC 6797 from 2012.
The idea is of course to reduce the risk for man-in-the-middle attacks when the server resources might be accessible via both HTTP and HTTPS, perhaps due to legacy or just as an upgrade path. Every access to the HTTP version is then a risk that you get back tampered content.
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Possibly, this feature is more useful and appreciated by applications that use libcurl for HTTP(S) transfers. With libcurl the application can set a file name to use for loading and saving the cache but it also gets some added options for more flexibility and powers. Here’s a quick overview:
CURLOPT_HSTS – lets you set a file name to read/write the HSTS cache from/to.
CURLOPT_HSTS_CTRL – enable HSTS functionality for this transfer
CURLOPT_HSTSREADFUNCTION – this callback gets called by libcurl when it is about to start a transfer and lets the application preload HSTS entries – as if they had been read over the wire and been added to the cache.
CURLOPT_HSTSWRITEFUNCTION – this callback gets called repeatedly when libcurl flushes its in-memory cache and allows the application to save the cache somewhere and similar things.
After over twenty years, Mozilla is still going strong. But over that amount of time, there’s bound to be changes in responsibilities. This brings unique challenges with it to test maintenance when original creators leave and knowledge of the purposes, and inner workings of a test possibly disappears. This is especially true when it comes to performance testing.
Our first performance testing framework is Talos, which was built in 2007. It’s a fantastic tool that is still used today for performance testing very specific aspects of Firefox. We currently have 45 different performance tests in Talos, and all of those together produce as many as 462 metrics. Having said that, maintaining the tests themselves is a challenge because some of the people who originally built them are no longer around. In these tests, the last person who touched the code, and who is still around, usually becomes the maintainer of these tests. But with a lack of documentation on the tests themselves, this becomes a difficult task when you consider the possibility of a modification causing a change in what is being measured, and moving away from its original purpose.
Over time, we’ve built another performance testing framework called Raptor which is primarily used for page load testing (e.g. measuring first paint, and first contentful paint). This framework is much simpler to maintain and keep up with its purpose but the settings used for the tests change often enough that it becomes easy to forget how we set up the test, or what pages are being tested exactly. We have a couple other frameworks too, with the newest one (which is still in development) being MozPerftest – there might be a blog post on this in the future. With this many frameworks and tests, it’s easy to see how test maintenance over the long term can turn into a bit of a mess when it’s left unchecked.
Here’s another batch of presentations and workshops from the recent openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020! You can see them in the YouTube playlist, and here are the individual videos...
A Dutch translation of the Public Money? Public Code! campaign video is in the works and close to being released. The video was initially released in English and has been translated in many languages already: German, French, Italian, Polish and Russian. And there is an even greater number of subtitles available. Getting a voice-over translation for the video was one of this year’s goals for the Netherlands local group, to help us advocate for this cause. Getting a voice-over translation can be much more involving than a textual translation, so that why I want to explain how we did it. And by showing others the way, hopefully there will be more audio translations in the future.
Getting quality
What makes a good voice over translation? It should be clearly spoken, be comfortable to listen too, be a correct translation, have a timing that matches the sound effects and visuals, has a varying tone that matches the message, and keep a rhythm to it to keep the attention. As you can tell, there are many factors that have to be balanced, requiring an iterative process. A good translation has to be adjusted if it doesn’t work for the required timing, and the best way to check the timing is by rendering the complete video with sounds effects. And so one has to be able to adjust parameters on the fly. Especially because arranging a voice actor and recording setup can be difficult and costly. You should be able to record it in about 5 to 10 takes. So you need a good preparation and the flexibility to make adjustments.
It has been awhile since I've posted any updates regarding Qt Quick 3D, but not because there has been no progress. In fact quite the opposite: my team and I have been so busy getting Qt Quick 3D ready for 6.0 we haven't had time to talk about all the cool new features we have added. So today I would like to talk about some of the things we have done so far.
While Qt 6.0 is aiming to ship in December there are many open bugs against the Qt code-base. Given the increasing number of P1 priority bug reports that are the highest besides the "P0" build breakage bug reports, developers are discussing what to do with these bugs and the merits of their current priority classifications.
Jason McDonald began a discussion today over the long-lived P1 issues. He notes that Qt currently has 1,175 open P1 issues in their bug tracker. Of those 1,175 bugs, about half of them at 583 have been open for more than one year and some 342 bugs were opened two years ago. 175 of those bugs are more than three years ago. So for being "P1" priority issues, Qt sure has many open bugs lingering around for extended periods of time. Thus he questions if a P1 issue is really a priority if it stays open for more than one year.
Objective-C is a general purpose programming language which is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods.
It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime. Objective-C can incorporate blocks of C code (as well as C++), making it very versatile for application development.
Objective-C is the primary programming language used when writing software for OS X and iOS.
The Linux x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels have taken shape this year for different feature/performance levels based on a CPU's capabilities. Both LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 are ready to go in offering the new x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4 targets.
These x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels have been about coming up with a few "classes" of Intel/AMD CPU processor support rather than continuing to rely on just the x86_64 baseline or targeting a specific CPU family for optimizations. These new levels make it easier to raise the base requirements around Linux x86-64 whether it be for a Linux distribution or a particular software application where the developer/ISV may be wanting to compile with greater instruction set extensions enabled in catering to more recent Intel/AMD CPUs. Having this set of four versions/levels also reduces the number of possible combinations if wanting to enable Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) or the like without resorting to every possible Intel/AMD CPU family. And we'll see what else comes of this and the effort around some distributions looking to raise the Linux x86_64 CPU requirements.
Flutter is a popular open source toolkit for building cross-platform apps. In "Create a mobile app with Flutter," I demonstrated how to install Flutter on Linux and create your first app. In this article, I'll show you how to add a list of items in your app, with each item opening a new screen.
The web has a long and rich history dating back to the nineties at CERN. Back then Tim Berners-Lee laid the foundation of HTML that is still around today. There have been attempts to replace it with varying success but none have been successful, for good reason. HTML and the later invention of CSS are a remarkably powerful set of tools to build all kinds of experiences on the web. People are still trying to replace HTML, which brings us to the topic of this post: Flutter Web.
Flutter Web is part of Google’s Flutter framework for building cross platform UI. Hailed by many developers as the best thing since sliced bread, my opinion of it lacks the rose coloured glasses. I haven’t looked at Flutter for other platforms than web so I cannot comment on it other than that the general principle of Flutter is a terrible idea. Flutter works by throwing away the native UI toolkits provided by the platform and rendering everything from scratch using OpenGL et al. This translates extremely poorly to the web platform in particular. It’s worth noting that Flutter for Web is currently in beta and the problems I am about to detail could be addressed. However, I believe these issues are fundamental to Flutter’s design choices so I feel confident in my criticism.
PyCharm is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Over the last decade, PyCharm has grown alongside Python, carefully following changes in the language and adjusting to the feedback of Python developers. This whole time, the PyCharm team has spared no effort to make PyCharm more enjoyable and productive for its users to work with.
Looking back, we can clearly see that PyCharm is not just a purely commercial product – it’s also the result of community-driven development. Our users have contributed immensely to making PyCharm better through all these years.
We are proud of the work made up to these days, and prepared PyCharm birthday page with a special ‘thank you’ message to our users, as well as a timeline with important milestiones, and a challenge.
The term slicing in programming usually refers to obtaining a substring, sub-tuple, or sublist from a string, tuple, or list respectively.
Python offers an array of straightforward ways to slice not only these three but any iterable. An iterable is, as the name suggests, any object that can be iterated over.
In this article, we'll go over everything you need to know about Slicing Tuples in Python.
Speech Recognition means that the program will capture the words produced by a person and converts them into written words. It can be handy to generate subtitles, transcript a meeting discussion, and many other use cases.
Converting speech to text is quite a complex machine learning problem where an algorithm needs to receive every sound produced by a person and identify the corresponding written letters. Plus, depending on the language used, different sounds might correspond to other characters. As a result, speech recognition is too complex to be solved using a traditional programming approach.
The business world uses Microsoft Office. Their spreadsheet software solution, Microsoft Excel, is especially popular. Excel is used to store tabular data, create reports, graph trends, and much more.
The real world is full of systems, like airports and highways, that frequently experience congestion and delay. When these systems are not optimized, their inefficiency can lead to countless unhappy customers and hours of wasted time. In this course, you’ll learn how to use Python’s simpy framework to create virtual simulations that will help you solve problems like these.
The platform module provides an API to get information about the underlying system/platform where our code runs. Information such as OS name, Python Version, Architecture, Hardware information, etc. is exposed via platform module functions. This module does not require installation since it is part of the default libraries that comes with python installation.
Recent research suggests that most languages that have ever existed are no longer spoken. Dozens of these dead languages are also considered to be lost, or “undeciphered” — that is, we don’t know enough about their grammar, vocabulary, or syntax to be able to actually understand their texts.
The researchers developed a decipherment algorithm, which “can handle the vast space of possible transformations and the scarcity of a guiding signal in the input.” The system relies on established linguistic principles, such as the patterns in which languages typically evolve.
A 2019 paper describes the model and reports successful results deciphering the languages of Ugaritic, an extinct dialect of the Amorite language, and Linear B, a syllabic language related to ancient Greek.
We have little room for error if we are going to prevent thousands of people from getting sick and dozens from dying every day.
President Donald Trump suggested during a campaign rally on Sunday he may fire infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci from his position on the White House coronavirus task force, and possibly from his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dan Kohn, leader of the Linux Foundation's Public Health (LFPH) initiative and former executive director at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has died of complications while trying to fight off colon cancer.
Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin wrote that Kohn helped establish the Linux Foundation and oversaw the fastest growing open source community in history, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
In 1994 he conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the internet after building the first web shopping cart.
Dan Kohn, leader of the Linux Foundation’s Public Health (LFPH) initiative and former executive director at CNCF, died of complications from colon cancer in New York City.
He helped create the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative as an industry-wide response to the security vulnerabilities demonstrated by Heartbleed.
This weekend, we lost a titan of the open source community with the passing of Dan Kohn. CNCF, the foundation Dan helped build as its Executive Director, will always be home to Dan’s legacy as a pioneer and innovator in the world of technology. As a community, we remain humbled and grateful to the tireless effort Dan gave to this foundation, his colleagues, and his friends. His work in creating an inclusive foundation that was welcoming and safe was momentous and beneficial to all. The strong and diverse leadership we experience today stems from Dan’s determination. Dan was unwavering in his passion for and belief in open source. His presence will be severely missed, but never forgotten by those who knew his gentle nature and felt his supportive touch. Our thoughts and prayers remain with the Kohn family, who so gracefully shared Dan’s light with us for so many years. While it’s almost impossible to imagine CNCF without Dan, we know there would never be a CNCF without him, either, and for that, we are truly thankful. Thank you, Dan.
Last Friday (Oct 23, 2020), a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown notice by the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) has effectively shut down development of youtube-dl, a tool to access content on video streaming platforms like Youtube.
There seems to be a fundamental disagreement between the right holders and the community if this tool is legal or illegal. We received a number of questions on social media how we would handle such a takedown request.
To answer this question, but also to assess potential risks and consequences for sustainability of Codeberg e.V. and Codeberg.org, and to outline viable options to go forward for all affected parties, we performed research and analysis of relevant rules and constraints. This post outlines our position and understanding of the issue. As usual, this is the result of careful research but nothing should be construed as legal advise. Our understanding, interpretation, and position may or may not change with incoming information.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (blueman and wordpress), Fedora (fastd, kernel, and samba), Gentoo (bluez, fossil, kpmcore, libssh, and opendmarc), openSUSE (claws-mail and icinga2), and Ubuntu (blueman).
Three years ago, Google jumped into the home security market. After a troubled development cycle it launched Nest Secure, a $500 home security system that competes with the likes of Abode and Simplisafe. But things didn't go quite as planned. Last year, the company took some deserved heat for failing to mention the system's "Nest Guard" keypad control base included a hidden microphone, creating ample paranoia among owners. Google also took heat for failing to really deploy updates at the same pace that other Nest products had seen, and for making changes that locked you into the Google ecosystem at the cost of interoperability.
If you are on Instagram, you have been probably bombarded by Instagram Stories and notifications about new features like emojis, chat themes, selfie stickers, and “cross-platform messaging” that will allow you to exchange direct messages with, and search for, friends who are on Facebook. But the insistent messages to “Update Messaging” minimize the extent of this change, which will blur the lines between the two apps in ways that might unpleasantly surprise users.
1_IGFBmsgrchangecolor.png1_express.png1_instagram_react.png
That gave a professor of engineering an idea. The professor asked his students to design a pipeline to transport human blood from Nicaragua to the United States. The students began by discussing the optimal diameter for the pipe and methods for keeping the blood from coagulating. But the professor did not allow the discussion to continue for long before he asked why not one of them had objected to the question.
“This is a class in engineering not ethics,” one student replied.
Shortly after sunset on the day he would die, Aaron “Jay” Danielson and his Patriot Prayer comrade Chandler Pappas walked through downtown Portland, Oregon, toward the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that had gripped the city for 93 consecutive days.
The far-right activists had ridden into town that afternoon in the back of a pickup, armed for battle and part of a miles-long caravan in support of President Donald Trump. They’d been jeered at and hit with bear spray, and some in their crowd had returned the favor, firing mace and shooting paintballs at racial justice protesters. And now, after a warm late-summer day of laughter and hard drinking, they headed once again downtown, where hundreds had gathered outside the boarded-up police headquarters and the U.S. courthouse, blanketed in graffiti.
The multimillion-dollar effort by Michael Bloomberg, LeBron James and other celebrities to pay off lingering court fines and fees for Florida felons could make almost 13,000 of them eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, an analysis by the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald and ProPublica found.
Although the modest increase in eligible felons falls far short of expectations, it could be large enough to make a difference in a key state where polls indicate that the presidential contest is once again a toss-up.
Unlimited irresponsible consumption of goods, services and animal food produce is the underlying cause; destructive unhealthy behavior encouraged by short-term political and business policies rooted in nationalism and the ideology of competition and greed.
Land sea and air are contaminated everywhere, more or less; the natural climatic rhythms have been radically disrupted, chaos created where order once held sway; the great rain forests of the world are being decimated, trees cut down, land turned over to cattle, or agriculture – principally to grow soya for animal feed – indigenous peoples displaced or killed, cultures shredded, ecosystems shattered, animal habitat destroyed, plant species crushed under the vile weight of corruption and money.
Despite the "populist" myth, Trump has decimated workers' rights and protections.
The key point is the one I make all the time: the bad guys have deliberately structured the market in ways that redistribute income upward. While it is understandable that the right likes to pretend that the rich getting all the money was just a happy outcome of the natural forces of globalization and technology, it is malpractice for a progressive to go along with this charade.
It is also important to reduce the huge flows to the top. While proposals to raise the minimum wage, drastically improve welfare state provision of items like child care and health care, and make it easier for workers to organize, are hugely important, there is a limit to how much we can improve living standards at the bottom and middle if we don’t take a whack at the top.
GDP grew at a record 33.1 percent annual rate, as the economy bounced back from the pandemic-driven shutdowns in the second quarter. However, even with this record growth, the economy was still 3.5 percent below its pre-pandemic level. If we assume a modest 2.0 percent annual growth rate, the third quarter GDP would be more than 5.0 percent below the trend path from the pre-recession period.
Sharp Divergences in Growth Paths
Donald J. Trump is a desperate, terrified, cornered man. That does not mean he isn’t an active menace, but it sure doesn’t make him “strong.”
This could be our last chance to send the American dictator packing.
Amnesty International on Sunday condemned President Donald Trump for “condoning violence and intimidation” after the president applauded the caravan of his truck-driving supporters that surrounded a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway Friday, prompting allegations of reckless endangerment and an FBI probe of the incident.
The storied “swing voter” has long been portrayed as key to electoral victory in the battleground state of Ohio. Much as Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab obsessed over the white whale, traditional democratic operatives have obsessed over reclaiming the lost white (usually working-class and male) voter. However, grassroots organizations like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative reject a singular focus on chasing on-the-fence voters.
"This lawsuit is another desperate and ludicrous attempt by extremists to block the will of the people and disrupt democracy."
These programs are easy marks for an administration that wants to demonstrate toughness with Beijing.€ It is arousing suspicion about several categories of Chinese visitors—scholars, students, journalists, and scientists among them—on the basis that they€ might€ commit espionage, stifle academic freedom, spread propaganda, steal intellectual property, and undermine American values.€ Members of Congress and Congressional committees, US intelligence agencies, the State Department, think tanks, journalists, professors on the left and right, and US educational organizations have all weighed in to warn of the dangers of association with individual Chinese and China-financed organizations.
Victims of China Bashing
In the wake of fresh reporting indicating that President Donald Trump is planning to prematurely claim victory if he has a lead Tuesday night and reject as illegitimate ballots counted after November 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders late Sunday characterized the news as “no surprise” given the president’s repeated nods toward such a ploy and urged the public to be prepared for the false declaration.
America in the mid-seventies and 2020.
"We will not allow that to happen. Every vote must and will be counted."
Trump has promoted coal burning, the dirtiest fossil fuel and the one most deadly to the health of the earth’s climate.
"The public very much needs media outlets and prominent officials, including the Secretary of Defense, to state clearly that the president's use of the military to interfere in the election will not be tolerated."
"This mural is a call to everyone that we need to choose to defend democracy and build the kind of world that we want together."
"This constitutes interference with our most fundamental civil rights—the right to protest and the right to vote."
"The last thing Chief Justice Roberts wants is another Bush v. Gore."
As Trump administration officials tout progress on the 400 miles of border wall state agencies have rammed through California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, opponents of the wall are protesting and getting out the vote in borderland states.
Jim Jones became paranoid because he was under investigation by government agencies, while the president is using government agencies to investigate his opponents. In fitting with his graveyard politics, thousands more will die as a result of more quackery. A superstitious idea, called ”herd immunity,” is 2020’s witchcraft.
What is the meaning of the Trump phenomenon? Millions of whites will support white supremacy even if it kills them. Or us. Finally, If Trump wins and you feel deep despair, suppose you were living in another time.
For example, the Open Letter: Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden argues for “the most urgent task — defeating Trump in the election with as big an Electoral College margin as possible, to undermine his predictable efforts to steal the election.” Among the 55 signatories of the open letter are some of the most dedicated and productive people on the progressive left.
Many of them would agree that ultimately there needs to be a political force representing working people not tied to the dictates of capital – but now is not the time. The open-letter signatories argue, “Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point.”
If anyone's to blame for this latest Erdogan related debacle, it's the thin-skinned "leader" of Turkey, R.T. "Gollum" Erdogan. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone else to blame if the Dutch government hadn't been an enabler of this bad behavior.
Twitter has hidden a tweet from President Donald Trump about voting, hours before election day.
Mr Trump tweeted that a Supreme Court decision to allow more time for postal ballots to arrive in Pennsylvania was "very dangerous".
He once again made the widely debunked claim that "rampant and unchecked cheating" would follow.
Facebook also labelled the message with a fact-check that contradicted the president.
People could finally scrutinise raw documents – cables, memoranda, briefing notes, diplomatic traffic – without the secondary and tertiary forms of self-censorship that characterise the newspaper imperium. Editorially imposed measures could be outflanked; the biases and prejudices of newspaper moguls could be ignored.
This has meant that media outlets in the drought affected mainstream can only ever make quiet acknowledgments about the seriousness of the US case against Assange. It is why certain outlets fail, and have failed to cover the extradition proceedings against the publisher with any degree of serious alarm or considered fear. When they do, irrelevant and inconsequential details feature like tabloid tat: the irate Assange, shouting from his caged stand; the kooky Assange, somewhat unhinged.
Hatred has been let loose from Pandora’s box of ills. It is wandering around the world looking for someone to abuse. Like a virus, it has infected our politics and cultural life. Emcke locates hatred and violence toward the ‘other’ in our cultivated perceptions of ourselves and others. We have to learn to hate. Our imaginations have to be marinated or saturated in ideologies that divide the pure and authentic believers from those deemed impure. Emcke rivets our attention to the Islamic State (IS) ideology, now prevalent in the Middle East, as a disturbing purveyor of hatred and contempt.
In itself, this is a controversial move, given that scholars like Edward Said, Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky have described Zionism as a colonial settler vision of a pure Jewish homeland that erases the Palestinian presence to legitimate its solitary claim to the “promised land.” Ironically, the plight of the Palestinians remains invisible in Emcke’s text. Strange—because, like Said who challenged us to see Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, she wants us to cultivate an empathic sensibility towards those who are the targets of violent hatred.
We’ve heard countless experts argue that Latinos “will decide the 2020 election,” but can either Donald Trump or Joe Biden win big with Latinx voters?
In the weeks leading up to Monday’s Supreme Court confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, there was a slate of reporting about abortion and religious communities. Much of the reporting was ahistorical, inaccurate, and failed to convey that Coney Barrett was not confirmed despite her inexperience and extreme views, but because of her inexperience and extreme views. Coney Barrett has one job: to push the court further right — and this includes ending the ability to legally access abortion care in the United States.
When I started my career, I got a foot in the door by making bar graphs. Way back then, (let’s just say it was the pre-Windows era), bosses were super-impressed. Things haven’t changed much. People still love graphs and maps. Bosses like them. Donors like them. In this often depressing world of humanitarian action, data glitters. But the way the world has gone, it’s time for a talk about data responsibilities. Misinformation and disinformation are running wild. Data can be – is being – weaponised. What I do for work these days still involves bar graphs from time to time. But it’s mainly words, and journalism. Our purpose at The New Humanitarian is to inform decision-makers. We don't make recommendations, but we try to serve up the ingredients of better decision-making. We’re one of very few news organisations that specialise in this field. One of our selling points is that we don't dumb it down: A bit less sexy and clickable than some perhaps, but we’re not going to give readers a caricature. Nobody can claim absolute neutrality in journalism, but we try to be conscious of where our biases might be, and not to indulge in the worst habits that the media and aid industries can be guilty of.
Let’s stop ignoring the obvious: broadband internet access service is a public utility and needs to be regulated as one.
The upcoming U.S. elections have invited broad attention to many of the questions with which civil society has struggled for years: what should companies do about misinformation and hate speech? And what, specifically, should be done when that speech is coming from the world’s most powerful leaders?
Silicon Valley companies and U.S. policymakers all too often view these questions through a myopic lens, focusing on troubles at home as if they are new—when there are countless lessons to be learned from their actions in the rest of the world. The U.S. is not the first nation to deal with election-related misinformation; nor are this or past U.S. elections the only times the major platforms have had to deal with it.
My career in the public service began in 1992, when I joined the Ministry of Defence and began my practice in public international law. I subsequently joined the Attorney-General’s Chambers in 2008 to continue my practice. Just prior to joining IPOS, I was a member of the Hague Diplomatic Office of Singapore in the Netherlands. I am also Singapore’s Ambassador for Oceans and Law of the Sea Issues and the Special Envoy of the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
The Great Stephan Kinsella joins me to discuss balancing the practice of law with scholarly pursuits, the future of libertarianism, and his forthcoming book “Law in a Libertarian World.”
The court issued an important short-opinion, In re Ivantis, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2020), that should be read and considered as a case-study by in-house counsel. The case involves pre-lawsuit destruction of evidence.
The basic setup is that Ivantis has a corporate email-destruction-policy* of deleting emails that are 12-months old. Glaukos sued Ivantis for infringement in April 2018 and served the defendant with the Summons and Complaint on April 16, 2018. On April 19, 2018 the company instituted an internal “litigation hold” that suspended the deletion-policy for emails potentially related to the lawsuit. It turns out that Ivantis has been preparing for this litigation and considering work-arounds for Glaukos patents since at least 2013, and all those emails were deleted.
The district court found that Ivantis actually anticipated the litigation and that the email deletion constituted improper spoliation under FRCP 37(e).
[...]
In its decision, the appellate panel found these events sufficient to sustain the lower court’s determination that Ivantis “acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.”
Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that LIXIL Group Corporation (“LIXIL”) has become a licensee and joined more than 3,300 other OIN community members to promote open source innovation. A leading maker of pioneering water and housing products that are becoming increasingly smart, LIXIL is demonstrating its commitment to open source, especially embedded Linux, as it integrates Internet-of-Things (IoT) capabilities into its solutions.
“The rapid adoption of IoT and digital technologies continue unabated. The proliferation of intelligence, propagated by the integration of open source, is enabling smarter kinds of water and housing products and services. LIXIL recognizes the benefits of leveraging Linux and open source, enabling it to enhance its offerings,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network. “We are pleased LIXIL has joined our community and committed to patent non-aggression in Linux and adjacent open source technologies.”
