I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.
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Your computer now serves a remote master, who has decided that they are entitled to spy on you. If you’ve the most efficient high-res laptop in the world, you can’t turn this off.
Let’s not think very much right now about the additional fact that Apple can, via these online certificate checks, prevent you from launching any app they (or their government) demands be censored.
The Linux desktop distros of today are the most accessible to complete newcomers as they have ever been. There was a time not long ago when only truly intrepid computer thrill seekers would dare install Linux. Now, not only can one get Linux installed on most desktop or laptop computer hardware in 15 minutes, but one can hand it off to anyone with the loosest grasp on how to use computers and expect them to be just fine.
All of that said, once in a blue moon, one will experience sheer terror at the hands of a buggy Linux system. No amount of battle-hardiness can keep you completely safe, either.
I know this because not too long ago, a fear-inducing Linux bug came for me. I wanted to share this true Linux story, so that you may be informed and entertained. Out of respect to hard-working Linux distro developers who make honest mistakes, I will not name the offending distribution, but to add an air of ominousness I will note that it has consistently ranked in DistroWatch’s Top 10 for at least a year.
To those of you who place unshakeable confidence in “mainstream” distros: You have been warned. Now then, let us begin.
Over the summer of 2019, I was watching my kids play. Indoors or out, with or without props, they were (and still are) always inventing some kind of game. At the time, they were re-enacting Pokemon battles, complete with sound effects, special moves, and crazy voices. I started thinking about how to preserve this creative spirit before the teenage years crept in. Dungeons and Dragons.
I played D&D twice myself: once when I was 11 with the boy next door, which was essentially a pointless character creation exercise, and once as a grown-up, when I just about died of awkwardness. But for my son and his friends, I could do this; I offered to be a Dungeon Master (DM) for them. I made a significant rookie mistake, however. I did not limit how many players my son could bring to the table. I ended up starting my DM adventure with a party of six 10-year-old boys (and sometimes a 6-year-old girl). I underestimated both the work—and the chaos—by several orders of magnitude.
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I learned so much writing this application, both as a new DM trying to understand how D&D works, and as a developer going beyond cut and paste examples to use and understand the data I was gathering. Application-specific metrics found bugs that my tests didn’t, and allowed me to see the impact (or lack thereof) of implementation choices I made. In a real world scenario, metrics collection for a live service just keeps on going, providing a statistical baseline that can be used to spot behavior changes as applications are updated.
I mentioned that one of the things I’d hoped to do was compare the capabilities of metrics libraries. What I rapidly discovered was that I couldn’t. The Java library for metrics with OpenTelemetry was not-quite ready at the beginning of the year. I will give an updated version of this talk at J4K in September 2020, so I have ample time to try again.
I also ran into trouble with MicroProfile Metrics, as it emitted only pre-digested histogram values, making it impossible to use Prometheus and Grafana to calculate rates or averages from data aggregated across sources. As a result, the Quarkus application is also using micrometer. At first it used the micrometer library directly, but I later created a Micrometer Extension for Quarkus to see how far I could get in providing a first-class experience using Micrometer with Quarkus.
In a recent article on Jaxenter, Erin Schnabel explores what the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has in common with application metrics and frameworks like Quarkus and Micrometer. In this deeply detailed article, Schnabel takes readers on an adventure full of monsters, graphs, and metrics.
Long before free or open source software licenses, Unix source code was open to users who licensed the operating system. The owners of Unix maintained copyright over the source code and sometimes exerted their control over it very harshly, as we’ll see later in this series. But that stance doesn’t detract from the revolution presented by the availability of Unix source code.
Because Unix users had the source code, Unix developers provided options that could be changed only by recompiling the code. It was fairly common for system administrators to recompile Unix after tweaking the options for their sites—another tradition carried on by Linux. In conversation with the author, BSD developer Greg Lehey pointed out that recompilation was actually a common practice for many operating systems at that time. For instance, a 1981 IBM manual for the VM/370 specifies on page 228 that their “SOURCE tape contains all source files, and macros of VM/370.”
The availability of source code for a robust, contemporary operating system was also a boon to students. Unix not only pioneered important operating system techniques in memory management, scheduling, etc., it also contained interesting data structures and algorithms that were broadly applicable to other applications. Computer science professor John Lions documented the source code for Unix in a book that is considered a classic.
In this article, I have tried to convey some of the aspects of computing that we take for granted today, but that were made uniquely possible by Unix. The operating system has followed a long and unexpected path, which I’ll continue to trace in upcoming articles.
Republicans have their differences, but they generally agree on Ronald Reagan, the conservative icon who for the better part of five decades has been their party’s emotional and ideological touchstone figure. So here’s a reference point for the Republican Party leaders who are now joining Donald Trump in a go-down-with-the-ship refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden is currently winning that election by a higher percentage of the national popular vote than Reagan did in his historic victory over President Jimmy Carter.
2. Once in power Trump pleased Wall Street with his tax cuts and deregulation, but alarmed many by his apparently unstable personality, and unpredictable trade and foreign policies. Many bosses wanted to fire him. Ruling class opposition to him took the most traditional, uncreative, backward Cold War form: he was criticized for alleged ties to Russia. But the campaign to oust Trump as a Putin puppet failed, as did the effort to impeach him—for the high crime of delaying delivery of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Having avoided removal from office in February 2020, as the Dow Jones reached new highs, Trump seemed poised for reelection.
3. Then COVID19 arrived. The main issue now became not the (discredited) Russia charges, but the president’s callous, irresponsible response to the virus, indeed his responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths. And in May there was a sudden surge in mass demonstrations—despite the virus—against systemic racism as reflected in the latest iPhone-captured police murders. The protests were extraordinarily diverse and peaceful, and depicted sympathetically by much of the press. Trump’s hostile response to the protests, catering to his racist base, was condemned as “divisive.” COVID, racism and the prospects for a police state became the new issues in the drive—backed by the majority of the ruling class—to oust Trump.
Grep is a great tool but nowadays there are faster implementations with better defaults available and one such tool is ripgrep which claims to be up at least twice as fast even in simple tasks and that gap only widens when doing larger search jobs.
The long-standing patches by Bas Nieuwenhuizen on implementing DMA-BUF modifier support for the RadeonSI code within Mesa has now been merged for next quarter’s Mesa 21.0 feature release.
With Linux 5.11 bringing the buffer modifier support on the kernel side for GFX9/Vega and newer, the code merged today into Mesa 21.0 enables the user-space API and makes use of the modifier capabilities within RadeonSI Gallium3D for the recent AMD Radeon graphics cards. This follows Intel’s Linux graphics stack that has benefited from modifier support for a while.
I had some requirements for writing a vulkan software rasterizer within the Mesa project. I took some time to look at the options and realised that just writing a vulkan layer on top of gallium’s llvmpipe would be a good answer for this problem. However in doing so I knew people would ask why this wouldn’t work for a hardware driver.
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Software rasterizers are a very different proposition from an overhead point of view than real hardware. CPU rasterization is pretty heavy on the CPU load, so nearly always 90% of your CPU time will be in the rasterizer and fragment shader. Having some minor CPU overheads around command submission and queuing isn’t going to matter in the overall profile of the user application. CPU rasterization is already slow, the Vulkan->gallium translation overhead isn’t going to be the reason for making it much slower.
For real HW drivers which are meant to record their own command buffers in the GPU domain and submit them direct to the hw, adding in a CPU layer that just copies the command buffer data is a massive overhead and one that can’t easily be removed from the lavapipe layer.
The lavapipe execution context is also pretty horrible, it has to connect all the state pieces like shaders etc to the gallium context, and disconnect them all at the end of each command buffer. There is only one command submission queue, one context to be used. A lot of hardware exposes more queues etc that this will never model.
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Can this make my non-Vulkan capable hw run Vulkan?
No. If the hardware can’t do virtual memory properly, or expose features for vulkan this can’t be fixed with a software layer that just introduces overhead.
Over the past week we have published our Linux performance reviews of the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 9 5900X + 5950X “Zen 3″ processors. For as much data that has been available in those reviews, here is even more data accumulating thanks to the open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Thousands of data points are building up for these very exciting AMD Zen 3 desktop processors.
Since the initial reviews on Phoronix I continue running more benchmarks on the AMD Zen 3 CPUs on Ubuntu 20.10 and in other hardware/software configurations — both for future Phoronix articles and also just running more benchmarks to explore more areas of these new AMD CPUs. All of that public benchmarking funnels into OpenBenchmarking.org. Other sites using the Phoronix Test Suite and opting to upload their results like L1 Techs to OpenBenchmarking.org and other early Ryzen 5000 owners lucky enough to buy the CPUs already have also begun uploading their results as well.
A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Typically it does not exist in physical form (like paper money) and is also typically not issued by a central authority. Instead, there’s decentralized control.
Cryptocurrencies have not only had an impact on the world’s expectations surrounding money. They’ve also continued to evolve since the first Bitcoin block was mined back in 2009. Since then, thousands of unique cryptocurrencies have appeared.
Of these, Bitcoin remains the most popular. Some economists, including several Nobel laureates, have characterized it as a speculative bubble. But Bitcoin could be on the verge of adoption by professional investors which would send its price higher.
markets is software that lets you track stock, currency, and cryptocurrency prices. The tool is written in Vala and uses GTK3.
Want to get some wallpapers for your Ubuntu Desktop? Here’s a simple tool to browse, download, and apply wallpaper from huge collection of wallpapers.
Wonderwall is a simple graphical utility that allows to browse through the world’s largest collection of online 4k and Ultra HD Wallpapers.
You can search wallpapers via colors, tags, categories, resolution, popularity, views, or by just typing a keyboard in filter.
Simply click on a picture, you’ll get the menu with image details and download buttons.
For downloaded wallpapers, you can crop / scale selected wallpaper to make it fit into your screen resolution. And of course, there’s an option to set as wallpaper.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Chromium Web Browser on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, The Chromium project covers two utilities such as Chromium and Chromium OS, which are the open-source projects of the Google Chrome browser and Google Chrome OS. Chromium has been developed as an open-source browser project whose critical mission is to offer a more secure, faster, and more stable way to navigate the web where threats are constant at every minute.
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 Chromium Web Browser on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Want to install Discord on Ubuntu? You are not alone. This popular messaging platform is ballooning in popularity on all systems for two reasons: it’s free, and it’s good.
In this post we show you how to install Discord on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, or higher as a Snap app.
And if Snap apps aren’t your thing? Well, that’s cool too as we show you how to install Discord’s Linux app using the terminal and a couple of commands.
Whichever way you choose to install Discord you’ll be able to create a new account (or log in with an existing one); join your favourite channels; send messages, gifs, and media; take part in audio chats with other users; or create your own private Discord server.
If you’re a music fan who uses Linux, you’ll no doubt have dozens, if not hundreds of music files on your Linux PC. However, if these music files are not backed up, you could lose them if something happens to your system.
Cron is a built-in Linux utility used to run different processes within the computer system at a particular scheduled time.
Crontab i.e. the Cron Tables are used for reading the scripts that are predefined within a system and by using a syntax, users can do the configuration of a Cron job for scheduling the commands. Cron is a daemon for managing that enables you to manage task execution at prescribed time. These activities are referred to as cron jobs and may be scheduled to run by a minute, hour, month day, month, week day, or any combination thereof. If the task were to be carried out manually, this could be an incredibly difficult task for a user, since the user would have to be present every interval to perform the task. This tutorial will assist you through several techniques to schedule and list Cron jobs in Linux.
Feeling bored at work? Let’s have some fun! The other day I stumbled upon a cool utility named globe-cli. As the name says, globe-cli is a command line ASCII globe generator to render an ASCII globe in your Terminal. You can rotate the globe in all direction, zoom in and zoom out a specific region in the globe using the mouse or keyboard. The globe-cli is written in Rust programming language and its source code is freely available under GPLv3. Without further ado, let us go ahead and run ASCII globe in Terminal with globe-cli utility in Linux.
vnStat is a free, open-source and console-based network traffic monitoring tool for Linux operating system. With vnStat, you can monitor network statistics over various time periods. It is simple, lightweight and consumes a small portion of your system resources. vnStat allow you to generate the network traffic data in an hour, day, month, week and day.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and use vnStat to monitor network traffic.
The terminal in Linux is a software that takes the commands from users, gets them executed from the OS, and returns the output to the users. They are also called shell and console.
This article focuses on different ways of opening the terminal in CentOS 8.
There are following five ways. I will demonstrate it to you one by one.
Oracle VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.
AMD is starting to become the mainstream option for gamers nowadays with their CPUs & GPUs, allowing on-budget gamers to enjoy great performance for mostly half the price of the other vendors in the market like Intel and NVIDIA.
Sadly AMD does not provide its AMD Radeon software for Linux (The controlling program responsible of tweaking GPU & CPU), and hence Linux users have to find alternatives or develop their own in order to unlock the full potential of the parts they bought.
Luckily, a new game changer is finally available in market; Meet CoreCtrl.
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Just keep in mind that manipulating the power/performance levels is not generally recommended unless you know what you are doing. Most users in fact can generally gain 10-30 FPS in their games by simply starting the fans at early levels without modifying anything else at all in their systems.
So that could be a good option for you to try if you are newbie to these kinds of things, rather than burn your chips or shorten their virtual age.
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CoreCtrl is an amazing open source software that fulfills a unique use case for AMD users on Linux. Using this software users will be able to gain additional performance from the parts they have in their PCs, and may even decide to skip a hardware upgrade due to the performance gain it can give.
And it gives it quite easily; Just few clicks with a beautiful Qt-driven user interface that makes the operation very smooth and quick.
CoreCtrl is definitely a must-have for AMD users on Linux.
Following on from a successful Kickstarter campaign in September 2020, Octobear Knight Games have released their digital board game October Night Games.
Being influenced by the writings of Roger Zelazny, H.P. Lovecraft, Abraham Merrit, Bram Stocker, Albert Bloch, and many others to create their procedurally generated narrative the game follows a battle between two mysterious and magical cults to decide the fate of the world on Halloween night.
Enjoy escape room puzzle games? Mad Experiments: Escape Room from PlayTogether Studio is officially out now.
With multiple rooms to break out of that are full of riddles, clues, and mysteries to uncover it’s a highly interactive game with items everywhere you can examine to try and find your way out. They here, is to fully explore your surroundings. It’s built firmly with co-op in mind, with it being possible to have six player try to solve the rooms together. It was previously in Early Access with the 1.0 release adding in the third chapter.
Sail Forth is a very colourful high seas adventure that sees you travel through a procedurally crafted adventure over an unending ocean. It is perhaps the most vibrant sailing game I’ve ever seen, with sharp colours and a cute style to it
Coming with Linux support sometime in 2021, they’ve released a fresh demo build to go along with the IndieX event and it will be live for you to play until Sunday, November 15. This new and improved demo which was previously showed off during one of the big Steam events has “a lot of general gameplay changes and improvements, as well as new encounters, boats” and more.
Is it just me, or is there a complete category of games that are just building on past titles (almost with carbon copy precision) without using the original brand name? Just yesterday I saw an upcoming indie title, a 1 vs. 1 fighter, clearly looking like and playing like Bushido Blade, without the trademark. Then there’s this Wipe-out clone without the official name, BallisticNG. And I could go on. What’s interesting to me is that they are NOT cloning recent games – that used to be a thing. When Doom came out, within a couple of years every big publisher had a Doom-like game in their line-up. No, here we are witnessing something different, with (mostly) indie devs cloning/recreating much older games or genres that are not really popular anymore. I wonder about the economics of those. Do they sell well enough because of the semi-brand recognition for older gamers? Does the appeal to nostalgia work? It probably does well enough as there’s no sign of the trend stopping any time soon. The point may also be to bring such games to other platforms while they used to be exclusives of one console or another.
To get a taste of Linux, you don’t always have to have a beast of a computer. We know that the latest version of Ubuntu and other such newer Linux distros can be a bit difficult to run on older systems. However, there are many operating systems in the world of Linux that are especially geared toward machines with low-end specifications.
And the best thing about them is that they still provide users with a genuine Linux experience but go easy on the computer resources by cutting down on a few less-needed elements. Other than that, you’ll also see that even though these distributions are really lightweight, they still happen to come with many features.
Hi to all our Endian Community fans and we’ve got some great news to share! First we’re releasing a huge set of updates that has a ton of bug fixes and minor feature improvements. In addition, we’re releasing a new ISO for those who want a new install with all the latest and greatest packages.Last, we’re switching our development cycle to use rolling releases which means you guys should be hearing (and receiving “update goodies”) a whole lot more from us on a much more regular and frequent basis
SeaMonkey is an all-in-one Internet application suite. It includes a browser, mail/news client, IRC client, JavaScript debugger, and a tool to inspect the DOM for web pages. It is derived from the application formerly known as Mozilla Application Suite.
The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady.
The current situation is that major packages have been updated to latest versions, such as:
– latest Linux kernel 5.9.6 built for x86_64, i586, arm7l and aarch64 architectures,which can recognize all new released hardware since Mageia 7.1. We intend to release Mageia 8 with a Long Term Support Kernel. 5.10 will be the new LTS one, just around the corner for a December release. We will ship with this version.
– basesystem with systemd 246, glibc 2.31, GCC 10.2, LLVM 10.0.1, urpmi 8.123, DNF 4.2.23 and rpm 4.16.0 ;
– Java stack updated to java-11-openjdk (11.0.9.6) and built against this version;- python 3.8.5, rust 1.47, ruby 2.7.2, Golang 1.15.3,…
We decided to stop supporting Java 8, and only have Java 11. This requires fixing the Java stack, as some applications have never been ported, and therefore have to be removed, while others have to be updated to the ported version.
On the desktop side, we have an updated x11-server to 1.20.9 stack. A Wayland session for GNOME is available on Intel, AMD and even NVIDIA (with nvidia-current nonfree drivers). KDE Plasma is based on QT 5.15.1 with Plasma-Workspace 5.20.2, which can permit a wayland session preview. All infrastructure is here for it to have a desktop running on modern technologies. By default, we still ship Plasma with an X11 session on all hardware.
GNOME is at 3.38.1. LXqt is 0.16. XFCE is at 4.15 preview and is a good candidate to move to the 4.16 release before we ship Mageia 8.
“The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady,” begins the project’s latest status update.
It’s been a quiet few months after Mageia 8 Alpha shipped back in January and was succeeded by the Mageia 8 Beta in August. This Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Linux distribution has been working to transition off Python 2, switch to Zstd for RPM package compression, better their Arm support, and better support the likes of F2FS and NILFS2, among other improvements for the latest iteration of Mageia Linux.
Though with all the work at hand and always in need of resources/volunteers, the road to Mageia 8 hasn’t been too speedy. In today’s status update of it being “on its way” they have now switched over to the Linux 5.9 kernel and will likely be using Linux 5.10 LTS for the final release, systemd 246 is at play, GCC 10.2 and LLVM 10.0.1 are the compilers, and numerous other key packages have been updated.
Overall, week 46 was good. A steady flow of new snapshots, staging projects that keep on moving – and we delivered 6 snapshots during this week (1105, 1106, 1107, 1108, 1110, and 1111).
Oracle has released Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 as the newest version of their RHEL8-based operating system.
Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 is based off the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 and thus sharing many of the same changes. RHEL 8.3 upstream brings TSX being disabled by default for Intel CPUs to reduce mitigation overhead, various network driver additions, a number of new module streams, installer updates, USBGuard integration work continuing, and other tech preview features catering to their enterprise Linux customers.
Derived from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 is here six months after Oracle Linux 8.2 and it’s powered by the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 (UEK R6) based on the upstream long-term supported Linux 5.4 kernel, along with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK).
Highlights of this release include a much-improved graphical installer that features better support for NVDIMM devices and IPv6 static configurations, the LUKS2 (Linux Unified Key Setup) disk encryption management for encrypted containers by default, as well as the addition of “root password” and “user creation settings” in the Installation Summary screen.
For those who don’t know, Fedora Media Writer is a tool to create bootable live USB drive with your favorite flavor of Fedora. It is written in C++ with UI written in QML and it is supported on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It was developed by Martin Bříza, my former collegue from Red Hat, who did an amazing job in the past. Fedora Media Writer (FMW) primarily targets Fedora Workstation and therefore the UI looks like a GNOME app using Adwaita theme. Unfortunately the Adwaita theme changed over time and originally FMW was written using QtQuickControls 1 (deprecated these days) so it needed an UI overhaul.
The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F33-20201113-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.8.18-200 kernel.
Some say Friday the 13th is unlucky, but we can say otherwise with this release.
This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 800MB+ of updates)).
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 serverless blog search with Java, Quarkus, and AWS Lambda from Gunnar Morling and Burr Sutter.
Managing Kubernetes is not for the faint of heart. For all its popularity, Kubernetes, the container-orchestration program requires a great deal of skill and the right tools to manage software on its clusters properly. That’s where Kubernetes Operators come in. And now Canonical’s DevOps Juju-based Charm Open Operator Collection, the largest collection of application operators, supports Kubernetes, cloud-native, and traditional applications on Windows and Linux. The collection is hosted at Charmhub.io and follows the Open Operator Manifesto.
“The operator pattern successfully replaced config management on Kubernetes for cloud-native workloads,” said Sohini Roy, Product Manager at Canonical. “We are excited to generalise the operator pattern to include traditional applications on Linux and Windows, for a consistent model-driven operator framework for application management, across bare metal, virtual and K8s estates.”
An operator is software that implements the lifecycle management of an application. The operator replaces custom hand-crafted institutional ops code with shared, standardised ops code packages for many organisations and many scenarios. An operator eliminates duplication of effort between organisations, who benefit from a shared operations codebase for that app.
Operators encapsulate application domain knowledge so that organisations can run them without learning the low-level details. The operator code provides the full application lifecycle, including configuration and integration, as well as day-2 actions.
“Data security and developer productivity are vital to our customers – across the full application lifecycle,” said Ian Tien, Co-Founder and CEO, Mattermost. “With charmed open source operators, Mattermost installs in minutes with the assurance the implementation utilises best practices – not just for deployment, but also for patching, upgrading and even re-architecting.”
With Arch Linux users, Spotify still holds the crown, Microsoft Visual Code has gained popularity, and Anbox has displaced Slack in the top-five list. CentOS users are all about productivity this time around. The presence of Certbot aligns with the overall shift to HTTPS across the Internet, and the growing use of the Let’s Encrypt service. Container and Kanban-style snaps are also quite popular.
Debian shows similar traits to CentOS – but with some notable differences, to make it all more interesting. Debian users seem keen on the Snap Store, which provides a graphical interface for snap management and installation, and they also like to have a bit of fun among more server-like tasks. Fedora users are still focused on a mix of entertainment and productivity. In a move similar to what we see with Arch Linux, Anbox also seems to have gained interest here.
Manjaro users are the most consistent of the bunch – with strong focus on fun and entertainment, and code development. The inclusion of the Zoom client snap is not surprising, given the global shift in work trends and the increased use of VoIP software in everyday communication due to the pandemic.
Looking for an ESP32 board with a color touchscreen display? There is plenty of choices here, including Espressif Systems own ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1 multimedia devkit with a 3.2-inch display or M5Stack Core2 with a 2-inch display. But if you’d like a thinner and larger display, Tag Wireless WT32-SC01 is an ESP32-powered 3.5-inch color display with a 2-point capacitive touchscreen designed to be integrated into your own project or product.
In this article, I will cover three Operating System (OS) for the Raspberry Pi (RPi), preferably the RPi 4. These Operating Systems are not truly MacOS or Windows 10, but a desktop with the look and feel of a Mac or Windows system. The look of a Mac or Windows is truly ‘screen deep’.
All of the Operating Systems covered in this article are based on the Raspbian Buster OS. Do note that this OS is 32-bit, but these options are extremely elegant.
Anyone that has a Raspberry Pi system has most likely installed and used Raspbian. The OS is the ‘default’ OS that comes with the Raspberry Pi if an SD card came with the board. It is the first download on the RaspberryPi.org website’s Download page (here). It is now called ‘Raspberry Pi OS’ instead of Raspbian.
The kit then relies on the Raspberry Pi 4/3 SBC’s WiFi and Bluetooth LE connectivity to provide a secure Smart Home system compatible with Connected Home over IP standard for wireless alarm systems, automation and secured monitoring, smart lighting, and more.
Data Modul announced a universal “eDM-CB-SM-IPCS” carrier for Arm and x86 SMARC modules plus a Linux-ready “eDM-SMX-EL” SMARC module featuring Intel’s Elkhart Lake Atom x6000E.
One of the benefits of standardized compute module form factors such as SMARC is that manufacturers can easily upgrade to a faster new module using the same basic design and vendor. In some cases, there is the potential to switch processor families and even architectures. Last year, for example, MSC launched a universal SimpleFlex carrier for SMARC modules that supports i.MX6, i.MX8/M/Mini, Zynq UltraScale+, and Intel Apollo Lake. Now, Data Modul has announced its own universal SMARC carrier called the eDM-CB-SM-IPCS plus an Elkhart Lake based eDM-SMX-EL SMARC module that runs on it (see farther below).
The Knowledge is Everything (KIE) group recently released TrustyAI, an open-source solution that combines machine learning models and decision logic to enrich automated decisions by including predictive analytics.
It is the result of a new initiative, within the KIE group, to increase trust in decision making processes that depend on AI predictive models. The new initiative focuses on runtime, explainability, and accountability.
“New laws such as GDPR include the right to access how your data has been processed. Therefore, domain experts must understand the way in which a customer’s data has been processed, so that they can pass this information back to them,” the KIE group wrote in a blog post.
Zoom has been a boom since Coronavirus started, it seemed to be one of the very few software in the world capable of handling the planet’s digital transfer of most face-to-face communication since people were forced to stay in their homes during the quarantine. Governments, schools, universities, hospitals, companies, enterprises… All of them went to Zoom in order to face the new communication hassle.
Its stock market increased by %500 since the beginning of the pandemic, and tens of of millions of new users worldwide signed up for its premium plans. Everything sounded so great so far for Zoom, unlike most of the human race standing on the other side of the equation.
Until, an investigational report by the FTC showed that Zoom lied about its end-to-end encryption for years, and that its so-called E2E secure communication is actually false marketing. Of course, users and developers around the world had no way of verifying Zoom’s marketing claims easily since it was a proprietary, closed-source application. And thus, they were not able to check the source code by their selves to verify those claims.
Zoom being fully proprietary is why people started switching into open source zoom alternatives, like Jitsi, BigBlueButton and many others, so that they don’t remain in Zoom’s jail locking all their remote communications in one place.
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It’s freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.
We have a new stable release today. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.6 on the download page. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser likely next week.
We’ve also released 0.3.5.12 (changelog) and 0.4.3.7 (changelog) today. You can find the source for them at https://dist.torproject.org/, along with older releases.
In the past month, I’ve read about a dozen security bulletins involving remote execution exploits due to font parsing vulnerabilities in a range of operating systems, from desktop to mobile. In all these cases, there was a detailed mention of problems, but very little if any mention of possible solutions, other than vendor updates, that is.
Which is rather intriguing, because there is a tool that can help you with fonts. It’s called Noscript, it’s a supreme browser extension available in Firefox and more recently in Chrome, and it allows you to govern the loading of fonts in your webpages. A simple and elegant tool that can save – or at the very least, significantly minimize, headache with fonts. But does it get the spotlight it deserves? Of course not, drama and fear are far more interesting. Let’s see what gives.
We have enabled Warp, a significant update to SpiderMonkey, by default in Firefox 83. SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in the Firefox web browser.
With Warp (also called WarpBuilder) we’re making big changes to our JIT (just-in-time) compilers, resulting in improved responsiveness, faster page loads and better memory usage. The new architecture is also more maintainable and unlocks additional SpiderMonkey improvements.
This post explains how Warp works and how it made SpiderMonkey faster.
Back in September Firefox Nightly enabled the JavaScript “Warp” code for SpiderMonkey and now for next week’s Firefox 83.0 release it is remaining on by default for this web browser update.
Warp is a big upgrade to Mozilla’s JavaScript just-in-time (JIT) compiler code. Thanks to a variety of optimizations the Warp functionality should yield more responsiveness and faster page load speeds, commonly around 5~15% faster but some cases ~20%+ speed-ups.
Mozilla engineers confirmed in a Mozilla Hacks blog post today that this Warp update to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine will indeed be the default for next week’s Firefox 83 release.
To tackle the epidemic, China is favouring farms with at least 500 pigs, following the biosecurity precept that bigger is better. ‘Family farms will tend to disappear in favour of industrial production,’ said Jian Huang, an expert at China’s national pig institute. China is following health advice from international bodies for epizootic diseases (epidemics that affect animals), said Wantanee Kalpravidh, an animal health expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); farms are classified according to their presumed risk of infection, from sector 1, deemed to have the highest level of biosecurity, to sector 4, with the lowest.
The underlying idea is that the spread of viruses is limited when animals are reared in closed buildings or behind fences that prevent contact with wild species that could transmit pathogens, and livestock eat commercially produced feed with sanitary certification rather than feed grown on the farm. Biosecurity regulations govern not only the farm’s hygiene regime (hand-washing, clothing changes before entering buildings, disinfection of vehicles) but the technical and business orientation of the operation. And that raises questions.
The government “could pay for a package right now” to cover economic losses—making it possible to curb Covid-19 transmission without increasing the financial suffering associated with shutting down commerce, said epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.
Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager for training and certification at The Linux Foundation, said the goal is to increase the number of IT professionals that have been exposed to DevOps fundamentals at a time when demand for DevOps expertise is surging. A survey published by The Linux Foundation finds 65% of organizations are currently looking for more IT personnel with open source DevOps skills.
At its annual, flagship Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF) held virtually in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, FINOS (the Fintech Open Source Foundation), today announced the launch of its Open RegTech initiative, which aims to expand the successful open collaboration model built between financial institutions, fintech and technology firms to regulators and regtech companies. Additionally, FINOS announced a codebase contribution from Deutsche Bank of the Symphony Java Toolkit as well as the OpenMAMA project, which is led by JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and several other FINOS members.
The announcement comes a day after FINOS announced six new members and also recorded the largest number of commits, the smallest unit of contribution, on its open source projects since its inception with a 40 percent growth with respect to the previous record.
The Linux Foundation, and National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), have introduced an online training course that “delves into facts about diversity in tech, the importance of diversity for innovation, the basics of unconscious and societal bias, and how to recognize the different ways unconscious bias presents itself in technical environments.”
It is expected that in 2020, the global cloud microservices market will grow at a rate of 22.5%, with the US market projected to maintain a growth rate of 27.4% [5]. The tendency is that developers will move away from locally hosted applications and shift into the cloud. Consequently, this will help businesses minimize downtime, optimize resources, and reduce infrastructure costs. Experts also predict that by 2022, 90% of all applications will be developed using microservices architecture [5]. This article will help you to learn what microservices are and how companies have been using it nowadays.
A few weeks ago we had a story about the RIAA getting GitHub to remove YouTube-dl using a bizarre form of copyright takedown. The RIAA claimed that the tool violated rules against circumventing DRM. Over at Freedom of the Press Foundation, Parker Higgins has highlighted how often this tool is used legitimately for journalism purposes, which is important. Under the Betamax standard, tools with substantial non-infringing uses should not run afoul of copyright law. Higgins’ writeup is reposted here with permission.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libproxy, pacemaker, and thunderbird), Fedora (nss), openSUSE (kernel), Oracle (curl, librepo, qt and qt5-qtbase, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox), SUSE (firefox, java-1_7_0-openjdk, and openldap2), and Ubuntu (apport, libmaxminddb, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, and slirp).
In many ways, Zoom is an incredible success story. A relative unknown before the pandemic, the company’s userbase exploded from 10 million pre-pandemic to 300 million users worldwide as of last April. One problem: like so many modern tech companies, its security and privacy practices weren’t up to snuff. Researchers found that the company’s “end-to-end encryption” didn’t actually exist. The company also came under fire for features that let employers track employees’ attention levels, and for sharing data with Facebook that wasn’t revealed in the company’s privacy policies.
Git’s Large File System is a reasonable solution to a bit of a niche problem. How do you handle large binary files that need to go into a git repository? It might be pictures or video that is part of a project’s documentation, or even a demonstration dataset. Git-lfs’s solution is to replace the binary files with a text-based pointer to where the real file is hosted. That’s not important to understanding this vulnerability, though. The problem is that git-lfs will call the main git binary as part of its operation, and when it does so, the full path is not used. On a Unix system, that’s not a problem. The $PATH variable is used to determine where to look for binaries. When git is run, /usr/bin/git is automagically run. On a Windows system, however, executing a binary name without a path will first look in the current directory, and if a matching executable file is not found, only then will the standard locations be checked.
You may already see the problem. If a repository contains a git.exe, git.bat, or another git.* file that Windows thinks is executable, git-lfs will execute that file instead of the intended git binary. This means simply checking out a malicious repository gets you immediate code execution. A standard install of git for Windows, prior to 2.29.2.2, contains the vulnerable plugin by default, so go check that you’re updated!
Burp Suite is a rich-featured web application attack tool designed by Portswigger. It is equipped with everything needed to perform a successful pentest against a web application. Burp is the world’s most widely used web application tester & scanner, with over 40,000 active users, due to its easy to use interface and depth. It’s already an awesome web application pentesting with capabilities that can even further increased by adding extensions or add-ons called BApps.
By itself, this is one of those security holes where an attacker would already need to have a high level of system access to cause damage. Unfortunately, as Red Hat’s security team put it, “Certain services and applications allow remote unauthenticated attackers to provide environment variables, allowing them to exploit this issue.”
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning to the health sector, saying it has seen increased targeting by attackers using the SDBBot remote access trojan.
Weekly threat roundup: Windows, Intel, and Ubuntu [Ed: Microsoft ‘research’: if you sit on a desktop of yours, running GNOME, then you probably already own that machine. BUT SHOCK HORROR! Under particular scenarios you can become ROOT! The SKY IS FALLING!]
GitHub researcher Kevin Blackhouse found flaws in Ubuntu 20.04, now patched, that could have allowed any desktop user to gain root access to the operating system.
Two separate issues may be exploited to allow hackers to escalate user privileges in an “astonishingly straightforward” manner, using a few simple commands in the terminal and a few mouse clicks.
The first element involves exploiting the daemon which manages user accounts, known as AccountsService, while the second element involves a component of the Gnome desktop, which triggers system setup. This would allow somebody running the exploit to create a new user account with root privileges.
We’ve repeatedly made it pretty clear that President Trump’s effort to ban TikTok is little more than a performative, xenophobic, idiotic mess. For one, the effort appears more focused on trying to get Trump-allied Oracle a new hosting deal than any serious concern about consumer privacy and security. Two, banning a teen dancing and lip syncing app does jack shit in terms of thwarting China or protecting U.S. consumer privacy, since the U.S. telecom, app, and adtech markets are largely an unaccountable privacy mess making it trivial to obtain this kind of data elsewhere.
Julian Sanchez joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they delve into the problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISC or the FISA Court. Sanchez explains how the FISA Court signs off on surveillance of huge swaths of our digital lives, and how the format and structure of the FISA Court is inherently flawed.
The best known of these is the Austrian privacy expert Max Schrems, whose work has seen both the Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield frameworks for sending EU personal data to the US struck down as invalid, with major implications for data protection in the EU and US. One of Schrems’ continuing battles is with Facebook – and the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which refuses to enforce the GDPR properly, he says. Rather than conclude its main investigation into Facebook, the DPC wants to start a completely new one, but Schrems has obtained a temporary legal stay to prevent that move.
Google is just so much a part of our daily lives. Forget our tech lives – it’s a major part of our lives. Even if you rant often about Google, it’s still ingrained in your life in some way. But now, Google wants to pull out. While Google has allowed us to use it for all our storage, it’s going to start charging us and will also delete our files.
On July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity.” It is the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come.
Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero—the Trinity test site—Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74 years old, she solemnly recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever.
Fascism is a politics of contradictions that cannot be resolved. This is a fundamental argument author David Renton makes in his recently updated text Fascism: History and Theory. It is because of these contradictions that it usually falters and fails. Equally important to fascism’s occasional (if fleeting) success is its dependence on a genuine social movement to grow and take power. Unlike most other political parties of the capitalist class, fascist leaders are dependent on the popular movement supporting them. This movement, which crosses classes but has its origins in a disgruntled petit bourgeoisie fearful of having to become part of the working class to survive, believes it is acting in its own interests. As history proves, however, when fascism takes complete power, it only truly serves what is currently known as the one percent. In other words, fascism is not interested in the advancement of the laboring classes, but rather its total acquiescence to capitalism. While this is arguably the goal of most right wing (and even liberal) capitalist parties, fascism is not even interested in any pretense of equality or democracy. Instead, it seeks uniformity under the banner of nation and leader; indeed, the party leader becomes the nation.
Fenton utilizes the works of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky, among others, to describe the nature and history of fascism between the two wars. Primarily focused on Mussolini and Hitler, he contrasts the development of each nation’s movement, its taking power and its demise. At the same time, he examines the various Marxist arguments regarding those movements and their meaning. He discusses the united front and the popular front oppositional approaches in terms of the different understandings of fascism he describes. The result is a nuanced and intelligent discussion of what constitutes fascism. Although Renton’s text is primarily historical, the publication of this new edition in the current time is obviously for a reason. From Hungary to the United States, from Germany to Rome, the rise of modern fascist movements has changed the political landscape of the world. In Hungary and the US, the movements are both popular and influential among surprisingly large segments of the respective populations. In other nations, like Germany and Italy, the fascist parties enjoy a similar popular support, albeit not in as large numbers. Furthermore—and perhaps more dangerously—members of fascist groups have infiltrated law enforcement and the military in the US, Germany and elsewhere. Despite their support for fascism (or perhaps because of it), most of these fascist police and troops are permitted to keep their positions with little risk of sanctions. Indeed, several chapters of the police union in the United States endorsed Donald Trump for president, thereby encouraging its members to treat anti-Trump protesters much differently than those marching (and driving their vehicles) for Trump.
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The UAE belongs to a military coalition led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which is waging a genocidal war on Yemen with the help of US arms. The Saudi-led aggression began in March 2015 after Houthi rebels ousted Yemeni interim president and Saudi ally Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Seeking to restore Hadi, the coalition went to war against the Houthis but is indifferent to who it kills. The coalition makes no distinction between combatants and civilians—a violation of international humanitarian law. One hundred thousand Yemenis have died. Some of those deaths were a direct result of coalition air strikes. Others resulted from hunger and disease following on the coalition blockade of Yemen and the coalition’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure used in food production and medical care—war crimes. There was already an epidemic of cholera in Yemen at the time Covid-19 struck. The United Nations calls Yemen the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
Under the $23 billion sale, the UAE will receive up to 50 F-35 Lightning II warplanes, armed aerial drones, and air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions. The sale is made possible by the so-called Abraham Accords. William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy writes that if President Donald Trump, who helped broker the agreement, “had been honest for a change, he would have dubbed those Abraham Accords the ‘Arms Sales Accords.’” Impeding the sale to the UAE was a long-standing US commitment not to impair Israel’s “qualitative military edge” over its Middle East rivals. The Abraham Accords removed this obstacle. Under the Abraham Accords, signed by Israel, the UAE, and the US on August 13, the UAE agreed to normalize relations with Israel, while Israel gave the nod to the US arms transfer to the UAE.
We continue to look at the world’s response to the U.S. election with South African activist Kumi Naidoo, a global ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, former secretary general of Amnesty International and former head of Greenpeace. Naidoo says President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden is good news, but notes that the world lost four crucial years to tackle the climate crisis and other issues because of the Trump administration. “This is a relief, but it is not something for us to — at this stage, anyway — celebrate with any great enthusiasm,” he says.
When cops can’t do the brutalization themselves, they send in man’s best friend. Best friend to The Man, that is. K-9 “officers” aren’t just for illegally extending traffic stops. They’re also capable of maiming people for the offense of not being respectful/subdued enough for an officer’s liking.
But then I read about Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) new bill (S. 4538 ) to help relieve youth unemployment by resurrecting the Great Depression’s famed CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). Recruits would be 16 or older, not just the 18-25 in the original men’s program. At the same time the AmeriCorps was announcing expansion plans to help the nation recover from the “economic and social impact” of COVID-19. This despite its parent agency, the 295,000 volunteer Corporation for National and Community Services (CNCS), barely escaping President Trump’s FY2021 budget snickersnee for the fourth year (“Funding community service and subsidizing the operation of non-profit organizations is outside the proper role of the Federal Government”).
The estimated 2.5 million 16-year-olds, usually high school juniors, would be eligible. Now, teaching them made me well aware of the timeless secret dread of becoming seniors and leaving the cocoon of life beyond school. Many were apprehensive about having to permanently join a workplace with “older” employees (i.e., those over 30) or college acceptances. But many finally were concerned about grades instead of looks, clothes, sex, popularity, clique expulsion, and as always, peer pressure to do wild things.
Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict is little more than a week old, but the number of people killed and displaced is rising fast. On 12 November, Amnesty International said “scores and likely hundreds” of day labourers were stabbed or hacked to death in Mai-Kadra, a town in Tigray. TNH could not independently verify the killings, but witnesses who spoke to the rights group blamed militia aligned to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, an ethnic Tigrayan party fighting against the government. One witness who inspected ID cards of victims said the dead were mostly ethnic Amharas, from a region that is supporting Addis Ababa’s offensive. Hundreds of combatants from both sides are also thought to have died in air raids and clashes in the region, while banking, transport, trade, and telecommunications services remain cut off. Some 11,000 people – half of them children – have fled to neighbouring Sudan, where local authorities told TNH they are struggling to cope. “The capability of Sudan is very limited and the number of refugees is very big,” said one Sudanese official. Read our latest on the conflict for more.
In order to roll back catastrophic carbon emissions, humans must “start developing the technologies for large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” says one of the study’s lead authors.
“The climate crisis is the biggest threat to financial stability, as well as the broader economy. Financial regulators who ignore it are simply failing at their missions.”
Both Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) immediately took to CNN and Fox News in the days after the election was called to try and rally support for the fossil fuel industry in the wake of Joe Biden’s election as president — a success which brings with it the promise of strong climate action.
Largely in response to the president’s ‘spew more fossil fuels’ outlook Noam Chomsky described Trump as “the worst criminal in human history.” Pressed on the matter, Chomsky recently told the New Yorker that Adolf Hitler “was an utter monster but [he was] not dedicating his efforts perfectly consciously to destroying the prospect for human life on earth.”
So why is Ottawa trying to maintain one of the Republican’s worst environmental policies?
Jack Halberstam mourns the lost dreams of a wilder future. Today, few practical people dare imagine a world free from environmental degradation and police terror, a world in which humans do not try to master nature. The radical Columbia professor’s new book maintains that our environmental and carceral crises trace back just six centuries. As European conquest altered our climate, the state legitimized its violence through colonial ideas of the wild: “savage otherness,” “unspoiled nature,” and an “intuitive connection” to Black criminality. Living in the ruins of genocide and slavery, Halberstam argues that we must remake everything. Wild Things is a deconstruction of the colonial logics of the wild and a reconstruction of the term itself.
The slightly over 1,500 votes on the Green Party of Alaska line for former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura may seem a mere footnote to the failed re-election bid of Donald Trump, whose level of support for Ventura’s rerun was much less than the “one hundred percent” promised at WrestleMania in 2004. Yet the success of referendum initiatives for drug decriminalization, two decades after Ventura’s support for such measures were viewed as no less outrageous than his feathered boas, hints that he may have had more to offer than a coincidental foreshadowing of the paths from performance to politics of Trump or Ventura’s movie costar Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In his 1999 book I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, Ventura argued against drug prohibition not only on pragmatic grounds that it would be ineffective and counterproductive, but that “the government has no business telling us what we can and can’t use for pain relief and in matters of our own health.” Despite bragging to Reason magazine that year about how “I’ve taken the libertarian exam and scored perfect on it,” his record in office was less consistent, and he failed to sustain an alliance with libertarians.
That simple admission of one’s “failed state” is a profound, even heroic, act that leads to transformational, rather than merely “regime” change. Clearly America, so far removed from the aspirations and principles our nation has identified with for over 300 years – its moral compass tossed overboard, unneeded by those who are steering the ship toward their own mad ends, nor by those who are allowing themselves to sink into “savagery” – needs not regime change but transformation. For individuals, confessing one’s failed state allows the letting go of compulsive hubris that stands in the way of an “other” reality becoming available to consciousness – that is, the larger, metaphysical, interconnected reality which one is, at last, sufficiently humbled to recognize and accept as “redemptive.” This is how one comes to belief out of rigid denial, to life out of death, how one recovers native vitality from the grip of one’s own deadening compulsions.
For the failed state of America, we cannot hope for or expect the humiliating admission of failure to come from the plutocrats and oligarchs that benefit from the dissolution, nor can we wait for heroes who’ll show us how to do this. The fate of the nation rests with individuals prepared to confess their failure and undergo the long postponed transformation into a life that matters ( because it matters to oneself); a special responsibility that rests disproportionately with the enlightened liberal class. We who’ve for so long bypassed our human responsibility to our souls, as if we lived apart, in a godlike realm of “exceptionalism” when in fact we exist in a social reality that depends, historically and presently, upon the disposability of human beings, valued less than our machines, must come to grips with the truth of our failed state.
Biden and the Democrats should put principles first and rally the nation around a serious vision: an agenda not simply to “restore the soul of America” but to expand that soul, make this country a true global leader as Planet Earth faces its treacherous future.
Then the political sociologist in me took over as I looked at the electoral breakdown by race.
Whites make up around over 65 percent of the electorate of the US. Surveys show that 57 percent of white voters (56 percent women, 58 percent men) went for Trump, despite everything — his awful mismanagement of the pandemic, his lies, his anti-science attitude, his divisiveness, and his blatant pandering to white nationalist groups like the Nazis, Klan, and Proud Boys.
“Underestimating Donald Trump is a mistake that people should not go on making. Laughing at him will not make him go away. If it did, he would have vanished decades ago.”
Zhu Qingqiao, China’s ambassador to Mexico, said that his country agrees, and has “many plans to invest in Mexico,” including the $600 million needed by the state-owned Dos Bocas petroleum refinery in Tabasco; this money was put together by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the Bank of China, and other international partners.
On June 4, 2019, just after he arrived in Mexico City, Ambassador Zhu wrote an opinion piece in a leading financial newspaper, El Financiero. “The trade war,” he wrote, “will not stop China’s development. Faced with risks and challenges, China has the confidence to face them and turn them into opportunities.” The U.S.-China economies, he noted, are highly integrated, which will make decoupling next to impossible. Meanwhile, China is prepared to increase its interaction with other countries, both through investments into those countries—such as Mexico—or by welcoming investment into China. China, he wrote, is not the author of this “trade war,” and China would like this conflict to end.
In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran a YouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela’s ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran a YouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela’s ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
YouTube showed the ad more than 100,000 times in Florida in the eight days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press published a fact-check debunking the Trump campaign’s claim. Actually, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed opposition to both presidential candidates.
The White House has ordered agencies not to cooperate with Biden’s presidential transition team, and President Donald Trump continues to refuse to accept defeat in the 2020 election, which means Biden cannot receive security briefings or access government funds for the transition. But while the standoff continues in the U.S., other countries are already preparing for a new administration. For more on how the historic U.S. election is playing out internationally, we speak with analysts from around the world, including Maria Luísa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has not acknowledged Biden’s victory. “The progressive movements in Brazil can also be inspired by that election here,” says Mendonça. “I think that the U.S. can play a much more positive role in Latin America.”
Getting Donald Trump out of office was uniquely important because his reality TV stardom allowed him to go from acting like a jerk on The Apprentice to playing a real-life authoritarian strongman. People bought into his “drain the swamp” and “I tell it like it is” rhetoric while he and his family engorged themselves on the hard-earned taxes of the working class. Joe Biden was not the first choice of most progressives, but when the full might of the national Democratic Party leadership converged to anoint him, he became our only hope.
After four years in office one thing about Donald Trump has become transparently clear – he is a petty, vindictive man. He never admits mistakes and makes false statements whenever they serve his purpose. In the face of an apparent electoral repudiation, he – and his team led by Rudi Giuliani and Bill Barr – is seeking to overturn the election results through dubious legal challenges. His strategy will likely fail, even with his successful packing of the Supreme Court with arch conservatives.
In all likelihood, Trump will turn over the presidency to Biden on Inauguration Day, January 20th. However, if he refuses to cede power, even if the Court rejects his claims regarding the legitimacy of the elections, a true national crisis could result.
“He has always understood that money equals power, and now he wants to have a bunch of money and it’s going to give him a seat at the table. That’s what he’s doing.”
Search engines generally aim to return the most relevant results, but that’s not always the case. Earlier this year we reported how popular pirate sites were dropping from Google’s top results and the same appears to be happening in DuckDuckGo as well now, with Bing not staying behind.
A few months back we highlighted the insane lengths the WHO was going to in an effort to silence Taiwan, despite that country’s extraordinarily successful efforts to combat COVID-19. Yes, yes, everyone understands the geopolitical mess in that the Chinese government refuses to recognize that Taiwan is an independent country (which everyone who lives in reality knows) and that various organizations and governments have to pretend otherwise to keep the Chinese government happy.
None of us is promised another day, hour, or even minute. Here on federal death row, that reality bears down on us harshly. But Christopher Vialva’s execution on September 24 weighs especially heavy on me.
During a trip home a few years ago, I casually asked my mother’s partner, D, for some financial advice. I was starting my third job in three years, and a byproduct of all this shuffling of tax forms was that I possessed two or three 401(k) accounts, each containing a paltry amount I nonetheless didn’t want to languish forever. D is a responsible, intelligent man in his 70s whose concerted investing efforts paid dividends throughout his life, and within days, he prepared a modest portfolio of annotated printouts suggesting some mutual funds and stocks for whenever I got around to rolling over those disparate accounts into one.
This recent decision [PDF] by the First Circuit Court of Appeals details a law enforcement enabled nightmare — one that saw the plaintiff shot by the same person who had raped her earlier… and someone the police were supposed to be trying to locate. So much for the “Thin Blue Line.” The line never materialized here and, in fact, took affirmative steps to erase what little line there actually was.
Gigi Sohn joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss broadband access in the United States – or the lack thereof. Gigi explains the choices American policymakers and tech companies made that have caused millions to lack access to reliable broadband, and what steps we need to take to fix the problem now.
Today EFF is launching How to Fix the Internet, a new podcast mini-series to examine potential solutions to six ills facing the modern digital landscape. Over the course of 6 episodes, we’ll consider how current tech policy isn’t working well for users and invite experts to join us in imagining a better future. Hosted by EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn and our Director of Strategy Danny O’Brien, How to Fix the Internet digs into the gritty technical details and the case law surrounding these digital rights topics, while charting a course toward how we can better defend the rights of users.
It’s easy to see all the things wrong with the modern Internet, and how the reality of most peoples’ experience online doesn’t align with the dreams of its early creators. How did we go astray and what should we do now? And what would our world look like if we got it right? This podcast mini-series will tackle those questions with regard to six specific topics of concern: the FISA Court, U.S. broadband access, the third-party doctrine, barriers to interoperable technology, law enforcement use of face recognition technology, and digital first sale. In each episode, we are joined by a guest to examine how the current system is failing, consider different possibilities for solutions, and imagine a better future. After all, we can’t build a better world unless we can imagine it.
“youtube-dl” is a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub recently took down youtube-dl’s code repository at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America, potentially stopping many thousands of users, and other programs and services, that rely on it.On…
EFF is excited to participate this weekend in a virtual version of the annual Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon—a day dedicated to celebrating the continuing legacy of activist, programmer, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz.
Join EFF Senior Researcher Dave Maass and privacy advocate Madison Vialpando as they lead a virtual session on the Atlas of Surveillance project. Participants will gather news articles, press releases, and public records about law enforcement agencies using surveillance technologies such as social media monitoring, automated license plate readers, and body-worn cameras. EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow, Director of Strategy Danny O’Brien, and Senior Activist Elliot Harmon are also scheduled to speak about Aaron’s legacy and how his work lives on today.
A legacy of the 2016 U.S. election is the controversy about the role played by paid, targeted political ads, particularly ads that contain disinformation or misinformation. Political scientists and psychologists disagree about how these ads work, and what effect they have. It’s a pressing political question, especially on the eve…
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and leading cybersecurity experts today urged the Supreme Court to rein in the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—and protect the security research we all rely on to keep us safe—by holding that accessing computers in ways that violate terms…
The people of Massachusetts demanded their right to repair this month, passing a ballot initiative to allow independent repair shops to access critical information about their cars by an overwhelming 74.9% majority. Now, automakers—whose scare tactics and false privacy and security claims did not fool Massachusetts voters—are expected to use another known tactic from their playbook and ask the legislature to delay implementing that law for years to come by saying the timeline is too tight.
That’s simply unacceptable. EFF stands behind the right to repair: If you bought it, you own it. You have the right to fix it yourself or take it to the repair shop of your choosing. Manufacturers often want to keep their customers tied to them long after a sale is done, and clearly are not above using whatever tactics they can to keep it that way. The people of Massachusetts didn’t fall for it. Neither should the legislature.
Have you tried modifying, repairing, or diagnosing a product but bumped into encryption, a password requirement, or some other technological roadblock that got in the way? EFF wants your stories to help us fight for your right to get around those obstacles.Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)…
In the final days of the administration, Andre Iancu, President Trump’s Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, is trying to push through permanent rule changes that would destroy the post-grant review system. Iancu is going all out to weaken “inter partes review” proceedings (or IPRs), which are the most effective mechanisms we have for getting the Patent Office to cancel patents it never should have granted in the first place. If these rules are adopted, the weakened IPR system will become a bonanza for patent trolls—and stay that way into the next administration.
We spoke out earlier this year about how the Patent Office was undermining the IPR process through bogus rules the Patent and Trial Appeal Board (PTAB) pushed through last year. Now, the Director is seeking to make these rules even more powerful and permanent. Now, we need EFF supporters to help us stop these dangerous changes.
On November 12, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 7,260,846, owned and asserted by Longhorn HD LLC, an NPE. The ’846 patent is directed to cybersecurity techniques including detecting malicious network behavior and was previously owned by Intellectual Ventures, a well-known NPE. It had been asserted against Fortinet, Juniper Networks, and Check Point, but new assertions include NetScout Systems, Mitel Software, and Trend Micro.
Following a criminal complaint filed by Canal+ and anti-piracy company NAGRA, an IPTV provider distributing more than 84,000 TV shows and movies has been shut down by local police with assistance from Europol. The main domain of KBoxServ now displays a seizure notice. The action is said to be the first of its kind in Switzerland.
On November 12, 2005, the first article appeared on TorrentFreak. Since then we have published 12,775 more, covering copyright news and piracy developments from all angles. It’s been a great ride so far, and we’re not done yet.
Summary: 19 years ago Free software advocates foresaw the misuse and obscene misapplication of DMCA to outlaw and censor applications, including Free software that does nothing illegal (but Microsoft censors that software anyway)
Marcia K Wilbur spent a lot of time preparing for publication these old videos she had taken 19 years ago. The timing could not be better.
Further to the prior parts with Richard Stallman, Larry Lessig, protesters against DMCA injustice etc. we’ve decided to post a final pair of videos, which are increasingly relevant because the RIAA attacks Free software based on a lie, helped by its close ally, Microsoft. They claim DRM circumvention, but in reality it’s just a plain text URL lookup, not DRM. Facts don’t seem to matter.
“They claim DRM circumvention, but in reality it’s just a plain text URL lookup, not DRM.”“DRM is the future,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO. They don’t care about users, they just care about the copyright monopolists (same as Biden for that matter). “Get me into that,” Bill Gates once said “and goddam, we’ll make so much money!”
At the heart of OpenStack, as with many open source projects, is a thriving community. Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director at the newly renamed Open Infrastructure Foundation which sits behind OpenStack, feels this is it’s finest work. “OpenStack’s greatest achievement is our community – a growing group of diverse contributors, users, and vendors who have enabled OpenStack to be one of the top three most active open source projects, in addition to Linux and Chromium.”
And while not always seen as being ‘mainstream tech’, the numbers are staggering. Bryce continued: “Over 100,000 individuals from 187 countries continue to support a project that is running over 10 million cores in production, powering critical infrastructure like banks, telecoms, railroads, retailers, hospitals, and more. I am so proud of the work that our community puts in daily to keep the world running on OpenStack.”
One of the biggest issues any technology can experience is scalability. Growing fast enough to suit demand, but also ensuring that the tech can deliver consistent quality as it does so. But these views of community – and its growth – are echoed by Georgi Georgiev, CIO of Japan’s SBI Bits: “Finding the appropriate technologies to build a virtual environment is a challenge of its own. OpenStack solved this problem by putting together a great stack of projects, and more impressively, built a community around it to support. This is the best that could have happened for open source, with OpenStack being available freely to everyone, while also enabling companies to package it up and sell while improving the product together.”
Talking of growing fast, OpenStack’s complimentary nature as a companion to the ever scalable public cloud provides organisations with the best of both worlds according to Tytus Kurek, Product Manager, at Canonical: “Although public clouds have almost dominated the cloud computing market, OpenStack adoption continues to grow every year. This is because OpenStack continues to deliver a cost-effective extension to the public cloud infrastructure, allowing organisations to take control over their budget. As one of the biggest contributors to the OpenStack project, Canonical is looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years will bring.”
Linux is scalable, modular, reliable and efficient. It offers a backbone for specific implementations that is simple to tailor and adapt.
The cloud and IoT are two technologies that are built almost exclusively on Linux due to these benefits.
Linux is ideal for IoT because there’s no heavy GUI, it can be optimized for hardware-level workloads, and the licensing makes it easy for redistribution. Plus, the extensive open source community may have already created something that suits the needs of a device maker and can be plugged right in.
Many of the same benefits apply when considering Linux for cloud workloads. So logically, as of 2017, Linux was running 90% of public cloud workloads. The benefits—as stated above—allow cloud architects to build anything on top of it while maintaining the inherent benefits of the cloud.
I am often asked, “What is your favorite window manager?” or “What is the best window manager?” Well, I thought I would give my opinion, even though I don’t speak in this video. I just let the window manager do all the talking.
Recently I looked at an app called z lua which learns how you navigate your linux file system but it’s not the only linux tool that does, another one that’s a little bit older is called autojump and like fasd it learns how you navigate your linux file system whenever you run cd.
Call me weird, but I LOVE benchmarking all my Linux PCs, and I constantly use Phoronix Test Suite because it’s a consistent, scalable and flexible piece of software for benchmarking EVERY aspect of your computer (games too!)
While looking around for some sort of dashboard to keep an eye on my Linux servers, I came across Rudder. Rudder allows you to keep track of all your Linux installations, and even force changes to make your servers meet compliance requirements for your organization. In this video, I’ll go over the process of setting up the server and agent components, as well as an overview and my thoughts.
This week we get crafty, discuss if Ubuntu is still exciting, bring you some command line love, round up all your wonderful feedback and visit ThinkPad corner.
It’s Season 13 Episode 34 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
FreeBSD 12.2 is available, ZFS Webinar, Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, how the OpenBSD -stable packages are built, OPNsense 20.7.4 released, and more
A late notable change for the Linux 5.10 kernel that was merged today as a “fix” is DPTF support for Intel Alder Lake hardware.
Intel’s Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) has been common to Intel ultrabooks for a few years as their power/thermal solution for managing fan noise, overheating, and other performance-related problems. But for Linux users DPTF has been a mess and making full use of Intel DPTF on Linux has required binary bits — including a binary-only utility for parsing DPTF tables from the system firmware.
Red Hat engineers are working on a “big block mode” for the VirtIO-MEM code and could land for the Linux 5.11 cycle.
Right now the virtio-mem driver only supports device block sizes that max out at the size of a single Linux memory block. The “Big Block Mode” addresses that and allows any device block size for any Linux virtual machine.
After announcing Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 back in March as their modified kernel based currently on the Linux 5.4 source tree while adding and back-porting extra features, UEK R6U1 was released today as their first major update to this kernel that can be found on the likes of Oracle Linux and powering the Oracle Cloud.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 1 remains based on the Linux 5.4 code-base but with plenty of back-porting and extra patches added in. UEK6 is an alternative to their “Red Hat Compatible Kernel” (RHCK) for use in the Oracle Linux environment for those wanting a newer kernel branch and extra features compared to what is found in Red Hat’s current Enterprise Linux base.
The Translation Table Maps (TTM) video memory management code used within the Linux kernel by DRM drivers such as Nouveau and Radeon/AMDGPU is seeing some improvements with the forthcoming Linux 5.11 kernel cycle.
Covered last week was new TTM allocator code being merged to DRM-Next ahead of December’s Linux 5.11 merge window. That new TTM page allocator code can yield 3~5x faster page allocations though it’s looking like the real-world impact will be minimal at least from the AMD tests thus far.
Just one week after OpenZFS 2.0-RC5, a sixth release candidate is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently geared for Linux and FreeBSD systems.
NVIDIA have released another update to their quickly advancing Vulkan Beta Driver, with the 455.46.01 release out.
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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?
22120 is a tool to save your browser history as an offline archive, available for Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS. Currently, it only supports Chrome-based web browsers, but its developer is investigating making this work for Firefox too.
Systemd 247-RC2 is primarily driven by various fixes that landed the past few weeks but there is also now a FixedRandomDelay= boolean setting for timer units to keep the same randomized delay for that given service, socket units now support Timestamping= with us/ns/off values, and SYSTEMD_SECCOMP=0 can be set as an environment variable for systemd-nspawn to turn off all seccomp filtering. Those are the lingering last minute items on top of all the feature changes in 247-rc1. There has also been HWDB additions such as for the HP ZBook Studio G5 keyboard and Dell microphone mute hotkey, documentation updates, and updates for the systemd tests.
For our November “Community Choice” Project of the Month (based on August vote), the community elected Pidgin IM, a universal instant messaging (IM) program.
Pidgin IM lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously, and is compatible with several chat networks out of the box, including Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC and more.
We caught up with project maintainer and lead developer Gary Kramlich as he shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
This article will discuss free and open source weather applications available for Linux. These applications are really useful if you want to plan your day ahead or upcoming schedule.
These are some of the best GUI and command-line applications for viewing weather conditions on Linux desktops. Almost all of these applications support automatic detection of location as well as options to manually specify any location around the world.
If you’re running your own mailserver, it’s best practice to connect to it securely with a SSL/TLS connection. You’ll need a valid certificate for these secure connections. In this tutorial, we’ll set up a Let’s Encrypt certificate for our mailserver that renews automatically.
Fedora Linux 33 was released last week with some interesting changes like switching the default file system to BtrFS, handing DNS resolution over to systemd-resolved, and enabling ZRAM instead of a swap partition by default. I’ll focus on the latter feature in this article.
SSH is a network protocol that enables users to share data traffic securely within an unprotected network. It provides this protection through an SSH server, linking it to the connection between the central server and the client. Any network service can be made secure by Secure Shell, and SSH can be set up on almost any operating system.
In the following short guide, we will look at SSH server installation and configuration on Arch Linux.
If you are curious about Fedora Linux, there are several ways to try it.
The easiest way that won’t affect your current operating system is to create a live USB of Fedora.
An alternative way to try Fedora, is to get advantage of virtualization technology through an installation in VirtualBox. This way, you use Fedora like an application on your current operating system.
This way, you can perform more thorough testing without messing up your current operating system.
You can even copy your virtual setup and re-install it on some other system. Sounds handy? Let me show you how to do it.
Date command is an external bash program that allows to set or display system date and time. It also provides several formatting options. Date command is installed in all Linux distros by default.
PulseAudio is a free and open-source sound server, released in 2004 as Polypaudio. PulseAudio serves as a proxy between software applications creating sound data and audio output devices. Though it was originally intended for the Linux operating system, PulseAudio can be used on just about any other OS with the right utilities.
PulseAudio allows users to perform complicated manipulations on sound data, from mixing sound samples to customizing audio channels. This also includes multiplexing – a technique by which users can direct different audio outputs to different speakers.
This article provides a tutorial on how to set up and begin using PulseAudio in ArchLinux.
Linux terminal is the most powerful handy tool that comes pre-installed on every Linux distributions. We use the terminal shell to install, run, and remove applications and tools with different terminal commands. But, did you know that you can also use the terminal shell to play your favorite MP3 music via different command lines? Playing MP3 files via command lines doesn’t only make you smart; it is also very efficient and time-saving. Besides these, you can get a unique and different flavors music player by playing MP3 files via the terminal command lines.
Samba is a free and open-source software that provides a seamless means of file sharing between Windows and Linux/Unix systems on a network. Samba is essentially an open-source re-implementation of SMB (Server Messaging Block) and CIFS (Common Internet File System) networking protocols. Aside from sharing files between clients and hosts, Samba also allows for sharing, printing, and domain control services within the network.
This tutorial will show you how to set up and configure Samba on an ArchLinux client or server.
In this tutorial, we will take a look at Network Time Protocol (NTP), a technique often used to sync the clock timing on Linux systems to Internet time. Synchronization between system and internet timing is important because of network latency, a parameter that can significantly alter the user’s experience on the web. NTP is capable of maintaining a network lag of just 10 milliseconds, which is an acceptable value.
This tutorial will cover the installation and configuration of the NTP daemon in ArchLinux.
All Linux systems create and store information about servers, boot processes, kernel, and applications in log files, which can be helpful for troubleshooting as it contains systems activity logs. The log files are stored in /var/log directory and its subdirectory. In this tutorial, we will learn how to view and monitor log files in CentOS8 using different ways. So, let’s get started.
Tor preserves your online anonymity through its unique onion routing, in which your encrypted data passes through several intermediary nodes. Each node is peeled back one at a time, much like an onion. None of them know anything about the origin of your data or your final destination, thus protecting your identity.
There is a drawback, though. Since the traffic in Tor is routed through multiple onion relays, it can significantly reduce your browsing speed. Also, ISPs can restrict or throttle Tor traffic without prior warning. Tor FAQs say that their main focus is security and not speed.
There are times when I want to turn off the displays on my workstation, but not actually lock it. In this Linux quicktip we will show you how to turn your displays off using the command line. We will also show you how to use that command as a keyboard shortcut, or HotKey.
KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. This software allows users to run multiple virtual machines with different operating systems, thus bypassing the need to follow more conventional means of using Virtualbox. KVM is free, open-source, and has been refined and improved over the last ten years.
Ubuntu is a Linux distro based on the Debian operating system. This distro has completely transformed Debian into an operating system that is user-friendly.
Ubuntu has a graphical user interface for package installers and acts more like a conventional operating system. With Ubuntu, you do not need a terminal to download packages. Ubuntu has three versions: desktop, server, and core.
The user name with a corresponding password for a specific account is the primary requirement through which a user can access a Linux system. All user’s accounts password is saved in a file or a database so that a user can be verified during the login attempt into the system. Every user does not have enough skills and expertise to locate this file on their system. However, if you get access to the database or a file that keeps all the login user’s passwords, then you can easily access the Linux system. When a user enters a username and password on Linux for login, it checks the entered password against an entry in various files of the ‘/etc’ directory.
The /etc/passwd files keep all the important information that is necessary for user login. To explain it in simpler words, the /etc/passwd file stores the user’s account details. This file is a plain text file that contains a complete list of all users on your Linux system. It has the information about username, password, UID (user id), GID (group id), shell, and home directory. This file should have read permissions as many command-line utilities are used to map the user IDs to the user name. But, should have limited write access permissions only for superuser or root user accounts.
This article will demonstrate how and where you can store system user’s account passwords on Linux distribution. We have implemented all demonstrations on Ubuntu 20.04 system. However, you can find /etc/passwd file on any Linux distribution.
Nginx was launched in 2004 as an open-source web server. Since the time it has been released, it is very commonly used for hosting websites. Apart from this, it is also being used as Load Balancer, Email Proxy, Reverse Proxy, and HTTP Cache. Like every other web server, Nginx is also prone to certain errors, out of which the most common one is the 502 Bad Gateway error. This is a highly generic type of error that arises when you try to access a web server but fail to reach it. In that case, your browser may render the 502 Bad Gateway error. Since there is no other information that appears along with this error, it leaves the user clueless about what exactly went wrong and how they can fix it.
Therefore, in today’s article, we will try to look for all the potential causes of the 502 Bad Gateway error in Nginx, as well as the ways on how we can possibly fix it.
We all know that Linux based systems rely heavily on files. These files are grouped together in the form of multiple file systems, and for accessing a particular file system with an added level of ease, you can attach that file system to any desired location till the time you wish to access that file system. Once you are done, you can simply detach that file system from that location. In this whole process, the attachment of a file system on a specific location is known as “mounting,” whereas the detachment of a file system from a specific location is known as “unmounting.”
Also, the location to which you attach a file system is formally known as a “mount point.” There are multiple file systems available on a Linux operating system. Some of these file systems are mounted by default, and some of them are unmounted, which means that you can easily mount them on your own. In today’s article, we will be teaching you the methods of mounting and unmounting a file system in Linux Mint 20.
Creating shell scripts is one of the most essential skills that Linux users should have at the tip of their fingers. Shell scripts play an enormous role in automating repetitive tasks which otherwise would be tedious executing line by line.
In this tutorial, we highlight some of the basic shell scripting operations that every Linux user should have.
Once you have ROS installed, you might want to build a robot. A good way to succeed in this project is to plan what you want to do. In this case, ROS comes to the rescue. With ROS, you can set up what you have built and visualize the whole thing. When working with robots, there will be many scenarios that you may need to consider. The robot must interact with the environment, such as avoiding the sofa and finding its way back from the kitchen. The robot should also have arms and legs if your needs require it. You can simulate all of this using ROS, and for the coding part, you can also simulate the internals of your system.
Ubuntu is an open-source operating system. It is based on Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Ubuntu is a great operating system for your IoT projects on the Raspberry Pi 4.
In the headless setup of Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi 4, you don’t need a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor. You can directly access the Ubuntu operating system installed on your Raspberry Pi 4 remotely via SSH.
In this article, I am going to show you how to install Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS on your Raspberry Pi 4 in headless mode and configure SSH access. So, let’s get started.
Kali Linux is Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and System Auditing. It comes with hundreds of tools used Information gathering, Penetration testing, forensics, reverse engineering, security research, and much more.
Today we are looking at how to install MVP Media Player 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.
LeoCAD is a 3D modeling CAD program for designing lego block creations. It is an excellent piece of software and works on nearly all Linux operating systems with ease. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install it.
Suppose you have written, build, and compiled a program to calculate the Fibonacci numbers among a million numbers. Once the program is built, you may decide to make your raw codes available for others so that they can use or modify your code for further usages. That raw code is called the source code. In other words, source code is the mother code of any package. When you install software on your system, you install the source codes as well. Actually, source code is nothing but the millions of code lines you can compile to build a complete package.
Many Linux users don’t even know that they are using source codes regularly. When you clone a code from GitHub or another package repository, you actually download the package’s source code. Later, you can install that package on your Linux system through the conventional method of installing software from source code.
PowerDNS is a free and open-source authoritative nameserver. It is written in C++ and runs on Unix, Linux and macOS operating systems. It uses MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Oracle to store zone files and records.
PowerDNS Admin is a web-based tool used for managing PowerDNS. You can create and manage DNS zones using the web browser. It comes with a rich set of features.
Prefer installing digiKam photo manager via apt repository rather than the containerized Flatpak package? There’s a third-party PPA maintains the latest packages for all current Ubuntu releases.
Symbolic links, also called “soft links” and “symlinks,” are a form of shortcuts that can point to files and directories. A symlink looks just like a regular file or directory in a file manager window. It also shows up as an entry in a file listing in a terminal window. The file or directory to which the symlink points can be anywhere in the file system tree.
For example, let’s say you have a symlink in your home directory called “dave-link” that points to a file called “text-file.txt” located somewhere else in the file system tree. Commands you use on the symlink are automatically applied to the file to which it points. If you try to use cat or less on the symlink, you’ll actually see the contents of the “text-file.txt” file.
A standard Linux installation contains many symlinks. Even if you don’t create any yourself, the operating system uses them. Application installation routines often use symlinks to point to executables files. When the software is updated, the binary file is replaced with the new version, and all the symlinks carry on working as before, as long as the new file’s name is the same as the old.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Ant on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Ant™ is a Java library and command-line tool whose mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other. The main known usage of Ant is the build of Java applications. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing them to compile, assemble, test, and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non-Java applications, for instance, C or C++ applications. More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks.
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 Apache Ant on CentOS 8.
As you may know, the “access time” and “modify time” timestamps of a file will be changed to the current time after the file is edited or modified. Sometimes, you might want to preserve the old timestamps for any reason even after editing or modifying the files. This brief guide explains how to edit a file without changing its timestamps in Linux.
As thousands of games release each year, it’s easy for many to go unnoticed and there’s always plenty crowdfunding on the likes of Kickstarter. Here’s a reminder of some finished campaigns with upcoming Linux games.
Another fresh Steam Client Beta went up on November 13, improving support of Steam’s own Steam Input handling with the newer controllers from the next generation consoles.
The Beta notes that the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller now has initial support with Steam, however there’s a few advanced features (trackpad / gyro) that are not currently supported. Additionally, the Xbox Series X controller should no longer show up as 2 separate controllers.
Nice to see Valve getting in early on that. They’re not the only ones doing so either, as SDL 2 the cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware also recently added in support for both the PlayStation 5 DualSense (commit) and Xbox Series X too (commit). Both of which were added in by Sam Lantinga from Valve.
Never missing an opportunity to run a big sale, Valve have put together a big fighting game sale including multiple genres with lots of games going cheap.
The sale includes straight-up 1 on 1 traditional fighting games, side-scrolling beat ‘em ups and a whole lot more in between. There’s some really nice picks there too, although the special event sale page they setup makes finding what you want a little difficult with only a few basic genre categories.
After being available for a long time on itch.io, the fast-paced RTS game Abstractanks with it’s unique take is now available on Steam.
This isn’t just a game moving from one store to another, it’s actually part of a huge upgrade for the game too. The 1.0 release came along with the Steam build, which added in a full 20-mission campaign to play through with each level having multiple challenges to master. Additionally there’s been plenty of minor polishing improvements.
PixelNAUTS Games who released LOST ORBIT: Terminal Velocity back in 2019 have announced Rocket Rumble, a frantic action-racing game with a cast of animals in rocket suits smash and bash their way across the finish line.
Rocket Rumble is a 2-4 player action-racer featuring local single-screen, online multiplayer, and action-packed combat across 9 different obstacle courses. Race through an Asteroid Mine, Star Forest, amidst a Galactic Battle and through a dangerous Space Reef, avoiding asteroids, machines, lasers, creatures and plant life. Players will have the choice to pick from and customize 8 different quirky animals equipped in mighty mech suits.
Lizardcube and Dotemu announced today that Streets of Rage 4 is now officially supported on Linux (and macOS), with a port done by Ethan Lee creator of FNA.
“The all-time classic Streets of Rage, known as Bare Knuckle (ベア・ナックル Bea Nakkuru) in Japan, is a trilogy of beat ‘em up known for this timeless gameplay and electronic dance influenced music. Streets of Rage 4 builds upon the classic trilogy’s gameplay with new mechanics, beautiful hand drawn visuals and a God tier soundtrack.”
Originally released for the Apple II in 1989 and later MS-DOS, DRM-free store GOG.com have revived the first-person retro RPG, The Dark Heart of Uukrul, thanks to the power of DOSBox. Another hidden gem from many years ago, and due to how it was released a lot of people completely missed it as it was originally put out at the end of the Apple II’s lifespan.
“You four – a warrior, a magician, a priest and a paladin – you tiny band of four must somehow vanquish the evil Uukrul. For he and his depraved followers hold the once-lovely city of Eriosthé in dark dominion. And until he is destroyed, the entire land lies helplessly at his mercy.”
What was originally looking like a free update to the brilliant Plague Inc: Evolved is instead going to be a massive expansion that is “big enough to be a brand new game”.
In Plague Inc: The Cure, Ndemic Creations worked with various real-world health organisations including the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), World Health Organisation (WHO) and Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN). You will balance social, economic and global health factors in order to keep the disease under control whilst also maintaining public trust – so it’s very much the opposite of the normal gameplay.
An adventure that slightly reminds me of the Reigns series, The Choice of Life: Middle Ages has you pick from a couple cards to pick choices and go on your adventure.
It’s a bit odd, often quite short when your choices lead to your demise but also quite amusing at the same time. You start off as a baby as you try to make yourself get noticed, and gradually go through decision after decision hopefully trying to stay alive and make a name for yourself. Most of the time, I just keep end up getting killed through various daft encounters but it’s got a weird sort of charm to it.
After an impressive early demo (which you can still try out) and a successful Kickstarter campaign, LAZR is looking really fun and I can’t wait to see more of it.
What the developer calls a “clothformer” as it’s using a lot of physics interactions with various forms of cloth. Created from the ground up to show off “never before seen realistic cloth simulations with full destruction” along with plenty of game mechanics designed around it like intriguing sounding cloth-based enemies.
In the latest development log, Garrick Campsey did a long look at the early part of the game and it’s really looking good.
With the last Steam Game Festival ending in October, Valve have announced the dates for the next and developers don’t have long to get their demos ready.
Announced in the Steamworks Group, the next Steam Game Festival begins on February 3, 2021 and will run until February 9. For developers, the cut-off for demo submissions is December 2, 2021 at 11:59pm PST / December 3, 2021 7:59am UTC and they won’t accept any new games after that date.
In previous post we looked at the Semantic Web, the semantic desktop, and how it can be that after 20 years of development, most desktop search engines still provide little more than keyword matching in your files.
History shows that the majority of users aren’t excited by star ratings, manual tagging or inference. App developers mostly don’t want to converge on a single database, especially if the first step is to relinquish control of their database schema.
So where do we go from here? Let’s first take a look at what happened in search outside the desktop world in the last 20 years.
By the end of last week I had curated a list of the issues for GNOME contacts ready on which I need to work on. I also created an issue for that in the user-docs section on GitLab. Creating an issue and then working on it is a good practice as you can then reference all the Merge Requests you work on under the same issue. This allows not only the supervisor, but also everyone who is working on documentation for GNOME to get a clear idea about what you are working on and what is the next task you would be working on.
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And with all this I managed to finish GNOME contacts. It was very quick to be honest. Another core application finished!
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest Linux distributions, you must have noticed that 32-bit support has been dropped from most of the popular Linux distributions. Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, everyone has dropped the support for this older architecture.
But, what if you have vintage hardware with you that still needs to be revived or you want to make use of it for something? Fret not, there are still a few options left to choose from for your 32-bit system.
Compared to the popular proprietary operating systems, your average Linux distro doesn’t break down very easily. But a hardware failure or a clumsy operator can still wreak considerable havoc.
Of course, there’s no shortage of tools and utilities that’ll help users heal their broken installations. However, like with most things open source, it is the sheer number of choices that often confuse the average desktop user who might end up choosing the wrong tool for the job.
This is where these specialized rescue distros come into the picture. They not only collate a vast number of healing tools, they’ll also go the extra mile and help you find the right tool for the job.
Some minor email changes have affected the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, so reviewer ratings won’t be listed.
The latest snapshot, 20201111, updated a half dozen RubyGems. The 4.11.0 rubygem-mini_magick package fixed the fetching of metadata when there are GhostScript warnings and fixed some method redefined warnings. The rubygem-web-console 4.1.0 package update added support for Rails 6.1.
KDE Applications 20.08.3 arrived in snapshot 20201110. In the 20.08.3 apps update, a fix for Okular addressed a wrong memory access that could cause a crash and a fix for the fast scrolling with Shift+Scroll. Video editor kdenlive provided a fix for the monitor displayed frames per second with high fps values and fixed the playlist clips that had a no audio regression. There were several other app fixes and konsole provided an important fix for closing the split view with ‘Alt+C’. Mozilla Firefox 82.0.3 fixed regressions introduced in the pervious minor version and took care of a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, which in certain circumstances, the MCallGetProperty opcode would emit with unmet assumptions that could result in an exploitable use-after-free condition. GStreamer 1.18.1 provided some important security and memory leak fixes while providing various stability and reliability improvements. Hardware identification and configuration data package hwdata 0.341 updated the Peripheral Component Interconnect, USB and vendor identifications. The multi-purpose desktop calculator qalculate 3.14.0 improved the plot speed for functions that are defined using expressions. Other packages updated in the snapshot were libbluray 1.2.1, a month and a half of updates for libiscsi and udisks2 2.9.1.
An update of the Xfce file manager package thunar to version 1.8.16 was the lone update in snapshot 20201108. The newer version updated translations, fixed an error for custom date formats and added a missing parameter to the ThunarBrowserPokeDeviceFunc function.
Oracle is pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 for the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. Oracle Linux brings the latest open source innovations and business-critical performance and security optimizations for cloud and on-premises deployment. Oracle Linux maintains user space compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is independent of the kernel version that underlies the operating system. Existing applications in user space will continue to run unmodified on Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 (UEK R6) and no re-certifications are needed for applications already certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 or Oracle Linux 8.
Oracle Linux 8 Update 3 includes the UEK R6 on the installation image, along with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK). For new installations, UEK R6 is enabled and installed by default and is the default kernel on first boot. UEK R6, the kernel developed, built, and tested by Oracle and based on the mainline Linux Kernel 5.4, delivers more innovation than other commercial Linux kernels.
More than six months in development, CentOS Linux 7.9 is here packed with great enhancements, including support for the Python 3.6 interpreter, redesigned desktop layout, improvements to Security Profiles in the Anaconda graphical installer, as well as the ability to report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
As expected, many packages received important updates. Among the most important ones, there’s FreeRDP 2.1.1, Linux kernel 3.10.0-1160, MariaDB 5.5.68, Pacemaker 1.1.23, and SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) 1.16.5. And the new installation media also comes with all the security patches from upstream.
Looking to bolster the businesses of partners, Red Hat introduced Red Hat Renewals Intelligence, part of Red Hat’s Partner Renewals Engagement Program, a platform that puts at the fingertips of distributors, resellers and solution providers the information they need to retain clients and grow those accounts.
What opportunities and challenges will operators face when it comes to deploying virtualized radio access networks (vRANs) in their 4G infrastructures and their planned 5G implementations? How will container and cloud-native technologies impact vRAN plans?
Heavy Reading explored these issues in a recent survey sponsored by Red Hat. The topic and survey results were discussed in a webinar, available on-demand here.
The survey finds an accelerating rate at which telecommunications service providers (telcos) will move to 5G, with its lower-latency service, higher bandwidth, and massive Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities. Respondents expect 5G penetration to significantly increase in their respective carrier networks and the solutions to be cloud-native. Not much of the 5G vRAN infrastructure is containerized today, but nearly 75% of respondents believe that at least half of their 5G vRAN infrastructure will be containerized in two years. The data also indicates that 4G implementations will peak in two years, but at a somewhat reduced level because operators will start transitioning from 4G to 5G, even as they replace older 3G with 4G.
This is the second half of a two-part article about multitenancy with the Jakarta Persistence API (JPA) on WildFly. In Part 1, I showed you how to implement multitenancy using a database. In Part 2, I’ll show you how to implement multitenancy using a schema and the Jakarta Persistence API (JPA) on WildFly. You’ll learn how to implement JPA’s CurrentTenantIdentifierResolver and MultiTenantConnectionProvider interfaces, and how to use JPA’s persistence.xml file to configure the required classes based on these interfaces.
The network role supports two providers: NetworkManager(nm) and initscripts. For CentOS/RHEL 6, we only use initscripts as providers. For CentOS/RHEL 7+, we use initscripts and nm as providers. Various networking profiles can be configured via customized Ansible module. Several tasks will run for host networking setup, including but not limited to, package installation, starting/enabling services. Network role CI system consists of Tox running unit tests and Test-harness running integration tests. When we use Tox to run unit tests, we can check code formatting using Python Black, check YAML files formatting etc. Integration tests run in internal OpenShift, watch configured GitHub repositories for PRs, check out new PR, run all testing playbooks against all configured images, fresh machine for every test playbook, sets statuses of PR and uploads results. For better testing efficiency, in some playbooks, we can call internal Ansible modules instead of role to skip redundant tasks, we can also group Ansible modules into blocks for more targeted unit testing. Furthermore, there are helper scripts to get coverage from integration tests via Ansible, basic unit for argument parsing, additional helper files for assertion/test setup/logging.
My second mentor did not actually know that I had selected him as my guiding beacon during what was a very challenging and confusing time for me. I had been sent to Asia to build up the corporate network and migrate whatever email systems and collaboration tools they had over to Lotus Notes. I was stationed in Bangkok with my family and had 16 countries to look after. Even though I had been working with some of them online, it was a completely different ballgame to be out there in the sticks, looking at a server in a shower cabinet and having to fix it. I was building up a data center as part of the global infrastructure, working in teams with local sysadmins. These were guys who were used to being king of the hill, and now I gently had to demote them to checking log files without any admin access to the servers. In addition to the hands-on technical work, I was also the IT manager for Asia, and while I am a pretty social person, I had much to learn about culture and management.
That’s when I met Liam, the production plant manager in Singapore. He was a down-to-earth character who knew every nook and cranny of his enormous technical plant. He would walk to the local food court and get his lunch, as opposed to other managers that had their secretaries bring their lunch to the (managers-only) lunchroom. Liam talked to everyone and was adamant when it came to crew safety. He was a hardworking professional with high demands, and yet there was a very human side to everything he did. If there was a problem, he was there, on the ground, talking with people, helping out, discussing, reviewing. Everyone had the greatest respect for him, but they were also not afraid to make their voice heard. The executive board would send him to production plants all over the world whenever things needed fixing or when they had bought a new plant—as had been the case in Singapore, where he had now been for a few years.
Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a “lightly maintained” package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages.
For the past two months there has been this FESCo ticket around the idea of having a new repository for serving “lightly maintained” packages. In this context it’s about packages that are used just as dependencies for other packages but unlikely to be used at scale, packages with open security vulnerabilities that go left unaddressed, or are just more “raw” than accustomed for Fedora packaging standards. This could be either a separate Fedora repository (remember the days of Fedora Extras?) that might be disabled by default or otherwise indicated the package status via RPM metadata.
It has been several weeks since the Community Outreach Revamp launched. Within these weeks, we have made some productive steps. To learn more about the initial proposal and start up process, you can take a look at the wiki page that contains all the details. Also, make sure to check out the previous updates we have published on the Community Blog.
In order to keep everything in one place and track progress easily the co-leads, Mariana and Sumantro, have created a Trello board to organize ongoing tasks. The Trello board will help the Temporary Task Force (TTF) and the other Teams and contributors involved in the Revamp coordinate with each other.
Amidst the Fedora 33 Release, Fedora Women’s Day, Outreachy application period and preparation of Virtual Release Parties; it has been a busy October. With all that going on, we still managed to cover significant ground.
FriendlyElec has posted specs on a “NanoPi R4S” SBC equipped with a hexa-core RK3399 with up to 4GB LPDDR4, a microSD slot, dual GbE, dual USB 3.0, and -20 to 70℃ support.
Rockchip’s RK3399 has been dropping in price over the years, with RK3399-based Linux hacker boards starting at over $100 but now selling for as low as $39 for the 1GB version of Radxa’s Rock Pi 4. Apparently, the hexa-core -A72 and -A53 SoC is now cheap enough that FriendlyElec can afford to use it on its latest headless NanoPi Rx router boards. The unpriced, RK3399 based NanoPi R4S lacks display or camera interfaces to exploit the SoC’s high-end Mali-T860 MP4 GPU and MIPI and HDMI 2.0 interfaces.
One Banana Pi customer asked them to customize Banana Pi BPI-R64 Linux router board based on MediaTek MT7622 WiFi processor as part of their “BPI 4.0 server” OEM/ODM customization service. Specifically, they were asked to design a cellular gateway board with the same five Gigabit Ethernet ports as on the original board, but adding five mini PCIe sockets and SIM card slots for 3G/4G cards, and one M.2 socket plus two SIM cards for a 5G module.
Looking at the device’s vast popularity, you have bought a raspberry pi, too, out of enthusiasm. But what now? Confused about how to use raspberry pi? It’s normal to be confused about getting started with this thing and, more importantly, where to begin? To help you with this situation, I have decided to write this beginner’s tutorial to understand all the basic steps of the Raspberry Pi installation. Stick through the end to get started with your Raspberry Pi.
I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4B to use as a small always-on home server. I don’t plan to run it at full throttle all the time, but I still wanted to upgrade it with a heatsink. Its processor comes with a small heat spreader as the board’s only cooling solution. A heatsink is a chunkier block of aluminum than what’s used in the built-in heat spreader, and it has fins that help with heat dissipation. This upgrade should give it a little more headroom before the processor begins throttling performance to keep itself from overheating.
I wanted to find a heatsink that either came with a syringe of thermal adhesive glue or a set of adhesive thermal pads. I browsed for options on AliExpress and found a couple of potential candidates. As per usual, the product description and specifications on AliExpress were incomplete and it was hard to determine which listings fit my requirements. I looked in the review sections to try and determine if any other customers had shared any useful insights.
Among the reviews on several listings, I found lots of confused consumers who’ve bought heatsinks only to realize they didn’t have a way to attach them. Some customers shared “helpful” reviews where they suggested to attach the heatsinks with super glue or double-sided tape. This same idea is also shared on a few blogs and in reviews on other shopping sites. This advice is completely wrong. You should not use super glue or regular tape to attach a heatsink to anything!
Congatec unveiled a “Conga-TCV2” Type 6 module with AMD’s Ryzen Embedded V2000 SoC. The company also launched six -40 to 85°C versions of its Type 6 and COM-HPC Tiger Lake modules and previewed a COM-HPC carrier.
AMD officially announced AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Zen2 processor family yesterday, with claims of twice the multi-threaded performance-per-watt, up to 30 percent better single-thread CPU performance, and up to 40 percent better graphics performance over Ryzen Embedded V1000 processors.
There is plenty of cheap 5V or 3.3V USB to TTL debug boards used to access the serial console and/or program boards, but FTDI FT2232H based Tigard open-source hardware board does much more than that as it supports multiple protocols, multiple voltages for hardware hacking & debugging.
The developer explains Tigard can be used as a drop-in replacement for dozens of other hardware tools based on FTDI chips and includes native support OpenOCD, FlashROM, and more.
The custom setup oscillates the cup pyramids back and forth under the power of a stepper motor, belt, and magnet assembly under the table. These magnets pull on corresponding magnets attached to the bottom of each cup, causing them to slide “like magic” on top of an acrylic surface.
Palowski’s system is controlled by an Arduino Nano with a rotary encoder and OLED interface. As shown in the video below, both sides of the table are motorized in the same manner for a two-player challenge!
Raspberry Pi is today the most ubiquitous name in Single-Board Computer (SBC) products. It’s cheap, widely available and popular with DIY enthusiasts as well as serious IoT makers. This has created a niche for identical SBCs which can improve on the Pi specs to build flexible, long-lasting products, yet retain their familiar form factor and compatibility with Raspberry Pi projects.
The Arduino Science Journal is a mobile application that allows anyone to conduct scientific experiments by measuring the surrounding world with sensors, documenting and comparing data, developing and validating hypotheses, and taking notes. The app and all learning materials are free, open source, and available for download on Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and starting from today on Huawei App Gallery.
The Arduino Science Journal encourages students to explore how the world works, record data, document observations, and experiment like a real scientist — all through their mobile device, providing in effect a pocket-sized science lab!
While Uber is under fire in several countries from angry taxi companies and taxi drivers especially in Europe and Turkey, It’s hard to keep Uber up and running because of legal constrains and lockdown. But with an open-source solution that anyone can install and run, there might be an answer to such problems.
LibreTaxi is an open-source completely free of charge Uber alternative which allows user to use a commonly used Telegram messaging application to request a taxi nearby with simple few clicks.
The whole system works as a Telegram intelligent bot, making a use of Telegram’s messaging potential as a successful messaging app like instant messaging, push notification, maps and geolocation integration and all mobile devices support.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used more frequently in our daily lives, with systems such as Siri and Alexa becoming commonplace in many households. Many households themselves are “smart,” powered by devices that can control your lights, heating and air, and even the music playing. And those music players are powered by AI that recommends songs and artists you may like.
However, these systems are often referred to as “black box” systems because we do not know how the data is processed—how do the users know why the model has made that prediction? The advent and widespread adoption of deep neural networks, while providing impressive results, made this even more critical, since humans can’t logically interpret how information is processed within thousands of neurons.
Whether you are a senior leader or an individual contributor, you make decisions based on your personal, peers’, and colleagues’ experiences and feedback. If the people around you are evolving, you will grow with them, as will the organization you support. If the backgrounds and knowledge of the people around you are diverse and changing, you and your team will benefit.
I’ve noticed that my skillset and contributions give diminishing returns if I am not challenged. Human beings tend to get into their comfort zones quickly. We get used to working a certain way, and we start to depend on key people to make decisions for us. This leads to complacency, which does not change unless we are challenged due to market shifts or other external forces.
2020 has been a roller coaster. As everyone continues to navigate through these challenging times, the Qt team is excited to provide a space for like-minded peers to watch and ask questions. Gather around for 10 hours with the Qt product team, industry thought leaders and the Qt Ecosystem in your school of choice: Embedded, Desktop, and UI Design!
The busy Q3/Q4 2020 schedule of conferences continues this week with Linux App Summit (LAS), a conference “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.”
Starting today, and running until this Saturday (November 14), LAS will be taking place entirely online for the first time, with 30+ talks spread out over three days. Collaborans will giving presentations on Linux graphics, PipeWire and our work with Valve. You can find full details below for each talk. The conference is free of charge, but you must register to attend.
In October there were 202 alerts generated, resulting in 25 regression bugs being filed on average 4.4 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the second edition of the new format for the performance sheriffing newsletter! In last month’s newsletter I shared details of our sheriffing efficiency metrics. If you’re interested in the latest results for these you can find them summarised below, or (if you have access) you can view them in detail on our full dashboard. As sheriffing efficiency is so important to the prevention of shipping performance regressions to users, I will include these metrics in each month’s newsletter.
In my previous blog post, I discussed an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) implementation for doing local data analysis within Mozilla in a standardized way. That work provided us with a straightforward way of consuming data from various sources and standardizing it to conform to the expected structure for pre-built analysis scripts.
Today, not only are we using this ETL (called PerftestETL) locally, but also in our CI system! There, we have a tool called Perfherder which ingests data created by our tests in CI so that we can build up visualizations and dashboards like Are We Fast Yet (AWFY). The big benefit that this new ETL system provides here is that it greatly simplifies the path to getting from raw data to a Perfherder-formatted datum. This lets developers ignore the data pre-processing stage which isn’t important to them. All of this is currently available in our new performance testing framework MozPerftest.
Hello. We’re the Firefox Content Design team. We’ve actually met before, but our name then was the Firefox Content Strategy team.
Why did we change our name to Content Design, you ask? Well, for a few (good) reasons.
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We are designers, and our material is content. Content can be words, but it can be other things, too, like layout, hierarchy, iconography, and illustration. Words are one of the foundational elements in our design toolkit — similar to color or typography for visual designers — but it’s not always written words, and words aren’t created in a vacuum. Our practice is informed by research and an understanding of the holistic user journey. The type of content, and how content appears, is something we also create in close partnership with UX designers and researchers.
Over the last year, Mozilla has decided to shut down the IRC network and replace it with a more modern platform. To my greatest delight, the Matrix ecosystem has been selected among all the possible replacements. For those who might not know Matrix, it’s a modern, decentralized protocol, using plain HTTP JSON-formatted endpoints, well-documented, and it implements both features that are common in recent messaging systems (e.g. file attachments, message edits and deletions), as well as those needed to handle large groups (e.g. moderation tools, private rooms, invite-only rooms).
In this post I reflect on my personal history of writing chat bots, and then present a panel of features that the bot has, some user-facing ones, some others that embody what I esteem to be a sane, well-behaved Matrix bot.
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It is quite common in teams to set up regular standup meetings, where everyone in the team announces what they’ve been working on in the last few days or week. It also strikes me as important for personal recognition, including towards management, to be able to show off (just a bit!) what you’ve accomplished recently, and to remember this when times are harder (see also Julia Evans’ blog post on the topic).
There’s a Botzilla module for this. Every time someone starts a message with confession:, then everything after the colon will be saved in a database (…wait for it!). Then, all the confessions are displayed on the Histoire website, with one message feed per user. Note it is possible to send confessions privately to Botzilla (that doesn’t affect the frontend though, which is open and public to all!), or in a public channel. Public channels somehow equate to team members, so channels also get their own pages on the frontend.
What is the best way to alert people about catastrophes? Germany went with proprietary apps which caused the recent warning day (“Warntag”) to become an official failure. We analysed the situation and found more robust solutions that respect user rights.
The basic idea of testing emergency systems is to find potential or real problems. However, it is remarkable how much went wrong in Germany’s official warning day in September. Especially the unreliability of the officially advertised non-free and non-standard apps forced the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), that is in charge of the responsible Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), to label the test day as a failure.
The FSFE analysed the findings together with experts in civil protection and mobile networking to figure out why the apps failed, and what a more resilient and open system can look like.
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Despite the clear advantages of cell broadcasts, warning apps have their justification. Users can request various information about other regions and past events. However, basing a large part of the emergency communication system on warning apps has proven to be too prone to single points of failure.
Furthermore, because of the critical role of emergency communication systems for the public, they have to be Free Software, and built upon Open Standards. Only with the freedoms to use, study, share, and improve software, can they be analysed by citizens and independent security researchers. This in turn increases trust and willingness to install a complementary warning app, as the practical experience with the Corona tracing apps shows.
The POCO X3 NFC was launched back on September 7, 2020, bringing around a very high-value package at an affordable price tag. POCO repeated the same act with the POCO X3 in India, launched on September 22, 2020, but with slight differences from the globally launched variant: a bigger battery and no NFC. Two months on, the device remains one of the best purchases overall in the mid-range, for both the Global and the Indian variants. But what disappoints us is the fact that the kernel source for the device(s) has still not been released, despite a promise to release it on launch day.
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Since it has been more than 2 months now since the phone has been released, there is very little excuse left on POCO’s end for not having released the source code. The phone is in the hands of consumers, and a fair few updates have also been delivered. Releasing kernel sources promptly should be something that every OEM does anyway. But POCO explicitly promised a very quick kernel release. And not releasing it so far trudges upon these claims of developer-friendliness and the trust of customers (and legal contracts, too).
The POCO X3/NFC remains an excellent value device in the age of rising flagship prices. While the phone is no flagship, nor does it pretend to be, it’s very easy to recommend to average users in the regions where it is officially sold. You get a lot of phone for the money. We hope POCO releases kernel sources as soon as possible, to keep up its promise to its fans. And while they’re at it, we hope they release kernel sources for the POCO M2 (device codename: shiva) and POCO C3 (device codename: angelicain) as well.
You want to know React vs Angular which is best choice for web development? In the neverending React vs Angular fight, it’s really hard to choose what technology is the most suitable for a web app project. It’s time to unblur both of these technologies and discover them in detail so you can make the right choice. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.13RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 32-33 or remi-php74-test repository for Fedora 31 and Enterprise Linux 7-8.
RPM of PHP version 7.3.25RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 31 or remi-php73-test repository for Enterprise Linux.
Form validation is the basic and most important part of the web development process. Usually, form validation is done on the server-side. Form validation helps in showing error messages to the user if there is any unnecessary or wrong data is provided, or a required field is left empty. If the server finds any error, it throws back that error; then, we show the error message to the user. But, we can use javascript at the front-end to validate the form data and show errors right away. In this article, we will learn the basic form validation in javascript. So, let’s get straight to the examples and see how can we do that in javascript.
A first update of the still fairly new package tidyCpp is now on CRAN. The packages offers a C++ layer on top of the C API for R which aims to make its use a little easier and more consistent.
The vignette has been extended with a new examples, a new section and some general editing. A few new defines have been added mostly from the Rinternals.h header. We also replaced the Shield class with a simpler yet updated version class Protect. The name better represent the core functionality of offering a simpler alternative to the PROTECT and UNPROTECT macro pairing. We also added a short discussion to the vignette of a gotcha one has to be mindful of, and that we fell for ourselves in version 0.0.1. We also added a typedef so that code using Shield can still be used.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) are two famous data formats for the storage of data. Both JSON and XML allow us to store the data in such a way that is readable by human as well as machines. To begin with, JSON is a type of data structure that is mainly used to exchange data between servers and software applications. It stores the data as key-value pairs. JSON makes an object of the data where key-value pairs are separated on the basis of the colon (:), and one complete key-value pair separated by others based on the comma.
Furthermore, XML is an HTML type markup language that is also used to store the data. But, the XML does not provide any kind of predefined tags. We can create our own tags and store the data. As we discussed, both JSON and XML are used to exchange data between the servers and software applications. However, the two data formats differ somewhat. The JSON is an object type data storage format, whereas XML has no type. The XML files only store the data in string format and heavier than the JSON file. Whereas the JSON files can store the string, arrays, numbers floating-point numbers, and Boolean.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the markup language that is used to store the data. It is a very useful format to store data because it defines a set of rules that allow us to store the data in such a format, which is a machine as well as human-readable. It is widely used to store data. It is an HTML type markup language as they have the same type of structure. However, XML doesn’t offer the defined tags, but you can define your own tags and create your own markup language. The data stored in the XML document can be extracted and analyzed easily. This is the reason that it is most commonly used for web servers. XML is a case sensitive language.
Python comes with many built-in modules and functions to perform specialized tasks. It has many built-in data structures to store and manage the data. Dictionary is one of the very useful built-in data structure that is used to store data in the key-value pair format. We can simply convert the XML data to a Python dictionary. Python provides the xmlodict module to perform the XML related tasks. This article explains the conversion of XML to a dictionary in Python.
Python is a general-purpose and widely used programming language of recent times. However, Python provides many built-in functions to perform a bunch of specific tasks. However, we can create our own functions to perform a specific task. In Python, the lambda keyword creates an anonymous function. A function without a name is called an anonymous function. Normally, a regular function in Python is created using the def keyword. It has a name and parentheses. While the anonymous function is used with the lambda keyword. Therefore, the anonymous function is also known as the lambda function. This article explains the Python lambda function with examples.
You may already be familiar with code coverage, which shows you which lines of code execute. Code coverage is usually applied to tests to find out which code is actually being tested and which code isn’t.
Nightly Rust already supports another kind of source code coverage, commonly called gcov, which relies on debug info to map from LLVM IR to lines of source code. Instrumentation is then added in the LLVM backend during code generation to count how many times each line is run.
However, since LLVM doesn’t know exactly how Rust code is structured, there’s a lot lost in the translation between Rust source and LLVM IR. Line-level granularity is sometimes too coarse, and debug info can be unreliable, especially when building in release mode. The result is coverage reports that only show an approximation of what code actually executed.
Source-based code coverage instrumentation is applied by the Rust compiler, not LLVM. This instrumentation is more precise because it’s being done in MIR, which holds a mapping between the original Rust source code and the control-flow graph of the program.
That means things like short-circuited conditionals, closures, and match guards are all precisely counted. And since instrumentation counters are injected as regular MIR statements, the compiler can further optimize the program without affecting coverage results.
It was a little unnerving, I’ll admit, to venture into the Manhattan galleries again, to finally see some new art after six months of abstinence. It was a return for some of the art, too. Kara Walker’s exhibition “Drawings” opened briefly in March before the gallery doors had to close. Luckily, it was still there when Sikkema Jenkins & Co. reopened in September for a three-week extension. Even that seemed hardly enough time for anyone to fully grasp this immense gathering of work: hundreds upon hundreds of works on paper made between the 1990s and this year. Some have been executed on a grand scale and to a considerable degree of finish. Among a quartet of six-foot-tall allegories featuring the figure of Barack Obama made in 2019, two have been left in a fairly sketchy state—Barack Obama Tormented Saint Anthony Putting Up With the Whole “Birther” Conspiracy and Barack Obama as “an African” With a Fat Pig (by Kara Walker)—but two others, Allegory of the Obama Years by Kara E. Walker and Barack Obama as Othello “the Moor” With the Severed Head of Iago in a New and Revised Ending by Kara E. Walker, are dense with detail.
Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was a 19th century English mathematician who is today commonly given the moniker of the world’s first computer programmer. According to some, Ada Lovelace is a mathematical genius who was crucial in the development of the computer and to whom credit has been unjustly denied. According to others, Ada’s contributions have been overstated and her role is only one of minor historical interest.
Ada Bryon was born in London on December 10, 1815. She was the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron and the Baroness Anabella Milbanke. While the pair was perhaps the most intelligent couple in Europe, they were incredibly different in temperament. Lord Bryon was one of the greatest poets while Baroness Milbanke was one of the most prodigious mathematicians. Lord Bryon was known for his scandalous, wild exploits while Baroness Milbanke was austere and religious. The couple split 5 weeks after Ada’s birth.
Ada spent her childhood undergoing a strict and rigorous educational plan. Ada’s true interest in mathematics seems to have been ignited after a meeting with Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage was the son of a wealthy banker and showed genius in mathematics at an early age. After graduating from Cambridge, his bright career was postponed for many years while he was unfairly denied research positions at several universities. During this period, Babbage lived off his family’s wealth and continued to produce papers on a variety of topics.
Babbage’s interest soon turned to produce trigonometry and logarithmic table books. These books were enormously valuable, especially to militaries for their use in ship navigation. The tables were produced by assigning the calculations to mathematicians to write down into a manuscript and then copying the manuscript by the printing press. The production of these tables was incredibly laborious and time-consuming, with many different opportunities for errors to slip in. Babbage’s focus turned to the design and invention of a mechanical calculator that could use Isaac Newton’s “method of differences” algorithm to automate the work of these mathematicians.
At age 17, Ada travelled from her mother’s country estate to London for her debutante season. While at a party thrown by the philosopher and mathematician Charles Babbage on behalf of his 17-year-old son, Ada was introduced to the 41-year-old Charles due to their common interest in mathematics. Babbage showed Ada the prototype of his “Difference Engine” machine. The Difference Engine was supposed to be a special-purpose calculator that would inspire Babbage’s design for a Turing-complete universal computer.
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The provenance of the idea of computation is a complicated and difficult issue. It seems that Alan Turing was not aware of Babbage and Ada’s work on the Analytical Engine in 1937 when he published “On Computable Numbers”. Ada was clearly one of the most brilliant minds in history. Her reflections on information processing and artificial intelligence are completely original and far ahead of her time. The bulk of the credit for designing the blueprints of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine belongs to Babbage but Ada had an important role in clarifying these blueprints. In summary, Ada Lovelace didn’t invent the computer but had she not tragically died so young, she might have played a very large role in the construction of the first computer or in the development of the idea of universal computation. In many ways, Ada saw deeper than Babbage to the potential of the Analytical Engine. Had Ada lived longer, she might have made the contributions of Turing or Von Neumann.
Transistors are semiconductor devices that have two main functions in an electronic circuit – an amplifier and a switch. Before the era of transistors, vacuum tubes were predominantly used as an amplifier or a switch for the first half of the twentieth century. However, the high operating voltage requirement, high power consumption, and high production of heat caused vacuum tubes to become inefficient and unreliable over time. Not to mention, these tubes are bulky and fragile because the casing is made of glass. To solve this dilemma, years of research were done by different manufacturers for a suitable replacement.
At long last, in December of 1947, three physicists from Bell Laboratories successfully invented the first working transistor. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley spent years of research to finally develop a working point-contact transistor. Shockley further improved the device into a bipolar junction transistor in 1948, which was the type of transistor that was widely used in the 1950s. Such was the importance of their invention that Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were awarded the renowned Nobel Prize in 1956.
The U.S. presidential election has absorbed the world’s attention for the last several weeks. Barring an all-out coup by President Donald Trump, the potential impacts of his flirtations with one, or one of his long-shot legal challenges turning out how he wants, it seems like the dust has largely settled and Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States.
While we might feel perversely relieved that Biden is already centering science, the weeks between now and January 20 will likely be defined by much more than the discussion of the transition of presidential power, which the Trump administration has so far been hesitant to engage in. In fact, another huge 2020 story that Trump and his team have neglected could define this holiday season: COVID-19.
It turns out there is hope that R will work on Apple silicon. A usable Fortran 90 compiler for Apple silicon will hopefully be available relatively soon, since the development version of GFortran already seems to be working (check-all passed for R including reference LAPACK/BLAS) and there is a strong need for such compiler not only for R, but any scientific computing on that platform.
Any package native code that wants to reliably preserve NAs (computations with at least one NA value on input provide NA on output) has to include explicit checks, be it for computations implemented in the package native code or in external libraries. That is the only portable, reliable way, and has been the only one for long time. Packages that choose to not guarantee such propagation, on the other hand, should not capture in tests the coincidental propagation on the developer’s platform. On ARM, and hence also Apple silicon, R now masks some of these issues by disabling the RunFast mode, but another new platform may appear where this won’t be possible, and more importantly, NAs may be “lost” also due to compiler optimizations or algorithmically in external libraries.
Pseudo-Open Source
Openwashing
Advanced Cluster Management for Your Hybrid Cloud [Ed: Filed under "OPINION", but "Sponsored by Red Hat" so IDG is basically just a platform/space for sale to companies that do PR/marketing; it once upon a time was a news site]
We at The Linux Foundation (LF) work to develop secure software in our foundations and projects, and we also work to secure the infrastructure we use. But we’re all human, and mistakes can happen.
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For example, security researcher Hanno Böck recently alerted us that some of the retired linuxfoundation.org service subdomains were left delegated to some cloud services, making them potentially vulnerable to a subdomain takeover. Once we were alerted to that, the LF IT Ops Team quickly worked to eliminate the problem and will also be working on a way to monitor and alert about such problems in the future. We thank Hanno for alerting us!
The Linux Foundation has published a new open source guide by Ibrahim Haddad to help organizations evaluate the tools used to “track and analyze any open source code brought into a project from a licensing compliance and security vulnerabilities perspective.”
Today, at its annual flagship conference, the Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF), the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), announced three new corporate members – Intel and SUSE, joining as gold members, and Diffblue at the silver level. FINOS also announced today the launch of its Associate Member Program and three inaugural associate members, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR), InterWork Alliance(IWA), and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA).
“From big tech to financial institutions, from regulators to fintech vendors, we are bringing together a community that is actively contributing valuable IP and sweat equity because it has now realized how the ‘open source way’ has the concrete potential to solve long standing challenges in this industry and beyond,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director, FINOS.
A cyber-espionage campaign that is targeting entities around the globe has been discovered by the Blackberry Research and Intelligence Team, which says it appears to operated by attackers for hire.
Researchers have devised a new method that allows potential attackers to leak sensitive information such as encryption keys from the Linux kernel’s memory and Intel SGX enclaves. The attack, dubbed PLATYPUS, abuses a legitimate CPU interface for monitoring and controlling the power consumption.
Google Chrome has started receiving new update that fixes two zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in the wild. The update is specifically meant for Windows, Mac, and Linux users and is the third in the series after Google released a zero-day issue-related update in October and another similar patch last week. The search giant also recently brought a zero-day vulnerability fix to the Chrome for Android a few days back. However, unlike the three earlier patches that were reported by Google’s internal researchers, the two new zero-day issues were discovered by anonymous sources.
According to Google Project Zero researcher Felix Wilhelm, a GitHub Action design flaw can enable hackers to write to your repositories. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, it can also be used to reveal encrypted secrets.
Guessing the source port becomes possible because of how the Linux kernel handles ICMP requests (think ping or tracert).
To save bandwidth, the rate limiter built into Linux defaults the number of incoming requests to 1,000 per second and uses a counter to keep track of these requests.
For every request received at a closed port on a Linux-based server, the counter would decrement by 1 and the server would respond with “unreachable.”
Meaning, in a second, if you sent 1,000 packets to different random ports on a server, all of which were closed, the server would cut you off for that second.
But, this would also tell you that all of your 1,000 guesses for which port could be open were incorrect.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (codemirror-js, firefox-esr, and pacemaker), Fedora (firefox, java-latest-openjdk, and xen), openSUSE (sddm), Oracle (bind, curl, fence-agents, kernel, librepo, libvirt, python3, qt and qt5-qtbase, and tomcat), SUSE (firefox), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, openldap, and raptor2).
Source code for Tor 0.4.4.6 is now available; you can download the source code from the download page at https://www.torproject.org/download/tor/. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser coming next week.
Also today, Tor 0.3.5.12 and 0.4.3.7 have also been released; you can find them (and source for older Tor releases) at https://dist.torproject.org/ . Their changelogs are here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/ChangeLog?h=tor-0.3.5.12 https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/ChangeLog?h=tor-0.4.3.7
The US Commerce Department has halted a ban on TikTok that was due to come into effect on Thursday night.
The order would have prevented the app from being downloaded in the US.
The Commerce Department delayed the ban “pending further legal developments,” citing a Philadelphia court ruling from September where three prominent TikTokers had argued the app should be allowed to operate in America.
According to an unpublished rule from the Commerce Department, the agency is complying with the terms of the judge’s ruling. Its prohibition of TikTok transactions “has been enjoined and will not go into effect, pending further legal developments.”
Naha, Okinawa—Every day except weekends, holidays, and typhoon days, even in the pandemic, charter buses leave from Naha and other cities on this island to transport protesters to three locations in the north, where the Japanese government is trying to build a super airbase for the US Marines.
We look at how Joe Biden’s presidency will affect the U.S. footprint in the Middle East with Guardian correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who says Biden’s win is being viewed with “anxiety” by many Iraqis who are eager to avoid war between the U.S. and Iran. “Any conflict will take place on Iraqi soil,” says Abdul-Ahad. “There is not much optimism. There is anxiety towards Biden and his team in the way they deal with Iraq.”
In the aftermath of our recent election, with all of the exuberance on one side and the laughable claims of stolen elections on the other, one underlying concern discussed before the election seems to have gone by the wayside: what happens in the last days of the Trump presidency if he loses? You heard the most prevalent concerns in the immediate runup to election day, which typically amounted to wondering aloud what unhinged or corrupt shit Dear Leader would get up to when his Dear-Leadership suddenly carried an expiration date? It was, frankly, a fair concern to have.
Of the 50, 37 were indeed dead and had not voted, according to the voter information database. Five people out of the 50 had voted — and they are all still alive, according to public records accessed by CNN. The remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.
It started with a drizzle but quickly turned into a downpour: Disinformation about the election, and in particular unfounded claims of election fraud, has flooded the internet over the past week. And Americans were primed to believe it.
Dozens of false claims shared on social media have kept fact-checkers busy and partisans energized. Pro-Trump Facebook groups that dispute the election results have attracted tens of thousands of users and become a lively marketplace for exchanging disinformation (until the social media network shuts them down). And President Trump’s supporters have shown up in person as well to rail against what they perceive to be election fraud.
Ingratiatingly, politicians have made the journey of pilgrimage to the not-so-holy Murdoch to keep in his good books. Disgracefully, though motivated by perceived necessity, British Labour’s Tony Blair wooed Murdoch prior to the 1997 UK general election he was to win. The victory for New Labour led to an association between Blair and Murdoch that was, according to former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, “almost incestuous”.
Blair’s kowtowing did its magic. As former deputy editor of The Sun, Neil Wallis, recalls in the first instalment of the documentary series The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, he was flayed by Murdoch for initially running what he called a “fairly standard” front page on the election. This was the same paper that boastfully declared on April 11, 1992, that, “It’s The Sun Wot Won It.” Labour, then led by Neil Kinnock, was favoured in the polls to defeat John Major’s weary, dysfunctional Conservatives. Murdoch, and his paper, would have none of it. On election day, the paper’s headline bellowed: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”
After all, there never really was a left, right, or center for the king of apprentices. There was never anything but the imposing figure known as The Donald, the man of the hour, any hour, past, present, or future. Whatever his political position of the moment, he reflected one thing above all: the underlying chaos and bad faith of a world of wealth, power, and ever-growing inequality, a world, as it happened, just waiting to go down.
Now that he’s defeated, count on one thing: he’ll take as much of this country with him as he can. If he has his way, when he finally decides to jump ship, money in hand, he’ll leave the rest of us at a vast mask-less rally with death running wild in our midst. From the beginning, he was always the orange-faced, yellow-haired personification of chaos. Now, just as the Republican Party did in 2016, this country has taken on his chaos as our own and, in the wake of the recent election, one obvious question is: Are we, too, scheduled for the ventilator of history?
In 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a billionaire (or wanna-be billionaire or in-hock billionaire, not to mention a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel), but from the beginning he appealed to the forces of order in America that were also, as it happened, the forces of chaos. Donald Trump entered the presidential sweepstakes, or to be completely accurate rode an escalator into it, from stage right. In another universe, he could have entered from stage left and he wouldn’t have given a damn either way.
There are now fewer than 70 days to go until the inauguration of Joe Biden as president of the United States. No matter which candidate you supported in the Democratic primaries, many of us breathed a sigh of relief as the election was called for the former vice president four days after people went to the polls.
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been one of President Trump’s closest international allies. How will he adapt to working with a Biden administration? Cambridge professor Priya Gopal says Johnson was clearly betting on a Trump reelection, especially amid Britain’s exit from the European Union. “I think they were certainly hoping that there would be a Trump victory,” says Gopal. “Brexit and Trump, as Trump quite correctly recognized, are very deeply in sync.”
Bannon, who is currently facing criminal charges for his role in a scam fund to build a border wall that appears to have been funneled into his pocket, caused controversy when he posted a video calling for FBI Director Christopher Wray and COVID-19 task force expert Anthony Fauci to be beheaded. Facebook took down the video — and removed a set of Bannon-controlled pages spreading disinformation about the election — but left up Bannon’s main page.
Fifteen pro-democracy lawmakers pledged to resign en masse on Wednesday, hours after their four colleagues, Alvin Yeung, Denis Kwok, Kwok Ka-ki and Kenneth Leung, were disqualified by the government. The quartet’s dismissal came after a Chinese legislative committee ruled that Hong Kong’s government could disqualify any lawmaker believed to be a threat to national security without going through the courts.
The disqualifications of the four lawmakers were denounced by the United States and other Western nations. White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien said the move showed Beijing’s communist government has “flagrantly violated its international commitments” and was bent on “expanding one party dictatorship in Hong Kong.”
Early this month police arrested eight opposition politicians, including five Legco members, for their alleged involvement in a scuffle in the chamber. Then came the ruling by the parliament in Beijing, the National People’s Congress (NPC), that resulted in the final purge and, on the same day, Mrs Lam’s chilling response. It said Hong Kong’s government could disbar any legislator who did not accept Chinese rule in Hong Kong or who otherwise violated national security.
Something does not feel quite right.. each time I read a headline referring to Joe Biden, who will be president, I am more dubious, more skeptical..
I listened to right-wing radio (Sean Hannity) for about twenty minutes yesterday. The mood there was defiant, aggressive—quite different than what one might glean from the New York Times’ coverage, which as an avatar for institutional media seems determined to take control of the moment—(this time, definitively, they seem to say—not like those last times, with Russiagate, with impeachment, with the 2016 election, when it slipped away from us).
Are we simply just stuck in the middle seat between a lunatic (Trump) and scumbag (McConnell) on an insane airplane ride…. or is it something much more sinister?
Back in July, we noted that after years of living with a pathetically weak anti-SLAPP bill, the NY legislature had finally approved a more significant anti-SLAPP bill. It’s incredible that it has taken this long, given that much of the media industry is based in New York, and for so many years has been open to a barrage of ridiculous SLAPP suits, since the old law only covered speech made in the process of petitioning the government. Also, unlike most anti-SLAPP bills, New York’s did not have automatic fee shifting, which would make the vexatious litigant have to pay for the legal costs of the defendant.
Dayee had been reporting from Helmand for more than a decade for the Afghan branch of the U.S. government’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s external broadcast services.
No one immediately took responsibility for the early morning bombing in Lashkargah, which has been under attack from Taliban insurgents for almost a month.
If there is one thing wrong with the police that we can all agree on, it’s the fact they’ve never implemented Helene Adelaide Shelby’s 1927 idea for a robotic interrogation skeleton with glowing red eyes that could extract confessions (and presumably feces) from terrified criminals. But that’s, shockingly, not the only area where the cops dropped the ball.
In fact, some of the biggest problems with the police include stuff that you may not even be aware of, like the fact that …
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a reliable broadband connection is a health and safety necessity. Families need the internet to connect to remote work, virtual classrooms, election information and telehealth care while maintaining social distance.
Good news for Apple II fans: there’s a new Apple II firmware update for the BMOW Floppy Emu Disk Emulator. This update introduces substantial emulation enhancements for copy-protected Apple II software on 5.25 inch floppy disk images. Though Floppy Emu is designed for standard non-protected disks, most copy-protected games and utilities should now work too, including most disks from the WOZ-a-Day collection.
The new firmware is version 0.2N-F26 or 0.2N-F27, depending on the model of your Floppy Emu board. You can download the latest firmware here: firmware
Remember the Slingbox? It was a piece of hardware by Dish subsidiary Sling Media that let users beam TV content from your home cable box to anywhere else. Sling was public enemy number one among entrenched cable and broadcast industry gatekeepers, because its products (*gasp*) not only made life easier on consumers, but at one point integrated ad-skipping technology. Back in 2013 the broadcast and cable industry was so pissed at Sling, it managed to get a best-of-show CES award retracted by CNET and CBS simply because the industry didn’t like the disruptive nature of the company’s technologies. Ah, memories.
On the whole, Disney’s Q4 revenue was better than expected, earning $14.7 billion as opposed to the $14.2 billion expected. A big chunk of that came from Disney’s streaming division, which continues to grow, now boasting just over 120 million subscribers across all its services worldwide. The return of sports also helped generate advertising revenue in its media networks division. It was the parks, experiences, and consumer products division, however, that continued to flail, dropping 61 percent year over year. With Disney’s final movies moved off the calendar year for 2020, there’s not much revenue coming in from Studios, either. Overall revenue was down 23 percent year over year.
A group of 165 companies and industry bodies are reportedly urging the European Union’s antitrust enforcers to take swift action on Google, accusing the U.S.-based tech giant of giving its own services preferential placement in search results.
This semester I’m holding a moot-court again for my patent law class. We’re suing the recent decision in SynKloud v. HP, and taking an appeal from that decision. Oral arguments will be online because of COVID issues.
The appeal court confirmed the decision of the first instance court that CDVI’s European patent was invalid due to lack of inventive step. However, the decision raises questions in relation to what may be considered to be common general knowledge.
Originally, the Dusseldorf Regional Court had scheduled its Nokia v. Daimler ruling (with implications for a spin-off from that case, the Huawei v. Nokia case that resulted from the severance of Huawei’s third-party counterclaims) for today. But for court-internal reasons, the ruling date has been pushed back by two weeks.
The Internet of Things industry should pay close attention on November 26, 2020. No judicial decision to date has been of comparable importance to the “I” in “IoT.”
There’s no IoT without an Internet connection. Apart from a small subset of IoT devices that will be just fine with a BlueTooth connection, some kind of WiFi or cellular (such as 4G/LTE) connectivity is a hard requirement. That’s where you have to deal with thousands of allegedly standard-essential patents (SEPs)–a challenge even for large and sophisticated organizations, and nothing short of a nightmare for small and medium-sized IoT companies, especially startups.
At a Brussels conference I organized about a year ago, young and innovative IoT companies like AirTies (from Turkey) and Kamstrup (from Denmark) discussed the problem of SEP licensing from their perspective. The problem they face is that SEP holders (particularly trolls, of which are many–and they get fed with patents by the likes of Nokia and Ericsson) are at least as unwilling to extend exhaustive component-level SEP licenses to the IoT industry’s suppliers as they are in the automotive context. Their calculus is always that they can maximize their leverage by going after end-product makers, such as companies that produce smart meters (such as Kamstrup). They make outrageous demands, sometimes listing dozens or even hundreds of patents that one can relatively easily identify as being technologically unrelated to the standard they claim they’re essential to.
The 2020 virtual CC Global Summit exceeded our expectations—over 1300 community members, from Canada and El Salvador to Nigeria and New Zealand, chose to spend a week with us to discuss the future of open, the unknowns of artificial intelligence, the possibilities of open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), the pressing need for copyright reform, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and much more. For the first time ever, the CC Summit was free for all to attend. We also adapted the virtual format to accommodate community members worldwide, with sessions taking place across various time zones and languages.
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