The best Linux distros for beginners make it simple and easy for Windows and Mac users to start using Linux.
Choice is perhaps the biggest strength as well as the biggest weakness of the Linux and the open source ecosystem.
For instance, the sheer number of Linux distros means that there’s one for every use case. However, the same number can be daunting for new users who wouldn’t know where to begin.
ProjectLibre helps you organize and optimize a complex project with lots of moving parts.
Project management is the instrument of choice for evil bosses who live to torment their teams with micromanagement and impossible deadlines. Stereotypes aside, project management and the software that supports it make almost any complex group project run more smoothly.
Many of the technologists at AMD who are driving the Epyc CPU and Instinct GPU roadmaps as well as the $35 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Xilinx have long and deep experience in the high performance computing market that is characterized by the old school definition of simulation and modeling workloads running on federated or clustered systems. And so, it is no surprise that when AMD plotted its course back into the datacenter, it had traditional HPC customers, who flocked to its Opteron processors in droves in the middle 2000s, in mind.
AMD president and chief executive officer, Lisa Su, hails from IBM Microelectronics and notably headed up the “Cell” hybrid CPU-GPU processor that was used in Sony game consoles as well as the $100 million “Roadrunner” petaflops-busting supercomputer, which set the stage for hybrid supercomputing in 2008 when it was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Significantly, it paired dual-core Opteron processors with the Cell accelerators, themselves with Power4 cores and eight vector processing units that could do math or process graphics.) Papermaster led the design of several generations of Power processors at IBM, including many that were employed in federated RISC/Unix systems that predated Roadrunner. Interestingly, Brad McCredie, who took over processor design at Big Blue after Papermaster left and founded the OpenPower consortium, joined AMD in June 2019 to take over development of its GPU platforms.
Anthos on bare metal provides built-in networking, lifecycle management, diagnostics, health checks, logging and monitoring. It supports CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ubuntu. With Anthos on bare metal, enterprises can use their own standard hardware and operating system images, taking advantage of existing investments.
Abdelrazik and Seroter said Anthos on bare metal enables customers to leverage their existing hardware investments, as it has minimum system requirements of just 4 cores, 32 gigabytes of RAM and 128GB of disk space. Customers can choose their own operating system too, with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1/8.2, CentOS 8.1/8.2 and Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS.
Proxmox virtual machines (VM) are highly popular with home server aficionados, whereas VMware sits squarely at the front of the enterprise VM market. Both of these tools offer free and paid versions, but with vastly different features and support at that level. This article compares the use cases, license options, performance, and extra features for Proxmox vs. VMware.
For teams that oversee ecosystems and software packages, configuration management tools have the power to boost operational consistency. But which products deserve attention?
Change is an essential part of IT, but it's often disruptive. An adjustment to one asset can throw other resources out of alignment -- sometimes in ways no one anticipated. Those misconfigurations can result in poor performance, application inconsistencies or noncompliance.
To avoid those outcomes, configuration management delivers documentation, consistent maintenance and change controls. These capabilities help an organization not only identify its IT assets but also understand the relationships between those assets.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of MX Linux 19.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Display managers look cool, I get it but if all you want to do is login to you're X based linux system you really don't need them in face you can start everything up with a single command called xinit or our case the wrapper script called startx.
Welcome to the first video in a series for beginners, exploring using the Raspberry Pi 400 as an everyday PC! Before we dive deeper, learn how easy it is to put a different operating system on your Raspberry Pi -- and this applies to most Raspberry Pi models, not just the Raspberry Pi 400.
Josh and Kurt talk about advent calendars. We are publishing 25 5 minute episodes in 25 days. Also portable X-ray machines.
In this lengthy rant video, I address a few questions and comments that I've been receiving from viewers.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds wants one of Apple’s first machines using in-house silicon—but running his open-source OS.
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Apple’s new M1 Macs have been receiving glowing reviews for performance and battery life. The praise has been hard to ignore, even for those who’ve historically avoided Macs.
While it’d be a surprise to see Apple change course on its attitude towards Linux anytime soon—Microsoft, on the other hand, has been increasingly supportive.
A known developer called "Marcan" , wants to port Linux to the recently released Apple M1 MacBook. According to Linux creator this may not be possible.
Developer Hector Martin, who describes himself as someone who "likes putting Linux on things," has launched a plan create a Linux port for Apple Silicon Macs.
The developer who brought Linux to the PS4 has a new target in his sights: Linux on Apple Silicon.
Apple recently switched to using its own ARM-based processors gives Mac computers, giving them an unassailable lead over current Intel-based chips. But the switch also thrusts a stick in the spokes of other operating systems that have, traditionally, been able to run Apple hardware.
And that includes Linux.
On the software side there are (already) fruitful efforts to port Windows 10, Docker, and other virtualisation software to run on Apple M1 chips (and some x86 code is said to run faster via emulation on Apple’s M1 processor than it does natively on Intel chips).
Eventually, this was supposed to happen anyway. An experienced reverse engineering professional launched a Patreon project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 macs ARM devices.
Version 1.10 of Intel's IWD "iNet Wireless Daemon" has been released as the increasingly useful alternative to the likes of WPA_Supplicant for Linux systems.
Intel's open-source wireless daemon for Linux systems continues adding in more features and improvements. While it started out with a focus on minimalism and embedded use-cases, IWD is being evaluated for possible use on Ubuntu among other Linux distributions.
The biggest change is the rename of the project from ZFS on Linux to OpenZFS, which actually sounds really good and makes the project easily discovered by anyone who wants to an advanced file system and volume manager on their GNU/Linux or FreeBSD operating systems.
The second biggest change of the OpenZFS 2.0 release is the fact that Linux and FreeBSD platforms are now supported from the same repository, which means that both camps are now getting the same features at the same time. On GNU Linux, OpenZFS supports kernels from Linux 3.10 to Linux 5.9, while FreeBSD is supported from version 12 onwards.
OpenZFS project has officially announced the release of a new version 2.0.0 for its open source ZFS file system with unified Linux and FreeBSD codebase and other new features.
For those who don’t know, OpenZFS is an open source storage platform that combines the traditional file system with a volume manager.
OpenZFS 2.0 has been officially released! OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support (macOS support is still being pursued as well) and this release also bringing many new features.
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) already supports LZO, LZ4, and Zstd compression while a proposal would also add support for LZ4HC.
A Huawei engineer sent out the patch adding LZ4HC support to F2FS. LZ4HC is the "high compression" version of LZ4 that improves the compression ratio at slightly lower compression speed. But the higher compression ratio allows for greater storage and maintaining the same decompression speeds as LZ4.
It's quite straight-forward and reuses the existing LZ4HC implementation within the kernel that is already used by the likes of zRAM and Pstore compression. The patch is just a few dozen lines of new code to the F2FS driver.
For years there have been calls to deprecate Linux's FBDEV and work around replacing FBDEV drivers with modern Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers. While hardware vendors are now trending in the direction of DRM drivers (and the FBDEV emulation support if needed) after the embedded space was somewhat of a holdout, FBDEV drivers and the subsystem still exist as we roll into 2021. But at least one more FBDEV driver is now looking likely for removal in favor of its modern and maintained DRM counterpart.
Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE's graphics team is proposing that the UDLFB driver be removed from the mainline kernel as it's been superseded by the DRM UDL driver. These are the display drivers for supporting the DisplayLink-based USB 2.0 display adapters.
NVIDIA tomorrow is launching the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with their Founder's Edition card and AIB variants are also expected. For about $400 USD, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti offers performance comparable or slightly faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER and especially much stronger performance for compute and RTX workloads. With the review embargo now lifted a day ahead of the launch, here are the initial Linux benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti under Ubuntu Linux.
NVIDIA have revealed the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti officially today, along with a release date of December 2 and it sounds like quite an awesome card.
Hitting performance levels (and above!) comparable to the RTX 2080 SUPER, which for the price is absolutely amazing at $399 / €£369 which is far less than the 2080 SUPER. When it becomes available on December 2 this will be as custom boards including stock-clocked and factory overclocked models from various vendors as well as a Founders Edition direct from NVIDIA.
Hi list,
Mesa 20.3-rc3 is now available for general consumption. This is a few days late thanks to the US Thanksgiving holiday. I think we're pretty close to having .0 this week, just one issue left on the tracker.
Dylan
The weekly release candidates of Mesa 20.3 fell off the wagon last week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday but now is updated today for Mesa 20.3-RC3.
Mesa 20.3-RC3 is out and things are looking good for the stable release potentially in a week or two. There remains just one blocker bug left before Mesa 20.3.0 could be cleared for release.
This month Western Digital introduced the WD_BLACK SN850 as the latest PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive hitting the market. The WD_BLACK SN850 is a surprisingly strong performer if looking to upgrade to PCIe 4.0 solid-state storage, competing with the fastest of the consumer drives currently available.
The WD_BLACK SN850 makes use of Western Digital's G2 controller and 96L TLC NAND flash memory. The 1TB drive being tested today is rated for 7,000 MB/s sequential reads and 5,300 MB/s sequential writes and 1 million IOPS for random reads and 720k IOPS for random writes.
Want to install Google Fonts in Ubuntu? The GTK+ Font Manager now adds support for Google Fonts integration.
Font Manager is a simple font management tool for GTK+ desktop environment. By releasing version 0.8.0, it adds support for downloading and managing Google Web Fonts, so that you can use Google Fonts for off-line use on your desktop.
You may have heard about Emacs and Vim and Nano, the quintessential Linux text editors, but Linux has an abundance of open source text editors, and it's my goal to spend December giving 31 of them a fair go.
In this article, I look at Jed, a terminal-based editor featuring a handy drop-down menu, which makes it especially easy for users who are new to terminal editors, as well as those who just don't like remembering keyboard combinations for every function.
CUPS printing system founder Michael Sweet who left Apple last year and that left CUPS in a stagnate position (as of writing, still no commits to their Git repository since April) while Sweet continues pushing ahead with his new and modern "PAPPL" effort.
PAPPL is the printer application framework being worked on by Michael Sweet over the past year for developing CUPS Printer Applications as a replacement to the conventional CUPS printer drivers. PAPPL supports JPEG / PNG / PWG Raster / Apple Raster / raw printing to printers via USB or network connections and supports an embedded IPP Everywhere service.
Two very useful tools for extracting essential details on your Linux system OS and hardware are screenfetch and geofetch.
Each of these tools is actually a lengthy bash script that fetches the information from your system for you and presents it in an attractive manner with the distribution logo on the left and details on the right--essentially "screen shots" of your system. Neither is likely to be installed on your system by default, but each can be installed with a single command.
In the never-ending quest to empower your employees, you've gone to great lengths to give them the means to communicate. The vast majority of those tools are for business-only communication. During a time when morale is at its lowest, and your business needs to do everything it can to give its staff a boost, why not launch a private social networking platform? This way your employees have the means to be social in such a way that'll keep them connected, which will help improve the remote work environment.
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There are plenty of tools to make this a reality, one of which is called HumHub. This open source social network platform offers many of the usual features, without the ads, privacy invasion, and the other issues that go along with so many other platforms.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Hadoop on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework used for distributed storage as well as distributed processing of big data on clusters of computers that run on commodity hardware. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.
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 Flask on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces (CRW) provides a default browser-based IDE to be used with developer workspaces. However, the architecture is flexible for using other IDEs such as Jupyter Notebooks and Eclipse Dirigible. In this article, you will learn how to create a custom workspace using the community edition of IntelliJ IDEA.
Creating a snapshot of the RDS instance makes a complete copy of the entire DB instance and not just the individual database. It creates a storage volume snapshot of the DB instance. The time required to take a snapshot of the RDS instance varies with the size of the databases.
The snapshot that is created can be used to restore the data to a DB instance. The data can not be restored to an existing database instance from the snapshot, rather a new database instance is created when the snapshot is restored. If the DB snapshot is both shared and encrypted, it can not be used to restore to a database instance.
On Linux, the root account is probably one of the most powerful accounts that there is.
Considered the most privileged account on a Unix system, root can perform any tasks needed for system administration.
Navigating a specific folder, killing any process or deleting a directory, root is so powerful that it has to be managed properly.
In this tutorial, you will learn about the different facets of the root account on Ubuntu 20.04.
You will learn to lock and unlock it, to change its password as well as disabling it when trying to remotely access your machine.
Finally, you will know the difference between the root account and the sudo command that is used quite often.
Kubernetes control plane nodes and worker nodes, their features, and how they interact.
If you're a smart contract developer looking to increase your smart contracts' utility with external data, try out this Chainlink example walkthrough to deploy a universal smart contract that interacts with off-chain data.
Chainlink is open source under the MIT License, so if you're developing a product that could benefit from Chainlink decentralized oracles or would like to assist in developing the Chainlink Network, visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord.
Because the notes stay as separate notes. Ideas and knowledge remains scattered as individual pieces. In regular note-taking, connections between ideas are not made by default. When reviewing a note, other relevant notes (i.e., ideas) don’t present themselves. If your notes are digital, you might do a free-text search. If not, you might flip through your notebooks, or worse, not bother.
I didn’t realise this was an issue until I stumbled upon the Zettelkasten, which emphasizes building connections between notes.
It’s a rhetoric question. I think it does not because the Gemini world uses “trust on first use” (TOFU). That is, a Gemini client visits a Gemini server for the first time, and if it doesn’t know the certificate, it silently stores a fingerprint of said certificate. The next time the Gemini client visits the same Gemini server, the client verifies that the fingerprint still matches. If it does, then nobody has been meddling with the encryption. If it has changed, a warning is usually shown to the user.
Trust on first use
The benefit is that we can use self-signed certificates. No promises are made, and you might run into a trap on your first use, but once you begin to trust a site, you can be sure that nobody is meddling with your encryption as long as the fingerprints stay the same.
PCRE 4.0 and later introduced regular expression recursion, this allow to re-execute all or a part of the regular expression on the unmatched text. To use recursive regex, you use (?R) or (?0).
When the regex engine reaches (?R). This tells the engine to attempt the whole regex again at the present position in the string. If you want only to reapply a specific part of the regex then you use the grouping index: (?1), (?2)
Using this, we can solve more complex problems with regex. Let's start by a more simple one and try to detect palindromes:
This allows us to construct something really interesting - we can define a regular expression that has itself in the "code" part. The result is a recursive regular expression!
One of the classical problems that a regular expression can't match is the language 0n1n, i.e., a string with a number of zeroes followed by an equal number of ones. Surprisingly, using the lazy regular subexpressions this problem becomes tractable!
Here is a Perl regular expression that matches 0n1n: [...]
basename is a command-line utility that strips directory and trailing suffix from given file names.
When adding storage to a Linux server, system administrators often use commands like pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate, and mkfs to integrate the new storage into the system. Stratis is a command-line tool designed to make managing storage much simpler. It creates, modifies, and destroys pools of storage. It also allocates and deallocates filesystems from the storage pools.
Instead of an entirely in-kernel approach like ZFS or Btrfs, Stratis uses a hybrid approach with components in both user space and kernel land. It builds on existing block device managers like device mapper and existing filesystems like XFS. Monitoring and control is performed by a user space daemon.
Stratis tries to avoid some ZFS characteristics like restrictions on adding new hard drives or replacing existing drives with bigger ones. One of its main design goals is to achieve a positive command-line experience.
Here is a quick howto upgrade default PHP version provided on Fedora, RHEL or CentOS with latest version 8.0.
Its cool, it is a 15” ASUS VivoBook, with an Intel core i3 10th gen running Windows 10 on it. It has a 120gig HD with 80 of them still free to use. All I have done to it is install Chrome and LibreOffice 7.0. That’s it. So far everything I do on my laptop I do on the internet so I only use Chrome while being connected to the internet. I’ve had my new laptop for a couple of months now and being the lover of Linux and all things FOSS I really want to use Linux instead of Windows but I need to keep Windows around in case I need it for something I just absolutely can’t do without it. I also need to keep Windows so that in case I need to I can take advantage of the 2 year warranty that came with the laptop.
So, the answer? I want to install Linux onto a USB drive and boot into Linux from there. That way the laptop stays in “stock” condition. I have two jump-drives, a 16gig and an 8gig that I can use to install different versions of Linux onto and see if they work with my laptop’s hardware. I have loved Linux and all things FOSS for the last 15 years or so and I have learned a lot but I make no claims on being an expert. That distinction is for others who know far more than I. One of those people is my good friend Donald Carter. We have known each other for..what is it? 10, 15 years now, I’ve lost count. He is an expert. I’m not.
I’m just dangerous enough to want to mess with the hardware I own and software I use. He has been supporting computer hardware and software in one form or another for a long time. I asked Don for his help and he said yes. Thank the Gods! So here we go..
The Budgie desktop is a fast, simple, and elegant desktop environment. It's a lightweight desktop environment that combines stability and a traditional-looking Ubuntu look-and-feel. Written in C and Gnome based, Budgie desktop is developed by Solus project and is now integrated with Ubuntu Budgie.
In this guide, we will show you how to install Budgie desktop 20.10 on Ubuntu 18.04/20.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8 on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a popular server scripting language known for creating dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP is a widely-used programming language on the Web.
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 PHP 8 on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Recently, Python development team released latest stable version of Python 3.9. You can download it from its official pages. New version comes with multiple new features and security updates. Python 3.9 uses a new more flexible parser, based on PEG, which replaces LL parser. In the next Python versions the old parser will be deleted.
This tutorial describe you to how to install Python 3.9 on CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 systems. In this tutorial, we will install Python from the source code.
Quick guide on how to install Jitsi Meet on CentOS 8. We've made the steps easy to follow so you can have Jitsi Meet running in no time.
CodeCommit hosts Git-based repositories and is a fully managed service by AWS. Teams can use it to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable way. It helps us to eliminate the need of having our own self-hosted Source Code Management (SCM) system and manage it on our own.
There are different string operators available in bash scripting language which can be used to test strings. The -z and -n operators are used to verify whether the string is Null or not. In this guide, we will test these string operators using the if statement in Centos 8.
In Linux, there always seems to be an ingenious way of getting things done. For any task, there’s always more than one command-line utility to execute it in a better way. The Linux stat command is a command-line tool used to display detailed information about a file. In this guide, we highlight 8 stat command usages in Linux. This works across all Linux distributions.
While working with files and folders as a Linux Administrator, we frequently need to access and edit files and folders that require root/super-user permissions. We usually perform this task through the Debian Terminal(the command line utility) using the sudo function. However, when we need to edit files that require root privileges through the Graphical Interface, we need to have a solid workaround for that.
The latest versions of Debian, like Debian 10, comes with a default file manager by the name of Nautilus. This open source file manager created for our GNOME desktops gives us a way to manage our files and applications. It also lets us open and edit our files and folders as a Debian administrator.
Clojure is a modern, dynamic and powerful programming language on the Java platform. It is based on the LISP programming language and has compilers that make it possible to be run on both Java and .Net runtime environment. Clojure helps you to build systems from the ground up without touching Java code directly. Currently, it is used by many large companies including, Walmart and Puppet Lab.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to deploy a Clojure Web Application on Ubuntu 20.04.
There are quite a lot of security devices available for users and admins to work with. Many of these devices offer the ability to save credentials such that only with that device present, can you log in to an account. That's fundamentally how FIDO2 works, and there are plenty of companies that make such devices.
Did you forget your password on your Linux PC? Can’t get back in? Don’t worry! You can use the Ubuntu live disk to reset your password! In this guide, we’ll show you how to do it!
In this video, we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on Ubuntu 20.10.
Today we are looking at how to install FireAlpaca on a Chromebook with Crossover 20. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Fish shell ships with many cool features by default. One such feature is Private Mode. In this brief guide, we will see how to launch Fish shell in private mode in Linux to avoid storing commands in history file. In other words, we will see how to enable incognito mode in Fish shell. As you know already, nothing gets logged in incognito mode.
What are inodes in Linux? How do they work? What really happens when you type 'ls -l' into the Linux command line?
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Firefox on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Firefox is the default web browser in a number of Linux distributions and Ubuntu is one of them. Firefox comes preinstalled in Ubuntu unless you are using Ubuntu minimal version. Some of the outstanding features in this release are the new Firefox Privacy Protection Report and a secure password generation with Lockwise.
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 Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
After you install Fedora, you may discover that some of the software that you want to install and use is not available in the software store. These packages may not be in the Fedora repos for several reasons.
Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how to make them available by adding third party repos for Fedora.
What is Nmap, and why do I want to use it? Finding rogue devices on your network is a good start.
This week’s blog presents a set of short videos on how to establish secure connections to remote Oracle Linux 8 systems. With secure connections, all traffic transmitted over the wire is encrypted and protected from password sniffing attacks and other outside monitoring.
This week’s blog presents a set of free, short videos on performing network configuration functions on Oracle Linux 8. Being able to configure networks is an essential skill to access programs, storage and data on remote systems. This video series also covers firewall configuration required to keep your networks safe and secure from intruders.
Now that you’ve had a chance to learn about Oracle Linux 8 installation – you did check out the prior blog – right? You’ll want to continue learning Oracle Linux 8 by delving into the next set of free, short videos on some common administration tasks that you can perform on Oracle Linux 8. These videos are applicable for deployment via on-premises systems or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instances.
Kenney, creator of masses of free and paid assets for game developers has released a second game with Pixross. It's a picture logic puzzle game with tons of levels and it's great. Note: key provided by itch.io press access.
Seems like Kenney is on a bit of a roll now, after releasing their first commercial title with Frick, Inc. back in October. Across 150+ unique puzzles Pixross has you attempt to find the picture hidden inside, using logic to count the squares that need colouring in on the board.
An urban-mystical grand-strategy RPG? Domains of Dusk certainly has an interesting description from Critique Gaming and it looks very interesting. This is the third game from Critique Gaming following on from the very good Interrogation: You will be deceived in 2019 and Brain Please Don't earlier this year. Seems like they're being a lot more ambitious this time too.
Game developer Rising Tail have confirmed they're working on Factory Magnate, their own take on the factory building and mining strategy sim with a tycoon style to it.
Factory Magnate will take elements from the likes of Factorio and Mindustry for the building and mining side but with different goals. With a "small loan of a million credits" your goal is to build up an empire of factories spread across a procedurally generated solar system. You will be in charge of extracting materials, setting up productions lines and making various products to get them transported off-world to sell.
Skellboy Refractured from UmaikiGames is one you need to keep on your radar for early next year, as they've announced it's going to release on January 13. This is the PC version of a game that originally released for the Nintendo Switch along with several enhancements the developers have put in like local co-op, a new randomized dungeon, a New Game+ mode and plenty of new items to use and more technical improvements.
"Sometimes, when there is nobody up to the task, old heroes have to rise from the grave to save the day! Crush your enemies and make good use of their guts - literally, as you can augment Skippy with your foe's body parts and weapons!
On Linux, there are many different ways to play Super Nintendo video games. However, if you’re new to the platform, you might not know about the many ways to enjoy SNES video games on Linux. That’s why we’ve made this list of 5 ways to play SNES games on Linux.
A few week ago I realized something rather extraordinary. As a great fan and proponent of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games, for some odd reason, I seem to have completely missed Cossacks. I don't know why, but in between Age of Empires, Total War and SimCity 4, two decades went by. Rhyme. And in that time, I never played Cossacks, a game focused on musket-and-dragon-heavy 17th and 18th century European wars.
I know a few people eagerly awaiting this after playing through To the Moon and Finding Paradise, sadly though you have to wait a bit longer for Impostor Factory.
What is it? Impostor Factory is part of a series of games. They're not being entirely clear how it fits in joking about it maybe being a sequel or a prequel and maybe neither, they also refer to it as To The Moon 3 often. You don't need to play their previous games though but it usually helps to understand their story-telling and they're just great anyway.
Developed Kan Gao released a new video that joked about their previous Raccoon break in and the results where…a little gross. That caused a bit of a delay and Gao spoke about other issues, with the game being delayed again. It's looking like Spring 2021 for the release, with some "pretty exciting stuff" coming soon after that they're working on in secret. An animated film of To The Moon is still happening too. Since in November 2021 it will also mark 10 years since the release of To The Moon, Gao also mentioned that have some fun things planned to mark the occasion.
ScourgeBringer. There’s a (not great) joke here, about how I’m not very good at this game. I like it, though in limited amounts. A better player than me would persevere, would thrive, and one that knows their limits better would have given up. I’m not sure where that puts me exactly. Dashing, slashing, shooting, and dying, always dying. The game is better than me, in more ways than one.
ScourgeBringer is a 2D action game, where you move through the map by clearing a room of enemies, rather than platforming (think Binding of Isaac rather than Super Meat Boy or Dead Cells). Movement is important in combat though, and most of the time you’ll stay in the air with dashes and slashes that keep you hovering in place. Position to take out enemies, dodge their attacks, and make it all one seamless motion is the name of the game here.
Coldwild Games have announced their latest game following on from the wonderful Merchant of the Skies, this time they're going with a very chilled-out game with Luna's Fishing Garden.
In the game you play as Cassie, who wakes up on a strange island that belongs to a mysterious fox spirit named Luna. You're tasked with creating the biggest garden ever. Catch fish, trade with the fox spirit, and create the garden of your dreams by planting new trees, placing water objects, and bringing animals to the archipelago.
Designed much like their last game, it offers a relaxed approach to gaming. You can play it like an open sandbox experience, or follow the plot. You can't lose the game in Luna's Fishing Garden so you can just go at your own pace.
More than six months in development, Cinnamon 4.8 is finally here and it already made its appearance on the software repositories of the Arch Linux distribution. But, it is designed with Linux Mint users in mind, as they are the main target of this GNOME-based desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
The biggest new features in Cinnamon 4.8 include a new suspend-then-hibernate function that instructs the desktop environment to first suspend the system and then hibernate it after a certain period of time of inactivity.
In this update, which comes about three weeks after KDE Plasma 5.20.3, the KDE developers re-implemented support for installing distro specific packages like DEB or RPM that have been downloaded locally with the Plasma Discover package manager. Plasma Discover now also displays the title in the application page.
They also fixed the Audio Volume applet’s pop-up to no longer displays an unknown and non-functional device with the text “Device name not found,” updated the Emoji Selector to show the Smilies & Emotion category, and improved the switching to Picture of the Day on the Screen Locking appearance page in System Settings to always work.
As promised, the PinePhone KDE Plasma Mobile Community Edition is now available for pre-order from the Pine64 store.
Expected to ship in January 2021, the phone will be the first smartphone to ship with the KDE Plasma Mobile user interface out of the box. But like all PinePhones, users will be free to run different operating systems either by booting from a microSD card or by replacing the software that comes pre-installed.
The basic PinePhone KDE Community Edition smartphone is priced at $150, but customers can also pre-order a Convergence Package version that has extra RAM and storage and comes bundled with a USB-C dock that lets you connect an external display, keyboard, mouse, and other accessories.
PinePhone KDE Community edition pre-orders start from today, and we are continuously working on polishing the software that will be shipped with it.
Plasma Mobile is a user interface for phones and tablets, just like Plasma Desktop is for notebooks and desktop PCs.
There are various distributions that package Plasma Mobile...
The PinePhone is a very popular smartphone with the Linux community. One of the main reasons is that it is open source hardware and already you can run several different flavours of Linux on it. Linux phones by "definition" do not have Google or Apple tracking baked into the Operating System. Do not expect to be unknowlingly tracked and traced by this thing.
We are pleased to announce that the KDE Community Edition (CE) PinePhone is now available for pre-order. This edition of the PinePhone ships with a tailored build of Plasma Mobile built upon Manjaro Linux, and it is the culmination of ongoing efforts to bring the popular Plasma desktop environment to the smartphone.
To learn more about Plasma Mobile please visit the project’s website. To better understand your options for running Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone and the current state of development (at the time of writing) I encourage you to read the development team’s blog post on this subject matter.
This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by the Plasma Mobile team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a KDE logo on the back-cover (see renders for reference).
Announced two weeks ago, PinePhone KDE Community Edition is the latest limited edition of the PinePhone Linux phone powered by the KDE Project and featuring the gorgeous Plasma Mobile user interface by default.
Under the hood, PinePhone KDE Community Edition is powered an Allwinner A64 Quad-Core CPU with Mali 400 MP2 GPU. It features up to 3GB LPDDR3 RAM, up to 32GB eMMC internal storage, and a 5.95-inch LCD with 1440Ãâ720 resolution, 18:9 aspect ratio, and hardened glass.
The KDE Plasma and Ubuntu-based distribution Nitrux 1.3.5 released with its latest version. Here we take a look at what's new, download links, features and more.
Web applications can be pretty useful at times when a native application is not available. In today’s tutorial, we will make an AppImage file of a web application using a tool called nativefier-appimage. nativefier-appimage makes it very easy to create AppImages of your favorite web applications and share them. It leverages the web application creation process by using nativefier. It packages the resulting web application in an AppImage for portability using appimagetool (which is included by default in Nitrux).
Over the last two months, we reported the major release of four operating systems: OpenBSD 6.8, NetBSD 9.1, MidnightBSD 2.0, and FreeBSD 12.2 from the BSD family.
[...]
The most notable change that the latest version has added is the OS fixes for Linux binary compatibility, also known as “Linuxulator.” Linuxulator allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on BSD distribution. With the new fixes, GhostBSD now offers better performance for running the Linux build of Steam.
In simple terms, you can run more Linux games on GhostBSD 20.11.28. Furthermore, v20.11.28 also has a new live system that uses ZFS, compression, and replication capabilities.
Among the userland updates, it includes an upgraded MATE desktop, improved Software Station performance, and other updated applications.
The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel.
For FreeBSD 13 there is now the import of the WireGuard kernel module. This follows OpenBSD adding WireGuard earlier in the year, various Linux kernel back-ports have been adding WireGuard too now like the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, and Android 12 looks to support WireGuard. The WireGuard port for Windows was also recently updated.
Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust.
Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers and also allows one to share files with other dropbox users.
Interlink Mail & News is a free e-mail client based on open source community code built on the Unified XUL Platform. The client focuses on efficiency with carefully selected features and optimizations to improve stability and user experience, while offering full customization and a growing collection of extensions and themes to make the client truly your own.
Members of the openSUSE release team members will share results of openSUSE on arm during two separate online sessions on openSUSE’s Jisti instance Dec. 2.
The first session will be at 10:00 UTC and the second session at 16:00 UTC. Both sessions are expected to cover the same content and reach different time zones globally for those interested in attending.
Overall, there were almost 300 responses submitted. The core team to develop the survey wants to use the results as a baseline for future surveys about arm to help gauge trends about development efforts with openSUSE on arm architecture.
The results did offer some telling answers about the majority of openSuse use on arm. More than 4 out of 5 responses indicated they used AArch64, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 4, PinePhone and/or Pine64.
The openSUSE Board Election is scheduled for the 15th till 30th of December 2021. The candidate slate has been finalised and posted on the project's mailing list this morning.
It’s been six months since the last BlackArch Linux ISO release, and BlackArch Linux 2020.12.01 ISO is out now packed with more than 100 new tools for all your penetration testing and ethical hacking needs. BlackArch Linux now features over 2,600 tools in its repositories.
The biggest change is the fact that the BlackArch Linux ISO is now powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.9 kernel series. This means that you’ll now get better hardware support to install the ethical hacking distro on more systems than before.
Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment Release 1.2. This release includes several enhancements focused on improving the security and compliance of customer environments. Release 1.2 also includes new versions of core components, including Kubernetes, CRI-O, Kata Containers, and Istio.
Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment is an integrated suite of software components for the development and management of cloud-native applications. Based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Open Container Initiative standards, Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment delivers a simplified framework for installations, updates, upgrades, and configuration of key features for orchestrating microservices.
For a long time, we talked about EOLing EL6 and EL7. What does it actually mean?
RHEL 6 is going to be EOL at the end of this month (30th November 2020). We will no longer build ABRT packages for EL6 and we will stop supporting EL6 as content.
RHEL 7 is still active but quite old. ABRT team will stop testing, building, and developing on top of RHEL7. We are going to focus on RHEL 8 and upcoming RHEL and Fedora. We still support RHEL 7 as content (e.g., in ABRT Analytics).
With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base.
While Red Hat developers previously worked to manage X.Org Server releases, there isn't much upside to that these days and they would rather ship a standalone XWayland package for Fedora users rather than go through the process of new xorg-server releases.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 was introduced more than 10 years ago, on November 9, 2010. Originally branched from Fedora 12, RHEL 6 has spent the last 10 years faithfully running Linux workloads. After more than a decade of faithful service, RHEL 6’s lifespan is nearly up: on November 30th, RHEL 6 will move out of Maintenance Support 2 and into Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS).
Today, we’ll walk through how to prepare our Red Hat Satellite server for the switch of RHEL 6 to ELS, as well as adjusting our currently registered systems. We’ll be doing both of these things via Ansible and the newly introduced redhat.satellite Ansible Collection.
It appears that straight forward install Debian Testing via official ISO image at least in meantime hangs . Looks like "sddm" hangs attempting to pop up logging screen prompt
I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 4.5 hours from earlier months. I worked 11.5 hours this month, so I will carry over 9 hours to December.
This month just went past way too fast, didn’t get to all the stuff I wanted to, but managed to cover many essentials (not even listed here) that I’ll cover in follow-up posts. In particular, highlights that I’m thankful for are that we’ve selected the final artwork for Bullseye. We’ve also successfully hosted another two MiniDebConfs. One that was gaming themed, and a Brazilian event all in Portuguese! Videos are up on Debian’s PeerTube instance (Gaming Edition | Brazil) and on the DebConf video archive for direct download.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Christmas is coming fast. We’re hoping to release Linux Mint 20.1 during the holiday season but we’re on a very tight schedule.
I’d like to thank you all for your donations and for your support. Before rushing back to work on 20.1, I’d like to share some of the progress we made on Hypnotix, our new IPTV player.
Linux Mint recently began developing a new open-source Linux IPTV player. That project "Hypnotix" is moving ahead and will be integrated with Linux Mint 20.1 while is also available as a standalone Debian package.
Over the course of November the developers working on Hypnotix added support for being able to configure among multiple IPTV providers, support for configuring via M3U playlists, various settings can now be controlled, and video-on-demand (VOD) libraries can also be handled for movies and TV series. Hypnotix has also added support for querying IMDB information for movies or TV series while watching it.
MAAS provides a state-of-the-art User Interface (UI), which simplifies usage. But you may not know that MAAS also has a robust Command-line Interface (CLI), which actually provides more functionality than the UI. Everything you can do from the UI, you can do from the CLI, but not the other way round. Let’s walk through MAAS operations using only the CLI, and look at a few jq tricks to produce human-readable CLI output.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 659 for the week of November 22 – 28, 2020.
We found NanoPi R4S board in a work-in-progress Wiki last month. The tiny single board computer is designed for headless applications but comes with much better specifications compared to similar boards with a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with up to 4GB RAM, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0 ports.
At the time we had limited information, but FriendlyELEC has now started selling the board for $45 and up, together with an optional metal case for a fanless operation that should ensure very good cooling.
We recently reported on the Rockchip developer conference (RKDC) 2020, and especially the upcoming Rockchip RK3588 Cortex-A76/A55 processor that packs a lot of power and features, and is now scheduled to launch in Q3 2021.
But as you can imagine there were other products revealed during the conference, including the new Rockchip RK3568, similar to the previously announced RK3566, and designed for edge computing and network video recorder (NVR) applications.
Portwell’s “PCOM-B656VGL” Compact Type 6 module runs on 11th Gen Core CPUs including embedded “E” and industrial “GRE” models with up to 64GB DDR4-3200, 4x displays, 4x USB 3.2 Gen2, and 9x PCIe lanes, including 4x Gen4.
Adlink’s rugged, Linux-ready “LEC-iMX8M” SMARC module combines a quad -A53 i.MX8M with a crypto chip plus up to 4GB DDR3L, up to 64GB eMMC, and support for HDMI 2.0a with 4K, 2x MIPI-CSI2, and up to 2x GbE with optional TSN.
Earlier this month, we reported on Adlink’s SMARC 2.1 form-factor LEC-IMX8MP module with NXP’s AI-enabled i.MX8M Plus. Adlink has also posted a preliminary product page for a SMARC 2.1 module that builds on the standard, similarly quad-core, Cortex-A53 i.MX8M. The rugged LEC-iMX8M module is notable for its additional, AES-128-enabled cryptography chip with hardware key storage for up to 16 keys, certificates, or data.
Here’s a video of the RPi working via a vnc setup (right side of the video) and on the left side the Arduino code for a second setup with an Arduino Yun device.
Because the RPi does not have analog input pins, and since i did not want to create additional circuity to do ADC (analog to digital conversion), I created a second setup with the Arduino Yun which does have both digital and analog input options.
The Arduino Yun is an interesting part of the Arduino family (although, it has sadly been deprecated) as it has both the microcontroller portion as well as a bridge to a Linux operating system (albeit running OpenWRT meant for the Yun) which allows for the Yun to be accessed via a wifi/wired link. Unlike products that are proprietary, even though the Yun I have has been deprecated, the device is open sourced and the code etc are all available to be used and worked on. The power of open source, open collaboration wins here handily.
Given the success of working with the Yun, I figured that the work is done. But no! I wanted to further optimise the setup as the Yun should really be a prototyping board rather than a deployed in production board mainly because, in my case, I only need two sensors that need to be accessed and the Yun has lots of other pins for a larger project.
While the last few updates about Precursor have focused on evidence-based trust and security, this update is more about the process of making Precursor itself. There is an essential link between evidence-based trust and understanding the manufacturing process: to convince yourself that something has been constructed correctly, it’s helpful to understand the construction process itself. It’s hard to tell if a small crack in a wall is the result of harmless foundation settling, or a harbinger of a building’s imminent collapse, without first understanding the function and construction of that wall.
Most designers like to abstract the PCB away as a commodity service, preferring “no-touch” or “one-click” ordering services where design files are uploaded and finished boards arrive in the mail, on time and at a good price. This is a bit like running a restaurant and ordering your produce from a mass distributor. The quality is uniform, delivery times are good, and the taste is acceptable. However, it’s hard to make a dish that’s really differentiated when basic ingredients all come from the same place.
I personally enjoy building electronics with a bit more of an artisanal flavor. Just as gourmet chefs invest the effort to develop relationships with their farmers, I’ve developed a personal relationship with my preferred PCB shop, King Credie. Since a PCB is at the core of virtually everything I build, I have found developing a healthy personal relationship with my PCB supplier has the benefit of raising the bar on virtually all my products. While King Credie is neither the cheapest nor the quickest-turn of PCB shops, their quality is consistent and, most importantly, they are willing to customize their process. For a small shop, they offer a wide variety of speciality processes, such as rigi-flex, metal core, edge plated cavities, HDI, and custom soldermask colors.
A decade ago, an idea was born in a laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley to create a lingua franca for computer chips, a set of instructions that would be used by all chipmakers and owned by none.
It wasn't supposed to be an impressive new technology, it was merely supposed to get the industry on the same page, to simplify chip-making in order to move things forward.
Continuum robots — which look like a tentacle or perhaps an elephant’s trunk — use a series of linkage sections and internal tendons to move both horizontally and vertically. While they may seem quite exotic, in the video below element14 Presents’ DJ Harrigan breaks down how he built one with an Arduino Mega and a fairly simple list of parts.
While the Librem 5 is a phone, it’s also a general-purpose computer. This allows the Librem 5 to act as a media center, game station, server, ultra-mobile PC, or whatever you can personally imagine.
Two weeks ago, a wlroots release was pushed to Alpine that caused Phosh to crash. This is a good example of things that can go wrong when using the edge channel of postmarketOS (as opposed to stable). The bug was reported to the postmarketOS issue tracker (precisely the right move!) and within the next eight hours until we could close that issue, it was pinned down to the wlroots 0.12.0 upgrade, Phosh developers were informed, log messages were analyzed but were not useful and eventually the "offending" commit was found with git bisect. It turned out that the commit was a feature and not a bug, it made wlroots terminate connections if some API protocol was not followed as intended whereas it would just ignore this previously. An issue was created in the Phosh tracker, and a patch was submitted to Alpine edge to revert that specific commit until Phosh follows that specific API as it was intended (likely soon).
The story told above was certainly not worth writing a regular blog post about, it was so quickly resolved that if each time we dealt with issues like these it would be hard to find the proper blog posts among these edge breakage reports. But still, it would be nice if there was something like a second blog where people running postmarketOS edge can quickly find information about such issues while they are ongoing. The solution we arrived at is a second blog, which will only have such breakage reports from postmarketOS edge.
Camus is a lightweight cross-platform real-time peer-to-peer video chat application. It's built with Python3 and ready to be deployed on server with simple few steps.
We have reviewed and listed several open-source video applications on Medevel.com, but most of them require time and skills to install and use. It's not the case with Camu which is created by a solo developer using several technologies to make it a good alternative for Google Meet, meet.jit.si and of course zoom.
In glance, Camus offers similar functionalities to the competing apps like text messaging, customizable video quality, high audio quality and desktop sharing.
It's also can be installed easily on any Linux distribution that support Snap or on a web server with Docker.
The main reason why do like Camus is its easy install as it takes far more time to install and configure than most of the alternative apps we tested and used before.
As a consultancy, Collabora provides expert open source solutions to ensure the best possible result for our clients. Our business aims at fulfilling niche markets, and at its core we have our people. Talent, skill and expertise are unique and valuable traits for any company - at Collabora however, our mission is to not only see how we can ensure our people are equipped to complete projects successfully, but also that we foster a work environment where all Collaborans feel heard, empowered and supported.
The table above shows articles updated in November 2020.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
Chromium developers have announced that they plan to remove support for HTTP/2 server push from the market-leading browser engine. Server push lets web servers preemptively send clients resources it expects them to request later. The technique can reduce the number of network round-trips required before the client has all the resources it needs to display a page. The announcement cited high implementation complexity, low adoption among websites, and questionable performance gains as the reason for the removal.
Server push is an optional feature introduced in the HTTP/2 standard. Chrome can remove it and remain compatible with the HTTP/2 standard. When used correctly, server push can greatly improve page-load times. It also enables use-cases like instant redirects.
Earlier today I released a version 0.4 of celery-batches with support for Celery 5.0. As part of this release support for Python < 3.6 was dropped and support for Celery < 4.4 was dropped.
So you want to collect data in your project? Okay, it’s pretty straightforward.
Firefox is the only major browser that still evaluates every website it connects to whether the certificate used has been reported as revoked. Firefox users are notified of all connections involving untrustworthy certificates, regardless the popularity of the site. Inconveniently, checking certificate status sometimes slows down the connection to websites. Worse, the check reveals cleartext information about the website you’re visiting to network observers.
We’re now testing a technology named CRLite which provides Firefox users with the confidence that the revocations in the Web PKI are enforced by the browser without this privacy compromise. This is a part of our goal to use encryption everywhere. (See also: Encrypted SNI and DNS-over-HTTPS)
Based on CMS usage trends, now available for 2019 and most of the current year, several outlets have projected that WordPress will be the driving force behind half of all websites by 2025. According to the newest numbers by W3Techs, its usage is growing by 2.47% per year on average. If it continues at this rate, WordPress will surpass 50% market share, potentially within the next five years.
[...]
The pandemic has hastened the shift from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce by roughly five years. Today's 'online first' strategy is commonplace for many new and established businesses. However, as of 2019, less than two-thirds of small businesses had a website. For many business thought-leaders, the idea that a brand is too small or unsuitable for online trade ceases to exist. In the post-millennial marketplace, stores without an online presence give the impression that you're no longer in business.
The trajectory of WordPress has historically depended on the demands of its users. It's continuously unfolded to cater to millions of bloggers and webmasters around the globe. Improvements such as REST API and the Gutenberg editor means WordPress is now better placed to contend with closed-source competitors Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace. Furthermore, you can anticipate developers will see WordPress as a simple solution to power the expansion of all varieties of mobile and web apps.
Wiki is a collection of web pages that is collaboratively edited by its users. Its content and structure of wikis are designed to be easily modified using a simple markup language. A wiki is powered by an engine, i.e. software that facilitates the creation and modification of its web pages typically implemented as a web app running on at least one server.
The most popular wiki we have today is Wikipedia, which is popular for being the usual landing page of every researcher whether they admit it or not, as well as hobbyist readers.
Today’s article brings you a list of the most resourceful software with which you can host your very own wiki. Listed in order of their user ratings, here are the 15 best self-hosted wiki software for your Linux computer.
GNU Octave 6.1 was released a few days ago with numerous improvements, bug-fixes, and a list of new functions.
Changes in Octave 6.1 include...
There’s no PPA repository contains the new release package at the moment of writing.
Before the official Snap package and the community maintained Flatpak package publish the new package, you can download & build GNU Octave from the source tarball...
Friends of open source Matlab-alternative GNU Octave can now get their hands on version 6.1 of the numerical computation tool.
The first release of the 6.x series has landed with a couple of rewrites and new implementations of already known components that are designed to improve performance and precision. The new rand function, for example, uses a uniform interval between floating point values in the range (0,1) instead of going for uniform density, and makes sure that values generated for single precision outputs are strictly within that spectrum.
Development has now proceed at a good pace. The initial focus has been the development of configuration tools for setting up a Gnu System, in the form of the Gungadin Software Tools.
A beginners’ introduction to using GNU radio to create simple amateur radio projects. Starting from the beginning Heather will introduce the GNURadio programming environment, develop a little of the theory needed to understand SDRs and then go on to use some simple GNURadio blocks to build a receiver based on one of the super cheap SDRs. Finally, she will show how to build more complex radio systems and where to go to take things to the next level.
19 new GNU releases in the last month (as of November 25, 2020): automake-1.16.3 bison-3.7.4 complexity-1.13 emms-6.0 gama-2.11 gmp-6.2.1 gnucobol-3.1 gnunet-0.14.0 gnupg-2.2.25 grep-3.6 guix-1.2.0 libredwg-0.11.1 mdk-1.3.0 parallel-20201122 taler-0.8.1 texinfo-4.1 unifont-13.0.04 units-2.21 zile-2.4.15
UNIX was the first operating system designed to work on multiple platforms. It has appeared in the New York Times Crossword 31 times, most recently in the Nov. 26 puzzle by Neville Fogarty.
UNIX was first released in September 1969 by engineers at Bell Labs, and it is the basis for hundreds of operating systems, according to the IEEE.
[...]
Linux was developed as a free and open alternative to a UNIX descendant, and it has since become the backbone of as many as two-thirds of all internet servers and all of the top 500 supercomputers. Android phones and Chromebooks also use derivatives of Linux.
Linux is also known for its penguin logo/mascot, Tux.
Version 8.0.0 of the PHP language has been released. New features include union types, named arguments, match expressions, a just-in-time compiler, and more; see this article for more information.
Early in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the New Jersey state government had a very specific IT staffing need—and it got a lot more publicity than hiring moves usually get. The recently passed CARES Act had added $600 to weekly unemployment payments nationwide, but New Jersey’s archaic unemployment software, written in COBOL, couldn’t incorporate the extra money without reprogramming, and there was nobody on staff capable of doing the job.
The incident was a very public glimpse at a dirty little secret within IT: There are billions of lines of code written in COBOL still running mission critical applications, but the great wave of COBOL-trained programmers who wrote all that code are aging out of the workforce. That story isn’t new—we wrote about it eight years ago, and eleven years before that.
Exenv, Kiex or ASDF? What’s the difference?
After PHP 7.1, and as announced, PHP version 7.2.34 was the last official release of PHP 7.2
To keep a secure installation, the upgrade to a maintained version is strongly recommended:
PHP 7.4 is in active support mode, and will be maintained until November 2021 (2022 for security). PHP 8.0 is in active support mode, and will be maintained until November 2022 (2023 for security).
A new release of the inline package arrived on CRAN this evening and has already been shipped to Debian as well. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene proving an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still use by rstan and a number of other packages.
Quite a while ago I came across the SQLite testing page and was impressed (and since then it’s gotten even better). They’ve clearly invested a lot in it, and I think SQLite’s ubiquity is well deserved.
When I started the ostree project I had this in mind but…testing is hard. We have decent "unit test style" coverage since the start but that’s not very "real world". We’ve gone through a few test frameworks over the years. But to the point of this blog post: I finally had a chance to write some new testing code and I’m happy with how it turned out!
Everyone loves to hate the Waterfall Model (WM) and extoll the virtues of modern development methodologies. But while people are rolling their eyes at the mere mention of the WM, they forget that it was one of the first attempts at a systematic approach to complex system development. Few first attempts turn out to be the best, but all first attempts teach us something. As such, the WM contains pearls of wisdom that should not be ignored.
9 years ago started gemification of the Ruby standard library. What exactly are default and bundled gems in Ruby releases?
I didn’t expect my previous report to have a continuation, but here it goes. When the initial implementation of new coercions was merged, I started checking if there’re any tickets in the issue tracker which can now be closed. One of them, #2446, is related to coercions but still needed a fix. As long as I was looking into the ticket, it was becoming clear to me that the time has come for an itch I had had for quite some time already.
Now that it’s December, it’s time for two of my favorite traditions from the tech world: the Raku Advent Calendar and Advent of Code. These two holiday traditions have a fair amount in common – they both run from December 1 through Christmas, and both involve releasing something new every day during the event. Specifically, the Raku Advent Calendar releases a new blog post about the Raku programming language, while Advent of Code releases a new programming challenge – which can be solved in any language.
(In this post, I’ll be referring to Advent of Code as “AoC” – not to be confused with the American politician AOC who, to the best of my knowledge, does not program in Raku.)
For me, Raku and AoC are the chocolate and peanut butter of tech Advent season: each is great on its own, but they’re even better in combination. If your only goal is to solve AoC challenges, Raku is a great language to use; on the other hand, if your only goal is to learn Raku, then solving AoC challenges is a great way to do so. This post will explain how Raku and AoC are such a good fit and then provide some resources to help us all get started solving AoC challenges.
Even with the help of his time machine, delivering all presents in a single night keeps Santa extremely busy. With little time to spare he does all his coding in Raku. One of the advantages of time travel, is the option to use the last version of the last programming language.
Next year’s FOSDEM will be an online event only, on 6/7 February 2021. It will also have a Raku Programming Language DevRoom track, shared with Perl. Please contact JJ Merelo (on Twitter or on the #raku IRC channel) if you are interested in giving a presentation about your experiences with Raku!
With so much going on in my personal life, it is hard to focus on anything. One thing that I really miss these days are personal time. I am constantly working on it with the help of experts in the field. I try to look at the positive side of the life but I can't ignore the fact I am not giving 100% to my pet project The Weekly Challenge. Having said that I must thank the entire team for the support and encouragement in this difficult time. As of today, we entered into the 89th week. I can't wait to see when we get to the 100th week.
Ever since I shared about my treatment, I have had many encouraging and supporting messages from friends. I read them again and again. I feel blessed to have such caring friends around me. I have let myself down by not taking part in Hacktoberfest 2020 in the same spirit as before. Atleast I completed the challenge by submitting the required number of Pull Requests.
Let me share some happy news as well, I have now become co-editor of Perl Weekly Newsletter with the most editions, going past greats like Yanick Champoux and Neil Bowers.
On behalf of the Python Packaging Authority, I am pleased to announce that we have just released pip 20.3, a new version of pip. You can install it by running `python -m pip install --upgrade pip`.
This is an important and disruptive release -- we explained why in a blog post last year
The death of soccer god and social rebel Diego Maradona has provoked an outpouring of remembrances. Last week, I wrote about his various political stances, and how he always stood in solidarity with the Global South and against Yanqui imperialism. Yet there is another part of Maradona’s political history that demands examination. That is the way his politics were reflected in his play. This is not uncommon in international soccer, where the political language of nationalism runs through the game, but in the annals of the history of the sport there are few rivals to the 1986 World Cup, when a 25-year-old Maradona put the country of Argentina on his back to defeat England in the quarterfinals.
The Navy has decided to scrap the USS Bonhomme Richard, the amphibious assault ship that caught fire over the summer in San Diego, officials announced Monday.
Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite said the decision was made after officials determined the damage was too extensive and the cost of repair too high to justify salvaging the vessel.
However amusing the meme or moving the pictures, reading—not gazing—remains the cornerstone of our civilisation. People who don’t actively seek out books or articles inevitably lead more restricted lives because extended prose remains the most effective means of communicating complex ideas. If your reading never strays beyond the demands of a colleague’s email or the brevity of a friend’s social media message, you live like a foreigner in your mother tongue, moving through the world partly sighted, a second-class citizen lacking a passport to ideas.
That is why millions of pounds of international aid are spent on global initiatives to improve literacy. But the ubiquity of the computer chip has meant the whole business of reading, the physical experience of engaging with extended prose, has brought about dramatic changes that we are struggling to acknowledge, never mind understand. Meanwhile, our educational system behaves as though Fleet Street still existed and professional authors still used Tippex. The ubiquity of costly computers and infrastructure has not in itself done anything to change academic attitudes to reading or to texts even though the way they are produced has been completely transformed.
As many have noticed, our product line has been getting smaller and our tech support has been slowing down to a crawl. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been the final KO blow. It has hit our little town hard and we have not been able to recover from it. As of Tuesday, 11/24/20 17:00 EST ZaReason is no longer in business. If you have a computer from us, we hope that it gives you a long and solid lifespan. If it does not and you would like warranty work done, we regret there are no employees who can answer those questions or do service repair. Employees usually want to be paid and without sales there is no income to pay them.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic reared its ugly head in China and then made its way to Europe and the rest of the world, conspiracy theorists have had a field day. Whether it was the idea that the 5G rollout in Wuhan, China somehow sparked or accelerated the COVID-19 outbreaks that evolved into the pandemic, that the influenza vaccine makes you more susceptible to COVID-19, or that COVID-19 was bioengineered in a laboratory and thus the pandemic is really a “plandemic” designed to yes, aliens!—could exploit the population and its resources), conspiracy theories have been flowing fast and furious since early this year. Meanwhile, antivaxxers rapidly formed an unholy alliance with antimaskers, COVID-19 pandemic minimizers and deniers, and others opposing public health mandates to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (including QAnon believers!) while infusing that movement with antivaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and launching a pre-emptive disinformation war against COVID-19 vaccines. Antivax leader and propagandist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has gone all-in on COVID-19 minimization/denial, and Del Bigtree, who made the antivaccine propaganda film VAXXED with Andrew Wakefield, has urged his listeners to “catch this cold” in order to build up herd immunity among the “healthy,” because, to him, COVID-19 is not dangerous except to those who deserve to be endangered, specifically those with chronic conditions due to overeating, lack of exercise, excess drink, and the like. It was blaming the victim at its most blatant, very typical of antivaccine activists.
Ideas of participants of a recent anti-mask protest are worth listening to as they hide clues in terms of why a part of people believe misinformation "from the internet" or why some only join because they are tired of restrictions, Marju Himma finds in Vikerraadio's daily comment.
When President-elect Joe Biden enters office, he will inherit two public health crises: the coronavirus, which continues to spread and fill hospitals throughout the country, and the resurgent opioid drug epidemic, which continues to plague American families.
The American Medical Association warned in October that “the nation’s opioid epidemic has grown into a much more complicated and deadly drug overdose epidemic,” largely due to the availability of “illicitly manufactured” fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. And according to the AP, the United States could reach a record-high number of drug overdoses in the country this year. Experts point to the pandemic as making the opioid problem worse because many people are isolated, unemployed, and under increased amounts of stress.
When President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in January, his administration will face the ongoing public health and economic challenges created by COVID-19. Even if Biden takes office without control of Congress, we can expect his administration to take important actions regarding COVID-19 innovation in response to the pandemic. In this post, we consider three main pillars of his administration’s likely response (as articulated by the Biden-Harris transition website) and explain the legal foundations behind them.
[...]
In addition to more foundational innovation policy issues, communication is central to ongoing efforts to combat the pandemic. The pandemic has been greatly exacerbated by communications failures by the federal government, which has sent profoundly mixed messages on masks, the severity of the pandemic, and social distancing. The Biden administration aims to communicate better with the public in three related ways.
First, the administration plans to put doctors and scientists front and center in the pandemic response. Biden’s already-announced COVID task force shows this commitment. It is replete with scientists and physicians, particularly those with governmental expertise (like former FDA Commissioner David Kessler and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy)—though some have noted a lack of other experts, including social scientists. Biden also plans to return the CDC to the front line, including resuming regular daily briefings led by respected public health experts and scientists—and hopefully restoring some of the CDC’s lost luster and public authority.
Second, the Biden administration plans to provide evidence-based guidance for dealing with the pandemic dynamically. The transition guide suggests a more nuanced version of the policy prescriptions that have become familiar over the last several months. Social distancing, for instance, “is not a light switch. It is a dial. President-elect Biden will direct the CDC to provide specific evidence-based guidance for how to turn the dial up or down…” (Those of you who follow public-health-law-focused Professor Lindsay Wiley on Twitter will be familiar with this theme.)
Third and finally, the administration plans to be substantially more transparent than the Trump administration has been and to promote that transparency throughout the various agencies involved. For instance, the Biden administration plans to “publicly release clinical data for any vaccine the FDA approves, and authorize career staff to write a written report for public review and permit them to appear before Congress.” The FDA is now planning to do this—but the GAO is concerned that the FDA has been insufficiently transparent in its COVID-19 decisions to date, especially emergency use authorizations for therapeutics. Presumably, greater transparency about CDC guidance on public health matters is also likely to follow in a Biden administration. Particularly as scientists discover more about COVID-19 and recommendations change over time, transparency about those recommendations is especially important to maintain public trust. For therapeutics, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and vaccine distribution alike, public trust is key, and effective and transparent communication are essential to restoring and maintaining that trust.
We ask a lot of our smartphones. Making and taking calls just simply isn’t enough. They need to be quick, have a great camera, be large enough but not too big, etc. Because we don’t all take care of our things – we want them to be water resistant as well. Apple has been advertising the iPhone as water resistant, but Italy fined the company €10 million for misleading its customers with that claim.
AWS has open-sourced Graph Notebook, a tool that provides data scientists with an easy way to interact with graph databases using Jupyter notebooks.
The certification is valid for three years and you get one free retake if the first time doesn't go well. The LFCA exam was built using Certiverse, a new online test marketplace. The platform uses artificial intelligence and allows asynchronous contributions from subject matter experts. This approach reduces the time and cost of developing a new exam, according to the foundation.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Linux Foundation Certified IT Administrator (LFCA) exam, previously announced to be in development, is now available for registration. Enrollees will be able to sit for the exam beginning January 15, 2021.
In 2020, our ways of living and working were turned completely upside down in a matter of days. As COVID-19 began to spread across the globe, we brought our companies home, and staying connected to our colleagues, friends, and family online became a critical necessity. This opened the door for hackers to cause disruption; for example, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks around the world were up 151% in the first half of the year, according to Neustar.
CrowdSec is an open source security engine that analyzes visitor behavior and provides an adapted response to all kinds of attacks. It parses logs from any source and applies heuristic scenarios to identify aggressive behavior and protect against most attack classes. It then shares that intelligence with other CrowdSec installations; every time an internet protocol (IP) address is blocked, it informs the entire user community. This creates a real-time, collaborative IP reputation database that leverages the crowd's power to make the internet safer.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (c-ares, libass, raptor, rclone, and swtpm), Debian (libproxy, qemu, tcpflow, and x11vnc), Fedora (asterisk, c-ares, microcode_ctl, moodle, pam, tcpdump, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (jruby and webkit2), openSUSE (buildah, c-ares, ceph, fontforge, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, LibVNCServer, mariadb, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and wireshark), Red Hat (firefox, rh-mariadb103-mariadb and rh-mariadb103-galera, and thunderbird), SUSE (binutils, libssh2_org, LibVNCServer, libX11, and nodejs12), and Ubuntu (mysql-8.0 and qemu).
One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.
The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
Schools were closed Wednesday, one day earlier than scheduled for Thanksgiving. On Saturday, the district announced on Twitter that classes would be closed for two additional days on Monday and Tuesday due “to the recent ransomware attack.”
Baltimore County is not the only school district in the country that has faced a ransomware attack recently. Since the academic year began, 77 school systems across the country have fallen victim to ransomware attacks. Fourteen of those cyber breaches took place in September alone.
Microsoft will remove support for root certificates with kernel mode signing capabilities in the Microsoft Trusted Root Program in the first half of 2021.
The change affects devices running Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system only, and drivers that have expired as part of the change won't load, run or install anymore on Windows 10 devices.
Industrial automation and industrial IoT chip manufacturer Advantech has suffered an attack by cyber criminals using the Windows Conti ransomware.
Attackers claim to have used the Windows DoppelPaymer ransomware to hit leading British television production company Endemol Shine and have published a few files from the company that they claim to have exfiltrated from its systems.
The authorities at Baltimore County Public Schools, which was hit by ransomware last week, appear to have realised that Windows was a factor in the infection, and have advised students to avoid using Windows-based devices until further notice.
This data is gathered by Venntel through agreements with mobile applications which siphon your personal information for advertising purposes. The thing is, the government is also utilizing this data – which they obviously aren’t allowed by the Constitution to collect by themselves. Besides the IRS, US Customs Border Protection (CBP) has also been revealed to have a Venntel contract. It seems that many three letter agencies, certainly not just limited to the IRS, have been using this tactic to spy on Americans and it’s high time that legislation was introduced to stop this widespread privacy violating practice.
Germany has rejected the US push to ban Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei technologies from its 5G rollout, with the Asia Times reporting on Monday that the company would be allowed to build part of the network.
Exactly why the Federal Government has decided to upgrade the COVIDSafe app after its abysmal showing as far as contact tracing is concerned is a mystery.
The Australian consumer watchdog has called for submissions on a proposed court-enforceable undertaking offered by Google with regard to its bid to buy American digital health and fitness company Fitbit.
Last week, EFF urged the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reconsider a split three-judge panel’s ruling that the Baltimore Police Department’s aerial surveillance of the city’s more than half a million residents is constitutional. In a friend-of-the-court brief—which was joined by the Brennan Center for Justice, Electronic Privacy Information Center, FreedomWorks, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Rutherford Institute—we argue that the panel decision is both wrong on the law and failed to appreciate the disparate burden of government surveillance borne by communities of color.
In May, the Baltimore Police Department launched its Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) Pilot Program. For six months, three surveillance aircrafts operated by a private company called Persistent Surveillance Systems flew over Baltimore—covering about 90 percent of the city—for 12 hours every day. The planes produced images that even at a resolution of “one pixel per person” allowed the police to track individual’s movements over multi-day periods, especially when combined with the police’s networks of more than 800 ground-based surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers.
We are quickly approaching the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, a powerfully hopeful time in history when—despite all odds—Egyptians rose up against an entrenched dictatorship and shook it from power, with the assistance of new technologies. Though the role of social media has been hotly debated and often overplayed, technology most certainly played a role in organizing and Egyptian activists demonstrated the potential of social media for organizing and disseminating key information globally.€
2011 was a hopeful time, but hope quickly gave way to repression—repression that has increased significantly this year, especially in recent months as the Egyptian government, under President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, has systematically persecuted human rights defenders and other members of civil society. In the hands of the state, technology was and still is used to censor and surveil citizens.
The deal was valued at more than $1 billion, said a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified because the terms were private.
The social media giant made the deal to bolster efforts to monetize its messaging business, which is expanding to include customer-service products that help companies interact with people via chat apps, like WhatsApp and Messenger.
Zoom doesn’t state how many users it has in total, but its metrics around paying customers continue to grow. The company now has 433,700 subscribers with more than 10 employees, up from 370,200 last quarter, and it grew the number of customers delivering more than $100,000 in revenue over the prior year to nearly 1,300, from around 1,000.
Will the Biden administration dare cut military spending?
On Friday November 27, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in the Iranian city of Absard outside of Tehran. First, a truck with explosives blew up near the car carrying Fakhrizadeh. Then, gunmen started firing on Fakhrizadeh’s car. The immediate speculation was that Israel had carried out the attack, perhaps with the support of the Iranian terrorist group the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted that there were “serious indications of [an] Israeli role” in the assassination.
All indications indeed point to Israel. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified this scientist, Fakhrizadeh, as a target of his administration during a presentation in which he claimed that Israel had obtained secret Iranian files that alleged the country was not actually abiding by the Iran Nuclear Deal. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh. So here’s his directive, right here,” Netanyahu said.
Now that Joe Biden is slated to take office as the 46th president of the United States, advice on how he should address a wide range of daunting problems is flooding in. Nowhere is there more at stake than when it comes to how he handles this country’s highly militarized foreign policy in general and Pentagon spending in particular.
St. Petersburg’s Kolpinsky District Court has ordered the Russian Interior Ministry to pay 50,000 rubles (approximately $657) in compensation for moral damages in connection with the case of a teenager who was tortured at a local police station, the rights group Zona Prava told Meduza.€
An officer in Russia’s Secret Service, the Federal Protective Service (FSO), died by suicide while on duty inside the Kremlin, the Telegram-based news channel Baza reported on Monday November 30. This was also reported by the Russian state news agency TASS, citing an unnamed source in law enforcement.€
"You feel your privacy is being invaded," said one Palestinian victim. "The aim is to control and humiliate."
On Friday, top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot and killed while travelling in northern Iran. No one has claimed responsibility for the killing, but both the Iranian government and many outside observers point to the likelihood of Israeli involvement, possibly with American assistance. As The New York Times reports, “One American official—along with two other intelligence officials—said that Israel was behind the attack on the scientist. It was unclear how much the United States may have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and have long shared intelligence regarding Iran.”
The alleged mastermind of Iran's nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was buried with full military honors on Monday. He was ambushed with a remote-controlled machine gun mounted on a car that later blew up, according to Iranian media reports. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blamed Israel for the killing on Saturday and vowed retribution "in due time."
Reuters reports that 30 of the victims were beheaded in the attack. At least ten women were reportedly still missing as of Sunday.
Though no one has claimed responsibility, Reuters and the BBC note that at least two militant groups are active in the area: Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province.
Both groups have carried out massacres in the region before. More than 37,000 people have died in incidents involving Boko Haram, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates.
The Fars News report said Fakhrizadeh was traveling with his wife in a bulletproof car, alongside three security personnel vehicles, when he heard what sounded like bullets hitting a vehicle, and he exited the car to determine what had happened.
When he got out, a remote-controlled machine gun opened fire from a Nissan stopped about 150 meters (164 yards) from Fakhrizadeh's car, the agency said.
Fakhrizadeh was hit at least three times, according to Fars News. His bodyguard was also shot. Following the gunfire, the Nissan exploded, the news agency reported, adding the attack lasted three minutes.
CNN cannot independently confirm Fars News' version of events.
Humanitarian agencies said more bodies of the Zabarmari villagers killed by the insurgents in rice fields were being recovered from far-flung areas.
Edward Kallon, the United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, said in a statement on Sunday that over 110 farmers were killed by the Boko Haram assailants on Saturday.
A statement by the rights group National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko reads partly: “HURIWA is shocked at the attacks that took place in the past 24 hours in the North East of Nigeria and especially the day light genocide of rural farmers by persons suspected to be members of the Boko haram terrorists. It is a sad day to wake up with the heartrending story of the gruesome decapitation of some Nigerians only because they went in search of foods for their families.”
Ethiopian federal forces captured the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle at the weekend, but a vow by the rebel regional government to fight on means there’s no end in sight to the unfolding humanitarian crisis. Among those most at risk are 96,000 Eritrean refugees sheltering in four camps in Tigray, cut off from desperately needed relief supplies. “We are surrounded by war, and we can't move,” one Eritrean refugee told The New Humanitarian from Mai-Aini camp. Unlike most places in the region – where communications have been blacked out by the Ethiopian government – Mai-Aini, located in southern Tigray, has at least some mobile phone coverage. The refugee told TNH there was little food or fuel to run the camp’s water pumps, and added that fleeing further away from the conflict zone had become even harder due to vehicles being banned on the roads and the banks being shut. “Even if our families send us money, we cannot get it as the banks are closed,” said a second Eritrean refugee, again speaking from Mai-Aini by phone.
As the Syrian war worsened and hospitals were overwhelmed with botched amputations, injuries, and infections, the International Committee of the Red Cross opened a special centre in Lebanon in 2014, mainly treating the war-wounded from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Seven-year-old Maria Ismail Sheikho was brought to the centre in 2015, after a rocket hit her home in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Shrapnel nearly severed her right limb, but after nine surgeries and years of rehabilitation she regained movement in her arm and fingers. “I don’t know where else we would have gone,” Maria’s mother, Samira Muhammad, told The New Humanitarian over the phone. “My daughter would have lost her future completely.”
Tensions are building ahead of presidential and legislative elections this month in Central African Republic, amid friction between rival candidates and increasing violence by armed groups that still control much of the country despite a peace agreement signed almost two years ago. Among the candidates who have applied to stand for president on 27 December is former leader François Bozizé, who returned to CAR in late 2019 after six years in exile following his ouster by rebels. Supporters of the incumbent president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, claim Bozizé, who is under UN sanctions, cannot stand because he didn’t spend 12 consecutive months in the country prior to submitting his application to run, as is required by law. Bozizé’s team claim he entered CAR via neighbouring Cameroon before the deadline. CAR’s constitutional court is expected to announce a list of approved candidates on either 2 or 3 December. Many expect protests should it rule against 74-year-old Bozizé, who remains popular among some Central Africans and is considered a threat to Touadéra’s chance of a second term. This month’s ballot will be the second since widespread conflict broke out in 2013 when the mostly Muslim Séléka rebel alliance that overthrew Bozizé fought the mostly Christian and animist anti-Balaka milita, which the ex-president is accused of helping create.
Mounds of heavy stones are all that protects Jeffrey Daniels’ home from the waves that wash onto tiny Emao, an island dotting the Pacific nation of Vanuatu.
But the makeshift dams can’t stop his village from flooding during fierce tropical cyclones, tidal surges, or simply a heavy downpour.
“When the rain comes, we feel trapped as if we were standing on a ship,” Daniels said.
His home is located on an island strip less than 70 metres wide. When Daniels was a child, this land was twice as wide. Now his home and his village of Marow are vanishing, losing ground to the sea year by year. Where he used to play football, today there are only floating boats.
“If the sea levels continue to rise, this village will disappear,” he said. “Our community will disappear.”
The European Court of Human Rights said the case, which accuses 33 European nations of violating the applicants’ right to life by disregarding the climate emergency, would be granted priority status due to the “importance and urgency of the issues€ raised”.
"It's very America for us to finally require paid sick leave and family leave during the pandemic only to let it lapse before the pandemic is over."
Something has to be done to heal the rupture in the sickened body of our nation.
"Everything toxic about the corporate Democratic Party is embodied in Neera Tanden."
Inequality is reaching feudal proportions, where very few own almost everything, and everyone else is crushed under the wheel of engineered destitution.
GP: It is true that the problem is not only for the Council of Europe, but also for the International Criminal Court, which received $115,000 from the Open Society in 2017, and even more for the WHO and even the UN. The Gates Foundation is the second largest funder of the WHO after the United States, with a contribution of $530 million in 2019.
80% of WHO’s budget is based on voluntary contributions, i.e. donations from foundations and governments. This mode of financing obviously calls into question the political independence of these organizations.
These large international organizations are prime targets for those who want to exert global political influence, as they have considerable power but fewer financial resources than their ambitions. These organizations are therefore vulnerable to “philanthropic billionaires” who seek to exert global political influence. This political influence can be exercised, as you will have noted, without any recourse to democratic mechanisms or controls. In order to preserve or restore the independence of these large international organizations, it is therefore imperative to examine and clarify their funding methods.
The congresswoman was joined by Canadian progressive leader Jagmeet Singh, who spoke about bold, far-reaching policies in Canada.€
What's especially weird about this whole situation is that Trump is doubling down on these false claims in the face of an epic failure to get his attempted coup off the ground. The recount that Trump demanded in Wisconsin — although his campaign only paid for a recount in two overwhelmingly Democratic counties — not only affirmed Biden's win in that state, but increased the president-elect's total by 87 votes. Meanwhile, Trump's losing streak in the courts only got worse over the weekend, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissing one Trump lawsuit with prejudice (meaning he can't sue again regarding this matter) and another suit failing in the Third Circuit federal appeals court.
Trump’s presidency can be understood as a four-year assault on journalism, in which he has attacked individual reporters, newspapers, and television news networks with a fury that was evident on Thanksgiving Day, when he held a deranged press conference—while seated at a “kid’s table” desk—and started ranting in response to Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason’s question about when Trump might finally concede his loss. “Don’t talk to me that way,” raged Trump. “You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me [like] that—I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”
Trump’s tantrum produced a mocking Twitter hashtag—#DiaperDon—that trended to the top of social media and embarrassed the egomaniacal president to such an extent that he snapped and raged—falsely: “Twitter is sending out totally false ‘Trends;’ that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative ‘stuff.’” Then he tweeted something that should unsettle everyone who understands the role of social media in modern political communications: “For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!”
Less than a week before voters across the US headed to the polls in the 2020 presidential election, famed journalist Glenn Greenwald made a stunning announcement: He was leaving the Intercept, the outlet he helped found in 2013, and striking off on his own at the newsletter website Substack.
On Wednesday, November 25, the workers of Verso Books won voluntary recognition from management to join The Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild (WBNG), a unit of the NewsGuild and the Communications Workers of America. A petition for election was filed simultaneously with the initial request for recognition on November 16. In the coming weeks, they will begin contract negotiations.
Julia Judge, Senior Publicist at Verso, said: “The decision to unionize felt especially urgent now, as our staff both grows significantly in size and grows more remote. We’re excited to join our colleagues who have already begun organizing across the industry and hope that fellow book workers continue pushing for more dignified labor conditions in their own workplaces.”
Australia has used a range of torture techniques against Julian Assange, writes Dr Lissa Johnson. Governments have isolated and demonised him; flatly rejected evidence of ill-treatment; refused to respond to specific allegations; and divested themselves of any responsibility. Leaders can’t, or won’t, accept the difference between psychological torture and ‘a legal matter’.
One policeman was filmed as he hit a reporter over and over again. The images of the brutality have rocked the country. These are images that will soon be illegal to spread.
The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.
Until now, international efforts to protect monuments have overwhelmingly focused on acts of war and terrorist violence. Following the widespread destruction of museums, libraries and artworks during World War II, diplomats drafted the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which was eventually ratified by more than 130 countries. But the treaty had a significant loophole for “military necessity.”
Since the Cold War, deliberate attacks on an adversary’s major monuments — the Croatians’ shelling of the Old Bridge of Mostar, Bosnia, in 1993; the Taliban’s dynamiting of the giant sandstone Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001; the Islamic State’s razing of Yazidi shrines in Iraq in 2014-15 — have pushed world leaders and international organizations to give more teeth to the existing legal framework.
In 2002, the International Criminal Court was established to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes — including, in the case of war crimes, for the intentional destruction of cultural heritage. In 2008, following widespread outrage over the looting and damage to sites in Iraq during the American invasion and occupation, the United States Senate ratified the 1954 Hague Convention.
It was Dec. 1, 1955, at the end of a working day, and Parks was on her way home when the confrontation occurred over “coloured” seating on that Montgomery bus. Parks would not move back a row to accommodate a white passenger.
She was arrested.
What followed four days later was a boycott of the bus system in Montgomery by African Americans, an action considered to be the first big organized strike against Jim Crow laws and segregation. Abandoning the city’s buses was an economic move, as blacks made up the majority of riders. The strike lasted a little over a year; it ended after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.
18 U.S.C. 1030(a). The broad and potentially uncertain scope of “exceeds authorization” is the Focus of the Supreme Court’s November 30, 2020 oral arguments in Van Buren v. United States.
As a police officer, Mr. Van Buren was authorized to search the Georgia Crime Information Center database, but only for police business. As part of a broader FBI sting, Van Buren agreed to and did-actually search the database at the request of private citizen (Albo). In particular, Albo paid Van Buren $6,000 to search the license-plate records of a prostitute that Albo was considering hiring.
[...]
18 U.S.C.A. €§ 1030(e)(6). Martin’s simple statutory argument: As a police officer, he was authorized to access and obtain the license-plate information, even if he did so here for an inappropriate reason. The 11th Circuit disagreed and followed its prior precedent in U.S. v. Rodriguez (11th Cir. 2010). Rodriguez is a closely parallel case of an SSA employee who conducted personal searches on the SSA databases. In that case, the 11th Circuit affirmed the CFAA conviction.
One underlying issue here is that the 11th Circuit’s approach seemingly makes it a federal crime for an individual to obtain information after violation of a terms-of-use. The government argues that prosecutorial discretion is sufficient to avoid these concerns and that the statute should be “specifically and authorized” individuals, not the general public.
[...]
The government repeatedly worked to draw an analogy between the information at issue here and property rights. The case may turn on the extent that the Supreme Court finds that analogy appropriate. In particular, the government will likely win if we think of exceeding access as a form of “stealing information” as parallel to that of a brick-and-mortar store employee taking money from the till. The employee has access to the money, but exceeds access by taking it out.
Pai's decision to step down could have significant implications on net neutrality, an issue that helped define his term as chairman. In 2017, Pai voted with his fellow Republican commissioners to remove rules that prohibited [Internet] providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular sites and offering higher speed "lanes" at higher prices. Many major internet providers have not yet taken advantage of that rule change, however.
Pai was appointed chairman in 2017 and served for the duration of the Trump administration, overseeing an unusually active period in federal telecom policy. He began his term with the controversial decision to roll back Title II classification, undoing the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court granted writ of certiorari on the PTAB appointments clause issues stemming from the Federal Circuit’s determination that (1) PTAB judges were Officers of the United States who should have been appointed by the President (rather than by the Secretary of Commerce), but (2) the appointments problem was curable by eliminating any statutory job security held by the judges (this reduced them to “inferior officers” who are properly appointed by a head of department, such as the Secretary of Commerce). The court agreed to hear the first two questions, but not the third (regarding waiver/forfeiture).
Parker first sued in Missouri state court asking for $2 trillion and $900 USD as well as return of his priceless phone. The Missouri court dismissed on the pleadings for failure to state a claim. Later, Parker refiled in Federal Court and that case was also dismissed.
You may have heard of district court’s certifying questions for appeal under 28 U.S.C. 1292(b). In this case, the district court issued a reverse-certification — certifying that any appeal by Mr. Parker should not be taken in good faith. Still, Parker appealed.
The IP Law of Turkey prohibits any kind of amendment/limitation of claims or patent documents after the patent has been granted. The only exceptions to this rule are the amendment/limitations made by the patentee during the national post-grant opposition phase, which was introduced to Turkish law in 2017.
As per the introduction of a national post-grant opposition procedure, the Law also prohibits any ruling to be made in a revocation action against a national patent, while the post-grant opposition phase is ongoing before the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (“TPTO”). However, the IP Law allows revocation actions to be heard and ruled against national validation of European patents, while post-grant oppositions or appeal phases are ongoing before the European Patent Office (“EPO”). Likewise, the local court is not obliged to deem the EPO proceedings as a prejudicial matter and this is entirely at the discretion of the judge.
In practice, some IP Courts consider the ongoing opposition or appeal process before the EPO as a prejudicial matter in view of the principle of procedural economy. This principle is one of the principles that dominates civil proceedings and is regulated under Article 30 of the Code of Civil Procedures (“CCP”). Based on this principle national proceedings are delayed in order not to undertake unnecessary investigations, as the patent may be revoked by the EPO.
On the other hand, some IP Courts consider that EPO proceedings may take too much time, and they may decide not to delay revocation proceedings in order to avoid a serious loss of rights of the plaintiff.
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Although, both the EPC and national IP Law allow limitation of claims for revocation action purposes, the patentee practically battled to win this result. The approach of the TPTO and the decision of the court is important for any European patent owner who may fight against a revocation action in Turkey, and who may need to benefit from the EPC 138/3.
As part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone, Unified filed two Japanese oppositions, challenging JP6700341 and JP6700342, on November 27, 2020. Both patents are owned by GE Video Compression LLC (GEVC). The ‘341 and ‘342 patents are in the same patent family and they are related to U.S. patents that have been designated as essential in the HEVC Advance patent pool.
As one of the original founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde has made a name for himself over the past two decades. While he is no longer associated with the site, copyright holders still see him as a threat. Sunde, for his part, is warning against the power American corporations have on the Internet. In a letter to the US Trade Representative, he sounds the alarm bell.
Kingdom Leaks, a music piracy site that has been leaking new music to the Internet for the past seven years, has announced its imminent demise. Due to personal reasons, from January 1, 2021, the site will permanently close down, taking all user data and content with it. While a disappointment to its followers, the site's self-deletion won't be discouraged by recording labels.
The Matchroom case follows a number of website blocking injunctions, pursuant to the reasoning in the FAPL decision (see IPKat posts, here, hereand here). The current case is of particular interest because it provides an opportunity to actually see how such an order in structured and what issues are covered by it.
In an attempt to keep these orders balanced (between the rights and interests of the right holders and the rights of third parties to continue with their business activities) and to avoid abuse, the possibility to apply for an exception is an important aspect to be considered. Notably, such permission is not limited to the Respondents, but it also enables third parties directly or indirectly affected by the order to request an exception. With technological means evolving, and pirates finding new ways of circumventing a blocking order, one can expect website blocking injunctions to evolve as well.
