The article also notes that the helicopter-like drone Ingenuity "was built using off-the-shelf parts, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, a smartphone chip."
"Ingenuity is purely a technology demonstration," notes ZDNet. "It's not designed to support the Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting rock and dirt samples for later missions to return to Earth. Its mission is to show that it's possible to fly on Mars using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software."
The state-run Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) has released new customised Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)based Operating System, the K'ITE GNU-Linux Lite 2020,for the benefits of computer users in the state.
The same Operating System (OS) suit would feature in lakhs of the student laptops that are being provided as part of the Vidyasree project of the state government, an official statement said here.
Completely based on an Ubuntu free software platform, the new version of the OS comes pre-loaded with a bunch of software ranging from office packages, language input tools, Database applications to DTP- Graphics Image Editing software and so on.
In addition to internationally acclaimed educational software such as GeoGebra, PhEt and GCompris,the OS suit also features several utility packages like G-Image reader which provides the image to text conversion, it said.
Linux draws a distinction between code running in kernel (kernel space) and applications running in userland (user space). This is enforced at the hardware level - in x86-speak[1], kernel space code runs in ring 0 and user space code runs in ring 3[2]. If you're running in ring 3 and you attempt to touch memory that's only accessible in ring 0, the hardware will raise a fault. No matter how privileged your ring 3 code, you don't get to touch ring 0.
Kind of. In theory. Traditionally this wasn't well enforced. At the most basic level, since root can load kernel modules, you could just build a kernel module that performed any kernel modifications you wanted and then have root load it. Technically user space code wasn't modifying kernel space code, but the difference was pretty semantic rather than useful. But it got worse - root could also map memory ranges belonging to PCI devices[3], and if the device could perform DMA you could just ask the device to overwrite bits of the kernel[4]. Or root could modify special CPU registers ("Model Specific Registers", or MSRs) that alter CPU behaviour via the /dev/msr interface, and compromise the kernel boundary that way.
It turns out that there were a number of ways root was effectively equivalent to ring 0, and the boundary was more about reliability (ie, a process running as root that ends up misbehaving should still only be able to crash itself rather than taking down the kernel with it) than security. After all, if you were root you could just replace the on-disk kernel with a backdoored one and reboot. Going deeper, you could replace the bootloader with one that automatically injected backdoors into a legitimate kernel image. We didn't have any way to prevent this sort of thing, so attempting to harden the root/kernel boundary wasn't especially interesting.
XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."
On the feature front for Linux 5.12, this mature file-system has seen work to speed up freezing when read-only workloads are still running, refactoring to the logging code, faster fsync and garbage collection scans, and continued work towards being able to support shrinking XFS file-systems.
Hi list,
This is very delayed, but mesa 21.0.0-rc5 is now available. RC5 has roughly two weeks of work in it, so there's a lot that's changed since RC4. We've got a few issues left open blocking the relase, but hopefully we can get those all taken care of by next week for a .0 release.
Cheers, Dylan
The Mesa release train once again fell off the tracks for Mesa 21.0 but on Friday the fifth release candidate managed to ship.
Mesa 21.0 is running behind schedule for release and there ended up being two weeks since the prior RC4, but in any case Mesa 21.0-RC5 is now available for testing. Given the extra time between release candidates, Mesa 21.0-RC5 does come on the heavier side. There are also still open blocker bugs left so it's possible a Mesa 21.0-RC6 will be warranted in the next week or so before announcing Mesa 21.0.
The internet is a wonderful tool to have and use. Many of the services we rely on for our daily convenience have since moved online. Every day, we find ourselves needing to download various things from the internet; documents, music, videos, ZIP files, you name it.
Of course, all internet browsers have built-in download managers that do serve their intended purposes well. But sometimes, you need a little bit more functionality—scheduled downloads, control download bandwidth, resume capabilities, and so on.
With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server.
The good news is that OpenZFS's development version just landed a fix for this, in fact a very general one. The simple version is that there's a new ZFS pool property called 'compatibility'; if set, it limits what features a pool will be created with or upgraded to. You can set it to a wide variety of general choices, which include things like 'OpenZFS 2.0 on Linux' and 'what Grub2 will support'.
Centmin Mod is a CLI installer for the LEMP stack. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Centmin Mod to install a WordPress website on a CentOS server.
Centmin Mod is an auto-installer of the LEMP stack which is already optimized and configured for the best performance by default. In short, if you want an optimized, fast website without doing too much manual work, this tool is perfect for you.
I upgraded my home internet connection and as a result I had to give up my ~15y Static IP. Having an ephemeral Dynamic IP means I need to use a dynamic dns service to access my homepc. Although the ISP’s CPE (router) has a few public dynamic dns services, I chose to create a simple solution on my own self-hosted DNS infra.
The HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) drivers have been updated to version 3.21.2, a release that adds support for some of the latest GNU/Linux distributions and lots of new HP printers.
HPLIP 3.21.2 is here more than two months after version 3.20.11, which only added support for the Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) and Debian GNU/Linux 10.6 “Buster” operating systems. This new release adds support for the Fedora 33, Manjaro 20.2, Debian GNU/Linux 10.7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, 7.9, 7.8, and 7.7 operating systems.
Wget is a command line utility in linux to download files from the internet. It provides many features such as downloading multiple files, resuming stopped downloads, limiting the bandwidth, downloading in the background and can be used for taking mirrors of the site. Wget supports HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocol to connect server and download files. In this article , we are going to learn wget commands with 15 quick examples.
Sometimes you may want to know the CPU usage of a particular Linux process. As the CPU usage of a process can fluctuate over its lifetime, you will want to measure the average CPU usage or CPU utilization of the process. For this purpose, a Linux tool set called sysstat may come in handy, which contains a collection of performance monitoring tools for Linux, reporting statistics on disk I/O, CPU, memory, networking, and other system activities. One of the utilities contained in sysstat is pidstat, which can measure the average CPU usage of Linux processes.
Do you have a USB flash drive, USB SD card reader, or USB external hard drive? Want to mount your USB in Ubuntu Linux but can’t figure it out? We can help! Follow along with this guide as we show you how to mount USB devices in Ubuntu Linux!
Stardew Valley is a simulation RPG developed by Eric Barone. It was released on Microsoft Windows in 2016. Later, it made its way to Mac OS, Linux, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, iOS, Android, and even PlayStation Vita.
This article will explain how to install custom Fonts in Linux using various graphical and command line tools. You can use these methods to install system-wide fonts that will be automatically available to all major apps installed on your Linux system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KeeWeb Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KeeWeb is an open-source password manager. It can store passwords both offline and online and syncs with online storage tools such as Owncloud, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, and Dropbox. It is compatible with KeePass and also available as a web version and desktop apps.
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 KeeWeb Password Manager 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.
If you have multiple audio-input devices connected to your Linux PC, it often becomes necessary to know which ones work properly. Otherwise, you might think that your high-end external microphone is at work capturing audio when in reality, your system is using the default in-built low-quality microphone.
To help you out, we have put together a comprehensive guide on how to test microphones on Linux. We will be showing you both a GUI method and the Terminal method for testing microphone input.
The terminal method is universal and will work for all Linux distros.
Slack is a popular collaboration tool and arranges communication in channels. It is explicitly designed for professional environments and is used by many professionals around the globe. By using Slack, you can create channels for teams to ensure effective communication. Moreover, it enables us to search the previous conversation, share documents, and make video and audio calls.
You have forgotten your root password, and now you have no idea how to retrieve your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Operating System? In this post, we will guide you on how to reset your root password on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS System from the GRUB menu. The Grand Unified Bootloader or GNU GRUB menu is a boot loader and software or program that loads and transfers control to the Operating System like Linux- it runs when a computer starts. So, let’s begin with the step-by-step guide of resetting the password of the root.
Edit, retouch or optimize your images using the free and open-source GIMP editor by installing it on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 Linux distro, here we are showing 3 ways of doing that using GUI and command line methods.
The free image editor “GIMP” offers professional tools and retouching functions for photos. Its name is actually an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it is one of the best free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop for private and semi-professional use.
Thanks to the KDE FreeBSD CI, which runs our code on top of libc++, we discovered an interesting difference between libstdc++ and libc++'s implementation of unique_ptr. This is quite unexpected, and the actual result for users is even more unexpected: it can lead to crashes in specific situations. This happens when a widget -- using unique_ptr for its d pointer, as is customary these days -- installs an event filter. That event filter will be triggered during destruction of child widgets (at least for the QEvent::Destroy event, I've also seen it with QEvent::Leave events for instance). And, depending on how the event filter is written, it might use the d pointer of the widget, possibly before checking the event type. That's where it gets interesting: the libc++ implementation of unique_ptr sets it to null *before* calling the destructor (because it's implemented in terms of reset(nullptr);. In libstdc++ however, unique_ptr's destructor just calls the destructor, its value remains valid during destruction.
The KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters.
The KDE e.V. is for example responsible for paying the servers that run our GitLab instance and all our other web services. The e.V. takes care of sponsoring developer sprints and contributor travel costs, too.
You did participate at some Akademy? This wouldn’t have been possible without the KDE e.V., both by sponsoring and helping to organize the event!
If you are an active KDE contributor, consider to join the e.V. to be able to vote on its future direction. This includes very important things like the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
At the moment, already a lot of our KDE community members are e.V. members, too.
Hi everyone! I am Rohan Asokan. I am currently doing my undergraduate studies in Computer Science in IIITH, a university in India. I can program quite proficiently in C, C++, Javascript, Python and have some knowing some basic Q#, R, FORTRAN, QBasic (I don’t think even primitve coders know about this anymore). I am interested in AI/ML (obviously, cuz that seems to be trend anyways) and any tech that seems really simple but is infact as good as it gets, out of which my favourite is Ray Tracing and Ray Marching - I do have some projects on this, do checkout my github.
Dubbed “XOXO,” Netrunner OS 21.01 comes a year after Netrunner OS 20.01 “Twenty” which celebrated project’s 10th anniversary release. This release is powered by a newer kernel, namely Linux 5.9, which reached end of life two months ago, and carries the latest updates and security patches from Debian GNU/Linux 10.7 “Buster.”
Linux kernel 5.9.15 is included in Netrunner OS 21.01, which was pulled from the Debian Buster Backports repository, which also provides updated firmware for Wi-Fi and Ethernet cards, as well as improved printer drivers to support more modern hardware. Mesa 18.3.6 and X.Org Server 1.20.4 graphics stacks are also included.
Netrunner 21.01 ships with all the latest security updates provided by Debian and a new beautiful wallpaper showing of the new Codename of this release.
With the activated Debian Buster Backports repository we provide updated firmware for wifi and ethernet chips aswell as improved printer drivers to allow more modern hardware support.
Firefox-ESR and Thunderbird were updated to the latest stable LTS (long term supported) versions, which get regular security updates provided by Debian security. Netrunner maintains its georgous look and feel from the previous version based upon Breeze Window decoration and the red colors cursor.
It's been nearly one year to the day since the release of Netrunner 20.01 as this desktop Linux distribution focused on providing a good KDE-based desktop environment and backed by Blue Systems. Today Netrunner 21.01 has been released as the latest step forward for this KDE desktop distribution built atop a Debian base.
Netrunner 21.01 "XOXO" is the new release that is based atop Debian 10.7 "Buster" but switching to the Linux 5.9 kernel and other backports. The Linux 5.9 usage allows for much better hardware support than is provided by the stock Buster kernel that tracks Linux 4.19.
About two years ago, I started using Kdenlive to do video editing. The dark theme I had been using, a modified version of the “openSUSE dark alternate” theme, was not getting along with Kdenlive and I had to use the “Breeze Dark” theme to be able to properly distinguish the widgets and such on the application. Shortly there after, I set out to modify the Breeze Dark theme to give me that openSUSE feel I have been enjoying for years. I have made it available on this page of my site but I decided to push it to the “KDE Store” which I previously thought was “look and feel” but is now called Pling. Yes, I am confused but I’m sure I’ll get it cleared up eventually.
The smart thing to do would have been to study and get a good, solid understanding of the history of all this but instead, I have decided to just leave my ignorance on full display. I am using this post as a note or reminder to myself on the process of publishing things for the Plasma desktop in the future. I will be soon, when I can get the little bits and bobs worked out on the specifics as my knowledge gaps are kicking my rear, but I’ll get it figured out soon enough.
I gave a short presentation - WAF on Debian.
Especially, I talked about usage of ModSecurity-nginx.
As my contributions to Debian continue to grow in number, I find myself uploading to the archive more and more often.
Although I'm pretty happy with my current sbuild-based workflow, twice in the past few weeks I inadvertently made a binary upload instead of a source-only one.1
As it turns out, I am not the only DD who has had this problem before. As Nicolas Dandrimont kindly pointed to me, dput-ng supports pre and post upload hooks that can be used to lint your uploads. Even better, it also ships with a check-debs hook that lets you block binary uploads.
Neither are standalone boards, and instead, they are meant to be connected to the Arduino Zero board – the HMCU board – as a shield.
It has recently emerged that the open-source operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, installs a Microsoft repository during installation. The inclusion of one of Microsoft's many repositories means that each time the Raspberry Pi OS updates, it pings a Microsoft server, potentially disclosing information regarding your device.
After the install, whenever someone on Pi OS runs apt update, the Pi will reach out and check Microsoft's apt server for any updates.
ESP32-S2 is new SOC from Espressif, compared to ESP32 it has no Bluetooth and Ethernet connectivity, but offers plenty of GPIOs and has native USB-OTG interface.
Our first version uses USB to Serial converter as Espressif IDE at that time didn’t support programming via the native USB interface, but now their SDK supports USB programming, so we released new version without the not necessary USB-Serial converter.
To the best of our knowledge this is the first board to the market where USB-OTG is implemented and the board can work both in device and host mode ( at least as hardware ðŸâ¢â )
You can video call without phone, number, nor email. Here, if you can video call, of course you can do group chat, voice, upload files, and share screen too. Thanks to Element and several other choices, now this is possible. It is very useful for everybody in teams or groups today especially when work from home becomes a norm. What to prepare and how to do it? This article explains it briefly special for you and your friends.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed one of our newer IndieWeb community participants found an example on the IndieWeb wiki that no longer worked, and it was from someone who hasn’t been around for a while.
[...]
When these things happen, as a community, I feel we should respond with kindness, support, and understanding when someone steps back from community participation or projects. We should not shame or guilt them in any way, and ideally act in such a way that welcomes their return whenever they are able to do so.
Many projects (especially open source software) often talk about their “bus factor” (or more positively worded “lottery factor”). However that framing focuses on the robustness of the project (or company) rather than those contributing to it. Right there in IndieWeb’s motto is an encouragement to reframe: be a “people-focused alternative to the corporate […]”.
The point of “life happens” is to decenter the corporation or project when it comes to such matters, and instead focus on the good of the people in the community. Resiliency of humanity over resiliency of any particular project or organization.
Adopting such values and practices explicitly is more robust than depending on accidental good faith or informal cultural support. Such emotional care should be the clearly written default, rather than something everyone has to notice and figure out on their own. I want to encourage more mutual care-taking as a form of community-based resiliency, and make it less work for folks experiencing “life happens” moments. Through such care, I believe you get actually sustainable community resiliency, without having to sacrifice or burn people out.
We have many data structure classes in Collabora Online. Most of them are complex enough to warrant unit tests for their correctness. We already have cypress tests in Online which does integration testing, but we need unit tests for the internal data structure classes too. Mocha testing framework is a good match for this. With this we can do asserts via its BDD interface. In fact we could use any assertion library like Chai or Expect.js. You can now add Mocha tests in Online to test its any existing typescript classes or functions.
On 17 February I participated in a panel discussion about opportunities, hurdles with and incentives for Free Software in the public administration. The panel was part of the event "digital state online", focusing on topics like digital administration, digital society and digital sovereignty. Patron of the event is the German Federal Chancellor's Office. Here a quick summary of the points I made and some quick thoughts about the discussion.
The "Behördenspiegel" meanwhile published the recordings of the discussion moderated by Benjamin Stiebel (Editor, Behörden Spiegel) with Dr. Hartmut Schubert (State Secretary, Thuringian Ministry of Finance), Reiner Bamberger (developer at Higher Administrative Court of Rhineland-Palatinate), Dr. Matthias Stürmer (University of Bern), and myself (as always you can use youtube-dl).
[...]
I also plead for a different error culture in the public administration. Experimentation clauses would allow to be test innovative approaches without every bad feedback immediately suggesting that a project has to be stopped. We should think about how to incentivize the sharing and reuse of Free Software. For example if public administrations document good solutions and support others in benefiting from those solutions as well could they get a budget bonus for that for future projects? Could we provide smaller budgets which can be more flexible used to experiment with Free Software, e.g. by providing small payments to Free Software offers even if they do not yet meet all the criteria to use it productively for the tasks envisioned.
One point we also briefly talked about was centralization vs decentralization. We have to be careful that "IT consolidation" efforts do not lead to a situation of more monopolies and more centralization of powers. For Germany, I argued that the bundling of IT services and expertise in some authorities should not go that far that federal states like Thuringia or other levels and parts of government lose their sovereignty and are dependent on a service centre controlled by the federal government or another part of the state. Free Software provides the advantage that for example the federal state of Bavaria can offer a software solution for other federal states. But if they abuse their power over this technology, other federal states like Thuringa could decide to host the Free Software solution themselves, and contract a company to make modifications, so they can have it their way. The same applies for other mechanisms for distribution of power like the separation between a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. All of them have to make sure their sovereignty is not impacted by technology - neither by companies (as more often discussed) nor by other branches of government. For a democracy in the 21st century such a technological distribution of power is crucial.
Victory! I've just hunted down a bug that has haunted me, and had me baffled, for a couple of weeks.
I often enjoy bug hunting war stories, so I figured I'd write this one down, while running a full build and regression test cycle with the fix.
Context: I've been porting GCC and binutils for the Libre-SOC project. We're designing and building a PowerPC processor with various extensions and lots more registers to make it efficient as a CPU, GPU, VPU, APU... I'm calling it hapPU, if you get one.
Adding the hundreds of new registers required renumbering some preexisting registers in GCC's internal register file. Since several parts of GCC used numeric literals instead of symbolic names to refer to certain registers, one of my first tasks was to hunt those down and adjust them for the new numbering. Some of that amounted to grepping for suspicious constants, some of that was only caught with regression testing.
Eventually, I was down to a handful of stack-check fails in the Ada testsuite. The tests and the failures were similar: create a task to run a subprogram that recursed infinitely, to make sure that the stack overflow was detected, handled, turned into an Ada exception out of the signal handler, caught by the task subsystem and made available for the task initiator. All really simple stuff, right?
I’m often around people who hate XML (because yeah, it is pretty awful, almost as bad as as YAML or JSON) and I kinda squirm during the two minute hate sessions because I’ve spent so much time learning a bunch of XML-related tech.
OK, Scheme students, this is gonna get dense. Start at the top, don’t skip ahead, and when you’ve found the one you need, stop reading, grab it and get back to work.ââ¢Â¥
Lupa is a Gemini crawler. Starting from a few given URLs, it retrieves them, analyzes the links in gemtext (Gemini format) files and adds them to the database of URLs to crawl. It is not a search engine, it does not store the content of the resources, just the metadata, for research and statistics.
Lupa is written in Python.
Gemini server statistics (2020-12)
Statistics on Gemini servers, gathered on 2020-12-22 (give or take a few days), based on the list of hosts found at gemini://gus.guru/known-hosts
To get complete results, get-tls-supported-versions.sh and get-tls1_2-supported-ciphers.sh need to be executed at least 2 times each, as connections might fail for various reasons.
I started the Inline::F2003 project in 2017 because I have a strong interest in modern Fortran and Perl programming.
The project features the Perl module Inline::F2003. This module allows modern Fortran source to be inlined and called from a Perl program. The module compiles the Fortran source and builds an executable shared library that is loaded into the Perl system.
It's often (for work or for personal projects) that I need to create a real-time feature for a website. This can range from a simple notification whenever an event happens on the server of an existing website, to implementing a real-time multiplayer game or adding a feature inspired from social media websites.
Unfortunately the increase in complexity in code (Perl & JS) and architecture involved in setting up a reliable solution, very often made me forego the opportunity to use WebSockets for many of these projects, and instead resorted to http polling to keep the solution simple for the others to maintain.
I've turned the libdeflate compression library into a CPAN module:
Gzip::Libdeflate
This is the gzip compression method, but updated.
It's supposed to be much faster and better than libz (the original gzip library).
Sometimes I am getting compression of as much as 30% better on some files.
Like many of you, I am a software developer. For the past few years, I've been working with Python, both at work, and writing small hobby projects at home.
One of the most common things I do with Python is write Linux services/daemons. A linux daemon is a program, in our case written in Python, that runs in a loop, usually by SystemD, and only exits when it receives a kill signal.
A few months ago, I decided to teach myself Rust, and after reading the Rust book (which I highly recommend), and watching lots of youtube videos, I tried to write a Rust Linux daemon.
Each morning I sit in silence, time slides, changes in my heart, a moss covered cavern where its fire wakes me to a camaraderie of light, my wife waking
upstairs to walk to her window to pray, to gaze outward at the pasture where Wappinger people eyed white men making laws to own people and the land.
Let’s begin with two bookcases.
About a year ago, I finally came to the conclusion that I would not put anything on a performance review writeup for a coworker that could ever be used against them. Now, keep in mind what I said about skilled managers being able to turn a large accomplishment into a big negative, and you'll realize that's harder than it sounds. So, what you do is you look up the official descriptions of what a person at level X does, and mention the ones that they managed to do.
Attempting to teach young people critical thinking as a general skill that can be developed through practice is a little like corralling a group of teenagers and running them through a series of experiences where they give someone an injection, talk to a patient, participate in surgery, change a hospital bed, and inspect the stomach contents of a corpse with the aim of developing “medical thinking.” In fact, where this analogy falls down is that “medical thinking” would be a far more restricted field than critical thinking.
As Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, has pointed out, young children are capable of thinking critically about subjects they know a great deal about, whereas trained scientists can fail to think critically in areas where they are less knowledgeable. This serves to caution us against a bias that afflicts our media. Just because someone is an expert in a particular field, it does not make them qualified to pronounce on a different field. Trained scientists making claims about public policy are likely to be as wrong as any other educated commentator, but we tend to take them more seriously.
Willingham has written a report for the government of the Australian state of New South Wales in which he states that, “scientists are united in their belief that content knowledge is crucial to effective critical thinking,” before setting out a plan for developing critical thinking abilities within each of the traditional subjects of the school curriculum. This will give little comfort to those who constantly seek to strip content from the school curriculum (to “declutter” it) in order to make way for the experiences they believe will deliver more critical thinking, creativity, or whatever other abstract nouns they deem desirable.
The history of computing is filled with mythical figures, but often lost in the shuffle is the accomplishment of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. On February 14, 1946, the pair publicly unveiled the world's first true computer: ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). From their lab at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, they launched a revolution that truly changed the world.
On its 75th anniversary, ENIAC is once again in the spotlight. "It was the big bang of the information age. It set in motion a paradigm that has become the underpinning of daily life, as well as of deepest science," observes Bill Mauchly, an inventor and software architect who, as the son of John Mauchly, has also become a historian for the computer.
All drugs offer a mix of harms and benefits. But despite their popularity, the effects of puberty blockers remain unclear. Because they are not licensed for gender medicine, drug firms have done no trials. Record-keeping in many clinics is poor. A 2018 review by researchers at the University of Melbourne described the evidence for their use as “low-quality”. In December British judges likewise flagged the lack of a “firm evidence base” when ruling that children were unlikely to be able to give meaningful consent to taking them. Britain’s National Health Service recently withdrew a claim, still made elsewhere, that their effects are “fully reversible”.
The studies that do exist are at once weak and worrying. The day after the court ruling, GIDS published a study that found children were happy to receive the drugs. But there was little other evidence of benefit—not even a reduction in gender dysphoria. Two older studies of Dutch patients given puberty blockers in the 1990s found that gender dysphoria eased afterwards. But without a control group, it is impossible to tell how patients would have felt had they not taken the drugs.
Since November, tens of thousands of farmers have been camping out in the capital to protest new agricultural laws that they say could destroy their livelihoods and leave them open to exploitation by large corporations.
Ravi fervently backed the cause, tweeting her support for the farmers as they pose a rare and major challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authority. Farmers are the most influential voting bloc in India and a key part of its economy.
But the farmers are worried that the reforms will leave them at the mercy of large corporations that will buy their crops for low prices, leading to their financial ruin. Their cause gained even more international attention earlier this month, when international celebrities including pop star Rihanna and Thunberg tweeted about the protests.
But that online support also drew the attention of Modi’s right-wing nationalist government, which has sought to control the narrative around the protests and suppress dissent. The latest action in response to the toolkit is part of that effort.
"The climate crisis is already here. Those in power have congratulated us countless times because 'we're going to change the future'," Ravi wrote in an opinion piece for the Thomson Reuters foundation that she co-authored https://news.trust.org/item/20200917201445-4iew6 in September.
"They choose to ignore that the climate crisis is a problem we are facing today."
Tens of thousands of farmers have been demonstrating for months against new agricultural laws, which they say will devastate their livelihoods.
Ravi, a vegan and a member of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, has been detained by Delhi police for questioning over involvement in an online campaign guide that the Swedish climate activist promoted in support of farmers protesting India’s agricultural reforms.
Ravi’s environmental activism has been what the New York Times calls “passionate, but fairly limited.” She started the local chapter of Fridays for Future, Greta’s “global people’s movement for climate justice,” organizing climate strikes and clean-up drives. In 2019, she told an African news outlet that she had been inspired to join the cause because she had seen her grandparents, who were farmers, suffer the effects of climate change. On February 19, Greta showed support for Ravi on Twitter, writing, “Freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest and assembly are non-negotiable human rights. These must be a fundamental part of any democracy.”
The Norwegian health policy agency, the Ministry of Health and Care Services, sent legal proposals to legislators on Friday that would retain the illegal status for prohibited drugs but abolish all criminal penalties for “the use of drugs and the acquisition and possession of a small amount of drugs for own use.” Instead, police will confiscate drugs and refer their owners to municipal advisory units that could refer them to counseling (and fines could be imposed if treatment is not sought).
The big picture: Millions of people across the South have been told to boil water, with thawing temperatures expected to reveal the extent of the damage to infrastructure.
Mitchell had become a fierce public critic of Google and its management after Gebru’s exit. Gebru, one of the few prominent Black women in AI research, said she was fired in December after refusing to retract a research paper critical of a key Google technology or remove the Google authors from it. The company has said that she resigned. Mitchell was a co-author of the paper. Former colleagues expressed outrage over Google’s handling of the matter.
The Alphabet Inc. company had accused Mitchell of downloading files from its systems and said it would review her conduct. For five weeks, Mitchell, who had co-led the Ethical AI team with Gebru, was locked out of all corporate systems -- unable to access her email or calendar.
I hate username fields in registration forms. The usernames I want are, of course, already taken. Many services won’t let you change your username later, so you might get stuck with it. Who wants to settle for a name they don’t like? Just please don’t make me choose a username.
Personal identity is hard. It molds and changes over time. Online identity is harder, but can often be more permanent. Many services won’t let you change your username without deleting the account and making another one. You’ll lose all your data with the service in the process. (Assuming you’re allowed to delete your account and set your email address free.)
Many services make do with just your email address. Your email address isn’t truly yours, but just a rented identity. However, everyone still needs a unique name for services where you interact with other members.
CrowdSec is a massively multiplayer firewall designed to protect Linux servers, services, containers, or virtual machines exposed on the Internet with a server-side agent. It was inspired by Fail2Ban and aims to be a modernized, collaborative version of that intrusion-prevention tool.
CrowdSec is free and open-source (under an MIT License), with the source code available on GitHub. It uses a behavior analysis system to qualify whether someone is trying to hack you, based on your logs. If your agent detects such aggression, the offending IP is then dealt with and sent for curation. If this signal passes the curation process, the IP is then redistributed to all users sharing a similar technological profile to “immunize” them against this IP.
The goal is to leverage the power of the crowd to create a real-time IP reputation database. As for the IP that aggressed your machine, you can choose to remedy the threat in any manner you feel appropriate. Ultimately, CrowdSec leverages the power of the community to create an extremely accurate IP reputation system that benefits all its users.
It was clear to the founders that Open Source was going to be one of the main pillars of CrowdSec. The project's founders have been working on open-source projects for decades - they didn’t just jump on the train. Rather, they are strong Open Source believers. They believe that the crowd is key to the mass hacking plague we are experiencing, and that Open Source is the best lever to create a community and have people contribute their knowledge to the project, ultimately make it better and more secure.
A large percentage of computer users never update their operating systems. This is true of desktop Linux users as well, which may be surprising to some since Linux users are supposed to be a bit more tech-savvy than Windows and Mac users. R
Linux users are more knowledgeable regarding computer maintenance than Windows users, right? Maybe. That is certainty up for debate. With that said, Linux user may not be very responsible computer users. Well, Linux Mint users, at least.
You see, in a stunning development, it turns out Linux Mint users are often very behind in installing both operating system and application updates. In other words, Linux Mint users are often running outdated software, which could be no longer supported, or even worse, it could contain exploitable vulnerabilities. For example, a surprisingly high number of these users are running Linux Mint 17.x, which is unsupported since 2019!
When it comes to geopolitics, the so-called ‘cyber’ and the realm of the internet has become a serious battlefield and a space where enemy states have traded disinformation campaigns and can have things like a power plant knocked out by a string of code. Since 2011, New York Times journalist Nicole Perlroth has been reporting on the secret world of cybersecurity and the arsenals of malware that nation states are stockpiling.
This is quite alarming, given that the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced yesterday that it is a longtime client of AFTS and that the February attack may have compromised approximately 20 months of data it had shared with the company, including the “names, addresses, license plate numbers and vehicle identification numbers (VIN)” of millions of Californians.
Alphabet Inc's Google has fired staff scientist Margaret Mitchell, they both said, a move that fanned company divisions on academic freedom and diversity that were on display since its December dismissal of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru.
Google said in a statement Mitchell violated the company's code of conduct and security policies by moving electronic files outside the company. Mitchell, who announced her firing on Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.
I migrated the few outstanding chats I had to Signal or SMS or email. I reluctantly accepted WhatsApp as a fallback if absolutely necessary, since even if you stay within the Facebook Inc. empire it’s probably better to shrink your footprint. Even the people who I expected to call me a tin-foil-hatted-dweeb were sympathetic to my motivations. No one actively wanted to stay on Facebook and very few people I co-ordinated with posted anything publicly anymore. We were all just victims of those sad network effects who wanted to be able to talk with our friends. I posted about my plans a few weeks before I hit the button, and several people who I used to to like a lot but haven’t spoken to for years got in touch to swap off-Facebook contact details. I’m hopeful that we’ll be friends again and that deleting Facebook has brought us closer than using it ever did. If all you want is a messaging platform then you have a million alternatives, and some of them aren’t even wholly-owned Facebook subsidiaries.
This is especially worrisome for those of you who use Brave browser from your normal residential IP and (for whatever reason) use the Tor feature built into the browser to access Tor sites. Your ISP or DNS provider will know that a request made to a specific Tor site was made by your IP. With Brave, your ISP would know that you accessed somesketchyonionsite.onion .
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EDIT 2: The mods of /r/privacy won't let this be posted. They say: [...]
Earlier today (February 19), a blog post from ‘Rambler’ claimed that Brave was leaking DNS requests made in the Brave browser to a user’s ISP.
Prince has "been linked to the Trump administration, the Emirati leadership, and the Russians," noted one expert.
The northeastern parts of Syria remain a tinderbox, both politically and militarily. Turkey has taken control over the border region and intends to push back Kurdish forces. Ankara further actively supports Islamic groups that pressure the Syrian Army and president Bashar al-Assad in an attempt to destabilise the region even more. The Syrian border to Iraq also remains in a precarious situation. For several weeks now, the Iraqi army has been requesting international support in the fight against IS forces.
Saudi Arabia will invest more than $20 billion in its domestic military industry over the next decade as part of aggressive plans to boost local military spending, the head of the kingdom's military industry regulator said on Saturday.
The Gulf state wants to develop and manufacture more weapons and military systems domestically, aiming to spend 50% of the military budget locally by 2030.
In a recent report to the General Assembly (A/75/259), the Working Group on the use of mercenaries identified “cyber mercenaries” as one category of actors that can generate mercenary-related activities. This entails a wide range of military and security services provided in cyberspace, including data collection and espionage. Private actors can be engaged by States and non-State actors in various proxy relationships to conduct offensive or defensive operations, to protect their own networks and infrastructure, as well as to carry out cyber operations to weaken the military capacities and capabilities of enemy armed forces, or to undermine the integrity of another State’s territory. Individuals carrying out cyberattacks can cause damage remotely, across various jurisdictions. As such, they can be considered as undertaking a mercenary-related activity, or even a mercenary activity if all the qualifying criteria are met.
The lessons are ever-more important as the children are bilingual, she says. “Children learn English very well, and so all cultures are available to them. They may see English stars or influencers who spread misinformation – it is very important that children can tell the difference from an influencer’s [opinion] and the news.”
The United States is formally back in the Paris climate agreement as of February 19, 2021, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump announced it would pull out.
Let’s get the facts straight. Every type of power plant — whether powered by coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, or wind sources — in Texas was impacted by the ice and freezing temperatures that arrived with Winter Storm Uri over the weekend. But it was natural gas — the state’s top source of electricity — that failed most significantly as wellheads and power plants froze over. Wind turbines, meanwhile, were responsible for 13 percent of the total lost electricity output, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s nonprofit grid operator.
But there is nothing innate about wind power — or natural gas — that caused these power plants to fail. It’s merely a matter of preparation, Hui Hu, a professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University who studies wind turbines, told Vox.
Places reliant on wind energy that are no strangers to cold and ice — from Sweden to Iowa — are proof that the freezing of turbines in Texas was not inevitable. The difference: Unlike in Texas, those turbines were weatherized to operate in the cold.
What a surprise — the Texas energy disaster has been turned into a yet another culture war scrimmage field, pitting right-wing advocates of fossil fuels against liberal supporters of renewable energy. But the red vs. blue framing conceals something important: when it comes to the climate, Texans are far to the left of their representatives.
All told, it was a textbook case of infrastructure collapse. Uninsulated pipes started buckling under the pressure, grocery store shelves stood empty — and right wing political pundits attempted to shift the blame on renewable energy while racing off on holiday to a balmy Cancun.
Compounding the trouble, Texas had previously shut itself off from the rest of the country’s electricity grid, meaning that it wasn’t able to import power from neighboring states to keep its inhabitants from freezing to death.
That also means Texas isn’t beholden to federal regulations — one of the qualities that drew Musk to the Lone Star state in the first place. A whole decade ago, grid regulations warned Texas that its power plants wouldn’t be able to survive plunging temperatures, as Bloomberg reports. Recommendations to insulate and heat pipes fell on deaf ears, leading to households flooding across the state this week.
Without immediate action, it was feared that the network could implode with substations catching fire and power lines collapsing—physical damage that could have taken an "indeterminately long" time to fix.
Magness said blackouts "could have occurred for months" had his team not stepped in to limit supply to homes and businesses and protect the grid.
"Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not incidental to the federal budget and is permissible under the rules," the independent senator from Vermont said Saturday.€
We need to begin changing our fundamental ethic, from "I'm getting mine. Screw you,"€ to "We're all in this together." Because we are.
As Republican strategist Kevin Philips noted years ago, the Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.
Junaid I. was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the appeals court for threatening an attack on PVV leader Geert Wilders in 2018 after the far-right politician announced a contest for the best cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. The sentence is equal to what the Pakistani man got when this case was first tried in 2019.
The court said it took into account that I. was planning to murder a parliamentarian, and that this is considered an attack on the Dutch rule of law, NU.nl reports. Behavioral experts also concluded that I. has a penchant for violent extremism and the chance of recurrence is great.
Last Tuesday, the news came down that newspaper giant Tribune Publishing was merging with hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Alden’s 31.6 percent stake already made it the company’s biggest shareholder, but the $630 million deal will see it take full ownership of the struggling firm — if, that is, it gets the go-ahead from regulators and Tribune’s other shareholders, including Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire and LA Times owner who owns 24 percent of Tribune’s stock.
To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to get a sense of how sprawling Tribune Publishing’s ownership is. Tribune owns: [...]
Algeria on Friday released prominent journalist Khaled Drareni and dozens of "Hirak" protest movement activists from jail under presidential pardons issued ahead of the second anniversary of a popular uprising.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has blocked Julian Assange’s extradition! While her ruling adopted the U.S. government’s extremely dangerous arguments undermining press freedom, the judge found that because U.S. prison conditions are so deleterious, it would be unjust and oppressive to extradite Julian. Almost immediately the lawyers representing the U.S. announced their intent to appeal that decision.
Recent allegations that planted evidence may have been used to frame an activist in a terrorism case are raising new questions about the surveillance and [cracking] ecosystem in India.
The human rights activist in question, Rona Wilson, is one of several people accused of plotting to overthrow the Indian government in connection with a violent demonstration in Bhima Koregaon, India in 2017. Wilson is among the several activists accused of instigating violence at the demonstration. Cases against the defendants have largely relied on digitally-collected evidence, according to Amnesty International. He has been incarcerated for nearly three years.
In the aftermath of the Jan 6 Trumpist putsch at the Capitol, the world reeled – not just at the spectacle of the Capitol building overrun by deranged armed insurrectionists, but also at the manifest incompetence of the Capitol Police.
The Capitol Police command $460m/year, 10% of Congress's total budget. They had ample warning that murderous, anti-democratic revolutionaries were converging on the Capitol. They had a long track-record of over-responding to protests with overwhelming shows of force.
Given the track-record, the budget and the warnings, could we truly attribute the failure to contain the insurrectionists to incompetence? Did the shots of police officers taking selfies with members of a lynch mob mean that the force was complicit with the traitors?
Opposition to DAPL rallied thousands of environmental and Indigenous rights activists to the Oceti Sakowin prayer camp at Standing Rock, ND in 2016 and 2017. These Water Protectors were met with heavily militarized intervention from the oil company’s private security forces, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office, and numerous assisting agencies. Since March, 2017, DAPL has leaked over 1000 gallons of oil into sensitive water sources, and the Energy Transfer link connecting DAPL to Texas has leaked over 5000 gallons of oil. On January 26, 2021, the appeals court in Washington D.C. upheld a lower court ruling which found that the permit allowing DAPL to cross beneath the Missouri River — on unceded Lakota / Dakota / Nakota lands – violated key federal environmental laws, by failing to consider the risk the pipeline poses to the Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous nations who depend on the river for drinking water, as well as cultural, spiritual, and economic survival. After years of struggle and irreversible harm to both land and people, the rulings affirm the positions of the Water Protectors, and mean that DAPL is currently operating illegally.
It is now three years later. The agreement is supposed to be in effect. No right to repair legislation has been passed. Deere, the dealers, and the manufacturers got what they wanted. And, yet, farmers are still struggling to get anything promised in the agreement.
Ericsson v. Samsung is the first massive 5G patent spat in the industry. Unless the two "lovebirds" settle reasonably soon, the dispute threatens--or in some people's eyes perhaps promises--to raise a number of important issues. One of them involves antisuit injunctions, especially multiple-anti ones. Samsung's reply brief in support of an expedited Federal Circuit appeal of Ericsson's anti-antisuit injunction from the Eastern District of Texas reinforced the need for speed, but also revealed the kind of playing field on which Ericsson wanted to arbitrate the terms of a cross-license. Samsung's motion succeeded in part, and its opening brief is due tomorrow (Monday, February 22), but Ericsson will have until April 2 to respond--ample time, as it wanted.
[...]
In reality, Samsung doesn't favor SEP injunctions anymore. About ten years ago, they were countersuing Apple over SEPs, and at that point they were interested in maximum leverage from that category of patents. But even in the Apple-Samsung dispute, SEPs quickly lost relevance. Samsung is far more interested in a strong product business than Ericsson, which wants to have it both ways but increasingly relies on patent licensing revenues.
In that Apple-Samsung dispute, the ITC actually decided in Samsung's favor, but the import ban (which wouldn't even have impacted Apple's flagship products at the time) never took effect because the United States Trade Representative (USTR), to whom President Obama had delegated his veto powers against ITC import bans, vetoed the exclusion order as he was concerned over SEP enforcement harming the economy.
A presidential veto might happen again. With Ericsson and Samsun battling each other in the ITC, the theoretical outcome would be that--of the big three vendors in a market from which Huawei is excluded for trade-war reasons--only Nokia could import 5G-capable mobile base stations into the U.S. market. And occasionally even Nokia is under attack.
History might repeat itself in a way next year. And this time around, Samsung would welcome a presidential veto, provided that it's symmetrical, which I'm sure it would be.
With patent trolling on the rise, investment bank Barclays and TD Bank Group have put patent assertion entities on notice by taking membership in Open Invention Network.
Viewers on many platforms (including Blizzard’s own Twitch and YouTube channels) heard a performance of Metallica’s 1984 tune “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” Several Twitch streamers broadcasting BlizzCon muted the feed during Metallica’s appearance to avoid any potential DMCA troubles.
After several years' hiatus, the major Hollywood studios of the MPA have obtained a new site-blocking injunction at the HIgh Court in London. Apparently handed down this month, the order compels local ISPs to block several web-based streaming sites using the '123movies' branding.
The Tribler lab at the Delft University of Technology has released a new Android app showcasing how the music industry can be revolutionized. With BitTorrent, a blockchain, and cryptocurrency, music streaming no longer needs any middlemen. "We fixed the 'predatory intermediary problem' by showing that music industry overhead can be 0%," project leader Johan Pouwelse says.
