As expected, during the weekend when it started: No, Microsoft Does Not Get to Lecture Us on GNU/Linux Security (or Security in General) (detailed rebuttal, video)
Summary: Dev Kundaliya and ‘Hacker’ News play along and go along with this laughable lie that Microsoft is some kind of security expert with moral authority/credibility on this subject
Maybe the crooks at the EPO‘s top floor have simply counted on a Benoît Battistelli-controlled UPC bypassing all the national laws (and common sense, too; kangaroo courts follow orders, not laws)
Summary: Based on this week’s reports (see batches of Daily Links), many recently-granted European Patents are being thrown out by courts, which means it’s hardly surprising that demand for European Patents is in fact decreasing (while quality/validity/legal certainty nose-dives)
Video download link | md5sum 2c1236a74235b8218f02ec9b0f94aaaf
Summary: Sources of funding or “sponsors” such as large corporations typically come with some barely-visible or temporarily-invisible strings attached (an expectation of commercial reciprocity, rendering the recipients subservient like ‘slaves’) and we need to understand how to preserve software freedom in the face of such trends
THE ethical condundrum surrounding Free software funding is hardly new. Richard Stallman spoke about it more than two decades ago (he suggested ways to get paid for writing freedom-respecting software) but corporate media likes to pretend Free software can only succeed if monopolies fund to control it. They don’t even speak about freedom; they prefer shallow nonsense such as “Open Source”.
This video is part of an ongoing series or a theme that explores the loss of collective control by users and communities; by encouraging non-reciprocal licensing, CLAs etc. the monopolists seek to control everything. Remember what IBM did with Red Hat only months after IBM had taken over (and then again a year and a half later) because money comes with demands. They want something in return. Audacity comes to mind and earlier on we mentioned LibreOffice, which relates to the links below:
This subject is part of a much broader problem; sponsorship and funding are a matter of control (coercion, subjugation and so on). And if the goal is to empower users and give them true control over their lives (on the platform or on-line), then we need to understand and accordingly tackle the emergent threats.
“This subject is part of a much broader problem; sponsorship and funding are a matter of control (coercion, subjugation and so on).”As always, we welcome guest posts and other contributions from readers. There seems to be a passionate and eager ‘base’ that recognises these risks and has a bunch of stories to tell, based on rumours heard somewhere like Microsoft and/or the Linux Foundation. People who see these from the inside are sometimes horrified to learn what a bunch of charlatans and frauds work there. They want to control Linux users; but they aren’t even Linux users themselves. █
Hello and welcome to Episode 421 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts interview Neil Rapp, WB2VPG, coordinator of the IARU Region 2 YOTA camp and Peter Lafreniere, N8JPL, one of the youth participants. The topics include an in-depth look at what the campers experienced, events held, challenges faced, and the future of the event. We hope you enjoy this interview and deep and have a great week until the next time we meet.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 20.2 “Xfce” and some of the applications pre-installed.
Tuxedo sent over their InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux notebook to the studio for me to review, and in this video, I’ll give you my thoughts. And it very well might have the best screen from any notebook I’ve ever reviewed.
Over the last few months we’ve been keeping an eye on WiFiWart, an ambitious project to develop a Linux single-board computer (SBC) small enough to fit inside a USB wall charger. Developer [Walker] says the goal is to create an easily concealable “drop box” for penetration testing, giving security researchers a valuable foothold inside a target network from which to preform reconnaissance or launch attacks. Of course, we don’t need to tell Hackaday readers that there’s plenty of other things you can do with such a tiny open hardware Linux SBC.
Today we’re happy to report that [Walker] has gotten the first version of the board booted into Linux, though as you might expect given a project of this complexity, there were a few bumps along the way. From the single missing resistor that caused U-Boot to throw up an error to the finer points of compiling the kernel for an embedded board, the latest blog post he’s written up about his progress provides fascinating insight into the little gotchas of bringing up a SBC from scratch.
Latest security fix kernels should now be in the repos.
All users are strongly advised to upgrade (via synaptic, cli-aptiX or package-installer).
In the last blog post of the X86 Linux assembly series, we focused on how to make our Hello World payload friendly for use as a payload in exploits. However, we didn’t cover how to extract the payload itself for use in exploits. Sure you could view the Objdump output and copy each hex byte out by hand, but that would be tedious and time consuming. Today I want to cover a method for extracting our custom payload from an object file created with GAS using Objcopy.
It turns out there is actually people running modern versions of the Linux kernel in 2021 that also are using floppy disks.
There remains a lot of vintage hardware code within the Linux kernel like enthusiasts maintaining the Motorola 68000 series support, among a lot of other older hardware and many drivers for peripherals that haven’t been sold new in many years — including the floppy disk code. But as is often the case, besides it becoming increasingly rare for users of old hardware in general, it’s increasingly rare to find vintage computer owners running modern versions of the Linux kernel. But some still do, with the latest example being a regression report over the Linux floppy driver.
The DXVK 1.9.1 release comes one and a half months after DXVK 1.9 to improve support for various games, including Roblox, which should perform much better on NVIDIA GPUs, Risen 3, which should no longer crash on NVIDIA GPUs, as well as GTA IV, which should no longer break when playing with an NVIDIA graphics card.
The Roblox performance improvements were achieved by rewroting the way staging textures are handled in D3D11, which also reduces memory usage and the number of image copies needed to move data between the GPU and CPU.
Time for another GamingOnLinux interview! This time, we have someone who many that follow Valve and Steam Play Proton will be familiar with – it’s Joshua Ashton.
Halfway through the year, many new apps released and many abandoned. Here are 6 weather apps that are still useful in 2021.
Without searching in web browser or watching an app on mobile, there are quite a few weather apps for Linux that display weather conditions and forecast either on desktop or via system tray applet.
And here are top ones still in active development and well working in all current Ubuntu releases.
The kernel of a Linux system is the core that everything else in the operating system relies on. The functionality of the kernel can be extended by adding modules to it. As such, a user can fine tune their kernel settings by enabling or disabling modules. This level of granular control is one of the many reasons why users love Linux in the first place.
In this guide, we’ll go over some of the most essential kernel module administration commands on Linux. Knowing these commands will help you understand the components that have been loaded into your system’s kernel, and will also allow you to load, reload, or unload modules in the system kernel.
You can hardly mention the sudo command without recalling the hilarious XKCD strip about making sandwiches. It does seem like sudo is the magic power to make a Linux system do what you want. The only problem is that those superpowers are not something to be taken lightly.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Suricata on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Suricata is a free and open-source, mature, fast, and robust network threat detection engine. It can function as intrusion detection (IDS) engine, inline intrusion prevention system (IPS), network security monitoring (NSM) as well as an offline pcap processing tool. Suricata inspects the network traffic using powerful and extensive rules and signature language and has powerful Lua scripting support for the detection of complex threats.
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 the Suricata on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
At some point, you’re going to want to run commands from non-standard directories. When that happens, you’ll want to add those directories to your $PATH. Jack Wallen shows you how.
Virtual machines (VMs) have transformed infrastructure deployment and management. VMs are so ubiquitous that I can’t think of a single instance where I deployed production code to a bare metal server in my many years as a professional software engineer.
VMs provide secure, isolated environments hosting your choice of operating system while sharing the resources of the underlying server. This allows resources to be allocated more efficiently, reducing the cost of over-provisioned hardware.
Given the power and flexibility provided by VMs, it is common to find many VMs deployed across many servers. However, managing VMs at this scale introduces challenges.
This quick tutorial demonstrates the steps to install elementary Tweaks tool/Pantheon Tweaks Tool.
Did you know that you can ask your Linux system to tell you what upgrades are available for the packages installed on it? You might be surprised by how many you’ll see, especially if you’re using the current release and don’t have your system set up for frequent or automatic updates.
Updates play an important role in keeping your Linux systems secure and performing well. Since most packages are updated as fixes or improvements to the code become available, it’s hard to predict how many will show up on any particular day. (Note: Updates should be done when your system is not performing other important tasks.)
Rancher’s system-upgrade-controller allows to upgrade Kubernetes nodes using privileged pods within that Kubernetes cluster. This can be very helpful to install latest updates to fix CVE or to upgrade used software to a later version. But sometimes those updates require the system to reboot to take effect.
This might be no problem for most of the workloads running in pods on that machine. But what if your workload isn’t stateless and its rescheduling would lead to outages of your services?
SUSE’s Kernel live patching might help here as the Kernel modules of the Kubernetes node can be updated without requiring a reboot of the machine and without forcing the pods to be rescheduled.
Zypper is the default package manager for openSUSE distributions and SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers. It differs from APT and YUM package managers, as it employs SAT solver, one of the best package dependency libraries. This Zypper cheat sheet covers the main zypper commands, segmented into various categories.
CSF is a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, Login/Intrusion Detection and Security application for Linux servers.
t consists of the firewall itself (CSF) which is comprehensive, straightforward, easy, and flexible to configure.
It also has a Login Failure Daemon (LFD) that perfectly complements CSF. This LFD runs all the time and periodically (every X seconds) scans the latest log file entries for login attempts against your server that continually fail within a short period of time. Such attempts are often called “Brute-force attacks” and the daemon process responds very quickly to such patterns and blocks offending IP’s quickly
The MERN Stack is made from four components: MongoDB, Express, React, and Node. It provides a bundle of JavaScript technologies used for building dynamic JS websites.
MongoDB is an open-source and most widely used NoSQL database system used for developing robust web applications. Express.js is a Node.js web application framework used for developing hybrid web-based applications. React.js is an open-source JavaScript framework used to create a front-end interface for mobile applications. Node.js is a JavaScript environment that allows developers to run codes on the server.
In this guide, we will show you how to install the MERN stack on Ubuntu 20.04.
This detailed tutorial explains what is LocalWP, benefits of using LocalWP, how to install LocalWP to deploy and setup local WordPress development environment in Linux and Unix-like operating systems.
Odoo is a group of open-source business apps that offers a wide range of applications including, CRM, accounting, billing, inventory, warehouse, e-commerce, project management and more. It is simple, customizable, fully integrated and helps you to manage your business and be more efficient wherever you are. It is written in Python and uses PostgreSQL as a database backend.
Developer Passenger has announced that their interactive fiction game Closed Hands is now available with a native Linux version from itch.io.
While the story itself and the city are fictional, it pulls from Passenger founder and artist Dan Hett’s own personal experience of losing his brother Martyn Hett in the Manchester terror attack in 2017. It’s a pretty powerful piece of fiction that isn’t often explored, especially not in this way.
Fishing Cactus has revealed that their latest fantasy adventure in the Typing Chronicles series, Nanotale, is now available on Linux and Mac. If that wasn’t enough, they are also bringing the hotly requested Arena mode to all versions of the game, as well as a 25% off discount on Steam if you buy the game within the first 48 hours of the update, starting from today at 7pm CEST/10am PT, bringing endless replayability to keyboard wielding adventurers and travellers alike.
Sometimes file thumbnails in Nautilus aren’t enough. Sometimes you need a closer look at a file, photo, or folder to make sure it’s the one you actually want, but without the hassle of opening a full-blown app to find out.
And that’s where GNOME Sushi comes in.
GNOME Sushi is an alternative to macOS ‘Quick Look‘ for Linux desktops that use Nautilus, aka GNOME’s famous file manager.
You select a file in Nautilus, tap the spacebar, and an instantaneous (and usually interactive) preview of the file appears — no need to open a full app.
Sushi supports file previews for most plain-text documents, including scripts with syntax highlighting, as well PDFs, HTML files, and LibreOffice documents. Music and video file previews use the GStreamer framework to let you to seek/scrub through them.
Software permeates every part of our existence. Google services alone combine for 2 billion lines of code, and a vehicle contains approximately 100 million lines of code. It’s a monumental challenge to create, debug, maintain, and update these complex software systems.
A fast-growing discipline known as AI for Code aims to help software developers improve their productivity by automating the software engineering process. AI for Code researchers have been leveraging technologies like natural language processing and augmenting them with code analysis and compilation techniques to perform a myriad of practical tasks, such as code search, summarization, and completion, as well as code-to-code translation. And, the discipline isn’t limited to academic research. Ruchir Puri, IBM Research’s chief research scientist, discussed in a recent podcast how technologies from AI for Code are being used to modernize legacy software by helping to migrate monolithic applications to microservices for IBM enterprise clients. To serve that purpose, the IBM AI Research division has released a new data set called Project CodeNet.
Data controls help protect data integrity and prevent unauthorized data disclosure for stored data and data in motion. In this post we’ll dive deeper into the concepts of data controls and how they fit into the DevSecOps framework.
July is “Data Controls” month in Red Hat’s monthly Security series! Since March 2021, the Red Hat Security Ecosystem team has published monthly articles and videos on DevOps Security topics to help you learn how Red Hat can help you master the practice called DevSecOps.
By explaining how to assemble Red Hat products and introducing our security ecosystem partners, we aim to aid in your journey to deploying a comprehensive DevSecOps solution.
With the pace of technology, software training must evolve quickly to help workers build new IT skills. Whether enterprises are adopting new software or upskilling on new versions of open source technologies that they’ve been using for years, they need the most relevant training materials delivered with flexibility for various jobs roles, business objectives, and learning styles.
In this post, we’ll share why it’s important for us to have Red Hat Learning Subscription users be a part of the content development process and how you can be the first to see new, hands-on training.
One way that we’re helping learners meet their needs faster is by providing them early access to content within the Red Hat Learning Subscription platform. With early access, subscribers get first-look access to course chapters and lab environments before they are released for public purchase.
While I prefer the Gnome-2-based Cinnamon desktop (now up to version 5.04), Mint gives you a choice of fully supported interfaces. These include MATE, a Gnome-2 fork, and the ultra-lightweight Xfce. Most desktop users will be pleased with Cinnamon or MATE. But if you have older low-powered systems or if you’re running Linux on Chromebooks or Windows 10 PCs with Windows SubSystem for Linux (WSL) 2, Xfce is an excellent choice.
Even PCs built in the 2000s can run Mint. If the box has a 64-bit processor, it can run Mint. The full version of Linux Mint requires a mere 2GB of RAM, but you can run it with as little as 1GB. This is not Windows — where trying to run it on 4GB is asking for trouble.
You’ll also need at least 20GB of disk space, but Mint recommends 100GB. Finally, you’ll need a graphics card and monitor that supports a 1024×768 resolution. In other words, you can pretty much run Mint on any PC you find in a second-hand junk shop.
I like running the fastest and best hardware, but let’s face it, sometimes we can afford the latest and hottest. That can be a real problem. For example, Windows 11 won’t run on hardware dating from 2016 and earlier. It also won’t run on some processors from 2019 or earlier. Linux Mint? I know people who are running it on 2009 Intel Core i5 desktop processors. To get the most of your old gear, you want to use Linux Mint.
Zidoo’s “M6” mini-PC runs Linux or Android on an RK3566 with up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC, 3x USB, HDMI, GbE, 802.11ax, and mini-PCIe and SIM slots.
Chinese media player and set-top manufacturer Zidoo has unveiled a mini-PC built around Rockchip’s 1.8GHz, quad-core, Cortex-A55 RK3566. The Zidoo M6 runs Android 11, Ubuntu 18.04, buildroot and Qt on the RK3566, which integrates a Mali-G52 EE GPU and 0.8-TOPS NPU. The mini-PC also supports T-Firefly’s Android-based, media-savvy Station OS (Firefly Geek System), which is available on Firefly products such as its RK3566-based Station M2 mini-PC.
Geniatech’s $179-and-up “APC820” media player mini-PC runs Android or Linux on Rockchip’s RK3399 with up to 4GB RAM and 128GB eMMC plus GbE, HDMI in and out, 4x USB, and optional TV tuners, WiFi/BT, LTE, and other wireless links.
Geniatech has launched a media-focused, wireless ready mini-PC based on the Rockchip RK3399 aimed at “commercial displays” such as signage solutions. The APC820 also has a bit of a set-top feel to it with its optional digital TV tuners. Other RK3399-based mini-PCs include Firefly’s Station P1.
It’s been a while since Linux smartphones have stepped foot in the market, and as you might’ve guessed, they’re not very popular, thanks to Android and iOS already dominating the market. People are yet to try them out, and most smartphones are either very cheap and lacking in specs like the PinePhone, or expensive with two generations old hardware like the F(X)tec Pro.
But there is one problem developers need to take care of, and that is Android app support. For starters, to run Android apps on Linux, Anbox was being used, but it was comparatively slower than WayDroid. However, postmarketOS developer Caleb, on July 24, shared a screenshot of his OnePlus 6 running what looks like an Android emulator running LineageOS smoothly.
We have previously seen some rumours regarding the name of the OS that is to power the upcoming Galaxy Watch 4′s – Since Samsung have abandoned Tizen on wearables as they have previously done on mobile. Now, Google has officially released the name of its OS next wearable OS, Wear OS 3. The Galaxy Watch 4 and the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic will be the first Samsung smartwatches to use Wear OS 3 by default.
Wear OS 3 gives a new user interface with more third-party apps than Wear OS 2. Google is promising that apps will open 30% faster. The battery life using Wear OS 3 is said to be boosted by a significant amount – though we don’t know how this is technically achieved. Brands will be able to create themes for Wear OS, just like the Galaxy Watch 3. Samsung has said that its UI customizations over Wear OS 3 would’ve been called One UI Watch.
According to Istio’s support policy, minor releases like 1.9 are supported for three months after the next minor release. Since 1.10 was released on May 18th, support for 1.9 will end on August 18th, 2021.
Open-source software is prolific in technology today. Just about everything from supercomputers to consumer electronics is powered by at least one piece of open source code.
But many businesses find themselves launching open-source products at a rapidly accelerating pace without truly understanding either the benefits that come with it or the potential pitfalls that must be avoided.
Let’s talk about what open source means to your business, and how you can leverage it to serve both your customers and your business needs.
By sponsoring the LibreOffice Conference you will have the opportunity to connect with one of the largest and most dynamic FOSS communities, with supporters, volunteers and users in every country in the world. The virtual event lasts for three days, from 23 to 25 September 2021.
setting up mingw on windows is PITA, at first since i am not used to backslash for filepaths, it load the gdb printers, i then realised that it does not come with python enabled. Downloaded a new one it does not come with python3 instead it is python 2.7.
[...]
it inherits from a QFiledeviceprivate, but the size of the qfiledeviceprivate is not consistent across operating system, architectures and qt5 versions.I got the list of offset from the qtcreator types this problem exists for also qprocess (not fully implemented as of now) and for others as i may not be able to get it size for all operating systems, architectures and qt5 versions.
The Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 as the latest version of their high performance virtual machine that continues advancing four years after IBM donated the original J9 code.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (aspell, intel-microcode, krb5, rabbitmq-server, and ruby-actionpack-page-caching), Fedora (chromium, containernetworking-plugins, containers-common, crun, fossil, podman, skopeo, varnish-modules, and vmod-uuid), Gentoo (leptonica, libsdl2, and libyang), Mageia (golang, lib3mf, nodejs, python-pip, redis, and xstream), openSUSE (containerd, crmsh, curl, icinga2, and systemd), Oracle (containerd), and Red Hat (thunderbird).
Even though cryptography is used by almost every application today, the implementation of it is usually delegated to specialized cryptographic libraries. There are multiple reasons for that, including that implementing cryptography is not easy, and in fact it is easy to get wrong. Small mistakes–such as reusing a nonce–may render the data encrypted by an application recognizable. At the same time, the security landscape changes so fast that secure software of 10 years ago can no longer withstand attacks that exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities. For instance, algorithms like RC4 that were dominant in the early days of Internet commerce are today considered broken.
How can we be assured that these cryptographic applications and libraries implement cryptography correctly and follow best practices such as not using legacy cryptography? As cryptography is sensitive to governments around the world, there is no universally accepted answer yet. To address this problem in the U.S., NIST developed FIPS 140, a data protection standard that is our focus in this article.
FIPS 140 defines security requirements related to the design and implementation of a cryptographic module, or in software terms, for an application or library implementing cryptography. The standard has multiple levels of security, from levels 1 to 4, with level 1 applying to software implementations, while level 2 and further applying to specialized hardware alongside its software. On level 1, the standard requires the use of known, secure cryptographic algorithms and modes for data protection and requires their logical separation from the application. It further includes a certification process that ensures that the claims are tested and attested by an accredited lab by NIST.
In essence the FIPS 140 standard ensures that cryptography is implemented using well known secure designs, follows certain best practices, does not involve obscure algorithms, and that there is a due process in attestation.
Red Hat has announced the renewal of the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2) security validation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2. The second FIPS certification for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform, this validation indicates Red Hat’s leadership and commitment to providing a more secure backbone for the innovation of open hybrid cloud.
With this validation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, many of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud offerings also retain the FIPS 140-2 certification as layered products building on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2’s cryptography modules. These include but are not limited to: Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Satellite, and Red Hat Virtualization.
Linux is downright one of the most popular and secure operating systems for large-scale servers. Despite its widespread usage, it remains vulnerable to cyberattacks. Hackers target servers to either shut them down or steal valuable information.
There is a pressing need to develop counter-hacking methods to brace security breaches and malware attacks. This is possible by hiring cybersecurity professionals; unfortunately, this can prove to be a costly affair. The next best solution is to install scanning tools that fit like a hand in glove for your Linux systems.
Summary: OSI, SFC, FSF and Linux Foundation are in effect selling time and space (even to Microsoft, except the FSF was never foolish enough to do this). As of today, LibreOffice does the same thing (which might remain benign; just be sure to reject rivals as "sponsors" because it dooms projects and events).
Video download link | md5sum abae31beaaf4edf1877fa381600ebe98
Summary: The rapid decline of Microsoft, Windows and IIS in servers is undeniable; it’s just a damn shame that corporate and so-called ‘tech’ media never writes about this subject
EARLIER today the “July 2021 Web Server Survey” was released, stating that “[t]“he number of websites powered by Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) fell by 1.92 million to 51.6 million this month. These sites are spread across 13.5 million unique domains and use several different versions of IIS.”
It then goes into a long ramble about IIS versions and Azure, which is failing (there are even layoffs). Microsoft is nowadays trying to become a Web host, seeing that as a provider of web-hosting software it is failing very fast. That’s also why Microsoft bought a bunch of companies such as GitHub, hoping to somehow leverage control/power over developers (they moved away from there as well).
“Right now the strategy of Microsoft is a hostile takeover of alternatives to Microsoft.”In the video above I show that Microsoft was delisted from almost all the tables due to its irrelevance (miniscule market share).
It’s likely that Microsoft’s “Plan B” or contigency would be to hijack the competitors. It is a classic Microsoft move and it is the reason Microsoft ambushed GitHub for a takeover since 2014. It’s a very malicious cult that presents itself as a company. Jeremy Stretch has just published this article entitled “Corporate Participation in the Open Source Community” and he seems to be unaware of the risks of Corporate Takeover. This article mentions GitHub as if it is something desirable, but it is a hostile abduction of projects to undermine the freedom of software and to interfere with communities (giving Microsoft control over them). This obsession with business at the expense of communities (like Microsoft’s meddling in NGINX and other projects, even Apache) is something that needs both explaining and understanding. Right now the strategy of Microsoft is a hostile takeover of alternatives to Microsoft. We can’t let them do it. Just go away and leave us all alone. You’ve done more than enough damage. █
This week has been great for Linux news as we got new security releases for Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS, and new bugfix releases for GNOME 40, HandBreak, VirtualBox, Plasma Mobile, LibreOffice, as well as the NVIDIA graphics driver.
On top of that, this week marked the end of life of the Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla” operating system release, as well as of the Linux 5.12 kernel series, and GNOME’s GUADEC 2021 conference proved to be another success. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for July 25th, 2021, below!
The number of websites powered by Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) fell by 1.92 million to 51.6 million this month. These sites are spread across 13.5 million unique domains and use several different versions of IIS.
Motivated in part by the recent le9 kernel patches that are already carried by XanMod and not having benchmarked the XanMod or Liquorix Linux kernel downstreams in a while, here are some fresh benchmarks of Liquorix and XanMod against the recent upstream Linux kernel releases.
The DXVK project continues to mature its translation layer for Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan, something that can be used together with Wine and Proton (along with a few ports using it). If you don’t know what Proton is, be sure to check out our dedicated page.
DXVK 1.9.1 follows on from the big 1.9 release on June 15 that gave us some new features. As a point release, it mainly focuses on cleaning up some bits here and there.
DXVK 1.9.1 is out as the newest version of this key component to Steam Play / Proton for running Windows games on Linux with DXVK being responsible for translating Direct3D 9/10/11 calls to Vulkan.
The SDL2 library that is commonly used by many cross-platform games landed several patches this weekend to improve its Wayland support.
The main change from the Git activity this weekend in SDL2 is landing support for using client-side decorations on Wayland.
Many 0.xx versions of Firewalld have accumulated over the years. With version 1.0 of the tool for network firewall configuration under Linux, Red Hat is now cutting old threads and reducing dependencies. The new version is no longer compatible with Python 2. In addition, the project declares Direct Interface and the PTables backend to be out of date. We have also said goodbye to the tftp client service.
The upcoming release also raises intra-zone forwarding to the standard. By moving the NAT rules to the iNet family, the rule set is reduced. The default target is now similar to reject. ICMP blocks and block reversal are now only valid for input and not for forwarding. CleanupModulesOnExit is set to no by default and kernel modules are not unloaded.
Every Linux distribution comes with a document viewer app that lets you read PDF and other documents.
Most of the time, it is Evince from GNOME that is displayed as Document Viewer in Ubuntu and some other distributions. Evince is a handy tool and supports a wide variety of document formats.
However, there are other applications for reading documents. Take Foliate for example. It’s an excellent application for reading ebooks on Linux.
I recently came across another document viewer called Zathura.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DNSCrypt on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, DNSCrypt is a flexible DNS proxy, with support for modern encrypted DNS protocols such as DNSCrypt v2, DNS-over-HTTPS, Anonymized DNSCrypt, and ODoH (Oblivious DoH).
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 the step-by-step installation of the DNSCrypt 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.
While PCs still usually provide a full set of analog jacks capable of outputting a 5.1 audio, other modern hardware (such as TVs) is usually limited to digital audio outputs (and sometimes analog outputs limited to stereo sound). These outputs are either S/PDIF (coaxial or optical) or HDMI. When the PC is connected to a TV, a pretty logical setup is to carry the sound via HDMI to the TV, and from there via S/PDIF or HDMI ARC to a 5.1 amplifier. However, it isn’t always as simple as it sounds.
For a start, S/PDIF is a pretty antiquated interface originally designed to carry stereo PCM audio. The modern versions of the interface have sufficient bandwidth for up to 192 kHz sampling rate and up to 24 bit audio depth. However, in order to support more than two audio channels, the transmitted sound needs to be compressed. S/PDIF hardware usually supports MPEG, AC3 and DTS formats.
HDMI is better there. HDMI 1.2 technically supports up to 8 channels of PCM audio, 2.0 up to 32 channels. However, not all hardware actually supports that. In particular, my TV seems to only support stereo PCM input, and ignores additional channels when passed 5.1 audio. Fortunately, additional audio channels work when compressed input is used. HDMI supports more audio formats, including DTS-HD MA and TrueHD.
In this post, I’d like to shortly explore our options for making a PulseAudio-enabled Linux system output compressed 5.1 over S/PDIF or HDMI (apparently both are treated the same from ALSA/PulseAudio perspective).
hen working with Ubuntu, Debian Linux, and ZFS, you will run into ZFS cache size problems. You see, not all Ubuntu or Debian servers need aggressive file caching. Some servers act as a web server or run Linux container workloads or KVM guest VMs where you want those guest VMs to manage their own caching. Therefore, it would be best to have tons of ECC RAM for ZFS. Unfortunately, not all projects get that kind of extravagance in real life. This page explains how to set up ZFS arc size on Ubuntu/Debian or any Linux distro of your choice. So that, Linux kernel avoid running out of memory.
Microsoft is preparing to release Windows 11 later this year, and so far, it looks like a major improvement over Windows 10. It has a brand-new visual design that’s more consistent and attractive, and it includes some big new features like support for Android apps. As good as it may be though, it doesn’t necessarily fit every workload or preference. What if you prefer Linux or need it for certain tasks? In this guide, we’ll show how you to set up your PC so you can dual-boot into either Linux or Windows 11 whenever you want.
If you had told me last year that I’d write not one, but two blog posts about web design, I would not have believed you. Alas here we are, and I’m going to tell you about another pet peeve of mine and how to fix it.
I view at least half the written content I consume via my mobile phone, which belongs to the class of phones with a slightly smaller than average screen. In fact, it’s width as reported by the Firefox and Chrome viewport simulators is 375 pixels wide, small but not tiny. And yet many websites I visit hinder my mobile viewing experience because of a rather simple issue: horizontal scrolling.
There I am, happily reading a blog post or article from the front page of $NEWSAGGREGATOR. But suddenly I’m not scrolling down, but down-right and constantly have to scroll back to the left edge in order to read full sentences. My experience is even worse if the site for some reason has a minimum width larger than my screen is wide.
Reading articles on those sites really cumbersome and more often than not I decide that it’s not worth the hassle to continue reading and move on to the next article. I find that quite sad, since the author invested time and effort to produce it, and the only reason I’m not reading is because of its subpar layouting.
Postfix is an open-source Mail Transport Agent (MTA). An MTA is a component of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) responsible for transferring mail from one mail server to another.
This tutorial describes how you can install and configure Postfix as a send-only SMTP server on Ubuntu 20.04. You can use this for sending notification emails to an external address when specific events occur on the server — such as when a backup job succeeds or fails.
Have you ever looked in the apache config files to see where a website’s virtual host is defined? The apache2ctl script has a useful option that could come in good here.
Linux distributions are great to use and they have some tricks under their sleeves which users may not be aware of. Let’s have a look at some command line utilities which really come in handy when you’re the guy that likes to stick with the terminal rather than using a GUI.
We all know that using a terminal is more efficient to use the system. In case you are editing or playing with text files on a terminal then these tools will surely make your life easy.
For this article let’s have a look at wc, sort, tr, and sed commands.
If you have accidentally removed a logical volume (LV) or LVM meta data got corrupted or damaged in some way, it can be easily restored without losing the data using the ‘vgcfgrestore’ command.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to restore accidentally deleted a logical volume in Linux.
By default, LVM automatically takes backup of it’s meta data whenever a configuration change occurs on all LVM devices using the ‘vgcfgbackup’ command.
The cron system is a method to automatically run commands on a schedule. A scheduled job is called a cronjob, and it’s created in a file called a crontab. It’s the easiest and oldest way for a computer user to automate their computer.
Need even more information on the upcoming Linux-powered Steam Deck from Valve? We’ve got some more that has trickled through to talk about.
Firstly, in a newer IGN video the team at Valve went over the hardware and power of the Steam Deck and talked about what it’s actually capable of. During the video Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned “We’ve been looking at various games over the past few years in the back catalogue but the real test for us was games that were coming out last year”, he continued, “They just couldn’t really run very well on the previous types of prototypes and architectures we were testing and this is the first time we’ve achieved the level of performance that is required to run the latest generation of games without a problem. All the games that we wanted to be playable is the entire Steam library, we haven’t really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn’t handle.”.
CarX Drift Racing Online running through Steam Play on Linux.
Around two years ago Alexis Kennedy, a founder of Failbetter Games, was accused of abuse by multiple women which Kennedy has always denied. Now, Kennedy of Weather Factory has put out an open letter and the situation gets a bit murky.
The allegations didn’t just involve Kennedy though, as his partner Lottie Bevan ended up having some allegations pressed against her too. The blog post is a long one and so we won’t be going over all parts of it but it’s worth a read. There’s some pretty big key points though which we will go over.
Previously, Kennedy didn’t directly mention who and what company the allegations were coming to “cancel” them from but no punches are being pulled now. Kennedy is now claiming that it seems all of this was “an intentional attack on us by a larger competitor” and goes on to directly say it’s Failbetter Games (the company he co-founded).
Alawar Premium & Wooden Monkeys Studio have launched their hacking detective novel adventure Song of Farca with native Linux support included.
Another fresh upgrade is out for Goverlay the open source application designed to help you work with the likes of MangoHud, vkBasalt and ReplaySorcery.
Ubuntu offers games, not only the educational ones, but also the purely fun and amusing ones like these aircraft shooting genre. You will find both 2D and 3D ones, Astro Menace and Chromium BSU, as examples beside the others. All of these games are libre software licensed and available on Ubuntu repository. This article offers short descriptions and instructions to install them. Let’s see them all and play!
One year after Haiku R1 Beta 2, the third beta of this inaugural release of the open-source Haiku operating system is now available for testing. Haiku remains the open-source OS project going on two decades for advancing as the spiritual successor to BeOS.
The Haiku Project this morning announced the release of Haiku R1 Beta 3. Haiku R1 Beta 3 includes work across the operating system stack with all of the changes made over the past year including around installation and storage, countless hardware driver improvements, various software application updates, greater POSIX compatibility, many bug fixes, translation updates, and much more.
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bullseye. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.
Our community portal, reachable via https://connect.opensuse.org, accompanied our community now since 2010. A long, long time. Especially, if you compare it with Facebook (which started in 2006) or LinkedIn (who became an international company in 2010).
While Facebook and LinkedIn are meanwhile multi-billion dollar markets, our community portal is meanwhile mainly used to organize the openSUSE members and being a “contact point” for members, who provide their profiles to help others to contact them.
Over 20,000 actively registered users and 100 groups might give an idea about the diversity and agility of the openSUSE community. From artists to musicians over to local user groups and groups for all the different window managers and their lovers. Everyone found a place here in the openSUSE universe.
WildFly is a production-ready, cross-platform, flexible, lightweight, managed application runtime that provides all the necessary features to run a Java web application. It is also a Java EE 8 certified application server almost exclusively in Java, and it implements the Jakarta EE, which was the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications. Therefore you can run it on any operating system.
WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, is a fully implemented JEE container—application server, developed by JBoss, which became a part of Red Hat on June 5, 2006, and since then, WildFly became their product.
Open Data Hub is an end-to-end AI/ML platform that runs and installs on Red Hat OpenShift 4.x. It provides components for every phase of the end-to-end AI/ML process, including data ingestion, model development, and production model serving and monitoring.
The Open Data Hub team recently released Open Data Hub 1.1.0. In this new release, the community focused on hardening JupyterHub deployment, providing a new and improved JupyterHub Spawner UI, integrating the Open Data Hub dashboard with OpenShift’s OAuth server, and adding a Kubeflow 1.3 OpenShift distribution stack along with new components such as Trino and Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines. Open Data Hub 1.1.0 also comes with an Operator Level 4 verification indicating “Deep Insight” status after enabling more monitoring and logging.
Apache Camel is used widely for message queue integration and notification. Its lightweight and simple coding structure makes it a good choice for developers. Camel is well suited for application modernization and integrates very well with Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. You can use these technologies together for a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and deployment.
In this article, we’ll introduce the elements of application modernization, give an overview of Camel’s components and architecture, and demonstrate how to use Camel with JavaScript to deploy your applications to OpenShift. We’ll go through a few application modernization examples and look at the performance gains from using Camel with OpenShift and JavaScript. We’ll also introduce Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built from Apache Camel that is specifically designed for serverless and microservices architectures.
Some of us have witnessed firsthand when a great technician turned into a manager as a reward from the company for faithful and fantastic work. It could be the aspiration of the technical person to turn manager. Still, other factors such as the salary headroom for a previous role have been reached—only manager roles get the desired perks of bonus, company car, better healthcare, etc.
However, by removing one of the sharpest tools in the shed, the company is running a considerable risk. The transformation from a great sysadmin to a good manager does not happen without support, requiring a lot of changes. If the transition does not go well, the company will have lost one of its best sysadmins and instead gained one of its worst managers. To avoid this situation for a sysadmin that aspires to become a manager, I have gathered some valuable tips that perhaps can guide you on your path to become a manager or to get comfortable in the manager role you just obtained.
Deepin Linux is by far one of the most good-looking Linux distros out there. But as much as it’s praised for its good looks, it’s also infamous for collecting user data and sending it to Chinese servers.
So what is the truth here? Is Deepin trying to lure in users with its stunning looks and then stealing their data? Or is it just Chinese paranoia that got blown out of proportion?
In this read, we will give you an in-depth look at all the evidence and security claims surrounding Deepin OS. In addition, we will show you what started this whole “Deepin OS is Spyware” controversy and discuss the Linux distro’s current state.
So without further ado, let’s get started…
This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
This article explains the main ways you can get help direct from your new Ubuntu system. This is best used in conjunction with help from other sources such as friends, colleagues, forums, and other sources of information.
Most of the help facilities are already present on your Ubuntu system with the exception of tldr. But we’ll cover everything you need.
Let’s first start with the Ubuntu Desktop Guide.
Raspberry Pi has paved the way for a legion of single board developments that allow you to work or have fun doing a ton of projects. In MuyComputer you already know what we like and we do not miss the opportunity to offer you the most attractive ones.
Zidoo M6 is one of the last. It is based on a processor ARM RK3566, a quad-core Cortex-A55 that we have already seen perform in other models such as the Pine64 Quartz64 and although it is almost double the size of a Raspberry Pi with dimensions of 158mm x 95mm, it includes many more ports and expansion options.
You may have heard about the 2G/3G sunset with the older cellular networks being phased out in many countries. But it’s not always straightforward, as telecom operators may have to obtain regulators’ permission for the shutdown notably because of the eCall emergency services integrated into cars in Europe.
Eventually, eCall will be migrated toward IMS Voice and 2G M2M services to 4G LTE IoT and 5G LPWA, but in the meantime, 2G networks are still operating in parts of the world, and UK-based SB Components has just introduced the Pico 2G Expansion board for Raspberry Pi Pico based on the SIM868 module.
As more products are designed with [I]nternet connectivity—from smartphones to refrigerators to cars—the issue of repair rights has become increasingly complicated. Repair advocates say consumers should have access to all of the data that their personal devices collect, and that independent repair shops should have access to the same software diagnostic tools that “authorized” shops have.
The Glean SDK is Mozilla’s telemetry library, used in most mobile products and now for Firefox Desktop as well. By now it has grown to a sizable code base with a lot of functionality beyond just storing some metric data. Since its first release as a Rust crate in 2019 we managed to move more and more logic from the language SDKs (previously also known as “language bindings”) into the core Rust crate. This allows us to maintain business logic only once and can easily share that across different implementations and platforms. The Rust core is shipped precompiled for multiple target platforms, with the language SDK distributed through the respective package manager.
[...]
Consumers such as Fenix will depend on both GeckoView and Glean. At build time the Glean Gradle plugin will detect this and will ensure the glean-native package, and thus the Glean library, is not part of the build. Instead it assumes libxul from GeckoView will take that role.
We are happy to announce that the full schedule for PGDay Austria is now out and available here: https://pgday.at/talks/
Austrian pgDay will take place September 17, 2021 at Schloss Schoenbrunn (Apothekertrakt) in Vienna. https://pgday.at/en/
Both MySQL and MariaDB databases have an undisputed commonality. They are the most sort after database management systems on a worldwide scale. To understand the need for MySQL vs. MariaDB truce, we need to slightly o back in time.
Before MariaDB came into the picture, it was just MySQL ruling the database management systems universe. Its popularity remained unshaken for a long time. Its preference as a reliable DBMS by many is also because of its associated base programming language, C++.
In 2008, the acquisition of MySQL AB, the Swedish company housing MySQL, by Sun Microsystems, then took place. Finally, in 2010, the Oracle company stepped up and acquired Sun Microsystems. Since then, Oracle continues to own, manage, and maintain MySQL.
However, during the acquisition of this database management system by Oracle, its lead developers and engineers felt that Oracle Database Server (a commercial database) was creating a conflict of interest with MySQL. This event led to the creation of MariaDB as a fork of MySQL code.
Hi reader! It’s been some time since I have posted a blog on my GSoC project. I am writing this blog to keep you updated with the development of Krita. To avoid duplicating code I have gone through relevant part of existing code in Krita (again). I must say it always amazes me as the first day as I explore through the code. Let’s talk a bit about ‘copying layers to clipboard’.
We created Team Pufferfish about a year ago with a specific goal: to avert the MySQL apocalypse! The MySQL apocalypse would occur when so many students would work on quizzes simultaneously that even the largest MySQL database AWS has on offer would not be able to cope with the load, bringing the site to a halt.
A little over a year ago, we forecasted our growth and load-tested MySQL to find out how much wiggle room we had. In the worst case (because we dislike apocalypses), or in the best case (because we like growing), we would have about a year’s time. This meant we needed to get going!
Looking back on our work now, the most important lesson we learned was the importance of timely and precise feedback at every step of the way. At times we built short-lived tooling and process to support a particular step forward. This made us so much faster in the long run.
I don’t get it. Why would I need to use React if I am supposed to work on building websites? Are employers afraid that if you don’t know React that you wouldn’t be able to make a landing page? Would knowing React help you solve any problems when creating a new layout or template? I cannot think of any part of the website that would require React.
All these questions made me realize that I don’t need frameworks for my everyday work.
Fishing for a new shell? (Sorry.)
Oleksandr Kyriukhin has announced the release of Rakudo Compiler 2021.07, an implementation of the Raku Programming Language. With quite a few (small) efficiency improvements, some fixes, a few cool new features and one deprecation this time around. On top of that, a Windows MSI installer is now also available from the Rakudo Downloads page (thanks to Patrick Böker). And of course there are new Linux packages (by Claudio Ramirez)! Great to see more OSes being supported by binary installers!
Only after public outcry, a lawsuit and a statement from the county prosecutor calling their actions illegal, did the county commissioners agree to return all of the funds.
For millions of refugees and asylum-seekers around the world, death may seem more merciful than what they have to endure before, during, and after migration, especially during a pandemic that has crippled even the strongest of countries.
“It’s not everyday you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it! What an asshole!” he wrote in the post. “This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.”
Misleading posts on Social Media posts claim that no persons have died outside of hospitals in Indonesia.
Multiple Facebook posts circulating in Indonesia claim that nobody has died from Covid-19 outside of the Southeast Asian nation’s hospitals. The posts misleadingly question whether the disease is deadly whilst implying Indonesian hospitals are responsible for its virus deaths. The claims are false: thousands of Covid-19 victims in Indonesia have died outside hospitals, according to data recorded by a volunteer group. AFP and other media have reported people died of Covid-19 while self-isolating at home and elsewhere after hospitals became overwhelmed with patients.
LemonDuck crypto miner has new features allowing key theft, introduction of backdoors and more, Microsoft warns
While most of you guys were furiously grep-ing TermService memory for clear-text passwords
I found myself searching for plain-text private keys in a ssh-agent process memory on a Linux box. Last time I did something similar was definitely before June 2019, when Shielded Private Keys were introduced in OpenSSH, therefore the tools I have available don’t work anymore.
Saudi Aramco, based in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, has the world’s biggest daily oil production and pulled in revenue of US$229.9 billion (A$312.27 billion) in 2020.
In response to a query from iTWire, a company spokesperson said it recently became aware of the indirect release of a limited amount of company data.
With the Taliban advancing against Afghan security forces in every corner of the country as U.S. troops withdraw, several Afghans who are eligible for a U.S. visa told NBC News they fear they will be stranded in far-flung towns and are struggling to find the money and means to get themselves and their families to Kabul.
“Our city is surrounded,” said Mohammad, a 33-year-old IT technician in Kandahar who worked for the U.S. military. “It can fall to Taliban militants any time.”
Afghans contacted by the U.S. government and offered flights to a military base in Virginia “have reached out to us begging for help because they do not have the resources to fly to Kabul,” said Chris Purdy, project manager for Veterans for American Ideals at Human Rights First.
“These Afghans know they cannot travel by land because the Taliban have captured the roads, and they know if they stay where they are then the Taliban will find them and kill them in their homes,” he said.
Prior to this, Pardis had reportedly been receiving death threats for days after the Taliban had discovered his brief tenure working as a US Army translator. He had only served 16 months, and was fired in 2012 after failing a polygraph test.
Villagers who witnessed the incident told the Red Crescent the Taliban shot his car before it swerved and stopped. They then dragged Pardis out of the vehicle and beheaded him.
Pardis was one of thousands of Afghan interpreters who worked for the US military and now face persecution by the Taliban, as the group gains control of wider swaths of the country.
Earlier this month, activists from Greenpeace Spain installed a 12-meter long train model in the Barcelona-El Prat Airport to protest the impact of the airline sector and the planned expansion of the airport.
With the massive Bootleg Fire less than half contained and having burned nearly 409,000 acres in Oregon, Democratic Gov. Kate Brown appeared on CNN Sunday to discuss current conditions in her state, the climate emergency, and what the future may look like across the U.S. West.
“The harsh reality is that we’re going to see more of these wildfires,” Brown told host Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday issued a statement emphasizing the importance of ambitious climate action after officials at a Group of 20 summit failed to reach an agreement for a communiqué just 100 days away from a major U.N. conference in Glasgow.
“The world urgently needs a clear and unambiguous commitment to the 1.5 degree goal of the Paris agreement from all G20 nations.”—U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres
In a congressional primary race that’s been framed as part of a broader battle for the future of the Democratic Party, Nina Turner has won not only an endorsement but on-the-ground support from one of the most high-profile progressives in the U.S. House of Representatives: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was in Cleveland on Saturday to campaign for Turner, a former member of the city’s council as well as the Ohio state Senate. More recently, Turner served as a national co-chair for the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is also backing her bid to represent Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it is past time to reckon with “war on terror” approaches that have cast too many Americans—from Muslims to racial justice protesters to Chinese scientists—as national security threats. Two decades of permissive rules for intelligence collection, coupled with weak protections for speech and against discrimination, have subverted legitimate counterterrorism aims. We must revisit those rules to ban invidious profiling under the guise of national security.
An image of several bodies on a hospital floor has circulated in Facebook posts that claim it shows the aftermath of a protest staged by nurses in Sri Lanka in July 2021. But this claim is false: the photo is unrelated to the protest in Sri Lanka; it has in fact circulated in reports about Covid-19 fatalities in a town in Myanmar.
On July 15, 2021, Islamic terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, released a 40-minute video threatening France and repeatedly targeting President Emmanuel Macron and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin by name. The video is Al-Qaeda’s response to Macon’s perceived insults to Islam, such as his support of Charlie Hebdo’s freedom of speech to release cartoons that mock Islam’s founder Muhammad.
PRICE: I focus on what we call book challenges, so that’s any attempt to remove, relocate, restrict a book in a public library, a school library and in a curriculum. And usually in the curriculum, that’s in English classes, but not always. And so the current controversy over critical race theory really has been focused just in this past year. But it is part of what I would call kind of a cycle of anxiety in which book challengers are driven by concerns and fears about a changing world. And so whatever the issue of the day is, then that usually drives and pushes people to try to remove books.
In the early 20th century, much of Europe’s film-going population had low literacy levels. Subtitles are useless if you can’t read them (or read them fast enough). There’s also the argument that subtitles ruin a film’s images and keep the viewer’s eyes glued to the bottom of the screen. However, perhaps the most important reason for dubbing’s favour was political.
Dubbing is a brilliant tool for film censorship. Sound films began to appear in the early 1930s, a time when many countries were falling under the sway of totalitarian regimes. In Europe, these included those of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and the Nazis. Censorship had been a feature of film production and distribution in Italy, Spain and Germany since before these dictatorships took power, but it increased markedly after they did so.
The day the Taliban entered Balkh district, 20 km west of Mazar e Sharif, the capital of Balkh province last month, local radio station Nawbahar shuttered its doors and most of its journalists went into hiding.
Within days the station started broadcasting again, but the programming was different. Rather than the regular line-up, Nawbahar was playing Islamist anthems and shows produced by the Taliban.
Afghanistan is in the throes of a civil war, but no one can be conclusively blamed for it. Except maybe, ironically, the peace talks. Five human rights activists and six journalists have been killed in the months after the negotiations began in Doha last September. “The killings are a direct result of the peace talks,” Shahid says.
Some victims received threats in advance. Many others were not offered a warning before being killed.
Most attacks are carried out against journalists and activists. Heather Barr, former Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that the Taliban might be perpetrating them to shake people’s confidence or to go against people who they think perpetuate ‘western’ values.
In a plea for public transparency, a political foe of the United States gained AMLO’s backing. “Assange should be freed, because he is in prison unjustly,” he said, referring to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. from London.
Shortly after emerging from his 10-minute space flight last week, Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees for their primary role in paying for his Blue Origin joyride to the edge of space.
There’s a growing number of technology companies trying to help copyright holders fight online piracy. Akamai Technologies, one of the big players, takes a multi-faceted approach to tackle the problem. In recent years the company has already reported several success stories but plenty of challenges remain.
3 days ago: The Next One Thousand Blog Posts and the 15th Anniversary of Techrights
Want to become an unpaid volunteer of IBM? Then join Fedora in 2021. And create a Microsoft GitHub account.
Summary: After 31,000 blog posts it’s time to add a new theme to our coverage, which prioritises science, computer developers, and technology users; an urgent matter and pressing issue is the passage of control (e.g. over code and policy) to non-practising entities
THIS blog post of ours is technically the 31,000th (unpublished drafts included), but a pointless self-congratulatory post would not accomplish anything. Instead, let’s discuss priorities. Thinking ahead, the EPO conflict will certainly escalate as dialogue with António Campinos broke down this year (first SUEPO at the start of the year, then increasingly the staff representatives too) and recent rulings about the Benoît Battistelli-led Vichyite strike regulations led to this call for reparations (see all the comments here).
“Team UPC will continue to spread false predictions in the media. As always!”A decade ago the EPO typically referred to European software patents as “CII” but now it’s “AI” (Hey Hi!) and a bunch of other fluff. We need to keep abreast of those sementic games as they occasionally spread to other continents, threatening to undo 35 U.S.C. § 101 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and even the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
Judging by what President Biden has done so far, we don’t expect Coons et al to thwart 35 U.S.C. § 101 and therefore we won’t be focusing on the US patent system, except habitually in Daily Links (as we last did this morning; Chris Coons, the corrupted lobbyist/mole of the litigation fanatics/profiteers, is being groomed by Joff Wild and IAM).
Remember that from Day 1 (2006) we’ve been fighting against software patents. That’s nothing new.
Team UPC will continue to spread false predictions in the media. As always! We can safely respond to that in Daily Links without devoting long articles to the subject.
So what does that leave us with? Mostly Free (as in freedom) software and EPO.
But our plan is to add more focus to simplicity and UNIX philosophy (the roots of GNU). Something ought to be done about complicated, monopolised, privatised, and centralised so-called ‘tech’. We need to change that current trajectory because people are being farmed, not served. Complexity needs to be replaced by simplicity and front groups like Linux Foundation replaced by communities. Google has not helped anybody embrace (software) Freedom, IBM does not embrace real communities (it calls its own employees “communities”), and Microsoft is openwashing everything so as to push proprietary software whereas Amazon mostly kills off lots of small webhosts and shops.
The way things are generally going, we won’t win back freedom (or control over our computing), even if "Linux" spreads further over time. █
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