Hostirian today announced its sponsorship of Navy Linux. Effectively, Hostirian will provide important infrastructure to support Navy Linux programmers, as both entities are dedicated to ongoing improvements for the programming community. As part of the sponsorship, Hostirian President Ken Cox has joined the Navy Linux Board of Directors.
If you don’t posses the right knowledge & the experience, then finding the best Linux laptop can be a daunting task. And thus you can easily end-up with something that looks great, features great performance, but struggles to cope with ‘Linux’, shame! So, as a RedHat Certified Engineer, the author & the webmaster of this blog, and as a ‘Linux’ user with 14+ years of experience, I used all my knowledge to recommend to you a couple of laptops that I personally guarantee will let you run ‘Linux’ with ease. After 20+ hours of research (carefully looking through the hardware details & reading user feedback) I chose Dell XP S9360-3591-SLV, at the top of the line. If you want a laptop that’s equipped with modern features & excellent performance that ‘just works’ with Linux, then this is your best pick.
It’s well built (aluminium chassis), lightweight (2.7 lb), features powerful hardware, 6 hours+ battery life, includes an excellent 13.3 inch Gorilla Glass touchscreen with 3200Ãâ1800 QHD resolution which should give you excellently sharp images without making anything too small & difficult to read, a good & roomy track-pad (earlier versions had a few issues with it, but now they seem to be gone) with rubber-like palm rest area and a good keyboard (the key travel is not deep, but it’s a very think laptop so…) with Backlit, two USB 3.0 ports. Most importantly, two of the most common elements of a laptop that can give ‘Linux’ user a headache, the wireless adapter & the GPU (yes the Intel HD Graphics 620 can play 4K videos at 60fps), they are both super compatible with ‘Linux’ on this Dell.
In the meantime, an active Linux forum has been established that provides instructions for various distributions. Ubuntu recommends version 21.04 because the current LTS version 20.04 is not up to date. Fedora 34 must first be brought up to date or a current respin must be used. With Arch Linux everything seems to work from kernel 5.13.7 onwards, while with elementary OS due to the Ubuntu LTS basis there is still a lot of manual work to be done. Even the Qubes OS , which is very critical in terms of hardware, runs on the framework laptop.
A Quick overview of Manjaro 21.1.0 Xfce Edition. #linux #Manjaro #Shorts #opensource https://youtu.be/SqAISUFTYLg Manjaro Linux is a fast, user-friendly, desktop-oriented operating system based on Arch Linux. Key features include intuitive installation process, automatic hardware detection, stable rolling-release model, ability to install multiple kernels, special Bash scripts for managing graphics drivers and extensive desktop configurability. Manjaro Linux offers Xfce as the core desktop options, as well as KDE, GNOME and a minimalist Net edition for more advanced users. Community-supported desktop flavours are also available.
Wanna get your own Linux server? Visit https://www.linode.com/linuxexperiment for a 100$ credit ! Get your Linux desktop or laptop here: https://slimbook.es/en/ This time, we have Intel announcing gaming-grade GPUs, multiple new distro releases, and Github Copilot producing unsafe code.
Today's community-powered installment of "Will It Linux" examines a fun, gorgeous, and humorous indie game called Death's Door.
This week we’ve been building a new Ubuntu workstation. We interview Andreas Kling about SerenityOS, bring you some command line love and go over all your wonderful (and not so wonderful) feedback.
As expected, Linus Torvalds Linux Kernel 5.14 yesterday, Sunday released . As always, the new kernel brings better hardware support. At 5.14, this includes full support for the Raspberry Pi 400 and support for the Rockchip RK3568 , a SoC with a 4-core ARM A55 CPU and Mali G52 2EE GPU. The two smartphones Sony Xperia 1, 1II and 5 as well as 5II receive initial support. Microsoft’s Android Phone Surface Duo with Qualcomm’s SM8150 (Snapdragon 855) SoC also receives better support.
A regression that was recently reported for 5.14 in the media subsystem is a bit of a strange beast. The kernel's user-space binary interface (ABI) was not changed, which is the usual test for a patch to get reverted, but the report still led to a reversion. The change did lead to problems building a user-space application because it moved some header files to staging/ as part of a cleanup for a deprecated—though apparently still functioning—driver for a Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) device. There are a few different issues tangled together here, but the reversion of a regression in the user-space API (and not ABI) is a new wrinkle.
Soeren Moch reported the regression in a lengthy message on August 11. Parts of the message were aimed at Linus Torvalds and requested the reversion of three patches committed by media subsystem maintainer Mauro Carvalho Chehab. Those patches moved the av7110 driver to staging and followed up by moving some documentation and header files there as well. But that broke the ability to build parts of the Video Disk Recorder (VDR) application, which is shipped with multiple Linux distributions, Moch said.
He pointed to a Red Hat bug that had been filed by another member of the VDR community as evidence of the problem. VDR uses header files from the uapi/linux/dvb directory; when those got moved, VDR would no longer build on the kernel used for the upcoming Fedora 35. Beyond that, Moch disagreed with moving "the long existing and working av7110 driver" to staging/.
Unix-like systems — and their users — tend to expect all filesystems to behave in the same way. But those users are also often interested in fancy new filesystems offering features that were never envisioned by the developers of the Unix filesystem model; that has led to a number of interesting incompatibilities over time. Btrfs is certainly one of those filesystems; it provides a long list of features that are found in few other systems, and some of those features interact poorly with the traditional view of how filesystems work. Recently, Neil Brown has been trying to resolve a specific source of confusion relating to how Btrfs handles inode numbers.
One of the key Btrfs features is subvolumes, which are essentially independent filesystems maintained within a single storage volume. Snapshots are one commonly used form of subvolume; they allow the storage of copies of the state of another subvolume at a given point in time, with the underlying data shared to the extent that it has not been changed since each snapshot was taken. There are other applications for subvolumes as well, and they tend to be heavily used; Btrfs filesystems can contain thousands of subvolumes.
Btrfs subvolumes bring some interesting quirks with them. They can be mounted independently, as if they were separate filesystems, but they also appear as a part of the filesystem hierarchy as seen from the root. So one can mount subvolumes, but a subvolume can be accessed without being mounted if a higher-level directory is mounted. Imagine, for example, that /dev/sda1 contains a Btrfs filesystem that has been mounted on /butter. One could create a pair of subvolumes with commands like:
The first installment in this two-part series looked at the difficulties that arise when Btrfs filesystems containing subvolumes are exported via NFS. Btrfs has a couple of quirks that complicate life in this situation: the use of separate device numbers for subvolumes and the lack of unique inode numbers across the filesystem as a whole. Recently, Neil Brown set off on an effort to try to solve these problems, only to discover that the situation was even more difficult than expected and that many attempts would be required.
The Arm SoC and platform updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel.
Highlights of the ARM hardware support changes this time around include:
- Support for the Microchip SAMA7 family of SoCs using the aging Cortex-A7.
- The Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM636 and SDM8150 are both supported now by the Linux 5.15 upstream kernel.
It's busy on the Linux file-system front for the 5.15 cycle woth Btrfs adding a degenerate RAID option along with performance improvements to big improvements for XFS and now comes the EXT4 updates.
With EXT4 there are various fixes and improvements as usual but this cycle does bring some new performance work too.
First up, EXT4 adds a new "orphan_file" mount option to speed-up its handling of orphan file handling. As summed up by Jan Kara with the orphan file improvement patch series, "Orphan inode handling in ext4 is a bottleneck for workloads which heavily excercise truncate / unlink of small files as they contend on global s_orphan_mutex (when you have fast enough storage). This patch set implements new way of handling orphan inodes - instead of using a linked list, we store inode numbers of orphaned inodes in a file which is possible to implement in a more scalable manner than linked list manipulations."
Unix-like systems abound with ways to confuse new users, many of which have been present since long before Linux entered the scene. One consistent source of befuddlement is the "text file is busy" (ETXTBSY) error message that is delivered in response to an attempt to overwrite an executable image file. Linux is far less likely to deliver ETXTBSY results than it once was, but they do still happen on occasion. Recent work to simplify the mechanism behind ETXTBSY has raised a more fundamental question: does this error check have any value at all?
The "text" that is busy in this case refers to a program's executable code — it's text that is read by the CPU rather than by humans. When a program is run, its executable text is mapped into the running process's address space. When this happens, Unix systems have traditionally prevented the file containing that text from being modified; the alternative is to allow the code being run to be changed arbitrarily, which rarely leads to happy outcomes. For extra fun, the changed code will only be read if it is faulted into RAM, meaning that said unhappy outcomes might not happen until hours (or days) after the file has been overwritten. Rather than repeatedly explain to users why their programs have crashed in mysterious ways, Unix kernel developers chose many years ago to freeze the underlying file while those programs run — leading to the need to explain ETXTBSY errors instead.
Perhaps the easiest way to generate such an error is to try to rebuild a program while some process is still running it. Developers (those working in compiled languages, anyway) tend to learn early on to respond to "text file busy" errors by killing off the program they are debugging and rerunning make.
Last month were our benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on Linux for that new desktop APU with Zen 3 cores and Vega graphics available through retail channels. Due to reader interest and with the Ryzen 5 5600G still readily available via Internet retailers, here is a look at the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Linux performance in a variety of benchmarks.
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On the graphics side with the Ryzen 5 5600G are Radeon Vega graphics with seven cores and a 1.9GHz clock frequency, down from eight graphics cores with the 5700G. The Ryzen 5 5600G is currently available from Internet retailers for ~$259 USD and indeed last week I had no issues purchasing one and as of writing still is enjoying broad availability.
For Gnome fans, Apostrophe is a clean and intuitive Markdown editor you should try!
Apostrophe is one of the Gnome Circle Apps that provides a modern and distraction-free writing environment for Linux.
The editor supports for inputting via Pandoc’s Markdown, CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown and Plan Markdown formats.
The app has Light, Dark, and Gray (maybe) UI appearance. The ‘Hemingway Mode’ is available which will disable the backspace key. And ‘Focus Mode’ will highlight the current line, remove header and bottom bar to provide a zen-like environment when writing.
Today we are going to learn how to install and upgrade Mate 1.26 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS & Ubuntu 21.04 latest update, as we know recently Mate 1.26 released with tons of new features with polished design
The new version of Mate 1.26 PPA maintained by Ubuntu Mate Developers, and pushed to exiting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users as well as Ubuntu 21.04 Latest version while you can also able to install Mate 1.26 in Ubuntu 21.10 beta version and other all Ubuntu community Driven flavors like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu
Mate 1.26 version ppa provide Desktop environment with new version core apps like pulma and caja for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS & Ubuntu 21.04
The Linux set command allows you to change the value of shell options or to display the names and values of shell variables. Rarely used, it is a bash builtin, but is quite a bit more complicated than most builtins.
If you use the command without any arguments, you will get a list of all the settings—the names and values of all shell variables and functions. Watch out though! You’ll end up with a torrent of output flowing down your screen.
I have been Debian Stretch running on my HP Pavilion 14-ce0000nq laptop since buying it back in April 2019, just before my presence at Oxidizeconf where I presented "How to Rust When Standards Are Defined in C".
Debian Buster (aka Debian 10) was released about 4 months later and I've been postponing the upgrade as my free time isn't what it used to be. I also tend to wait for the first or even second update of the release to avoid any sharp edges.
As this laptop has a Realtek 8821CE wireless card that wasn't officially supported in the Linux kernel, I had to use an out-of-tree hacked driver to have the wireless work on Stretch kernels such as 4.19, it didn't even got along with DKMS, so all compilations and installations of it, I did them manually. More reason to wait for a newer release that would contain a driver inside the official kernel.
I was waiting for the inevitable and dreading the wireless issues, but since mid-august Bullseye became stable, turning Stretch into oldoldstable, I decided that I had to do the upgrade, at least to buster.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bagisto on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bagisto is a free, eCommerce platform built Laravel eCommerce framework for anyone who wants to run an online store. Bagisto has a built-in easy navigable admin panel and is bundled with functionalities like Multi-Currency, Multi-Localization, Access Control Level, Multi-Channel, Payment integration, and much more.
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 Bagisto eCommerce platform 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're wondering where your disk space went, the likely culprit is Arch's package cache. Arch Linux stores a copy of each package you download in the /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ directory. This includes every package you download, even upgrades. You can roll back to previous versions in case an update breaks a package, which comes in handy on a rolling-release distro like Arch.
While having multiple copies of a package is useful for recovery, it does take up space. You might forget to remove older versions of packages. The developers of Arch Linux decided it would be better for the user to manage this cache rather than building some automatic utility to get rid of outdated versions. So how do you get your space back?
As a systems/network administrator, it's on you to keep tabs on the Linux servers in your data center (be it on-premise or in the cloud). Given the Linux platform has a significant number of tools to help you monitor those servers, you might not know where to start. Among those many titles, there is one particular software package that you should definitely try out. Said monitor is Checkmk.
Charles Games have released their second native Linux game today with Svoboda 1945: Liberation a historical adventure that offers a unique blend of adventure gameplay, full-motion video interviews with real actors, and historically accurate interactive memories and more. The follow-up to the award-winning Attentat 1942 (IGF finalist, A MAZE winner, Apple Design finalist).
"Attentat 1942 was so warmly received by the Linux community, so porting Svoboda 1945: Liberation was a no-brainer. Linux players are among the most encouraging and passionate," says Lukas Kolek, director of Charles Games. "We believe that games are a great medium for telling stories and have the power to tackle serious issues such as the rise of dictatorship, or historical reconciliation," adds lead designer Vit Sisler
With the GNOME Circle , the GNOME Foundation promotes the development of useful applications and tools for the everyday life of a GNOME user.
In a series of articles we now present various useful applications from the GNOME Circle project.
The release of the distribution Nitrux 1.6.0 , built on the Debian package base, KDE technologies and the init system has been OpenRC published . The distribution develops its own NX Desktop , which is an add-on over the user’s KDE Plasma environment. The AppImages self-contained package system is being promoted to install additional applications. The boot images are 3.1 GB and 1.5 GB in size. The developments of the project are distributed under free licenses.
NX Desktop offers a different style, its own implementation of the system tray, notification center and various plasmoids, such as a network configurator and a media applet for volume control and playback control of multimedia content. The package also includes applications from the MauiKit suite , including the Index file manager (Dolphin can also be used), Note text editor, Station emulator, Clip music player, VVave video player, and Pix image viewer.
In the new release:
Desktop components have been updated to KDE Plasma 5.22.4, KDE Frameworksn 5.85.0 and KDE Gear (KDE Applications) 21.08.
Linux Lite has just announced Linux lite 5.6, the fourth installment in their 5.x series of releases. This release brings some major changes, especially in the download process. Other, more subtle tweaks are also shown throughout the OS.
Here, we will be looking at what is new, what has changed, and how these changes may affect the future of Linux Lite.
Linux Lite 5.6 Available to Download, Linux Lite is a beginner-friendly Linux distribution based on Ubuntu’s long-term support (LTS) release and featuring the Xfce desktop. The project’s latest release, Linux Lite 5.6, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and offers a number of conveniences and upgrades. Python 3 is now used by default, it is possible to install the distribution via the welcome screen on the live media, and the Lite Tweaks tool will offer to clean up temporary files used by the Brave browser.
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami talks competition with VMware via its new Nutanix Red Hat partnership around OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, HCI and Nutanix AHV.
Version 8.1.0 Release Candidate 1 is released. It's now enter the stabilisation phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.
RPM are available in the remi-php81 repository for Fedora ââ°Â¥ 33 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS), or in the php:remi-8.1 stream, and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository (or remi for Fedora)
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat is establishing a small team directly responsible for participating in EPEL activities. Their job isn’t to displace the EPEL community, but rather to support it full-time. We expect many beneficial effects, among those better EPEL readiness for a RHEL major release. The EPEL team will be part of the wider Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short.
In August, we published 12 posts. The site had 4,906 visits from 3,407 unique viewers. 1,685 visits came from search engines, while 661 came from the WordPress Android app, 177 came from Twitter, and 176 came from LinkedIn.
Like CPUs and memory, block devices have been with us in the Linux and UNIX world for a long time, and are
going to stay. In this article, I try to point at some recent developments and give ideas for debugging and available tools.
Ever wondered how to do checksumming on a block device? How to have a device appear bigger than the underlying disk? How to compress your disk? This article has something new for everybody.
For character devices, the driver sends/receives single bytes. For block devices, communication is in entire blocks. For example, hard disk or NVMe drivers can present the disk contents for read/write access via device node /dev/sda, and we can imagine the block device as representing the disk as a long lineup of bytes. A user on the Linux system can then open the device, seek to the place which should be accessed, and read or write data.
Functions as a Service (FaaS) and serverless architecture promise quick, lightweight deployments for web applications and other standalone functions. But until recently, creating FaaS in Red Hat OpenShift has been a "sort of" process consisting of multiple steps. You weren't really creating a function so much as an application that could scale back to zero pods after a few minutes, then scale up again when called.
Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions is a newer feature that changes all of that. As a developer, you can use it to deploy functions in a snap. You can scaffold functions that handle HTTP requests or CloudEvents with one command.
This article gets you started with creating and deploying serverless functions with OpenShift Serverless Functions. We'll use Python to develop our serverless function, but it's just one of many languages you could choose from.
At the end of April 2021, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ‘Xenial Xerus’ transitioned into the extended security maintenance (ESM) phase, effectively ending free updates for it, though paid security patching is still available via Ubuntu Advantage. To ensure users don’t build on Ubuntu images that may be insecure, Ubuntu 16.04 is no longer available to be selected for deployment through the Web UI, CLI and API. When selecting ‘Canonical Ubuntu’ in the Platform Images, you now only have 18.04 and 20.04 (and its Minimal images) options:
We want to make it possible to deploy MAAS in an existing datacenter, and have it keep track of machines that already have a deployed workload — without disturbing machine or workload. Currently, in order to get a machine into MAAS, with correct hardware information, you have to network boot the machine and let MAAS inspect the machine in an ephemeral environment.
Geniatech has launched a $90 “XPI-iMX8MM” SBC that runs Linux on an i.MX8M Mini with up 1GB to 4GB RAM, 8GB to 128GB eMMC, and 40-pin GPIO.
Geniatech has begun selling a Raspberry Pi sized SBC with NXP’s 1.8GHz, quad -A53 i.MX8M Mini. The XPI-iMX8MM follows Geniatech’s larger APC810 SBC, which is equipped with the i.MX8M. The SBC has the same Raspberry Pi size and layout as its Amlogic S905X powered XPI-S905X.
Advantech’s Linux-ready “SOM-5883” Basic Type 6 module builds on an up to octa-core, 11th Gen H-series CPU with up to 128GB DDR4, optional NVMe, PCIe Gen4 x16, quad 4K displays, 2.5GbE with TSN, 4x USB 3.2, and USB4.
Advantech has announced a COM Express Basic Type 6 module with Intel’s desktop-class, 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H processors. The SOM-5883 runs Advantech’s AIM Linux or Win 10 on the 10nm fabricated, up to octa-core Tiger Lake-H Core CPUs (see farther below).
Over time, people age and naturally tend to lose some or most of their mobility, leading to a need for a wheelchair, walker, or other assistive device. This led hitesh.boghani to submit his project, which he calls the smartChair, to element14’s Design for a Cause 2021 contest. This build features a sort of pseudo-walker that enables a user to transition from a sitting to a standing position with some motorized assistance. Apart from that primary use, Hitesh also wanted to create a “summon” mode that would allow the walker to move on its own to where it’s needed.
There’s a truckload of news from the Arduino Tooling Team today: Arduino CLI 0.19.0 is now available! This release has tons of great enhancements, exciting new features and heaps of bug fixes. Some things required quite a bit of breaking changes but they’re worth the hassle.
The highlights of this release are certainly the addition of pluggable discovery and the internal restructuring of the startup steps of the Arduino CLI. These affected the JSON output of some commands and the gRPC interface functions, which is documented in the upgrading guide.
We’re really excited about the release of the pluggable discovery. This new feature will give platform developers the possibility to support more and more boards (such as the Teensy), and also new ways of uploading to boards, like via WiFi, Bluetooth, SSH, CAN bus and anything that comes to mind! If you’re a platform developer and want to know how to start supporting pluggable discovery take a look at the updated platform specification documentation.
The Nitrokey company from near Berlin has greatly expanded its field of activity in recent years. The eponymous Nitrokeys were followed by NitroPad X230 and NitroPad T430 , NitroPC , the NetBox and the NitroShred service. As of today, the company is expanding its portfolio to include the NitroPhone .
According to the product description, the NitroPhone combines security, privacy and ease of use with modern hardware. The components for this are Google’s Pixel 4a smartphone and the hardened mobile operating system GrapheneOS , which is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
The highlights of Genode 21.08 are revamped GPU support as well as new drivers for the Pinephone and MNT-Reform laptop based on a new streamlined approach for porting Linux kernel code. Further topics range from VirtualBox improvements, over media playback in the native web browser, to LTE connectivity in Sculpt OS.
We've been covering Genode OS for more than a decade now as this original open-source operating system "framework" and through this time they have managed to keep up with their routine feature releases. Out this week is Genode OS Framework 21.08 as they seek to make it easier porting device driver code to their platform.
As is the usual battle with new operating systems, good device driver coverage is key for end-user adoption. Genode OS has already ported Linux driver code in the past but relies on a lot of manual handling, to which they've now been working to streamline the process.
Helpdeskz is a free help desk software which allows you to manage your sites. It supports web-based ticketing system.
The solution can update their business in hours. It is a features-rich and comes with a repository for translations.
It made for your business a LoginShare modules that let you integrate HelpDeskZ with your Drupal, Magento or WordPress site,
HelpDeskZ Offer a quality support, increase your productivity, it's a quality product with no price, it makes support management easier than never.
HelpDeskZ is suitable for customer support needs to manage customer problem.
Postal is free Libre mail server for enterprise. It is the open-source equivalent and competitor for Mailgun, SendGrid, and Postmark.
Postal mail server is an ideal solution for enterprise, companies which require to have their mail server for privacy, security or cost reasons.
It comes with a fancy productive enterprise-looking dashboard, with real-time graphs and charts as well as quick access to all the mail server functionalities and options. The dashboard summarize all current and important past events and information which include: server usage, queued messages, bounce rate, outgoing messages count, incoming messages stats, message rate, recently processed email and more.
Postal is a developer-friendly solution as it comes with a built-in webhook support, REST-API and multiple domain and credential management options.
In the last few weeks, Apple announced that it will begin actively monitoring the photos and videos stored on the iPhones of its users in the United States. Apple is describing its surveillance system as a way to monitor for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), but whatever it claims it is searching for, what it really is is a way to use proprietary software to constantly search and spy on its users' devices. Technological ethics groups around the world have highlighted the grave implications and dangerous precedent these practices set for a user's privacy and right to control their own device. In short, Apple has stated it will roll out two types of surveillance to all iPhone models receiving a forthcoming update: one which compares photos stored on the device to hashes of a database of known CSAM hashes, and one which (optionally) alerts parents of sexual materials sent from their child's iPhone.
Appealing to such an emotionally intense and important issue is a dangerous and shrewd way for Apple to seize more control over iPhone users. Despite the claims in its TV commercials, Apple is an enemy of user freedom and meaningful privacy. We wouldn't agree to having someone come and scour through our house on a whim. We especially wouldn't agree to it if it was a person with a track record of working against our best interests, and exploiting us for their own profit. This is precisely the situation in which millions of Apple users in the US find themselves. In the coming weeks, users will be allowing Apple to comb through a portable computer containing private messages, photos, videos, banking information, and business records; all without anyone being able to verify what it is looking for, or with whom it is sharing that information.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect computer user freedom, seeks a motivated and organized Boston-based individual to be our full-time outreach and communications coordinator.
Reporting to the executive director, the outreach and communications coordinator works closely with our campaigns, licensing, technical, and operations teams to plan, write, edit, publish, and promote high-quality, effective materials, both digital and printed. These materials are a critical part of advancing the FSF's work in support of the GNU Project, free software adoption, copyleft licensing, and freedom on the Internet; and against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), software patents, and proprietary software. Nearly every publication from the FSF goes through this public-facing position, tying together our work across various constituencies.
Version 1.21 is available for download. This version introduces an important new feature: Crash tolerance, brought to gdbm by Terence Kelly.
One of the reasons so many DOS applications sported a text user interface (or TUI) is because it was so easy to do. The standard way to control console input and output (conio) was with the conio library for many C programmers. This is a de-facto standard library on DOS, which gained popularity as implemented by Borland's proprietary C compiler as conio.h. You can also find a similar conio implementation in TK Chia's IA-16 DOS port of the GNU C Compiler in the libi86 library of non-standard routines. The library includes implementations of conio.h functions that mimic Borland Turbo C++ to set video modes, display colored text, move the cursor, and so on.
Python remains dominant, with a 15% quarter-over-over increase in job postings listing it as a desired skill. Its momentum shows no sign of slowing, with GitHub survey data showing that Python, HTML and JavaScript were the most used languages by students, the incoming generation of technologists.
Apple has fallen to #4 in smartphone sales according to AppleInsider, citing a study by Trendforce, which now has Samsung, Oppo, and Xiami ahead of the iPhone-maker.
Apple blames COVID and the upcoming iPhone 13 launch, which they admit will be a “continuation of the 12 series”. Of course, anyone who knows Apple knows that they’ve barely improved their phones at all in the past several years, and aside from messages popping up saying your apps will no longer work because reasons and raising the price of the phone another $100 every time you go to replace it, Apple’s revenues would be in the toilet.
As it stands, they have Consumertards buying a $1,749 iPhone that can’t do much more than the $400 model.
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No on to 2FA codes. AppleInsider posted an article on how to port over your codes from Google Authenticator to an iPhone. Google really doesn’t want you doing this. There are some open source authenticator apps that save the token you used to seed the generator, but mostly, if you use secure passwords that Firefox can generate on the fly, 2FA is rubbish in order to sell more phones and make it hard (if you use SMS) to change your phone number or carrier, or give up on using smartphones.
Security updates have been issued by openSUSE (ffmpeg and gstreamer-plugins-good), SUSE (apache2, apache2-mod_auth_mellon, ffmpeg, gstreamer-plugins-good, libesmtp, openexr, rubygem-puma, xen, and xerces-c), and Ubuntu (openssl).
On the ADA Logics blog, David Korczynski and Adam Korczynski write about their work integrating 115 open-source projects with Google's OSS-Fuzz project for doing continuous fuzz testing. They describe the process of integrating a project into OSS-Fuzz, and discuss their findings, which include more than 2000 bugs (500+ security relevant), of which 1300+ have been fixed at this point..
In this blog post we will describe our efforts of integrating continuous fuzzing into more than 100 open source projects by way of OSS-Fuzz that has resulted in more than 2000 issues being reported, 1300 of which are verified and fixed. This is an effort of work that was split out over the duration of a year and the goal of the blog post is to give insights into the end-to-end process of integrating projects into OSS-Fuzz as well as highlight some of the interesting results that we encountered.
The work described in this post was carried out by David Korczynski and Adam Korczynski from Ada Logics with a lot of support from maintainers of each open source project discussed in this post and from the entire OSS-Fuzz team.
Several companies that use the OpenSSL cryptography library toolkit are reportedly scrambling and releasing security advisories to their users following patching of
Users often store a lot of sensitive information on their computers—from credentials to banned texts to family photos—that they might normally expect to be protected by the login password of their account. Under some circumstances, though, users can be required to log into their system so that some third party (e.g. government agent) can examine and potentially copy said data. A new project, PAM Duress, provides a way to add other passwords to an account, each with its own behavior, which might be a way to avoid granting full access to the system, though the legality is in question.
As its name would imply, PAM Duress is a pluggable authentication module (PAM), which is the mechanism used on Linux and other Unix operating systems to easily allow adding different kinds of authentication methods. PAM is not exactly standardized, however, so there are multiple implementations of it, including Linux PAM that is used by Linux distributions. The Duress module allows administrators to configure the system to check for one or more extra passwords if the normal password associated with the user account does not match what is provided.
Representatives of South African parties and local Cuba solidarity associations demonstrated today in front of the US consulates in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg against the US blockade of Cuba.
As a fundamental part of these activities, the participants sent by e-mail a memorandum to the US authorities (who refused to receive it in person) demanding the lifting of the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on Cuba for 55 years.
In the text, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the African National Congress (ANC), and the Society of Friends of Cuba in South Africa (Focus) stress that this demand is made in compliance with international law and UN resolutions, for the good of humanity (Ubuntu), in the era of the Covid-19 global crisis.
The US and others may have withdrawn from Afghanistan, but many Afghan Government websites and email addresses under the .gov.af top-level domain are still very much dependent on services hosted outside of the country – mostly in the US.
By taking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban has inherited these government domains and now shares web hosting and mail servers with several other governments around the world, including the UK Government. In many cases, emails sent to .gov.af domains will be routed through US-hosted servers, presenting intelligence opportunities if the new Taliban government were to continue using them.
