System76 announced they’re updating the Ryzen-powered Pangolin laptop to meet today’s need for more power.
System76 is not just one of the most popular makers of Linux-only hardware, they’re also really good at pushing all of the boundaries and reinventing all of the wheels. This latest move might not push or reinvent, but it certainly gives consumers options for more mobile power.
But this isn’t news, right? The Pangolin was already available with an AMD Ryzen processor. This is a situation where out with the old, in with the new applies, because the company is upping the Ryzen ante by offering the 15" Pangolin with a Ryzen 7 5700U CPU.
All in all, my AlmaLinux 8.4 experiment on the IdeaPad 3 went well. Very nice considering this being a relatively new device, with some relatively new hardware in it (not innit, guv), plus the fact AlmaLinux 8 is a conservative server distro with a somewhat older kernel. In that regard, I had a good, fast, stable experience. Solid speed, no errors, pretty looks. Very desktopy, very accessible. Triple boot, no issues and all that.
The Wireless card issue can be a dealbreaker for many, though. Having to customize the system is also a tricky one, ergonomics and all that. But, at the end of the day, I had a very stylish, functional system, and now I can focus on some extra tweaking and testing. Can I call this: How to turn AlmaLinux into a perfect desktop? Well, almost. 'Tis a good, promising start. Now, from a pure usability perspective, this ain't it, but then, this also isn't a desktop per se, which explains my chipper and forgiving attitude. Definitely worth exploring, and stay tuned for more solid fun and nerdology.
The Librem 5 is very, very close to being the only phone I carry around with me. But there are five things holding it back. Let's talk about them.
We chat with Matt from Adventurous Way about the home automations that have improved his quality of life, the clever way he manages their off-grid rig, and the new smart home project he's just kicking off.
The Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) turned 30 this year. As part of that major milestone we asked Red Hatters who have been using or contributing to Linux since the early days about their experiences. What was it like contributing to Linux, what was it like using it? Could you imagine that Linux would have the impact it's had on the world up until now?
Today we’re talking to Pete Zaitcev, who has been contributing to Linux since the early 1990s, joining Red Hat in 2001. Pete now works as a Principal Software Engineer in Red Hat’s R&D OpenStack Platform team.
[...]
A: I do not remember what my first proper contribution was. I think it must have been a patch to fix pseudo-DMA in floppy.c in August 1995. Nobody cared who you were as long as the code was good. My first attempt was to make a raster console. It was required for SPARCstation, which did not have a text mode. The prime customer for that was David "DaveM" Miller, the leader of the port to SPARC. However, my code was over-engineered for what was needed. Although he accepted it in the Sparclinux tree initially, DaveM eventually ripped it out and replaced it with the raster console developed by Geert Uytterhoeven for Amiga. I remember being very disappointed. I wasn’t sure Dave even made the right call. Thereafter I stuck with minor fixes here and there.
The latest AMD driver has posted patches to the Linux kernel that’ll enable users to get better per watt performance from their AMD Zen-based CPUs.
According to Phoronix, the drivers currently support processors powered by the Zen 3 microarchitecture, such as the Ryzen 5000 desktop processors, as well as the Epyc server processors.
“We would like to introduce a new AMD CPU frequency control mechanism as the "amd-pstate" driver for modern AMD Zen based CPU series in Linux Kernel,” wrote Rui Huang, senior member of the technical staff at AMD.
Users running a Linux system hardly pay attention to the underlying filesystem. In fact, during the installation of Linux, there’s a tendency to often go with the default filesystem listed without exploring other available options. For windows, things are a lot easier since NTFS is the dominant filesystem. With Linux, there are numerous filesystems at your disposal. These include the Ext4, XFS, ZFS, and BTRFS.
The most widely used filesystems are Ext4 and XFS, with the latter being the default filesystem in RHEL-based distros and Ext4 being the standard filesystem in Debian and Ubuntu distributions. When choosing a filesystem some of the factors that need to be considered include scalability, stability, and data integrity.
The Paragon’s NTFS driver was merged by Linux creator Linus Torvalds earlier this month, bringing reliable read and write functionality for this filesystem to the kernel.
The last month, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, made it known to Paragon Software that it should really submit a pull request for its read-write NTFS driver to be included in the awaited version 5.15 release, for which the merge window is still open at the time of writing this.
Last week a number of patches were merged in the quest to provide the kernel with comprehensive compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows. Another patch series was sent out today while still for this cycle they are expected to enable the compiler warnings around array-bounds and zero-length-bounds.
Kees Cook sent in the second batch of overflow updates for Linux 5.15. This latest batch has tree-wide changes to replace open-coded flex arrays in unions, replacing zero-element memcpy() destinations with flexible arrays, and a variety of other improvements to improve the Linux kernel's buffer overflow detection and trying to make it an issue of the past.
While Vulkan is quickly taking over as the dominant graphics API for Linux gamers especially with the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton mapping Direct3D atop Vulkan, OpenGL remains widely used by workstation software. It's also for workstation software where AMD's "PRO" closed-source OpenGL Linux driver has traditionally competed well (and outperformed) the open-source Mesa driver. But with all the recent changes, that's either a matter of the past or close to not being relevant with the latest Mesa enhancements.
With less than one month out from the official release of Microsoft Windows 11, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build against Windows 10 21H1 to see how the performance is looking. Of course, also to see how Windows 11 is shaping up against Ubuntu 21.10 also due for release in October.
AntiMicroX (a continuation of AntiMicro) for mapping gamepad keys to keyboard, mouse, scripts and macros has a new release out with version 3.1.7.
Thankfully for people who have moved from classic X11 over to Wayland - you're in luck. This version brings on Wayland support for keyboard emulation! This was achieved by moving from xtest to uinput when wayland session is detected, and they've added some new udev rules too. That's the biggest change with the rest being general bug fixes and improvements.
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks.
Cozy is different to the music players we’ve covered. While it plays music the software is geared to playing audio books. Cozy is free and open source software. It’s written in Python.
Let’s see how it fares.
OpenSnitch, a Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall for macOS, had a major new release today. The latest OpenSnitch 1.4.0 adds the ability to use eBPF to intercept processes, nftables support, allow/block lists, GUI improvements, and more.
The application is made of a daemon (written in Go) and a GUI (PyQt5); a tray icon is also available which you can use to open the OpenSnitch GUI, disable the firewall or close it. While running, OpenSnitch monitors outbound connections that your applications are trying to make, preventing or permitting their connection based on a set of rules (the user is prompted to allow or deny access when no existing rules are found).
It's worth noting that the first time you run this application-level firewall for Linux, it will display many dialogs to allow or deny connections. That's expected since every process that tries to make outbound connections is shown in a new popup by OpenSnitch. But once you allow or deny your most used applications, the application will remember your preference, and it won't bother you again.
YOGA Image Optimizer is a graphical tool to batch convert photos into JPEG, PNG and WEBP, and compress file sizes while having equivalent quality.
It’s a free and open-source tool based on YOGA command line tool, which can also convert and optimize 3D models from various formats to glTF and GLB.
The release of the project has PipeWire 0.3.35 been published , which develops a new generation multimedia server to replace PulseAudio. PipeWire has enhanced video streaming capabilities over PulseAudio, low latency audio processing, and a new security model for device and stream access control. The project is supported in the GNOME and already the default used in Fedora Linux. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the LGPLv2.1 license.
Inkscape, the most used and loved tool of Fedora’s Design Team, is not just a program for doing nice vector graphics. With vector graphics (in our case SVG) a lot more can be done. Many programs can import this format. Also, Inkscape can do a lot more than just graphics. The first article of this series showed how to produce GCode with Inkscape. This article will examine another Inkscape extension – Ink/Stitch. Ink/Stitch is an extension for designing embroidery with Inkscape.
So Slackware is already in release candidate available, this release is coming with many changes on the core and on the packages, we will explain to you to Setup LAMP stack Slackware 15.0 Server.
Sysadmins use an untold number of command-line tools, and you probably regularly use the three discussed in this article: grep, sed, and awk. But do you know all the ways you can use them to manipulate text? If not (or you're not sure), continue reading.
I had this nightmare where I had a very, very important confcall.
I joined with Chrome. Chrome said Failed to access your microphone - Cannot use microphone for an unknown reason. Could not start audio source.
I joined with Firefox. Firefox chose Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo as a microphone, and did not let me change it. Not in the browser, not in pavucontrol.
I joined with the browser on my phone, and the webpage said This meeting needs to use your microphone and camera. Select *Allow* when your browser asks for permissions. But the question never came.
Btrfs or commonly pronounced as b-tree FS or butter FS is a COW (copy-on-write) based disk storage format and filesystem. In btrfs, all characters except / and Null are applicable for creating the files featuring self-healing and the capability of spanning multiple volumes. It was initially developed by Oracle in 2007 and developed by multiple companies such as Redhat, Linux Foundation, Facebook, suse, etc.
Many features like sub volume file-system, extended base file-system, mks skinny-metadata, ability to link lost files to lost and found, etc. make it a powerful file system compared to others. In this article, I will show you how to create a disk partition and format it with Btrfs file system on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Trimage on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Trimage is a cross-platform GUI and command-line interface to optimize image files for websites, using optipng, pngcrush, advpng and jpegoptim, depending on the filetype (currently, PNG and JPG files are supported). It was inspired by imageoptim. All image files are losslessy compressed on the highest available compression levels, and EXIF and other metadata are removed. Trimage gives you various input functions to fit your own workflow: A regular file dialog, dragging and dropping and various command-line options.
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 Trimage image compressor 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.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sublime Text on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Sublime Text is a cross-platform text editor written in C++ and python and developed for individuals who are looking for an effective yet minimalist tool for shuffling code around. Not only does it supports many languages, but you can also even extend the functionality using plugins.
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 Sublime Text 4 on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Anaconda is an open-source platform written with Python programming language. It was built by data scientists, for data scientists. Anaconda contains a large variety of packages and repositories. It is important in its functionality as it provides processing and computing data on a large scale and also to program in python language. The Anaconda is a good platform to program python applications.
This article helps you to install Anaconda on your Debian 11 (Bullseye) Linux system with easy instructions.
MERN stack consists of four key technologies MongoDB, Express, React, and Node. It is specially designed for easier and faster deployment of full-stack web applications. It is one of the most popular and user-friendly development structures that helps you to improve your applications to a great extent. The MERN stack allows you to build a 3-tier architecture (frontend, backend, database) entirely using JavaScript and JSON.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the MERN stack on Debian 11.
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser, the platform that angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, smarter browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual style approach to browsing than its competitors.
If you are running Java programs on Ubuntu using Eclipse, Maven or Netbeans etc, you’ll need to set JAVA_HOME to your path. Otherwise, your system will complain that “java_home environment variable is not set”.
In this beginner’s tutorial, I’ll show the steps to correctly set Java Home variable on Ubuntu. The steps should be valid for most other Linux distributions as well.
Changing the WordPress site URL is an inevitable activity. A growing WordPress site or one under active development and testing introduces new URL routes to make it more flexible, dynamic, and easily explorable to the targeted internet users.
One reason to remove this issue of changing WordPress site URLs from your bucket list is the fact that your WordPress site developer might not always be on speed dial. When a WordPress site changes its domain name, the domain name change does not automatically integrate with the already configured site URLs.
Slack is a group collaboration tool designed for teams that work in different locations. Primarily used for communication in teams, as the service can be perfectly integrated into the workflow. Users can link Slack with many other services, for example with cloud services such as Dropbox or with social networks. So Slack becomes the focal point of the action. At its core, Slack is instant messaging software. In addition to direct messaging, Slack enables communication “channels” that can be organized by project, customer, team, or any other way your company deems appropriate for separate conversations. Channels are structured according to the concept of a chat room: All channel participants can take part in the conversation and the messages appear in real-time.
Well, communication using Slack is possible both between individuals and in groups. It comes with a free plan suitable for small teams. You can use this plan for as long as you want, but there are limitations.
If you try to download something with wget on CentOS 6/7 or 8 you will get the error : bash: wget: command not found or bash: /usr/bin/wget: no such file or directory and this is because wget is not installed on your system, so to solve this issue you need to install wget first then you can use it to download anything you want.
After being in Beta since the end of July, Valve has now released a big update to the stable version of the Steam client for everyone which has the new Downloads Page & Storage Management.
The new Downloads Page is actually a big improvement overall. Allowing you to drag and drop games around in the list. It now also correctly shows the total progression based on the downloading and disk allocation.
At the Game Developers Conference 2021, multiple developers from Red Hat attended and gave a talk titled "Open source in games: How to save your studio time and effort". GDC 2021 was held back in July but only recently Red Hat put their presentation video up so now everyone can view it.
For most normal gamers it probably won't be a hugely relevant talk but for developers it could be an interesting one. The main thing is that Linux had a presence at such a huge industry event.
Spine is an upcoming PlayStation 4 emulator that's currently closed-source while it's under heavy development. It's also currently only available for Linux. Well-known PlayStation "scener" Nagatoro announced the new demo on Twitter along with a download link.
What's interesting is that the PS4 was the generation to come back to x86 CPUs, instead of the Cell style found in the PS3. This makes the emulator a bit more like the Wine compatibility layer and less like a full emulator, the developers even announced it originally as it being "Wine-like".
Ever heard of Tux and Fanny? It's originally an incredibly strange 2019 animated film by Albert Birney who has teamed up with Ghost Time Games (Jettomero, Test Tube Titans) to make an adventure game out of it.
The film was so weird that it's gained a small cult following. I cannot express in clear enough wording just how completely odd it is. Tux and Fanny matches up well with a lot of the early classic flash animations, it leaves that strange lasting impression.
The biggest new feature of the new Steam Client update is a brand new downloads page that’s easier to use and has a new design. The new download page now displays the total progress, including disk allocation process, when downloading or updating a game, as well as a faded progress bar and percent completed for partially completed downloads or updates.
In addition, the new downloads page will now display a new icon next to a game’s title with a tooltip showing the type of content included in the update (e.g. Downloadable Content, Game Content, Shader Pre-caching, or Workshop Content). Moreover, users will now be able to re-order the download queue using drag and drop, as well as to launch a game or suspend download throttling from the context menu of the actively downloading game.
If you use git on a regular basis, you should look at using git-prompt; there is a file called git-prompt.sh that is shipped with git, the location in your setup varies depending on the Linux distribution you're using, for example in OpenSuse it's /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt.sh. The file is of course available in the upstream git repo.
Following the instructions from the top of that file should give you a very useful addition to the prompt of your shell (the file has instructions for BASH and ZSH). However that is not what this blog post is about; this post is about making the Konsole window title more useful, and by that I mean use the window title to show the current dir path and the info from git-prompt.
Debian 11 (Bullseye) comes with the mlt framework 6.24.0 and kdenlive 20.12.3. Unfortunately it was already too late (freeze) to build mlt with enabled OpenCV features, this are also required to use the motion tracker features, which are now still missing in the pure stable release.
The beta version for GNOME 41 from August 25th is now followed by a release candidate GNOME 41 RC1 (Download). Release manager Javier Jardón announced this on the GNOME mailing list . The stable release of GNOME 41 is scheduled for September 22nd.
Making the style feel lighter and reducing visual noise is a major goal for the style refresh we’re doing for libadwaita. While we’ve done lots of smaller changes and cleanups across the stylesheet to bring us closer to that goal, this is probably the highest-impact part of it due to how prominent header bars are in GNOME apps.
This is not a new idea either — pretty much everyone else is doing it, e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.
In fact, we’ve been doing this for a long time in view switchers. So this just extends it to the whole header bar.
However, if applied carelessly, it can also make certain layouts ambiguous. For example, a text-only button with no background would look exactly same as a window title. To prevent that, we only remove background from buttons that we can be confident won’t look confusing without it — for example, buttons containing a single icon.
While we avoid ambiguous situations, it also means that apps will need changes to have consistent buttons. In my opinion this is a better tradeoff: since the API is not stable yet, we can break behavior, and if an app hasn’t been updated, it will just get inconsistent look and not accessibility issues.
In the Linux Release Roundup series, we highlight the new distribution and application version releases in the last few days. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
Lakka Linux 3.4
The retro gaming OS now runs on the latest Retroarch 1.9.9. It has received many new features, including AMD’s Fidelity FX, Mesa 21.2.1, and new console cores.
To know more, you can check out our original coverage.
There was one openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot this week out of five that brought an enormous amount of package updates for those using the rolling release.
Snapshot 20210904 brought updates for systemd, GTK4, Mesa, KDE’s Plasma and Gear and many other packages.
The most recent snapshot to be released was 20210908; it updated fuse3 3.10.5 and made various improvements to unit tests more robust for the Filesystem in Userspace package. The mpg123 1.29.0 update added an--enable-runtime-tables. An update of yast2 4.4.17 provided some maintenance for the systemd package that arrived earlier in the week. A few other packages like glslang 11.6.0, libstorage-ng 4.4.36 and pinentry 1.2.0 were also updated in the snapshot.
Snapshot 20210907 updated seven packages. The package manager zypper 1.14.49 made a change to avoid calling su as it can be too restrictive for sudo user umask. The package manager library libzypp also had an update to version 17.28.3, which had a policy modification for avoid the breaking of a single rpm transaction. The AV1 decoder package dav1d 0.9.2 had some Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 and SSE4 optimizations for x86_64. Other packages updated in the snapshot were geoclue2 2.5.7, mozilla-nss 3.69.1, supermin 5.2.1 and an update to plymouth.
The previous batch of ISOs for Slackware Live Edition is already a few months old, so I decided to generate new images. The ISO files are based on Slackware-current of “Wed Sep 8 18:07:38 UTC 2021” and using the liveslak-1.3.10 scripts, where passwordless login is a new feature.
Slackware-current has the label “15.0 Release Candidate 1” since August 16th but considering the amount of non-trivial updates since that date, I wonder whether the phrase “release candidate” has any relevance here. No sign that we are anywhere nearer to a final 15.0 release.
Let’s hope for the best, and in the meantime fresh ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition can be obtained at download.liveslak.org .
I refreshed he ‘bonus‘ section as well. There you find several squashfs modules you can use with your persistent liveslak USB stick. Copy these module into the ‘addons’ directory on the USB drive. They expand the functionality of the Live OS and allow me to keep the ISO file size within reasonable bounds. Among these you’ll find the binary nvidia driver (already contained in the CINNAMON, DAW and MATE ISOs by the way); Wine 6.12, multilib, the DAW package collection, and a set from my own repository (chromium, libreoffice, veracrypt, vlc etc).
Sumo Logic and IBM have expanded their alliance to announce the availability of Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence Platform on Red Hat Marketplace, the open cloud marketplace for enterprise customers that offers a simpler way to buy and deploy certified container-based software.
With applications running in the cloud, it’s easy to focus on the cloud services without ever thinking of the underlying operating system — or even needing to think about it. It almost seems quaint, to think about standard operating environments, base images, and compatibility like it’s 2010.
When all of your innovation and future projects are in the cloud, does the operating system really matter anymore?
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 8.0.11RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-php80-test repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.24RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 33-34 or remi-php74-test repository for Enterprise Linux.
This is one of those more open-ended posts in that I don’t have any good answers, but I’ve got a bunch of questions. I’d love to have feedback, comments, and thoughts if you have any.
Recently, it was "results week" in the UK. Here, there are two major sets of exams that most students take: GCSEs and A levels. The former generally are taken by 16-year-olds, with around 8-12 in total, and the latter by 18-year-olds, with 2-4 in total (3 being the strong median). A level results are one of the major criteria for entry into universities, and GCSE results typically determine what A levels students will take, and therefore have an impact on university course choice in the future.
Fedora will be participating in the upcoming round of Outreachy (December 2021-March 2022) and we are looking for more projects and mentors!
Being a community of diverse people from various backgrounds and different walks of life, the Fedora Project has been participating as a mentoring organization for Outreachy internships for years. The Outreachy program is instrumental in providing a rich experience in working with free and open-source software. Fedora is a proud participant.
The Linux community was caught unprepared when, in December 2020, as part of a change in the way Red Hat supports and develops CentOS, Red Hat suddenly announced that it's cutting the official CentOS 8 support window from ten years – to just two, with support ending Dec 31, 2021.
It created a peculiar situation where CentOS 7 users that did the right thing and upgraded quickly to CentOS 8 were left using an OS with just a year's official support remaining – while users of CentOS 7 still get full support until June 30, 2024.
Worse, the fact that stable releases of CentOS were discontinued in exchange for the rolling-release CentOS Stream means that to secure their workloads most CentOS 8 users have to opt for an entirely different Linux distribution, with just a year to choose, evaluate and implement an alternative.
Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our resource library with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. Check out the curated pieces below, available to readers through the end of the month.
In terms of IT jobs, it’s largely a candidate’s market. If the predicted post-pandemic turnover tsunami hasn’t hit your organization yet, it may soon. The hybrid work options that the pandemic created means that as an IT leader, you may have more open roles – and a tougher time filling them.
That points to the need to step up retention efforts. But there are also IT hiring practices that need rethinking. Fine-tuning your recruiting approach can improve your ability to attract and retain top IT talent.
When a new project type starts to get a lot of exposure, it’s typically not long before we see people forking the basic concept and striking out in a new direction. It happened with POV displays, it happened with Nixie clocks, and now, it seems to be happening with cyberdecks. And that’s something we can get behind, especially with cyberdecks built to suit a specialized task, like this musical cyberdeck/synth.
Like many musicians, [Benjamin Caccia] felt like he needed a tool to help while performing with his band “Big Time Kill.” He mainly needed to trigger track playbacks on the fly, but also wanted something to act as a mega-effects pedal and standalone synth. And while most of that could be done with an iPad, it wouldn’t look as cool as a cyberdeck. The build centers around a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 7ââ¬Â³ LCD display. Those sit on top of a 25-key USB MIDI keyboard and a small mixer. Alongside the keyboard is a USB keypad, which has custom mappings to allow fast access to buried menu functions in the cyberdeck’s Patchbox OS. Everythign was tied together on a 3D-printed frame; the video below shows it in action, and that it sounds as good as it looks.
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has made considerable strides in increasing its presence in the open source world lately. RIT's Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture minor is the first of its kind in academia. For example, its open source programs office, Openââ¬Å @ââ¬Å RIT, has begun helping RIT faculty and staff fellows build and maintain communities for their open source projects.
These strides are driven by the students, faculty, and staff at RIT. Already, a growing number of people at the university are heading their own open projects. However, running an entirely open source project can be cumbersome. Much of this comes from maintaining a community for the project and managing data such as the project's code, issue tracking, and repositories.
This summer, Christoph Haag and I had the pleasure of taking part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as mentors for xrdesktop, the Open Source project bringing the Linux desktop to VR on SteamVR & Monado. Our students, Remco and Manas, were both able to finish their projects and submit merge requests. Kudos!
As our tools of choice, C/GObject and Vulkan were used in both projects, maintaining our goal of keeping xrdesktop low level and thus providing a performant XR experience.
Contributions like these support our vision with projects like xrdesktop and Monado to provide a fully open source XR stack that enables complete control and independence for end users and product builders alike.
Briar is an open-source mobile massager application with enhanced security for Android systems. It is designed to protect its users from surveillance and authority tracking.
With Briar, you don't need to worry about messages encryption as it uses a peer-to-peer encryption for all messages and forums.
The app can work seamlessly even with or without internet as it can sync the messages between devices using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Tor network.
Using Briar messenger you don't need to worry about denial of service, metadata surveillance, message/ content surveillance, takedown and internet blackouts.
Currently, the application works in the background, and asks for some permission to run as camera access, location access and Bluetooth access.
We’d also like to point out several details regarding event administration. We will be using an instance of the open source web conferencing system, BigBlueButton, to stream our talks and panels at POSI, with hosting courtesy of our in-kind sponsors at Blindside Networks.
We're wrapping up another great week with the following activities from the Apache community...
Once upon a time, a few people were thought to be software engineers with cutting-edge coding skills. Currently, a good command of many programming languages is required for a variety of IT jobs. If you want to advance in your career or change careers completely, you may be considering which programming language to study.
Given that learning a language will take time and money, you must choose wisely. A few considerations, for example, the difficulty level you're willing to learn, the information you already have that corresponds to your present coding talents, or your motivation for learning a top programming language, all play a role in your decision.
Getting started with a new programming language can be challenging. Whether you're a beginner or a grizzzled veteran, there are a number of larger context questions to answer that go beyond simply learning the language's syntax. This article provides a high-level overview of five important things to keep in mind as you begin your journey into Python. You won't learn the specifics of the language here, but you'll gain a general picture of how Python works.
Adopting an enlightened standards policy could greatly advance the national interest in the area of information and communications technology (ICT) standards. And at no time in recent memory has the need to do so been more urgent, as trade tensions with China sustain rather than abate. Absent a change in direction in policy, there is the potential for standards wars between East and West in areas such as 5G technology.
Maintaining a healthy standards development ecosystem domestically is equally important, as standards setting organizations (SSOs) annually create hundreds of standards that are referenced into law, at great savings in time and tax dollars when compared to the costs of drafting regulations within the government.
[...]
With the exception of specific treaty obligations, international adoption of standards is entirely voluntary and market driven. Competing standards can, and often have, been used as competitive weapons, both to exclude or burden foreign products or to avoid licensing costs associated with “standards essential patents” (SEPS). While both the US and China are signatories of the World Trade Organization Treaty on Technical Barriers to Trade (TTBT), which bars signatory nations from adopting local standards where suitable global standards have become widely adopted, this did not prevent China from launching its own wireless standard (WAPI) in competition with Wi-Fi a decade and a half ago, alleging that the Wi-Fi standard developed by the IEEE provided insufficient security.
The WAPI standard was encumbered by many SEPS owned by Chinese companies (as, indeed, the competing Wi-Fi standard was encumbered by SEPS owned by Western companies). Licenses to those standards were available only to certain Chinese companies. China also developed its own 4G standard (CDMA) in competition with two Western contenders. With the largest population in the world, China was able to use its competing standards to the benefit of its domestic vendors. It has every incentive to do the same now if trade tensions between the US and China do not lessen.
Significantly, Huawei is recognized as owning more 5G patents than any other company in the world. It is also believed to have been a member of c. 400 SSOs, many of which ejected Huawei or suspended its participation after it was placed on the Entity List. The intellectual property rights (IPR) policies of virtually all of these SSOs require participants to either license their SEPS on “reasonable and non-discriminatory” (RAND) terms, or to disclose them so that an attempt can be made to revise the related standards to avoid infringement. But this obligation only attaches to companies participating in the working groups that create the standards.
Like most people, pilots want to expedite things and generally make their work easier. A common conception about aviation is that it’s a leading industry with technology at its forefront. While this is generally true some of the systems in use today are rather dated (to put it mildly). A great example is the method that pilots use in poor visibility to “find” the runway; their Instrument Landing System (ILS), a technology invented in 1929.
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The ILS is used on aircraft to help pilots navigating to the runway on approach / landing in both a horizontal and the vertical sense. Whilst there have many improvements to ILS technology since its conception, the fact remains that the ILS was invented in the 1920s and became approved and adopted by ICAO in 1949. To this very day, it remains the most accurate method available to commercial pilots when it comes to navigating to the runway.
Intel-owned Habana Labs now has the most open software stack among AI accelerators! While Habana Labs has long provided an open-source, upstream kernel driver for their Gaudi AI training and Goya AI inference accelerators, the user-space portions including their code compiler and run-time library have been closed-source. This has been a thorn for upstream kernel developers and their standards, but now Habana Labs has open-sourced their user-space components too.
In use for a decade as the de facto standard for communicating software bills of materials, The Linux Foundation has announced that the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) specification has been published as ISO/IEC 5962:2021 and recognized as the open standard for security, license compliance and other software supply chain artifacts.
Users of HAProxy 2.0 and earlier versions are being urged to push through updates after a vulnerability was found that could allow "an attacker to bypass the check for a duplicate HTTP Content-Length header, permitting a request smuggling attack or a response-splitting attack."
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, ghostscript, ntfs-3g, and postorius), Fedora (java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, libtpms, and salt), openSUSE (libaom, libtpms, and openssl-1_0_0), Red Hat (openstack-neutron), SUSE (grilo, java-1_7_0-openjdk, libaom, libtpms, mariadb, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, and php74-pear), and Ubuntu (firefox and ghostscript).
WordPress 5.4-5.8 are affected by multiple vulnerabilities. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected website.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the WordPress Security and Maintenance Release and upgrade to WordPress 5.8.1.
Imagine that the data on your devices could not only be collected and copied, but also added to and modified (data disruption warrant). To make matters worse, imagine if any or all of your online accounts could be controlled by law enforcement without your knowledge, and you could potentially also be locked out of those accounts (account takeover warrant). Further, any network you interact with and all your electronic communications, whether on email, social media, or messaging platforms, could be intercepted (network activity warrant). Not only would all of this be done without your consent or knowledge, but the fact of access by law enforcement could also be concealed. This is how three new warrants under the Identify and Disrupt bill, or the hacking bill, jeopardise people’s data, privacy and security in Australia.
Indeed, any device, online network or account, including social media profiles, used by people in Australia, could now be susceptible to hacking by Australian law enforcement agencies. The Identify and Disrupt Bill confers hacking powers on the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), enabling them to add, copy, delete or modify data, control online accounts and access communications data, through a data disruption warrant, an account takeover warrant, and a network activity warrant.
After being compelled by a Swiss court to monitor IP logs for a particular user, ProtonMail no longer claims that “we do not keep any IP logs.”
Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the netizen's arrest.
Police were executing a warrant obtained by French authorities and served on their Swiss counterparts through Interpol, according to social media rumours that ProtonMail chief exec Andy Yen acknowledged to The Register.
ProtonMail is an open-source webmail client distributed and licensed under GNU "General Public License" version 3.
The point of terrorism is to leverage the efforts of a small group in an attempt to modify the behavior of a much larger group.
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“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation’s enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren’t thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things WHETHER THEY ARE WARRANTED OR USEFUL OR NOT.
In 1956 two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon and the regulatory response was today’s air traffic control system. The FAA felt that by keeping most planes under positive control — telling them where to go and when — they could avoid future collisions. Yet collisions continue to happen. In 1978 a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane smashed into a small Cessna over San Diego despite the fact that both planes were flying under instrument rules and were under positive control. The FAA response that time was to carve up even more finely the sky over nearly every metropolitan area, controlling the airspace even more stringently with the intent of keeping instrument and visual traffic apart. There was no visual traffic in the San Diego accident, yet we still live with rules that arose from that accident even though those rules would not have prevented it.
So how will the FAA react this time? They will do what they have always done, pass new and stricter rules, and they will do so because it makes them feel better, not because it will actually help.
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Why, I find myself thinking, can’t we build a system that takes over control of the autopilot, locks out flight crew and hijackers alike, and lands the plane at the first sign of trouble. Well, we could, but it opens a whole new area of vulnerability — hijacking autopilots. Forget I said anything.
Ugandan prosecutors on Tuesday charged two lawmakers allied to opposition leader Bobi Wine with the murder of three people, following a spate of unsolved killings that have stoked widespread public alarm.
Wine's opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) dismissed the prosecution of the two MPs, Muhammad Ssegirinya and Mr Allan Ssewanyana, both NUP members, as a politically motivated attempt by authorities to smear the party.
Appearing at a court in Masaka town in central Uganda, south of the capital Kampala, the two were charged with the three murders and remanded in prison, Joel Ssenyonyi, a fellow NUP lawmaker and the party's spokesperson, told Reuters.
A lack of clarity on the Taliban's position on women in Afghanistan has generated "incredible fear" across the country, a senior U.N. official said on Wednesday, warning there were daily reports of curbs on the rights of women.
Alison Davidian, deputy head of UN Women in Afghanistan, said some women were being prevented from leaving home without a male relative, women in some provinces were forced to stop work, protection centers for women fleeing violence had been targeted and safe houses for rights activists were at full capacity.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree on Monday that temporarily bans social media platforms from removing many types of content, including misinformation about COVID-19 and the country’s upcoming presidential election.
Brazil’s new rules appear to be the first in the world to make certain types of content takedowns illegal under national law, even as other national governments around the world implement rules that force social media companies to take down more types of content proactively.
Between September 7, 2021 and midnight of September 9, 2021, internet services were suspended in four districts of Haryana due to ongoing farmers’ protests. The order has been circulating on social media, but is not available on the Government websites. The order does not lay out a factual justification for why the internet suspension is required, and does not justify the geographical extent of the suspension either. We wrote to the Haryana government to officially publish all orders related to the current internet shutdowns in the state and proactively publish any subsequent internet shutdown orders in compliance with the Supreme Court of India’s judgment in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2019).
Deliberate internet shutdowns enacted by governments around the world are increasing in frequency and sophistication, according to a recent report. The study, published by Google’s Jigsaw project with the digital rights nonprofit Access Now and the censorship measurement company Censored Planet, says internet shutdowns are growing “exponentially”: out of nearly 850 shutdowns documented over the last 10 years, 768 have happened since 2016.
India’s government has shut off the internet more than any other—109 times in 2020 alone—and data shows that shutdowns are most common around elections and times of potential civil unrest, leading to claims that it has become a tactic to suppress dissent. But while they are becoming more prevalent, shutdowns are also getting more subtle, using tactics like throttling a URL to dramatically slow its function, blocking particular internet addresses, and restricting the use of mobile data.
MIT Technology Review sat down with Dan Keyserling, the chief operating officer of Jigsaw, to discuss the growing phenomenon.
