Be careful becoming Bill’s liability/risk, or you too will be dead?
Summary: Even the full clip (fluff followed by this) fails to say that Gates actually paid the ‘news’ channel that did this ‘interview’; the response was mostly choreographed (likely prepared in advance by spokespeople), so there is no mention of Epstein's will among other serious and glaring issues
From Journalism’s Gates keepers (2020):
Summary: With Windows Vista Service Pack ’11′ promised “soon” remember why they’re so desperate to pretend Windows is "exciting" again (to the point of bribing the media just to say it while censoring commenters who disagree)
“Well the initial impression is how much it [Windows 7] looks like Vista. Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say.”
–Microsoft Jack (Schofield)
Yes, turns out London is in France
Summary: Team UPC has found a solution to the UPCA deadlock
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Budgie 21.10 Beta. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at Ubuntu Budgie 21.10 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13, Budgie Desktop 10.5.3, and uses about 1.2GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
Anti cheat has been one of the biggest hurdles for gaming on Linux but Valve has actually done it, they’ve got EAC and Battleye to bring support to Linux and allow people to play competive games in Proton
While the Linux kernel still hasn’t added any formal control yet for AMD Predictive Store Forwarding to disable it short of also toggling Spectre V4 / SSBD, with the Linux 5.16 kernel the AMD PSF bit will now be exposed to KVM guest virtual machines so that they — either with a patched/future kernel or for other operating systems — may choose to toggle explicitly disable this AMD CPU feature.
Predictive Store Forwarding is the Zen 3 feature in the name of performance that AMD provided a security analysis of earlier this year and the (small) possibility it could lead to incorrect CPU speculation. More than a half-year later, there still are no indications of any real-world attack on AMD PSF and the functionality remains enabled by default. But efforts to expose a PSF option for disabling it under Linux if so desired (aside from also engaging SSBD) have stalled.
AMD open-source driver developers today merged another big set of patches providing various micro-optimizations and other enhancements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
Ahead of Mesa 21.3 branching in a few weeks, the latest Mesa Git code saw a big set of patches today for the open-source RadeonSI driver. As with recent Mesa activity, there has been much work around SPECViewPerf/workstation optimizations and also further maturing the open-source driver’s NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) handling.
ince July we’ve seen AMD open-source driver engineers posting code for “Cyan Skillfish” as an APU with Navi 1x graphics. While initial support for Cyan Skillfish was merged for Linux 5.15, it turns out the display code isn’t yet wired up due to being a different DCN2 variant for its display block.
Cyan Skillfish is in a bit of an odd position since its a Navi 1x RDNA APU where as other leaks/rumors showed AMD moving straight from the existing Vega-based APUs over to Navi 2x / RDNA2 and not matching with other road-map expectations… Especially with the AMDGPU Linux driver stack already busy preparing for Yellow Carp / Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Possibly pointing to Cyan Skillfish being more of a custom APU design is that it has slightly different display IP compared to existing RDNA/RDNA2 hardware.
This is my simple overview of two greatest group chat messengers from decentralization family, Element of Matrix and Movim of XMPP, with easy point of view everyone can try themselves. This is a discussion of usability from an end user without talking about technology stuffs like security or protocol. Let’s chat!
The gThumb 3.12 image viewer has been released. Also in August, 3.11.4 was released, which we have not yet written about. Let’s note some changes in new versions.
Recently OBS Studio 27.1 has appeared , the first minor release of the twenty-seventh major version of this professional video recording software, which is also one of the great prides of free software as its code is published under the GPLv2 license.
OBS Studio 27 was a turning point for the Linux application thanks to the fact that it finally brought official support for Wayland, something that was beginning to be necessary due to the slow but constant advancement of the graphical protocol, which could have its definitive consolidation in the year 2022 thanks to the progression of KDE Plasma and the apparent high probability that the Steam Deck, with the composer GameScope in SteamOS 3, will bet on Wayland by default.
Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord client on Debian 11 Bullseye.
FeedReader is a modern desktop application designed to complement existing web-based RSS accounts. It combines all the advantages of web based services like synchronisation across all your devices with everything you expect from a modern desktop application.
This beginner tutorial shows how to go about fixing the Bash: command not found error on Debian, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.
When you use commands in Linux, you expect to see an output. But sometimes, you’ll encounter issues where the terminal shows ‘command not found’ error.
As said in the article about mixnodes and validators, NYM is a technology aiming for providing privacy for the communications.
Once you get some tokens, PUNK at this time, you can use the web wallet to check the balance of your account and delegate it to mixnodes or gateways… but, using the binaries, you can additionally delegate to validators.
For doing this, we first need the nymd binary on our system to follow the procedure for compiling it from the documentation for validators, but skip the remaining parts https://nymtech.net/docs/run-nym-nodes/validators/.
I now have Fedora 34 running on all 7 nodes of my Turing Pi 1 cluster. Tedious to install, so these are just my notes.
If you’re running a website, or even if you’re a webmaster, you will definitely come across users that are annoying to the core. They may spam comments, or are just a nuisance for other users on your website. Another, more alarming reason for constant requests by a specific IP address is the security threat of a brute force attack on your website. In either case, you’ll just want to get rid of them pronto!
What these users are doing is they’re sending too many requests, and the best way to deal with them is to block their IP address. To do this is fairly easy if you’re using a Linux OS. You’ll have to use iptables to access IP Addresses on Linux.
Follow this article for all the commands to access IP addresses on your website and block them.
Today we are looking at how to install PulseEffects on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Keepalived is a system daemon that monitors services or systems continuously and achieve high availability in the event of failure. If one node is down then the second node will serve the resources. Keepalived is used for IP failover between two servers. Its facilities for load balancing and high-availability to Linux-based infrastructures. It worked on VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) protocol.
Usually we install and configure Keepalived in two server with one IP usually known as VIP (Virtual IP).
It’s been a while since we’ve touched on CrossOver. It’s a commercial product from CodeWeavers, the developers behind Wine and Proton, which allows Windows applications and games to run natively on Linux and macOS. Thankfully the janky old days of CrossOver running on Chromebooks through limited Android integration is now behind us. They have moved to having it instead run in the Linux (Crostini) environment which provides an enhanced experience. A lot of changes have been made under-the-hood since we last had a look at CrossOver just 4 years ago. Installation is easier, compatibility has gotten a lot better, and even the user interface has received some more polish. Check out all the new updates in CrossOver 21 over on the CodeWeavers blog.
Linux has made impressive leaps in terms of its accessibility to gamers of all genres, from the most avid map painting enthusiasts to the most competitive marksmen. Despite all of this, there are still game compatibility challenges to overcome from a large variety of sources, including frame rate consistency. We’re here to explore why many games that don’t have a high demand for resources inexplicably suffer, even when explicitly ported for play in Linux.
SuperTuxKart, one of the golden oldies when it comes to free and open source gaming has a new release out with SuperTuxKart 1.3 improving lots.
To help with performance STK now has the ability for you to change the rendering resolution scaling to get a performance boost, although it does reduce the image quality. There’s a few unused graphical effects removed, the texture code was improved, improved screen space reflection and more graphics updates.
The SuperTuxKart team is happy to announce the release of version 1.3. Online play is still compatible with the previous 1.x versions. Here are the changes compared to release candidate:
It took a little longer than usual, but article this week’s on what’s to come for the KDE world was released this weekend. The title of the post alone tells you a lot: “Plasma in progress”. So this means that Plasma 5.23 beta is now available, and in the list of new features that have advanced today there are many changes that will come in the next major release, namely in Plasma 5.24. One of them concerns the accent color that can be chosen. So, the KDE project starts to focus on the new features of Plasma 5.24 which already has many new features as you can see below.
HOT DOG Linux is only a Linux distribution in the broader sense. HOT DOG stands for
H orrible O bsolete T ypeface and D readful O nscreen G raphics for Linux, and the name says it all.The project tries to on a modern basis look and feel to imitate older user interfaces. This includes Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM and the surface of classic Macs. A display with a low DPI value is recommended for use, as the graphics used are only available in bitmap format in a predefined size. HOT DOG Linux can be used either in 5: 4 landscape mode or in 3: 4 in portrait mode.
OmniOS r151038v, r151036av and r151030dv are now available.
The open-source Solaris/Illumos ecosystem certainly isn’t vibrant these days like back during the Sun Microsystems times with OpenSolaris, but OmniOS continues progressing as one of the few still-active and useful Solaris/Illumos-powered platforms.
This is our third blog post since summer started in Europe and also the third time in a row we write a combined blog post for two development sprints. And it’s also the third consecutive report focused on improvements to the existing codebase rather than on new shiny features.
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora Linux 35 Beta, the next step towards our planned Fedora Linux 35 release at the end of October.
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New in this release is Fedora Kinoite—a KDE Plasma environment based on rpm-ostree technology. Like Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite provides atomic updates and an immutable operating system for increased reliability.
Fedora Linux 35 builds on the switch to PipeWire for managing audio by introducing WirePlumber as the default session manager. WirePlumber enables customization of rules for routing streams to and from devices.
Of course, there’s the usual update of programming languages and libraries: Python 3.10, Perl 5.34, PHP 8.0 and more!
The beta release marked the transition to the final stage of testing, in which only critical bug fixes are allowed. The release is scheduled for October 26th. This release covers Fedora Workstation , Fedora Server, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT, and Live builds delivered as spins with KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE and LXQt desktop environments. Assemblies are formed for x86_64, Power64, ARM64 (AArch64) architectures and various devices with 32-bit ARM processors.
The Fedora team have announced a new development snapshot of their popular Linux distribution. Fedora 35 Beta ships with GNOME 41 with an updated software manager, and utilities to improve laptop battery life.
“Fedora 35 Workstation Beta includes GNOME 41, the newest release of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 41 includes a redesigned Software application that makes it easier to find and install the tools you need. And now when you enable third-party repositories during installation, you’ll get access to flatpaks from Flathub to supplement the Fedora repository. Fedora 35 Workstation also includes power-profiles-daemon, which allows you to choose between optimizing for system performance or battery life. New in this release is Fedora Kinoite—a KDE Plasma environment based on rpm-ostree technology. Like Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite provides atomic updates and an immutable operating system for increased reliability. Fedora Linux 35 builds on the switch to PipeWire for managing audio by introducing WirePlumber as the default session manager. WirePlumber enables customization of rules for routing streams to and from devices.” Additional information can be found in the project’s release announcement.
The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 35 Beta, which includes updates spanning the Linux kernel to the desktop experience.
Fedora Workstation 35 comes with improved NVIDIA support under Wayland. This adds support for NVIDIA with XWayland, which means users who want to run applications that don’t have native Wayland support can still benefit from 3D support under NVIDIA drivers.
Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to F35 Beta on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert back if anything unforeseen happens.
Prior to the update to Fedora 35 Beta, apply any pending upgrades.
IBM Corp. has teamed up with the The LF AI & Data Foundation, an open-source group operating as part of the Linux Foundation, to launch a new toolkit for managing enterprise machine learning projects.
The toolkit is called the Machine Learning eXchange and made its debut today under an open-source license. According to IBM, the software aims to address a common challenge for enterprises developing artificial intelligence applications: duplicate work.
IBM and Linux Foundation AI (LFAI) launched Machine Learning eXchange (MLX) as a one stop shop for trusted data and AI artifacts in open source and open governance.
MLX provides a collection of free, open source, state-of-the-art deep learning models for common application domains. The curated list includes deployable models that can be run as a microservice on Kubernetes or OpenShift and trainable models where users can provide their own data to train the models.
MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux® products and services, today announced the immediate availability of MVShield support services for Rocky Linux. The Rocky Linux project was founded in late 2020, gathering immediate momentum since its inception with continued robust adoption during 2021.
I must admit, that knowing what an IBM Power Champion is, I am not surprised at all, that I was mistaken for an IBM Power Champion. I am a long time POWER user. Started with RS6000 boxes almost 30 years ago. I helped to install the largest POWER server in Hungary at the turn of the century. I supported Linux on the Genesi Pegasos, a PowerPC workstation, for many years. I was an active contributor and moderator on the power-developer forums and on power.org. And recently I support syslog-ng on POWER. POWER9 provided the best syslog-ng performance for years, and I have a strong suspicion that after a short break the release of POWER10 gives back the performance crown to the POWER architecture. Tead the article I wrote based on my OpenPOWER conference talk last year to see my history in detail and that I am not that active recently: I’m a POWER user
So why do people have the impression that I actively work on POWER technologies? I guess it’s because of my job. If I am enthusiastic about a technology, I talk about it loud and clear. Even if it is not part of my job. And my enthusiasm is contagious. I am a technology evangelist, and by definition it means that I advocate technologies and help them in many possible ways. For my job I work with sudo and syslog-ng, however if I like something, it receives the same treatment – in my free time. You can learn more about being an open source evangelist from my article on opensource.com: What is an open source evangelist?
In the article Automate Red Hat JBoss Web Server deployments with Ansible, we fully automated the setup of an Apache Tomcat server instance. In this follow-up, we’ll further customize the behavior of the Java web server. We will also use this opportunity to replace the Apache Tomcat distribution we deployed previously with Red Hat JBoss Web Server.
Way back in Linux 5.2 was a “YOLO” mode for the DAWR register required for debugging with hardware watchpoints. This register functions properly on POWER8 but has an erratum on pre-DD2.3 POWER9 steppings (what Raptor sells as “v1″) where the CPU will checkstop — invariably bringing the operating system to a screeching halt — if a watchpoint is set on cache-inhibited memory like device I/O. This is rare but catastrophic enough that the option to enable DAWR anyway is hidden behind a debugfs switch.
In the first part of my interview with Sam Knuth, a fellow Open Organization Ambassador, we discussed how leaders need to make time to be open. Openness isn’t effortless.
In this second part, Sam and I discuss how executive leaders support their managers and teams in leading with open values. Because of the confidentiality of some of the answers (we’re colleagues at Red Hat, after all), I am summarizing the interview in a series of articles that highlight and share some of Sam’s most memorable observations and practices.
The bookworm (Debian 12 ‘Bookworm’) is ready for download and testing. If you find Debian boring, you can take part in the test of version 12 and learn better. After the freeze and release phase of Debian 11, the developers are back to work. Gnome 40.4 is already included in the test version ‘Debian 12 Bookworm’. Download, try, help test!
Gnome 40 is a turning point in the Gnome world as it makes the graphical environment more attractive, brighter and less cluttered compared to the 3-series versions. You can stand by the reduced desktop environment however you want; It is always attractive and modern. With GNOME 41, the options for settings have been expanded again, as we reported.
My Western Digital 2 TB “EasyStore” finally crashed after 5 years.
Luckily, I back up things that are important in numerous places, so I lost very little that was ultimately that important, but when I purchased a replacement, the best deal I could find (with my spouse’s 10% Walmart discount and my 5% back in points from the credit card people on Walmart’s website) was a 4 TB Toshiba Canvio Advance.
The review of reliability (as far as drives go) was hard to determine, as the BackBlaze article I was able to gloss over said they appear to be at least as reliable as other major brands, but that they just didn’t have as many to compare. Fair enough. For 2.9 cents per GB, it made sense to try one out. So that’s what I’m using now.
I formatted it to Ext4 for use with Linux, as non-native NTFS volumes require third party userspace drivers, because of all of Microsoft’s nasty patents and if Microsoft’s own repair tools for NTFS can sometimes themselves corrupt NTFS volumes, even though NTFS dates back to 1993, I’m not hopeful for third party tools. You get better reliability and I/O efficiency, and better CPU usage stats, out of native file systems. Period. And while NTFS being compatible with Windows is an argument for NTFS, it’s not that much of one. With Linux having a kernel module for ExFAT now with read/write support and a tools package, you’d probably be better off with that if cross-platform compatibility is going to be a concern.
(The Macs have read/write ExFAT but cannot write NTFS. Toshiba suggested that Mac users reformat it to Horrible File System + extended attributes, not the actual name, but I jest. Anyway, then it wouldn’t work right with Windows or Linux. Though it was nice of them not to just do what hardware vendors normally do. Preformat it for the Mac and add fifty bucks and say it’s the Mac version).
Plus, I think Windows can read Ext4 now, so really, even if I encounter Windows again, meh.
Regardless, while I was formatting the sucker, something odd popped out at me.
The Bangle.js 2 is an upgraded, improved version of the Bangle.js hackable, JavaScript smartwatch based on NordicSemi nRF52832 SoC that was introduced in 2019 with ESPruino open-source firmware.
The new watch comes with a new rectangular design, a Nordic Semi nRF52840 SoC that offers four times the RAM, twice the on-chip and external flash, plus an always-on sunlight-readable screen with full touchscreen support, and improved Bluetooth signal strength.
Aaeon’s $900-and-up “Boxer-6643-TGU” system combines Intel’s 11th Gen CPU with up to 64GB DDR4, 2.5GbE and GbE, 3x USB 3.2 Gen2, 2.5-inch SATA, and M.2 B- and M-key slots. A smaller “Boxer-6450-TGU” model is also in the works.
Aaeon has launched a rugged, fanless embedded computer equipped with Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake UP3 processors. The Boxer-6643-TGU, which starts at $900 with a dual-core Core i3-1115G4E, is designed for embedded controller, digital signage, and Industrial IoT (IIoT) gateway applications. Supported OSes include Ubuntu 20.04.2, Win 10 IoT, and Win 10 Pro. Aaeon also revealed a smaller, reduced-feature Boxer-6450-TGU mini-PC, which is due later this year (see farther below)
DIamond Systems’ Saturn is a rugged Intel Atom x5-E3940 powered SBC with an industrial analog and digital data acquisition subsystem, as well as PCIe/104 OneBank and mini PCIe sockets for I/O expansion.
The Saturn SBC is also equipped with either 4GB non-ECC or 8GB ECC RAM, SATA, two Gigabit Ethernet networking interfaces, two HDMI video outputs, multiple USB and serial interfaces, and more… most available through positive latching connectors that comply with the PCIe/104 standard, which also allows for stacking multiple expansion boards through the PCIe/104 Onebank connectors.
MiTac’s 3.5-inch “PD11TGS” SBC is equipped with an 11th Gen U-series CPU with quadruple display support plus 2.5GbE, GbE, 4x USB 3.2 Gen2, SATA III, and M.2 E-key and B-key slots with nano-SIM.
ICP Germany has begun distributing what appears to be MiTac’s first 3.5-inch SBC. The 3.5-inch form-factor PD11TGS board follows MiTac’s MP1-11TGS embedded system, which similarly runs on Intel’s 10nm-fabricated, 11th Gen Tiger Lake ULP. Other Tiger Lake-U based 3.5-inch boards include Commell’s LE-370, among others.
Changing colors during a 3D print is notoriously difficult. Either you need multiple heads ready to go during the print which increases operating and maintenance costs for your printer, or you need to stop the print to switch the filament and then hope that everything matches up when the print is resumed. There are some workarounds to this problem, but not many of them are as smooth an effortless as this one which uses erasable pen ink to add colors to the filament on the fly.
[Jaryd] even made their own spring for this beast using a drill and a 3D-printed cylinder chucked into it. But the best part has to be the way it works: by actuating a regular-sized key switch connected to an Arduino.
Modern television remote controls have a massive number of buttons compared to their more primitive predecessors, and because of this, seniors can struggle with knowing which button to press and when as well as having difficulties seeing the small text. This problem inspired Instructables user omerrv to create a device that he calls the Sababox, which contains just a few large, easily-pressable buttons for simple use.
Tutanota, a leading end-to-end encrypted mail service, is giving free premium subscriptions to open-source developers.
Online privacy matters. And, people associated with open-source projects prefer using privacy-focused solutions for the same reason.
If you are a part of an open-source project (project lead or an active contributor) older than 30 days, you can get free premium accounts for all your team members.
So the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2021 has been going on for not yet 48h now and it appears people are having fun, enjoying discussions between fellow Debian people and getting some stuff done as well. I guess I’ll write some more about it once the event is over…
The release of the browser Google Chrome 94 took place. Chromium 94 was also released. Let’s note some changes in the new release. Chrome is a browser from Google based on the free browser Chromium. It is partially proprietary. It is cross-platform, available for desktop and mobile operating systems.
A new Google Chrome zero-day exploit is currently putting the company’s user data at risk. Various cybersecurity experts claimed that this issue could be more dangerous compared to common system flaws.
Here’s the opening session from last week’s LibreOffice Conference 2021!
More sessions to come, plus a playlist and PeerTube alternatives…
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The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is organizing the coding competition “Youth Hacking 4 Freedom” (YH4F) for European teenagers (14-18). Six winners will receive a cash prize and a trip to Brussels. There will be an opening event October 10 and registration will remain open until October 31.
This was not an one-off situation either. We had multiple customers with years of uptime. In one of the academic institutes, the uptime was well into decades, that multiple sysadmins changed, but the netware box tirelessly worked on. At some point of time, nobody knew where the server was physically located, as nobody looked at it as everything worked fine.
In almost all the cases, the hardware failed before the software. The software was engineered so well that it would have run forever on superior hardware (albeit not so efficiently capable of using the modern hardware in its true potential). Those days, even the hardware was built to last for decades. It was the good old times before the planned obsolescence.
Fast forward to today, 2021. I have a Redmi 4 android phone, built by the mass manufacturer Xiaomi. I bought it on May 30th 2017 and still use it everyday. I always purchase things for long-term. I believe in BuyItForLife principles. I maintain my hardware properly (Fully discharge and then recharge, handle with care etc.). Even my prior phone, a Motorola E398 lasted me a about a decade, before the charger gave up.
While Keith Packard is known for his work on X11/X.Org, the past few years he has also been developing Picolibc as a C library intended for embedded systems. He also recently jumped from SiFive to Amazon and appears at the ecommerce giant to be working on Picolibc in an official capacity, presumably for use on Amazon’s growing hardware devices.
Keith packard presented virtually yesterday for the Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit North America on Picolibc in an Amazon capacity. Picolibc 1.0 released back in 2019 and we’ve covered it a few times since while this was the first status update we’ve heard on the project for 2021.
When I wrote about Bangle.js 2 JavaScript smartwatch yesterday, I noticed they used “Heatshrink compression” in ESPruino firmware. I can’t remember ever reading about Heatshrink before, and indeed there are no results while searching on CNX Software.
Heatshrink is an open-source data compression library designed for resources-constrained embedded systems that works with as little as 50 bytes of RAM. That’s impressive, so let’s investigate.
he 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web passed earlier this year. Naturally, this milestone was met with truckloads of nerdy fanfare and pining for those simpler times. In three decades, the Web has evolved from a promising niche experiment to being an irreplaceable component of global discourse. For all its many faults, the Web has become all but essential for billions around the world, and isn’t going anywhere soon.
As the mainstream media lauded the immense success for the Web, another Internet information system also celebrated thirty years – Gopher. A forgotten heavyweight of the early Internet, the popularity of Gopher plummeted during the late 90s, and nearly disappeared entirely. Thankfully, like its plucky namesake, Gopher continued to tunnel across the Internet well into the 21st century, supported by a passionate community and with an increasing number of servers coming online.
Vulkan 1.2.194 is out as the latest spec revision to this high performance graphics and compute API.
Vulkan 1.2.194 comes with the usual assortment of documentation fixes/clarifications collected over the past week. Plus there is one new extension.
Since I have been working from home during this fall/winter season up north, in the woods, I also setup a mini-network here with a nice: 802.11ac tri-band POE-AP, Netgear gigabit-ethernet POE-SWITCH, and the famous TP-LINK archer C7-V5 OpenWRT router/firewall. These all make for a great, stable, and reliable home network configuration when used together!
As mentioned previously, open source skills are in high demand, with 92 percent of hiring managers reporting difficulty finding skilled talent, according to the recent 2021 Open Source Jobs Report from the Linux Foundation and edX. In this article, we’ll look at specific in-demand skills and other insights from the survey.
“Open source talent is in high demand, encouraging the most experienced pros to look for new opportunities while hiring managers battle it out for the most desirable candidates,” said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. “For those looking for the best career paths, it is evident that cloud native computing, DevOps, Linux, and security hold the most promising opportunities.”
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), openSUSE (gd, grilo, nodejs14, and transfig), Oracle (nodejs:14 and squid), Red Hat (kernel and shim and fwupd), SUSE (apache2, atftp, gd, and python-Pillow), and Ubuntu (apache2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.11, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, and vim).
Hikvision has released updates to mitigate a command injection vulnerability—CVE-2021-36260—in Hikvision cameras that use a web server service. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected device.
Browser extensions make attractive attack targets. That’s not necessarily because of the data handled by the extension itself, but too often because of the privileges granted to the extension. Particularly extensions with access to all websites should better be careful and reduce the attack surface as much as possible. Today’s case study is Custom Cursor, a Chrome extension that more than 6 million users granted essentially full access to their browsing session.
The National Security Agency (NSA) and CISA have released the cybersecurity information sheet Selecting and Hardening Standards-based Remote Access VPN Solutions to address the potential security risks associated with using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Remote-access VPN servers allow off-site users to tunnel into protected networks, making these entry points vulnerable to exploitation by malicious cyber actors.
A Preliminary Analysis of Collection Technologies, Data Collection Laws, and Legislative Reform during COVID-19
This report focused on how data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the extent to which privacy inhibited pandemic responses in Canada, and how Canadian privacy legislation introduced during the pandemic would problematically have rewritten federal commercial privacy law had it not died on the order paper.
In analyzing how COVID-19 data has been collected in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, we found that the breadth and extent of data collection constituted entirely novel technological responses to a health crisis despite the fact that many of the adopted methods could be mapped onto a trajectory of past collection practices. We also found that the ability for private companies such as Google and Apple to forcefully shape some of the technology-enabled pandemic responses speaks to the significant ability of private companies to guide public health measures that rely on contemporary smartphone technologies.
Throughout the pandemic concerns have arisen that privacy, or privacy law, would prevent governments from adequately collecting, using, or sharing data to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We did not find that privacy law was responsible for the problems that have arisen throughout Canadian governments’ responses to the pandemic. Privacy, health, and emergencies laws that were in place since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic ensured that governments and private organizations alike were able to mobilize information to combat the pandemic.
Finally, in assessing potential future privacy legislation that emerged in the wake of the pandemic, we found that the Canadian government’s proposed legislation could have significantly extended the ability of private organizations to collect, use, or disclose personal information without individuals’ consent. Moreover, had the Canadian-style legislation been adopted into law then it would have failed to include a human rights-based focus, with the effect of insufficiently protecting Canadians’ personal information at a time where such protections are sorely needed.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) constitutes one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations, and its main purpose is to promote and protect intellectual property across the world by cooperating with countries as well as other international organizations involved. WIPO has an international ‘Patent Cooperation Treaty’ (PCT) that has been ratified by at least 153 countries worldwide, including the United Arab Emirates. A PCT application can be best understood as the procedure through which applicants can seek international protection for their patents. International patents are granted as an exclusive right granted for an invention, which provides a new method or industrial applicability.
The incorporated system allows the applicants to file a single application under the PCT in order to seek patent protection in a number of countries altogether instead of processing individual applications to each member country. Such a procedure allows an applicant to save both time and money and allows them to process patent protection internationally in a highly convenient and simplified procedure.
Today’s decision in SRI Int’l., Inc. v. Cisco Sys., Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2021) is an important Federal Circuit decision regarding enhanced damages for willful infringement. It also adds further to the complexity of Federal Circuit doctrine on enhanced damages — despite the Supreme Court’s warning against an “unduly rigid” approach in Halo Elecs., Inc. v. Pulse Elecs., Inc., 136 S. Ct. 1923 (2016).
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Based upon the lower-standard for willfulness, the appellate panel reinstated the jury verdict of willfulness and also reinstated the district court’s award of double-damages.*
According to a report of the UPC Preparatory Committee, the German government deposited the instrument of ratification for the PPA on 27 September 2021. It wrote: “This is a decisive step on the way to the establishment of the Unified Patent Court after the work had been on hold for several years during the examination of the Agreement by the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC).”
In a press statement, the German minister of Federal Justice, Christine Lambrecht, said: “With this step we have come a decisive step closer to European patent reform, which is so important for innovative companies in Europe. The Unified Patent Court will come. For German industry, which holds around 40 percent of all registered European patents, better protection of their inventions in the European internal market is of particular importance. This also applies to small and medium-sized companies that make a significant contribution to the innovative potential of our country. ”
If you want a great Linux experience, we recommend getting a laptop that comes with a Linux OS pre-installed. That way your laptop’s hardware and drivers will work without a hitch. Here are our recommendations to do just that.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Archcraft 2021.09.25 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The past month we have started our testing of Ampere’s Altra Max M128-30, the company’s new 128 core server processor, and in this article today are our initial benchmarks of this promising chip for high core count servers in both 1P and 2P configurations tested.
At the end of 2020 we looked at Ampere Altra that offered up to 80 cores per socket using Neoverse N1 cores on a TSMC 7nm process, supporting eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory, 128 PCI Express Gen4 lanes, and other features that put it in line for competing with the latest AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon wares. Ampere is now shipping the Altra Max as a drop-in upgrade that offers up to 128 cores per socket.
In the new version, the “Line-to-Path” function has been improved so that it works again on text and the ID of an object is no longer lost when undoing. The Object-to-Path feature has been improved so that it acts on an object with a live path effect when undone without undoing the previous action. In addition, the screen has been improved so that it no longer blurs when the window is moved from a HiDPI display to a non-HiDPI display.
eSpeak NG is a command line, multi-lingual software speech synthesizer for English and many other languages. We can convert text to speech using eSpeak NG in Linux and Unix-like systems. eSpeak NG is an updated version of eSpeak engine created by Jonathan Duddington.
eSpeak NG will read aloud the given text for you! It can able to speak text either from standard input or from a file. So, you can directly give the phrase to speak as input for eSpeak NG or save the text in a file and then pass that text file as an input. It uses text-to-speech to speak through the default sound device.
OBS Studio 27.1 is here almost four months after OBS Studio 27.0 to add YouTube integration, a feature that helps users connect their YouTube account without using a stream key, create and manage YouTube streams through a new “Manage Broadcast” button, and easily set up settings for their streams, such as privacy settings, description, title, scheduling, etc.
In addition, the new YouTube integration comes with a read-only chat dock for public and unlisted broadcasts, as well as bandwidth testing support in the Auto-Configuration wizard, a feature that’s only available when you’re logged in to your YouTube account.
GPU-Viewer is graphical tool to show the detailed information about OpenGL, Vulkan, and/or OpenCL graphics libraries.
Without struggling with glxinfo, vulkaninfo and clinfo command line tools, the GTK+3 tool provides a graphical front-end that shows all the important details.
Port forwarding transfers network traffic from one network listener (called a “port”) to another, either on the same computer or a different computer. Ports, in this context, are not physical objects but a software routine listening for network activity.
When traffic directed at a specific port arrives at a router or a firewall, or other networked application, the response it receives can be defined according to the port it’s trying to communicate with. When you use port forwarding, you can catch communication coming in on port 8080, for instance, and forward it on to port 80 instead. The new destination port may be on the same device as the one receiving the signal or on a different device. There are many ways to forward ports, and there are different reasons for doing it. This article demonstrates the most common scenarios.
Ruby on Rails® is an open-source web framework written in Ruby. It helps you create highly powerful web sites and appls.
Rails is released under MIT license.
Also Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, provide default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.
So this guide will help you to install Ruby on Rails on CentOS / RHEL 8.
The KVM is defined as a Kernel-based Virtual Machine that is an excellent arrangement for running other operating systems on Linux. It uses the Hypervisor emulator for creating virtual machine environments. It requires the hardware level configuration. The KVM works with the machine’s processor, system memory, hard disk, network, and parameters of the host machine. In Linux, using is KVM is secure and safe. You can manage the storage management, RAM usages, and power. Even you can schedule virtual machines on Linux through the KVM. Now, the issue you might think when you want to migrate and use your Virtualbox hypervisor VMs to your KVM system is starting it all over again, which is time taking and complex.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ngxtop on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ngxtop is a free, open-source, flexible, and real-time monitoring tool for Nginx web servers. It can parse the Nginx access log and print the information about request count, requested URI, the number of requests by status code, 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 the step-by-step installation of the Ngxtop real-time metrics for the Nginx server 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 change the timezone on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, By default, when a server is provisioned a default timezone will get configured automatically with the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). It happens that sometimes your system may have the wrong time zone or want to change the time zone due to the nature of working or forgot to set the right time zone at the time of installing the Debian operating system.
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 set timezone on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
With the rise of social media platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and online chat platforms such as discord, we have seen online bulletin forum communities dwindle. Personally, as I just mentioned, they are slowly making a comeback in specific niche communities over the newer additions. phpBB is one of the most extended open-source forum bulletin software on the market.
phpBB isn’t the only option. Others such as VBulletin, Nodebb, Xenforo, and so on, but most of these are paid with mixed reviews. VBulletin used to be a powerhouse, but now it’s a shadow of its former self. Xenforo is one of the best-paid bulletin pieces of software. However, that is just my personal opinion, but I will always choose phpBB first as it’s free, open-source, and has some great 3rd party open-source developers, both new devs and ones that have been around since the start.
Blue Recorder is a simple desktop recorder for Linux systems. An app built using Rust, GTK+ 3 and ffmpeg. In this tutorial, learn how to install Blue Recorder on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian and openSUSE Linux using Flatpak packages.
Delta Chat is a free and Open-Source messaging application that is similar to Whatsapp or Telegram without tracking and it doesn’t require any phone number for login.
Delta Chat doesn’t have any servers to store user data, instead, they are using the existing e-mail server network.
You can chat with anyone if you know their e-mail address by using Delta Chat instead of mobile no.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to create Symbolic Links on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, A symbolic link, also known as a symlink or soft link is a type of file in Linux that points to another file or a folder on your computer. Symlinks are similar to shortcuts in Windows. By using symbolic links, you make it possible to more easily access other files that might reside in complicated directory paths or are required for certain services.
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 create Symbolic Links with practice examples.
PHP Composer is basically a dependency management tool for PHP applications. It provides hassle-free installation of PHP modules for the applications. The composer keeps track of all the modules required for the application and installs them with a single command. It also allows users to keep modules updated. You can easily install all the required packages using Composer. The composer maintains a list of required packages in a JSON file called composer.json.
Composer is a similar tool to npm for Node.js, pip for Python, and bundler for ROR. Composer 2 is the latest available version for your system with enhanced performance. We will use that version to install on our system.
This tutorial helps you to install and use PHP composer on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux system.
Linux comes with a powerful tool named find to find a file (or files). It can recursively search into subdirectories for a file (or files) based on certain conditions.
In this tutorial, we learn how to find a file in Linux using the command line.
HA Proxy stands for High Availability Proxy written on C. It is a free and open source TCP/HTTP load balancer and proxy solution for TCP and HTTP based applications. HA Proxy allows you to balance incoming TCP / HTTP Traffic by distributing load across backend server using different criteria.
The use of HA Proxy is to provide fault tolerance and high availability in case when one node is getting too many concurrent requests. It is used by most famous web sites like GitHub, Stack Overflow and Tumbler.
HA Proxy allows an application to restart automatically or reroute work to another server in the event of a failure. HA Proxy is a powerful, high power, reliable and secure load balancer.
In his tutorial we will install and configure HA Proxy on CentOS 8.
Google’s UI toolkit Flutter is getting increasingly popular for creating cross-platform applications for the mobile, web and desktop.
Flutter is not a programming language but a software development kit. Dart is the programming language used underneath the Flutter SDK.
Flutter is the main framework behind Google’s open source Fuchsia OS, Google STADIA and many other software and mobile apps.
If you want to start developing with Flutter, this tutorial will help you to get your set-up ready on Ubuntu and hopefully other Linux distributions.
When you realize that your branch name in Git is not suitable while collaborating on a project, you can rename the branch name easily on your local and remote.
This guide explains how to change the name of the branch on your local and remote.
By releasing version 0.1, the GTK+3 file search tool FSearch finally goes stable after 5 years of development.
FSearch is a free and open-source file search utility, inspired by Everything Search Engine. It’s super fast that you get instant result as you type. The app supports wildcard and RegEx, so users can use * and a series of characters to define filters.
It by default uses traditional UI with menu bar. However, it provides option to enable client-side decorations so to look modern in GNOME desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc). And “dark mode” is supported for those working at night.
The ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems are some of the most known and used filesystems specifically designed for Linux. The first one, ext2 (second extended filesystems) is, as its name suggests, the older of the three. It has no journal feature, which is the biggest advantage of its successor over him: ext3. Released in 2008, ext4 is the more recent, and currently the default filesystem on many Linux distributions.
A common set of utilities made to work with these filesystems are part of the e2fsprogs package. In this tutorial we see how to use two of them: dumpe2fs and tune2fs, respectively to retrieve information and tune its parameters.
The current popularity of cryptocurrencies also includes trading in them. Last year, I wrote an article How to automate your cryptocurrency trades with Python which covered the setup of a trading bot based on the graphical programming framework Pythonic, which I developed in my leisure. At that time, you still needed a desktop system based on x86 to run Pythonic. In the meantime, I have reconsidered the concept (web-based GUI). Today, it is possible to run Pythonic on a Raspberry Pi, which mainly benefits the power consumption because such a trading bot has to be constantly switched on.
That previous article is still valid. If you want to create a trading bot based on the old version of Pythonic (0.x), you can install it with pip3 install Pythonic==0.19.
This article covers the setup of a trading bot running on a Raspberry Pi and executing a trading algorithm based on the EMA crossover strategy.
Ready to run gun and explode some pixels? Zenovia Interactive and publisher Tribute Games have launched Steel Assault, a fresh retro inspired 16-bit 2D action platformer. Another great title ported to Linux with FNA by Ethan Lee.
“You are Taro Takahashi, a resistance soldier on a revenge mission against the dictator who lords over the ashes. You’ll punch enemies and zipline your way out of danger in a post-apocalyptic America beautifully rendered in 16-bit-style graphics.”
Lonesome Village is an upcoming puzzle-solving adventure that also blends in a few life sim features from developer Ogre Pixel has been delayed until 2022. This is a game that was crowdfunded on Kickstarter back in October 2020 that gained around £77,855 in backing.
Writing in a fresh announcement on Kickstarter, the team explained “we must sadly inform you that due to the amount of work needed to deliver Lonesome Village as polished as possible the release date has to be extended beyond what we had anticipated, and therefore the release of the game must be delayed to 2022″.
A Gummy’s Life might not be as well known as say Gang Beasts but it’s a great wobbly-physics party game that really is a lot of fun to play and it just got a lot bigger. Honestly if you didn’t like Gang Beasts but like the idea then I think you might find a home with A Gummy’s Life.
Giving you a range of small areas to fight in, the game is all about comedy. Everything about it is silly and it’s hard not to laugh at how ridiculous the characters are with them being based on sweets (or candy if you’re American – whatever). . A big 1.1.0 update went out adding cross play with the various consoles, cosmetics you can add to your gummies, 3 new maps, a training map for local play, 2 new unlockable gummies, a new difficulty mode to unluck, a rework of the grabbing system, a better AI and lots more tweaks.
plitgate is the popular and free to play first-person shooter with portals from 1047 Games and a fresh upgrade is out to hopefully make the experience even better.
One of the big new gameplay features is Mantling, so you can grab a ledge to help you get up onto a platform. They’ve not done it as a first-person grabbing animation though, instead as if your jetpack is given a tiny boost so it won’t get in the way of shooting. It’s something that can be turned off too if you prefer.
One developer that has actually properly released a statement on updating Easy Anti-Cheat to support Linux and Proton for the Steam Deck is Fatshark for Warhammer: Vermintide 2.
Recently Epic Games announced that Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux had expanded to offer full support for native games and on an opt-in basis for the Wine / Proton compatibility layers. Since it’s opt-in, it does need developers to go and manually sort it out. Epic said it requires “just a few clicks” to enable but that’s not quite the whole story. Developers still of course need to test it working.
OBS Studio is the free and open source recording and livestreaming app used by many content creators and a big new release is now available with YouTube integration.
This means you can now connect up with YouTube instead of supplying a streaming key, and it gives you a bunch of options to help manage YouTube livestreams. Much like the Twitch integration, for Linux you need to be using their official package otherwise you need to supply your own client keys for API interaction (source).
If you’re just a GNOME user, there’s a lot to like about the latest version of this popular Linux desktop interface. But, if you’re a GNOME developer, there’s more to love in it.
Firstly, as for the interface itself, it now boasts a new top utility for discovering and installing applications called Software. OK, so the name isn’t anything to write home about, but it seems faster, and it’s easy enough to use.
Fedora Linux 35 is the next major version of the popular GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat and it’s now available for public beta testing one month ahead of the planned release on October 26th, 2021.
As expected, Fedora Linux 35 will pack all the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software. The beta version ships with the RC (Release Candidate) development version of the latest GNOME 41 desktop environment series, which brings some cool new features and improvements for the Fedora Workstation edition.
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce Fedora Linux 35 Beta. This release continues the Fedora Project’s emphasis on delivering leading-edge open source technologies and includes updates spanning the Linux kernel to the desktop experience.
Fedora Linux 35 Beta is all about polish — extending existing features and adding new features or support to level up the experience of using Fedora Linux. Whether you use Fedora on the desktop, as a cloud-based image, or as a Linux container image, you’ll find improvements that make Fedora 35 a pleasant upgrade.
After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions.
Fedora 35 Beta Workstation is making use of the newly released GNOME 41 desktop environment to provide the very latest desktop enhancements there, many of which were developed by Red Hat engineers. Also on the desktop side, PipeWire continues to be used for all audio needs while WirePlumber has become the default session manager.
Self-healing infrastructure brings together monitoring, streaming, intelligence and automation so that organizations can respond more quickly to datacenter events, reducing operational toil and improving reliability while, to a reasonable degree, minimizing human intervention.
The trigger of events as well as the automation that is applied in response are both part of the story. In this post, we explore how Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can be used as core components of a self-healing infrastructure.
This summer marked an important milestone for Red Hat and our partners: Two years ago we announced the closing of the IBM acquisition. This was not only a turning point for Red Hat and the industry as a whole, but also for our partners. We told partners that Red Hat would maintain our neutrality and commitment to supporting a collaborative, open partner ecosystem. Since then, we have seen a lot of change, from new leadership to product updates and a global pandemic, but one thing remains constant – Red Hat is still Red Hat.
Red Hat is firmly focused on building further capabilities into our portfolio of solutions to meet even more customer needs and anticipate future growth opportunities. This of course is rooted in open hybrid cloud – going beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux and into emerging technologies out to the edge. To help customers reach the full potential of open hybrid cloud and address challenges along the way, Red Hat needs our partners.
With this in mind, here are a few key resources for our partners to navigate recent product updates and future opportunities:
An automation-first mentality is likely a significant transformation for any organization, typically starting with task automation, moving to complex workflow orchestration, and ultimately innovating intelligent operations and “push-button” end-user services. It represents a solid commitment for DevSecOps—acknowledging the competitive edge this type of cultural change can provide. But getting there, and finding and building the necessary support for it, are real challenges—even when there’s been some initial success running automations in individual departments.
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Training and certification are critical to all aspects of adopting an automation-first mentality. Not only is it key to helping your team deploy automations confidently, but it also helps build momentum for broader automation adoption across your organization. You can benefit from a “train-the-trainer” approach that empowers other teams while ensuring compliance with established automation standards and governance.
Many organizations use strategic outside consulting engagements to help accelerate the automation adoption process. That can be unnerving to IT professionals within the organization—fearing this represents permanent outsourcing or job loss. But good consulting engagements have measurable, finite goals that enable and empower these teams through a mentoring relationship—leaving them with automation in production and the capabilities to continue work on increasingly complex projects and use cases.
While many years ago Fedora’s Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora’s Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair.
Fabio Valentini who is apparently the only one left in the Java Maintainership SIG (Special Interest Group), started a mailing list thread on Sunday about the poor state of affairs.
Lightning talks are short presentations that focus on just a couple of key points. Done well, they are a great way to get your point across in a small amount of time. The time restriction forces speakers to edit their message to focus on the most important elements.
Scientists and technologists often use lightning talks to shift their approach from “look at everything I know” to “what is the most important thing for you to know right now?”
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For IT and business leaders, lightning talks can be a valuable tool to sharpen delivery and showcase the value of complex information. They can be particularly useful for introducing new topics, presenting a challenge or call to action, and sharing knowledge and experience. They can also be a refreshing way to provide status updates.
Agile leaders often use lightning talks to foster collaboration and enable their teams to share insights in a focused, “time-boxed” way. Teams can also use these occasions to offer feedback to the product owner and other stakeholders at the end of a sprint. Product owners can also use this format to share their vision or business needs with scrum team(s) for upcoming sprints.
Q4OS 4.6 is code-named Gemini and is based on Debian GNU / Linux 11. The version of the distribution that is now available is an LTS release that will be updated for at least 5 years.
As a desktop environment, either Plasma 5.20 or the Trinity Desktop from KDE 3 in version 14.0.10 can be used. The lightweight Trinity desktop in particular is very popular with the community, as it can be operated smoothly even on older hardware. This also explains that the distribution is not only available for 64bit / x64 and 32bit / i686pae computers, but a variant for older i386 systems without PAE extension is also available.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 702 for the week of September 19 – 25, 2021.
This hacker-friendly piece of horological hardware is the brainchild of Espruino developer Gordon Williams. Much like Williams’ earlier efforts in this area, the Bangle.js 2 runs on JavaScript.
Yup, JavaScript; it seems JS really can run everywhere!
Specifically the Bangle.js uses the open source Espruino JavaScript interpreter. This is custom designed software for devices with extremely low hardware resources, like microcontrollers.
Version 5.1 of pgFormatter, a free and reliable tool used to format SQL and PLPGSQL code, has been officially released and is publicly available for download. A demonstration site is available online at http://sqlformat.darold.net/
pgFormatter is the most advanced SQL and PlPgsql code formatter and beautifier dedicated to PostgreSQL. It is provided as a CLI or a CGI program.
Version 2.4.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for Oracle is out.
This release provides support for PostgreSQL v14.
Eleven years ago, on 28 September 2010, a new chapter in the history of free office suites started: the creation of the LibreOffice project and the start of The Document Foundation as independent entity. Thanks truly to everyone who made this amazing journey possible. <3 Happy birthday!
On September 28, 2010, LibreOffice was announced to the world. After 11 years, the project and its global community are amongst the largest in the FLOSS ecosystem, and LibreOffice Technology sets the development path for personal productivity.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charity that empowers users to control technology. To inspire the younger generation to software freedom, the FSFE is organising the coding competition ‘Youth Hacking 4 Freedom’ (YH4F), where teenagers from all around Europe have the chance to compete in a fair and fun way. The winners receive a cash prize and a trip to Brussels with other young hackers.
The thin, atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene are the thinnest and simultaneously the strongest material known to science. Graphene was discovered about twenty years ago, but so far had no real-world, large scale application, also because of very high production costs.
The only issue I have with those “findings” is the “we, Facebook” part of the second bullet. It should read _“We PARENTS make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” by letting them use, without any support. something they cannot obviously handle by themselves.
No way they are. They are YOUR fault.
What happens when journalism is done with a software program that becomes obsolete? Adobe ending support for the Flash multimedia player means that, among other things, some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. Only twenty years after the fact, that is.
Vaccine passports are here; but what are they? Are they as useful as government authorities are claiming them to be or are they another form of discrimination being digitalised? In this post, we will take a look at these questions and more to understand whether use of vaccine passports for international travel should be allowed.
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Issuance of digital vaccine passports, not just for international travel but also for accessing public places and benefits, will also open another can of worms as it would pave the way for the creation of another digital identity scheme that may end up being discriminatory and exclusionary while facilitating surveillance (case in point being Aadhaar where linking welfare schemes to Aadhaar and its biometric verification system has caused mass exclusions, and has even led to starvation deaths). The Electronic Frontier Foundation emphasises the need to be mindful of “the potential that today’s vaccine passport will act as a catalyst toward tomorrow’s system of national digital identification that can be used to systematically collect and store our personal information”. For example, even though the National Digital Health Mission’s Health Data Management Policy states that its guiding principle is ‘security and privacy by design’, the overarching concern of large scale processing of health data in the absence of a data protection legislation remains.
If vaccine passports are made mandatory and issued digitally, it would require the “ability to uniquely identify an individual and validate vaccination status (which) requires international cooperation, orchestration across complex systems and widespread adoption of open interoperability standards to support secure data access or exchange”. Thus, it would result in the creation of a new database containing important health information which would be open to function creep, especially since India lacks a personal data protection law. Function creep occurs when a technology or system gradually widens its scope from its original purpose to encompass and fulfil wider functions. For example, the Delhi Police acquired facial recognition technology for the purpose of finding missing children but now is using them for wider investigation purposes. Such “centralized systems (also) carry risks of surveillance, profiling, exclusion, privacy violations, and cybersecurity threats”. Thus, digital vaccine passports may end up violating not just the right to privacy but also the rights to freedom of movement and peaceful assembly.
I’ve frequently said that marketing departments are the most damaging appendage of any modern corporation. However, there is one example of this which really proves the point: corporate songs, and more recently, corporate music videos. These Lovecraftian horrors are usually created in order to raise employee morale, typically at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours being wasted on meetings to compose the song by committee. But don’t take my word for it: here’s some examples.
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While I appreciate material where the jokes write themselves, these songs represent the worst of corporatism. Spend the money buying employees something they would actually appreciate, like a gift card or something instead of making these eldritch horrors. Dammit, I still have the PWC one stuck in my head. Gaaaaaaah!
Two years ago I explained why social media should NOT be instantaneous. Eight months ago I pointed out that the first to “slow down” should be [the most powerful “influencers”]. Now, it turns out that Facebook is doing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE…
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At times XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users. In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook.
In 1955, September was the holding of voting in selecting members of the DPR in the first general election in Indonesia, which was attended by 29 political parties and individuals. Where the election left a sad one, the general election committee was kidnapped and killed. The tragedy of the massacre in 1965-1966, the Tanjung Priok incident in 1984, the Semanggi II incident in 1999, the murder of Munir in 2004, to the brutality of the apparatus in the “Corruption Reformasi” action in 2019 yesterday caused one of my friends in the struggle who was a student at Halu Oleo University to be shot dead by the police. in action.
All of the above events took place in September, which the author calls “September Mourning”. The historical record has shown that from time to time the civilization of the Indonesian State has not yet ended with problems that pose a great risk, especially regarding the loss of life. This collection of tragedies in September demonstrates an understanding that what happened was an act of desertion.
This is a review of The Intellectual Property of Nations: Sociological and Historical Perspectives on a Modern Legal Institution by Laura R. Ford – Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College, New York.
In this book, Laura Ford draws on macro-historical sociological theories, to trace the development of intellectual property from antiquity to the modern nation-state system, showing how this infrastructure of power emerged. In doing so, using comparative and historical evidence, this groundbreaking work – representing nearly two decades of study – reflects on the role of intellectual property in our contemporary political communities and societies, on the close relationship between law and religion, and on the extent to which the law’s obliging force depends on ancient, written traditions.
We are delighted to share the news with clients and contacts that the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has launched its IP Access scheme providing SMEs with up to £5,000 (including VAT) to help protect and commercialise their IP. The scheme is part of a new government initiative to support post-pandemic recovery.
On 22 September 2021, China released a 15-year plan to develop intellectual property rights (IPR): ‘The Outline of Building a Powerful Intellectual Property Nation’ (2021–2035). The full text in Chinese is accessible at the Xinhuanet. The official English version will be made available here in due course. This post serves as a quick briefing.
On 30 September 2019 the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office issued guidelines regarding the examination standards for trademark applications in terms of absolute grounds, which were the first of their kind under Turkish law. Recently, a new chapter concerning the substantive examination standards for the assessment of confusing similarity has also been published.
Optis continues its winning courtroom streak against Apple. After last month’s $300M verdict in a Texas retrial, Optis has now obtained a favorable UK ruling: Apple faces a British sales ban unless it takes a license on FRAND terms yet to be determined by the London-based High Court of Justice.
I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, so for a thoughtful summary of the decision let me refer you to this write-up by Simmons & Simmons, which contains a link to the judgment (Word document). I just wanted to add my two cents regarding what’s next, and to comment on just one remark by Justice Richard Meade, whose recent contribution to a Chinese conference was really great.
Justice Meade notes in his judgment that Apple doesn’t deserve sympathy or strengthen its case by threatening to exit the UK market. In other words, he won’t allow his court to be bullied. I actually understand both sides: I can see why Apple’s counsel truthfully told the judge what her client might consider doing, but I can also see that a court can’t be swayed that way. Some judges react sensitively to what they perceive to be corporate bullying. I remember Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California noting that his court, unlike the plaintiff in the case before him at the time, was “not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.”
I doubt that Apple can get this injunction overturned on appeal. The UK courts from the lowest level to the highest have had a consistent position for years, and it amounts to requiring implementers to take a (worldwide!) license “on whatever terms are in fact FRAND.” Apple may not like the idea that it has to make a decision now, without knowing what terms will be set next year. But the UK courts are most likely going to continue to tell Apple that it has to trust them.
Can an artificial intelligence (“AI”) machine be an inventor and can the machine’s owner apply for a patent? These were two of the key questions which the Court of Appeal grappled with in Thaler v Comptroller General of Patents [2021] EWCA Civ 1374. The Court, by a 2-1 majority, answered both these questions, as well a third question, in the negative. The result was that the appeal was dismissed. The appeal, however, leaves unanswered question as to whether the UK law, in its current state, is fit for purpose when it comes to protecting AI inventions.
Germany has ratified the Protocol on the Provisional Application of UPC Agreement (PAP-Protocol) and paves the way for the Unified Patent Court (UPC).
On a day when Germany was more pre-occupied with the determination of its future president, the outgoing justice minister, Christine Lambrecht, made a somewhat surprising press announcement regarding Germany’s ratification of the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPC Agreement (PAP). This protocol is the springboard for full implementation of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), whereby the Unitary Patent System can enter into force.
The German Federal Government yesterday deposited Germany’s instrument of ratification of the Protocol on the Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). The deposit with the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU, recorded here, was required for the ratification to be effective. As reported by the Federal Ministry of Justice, this is an important step towards the establishment of the UPC. Germany’s ratification now enables the PPA to come into force (and therefore the provisional application period to start) as soon as two more countries ratify the PPA or otherwise consent to be bound by the provisional application of certain UPCA provisions. One of those countries is very likely to be Slovenia (which is hosting in Ljubljana one of the seats of the UPC Mediation and Arbitration Centre). Slovenia’s legislation ratifying the PPA came into force on 24 September 2021 when it was published in Slovenia’s Official Gazette although the Council of the EU has not yet recorded the deposit of the instrument of ratification. Austria is also expected to ratify the PPA shortly.
As of September, Frédéric Portal (43) has joined Bird & Bird’s IP team in Paris as counsel. Previously, he was a partner at mixed law firm Lavoix for ten years. Portal is a patent attorney in chemistry, with a wealth of experience with life science clients. This expertise makes him a good addition to the practice.
In the case of Ferid Allani v. Union of India and Ors., the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (‘IPAB’) set aside the refusal order of the Indian Patent Office (‘IPO’) and allowed the appellant’s patent application.
After juggling the matter between the Delhi High Court, the IPO, and the IPAB, primarily over the issue of patent eligibility of computer-related inventions under Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, the claimed invention was acknowledged as patentable in view of the ‘technical effect’ and the ‘technical contribution’ of said invention. The silver line is that the courts and tribunal in India are aligned to the jurisprudence developed in the US and the EU in granting patents to computer program enabled inventions. However, like in any other jurisdiction, some examiners or controllers may exercise narrow view of granting patents for such subject matter. A huge credit goes to the applicant for his conviction in the merits of the invention and his faith in the Indian judicial system. After many battles, including twice in the IPO, twice in the IPAB, and twice in the Delhi HC, the applicant finally won the war and got a well-deserved relief. The decision also confirms the view that Indian IP jurisprudence is still developing and that interference by the Courts is not avoidable in all circumstances.
The write-up below provides the facts of the case, the timeline, a summary of the second leg of proceedings at the Delhi HC, the IPO and the IPAB, and conclusions.
On 21 September 2021, the UK Court of Appeal dismissed Dr Stephen Thaler’s appeal against the UK Intellectual Property Office’s decision to refuse two patent applications, in which Dr Thaler named his AI system (DABUS) as the sole inventor.
The outcome of the appeal will not come as a surprise to many. All three judges were aligned in their opinion that only a person, not a machine, can be an inventor for the purposes of the UK Patents Act 1977. However, there was a divergence of views amongst them as to whether this was fatal to Dr Thaler’s patent applications.
Airline Alitalia ceases operations in October and its trademark portfolio is up for grabs, but what should companies consider when selling or buying IP rights?
Counsel highlight the notable changes and missed opportunities in the new act and their hopes for Australia’s expected joining of the Hague Convention
Capturing the sentiment
Summary: The screenshots above are minutes old; insiders don’t think too highly of long-term careers at Red Hat (the latter seems to be the same person as the former)
Video download link | md5sum 43c1ae14359c4ba2d4adc78cc9e4601a
Summary: A personal and occasionally arduous experience with a whole year of IPFS; it may come across — on the surface at least — as an unconstructive rant, but IPFS is still a promising technology, albeit it has severe limitations that need to be properly understood (some can be technically overcome, too)
THE Web is generally not decentralised. The Internet is not decentralised, either. DNS is centralised, certificates are centralised (if you rely on the concept of ‘trusted’ CAs), and with most services you rely on just one address to work (for things to become accessible; it’s possible to have multiple servers assigned/connected to the same address, but that’s redundancy, not decentralisation).
Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies and BitTorrent are OK, but they too have their limitations, including privacy- and censorship-related limitations. There are single points of failure.
IPFS is a bit different. We started using it about a year ago, starting with daily bulletins and then adding IRC logs, both in the form of HTML and plain text (the latter was added months later).
“We started using it about a year ago, starting with daily bulletins and then adding IRC logs, both in the form of HTML and plain text (the latter was added months later).”IPFS is generally good; when it works, it sure works well (albeit not quickly, the latency is incredibly high, ranging from seconds to minutes, which is unsuitable for some use cases). As I noted in the video above, this week has been more eventful than usual because the IPFS daemon started respawning endlessly and was still malfunctioning. Last night it just completely stopped working all of a sudden. With DHT traffic taking up the lion’s share of the pie (unless you serve something such as video), IPFS does not scale well. It’s very costly, requiring a lot of energy and bandwidth for relatively small returns. To make matters worse, it occasionally can and would become inaccessible, it can use up all the bandwidth (requiring further configuration), and it’s difficult to debug. So adopting IPFS for site-related delivery of content can become a lot of work devoted to maintenance, not to mention CPU cycles and bandwidth. We have a few thousands of objects in it and it’s stretching it to the limits, at least for a device with a residential connection. Several other people have reported similar issues, so we know we’re not alone. What’s ugly is that many of those reports — like much of the code — are still hosted by proprietary software (Microsoft GitHub) and are “GitHub Issues”, i.e. vendor lock-in. That sends across a negative message; GitHub is an enemy of decentralisation, it’s proprietary, and it is a den of arbitrary censorship on behalf of Hollywood, governments, etc.
IPFS can very quickly become utterly wasteful, just like Bitcoin and other digital (or crypto) ‘coins’. But unlike coin mining, timeliness matters. IPFS can become completely inaccessible for long periods of time, with no fallbacks in place. That means downtime. We’ve been spending hours on IPFS this past week and it’s not even serving the content (it times out); it is failing for long periods of time. It’s almost impossible to debug because it is decentralised and diagnosing a swarm is incredibly difficult, akin to guesswork or “hocus pocus”. One time it works, the next time it might not…
“IPFS can very quickly become utterly wasteful, just like Bitcoin and other digital (or crypto) ‘coins’.”As noted at the end of this video, adding a new object scales poorly (but linearly, not quadratically/exponentially) as the index of objects needs to be rebuilt from scratch (in the Go implementation at least), which means that when the number of objects doubles it can take twice as long to add new ones. If this carries on for a few years it can take an hour if not hours just to add our daily objects. Hours of CPU cycles! Maybe future/present versions tackle this issue already, so we can be patient and hope IPFS will mature/evolve gracefully. Otherwise, it is untenable for the purposes/work we’ve assigned to it originally (last October).
The video isn’t an admission of mistake or regret; I don’t personally regret pouring so much energy into IPFS, I just hope to express my thoughts on things that can be improved and probably should be improved. IPFS isn’t a very young project (it has been around for quite a while), but its releases are considered not stable and work in progress. If we’re part of a large experiment and the risk we take is occasional downtime (over IPFS, not Gemini or HTTP), then so be it. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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