In the October 2021 survey we received responses from 1,179,448,021 sites across 265,426,928 unique domains and 11,388,826 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.59 million sites, but a gain of 1.07 million domains and 20,800 computers.
The number of unique domains powered by the nginx web server grew by 789,000 this month, which has increased its total to 79.5 million domains and its leading market share to 29.9%. Conversely, Apache lost 753,000 domains and saw its second-place share fall to 24.7%. Meanwhile, Cloudflare gained 746,000 domains – almost as many as nginx – but it stays in fourth place with an 8.15% share while OpenResty's shrank slightly to 14.5%.
Cloudflare also made strong progress amongst the top million websites, where it increased its share by 0.24 percentage points to 18.2%. nginx is in second place with a 22.5% (+0.12pp) share but has closed the gap on Apache which still leads with 24.0% after losing 0.21pp.
Apache also continues to lead in terms of active sites, where it has a total of 48.0 million. However, it was the only major vendor to suffer a drop in this metric, with a loss of 277,000 active sites reducing its share down to 23.9% (-0.29pp). In terms of all sites, nginx lost the most (-9.99 million) but remains far in the lead with a total of 412 million.
Ubuntu 21.10 finally features the GNOME 40 desktop, better Wayland support, and more. In this video, I'll give you my thoughts on "Impish Idri" and we'll go over some of the new features. I'll talk about the installation process, Wayland changes,
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
We have our script that sets up the system... now we make our script to automatically make our desktop the best looking one out there!
These recommendations assume that the initial Linux-kernel targets for Rust developers are device drivers that do not have unusual performance and scalability requirements, meaning that wrappering of small C-language functions is tolerable. (Please note that most device drivers fit into this category.) It also assumes that the main goal is to reduce memory-safety bugs, although other bugs might be addressed as well. Or, Murphy being Murphy, created as well. But that is a risk in all software development, not just Rust in the Linux kernel.
Those interested in getting Rust into Linux-kernel device drivers sooner rather than later should look at the short-term recommendations, while those interested in extending Rust's (and, for that matter, C's) concurrency capabilities might be more interested in the long-term recommendations.
You would like to do some formal verification of C code? Or you would like a challenge for your formal-verification tool? Either way, here you go!
Cluster scheduler support has been queued up for landing in the Linux 5.16 kernel for AArch64 and x86_64 systems for improving the CPU scheduler behavior for systems that have clusters of CPU cores.
The cluster scheduler support in this context is about enhancing the Linux kernel's scheduler for systems where sets of CPU cores share an L2 cache or other mid-level caches/resources.
This cluster scheduler work stems from work by HiSilicon and Huawei aiming to improve the Linux performance for the Kunpeng 920 server chip. That HiSilicon SoC has six or eight clusters per NUMA node with four CPU cores per cluster and a shared L3 cache. With the cluster scheduler patches they were able to enhance the overall performance of the system and also improve the efficiency.
With it getting late into the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle, the focus is shifting by the Direct Rendering Driver maintainers from new feature work targeting the next cycle (5.16) to instead on bug fixes. AMD sent out a pull request of new AMDGPU Linux 5.16 material this week that is primarily delivering bug fixes but one notable addition is finally enabling PSR by default for newer GPUs.
Intel's open-source engineers have shipped Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 as the newest version of this Linux compute stack enabling OpenCL and Level Zero support with their graphics processors.
Intel Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 is the latest weekly update for this compute stack. New this week is updated DG1 platform support and Level Zero support for SPIR-V static module linking.
Open source expert Jack Wallen explains the Linux source command and offers an example.
Legion TD 2 is a tower defense game for Windows. It was developed and published by AutoAttack Games. Thanks to Proton, you’ll be able to play this game on Linux. Here’s how.
Stick Fight: The Game is a physics-based online fighting game for PC. It was developed by Landfall West and published by Landfall. Here’s how you can enjoy Stick Fight: The Game on Linux.
Two chapters in this article are Debian-specific, the rest is more or less Archlinux-specific. It never grew into the device-specific alround tutorial I envisioned and has been partially superseded by this article. The ThinkPad itself is in daily use. No regrets there!
Fish Shell also known as ‘Friendly interactive shell’ used for Unix/Linux-like operating distributions. It provides a smart, fully equipped, and user-friendly command-line environment for all Linux users. Fish shell supports various features unlike any other shell such as autosuggestion, Tab completion, syntax highlighting, Sane Scripting, Glorious VGA Color, and web-based configuration. Using this interactive shell environment, you do not need to remember a bunch of Linux commands because it is more productive and comes with various handy features.
We will talk about the installation of interactive Fish Shell on CentOS 8 in this tutorial. The same steps apply to Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux too.
In this article I show how to install Devuan using the installer included in the desktop-live iso, refractainstaller. In a previous article I’ve showed how to install it using the net-install ISO.
From the devuan site: Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.
In this guide, we are going to set up NextCloud on a Centos 8 server hosted with Nginx and php (LEMP stack). We will be using Mysql 8 and PHP 7.4 for this guide.This will also work for RHEL derivatives like Alma Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8 and RHEL 8.
Nextcloud is an Open Source suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is a a free self-hosted cloud storage solution similar to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. With Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the pricey alternatives and since you will host your own files, you don’t have to worry about privacy or someone collecting your data.
SuiteCRM is a free open source Customer Relationship Management application for servers. It is written in PHP. Open source CRM is often used as an alternative to proprietary CRM software from major corporations such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications. SuiteCRM is a software fork of the popular customer relationship management (CRM) system from SugarCRM. The SuiteCRM project started when SugarCRM decided to stop development of its open-source version.
In this guide, we will show you how to install SuiteCRM in your CentOS 8 Linux.
Virtual Network Computing, commonly known as VNC, is a platform-independent protocol that uses the client-server architecture to access a remote computer over a network.
It enables users to access the remote computer’s graphical desktop and send mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to the remote system.
Alternatives to VNC for CentOS that we have covered are xRDP and X2Go. All these technologies have similar goals, but their methods for achieving them differ.
This post will give you a step-by-step tutorial for installing and configuring a VNC server on your CentOS 8, Rocky Linux 8 or AlmaLinux 8, along with how to install and use multiple popular desktop environments.
Over the course of this article we’ll refer to all 3 operating systems when mentioning only CentOS 8, to avoid repeating all 3 every time. Also, the screenshots provided in this tutorial are mostly from CentOS 8. I have provided a few from Rocky Linux 8 and AlmaLinux 8, to prove that I have also tested this tutorial on them.
Apache Spark is a free, open-source, general-purpose and distributed computational framework that is created to provide faster computational results. It supports several APIs for streaming, graph processing including, Java, Python, Scala, and R. Generally, Apache Spark can be used in Hadoop clusters, but you can also install it in standalone mode.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Spark framework on Debian 11.
As part of application requirements or testing, you might need to install specific version of a package. DNF is a package manager for RPM-based Linux distributions such Fedora, RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and more.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install specific version of package using DNF.
Unity Desktop Environment is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment created and maintained by Canonical for Ubuntu operating systems. As time has passed and Ubuntu is now officially using GNOME as the default desktop environment, it is maintained and developed by the Unity7 Maintainers and UBports.
With Ubuntu 21.10 being released, another Unity Desktop environment has occupied it. This release still uses the Unity 7 interface as the UnityX 10 is still under development. However, in further Ubuntu distribution releases, this interface will undoubtedly appear. Overall, Unity is an excellent option for its speed, alternative looks to rival any other Desktop Environment.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Unity on Ubuntu 21.10 with various options.
Just like WordPress, we have another open-source Craft CMS that is a new and innovative content management system with a large community of developers and communities worldwide. Here we learn the steps to Install Craft CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04.
It is an open-source CMS based on PHP / MySQL with the TWIG template engine, flexible in nature, and has a user-friendly interface for creating digital current and administrative tasks. Craft CMS also offers a built-in plugin store with hundreds of free and paid plugins. Whereas is robust framework allows developers to develop modules and plugins.
As a system administrator, you may find yourself (today or in the future) working in an environment where Windows and Linux coexist.
It is no secret that some big companies prefer (or have to) run some of their production services in Windows boxes and others in Linux servers.
Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder is a brand new release from Konfa Games and tinybuild that sees you command a bunch of naked people and send them through a strange post-apocalyptic labyrinth. Note: personal purchase.
Like it Loop Hero, you have no direct control during combat you just watch it play out and hope for the best. Here though you're running through some kind of maze-like dungeon full of strange machines, with multiple people you need to look after. They'll likely die a lot though, don't get too attached, you can buy more naked people. Eventually you might come across the nefarious d’Spot who runs the show and perhaps destroy them to earn your freedom.
It blends together quite a few different genres and it feels totally unique. The structure is a bit like The Binding of Isaac with you going from room to room, it's also a strategy game with you buying people and equipping them with various weapons you buy from shops spread throughout the maze and then there's the fusion of auto battling so you can sit back and watch the mess unfold.
When Techland released the Hellraid DLC in August 2020 inspired by their unreleased dark fantasy slasher Hellraid the reviews were not kind, as it was very basic but they've kept at it and another big update is out now.
Blue Mammoth Games announced that later in October that the platform-fighter Brawlhalla will be getting Easy Anti-Cheat. Thankfully, they've put up a Beta for Linux users playing it on Steam Play Proton and it works.
There's apparently absolutely no stopping the Blender train, with the developer announcing that Apple has now joined their development fund.
It seems Valve aren't a big fan of cryptocurrencies or NFTs as they've updated their onboarding guide with a new point about disallowing games that allow you to exchange them.
Under the Rules and Guidelines heading where it mentions "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam" there's a new line that states "Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs".
GDQuest, a well-known name in the free and open source Godot Engine land has launched a new crowdfunding campaign aiming to get you to go from zero to hero with Godot programming. A course aimed at anyone and everyone who fancies getting into making games with Godot.
The founder of GDQuest, Nathan Lovato, emailed in a little info about it: " Learn to Code From Zero is a course for everyone who wants to learn development.
With it, you will learn programming from the very basics to creating a complete video game inspired by the hectic action game Enter the Gungeon.
Game development courses typically consist of hours of step-by-step tutorials. They feel nice while you follow along, but as soon as you're left alone, working on your game, you get stuck.
The release of the custom KDE Plasma 5.23 shell is available , built using the KDE Frameworks 5 platform and the Qt 5 library using OpenGL / OpenGL ES for rendering acceleration. You can evaluate the work of the new version through the Live build from the openSUSE project and the build from the KDE Neon User Edition project . Packages for various distributions can be found on this page .
The release is timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the project – on October 14, 1996, Matthias Ettrich announced the creation of a new free desktop environment aimed at end users, not programmers or system administrators, and able to compete with the commercial ones available at that time. products such as CDE. The GNOME project, which had similar goals, appeared 10 months later. The first stable release of KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998, KDE 2.0 was released on October 23, 2000, KDE 3.0 on April 3, 2002, KDE 4.0 on January 11, 2008, KDE Plasma 5 in July 2014.
KDE turns 25 . On this day a quarter of a century ago, a young German software engineer named Matthias Ettrich culminated his final degree project with an ambitious proposal : the creation of a desktop environment for Linux and other Unix systems that was “consistent, pleasant and free €»using the Qt library. Thus was born Kool Desktop Environment, more popular today for its acronym.
Since then it has not rained not much, but a lot and KDE has become one of the most important Free Software projects and communities in the world , although it has remained on the less populous and profitable side of the end user and not so much on that of the company, even though the truth is that the software as such is agnostic and only attends to what its license allows.
KDE thus became the first Linux desktop environment and after four major versions in which it has not stopped expanding and improving, in one of the best desktop environments for PC, standing up to and even surpassing alternatives developed by the big companies in the technology sector. But KDE is not just a desktop environment, it is much more than that.
It has been a while since the last update of digiKam Recipes. But that doesn’t mean I neglected the book. In the past few months, I’ve been doing a complete language review and adding new material. The new revision of digiKam Recipes features detailed information on how to move digiKam library and databases from one machine to another, how to access digiKam remotely from any machine, and how to import photos from an iOS device. The book now uses the Barlow font for better legibility along with a slightly improved layout.
The GNOME 41 desktop environment series was released at the end of September 2021, and is slowly making its way into the stable software repositories of various rolling-release distributions. It still didn’t arrive for Arch Linux users, but it landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed.
If you can’t wait any longer for GNOME 41 to arrive in the software repositories of your favorite distro and you want to use it right now, you can download and install the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed Live GNOME ISO snapshot from here.
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 21.10.
Xubuntu 21.10, codenamed Impish Indri, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until June 2022. If you need a stable environment with longer support time we recommend that you use Xubuntu 20.04 LTS instead.
The final release images are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/download/.
As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.
Xubuntu Core, our minimal ISO edition, is available to download from unit193.net/xubuntu/core/ [torrent]. Find out more about Xubuntu Core here.
Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week have brought updates for text editors, browsers, emails clients, database management systems and many other pieces of software.
Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, nano, and PostgreSQL were all in the latest 20211012 snapshot. A new major version of Firefox 93.0 added support for the optimised image format AVIF, which offers a significant file size reduction as opposed to other image formats. The browser also improved web compatibility for privacy protections and fixed more than a handful of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Thunderbird 91.2.0 addressed many of the same CVEs, fixed some issues with the calendar and fixed the new mail notifications that did not properly take subfolders into account. The 5.9 version of text editor nano added syntax highlighting for YAML files and fetchmail 6.4.22 added a few patches, addressed a CVE related to an IMAP connections and now highlights being compatible with OpenSSL 1.1.1 and 3.0.0. The new major version of postgresql 14 provided improvements for heavy workloads, enhanced distributed workloads and added a couple more predefined roles like pg_read_all_data, pg_write_all_data and pg_database_owner. Other packages to update in the snapshot were GNOME’s document viewer evince 41.2, Flatpak 1.12.1, graphics library gegl 0.4.32, glusterfs 9.3 and many RubyGems and YaST package updates.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Due to my slacking off last Friday, I have to write the review over two weeks again. But that might turn out even better this time, as otherwise, the review might be a bit short (we struggled a bit this week with ‘openQA being slower in testing than OBS with building’). During the last two weeks, we have released a total of 6 snapshots (0929, 1001, 1005, 1008, 1011, and 1012).
Bare metal clouds are gaining a lot of momentum in the telecommunications industry—but why? What is a bare metal cloud, and what are the benefits of using it? In this post, we answer these questions and more.
The Devuan community has announced the release of Devuan 4.0 with code name Chimaera, which strives to make GNU/Linux free of systemd.
Devuan came into existence in 2014 as a result of Debian shifting to systemd after a long technical and much publicized debate. The move led to several Debian developers coming together to create Devuan by removing all traces of systemd from the Linux distro, instead sticking to the well-known init system, sysvinit.
The name Devuan was chosen as a blend word, formed from parts of two others – “Debian” and “VUA“. And if you’re curious what “VUA” means, it’s the shortened form of Veteran Unix Admins.
The latest version of Devuan includes options for running the SysV, runit, and OpenRC init software implementations. “What’s new in Chimaera 4.0? Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10. Your choice of init: sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC. Improved desktop support – virtually all desktop environments available in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free. New boot, display manager and desktop theming. Enhanced accessibility: installation via GUI or console can now be accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis, or using a refreshable braille display, and Devuan Chimaera has the ability to install desktop environments without PulseAudio, allowing speech synthesis in both console and GUI sessions at the same time.” Further information on the new release can be found in the project’s release announcement.
We already have among us Devuan 4.0 Chimaera , the latest version of the Debian Stable fork and reimplementation that stands out for not using systemd and offering the possibility to choose between various inits more akin to the Unix philosophy in the installation process.
As you might expect, Devuan 4.0 Chimaera is based on the Debian 11 Bullseye software suite , more specifically from the 11.1 release . This means that the major novelties include, above all, what differentiates it from the operating system that forks, so, for example, the “engine” of the system is still Linux 5.10 LTS .
Compared to previous releases of the same system, Devuan 4.0 has improved desktop support . Those responsible have explained that “practically all the desktop environments available in Debian are now part of Devuan, without systemd” . On the other hand, support for GDM and SDDM and new themes for the startup, the graphical session manager and the desktop have been incorporated .
I understand that they don’t want VPN and Tor users messing up their Wiki anonymously, where it would be difficult to ban any one vandal, but to block people from even _reading it_ unless they unmask themselves is a bit heavy-handed.
On Wikipedia, they block Tor and VPN users from editing, but you can read it all you want, and you can view the page’s source code if you are on a VPN. This is the right thing to do.
I’m not sure why Debian is requiring us to de-anonymize ourselves just to read their Wiki. I wish that they would stop doing this.
Hardkernel has just discontinued ODROID-H2+ single board computer based on the Intel Celeron J4115 Gemini Lake Refresh processor, which followed ODROID-H2 SBC itself being discontinued shortly after Intel decided to phase out Intel J4105 and other Gemini Lake processors.
The reason given is the “uncertain situation of main component supply”, which could mean Celeron J4115 processor is hard to get (or expensive), or the Realtek RTL8125B chipset provides 2.5GbE networking. That means Hardkernel does not offer any x86 SBC at this time. That’s a shame before ODROID-H2+ was a well-supported SBC running Linux or Windows, and great value for money at $119, especially for people interested in the two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports found on the board (and upgradeable to six), not to mention support for SO-DIMM memory and M.2 NVMe SSD.
We thought we’d lead with the weirdest Raspberry Pi-powered thing, purely because we couldn’t resist the bizarre visual. These robotic hands move according to actions taken on social media. And they’re creepy. We like creepy.
Another robot from the blog this week can solve your Sudoku in seconds, and a hackathon-winning student project can photograph any object and automatically turn it into an NFT.
After Italo's keynote announcement of the new LibreOffice Technology marketing plan at the LibreOffice conference, we lost no time integrating this great way to fairly present the goodness of LibreOffice that we depend on to build Collabora Online & Collabora Office mobile into the product. With new links that can take you to our LibreOffice Technology page where we can celebrate the community & credit all the hard work done under the hood here, and of course the logo. Still a work-in-progress, and will start to appear in our products over the next weeks as/when we refresh them, but so far it looks like this for desktop & mobile
[...]
up-coming COOL About dialog up-coming COOL About dialog Thanks to Italo & Mike at TDF for developing the concept, and also to Pedro & Elisa, for their work on the code & logos - we'll be iterating it with them over the next days & weeks.
Want to organise a local (or online) LibreOffice event? Need some merchandise to boost your project or community? Then we can help you! The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, is backed by contributions from ecosystem members and volunteers, as well as donations from end-users. This helps us to maintain TDF, but we can do a lot more too. And next year, we want to do a lot of projects again!
Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos...
In programming, we usually face bugs that we should fix to maintain or improve our software. In order to fix a bug, first we should find the source of the problem, and there are tools like “Automated bibisect” are available to help, specially when the bug is a regression.
And then, after having tested hundreds of Linux distributions, thousands of applications, every release of Windows since 3.11, and then some, I can definitely say that the slow, steady erosion of professional testing in the software world is noticeable. And by that mean, in those scenarios it actually existed, because in some domains, it's never been there, and it shows. If anything, the longer I keep my hands on this or that application or program, the more I'm convinced that the new, casual approach to quality is simply not working. There will be a moment of reckoning.
Published edition Dear PyGui 1.0.0 (the DPG), a cross-platform toolkit for GUI development in Python. The most important feature of the project is the use of multithreading and outsourcing of operations to the GPU to speed up rendering. The key goal of shaping the 1.0.0 release is to stabilize the API. Compatibility-breaking changes will now be proposed in a separate “experimental” module.
To ensure high performance, the bulk of the DearPyGui code is written in C ++ using the Dear ImGui library , designed for creating graphical applications in C ++ and offering a fundamentally different operating model. The Dear PyGui source code is licensed under the MIT license. Declared support for Linux, Windows 10 and macOS platforms.
Most Linux users are often unaware of the internal working of the operating system. You might be running Linux commands on the shell for a long time, but have you ever wondered what's happening behind the scenes when you hit Enter?
By the end, you'll have a brief understanding of how the shell processes the typed command in Linux.
IN 2004, then-Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., cast herself as a conservative, commonsense Democrat focused on finding savings, such as moving to allow Medicare to use its size and scale to collectively negotiate lower drug prices.
The release of the operating system Chrome OS 94 has been published , based on the Linux kernel, the upstart system manager, the ebuild / portage build toolkit, open components and the Chrome 94 web browser . The user environment of Chrome OS is limited to a web browser, and instead of standard programs, web applications are used, however, Chrome OS includes a full-fledged multi-window interface, desktop and taskbar. Chrome OS 94 is available for most current Chromebooks. Enthusiasts have formed unofficial assemblies for ordinary computers with x86, x86_64 and ARM processors. Source texts are distributed under the free Apache 2.0 license.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (squashfs-tools, tomcat9, and wordpress), Fedora (openssh), openSUSE (kernel, mbedtls, and rpm), Oracle (httpd, kernel, and kernel-container), SUSE (firefox, kernel, and rpm), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4).
Apache 2.4.50 included a fix for CVE-2021-41773. It has since been discovered that this fix was incomplete, and this version is vulnerable to a permutation of the same vulnerability. 2.4.51 is now available, and should properly fix the vulnerability.
The original exploit used .%2e/ as the magic payload, which is using URL encoding to sneak the extra dot symbol through as part of the path. The new workaround uses .%%32%65/. This looks a bit weird, but makes sense when you decode it. URL encoding uses UTF-8, and so %32 decodes to 2, and %65 to e. Familiar? Yep, it’s just the original vulnerability with a second layer of URL encoding. This has the same requirements as the first iteration, cgi-bin has to be enabled for code execution, and require all denied has to be disabled in the configuration files.
The Apache Software Foundation has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability in multiple versions of Tomcat. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial of service condition.
Even before Apple made their announcement, law enforcement shifted their battle for back doors to client-side scanning. The idea is that they wouldn’t touch the cryptography, but instead eavesdrop on communications and systems before encryption or after decryption. It’s not a cryptographic back door, but it still a back door — and brings with it all the insecurities of a back door.
I’m part of a group of cryptographers that has just published a paper discussing the security risks of such a system. (It’s substantially the same group that wrote a similar paper about key escrow in 1997, and other “exceptional access” proposals in 2015. We seem to have to do this every decade or so.) In our paper, we examine both the efficacy of such a system and its potential security failures, and conclude that it’s a really bad idea.
The Linux Foundation has announced a $ 10 million commitment to the OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation), an effort to improve the security of open source software. Funds raised through royalties from parent companies of OpenSSF, including Amazon, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Facebook, Fidelity, GitHub, Google, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Red Hat, Snyk, and VMware …
Vulnerabilities in the life cycle of open-source software development can start from tiny crumbs but grow into substantial issues.
A draft ruling from Ireland’s privacy regulator would require Facebook Inc. to change how it informs users about its data processing but disregards complaints that the social-media giant needs to obtain direct consent for its activities.
If the decision is finalized, Facebook would also face a fine of between €28 million and €36 million (equivalent to $32.4 million to $41.7 million) for failing to be transparent with users. The case stems from a 2018 complaint filed by Austrian privacy lawyer Max Schrems, whose nonprofit organization NOYB published the draft decision on Wednesday. The Irish Data Protection Commission hasn’t made the decision public.
A spokesman for the Irish regulator declined to comment because the investigation is still open, and said the office shared the document with regulators from the 26 other European Union countries last week. These regulators have one month to respond and could raise objections. The Irish Data Protection Commission will then issue a final decision, and other European watchdogs could still object at that stage.
Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it’ll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN)—a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is trained on.
But such generated faces—which are starting to be used in CGI movies and ads—might not be as unique as they seem. In a paper titled This Person (Probably) Exists, researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data. The fake faces can effectively unmask the real faces the GAN was trained on, making it possible to expose the identity of those individuals. The work is the latest in a string of studies that call into doubt the popular idea that neural networks are “black boxes” that reveal nothing about what goes on inside.
On october 8th two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, won the Nobel peace prize for their “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression”. The Kremlin congratulated Mr Muratov for being “brave”, which he is. Six of his colleagues at Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper he founded in 1993, have been murdered.
[...]
The Nobel award recognises a sad truth. Globally, freedom of expression is in retreat. The bluntest methods of silencing dissent are widely wielded: autocrats and criminal gangs often use the sword against the pen (or bullets against bloggers). Many governments also lock people up for peacefully expressing their views.
But these old-fashioned forms of repression are increasingly reinforced with or replaced by newer techniques. Freedom House, a think-tank, reports that in the past year efforts to control speech online escalated in 30 of the 70 countries it monitors, and receded only in 18 (see map). Many autocrats and would-be autocrats look with envy at China, where the Communist Party has overseen the construction of a walled-off information sphere, within which criticism of those in power can barely be seen or heard. None can copy it exactly, but many are deploying digital tools to curate the information that reaches their citizens.
When talking about remote machines, sometimes we mean really remote, beyond the realms of wired networks that can deliver the Internet. In these cases, remote cellular access is often the way to go. Thus far, we’ve explored the hardware and software sides required to control a machine remotely over a cellular connection.
However, things can and do go wrong. When that remote machine goes offline, getting someone on location to reboot it can be prohibitively difficult and expensive. For these situations, what you want is some way to kick things back into gear, ideally automatically. What you’re looking for is a watchdog timer!
