Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 21/10/2021: MX Linux 21 and Git Contributors’ Summit in a Nutshell



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • The intersection of modules, GKI, and rocket science [LWN.net]

        One does not normally expect a lot of controversy around a patch series that makes changes to platform-specific configurations and drivers. The furor over some work on the Samsung Exynos platform may thus be surprising. When one looks into the discussion, things become more clear; it mostly has to do with disagreements over the best ways to get hardware vendors to cooperate with the kernel development community.

        In mid-September, Will McVicker posted a brief series of changes for the Exynos configuration files; one week later, a larger, updated series followed. The purpose in both cases was to change a number of low-level system-on-chip (SoC) drivers to allow them to be built as loadable modules. That would seem like an uncontroversial change; it is normally expected that device drivers will be modular. But the situation is a little different for these low-level SoC drivers.

      • Pulling slabs out of struct page [LWN.net]

        For the time being, the effort to add the folio concept to the memory-management subsystem appears to be stalled, but appearances can be deceiving. The numerous folio discussions have produced a number of points of consensus, though; one of those is that far too much of the kernel has to work with page structures to get its job done. As an example of how a subsystem might be weaned off of struct page usage, Matthew Wilcox has split out the slab allocators in a 62-part patch set. The result may be a foreshadowing of changes to come in the memory-management subsystem.

        The kernel maintains one page structure for every physical page of memory that it manages. On a typical system with a 4KB page size, that means managing millions of those structures. A page structure tells the kernel about the state of the page it refers to: how it is being used, how many references to it exist, its position in various queues, and more. The required information varies depending on how any given page is being used at the moment; to accommodate this, struct page is a complicated mess of structures and unions. The current definition of struct page makes for good pre-Halloween reading, but those who truly want a good scare may want to see what it looked like before Wilcox cleaned things up for 4.18.

      • A rough start for ksmbd [LWN.net]

        Among the many new features pulled into the mainline during the 5.15 merge window is the ksmbd network filesystem server. Ksmbd implements the SMB protocol (also known as CIFS, though that name has gone out of favor) that is heavily used in the Windows world. The creation of an in-kernel SMB server is a bit surprising, given that Linux has benefited greatly from the user-space Samba solution since shortly after the beginning. There are reasons for this move but, in the short term at least, they risk being overshadowed by a worrisome stream of security-related problems in ksmbd. Why create an in-kernel SMB server at this point? In a sense, ksmbd is not meant to compete with Samba; indeed, it has been developed in cooperation with the Samba project. It is, however, meant to be a more performant and focused solution than Samba is; at this point, Samba includes a great deal of functionality beyond simple file serving. Ksmbd claims significant performance improvements on a wide range of benchmarks; the graphs on this page show a doubling of performance on some tests. An in-kernel server is an easier place to support variants like SMB Direct, which uses RDMA to transfer data between systems. By drawing more eyes to the code, merging into the mainline may also facilitate faster development in general. One other reason — which tends to be spoken rather more quietly — is that a new implementation can be licensed under GPLv2, while Samba is GPLv3.

        Ksmbd was first posted for review (as "cifsd") by Namjae Jeon in late March; the eighth revision came out just before the opening of the 5.15 merge window in late August. The last version received no review comments, but previous versions had clearly been looked at by a number of developers. Nobody objected when Steve French asked Linus Torvalds to pull ksmbd into the mainline on August 29.

      • Scrutinizing bugs found by syzbot

        The syzbot kernel-fuzzing system finds an enormous number of bugs, but, since many of them may seem to be of a relatively low severity, they have a lower priority when contending for the attention of developers. A talk at the recent Linux Security Summit North America reported on some research that dug further into the bugs that syzbot has found; the results are rather worrisome. Rather than a pile of difficult- or impossible-to-exploit bugs, there are numerous, more serious problems lurking within.

        [...]

        The first speaker on day one of the summit was Xiaochen Zou, a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside, who described a tool that he and his colleagues have been running on bugs that syzbot—which uses the syzkaller coverage-guided fuzzer—has reported in the Linux kernel. Over the last four years, syzbot has reported around 4000 bugs, of which 3000 have been fixed. There are eight categories that these bugs mainly fall into, but only some of those categories represent security bugs, he said. These are classic, severe kernel security holes, such as use after free, double free, and out-of-bounds writes; they are mostly found by the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) as part of syzkaller runs.

      • AMD "Smart Trace Buffer" Feature Being Wired Up For Linux - Phoronix

        AMD patches this month have begun preparing support for a new CPU feature called Smart Trace Buffer (STB).

        Earlier this month the initial patch was posted for enabling AMD Smart Trace Buffer support on Linux as an extension to AMD's PMC kernel driver. This morning the STB enablement has already been revised in a second version of the patches.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Check and better order your photos on Kodi with these changes | ITIGIC - TechStony

        When we hear the name of Kodi, the first thing that comes to mind is a complete multimedia center for playing videos and music . However, this program goes much further and allows us to manage and reproduce other content such as television channels or photos.

        Precisely in these same lines we want to focus on this last element that we comment on, that is, in the management and visualization of images. This is something that we can directly carry out from this program without the need for additional ones. With this, what we want to tell you is that, as with video or audio content, photographic files can also be managed from here.

        As with the rest of the file types, when we start working with Kodi the first thing we have to do is create our photo library or libraries. From there, the application itself will already know the disk locations where we have these contents stored for later management. This is something that is surely familiar to us if we have already used it with videos or audios. In fact, below, we are going to show you a series of changes that we recommend you do to improve the viewing experience of these own photos.

      • Install Nexus Repository Manager on Debian 11 - kifarunix.com

        This tutorial describes how to install Nexus repository manager on Debian 11.

        Nexus is the World’s #1 repository manager for build artifacts.

      • Sync WM wallpaper with LightDM on Linux Mint :: Rafael Cavalcanti

        Linux Mint uses LightDM GTK greeter for the login screen. It tries to show each user’s wallpaper, and it works well if you stick to the default Cinnamon desktop environment.

        However, I use a standalone window manager (dwm) and my wallpaper is set by Nitrogen. This breaks the feature, unless we take some steps.

      • How to get useful answers to your questions

        5 years ago I wrote a post called how to ask good questions. I still really like that post, but it’s missing a few of the tactics I use to get useful answers like “interrupt people when they’re going off on an irrelevant tangent”.

      • How To Install Yarn on AlmaLinux 8 - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Yarn on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, YARN an acronym for Yet Another Resource Navigator is a fast, stable, and reliable Javascript package manager which is compatible with npm ( Node Package Manager). Yarn helps with the management of npm packages which includes installation, updating, configuration, and removal of packages.

        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 Yarn Package Manager on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

      • How to Install Anbox to Run Android Apps in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10 | UbuntuHandbook

        Want to run Android apps in Linux? Here’s how to do it using the Anbox container in Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 21.10.

        Anbox, Anbox in a box, is a free and open-source software that runs the full Android system in a container, abstracts hardware access and integrates core system services into a GNU/Linux system.

        There’s another solution “Waydroid” to do the similar things in Linux. It’s said to have better performance, though it requires Wayland session. For those stick to Xorg, here’s how to install and use Anbox.

      • How to Install Deno JavaScript Runtime on Ubuntu 20.04

        Deno is a lightweight JavaScript runtime that is both straightforward and safe. It provides a stable and comfortable development environment, allowing you to write TypeScript without transpilation. In addition, as an engine with V8 as the base, it has high compatibility with existing JavaScript code written with full support for ECMAScript standards. We'll show you how to install Deno on Ubuntu 20.04 and run a hello world script to test your installation in this article.

      • How to Install GCC Compiler Collection on CentOS 8 and Rocky Linux 8 – VITUX

        The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a compiler software package with a collection of compilers for several languages. It is free and open-source software, which means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute or modify the application according to their own needs. GCC supports various programming languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java and Ada. It also provides libraries such as libstdc++ for C++ and libgcj for Java.

        GCC uses a technology called “Recursive Descent Parsing”, which is very effective at finding errors in the code. GCC also provides a rich set of warnings that can be used to spot possible problems or bugs that may not have been detectable by the compiler itself. GCC performs some optimizations on both the intermediate code and the final machine code, but it does not perform as many optimizations as a commercial compiler would.

      • Bash Conditional Statements - OSTechNix

        In this guide, we will learn the usage of conditional statements in Bash scripting with examples. Decision-making is an important step in programming. There may be a situation where certain conditions have to be met and based upon that you have to write some logic. This is what a conditional statement does. The conditional statements allows you to write logic and take decisions. The concept that you read here will be the same for all the programming languages out there but with syntactic and implementation difference.

      • 7 handy tricks for using the Linux wget command

        Wget is a free utility to download files from the web. It gets data from the Internet and saves it to a file or displays it in your terminal. This is literally also what web browsers do, such as Firefox or Chromium, except by default, they render the information in a graphical window and usually require a user to be actively controlling them. The wget utility is designed to be non-interactive, meaning you can script or schedule wget to download files whether you're at your computer or not.

      • Linux IP Command with Usage Examples

        The IP command is part of iproute package that is by default installed in Modern Linux distributions. In Linux, the IP command is used to manage and display Network Interfaces, IP Addresses, IP Routing Table, and IP Neighbor Entries. It is commonly used to assign an IP address to a network interface and configure network interface settings.

        In this tutorial, we will learn Linux IP command with usage examples.

      • Jenkins: An introduction to jobs and projects - Anto ./ Online

        This guide will explain what a Jenkins job (or project) is and discuss the different types you may encounter. There are many types available, and it depends on the plugins that you have installed. First, however, this guide will discuss the main types that you will encounter.

      • How to create an RDS cluster on AWS

        AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed database service provided by AWS to launch highly available, fault-tolerant, automatic failover, and scalable database servers as AWS RDS is a managed service, so it does not provide the shell access to the server. You only get the connection endpoint to connect to the database. AWS RDS provides the following benefits over a self-managed database server.

      • How to Deal with Spaces in File Path Linux

        Using Linux operating system and facing problems while dealing with the spaces in file path? Many Linux users encounter this issue. In the Linux operating system, we can run commands by passing multiple arguments. A space separates each argument. So, if we give the path that has a space, it will be considered two different arguments instead of one a single path.

        In this article, we will dive deeper into how to deal with spaces in file path Linux? But, before that, we need to know the ls command, the uses of the ls command, the syntax for writing the command on the terminal.

      • How can I see all services in Ubuntu?

        System services are the processes or system programs known as ‘daemons’ that continuously run in the background. These services wait for client requests and are responsible for how the system works and how it communicates with other programs. When working in a Linux environment, including Ubuntu, you can easily manage all system services (start, stop, restart, enable at system boot, etc.) through a service manager. Most of the modern Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, now use a process manager known as ‘systemd’. The systemd is a service manager in the Ubuntu system and used to replace the ‘init’ process. The systemd services manager is controlled by the primary command-line tool ‘systemctl’ command.

        We will show you the various techniques in this tutorial related to listing or viewing all services in the Ubuntu 20.04 system.

      • How do I Copy Multiple Files Using CP in Linux

        CP allows you to copy directories and command files using the command line. With this command, you can transfer multiple files or folders, preserve attribute information and create their backups. CP copies file independently from their originals. So, we can say that the CP command is useful for Linux. People still don’t know how to use this command and search for answers regarding copying multiple files using CP in Linux. That’s why we have written this article to briefly describe how to copy multiple files using CP in Linux.

      • Find Processes Using Most CPU Linux

        Many times such situations come in Linux where we have to deal with application unresponsiveness or sluggish applications due to CPU usage. This happens when our Linux system CPU is very busy. Most of the time, it has to wait until the CPU is free and queue up to process its pending requests.

        Whenever the CPU is completely occupied by the processes of the Linux system, it becomes difficult for the CPU to process other requests. All remaining requests have to be stopped until the CPU is freed. This becomes a huge obstacle.

        We have to use the appropriate command to know the processes which are affecting the CPU. In this article, we will tell how we can solve CPU-related problems with the help of the following commands, as well as see how to find those processes which are using most CPU Linux.

      • Detect SQL Injection (SQLi) and XSS - blackMORE Ops

        LibInjection is a C library to Detect SQL Injection (SQLi) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) through lexical analysis of real-world Attacks.

        SQLi and other injection attacks remain the top OWASP and CERT vulnerability. Current detection attempts frequently involve a myriad of regular expressions which are not only brittle and error-prone but also proven by Hanson and Patterson at Black Hat 2005 to never be a complete solution. LibInjection is a new open-source C library that detects SQLi using lexical analysis. With little upfront knowledge of what SQLi is, the algorithm has been trained on tens of thousands of real SQLi attacks and hundreds of millions of user inputs taken from a Top 50 website for high precision and accuracy.

      • Diagnose connectivity issues with the Linux ping command | Opensource.com

        Networked computers are so common these days that most of us take it for granted that a computer on one side of a room can contact one on the other side of the room, much less the other side of the world. When it works as designed, networking is what makes the Internet, the cloud, file shares, media streaming, remote administration, printing, and much more possible. When something goes wrong, it can sometimes be challenging to diagnose. One of the most fundamental diagnostic tools for networked connectivity is the ping command.

    • Games

      • Get out together, go it alone or make your own rooms in Escape Simulator out now | GamingOnLinux

        Up for a challenge and love to problem solve? Team up with a friend in co-op or do it alone in Escape Simulator out now. Developed by Pine Studio, the same team that created Faraway: Puzzle Escape and SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell.

        Escape Simulator is a first-person escape room experience - designed with input from real-life escape room operators. Playing solo or via online co-op, players must puzzle their way through a quirky collection of interactive escape rooms, putting their wits (and teamwork) to the test.

      • Steam Digital Tabletop Fest RPG Edition is live with many discounts | GamingOnLinux

        Another big Steam event is underway with the Steam Digital Tabletop Fest RPG Edition. A chance for you to pick up some cheap games and more.

      • Space Crew: Legendary Edition is out now free for existing owners | GamingOnLinux

        Space Crew, the sequel to the very popular Bomber Crew from Runner Duck and publisher Curve Digital, gets renamed to Space Crew: Legendary Edition with a free expansion upgrade out now.

        Bringing with it a fair amount of fresh content, it sounds like a good time to go out and explore space. New dangers lurk in the dark corners though.

      • Paradox announced the Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back expansion releases November 23 | GamingOnLinux

        Paradox sure are busy with recent announcements including the Stellaris: Aquatics Species Pack, Europa Universalis IV: Origins and now Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back which releases November 23.

        "With new alternate history paths and game systems, this eagerly awaited add-on presents new challenges for fans of Paradox Interactive's best-selling grand strategy wargame. The centrepiece of No Step Back is a series of new National Focus Trees, giving players many new ways to imagine the course of World War II in Eastern Europe. Major nations have been entirely reworked to offer unique challenges and original histories."

      • PS3 emulator RPCS3 can now boot all games released for the console | GamingOnLinux

        An incredible milestone for RPCS3, the free and open source cross-platform PlayStation 3 emulator as their compatibility list has hit the ability to boot all known games.

      • Helms of Fury is an action rogue-lite with a focus on collecting abilities and fast combat | GamingOnLinux

        After a new fast-paced action dungeon crawler? Helms of Fury built with Godot Engine looks like a lot of fun and worth keeping an eye on. The developer has just put up a Kickstarter campaign with plans to offer native Linux support. They're hoping to raise CA$15,000 by November 20 with a release planned for 2023.

        Designed to offer plenty of freedom with the ability to create some insanely powerful character builds, there's a lot to love about the design. Mixing together tons of items to collect across different rarities, with a system that allows you to power up further using a mixtures of attunements and runes to buff you up.

      • Atmospheric rogue-lite RPG Himno - The Silent Melody is now in Early Access | GamingOnLinux

        Developer David Moralejo Sánchez has taken the popular mechanics from the first peaceful Himno, and adapted them into a much bigger game in Himno - The Silent Melody. This time around it's not a peaceful experience, there's dangers lurking in the dark.

        "You play as Fash, an intrepid Guardian Explorer who has seen this world fall. Now after hundreds of years, Fash must bring together the other guardians and restore that world of light and color.

    • Distributions

      • New Releases

        • Systemd-Free MX Linux 21 Officially Released, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

          Dubbed “Wildflower”, MX Linux 21 has been in development for the past six months and comes as an upgrade to the MX Linux 19.x series, based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series, and shipping with the Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environments, as well as, for the first time, an official edition featuring the Fluxbox 1.3.7 window manager with mx-fluxbox 3.0 configs.

      • Debian Family

        • Ian Jackson: Going to work for the Tor Project

          I have accepted a job with the Tor Project.

          I joined XenSource to work on Xen in late 2007, as XenSource was being acquired by Citrix. So I have been at Citrix for about 14 years. I have really enjoyed working on Xen. There have been a variety of great people. I'm very proud of some of the things we built and achieved. I'm particularly proud of being part of a community that has provided the space for some of my excellent colleagues to really grow.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Ubuntu 21.10 Released and Finally Includes GNOME 40
          GNOME 40 has been out for some time. For those that have experienced it, you know the new horizontal workflow is a game-changer. With a much-improved ability to interact with and manage workspaces, the open-source desktop makes daily usage considerably easier and more efficient.

          Finally, this new workflow arrives in Ubuntu, with the 21.10 iteration.

          If you’ve already been working with GNOME 40 on a different distribution, this news is old. But for those who prefer to stick with Canonical’s version of Linux, this upgrade is big. Along with the new horizontal workflow, you’ll also see a new Yaru Light theme, which is now the default. The new theme has light gray header bars to better align with how developers wanted their apps to look all along.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • SaaS/Back End/Databases

        • pgAdmin 4 v6.1 Released

          The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.1. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 30 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

          pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

        • pgexporter 0.2.0

          The pgexporter community is happy to announce version 0.2.0.

      • Programming/Development

        • How C++ Modify Arrays in Function

          Arrays have been widely known among programmers and developers. We have been using arrays in almost every structural language to object-oriented language. As we know, arrays store more than one value in their indexes, and we also modify the arrays. So, in today’s article, we will be deliberating how to modify the arrays in functions of C++. Start by logging in from the Linux system and launching the terminal with the “Ctrl+Alt+T” shortcut.

        • Digging into Julia's package system [LWN.net]

          We recently looked at some of the changes and new features arriving with the upcoming version 1.7 release of the Julia programming language. The package system provided by the language makes it easier to explore new language versions, while still preserving multiple versions of various parts of the ecosystem. This flexible system takes care of dependency management, both for writing exploratory code in the REPL and for developing projects or libraries.

          [...]

          For a while I've thought that the Plots package needed a particular feature. This morning I cloned the project to my computer, added the feature, made a pull request on GitHub, made a change suggested by one of the maintainers, and got it approved. The entire elapsed time for this process was about five hours. In this section I'll describe two more package system commands that make it easier to hack on public packages.

          In the REPL, I entered package mode, then executed develop Plots. This command, which can be shortened to dev, clones the named package's Git repository to the user's machine in the directory .julia/dev/. Since Plots is a big package with many source files, this took about two minutes.

          This command also alters the environment so that using Plots imports from the version under development, rather than the official version. The command free Plots returns to using the official version. One can switch back and forth between these two incarnations of the package freely, as subsequent dev commands won't download anything, but simply switch back to the development version.

          I entered the development directory and created a branch for my feature with the git checkout ‑b command. The package manager doesn't require this; it's happy to let you mangle the master branch. But I had plans to ask that my feature be merged into master, and needed to create a branch for it. Packages under develop are loaded from the file tree, not from the Git repository.

          Then I wanted to edit the function to add my feature. But where is it? Plots has 37 files in its src tree. Because of multiple dispatch, each function can have dozens of methods associated with it, all with the same name. This makes finding a particular method in the source difficult to accomplish with simple grep commands.

        • A QEMU case study in grappling with software complexity [LWN.net]

          There are many barriers to producing software that is reliable and maintainable over the long term. One of those is software complexity. At the recently concluded 2021 KVM Forum, Paolo Bonzini explored this topic, using QEMU, the open source emulator and virtualizer, as a case study. Drawing on his experience as a maintainer of several QEMU subsystems, he made some concrete suggestions on how to defend against undesirable complexity. Bonzini used QEMU as a running example throughout the talk, hoping to make it easier for future contributors to modify QEMU. However, the lessons he shared are equally applicable to many other projects.

          Why is software complexity even a problem? For one, unsurprisingly, it leads to bugs of all kinds, including security flaws. Code review becomes harder for complex software; it also makes contributing to and maintaining the project more painful. Obviously, none of these are desirable.

          The question that Bonzini aimed to answer is "to what extent can we eliminate complexity?"; to do that he started by distinguishing between "essential" and "accidental" complexity. The notion of these two types of complexity originates from the classic 1987 Fred Brooks paper, "No Silver Bullet". Brooks himself is looking back to Aristotle's notion of essence and accident.

          Essential complexity, as Bonzini put it, is "a property of the problem that a software program is trying to solve". Accidental complexity, instead, is "a property of the program that is solving the problem at hand" (i.e. the difficulties are not inherent to the problem being solved). To explain the concepts further, he identified the problems that QEMU is solving, which constitute the essential complexity of QEMU.

        • Notes from the Git Contributors' Summit 2021, virtual, Oct 19/20
          
          

          we held our second all-virtual Summit over the past two days. It was the traditional unconference style meeting, with topics being proposed and voted on right before the introduction round. It was really good to see the human faces behind those email addresses.

          32 contributors participated, and we spanned the timezones from PST to IST. To make that possible, the event took place on two days, from 1500-1900 UTC, which meant that the attendees from the US West coast had to get up really early, while it was past midnight in India at the end.

          I would like to thank all participants for accommodating the time, and in particular for creating such a friendly, collaborative atmosphere.

          A particular shout-out to Jonathan Nieder, Emily Shaffer and Derrick Stolee for taking notes. I am going to send out these notes in per-topic subthreads, replying to this mail.

        • Notes from the 2021 Git Contributors' Summit

          For those who are curious about where the development of Git is headed: Johannes Schindelin has posted an extensive set of notes from the just-concluded Git Contributors' Summit.

        • Python

          • How to find a substring in Python

            Python is a versatile language having many built in methods and libraries. Strings and substrings are an important part of every programming language; python provides different methods to deal with strings and substrings, we check if a python string has a substring for a variety of reasons, but conditional statements are the most typical application. To find substrings in a string, python language provides many predefined methods.

          • How to find the average of a list in Python

            Average (Arithmetic mean) is a mathematical function which is calculated by adding the numeric values in the list and dividing them by the count of numbers of the list. Python provides several built-in mathematical functions; consequently it provides different ways to calculate the average of a list.

        • Rust

        • Java

          • Oracle Releases GraalVM 21.3 With Java 17 Support, Other Enhancements

            Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby.

            Given last month's release of Java 17 / OpenJDK 17, GraalVM 21.3 has added Java 17 support. Plus there are many other improvements to its various language front-ends and other components. Some of the GraalVM 21.3 highlights include:

            - Java 17 support with GraalVM builds based on Oracle Java 17 and OpenJDK 17. OpenJDK 11 also continues to be supported while OpenJDK 8 is no longer supported by GraalVM.

  • Leftovers

    • Hardware

      • Bright Lightbulb Saves Old Radios | Hackaday

        If you work on old equipment, you know that there’s always that tense moment when you first plug it in and turn it on. No matter how careful you have been, there’s some chance your garage sale find is going to go up in smoke. [BasinStreetDesign] built a little box that can help. On one side is a variac and the device you want to test goes into the other side.

        In the middle? A lightbulb, a few switches, and a meter to monitor the current. The magic happens because the lightbulb will stay relatively cool and only light dimly if the device under test is drawing an appropriate amount of current. You match the bulb wattage with the approximate watts you expect the load to draw. If the device’s power is shorted to ground, though, the bulb will light brightly and this causes the lightbulb’s resistance to increase, thus helping to protect the device.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • Security updates for Thursday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-babel, squashfs-tools, and uwsgi), Fedora (gfbgraph and rust-coreos-installer), Mageia (aom, libslirp, redis, and vim), openSUSE (fetchmail, go1.16, go1.17, mbedtls, ncurses, python, squid, and ssh-audit), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk and java-11-openjdk), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk and java-11-openjdk), SUSE (fetchmail, git, go1.16, go1.17, ncurses, postgresql10, python, python36, and squid), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.10, and linux-oem-5.13).

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • T-Mobile Home Internet swaps out my Nokia Trash Can, then two days later says I didn’t return it and they’ll bill me almost $400.

        I told the lady that I had been a Sprint customer since 2002, with a Nokia phone you could play Snake on if you got bored, and I never had problems like this. T-Mobile has taken almost two decades of customer loyalty and goodwill and thrown it in the trash in less than a year.

        It’s not bad enough that they sold me a new Galaxy S20 FE 5G and then almost completely bricked it with a “SIM upgrade” a few months in, and now it just barely works well enough to make phone calls and get my GPS app up sometimes. They have to go and do this too.

      • Today my T-Mobile Galaxy S20 FE 5G decided that the ringer won’t work for some reason. – BaronHK's Rants

        In the latest of the comedy of errors on the piece of junk…

        Now my phone doesn’t ring. There’s nothing wrong with the speaker. It’s not on Do Not Disturb, the ringer volume is on 100%, I tried Find My Phone on Google and it rungs, but calls are quiet and go straight to voicemail.

        Might be T-Mobile’s shitty network though. I tried to make an outgoing call and the phone just sat there doing nothing. It’s getting bad reception today, but it rings anyway.

        [...]

        This isn’t exclusive to my phone. It seems they all do it. It’s just another deception like AT&T connecting people to LTE and calling it “5Ge” on the firmware, which requires Apple to go along with it, and they do.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Tomorrow’s plastics: Patent data reveals companies in consumer goods industry with high rate of innovation in bioplastics [Ed: EPO budget spent on greenwashing dross to distract from the EPO's crimes; Response Source Press Release Wire isn't a news site]

          From a global perspective, Europe and the US are leading innovation in plastic recycling and alternative plastics technologies, a new study published today by the European Patent Office (EPO) shows. Europe and the US each accounted for about 30% of patenting activity worldwide in these sectors between 2010 and 2019, or 60% combined. Within Europe, the UK together with France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium stands out for its specialisation in both plastic recycling and bioplastic technologies, while Germany as the top patent applicant among European countries, lacks specialisation in these fields. The Patents for tomorrow’s plastics: Global innovation trends in recycling, circular design and alternative sources study also reveals that in the domain of alternative plastics, the cosmetics and detergents industry is the sector innovating most intensively in bioplastics, with the UK’s Unilever among the top ten patent applicants in this field.

        • European Patent Office reports on the future of plastic recycling and bioplastics [Ed: EPO now pays German media to produce propaganda and lies about patents, as if monopolies will save the planet]

          A report released today by the European Patent Office (EPO) suggests that Europe and the US account for over half of worldwide patenting activity in the plastic recycling and bioplastic industries, with the cosmetic and detergent segments emerging as front runners for innovation.

          The report uses data from 2010 to 2019, particularly international patent families (IPFs) covering inventions that have submitted applications in two or more patent offices worldwide, to analyse innovation trends in plastic recycling and bioplastic technologies. As a relatively small number of applications are granted IPFs, and these are often filed months or years before a product appears on the market, the EPO considers IPFs to be a valid indicator of future trends.

        • Patents to tackle plastic waste on the rise [Ed: The EPO's paid-for propaganda is even being reprinted in India]


Recent Techrights' Posts

Comparing U.E.F.I. to B.I.O.S. (Bloat and Insecurity to K.I.S.S.)
By Sami Tikkanen
New 'Slides' From Stallman Support (stallmansupport.org) Site
"In celebration of RMS's birthday, we've been playing a bit. We extracted some quotes from the various articles, comments, letters, writings, etc. and put them in the form of a slideshow in the home page."
Thailand: GNU/Linux Up to 6% of Desktops/Laptops, According to statCounter
Desktop Operating System Market Share Thailand
António Campinos is Still 'The Fucking President' (in His Own Words) After a Fake 'Election' in 2022 (He Bribed All the Voters to Keep His Seat)
António Campinos and the Administrative Council, whose delegates he clearly bribed with EPO budget in exchange for votes
Adrian von Bidder, homeworking & Debian unexplained deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
 
People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 18, 2024
Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/03/2024: A Society That Lost Focus and Abandoning Social Control Media
Links for the day
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
Examples of boasting about the association
Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
"I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
[Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
fake elections
Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
Windows TCO?
Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
Links for the day
Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
[Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
Catspaw With Attitude
The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
Links for the day
Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Our Plans for Spring
Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
This is totally normal, right?
USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
Not joking!
The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
Not About Linux at All!
nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
Links for the day