Today LinuxInsider introduces a bimonthly news column to summarize some of the Linux and open-source consumer and enterprise events scattered around the Linux Sphere.
Look forward to an assortment of topics that will keep Linux users and open-source supporters up to speed with new developments. We will cover items of interest for Linux desktop users, distro hoppers, software developers, and — well anyone considering a migration to the Linux computing platform.
The Tuxedo Nano Pro Gen 11 is a mini PC that measures 4.6ââ¬Â³ x 4.3ââ¬Â³ x 1.9ââ¬Â³ and ships with a choice of Ubuntu Linux or the Ubuntu-based Tuxedo_OS.
It’s the latest in a line of Linux PCs from Tuxedo Computers, and the company says the little desktop is one of the smallest available with an AMD Ryzen 4000U processor. It’s available from Tuxedo for 640 Euros and up, taxes included.
The TUXEDO Nano Pro (Gen 11) is a palm-sized computer that measures a mere a 110x118x48mm. Despite the petite proportions the device packs in powerful AMD Ryzen 4000U series processors, and has enough room for 2 RAM modules (up to 64GB) and 2 storage slots (1x M.2 and 1x 2.5-inch).
Basically this thing is a tech TARDIS.
Three processor choices are available: a quad-core AMD Ryzen 3 4300U; a 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 4500U; and an octa-core AMD Ryzen 7 4800U.
Meet the 11th-generation of the TUXEDO Nano Pro palm-sized mini computer featuring AMD’s highly efficient Ryzen 4000U CPU series, namely the AMD Ryzen 3 4300U, AMD Ryzen 5 4500U, and AMD Ryzen 7 4800U, all with integrated AMD Radeon graphics.
The tiny PC also features two exchangeable SO-DIMM RAM slots for up to 64 GB RAM, as well as two M.2 SSD slots with PCIe 3.0 x4 or SATA3 connection for up to 10TB of storage.
Looking for something small yet mighty? The TUXEDO Nano Pro was just announced and not only is it tiny, it seems like it will pack quite the performance punch with AMD Ryzen.
Officially labelled as the "TUXEDO Nano Pro: The Nano Pro - Gen11", they say it's "the perfect digital signage solution for digital media content in advertising and information systems as well as a home media station for the living room or an ultra mobile home or work PC". Smaller than a shoebox, diagonally about the size of a standard pen - it really is quite small (110 x 118 x 48 mm).
Rackspace had the most reliable hosting company site in October 2021, with an average connection time of 8ms and no failed requests. So far in 2021, Rackspace has appeared in the top 10 every month, with four appearances in first place. Rackspace provides a wide variety of cloud services from its global network of over 50 locations across five continents.
In second place, CWCS Managed Hosting also responded to each of Netcraft’s requests in October, with an average connection time of 62ms. CWCS provides dedicated servers and cloud services with data centres across the UK and North America.
The top five is completed by Choopa.com, Bigstep and Swishmail whose sites each responded to the same number of requests and were separated by average connection time. Choopa.com had the fastest average connection time of just 3ms. Choopa.com offers a range of services including cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation with its own primary facility in Piscataway, New Jersey and other facilities in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Colocation from Choopa.com is available in the US, Amsterdam and London.
pi stuff, cooking, home made soda
Build Your FreeBSD Developer Workstation, logging is important, how BSD authentication works, pfSense turns 15 years old, OPNsense Business Edition 21.10 released, getting started with pot, and more
This is for people who want to understand how programs get loaded under linux. In particular it talks about dynamically loaded x86 ELF files. The information you learn will let you understand how to debug problems that occur in your program before main starts up. Everything I tell you is true, but some things will be glossed over since they don't take us toward our goal. Further, if you link statically, some of the details will be different. I won't cover that at all. By the time you're done with this though, you'll know enough to figure that out for yourself if you need to.
All of the Arm SoC/platform changes were merged on Wednesday evening for the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle.
It's another busy cycle bringing up more Arm platforms with the mainline Linux kernel with multiple new SoCs and boards enabled. Some of the highlights of this work for Linux 5.16 are listed below.
Red Hat engineer Michel Dänzer has uncovered and addressed another performance shortcoming within X.Org's XWayland code.
While our (X)Wayland Linux gaming testing has shown GNOME and KDE to be in good shape with the Wayland session versus X.Org performance, there are more optimizations still that can be made.
Hello everyone,
The fourth release candidate is now available, containing once again an overwhelming majority of zink fixes, and a handful of patches for everything else.
Note that while this could have been the final release of 21.3.0, there are a number of blocking issues still left, so we're having another round of release candidate. We'll see how things look in a week.
Please test it and report any issue here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
Issues that should block the release of 21.3.0 should be added to the corresponding milestone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/milestones/27
Cheers, Eric
Mesa 21.3 as the final feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers isn't yet ready to go as some blocker bugs persist, but available now is the fourth weekly release candidate.
Blocking Mesa 21.3 still are regressions affecting various dEQP failures, a regression breaking builds for all non-Linux platforms like macOS / BSDs / Solaris / Haiku / Cygwin / Hurd, Piglit test failures, and a rendering issue with Tomb Raider paired with RadeonSI Gallium3D.
With the Intel 12th Gen Core processors shipping today along with the new line-up of Z690 motherboards, the review embargo lifts for talking about these Intel "Alder Lake" processors. While by now you've likely heard a lot about Intel Alder Lake on Windows and various leaked benchmarks with Windows 11, how does these processors with the new hybrid architecture work and perform on Linux? Here are the initial benchmarks and support information for Intel's Core i5 12600K and Core i9 12900K processors under Ubuntu Linux.
Ardor usually takes center stage when it comes to open-source digital audio stations (DAW), however, that does not mean that it is the only option, so we are going to take the opportunity to present Stargate , another application the same type of recent creation (more or less) that aims to be “a comprehensive audio production solution, with everything you need to make music on a computer .“
[...]
Stargate also has, according to the features published in its GitHub repository, a powerful track routing matrix with lateral chaining and a modular mixer architecture. In theory, it works on Linux, Windows and macOS covering x86 and ARM processors, but for now the latest version of the application only has installers for Linux on ARM and x86 and Windows on x86. It is programmed in C and PyQt mainly and has been designed and developed in such a way that it is easy to port to other platforms.
In this guide we are going to learn how to install MongoDB 5.0 Community Edition on an OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 server.
MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented NoSQL database program that uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Server Side Public License.
It is rare that you want to write something without later wanting to be able to read it back. One common way of organizing files that are generated regularly is by time stamp. If you want to add a timestamp to a file name, you can do so using the date command.
COmpiling the Linux Kernel is a long running task. Oh, sure, you can put -j 32 and it speeds it up tremendously. But it still is a long running task. And by that, I mean it fits the following definition:
Database Management Systems have some common operations that are supported by SQL and NoSQL databases as well. The aggregation operation is one of them and is backed by several relational and non-relational databases. MongoDB is one of those databases that have the support of this operation. Aggregation is a key operation in any database that allows you to process data records to get targeted results. With the help of aggregation, the users can combine several entities to form a single meaningful entity by grouping the data.
The aggregation operations consist of several expressions that help to group the data for a meaningful output. For instance, a laptop, mobiles, gadgets can be combined under a single entity, let’s say technology_store. The entities are combined when individual entities do not represent anything or have no meaning.
This article provides a deep insight into the aggregate method and the expressions supported by this method.
MySQL is one of the most popular databases in the world. Regardless of the industry, MySQL is widely adopted for its features. It’s an open-source RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Data are organized into tables that can be related to each other. It incorporates SQL to perform various database actions.
In this guide, we’ll check out one such function. It will demonstrate how to use the DATEDIFF function in MySQL.
MongoDB is a NoSQL database that performs the fundamental operations that a DBMS(Database Management System) can perform. There are several methods and functions supported by MongoDB that are exercised for the insertion process. The insertOne() belongs to the insertion methods and this method is practiced to insert one document in the MongoDB collection. The insertOne() method also creates a collection, if it does not exist.
MongoDB stores data in a document form and these documents are kept inside a collection. The primary purpose of the insertOne method is to add a document in a MongoDB collection; however, if the collection does not exist then this method also creates the collection as well. Following the importance of this method, our today’s guide is focused on demonstrating the use of the insertOne method in MongoDB:
SQLite is an open-source RDBMS (relational database management system), which manages the data in tables. The tables used in databases can have relationships with each other, to establish this relationship, foreign keys are used. Foreign keys tell which table is connected to which table.
The relationships between the tables are the key feature of relational databases, which is being represented by foreign and primary keys. In this article, we will explain the foreign keys and their working in SQLite.
SQLite is a relational database management system (RDMS), which has a very simple architecture because it has no server and it stores data on the operating system of the local machine in which it is operating. SQLite supports different functions of Date and Time which can help to manage date and time accordingly. Every database management system either has DateTime data types, functions, or both.
In this write-up, we will discuss the DateTime data type and function in detail with the help of examples.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Darkstat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Darkstat is a cross-platform, lightweight, simple, real-time network statistics tool that captures network traffic, computes statistics concerning usage, and serves the reports over HTTP. Darkstat supports IPv6 protocol and asynchronous reverse DNS resolution.
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 Darkstat web-based Linux network traffic analyzer 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.
This simple tutorial will explain how you can prepare a hard disk or a USB flash drive with GUID Partition Table (GPT) technology for the purpose of operating system installation on UEFI computer. You can read this before installing a GNU/Linux distribution to your modern PC and laptop. Good luck!
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MAAS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MAAS (Metal as a Service) offers cloud style provisioning for physical servers. It is open source and free to use, with commercial support available from Canonical. This tool is very useful for normal enterprises in managing virtualized infrastructure. MAAS is supported on Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, and RedHat operating systems.
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 MAAS 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.
GitLab Watchman is an application that uses the GitLab API to Search GitLab for sensitive data and credentials exposed internally – this includes code, commits, wiki pages and more.
Xibo is open-source digital signage (public display signs) solution that is comprised of a web-based content management system (CMS). The best way to capture the attention of people for your very important announcements can be done with digital signs using Xibo. It lets us turn PCs and TVs into a distinctive way of getting the word out, transforming them into information desks that you can place in strategic locations to draw people's attention.
Using Xibo, you can set up your own digital signage server that can push out images, video, and even PowerPoint presentations to kiosks automatically, allowing you to keep your entire organization up to date on your latest news without resorting to mass e-mailings or having to hand-edit files or slideshows on multiple machines.
Xibo can be run through Docker or on a web server with MySQL/PHP installed. In this tutorial, we learn how to install Xibo CMS with Docker on Ubuntu 20.04.
Open-source software includes code that’s available publicly. As a result, the software can be shared and used for a wide range of reasons. One of the biggest reasons why developers use open-source code is because it helps them to build and deploy applications faster.
Organizations are demanding more and more from developers, and they’re coming under pressure to create applications faster. Open-source software makes this possible. Most software applications now include open-source components.
Django is Python-based free and open source web framework that allows model-template-view architectural patterns. Django encourages rapid development and clean and pragmatic codes. It takes care of much of the hassle of web development so that you can focus on the code without reinventing the wheel.
In this guide we are going to learn how to run a golang revel app using docker and docker-compose. Golang revel is a high productivity, full-stack web framework for the Go language. Checkout the code used here in this github repo here.
UNIX and Linux users find many uses for links, particularly symbolic links. One way that I like to use symbolic links is to manage configuration backups of various IT equipment.
I have a directory structure to hold everything related to documentation, updates, and other files for the computers and devices on my network. Devices can include routers, access points, NAS servers, and laptops, often of different brands and versions. The configuration backups themselves might be deep within the directory tree, e.g. /home/alan/Documents/network/device/NetgearRL5000/config.
A virtual machine is created under certain assumptions about required memory, data storage, processing capacity, and so on. All too often, these assumptions need to be adjusted based on actual use practices, and additional configuration work by system administrator is required. Cockpit greatly simplifies and facilitates this work, especially for the Fedora Server editions, that themselves do not include a graphical interface.
GoGodotJam is a month-long festival ending with a game jam. During the event, you can expect tutorials and interviews with Godot creators on a daily basis. This time, the event is also organizing a fundraiser, aiming to donate 50% of the raised funds to Godot!
Bear's Restaurant is one we missed from early October. It involves the afterlife, with you landing a job at the afterlife’s coziest eatery.
As a waiter at the titular restaurant, players are tasked with diving into the memories of the newly deceased in order to find out what their favourite foods are, and learn the sentimental significance they had in their lives. Players will meet a wide variety of lost souls on their way to the afterlife and will get to witness first-hand how each one lived and died before delivering the last supper that will help them rest in peace.
Sandbox Interactive has announced that the Lands Awakened upgrade for Albion Online is set for release on November 24. It sounds like it's going to be pretty big too.
Thankfully, this time around it's not just expanding the PvP available in the game, of which there's quite a lot already. While it's a heavy PvP focused game, the team has gradually added more to do outside of that and this update builds upon it. The open-world will be upgraded with new dungeons, mobs, treasure sites, open-world PvP objectives for various group sizes. On top of that you can expect to see "massively" improved visuals and layouts for the different biomes, a new War Gloves weapon line and lots of quality of life adjustments.
As crypto continues to be a global phenomenon, people worldwide are trying to incorporate this wide-ranging and environment-friendly technology in their industrial products and company services. Innovative methods are being developed to leverage crypto and trade it into gaming by purchasing avatars, gaming products, characters, and various other industries. In the past few decades, video gaming has evolved substantially, achieving a remarkable level. But during the Covid 19 pandemic, when several economies experienced a decline and collapse, the video gaming sector was one of those that showed up an unexpected reverberation. Nationwide lockdowns were imposed, and the people were compelled to stay in their homes. People to seek entertainment played videogames that they get with cheap cd keys, and a massive record was found of users purchasing in-games. With the evolution in PC and mobile gaming, there has been a noticeable increase in the gaming industry’s interest in cryptos. Unquestionably, crypto games are now ruling over the traditional games market as they are allowing their players to earn while playing, thereby illuminating their time and effort.
The connection and remote control tool KDE Connect is now available for iPhones and iPads – for beta testing. KDE Connect iOS is intended to enable interaction between Apple devices as well as Linux and Windows PCs – via the local network.
A macOS version of KDE Connect is also in development; it currently has to be compiled by yourself. The Apple systems are already well linked via various handoff functions of the manufacturer.
Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.
Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations. Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.
note that it doesn't understand project-local QML components, only stuff installed to the system QML dirs with qmlplugindump set up correctly.
regardless, it does a decent job at completing system types, and considering that Qt Creator struggles with some of the plugins that qml-lsp has no problem with, it's pretty usable and an improvement over the nothing found in editors other than Qt Creator.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 5.0.3!
GNOME 40.5 comes two and a half months after GNOME 40.4 and it was originally scheduled for September 22nd, 2021. It is a stable bugfix release for GNOME 40 and recommended to all distributions shipping the desktop environment in the software repositories.
GNOME 40.5 is a small point release compared to previous updates, and it’s here to optimize the rendering of full-screen zoom in GNOME Shell, fix monitor screencast scanouts and middle-click emulation support on X11 in Mutter, as well as to add duplex scanning support for Canon DR-C240 in Simple Scan, which also received better support for Brother scanners.
The week prior put together frequent Tumbleweed snapshots and the rolling release has been delivering continuous daily software updates since Oct. 27.
Updated documentation for the --whitespace-off feature in urlscan 0.9.7 was made in the latest 20211102 snapshot. Two other packages were also included in the snapshot; both packages were 2.0.99.2 versions of the Chinese input method ibus-sunpinyin and sunpinyin 2.0.99.2.
Snapshot 20211101 updated two packages. The general-purpose parser bison updated to version 3.8.2. It removed support for the YYPRINT macro and added a new C++ native GLR parser. The other package to update in the snapshot was gdb 11.1; the debugger added many maintenance scripts and removed several obsolete Fedora patches. The gdb package now supports general memory tagging functionality if the underlying architecture supports the proper primitives and hooks, which is currently only enabled for the AArch64 Memory Tagging Extension.
Red Hat has announced the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 . Ready- to-use installation images have been prepared for registered users of Red Hat Customer Portal ( CentOS Stream 9 iso images can also be used to evaluate functionality ). Package repositories are available without restriction for x86_64, s390x (IBM System z), ppc64le, and Aarch64 (ARM64) architectures. The sources for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rpm packages are located in the CentOS Git repository . The release is expected in the first half of next year. In line with a 10-year support cyclethe RHEL 9 distribution will be maintained until 2032. Updates for RHEL 7 will continue to be released until June 30, 2024, and RHEL 8 until May 31, 2029.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is notable for its move to a more open development process. Unlike previous branches, the CentOS Stream 9 package base was used as the basis for building the distribution.… CentOS Stream is positioned as an upstream project for RHEL, allowing third-party participants to control the preparation of packages for RHEL, propose their changes and influence decisions. Previously, a snapshot of one of the Fedora releases was used as the basis for a new RHEL branch, which was refined and stabilized behind closed doors, without the ability to control the development process and decisions made. Now, based on the Fedora snapshot, with the participation of the community, the CentOS Stream branch is being formed, in which the preparatory work is carried out and the basis for a new significant RHEL branch is formed.
This latest look at the future of RHEL is based on the controversial CentOS Stream Linux distribution. While many CentOS users have grumbled about CentOS becoming RHEL's upstream rather than a Linux distro in its own right, RHEL 9 shows that the new CentOS model has delivered what the company wanted from it. In the meantime, former CentOS users now have RHEL clones Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux or can turn to CloudLinux for CentOS 8 support.
But, if you want to know what's what with RHEL 9 so far, here's what we know. First, it's based on Linux kernel 5.14. It will run on four different architectures: Intel/AMD64 (x86_64); ARM 64-bit (aarch64); IBM Power LE (ppc64le); and IBM Z (s390x). And, in case you've been, unlike RHEL 8.x, you should be able to run RHEL 9 with Mac M1 processors.
Fedora 35 was released on November 2nd of 2021, and brings with it the latest GNOME experience and various tweaks and improvements. Could this be the best GNOME desktop of 2021 so far? In this review, we'll take a look at it and see how it stacks up.
The paradigm shift to hybrid work and remote work has left nearly every organization rebuilding a key piece of its structure – its culture. Offering a mix of on-site and remote work options has become the expectation of legacy employees and new hires alike, but trying to build a cohesive culture in a digital environment in trying times can lead to change fatigue, frustration, and apathy.
Enterprises are becoming more nimble with DevOps workflows to take advantage of container and cloud technology, which can also lead to an increase in the attack surface of their systems. Monolithic, single-perimeter security approaches don’t work with cybersecurity threats like ransomware and supply chain attacks becoming more common. How can organizations revamp their security approach while continuously deploying applications?
Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, has a few thoughts on core DevSecOps technologies that can help address these concerns. She joins Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright in "DevSecOps Decoded," a recent addition to our Technically Speaking series.
The series features conversations between Wright and a rotating cast of industry leaders as they chat about what's on the horizon for technology. Here are some snippets from Wright and Rice’s conversation.
A Red Hat certification can help administrators, developers, architects, operators, or engineers take the next step in their career or fill skills gaps within their enterprises. What types of questions won’t you find on Red Hat exams? Multiple-choice, check all that apply and matching terminology. It’s no secret that the exams are hard.
They’re performance-based, practical exams that are designed to validate IT professionals who want to take on ambitious projects and stay ahead of the technology curve. During the exams, you demonstrate your skills in solving real-world scenarios. To pass, you’re to make your systems and applications work according to the exam objectives, and configurations must persist after reboot without intervention.
So how do you start getting ready for a hands-on exam? In a video on redhat.com, Randy Russell, Director of Certification, offers tips to help you prepare, and hopefully pass, your Red Hat certification exam. We’re rounding out his suggestions in this blog post with a few other helpful resources for you to bookmark.
We (Robert Tari, the UBports developers team, myself) are very close to releasing Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x. The work on Ayatana Indicators is currently nearly completed funded by the UBports Foundation and over the past half year, many many changes, improvements and clean-ups have been added to the code.
Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x will be the first release series to be in the development tree of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 (which is currently under very heavy development).
Wallys unveiled two Linux-driven router SBCs with a 1GHz Qualcomm IPQ6010. The “DR6018 V4” offers WiFi-6, 5G, 2.5GbE, and 4x GbE, including one with PoE. The “DR6018-S V02” has GbE, GbE with PoE, and WiFi-6, and also supports the 1.8GHz IPQ6000 and IPQ6018.
Wallys (or Wally’s) Communications has delivered two new variations on its DR6018 router board from 2020. Both the DR6018 V4 and DR6018-S V02 offer the 1GHz, quad -A53 Qualcomm IPQ6010, which is a slower version of the 1.8GHz IPQ6018 on the DR6018. The DR6018-S V02 also offers an option for the IPQ6018, as well as a similar, 1.8GHz, quad -A53 IPQ6000, which we have seen on Wallys’ DR6000 and similar Compex CP03 mesh router board. The IPQ6000 is also available on 8devices Mango module and Mango-DVK dev kit.
Intel IoT flavor of Linux operating system to target scaling and massive fleets with built-in security features.
AAEON PICO-EHL4 is a Pico-ITX single board computer based on Intel Atom x6000E, Celeron and Pentium “Elkhart Lake” processors designed for IoT edge applications.
The SBC supports up to 16 GB LPDDR4 RAM via two SO-DIMM sockets as well as eMMC and SATA storage, offers two HDMI 2.0b video outputs, dual Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 interfaces, as well expansion capabilities via mini PCIe and M.2 sockets.
LattePanda 3 Delta is the new version of the x86 + Arduino board introduced in 2015 with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 processor, and followed by LattePanda Alpha/Delta in 2017 with respectively Kaby Lake and Gemini Lake processors.
The new LattePanda 3 Delta brings some serious performance boost with an Intel Celeron N5105 quad-core Jasper Lake processor that doubles the CPU performance, triples the GPU speed, and enables smooth 4K HDR video playback. Plus no vaccine is required that for that delta variant!
On Kickstarter: a $229 “LattePanda 3 Delta” SBC that runs Win 10 or Linux on Jasper Lake. The SBC provides an Arduino Leonardo, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, GbE, WiFi-6, M.2 M- and B-key, HDMI, eDP, 100 GPIO pins, and 4x USB including a Gen2 and Type-C with DP.
Shanghai based LattePanda has gone to Kickstarter to successfully launch a Jasper Lake based update to its earlier Gemini Lake based LattePanda Delta SBC. The LattePanda 3 Delta is far more than a processor upgrade, adding M.2 B-key, WiFi-6, USB 3.2 Gen2, and twice the RAM and eMMC. LattePanda has quickly doubled its $40K goal and is available through Dec. 17 starting at $229, with shipments due in March or April.
The launch of the $15 Pi Zero 2 W was still something of a surprise. Not only did it offer considerable speed upgrades, it introduced new Raspberry Pi-specific silicon packaging in the RP3A0. Starting with the same quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 SoC used in the Raspberry Pi 3 (BCM2710A1), it packages the processor die with 512MB of SDRAM, putting the memory in the same package as the SoC. The packaging even includes its own copper heatsinks, which should mean the Pi Zero 2 W runs cooler than its predecessor -- even when it's running at 1 GHz. This isn't Raspberry Pi developing its own silicon like it did with the RP2040, but it is providing its own spin on silicon packaging.
Operation Focus Flower is simple: just push the easy button to start the task timer, and the Arduino Nano attached will begin a countdown. Push the button again when you’re done, but if you don’t do it before the countdown is over, the plant squirts you with a steady, skin-blasting stream of water from a solenoid-driven flosser tip. An air compressor nearby is required, which blows the minimalist vibe a bit, but you could always stow that part underneath your desk.
Joos Poortfliet from Nextcloud has given me the prospect of an eventful November. It started on November 1st. with the presentation of the beta version of the peer-to-peer app Nextcloud Backup, which is now available for testing.
This is good news for everyone who hosts a Nextcloud themselves, because this clientele previously had to create their data backup using third-party software. In the future, Nextcloud Backup will allow regular compressed, encrypted backups of your data on your Nextcloud server. The app, which is designed for ease of use, is delivered with Nextcloud 23 in a stable version.
The internet is full of tools to check websites for SEO-related problems. However, they are not free, almost all of them come with a cost.
Unlike these tools which became services with subscriptions, our pick for today is offering a great value for free as free open-source software (FOSS).
Seo Panel is a self-hosted web-based app that helps site owner check their websites for errors and fix them to improve their SEO and website presence.
Seo panel is a fairly old project, it first appeared more than a decade ago. Since then, millions of users used it to improve their website SEO.
Earlier this year the European Commission unveiled its proposed ‘Digital Identity Framework’, a revision to the 2014 eIDAS regulation. While the draft law includes many welcome provisions on the security and interoperability of digital ID, it also contains a set of provisions that, if adopted, would have a fundamentally negative impact on the website security ecosystem. Our new position paper spells out the risks involved in forcing browsers to support a kind of web certificate known as Qualified Web Authentication Certificates (QWACs), and provides recommendations for lawmakers in the European Parliament and EU Council who are presently amending the draft law.
Web browsers are key user agents in our modern digital world. The web browser helps people visit the sites and services they want to use, and it protects them while they are there. One of the most important ways in which browsers protect users is through website authentication. For instance, if a person wants to visit Europa.eu, the web browser must reliably ensure that the site is actually under control of the owner of the domain ‘Europa.eu’, and not an attacker on the network impersonating the European Commission’s domain. Absent that assurance, users might send passwords, personal details, and other compromising information to the wrong party, putting them at risk of identity theft, fraud, and other privacy interferences.
From time to time, the Add-ons Team makes changes to the policies in order to provide more clarity for developers, improve privacy and security for users, and to adapt to the evolving needs of the ecosystem. Today we’d like to announce another such update, to make sure the Add-ons developer community is well-prepared for when we start to enforce them on December 1st, 2021.
The LibreOffice 7.1 office suite was released in February 2021 and it’s supported until November 30th, 2021. Today, The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 7.1.7 as the last point release for those still using the LibreOffice 7.1 series.
LibreOffice 7.1.7 is a minor update to address a few bugs across various of the office suite’s core components. A total of 27 bugs were squashed in this point release, and you can see details about them in the RC1 and RC2 changelogs.
LibreOffice 7.1.7 Community, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted to desktop productivity, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
With elections for The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors running, the Membership Committee is planning to conduct a live Q&A session with the candidates.
The sessions are not mandatory (the candidates can decide whether or not to attend), and TDF members can send the questions to be asked during the live session in advance to this address (which reaches the Membership Committee in private). The Committee will collect questions together, for easier moderation of the sessions.
The transparency and adaptability of Free Software enhance cooperation, inclusivity, and self-determination. This leads us to a society with stronger democratic procedures and community spirit. "The difference between Free and proprietary software is that Free Software always grants us four rights: any person may freely use, study, share, and improve the software. If software is developed under a free license, then anyone can use it without restrictions, anytime and anywhere. Since the source code can be read by anyone, this allows for more transparency and can lead to more security. People can work together across borders on problems that affect humanity; they can share the software, discuss it, and improve it collectively."
We are happy to announce that Belén finished her PhD thesis on"Understanding and designing technologies for everyday financial collaboration" which contains many inspirational ideas for future payment systems like GNU Taler:
Perhaps enticed by the promise of reduced marginal costs per customer and other “operational efficiencies”, the financial industry seems to take for granted that introducing technology into their services delivers convenience and makes it easier for people to manage their money. The overwhelmingly positive discourse that surrounds financial technologies portrays them as the inevitable next step in the evolution of money, and as driving consumer empowerment by reducing costs and improving quality of service. Research, however, has linked those very same technologies to new and existing forms of financial exclusion. This raises the question of how we can design financial technologies that promote access and fairness.
In this thesis, I take on this question by casting a critical lens over the design of financial technologies through experiences of financial difficulty and financial third party access. I conducted qualitative studies with a team inside the banking industry tasked with servicing customers deemed “vulnerable”; and with a group of people who live under the “double trouble” (Topor et al., 2016) of mental illness and financial difficulty. The latter trialled a new financial third party access digital service for 3 months. These varied perspectives on financial difficulty and third party access reveal the unintended consequences of introducing technology into our interactions with money, and the theories and assumptions concealed in the design of existing financial technologies.
Facebook's BOLT project for optimizing the performance out of compiled binaries is nearing the point of being added to LLVM's official source tree with its mono repository.
BOLT has been an engineering project at Facebook going back years that is a Binary Optimization and Layout Tool for speeding up Linux binaries. It aims to optimize the speed of large applications based on a collected execution profile, generated via Linux perf or similar, by improving the code layout for greater efficiency.
The festive season began already and I miss celebrating festivals with family and friends. But this is nothing new, I should get used to it now. Still sometimes it hurts really bad after all we are humans. In the past, we tried to be with family during festive season. The truth is it didn't feel the same. I don't know why. Could it be we are no longer carefree souls? But that can't be true. I have seen some of my friends on Facebook sharing celebration moments with family. It looks so beautiful and cute. The only difference I can think of is that they with family and I don't.
I would like to mention one friend from Nepal. We never met but I always watch his Facebook post having great time with his family. I think we became friends because of common love for Perl.
GCC optimizes this pretty much as you'd expect; CSE on the AND expression, do two compares with either branching or sete + or (depending on whether you actually want 0/1 or to branch on the expression). But could we do better? After some attempts to deal with this by hand, I turned to GNU superopt, a program with last update in 1995, and beat it into submission to get it to compile. (It only does 32-bit, of course. It hasn't even heard of ARM.)
The word functor is quite known in C++. The functor is quite like a class that behaves like a function or method. It will let you make some objects that are similar to functions and can use the operator(). In simple words, the functors are those objects that can be used as functions or likewise. These are helpful when a user wants to pass more than 1 argument in a function while that function doesn’t allow it. Today, we will learn about functors in C++ within Ubuntu 20.04. Start by opening the shell terminal with the “Ctrl+Alt+T” shortcut on the Ubuntu 4desktop.
The word “const” i.e., constant, means “no change” to any variable value within the programming languages. The pointer in programming refers to a variable that is pointing towards some specific address, probably of some variable address. The constant pointer will be one that will always point in the direction of the same address. This means the address of a variable to which the pointer is pointing cannot be updated so far. Therefore, in this article, we will see what is a constant pointer in C++ and how it works. So, let’s have a good start.
Typecasting refers to a method of converting one data type to another for the sake of computational ease. The C++ programming language also supports typecasting. There are mainly two types of typecasting in C++, i.e., implicit typecasting and explicit typecasting. What is Typecasting in C++ is explained in this article.
Typecasting refers to a method of converting one data type to another for the sake of computational ease. The C++ programming language also supports typecasting. As far as this article is concerned, we will take an in-depth look at what this phenomenon is and how it can be implemented in C++ on a Ubuntu 20.04 system.
The AWK scripting language also has a series of built-in special variables to serve some pre-defined purposes. One such built-in variable is “NF” which has its own pre-defined functionality. This article will explore the purpose of this built-in AWK variable by demonstrating some relevant examples in Ubuntu 20.04.
Hypersonic speeds are defined by those exceeding Mach 5, and lately there’s been a lot of buzz about unmanned hypersonic vehicles making test flights. Vehicles returning from orbital flight also travel at hypersonic speeds as they do their best to transition back to the terrestrial realm. Before anything leaves ground though, these machines are tested in wind tunnels. [Scott Manley]’s video “How Hypersonic Wind Tunnels Recreate Mach 20” (embedded below) does a wonderful job of explaining the engineering behind wind tunnels for testing hypersonic vehicles.
While the earliest wind tunnels such as that used by the Wright Brothers were powered by simple fans, it is not possible for any propeller to surpass subsonic speeds. This is evidenced by there not being any propeller driven aircraft that can exceed Mach 1. Since an aircraft can’t reach those speeds with a propeller, it follows that a wind tunnel cannot be driven by propellers, fans, or any such device, and exceed Mach 1 wind speed, either. So it begs the question: Just how do they do it?
I want to install a microphone in my workstation for long Zoom training sessions (7 hours in a day) that otherwise require me to use multiple Android devices as I don’t have a device that will do 7 hours of Zoom without running out of battery. A new workstation with USB-C is unreasonably expensive. A PCIe USB-C card would give me the port at the back of the machine, I can’t have the back of the machine near the microphone because it’s too noisy.
If I could have a USB-C hub with reasonable length cables (the 1M cables typical for USB 2.0 hubs would be fine) connected to a USB-C port at the back of my workstation that would work. But there seems to be a great lack of USB-C hubs. NewBeDev has an informative post about the lack of USB-C hubs that have multiple USB-C ports [2]. There also seems to be a lack of USB-C hubs with cables longer than 20cm.
Even the most talented engineers can be stymied by simple repair projects. In this case, repairing a broken sewing machine has [CuriousMarc] all tangled up. [Marc] is probably best known as a part of the team who managed to restore and boot up an apollo guidance computer, but he’s worked with plenty of other vintage machines.
This problem hit much closer to home. [Marc’s] daughter wanted to sew a Halloween costume. The machine would boot up fine, but when attempting to sew, it would make a bit of noise, then beep and display “The safety device has been activated”. Not very helpful.
The U.S. Commerce Department added Israel's NSO Group and Candiru to its trade blacklist on Wednesday, saying they sold spyware to foreign governments that used the equipment to target government officials, journalists and others.
Positive Technologies of Russia, and Computer Security Initiative Consultancy PTE LTD, from Singapore, were also listed. The Department said they trafficked in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to computer networks.
The Israeli cyberweapons arms manufacturer — and human rights violator, and probably war criminal — NSO Group has been added to the US Department of Commerce’s trade blacklist. US companies and individuals cannot sell to them. Aside from the obvious difficulties this causes, it’ll make it harder for them to buy zero-day vulnerabilities on the open market.
The Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) module has been designed to facilitate intra-cluster communication across Ethernet or UDP connections and is capable of service addressing, tracking, managing communication between nodes, and more.
Open source software tools and services are often created quickly and out of necessity. Linus Torvalds, for example, created the first version of git in a weekend when the Linux kernel team could no longer use BitKeeper for Source Control Management.
sigstore was created earlier this year to address the massive gap for an easy, trustable and efficient digital signing tool to confirm the provenance (origin) of software. Since March 2021 sigstore has been growing rapidly and is being used for various projects. This includes Kubernetes, one of the world’s largest open source projects.
But like Let’s Encrypt and the Linux Kernel, sigstore requires resources. Building the first version of the tool is different from bringing together resources to enable widespread adoption and support it for the long term. That’s why we’re excited to announce today that the project has received generous contributions from Chainguard, Cisco, HPE, Google, Red Hat and VMware to conduct an extensive security audit and hire a full-time developer relations engineer.
Cisco has released new releases of the free ClamAV antivirus package 0.104.1 and 0.103.4 . Recall that the project passed into the hands of Cisco in 2013 after the purchase of Sourcefire, which develops ClamAV and Snort. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
On November 1, 2021, researchers publicly released a BrakTooth proof-of-concept (PoC) tool to test Bluetooth-enabled devices against potential Bluetooth exploits using the researcher’s software tools. BrakTooth—originally disclosed in August 2021—is a family of security vulnerabilities in commercial Bluetooth stacks. An attacker could exploit BrakTooth vulnerabilities to cause a range of effects from denial-of-service to arbitrary code execution.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ansible, chromium, kernel, mupdf, python-PyMuPDF, rust, and zathura-pdf-mupdf), openSUSE (qemu and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (firefox and kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (qemu, tomcat, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (firefox and thunderbird).
TIPC is a transport layer protocol designed for nodes running in dynamic cluster environments to reliably communicate with each other in a manner that's more efficient and fault-tolerant than other protocols such as TCP. The vulnerability identified by SentinelOne has to do with a new message type called "MSG_CRYPTO" that was introduced in September 2020 and enables peer nodes in the cluster to send cryptographic keys.
China’s sophisticated filtering system, known as the Great Firewall (GFW), is the region’s biggest impediment to the freedom of information. The GFW is built by the Chinese government and is continuously developed to serve their political interests. In this report, we introduce the design of GFWatch, a large-scale longitudinal measurement platform that informs the public about how GFW censorship changes over time and its negative impact on the free flow of information.
Today, Access Now sent a letter to Spotify’s biggest investors, asking them to hold the company accountable for developing a dangerous voice-recognition patent technology. Spotify claims the tech is capable of detecting the “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” of listeners—violating their right to privacy, nondiscrimination, and freedom of expression.
In several cases over the last couple of years, the police have highlighted WhatsApp chats found on phones to explain why they needed to keep people in custody.
This strategy has been deployed most recently in narcotics cases involving Hindi film actress Rhea Chakraborty and Aryan Khan, the son of film star Shah Rukh Khan. It has previously been used against activist Umar Khalid and others in the Delhi riots case.
Last week, there were reports of the Hyderabad police stopping people in the streets and checking their phones to see if their WhatsApp chats contained conversations about drugs.
However, many legal experts say that this is completely illegal. One researcher has sent the Hyderabad Police a legal notice asking them to stop these “roving and fishing enquiry with no legal basis”.
This has left many ordinary people wondering what the powers of the police are in this regard and whether they can actually conduct such searches of phones.
Ten days after invading forces shut down the internet in Sudan, coinciding with the bloody military takeover, millions of people are still unable to connect to vital services, access information, or communicate with each other or the outside world. Furthermore, journalists and human rights defenders are unable to fully document events within the country.
“We don’t know the full extent of brutality being inflicted upon people in Sudan,” said Marwa Fatfta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “The internet blackouts are doing their job, and providing cover for the military’s violent takeover and hijacking of a possible democratic future for Sudan.”
Access Now has been working closely with local partners and organizations across the world, and although the situation is constantly changing, a number of key disruptions can be confirmed by the #KeepItOn community:
Frances Wilson review's our project for a feature in this week's Times Literary Supplement
