This episodes includes discussions about key bindings, Mastadon, Virtual Box, the Framework laptop, file permissions, astronomy programs, printers, Win-Kex, and App Outlet. There’s even more!
It's a common story. A person hears about Emacs and wants to give it a try, but their initial experience is usually pretty bad. Why? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with three HUGE mistakes that new Emacs users tend to make.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there’s an eerily human one on offer this week. If you’re doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that’s easy enough to print on the average 3D printer — and who doesn’t want to build their own jet boat? We’ll wrap up the episode by digging into magnesium sources, and by admiring the number of outfits who are rolling their own silicon these days.
Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant explains how to use various kinds of cuts. In this video you’ll learn about J-cuts, L-cuts, Jump cuts, and Action/Motivated cuts. While this will apply to Kdenlive, a free software video editing solution, it will also generally apply to video editing. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!
Troubleshooting goes very wrong for Alex, and he puts his backups to the ultimate test.
Plus, monitoring your freezer in Home Assistant, building a self-hosted Notion alternative, and more.
Kent Overstreet who has been working relentlessly on Bcachefs for over a half-decade now issued his latest status update on this Linux file-system born out of the kernel's block cache code.
Bcachefs continues making progress with ambitions still to be mainlined in the kernel and being capable of competing ultimately with the likes of Btrfs and XFS. Today's mailing list post offers a fresh look at the current happenings around this file-system. The core B-Tree code has been undergoing improvements with interior nodes now journalled, updating parent B-Tree node pointers on every B-Tree write, and other optimizations.
Konstantin Ryabitsev introduces the "local email interface" (lei) functionality for the lore archive of kernel mailing lists...
One of kernel developers' perennial complaints is that they just get Too Much Damn Email. Nobody in their right mind subscribes to “the LKML” (linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org) because it acts as a dumping ground for all email and the resulting firehose of patches and rants is completely impossible for a sane human being to follow.
The HID subsystem updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.16 merge window with some notable improvements for Linux gamers.
As written about at the end of last month, the Nintendo Switch controller driver is finally landing! This kernel driver enables the Nintendo Switch Pro and Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers to now work with the mainline kernel. Both USB and Bluetooth connectivity is supported. Features like rumble mode, LEDs, and other functionality is working for these Joy-Cons / Pro controllers.
he Linux 5.16 kernel is doing away with hardware support for the MIPS-based Netlogic Microsystems SoCs, the network processors developed prior to being acquired by Broadcom a decade ago.
The Linux kernel has supported the more than decade old Netlogic XLR/XLS and XLP processors used in the company's former high-end network gear. However, as no current Linux kernel developers have access to Netlogic hardware and no clear signs there still are users out there with Netlogic SoCs and running up-to-date kernels, that Netlogic Microsystems support is being cleared out from the Linux kernel.
A few weeks ago I watched Victor's excellent talk on Vulkan Video. This made me question my skills in this area. I'm pretty vague on video processing hardware, I really have no understanding of H264 or any of the standards. I've been loosely following the Vulkan video group inside of Khronos, but I can't say I've understood it or been useful.
radeonsi has a gallium vaapi driver, that talks to firmware driver encoder on the hardware, surely copying what it is programming can't be that hard. I got an mpv/vaapi setup running and tested some videos on that setup just to get comfortable. I looked at what sort of data was being pushed about.
The thing is the firmware is doing all the work here, the driver is mostly just responsible for taking semi-parsed h264 bitstream data structures and giving them in memory buffers to the fw API. Then the resulting decoded image should be magically in a buffer.
I then got the demo nvidia video decoder application mentioned in Victor's talk.
I ported the code to radv in a couple of days, but then began a long journey into the unknown. The firmware is quite expectant on exactly what it wants and when it wants it. After fixing some interactions with the video player, I started to dig.
Now vaapi and DXVA (Windows) are context based APIs. This means they are like OpenGL, where you create a context, do a bunch of work, and tear it down, the driver does all the hw queuing of commands internally. All the state is held in the context. Vulkan is a command buffer based API. The application records command buffers and then enqueues those command buffers to the hardware itself.
As another "first on RADV" for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan open-source driver compared to AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver options, there is an early branch providing primitive, experimental support for Vulkan Video acceleration.
Earlier this year the Vulkan Video extensions were published in provisional form. When it comes to Linux support so far there has just been the NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver exposing the video extensions, but now with a branched, not-yet-mainlined set of patches there is initial RADV support too.
AMD traditionally has been updating its AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver sources publicly on a (bi)weekly basis, but that went off the wagon recently with not seeing any updates since the end of September. That changed this morning with the publishing of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1.
While more than one month has passed since the last AMDVLK code drop, AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 isn't all that exciting. AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 updates against the Vulkan 1.2.195 headers, limits the memory size of the pipeline cache for 32-bit systems, and improves the shader cache hit rate. There are also a few fixes primarily about the Vulkan memory handling.
Published yesterday was the Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K Linux review looking at the exciting performance uplift provided by Alder Lake. One of the areas only talked about briefly in yesterday's article were the UHD Graphics 770 found with these new desktop processors, due to time constraints with only having a few days so far for carrying out tests. Today the initial batch of UHD Graphics 770 / ADL-S GT1 Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks have wrapped up to show how the Intel graphics performance compares to prior generation Rocket Lake as well as AMD's Ryzen 7 5700
If you are a professional or a hobby photographer, certainly you are using Google Photos or similar services to back up, organize and share your photo collections.
Many open-source tools and self-hosted solutions can help you to achieve that, but today, we bring you the best there is: PhotoPrism. Let's know why!
PhotoPrism is a free open-source solution that helps you browse, organize and share your photo collection.
PhotoPrism comes with built-in search support, RAW file format conversion, duplicate finder support, many videos, and file formats, and automatic image classification and location visualization support.
While using PhotoPrism, you don't need to worry about your data being collected or sent to big firms.
Being able to upgrade Fedora from one version to the next is one of Fedora’s best features. Here’s how to do it easily.
Fedora brings two major stable releases every year. If you’re using an older version, you can easily upgrade to the latest desktop or server edition. You benefit from getting the latest software, including new security patches, and all the upgraded technology that comes with a new release without having to resort to reinstalling and reconfiguring your system.
There are two ways to upgrade to a new Fedora version, graphically or by using command line, and I will show you both ways here.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano Text Editor on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU nano is one of the popular and easiest command line text editors used on many operating systems including Unix-based systems and BSD variants. Nano text editor supports syntax highlighting, spell checking, justifying, completion, undo/redo, and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the nano text editor on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
GitLab is a free git repository management tool that allows you to create and manage git repositories. It provides tools for everything an open-source developer would need.
Gitlab has everything that allows a developer to manage their project easily. You can create issues, track your bugs or comments related to your project, keep releases organized, and have much more useful features than the ones you find on GitHub. It integrates perfectly with other development tools like CodeShip, which makes deployments easy and fast.
The difference between GitLab and GitHub is: GitHub is a web-based application while GitLab is an open-source application. GitHub is currently the most popular choice among developers.
Both services are popular for hosting projects of any kind. However, GitHub is more popular among open-source projects. If you search on Google with "GitHub" or "GitLab", GitLab will return almost four times fewer results than GitHub. This doesn't mean that GitLab is not good. GitLab is the better choice for self-hosted private repositories.
This is the third and final article in a series on starting the Horizon Client from the command line. In the first article, I walked through how to launch the Horizon Client to a Horizon desktop using a .bat file. In the second article, I showed how I added a .bat file to the taskbar and Start menu which could automatically log me in to a Horizon streaming application. Being that I was already down this rabbit hole, I figured it would be worthwhile to go one step further; in this article, I will go over how to start a Horizon session from the Linux command line, even if you are not on the GUI.
If you are not familiar using the vmware-view command, I highly recommend first reading the articles mentioned above.
Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a high-performance block storage service. It is designed for use with Elastic Cloud Compute i.e. EC2 for transactions and intensive workload. Relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS. We can change types of EBS Volume, increase volume size without disrupting our applications. Amazon EBS volumes are easy to create, use, encrypt, and protect. Amazon EBS architecture offers reliability for mission-critical applications. Each volume is designed to protect against failures by replicating data on it within the Availability Zones. Amazon EBS enables us to increase storage without any disruption to our critical workloads. EBS is built to be secure for data compliance. Newly created EBS volumes can be encrypted by default with a single setting in our account.
Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It enables infrastructure as code. Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
Ansible itself is written in Python and has a fairly minimal learning curve. Ansible follows a simple setup procedure and does not depend on any additional software, servers or client daemons. It manages nodes over SSH and is parallel by default.
In this guide, we are going to learn how to Install and Configure Ansible on Fedora 35.
Python is among the most popular programming languages. Because of this, most scripts and tools used in linux are written on python. It iss often described as easy to learn and therefore often recommendd for beginners.
In this guide, we are going to learn how to install Python 2 and python 3 in Fedora 35.
Get ready for a race around various indoor arenas in the upcoming Liftoff: Micro Drones, as it's now confirmed to be releasing in Early Access on November 30 with Linux support. This is the fifth game from LuGus Studios and their fourth to officially support Linux too.
After eight years in development, the LXQt desktop that was created by the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt open-source desktop projects is celebrating its v1.0 release.
LXQt 1.0 targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit and hasn't yet been ported to Qt 6. LXQt 1.0 prides itself on improvements to its file manager and image viewer, a do-not-disturb mode for its desktop notifications, two new desktop themes, updated translations, and more.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 29 to November 05.
In a world where Windows has become synonymous with PCs in the minds of the public, is there room for Open Source Operating Systems in your business? What many business leaders don’t realize is that even companies like Microsoft themselves are adopting Open Source technologies, mostly in a bid to tempt diehard Linux users to Microsoft. There’s many reasons that an Open Source operating system might be good for your business, however. Today we will take a look at a few of them.
We have just sent out a new Stable Development build of MakuluLinux LinDoz to testers, this ISO has also been shared with our Patreon Members. There have been significant updates to this new build, which has been marked as a stable build. You can read the Dev logs by Clicking here, We are one step closer to release. Additionally, should you wish to get access to early builds, you can always sign up to become a patreon member to help support the project, to sign up Click here to our Patreon page, and follow the sign up links.
Project Trident, the Linux distribution that started life as a BSD operating system, is calling it quits, bringing to an end a desktop operating system saga that began with PC-BSD during the first decade of the 21st century.
Some might remember that PC-BSD was an attempt to develop a GNU-based desktop oriented BSD operating system as an alternative to GNU/Linux. Based on FreeBSD, the OS even went so far as to develop its own desktop environment, Lumina, and for many years maintained booths at various Linux and open source conferences, where it handed out installation CDs of the operating system, hoping to get Linux users to give it a try.
In 2016, the company that had owned PC-BSD since 2006, iXsystems, changed the OS’s name to TrueOS, and two years later dropped the desktop version to focus on servers and the enterprise, with the desktop being spun-off under a new moniker, Project Trident, that continued to produce a desktop distribution, but now based on TrueOS.
This lasted for about a year, until in 2019 problems such as hardware compatibility and software availability (issues that were also once a roadblock to Linux desktop adoption) moved Project Trident’s developers to move the project away from BSD to adopt Void Linux, a scratch-built and systemd-free distro, as its base.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Fedora 35 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The following kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel LTS 5.4.157. Kernel LTS 5.10.77 and Kernel 5.14.16.
KDE Plasma Applications updated to 21.08.3 which is a service release to address a few bugs to the KDE Plasma programs.
The weather is getting colder, days shorter, motivation to go outside is shrinking. Which leaves more time in front of the computer, helping Tumbleweed roll. And roll it did during the last week! We have published 6 snapshots (number 7 needed to be discarded due to vi installation issues). The snapshots released were numbered 1028, 1029, 1030, 1031, 1101, and 1102.
The launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 Beta today marks a bit of a change from previous releases. While it has many improvements and enhancements that customers have asked for, there are fewer changes that require admins and IT Ops to learn new ways of doing things.
This means anyone already familiar with RHEL 8 should feel at home. Among new features are enhanced web console performance metrics, kernel live patching via the web console, and streamlined image building.
Security and compliance improvements include smart card authentication via the web console so users can make use of smart card authentication to access remote hosts, additional security profiles to help compliance with standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and others. There's also detailed logging of SSSD -- the built-in enterprise single-sign-on framework -- and integrated OpenSSL 3 cryptographic framework support.
Davie Street Enterprises is our fictional Red Hat customer that is working its way through real-world digital transformation problems, and this time around, it's tackling measurement.
Newly-promoted Director of Security Engineering Zachary L. Tureaud knew that Monique Wallace, Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) CIO, was impressed with the work he had led on solution design, but he still needed to ensure his DevSecOps vision was working. It wasn’t enough to just point to all the new tooling his team had put together.
He needed to be able to demonstrate, quantifiably, that the changes were having the desired effect. Let’s see how he led DSE toward a DevSecOps practice using measured approaches from Google’s DevOps research and assessment team.
To move up the IT ladder, it helps to be aware of where you need to improve. Half the battle is acknowledging your weaknesses, and the other half is looking for ways to improve them. Coachable people typically have a better chance to succeed in their careers. Most successful professionals do not do it alone; they have mentors to give them constructive feedback. Being coachable means you will never stop learning and improving.
This article does not talk about coaching and mentorship, rather it highlights four soft skills I think help sysadmins further their IT careers. As a sysadmin, I use these skills almost daily to help me become a better communicator at work and make my professional life easier and more enjoyable.
Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs.
Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our resource library with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. Check out the curated pieces below, available to readers through the end of the month.
Container adoption is a common step in the DevOps journey for many organizations. But as the number of containerized applications increases, teams become unable to manually sustain the operational processes required to manage and deploy them. Container orchestration via a Kubernetes platform enables them to automate many of these processes.
After an organization adopts a container orchestration approach, human skills still play an important role in container success. At enterprise organizations, teams require specific skills to ensure that they can effectively problem-solve, make improvements, scale, monitor, maintain security, and more.
After a two-day delay, Tails 4.24 is now available for download and ships with the latest and greatest Tor Browser 11.0 anonymous web browser, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox 91 ESR series and brings numerous new features and improvements.
In fact, Tor Browser 11 has not even been officially released, it’s still in alpha development at the moment of writing, but the Tails developers decided to include it as the default web browser in this new release of their amnesic incognito live system.
Adlink unveiled two edge AI systems that run Linux on a Jetson AGX Xavier: a rugged “AVA-RAGX” railway PC with 4x GbE with PoE, 4x USB, 2x M.2, and 2x CAN, and an “AVA-XV-V1” system for autonomous vehicles with 10GbE, GbE, and 8x GMSL2 camera ports.
Adlink has been keeping us busy this week with new edge AI products that run Linux. After rolling out its Coffee Lake based AVA-3501 and AVA-3510 systems for autonomous vehicles, the company announced two new ROSCube-branded robotics controllers: a ROSCube Pico NPN equipped with a Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX and a ROSCube Pico TGL built around Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core processors.
Contec has added three new RPi HATs to it DAQ-oriented CPI Series for 12-bit, 8-ch. isolated analog in, 16-bit, 2-ch. isolated analog out, and 32-bit Up/Down counter. There is also a DIN-rail kit for its HATs and some recent “DX” Jetson edge AI systems.
We missed Contec’s April announcement of its CPI Series HAT Size Cards for digital acquisition (DAQ), having forgotten entirely about the Japanese embedded firm, which was founded in 1975. We had to go back to our LinuxDevices archives for our last Contec report from 2011, about an Atom D510 based BX-956 embedded computer. We heard about their latest round of CPI Series Raspberry Pi HATs from this Nov. 1 MarketScreener announcement. Farther below, we also look at some recent DX-branded embedded computers based on Jetson Nano and Xavier NX.
TQ Embedded (aka TQ) has just announced the availability of the TQMa117xL system-on-chip module based on NXP i.MX RT1170 crossover processor family, and as well as MBa117xL single board computer (SBC) based on the 31Ãâ31 mm module.
TQMa117xL’s small size has been achieved thanks to a 277-pad LGA design, with the module still integrating LP-SDRAM, Quad-SPI NOR flash and EPROM, a PMIC, as well as an optional security chip.
With remote activities increased due to pandemic, a lot of families needed more home computer to manage smart working, school sessions and family meetings. Ubuntu on Raspberry PI can be a fast solution for your cheap desktop computer, but only adopting certain tricks
For some reason, wildfire seasons in Australia, North America, and other places around the world seem to happen more and more frequently and with greater and greater fervor. Living in these areas requires special precautions, even for those who live far away from the fires. If you’re not sure if the wildfires are impacting your area or not, one of the tools you can build on your own is an air quality meter like [Costas Vav] shows us in this latest build.
The air quality indicator is based around an Adafruit Feather RP2040 which is in turn based on the 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core processor. This makes for a quite capable processor in a small package, and helps accomplish one of the design goals of a rapid startup time. Another design goal was to use off-the-shelf components so that anyone could easily build one for themselves, so while the Feather is easily obtained the PMS5003 PM2.5 air quality sensor needed to be as well. From there, all of the components are wrapped up in an easily-printed enclosure and given a small (and also readily-available) OLED screen.
Photo manipulation and image editing programs like Photoshop, and GIMP are often desktop applications. However, photo editing can also be done through the web browser.
Many web-based services offer photo editing for a price, which requires only an internet connection, a web browser, and an account.
Although they seem limited compared to desktop programs, web-based image editing programs have proven to be reliable for many users.
In this article, we present a collection of free web-based open-source image editing solutions that you can download, install and run on your local machine or server.
No big deal, Philipp Kewisch, the add-ons product operations manager at Firefox’s parent Mozilla, said in a blog announcing the upcoming changes on Wednesday. The organization is mostly clarifying their add-on policies to make them easier for developers to understand — although there are a few small changes in the works.
“While this has resulted in a substantially rewritten and reorganized document, the policy changes are modest and unlikely to surprise anyone,” he said.
Every morning, I wake up, look in the mirror, and ask myself: Am I a hipster? And since the answer is always categorically no, I know that my choices in life will be superior, aesthetically and functionally. Which meant that when I saw my Firefox 78 ESR transform into Firefox 91 ESR with its pointless Proton interface, I knew it was going to be a bad day.
Now, Firefox is my default browser of choice on any platform, has always been and hopefully will always be, but I refuse to succumb to hipsterology trends. I'm neither a child nor do I live near the Pacific Ocean coast. Hence, clarity, contrast, good clear colors. I've already shown you how to undo most of Proton nonsense in a dedicated tutorial, now I'd like to give you a few more tips. Follow me.
The well-known open-source web browser has received yet another update that contains some major features.
Notable features include tweaks for faster performance, improved warnings on exit, and a bug fix for Ubuntu. Most importantly, the OpenGL EGL backend is now enabled by default.
You should find all the technical details in the official release notes.
LibreOffice 7.3 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 7.3 started in mid June, 2021. Since then, 4764 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 760 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha1 can be downloaded from here for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).
Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:
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A legal document is, in many cases, a part of a company’s user experience. As such, it needs to be vetted for consistency with the rest of the software, just as you’d vet any other part of the UX.
This is hard, and easy to screw up, because let’s face it—who likes reading and re-reading legal documents? Not even lawyers, if we’re being honest. This particular document screws this up in two ways.
First, the tool (very correctly!) encourages companies not to do a background check for every position, since that introduces a significant bias against people who may have been rehabilitated and should have a fair chance at employment. But the legal document says very plainly that “all offers of employment are contingent on … a background check” (emphasis mine). The legal terms must be brought into alignment with the software’s reality.
Similarly, one of the benefits of this tool is that it takes care of the paperwork for you—without pens and paper. And yet the legal document says that a “signed, written consent will be obtained … in compliance with … law”. Now, good American lawyers know that under the E-SIGN Act of 2000, lots of digital things are “signatures” for the purposes of American law, but most people don’t know that. Good drafting will avoid confusing these non-lawyers by simply saying the consent will be “explicit” and recorded by the service.
[...]
I continue to believe that many legal documents should at least be edited (not necessarily finalized) in a Q&A style—in other words, changing each section header to a question, and making sure the section actually answers the question. I talked a bit more about that in this post about doing it for a draft of the Mozilla Public License.
PHPStan is a static analyzer for PHP focused on finding bugs in your code without actually running it. PHPStan 1.0 finally has been released, so let’s see what’s new.
Introducing static code analysis into your process should improve the quality of your code and make the QA process more efficient due to finding errors earlier on.
PHPStan is an open source tool with 10.4K GitHub stars and 737 GitHub forks. It is probably the most popular static analysis system for PHP projects, which finds bugs in your codebase by inspecting the source files. In other words, you don’t need to run your code or manually write tests to discover issues.
Out of all Qt's subdomains, https://doc.qt.io sees the most views and time spent browsing. Many users find a darker color scheme easier on eyes, especially during late-night coding sessions.
Term::ReadLine is a core module (since Perl 5.002) that provides an extremely limited text interface of the prompt-and-type variety. Its main virtue is that you can add a back end which gives it things like command history, editing, and completion.
The back ends live in the Term::ReadLine::* name space, and you can control which one you get by defining the PERL_RL environment variable as documented at Term::ReadLine. If this is not defined, various undocumented things are tried; if none works you get the bundled minimal interface, Term::ReadLine::Stub.
The preferred back end (at least, according to Bundle::CPAN as of this writing) is Term::ReadLine::Perl. This is a shy, retiring module, with no POD documentation at all, which provides readline-style history, editing, and completion. By default the only completion you get is file name completion, but with some work you can expand this to do whatever you can figure out.
On Discord Hydrazer was looking for a list concatenation operator. That leaves the question if it should mutate like Array.push or return a new list of Slips.
On Discord flirora wished for a way to merge list elements conditional. In this instance the condition is that any element that starts with a space is part of a group.
I wanted to write about an idea that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for some time. I call it view types. The basic idea is to give a way for an &mut or & reference to identify which fields it is actually going to access. The main use case for this is having “disjoint” methods that don’t interfere with one another.
Nothing makes you appreciate your vision more than getting a little older and realizing that it used to be better and that it will probably get worse. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if you were totally blind. That was what happened to [Berna Gomez] when, at 42, she developed a medical condition that destroyed her optic nerves leaving her blind in a matter of days and ending her career as a science teacher. But thanks to science [Gomez] can now see, at least to some extent. She volunteered after 16 years to have a penny-sized device with 96 electrodes implanted in her visual cortex. The research is in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and while it is a crude first step, it shows lots of promise and uses some very novel techniques to overcome certain limitations.
There’s this effect I often refer to when talking about digital photography. Old photographs, for whatever reason, tend to age themselves significantly over time, as the formats reflect older processes for making pictures, as well as the general effects of age. But digital photos, while not nearly as high a resolution as a modern pro-quality camera can take, do not age themselves quite so quickly. So as a result, pictures on Flickr that are nearly 20 years old at this point often manage to look like they were, for all intents and purposes, taken yesterday. As time goes on, the baseline for quality improves. Same with music: A pop song from 1998 generally doesn’t draw too much attention to its age on modern radio compared to a song from 1988, in part because digital recording formats like ProTools had become common by that point.
We sure do love a good one-piece split keyboard, and it’s not just because you never have to worry about the halves drifting too far apart throughout the day, though that’s a big plus. For one thing, the angles are always just right without having to mess with anything, so muscle memory gets you back to the home row every time. Usually, the only thing missing from these mono-block splits is the num pad. Well, not on the SuperLyra.
This is [Malevolti]’s back-to-the-office build, and it’s sure to start a few conversations. While we don’t have a lot of details, there will be plenty forthcoming on the Black Cat Plasticworks website. As soon as next year, [Malevolti] plans to sell fully-assembled SuperLyras, kits, and bare-bones PCBs. We really appreciate that it allows for either MX-type switches or Chocs, depending on the hot swap sockets installed.
We’re pretty sure that we don’t have to tell you how great cardboard is. You probably sing the praises yourself and use it for everything from a work surface protective layer to a prototype of your next amazing build. But if you still find yourself flush with cardboard even after all that, here’s one thing you can do with all those pieces that are too small to use for anything else– chuck them in an old blender, whip up some cardboard pulp, and press that gunk into some 3D-printed molds.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (python3.5, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (rust), openSUSE (binutils, java-1_8_0-openj9, and qemu), Oracle (firefox and httpd), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), and SUSE (binutils, qemu, and systemd).
Passwords are a weak link in enterprise security. As users struggle with requirements for complex passwords and password managers, bad habits multiply: post-it notes on screens, Word docs with passwords listed, retaining default passwords, reused passwords, and other workarounds.
That’s why cyber criminals go after passwords so often. Once a hacker steals credentials, they can enter sensitive systems or wait in ambush to stage a devastating attack against a prized asset. And because users tend to reuse passwords, they attempt to crack other systems and websites with them too in password spraying and credential stuffing attacks. It’s enough to make you want to go passwordless.
Penetration testing, therefore, pays close attention to password cracking. John the Ripper is a free, easy-to-use, open-source tool that takes the best aspects of various password crackers and unites them into one package. As such it can be harnessed by pen testers to detect weak passwords and find a way into a system or database.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 190. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Don't raise a traceback if we cannot de-marshal Python bytecode to support Python 3.7 loading newer .pyc files. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#284) * Fix Python tests under Python 3.7 with file 5.39+.
[ Vagrant Cascadian ] * Skip Python bytecode testing when "file" is older than 5.39.
[ Roland Clobus ] * Detect whether the GNU_BUILD_ID field has been modified.
Security researchers have discovered a heap overflow vulnerability in the Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC) module of the kernel of Linux operating systems. Hackers could exploit the vulnerability locally or remotely within a network to gain kernel privileges.
We talk about ransomware gangs quite a bit, but there’s another shadowy, loose collection of actors in that arena. Emsisoft sheds a bit of light on the network of researchers and law enforcement that are working behind the scenes to frustrate ransomware campaigns.
Darkside is an interesting case study. This is the group that made worldwide headlines by hitting the Colonial Pipeline, shutting it down for six days. What you might not realize is that the Darkside ransomware software had a weakness in its encryption algorithms, from mid December 2020 through January 12, 2021. Interestingly, Bitdefender released a decryptor on January 11. I haven’t found confirmation, but the timing seems to indicate that the release of the decryptor triggered Darkside to look for and fix the flaw in their encryption. (Alternatively, it’s possible that it was released in response the fix, and time zones are skewing the dates.)
Emsisoft is very careful not to tip their hand when they’ve found a vulnerability in a ransomware. Instead, they have a network of law enforcement and security professionals that they share information with. This came in handy again when the Darkside group was spun back up, under the name BlackMatter.
The system had limited goals compared to commercial competitors. [7402] was more than happy to deal with a limited vocabulary of understanding as a trade off for privacy. It’s all built around a Raspberry Pi Zero, which runs the Julius speech recognition library. Ultrasonic sensors are used to only activate the device when a person leans in and directly addresses the system.
ORAL STATEMENT 32nd Special Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council on the implications of the ongoing situation in the Sudan Delivered by: Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager, Access Now
President Joe Biden targeted planet-warming methane emissions on Tuesday from the UN climate summit, announcing strong new US regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and launching a Global Methane Pledge, in partnership with the European Union, that has been signed by around 100 countries.
At the center of Biden's US methane strategy is a rule from the EPA that would push oil and gas companies to more accurately detect, monitor and repair methane leaks from new and existing wells, pipelines and other equipment. The agency estimates the rule would cut 41 million tons of methane emissions from 2023 to 2035 -- more greenhouse gas than all the carbon dioxide emitted by all US passenger cars and commercial planes in 2019.
On the front lines of the $SQUID “rug pull” that left investors in the lurch.
On Wednesday, an “industry-led and UN-convened” alliance of private banking and financial institutions announced plans at the COP26 conference to overhaul the role of global and regional financial institutions, including the World Bank and IMF, as part of a broader plan to “transform” the global financial system. The officially stated purpose of this proposed overhaul, per alliance members, is to promote the transition to a “Net-Zero” economy. However, the group’s proposed “reimagining” of international financial institutions (IFIs), according to their recently published “progress report”, would also move to merge these institutions with the private banking interests that compose the alliance; create a new system of “global financial governance”; and erode national sovereignty among developing countries by forcing them to establish business environments deemed “friendly” to the interests of alliance members. In other words, the powerful banking interests that compose this group are pushing to recreate the entire global financial system for their benefit under the guise of promoting sustainability.
This alliance, called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), was launched in April by John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change; Janet Yellen, US Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve; and Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and former chair of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada. Carney, who is also the UK Prime Minister’s Finance Advisor for the COP26 conference, currently co-chairs the alliance with US billionaire and former Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.
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With the UN now essentially a vehicle for the promotion of stakeholder capitalism, it is only fitting that it would “convene” and support the efforts of a group like GFANZ to extend that stakeholder capitalist model to other institutions involved in global governance, specifically global financial governance. Allowing GFANZ members, i.e. many of the largest private banks and financial institutions in the world, to fuse with MDBs, remake the “global financial governance system” and gain increased control over political decisions in the emerging world is a banker’s dream come true. To get this far, all they have needed is to convince enough of the world’s population that such shifts are necessary due to the perceived urgency of climate change and the need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Yet, if put into practice, what will result is hardly a “greener” world, but a world dominated by a small financial and technocratic elite who are free to profit and pillage from both “natural capital” and “human capital” as they see fit.
Today, MDBs are used as “instruments of power” that utilize debt to force developing nations to implement policies that benefit foreign interests, not their national interests. If GFANZ gets their way, the MDBs of tomorrow will be used to essentially eliminate national sovereignty, privatize the “natural assets” (e.g. ecosystems, ecological processes) of the developing world and force increasingly technocratic policies designed by global governance institutions and think tanks on ever more disenfranchised populations.
Though GFANZ has cloaked itself in lofty rhetoric of “saving the planet,” their plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory and further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing world.
