This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we are going to take a look at Fedora 35 now that it’s out. All of our hosts have been playing with this distro and it’s time to share our thoughts. Then we’re going to discuss a new desktop environment from System76. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Besides the efforts out there for implementing the likes of Direct3D, OpenCL, and OpenGL on top of Vulkan, there does still exist the hobbyist project for implementing AMD's Mantle API atop Vulkan for which the Khronos API was originally based. A new Vulkan extension is now being proposed to help in that Mantle-on-Vulkan effort.
GRVK is that open-source project implementing AMD's Mantle API atop Vulkan. GRVK has seen a few releases over the past year, most recently was GRVK 0.4 from back in April.
Mesa 22.0 development code now has basic support in the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for OpenCL powered by the Clover state tracker.
Freedreno is the open-source Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware that started out as a reverse-engineering effort and these days is now being used within Google Chromebooks along with the accompanying TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver and the MSM DRM/KMS driver in kernel-space.
Along with introducing DLSS 2.3 today, NVIDIA is making public an open-source Image Scaling SDK with promised cross-platform GPU support.
NVIDIA is launching an Image Scaling SDK that is open-source and aims to better compete with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution. On NVIDIA GPUs, the Image Scaling SDK supports making use of DLSS. But with this being open-source under the MIT license may end up working on Intel and AMD Radeon graphics via generic compute shaders.
While NVIDIA has had DLSS available for a while, it does depend on game support with a compatible NVIDIA GPU. So we saw AMD come along with FidelityFX Super Resolution that worked across both vendors and now NVIDIA has something of an answer with their own open source Image Scaler.
Self-hosted email clients are those that we can host on our own server or on our local network. The advantage of using a self-hosted email client is that it makes your email accounts accessible to any devices on a network. We can use these clients to not only integrate third-party email accounts, but also to construct our own email server, which allows us to communicate in perfect privacy over the internet.
If you’re asking why someone would need a self-hosted email client, the answer is simple: accessibility and privacy. If you value privacy, you can set up your own email server. It will give you complete control over your data, and no third-party services will be able to share it with advertising businesses. Second, you may integrate third-party email services with these email clients, allowing them to be accessed via the local network or the Internet.
EverSticky is a simple new Qt sticky notes tool for Linux that synchronizes with Evernote and displays rich text formatting.
The application lets users quickly take notes using post-it note-like windows displayed on their desktop. The notes are automatically saved, and synchronized to Evernote (including free Evernote accounts) at a given interval or on demand.
Eversticky sticky notes The sticky notes are accompanied by a tray icon from where users can create a new note (new notes can also be created by using the + button from an existing sticky note), force sync to Evernote, bring the notes to the foreground, log out of Evernote, and access the application settings. In the settings you'll find options like setting the sync interval, check for application updates, and set the tray icon style to light or dark.
Liqourix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Debian 11 Bullseye. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.
For users seeking to have their Debian 11 Bullseye system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel that may be for you.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Liquorix Kernel repository and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Debian 11 Bullseye.
Liqourix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.
For users seeking to have their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel that may be for you.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Liquorix Kernel PPA and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
Podman is a container engine that’s compatible with the OCI Containers specification. It is part of RedHat Linux, but can also be installed on other distributions. As it’s OCI-compliant, Podman can be used as a drop-in replacement for the better-known Docker runtime. Most Docker commands can be directly translated to Podman commands. Podman implements almost all the Docker CLI commands (apart from the ones related to Docker Swarm).
Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by offering an experience similar to the Docker command line: allowing users to run standalone (non-orchestrated) containers. And Podman doesn’t require a daemon to run containers and pods, so we can easily say goodbye to big fat daemons. There are no daemons in the background doing stuff, and this means that Podman can be integrated into system services through systemd.
In this guide we will learn how to install and enable sudo in FreeBSD 13. FreeBSD is known for its robustness and for being another valid alternative for servers to Linux servers.
Unlike su, sudo authenticates users against their own password rather than that of the target user. Sudo allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments. This allow the delegation of specific commands to specific users on specific hosts without sharing passwords among them.
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Debian 11 Bullseye. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.
For users seeking to have their Debian 11 Bullseye system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel that may be for you.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the XanMod repository and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Debian 11 Bullseye.
Hello, friends. Working in the terminal is common for all of us who work with Linux servers. However, in between uses, there may be tricks that we have overlooked or simply don’t know about. That’s why, in this post, we’re going to show you how to find duplicate files in Linux.
Finding files under a Linux operating system is a skill set that most Linux users have mastered and perfected. Linux command-line tools like the find command are very reliable and effective when handling file-finding tasks. However, using the find command to retrieve misplaced files on a Linux operating system environment is not everyone’s cup of tea due to its non-user-friendly tag.
The fd command is a user-friendly alternative to the usage complexity of the find command. It is a simple and fast file-finding command-line-based tool. Despite fd not having the functionality depth of find, the functionalities it offers are sufficient for most of your use cases and you might not even miss its alternative.
RPM Fusion is a repository specifically for Fedora Linux. It is an amalgamation of the software repositories Livna, Freshrpms, and Dribble to bundle resources. Among other things, the repo provides packages for multimedia and the required codecs. The repo is divided into “free” and “non-free“.
Over the last few years, I’ve often wondered what the true power output of my SDRs are. It’s a question with a shocking amount of complexity in the response, due to a number of factors (mostly Frequency). The ranges given in spec sheets are often extremely vague, and if I’m being honest with myself, not incredibly helpful for being able to determine what specific filters and amplifiers I’ll need to get a clean signal transmitted.
Hey, heads up! - This post contains extremely unvalidated and back of the napkin quality work to understand how my equipment works. Hopefully this work can be of help to others, but please double check any information you need for your own work!
This tutorial explains how to restore sudo privileges to a user from recovery mode on Ubuntu Linux and its derivatives like Linux mint, Pop OS operating systems. I tested this guide on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system. However, It should work on other Linux distributions as well.
Mattermost is an open-source, self-hosted Slack alternative. Being free of the requirement to depend on a third-party vendor means that you are able to host your data in your own infrastructure.
There are many reasons why you would want or need this – security being one of the most prominent ones. Furthermore, having full control over all processes will greatly increase the reliability and uptime of your team communication platform. You can use Mattermost in your browser, on mobile devices like Android and iOS, or integrate it with various other services via API or webhooks. Also, it’s very modular in its design; you are able to choose the components you actually need.
In this tutorial, we will walk through the steps required to install Mattermost on Rocky Linux 8.
This article is based on the Community Edition of Mattermost, which is freely available for download at its official website. Other Editions are also available there – you could start with the Enterprise Edition if you have a bigger team or require more extended security features, an on-premise solution instead of self-hosting, voice chat, etc.
Boto3 is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Python. It is the Python library that allows users or developers to create, configure, and manage AWS services and resources. Boto3 provides an API for AWS services that can be used to manage AWS services and resources such as EC2, RDS, S3, etc.
To learn more about Boto3, you can visit its official site here.
Before we continue, I assume that you are familiar with VPC. If not, you can click here to learn how to create a VPC from the AWS console.
In this article, we will see how to install the Boto3 library and use it to create a simple VPC together with its dependent components in AWS. We will create a public subnet in the VPC.
curl and Wget are the two most common utilities for making requests to servers from the Linux command line.
If you ever find yourself swapping between the two, one is just piquing your curiosity, or you have ever just seen some good old discussion online about it, there are some differences that might be helpful to know about.
While you'll hopefully have a smooth experience using either, knowing the basic differences between the two will help you have a better grasp on using both (and hopefully resolve anything from the aforementioned question-filled discussions).
Hugo is a free and open-source website framework written in developed in Go. Hugo provides a reliable and modern static site generator that allows you to create a simple and fast website easily. It comes with pre-made templates and other features including, SEO, commenting, analytics, and other functions. Hugo sites can run without any expensive run times like PHP, Python, Ruby and don't need any database.
In this post, we will show you how to install and use the Hugo site generator on Debian 11.
Terminator is a terminal emulator program that helps users easily manage multiple terminals. It provides flexibility for arranging multiple terminals side by side.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Lynis on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Lynis is the popular security auditing tool for Linux, Unix, and macOS systems. The aim of leveraging an auditing tool such as Lynis is to probe and resolve any underlying security vulnerabilities, and configuration errors such as weak user account passwords or inappropriate file permissions that might compromise the system in face of an attack. Lynis was commonly used by system administrators and auditors to assess the security defenses of their 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 through the step-by-step installation of the Lynis security auditing tool 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.
PHP 8.1 is a significant update of the PHP language that will be “officially” released on November 25, 2021. This is a giant leap forward from the existing PHP 8.0 release with the new PHP 8.1 is bringing enums, fibers, never return type, final class constants, intersection types, read-only properties amongst the long list of new features and changes.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Ondà â¢ej Surý PPA and install PHP 8.1 on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system.
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.
For users seeking to have their system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel may be for you.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the XanMod repository and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
In this tutorial guide I will be guiding you through installation and configuration of Memcached on Fedora 35.
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system. It is used to speed up dynamic databases-driven websites by caching data and objects in the RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read.
Memcached has an API with a very large hash table distributed distributed across multiple machines. when a table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used order.
Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design provides quick deployment, ease of development and solves many problems facing large data caches.
In this article, we’ll explain how to check internet speed in Linux with two different methods.
Speedtest is an old favorite. It’s implemented in Python, and also available with pip. You can use it as a Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net.
This is an open-source tool that enables you to check your internet and network speeds at the command line is Speedtest.
speedtest-cli is a command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net
At present, it is fairly easy to create virtual machines thanks to programs like VirtualBox, VMware, and a few others.
You can still install VirtualBox in your Linux system to proceed. But, in this article, I put my focus on an exciting tool that’s simple to use, works fast, and quickly helps you to spin up a virtual machine, i.e., Quickgui.
It was a long time since I last wrote, but important news coming up, so I thought it's time to post again.
The kind Christopher Davis has spent some time on porting Calculator to GTK4, a process which looks like complete to me know, with the merge into master happening fairly soon. This was a lot of work, given the framework changes, and would be nice to have some testing mileage on it, so I'm asking the curious people to check it out, and report any issues you may find.
Currently it is only available on the merge request branch, but it is fairly easy to try out using Builder. Thanks go out to the developers behind Builder+Flatpak for building up the whole ecosystem which makes development fairly easy without breaking the local environment, and without having to maintain a full JHBuild environment.
I used to exclusively run Manjaro on my home system, because of its power, simplicity, and my love of Arch based systems. While I don’t currently, I have zero troubles recommending this OS to anyone who wants to use an Arch based system, but not Arch itself. If you’re looking for a nice, easy to use system with plenty of GUI tools, but the power and flexibility of Arch, you won’t be disappointed using Manjaro; at least in my opinion!
Linux has been known for its different distributions that cater to different needs. The most famous among all is the Kali Linux which is a penetration testing oriented for security professionals. From the time it has been released, it has gone through various iterations in the form of updates while others were also being developed throughout the globe.
There are also alternative choices for those who like to look at options. Our detailed comparison between Parrot OS vs Kali Linux vs Ubuntu will help you decide to choose the best Linux for you. We have compared and analysed and taken into consideration various factors.
It’s been a couple of months since we released our ISO-NEXT release and we are completely aware of the bugs in it that have risen to the surface, which have become major obstacles through time.
As we explained earlier, the ISO had received a complete overhaul between April and August and after releasing the community gave us very valuable feedback by submitting bug reports.
Joe and Manuel, together with a lot of help from our community members and the Calamares dev community, began starting to improve the ISO and with every improvement, another issue arose.
Among those improvements are Nvidia handling, Grub and lots of other improvements we will reveal in the release announcement.
The FreeBSD project has published their latest quarterly status report highlighting the work achieved on this open-source BSD operating system. Even with the pandemic and limitations on physical events, the FreeBSD developers continue making significant progress on their goals and technology road-map.
For their period covered from July through September, some of the FreeBSD achievements included:
- FreeBSD is at $180k in fundraising for its $2M budget. Their heightened budget stems from their technology road-map and paying more developers now. FreeBSD is working towards better WiFi, graphics, and hardware support at large, They also want to get features like Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 working in the months ahead along with installer improvements, new performance tooling, and virtualization improvements for Bhyve.
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey Internet Application Suite (see below). Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users. Updated to 2.53.10.
Welcome back to our series of hands-on introductions to using Cryostat 2.0. This article shows you how to preconfigure custom event templates for Java application monitoring with JDK Flight Recorder (JFR). First, you'll use the new Cryostat Operator and a Red Hat OpenShift ConfigMap to create a custom event template, then you'll instruct the Cryostat Operator to use the ConfigMap when deploying Cryostat. You can use the OpenShift console to interact with Cryostat or edit the YAML file for your Cryostat custom resource. We'll demonstrate both approaches.
With the recent JDK Mission Control (JMC) 8.1 release, now is a good time to look at the new JMC agent plugin. The plugin, which was merged upstream, provides a convenient way to add custom JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) events to a running Java virtual machine (JVM) without restarting or rebuilding the Java application.
Many people think of training models when they hear "data science" or "machine learning." Training and models are certainly important, but making intelligent enterprise software involves many other tasks and technologies. These include gathering and processing data from disparate, voluminous sources; testing and comparing different algorithms; deploying models into production applications; continuous monitoring and updating of models, etc.
Enter our AI/ML platform cloud service: Red Hat OpenShift Data Science. OpenShift Data Science provides a platform where developers can easily collaborate with data scientists to develop, deploy, and monitor models. Find out how it can improve your machine learning projects, and explore hands-on resources to help you get up to speed quickly with natural language processing, Jupyter notebooks, and more.
When Red Hat conducts surveys, one of the factors that we keep an eye on is differences within the population we’re surveying, which, in the case of Red Hat's Global Tech Outlook 2022, is IT decision makers at medium- to large-sized enterprises.
Such differences may reveal themselves in job title, industry, or geographic region. There’s a limit to how finely we can slice results – the more granular we get, the smaller the bucket of responses, and the less confident we can be in our conclusions. Nonetheless, it’s useful to seek out cases where the average results obscure important distinctions.
Across a variety of surveys conducted during the past few years, the most consistent pattern we’ve observed is that IT decision makers are far more similar than they are different.
Nonetheless, in this year’s Global Tech Outlook research, which surveyed 1,341 IT decision makers from June through August of 2021, we spotted a few differences of interest around digital transformation, including differences that were also present in past surveys.
The global pandemic caused a fierce, sudden shift in just about every aspect of life, both at home and at work. For business leaders, it was the redirect of a lifetime as statistics and business forecasts gave way to corporate survival instinct.
Restaurant chains sold fresh groceries and paper goods along with takeout orders. National hotel conglomerates offered day rates for employees needing somewhere to work remotely when being at home wasn’t cutting it. Alcohol distilleries shifted gears to mass-produce hand sanitizer.
Coming out the other side, we’re able to see the positive takeaways from an unprecedented crisis, including proof that the ability to shift quickly can be the most important business skill of all. This begs the question: Given lessons learned in 2020, how can enterprise leaders plan for business growth while maintaining the ability to be flexible in an unpredictable landscape?
Results from Red Hat's annual Global Tech Outlook survey are in, and as in years past we explore what the data reveals about the current state of cloud and organizations' cloud strategies, their major funding priorities, and the factors influencing digital transformation success. This helps us not only understand the current business environment, but also how we can better serve our customers and help meet their needs. Here, we highlight key findings from the report and how these results have changed over time.
The Rocky Linux 8.5 distribution has been released , aimed at creating a free build of RHEL that can take the place of classic CentOS, after the Red Hat company decided to end support for the CentOS 8 branch at the end of 2021, and not in 2029, as originally intended. This is the second stable release of the project, recognized as ready for production deployments. Rocky Linux builds are prepared for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
As in the classical CentOS made to the Rocky Linux packages changes boil down to get rid of binding to the brand Red Hat. The distribution is fully binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and includes all the improvements proposed in this release . This includes additional packages for OpenJDK 17, Ruby 3.0, nginx 1.20, Node.js 16, PHP 7.4.19, GCC Toolset 11, LLVM Toolset 12.0.1, Rust Toolset 1.54.0, and Go Toolset 1.16.7.
Rocky Linux, one of the most anticipated CentOS replacements, has announced the general availability for Rocky Linux 8.5 “Green Obsidian”.
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.5. It’s an important milestone because it’s the first Rocky Linux release that officially supported Secure Boot.
For those of you unfamiliar with Secure Boot, it’s a feature found in the startup software for your computer that’s designed to ensure your computer starts safely and securely by preventing unauthorized software like malware from taking control of your PC at boot-up. In other words, Secure Boot allows only software or firmware signed with approved keys to execute during the boot process.
For over four years now Red Hat has been working on Stratis as their new Linux storage solution. As an alternative to shifting to newer file-systems like Btrfs or the controversial OpenZFS, Stratis has been about offering similar advanced Linux storage features while building atop LVM, DeviceMapper and XFS all while using the modern Rust programming language. Stratis Storage 3.0 is now available as the latest work on this front.
In stratisd 3.0.0 the D-Bus API has undergone a revision and the prior interfaces are all removed. The FetchProperties interfaces that were supported by all objects have been removed. The values that were previously obtainable via the FetchProperties methods are now conventional D-Bus properties. The possible values of error codes returned by the D-Bus methods have been reduced to 0 and 1, with the usual interpretation.
Approximately every two years, Debian releases a new stable version of its operating system, and the time has come again. And since Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian, the developers release a new version every time Debian gets an LTS release. The latest update is here and packed full of useful changes.
Debian Linux 11–codenamed "Bullseye"—offers a range of features that make the latest Raspberry Pi OS slicker and more functional than before. Let’s take a look at the latest iteration of Raspberry Pi OS and its noteworthy features.
The Web and design team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
For example, Ubuntu 16.04 Pro will continue to get security updates until 2026.
Pine64 has been selling ARM-powered Linux devices for years, such as PinePhone, a low-end smartphone with open hardware and software design.PinePhone Pro released a hardware upgrade last month, and while the original developer model is not yet available, Pine64 has shown off the phone in a video.
Pine64 community manager Lukasz Erecinski shared his impressions of the phone in the company's November update. "Everything I'm going to write is fundamentally biased, but I'm going to stand by every word I write -- I promise not to do pr," he said. It's fast, very fast compared to the original PinePhone and other similar devices."Eresinski shot a short video that showed the phone's reflexes to be (roughly) as responsive as a modern mid-range Android phone.
Kontron is providing Hailo’s up to 26-TOPS, 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU with its i.MX8M-based pITX-iMX8M Pico-ITX SBC and Whiskey Lake based KBox A-150-WKL systems running Linux.
Hailo continues its slow-rolling conquest of the embedded computing world by announcing another hardware partner that will offer its Hailo-8 NPU, once again via the Hailo-8 M.2 AI Acceleration Module. The up to 26-TOPS, 3-TOPS per Watt NPU module can be purchased with Kontron’s pITX-iMX8M, a Pico-ITX board equipped with NXP’s i.MX8M, as well as its compact KBox A-150-WKL embedded PC with Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake platform.
In our November Newsletter learn why device neutrality and upcycling of software are essential to make (re-)using our hardware more resource-efficient. Read about the key role translators play in the FSFE and about the loss of Router Freedom in Latvia. Watch a new video on Free Software core values, and follow our community events.
[Clairette] has had a particularly difficult time adapting to her friends leaving every day, but thankfully her human [Nathaniel Felleke] was able to come up with a clever solution. He trained a TinyML neural net to detect when she barked and used and Arduino to play a sound byte to sooth her. The sound bytes in question are recordings of [Nathaniel]’s mom either praising or scolding [Clairette], and as you can see from the video below, they seem to work quite well. To train the network, [Nathaniel] worked with several datasets to avoid overfitting, including one he created himself using actual recordings of barks and ambient sounds within his own house. He used Eon Tuner, a tool by Edge Impulse, to help find the best model to use and perform the training. He uploaded the trained network to an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense running Mbed OS, and a second Arduino handled playing sound bytes via an Adafruit Music Maker Featherwing.
With Windows all keyboards are compatible but most are with Mac as well. If we talk about Linux/Unix then there are few which are compatible with it in which some functions might not work at all or work partially. These are mostly for Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian and even Kali Linux. We have tested the 6 best Mechanical and Programmable Keyboards available for Linux that are suitable for gaming and programming, with typing in mind.
As the Perf-Tools team, we are responsible for the Firefox Profiler. This newsletter gives an overview of the new features and improvements we’ve done in Q3 2021.
This is our second newsletter and you can find the first one here which was about the H1 2021. With this newsletter, we wanted to focus on only Q3, so it would be less crowded and you can see the new features and improvements easily. I hope you enjoy the work that we’ve done this quarter.
Half of the DOM Web Speech API deals with speech synthesis. There is a method called speechSynthesis.getVoices that returns a list of all the supported voices in the given browser. Your website can use it to choose a nice voice to use, or present a menu to the user for them to choose.
The one tricky thing about the getVoices() method is that the underlying implementation will usually not have a list of voices ready when first called. Since speech synthesis is not a commonly used API, most browsers will initialize their speech synthesis lazily in the background when a speechSynthesis method is first called. If that method is getVoices() the first time it is called it will return an empty list. So what will conventional wisdom have you do?
The next “Cross Team Collaboration Fun Times” (CTCFT) meeting will take place next Monday, on 2021-11-22 at 11am US Eastern Time (click to see in your time zone). Note that this is a new time: we are experimenting with rotating in an earlier time that occurs during the European workday. This post covers the agenda. You’ll find the full details (along with a calendar event, zoom details, etc) on the CTCFT website.
Today, Firefox Relay, a privacy-first and free product that hides your real email address to help protect your identity, is available with a new paid Premium service offering. The release comes just in time for the holiday season to help spare your inbox from being inundated with emails from e-commerce sites, especially those sites where you may shop or visit a few times a year.
In real life you have a phone number where family and friends can call and reach out to you directly. You likely have it memorized by heart and it’s something you’ve had for years. In your online life your email address is like your phone number, it’s a personal and unique identifier. Your email address has become the way we login and access almost every website, app, newsletter, and hundreds of other interactions we have online every single day. That means your email address is in the hands of hundreds, if not thousands, of third parties. As you think more about your email address and the places it’s being used, Firefox Relay can help protect and limit where it’s being shared.
Firefox Relay is a free service available at relay.firefox.com where you’ll get five email aliases to use whenever you sign-up for an online account. Over the last year, the team has been experimenting with Firefox Relay, a smart, easy solution that can preserve the privacy of your email address. Firefox Relay was initially rolled out to a beta phase for early adopters who like to test new products. We heard back from beta testers who provided feedback where we improved the free service and added a new paid Premium service that we’re introducing today.
Version 23.0 of Ora2Pg, a free and reliable tool used to migrate an Oracle database to PostgreSQL, has been officially released and is publicly available for download.
This release fix several issues reported since last release and adds several new features and improvements.
PostgreSQL 14.1, 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, 10.19, and 9.6.24 released. This is the final release in the 9.6 series, so put those upgrade plans in action if you haven't already.
Two weeks ago, we started the Month of LibreOffice, giving thanks to all contributions across our projects. Everyone who takes part can claim a sticker pack – and at the end of the month, we’ll award some extra merchandise to ten lucky winners as well!
So, how’s it looking so far? Well, so far we’ve awarded 277 sticker packs! If you see your name (or username) on that page, check this blog when the month ends with details. And if you’re not there yet, read on to find out how you can join in…
This is a maintenance release, which fixes a bug in the pre-inst-env script, which is used by Guile-CV at build time and may also be used to test and run an uninstalled Guile-CV instance.
However, for all of the success of the GPLv3 drafting process, it must be noted that the GPL is ultimately published by the Free Software Foundation, an organization that many have questioned the long-term viability of lately. When the “or later version” clause was first introduced to the GPL, it was unthinkable that the Free Software Foundation could ever be in such a state of affairs, but now it is.
And this is ultimately the problem: what happens if the FSF shuts down, and has to liquidate? What if an intellectual property troll acquires the GNU copyright assignments, or acquires the trademark rights to the FSF name, and publishes a new GPL version? There are many possibilities to be concerned about, but developers can do two things to mitigate the damage.
First, they can stop using the “or later” clause in new GPL-licensed code. This will, effectively, limit those projects from being upgraded to new versions of the GPL, which may be published by a compromised FSF. In so doing, projects should be able to avoid relicensing discussions, as GPLv3-only code is compatible with GPLv3-or-later: the common denominator in this case is GPLv3.
Second, they can stop assigning copyright to the FSF. In the event that the FSF becomes compromised, for example, by an intellectual property troll, this limits the scope of their possible war chest for malicious GPL enforcement litigation. As we have learned from the McHardy cases involving Netfilter, in a project with multiple copyright holders, effective GPL enforcement litigation is most effective when done as a class action. In this way, dilution of the FSF copyright assignment pool protects the commons over time from exposure to malicious litigation by a compromised FSF.
This comic is almost 4 years old and it has become much worse since. Python is a mess. I really want to like Python. I have used it for many years and in many projects, including SourceHut, which was predominantly developed in Python. But I simply can’t handle it anymore, and I have been hard at work removing Python from my stack.
This has always been a problem with Python, but in the past few years everyone and their cousin decided to “solve” it by building another mess which is totally incompatible with all of the others, all of the “solutions” enjoying varying levels of success in the community and none of them blessed as the official answer.
I manage my Python packages in the only way which I think is sane: installing them from my Linux distribution’s package manager. I maintain a few dozen Python packages for Alpine Linux myself. It’s from this perspective that, throughout all of this turmoil in Python’s packaging world, I have found myself feeling especially put out.
Circuit sculpture is engineering and art all at play together. One must combine the functional with the aesthetically appealing. [EdwardA61] did just that with this enchanting lamp build.
Like many other circuit sculptures, the build relies on the aesthetic qualities of brass, though [EdwardA61] notes that copper wire can be used as well. Four WS2812B LEDs, in their bare PCB-mount form, are soldered into a circuit using the brass to carry the power and data signals as needed.
Latvia's parliament voted on Friday to ban lawmakers who refuse COVID-19 vaccine from voting on legislature and participating in discussions.
Latvia, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in European Union, was the first in the bloc to reimpose a lockdown this autumn as a surge in COVID-19 cases threatens to overwhelm its health system.
[...]
The ban on unvaccinated MPs in parliament was necessary to promote public confidence in the government's policies to control COVID-19 infections, the legislation's sponsor, lawmaker Janis Rancans, was cited as saying by the parliamentary press service.
Latvia, home to 1.9 million people, has reported 236,765 infections and 3,646 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.
Residents of Flint, Michigan, began complaining in 2014 that their water tasted bad, smelled foul, and came out of the tap discolored. The city had switched water supplies to save money, and in the process, the city and state failed to add anti-corrosion chemicals to the new supply. Flint’s aging pipes began to poison its residents. People suffered rashes after bathing, children were exposed to high levels of lead, and at least a dozen people died from Legionnaires’ disease.
Residents, pediatricians, and pastors sounded the alarm, but it wasn’t until they sued the city and state that a federal judge ordered bottled water to be delivered to every affected home.
The other day I was creating a new account on the web. It was financial in nature, which means it gets one of my most secure passwords. I used PasswordSafe to generate this 16-character alphanumeric password:
:s^Twd.J;3hzg=Q~
Which was rejected by the site, because it didn’t meet their password security rules.
The White House, via Executive Order (EO) 14028: Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, tasked CISA, as the operational lead for federal cybersecurity, to “develop a standard set of operational procedures (i.e., playbook) to be used in planning and conducting cybersecurity vulnerability and incident response activity” for federal civilian agency information systems. In response, today, CISA published the Federal Government Cybersecurity Incident and Vulnerability Response Playbooks. The playbooks provide federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies with operational procedures for planning and conducting cybersecurity incident and vulnerability response activities. The playbooks provide illustrated decision trees and detail each step for both incident and vulnerability response.
GitHub has disclosed two incidents in the NPM package repository infrastructure. On November 2, third-party security researchers ( Kajetan Grzybowski and Maciej Piechota ) as part of the Bug Bounty program announced a vulnerability in the NPM repository that allows you to publish a new version of any package using your account, which is not authorized to perform such updates.
npm’s culture presents a major problem for global software security.
Google presented the ClusterFuzzLite project , which allows organizing fuzzing testing of code for early detection of potential vulnerabilities at the stage of continuous integration systems operation. Currently, ClusterFuzz can be used to automate fuzzing testing of pull requests in GitHub Actions , Google Cloud Build, and Prow , but support for other CI systems is expected in the future. The project is based on the ClusterFuzz platform , created to coordinate the work of fuzzing-testing clusters, and is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
It is noted that after the introduction of the OSS-Fuzz service by Google in 2016, more than 500 important open source projects were accepted into the continuous fuzzing testing program. Based on the checks carried out, more than 6,500 confirmed vulnerabilities have been eliminated and more than 21,000 errors have been fixed. ClusterFuzzLite continues to evolve fuzzing testing mechanisms with the ability to identify issues earlier in the peer review phase of proposed changes. ClusterFuzzLite has already been introduced into the processes of reviewing changes in systemd and curl projects, and made it possible to identify errors missed by static analyzers and linters that were used at the initial stage of checking new code.
I registered on blogs.perl.org today so that I could comment on posts about object systems. However, the very first thing I encountered was a password page with NO SSL. So, even though I have a ton to say about object systems, my first blog post will instead be about setting up SSL.
(I’m aware that this is a “legacy server problem” but I also recently learned that it doesn’t matter with traefik.)
In this grand year of 2021 you can add SSL to any site, on any architecture, for free, by adding 3 files to your server, making one small config change to Apache, and running a service. We are truly living in the future.
The FBI is warning people of a new breed of scam involving cryptocurrency ATMs. A con artist convinces a person to put cash into a cryptocurrency ATM and send the purchased coins to the scammer using an address stored in a QR code (via CoinDesk). While the actual scamming is relatively low-tech, it’s an interesting misuse of technology and shows how criminals are using crypto to “improve” on old methods.
The “upgrade” (as it were) for scammers with the crypto ATM method is two-fold: it can be less friction than sending a wire transfer, and at the end the scammer has cryptocurrency instead of fiat. With wire transfers, you have to fill out a form, and you may give that form to an actual person (who could potentially vibe check you). Using the ATM method, there’s less time to reflect on the fact that you’re about to send money to a stranger. And, if you’re a criminal trying to get your hands on Bitcoin, you won’t have to teach your targets how to buy coins on the internet and transfer them to another wallet — they probably already know how to use an ATM and scan a QR code.
Twice recently, Internet shutdowns were imposed in Rajasthan to prevent cheating in exams. So, we filed Right to Information applications to determine the extent of the Rajasthan government’s compliance with directions in Anuradha Bhasin. We previously analysed the response received from the office of the Udaipur Divisional Commissioner, which had issued 26 internet shutdown orders, most of which were similar. We have also received a response from the Jaipur Divisional Commissioner, who issued 30 Internet shutdown orders, which also follow the identical copy, cut, paste format!
Three global publishers, Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society, filed a copyright infringement suit in the Delhi High Court against websites, LibGen & Sci-Hub, that enable researchers worldwide to access knowledge without cost. In their suit, they have asked the Court to block these websites permanently because they are ‘rogue’. A group of social science researchers have filed an intervention application, with legal support from IFF, highlighting the adverse impact any decision to block the websites will have on them. A Joint Registrar of the Delhi High Court has issued notice on the application after hearing Ms Vrinda Bhandari, the counsel for the researchers, and has asked the Plaintiffs to file their reply within 4 weeks. The case is now listed on 18.02.2022.
Theresa Babb's turn of the century photographs let us glimpse into a personal world of female friendship.
