This week has been really great with lots of cool stuff for everyone, starting with the launch of the Firefox 95 web browser and the Tails 4.25 anonymous OS, and continuing with a new release of the Gentoo-based Calculate Linux distro, a new Kali Linux release for ethical hackers, and the long-anticipated Zorin OS 16 Lite edition.
On top of that, I take a look at the Armbian Linux distro on the Raspberry Pi 4 computer and show Linux newcomers how easy is to search for text within many files and directories. Also, Linux Mint 20.3 is now ready for public beta testing.
In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 20.3 Beta, Cinnamon edition.
Today we are looking at Linux Mint 20.3 Beta, Cinnamon edition. It is based on Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Kernel 5.4 (but you can easily upgrade it to 5.13), Cinnamon 5.2, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
The Log4Shell vulnerability is making waves this week; we'll explain why and break down how it works.
Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.
Josh and Kurt talk about the epic failure that was episode 300. But this ties nicely into the topic of the day which is new ways to do things. The example is a new way to hold a controller when playing Tetris. There are always new tools and new ideas in security. Sometimes we have to abandon the old way because the new way to too good to ignore.
So everything looks fairly normal. This rc5 is perhaps a bit bigger than usual, but it's not like it's breaking any records. I blame people trying to get stuff done before the holidays, and/or just random timing effects.
Anyway, I do expect things to calm down over the next couple of weeks, but we'll see.
As to rc5, the patch is dominated by drivers (network, sound, hid, rdma, usb... and a lot of other random things) and selftest updates (bpf, kvm and networking).
The rest is fairly random - filesystems (cifs, btrfs, tracefs), core kernel and networking. Some fixups to the new damon virtual address space monitoring code.
Shortlog appended.
Do give it a good testing - with the holidays coming up, things are probably going to slow down both on the development and testing front, and as a result I expect that I will also extend the rc series by another week not because it's necessarily needed (too early to tell, but doesn't feel that way), but simply because nobody will want to open the next merge window immediately in the new year.
Anyway, that's the plan right now (based on previous years where we've done the same), but let's see how this all goes.
Linus
Linus Torvalds today announced the availability of Linux kernel 5.16-rc5, a release candidate on the road to 5.16. The only roadblock between this release candidate and an official release is Santa Claus. Not literally, of course. Linus blames the delay on the holidays, causing development to slow down. The release window is expected to be pushed back one week, with Torvalds saying that...
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc5 and while things are looking normal at this stage, he announced that this 5.16 cycle will drag on longer due to the Christmas / New Year's holidays.
Torvalds noted in this evening's release announcement, "So everything looks fairly normal. This rc5 is perhaps a bit bigger than usual, but it's not like it's breaking any records. I blame people trying to get stuff done before the holidays, and/or just random timing effects. Anyway, I do expect things to calm down over the next couple of weeks, but we'll see. As to rc5, the patch is dominated by drivers (network, sound, hid, rdma, usb... and a lot of other random things) and selftest updates (bpf, kvm and networking). The rest is fairly random - filesystems (cifs, btrfs, tracefs), core kernel and networking. Some fixups to the new damon virtual address space monitoring code."
The 5.16-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
The effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel marches on this week, with an update from Rust for Linux project maintainer Miguel Ojeda put out this week serving as cause for renewed excitement. While the update cautions that Rust support is “still to be considered experimental,” it notes that the project has moved on from using the beta Rust compiler to use stable releases, starting with Rust 1.57.0, which was just released last Thursday.
In addition, the project has migrated to the 2021 edition of Rust, and plans to migrate to new stable compilers each time one is released.
Fwupd 1.7.3 introduces support for Nordic Semiconductor nRF secure devices, adds a sync-bkc sub-command to ensure a known set of firmware versions, adds FuArchiveFirmware support for plugins that use archives as firmware files, adds sector size properties and a quirkable page to FuCfiDevice, and makes Upower and powerd support optional.
On top of these enhancements, the fwupd 1.7.3 release fixes various bugs to improve support for existing hardware. For example, it fixes firmware flashing of the Lenovo TBT3 dock, and improves support for System76’s Launch configurable keyboard by adding a new mechanism to wait for it to come back from DFU mode.
In order to install OBS Studio we need to add RPM Fusion Free repository.
Let’s do that by entering the command below and adding the RPM Fusion Free repository.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. Postgres is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.
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 PostgreSQL 14 on a Fedora 35.
As you may know, computers use IP addresses to connect with each other and communicate.
However, humans use and prefer names (such as bytexd.com) to access computers. This is because domain names in spoken language are easier to use and remember than a scary sequence of numbers (e.g., 192.168.1.165).
What would happen if we have to access the computers only using their IP addresses? In that case, you have to memorize tens or even hundreds of these numbers (can a human do that?).
This would not only be error-prone but also very hard or even impossible to use in this fast-growing digital world, where thousands of new domains are added to the Internet each day.
Luckily, we have computer scientist and internet pioneer, Paul Mockapetris for inventing a naming system called Domain Name System (DNS).
The main task of a Domain Name System (DNS) is to translate the domain names of computers into their IP addresses.
As you may know, computers use IP addresses to connect with each other and communicate.
Kubernetes offers various methods to update resources: edit, apply, patch, and replace. So, today our discussion topic is Kubectl patch or patch command. If you communicate with Kubernetes clusters via kubectl CLI, then you might be familiar with the edit or apply subcommands. Just like these two commands, we are less familiar with the patch command of kubectl. The patch command enables you to change part of a resource specification, specifying the changed part on CLI. While updating a resource, it’s good to patch it. There are three types of patching, i.e., Strategic, JSON merge patch, and JSON patch. The strategic-merge type tries to “do the accurate thing” when merging the given spec with the current spec. More explicitly, it tries to merge both arrays and objects. For instance, specifying a patch that holds a single or new variable in a pod container specification results in that variable being included in the current variables, not overwriting them. Erasing an array element via a strategic merge patch is more difficult, which needs the usage of merge orders.
Like the strategic approach, the JSON merge patch method takes a partial Kubernetes specification as input and holds the merging objects. This way is quite dissimilar from the above-cited approach as it only supports replacing arrays. While using this approach, you need to stream full specifications for all of the containers; if you need to modify any container propertyOn on the CLI, you can choose JSON merge patch via kubectl patch.
On the other hand, the JSON patch method uses a JSON illustration of the variations you wish to make to a resource. JSON Patch is a more robust and efficient way to state the modifications that you want to make.
Partitioning is a process in which large tables of the database are divided into separate tables but treated as a single table. We can make partitions in the database using MySQL and place the data according to these partitions. In the MySQL database, the only horizontal partition is supported and it is of six types. In this post, RANGE partitioning will be discussed in detail and explained with the help of examples so the readers can understand it.
Partitioning of a MySQL database is a process in which data placed in the tables is further divided into small tables; which makes it easy to handle the large size of data. MySQL is a database that is very much popular among SQL databases to manage the data.
MySQL supports only horizontal partitioning. In MySQL, there are six types of partitioning, one of them is List partitioning, which is going to be explained in this article with the help of an example.
Redis is an in-memory data store. This means that it stores the data in the system’s memory. The ability to store the data in the RAM is very crucial to improve performance as it does not require a complete round trip to the disk to fetch the data.
However, storing the data in memory comes with a significant drawback. When the data size grows exponentially, more RAM size is required to handle the data. Adding more RAM as the data grows can be expensive and prone to hardware compatibility and failures.
Although storage and size affect all database systems, it is more announced in in-memory databases such as Redis or Memcached. It is good to keep in mind that Redis is not developed as the central database for massive applications.
Redis is a free and open-source in-memory key-value database that is built for performance and flexibility. It is cross-platform and can run on Unix/Unix-like systems and Windows.
This tutorial describes how you can view and count all the keys in a Redis database using various commands and techniques.
The example commands and illustrations have been tested on a Debian 11 server and a Redis server version 6.0. We recommend using the official Redis CLI utility to get a similar output, as shown in this guide.
If you have ever used a Key-value database, you probably have no problem with the Redis database’s workings. However, if you are new to the concept of key-value databases, they can be a little confusing compared to relational databases.
This tutorial will try to demystify how to work with Redis by showing how to work with keys.
Redis is a free and open-source in-memory key-value data store famous for high performance, low latency, and flexibility. This tutorial will help you to interact with a Redis database using the Ruby programming language.
Redis is a key-value data store. Hence, understanding how to work with keys is a fundamental concept when using Redis.
This guide will look at how to work with Redis keys and various commands to manage them.
Backups are essential features in sensitive data environments such as databases. They allow us to perform restorations in case of failures and errors.
One example of such an environment is a database such as Redis. Since its an in-memory database, a simple error such as power failure can lead to data loss. It is therefore essential to have persistence for your data.
This tutorial will learn how to work with the Redis Database Backup to save the data stored in the memory to the system’s disk and perform restorations from the RDB.
Redis is a free, open-source key-value data store. It stores data in the system’s memory instead of the disk. This feature allows Redis to be super fast compared to databases such as relational databases. It is mainly used in high-performance and low latency environments.
Using this tutorial, you will learn to delete all the keys in a Redis database and clear the Redis cache.
Ansible is a free and open-source configuration management tool. It allows you to manage remote servers from a single machine.
In this tutorial, you will learn how the Ansible dry_run works and how to use it in your playbooks.
In Redis, a snapshot refers to the process and method of ensuring the persistence of data from the system memory to a permanent location such as the system’s disk.
Although Redis is an in-memory data store, it does provide various methods to store and recover data to and from the system’s disk.
This article will discuss how to use persistence in the Redis database. It is good to note that we will not dive deep into how the methods of backup provided by Redis are implemented. Consider the documentation to learn more and discover which is best for your use case.
Sorted sets are one of the most valuable and advanced data types in Redis. Sorted sets are very similar to sets because they both contain non-repeating string sequences. However, unlike standard sets, sorted sets include a score value associated with each member.
The score value allows them to be sorted in a specific order. Each member of a sorted set must be unique but can share a score value with multiple members.
In this tutorial, you will learn all about the sorted sets in Redis and how you can use them in your databases.
Ensure you have an existing Redis server installed and running to follow this tutorial.
In MySQL the data can be backed up by making its clone or making a copy, so in case of any mishap, it can be retrieved from its clone. For the new users of MySQL, it is the popular database management tool for relational databases(SQL); it manages the data by arranging them in tables which not only help the developers to manage them easily in a well-structured way but also improved the processing of the computer by which it is being operated.
To create the backup of the database in MySQL, we will make a clone or copy in a very easy procedure which will be discussed in detail in this article.
The Linux operating system is made of many libraries and packages linked together in a complicated network. These packages contain all the data that is required to run the operating system and to run your operating system smoothly, you should update your system frequently. It repairs security gaps that have been identified to protect your system from outside intruders, virus attacks, correct or delete computer bugs that can slow down your system, and improve the speed and system efficiency. Moreover, updates also bring new features to your devices while removing old ones that can enhance your productivity. So, updating your OS is critical, but manually doing that is a very hectic and tedious task. This is where automatic updates kick in, so you no longer have to bother about the manual updates.
Automatic updates repair security gaps that have been identified to protect your system from hackers, virus attacks, correct or delete computer bugs that can slow down your system and improve the speed and system efficiency. This article is an all-inclusive guide on how to configure Linux Mint updates automatically. Two different methods are mentioned in this tutorial: configuring updates automatically using GUI and modifying the auto-upgrades file in terminal.
System administrators require detailed information to diagnose and fix problems that may be encountered in a system. One source of such information is logs. Logs are a series of records that describe how a system or resources in the system are utilized.
A web server such as Lighttpd allows you to configure the level of details of the output information by the use of logs. It uses the Common Log Format by default. However, the logging method is highly configurable for various needs and scenarios.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to enable logging in Lighttpd server and understand the formatting of the logs from the access.log file.
Kubectl is a Kubernetes command-line configuration tool that interacts with a Kubernetes API server. Kubernetes objects can easily be created, updated, and as well as destroyed using Kubectl. This cheatsheet was built as a quick reference for running commands on a variety of Kubernetes components and resources.
With the rise of cloud computing over the years, the need for automated and fast tools to manage them has become necessary. Terraform is one of these tools.
Terraform, developed by Hashicorp, is an infrastructure as a code utility. It allows you to provision cloud infrastructure in a fast and efficient way. Using Terraform, you can build, modify and destroy cloud resources in a few lines of code. It supports cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and more, including custom cloud infrastructure.
Remote Dictionary Server, or Redis for short, is a free, open-source in-memory database. Redis is a single-threaded NoSQL database that is built for high-performance and low-latency between data reads and writes. It uses key-value pairs to store the data. Although the data is stored in the system’s memory, you can add persistence by dumping the stored data to disk and loading it when needed.
In this guide, we will introduce you to key concepts in Redis and show you how to use Redis with the Python programming language.
Hello, friends. In this short post, we will show you how to enable IPv6 on Nginx. This step is important to make our website or web application available in more ways.
Another year of work has nearly come and gone with the biweekly development releases of Wine, so a new main release is on the way with Wine 7.0 seeing a first Release Candidate. This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton.
Have some fancy Razer devices? Need help managing them on Linux? OpenRazer 3.2.0 is out now and it's looking good.
Much like many other bigger vendors, Razer don't officially support Linux with their proprietary applications so it's up to the community to work around that and get all features working. This is what OpenRazer does and it manages to do it very well too. When paired up with a GUI app like Polychromatic, it's easy!
Ubisoft issued a new job posting for a Linux developer, which has many Linux gamers excited especially as it's mentioned for an "unannounced project." Unfortunately, contrary to all the emailed tips in overnight about the job posting, it ultimately will likely prove to be of little interest to the gaming community.
A new Ubisoft job posting is looking for a senior programmer that is experienced with Linux and in particular Debian. While one might think that this is in relation to the upcoming Valve Steam Deck, Steam OS 3.0 is Arch Linux based where it's the now defunct former SteamOS builds that were based on Debian. If the Debian focus is accurate, it's possible this job role has something to do with Google's Stadia. The job role also makes mention of experience in Google Cloud SDK. Debian is the default operating system currently in Google Cloud. Meanwhile another popular Linux target with increasing gaming ambitions is Tesla's in-vehicle infotainment system though that is running on Ubuntu.
Blasphemous has a fresh update out with Wounds of Eventide, which brings overall the story to a close.
Coming as part of a series of updates that began with Stir of Dawn in 2020, this free upgrade provides us with the usual assortment of new levels, bosses, items and allows you to unearth "secrets that will unlock another fate for Cvstodia – leading into the events of the Blasphemous sequel (launching in 2023)". The developer did say that late-game saves may not be able to access all of the content "but you will get clues on what to do when you replay the game".
Combining together time travel with an action RPG full of dungeon crawling and lots of replay value, Last Epoch continues showing off its promise with the Eternal Legends update.
Firstly, as we will no doubt see plenty more games do over the next couple of months for the Steam Deck, Eleventh Hour Games have improved controller support with this update to make more of the UI easily accessible with it. There's also been a number of parts optimized for better performance like the minimap, enemy / minion movement and attack animations and so on.
Despite Valve pushing many areas of Linux gaming, including the upcoming Steam Deck handheld which will use the Arch-based SteamOS 3, they still totally break their own games.
It's pretty concerning that their absolute #1 most popular game on Steam, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has been thoroughly broken on Linux (and macOS) with the update that landed on Friday, December 10. First, the game wouldn't even launch at all which was thankfully fixed - but there's a pretty huge game-breaking problem still left in.
While all variants of the Steam Deck will come with their own case, the top-end 512GB model will include a slightly different design and Valve has now shown it off. It's not overly exciting and the tweaks to it are pretty minimal but still looks pretty stylish.
Valve say that the casing is functionally identical it's just a cosmetic difference with the Steam Deck logo being a different colour, the zipper pulls are different, the fabric inside is different and the addition of a microfiber cleaning cloth plus a a separate drawstring pouch for the power cord.
Seems Paradox and Colossal Order aren't done with their city builder just yet, as the Cities: Skylines Airports DLC was just announced for release on January 25.
"Cities: Skylines Airports expansion DLC invites you onboard to experience the wonders and logistics of modern-day air travel. Please have your boarding pass ready as you start to place and design your airport. Fasten your seatbelts and connect your airport to the city through bus, metro, and train stations. Please place your items in the overhead compartments so that you can create cargo terminals connected to your airport complex while hauling in new goods and materials. We are now at the perfect altitude to begin enhancing your city's travel industry! Thank you for flying with us today!"
I found the JuNest software to be one of those rare gems that does exactly what it sets out to do, no more or less. The JuNest project gives us the ability to set up a semi-isolated Arch Linux environment in a jail. The software allows us to install and run software from the Arch repositories without contaminating our host operating system. This essentially gives us access to an Arch Linux environment without the overhead of a virtual machine. It also means we can use Arch applications on our desktop and share files between our host system and the JuNest jail seamlessly.
I did run into some errors with more complex applications, but those were easy enough to work around by simply running the junest command to access the jail's namespace.
All in all, I like JuNest. It may not be a full Linux distribution, like those we usual cover here, but it does provide a helpful way to run cutting edge Arch software from within an existing Linux distribution with minimal overhead or maintenance. The fact we can manage the JuNest environment and install additional software from Arch's repositories without administrative access also makes this a very handy tool for situations where we are working in a restrictive environment.
Mint hasn’t formally announced this milestone at the time you read this, but the omg! tip box has been hammered with links to the Linux Mint 20.3 beta .iso from readers — it’s appreciated! — so I felt I better pass the news on ASAP!
The final stable release of Linux Mint 20.3 is due before Christmas (possibly on the 18th or the 25th, according to internet chatter). This beta is intended for devs and bug hunters but gives interested users a sneak peek at what’s planned too.
Powered by Linux kernel 5.11 and built around the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series (with support for GNOME 40 apps), Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) also introduced PipeWire support, nftables as the default firewall backend, support for smart card authentication, and a redesigned Yaru dark theme.
But, not being a long-term support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 21.04 only receives software and security updates for nine months, which means that it will reach end of life on January 20th, 2022. At that time, Canonical will stop offering updates for the Hirsute Hippo release. All users are urged to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) as soon as possible!
There are various reasons I chose to do an event involving Tryton. One reason is that I'm using it myself: investing in the community will help the product grow in the future.
Many free software organizations have recently tried to hire remote workers in Albania. These decisions have attracted a lot of attention. The woman I hired to help me prepare for the Courgent visit and organize the event in Tirana is Kristina Millona.
In each of the communities I've visited in the region, I've shared a lot of information to help young people seek scholarships abroad, for example, Irish scholarships and Australian scholarships. Kristina applied for the prestigious Chevening scholarship and in the middle of the project we were working on, she received the news that she had been selected. The scholarship has a rigorous selection process where each applicant is evaluated on merit. Congratulations Kristina.
Compared to the tech industry in other countries, there are a lot of women participating in these events. One of the top requests that I've heard from these women is to introduce any successful women in business or technology who might come and speak to them.
I love a good game, and I particularly enjoy tabletop games because they have many of the same traits that open source has. When you're playing a card game in real life with friends sitting around a table, you can as a group decide that Jokers are wild. Alternately, you could arbitrarily decide that should a Joker come into play, anyone holding an Ace must discard that Ace. Or when a Queen of Diamonds comes into play, everyone must pass their hand to the player on their right. In other words, you can reprogram the rules on a whim because a game is nothing but a mutually agreed-upon set of conditions. To me, what's even better is that you can invent your own games instead of hacking the rules of somebody else's game. From time to time, I do this as a hobbyist, and because I like to combine my hobbies, I tend to design games with only open source and open culture resources.
In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on new Mac computers. Maybe it’s the perfect time to move away from the proprietary world of Apple, and embrace the open source Linux scene.
Motion is used to create and edit motion graphics, titling for video production and film production, and 2D and 3D compositing for visual effects. The software lets users create and play back visual effects and motion graphics.
Motion is commercial proprietary software and not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
So, I’m here with a list of the best open-source word processors for Linux to make your life easier without that.
Please note that I am talking about word processors here, not a full-fledged office suite. The focus is on suggesting that tools that let you write documents. Some software may come with spreadsheets and presentation software but that’s not our goal here.
The first line of this article is partly true, especially for the Linux people.
These nonfree development tools present a dilemma for many free software developers. The goal of many of these tools is, through more efficient free software development, more free software and more freedom. CollabNet, Google and GitHub each claim to want free software to succeed and claim they want to help it. For a series of reasons though these companies choose to support software freedom through means that are less in line with free software ethics than the ones they seek to create. The result is developers who are disempowered. The software freedom of the code these hackers produce is contingent on unacceptable exclusivity.
First, the use of nonfree tools sends an unacceptable message to users of the free software produced. “Software freedom is important for you as users,” developers seem to say, “but not for us.” Such behavior undermines the basic effectiveness of the strong ethical commitment at the heart of the free software movement. As those that are already committed to free software, we should demonstrate that we can succeed—and thrive—using free software. We should support free alternatives to proprietary systems such as Savane which can replace SourceForge or Google Code and runs GNU Savannah, or Gitorious which can replace GitHub—by using them and by improving them in the areas where they fall short.
Secondly, we should realize that, going forward, the software we produce is only as free as the software it depends on for its continued use, distribution, and evolution.
A fundamental use of the PHP programming language is to build dynamic web applications. Hence, we often need to print information in HTML inside a PHP web application.
This guide will learn about two main ways to print HTML content on a PHP web application.
Whenever you are dealing with codes written in any programming language, there is a high chance that you encounter different types of errors. Similarly, while working with C++, you come across certain types of errors that seem quite challenging to resolve. However, when you look closely at your coding practices, you realize that these errors are nothing but a consequence of your careless mistakes.
One such error is the access violation writing location error in C++ and this article is dedicated to the discussion of this error. More precisely, we will discuss why this error occurs in the first place and then we will throw light on the different methods using which we can easily get rid of this error in C++ in Ubuntu 20.04.
The Pandas library method not only allows us to remove the header of the CSV file data but can also be used to remove other rows if we specify their number or index position to the skiprows. So the skiprows will be able to remove all those rows whose numbers will be assigned to them. How to skip the csv header row in Python is explained in this article.
In this article, we will learn how we can remove the header of the CSV file data while reading the CSV itself because sometimes we don’t need the header of the CSV file data.
The flaw, an unauthenticated remote code exploit, allows the complete takeover of systems using versions 2.0-beta9 up to 2.14.1 of the library.
Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Log4j is used in software that does not use Java as well and products from Apple, Amazon, Cloudflare, Twitter and Steam are all susceptible.
Security experts around the world raced on December 10 to patch one of the worst computer vulnerabilities discovered in years, a critical flaw in open-source code widely used across industry and government in cloud services and enterprise software.
In this article, we explain the Apache Log4Shell vulnerability in plain English, and give you some simple educational code that you can use safely and easily at home (or even directly on your own servers) in order to learn more.
Just to be clear up front: we’re not going to show you how to build a working exploit, or how set up the services you need in the cloud to deliver active payloads.
The award is named after the founder Director of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) India - the late Dr Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar. He is credited with establishing twelve national laboratories and held many positions in the government in independent India. It is only given to Indian scientists working in India. The Director-General announces the winners on 26 September on the CSIR Foundation Day.
The SSB prizes are awarded to scientists below 45 years of age for conduction research in one of seven disciplines. The prize includes a citation, a plaque, and a cash award of ââ¹5,00,000 lakh.
Over the last year, we've seen some breathtaking developments in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning - from robots that can reproduce, to human-like robots straight out of a sci-fi show, to AI programmes that can predict the onset of diseases like dementia.
Here's a list of biggest feats in artificial intelligence this year.
A research team led by engineers from The University of Texas at Austin analyzed several science conferences that first went virtual during the early months of the pandemic. The researchers examined the environmental, social and economic costs of virtual conferences compared with in-person events and analyzed how the shift online altered participation by women, early-career researchers and scientists from underrepresented institutions and countries.
The study found that virtual events lowered costs and reduced time and travel commitments that had previously held some conferences back from attracting diverse groups of attendees. Also, the environmental costs of hundreds or thousands of people flying from around the world to attend a conference were eliminated.
"Singh in USA" wreaked havoc on the MIT campus by challenging students who agreed to follow two rules - firstly, to choose among Mathematics, Chemistry, or Physics. Secondly, to solve one question from the entire JEE Advanced paper in 5 minutes.
Those who got the answer right stood a chance to get $100 and $20 for participating. Out of six participants, three people got the answers correctly, winning $100 while three couldn't get the answers right. As participation prize, the YouTuber gave them $20.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) was added to a U.S. blacklist last year that denies it access to advanced manufacturing equipment from U.S. suppliers due to its alleged ties to China's military, claims that the company rejects.
SMIC, China's largest contract chipmaker, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
In the coming months, U.S. officials are also considering adding more Chinese technology companies to the Commerce Department's entity list and to the Treasury list banning U.S. investment, the Journal added.
The decision by several governments across the globe to institute travel bans on seven African countries, starting on November 27, due to the discovery of a new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, was perceived to be hasty in the eyes of some and fully justifiable on medical grounds, in the view of others. However, the matter is hardly that of a difference of opinion.
Air pollution has for long been viewed as an environmental or chemical iss€ue. In reality, it is a major human health issue, causing disease, disab€ility and premature death of 7 million people glo€bally every year. We breathe 25,000 or more times every day, inhaling 10,000 or more litres of air. It is a basic body function meant to sust€ain life. But today, breathing kills. The very air meant to sustain life is killing us, because of the presence of pollutants in it, which are poison for our body and damage our health badly. In India, 93 per cent of children breathe air which is below WHO standards. Over 25 per cent dea€ths in children under 5 are directly or indirectly related to air pollution. WHO director Dr Mar€ia Neira has termed it “a global public health emergency” while the WHO director-general has termed it “the second tobacco epidemic”.
There's already plenty of literature about our contemporary mental health crisis. But Rego, who has practiced psychiatry for three decades, takes the unique approach of examining with specificity the impact of 21st century life on our magnificent, misunderstood prefrontal cortexes. He offers no sweeping generalizations, or finger pointing. Instead he takes the reader deep into the science of how the region of our brains that controls executive function evolved, how it operates — and what the unbelievable demands we put on it every day are doing to it. It's a fascinating window into what makes us human, and an urgent call to "build our lives as best we can."
Salon spoke to Rego recently via Zoom about why we're all feeling the effects of frontal fatigue, and what we can do to shake it off.
The thing is, they don’t prescribe antibiotics anymore. So there’s hardly a reason to go.
Swedish manufacturer Volvo Cars said Friday that hackers had stolen research and development data from its systems in a cyberattack.
The company, owned by China's Geely, "has become aware that one of its file repositories has been illegally accessed by a third party," it said.
Central to Sunkara's argument was that we can easily separate the science of nuclear power from the technology of atomic weapons. “Some of the paranoia is no doubt rooted in cold war-era associations of peaceful nuclear power with dangerous nuclear weaponry. We can and should separate these two, just like we are able to separate nuclear bombs from nuclear medicine.”
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Although Chekatt managed to escape the scene even after being injured by one of the soldiers, he was identified and shot dead 48 hours later in one of the southern Strasbourg districts. Authorities later found a video in which the attacker pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State.
A total of five people have since been investigated under the suspicion of providing Chekatt with weapons. However, a trial is not expected to take place before 2023.
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that extreme weather events like the tornados that recently devastated portions of the South and Midwest will become increasingly common as climate change wreaks havoc on the planet.
“This is going to be our new normal,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said on CNN’s State of the Union.
The death toll from the series of tornadoes that erupted late Friday will likely top 100 in Kentucky alone, the state's Gov. Andy Beshear said Sunday, as fears grew there would be no further rescues from a collapsed candle factory in the devastated city of Mayfield.
"This is the deadliest tornado event we've ever had."
Ford and a partner company say they plan to build three major electric-vehicle battery factories and an auto assembly plant by 2025 — a dramatic investment in the future of EV technology that will create an estimated 10,800 jobs and shift the automaker’s future manufacturing footprint toward the South.
The factories, to be built on sites in Kentucky and Tennessee, will make batteries for the next generation of Ford and Lincoln electric vehicles that will be produced in North America. Combined, they mark the single largest manufacturing investment the 118-year-old company has ever made and are among the largest factory outlays in the world.
At a time Cryptocurrency ecosystem stakeholders in India are keeping their fingers crossed, with a hope that India will come up with rules to regulate them instead of announcing a blanket ban, a statement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has contributed to more suspense on the issue. In a virtual summit hosted by US president Joe Biden, Modi said that emerging technologies such as cryptocurrencies should be used to empower democracy, not undermine it. The statement comes at a time when the entire world is coming up with its own set of regulations to deal with the emerging asset class. While some countries have banned cryptocurrency entirely, others have tried to partially control their flow in the economy. Outlook Business looks at the way different countries in the world have tried to regulate cryptocurrencies.
Date on which the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Texas under the Voting Rights Act, challenging new redistricting plans for congressional and state House districts: 12/6/2021
It was not immediately known how long the personal Twitter handle of Modi, which has over 73 million followers, was compromised.
Twitter took the necessary steps to secure the compromised account as soon as it became aware of the activity, a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Reuters, adding an investigation revealed no signs of any other impacted accounts at present.
It was unclear how the Twitter account was [cracked] or for how long. Modi has over 73 million followers on the social media platform.
Twitter recently underwent a major change in leadership as Jack Dorsey stepped down from his CEO post and appointed Parag Agrawal for the post. But the micro-blogging platform has shared an important update on the crackdown of state-linked information operations it has managed to remove from its platform in a bid to bring non-manipulated, bias-free news to users.
Twitter on Thursday announced that it has removed 3,465 accounts for its foreign state-linked information operations. The Twitter accounts that were removed were linked to operations attributed to six countries, but the biggest contributor remained China.
An October decision by the University of Florida to block expert testimony from three professors in a voting rights lawsuit against the Florida government raised concerns across the US academic community. Although the decision was later reversed, concern remains about what the case says about academic freedom, freedom of speech, and an increasing trend of political control over institutions of higher education.
That concern is only heightened by other controversial new Florida laws. One requires state universities and colleges to conduct annual surveys on the personal and political views of faculty, students, and staff. This is still being challenged in a Florida court as an infringement on freedom and free speech and may yet be overturned, but it is noteworthy that it was passed on 1 July, the same day that Florida’s Foreign Influence House Bill, known as HB 7017, was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, amid unanimous political support.
The team conducted surveys in 58 countries and found that Facebook achieved the least success in filtering ads accurately in Malaysia, where 45% of ads remain under the radar. On the hand, the social network scored the best in the U.S. and New Zealand, where only 1% of ads slipped through the net.
Facebook began labelling political posts and ads on the platform on several occasions, most recently during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections. This came after several critics called out the world’s largest social network for allowing biased and erroneous information to run rampant on the platform.
In response to a High Court order issued on Tuesday, the telecom regulator of the country identified the audio and video contents of the former statements containing indecent and vulgar remarks, and asked Facebook and YouTube authorities to remove them immediately.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) identified 387 links on social media and other platforms where the Jamalpur 4 MP’s obscene remarks have been shared.
A serious consequence of this ontological incertitude has been the maddening perversity of thought that marks the justification of mob violence against those charged under blasphemy laws in Pakistan. The most notorious example of this was the ordeal a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, went through before being acquitted of blasphemy in 2018. Many who defended her had to pay with their lives including the Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer.
The latest manifestation of the chronic malaise was the lynching in Sialkot earlier this month of a Sri Lankan man for allegedly taking down posters on which Quranic verses were inscribed. Less than a week before the Sialkot savagery, an extremist mob had burned a police station in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when officers rejected its demand to hand over a mentally unstable man arrested for allegedly desecrating the Quran. These ghastly incidents were preceded by the shocking arrest in July this year of an eight-year-old Hindu boy for “intentionally” urinating on the carpet of a madrasa library where religious books were kept. The boy’s family and several members of the Hindu community in the district of Rahim Yar Khan had to flee their homes when a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail in August.
Stella Moris, the fiancee of Julian Assange, reiterated demands for his freedom as she revealed Saturday that the WikiLeaks founder suffered a mini-stroke in October.
"Julian Assange suffered a stroke on the first day of the High Court appeal hearing on October 27th," Moris said in a tweet.
WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange will seek permission from Britain's Supreme Court to contest the verdict of a two-bench High Court panel which, on Friday, reversed a lower court's decision to deny a US request for his extradition.
International Human Rights Day is December 10. On that day in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated as the first in a series of covenants, treaties, and legal interpretations that would make up the post-war human rights framework.
Insofar as they can acknowledge Black poverty and misery, millions and millions of white USAers understand Black pain and suffering as essentially self-inflicted and deserved. Never mind the plethora of research and investigation showing US-American social, political, and economic institutions function in such a way as to produce stark white-Black disparities in every relevant statistical measurement: wealth, poverty, income, employment, infant mortality, maternal mortality, exposure to pollution, life span, health coverage, criminal branding, incarceration, home ownership, police brutality, access to full service grocery stores, access to green space, access to doctors and dentists, access to banks and loans, exposure to COVID-19, and on and on.
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Among some of the stalled bills tabled in Parliament today, an interesting Right to Disconnect Bill is also scheduled in this list. The first time Right to Disconnect Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha by NCP MP Supriya Sule in 2019 to give employees the right to not respond to employers' calls, texts or emails after office hours. Attempting to tackle the never-ending demands of professional life is the Right to Disconnect Bill.
This Bill gives employees the right not to respond to communication from employers outside of office hours. The Bill is largely aimed at reducing stress and easing work-related tensions and striving for a better work-life balance. The Bill mandates companies to detail out-of-work demands.
Prompt action by the Nigerian army prevented further harm by heavily armed herdsmen who attacked Sabo GRA at about 1 a.m., said area resident Agwam Adams.
According to an international business tech magazine, Paula Tuffin, the fintech company's general counsel, described the events of the past week as "very regrettable" and said the board has commissioned a third party to conduct an assessment of leadership and culture at the company. Tuffin also wrote that Garg will be replaced by the company's CFO, Kevin Ryan, as interim CEO.
The email rolled out by the Board of Directors of Better, a copy of which was first reported by Vice media, stated that the company has also engaged a third-party firm to do leadership and cultural assessment.
A statement made by Confucius may help us find our way to an answer. He was once asked: “Should we return evil with good? “Confucius replied: “If you return evil with good, what will you return good with? Therefore, return good with good and evil with justice.”
Similarly, once a pupil told him: “A gentleman (Chun-Tzu/Junzi) is one whom all the people of the village love.” He replied: “No, a gentleman is one whom all the good people of the village love and all bad people of the village hate.”
Mr Whitaker estimates that from March 2020 to March 2021, around 600,000 people moved from large, high-cost metro areas to mid-sized cities (meaning those with between 500,000 and 2m people), and more than 740,000 moved to rural areas, small towns and cities with populations below 500,000—an increase in both instances of 13.5% from pre-pandemic levels. New York and San Francisco saw the largest increases in the share of people leaving. In recent months, young renters have started returning to some cities while middle-aged people are continuing to flock to the suburbs to purchase homes.
Amazon was accused Saturday of putting corporate profits above worker safety following the tornado-caused partial collapse of a St. Louis-area warehouse that left at least six people dead.
"How many workers must die for Amazon to have a policy for extreme weather events?"
According to the report, over the last few years, seller fees grew much faster than every other major revenue stream at Amazon.
"They grew faster than Amazon's own retail sales and faster than its Prime membership programme. They even outpaced Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's massive cloud-computing division," the report claimed.
AWS is on track to post about $61 billion in sales this year -- a vast sum, but still only half the revenue Amazon will generate from seller fees.
Adult entertainment company Malibu Media continues to dig itself into a deeper hole. After it failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a man who was wrongfully accused of movie piracy, the company's assets were restrained. And after a dramatic hearing last week, the total amount owed has more than doubled to $108,271.
