Smacks of collective punishment or guilt by association (and resembles so-called 'Ethical' Source)
Summary: Italo from the OSI, where he worked to 'cancel' Richard Stallman, has just announced the banning of a Russian firm; this raises several concerns about the promises/premises of Free (libre) software and it merits a difficult discussion because this is quite unprecedented
Bryan Lunduke: “the same wonderful person who brought us that Windows 95 Linux theme did the same for MacOS 9! He calls it “Platinum9″ (Platinum was the name of the default appearance style of MacOS 8 and 9). And it’s pretty close to the real thing!”
Farewell, February –we’re wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community’s activities…
In the February 2022 survey we received responses from 1,173,621,471 sites across 271,199,972 unique domains and 11,774,714 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 5.91 million sites, 1.36 million domains and 73,800 computers.
OpenResty experienced the strongest growth this month, both in overall sites and domains, with increases of 10.4 million sites and 546,000 domains. This represents a large 13.0% increase in its number of sites, but a more modest 1.4% increase in domains. Its market share in the domains metric now stands at 15.1%, an increase of 0.13 percentage points since January.
nginx closely followed OpenResty with a growth of 538,000 domains, helping it to maintain its leading 26.7% market share. nginx also saw strong growth in web-facing computers, which increased by 53,500. In contrast to its gains in these metrics, nginx lost 12.1 million sites this month (-3.2%), however it retains its position as the most commonly used web server with 31.1% of all sites using it.
Cloudflare continues to make strong gains amongst the million busiest websites, where it saw the only notable increases, with an additional 3,200 sites helping to bring its market share up to 19.4%. Apache, Microsoft and nginx all experienced losses in this metric; however, Apache and nginx still hold the top two positions with market shares of 23.3% and 22.1%.
One of the unfortunate things about the Linux community is that it loves to hate on certain projects, like Snaps. Is all the hate warranted? In some case, yes, but in many cases, no!
The 5.17-rc6 kernel prepatch has been released.
The transition to virtual conferencing has enabled work from home for office teams and eLearning for students. A new era is ushering in, given the use of technology for imparting education, managing workloads, and leading by example.
Whiteboards have become the thing of the present, considering how often you need to present your thoughts to other people over virtual mediums. Given the rise in virtual presentations, it’s time to move over to whiteboards to do your bidding.
Without further ado, you should try these seven open-source whiteboard applications on your Linux system for a seamless experience.
Linux Terminal Emulator is a truly useful and valuable tool for novice or super clients. Terminal Emulators assist you to utilize and collaborate with the shell of Linux systems. It provides you complete access to unleash the power of the system.
Furthermore, Linux Terminal Emulator is the most ideal approach to study commands of Linux without having a trained subsystem of Linux. There are no online terminals and bash editors accessible in the market to execute several commands and examine the results. If you don’t have a Linux system then you can explore the basics of system or test scripts and much more. Moreover, online terminal emulators and bash editors will assist you with excursion from this circumstance.
On the other hand, if we talk about bash editors then firstly we convey that there are two types of bash editors i.e. console-based editors and graphical user interface editors. Bash editors are used in order to write code or modify configuration files.
We have come to another letter where we are going to better document something PastSelf thought it knew, but clearly didn’t. In this case we are going to start recovering from a RAID array after a reinstall. For reasons we won’t get into, PastSelf had to reinstall the home server for the 2nd time this week. [Let us just say that PastSelf is no longer allowed to use sudo without supervision and move on.] In the reinstall, we could not get the /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc RAID array to be fully recognized and realized that we had also made the original ones too small for what we needed [which is what started the whole problem when we tried to grow a partition but forgot that the external backup always becomes /dev/sda for some reason and /dev/sdb was not the RAID drive but the / drive. Live and learn, live and learn.]
I remember the first time I went to an “un” conference. It was a chaotic event at first, with lots of socializing and sharing of personal projects, but it gradually coalesced into a mostly self-organized technical event. It didn’t happen with magic, but with sticky notes. People wrote ideas for talks and presentations on those colorful adhesive notepads, and stuck them to a common wall, and other people grouped similar ideas into clusters, and eventually everyone knew where to congregate to discuss specific topics. It was a beautiful and satisfying thing to witness, and it gave me a new respect for sticky notes. So I was happy to recently discover that the KDE Plasma Desktop has digital sticky notes, and in many ways they’re even more useful than the physical ones. The application is called KNotes, and if you have random ideas that you feel like jotting down, it’s probably something you want to consider for your own Linux desktop.
When you work with containers on Kubernetes, you often group applications together in a pod. When you launch a container or a pod into production, it’s called a deployment. If you’re using Kubernetes daily or even just weekly, you’ve probably done it hundreds of times, but have you thought about what exactly happens when you create a pod or a deployment?
I find it helpful to have an understanding of the chain of events on a high level. You don’t have to understand it, of course. It still works even when you don’t know why. I don’t intend to list each and every little thing that happens, but I aim to cover all of the important ones.
Here’s a visual map of how the different components of Kubernetes interact:
When using Linux on mobile devices such as Laptops, it is very important to tune the right kernel parameters in order to optimize battery life. Tlp is a highly customizable, free and open source command line utility released under the GPLv2 license (the source code is hosted on github) created with this exact goal. In this tutorial we see how to install Tlp on some of the most used Linux distributions, and how to configure it.
The purpose of this tutorial is to cover the step by step instructions to add a new static route via Netplan on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
Static routes are necessary when you have two or more networks that your computer needs to send traffic to. This is not a normal scenario for a home network, but is rather common in offices, schools, etc.
Normally, all network traffic is routed to the default gateway, which is a router that will then determine where to send the data to next. When adding more static routes, it adds more gateways. It is like telling your computer to send data destined to a certain network to a different router than the default.
If you have a GUI installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, but the desktop environment does not start automatically at boot, it is possible to start the GUI from the command line, or even configure the system to boot into the GUI automatically.
In this tutorial, you can follow our step by step instructions to manually start the GUI from command line, or configure the GUI to start automatically upon system boot in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
The SSH protocol operates on port 22 by default. In order to accept incoming connections on your SSH server, you will need to ensure that port 22 is allowed through the firewall.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to open SSH port 22 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The only prerequisite is that you must already have SSH installed. If you have not already installed it, see our guide on how to install SSH server on Ubuntu 22.04.
The GCC compiler is used to compile C programs on a Linux system and the G++ compiler is used to compile C++ programs. Both have numerous versions available for installation on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
In this tutorial we will install multiple versions of GCC and G++ compilers using the apt install command. Furthermore, by use of the update-alternatives tool you will learn how to easily switch between multiple GCC and G++ compiler versions and how to check the currently selected compiler version on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
The purpose of this tutorial is to cover the step by step instructions to install, enable, and disable SELinux on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
In some Bash scripts, there is an option to pass arguments to the script when you are executing it. This allows the user to specify more information in the same command used to run the script.
If you plan on giving users the option to pass arguments in your Bash script, it is important to include some type of error checking to verify that the expected number of arguments have been passed. Additionally, you can have your script react differently depending on the number of arguments that are passed. And this is why you will need to detect the number of arguments passed to the script.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to check the number of arguments passed to a Bash script on a Linux system. We will go over a few examples so you can see what this functionality looks like inside of a Bash script.
If you are writing a Bash script and have some information that may change during the execution of the script, or that normally changes during subsequent executions, then this should be set as a variable.
Setting a variable in a Bash script allows you to recall that information later in the script, or change it as needed. In the case of integers, you can increment or decrement variables, which is useful for counting loops and other scenarios.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to set variables and use them in a Bash script on a Linux system. Check some of the examples below to see how variables works.
An if statement in a Bash script is the most basic way to use a conditional statement.
In simple terms, these conditional statements define “if a condition is true, then do that, otherwise do this instead.” The if statements become more complex when you nest them together, or in other words put one if statement inside of another if statement. You can make the nest as deep as you want, though it will continue to grow in complexity.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use nested if statements in a Bash script on a Linux system. Check some of the examples below to see how nested if statements work.
Two popular games should be much better on Linux and Steam Deck with the latest update to Proton Experimental. What is Proton? It’s a compatibility layer designed to run Windows games from Steam on Linux. See more about it in our full guide.
Not only are dbrand working to bring out a fancy case for the Steam Deck with a built-in stand, they’ve also announced their own Tempered Glass Screen Protector.
Yes it’s true, Gabe Newell of Valve really did go around delivering a Steam Deck to various people and now there’s an official video on it.
Minecraft is a popular sandbox survival game that is based on voxel blocks world. In Minecraft players can build anything from a simple home, gardens, castles, and camps.
Minecraft was originally designed back in 2009, as it gains popularity, many developers attempt their own free, open-source versions of it.
In this article, we will provide you with a quick list of open-source Minecraft alternatives for gamers, and developers.
“Even though the migration has only just been completed, it is already clear that we have chosen the right platform for the future. SUSE Rancher and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are the perfect combination for our requirements.” Frank Bayer Senior Architect for Operating Systems and Container Services IT System House, Federal Employment Agency.
Every six months (in January and August) the CentOS board has the opportunity to reelect, or replace half of the directors. This staggered approach was adopted so that we are never in a situation where the entire board (or even a significant majority) is replaced, leaving no experienced directors.
In the January 2022 board meeting, the CentOS Board selected two new directors to replace outgoing directors Jim Perrin and Karanbir Singh – Celeste Lyn Paul and Amy Marrich. In the February meeting, these new directors attended as full members for the first time.
In this interview I speak with Amy about her road to the board, and what she brings to the conversation.
Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started.
There are two upcoming test weeks in the coming weeks. The first is Monday 28 February through Monday 07 March. It is to test GNOME 42. The second is Monday 07 March through Sunday 13 March. It focuses on testing internationalization. Come and test with us to make the upcoming Fedora 36 even better. Read more below on how to do it.
Automation skills have been a hot commodity over the past few years. Companies may want to use automation to free their employees from rote work, like applying the same security patch across hundreds of machines, so they have more time to participate in high-value innovation efforts.
Ansible technology has been at the forefront of hot automation skills. For example, the 2021 Stack Overflow survey found Ansible technology to be the eighth most loved tool—with similar results found in the 2020 edition of this survey. And if you do a LinkedIn job search, the results include thousands of jobs where “Ansible” skills are mentioned. As automation grows, there has never been a better time to expand your Ansible skills and knowledge.
Coming six months after Armbian 21.08, the Armbian 22.02 release is here to introduce initial support for Raspberry Pi devices. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B board is currently supported with 64-bit builds using Raspberry Pi Foundation’s kernels 5.15 LTS and 5.16, as well as Debian’s flash-kernel tool.
While the Raspberry Pi support is still marked as WIP (Work in Progress), it would appear that the community is reporting success in running Armbian on various 64-bit Raspberry Pi boards, including the older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi CM3 and CM4.
The Armbian project, which is a Debian-based distribution for Arm-based single-board computers (SBCs) and development boards, has a lengthy release announcement for Armbian 22.02. Beyond lots of updates and bug fixes (of course), Armbian has added support for Debian unstable (“sid”), Raspberry Pi images, a new Extensions build framework, build automation (continuous integration and continuous deployment) improvements, and more. There is also upcoming support for Ubuntu 22.04 images.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 724 for the week of February 20 – 26, 2022.
To simplify migration from Lomiri to the current version of Mir for developers, this release introduces MirOil. This is a supported API to assist with the migration. Read more about this library on the UBports forum.
We introduced support for onscreen keyboards with Mir 2.6 and that works with a range of applications but Qt only supports the older zwp_text_input_manager_v2 protocol. So, we’ve added exclusive support for Qt applications to Mir this release.
Plus, we have ensured that Mir 2.7 builds with the latest versions of Ubuntu (Jammy), Fedora (rawhide), Debian (sid), and Alpine (edge).
Learn more about Mir 2.7 release here, or explore its whitepaper and learn more about this open source display server.
Today Canonical announces it is collaborating with Vodafone to test a new technology that uses Anbox Cloud, and the power of smart mobile networks, to transform TVs, computers, wearables and other everyday objects into ‘cloud smartphones’.
The prototype Cloud Smartphone will be showcased on Vodafone’s stand at MWC 2022 in Barcelona, demonstrating the concept of a smartphone running entirely on the cloud while leaving basic functionality on the device a user holds. With the use of Canonical’s Anbox Cloud, Vodafone can test a software stack that allows for the implementation of running the Android operating system in the cloud by moving all the processing to a virtual machine. Because of this, the device of choice will only need to use basic video-decoding capabilities, enabling simple objects to take on smartphone tasks. The integration with functions remaining on the physical device like camera, location or available sensors, provides the user with an environment that shows no difference to what they are regularly used to having.
The ability to offload compute, storage and energy-intensive applications from devices (x86 and Arm) to the cloud enable end-users to consume advanced workloads by streaming them directly to their device. Anbox Cloud also allows developers to deliver an on-demand application experience through a platform that provides more control over performance and infrastructure costs, with the flexibility to scale based on user demand.
SmartCow’s Xavier NX based “Apollo Development Kit” ships with Nvidia’s Deepstream conferencing and RIVA conversational analytics SDKs. Features include a 128GB SSD, 4-MEMS mic, 2x speakers, audio I/O, mini-DP, 8MP camera, M.2, GbE, and an OLED.
We have covered several dozen carrier boards, dev kits, and edge AI systems built around Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX, but the Apollo Development Kit is the first we can recall that focuses primarily on audio AI. Developed by a Malta-based startup called SmartCow, this audio/visual dev kit blurs the line between a carrier board and an embedded system, as it ships with a stand and partial enclosure equipped with an OLED display. The kit is designed for AI-enhanced audio/video conferencing, public transport kiosks, and smart retail systems.
People often ask me for security advice, but before I can offer any recommendations usually I need to ask people specific questions about themselves to understand the threats they face. That’s because the security measures you take depend on your threats, and because everyone faces different threats, there are few one-size-fits all recommendations. When I wrote Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks, I intentionally split each chapter into three sections with each section recommending more extreme (and sometimes more complicated) hardening measures than the last. The reader was instructed to read up to their level of comfort and threat, and then revisit the more advanced sections later.
Each person not only faces different threats, the threats they face can change. Security needs to be flexible, and should be capable of offering strong protection by default, and extra protection during a crisis. Doors typically have a regular lock and a deadbolt, and many people only lock both at night or when they are leaving the house. We also expect to be able to lock our doors ourselves, with keys under our own control. Likewise our security measures should not only offer a strong defense, they should do it while maximizing our freedom and our control.
As you know, Arduino is all about open source, and now our Docs and Help Center sites now join the community club becoming open-source. Arduino lovers everywhere can now contribute to the content on official Arduino documentation websites through their public GitHub repositories.
Arduino Week takes place between 21-26 March, 2022, marking the first time we’ve expanded the birthday celebration into a full week of talks, events, launches and presentations. We’re reserving the last day of the week (Saturday, 26th March) for these community-driven events; putting the spotlight on your celebrations for the big finale.
We recently wrapped up the call for speakers, after we received a huge number of pitches and ideas for people who wanted to take part in the official Arduino Week event. Now we want to hear all about any events you’re planning to help us raise awareness and have fun with open-source hardware, software and services!
Following a short exchange of opinions with several community members, as of Saturday 26th of February 2022, TDF has suspended RusBITech’s membership in the Advisory Board.
While TDF does not get involved in politics in any way, the apparent involvement of RusBITech with the Russian Federation’s military complex creates a serious moral concern in the current situation.
As the globe still navigates the twists and turns of the times, Collabora can confidently say we’ve been steadily on the rise. The demand for open source expertise continues to intensify and we’ve remained in stride in the field. We’ve added brand new members to our crew who are more than equipped to keep pace.
In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a website developer and engineer from the US, who found the software and its community provide the impetus to keep her going forward.
WordPress gave Tonya Mork a new lease of energy after a health crisis from which she nearly died. She had spent two decades as an electrical and software engineer in high tech automated manufacturing. But when she discovered the WordPress software, teaching it to others became her new purpose. Through this discovery, she has gone on to help thousands of developers understand and build code in great depth.
[...]
For the first 22 years of Tonya’s life, she rose through the ranks from enlisted personnel in the US Navy to a highly sought after chief engineer with a multi million-dollar industrial automation engineering firm.
However, while she was working in engineering, her life was to change dramatically. In 2007, Tonya started to face health challenges that had an impact on all that she had known.
Thanks to, PWC 154 part 1 is so boring, I’m not going into details. Part two however is a bit of a head scratcher.
As a child, [David Windestal] already knew that a belt sander was the perfect motor for a banging radio-controlled car. Many years later, the realization of that dream is everything he could have hoped for.
The core of this project is a battery-powered belt sander by a well known manufacturer of gnarly yellow power tools. With an eye for using bespoke 3D printed parts, the conversion appeared straightforward – slap on (or snap on) a pre-loved steering mechanism, add a servo for controlling the sander’s trigger, and that’s pretty much job done. Naturally the intention was to use sandpaper as tread, which is acceptable for outdoor use but not exactly ideal for indoors. A thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) tread was designed and printed for playtime on the living room floor, where sandpaper may be frowned upon.
We’ve seen a wide variety of mask sanitization solutions, and now, [spiritplumber] from [Robots Everywhere] brings us a frugal and ingenious design – one that you barely even need tools for. This project might look rough around the edges but looks were never a prerequisite, and as a hacker worth their salt will recognize – this is an answer to “how to design a mask disinfector that anyone can build”.
Local shortages of masks have been threatening communities here and there, doubly so if you need a specific kind of mask that might be out of stock. This design could apply to a whole lot of other things where sterilization is desired, too – improving upon concepts, after all, is our favourite pastime.
Interfacing technology and electronics with the real world is often fairly tricky. Complexity and edge cases work their way in to every corner of a project like this; just ask anyone who has ever tried to operate a rover on Mars, make a hydroponics garden, or build almost any robotics project. Even those of us who simply own a consumer-grade printer are flummoxed by the ways in which they can fail when manipulating single sheets of paper. This robotic lawnmower is no exception, driving its creator [TK] to extremes to get it to mow his lawn.
Some of the most popular vintage computers are now more than forty years old, and their memory just ain’t how it used to be. Identifying bad memory chips can quickly become a chore, so [Jan Beta] spent some time putting together a cheap DRAM tester out of spare parts.
This little tester can be used with 4164 and 41256 DRAM memory chips. 4164 DRAM was used in several popular home computers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including the Apple ][ series, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and many more. Likewise, the 41256 was used in the Commodore Amiga. These computers are incredibly popular in the vintage computing community, and its not uncommon to find bad memory in any of them.
When people are thinking of the future of space travel, an idea that floats around is a spaceship with a giant solar sail pushed along by a massive laser. Inspired by the concept but lacking a giant laser, [Tom Stanton] build a small craft powered by a vortex cannon.
Creating a vortex is hard enough, but creating a vortex with enough oomph to travel a longer distance and push something takes some doing. [Sam] started with some cheap solenoids, but had a few issues. Their interior nozzles were quite small, which restricted airflow. He used four valves all plumbed together to provide the volume of air needed. Additionally, he found that their response time was lacking. They couldn’t quite switch off quickly enough so instead of a puff of air, it pushed out something closer to a stream. To compensate, [Sam] 3d printed and tried a few different sizes of cone nozzles to see if that helped. Unfortunately, it did not. So he combined the nozzle with an expansion chamber that allowed the pressure wave to shorten, then it narrows to speed it up again. This provided a decent vortex.
Newton famously said, “If I see further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” For 3D printing, though, it might be the reverse. If a printer prints larger than others, it is probably using work developed for smaller printers. There are a variety of very large 3D printers out there now and you frequently see claims in the press of “world’s largest 3D printer.” Roboze, for example, makes that claim with a build volume of 1 meter on each axis.
Not to dispute them, but depending on your definitions, there are FDM printers with bigger volume capacity. There are also many other machines claiming roughly the same size, from 3D Platform’s WORKBENCH XTREME to the re:3D Terabot. Of course, all of these come with a large price. But we’ve even seen a homebrew printer with an 800 mm x 500 mm bed. In addition, infinite bed printers are not that uncommon, although they do have some limitations. In particular, they are usually only large on one axis.
Ethernet cable testers are dime a dozen, but none of them are as elegant and multimeter-friendly as this tester from our Hackaday.io regular, [Bharbour]. An Ethernet cable has 8 wires, and the 9 volts of easily available batteries come awfully close to that – which is why the board has a voltage divider! On the ‘sender’ end, you just plug this board onto the connector, powered by a 9 volt battery. On the “receiver” end, you take your multimeter out and measure the testpoints – TP1 should be at one volt, TP2 at two volts, and so on.
In a surprise move that had everyone buzzing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, the Linux Foundation, in collaboration with the GSMA, introduced a global, open-source project to address industry API interoperability leveraging GSMA OPG requirements and Linux Foundation’s Developer Ecosystem.
Broadcom Software—an industry member of CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC)—uncovers an advanced persistent threat (APT) campaign against select governments and other critical infrastructure targets in a publication titled Daxin: Stealthy Backdoor Designed for Attacks Against Hardened Networks. The Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software, worked with CISA to engage with multiple governments targeted with Daxin malware and assisted in detection and remediation.
According to a US official, the finding of the malware was communicated to the United States government, which then shared the information with its overseas allies. Symantec published its research on the tool, which it refers to as Daxin, on Monday.
The backdoor is a Windows kernel driver implementing advanced communication features that allows its operators to infect systems on highly secure networks and let them to communicate without detection, even when the systems can’t connect to the Internet. These features are similar to the Regin malware discovered by Symantec in 2014, and which the company attributed to Western intelligence agencies.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (389-ds-base, cyrus-sasl, kernel, openldap, and python-pillow), Debian (cyrus-sasl2, htmldoc, and ujson), Fedora (flac, gnutls, java-11-openjdk, kernel, qemu, and vim), openSUSE (ucode-intel), SUSE (php72 and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (php7.4, php8.0).
he world’s largest automaker is suspending production at a third of its factories, according to Reuters. Toyota says it will temporarily stop making cars at its Japanese factories after one of its suppliers was hacked.
The company in question is called Kojima Industries, which makes composite and plastic parts for Toyota, both for car interiors and also parts for Toyota’s hybrid and fuel cell electric vehicles. Reuters quotes a Toyota spokesperson who described the event as a “supplier system failure.”
I installed the Google Keyboard (Gboard) app on a hunch and discovered that all my problems went away. Great! If you’re looking for a quick solution to the above problems, this might be it.
However, I wasn’t satisfied with just finding a solution. I wanted to understand the underlying issues. (You may be a regular reader, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise.)
I began by resetting all user data (settings, dictionary, and typing predictions and completions) belonging to the Samsung Keyboard app, and the problem went away. Weird. Okay, so this suggests it was caused by one or a combination of my preferences.
No, it isn’t a joke, people took it upon themselves to try it and the results are actually better than what was initially expected from this experiment.
Furthermore, users that have been using Surface devices since for graphics and work state that there is always something wrong with them.
They are referring to either Windows OS-specific problems or questionable hardware configurations choices made by Microsoft.
Regardless of the motivation that drove some to leave Windows 11 behind in favor of Linux, on Microsoft-designed laptops and tablets, the result is the same.
If you are a professional Linux user then you might already know that the Nginx and the Apache server both are useful for demonstrating your project under a localhost or a public domain. Before you go to the next stage of the server, you might need to know the difference between the load Nginx balancer server vs the Apache server. The Apache is widely used for or regular user interface to base service for HTTP and HTTPS servers. On the other hand, the Nginx server can handle the server load and balance the traffic of your server.
A Quick overview of deepin 20.4.
Today we are looking at LMDE 5 Beta Elsie. It is based on Debian 11, Linux Kernel 5.10, Cinnamon 5.2, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at LMDE 5 Beta Elsie.
Even though hard drives are getting much bigger some times you may want to do some system spring cleaning and clear out duplicates and other junk files your system accumulates.
The speed at which Linux developers are working on version 5.17 of the popular kernel has gotten the OS’ boss a bit worried.
In the weekly State of the kernel post, Linux creator (and the biggest developer) Linus Torvalds, said he believed the progress (or lack thereof) wasn’t caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or “whatever crazy things are going on in the world”, as these things “don’t seem to have affected the kernel much.”
However, the number of known regressions that Torvalds is claiming have been out there since late January have affected the development cycle. Although these “don’t seem all that big and scary”, Torvalds did stress that some of them were reported right after the rc1 release, meaning they’re getting somewhat stale.
Linux and audio have never entirely gotten along well together, when PulseAudio came along it actually solved a lot of problems but it’s PipeWire that’s the real future.
Truthfully, I was hesitent to switch my own PC over from PulseAudio to PipeWire for fear of breakage, especially with the Steam Deck — I needed thing to continue working smoothly. However, I also sometimes tend to just “YOLO” for the fun of it and so I did. I’m now running PipeWire and I have to tell you how happy I am with it.
Live kernel patching is an essential component of your Linux server management and vulnerability remediation strategy. Patching encompasses all installed software, and software essential for baseline operation of the OS. The most dynamic component of Linux, essential for baseline operation, is the kernel.
The Linux kernel has over 30 million lines of code, and in January 2022, the stable Linux kernel version had over 999 commits. It is not uncommon for a stable Linux kernel to receive 25 patches every day. Many of these patches address security vulnerabilities, which may or may not be formally disclosed. System Administrators need to insulate their estate from critical vulnerability exploits, which target one of the most scrutinised pieces of software in history.
HP’s Linux printer and scanner driver, HPLIP, released new 3.22.2 version today with many new printers support!
According to the release note, HPLIP 3.22.2 adds official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, Elementary OS 6.1, and Linux Mint 20.3.
OpenSSH 8.9 is a feature-focused version that has been released with some new features, bug fixes, and security enhancements.
OpenSSH is an open-source implementation of the SSH protocol. It encrypts all traffic to eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. In addition, OpenSSH provides a large suite of secure tunneling capabilities, several authentication methods, and sophisticated configuration options.
The latest release of OpenSSH – version 8.9, released on February 23th — removes in-built support for MD5-hashed passwords. It is important to note that this change only affects the portable version of the software. If you require MD5-hashed passwords on your system, the openSSH developers recommend linking against libxcrypt or a similar one-way hashing crypt library.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Snap is a package format developed by Canonical that can be installed in various apps and packages available in the Snapcraft repository. Snaps are faster to install, easier to create, safer to run, and they update automatically and transactionally so your app is always fresh and never broken.
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 Snap package manager on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Capturing packets is a very useful way of analyzing the inner workings of a network. There’s a variety of different tools available that are developed for this purpose. One of them is tcpdump. Here we show you how to make the best use of this great tool for network engineers and penetration testers alike.
Etherpad is a free and open-source alternative to services like Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Etherpad is a collaborative and real-time text editor for your team, it’s accessible from anywhere at any time because Etherpad is a web-based text editor.
Any changes on Etherpad are happening in real-time, and also etherpad is supports versioning and built-in formatting for teams. Etherpad is a highly customizable editor with the support of various plugins. And also supports modern document formats such as doc, pdf, odt, markdown, etc.
In this tutorial, you will install and configure the Etherpad Real-time Collaborative Editor on the Debian 11 Bullseye. This tutorial uses MariaDB as the database backend and Nginx web-server as a reverse proxy with the secure HTTPS enabled. In the end, you’ll have the Etherpad installed and secured through secure HTTPS encryption.
If you are new to Linux or someone who plans to ditch windows and switch to Linux, then this article will be of great use to you. This step by step article will walk you through the procedure to move home directory to new partition or drive in Linux.
Drupal is open-source software that has many features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. With Drupal tools, you can build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need. As an open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP, it is a great alternative to another CSM like WordPress or Joomla. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal 9 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
In this tutorial, we will learn step by step process of installing oracle JDK 17 in OpenSuse 15 Leap system.
Java is a general-purpose, also fast, secure, reliable, and object-oriented multipurpose programming language. Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Also, It is one of the most widely used programming language for developing software and application.
In this article we will learn How to Enable Conda-forge Channel For Conda Package Manager. The Conda Package manager installs packages from Default channels. ll packages in the default channel are tested and maintained by the Conda team from Anaconda, Inc.
Aside from the official default channel, there are some third-party channels available for hosting and managing packages. One of the channels is Conda-Forge. Conda-forge is community drived channel that provides latest conda packages for a wide-range of software.
The default channel may not always have all the packages. There could be some missing or outdated packages. The Conda-Forge community tackles these issues by maintaining up-to-date packages with the help of contributors. Conda-forge project is financially supported by NumFOCUS, a non-profit dedicated to support open source scientific computing community.
The alien program converts installation packages from one Linux distribution for use on another one. But don’t Snap and Flatpak make that redundant now? Sort of, but it’s not quite that simple.
Jenkins Job builder (abbreviated JJB) is a python script to maintain and simplify configuration of Jenkins jobs. Jenkins internally stores configuration of jobs in an XML format. JJB instead maintains jobs as simple descriptions in YAML or JSON format, which are then expanded to XML and uploaded to Jenkins through its HTTP API.
You can keep your job descriptions in human readable text format in a version control system to make changes and auditing easier. It also has a flexible template system, so creating many similarly configured jobs is easy.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install HPLIP 3.22.2 on Ubuntu 21.10, RHEL 8.5, Linux Mint 20.3, and Elementary OS 6.1
HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers in Linux platforms.
The latest version of HPLIP 3.22.2 contains new Distro support and added support to the new printers and the HPLIP installer is available for download from SourceForge.
If you’re using a PC, the operating system needs to know where to locate certain files or how to present the time and date. Windows typically does this using configuration files and the registry.
On Unix-based systems like Linux, this is set using environment variables. Knowing how to set environment variables in Linux can be a big help, and this guide will help you get started.
In this tutorial we are going to provide you with step-by-step details on how to https://www.rosehosting.com/debian-hosting.htmlinstall Kandboard on Debian 11.
Kanboard is an open-source project management system that uses Kanban board. It helps to visualize the work of the developers or any other users, that need to have a better view of their tasks. There is a drag and drop web user interface with columns like Backlog, Work In progress, Quality check, Done and etc. Also, Kanboard comes with a command-line interface and automation of everyday tasks. Kanboard is written in PHP and uses SQLite as a database system.
Installing Kanboard is a very easy and straightforward process that can take up to 10 minutes. Let’s get started!
In this blog post, we are going to explain a few steps that need to be taken for fixing the most common WordPress error “There has Been a Critical Error on your Website”.
This error is known in the recent versions of WordPress, more precisely from WordPress 5.4 to the latest WordPress 5.7. Before this message, WordPress was only displaying the white screen known as the white screen of death (WSoD). In the next paragraphs, we are going to show you what may be the cause of this and the possible solutions.
Let’s get started, and make your WordPress up and running!
AWS cross-account role access is one of the most common use cases in cloud environments and is always a headache to troubleshoot if one is not familiar enough with IAM. In this article, we will walk you through step by step procedure to drill down into the root cause of why AWS cross-account IAM role access is not working.
Nmap, short for “Network Mapper”, is an open-sourced tool for network discovery and auditing. It is now one of the most widely used tools for network mapping by system administrators. Nmap searches for hosts and services on a network.
There are a variety of free network monitoring tools and vulnerability scanners that are available to security professionals, however, Nmap stands out. Nmap is not only free, but it is also incredibly flexible, portable, well-documented, and simple to use.
Verifying the checksum of files you download from the internet is a good habit to get into if you’re serious about your Linux desktop’s security.
When you download a Linux ISO file, you may have noticed a checksum near the download link. The checksum is a long list of numbers and letters that don’t actually mean anything. The purpose of this checksum is to help you confirm that the file you downloaded is exactly the file you expected, that it hasn’t been corrupted by an incomplete download or someone tampering with the file before it gets to you.
There are several ways to verify a file’s integrity on Linux. Have a look at the following programs and see which one appeals to you.
One of the selling points of Unreal Tournament pitched to the modding scene by Epic Games was its ability to load assets from the original Unreal into the new engine, further expanding the content base for what was already a highly modifiable game. After a few years this snowballed into a concerted community effort to make the entire Unreal single player mode playable from within its own sequel, bringing it over to Linux in the process.
Installation is simple thanks to the unrealgold-install-436.run installer still hosted on icculus.org extracting the files off the disc and setting up the game as if it were a retail title. Installers are also available for owners of the original Unreal as well as for the Return to Na Pali mission pack, but Unreal Gold is the version that I have on CD-ROM. In fact, the longstanding but now defunct online retailer Tux Games even sold copies of Unreal bundled with the installer.
Again I made some modifications to the Unreal.ini file, switching to the SDLGLDRV renderer with “UseGammaExtension” set to “1″ as well as making “Coronas” and “VolumetricLighting” set to “False”. I decided to keep dynamic lighting enabled this time as Unreal places a far greater emphasis on darkness for both atmosphere and navigation. Set pieces such as the first Skaarj encounter are undermined by the lights not going out, making it an unacceptable compromise.
How would you feel if Valve’s Gabe Newell appeared at your front door to deliver a signed Steam Deck? Well, some people got to find out. Also, an overview of a recent IGN interview for you.
There’s been quite a few reports now of Newell out and about with a Deck in hand, and it’s pretty wholesome but it does sound quite a lot like some sort of marketing stunt. Not that anyone will be complaining about it of course, it’s a great way to show it all off.
Factorio is one game that I’ve yet to try on my Steam Deck but it sounds like it’s not ideal right now. Thankfully
Wube Software LTD. are working on it.The problem, like for a lot of similar such games, is that they were designed primarily for mouse and keyboard. To get them working nicely on a Steam Deck, they need you to make a Steam Input configuration which takes time and even then the experience might still not be ideal. Valve actually sent Wube a Steam Deck so they’re working on making it play better.
You all likely know the meme that Crysis became by now. It used to bring PCs to a halt and make GPUs cry. How about the Steam Deck though? Can it run the newest version with Crysis Remastered? Yes.
You’ll soon be throwing cards around and defeating monsters with ease, as Slay the Spire now has proper Steam Input support so it’s ready for the Steam Deck. In the new announcement, developer Mega Crit Games mentioned the use of the steamworks4j project to help with this.
For those just getting into Linux and / or people who will be testing out the Steam Deck, GOverlay can be a bit of a lifesaver to help configure some extra tools like MangoHud. Giving you a nice UI instead of diving into configuration files, it’s saved me a whole bunch of time.
This is terrible news for my free time, as if I didn’t have enough to play in bed. Terraria has a new patch out to make it even better on the Steam Deck.
From the announcement: “As we have mentioned over the past few months, the team has been hard at work on an update to further optimize Terraria for Steam Deck play – inclusive of performance and controls. With the Steam Deck officially shipping out to players starting today, we are pleased to be able to push this update out to everyone just in time!”
Here are 10 suggestions the Steam Deck’s software needs to be improved.
The Long Dark, a very chilly survival game that’s not really like any others recently had an upgrade. It’s also a Steam Deck Verified title.
Writing in a short and sweet Steam announcement, the developer said: “You’ll be happy to know that The Long Dark is Steam Deck verified! Access your Steam library on the go, and use Steam Deck to explore everything the Quiet Apocalypse has to offer. Plus, the Hinterland team has been hard at work on visual and performance improvements on Linux to make your experience on Steam Deck even better.”
Plasma 5.24 is a very good desktop environment. It’s stylish, stable and practical. I couldn’t find any major problems or issues. It definitely builds up on the quality and fun first seen in Plasma 5.20, and it supersedes the previous LTS (5.18) by a long parsec. I think it’s a worthy successor to the 5.12 line, which graces my Kubuntu on the Slimbook Pro2, and so, come April, I will be happy to move to the new Kubuntu edition.
Everything you could ask for in a classic desktop is here. Speed, availability of programs and tools, the ergonomic and aesthetic freedom, a foundation for serious work and fun. No need for any command line, and yet, if you want, you can tweak anything and everything, every function and widget has at least one alternative, and you can go to insane levels of details in making Plasma behave and look like anything else you want. I’ve already shown you how to make it look like Mac, Unity, Windows 10, and Gnome. Beyond this, your imagination is your limitation.
I am very happy with my initial 5.24 contact, and I am looking forward to installing and using 5.24 in earnest. In fact, I’m itching to splurge a fresh wad of capitalism on a brand new Linux-powered workstation, perhaps the Slimbook Apollo, or if they have a 27-inch model, then something like that. I might even advance my migration journey a bit. Or, at the very least, I’m just going to have immense fun with Plasma. Anyway, this is a superb release, arguably the best KDE version yet. On that happy note, I bid you farewell.
Login Manager Settings or gdm-settings is a new app developed by Mazhar Hussain that lets you change various settings of GNOME‘s Display Manager (a.k.a. GDM). Under the hood, the application is written in Python, but its graphical interface is written using GTK4 and libadwaita to provide users with a modern UX.
The app features no less than seven panes with various settings including the ability to change shell, icon, and mouse cursor themes, as well as to change the background to an image or a solid color from the Appearance pane.
Currently in an early stage of development (thus not really intended for mainstream use) Mazhar Hussain’s GDM Settings app aims to unlock a legion of login screen functions to let users create a welcome screen that better suit their needs.
The developer of the tool describes it as “an app to manage settings (including theme and background) of GNOME’s Login Manager (GDM)” and—faux shock—that’s exactly what it does. As it’s built using Python, GTK+, and LibAdwaita it vibes nicely with the (upcoming) GNOME 42 release…
Now you can experience the Cutefish Desktop in vanilla Arch Linux. This article outlines the steps to install the Cutefish desktop environment in Arch Linux systems.
One of the biggest issues with dealing with Enterprise Linux 8 (be it Rocky to Red Hat) is the lack of additional packages which you know are in Fedora. Trying to get them into EL-8 turns into a Sisyphean task of moving the boulder of multiple python/go/ruby/etc packages into EL8 only to find that the RPM macros and other software have changed so much in 2 to 3 Fedora releases you can’t. Past self spent the weekend trying to get a simple GO package backported and found that he needed to touch at least 175 src.rpms to make this ‘work’. That was just too much for trying to get something else working.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 28 February at 1300 UTC The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
Developers who are frustrated with waiting for development environments to be set up, waiting for special laptops to be assigned, switching context between projects and branches, or other bottlenecks to launching a project should check out Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. This service makes it simple to use containers without having to be a Kubernetes expert.
Does this sound like life in a magical fairyland? This article explains what CodeReady Workspaces offers and suggests five use cases where you can enjoy its benefits.
[...]
These are some use cases and ways Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces helps you be successful and agile.
Welcome to our monthly recap of the articles we published in February 2022! This month Red Hat Developer has brought you articles about many platforms that developers use in their everyday lives. You can learn how to write Kubernetes in Java with the Java Operator SDK or create a data stream with Amazon Kinesis, AWS’s stream management service. But it wasn’t all practical tips; one of this month’s most-read articles looked at progress in the MIR project, which aims to create a universal, lightweight Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. Read on for more February highlights.
If you’re adopting IT automation on any kind of scale, planning is essential.
Some leaders and teams operate without a well-defined automation strategy, however. We can lay some of the blame for ad hoc approaches to automation on the term: It suggests everything will go perfectly to plan – even when there is no actual plan.
That sounds promising enough at the beginning, but ask anyone who has tried to automate a flawed process – or anyone who has dropped new automation tools on a team that was already worried about its job security – how that story ends. (Spoiler alert: Not great.)
A lack of planning portends other things lacking as well, such as understanding (of existing processes and workflows), empathy or emotional intelligence (ignoring or dismissing people’s concerns about how increasing automation will impact their jobs), resources (whether financial, time, technology, skills, or some combination), and awareness (of various issues inside and outside the organization that may determine success or failure).
Ansible makes it easier to create, share, and manage automation, but like any tool, some ways of using it are better than others.
The future of any organization lies in its ability to adapt to a digital-first future, especially as the pandemic continues to boost demand for digital business service operations. With 65 percent of the world’s GDP expected to be digitized by the end of this year and the digital transformation market expected to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars by 2025, organizations simply cannot afford to forgo digital transformation if they want to stay relevant.
Like any journey, the transition from legacy systems is filled with its own challenges. However, the utility of the data that underpins transformation initiatives is what will allow your organization to grow and adapt more effectively than ever before.
To prepare for the challenge of digital transformation, consider these three often-overlooked roadblocks to becoming a digital-first enterprise.
LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.
LMDE aims to be as similar as possible to Linux Mint, but without using Ubuntu. The package base is provided by Debian instead.
LMDE 5 “Elsie” beta version is now available for download. LMDE is a short form of “Linux Mint Debian Edition”. LMDE 5 is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”. You will find Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series on LMDE 5.
Debian is a great Linux distribution in its own right, but also, it serves as a base for many other operating systems. For instance, two of the best Linux distros, Ubuntu and deepin, are based on Debian.
Linux Mint is a popular operating system based on Ubuntu, but did you know there is actually a lesser-known variant of the operating system based on Debian? It’s true! The unimaginatively named “Linux Mint Debian Edition” (aka LMDE) cuts out the Ubuntu middleman and is based on Debian directly.
SmartCow Apollo is an audio/video AI engineering kit based on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX computer module designed for applications with conversational AI capabilities, such as speaker recognition and sentiment analysis. But considering a camera is included, computer vision applications should also be possible.
The development kit comes with a 128GB NVMe SSD, four microphones, two speaker terminals, two 3.5mm phone jacks, an 8MP camera module, and a 2.08-inch OLED display with everything housed in a frame that keeps the module and accessories like that camera upright.
Orange Pi 4 LTS is a cost-optimized (and availability-optimized) variant of the Rockchip RK3399 powered Orange Pi 4 single board computer that was introduced in 2019 with 4GB RAM for $49.90 and up.
Shenzhen Xunlong Software mainly kept the same design with the cost savings involving a choice of 3GB or 4GB RAM, and the replacement of Realtek Ethernet PHY and Ampak wireless module with the equivalent MotorComm YT8531C Ethernet chip and CdTech wireless module with WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity.
In any given field there are epoch-defining moments, those events after which nothing was quite the same as it had been before. It’s been a decade since the launch of the first Raspberry Pi single board computer. This was by no means the first inexpensive computer board, nor was it the first to support the GNU/Linux operating system, but it was among the first to promise a combination of those two. Coupled with support from a crop of British 8-bit alumni meant that from when it first gained publicity in early 2011 it garnered a huge buildup of interest.
We were first teased with a USB stick style prototype, which morphed into a much larger Raspberry Pi alpha board and finally into pre-production boards much closer to the model launched at the end of February ten years ago.
There are plenty of Linux phones to choose from out there. All kinds of options with different specs from different companies. Each Linux phone with its own unique set of features. In this article, we will guide you through buying the best Linux phone.
For a quick comparison, check the table below.
If you want to learn more and go through our full buyer’s guide, read the sections below.
The data revolution is already upon us. The role of big data, data science, and open data in economies is as crucial as ever. It has led big corporations, businesses, and companies to utilize Business Intelligence tools to analyze data and present it in a precise and readable format.
The information is essential in product development, marketing strategies, and competitor analysis. In essence, Business Intelligence tools with reporting capabilities are critical for gaining a competitive edge.
The article reviews some of the best open source Business Intelligence software you can use for data analysis and generate reports whether you are getting started with your business or are an established entity.
Cassandra and MongoDB are NoSQL databases which means that they use data structures such as graphs, wide-column, key-value, and document stores. They handle data such as unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data. Both Cassandra and MongoDB facilitate their developers to be fast and agile when running code updates.
This article has been tailored to compare the two NoSQL databases in terms of their overview, features, organizations using them, similarities, and differences. Continue reading to learn more about these NoSQL databases.
Kiwi TCMS subscribers had to go through a manual process of registering a username with our container registry, quay.io and email support before they could access private docker images. This process is now fully automated!
New version of GIMP comes with a pretty major change: layer links are now gone. They’ve always been more like temporary solution for lacking multi-layer selection. Now that GIMP has the latter, it didn’t make much sense keeping layer links.
For use cases where you might want restoring a complex selection of layers that are not inside the same group there are now layer sets available. Frankly, the feature should have been called ‘layer selection sets’ instead as the name currently implies a different functionality (known as layer comps to Photoshop users).
Remember the “suitcase” form-factor for PCs? In the time before latops, these luggable machines were just the thing for the on-the-go executive. OK, maybe not really — but the ability to have PC, monitor, and peripherals in a single package had real appeal, and a lot of that rationale is behind the cyberdeck phenomenon. So when we saw this retro portable TV turned into a cyberdeck, it really caught our eye.
Ironically, the portable black-and-white TV that [Lucas Dul] chose as the basis for his cyberdeck hails from about the same period in time that luggable PCs were having their brief time in the sun. Scored from eBay, the Magnavox TV/radio combo had seen better days, and required a bit of surgery to repair what might have been drop damage. With the CRT restored and the video and audio paths located, the TV got a Raspberry Pi, a small touchpad, and a couple of concealed USB connectors. The Pi’s composite output drives the CRT, with about the results you’d expect. The keyboard appears to be just about the right size to serve as a cover, but [Lucas] said that’s a future project.
It looks like Windows 11’s February 2022 optional update (KB5010414) fail is causing misery for some users, with people taking to the Feedback Hub to complain that after installing the update, their Start menu starts to behave in a weird way.
Although the Start Menu is not flexible in Windows 11, it still allows users to quickly access the installed apps. The Start menu isn’t broken in Windows 11 KB5010414 update, but users have reported that the menu automatically hides when they hover over icons pinned to the taskbar.
Tarah Wheeler and Josephine Wolff analyze a recent court decision that the NotPetya attacks are not considered an act of war under the wording of Merck’s insurance policy, and that the insurers must pay the $1B+ claim. Wheeler and Wolff argue that the judge “did the right thing for the wrong reasons..”
Those policies had long included language that explicitly said insurers didn’t have to pay for damage caused by “hostile or warlike” acts, but when it came to NotPetya it wasn’t clear whether that language actually applied—the cyberattack had been launched by a nation, but was it really warlike?
Video download link | md5sum 077822cf2a2c4dc8eaa2bf52022a3d6a
The Real GitHub
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Microsoft GitHub is a really bad workplace, having already repelled many insiders, who protested not just dodgy contracts but also a toxic management team; yet the media isn’t willing to speak about it because what’s left of the media is corruptible and paid by Pentagon contractors like Microsoft (or their front groups, such as the Linux Foundation)
THE video above discusses the article we've published about NPM. There are a number of points worth discussing verbally and there’s a lot of cover-up or all sorts of ‘gossip’.
Microsoft is of course pretending everything is normal and employment affairs are fine. It does so while censoring Microsoft critics — not just perfectly legitimate Free software projects — and gaslighting internal complainants with perfectly legitimate grievances. Today we resume our long-running series, which is now expected to last until summer (at least). █
Tantrum-throwing EPO Presidents Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have oftentimes been compared to Putin, even by their own staff
Summary: The other Munich agreement, not the one which perpetuates unaccountable tyranny in EPOnia, is worth recalling (the European Council is still appeasing the violators and the corrupt EPO officials)
Series parts:
Summary: The time seems right to resume this series, more so now that the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) [1, 2] and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) [1, 2, 3] grapple with the legal chaos caused by Team Mono inside Microsoft’s GitHub
A few years ago Microsoft bought NPM through its tentacle (mind the pun!) known as GitHub, in effect controlling more of the “supply chain” while hiring NSA veterans to run GitHub. This is a major security fiasco, a blunder in the making. Remember that when NPM ships malware the media rushes to blame the victims (like GNU/Linux users who receive that malware) instead of blaming the company responsible for actually sending that malware. Meanwhile, with GitHub Actions, many projects have foolishly outsourced the build process to “the clown” — in essence losing control of the compiler, instead trusting Microsoft and the NSA to manage that for them. It’s a sort of subsidy (selling CPU cycles) in exchange for control. Who by? Microsoft.
It has been months since we published the arrest record of Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley, whom we’ll leave outside it for a moment. He has court hearings and it’s possible he’ll be behind bars for a very long time. Those who were connected to him or defended him have long regretted it, possibly left their job, or “resigned” to avoid public embarrassment. We’ll come back to them later in this series and maybe we’ll have some updates from the courts.
“Some sites announced that Microsoft had taken over NPM and that was it (they actually said “GitHub” to perpetuate the illusion that Microsoft and GitHub are separate entities).”As the state of journalism in general (not just on technical matters) is so appalling these days little actual investigation of the NPM takeover was conducted. Some sites announced that Microsoft had taken over NPM and that was it (they actually said “GitHub” to perpetuate the illusion that Microsoft and GitHub are separate entities).
A rather reliable source recently told us a few details about the NPM story; “I remember all that drama with TJ Holowaychuk leaving the NPM scene,” our sourced recalled. “Wondering if that was related to Microsoft acquiring NPM.”
What shocked me most at the time was the lack of press coverage or scrutiny. Like nothing actually happened! Or like it didn’t matter…
“A bit off topic but that whole event seemed strange,” our source noted. The motivation is still barely known or explored; it’s shrouded in mystery as there’s no actual business model other than taking control of people. NPM wasn’t about making money; the same was true about GitHub. The way we see it, Microsoft is trying to swallow all the code and repos as well (NPM). It’s about control.
“The way we saw it (at the time of the acquisition), NPM is a piece for Microsoft’s “supply chain” plan, which also helps the NSA’s objectives, especially at times of conflict.”TJ’s [Holowaychuk] departure “was a pretty big event,” our source explained. “At that point in time TJ had written like 60% of the node.js projects that everyone uses. Mostly by himself. Some people thought he wasn’t a real person for a long time. Like they thought he was a collective…”
The way we saw it (at the time of the acquisition), NPM is a piece for Microsoft’s “supply chain” plan, which also helps the NSA’s objectives, especially at times of conflict. They can remotely take over all sorts of things. Remember that they hired from the NSA for GitHub management. This is all very well documented. What sort of company would do this??? Heck, they can even plant back doors in downloads, custom-made or tailored to specific downloaders, never mind the above-mentioned compilation process. Why would anyone trust Microsoft after the NSA leaks? They work hand-in-glove with the NSA on back doors.
“TJ is just a legend and influenced my personal coding style,” our source told us. “There was another issue with the guy who originally wrote node.js [...] He wrote it then quit [...] Joyent hired him…”
“Ryan Dahl apparently thinks writing node.js was a mistake [...] Interesting he’s also from Rochester or just went to school there [as Graveley] is from there [and] they’re about the same age…”
NPM was acquired by GitHub two years after the Microsoft acquisition. It was mentioned by Nat Friedman on 16 March 2020.
According to our source, TJ’s “complaints about node.js mostly seemed technical, but who knows…”
As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that node.js and OpenJS became a Microsoft infiltration vector inside the Linux Foundation, as noted in Techrights several times in the past.
Now that the FSF and SFC are writing a lot more about Copilot (see links in the summary above) we intend to revisit the topic, probably some time next Monday. Graveley will walk into the darkness or some prison cell while we’re left to pick up and grapple with the damage he and his "best friends" the Friedmans have caused. █
Video download link | md5sum d61cabdab8e14a34185a0b3ba94916a6
Dictators-Run EPO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Clueless politicians with no grasp (or very scarce understanding) of patent law are taking over the entire state of EPOnia; it is a recipe for disaster as it facilitates coups by “special interests” (or moneyed interests), detached entirely from scientific objectives
MR. "efficiencies" António Campinos acts as if the EPO is basically a bank. Like bankers who disregard science, laws, their native populations and so forth. The video above reminds examiners that the patent examination process should be a lot like peer review, not a business-minded escapade. The EPO’s management is recklessly breaking the law, capitalising on diplomatic immunity as if it’s a licence to invade courts, introduce illegal measures, and drain the life out of the whole system for personal gain. Thankfully many examiners are fighting back. They didn’t join the Office to conduct clerical tasks for Campinos and his chums. They’re researchers, not machines operators.
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) has taken note of the fact that the Office isn’t even listening to staff anymore. It’s basically a dictatorship (you know whose!) and it’s designed to pass wealth from ordinary Europeans to plutocrats and corporations that are typically not European. Pillage and plunder (P&P) disguised as “Patents” and “Protection”[ism]…
“A GCC meeting took place on 16 February,” the CSC wrote. “Two documents were submitted for information, i.e. the President did not expect our opinion on them. However, in order to do our job, we consider that we have to give our opinion on both documents, which we sent to him and which you can read…”
The General Consultative Committee (GCC) was explained here in past years and introduced in the video above.
Now on to the documents from the CSC. They’ve sent to staff this one page summary along with this more detailed document [PDF], an opinion with annex. Or “Target Operating Model for DG1 Organisational Steps & Other Organisational Changes (including H&S),” to use their own words.
Here’s the much shorter document of the pair, as shown in the video above:
Opinion of the CSC members of the GCC on GCC/DOC 01/2022
Salary Savings Plan: Launch of two new target funds and update of Circular 317
Introduction
The list of funds in the life-cycle strategy needs to be updated at regular time intervals (e.g. on a five-year basis). The list is an integral part of Circular 317, The change in 2022 consists in the addition of two further funds in the life-cycle strategy.
On consultation
One duty of the Supervisory Committee for the Salary Savings Plan is to supervise investment management and administration for the salary savings plan. It shall also advise the President of the Office and may issue recommendations1. As a result, documents relating to the investment strategy available to the Salary Savings Plan members must be submitted to the Supervisory Committee. This has not taken place.
In addition, the document is presented to the GCC for information only. It relates to an amendment to Circular 317, which is an integral part (Part 1b) of the Service Regulations. Previous document (GCC/DOC 29/2019 REV1) was tabled to the GCC for consultation.
Therefore, the consultation process is flawed in two respects.
On the substance
The CSC members of the GCC gave a unanimous positive opinion on Circular 317 in its previous version of 2 June 2020. The change in 2022 consists in the mere addition of two further funds in the life-cycle strategy.
The CSC members of the GCC give a positive opinion on this amendment.
____
1 See Article 4 ServRegs – Impl. R. Supervisory Committee
As noted this morning (actually recorded yesterday), there’s just about ZERO MEDIA COVERAGE about this situation, a conflict inside Europe’s second-largest institution. This so-called “conspiracy of silence” isn’t helping Europe or the EU; these things are adding up and they’ll just boil over worse than before (the Benoît Battistelli era).
To use an analogy, similarly inside corporations or institutions (e.g. government departments) that don’t permit airing of grievances internally there’s a build-up of silent dissent, which eventually spills over and gets “out there” like Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. Snowden had studied the stories of prior NSA whistleblowers (at least 3 of them, J. Kirk Wiebe, Thomas Drake, and William Binney) and even tested the water a bit before choosing to meet journalists in Hong Kong. The EPO is well aware of all the scandals; the European Council trying to cover things up along with the Administrative Council simply ensures that the blowback will discredit a lot more than the EPO, causing a crisis not just for the Office but the whole of the EU and pertinent national governments, including ours.
Given the lack of participation by the media, which actively keeps this crisis under the wraps, we’d like to urge readers to contact local publishers. Here’s a list of them for Europe:
.ad RTVA https://rtva.ad/ .al RTSH https://rtsh.al/ .at ORF https://der.orf.at/ .ba BHRT https://bhrt.ba/ .be RTBR https://rtbf.be/ .be VRT https://vrt.be/ .bg BNR https://www.bnr.bg/ .bg BNT https:/bnt.bg/ .ch SRGSSR https://www.srgssr.ch/ .cy PIK https://cybc.com.cy/ .cz Česká televize http://www.ceskatelevize.cz .cz Český rozhlas http://www.rozhlas.cz/ .de BR http://br.de/ .de Deutschlandradio https://www.deutschlandradio.de/ .de DW https://dw.com/ .de HR https://hr.de/ .de MDR https://mdr.de/ .de NDR http://www.ndr.de/ .de Radiobremen https://www.radiobremen.de/ .de RBB https://www.rbb-online.de/ .de SR https://sr.de/ .de SWR https://swr.de/ .de WDR https://wdr.de/ .de ZDF https://zdf.de/ .dk DR https://dr.dk/ .dk TV2 https://tv2.dk/ .ee ERR https://www.err.ee/ .es RTVE https://rtve.es/ .fi YLE https://yle.fi/ .fo KvF https://kvf.fo/ .fr France Médias Monde http://www.francemediasmonde.com/ .fr France Télévisions http://www.france.tv/ .fr Radio France https://radiofrance.fr/ .ge GPB https://gpb.ge/ .gl KNR https://www.knr.gl/ .gr EPT https://int.ert.gr/ .gr EPT https://webradio.ert.gr/ .gr EPT https://www.ert.gr/ .hr HRT https://hrt.hr/ .hu Duna Médiaszolgáltató https://dunamsz.hu/ .hu MTVA https://mtva.hu/ .ie RTÉ https://rte.ie/ .ie TG4 https://tg4.ie/ .it RAI https://rai.it/ .lt LRT https://lrt.lt/ .lu Radio 100,7 https://100komma7.lu/ .lu RTL https://www.rtlgroup.com/ .lv LR https://www.latvijasradio.lsm.lv/ .lv LSM https://lsm.lv/ .lv LTV https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/ .mc MMD https://www.mmd.mc/en/ .md TRM https://trm.md/ .me RTCG https://rtcg.me/ .mk MPT https://play.mrt.com.mk/ .mt PBS https://www.pbs.com.mt/ .nl AVROTROS https://www.avrotros.nl/ .nl BNNVARA https://bnnvara.nl/ .nl EO https://www.eo.nl/ .nl HUMAN https://human.nl/ .nl KRO-NCRV http://kro-ncrv.nl/ .nl MAX https://www.omroepmax.nl/ .nl NOS https://nos.nl/ .nl NPO https://www.npo.nl/ .nl NTR https://ntr.nl/ .nl PowNed https://www.powned.tv/ .nl STER https://www.ster.nl/ .nl VPRO https://vpro.nl/ .nl WNL https://www.omroepwnl.nl/ .no NRK https://nrk.no/ .pl Spółka Akcyjna http://prsa.com.pl/ .pl TVP https://tvp.pl/ .pt RTP https://rtp.pt/ .ro SRR https://srr.ro/ .ro TVR https://tvr.ro/ .rs RTS https://rts.rs/ .se SR http://www.sr.se/ .se SVT https://www.svt.se/ .se UR https://www.ur.se/ .si RTV https://rtvslo.si/ .si RÚV https://www.ruv.is/ .sk RTVS https://rtvs.sk/ .sm RTV https://sanmarinortv.sm/ .ua Suspilne https://corp.suspilne.media/ .va Statio Radiophonica Vaticana https://www.vaticannews.va/
“The list of national broadcasters can be of use to EPO staff in reaching out about the upcoming strike,” an associate told me this morning. “Given that the EPO is the second largest international organisation in Europe, the news is relevant to the member states. However, they would have to be contacted by native speakers and, preferably, residents or nationals.” █
This week has been yet another slow week for Linux news and releases, but we got some interesting gems like the release of Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS with newer kernel and graphics stacks, a new NetworkManager release with lots of goodies, and a new release of the minimalist and portable Slax distribution (finally after so many years!).
On top of that, GNOME desktop fans can now take the beta release for a test drive, KDE Plasma fans got a new bugfix release, Star Lite Mk III laptop owners can now update their firmware, Steam Deck starts arriving in the hands of people, and I take a look at Foliate as the Flatpak app of this week.
We look at two new options that enable ANYONE to run a personal server at home or a small business.
Josh and Kurt talk about SBOMs. Not what they are, there’s plenty about that. We talk about why everyone keeps claiming they’re super important, and why we’re starting to see some people question if we really need them. SBOMs are part of a future that’s still being invented.
Nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy
things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombie
apocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it
doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much.
Things continue to look normal both in commit numbers and in
diffstats. We have the usual bulk being drivers (networking, gpu, iio,
clk, and usb stand out, but there's a smattering of other stuff), with
the rest being mixed. The only thing that stands out as a bit unusual
is some further btrfs defrag fixes. But even they stand out not so
much because they are enormous, as just because they are bigger than
most of the rest, which is pretty small.
Other notable areas: core networking, tracing, and selftests. As
usual, details are in the appended shortlog.
While things look reasonably normal, we _are_ getting pretty late in
the release, and we still have a number of known regressions. They
don't seem all that big and scary, but some of them were reported
right after the rc1 release, so they are getting a bit long in the
tooth. I'd hate to have to delay 5.17 just because of them, and I'm
starting to be a bit worried here. I think all the affected
maintainers know who they are...
So if you are a subsystem maintainer, and you have one of those
regressions on your list, please go make them a priority. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, please do look up the reports by
regzbot and Guenter Roeck. I added links below to make it really easy.
But on the whole things look fine. Just a few remaining warts is all.
But the more testing to verify, the better.
Linus
https://lore.kernel.org/all/164598944963.346832.10219407090470852309@leemhuis.info/
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220221024743.GA4097766@roeck-us.net/
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install IProyal in your Raspberry PI in a way that assures your privacy with the help of Docker.
Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds is “starting to be a bit worried” by lack of progress on version 5.17 of the project.
In his weekly state of the kernel post, he opened with an observation that “whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had ‘Zombie apocalypse’ on my bingo card, not ‘Putin has a mental breakdown’), it doesn’t seem to have affected the kernel much.”
But something has affected this development cycle: a number of known regressions that Torvalds said have been known since the January 24 release of version 5.17 rc1.
“They don’t seem all that big and scary,” he wrote, but he’s sufficiently concerned about them to have flagged the possibility of delays to the release of version 5.17 if they’re not fixed.
HPLIP 3.22.2 is here two and a half months after the HPLIP 3.21.12 release, which only added support for the Fedora Linux 35, elementary OS 6, and MX Linux 21 distributions, to add support for more recent distributions, including Linux Mint 20.3, elementary OS 6.1, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5.
This means that you can now use your HP printer or scanner device on any of these GNU/Linux distributions if you install the new HP Linux Imaging and Printing version.
Once upon a time on the web, people used relatively small image sizes because it was rude to do otherwise, especially when they were being used for things like icons. If somewhere had visually small icons, they almost always were small in actual image dimensions, and all the same size because the website made you do it that way. Over time that has shifted. People started using larger and larger images, even for things that were destined for little icons, and websites started accepting these images by clamping the image size in their HTML. This mostly works fine (although people on cellular data may be a bit unhappy with you), but it does open the door to accidental mistakes that produce awkward outcomes. Specifically, if you ever reuse the image in a context where it doesn’t have its size clamped by some HTML (or CSS), people will see a surprise giant image. Sometimes it can be hard to work out why this is happening.
I wasn’t explicitly clear on it then, but I will be now: because of the rise of ransomware attacks—where a malicious actor will encrypt all your files and ‘ransom’ an encryption key (usually in exchange for a small crypto payment)—you must have an offline copy of any data that’s important to you.
In this article guide, we are going to work on the installation and configuration of the Lighttpd web server on your RHEL 8 operating system.
If you need to run a script that takes several minutes or gets run again and again, here’s how.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cinnamon Desktop on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Cinnamon desktop is an intuitive and elegant desktop environment that was initially developed as a fork of the popular GNOME graphical shell, and it is based on the GTK+3 toolkit. It is the default desktop environment on Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. t is the most used desktop environment for workstations and servers like AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux.
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 Cinnamon Desktop on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Jenkins is an open source automation server which enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. It is a popular open source automation tool to perform continuous integration and build automation. Jenkins allows to execute a predefined list of steps, e.g. to compile Golang source code to build build binary file. The trigger for this execution can be time or event based.
Flatpak is a tool for deploying and managing software packages on the Linux operating system. It provides an isolated environment where users can run applications without affecting other parts of their computers.
With Flatpaks, installing an application is like pulling it into your local repository. Links have then generated that point from the right places in Filesystem to where you can find these files–these hard links will be efficient for disk space since they’re simple compared with doing things through traditional methods.
For Debian users, most would know that the distribution focuses on stability over newer features, it is what Debian is famous for, but for some users, you may want to install an application such as Discord, VLC, Spotify, and the list goes that if available on Debian is not up to date with the newest release and missing features.
Flatpaks are always known to be up-to-date for the most part depending on the maintainer, but out of third-party managers, they rank amongst the top.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Flatpak on Debian 11 and enable Flathub to search, install, maintain or remove Flatpak applications.
Wine is a program that allows you to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems. Wine translates system calls made by your favorite programs into POSIX ones, used in similar ways across different OSs like Linux and macOS alike!
Wine 7 is the newest major release; moving from the version 6 era with Portable Executable (PE) format helps Wine feel/behave closer to an actual Windows installation being the major talk in this release.
Debian 11 users can now install the latest Wine version by importing the WineHQ repository and installing either the stable or development branch.
In this article, you will see what sticky bit is and how to set and remove sticky bits from directories and files.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VidCutter on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VidCutter is a free and open-source professional-quality video editing software that can be used across different operating systems including Linux. It’s built using Python and Qt5 and uses FFmpeg as its decoding and encoding backend. It lets you cut, split, or trim large video files into smaller, easier to share clips.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the VidCutter open-source video editor 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.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install PIMCore on Ubuntu 20.04 using Apache as web server.
Banished is a city-building game developed and published by Shining Rock Software. In 2014, it was released on Microsoft Windows. Here’s how you can play this game on your Linux PC.
Unturned is a free-to-play survival game developed and published by Smartly Dressed Games. In 2017, it made its way to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Here’s how to play it on Linux.
Note: Unturned uses anti-cheat software. Some servers may have issues running on Linux. Play at your own risk!
Archinstall is a guided tool included with the official Arch Linux ISO. Users can easily configure and install an Arch Linux desktop with little effort. Here’s how to use Archinstall to install Arch Linux on your PC.
Pop!_OS 21.10, released in December 2021, is the latest release of Colorado-based computer vendor System76′s Linux distribution. Based on Ubuntu 21.10, Pop!_OS 21.10 provides a heavily customized experience. Most packages come from Ubuntu’s repositories, but the extra System76 packages change a lot. In this review, I explore what Pop!_OS 21.10 has to offer and take a look at many of the things that make the Pop!_OS desktop experience different from Ubuntu’s customized GNOME and standard GNOME.
Fedora 36 is one of the most anticipated releases of this year.
While we look forward to every major release, last year, Fedora 35 has set up some exciting expectations with GNOME 41 and a new KDE flavor (Kinoite).
Fret not; if you cannot wait for Fedora 36, I shall highlight the essential details about the release.
Work on LMDE 5 kicked off in early January 2022, shortly after the release of Linux Mint 20.3, which is derived from the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, but it’s built on top of a Debian GNU/Linux 11 base mostly for Linux Mint developers to test the compatibility of their own software stack with Debian GNU/Linux in preparation for the next major Linux Mint release, Linux Mint 21.
LXI Tools is an open-source project designed to manage Ethernet-connected test instruments such as oscilloscopes, power supplies, spectrum analyzers, etc… that are compliant with the “LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation” standard, or LXI for shorts, hence the name of the project.
LXI Tools is available either as a command-line program (lxi) or a graphical user interface (lxi-gui), and includes features such as the automatic discovery of test instruments, sending SCPI (Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments) commands, grabbing screenshots from supported instruments, benchmarking SCPI message performance, and Lua scripting for test automation.
I’m very impressed with the results and will definitely be using this method more in the future. If you were wanting to try this I recommend using a room with good ventilation as the machine essentially sucks in air from the back, heats it and the air comes out through vents on the sides near the front, along with any moisture. But pretty much any drying method would likely need ventilation or a condenser.
Rejoice, folks on the other side of the Atlantic: now you can buy the hardware you want from a source closer to home. Vikings’ OpenPOWER store is now showing items in stock, including Raptor Talos II and T2 Lite full systems, T2 Lite boards, DD2.2 and DD2.3 POWER9 CPUs up to 22 and 18 cores respectively, and heatsinks and HSFs (and the hex driver needed to install them). [...]
I recently got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module, 4 GB with 32 GB eMMC flash and a Compute Module 4 IO board. Due to the global chip shortage it’s hard to find one in stock but I got lucky by checking rpilocator.com regularly (thanks to Jeff Geerling for that site. He’s got amazing Raspberry Pi related content next to a bunch of high-quality Ansible playbooks, go give him a visit). The eMMC edition I have can only be flashed if you put a jumper on a pin on the I/O board (to put the cm4 in a special mode, nRPI_BOOT) and use a special tool, usbboot. Jeff has a great guide on flashing the cm4 eMMC edition. My cm4 however, was not showing up whenever I put it in this special flashing mode. This article goes over the troubleshooting I did and the eventual solution (hint: hardware problem).
Atlassian Corporation Plc is a software company founded in 2002 that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. It employs over 7,000 people and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Atlassian’s range of proprietary software includes software for collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. Atlassian dominates several markets where it still has intense competition.
Here’s how to create a SQLite database of every file you’ve started in your Google Drive, including both files created in Google Docs/Sheets and files you’ve uploaded to your drive: [...]
While YottaDB r1.34 is an otherwise modest successor to r1.32, internal changes allow the popular programming language Python to be fully Supported. We are excited about making YottaDB available to the large Python user community. Here is a “Hello, World” Python program that updates the database and illustrates YottaDB’s Unicode support: [...]
This tutorial explains how to create and insert Quick Response (QR) codes in Writer, the word processor program of LibreOffice. Why we learn to make QR Codes? Because today, QR Codes are popular thanks to smartphones so people can quickly access address you’re point to in your publications like books, registration papers, flyers, posters, etc. This requires Writer 6.4 or later and does not require other program. Now let’s do it!
In the Swedish capital Stockholm, IT savvy parents banded together to make a better version of the official app for school administration. The project of volunteers, completely developed in open source, was first rejected, but is now expanding further.
There are two sides of thinking that Git’s index is a good thing. The first is the practical side, where I like what it enables me to do. On the level where all VCSes are user interfaces to mathematics, the operations and double checks that the Git index readily enables are both useful and reassuring. Being sure of what you’re going to commit before you do it and having powerful selective commit capabilities are both useful, and they’re even better together.
When version controlling your code with git, there’s generally three choices when merging feature branches into main. Each has its own quirks, so which one should you use?
I’ve been working on some linting projects at $work and one thing I’m working on is finding unused variables in our codebase. This can be pretty important in a larger codebase. When you find variables which have not been used, you may find yourself asking, “why is this here?” and you may not easily get an answer. Eliminating unused variables can be good for the performance of the code, but also good for everyone else on your team. So, we want to make sure we can remove old bits of unused code and also prevent new cases.
“Who Lives, Who Dies: Reimagining Global Health and Social Justice” was the title of a talk delivered virtually at the University of Hawaii on February 17th by renowned public health physician Dr. Paul Farmer. He was speaking from a hospital in Rwanda that he helped build along with Partners in Health, the global non-profit organization he co-founded in 1987. Paul Farmer talked of his life’s work transforming healthcare systems worldwide, where too often access to care is reserved for the wealthy while the poor are left to die. With characteristic humility, he described healthcare as a human right and his years of what he called “pragmatic solidarity” in scores of countries. The clinics and hospitals he developed in the world’s poorest regions have saved patients from tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, cancer, and more. Four days after giving his talk, Paul Farmer died in his sleep, of an acute cardiac event. He was 62 years old.
Sun Microsystems was founded 24th February 1982, and died 27th January 2010. I spent 1982 on sabbatical in Amsterdam waiting for the Sun/1 we had ordered to show up. IIRC I visited their initial offices on Walsh Ave. in Santa Clara in early 1983, and joined the company in September 1985. I owe Sun, and the people who worked there, a debt of gratitude I could never repay.
In those early days Sun was an extraordinarily interesting company to work for, and throughout its 28-year history it spawned an incredible number of other startups. One of them was Nvidia, which is currently the 8th most valuable company in the world, but there are far too many others to list.
The higher-level advice here, which I think is generally good, is that while asking on Reddit is quick and easy, it’s not likely to produce anything of value. It’s like looking for your lost wallet under the lamppost because the light is good. But it doesn’t work; you need to go ask the question to the people who actually know what the solutions might be and who are in a position to actually do something about the problem.
On our news feeds and TV channels at the moment are many stories concerning the war in Ukraine, and among them is one which may have an effect on the high-tech industries. It seems that a significant percentage of the world’s neon gas is produced in Ukrainian factories, and there is concern among pundits and electronics manufacturers that a disruption of this supply could be a further problem for an industry already reeling from the COVID-related chip shortage. It’s thus worth taking a quick look at the neon business from an engineering perspective to perhaps make sense of some of those concerns.
As most readers will know from their high school chemistry lessons, neon is one of the so-called inert gasses, sitting in the column at the extreme right of the Periodic table. It occurs in nature as a small percentage of the air we breathe and is extracted from the air by fractional distillation of the liquid phase. The important point from the above sentences is that the same neon is all around us in the air as there is in Ukraine, in other words, there is no strategic neon mine in the Ukrainian countryside about to be overrun by the Russian invaders.
Also from the “The Welcome to the Dystopian Future” files, White Castle, the chain that literally invented the fast-food restaurant, has announced that they’ll be deploying 100 robotic cooks to stores beginning soon. Ironically, the track-mounted robot arm, which is dubbed Flippy 2, will not be making the company’s iconic sliders on the flattop; rather, it looks like they’ll be stuck making the fries. Flippy 2 is made by Miso Robotics, and basically amounts to a robotic work cell dedicated to fried foods, but it’s easy to see how this could encroach on other parts of the kitchen. But it makes sense to start here, since the fry station is dirty, dull, and often dangerous work with a high turnover rate. We’d just hate to be the field service tech who has to fix these greasy, nasty things when they break.
The wiper uses different corruption methods based on the version of Windows running on the machine and partition type (FAT or NTFS). HermeticWiper can damage both MBR and GPT drives and triggers a system reboot to complete the data wiping process, researchers with Cisco’s Talos division note.
Although executed on February 23, hours before Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, the attacks appear to have been in preparation for months.
The ransomware gang known as “Cuba” is increasingly shifting to exploiting Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities – including ProxyShell and ProxyLogon – as initial infection vectors, researchers have found.
The group has likely been prying open these chinks in victims’ armor as early as last August, Mandiant reported on Wednesday.
In addition, the expanding attack surface of hybrid workers and hybrid IT is a focal point that cyber adversaries are attempting to exploit. For a detailed view of the report, as well as some important takeaways, read the blog.
Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances, Fortinet: “Cybersecurity is a fast-moving and dynamic industry, but recent threat events show unparalleled speeds at which cyber adversaries are developing and executing attacks today. New and evolving attack techniques span the entire kill chain but especially in the weaponization phase, showing an evolution to a more advanced persistent cybercrime strategy that is more destructive and unpredictable.
Ransomware is not slowing down and continues to be relentless and more destructive, a new report has revealed.
Fortinet released announced the latest semiannual FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report. Threat intelligence from the second half of 2021 reveals an increase in the automation and speed of attacks demonstrating more advanced persistent cybercrime strategies that are more destructive and unpredictable. In addition, the expanding attack surface of hybrid workers and hybrid IT is a focal point that cyber adversaries are attempting to exploit.
A team of Chinese researchers has revealed details of a “top-tier” backdoor used by the Equation Group, a APT group linked to the NSA.
Our analysis of Al Tajer’s iPhone 11 Pro Max showed that the phone had been [cracked] with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware at least three times in September 2021, starting on September 2, 2021 and ending on September 27, 2021. Al Tajer’s phone was [cracked] while running iOS 14, and the phone does not appear to have been [cracked] after he updated it to iOS 15.0.2 in October 2021. Evidence of the [attack] on Mohammed Al-Tajer’s phone included records showing that three processes were run on the phone in September 2021 that we link to NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware with high confidence.
Instead of only processing the payment, the German payment service “giropay” (formerly “paydirekt”) keeps the information about each individual item purchased in online shops. This may lead to the processing of sensitive, personal data. A customer contacted noyb after seeing a detailed list of products she had ordered in an online pharmacy and a sex shop listed in her giropay account. Such data is specially protected under the GDPR and may not be processed without consent. noyb filed a complaint against giropay today with the Hessian State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.
One of the most popular—and dangerous—assumptions in the world is that violence keeps us safe.
Hiding in plain sight amidst the chaos of a possible war in Ukraine is the horrifying potential of another Chernobyl-scale apocalypse.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his invading army to attack “from all directions,” Ukraine’s defense forces and civilian volunteers reportedly repelled an assault on Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, but battles remain underway nationwide on Sunday as diplomatic efforts unfold.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Sunday that Kyiv intends to send a delegation to the Ukraine-Belarus border to hold discussions with Moscow “without preconditions.”
It’s now been four days since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yesterday, Russian troops advanced into Kyiv and continued shelling the city. As fighting took place on the streets of the Ukrainian capital, Meduza reached out to different Kyiv residents for eyewitness accounts of this past week’s events. Some of the people we spoke to were hiding in shelters, others had decided to join territorial defense groups, and some were evacuating the city altogether. Here are their stories.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is epoch-making, but not in the way the western powers understand it.
On the fourth day of fighting in Ukraine, refugees are still pouring out of the country — more than 368,000 people have already reached Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, and other countries, according to the United Nations. Fierce battles continued on the outskirts of the nation’s capital, Kyiv, and in the streets of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. For the first time, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that its soldiers have been killed and wounded in Ukraine. After several false starts, Kyiv and Moscow, with mediation by Minsk, also agreed tentatively to meet for the first ceasefire negotiations. Meduza presents several photographs from this day in the War for Ukraine.
When two scorpions are in a bottle, they both lose. This is the preventable danger that is growing daily, with no end game in sight, between the two nuclear superpowers, led by dictator Vladimir Putin and de facto sole decider, Joe Biden.
Putin’s tanks had barely crossed the border into Ukraine before the American Petroleum Institute (API) was out on Twitter attempting to exploit the crisis. Without even a word of solidarity for the people of Ukraine, API launched into a set of four demands for the White House, all of which would benefit the industry while providing no help to Europe or Ukraine.
We are all affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the interests of global peace, whether or not you have family or friends in Ukraine, the brutal aggression by a neighboring state creating a war affecting millions of innocent people has to be condemned in the strongest way possible.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was condemned on Sunday after ordering his military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert.”
“The U.S. and NATO must resist calls to react in kind and inject nuclear weapons deeper into this conflict.”
Russian police arrested 2,114 people at anti-war protests in 48 cities across the country on Sunday, the fourth consecutive day that demonstrators have risked their personal safety to hit the streets in opposition to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
That’s according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group that has long documented crackdowns on civil liberties in the country. A total of 5,500 anti-war protesters have now been detained since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military assault on Ukraine, said the independent monitor.
The Taliban have also stepped up street patrols in the capital and established temporary roadblocks at key intersections, where they search vehicles at random or check the identities of those inside.
The unlikely solution would ultimately involve the cooperation of 17 countries, the warp-speed work of a small cohort of U.S. Army chemists, and squabbling and infighting within the highest echelons of the U.S. government. It headed off U.S. military intervention in Syria and helped earn the Nobel Peace Prize for the intergovernmental organization under whose banner it was carried out. But before all that, the kernel of the idea — to destroy Assad’s chemical arsenal on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea — and the duty of seeing it through began with a team of anonymous young women in a dismal office, burrowed deep inside an obscure federal agency.
Unfortunately, what was a delusion for the people who actually stormed the Capitol is just a lived reality for Trump and the other GOP leaders who led the coup from the safety of their overpriced hotel rooms. They are tearing apart our democracy with confidence. Not because they possess courage, but because they believe — so far, with good reason — that their opponents lack it.
Trump and his allies understand that it doesn’t matter if the January 6 committee reveals every detail of the conspiracy to overturn American democracy. As long as none of the ringleaders go to jail for it, they will be free to try again. Next time, however, they will likely succeed.
The democratic island of Taiwan on Thursday laid out plans to defend its semiconductor industry from “economic espionage,” boosting penalties for anyone leaking its cutting-edge technologies to China or other hostile countries.
Taiwan currently makes most of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, which are needed to build smart gadgets and machinery from cell phones to cars to fighter jets.
The political instability and insecurity in some Sahelian states in West Africa has led to the capture of political power by their military in recent times. Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali have all experienced coups.
One thing these cases have in common is that the states are grappling with the threat of Islamist insurgency.
Nearly 200 nations approved a major UN climate change report detailing the accelerating impacts of global warming on Sunday, at the end of a sometimes fraught two-week meeting overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed that debates had concluded over the report’s crucial “Summary for Policymakers”, a 40-page overview distilling the thousands of pages of scientific research, which has been reviewed line-by-line and will be made public on February 28.
Species extinction, ecosystem collapse, mosquito-borne disease, deadly heat, water shortages, and reduced crop yields are already measurably worse due to global heating.
What can be done to prevent Africa from becoming the world’s biggest dumping ground for plastic?
That’s one of the big questions facing United Nations members next week at a stock-taking on Earth’s environmental woes.
From Antananarivo to Dakar via Nairobi and Conakry, African cities are scarred by huge landfills where plastic waste is measured in the thousands of tonnes.
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Having evacuated part of his team from Kyiv, Mike Chobanian, boss of cryptocurrency exchange Kuna, is watching the effects of Russia’s invasion on his flourishing industry with a weary eye.
The result is lots of people get scammed, and a lot of people lose their houses and even their lives due to fraud and foolishness.
This wasn’t a once-off, it’s now the account’s pinned tweet. This means people arriving on their profile will see this news above anything else they post. This is a clear signal of the company’s ethical stance and priorities.
The founder of noted Russian activist group Pussy Riot has teamed up with American non-fungible token (NFT) artists to use [cryptocurrency] to raise funds for Ukrainian aid groups.
The following is a guest post submitted by Catherine Pérez Vega and Karolina Zielinska-Dabkowska (IDA Technical Committee) about their recently published article “A Systematic Review for Establishing Relevant Environmental Parameters for Urban Lighting: Translating Research into Practice” authored by Catherine Pérez Vega, Karolina M. Zielinska-Dabkowska, Sibylle Schroer, Andreas Jechow, and Franz Hölker. This is an important first attempt to initiate communication between artificial light at night (ALAN) researchers and lighting professionals on the impact of light pollution.
The last known endangered freshwater Irrawaddy dolphin on a stretch the Mekong River near Cambodia’s border with Laos died this week, after it was reported snagged in a fishing net, wildlife officials and villagers in the Southeast Asian countries said.
Over 800 days ago, Gov. Phil Murphy issued Executive Order 91 authorizing the creation of a public bank implementation board. At his press conference in Newark on Nov. 12, 2019, he said, “With the creation of this implementation board, I am proud to take the first step toward ensuring that our taxpayer dollars are invested here in New Jersey.”
We’re not talking billions here. We are talking trillions.
For example, the amount of money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic totals US$9.94 trillion (or, if you prefer, €8.76 trillion). And that total represents only one program of the many used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada.
The United States and its allies on Saturday moved to block certain Russian banks’ access to the SWIFT international payment system in further punishment of Moscow as it continues its military assault against Ukraine.
The U.S. official told reporters that if one of the banks cut off from SWIFT wants to make a payment with a bank outside of Russia, it will likely need to use a phone or fax machine. But the official said most banks worldwide would likely stop all transactions with Russian banks removed from the network.
The United States and its allies will finalize the list of banks that will by cut off from SWIFT, the official said, adding that banks already under U.S. and European sanctions would be the first ones considered.
Here’s why SWIFT is important for international banking and why ban on Russia may impact other countries as well.
The ban on select Russian banks from SWIFT isn’t the first time that such a harsh measure has been implemented.
Iran lost access to SWIFT in 2012 as part of sanctions over its nuclear program, though many of the country’s banks were reconnected to the system in 2016.
When it lost access, Iran lost almost half of its oil export revenues and 30 per cent of foreign trade.
SWIFT can cause a major problem for Russia when it comes to managing international finances, and the country’s exclusion from the system could have a major impact on its financial and banking sector.
YouTube is pausing Russian affiliated channels’ ability to monetize on the video platform, the company announced on Saturday.
In a statement, YouTube announced it would be suspending several channels’ ability to collect ad revenue, including the state-funded media outlet RT. The move comes just days after Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine on Thursday.
Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, American online video sharing and social media platform YouTube blocked Russian state media outlet RT and other Russian channels from Ukraine and also suspended its ability to monetize content globally on Saturday (February 26).
Is it possible to glean useful information about international developments or even predict real world attacks from the activity that we record in the logs of Internet-facing systems?
b Looking at data I collect for other, quite pragmatic, reasons I see a clear correlation between the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this month and the password guessing activity targeting non-classified systems in my care.
I’ll be backing up that assertion with data later, but first, a bit of background.
NetBlocks metrics confirm the restriction of Twitter in Russia from the morning of Saturday 26 February 2022. Facebook servers have subsequently restricted as of Sunday. The restrictions are in effect across multiple providers rendering both social media platforms largely unusable, and come as Russian authorities and social media platforms clash over platform rules in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.
The executive board of the EBU made the decision following a recommendation by the Eurovision Song Contest’s governing body, the Reference Group. That recommendation was made based on the rules of the event and the values of the EBU.
In the propaganda war with Putin, a supposed master of the art with squadrons of [astroturfers] at his disposal, Mr Zelensky and his camera phone have emerged the winners.
The social media maskirovka strategy is one that Russia has honed since 2014, when it annexed Crimea, a peninsula that was formerly part of Ukraine. “This is Russia’s bread and butter,” says Ed Arnold at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think tank. Arnold was serving with NATO in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.
Russia can succeed with this strategy where Western governments can’t because of differing attitudes to honesty, he says. “We just can’t compete in the information war,” says Arnold. “Democracies, and the way you do these things, makes it very difficult.”
Western efforts at combating misinformation instead tend to fall to independent open-source intelligence (OSINT) organisations like Bellingcat, which trawl social media to puncture Russian propaganda.
Facebook and Twitter removed two anti-Ukrainian “covert influence operations” over the weekend, one tied to Russia and another with connections to Belarus, the companies said.
One of the operations, a propaganda campaign featuring a website pushing anti-Ukraine talking points, was an offshoot of a known Russian disinformation operation. A Facebook spokesperson said it used computer-generated faces to bolster the credibility of fake columnists across several platforms, including Instagram.
The other campaign used [compromised] accounts to push similar anti-Ukraine propaganda and was tied to a known Belarusian [cracking] group.
If everything goes well, the imprisoned Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi will be released next week after almost a decade in jail.
After years of campaigning for his release, human rights activists and his wife Ensaf Haider are pinning their hopes on a release by early March.
Badawi has spent almost ten years behind bars for publishing a blog called Free Saudi Liberals. He was sentenced to a decade in prison in 2014 for “insulting Islam” because he had discussed the separation of religion and state in Saudi politics on his blog.
The Lahore High Court recently acquitted the brother of slain Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch in the 2019 honour killing case. A look at Baloch’s audition for Pakistan Idol that racked up 8.3 million hits on YouTube.
On Wednesday, February 23, the Tehran home of Ronaghi Maleki, a freelance blogger and freedom of expression activist who posts reporting critical of the government on social media, was raided by unidentified security forces who took him to an unknown location, according to news reports and sources familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to the fear of reprisal.
The actions follow a Tuesday Twitter thread by Ronaghi Maleki, posted in both Farsi and English, which condemned the passing of the “User Protection Bill,” a controversial piece of legislation that restricts Iranians’ access to the internet and was ratified by parliament earlier that day.
Russian authorities have threatened to fine or block 10 Russian independent media outlets if they do not delete publications about the war in Ukraine, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities have interfered with access to Facebook and Twitter and have blocked access to another media website.
On February 26, 2022, Roskomnadzor, the state media and communications regulator, accused the 10 outlets of publishing “false information” about the war. The alleged false information includes information that the Russian military is shelling Ukrainian cities and causing civilian casualties and references to the armed conflict as “an attack,” “invasion,” or “declaration of war.” The Russian authorities appear to require outlets to refer to the war only as a “special operation in connection with the situation in Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic.”
“For the past decade, Russian authorities have used a web of vague laws and flimsy pretexts to intimidate and harass independent and dissenting voices,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Now they are bluntly imposing censorship combined with a false narrative that they demand everyone must parrot.”
The moves are part of a Russian pressure campaign against foreign technology companies. Using the prospect of fines, arrests and the blocking or slowing down of internet services, authorities are pushing the companies to censor unfavourable material online while keeping pro-Kremlin media unfiltered.
Apple, TikTok and Spotify have complied with the landing law, according to Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor, and Google has taken steps to do so as well. Twitch and Telegram have not. Meta, the parent of Facebook, and Twitter have complied with some parts of the law but not others.
Roskomnadzor, the regulator, ordered the media to delete the offending information or face restricted access to their websites and media resources.
Accusations of the psychological torture of Julian Assange have not been addressed, with no legal basis for leaving the WikiLeaks founder locked up in solitary confinement in a high security prison, a human rights expert has claimed.
Nils Melzer, United Nations special rapporteur on torture, said Mr Assange’s health is being “destroyed” as he remains in Belmarsh prison in London as the United States continues to try to extradite him.
Mr Assange does not have access to his lawyers and is prevented from preparing his legal case, said Mr Melzer.
In an insightful new book of the same name, Eyal Press, a journalist, reports unflinchingly on occupations in America that carry the taint of stigma. Among others, he interviews prison guards in Florida and slaughterhouse workers in Texas. The pandemic has changed people’s awareness of some essential work: meat-processing plants were designated as critical infrastructure by the Trump administration in 2020, for example. But these jobs remain largely hidden from view; many are in physically isolated locations. People do not know what these workplaces are like and do not care to.
A Tibetan shouted slogans and attempted to self-immolate in an apparent protest in front of the iconic Potala Palace in the Tibet regional capital Lhasa this week but was thwarted by Chinese police, sources in the region and in India told RFA Saturday.
Immediately after the incident Friday morning outside the Potala, police took away the Tibetan, whose identity, condition and whereabouts remain unknown, the sources said.
A Tibetan monk who served a 17-year sentence for his participation in the 1987 Lhasa Uprising has died at the age of 61, RFA has learned.
Ngawang Gyaltsen, one of the 21 monks of Lhasa’s Drepung Monastery who in 1987 took to the streets in a show of support for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, passed away Monday at 5:30 p.m.
Liberty Media, the company controlled by billionaire mogul John Malone that houses assets like audio entertainment giant SiriusXM, the Atlanta Braves baseball club and the Formula One racing circuit, reported improved fourth-quarter financials Friday. And it touted the outlook for live events giant Live Nation Entertainment.
The final episode of the iconic TV show “Friends” aired nearly two decades ago, but it still has a loyal following. Piracy numbers are relatively modest but in the Netherlands, there was a significant spike in unauthorized downloads earlier this year after the series left Netflix. This one again shows that availability remains an important driver of piracy activity.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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