Streaming from Deck

Steam Deck live w/ you fine folks! – Invidious

Steam Deck Running Portal 2 At 4K/60fps – Invidious

Open Source Software has a funding problem. – Invidious

Consoom Wordle In The Terminal With CWordle & More – Invidious

I don’t and will never understand the Wordle trend but people seem to like it so if you happen to be a heavy wordle user and want to enjoy the game Cwordle and these other implementations might be for you.

KeePassXC 2.7.0 Implements KDBX 4.1, Unlock via Windows Hello & Apple Watch | UbuntuHandbook

Using KeePassXC to store your passwords? By releasing v2.7.0 (Beta at the moment), the popular password manager introduced many exciting new features!

KDBX 4.1. The new release finally implements the KDBX 4.1 which was introduced 10 months ago via KeePass 2.48.

EasyCast 2.0 screen recording

I have introduced EasyCast yesterday:

https://bkhome.org/news/202202/recordmydesktop-cli-screen-recorder.html

I did a lot of work fixing and improving EasyCast, and modifying to work in EasyOS. T

Discover the hidden treasure

The tool “amCLI” can exactly display the information we are looking for: detailed data about the RAID controller and all associated devices, at runtime. Now we took the first hurdle.

Handover for the Next Round – SAP on SUSE Cluster and systemd Native Integration

How To Install Microsoft Fonts on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft Fonts on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu by default does not include the major Microsoft fonts commonly used in your installation. That happens because the font is owned by the Microsoft company and the font is not Open Source. This means that if you create a document and send it to your partner for editing, he/she will not be able to see it in the way it was originally a format. Conversely, you will not be able to see the document that your friend sends you in the way it has been formatted unless he/she is using the same fonts as you.

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 Microsoft Fonts 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.

How to install Atom Text Editor on Zorin OS 16 – Invidious [Ed: Better not to promote Microsoft-controlled software on GNU/Linux]

Install Erlang on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04 – kifarunix.com

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on how to install Erlang on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04. According to erlang.org, Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.

How to use SUID and SGID in Linux with examples – TREND OCEANS

Regular permission can be overridden by special permissions like SUID, SGID, and sticky bit. When you use the special permissions on a file, then only the owner of the file or group owner can manipulate the file.

In some cases where you just want only the owner or group can execute the file then SUID and SGID are the best way.

And if you want to protect your file from being deleted by any other user then go for a sticky bit permission which can be a savior in a shareable space.

How to Install Cockpit with free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate on Debian 11 – OSNote

Cockpit is free and open-source software that provides a web-based graphical interface for Linux servers and appliances (such as firewalls and network switches).

Cockpit is a web-based server administration tool, targeted at the new generation of sysadmins who need to manage many linux servers. It’s main goal is to make managing multiple servers easier than ever before.
Cockpit abstracts away the technical details of Linux using a simple interface that allows you to introspect and control your server/host from the outside—much like you would manage a virtual machine.

How to Install Craft CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 – OSNote

Craft is a flexible, user-friendly CMS, which allows you to be creative without having to worry about the technicalities. It’s also a content management system that’s immensely flexible and that offers you various solutions for getting your website up and running.

How to install Widelands on a Chromebook

Today we are looking at how to install Widelands on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

How to Use Email within Emacs

Web email interfaces, such as Gmail, are often inefficient and insecure. All of them require you to always be connected to the Internet and do not support features such as mass tagging and filtering. However, if you’re already using Emacs to edit text, you can also use it to manage your email.

Every Linux Geek Needs to Know Sed and Awk. Here’s Why…

sed and awk are every Linux power user’s favorite tools. But what are they? And how do you use them to process text files?

Two of the most under-appreciated Linux utilities are sed and awk. Although they can seem a bit arcane, if you ever have to make repetitive changes to large pieces of code or text, or if you ever have to analyze some text, sed and awk are invaluable.

So, what are they? How are they used? And how, when combined, do they make it easier to process text?

How To Install Apache Tomcat 10 on OpenSuse 15 [ Step by Step ]

In this tutorial, we will see step-by-step guidelines and the process of installing Apache Tomcat 10 on OpenSuse 15.

How to install OpenNMS Network Monitoring Platform on Ubuntu & Debian Servers

In this post, you will learn how to install OpenNMS

OpenNMS (Open Network Management System) is a free, open-source, enterprise-grade platform and cross platform java-based networking management system is designed to monitor and analyze large amount on data on remote servers and can generate data in simple form for you to easily analyze it. It gathers the information of remote hosts by using JMX (Java Management Extensions and SNMP. It runs both on Window & Linux Servers which includes web-based console for administrating networks and applications

How to Secure Apache Web Server with Let’s Encrypt on RHEL 8

In an online world that is constantly awash with security threats, securing your web server should be foremost in one’s mind. One of the ways of securing your web server is implementing the HTTPS protocol on your site using an SSL/TLS certificate. An SSL/TLS certificate not only secures your site by encrypting information exchanged between the web server and users’ browsers but also helps in Google ranking.

In this guide, you will learn how to secure Apache (http) web server with Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS on RHEL 8.

Encrypted block devices Centos RHEL 8 easy

Disk encryption protects the data on a block device to be encrypted. To access the device’s decrypted contents, a user must provide a passphrase or key as authentication. It is essential for mobile computers and removable media. In addition, it helps protect the device’s contents even if it has been physically removed from the system. The LUKS format is a default implementation of block device encryption in RHEL.

The Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format (LUKS) enables you to encrypt block devices, and it provides a set of tools that simplifies managing the encrypted devices. LUKS allows multiple user keys to decrypt a master key, which is used for the bulk encryption of the partition.

Linux Essentials – usermod – Invidious

The Linux Essentials series on LearnLinuxTV consists of mostly stand-alone episodes that are each dedicated to a specific command or feature in Linux. In this episode, we’ll go over the basics of the usermod command.

Godot Engine – Godot XR update – February 2022

At the end of last year, we had rounded off most of the core changes in Godot 4 to support XR. We had XR fully working through OpenVR/SteamVR and, except for a pesky timing issue, had OpenXR up and running.

It initially seemed the timing issue was related to issues with the original Vulkan implementation on OpenXR. OpenXR had already moved to a new approach, where OpenXR takes over managing the Vulkan instance. Switching to this new approach however required embedding OpenXR support into the core of Godot. With the Meta grant securing the funding to switch to the new approach, the whole implementation was ported to the core.

While we would later discover the cause of the timing issue was fixable in the plugin, the new approach is far more future-proof. It will make it much easier to implement various XR features including the editor features we have on the roadmap.

Aperture Desk Job from Valve is out now and it’s ridiculous | GamingOnLinux

Aperture Desk Job is the latest game from Valve, it’s free but it’s also just a tech demo to show off the Steam Deck controls and features. It’s actually a really charming and quite comical experience set in the Portal world but no it’s not Portal 3.

“Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work — your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life’s got other plans, and they all involve chairs. Designed as a free playable short for Valve’s new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld’s controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds.” — Valve.

You get to test all the controls including the microphone, touchscreen and gyro aiming while also destroying things with a toilet that has turrets attached to it. A very deadly toilet. You will also come across various other household appliances that have weapons attached, it’s completely ridiculous but a lot of fun.

Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck

Congratulations to Valve on the release of the Steam Deck, their new handheld gaming PC!

This new device comes with a new release of SteamOS, a specialized Linux distribution for gaming devices, which Valve and Collabora have been working on together for several years. SteamOS 3 is based on Arch Linux, a rolling-release distribution which includes the latest Mesa release for open-source accelerated graphics support, and supersedes the Debian-based SteamOS 2 release used on the earlier Steam Machine project.

A handheld device needs a solid update framework, so one of Collabora’s major contributions to SteamOS 3 was to help implement seamless system updates. With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it. If the upgrade was successful, you continue to use the new OS, and the previous system partition is reused for the next upgrade. If the upgraded version does not boot successfully, then the bootloader automatically falls back to the previous system partition, and you can try again later. Of course, new operating system images are downloaded with block-based deltas, so only the changed parts need to be re-downloaded.

Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

Collabora, the open source consulting firm that often works with Valve, has a new blog post out from developer Simon McVittie talking a little about their work on SteamOS and the Steam Deck.

SteamOS 2 was originally based on Debian Linux, but this was changed with the new SteamOS 3 to be based on Arch Linux. So yes, for those who still don’t know — the Steam Deck runs Linux! It’s a Linux handheld gaming PC! I covered it in an initial review, so be sure to take a look.

Collabora Details How SteamOS 3.0 Works on the Steam Deck

Earlier this week, Valve officially launched the Steam Deck gaming device, which is powered by a new version of the SteamOS operating system that ditches the Debian GNU/Linux base for the rolling-release Arch Linux distribution and adopts the awesome and modern KDE Plasma desktop environment.

No! SteamOS 3.0 is not out yet for the general public to install it on their personal computers, but if you’re curious to know more about it, Collabora tells us that their major contribution to SteamOS 3.0 was to help with the implementation of seamless system updates.

NixOS Community Survey 2022

Since the Nix community has been growing faster and larger every month, it’s gotten harder to understand who makes up the community and what everyone cares about. So we’re conducting this survey to improve our understanding of those questions. We hope to use your responses to develop Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs to match your needs and come up with new ideas for growing and serving the community. And we’ll publish major findings on Discourse and nixos.org.

All the questions are optional, and all responses are automatically anonymized. We will NOT collect your name, phone number, GitHub handle, IP address, or any other identifying information.

Sparky news 2022/02

New Releases

• OpenWrt 21.02.2 and 19.07.9 released [LWN.net]

  Versions 21.02.2 and 19.07.9 of the OpenWrt router distribution are available. Both releases include a number of security fixes. Additionally, 21.02.2 adds support for a set of new devices, adds a new rpcapd package, and includes various other enhancements.

• LFS and BLFS Version 11.1 are released

  The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 11.1, LFS Version 11.1 (systemd), BLFS Version 11.1, and BLFS Version 11.1 (systemd).

  This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS.

  The LFS release includes updates to glibc-2.35 and binutils-2.38. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 5.16.9. Changes to text have been made throughout the books.

  The BLFS version includes approximately 1000 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch Version 10.0 book. This release has over 900 updates from the previous version in addition to numerous text and formatting changes.

  Thanks for this release goes to many contributors. Notably:

  Douglas Reno
  Pierre Labastie
  Xi Ruoyao
  Thomas Trepl
  Ken Moffat
  Tim Tassonis
  DJ Lucas

  You can read the books online[0]-[3], or download[4]-[7] to read locally.

  Please direct any comments about this release to the LFS development
  team at lfs-dev@lists.linuxfromscratch.org or blfs-dev@lists.linuxfromscratch.org. Registration for the mailing lists is required to avoid junk email.

  – Bruce Dubbs
  LFS

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Introducing Easier Delivery of Hot Fixes from SUSE Technical Support | SUSE Communities

  When the SUSE Technical Support team provides assistance to customers, we often share a link to a directory listing with the RPM packages that address the issue. (RPM packages are utilities for managing the software packages of major Linux distributions.) These packages are called PTFs (Program Temporary Fix). Deploying them involves downloading these packages, distributing them to the affected systems and installing them. The procedure is documented in Best practice for applying Program Temporary Fixes (PTFs).

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• EuroLinux 9.0 beta released

  On March 1, 2022, we released version 9.0 Beta of the EuroLinux operating system. It is compatible with the latest upstream release. With this release we focused on delivering the most developer-friendly platform across the entire family of systems built upon the source code of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. A lot of heart and passion has been put into building this version to be released as soon as upstream does.

  At the beginning we will describe the technical advantages and new capabilities of the EuroLinux ecosystem. Then we will present links to the release notes documents along with the jumpstart documentation. For the purpose of this article, we will be referring to the aforementioned family of systems built upon the source code of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® as the Enterprise Linux family.

• Flatpak 1.14 Promises Networked Access to X11 and PulseAudio Services

  Phaedrus Leeds announced today the release of Flatpak 1.13.1 as the first step towards the Flatpak 1.14 stable series, which will probably be released later this spring with major new features like the ability to create a directory for XDG_STATE_HOME and set the HOST_XDG_STATE_HOME environment variable, as well as networked access to X11 and PulseAudio services if an app has network access.

• How Red Hat and Verizon are building the hybrid mobile edge together

  Last year, we announced how Verizon and Red Hat are teaming up to deliver a hybrid mobile edge computing (MEC) solution using Verizon 5G Edge and Red Hat OpenShift – a novel approach to converge both public 5G networks with AWS Wavelength and private 5G networks with AWS Outposts under a single compute mesh using Kubernetes.

• OpenShift at the core of stc’s digital transformation strategy

  In mid-2020, stc embarked on an ambitious project to pivot away from being a communications service provider (CSP) to become a comprehensive digital service provider (DSP).

  Here we take a closer look at this project, the challenges they encountered, and how they leveraged Red Hat products and services towards achieving these transformative business objectives.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Special Offer on PureBoot Bundle with Anti-Interdiction – Purism

  Freedom is essential to security. Purism’s commitment to security and user freedom means we can deliver products and services Big Tech players can’t. We also think security should be convenient and hardware and software should be secure by default. Our approach results in a completely unique combination of security solutions. Security must be anchored in trust. And that starts the moment you power on the computer.

How to talk to your boss about open source

In her presentation at POSI 2021, Deborah Bryant, OSI Board Director, recalled that she was first introduced to open source when she ran a commercial ISP earlier in her career. It was there that a 19-year-old developer excitedly told her about Linux and got her permission to work on the open source project and become a contributor. Later, she moved on to serve as the Deputy CIO for the State of Oregon where she was tasked with explaining complex and expensive technical projects to the legislature. She shares a story of the House of Representatives receiving a bill requiring the state of Oregon to consider open source products in software bids. The bill didn’t pass but she learned a lot about open source in the government sector from that experience.

After her time working for the State of Oregon, she moved onto Open Source Lab at the University of Oregon. Today she does a lot of open source advocacy and work, on several boards including DemocracyLab, the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and as leader of Red Hat’s Open Source Programs Office, and now in her final year on the board of the OSI.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • How to make sure you aren’t spreading misinformation online

    Facts can be empowering during uncertain times, and perhaps there’s no fact-finding tool more accessible than the internet. But as past years have taught us, the internet can also mislead — to dangerous lengths. We know when world events are scary, the internet gets loud and overwhelming. So here are three best practices to spot misinformation online.

  • A new year, a new MDN

    If you’ve accessed the MDN website today, you probably noticed that it looks quite different. We hope it’s a good different. Let us explain!

    MDN has undergone many changes in its sixteen-year history from its early beginning as a wiki to the recent migration of a static site backed by GitHub. During that time MDN grew organically, with over 45,000 contributors and numerous developers and designers. It’s no surprise that the user experience became somewhat inconsistent throughout the website.

    In mid-2021 we started to think about modernizing MDN’s design, to create a clean and inviting website that makes navigating our 44,000 articles as easy as possible. We wanted to create a more holistic experience for our users, with an emphasis on improved navigability and a universal look and feel across all our pages.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• 10 Things You Can Do With WordPress

  WordPress is free and open-source software used by millions of people, including some of the most recognizable brands in the world. WordPress is a content management system that allows you to create your website from the ground up or as a means of improving an existing one.

FSF

• My appointment as the FSF’s new executive director — Free Software Foundation

  This morning, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced my appointment as its new executive director with the press release below. I am excited to take on this new role and thrilled about the opportunities that the FSF has to move the fight for free software forward.

  The past three years working at the FSF as program manager have been educational and motivational. They have reinforced my belief that what we do is important, and that our goal to give the four freedoms to all computer users continues to be crucial. The work we do reminds people to recognize the power they have to demand change. This change will help free their own digital lives, and their loved ones’.

  I am grateful to John Sullivan for his leadership and support. His legacy of nineteen years will be hard to live up to, and I look forward to working with him, the FSF board, and the staff on this transition. I have a lot of work to catch up on, and I am excited to get started.

  We will continue our unwavering focus on our mission, especially working to increase understanding and adoption of copyleft, and bringing new people into the movement by communicating the necessity of the four freedoms. In the short term, we’re focused on making the upcoming LibrePlanet conference the best online edition yet for you. After that, I plan to reach out and ask for your thoughts and ideas on what else the FSF can do this year and beyond to advance the cause of user of freedom.

• LaTeX

  • The org-mode LaTeX exporter: LaTeX for non-TEXers | Linux Journal

    I got exposed to Emacs in the 1990’s when I used Unix mainframes and VT220 terminals for work. At the beginning, it was just my programmer’s editor and when I got used to it, I looked for ports to use at home. Initially a dream, it became a reality, first with a port[10] and them, when I installed my first Linux (from a floppy-disk set). Much later, I started to be exposed to LaTeX. It wasn’t until I was working on my PhD that I fully understood its potential when my Office suite collapsed on a last minute template change for a conference. It took me less time to install the full texlive distribution, export my paper to LaTeX, clean up the result and change the template than to fix the original document after changing the template. What I have always liked in LaTeXis that what you write is what you mean. The use of tags is a minor inconvenience for me.

    The next step in what you write is what you mean path after LaTeXwas org-mode. Initially a hint from my PhD advisor as a nice way to produce slides, it took me some time to realize its full potential both for presentations and documents. org-mode is included in the stock Emacs code.

    You can always be in the forefront and get the most recent public version of org-mode from the repositories, but a fairly recent version of Emacs guarantees a nice, up-to-date feature set in org-mode. In my case I use an Emacs 28.0.9x, a pre-release of the next stable Emacs which I compile myself once a week, both on Ubuntu 20.04 and macOS. If you want to produce a nice PDF file from org-mode, you rely on its LaTeXexporter and use a TEX distribution like texlive in Linux or MacTeX in macOS for typesetting and output generation.

    To prove my case, I keep this article in an org file that I use to explore org mode features. It is a living demo of how nicely you can write things using org-mode and then generate PDFs using LaTeX. My main sources of inspiration are the org-mode documentation[8] and an oldish Cookbook[4] and all those moments where I’m working on a document and feel that something is missing.

Programming/Development

• Exploring an Open Source Toolkit for Debugging Kubernetes – KoolKits | HackerNoon

  KoolKits (Kubernetes toolkits) are highly-opinionated, language-specific, batteries-included debug container images for Kubernetes. In practice, they’re what you would’ve installed on your production pods if you were stuck during a tough debug session in an unfamiliar shell.

  To briefly give some background, note that these container images are intended for use with the new kubectl debug feature, which spins up Ephemeral containers for interactive troubleshooting. A KoolKit will be pulled by kubectl debug, spun up as a container in your pod, and have the ability to access the same process namespace as your original container.

  Since production containers are usually rather bare, using a KoolKit enables you to troubleshoot with power tools instead of relying on what was left behind due to the generosity (or carelessness) of whoever originally built the production image.

• Qt Design Studio 3.1 Released

  We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.1.

• Digital advertising – Use cases and best practices

  This blog post is the first in a series that aims to show Qt users how they can generate additional revenue from their software thanks to digital advertising.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Auto-incrementing version letters

    In other words, I tail out the last record in the table, cut out the code in that last record, and add one to it with BASH arithmetic.

    But what if I wanted to have version letters at the end of mixed letter-number codes, like 101a, 101b, 101c etc? And also wanted to increment version numbers after a letter cycle, like 101c, 101d, 102a, 102b…?

    As is usually the case with command-line operations, there’s more than one way to do it. This post looks at a couple of solutions to this particular problem, namely incrementing (single) version letters and version numbers on a fixed letter cycle.

Human Power, Past And Future | Hackaday

We will assume you’ve seen The Matrix — it was from 1999, after all. The surprise, at the end, was that humans were being used as human batteries to power a civilization of intelligent machines. But aside from just putting out some heat, the idea does have some precedent. After all, humans powered machines like mills, sewing machines, and pumps for centuries before there were good alternatives.

Researchers Build Neural Networks With Actual Neurons | Hackaday

Neural networks have become a hot topic over the last decade, put to work on jobs from recognizing image content to generating text and even playing video games. However, these artificial neural networks are essentially just piles of maths inside a computer, and while they are capable of great things, the technology hasn’t yet shown the capability to produce genuine intelligence.

Cortical Labs, based down in Melbourne, Australia, has a different approach. Rather than rely solely on silicon, their work involves growing real biological neurons on electrode arrays, allowing them to be interfaced with digital systems. Their latest work has shown promise that these real biological neural networks can be made to learn, according to a pre-print paper that is yet to go through peer review.

In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world

Big LED Matrix Becomes Tiny LED Matrix Thanks To Fiber Optics | Hackaday

Everyone loves LED matrices, and even if you can’t find what you like commercially, it’s pretty easy to make just what you want. Need it big? No problem; just order a big PCB and some WS2812s. Need something tiny? There are ridiculously small LEDs that will test your SMD skills, as well as your vision.

But what if you want a small matrix that’s actually a big matrix in disguise? For that, you’ll want to follow [elliotmade]’s lead and incorporate fiber optics into your LED matrix. The build starts with a 16×16 matrix of WS2812B addressable LEDs, with fairly tight spacing but still 160 mm on a side. The flexible matrix was sandwiched between a metal backing plate and a plastic bezel with holes directly over each LED. Each hole accepts one end of a generous length of flexible 1.5-mm acrylic light pipe material; the other end plugs into a block of aluminum with a 35 by 7 matrix of similar holes. The small block is supported above the baseplate by standoffs, but it looks like the graceful bundle of fibers is holding up the smaller display.

Sprockets And Chains Drive This Unique Mechanical Digital Clock | Hackaday

When it comes to mechanical timepieces, we’re used to seeing mechanisms stuffed with tiny gears and wheel, often of marvelous complexity and precision. What we’re perhaps less used to seeing is a clock that uses chains and sprockets, and that looks more like what you’d find on a bicycle on your typical bicycle.

DIY Super-Bright Outdoor TV With Watercooling | Hackaday

Watching TV or playing a console game is usually not an outdoor activity, helped by the fact that you can’t see anything on your average TV in direct sunlight. However, with some basic fabrication skills, [Matt] from [DIY Perks] demonstrates how to upgrade an LCD TV to be viewable in the brightest conditions by upgrading its backlight, and adding a simple water-cooling system in the process. Full build video after the break.

An LCD panel doesn’t produce any light but acts as a filter for the backlight behind it, which is just a widely spaced array of white LEDs. The core of the build is upgrading the backlight, so [Matt] picked up a large 4K TV with a partially faulty backlight for a very affordable price. The new backlight consists of a set of high-brightness LED panels, screwed to a sheet of aluminum. The LEDs generate a lot of heat, so [Matt] cools the back of the aluminum sheet with a budget-friendly water cooling system built from a car radiator, small water pump, and some clear plastic tubing. Everything is housed in an industrial-looking enclosure made from aluminum sheet, aluminum extrusions, and an acrylic back panel. To protect the LCD panel, it’s glued to a sheet of tempered glass from an old coffee table.

Proprietary

• Delinea Extends Cloud Suite to Enable Centralized Management of Linux User Groups

  Delinea, a leading provider of privileged access management (PAM) solutions for seamless security, today announced new capabilities of Cloud Suite that enhance seamless access for local groups on Linux systems. Customers can now add users from cloud directories (ex. Active Directory, LDAP, Okta, Azure AD, etc.) to existing local Linux groups, solving long-standing efficiency and management challenges by simplifying and improving central policy management. With a centralized administrative experience, Delinea customers now experience greater efficiency in controlling access to mission-critical workloads.

• Dear Apple shareholders: ensure “People Come First” globally

  Ahead of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on March 4, 2022, we are urging Apple shareholders to demand the company provide meaningful transparency on government censorship demands — all around the world. Here’s why every shareholder should vote yes on Shareholder Proposal 6.

• Web devs rally to challenge Apple App Store browser rules • The Register

  On Monday, a group of software engineers plan to launch a group called “Open Web Advocacy” to help online apps compete with native apps and to encourage or compel Apple to relax its iOS browser restrictions.

  The group (OWA), organized by UK-based developers Stuart Langridge, Bruce Lawson, and others, aims to promote a more open web by explaining subtle technical details to lawmakers and to help them understand anti-competitive aspects of web technology. Over the past few months, group members have been communicating with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) to convince the agency that Apple’s iOS browser policy harms competition.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Privatisation/Privateering

    • Linux Foundation

      • Linux Foundation’s Zephyr Project Flies Higher with Implementations of its RTOS and the Addition of New Members

        It is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to effectively process data through their system while restricted by outdated traditional operating systems; instead, real-time operating systems (RTOS) are driving past prior constraints to provide enhanced functionality. As innovators rapidly develop a myriad of sophisticated technologies that require constant streams of data to operate effectively, the importance of overhauled real-time operating systems has become central to the success of data-critical solutions and devices.

• Security

  • Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and ruby:2.5), Red Hat (rh-ruby26-ruby), Slackware (libxml2 and libxslt), SUSE (htmldoc and SUSE Manager Server 4.2), and Ubuntu (mariadb-10.3, mariadb-10.5, policykit-1, qemu, virglrenderer, and webkit2gtk).

  • Open Source Security Foundation Attracts New Commitments, Advances Key Initiatives in Weeks Since White House Security Summit [Ed: Does OpenSSF work towards real security?]

    The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) a cross-industry organization hosted at the Linux Foundation that brings together the world’s most important open source security initiatives, today announced 20 new organizations have joined OpenSSF to help identify and fix security vulnerabilities in open source software and develop improved tooling, training, research, best practices, and vulnerability disclosure practices. It is also announcing the latest milestones achieved across a variety of its technical initiatives, all of which underscore the cross-industry momentum that is taking place as a result of increasing awareness in the wake of recent security incidents and since the recent White House Open Source Security Summit and recent Congressional hearings.

    “The time is now for this community to make real progress on software security. Since open source is the foundation on which all software is built, the work we do at OpenSSF with contributions from companies and individuals from around the world is fundamental to that progress,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director at OpenSSF. “We’ve never had more support or focus on building, sustaining, and securing the software that underpins all of our lives, and we’re happy to be the neutral forum where this can happen.”

    New Premier Member commitments come from 1Password, Citi, Coinbase, Huawei Technologies, JFrog, and Wipro. New General Member commitments come from Accuknox, Alibaba Cloud, Block, Inc, Blockchain Technology Partners, Catena Cyber, Chainguard, Cloudsmith, DeployHub, MongoDB, NCC Group, ReversingLabs, Spotify, Teleport, and Wingtecher Technology. New Associate Members include MITRE and OpenUK. For a complete review of the OpenSSF member roster, please visit: https://openssf.org/about/members/

    These commitments come on the heels of the recent White House Open Source Security Summit, where the Linux Foundation and OpenSSF represented hundreds of its project communities and discussed how best to support software security and open source security posture going forward. This summit was a major milestone in the Linux Foundation’s engagement with the public sector and underscored its position supporting not only the projects it hosts but all of the world’s most critical open source infrastructure.

Latest IPCC Climate Report Calls for Urgent Action

“The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F),” according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC in the announcement. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet.”

Hard-Won Workers’ Rights in New NAFTA

By Sally King In the first week of February, a historic union election happened inside one of Mexico’s largest General Motors (GM) plants. Workers in the city of Silao in central Mexico voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with the National Independent…

Dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia love smart cities projects — here’s why – Access Now

Imagine being filmed 24/7. Knowing someone is watching you the whole time, would your behaviors and decisions remain the same? When governments or tech companies promote “smart” cities projects, they talk about how having more data about us could make things better. What they don’t talk about is the way having surveillance technologies embedded in our physical surroundings would change the way we behave and impact our fundamental rights and freedoms.

That matters, because these smart cities are no longer hypothetical. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they are the pet projects of dictators who seized power through coups. These dictators are leveraging the vision of future cities that integrate the latest technology — using sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), biometric surveillance, and artificial intelligence — to extend their power.

As we explore below, smart cities like Saudi Arabia’s city of NEOM and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital could soon turn from utopian to dystopian projects. Here’s why “smart” cities are really surveillance cities — a dangerous tool for dictators.

Digital Transnational Repression Explained – The Citizen Lab

Copyrights

• Bruegel the Elder’s *Big Fish Eat Little Fish* (1556) – The Public Domain Review

  Bruegel’s drawing, based on a proverb and subject to numerous adaptations, relates the natural world to injustice: the feeling that human predation is innately born and instinctive.

Mabox Linux: Quick tiling and Desktop Grid – Invidious

KDE neon 20220210 overview | The latest and greatest of KDE community – Invidious

In this video, I am going to show an overview of KDE neon 20220210 and some of the applications pre-installed.

MPlayer 1.5 Video Player Comes with Built-in Skin Support

MPlayer 1.5 comes with small fixes to make sure it still compiles against modern versions of FFmpeg.

MPlayer (The Movie Player) is a very popular movie player available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. In the past, MPlayer was the best video player for a long time.

It has built-in support for the most common video and audio formats, as well as having a powerful filter system for video and audio manipulation. In addition, MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles, and visual feedback for keyboard controls.

2022-02-27, Sunday :: MPlayer 1.5 released

MPlayer 1.5 “Hope” is out.

We are happy to share this release with the world.

MPlayer 1.5 is compatible with the latest FFmpeg release (5.0) and current FFmpeg development version (FFmpeg master). The tarball already includes an FFmpeg snapshot, so you don’t need to fetch it separately.

If you want to follow the latest improvements in MPlayer and FFmpeg, you are strongly encouraged to use the development version (latest Subversion trunk) and benefit from the latest features and bug fixes.
You can find a short summary of the user visible changes in the included Changelog file.

The tarballs are compressed with xz, for compatibility they are available with gzip compression too. Please get the xz variant if you can, to save bandwidth.

How To Install Scala on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Scala on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Scala is a relatively modern high-level language that supports object-oriented programming and functional programming capabilities. Scala’s static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries.

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 Scala programming language 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.

Mip22- A Phishing Tool for Linux and Android – Latest Hacking News

Mip22 is a modern and advanced cyber security program for use with Linux and Android. Simply install and select manual or automatic attack and you can select what types of phishing methods to use.

Boost your home network with DNS caching on the edge | Opensource.com

If you’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “the cloud” over the past several years, then you may also have heard rumblings about something called “the edge.”

The term edge computing reflects the recognition that the cloud has boundaries. To reach those boundaries, your data has to connect with one of the physical datacenters powering the cloud. Getting data from a user’s computer to a cluster of servers might be quick in some settings, but it depends heavily on geographic location and network infrastructure. The cloud itself can be as fast and powerful as possible, but it can’t do much to offset the time required for the roundtrip your data has to make.

4 Vim features to use to improve productivity | Opensource.com

There’s always Vim. Vim is one of the most popular text editors in use today. This is in large part because it’s available everywhere. When you SSH into another system, you may not find Emacs, Nano, or VSCodium installed, but you can rest assured that Vim is there for you.

In this article, I cover some intermediate things that you can do with Vim to speed up your workflow and generally make your day easier. This article assumes that you have used Vim before, already know the editor’s basics, and are looking to take your Vim skills up a notch. Vim is full of useful tricks, and no one ever truly masters it, but the five tips in this article can boost your skills and, hopefully, make you fall just a bit more in love with one of the most popular and loved text editors.

How to Install OTRS Ticketing System on Alma Linux 8

OTRS stands for “Open Source Trouble Ticket System” is a free and open-source service management suite. It is one of the most popular ticketing tools used by help desks, call centers, and IT service management teams. It is written in the PERL programming language and uses MariaDB as a database backend. OTRS is made from three components including, an admin dashboard, agent portal, and customer portal. It has intuitive mechanisms that allow you to easily migrate from popular solutions to OTRS.
In this post, we will show you how to install OTRS Ticketing Software on Alma Linux 8.

Linux Security Auditing with Lynis

Linux undoubtedly has an unmatched security structure. In fact, it is the epitome of performance and security. The general consensus is that Linux is not vulnerable to malware or viruses, but this is not really true. The “Bash” bug virus, Troj/SrvInjRk-A, Linux/Rst-B, etc. are malware and viruses that target a Linux system. Now we understand how important it is to think about Linux security and use tools that allow us to scan our system for such threats.

Lynis is one such tool developed to take Linux security to the next level. Lynis is a free and open-source security checker released under the GPL license and available for Linux and Unix-based operating systems such as MacOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

Avoid errors in your Ansible playbooks with ansible-lint | Enable Sysadmin

Lynis is a free and open-source security checker released under the GPL license and available for Linux and Unix-based operating systems such as MacOS…

Dying Light gets a cross-play update | GamingOnLinux

Techland might have their shiny new Dying Light 2 now available but they’re apparently not even finished with the first Dying Light with a big update out now.

Not another content upgrade though, this time they upgraded their networking. This allows for cross-play between all PC platforms including Steam, Epic, GOG across Windows, Mac OS, and Linux! You really do have to hand it to Techland on how long they’ve supported this one for now, as it released back in 2015.

Squeezing A Wordle Clone Onto The Game Boy | Hackaday

The popular word game Wordle is both an addictive brain teaser for some and a perpetual social media annoyance for others. Its runaway success has spawned a host of clones, among them one created for the Nintendo Game Boy with a reduced vocabulary. [Alexander Pruss] took on the challenge of improving it by fitting the entire 12972-strong 5-letter-word vocabulary as well as the 2315-word answer list into a 32K cartridge along with the code. The challenge in compression on a platform of such meager resources is to devise an algorithm which does not require more computing power or memory than the device has at its disposal. His solution is both elegant and easy to understand.

Valheim updated with full gamepad and Steam Deck support | GamingOnLinux

Time to wander through the Black Forest from your bed, as Valheim now has a fresh update available that was previously in a public Beta to add in gamepad support and work nicely with the Steam Deck. It’s the same Beta we wrote about previously but it’s now available for everyone.

Web store Fanatical offers up Steam Deck categories to buy games | GamingOnLinux

While the simplest way to get games for the Steam Deck will be direct from Steam, there’s a few other stores out there that do give some amazing deals and Fanatical is one of the best. Note: we’re not currently affiliated in any way.

Originally called Bundle Stars, Fanatical (like Humble Store) offers up Steam keys and they also do bundles too. Seems they’ve been keeping a close eye on the industry, and they’ve tweaked their store now to offer up proper Steam Deck categories.

Steam Deck – using Luxtorpeda for Morrowind, Warzone 2100 and X-COM | GamingOnLinux

The Steam Deck is clearly great with a lot of modern titles and plenty of AAA games, but what about the classics? For that Luxtorpeda can provide a great experience on Deck.

It’s a tool I’ve covered a number of times for Linux desktop users, however it works beautifully on the Steam Deck too. Luxtorpeda is a tool to run native Linux game engines for various classics like Morrowind, Warzone 2100, X-COM and quite a lot more. Why would you want to use it? Well, a lot of these game engines are vast improvements over the original games and get around a lot of their limits along with improving them for modern platforms.

Godot Engine – Maintenance release: Godot 3.4.3

In parallel to our work on the upcoming feature releases Godot 3.5 (with a first beta) and 4.0 (now at alpha 3!), we backport important fixes to the stable 3.4 branch for use in production.

A number of such fixes have been queued in the two months since the 3.4.2 release, and we after a couple of Release Candidates (thanks to all testers!), we’re now ready to release Godot 3.4.3-stable as a maintenance update to the current stable branch.

New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-03-01 Edition – Boiling Steam

Between 2022-02-22 and 2022-03-01 there were 24 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 252 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.5 % of total released titles.

Genode – Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 22.02

The 22.02 release is dominated by three topics, the tightening and restructuring of the code base, device-driver infrastructure, and the transition of Sculpt OS towards a versatile toolkit for building specialized operating-system appliances.

Regarding the house-keeping of the code base, the release introduces a clean split between hardware-specific parts and the generic framework foundation. In particular, the various supported SoCs are now covered by distinct Git repositories shepherded by different maintainers, which improves the clarity of the code base and eases the addition of SoC support by 3rd parties. The framework foundation underwent a major spring cleanup including the tightening of several APIs and a raised default warning level. The changes are covered by Section Base framework and OS-level infrastructure.

The reorganization of the code base went hand-in-hand with intensive device driver work for several platforms (Section Device drivers). In particular, we started to apply our new method of porting Linux driver code to PC drivers such as our new USB host controller driver. The Intel GPU driver received welcome performance optimizations and became usable for guest operating systems running in VirtualBox 6. On the Pinephone, Genode has started interacting with the modem.

From a functional perspective, the highlight of the release is the extension of Sculpt OS towards a highly customizable toolkit for building special-purpose operating systems defined at integration time (Section Framework for special-purpose Sculpt-based operating systems). This new level of flexibility cleared the path to running a bare-bones version of Sculpt OS on the Pinephone, or directly on a Linux kernel.

ExTiX DDS Delivers Decent Deepin Alternative

Unlike other Linux desktops, Deepin is also limited to the handful of plugins described above. There are no widgets or desklet apps to install on the panel bar or the desktop screen.

You also get a slightly bare-bones inventory of programs. That leaves Linux newcomers at a disadvantage in not knowing what to download from the bundled app catalog.

The DDE environment is a pleasant alternative to other computing options. DDE’s easy-to-use interface and impressive performance puts this computing platform in a class of its own.

Developer Exton calls his ExTiX OS “The Ultimate Linux system.” Especially with the Deepin desktop edition, he is close to living up to that assessment. However, ExTiX could use a bit more polish and fine-tuning of the desktop features to make it truly an ultimate computing choice.

10 Best Portable Linux OS/Distros To Install & Run From USB

Undoubtedly, Linux is one of the most used and trusted systems for security and stability. But in some cases, if you’re using an old configuration of a PC or a very tiny notebook, you might face the urgency to have a Linux OS or distros that is lightweight and portable. There are many portable Linux OS out there on the web developed by expert software engineers that you can use.

When we’re talking about the plug-and-play type Linux distro, there is no reason to be afraid of losing all the files and applications every time you power off the system. The portable Linux OS or distro is designed so that the OS is totally capable of storing all the applications, configurations, and files on the portable drive.

New Releases

• Hyperbola – News: Milky Way v0.4 release

  After a long and continuous period of tests and development, we are happy to announce a new release of Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre. With version 0.4, we have reached yet another major milestone: With it Hyperbola will be able to start the groundworks, per say of HyperbolaBSD. This release will serve as a transitional platform, for the continued effort to create a copyleft BSD based alternative kernel and system. For more information on this check.

  Many of the commonly used frameworks that we identified as definitely not being wanted were dropped, and alternatives where packaged and included. Lumina is one example of that, when it comes to desktop enviroments, given its nondependence on D-Bus. Bluetooth is another, support has also been dropped, mostly because of the huge complexity of this codebase and derived and well-known vulnerabilities. In addition, Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre v0.4 stays further oriented towards INIT-Freedom. Therefore we have also added now experimental support for runit with the option to add also more alternatives (potentially S6). Please note at this point: This is for sure not finished and is for now marked as unstable while HyperRC stays our major focus. Again for further alignment with current roadmap. Continued direction in packaging, while previous versions used a snapshot-model the new release is now build from scratch with all packages included following the File System Hierarchy Standard.

• Nitrux 2.0.1 Switches to Mesa 22.1 by Default for Linux Gaming, Adds KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS

  The monthly Nitrux release cycle continues with Nitrux 2.0.1, which looks to be a small point release to last month’s massive Nitrux 2.0 update. It mostly contains updated core components and applications, starting with the kernel, which has been updated to Linux 5.16.11 in a XanMod flavor.

  Nitrux continues to use the XanMod flavored kernel by default to provide users with a more stable, responsive, and smooth desktop experience, especially on newer hardware. XanMod is a general-purpose Linux kernel with custom settings and new features.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• A minimalist syslog-ng package is heading to EPEL 9

  Last week, the ivykis library, the most important core dependency of syslog-ng landed in EPEL 9 successfully. There are still plenty of dependencies missing, but this way, I could submit a slightly cut down version of syslog-ng to EPEL 9. Hopefully the rest of the dependencies will arrive in EPEL 9 as well. I plan to update the syslog-ng package as soon as the dependencies arrive. Luckily, these are only needed to enable some less frequently used syslog-ng destination drivers, no core functionality is affected.

Debian Family

• Don’t Like Ubuntu? Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 5 Beta is Here! – It’s FOSS News

  Do you like Linux Mint, but don’t want Ubuntu as its base?

  Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is for you. If you did not know, LMDE is primarily meant to act as a replacement if Ubuntu ever disappears.

  LMDE is an excellent offering to ensure that you get to use Linux Mint, irrespective of its base.

  A new version upgrade for LMDE is around the corner. So, if you want to switch away from Ubuntu, you will have the chance soon!

  LMDE 4 was announced in 2020 with plenty of new features and improvements.

  Now, the beta version for LMDE 5 is here, meaning, it is almost ready to release soon. Here, let me mention the key highlights for the release.

• Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE 5 Beta Arrives to Revive Your Old hardware

  The Linux Mint team announced the beta availability of Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE 5 “Elsie”. Here are what’s new and the download details.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Pacific Textiles drives digital transformation with new infrastructure for legacy and cloud-native applications | Ubuntu

  Canonical announces that Pacific Textiles chose Canonical Charmed OpenStack for its infrastructure upgrade. The new private cloud environment allows keeping the legacy workloads running continuously and launching new cloud-native services simultaneously.

  The professional services team from Canonical helped Pacific Textiles during this migration, from making architectural choices to launching the live cloud. Ultimately Charmed OpenStack provides an excellent infrastructure for legacy workload and cloud-native experience. Pacific Textiles will have a vendor and technology they can rely on for continuity and flexibility for their workloads with ten years of support.

  Pacific Textiles knew they needed to give their developers easy access to technologies like cloud-native apps, Kubernetes, AI/ML, and others alike. Canonical therefore provided them with an enterprise-grade containerization technology solution: Charmed Kubernetes. This could not come at the expense of their VM-based legacy workloads. With Charmed OpenStack adoption, Pacific Textiles can now leverage the Ubuntu platform’s technical advantage to cloud-native apps and services with Kubernetes on their OpenStack private cloud. The combination reduced the cost and complexity of their infrastructure and increased their effort on new application development and management.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• LG Velvet will get Android 12 in the coming weeks – Pocketnow

• Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and S22 Plus review: the default Android phones to buy – The Verge

• Galaxy S22, S22 Plus and S22 Ultra: 7 Hidden Android Features, Settings to Know – CNET

• How to Make Google Calendar Event Notifications Ring Out Longer on Android

FSF

• Free Software Foundation announces new executive director, Zoë Kooyman — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom, today announced the appointment of Zoë Kooyman as executive director of the FSF.

  Kooyman was appointed by the FSF board following a careful selection process that included a review by a FSF staff committee and evaluation criteria such as management, fundraising, business and finance, legal, and technical skills. She succeeds John Sullivan, who served as executive director for twelve years. Sullivan will remain with the FSF for several months to assist the transition.

  “I appreciate the board and staff support, and I am excited to work with them, FSF associate members, and the broader free software community to advance FSF’s commitment to user autonomy, freedom, and empowerment,” she said. “As technology continues to evolve and our lives increasingly depend on software, software freedom is more relevant than ever to computer users, and to society as a whole.”

  Kooyman, 38, joined the FSF as program manager in early 2019. She has a diverse background as a highly experienced international project manager and event producer with demonstrated skills in successfully organizing and executing technology and social justice initiatives.

• Zoë Kooyman is the new FSF executive director

  The Free Software Foundation has announced that Zoë Kooyman will be the organization’s new executive director.

Programming/Development

• Android Multi-ABI builds for user projects are back

  In Qt 6.3, we have restored support for multi-ABI builds for user applications that use CMake. The build procedure for Qt 6 has undergone significant changes, especially with regards to Qt for Android. Let’s have a look at how to work with the multi-ABI builds in Qt 6.

  First of all, it’s recommended to use the recent CMake version to support latest features. As you probably noticed, Qt for Android uses DEFER calls, so multi-ABI builds rely on this feature as well. If you are stuck on CMake versions older than 3.19, check out the note at the end of this post.

Proprietary

• Master Key for Hive Ransomware Retrieved Using a Flaw in its Encryption Algorithm [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO]

  It was first observed in June 2021, when it struck a company called Altus Group. Hive leverages a variety of initial compromise methods, including vulnerable RDP servers, compromised VPN credentials, as well as phishing emails with malicious attachments.

• Decrypting Hive Ransomware Data

• Wladimir Palant: Skype extension: All functionality broken? Still exploitable!

  One of the most popular Chrome extensions is Skype, a browser extension designed as a helper for the Skype application. Back when I reported the issues discussed here it was listed in Chrome Web Store with more than 10 million users, at the time of writing more than 9 million users still remain. What these users apparently didn’t realize: the extension was unmaintained, with the latest release being more than four years old. All of its functionality was broken, it being reduced to a bookmark for Skype for Web.

  Yet despite being essentially useless, the Skype extension remained a security and privacy risk. One particularly problematic issue allowed every website to trivially learn your identity if you were logged into your Microsoft account, affecting not merely Skype users but also users of Office 365 for example.

  Last week Microsoft, after a lengthy period of communication silence, finally published an update to resolve the issues. In fact, the new release shares no functionality with the old extension and is essentially a completely new product. Hopefully this one will no longer be abandoned.

Overpopulation

• Discussion on water being a right to life set for Namibia Scientific Society | Namibia Economist

  The Namibia Scientific Society will be hosting a backyard talk, on the book, ‘Re-invigorating Ubuntu Through Water: A Human Right to Water under the Namibian Constitution,’ by Dr Ndjodi Ndeunyema on 2 March at 19:00.

  Ndeunyema said the subject matter of water is of self-evident critical importance in Namibia, Africa and globally.

  Ndeunyema will share an overview of the contents of his book which is based on his doctoral work with the society and argue for the existence of a court-enforceable human right to water that is implied from the right to life in Article 6 of the Namibian Constitution while invoking the African value of ubuntu as the normative basis.

Reddit r/Russia Quarantined For Huge Falsehoods

As the Russian government faces widespread condemnation from throughout the world and within its own country, all major websites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, are expressing their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine by placing sanctions on the country. Reddit has now blocked the /r/Russia subreddit, citing a substantial volume of false information contained within the community.

Subreddits that have been quarantined do not simply disappear. Communities are quarantined in order to prevent their material from being discovered by those who do not wish to see it. Communities that have been quarantined are no longer visible in search results or recommendations, and Reddit has placed restrictions on other features such as the ability to create a custom header or background for the community.