There's a new Ubuntu logo and I think it looks awful. AMD FSR 2.0 is announced! Plus, a major kernel exploits affects all Linux devices--including ANDROID!
Why GNOME 42 is the release we’ve all been waiting for.
Plus, we attempt to install Linux on an M1 MacBook live on the show.
Introduced in January, the previous release of Linux 5.16 enabled improved Wine and Linux game performance with a new futex_waitv() system call, faster memory management with the memory folios infrastructure, file system health reporting (for EXT-4 only at the time), and plenty of other changes including over 60 new Arm-based boards and devices.
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the Linux Kernel version 5.17, with one of the most prominent features being the new AMD P-State driver for modern CPUs.
From the release announcement: "So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I'm happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it's all good."
Linux kernel leader Linus Torvalds has officially taken the wraps off the Linux kernel version 5.17, which brings changes to software interfaces involving hardware from Intel, AMD, and Arm-based manufacturers.
In a world where Android and cloud infrastructure defines technology, new Linux kernel versions are important events.
Asahi Linux – the most prominent effort to create a Linux distribution for Apple's M1 silicon – has loosed what project lead Hector Martin has described as "a very early alpha release."
"It is intended for developers and power users," Martin wrote, adding that all users are welcome but may find the experience of running the release "a bit rough."
That phrase translates to a distribution that can't currently handle DisplayPort, HDMI on MacBooks, Thunderbolt, Bluetooth, GPU acceleration, inbuilt cameras or the Touch Bar. Chromium and Emacs are known to be broken, as is anything that uses the jemalloc memory allocation tool, or the libunwind project that aims "to define a portable and efficient C programming interface to determine the call-chain of a program."
Why it matters: The Asahi Linux Project has published the first public alpha of Asahi Linux, a distro made for the Apple M1 SoC and its derivatives. It's been eagerly anticipated by Linux users wanting to take advantage of Apple's newest silicon.
Support for the M1 was added to the Linux kernel in June 2021, seven months after Apple announced it. By then, the Asahi Linux Project had already formed and was documenting the M1's processes with the community's help. Asahi is now friendly and stable enough for average Linux users to install. Its developers say the alpha is only "intended for developers and power users," but "welcome everyone to give it a try—just expect things to be a bit rough."
Asahi supports the Apple M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max, but not the recently-announced M1 Ultra (not yet, at least). It's also limited to macOS, so no M1-powered iPads. Asahi has a shortlist of working features for now, but it includes the basics. Almost all the hardware is functional, including built-in displays, keyboards, trackpads, external displays, power buttons, and batteries. Only about half the ports work, but USB type-A and USB over thunderbolt mostly work, and so does ethernet, which is enough. Wi-Fi is also supported.
In 2020, Apple unveiled the M1 at the WWDC event. This reveal brought significant performance improvements and better power efficiency, although it did have one major drawback.
This was the software support, as it meant that it was no longer possible to boot a “normal” X86 distro on new Apple Mac devices with an M1 ARM chip. Hence, the Asahi Linux project (based on Arch) was born, with the aim to develop all the drivers and tools necessary to make a working Linux installation on Apple’s ARM-based Macs.
Now, after more than a year of work, the Asahi Linux project has finally released its first Alpha version, which introduces Linux support for Apple M1 devices.
When I am checking out Linux systems (or even troubleshooting computers running other operating systems), I frequently use the top command to check out the system's RAM and CPU utilization. It provides me with information to assess the computer's overall health. I learned about the top command early in my Linux journey and have relied on it to give me a quick overview of what is happening on servers or other Linux systems, including Raspberry Pi. According to its man page, the top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as a list of processes or threads currently being managed by the Linux kernel.
Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
Gobby is a fantastic collaborative editor with the support of multiple documents in one session. The most amazing thing it includes the chat system. All the collaborators can chat and share their ideas on one document. With such a unique feature, Gobby is popular among system admins and software engineers.
I personally like Gobby, and I use it on Ubuntu. In this tut, I will express my way of installing Gobby Collaborative Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Edition. Be careful before applying these instructions to a different Linux distribution.
LaTeX is a software system for document preparation for writers, researchers, and scientists. In contrast, it provides a high-level descriptive markup language to write the document in plain text and render it in the required formatted text.
It is based on the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) concept, which means the writer focuses on the contents and lets the machine do the rendering part.
Many consider LaTeX as a language, others may consider it a form of coding, but it is a system for high-quality technical typesetting.
Although it may not be for everyone, as there are easy document processors like MS. Word, LibreOffice Document processor, and online document collaborative document editors, scientists are still using LaTeX to write their documents.
Working for a famous tech company, I get asked a lot "Why don't you use technology X?" X may be an application, programming language, operating system, hypervisor, processor, or tool.
C language is one of the earliest programming languages. It is simple and easy to learn. Formerly C programming was performed on Turbo C, a discontinued integrated development environment. But nowadays it can be easily executed on different operating systems.
In this guide, you will learn how to write your first C program using the Linux operating system which requires just the GNU C compiler and a text editor and not a full blown integrated development environment to get started. The following steps will show to install a GNU C compiler on Linux, how to write the source code, compile and execute the C program.
The fastest way to create, launch, and manage a content-based website is through CMS (Content Management System) software. CMS presents a unique approach to website design and development such that any user without an in-depth technical background can quickly adapt to its usage.
It is due to the resourcefulness of numerous plugins and themes available for installation. Joomla is a world-renowned content management system (CMS) powered by PHP programming language. It is a free and open-source CMS that relies on an sql-based database engine for data storage.
This article will give us a walk-through on the installation and configuration of Joomla CMS on the Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 operating system.
Fork CMS is an open-source, content management system (CMS) platform. It has been in development for over 10 years and was designed to be completely modular – you can choose what modules work best with your website’s needs without having any coding knowledge necessary at all!
The fork comes from the word “fork” which means different things depending on where it’s used – this could refer both positively or negatively so we’re going neutral here; when talking about codebases such as a project branch/modification made by someone else who also wants their changes included within another group of people working together under one organization umbrella then they might call each other ‘forks’. And while there may not seem like much difference between Fork CMS and WordPress or Joomla! the platforms are completely separate in terms of code, functionality, design
The software is distributed under the GNU/GPL v3 open-source license which means it is open-sourced and freely available on GitHub. The Fork CMS team believes in keeping their software open-source and freely available to everyone, so please feel free to fork and modify Fork CMS to fit your needs!
Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It allows the user to examine data from a live network, or from a capture file on disk. Wireshark can be used as a simple network troubleshooting tool, as well as for security analysis and software development.
Installing Wireshark on Debian 11 is easy – in this guide, we’ll show you how to do it. We’ll also explain some of the basics of using Wireshark so that you can get started right away. Follow our step-by-step guide to installing Wireshark on Debian 11. The instructions have been tested on Debian 10 too.
GitLab is a leading platform for hosting Git repositories, CI pipelines, and DevOps workflows. It’s available as a SaaS offering on GitLab.com or as a self-managed distribution for private use on your own hardware.
GitLab’s a complex system formed from a web of distinct components and dependencies. Installing GitLab packages directly onto your operating system will add weighty new services to your machine, including PostgreSQL, Redis, Gitaly, and the main Rails-based GitLab web application.
Secure shell (SSH) is one of the most ubiquitous Linux tools. It provides secure connectivity among workstations, servers, managed switches, routers, and any number of other devices. Linux and macOS include SSH, and it's easy to add to Windows.
Linus Torvalds today announced the Linux 5.17 and it comes with new features and improvements in hardware support.
As per Linus Torvalds for Kernel 5.17
So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Linux kernel 5.17 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.1
Released by none other than Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 5.17 is here with lots of goodies and security fixes to make your Linux desktop and server experience safer, faster, and more reliable. It brings new features and better hardware support, so I bet there are many users out there who want to install it right now.
But why upgrade your Linux kernel if everything works fine? Well, the short answer is that you don’t have to upgrade the kernel in your system if all your hardware works as expected. But, if that’s not the case or you need one or more of the new features in Linux kernel 5.17, it is a welcome addition.
If we have to display the limited amount of data having only numeric and alphabets, we can use a 7 seven segment display. There are a variety of applications where 7 segments are used. In this guide a digital dice is created using a 7 segment and Arduino Uno. Schematics, code and hardware demonstration is also provided in this guide.
To detect the presence of any moving body we use the PIR sensor and this sensor can be named as the motion detection sensor as well. This article is a detailed guide on what a PIR motion sensor is and to demonstrate how we can interface the motion detection sensor with Arduino Uno we have designed a circuit and implemented it on the hardware in this guide.
The Arduino platform facilitates its users with providing hardware and software assistance in making either beginner or advance level projects. Similarly with the help of Arduino boards the interfacing of the multiple devices with the microcontroller has been made easy. These devices also include the different types of sensors and one which we are going to interface with Arduino Uno in this discourse. The sensor we are talking about is the motion detection sensor which detects the movement of the objects in its vicinity. This sensor is mostly used in the applications where movement of any object is to be monitored.
The interfacing of different devices with microcontrollers has been made easy with the help of Arduino boards. The Arduino boards are the advanced form of the microcontroller that can be used for various tasks. By controlling the devices, we can perform certain tasks at certain times so in this way we can create automation projects. So, to demonstrate how we can control the devices we have used the Arduino Uno and NPN transistor to control a 12-volt device.
The Raspberry Pi is a Debian-based Linux distribution in which we can manage the operating system in a similar way as in other Debian-based distributions. The Raspberry Pi OS is a multi-user operating system that means different users can operate a single system so that they can have the privacy of their data stored in the system as no other user can access it (until he has the authentication password of that user account).
In this write-up, we will learn the method by which we can switch from one user to the other user in the Raspberry Pi and also learn the method of creating the user as well as removing the user.
A boot in a computer system is a process that tells the computer which instructions and programs should be executed when the computer is turned on. The Raspberry Pi board is also a compact size computer in which a boot is responsible for the behavior of the Raspberry Pi at the time of startup. Now, from where the boot gets the instruction that should be performed at boot time, all instructions are stored in the configuration file of the boot.
The software and hardware details of the Raspberry Pi boards can be checked from the terminal of the Raspberry Pi OS. On a daily basis, new releases of the software are being launched in order to confirm which version of the Raspberry Pi operating system we are using, we can use some commands. In this article, some important commands are explained to check the versions of software and hardware of the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a small size computer board that implies it has all the hardware specifications which a normal PC and laptop have. The Raspberry Pi device contains the RAM, a CPU, and other peripheral devices of the computer like storage media and USB which can be connected to the Raspberry Pi board. In this write-up, we will discover different commands to find out the details of the hardware specifications of a Raspberry Pi board.
Many applications and games are designed in a programming language known as Java and the Java development software is supported by different platforms like Windows, macOS, and all distributions of Linux.
In Raspberry Pi, the package Java is already installed, but if it is not installed, then it can be installed using simple commands. There are two types of packages in the Raspberry Pi operating system repository which are JDK (Java Development Kit) and JRE (Java Runtime Environment). The JDK includes the JRE and the JRE includes the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) which includes the classes and binaries which are required to run the Java programs.
In this write-up, we will learn the installation and usage of Java on the Raspberry Pi operating system.
There are many text editors like nano, vim, mu but the most used and recommended text editor for the Raspberry Pi and other Debian-based distributions is the VIM text editor.
We install many packages on Raspberry Pi but most of them we do not use after performing a particular task. Hence these packages occupy the space of the device. These packages occupy the memory of the system, which makes the memory-less for the installation of the future packages and also slows down the performance of the system.
We can uninstall such packages which are of no use from the terminal as well as from the GUI method. In this write-up, both these methods of uninstalling software from the Raspberry Pi have been explained.
The DOSBox is an emulator which is open source so anyone can access it by downloading it, moreover, it is supported by different operating systems like macOS and different distributions of Linux. The DOSBox is a command-line-based emulator which is used to operate different DOS applications but mostly it is used for DOS games.
The DOSBox can be installed on the Raspberry Pi operating system and its installation procedure has been discussed in this article with the usage of a DOS application.
Category: raspberry piThe keyboard shortcut keys provide ease in performing different tasks like opening the file, saving the file, and deleting the file. In the Raspberry Pi, there are different shortcut keys that are used to perform different tasks whereas the Raspberry Pi operating system allows us to make our own keyboard shortcuts for different purposes which are known as customized shortcuts.
In this write-up, we will not only learn about the default keyboard shortcuts of the Raspberry Pi but also learn the method of adding our own customized shortcuts.
Raspberry Pi does not come with built-in storage; a microSD card is used to hold the operating system and packages. The SD card can quickly be filled up by the operating system updates and many libraries downloaded with the packages we install. Therefore, unused packages and files should be removed from time to time. This write-up is very useful as different commands to free up the space using the terminal on Raspberry Pi have been explained.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was the first home video gaming console launched in the year 1985 and was a die-hard choice of all the gamers in those days. Following the high demand, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was launched after five years of NES release with much improved graphics that time. The NES games include popular Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda and many more whereas on SNES you can play games like Legend of Star Wars, Super Metroid.
For the Raspberry Pi users, playing the classic NES and SNES games on their device will be a worthy experience and for those who are interested in playing these games then they should consider installing an emulator preferably RetroPie gaming emulator that lets you play these games on your device quite easily. You won’t find the NES and SNES games on RetroPie with a one click, you will need to perform some process in order to run these games on RetroPie.
In this article, we will show you how you can complete the game installation preferably NES and SNES games in order to play them on RetroPie emulator.
I've gone through plenty of games that have a musical theme to them and a fair few finger-bashing rhythm games but none of them are quite like A Musical Story. Developed by the French indie team at Glee-Cheese Studio, this is not a game about hitting a high-score instead it tells a story through the music and some wonderful animated clips.
Developer Ariel Jurkowski emailed in about their upcoming game Please Fix The Road, a puzzle game all about fixing up the roads and it really does look quite wonderful. The developer also confirmed full Linux support at release.
Oh good, another fantastic looking pixel-art life sim to suck away my time. Kynseed from PixelCount Studios has a Beta available on Steam for better Steam Deck support. It's been in Early Access since November 2018, with the Steam Deck announcement in the patch notes from Friday, March 18.
Want to play Phasmophobia on a Linux desktop or Steam Deck? Well, it still doesn't yet work fully as the voice recognition isn't there but support for it is coming thanks to the Wine team.
On Steam you would use Proton (which is built from Wine) since it's a Windows game, but the problem is that Phasmophobia uses Windows-specific voice recognition which you can't replicate right now. Recently though, Wine development version 7.4 was release and the changelog noted some additions for speech recognition.
Maybe it is some random coincidence of course. I had published the video in French at the end of Septmeber and these Linux trolls started writing defamation in French in mid-November.
It would be foolish to say that Matthew Miller or Red Hat ordered these trolls to engage like this. On the other hand, this campaign of harassment did not arise spontaneously. Red Hat Linux is one of the oldest and most respected Linux distributions. Miller published a character attack on Dr Richard Stallman earlier in 2021. Being in a position of leadership, Red Hat's attack on Dr Stallman have set a bad example for every troll in the Linux world to follow. Launching these attacks in French after my visit to war graves in France, they've demonstrated that there is no lower bound on their vulgarity.
It’s “old” in the sense that various forms of scripting, business process automation, and other technologies have been around for decades. It’s “new” – or newer, at least – in terms of containerization, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, security automation, robotic process automation (RPA), and the vast landscape of cloud-native tooling.
No matter what, it’s tough to find an IT shop taking a “just say no” approach to automation in 2022. On the contrary, there’s a trove of numbers that all seem to say: IT automation is virtually everywhere. That’s evident in software pipelines, hybrid cloud infrastructure, security operations centers, you name it.
Companies have been embarking on digital transformation efforts to reduce costs, boost efficiency, and better serve their customers. But it is easier said than done. Successful digital transformation requires a well-defined strategy and experienced teams.
Generally, when someone is a beginner to a project they lack an understanding of the project audience so they aren’t able to empathise with “what could be useful for a reader”. They also tend to lack the depth and breath of technical knowledge to know what to write for the documentation since by definition, they are a newcommer to this project.
A great way to connect with a beginner is to listen to their frustrations and what challenges the encountered with your project. First, connect how that frustration could be either a failing of the user interface and it’s design (even an API is a user interface). Second, only once you have eliminated design limitations, then consider it to be a documentation problem. As the project contributor, you are in a better position to write documentation than a beginner.
Back in the day, it used to irk me as to how GNU/Linux[1] distributions could not be even considered to be in the proximity of video games enthusiasts – less because of the performance of the video games themselves and more because of how inconvenient it could be for them to set it all up. Admittedly, it had been quite a while since an avid video games fan like me did that, so it was almost a no-brainer for me to try it out and see if things have changed. What I ended up finding surprised me – I like to think that it would be just as pleasing to both enthusiasts who have been playing video games on GNU/Linux distributions and to newcomers who have been scoping this, alike.
On a testing bench using an AMD RDNA2-based[2] GPU, the video game was configured to the highest possible graphical preset[3] to really stress the hardware into performing as much as its limiting factor. If the RDNA2 architecture reminds you of something, allow me to share that it is what forms the foundation of the GPU that no other than the widely acclaimed Steam Deck[4] makes use of. For that matter, if you factor in some performance scaling with respect to the handheld nature of the device and the optimized Proton compatibility layer, this article can be representative of what the Steam Deck is capable of when you use Fedora Workstation[5] as a platform of your choice for playing your favourite video games.
Infinispan, an in-memory data store, is popular among Java programmers as a fast and scalable key-value store that can be deployed in a variety of settings. This article describes how to use Ansible to automate the installation and setup of an Infinispan instance. Along the way, you'll learn about many aspects of Ansible's capabilities.
The most straightforward use for Infinispan is as an in-memory cache, embedded into an application. Infinispan can also be a separate, standalone cache offering transient memory to separate applications that access the cache using different protocols. A third option is to treat Infinispan as a kind of NoSQL database. And these are only the most common use cases; additional options are available.
Infinispan can be resilient, even across data centers or availability zones, thanks to its efficient cross-site replication and split-brain mitigation options.
With so many use cases at one's disposal, it is nice to have a dedicated Ansible collection to help automate Infinispan deployment and configuration. This article provides a walkthrough of Ansible's usage and shows you how to integrate Infinispan easily into an Ansible Playbook to manage the software like any other piece of the application's infrastructure.
This article shows how to control Podman from .NET. Podman is a container engine, like Docker, that is available on Linux, Windows (using the Windows Subsystem for Linux), and macOS (using a Linux virtual machine). The Podman executable is command-line compatible with Docker, and Podman also supports the Docker HTTP API. Now .NET programmers can use Podman and Docker through the Docker.DotNet library.
Our story this week comes from "Ivor" courtesy of his experience with punched cards and the IBM System/360 Model 40.
This particular bit of kit was aimed at businesses that had outgrown more simplistic hardware. There were rows of lights, magnetic tape, and dryer-sized magnetic disk units. CRTs had yet to make an appearance at Ivor's facility, but punch cards were still in use for programming purposes.
What does it all have to do with upstream first?, you may ask. (We are yet in the early stages of developing a proper mathematical apparatus for this theory. Feel free to add your suggestions and corrections in the comments section below.)
Look at how code is delivered to an enterprise-level Linux distribution, for example, CentOS Stream. There is an open source project and community which develops a specific version of a piece of software, for example, Firefox. We call such a project upstream. Once the upstream project releases a Firefox version, it gets packaged to Fedora. And then someday, the new CentOS Stream version is bootstrapped using the content of the Fedora package, which contains a specific version of Firefox from the upstream project.
When the upstream project releases a critical update of Firefox, the update is packaged and released in Fedora. But it is also packaged and released via CentOS Stream.
Linux Mint’s offering with Debian is always an exciting release to look forward to.
In case you did not know, LMDE is meant to act as a replacement if Ubuntu ever disappears. So, whether you like or hate Ubuntu as a base, you have an impressive alternative without compromising the Linux Mint experience on your desktop.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 has been released, giving you a stable Debian base with all the niceties that comes from the Mint team. The point of this distribution for the Mint team, is to provide a sort-of safety net if Ubuntu was to vanish on them, since the main Linux Mint distribution is based upon Ubuntu, which itself is based on Debian directly.
Linux Mint Debian Edition is a fallback option for the entire project. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu by default and the last release of the Ubuntu version dates back to January 2022. The team released Linux Mint 20.3 to the public in January 2022. All three flavors of Linux Mint -- Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce -- were released with Linux kernel 5.4 and an Ubuntu 20.04 package base.
The new release introduced improvements across the board, including a new document manager Thingy, search functionality in the Sticky Notes application, an updated look and more.
The main goal of Linux Mint Debian Edition is to guarantee that Linux Mint continues to be available if something happens to Ubuntu. While that seems unlikely, the team wants to be prepared for all eventualities. Linux Mint Debian Edition is that fallback. The team aims for feature-parity with the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint versions.
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) exists in case Ubuntu ever stops being developed. You see, the "regular" Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so if Canonical ever closed its doors, things would be quite disastrous for Linux Mint. Will Ubuntu actually die one day? While Ubuntu's demise is unlikely to happen anytime soon, the reality is, nothing lasts forever. So I suppose it makes sense for the Linux Mint developers to have a contingency plan.
With all of that said, you don't have to wait for Ubuntu to die to use Linux Mint Debian Edition. LMDE is a perfectly fine operating system, and it can absolutely be used as your daily distribution. If you fancy giving Linux Mint Debian Edition a try, today is your lucky day. The newest version of the distro, LMDE 5, is finally available for download.
Today I gave a talk at LibrePlanet 2022[1] about the internet and the web, giving a brief account of the web's past, its current state, and ideas for better futures.
In this talk I go over the old web (of 1990s and early 2000s) and how websites looked back then, fast-forwarding to the present day and the sad current state of the web, and some possibilities on where we could go from here if we would like to have a better net/web in the future for user freedom, privacy, and control.
I enjoyed reading this article named "22 years of Emacs" recently. It's kind of fascinating, because I realised I don't exactly know for how long I've been using Emacs. It's lost in the mists of history. If I would have to venture a guess, it was back in the "early days", which in that history is mapped around 1996-1997, when I installed my very own "PC" with FreeBSD 2.2.x and painstakenly managed to make XFree86 run on it.
We have release the Qt 6.2.4 today. Compared to Qt 6.2.3, the new Qt 6.2.4 contains more than 250 bug fixes. For more information about the most important changes and bug fixes, please check the Qt 6.2.4 release note.
API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface. It works as a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other securely.
When you use an application connected to the Internet, it sends data to a server. The server retrieves that data, interprets it, performs the necessary actions, and sends it back to your device. The application then interprets that data. Finally, it is presented to you, the user, in a universally understood and easy-to-use way. All of this happens via an API. It shares data, resources, even software across different applications without compromising privacy and maintaining a layer of abstraction.
When I gave the machine something a tad tedious to do – converting a five-minute 4K video to 1080P using Handbrake – it got the job done in 4:20. The same job in an Ubuntu VM under VMware Workstation required 7:54 to finish the job while I kept working in the Windows 10 host.
I would’ve thought that this would’ve been the worst thing but I underestimated how constantly stressful not having notifications or a trustworthy app repo would be. Still, it’s not great. I’ve ran into so many crashing bugs and annoyances that I can’t fix. For example, I’m writing the first draft of this essay in the Notes app using the pen and the “swipe to type” mini on screen keyboard. There’s a neat feature system wide in iOS where you can use the pen to make edit marks to easily insert or remove space between words or scribble out unwanted text. But the one place it doesn’t work is where I’d want it the most: in Notes!
Speaking of the swipe-to-type keyboard, it has a very frustrating bug. It uses a bigram-based autocorrect where it sometimes changes a word based on the following word, and when it gets this wrong and you delete it, it doesn’t let you rewrite the original, correct word. The idea seems to be that if you deleted a word, you must mean something else, and will keep giving you new suggestions for similar gestures, but it doesn’t understand that the wits I deleted wasn’t the original take (which was correct) but instead the one autocorrect mistakenly changed it to, post hoc.
Queen Elizabeth I is said to have expressed her attitude to her subjects' private beliefs by noting: "I do not seek to open windows to men's souls." Microsoft Windows 11 has few such qualms. A new feature,accidentally enabled in an Insider build, not only opened a channel between the company and the quintessential tool, File Explorer, it then stuffed it with adverts.
It is an open secret that Microsoft is increasingly keen on using Windows as an ad delivery platform, to the exasperation of users and the despair of all who have to manage the corporate computing environment.
Windows 10 is replete with lock screen ads, suggested apps in the Start menu, nagging taskbar pop-ups, notification nudges, and even a brief excursion into third party ads in its Mail client.
During a review of a client’s incident response capabilities the discussion turned to ransomware and strategies for handling it. The client’s board-level view was that if they were unable to restore their systems they would pay-up. They’d gone so far as considering setting up a cryptocurrency wallet to cover the payment.
The idea of paying ransoms really surprises me, and as surprising is the support that has in the cyber security community.
Is this what it has come to, that an acceptable way to deal with a ransomware attack is to pay?
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, chromium, libgit2, libpano13, paramiko, usbredir, and wordpress), Fedora (expat, kernel, openexr, thunderbird, and wordpress), openSUSE (chromium, frr, and weechat), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm and java-1.8.0-ibm), SUSE (frr), and Ubuntu (imagemagick).
Indian IT services giant HCL Technologies has told India's Labour Commissioner that its controversial decision to recover bonuses paid to staff who later resigned was not illegal.
News of the demand for repayments emerged in January 2022, when the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), an organisation that represents Indian IT workers, complained that some former HCL staff had been required to repay bonuses they had been pre-paid before resigning from the company.
HCL framed the prepayment of bonuses as a goodwill gesture "to help people with more cash flows" during an investors' call in January 2021.
