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Links 05/05/2022: Messenger-GTK 0.7.0, FreeBSD Has Sixth RC, and Fedora GNU/Linux 36 Final is GO



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Make Use Of ☛ 4 Innovative Technologies That Helped Spread Linux

        Linux is a great operating system, but it didn't get where it was just by itself. Some technologies made it easier for users to discover and share the new system with others.

        Here we discuss some of these technologies and their impact on the growth of Linux.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ An interview with Aaron Honeycutt from System76

        It's time for a fresh interview. Today I have Aaron Honeycutt from System76, makers of Linux distribution Pop!_OS and various hardware, who talked a little about their work.

    • Server

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Video ☛ elementary OS 7, SteamOS ISO, and Unity is still alive! - Linux and open source news - Invidious
      • Video ☛ Lubuntu 22.04 LTS overview | Welcome to the Next Universe. - Invidious

        In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 22.04 LTS and some of the applications pre-installed.

      • BSDNow 453: TwinCat/BSD Hypervisor

        Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS, Writing a device driver for Unix V6, EC2: What Colin Percival’s been up to, Beckhoff releases TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor, Writing a NetBSD kernel module, and more.

      • Video ☛ A First Look At Ubuntu Unity 22.04 (Yes, Unity Lives!) - Invidious

        Even though I've never been a "desktop environment" user, I'm often asked which desktop environment is my favorite? Well, if I had to choose one that I thought fit my workflow the best, it would be the old Unity Desktop. And despite Ubuntu dropping Unity a few years ago, Unity still sees some development. And there is even an Ubuntu Unity flavor.

      • Video ☛ New Official Arch Linux Installer Is Almost Perfect! - Invidious

        The official arch installer has been reworked multiple times and it's finally at the point where it's almost perfect, it has some issues still but it's almost at the point where even I have nothing to complain about.

      • Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #259

        Release of the GNU Coreutils 9.1 set of core system utilities: https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=10158

        LXQt 1.1 User Environment Released: https://lxqt-project.org/release/2022/04/15/lxqt-1-1-0/\

        Rsync 3.2.4 Released: https://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync-announce/2022/000110.html

        Celestial shuns snaps: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/u4jqt5/ubuntu_with_flatpaks_without_the_snaps_celestial/

        The SDL developers have canceled the default Wayland switch in the 2.0.22 release: https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/sdl-revert-video-prefer-wayland-over-x11/35376

        New versions of Box86 and Box64 emulators that allow you to run x86 games on ARM systems: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

        Release of the QEMU 7.0 emulator: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2022-04/msg02245.html

        PPA proposed for Ubuntu to improve Wayland support in Qt: https://launchpad.net/~ci-train-ppa-service/+archive/ubuntu/4829

        Movement to include proprietary firmware in the Debian distribution: https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19

        Git 2.36 source control released: https://lore.kernel.org/all/xmqqh76qz791.fsf@gitster.g/

        oVirt 4.5.0 Virtualization Infrastructure Management System Release: https://blogs.ovirt.org/2022/04/ovirt-4-5-0-is-now-generally-available/

        New versions of OpenWrt 21.02.3 and 19.07.10: https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2022-April/038491.html

        Ubuntu 22.04 LTS distribution release: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/jammy-jellyfish-release-notes/24668

        Valve has released Proton 7.0-2, for running Windows games on Linux: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases/tag/proton-7.0-2

        Release of OpenBSD 7.1: https://www.mail-archive.com/announce@openbsd.org/msg00429.html

        Summary ofresults of the election of the leader of the Debian project: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/04/msg00007.html

        New release of the Silero speech synthesis system: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models#text-to-speech

        Release of KDE Gear 22.04: https://kde.org/info/releases-22.04.0.php

      • Video ☛ How to install Shotcut video editor on Debian 11 - Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Shotcut video editor on Debian 11.

    • Applications

      • kde-inotify-survey

        I’ve finally gotten annoyed enough with inotify failing randomly, because of resource exhaustion, that I’ve built a tiny app to deal with it.

        Introducing kde-inotify-survey.

      • Mitubo 0.9: multiple concurrent video downloads

        It will never stop surprising me how easy it is to implement big new features in a QML application! The assumption here is that the C++ part of the application should be well-written: objects should not be overloaded with unrelated functionalities just because it seems faster to code them that way, but one should rather design classes so that each exposes one functionality, and then QML and javascript act as the glue which binds all the parts together.

        In a way, QML stands to C++ classes like the POSIX shell stands to command-line tools: a simple language which allows concatenating small units of functionality together to build a powerful program.

      • Adriaan de Groot ☛ VM (VM ( … | [bobulate]

        You can’t cross the same river twice, but can you boot the same laptop twice (at the same time)? Yes indeed, with the magic of VM’s and weird passthrough setups. I have a Slimbook with openSUSE and FreeBSD installed on it. Most of the time I use openSUSE – there’s suspend and resume and wifi things that need tweaking under FreeBSD. I’ve written about FreeBSD on Slimbook before. But with some magic, I can boot the laptop into openSUSE and them boot it again simultaneously into FreeBSD. Probably I can also mess things up royally, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

        [...]

        VirtualBox raw disk access can be used to do amazingly dangerous things to your drive, but also to do cool tricks.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to Install osTicket on Debian 11

        osTicket is a free and open-source support ticket system written in PHP.€  It comes with a simple and intuitive web interface used to manage, organize, track and archive all support ticket requests in your company.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Foxit PDF Reader on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Foxit PDF Reader on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Foxit PDF Reader is a free multi-platform PDF reader for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Besides free versions, Foxit it also provides premium versions with many features, but for common demand, we can use the free version.

        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 Foxit PDF Reader on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Install Sublime Text 4 in Ubuntu 22.04 [in different ways] | UbuntuHandbook

        For those want to install the Sublime Text code editor, here’s the step by step how to guide for Ubuntu 22.04 in 3 different ways.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Configure Static IP Address on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        The IP address of most devices today is generated by the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server. A DHCP server assigns a dynamic IP address to your device when it's connected to a network. Thus, you have the chance to change this IP address from time to time.

        On the other hand, a static IP refers to a fixed, immutable address, different from dynamic IPs. You can set static IP settings in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS in three different ways. Here's how to get started.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Grafana on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is web-based analytics and interactive visualization program that runs on a variety of platforms. Grafana running data analytics, pulling up metrics that make sense of the massive amount of data & to monitor our apps with the help of cool customizable dashboards. It connects with every possible data source, commonly referred to as databases such as Graphite, Prometheus, Influx DB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many more.

        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 Grafana monitoring tool on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • How to Set Up SSH Passwordless Login (Step-by-Step Tutorial) | strongDM

        SSH is one of the best ways to handle tasks such as automated backups, file synchronization, and remote server access and management. SSH passwordless login is an SSH authentication method that employs a pair of public and private keys for asymmetric encryption. The public key resides on the server, and only a client that presents the private key can connect.

      • The Definitive Guide to FIDO2 Web Authentication
      • How to View SSH Logs?
      • TechRepublic ☛ How to use KDE Plasma's Konsole SSH plugin | TechRepublic

        That’s why you’ll find a good amount of GUI tools on the market to help you manage those connections. One such tool is hidden away in plain sight, within the confines of KDE’s Konsole application.

        For those who don’t know, Konsole is KDE’s default terminal window application. It’s one of the more flexible and powerful terminal applications on the Linux market and it has a rather pleasant, SSH-centric surprise for you … an SSH Manager plugin.

      • How to save the terminal output to file in Linux | FOSS Linux

        Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allow us to accomplish daily tasks by interacting with windows and icons, and they come in handy for many tasks. However, several users find it better to input text commands into the PC directly rather than dealing with windows and icons for more efficiency and flexibility. This is done via terminals.

        Terminals, alias consoles, or command lines are used to enter and transcribe data from a PC system. They also allow us to carry out and automate tasks on a PC without implementing a GUI.

        The terminal is the heart of any Linux system. Every program that runs in Linux runs under a terminal command line. This ranges from massive programs like web browsers to simple ones like text editors. Due to this, using the terminal confidently is a vital step in understanding how the Linux operating system works.

        Also, if you are a DevOP, mainly a backend one, you inevitably need to do something on a Linux terminal rather than the Graphical User interface. One palpable complication is that the terminal is not visual-friendly, especially when checking out some vast standard output. As such, you must be keen.

      • Red Hat ☛ How to install an open source tool for creating machine learning pipelines | Red Hat Developer

        Create an open source machine learning environment quickly with Pachyderm, JupyterHub, and Ceph Nano on Open Data Hub.

      • How to install OnlyOffice suite on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | FOSS Linux

        Most operating systems come with a pre-installed office suite like Office 365 on Microsoft Windows and LibreOffice on most Linux distros. LibreOffice offers features and functionality close to MS Office and comes up with new features and improvements with every update.

        Having said that, other alternatives are a lot more secure and easy to use and may be specifically suited for your work. This article will discuss OnlyOffice, its features, and how to install it on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Experiment with containers and pods on your own computer

        In the TV show Battlestar Galactica, the titular mega-ship didn't actually do a whole lot. It served as a stalwart haven for its crew, a central point of contact for strategy and orchestration, and a safe place for resource management. However, the Caprican Vipers, one-person self-contained space vessels, went out to deal with evil Cylons and other space-borne dangers. They never just send one or two Vipers out, either. They sent lots of them. Many redundant ships with essentially the same capabilities and purpose, but thanks to their great agility and number, they always managed to handle whatever problem threatened the Battlestar each week.

        If you think you're sensing a developing analogy, you're right. The modern "cloud" is big and hulking, an amalgamation of lots of infrastructure spread over a great distance. It has great power, but you'd be wasting much of its capability if you treated it like a regular computer. When you want to handle lots of data from millions of input sources, it's actually more efficient to bundle up your solution (whether that takes the form of an application, website, database, server, or something else) and send out tiny images of that solution to deal with clusters of data. These, of course, would be containers, and they're the workforce of the cloud. They're the little solution factories you send out to handle service requests, and because you can spawn as many as you need based on the requests coming in at any given time, they're theoretically inexhaustible.

      • How to share files with Samba

        This is my samba setup in which I have a server and the server root is shared with other clients on my local network. I have used this setup in Debian Bullseye and Debian Bookworm/testing.

    • Games

    • Distributions

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • SUSE's Corporate Blog ☛ SUSE Manager 4.3 Public Beta is out! | SUSE Communities

          It’s been a year since the last SUSE Manager Public Beta, so it is time for a new beta program! Those of you that are part of the Uyuni community, which is our open source upstream project, might have alreay seen our continuous code improvement landing on the Uyuni Github project but now is the time to see and test them with SUSE Manager.

        • Call for Volunteers to 2022 openSUSE Asia Summit

          The openSUSE.Asia Summit is an annual openSUSE Asian conference, attended by contributors and enthusiasts from all over Asia. The event focuses primarily on the openSUSE distribution and community, its applications for personal and enterprise use, and open source culture. Since 2014, openSUSE.Asia Summit events had been held offline and thus, a great opportunity for the community to meet.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Red Hat ☛ Build a customized developer portal to manage APIs | Red Hat Developer

          It has become popular to manage developer tasks and to share APIs both internally and externally through a graphical interface on a web portal. To let you manage and share your APIs through a convenient portal of your design, Red Hat 3scale API Management provides a highly customizable developer portal. You can customize the look and feel of the portal to match your use cases and branding. Administrators can customize the developer portal using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other web tools. A successful portal makes it easier for developers to consume an API, helping them turn concepts into working applications quickly.

        • Fedora Linux 36 Final is GO

          The Fedora Linux 36 Final RC5 compose[1] is GO and will be shipped live on Tuesday, 10 May 2022. For more information please check the Go/No-Go meeting minutes[2] or log[3].

        • Red Hat Official ☛ Security recommendations for SAP HANA on RHEL [Ed: Red Hat presents proprietary software as something that can be secure]

          SAP HANA is SAP’s in-memory database (DB) that has been around since 2010. It is used as the backbone of their main applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Business Warehouse (BW), or as a standalone application since it incorporates many features that are useful for Big Data and analytics.

          There are other databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MaxDB and Sybase) on which SAP applications can run, but starting in 2027 customers wishing to maintain regular support will have to migrate to the new ERP suite, SAP S/4HANA. The suite only runs on SAP HANA, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is one of two supported platforms for the database.

          Enforcing. The policies are active and enforced.

          Permissive. The system uses the policies but it does not deny access to the targets, it just writes the approval and denial messages in the system logs (this mode is normally used to test policies before rolling them out to production).

          Disabled.

        • Enterprisers Project ☛ 5 AI adoption mistakes to avoid

          Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can be invaluable assets to business success. By implementing AI, businesses can automate hours’ worth of manual labor sifting through data to enable smarter and faster business decisions. However, automation and AI do not remove the need for human responsibility.

          It’s important to follow best practices to ensure AI helps versus hurts your business. Here are five mistakes to avoid in leveraging AI to meet company goals.

        • Enterprisers Project ☛ MIT Sloan CIO Symposium preview: Digital ecosystems and the future of business

          If organizations have learned anything in the shift to hybrid work, it’s that people want choice. They want to decide for themselves when and where they work, how they collaborate with others, and to build a schedule that matches their energy and productivity cycles throughout the week.

          As business conferences begin to welcome back in-person attendees again, they’ll have to take this new reality into account. Offering a blend of remote, in-person, and hybrid attendance options opens up a huge opportunity, said Allan Tate, executive chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: it enables conferences to optimize each of those experiences and deliver more value to attendees.

        • Fedora Project ☛ Taking farther strides now - An Outreachy Blog about Revamping Meetbot Logs – Fedora Community Blog

          I cannot help but feel a little nostalgic while writing this last blog post about my Outreachy internship. This post marks the end of my three-month internship where I worked with the community members to revamp the web application housing IRC meeting logs and summaries. I cannot believe how the time flew by – from applying, to getting selected, to contributing, and finally ending the journey. So today, I would be summarising my overall experience of this beautiful journey and will introduce the people who have helped me throughout the way.

      • Debian Family

        • Make Use Of ☛ Privacy-Focused Distro Tails 5.0 Released for Linux Paranoids

          The security-focused Tails live Linux distribution has announced the availability of version 5.0 of the system. It brings with it some major changes to apps, including a new PGP app, Kleopatra.

        • Nala

          Nala is a front-end for libapt-pkg. Specifically we interface using the python-apt api. Especially for newer users it can be hard to understand what apt is trying to do when installing or upgrading. We aim to solve this by not showing some redundant messages, formatting the packages better, and using color to show specifically what will happen with a package during install, removal, or an upgrade.

        • Bits from Debian: Google Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22

          We are very pleased to announce that Google has committed to support DebConf22 as a Platinum sponsor. This is the third year in a row that Google is sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!

          Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Linux Mint ☛ Linux Mint Monthly News – April 2022 – The Linux Mint Blog

          The mutter rebase for Cinnamon 5.4 is now well on its way and is getting more and more stable.

          Work started on the Linux Mint 21 base. The repositories are ready and so are the docker images. A first pre-ALPHA ISO was built to identify potential issues and we’re now patching software and looking for and fixing regressions. We usually work on new features first, and then work on the base and bugs near the end of the development cycle when we put it all together on the new base. But this time, we did the opposite. I wanted us to be confronted to some of the new libraries and upstream changes so we could have a clear view of any challenges ahead and plan accordingly when it comes to prioritizing or postponing work on some of the new features.

          The new upgrade tool took some time to develop but it was worth the wait. Our major upgrades weren’t flexible enough and they were too complicated. This is a fantastic addition for us, I’m really happy we worked on this. The tool is passing a final test today and should be officially announced in LMDE tomorrow.

        • Ubuntu ☛ The Operator Day Industry Panel Discussion at Kubecon EU 2022 | Ubuntu

          Find out who the panelists are for the Industry Panel discussion during Operator Day on May 16th. During this virtual session industry thought leaders will discuss the latest trends and developments about Kubernetes and Operators.

          Our panelists are not only thought leaders in various areas of cloud-native technologies, but also work at leading industry organisations. Their practical experience of the challenges to smooth operations in an enterprise setting while moving towards Kubernetes will fuel a lively discussion.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX Software ☛ Badger 2040 is a programmable E-Ink display powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040 - CNX Software

        Pimoroni Badger 2040 is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 board equipped with a 2.9-inch black and white E-Ink display with 296 x 128 resolution and programmable with C/C++, MicroPython, or CircuitPython.

        The board is not just an ePaper badge, as it also comes with five buttons, and expansion capability through a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector plus some pads with UART, I2C, interrupt, and power signals.

      • Open Hardware/Modding

        • Gunnar Wolf ☛ Gunnar Wolf● Using a RPi as a display adapter

          Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this blog I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from home — a Lenovo Yoga C630 13Q50. Yes, yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more.

        • Purism ☛ Why I Support Purism, A Tech Company that Respects Digital Rights

          I started working with personal computers over 40 years ago, back when an IBM desktop computer with 64KB of RAM and two 360KB floppy disks cost almost CAD$10,000. I bought the first Macintosh computer sold in Canada from the Hudson’s Bay Company in Montreal. I bought the first iPhone in Buffalo on the day the phone came out, brought it back to Canada, and spent hours entering code to unlock the phone so I could use it in Canada. I joined Facebook in its early days when someone on the platform had to invite you to join. I joined Twitter shortly after it went online. I was an enthusiastic supporter of these products and services with all the optimism that being young allows.

          Now, all these years later, I have abandoned all these platforms. I regard them as deeply harmful to our society. As a father of 6 children, who now range in age from 11 to 29, I feel a responsibility to protect them and other people from the harms caused by big tech, which is why I became involved with Purism as both Chairperson of the Board of Directors and as a customer.

        • Arduino ☛ This gyroscopic stabilizer aims to reduce boat roll in waves | Arduino Blog

          Boats are notorious for their constant swaying back and forth when set adrift on a body of water, leading to sea sickness for those unlucky sufferers and forcing items to be securely stored to prevent them from moving around unintentionally. So, as part of their course in electrical engineering, Kaden Werner and Alex Morin partnered together to create a control system that could effectively eliminate watercraft roll through the use of angular momentum.

          Similar to how the International Space Station maintains its orientation, the team’s scaled prototype system relies on a rotating flywheel that generates large amounts of angular momentum in a certain axis. A brushless DC motor and driver are responsible for spinning up the circular mass, while a servo motor on one side rotates the cradle to the desired angle. All of this is done with an Arduino Uno that monitors the boat’s current orientation by taking measurements from an IMU.

      • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Content Management Systems (CMS)

        • The Month in WordPress – April 2022 – WordPress News

          This past month saw a lot of preparation work for WordPress 6.0, due to release on 24 May 2022. This major release brings exciting improvements – read on to find out more about the latest happenings in the WordPress project.

      • FSFE

        • FSFE Youth Hacking 4 Freedom: radio silence

          It looks like the FSFE donors and volunteers have been duped into supporting child labor.

          [...]

          To be considered for the prize, the participants are told that they must publish all their code under a free software license: in other words, they must give up all rights to any future payment. This doesn't happen in any other industry, certainly not with children.

      • FSF

        • GNU Projects

          • Messenger-GTK 0.7.0 released

            We are pleased to announce the release of the Messenger-GTK application.

            The application is a convergent GTK messaging application using the GNUnet Messenger service. The goal is to provide private and secure communication between any group of devices. The interface is also designed in a way to scale down to mobile and small screen devices like phones or tablets.

      • Programming/Development

        • Qt ☛ Qt Speech coming to Qt 6.4

          Over the last couple of months we have ported the text-to-speech functionality in the Qt Speech module over to Qt 6, and it will be part of the Qt 6.4 release later in 2022.

        • OpenSource.com ☛ Boost the power of C with these open source libraries | Opensource.com

          The GLib Object System (GObject) is a library providing a flexible and extensible object-oriented framework for C. In this article, I demonstrate using the 2.4 version of the library.

          [...]

          I hope my examples show how the GObject and libsoup projects give C a very real boost. Libraries like these extend C in a literal sense, and by doing so they make C more approachable. They do a lot of work for you, so you can turn your attention to inventing amazing applications in the simple, direct, and timeless C language.

          GObject and libsoup do a lot of work for you, so you can turn your attention to inventing amazing applications in C.

  • Leftovers

    • Intro to Yee Diagrams



      For those who can’t see, imagine having a bunch of marbles laid out orderly, in neat rows and columns. The rows indicate a political position (guns, let’s say) and the columns another (drugs, let’s say).

      We might have a hundred such marbles, ten by ten.

      Each marble represents the winner of an election in a land where the population was centered around that position. So the top-left marble is from a world where people love guns but hate drugs, and the population as a whole vote accordingly (Yee used a Gaussian spread centere on the marble in his simulations).

    • What is horror good for?

      The horror non-fiction I've been reading so far has been closely tied to horror fiction as a genre, either as philosophy or as literary analysis. But I have a few works of "collapsology" on my to-read list. This might be the truest form of non-fiction horror, with an opportunity to feel both the empathetic and alienated perspectives. I'll see when I get to them.

    • the gdbeatles

      Can't remember if I mentioned, but once upon a time I created a fictional, Beatles-centric song spoof band called "the gdbeatles" for coworkers of a couple software teams I was on - you know, just to keep those naturally occurring software development suicidal tendencies at bay.... :-)

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • MakeTech Easier ☛ Intuit Forced to Pay $141M for Deceiving TurboTax Customers

          Tax time is always stressful – you sit down at your computer and just want to get it done! It makes it easy to just take the first easy, cheap method you find when Googling. This is behind the agreement between Intuit and multiple states for Intuit to pay $141M to TurboTax customers who were deceived by advertisements promising “free.”

        • TechRadar ☛ Browser wars: Has Microsoft Edge completely lost its way?

          Microsoft Edge’s user numbers appear to have stagnated

        • Help Net Security ☛ Phishers exploit Google’s SMTP Relay service to deliver spoofed emails

          Phishers are exploiting a flaw in Google’s SMTP relay service to send malicious emails spoofing popular brands. Avanan researcher Jeremy Fuchs says that starting in April 2022, they have seen a massive uptick of these SMTP relay service exploit attacks in the wild, as threat actors use this service to spoof other Gmail tenants.

        • Security

          • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Meeting the Cyber Safety Review Board

            Three Open Source hackers were invited to this meeting with the CSRB and I was one of them.

            [...]

            On April 21 2022, I joined the video meeting together with an OpenSSL and a Tomcat contributor and several members of the board. (I am not naming any names of participants in this post because I have not asked for permission nor do I think the names are important here.)

            For about an hour we talked to the board how we develop Open Source, how we take on security problems and how we work on making sure we do things as securely as we can. It was striking how similarly the three of us looked at the issues and how we work in our project, despite our projects all being different and having our own specifics.

          • LWN ☛ Security updates for Thursday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, recutils, suricata, and zchunk), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), Slackware (mozilla, openssl, and seamonkey), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_mellon, libvirt, and pgadmin4), and Ubuntu (dpdk, mysql-5.7, networkd-dispatcher, openssl, openssl1.0, sqlite3, and twisted).

          • Linux Journal ☛ Primer to Container Security

            Containers are considered to be a standard way of deploying these microservices to the cloud. Containers are better than virtual machines in almost all ways except security, which may be the main barrier to their widespread adoption.

            This article will provide a better understanding of container security and available techniques to secure them.

            A Linux container can be defined as a process or a set of processes running in the userspace that is/are isolated from the rest of the system by different kernel tools.

            Containers are great alternatives to virtual machines (VMs). Even though containers and virtual machines provide the same isolation benefits, they differ in the way that containers provide operating system virtualization instead of hardware. This makes them lightweight, faster to start, and consumes less memory.

          • USCERT ☛ Cisco Releases Security Updates for Enterprise NFV Infrastructure Software | CISA

            Cisco has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Enterprise NFV Infrastructure Software. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

          • Privacy/Surveillance

            • CERT-In Guidelines on Cybersecurity: An Explainer

              On April 28, 2022, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued fresh directions (No. 20(3)/2022-CERT-In) under section 70B of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 in relation to the information security practices, procedure, prevention, response, and reporting of cyber incidents. Issued without public consultations, these directions raise serious concerns related to state sponsored surveillance and data retention beyond need or purpose. Therefore, we call on CERT-In to recall these directions.

            • AccessNow ☛ Policy brief: What's wrong with Jordan's data protection law and how to fix it - Access Now

              Jordan currently has no data protection law. As a consequence, both the government and industry in Jordan have collected and exploited people’s personal data on an industrial scale, with little to no respect for individuals’ privacy. That includes government and U.N. agencies’ use of iris-scanning technologies to collect the biometric data of millions, and internet service providers’ routine exploitation of people’s personal information, often without their knowledge or consent.

              Fortunately, Jordan’s parliament is currently discussing passing a new data protection law. However, the draft legislation needs more work to meet global standards. We’ve prepared a new policy brief, How to strengthen Jordan’s data protection law, to guide lawmakers and ensure the law protects Jordanians’ fundamental human rights.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Professor Gets Hit By A Chair in the Face

        Believe it or not, that dude who's gotten hit by a chair in the face is a professor. His name is Amir Hetsroni. I was watching him on camera when a flying chair got into the frame and hit his face. He was not talking lije a professor, just made some crappy comments about the local people who live in Ashdod.

      • May 5th, 2022: The Elphinstone Bridge Shooting

        On the narrow sidewalk of the bridge from my hospital to my hostel, the press of bodies is usually tottering somewhere near overwhelming. It only thins out early in the day and late at night which is why I was surprised and grateful to find it quite a few steps removed from overwhelming on this afternoon. This in no matter affected the urgency that this city seemed to infect everyone with and in front of me, a mother was pushing her child to stop playing and hurry along.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • On Politics

        Let's break this down from a psychological perspective. The political spectrum is often placed on the liberal/conservative axis (at least in the U.S.), but that's too simplistic.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • I’m stopping to update this gemlog

        Everything is in the title… I will not update this gemlog any more, or only very occasionally. However, *everything* is in the title, and it doesn’t say that I’m stopping to update my capsule! Gemini is great, I just need to change my workflow.

      • nnix.io Scuttlebutt Service

        Scuttlebutt is a protocol for offline decentralized communities. It's really cool. If you want to see what a social network requiring only intermittent connectivity to the internet might look like, jump in!

      • BBC ☛ Internet shutdowns and restrictions on the rise in Africa
      • Public Knowledge ☛ Internet Service Providers Drop California Net Neutrality Lawsuit, But Nationwide Rules Still Needed - Public Knowledge

        Last night, broadband providers suing California over its popular net neutrality law officially dropped their suit. Their action follows a refusal by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the court’s decision in ACA Connects v. Bonta, rejecting yet another attempt by broadband providers to overturn California’s net neutrality law. Earlier this year, the court issued its opinion and determined the California consumer protection law could go into effect. Public Knowledge and other consumer groups filed an amicus brief in this case last year.

    • Monopolies

      • Google and Apple hide $40 price hike of phones behind the environment. – BaronHK's Rants

        Google and Apple got rid of chargers and charging cables included with new phone, and said it was to help protect the environment.

        They said that since most people already had millions and millions of fast charging cables and charging boxes, that you really didn’t need one included with every phone anymore because you probably had one already.

        When I unboxed my Google Pixel 6 it didn’t come with a charger, but I did have one left over from a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G.

        When I went to use it, I found out that it only operated in the slowest charging mode. If you were actually using the phone, the battery still ticked down (albeit more slowly) because “fast charger” standards had managed to change again in the last year.

        My laptop’s USB-C port was the only thing I had that would charge the phone quickly.

      • Copyrights

        • Public Domain Review ☛ Petrified Waters: The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond – The Public Domain Review

          Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance and their reception abroad, illuminating how these curious spaces transformed across the centuries.



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