06.01.22
Posted in Site News at 7:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 9f72ba60a72f4a8a0e5c6311f2c0e842
EPC Supersedes Guidelines
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The EPO‘s guidelines for examiners have long been perturbed by Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos on behalf of the same interest groups which lobby for the illegal, unconstitutional kangaroo court, UPC; all they want is more and more patents — even software patents — because they profit from applications, litigation and so on, not innovation
THIS “news” from Monday (warning: epo.org link) is misleading propaganda with the term “EPC” (European Patent Convention) preceding everything else in the headline. The general idea here is to give the false impression that with EPC in mind the guidelines of the EPO are being shaped; the body, including some charts (shown in the video above), contradicts this. The vision and the future of the EPO are shaped by patent maximalists and multinational monopolists; a lot of the input comes from non-scientists.
“The EPO is in a deep, highly profound state of crisis. Many of the stakeholders are perfectly aware of the crisis; few of them are willing to speak out about it, at least not without some conditions of anonymity. Some stakeholders stand to lose a lot (investment in European Patents), so they hope to just hide the crisis instead of tackling it.”This rapid and troublesome departure from the European Patent Convention was mentioned here on Tuesday morning along with this meme about "Illegal EPO Guidelines".
Thankfully, many workers of the EPO are rebelling against this injustice and have made the decision to follow the EPC, not those guidelines or illegitimate orders from management. EPC governs the EPO, in theory but no longer in practice. That needs to change. The first step would be for Josef to "grow a pair" and oust Campinos later this month (declining, outright refusing, to extend the term); of course that would be only the start because most of the high-level management at the EPO is unskilled and unqualified, imported by Campinos to join Battistelli’s despots. It’s one heck of a kakistocracy that shames Europe and harms the European economy. The EPO should be run by scientists, not banksters.
The EPO is in a deep, highly profound state of crisis. Many of the stakeholders are perfectly aware of the crisis; few of them are willing to speak out about it, at least not without some conditions of anonymity. Some stakeholders stand to lose a lot (investment in European Patents), so they hope to just hide the crisis instead of tackling it. █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Humour, Law, Patents at 6:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There will be no UPC this year
Summary: Get ready for another “deja vu”; The EU has known for over a decade that the UPC isn’t tenable, but there were attempts to bury legal facts
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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This is the second Istio release of 2022. We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping to get Istio 1.14.0 published. Special thanks are due to the release managers Lei Tang (Google) and Greg Hanson (Solo.io), and to Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his help and guidance.
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When you upgrade from Istio 1.13.x to Istio 1.14.0, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.14.0. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.13.x. Users upgrading from 1.12.x to Istio 1.14.0 should also reference the 1.13.0 change logs.
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This feature is intended primarily for use on VMs, where system administrators need to restrain interception of the outgoing traffic down to a few applications instead of intercepting all outgoing traffic.
By default, as before, the Istio Sidecar will intercept outgoing traffic from all processes, no matter what user groups they are running under.
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Moving from physical networks using switches, routers, and ethernet cables to virtual networks using software-defined networks (SDN) and virtual interfaces involves a slight learning curve. Of course, the principles remain the same, but there are different specifications and best practices. Kubernetes has its own set of rules, and if you’re dealing with containers and the cloud, it helps to understand how Kubernetes networking works.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Dr. Andre Kudra, who plays “retro geek jazz” with Aaron Newcomb (himself a retro master) and host Doc Searls in this fact and fun-filled episode about retro computing and Demoscene. Nothing in computing gets more open, real, and truly deep—close to the metal—in a fun way, than retro computing and the Demoscene. And nobody is more involved in all of it than Dr. Kudra.
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Not much is happening with AppImages, nobody likes Snaps, but flatpaks are gaining are lot of traction as of late especially with release of the Steam Deck which is the primary method to install software.
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Alma Linux is a community Linux distribution designed to be binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Today we are looking at LXLE Focal. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.4, based on Ubuntu 20.04, LXDE, and uses about 500MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
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In this video, we are looking at LXLE Focal.
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the major features of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is a highly-customizable dock or dash. Let’s look at how you can customize the new dock in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) or later to have a similar look to that of macOS.
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Today we are looking at how to install Natron on a Chromebook in 2022. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Counting lines in a Linux file can be hectic if you don’t know the applicable commands and how to combine them. This tutorial makes the process comfortable by walking you through eight typical commands to count lines in a file in Linux.
For example, the word count, wc, command’s primary role, as the name suggests, is to count words. However, since a group of words forms a line, you can use the command to count lines besides characters and words.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The new Plasma System Monitor is a great example of the wider Linux ecosystem. There was a tool, called KSysGuard, which worked pretty well. And so, a new tool was created, which for quite a while lacked the functional parity and was far buggier. This new tool was called Plasma System Monitor. Now, it has become the Plasma default, the old tool is gone, but you still don’t quite get the functionality equivalence, and the graphs are significantly worse (by default and else). Feels like a lot of unnecessary effort. Linux, and modern software to boot.
That said, Plasma System Monitor is an extensible program, and you can tweak its look & feel. You can add new custom graphs, edit the existing ones, and make it work the way you want it. This is great, for tinkering nerds who want to invest time in something like this. This is horrible for the average user, who just needs to see some basic metrics for their system. But hey. The wheel of code must forever turn. Hopefully, this tutorial slash rant provides the necessary guidance to help you tame Plasma System Monitor to your liking, so that you can have a reasonably productive and accurate experience. Now you have the tools to be your own … whatever. Thank you for reading, and see you soon.
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This past week I mainly worked on two things, getting Tasks to remember its window size and position and adding a way to search through tasks.
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Next is the search feature, I thought it would be pretty cool if this worked similarly to the less command line utility. The way it works in less is after you type the / character, everything after that will be the search pattern.
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We have been notified of a site that is using Kdenlive’s name and likeness to distribute malware to users. We will not be linking to the site to avoid accidental downloads, but if a search lands you on a site offering “lightmoon”, “a free video editor” that looks in the screenshots identical to Kdenlive, this is malware.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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We’re now in the final stretch with just a handful of issues left to resolve before we can release elementary OS 7. This month there was a large focus on making new stable releases of packages so that we can prepare for building stable images of OS 7. As we’ve mentioned before, the primary development focus has shifted from OS 6 and some components can no longer be released there. But, for those things which can still be built on both versions, a trickle of updates has landed in OS 6.1 this month.
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Many thanks to our sponsors and all the people who donated to us. Thank you for your generous donations!
Many thanks also to our developers, moderators and all the people in our community who help us in different ways. This is a fantastic project, it’s a real pleasure to work with you.
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There has been an interesting development in this month’s Linux Mint news segment regarding the future of the backup utility Timeshift which has become a core part of the distro in recent years. It turns out that Tony George, the developer behind the project doesn’t have time to work on Timeshift any longer and has agreed for the Mint team to take over. As part of the plans, Timeshift will now become a XApp, a suite of apps developed by the Mint team.
A core principle of Linux Mint is that things just work. To ensure things keep working after updates and upgrades, the Mint team started pushing, quite aggressively, for people to begin making system backups so they could restore their computers to an earlier state if anything went wrong. The tool of choice for backups in Mint was Timeshift and that utility has been bundled with the distro for quite a while now.
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Warp is a simple, no-fuss file transfer app for Linux desktops.
Like, seriously simple.
Built in GTK4, Warp offers the sort of clean, focused UI we more commonly associate with Mac apps than Linux ones.
Not that user-friendly file transfer apps are unique or exclusive to Linux. Plenty exist. Yet Warp does something that tools I’ve written about in the past, like Linux Mint’s (terrific) Warpinator, don’t: it lets you send files outside of your local network.
Or to quote the Warp page on Flathub: “Warp allows you to securely send files to each other via the internet or local network by exchanging a word-based code.”
Which is kinda neat.
The extra-LAN capability makes Warp the ideal tool to reach for when you want to share a file with friend/colleague but don’t want to go through the predictable hassle of uploading it to a cloud-based service, generating a shareable link, sharing the link, them complaining the link doesn’t work, you having to check again… and so on.
Just open Warp, select the file to “send”, and copy the shareable code it generates. The recipient just opens Warp, clicks “receive”, punches in the code and… et voila: digital transference through the binary ether.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Today, SUSE has added IBM Z and LinuxONE support for several SUSE Rancher products – Rancher Manager, RKE2, K3s and Longhorn. Read on if you would like a little more information about each of these products.
Rancher Manager is undoubtedly the most important product. With Rancher Manager it is easy to run Kubernetes everywhere. Learning how to manage Kubernetes can be difficult. The Rancher Manager web UI makes centrally managing multiple Kubernetes clusters much easier than having to use the command line to manage each Kubernetes cluster separately. Rancher Manager 2.6.4 includes support to manage any CNCF-certified s390x Kubernetes cluster which includes RKE2 and K3s. s390x is the architecture designation for IBM Z and LinuxONE servers. The validated features for the initial s390x support in Rancher Manager include Rancher Server, Rancher Agent, Kubernetes Fleet operations, Helm chart catalog and backup/restore operations. As newer Rancher Manager versions are released, monitoring, logging alerting and CIS scans for s390x Kubernetes deployments will be added.
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This is an article which is part of a series that attempts to showcase the kind of work that SUSE Support does and how we help customers resolve issues they encounter when running SUSE products. The cases that are selected will be based on real cases. However, all details will be fully anonymized and stripped of identifying marks.
Some problems are very hard to identify, but the steps to solve that issue are quite simple. Other problems are relatively easy to identify, but are not trivial to solve. I will share a problem that seems quite simple on the surface, but there are many complexities to take care of.
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Today, everything is digitally connected—from gaming, banking, education, and job searching, to socializing with your friends and family. While access to technology and the internet has become abundant in the developed world, a significant portion of the world’s population still does not have this same freedom to access. At the same time, global warming and environmental issues persist.
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The subscription includes over 130 hours of technical training content covering SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, SUSE Manager and SUSE Rancher. With an annual subscription, you’ll also stay up to date with the latest product releases from SUSE.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Cloud-native architectures have changed the way applications are deployed, but remain relatively uncharted territory for high-performance computing (HPC). This week, however, Red Hat and the US Department of Energy will be making some moves in the area.
The IBM subsidiary – working closely with the Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories – aims to develop a new generation of HPC applications designed to run in containers, orchestrated using Kubernetes, and optimized for distributed filesystems.
The work might also make AI/ML workloads easier for enterprises to deploy in the process.
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In just three years, this community site “by sysadmins, for sysadmins” has given millions of people information to help them do their work better.
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In the first quarter of 2022, the labor market continued its trend of what has been coined the “great resignation,” leaving many organizations competing to recruit and retain top talent. Red Hat continues to iterate its training offerings to keep pace with the changing needs of this talent as well as the landscape of technology.
Employees who participate in Red Hat Training average longer tenures and higher satisfaction with their jobs. Further, 75% of Red Hat Learning Subscription users agree that the subscription makes it faster and easier for them to troubleshoot issues with Red Hat technologies and 84% agree that they feel more confident on the job as a result of their training.
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As part of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision, Red Hat Insights is available on all actively supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to help continuously analyze platforms and applications and better predict potential risk, no matter where RHEL is actually deployed. Even with this relative ubiquity of the service, we’ve never had IBM Power-specific recommendations in Insights — until now.
Insights now integrates with an offering from IBM, the IBM Fix Level Recommendation Tool (FLRT). IBM FLRT provides cross-product compatibility information and fix recommendations for IBM products. One of the main IBM FLRT use cases is to plan upgrades of key components and to verify the installed software and firmware level to assess health and stability of your IBM Power systems.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Switch button with Raspberry PI Pico allows your projects to get the simplest input from the user: a push. With this input, you can start a program to execute a specific job only when the user requires it
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When it comes to activity monitors such as smartwatches, rings, and pendants, they are often considered cumbersome or too difficult to keep track of, especially for the elderly with memory or dexterity problems. This is why the team of Jure Špeh, Jan Adamic, Luka Mali, and Blaz Ardaljon Mataln Smehov decided to create the SmartSlippers project, which is a far more integrated method for detecting steps and falls.
The hardware portion of the SmartSlippers prototype is just a Nano 33 BLE Sense board due to its onboard inertial measurement unit (IMU) and Bluetooth® Low Energy capability. At first, the team collected 14 minutes of five different types of movements: walking, running, stairs, falling, and idle within the Edge Impulse Studio. From here, they trained a neural network on these samples, which resulted in an accuracy of around 84%.
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Mature process nodes like SKY130 (a 130nm technology) offer a great way to prototype IoT applications that often need to balance cost and power with performance and leverage a mix of analog blocks and digital logic in their designs. They offer a faster turnaround rate than bleeding-edge process nodes for a fraction of the price; reducing the temporal and financial cost of making the right mistakes necessary to converge toward the optimal design.
By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world.
Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other’s works rather than reinventing the wheel.
Towards this goal, we’ve been sponsoring a series of Open MPW shuttles on the Efabless platform, allowing around 250 open source projects to manufacture their own silicon.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Word users expect to be able to import their document to Writer and experience a matching feature set: form filling is not an exception. Word provides several content control kinds (inline, block, row and cell content controls), this project focuses on inline (“run”) content controls.
In the scope of inline content controls, the above linked blog post already described the rich text and checkbox types. In this post, we’ll focus on the new dropdown, picture and date content controls.
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In order to make it easier for users to find training videos about LibreOffice, we have created a comprehensive index updated to the end of April 2022 using the open source Zotero bibliography and reference management software.
The index is published on this blog in the Media Hub section (clicking on the Media Hub menu, you will open a drop down menu with Press Releases and Index of Videos).
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Events
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The regular meeting would have been Thursday, June 2nd but we decided to postpone for one week to gather up more topics… so the meeting will be on Thursday, June 9th instead. Hopefully topics will be added to this meeting notice later.
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GNU Projects
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Programming/Development
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The 5th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2022…
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Tailwind is a free, open-source utilities-first CSS framework. It was featured in dozens of projects by developers who use different frameworks as Vue, React, Angular, Blaze, Meteor, Svelte, and others.
As its popularity is growing, developers start building their own custom libraries on top of Tailwind.
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Easiest app/database deployment platform and webserver package for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go applications.
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Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server. It provides continuous integration services for software development, mostly used in highly customized builds of software. And it is a continuous integration service for software development which you can primarily utilize in highly customized software builds.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development process in which members of a team merge their work on a regular basis; typically, each individual integrates at least once each day, resulting in several integrations per day. To uncover integration faults as fast as possible, an automated build evaluates each integration (which includes a test). Further, the goal of CI is to ensure that all code committed to a shared repository can be built and tested, validating not only that the code works but also that it will continue to work properly when integrated with other code changes.
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Perl / Raku
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The much-anticipated Perl 7 continues to twinkle in the distance although the final release of 5.36.0 is “just around the corner”, according to the Perl Steering Council.
Well into its fourth decade, the fortunes of Perl have ebbed and flowed over the years. Things came to a head last year, with the departure of former “pumpking” Sawyer X, following what he described as community “hostility.”
Part of the issue stemmed from the planned version 7 release, a key element of which, according to a post by the steering council “was to significantly reduce the boilerplate needed at the top of your code, by enabling a lot of widely used modules / pragmas.”
It all sounds wonderful, but the price would have been the breaking of some backwards compatibility, meaning that some code targeting earlier versions of the programming language would have needed changing.
“This prompted a lot of heated discussions,” said the council. “Some thought this was a great idea, and some thought it a terrible idea to throw away one of Perl’s key strengths.”
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Considered to be preferable to sale to China-owned Nexperia, say sources
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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Samsung Electronics boss Lee Jae-yong met on Monday in South Korea and “discussed how to cooperate between the two companies.”
That quote comes from Samsung, which also let the world know the two leaders talked about next-generation memory chips, silicon for PCs and mobile devices, fabless chip design, the foundry business, and more.
It is unclear if the talks addressed a particular issue, or just represented the heads of the world’s top two chipmakers getting together for a chat while Gelsinger was in town.
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In a sign of how meteoric AMD’s resurgence in high performance computing has become, the latest list of the world’s 500 fastest public known supercomputers shows the chip designer has become a darling among organizations deploying x86-based HPC clusters.
The most eye-catching bit of AMD news among the supercomputing set is that the announcement of the Frontier supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which displaced Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku cluster for the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list of the world’s most-powerful publicly known systems.
Top500 updates its list twice a year and published its most recent update on Monday.
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The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world’s most-powerful publicly known systems.
Frontier’s lead over Japan’s A64X-based Fujitsu machine is by no means a narrow one either. The cluster achieved peak performance of 1.1 exaflops according to the Linpack benchmark, which has been the standard by which supercomputers have been ranked since the mid-1990s.
Frontier marks the first publicly benchmarked exascale computer by quite a margin. The ORNL system is well ahead of Fugaku’s 442 petaflops of performance, which was a strong enough showing to keep Fugaku in the top spot for two years.
Reaching exascale status is one thing, but many expected the efficiency-geared Fugaku system to hang onto its green rankings, even if it slipped on the performance front. But Frontier isn’t just the most powerful known supercomputer, its technology is now also the most efficient. At 52.23 gigaflops per watt, the system’s test-and-development machine Crusher also outperformed Japan’s Preferred Networks MN-3 system to take the lead spot on the Green500.
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Security
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Microsoft has warned users that Azure Active Directory isn’t currently producing reliable sign-in logs.
“Customers using Azure Active Directory and other downstream impacted services may experience a significant delay in availability of logging data for resources,” the Azure status page explains. Tools including Azure Portal, MSGraph, Log Analytics, PowerShell, and/or Application Insights are all impacted.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (libjpeg-turbo, webkit2gtk, and wpewebkit), Fedora (golang-github-opencontainers-runc, mingw-pcre2, python-jwt, python-ujson, and weechat), Oracle (nodejs:16 and rsyslog), Red Hat (container-tools:3.0, expat, fapolicyd, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, mariadb:10.3, postgresql:12, rsyslog and rsyslog7, and zlib), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (bind, dpdk, fribidi, hdf5, librelp, php74, postgresql12, and postgresql13), and Ubuntu (cups, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and webkit2gtk).
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CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Treasury, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to provide information on the Karakurt data extortion group. Karakurt actors steal data and threaten to auction it off or release it to the public unless they receive payment of the demanded ransom.
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An emailed report seemingly about a payment will, when opened in Excel on a Windows system, attempt to inject three pieces of file-less malware that steal sensitive information.
Researchers with Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence unit have been tracking this mailspam campaign since May, outlining how three remote access trojans (RATs) are fired into the system once the attached file is opened in Excel. From there, the malicious code will not only steal information, but can also remotely control aspects of the PC.
The first of the three pieces of malware is AveMariaRAT (also known as Warzone RAT), followed by Pandora hVCN RAT and BitRAT.
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Smart homes are increasingly becoming hackable homes, according to consumer research.
The report by consumer rights organization Which? paints a grim picture for people who have equipped their residences with gadgets, many from trusted tech names.
As with pretty much everything in IT, if you connect a device to the internet, ensuring it’s patched and has a decent password is the very least owners can do. Even then, there are no guarantees that this is secure.
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“It will also exfiltrate credentials from multiple software programs like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Outlook — making its potential impact truly catastrophic,” Qualys Principal Research Engineer Ghanshyam More wrote in a technical analysis earlier this year.
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Eleven significant tech-aligned industry associations from around the world have reportedly written to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to call for revision of the nation’s new infosec reporting and data retention rules, which they criticise as inconsistent, onerous, unlikely to improve security within India, and possibly harmful to the nations economy.
The rules were introduced in late April and are extraordinarily broad. For example, operators of datacenters, clouds, and VPNs, are required to register customers’ names, dates on which services were used, and even customer IP addresses, and store that data for five years.
Another requirement is to report over 20 types of infosec incident, even port scanning or attempted phishing, within six hours of detection. Among the reportable incidents are “malicious/suspicious activities” directed towards almost any type of IT infrastructure or equipment, without explanation of where to draw the line between malicious and suspicious activity.
The new rules attracted plenty of local criticism on grounds that a six-hour reporting window is too short, the requirement to record VPN users’ details is an attack on privacy, and that the requirements are too broad and therefore represent an onerous compliance burden.
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Researchers have reported a still-unpatched Windows zero-day that is currently being exploited in the wild.
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A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows has been under active exploit for seven weeks, giving attackers a reliable means for installing malware without triggering Windows Defender and a roster of other endpoint protection products.
The Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on April 12 as a zero-day that was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from Shadow Chaser Group said on Twitter. A response dated April 21, however, informed the researchers that the Microsoft Security Response Center team didn’t consider the reported behavior a security vulnerability because, supposedly, the MSDT diagnostic tool required a password before it would execute payloads.
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Ask 1,000 CIOs whether they believe their organizations are vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting their software supply chains and about 82 percent can be expected to say yes.
Security biz Venafi engaged research firm Coleman Parkes to put that question to as many corporate IT leaders from the US, UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia, and New Zealand.
The result was an emphatic vote of no confidence.
“The results show that while CIOs understand the risk of these types of attacks, they have yet to grasp the fundamental organizational changes and new security controls they will need to incorporate into their security posture to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks that can be devastating to themselves and their customers,” says Venafi’s report, which was released on Tuesday.
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Blame SolarWinds, Codecov, and Kaseya – companies that had their corporate software build tools compromised in sophisticated attacks that affected their customers – not to mention the past five years of poisoned packages at popular open-source software registries.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) into Google Workspace was launched by the Central Dutch government in 2020. The report noted there were eight high-risk issues, principally around data collection. It also noted that Google did not provide all the personal data it held when asked to do so under the GDPR provisions for the right to request access.
Google said today: “As a result of this process, the Central Dutch government, the Dutch education sector organisations/institutions, and Google Cloud found agreement and will continue working together on the DPIA recommendations.”
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Environment
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Wildlife/Nature
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Among all the other introduced pests in Australia, one that I really detest and keep meeting up with is the European wasp[1]. Sadly, there seem to be more and more of them each year, spreading further and further around the country and deeper into bushland.
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Finance
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India’s government has reportedly started probes into the local activities of Chinese tech companies Vivo and ZTE, prompting a rebuke from China’s foreign ministry.
As was the case when Indian authorities seized $725 million from Chinese gadget-maker Xiaomi, the investigations focus on possible irregular financial reporting that may amount to fraud, according to newswire Bloomberg’s original report on the matter.
A Bloomberg reporter asked about the state of the investigations at the daily press conference staged by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which produces a transcript of each day’s event.
Zhao Lijian, China’s famously feisty foreign ministry spokesperson, said Beijing “is closely following the situation.”
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I needed a sofa bed and started looking around. The only one that fit my criteria was the IKEA Nyhamn. The problem was that it doesn’t currently exist.
To be more precise hardly any IKEA store (at least here in Sweden) has it in because of logistical issues.
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The price of diesel has reached £1.90 per litre (about $9 per US gallon), food prices are way up, the economy seems to be heading for a period of stagflation, the UK government is destroying the constitutional checks and balances on its actions, Russia is making gains in eastern Ukraine. And little England is putting up the bunting to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of an elderly monarch who inherited her position and wealth and seemingly has no influence on the governance of the nation. What is an anti-monarchist to do?
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The UK has begun a fast-track visa scheme for tech workers graduating from a list of top 50 universities worldwide.
Critics, however, maintain the scheme will fail to compensate for the barriers erected to tech recruitment from the EU as a result of Brexit.
Announcing the “high-potential individual route”, which started from 30 May, the British government said it wants to attract the world’s top graduates in subjects such as science, engineering and medical research. Sought-after skills also include cybersecurity in a plan to support both economic growth as well as technological and medical advances.
The UK’s chief finance minister, Rishi Sunak, said: “This new visa offer means that the UK can continue to attract the best and brightest from across the globe. The route means that the UK will grow as a leading international hub for innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.
“We want the businesses of tomorrow to be built here today – which is why I call on students to take advantage of this incredible opportunity to forge their careers here,” he added.
Successful applicants will get a two-year work visa for Britain — three years for those with PhDs — and could move into other long-term employment routes.
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Tesla supremo Elon Musk has declared that executive staff at his battery-powered vehicle biz shall not work from afar.
In an email sent to Tesla underlings and obtained by the New York Times, Musk tells Tesla execs that remote work is no longer acceptable.
“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean minimum) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Musk’s missive mandates. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”
Musk, the world’s richest person at the moment, allows that he may, at his discretion, bend his rules for “particularly exceptional contributors” – if you have to ask, that’s probably not you. The billionaire poly-boss and Twitter influencer further stipulates that “office” as he defines it means main office, not some remote branch unrelated to one’s duties.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The US Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated the suspension of Texas’ social-media law HB 20 while litigation to have the legislation declared unconstitutional continues.
The law, signed in September by Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), and promptly opposed, forbids large social media companies from moderating lawful content based on a “viewpoint,” such as “smoking cures cancer” or “vaccines are poison” or hateful theories of racial superiority. Its ostensible purpose is to prevent internet giants from discriminating against conservative social media posts, something that studies indicate is not happening.
Those fighting the law – industry groups and advocacy organizations – say the rules would require large social media services such as Facebook and Twitter to distribute “lawful but awful” content – hate speech, misinformation, and other dubious material. They argue companies have a First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion for the content distributed on their platforms.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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It may be nearly three years since the world officially exhausted all of the available IPv4 internet addresses, but now a new initiative has been proposed that could free up hundreds of millions of addresses that are currently unused – or are they?
While the world is still slowly moving towards broader adoption of the newer IPv6 protocol, which offers a vast address space, the widespread continued use of IPv4 has caused problems because all available ranges of the roughly 4.3 billion addresses it supports have largely been allocated.
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I wanted to keep a history of my bike rides, so I created the “bikelog” on my capsule.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you use Linux as your daily drive operating system or you want to migrate from Mac or Windows, there are three main ways you can use to run Linux on your system.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Cron is a simple UNIX utility that manages and schedules the execution of commands in your computer. It was first developed in 1987 by Paul Vixie and it has since become an invaluable tool in Linux-based operating systems for both administrators and users alike.
Nowadays, there are a number of cron implementations and rewrites that you can easily install in your Linux system. Despite the differences, these programs all share the same Vixie Cron lineage.
As such, this article aims to provide a basic overview of how the original Vixie cron works, its syntax, and how you can use it to schedule tasks in your Linux system.
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In Ubuntu 22.04, you’ll find that the MPV media player does NOT have window border and title-bar out-of-the-box.
That’s quite annoying! You can no longer drag resizing the app window. And, title bar buttons (minimize, maximize, and close) only appear when you hover over the window during video playback.
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In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to setup Apache, PHP, and MongoDB on Ubuntu 20.04
We will install the Apache Web server, the latest PHP version, and the MongoDB database server. The purpose of this post is to explain how can these three different types of services be configured on one server for future development tasks and the building of an amazing application. MongoDB is a free open-source, NoSQL backend database server, which works perfectly with Apache Web server and PHP as a scripting language.
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Upgrading to the latest beta (development) release of Ubuntu is easier than you might think. By default, Ubuntu won’t tell you when there is a new development version available. You can, however, check for one and upgrade to it with just a few quick commands at the terminal.
A Word of Warning Before We Begin
Development versions of Ubuntu are likely to be unstable and contain bugs. A development release is an unfinished product that may behave in unpredictable ways. You should not install any type of pre-release version of Ubuntu on any system that serves a mission-critical purpose.
It is highly recommended that you back up all of your data and create a bootable USB containing your current Ubuntu version before attempting any of the steps that follow. If you should suffer a catastrophic failure you will be able to reinstall a working copy of Ubuntu and restore your data from the backup.
You should also be aware that once you upgrade your system to a development version, it can not be undone. There is no way to downgrade or roll back the update. If you decide later that you want to return to the previous version of Ubuntu, you will have to reinstall it.
With that said, the entire upgrade process will take place at the command line. So, go ahead and open a terminal window, and let’s get started.
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Youtube has a really nice RSS feature that is extremely well hidden.
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We previously covered other methods for dealing with logical structures to control the flow of the code. In this article, we will cover another method to repeat code until some value is false.
A While Loop allows the code to loop ‘while’ a value is true. Once the value is false, the loop stops.
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In my previous article, we went through the process of compiling and installing Nginx from source. I left off with a basic configuration for loading the default html page. In this article, I’m going to pick up where I left off. We are going to expand on our configuration to add some functionality to our demo site.
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Laser ranging has many applications in production and life, such as ranging, positioning, obstacle avoidance, and so on. Time-of-Flight (ToF) ranging, as a type of laser ranging technology, is often used for real-time object detection in robots, autonomous vehicles, and traffic management because of its accuracy, fast response, and low power consumption. The face detection function of mobile phones also uses this technology.
This article will introduce the WisBlock RAK12014 ToF laser ranging sensor module, and use the WisBlock development board to demonstrate how the module works.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vue.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework that is reactive and simple to learn. It provides various tools and libraries that are really awesome to adapt and learn. Vue.js helps in building web applications with the knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in no time.
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 Vue.js framework 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.
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The Ubuntu 17.10 and later systems use the Netplan as a new command-line utility for managing network interfaces. It works with the Systemd-networkd or NetworkManager renderes. Netplan configuration files are written in YAML format, allowing you simple-to-complex networking configurations. Which work from the Desktop to the server and from the cloud to IoT devices.
This article will help you to configure static IPv4 addresses on Ubuntu systems using the Netplan command-line tool.
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In this guide, we are going to learn how to install and configure SNMP on Ubuntu 22.04/Debian 11. SNMP is an acronym for Simple Network Management Protocol. It provides an agentless method of managing and monitoring of network devices and servers for health information, system metrics such as CPU load, Physical Memory usage, number of running processes, service state or any other service/process that support polling over the SNMP protocol.
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In this tutorial, you will learn how to add hosts to LibreNMS server for monitoring. LibreNMS is a fully featured MySQL/PHP and SNMP based network monitoring system.
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Games
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The upcoming Godot 3.5 is now considered feature complete, and has received a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the past weeks thanks to all the testers and developers who reported and fixed issues. We are now at the Release Candidate stage, finalizing everything so that we can release 3.5-stable for all users.
At this stage we need people to test this release (and potential follow-up RCs) on as many codebases as possible, to make sure that we catch non-obvious regressions that might have gone unnoticed until now. If you run into any issue, please make sure to report it on GitHub so that we can know about it and fix it!
This RC 3 fixes a number of recent regressions and older bugs. Notably, it fixes some rendering regressions with transparent materials, and crashing iOS templates and Web editor build in RC 2.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Xfce is known for being one of the most lightweight desktop environments yet flexible enough to carry out heavy loads easily.
One major issue with Xfce is that its default interface may look old and outdated to many users. This could be offputting for some new users who prefer beautiful-looking Linux distributions.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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The Genode release 22.05 stays true to this year’s roadmap. According to the plan, we continue our tradition of revising the framework’s documentation as part of the May release. Since last year, the Genode Foundations book is accompanied with the Genode Platforms document that covers low-level topics. The second revision has just doubled in size (Section Updated and new documentation).
Functionality-wise, the added support for WireGuard-based virtual private networks is certainly the flagship feature of the release. Section WireGuard briefly introduces the new component while leaving in-depth information to a dedicated article.
Among the other topics of the release, our continued work on device drivers stands out. We managed to bring Genode’s lineup of PC drivers ported from the Linux kernel up to the kernel version 5.14.21 using Genode’s unique DDE-Linux porting approach. As described by Section New generation of DDE-Linux-based PC drivers, this work comprises complex drivers like the wireless LAN stack including Intel’s Wifi driver and the latest Intel display driver. At the framework’s side, the modernization of Genode’s platform driver for PC hardware is in full swing. Even though not yet used by default, the new driver has reached feature parity with the original PC-specific platform driver while sharing much of its code base with the growing number of ARM platform drivers such as the FPGA-aware platform-driver for Xilinx Zynq (Section Xilinx Zynq).
Regarding the PinePhone, Genode 22.05 introduces the basic ability to issue and receive phone calls, which entails the proper routing of audio signals and controlling the LTE modem. Furthermore, in anticipation of implementing advanced energy-management strategies, the release features a custom developed firmware for the PinePhone’s system-control processor. Both topics are outlined in Section PinePhone while further details and examples are given in dedicated articles.
The release is wrapped up by usability improvements of the framework’s light-weight event-tracing mechanism, low-level optimizations, and API refinements.
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Many software developers use Linux because it is free and open source. Most expert developers choose to work with it because of its sophistication as an operating system. This view is beginning to shift, thanks in large part to the proliferation of more user-friendly Linux distributions. A distribution exists for everyone nowadays, from coders to home users to kids, and there’s even a little something for educational institutions and instructors. Explore the best Linux distributions for youngsters, professors, and schools. Are you a teacher who wants to upgrade the technology in your classroom? Trying to discover the right OS for their children? Or are you simply looking for a nice, open Linux kernel for educational use? If that’s the case, don’t bother looking it up on the internet. Our selection of the greatest Linux distributions for schools is a great place to start, though!
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New Releases
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Linux Lite has been around since 2012 and version 6, codenamed “Fluorite”, is one of the first Ubuntu-based distros to offer a version built on Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish”, released just last month.
This is unapologetically a distro aimed at Windows users. For instance, unlike some distros, there are no difficult questions of what desktop you want – you get Xfce 4.16, with a trendy flat theme, but a somewhat retro default layout that reminds us of Windows XP. The Start button and window buttons have text labels, for instance. We liked that: it’s simple, efficient, and welcome, but Zorin OS 16 manages a more modern Windows look.
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The lightweight Linux distribution Linux Lite has released version 6.0, including enhancements and bug fixes.
Linux Lite is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu that includes the ultra-lightweight Xfce desktop environment. As the name implies, it is a lightweight Linux distro that is ideal for people who have older hardware.
On top of that, the distro is also loaded with lightweight apps which ensure smooth workflow. So, even on an old machine, Linux Lite performs most everyday operations quickly and without stability issues.
The new major version Linux Light 6.0, is now available for download and usage, based on the newest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. First, let’s look at what’s new.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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When Red Had shifted CentOS from a major release structure to a rolling release, users were angry as hell but CentOS went smooth, and recently they came up with their new release of CentOS Stream in collaboration with Red Hat Engineers and Community.
So before going to the installation part let’s understand should you rely on CentOS Stream and what it offers in its new release.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Members of SUSE and openSUSE have deleloped several Work Groups (WG) to discuss the formation of the Adaptable Linux Platform. Below readers can see the latest brief from the various WGs involved in the open-source project.
The System Management WG has been progressing with the branding of Cockpit. They have been experimenting with attempts to containerize it; though outside of a possible chance to use wormholing, it doesn’t look promising. They do continue to add functionality to YaST in cointainers at a good pace.
The ALP Virtualization team has taken some technical decisions regarding support, etc. In their first technical meetings regarding VMs inside of containers, some work was done looking for the best approach and blocking points.
In the Build Service Next-Generation WG, the initial feedback shows little interest in a git-based packaging approach. Software as a Service options via git hosting continue to be very expensive, though on-premises options should be considered. A self-hosted Gitea appears to be the best option so far, while the current discussions for Large-File-Storing-in-Git have been paused at this time.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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IBM says it is rolling out its natural language processing software to a greater number of McDonalds’ drive-thrus months after buying the automated order technology unit from the fast food chain, along with the team that developed it.
IBM already added extra NLP features to its Watson Discovery enterprise AI service last year, and now the burger-flinger’s AI chatbot will feel the benefit, it said.
In October last year, Big Blue wolfed down the McD Tech Labs, which was itself created after McDonald’s bought and renamed AI voice recognition startup Apprente in 2019.
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IBM has been ordered to pay Houston-based IT firm BMC $1.6 billion for fraud and contract violations because it moved mutual client AT&T from BMC software to IBM software.
On Monday, US District Judge Gray Miller issued his final judgment [PDF] in the case, which began five years ago and culminated in a bench trial in March.
For years, IBM had serviced AT&T’s mainframe computers which at least since 2007 have relied on BMC software. IBM and BMC in 2008 entered into a contract governing the business relationship between the two companies. And in 2015, the two IT outfits agreed several amendments including an Outsourcing Attachment (OA) that disallowed IBM from moving mutual clients over to its own software.
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Ever since AlmaLinux made its footprints known to the Linux community as one of the viable replacements/alternatives to the now-discontinued CentOS, this Linux operating system distribution has earned its stripes as a reliable, stable, free, and open-source operating system.
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You can perform edge detection on images using this Jupyter notebook on any Kubernetes cluster. Learn how.
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It’s that time of the year again and OpenJS World is almost upon us. This annual event brings together both the JavaScript and Web communities, which include not only Node.js, but other OpenJS Foundation projects such as Electron, webpack, and more.
Red Hat and IBM will both be back as sponsors, and will be delivering some great talks as well. The last two conferences were remote affairs, but this year’s edition will be held in person in Austin, Texas, from June 6th through 10th.
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At their best, disagreements can reveal when an organization has built a culture of critical thinking and is tackling challenging problems. At their worst, they can damage working relationships and lead to emotional burnout.
As a leader, you can help your employees work through disagreements in a productive and healthy manner by building a culture of awareness that considers a diverse range of opinions and working styles.
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Digital transformation is the giant umbrella that encompasses how people work in today’s economy. It’s typically a multi-faceted initiative that goes beyond simply modernizing applications. It encompasses everything that represents the way a business needs to operate in 2022 to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
This type of initiative is a shared responsibility. It starts with the CEO, who must be a champion of change, but it must also involve other leaders throughout the organization working together to make transformation happen. Sometimes it will require a Chief Digital Officer to coordinate the response, but one fact is consistent: Without alignment throughout the organization, the effort is likely to fail. And it might just take the company down with it.
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CentOS Stream is regarded as a continuous-delivery distribution by Red Hat developers. It serves as RHEL’s next point release. Think of it as the security checkpoint for any package that wants to be granted an audience under RHEL 9.
For instance, such packages that want to be RHEL-oriented must pass through a series of tests and checks and then push to the CentOS Stream OS environment. These tests and checks are either manual or automated. This platform ensures that packages meet stringent RHEL standards.
Therefore, a typical CentOS Stream system and package update are equivalent to an unreleased RHEL OS minor version. The purpose of assigning CentOS Stream such an attribute is to progressively make it as stable as RHEL.
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Debian Family
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I have finally found how to make my fonts-creep2 package work on my Debian machines. The solution was to not use the TTF file that contains the Bitmap glyphs, but instead generate an OTB file, which is an OpenType format for Bitmap fonts.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu announced its 21.10 (Impish Indri) release almost 9 months
ago, on October 14, 2021, and its support period is now nearing its
end. Ubuntu 21.10 will reach end of life on July 14, 2022.
At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include
information or updated packages for Ubuntu 21.10.
The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 21.10 is via Ubuntu 22.04.
Instructions and caveats for the upgrade may be found at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JammyUpgrades
Ubuntu 22.04 continues to be actively supported with security updates
and select high-impact bug fixes. Announcements of security updates
for Ubuntu releases are sent to the ubuntu-security-announce mailing
list, information about which may be found at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security...
Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most
highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users in homes,
schools, businesses and governments around the world. Ubuntu is Open
Source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to
customise or alter their software in order to meet their needs.
On behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team,
Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak
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If you are running Fedora 34, the time has come to move on; that distribution will reach the end of its support life on June 7. Users of Ubuntu 21.10 have a little longer, but that release loses support on July 14 and users should update to 22.04.
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Ubuntu announced its 21.10 (Impish Indri) release almost 9 months ago, on October 14, 2021, and its support period is now nearing its end. Ubuntu 21.10 will reach end of life on July 14, 2022.
At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 21.10.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Open source software mainly known as (OSS) is used as an open development process. Linux supports a lot of open source software. Open source software is licensed software that you will have the codes to modify. However, there are many websites where you can download open source software for your Linux, but it is a little bit difficult for you to find these websites for downloading OSS. However, we can help you are looking for some websites for downloading open source software. And this content is all about those websites.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 101 is out, mostly of interest to developers but with a few liveability improvements. I suspect breakage of our LTO-PGO patch will be a regular occurrence and Fx101 indeed broke the diff again, but after updating rust, cargo and cbindgen the optimized build works fine with this revised PGO-LTO patch and the same .mozconfigs from Firefox 95.
I can’t figure out where the bugs are in our POWER9 Ion JavaScript JIT implementation, though I still strongly suspect it’s because we use sign-extended 32-bit ints. This is enough to pass the test suite but still breaks with the web. MIPS does too and we are strongly based on the MIPS port, but one wonders if MIPS suffers from the same issues, and I’m quite sure it’s not tested anywhere near as well. As 32-bit arithmetic instructions aren’t orthogonal in Power ISA this change would require some significant rearchitecting and I’ve just come off a really bad week at work, so I’ll just try to pull up the current JIT to 102 so that those of you building the new ESR can continue to use Baseline Interpreter and Baseline Compiler, and then it will be time for more major surgery on the source code. You can help (please!).
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Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Enhancing trust and security online is one of the defining challenges of our time – in the EU alone, 37% of residents do not believe they can sufficiently protect themselves from cybercrime. Individuals need assurance that their credit card numbers, social media logins, and other sensitive data are protected from cybercriminals when browsing. With that in mind, we’ve just unveiled an update to the security policies that protect people from cybercrime, demonstrating again the critical role Firefox plays in ensuring trust and security online.
Browsers like Firefox use encryption to protect individuals’ data from eavesdroppers when they navigate online (e.g. when sending credit card details to an online marketplace). But protecting data from cybercriminals when it’s on the move is only part of the risk we mitigate. Individuals also need assurance that they are sending data to the correct domain (e.g., “amazon.com”). If someone sends their private data to a cybercriminal instead of to their bank, for example, it is of little consolation that the data was encrypted while getting there.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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check_pgbackrest is designed to monitor pgBackRest backups from Nagios, relying on the status information given by the info command.
It allows to monitor the backups retention and the consistency of the archived WAL segments.
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Postgres London 2022 is the PostgreSQL Community conference for the whole UK, located a short tube hop from London mainline railway stations and airports.
Speakers are covering new features of PostgreSQL 15, info on the new Kubernetes operators, user talks about managing 5000 instances and about new web frameworks, amongst many others!
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GNU Projects
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I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
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Note that a new maintainer, Kjharcombe, has recently been put in place. We are hoping to be able to continue development with this package.
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Programming/Development
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I’ve been going over the various things that have crept into my day-to-day computing and evaluating them. In some cases I’ve found things that needed maintenance (perhaps a future post about refactoring my mutt[1] configuration is called for), and in others I’ve taken the opportunity to evaluate alternatives.
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Leftovers
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A friend submitted it to the Accursed Orange Website. Some of the discussion there was interesting. Many people asserted that minimizing seasonal variation in temperature is an unrealistic way of explicating what makes weather “nice”. In particular, there were jokes about how highly-ranked Reykjavík was.
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It’s a pretty common thing these days for a company to make a pivot, to change up its business model midstream because of some perceived weaknesses of the original approach. Small startups do it all the time; so, too, do massive corporate giants. (May I introduce you to Meta?) But I think a big thing to keep in mind is that changing a business model in an age where the ultimate product you’re moving around is chunks of electronic data? That’s something a lot different from having to basically shift your business model from, say, selling playing cards to developing video games (as one famous hard-pivoting company, Nintendo, was famous for doing). In the spirit of thinking ambitiously, in today’s Tedium, I want to highlight a few examples of companies that made pivots so extreme that you probably would have never guessed they switched gears so drastically.
[...]
Over time, Regina became a purely vacuum-driven play, and by midcentury was a household name in vacuums. Notably, in the 1990s, the company brought in Pigpen, the famously messy character from the Peanuts cartoons, to promote the company’s carpet cleaners.
The company eventually fell into merger hell, at various points being owned by Philips Electronics, Oreck, and the corporate owners of the Dirt Devil brand. But recently, the company relaunched under new corporate ownership, in case you’re in the mood for owning a vacuum developed by a corporate ancestor that started out making music boxes.
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Science
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Researchers at The Asteroid Institute have developed a way to locate previously unknown asteroids in astronomical data, and all it took was a massive amount of cloud computing power to do it.
Traditionally, asteroid spotters would have to build so-called tracklets of multiple night sky images taken in short succession that show a suspected minor planetoid’s movement. If what’s observed matches orbital calculations, congratulations: it’s an asteroid.
Asteroid Institute scientists are finding a way around that time sink with a novel algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR, that can comb through mountains of data, make orbital predictions, transform sky images, and match it to other data points to establish asteroid identity.
To prove the concept, THOR co-creator and Asteroid Institute graduate fellow Joachim Moeyens focused on a thirty-day window of data pulled from the NOIRLab Source Catalog, a 68-billion-point dataset of National Optical and Astronomy Observatory telescope images.
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Hardware
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AAEON PICO-V2K4 is a Pico-ITX board powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 processor with up to 8 cores, AMD Radeon graphics, which should make it the world’s smallest Ryzen V2000 SBC on the market.
The board comes with up to 32GB soldered-on memory and a 64GB NVMe flash, supports for SATA and M.2 NVMe storage, dual Gigabit Ethernet, up to four 4K display interfaces, four serial ports, and more. Use cases range from medical imaging (x-ray and MRI scan analysis) to casino gaming machines, and industrial automation.
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European microprocessor designer SiPearl revealed deals with Nvidia and HPE today, saying they would up the development of high-performance compute (HPC) and exascale systems on the continent.
Announced to coincide with the ISC 2022 High Performance conference in Hamburg this week, the agreements see SiPearl working with two big dogs in the HPC market: HPE is the owner of supercomputing pioneer Cray and Nvidia is a leader in GPU acceleration.
With HPE, SiPearl said it is working to jointly develop a supercomputer platform that combines HPE’s technology and SiPearl’s upcoming Rhea processor. Rhea is an Arm-based chip with RISC-V controllers, planned to appear in next-generation exascale computers.
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PC and printer giant HP Inc. is boldly but belatedly turning its back on Russia and Belarus due to the continued conflict in Ukraine.
HP was among the first wave of tech companies to suspend shipments to the countries soon after Russia invaded its neighbor on February 24, but now the company’s president and CEO Enrique Lores is making the move more permanent.
“Considering the COVID environment and long-term outlook for Russia, we have decided to stop our Russia activity and have begun the process of fully winding down our operations,” he said on a Q2 earnings call with analysts.
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Security
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Microsoft has detailed a workaround for admins to protect their networks from a zero-day flaw in a Windows tool that hackers have been exploiting via malicious Word documents. Over the weekend, security researchers discovered a malicious Word document that was uploaded to Google-owned VirusTotal on 25 May from an IP address in Belarus.
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Weeks after the disclosure of the vulnerability (CVE-2022-29464) in WSO2 products, attackers are leveraging the flaw to install Linux-compatible Cobalt Strike beacons, cryptocurrency miners and more.
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It exists in Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), enabling remote code execution. It’ll be assigned a CVE in due course, currently it’s Reserved. Microsoft provide all the details here CVE-2022-30190.
[...]
Put more simply; it makes Arbitrary Code Execution attacks possible when previewing or opening documents.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued Directions on April 28, 2022, without sustained stakeholder consultation, that will weaken cybersecurity, amplify the risk of surveillance, and jeopardise the right to privacy in India. Access Now and an international coalition of organisations and individuals are urging CERT-In to immediately withdraw these Directions.
“Unchecked surveillance is a pressing concern in India — one that is severely aggravated by the new data retention mandate in CERT-In’s Directions, which impact millions of people connected in India,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel at Access Now. “Requiring service providers, including VPN providers, to log information that they may otherwise not collect, for five years or more, violates the right to privacy protected by the Indian Constitution. This outrageous mandate weakens cybersecurity by creating a vulnerability that can be exploited to the detriment of people’s safety.”
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Finance
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TomTom says it is laying off 10 percent of its global workforce due to advances in automation technology and greater use of digital techniques in its mapmaking process.
The planned cuts will equate to about 500 employees at the Netherlands-based geolocation tech specialist, which was hit hard by the pandemic and remains in recovery mode.
“Higher levels of automation and the integration of a variety of digital sources will result in fresher and richer maps, with wider coverage,” said CEO Harold Goddijn. “These better maps will improve our product offerings and allow us to address a broader market, both in the Automotive and Enterprise businesses.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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In a welcome step towards transparency and accountability, the Department of Telecommunications (“DoT”) has recently started publishing the blocking notifications/instructions to Internet Service Licensees under court orders. We wrote to the DoT to appreciate their proactiveness in making these court orders public and urged them to ensure that executive blocking orders are also published and made publicly available.
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The UK government has listened to civil society’s assertion that blocking the flow of information in and out of Russia will strike a blow to the rights of millions affected by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
“On this occasion, the UK government has put people first by targeting its sanctions to better protect human rights, online and offline, while still delivering a powerful public punch to Russia’s war machine,” said Natalia Krapiva, Tech-Legal Counsel at Access Now. “Keeping people online, and news media in operation, will do more to advance democracy and strengthen civic actors than a wholesale ban on commercial services would accomplish.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Harvard University’s announcement at the end of April that it would invest $100 million to redress its links to slavery drew flurries of headlines and mild praise from Black scholars.
It was an acceptable first step, they said, as Harvard simultaneously released an extensive report documenting the “integral” role the horrors of slavery played in shaping the institution. Other top-ranked universities have also acknowledged their slavery connections, notably Brown University, which in 2006 started the movement with a report exploring topics like how slaves made money for the institution, funding that became the root of many of its assets, including its endowment that now totals almost $7 billion.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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A California Right to Repair bill, SB 983, died in committee last week, despite broad consumer support for fixable products.
It’s not clear who killed the bill, but Right to Repair advocates point to the usual suspects – the tech companies that benefit by controlling who can repair their goods and that have lobbied against Right to Repair bills all over the US.
“It happened in the most shadowy, unaccountable part of the process, so it’s hard to know exactly what happened,” said Nathan Proctor, US Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) senior Right to Repair campaign director, in a message to The Register.
Proctor said it could be that special interests got to political leaders but also allowed that those nixing the bill just didn’t consider it to be a priority at the moment.
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Gemini for Golang Programmers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Today we take a look at ways Go (Golang) developers can leverage Gemini protocol to their advantage; there’s a relatively new site or capsule called gemini://godocs.io
THE future of Gemini seems bright. As shown in the figure/image/chart at the bottom, based on this Hungarian capsule and Francophone dataset: “There are 2450 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1954 of them.” It keeps growing. There are also quite a few capsules in east Asia, Russia, and all sorts of rather remote and barely-connected places. Gemini is a lot more inclusive than the Web because of its low entry barrier (minimal requirements).
“It should be possible to do programming without a Web browser for referencing/lookups. Gemini is highly suitable for this task.”Today I decided to show how programmers can use Gemini in place of technical books, or how they can look up libraries on the Internet, especially or specifically for Go in this case.
Since almost everything in Gemini is Free software (not only tools and clients/browsers but also capsules), gemini://godocs.io could be modeled after the “now-defunct godoc.org, operated by Drew Devault.”
It works very well. It should be possible to do programming without a Web browser for referencing/lookups. Gemini is highly suitable for this task. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Applications
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This series highlights best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
horcrux is an open source tool that’s designed to split files and keep them secure with encryption. This encryption doesn’t require remembering a passphrase or retaining a private key. Instead, the utility uses the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme to break an encryption key into parts that can be recombined to create the original key, but only requiring a certain threshold to do so.
The tool therefore includes redundancy so that you can resurrect the original file without needing access to all of the split files.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this small tutorial, we will show you how to insttall qBittorrent on Ubuntu Systems.
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If you are from a programming or scripting background then you should be familiar with the concept called “conditional statements”. The conditional statements allow you to execute the code based on the result of the condition. Similarly in ansible, you can use the when conditional statements to execute tasks. If the condition is evaluated to true, the task will run, else the task will be skipped.
The syntax for the when conditional statement is as follows. You will learn how to apply the conditional statement with tasks in the subsequent sections.
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Hello techies, recently Red Hat has released its latest operating system RHEL 9. RHEL 9 fulfill all the requirements of hybrid cloud. It can be installed on physical server, virtual machine and inside the container image.
When we don’t have subscription and want to install packages for doing the POCs then setting up local yum or dnf repository will be handy.
In this guide, we will cover how to create local yum/dnf repository on RHEL 9 using DVD or ISO file step by step.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9), code-named Plow, is now generally available (GA). Red Hat made the announcement on the 18th of May 2022. It takes over from the Beta release which has been around since 3, November 2021.
RHEL 9 is a number of firsts in the Red Hat family. It is the first major release since the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM in July 2019, and the first major version since the deprecation of the CentOS Project in favor of CentOS Stream which is now the upstream of RHEL.
RHEL 9 is the latest major version of RHEL and comes with Kernel 5.14 and a host of new software packages and tons of enhancements. It places an emphasis on security, stability, flexibility, and reliability.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the hostname on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, A computer name (aka hostname) is a label on a computer network that is used to identify the device. This name also differentiates a particular device from others within a local network. Moreover, this name makes an operating system recognizable in the network, thus making the data exchange within the same network easy.
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 change of your hostname 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.
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Vagrant is an open-source command-line utility that enables Linux users to create and manage virtual machines using the virtualization hypervisors like VirtualBox, VMware and others. Before installing Vagrant on any system, you must ensure the installation of a virtualization hypervisor first as this allows you to work in a different environment without shutting down your system.
This article, guides you in installing Vagrant on Ubuntu 22.04 using the VirtualBox as a virtualization hypervisor.
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Netdata is an open-source monitoring system for Linux-based operating systems. It provides real-time performance and monitoring using beautiful and detailed dashboards. In this tutorial, you will learn to install and monitor various services using Netdata Tool on a Rocky Linux 8 server. We will use Netdata to track the metrics of a LEMP stack and Docker engine.
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uGet is a free, lightweight and open-source download manager for Linux users that speeds up the download process. It’s a perfect utility for those who want to download large files on their system. It can easily download multiple files at a time and gives you the option to queue them for faster downloading.
In this tutorial, you will be able to learn the way to install uGet on Ubuntu 22.04.
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The network is one of the most complex and sensitive components of an IT infrastructure. System administrators must understand various layers, interfaces, protocols, tools, and ports to effectively handle network communication. You must use the correct ports to enable secure communication.
Nmap is an open-source command-line tool to scan ports, audit network security, detect hosts and services, and get a list of open ports. It was started as a Linux tool and later included on Windows, macOS, and BSD.
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Secure Boot uses digital key pairs to check that SystemTap and other startup code hasn’t been altered by a rootkit or similar mechanism.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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KDE Plasma and Xfce are two popular desktop environment options for lightweight Linux distributions.
While Xfce is still favored more for some of the best lightweight Linux distributions, KDE Plasma is not a resource-heavy desktop either.
To help you pick a suitable desktop environment, we will be comparing some of the most common aspects of a desktop environment.
In case you are exploring some of the best desktop environments for the first time, you might want to know the differences between KDE Plasma and GNOME as well. It should help you choose the ideal desktop for your system.
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In May 2022, Xfce 4.16 users received two new maintenance updates to the Xfce Terminal modern terminal emulator app that only addressed a regression with the scrollbar position setting, a regression that broke scroll-on-output, an issue with KeyEvents when activating a TAB accelerator, as well as another regression with URL drag-n-drop adding rubbish characters.
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I’m an ardent KDE Plasma Desktop user, but at work I happily use GNOME. Without getting into the question of which desktop I’d take to a desert island (that happens to have a power outlet), I see the merits of both desktops, and I’d rather use either of them than non-open source desktop alternatives.
I’ve tried the proprietary alternatives, and believe me, they’re not fun (it took one over a decade to get virtual workspaces, and the other still doesn’t have a screenshot function built in). And for all the collaboration that the KDE and GNOME developers do these days at conferences like GUADEC, there’s still a great philosophical divide between the two.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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An editorial about the GNOME Shell and components for mobile phones in terms of the current state, progress and future.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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Linux Lite, one of the best Windows-like distros, has just released its latest version, 6.0.
Linux Lite 6.0 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and includes Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS out of the box.
This upgrade packs in a considerable number of exciting new features, including a new window theme and assistive technologies.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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/e/OS is a popular privacy-focused mobile operating system as an alternative to Google’s Android.
The operating system (fork of Lineage OS) eliminates any Google-related dependencies and encourages you to work without relying directly on any Google services.
Instead, it offers some of its solutions as alternatives to offer you a privacy-friendly ecosystem.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Programming/Development
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Perhaps rather unexpectedly, on the 14th of March this year the GCC mailing list received an announcement regarding the release of the first ever COBOL front-end for the GCC compiler. For the uninitiated, COBOL saw its first release in 1959, making it with 63 years one of the oldest programming language that is still in regular use. The reason for its persistence is mostly due to its focus from the beginning as a transaction-oriented, domain specific language (DSL).
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Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.
Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs, and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We’re going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we’ll do so when we think it’s a good idea.
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Leftovers
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Cyberdecks make for interesting projects, some are a bit rough while others are beautiful, but it’s maybe something that even the most ardent enthusiast might agree — these home-made portable computers aren’t always the most convenient to use. Thus we’re very pleased to see this machine from [TRL], as it takes the cyberdeck aesthetic and renders it in a form that looks as though it might be quite practical to use.
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As electronics hobbyists we are grateful to our spouses and flatmates who gracefully tolerate all of our weird equipment and chaotic projects in their homes. But it takes a different level of dedication to share one’s home with a pipe organ enthusiast: back in the 1970s, one organist in Bristol went to the effort of installing a full-sized church organ into their house, effectively turning the modest dwelling into one giant musical instrument. Recently however, the house passed on to new owners who, understandably anxious to reclaim some space, listed the whole system on eBay.
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I was thinking the other day about the way I learned English during my teenage years in Mexico and how in general learning and speaking other languages in a largely monolingual community makes you the target of mocking and bullying (your mileage might vary).
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Education
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This is a story about how history isn’t just the sum of textbooks. Sometimes the past gets erased or forgotten and needs to be restored. In 2003, a basketball player for small Division III Manhattanville College named Toni Smith created a media uproar when she turned her back on the American flag during the national anthem. She was “Kaepernick before Kaepernick” and, like the former NFL quarterback, her reasons for protesting during the anthem were immediately distorted. The press painted Smith’s actions as strictly a statement against George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East. But the reality was more complicated.
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Hardware
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Troll YouTube long enough and chances are good that you’ll come across all kinds of videos of the “How It’s Made” genre. And buried in with the frying pans and treadmills and dental floss manufacturers, there no doubt will be deep dives on how pipe is made. Methods will vary by material, but copper, PVC, cast iron, or even concrete, what the pipe factories will all have in common is the high degree of automation they employ. With a commodity item like pipe, it’s hard to differentiate yourself from another manufacturer on features, so price is about the only way to compete. That means cutting costs to the bone, and that means getting rid of as many employees as possible.
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Have you been slowly falling down a rabbit hole of Stallman-like paranoia of computers ever since installing Ubuntu for the first time in 2007? Do you now abhor anything with a GUI, including browsers? Do you check your mail with the command line even though you’re behind seven proxies? But, do you still want to play Minecraft? If so, this command-line-only screen viewer might just be the tool to use a GUI without technically using one.
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I have an Acer monitor that I’ve owned for around 15 years, and thanks to my having paid extra at the time for the model sporting a DVI socket for HDMI compatibility it still finds a place as one of my desktop monitors. It has a power brick that supplies it with 1 2V at 4.5 A, and over the years this has developed an annoying whine. Something’s loose in the magnetics, and I really should replace it. So off to AliExpress I went, and dropped in an order for a 12 V, 5 A power brick.
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When you’re working with PCBs and making single units to knock out in those Chinese fabs, going from layout to manufacturable Gerber files is just a few button presses, no matter what PCB layout tool you prefer. But, once you get into producing sets of PCBs that form a larger system, or are making multiple copies for efficient manufacturing, then you’re not going to get far without delving into the art of PCB panelization. We’ve seen a few options over the years, and here’s yet another one that’s looking quite promising — hm-panelizer by [halfmarble] is a cross platform Python GUI application, which leverages Kivy, so it should run on pretty well on most major platforms without too much hassle. The tool is early in development, so is restricted to handling only straight PCB edges, with horizontal mouse-bites for now, but we’re sure it will quickly grow more general purpose capabilities given time and support.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Similar to the harm and death smoking brings to individuals, the World Health Health Organization said Tuesday that the practices of the tobacco industry are wreaking environmental havoc and degradation around the globe.
“The environmental consequences of tobacco use move it from being a human problem to a planetary problem.”
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Security
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Defence/Aggression
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Former US President George W. Bush has had the good fortune of facing such a foiling, though the claims remain fresh. On May 24, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi national living in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested and chargedwith aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a former US official and charges of attempting to bring foreign nationals to the US. The nationals in question are said to be affiliated with the Islamic State group.
According to court documents, the FBI foiled the alleged plot through using informants. In November last year, Shihab is said to have told one of them that he “wished to kill former President Bush because they felt that he was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the entire country of Iraq.”
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One defining characteristic of the 21st century is that the United States has proven to be an easily distracted superpower. Since the dawn of the new millennium, both Republican and Democratic administrations have promised to take China more seriously as a threat, only to have that policy get sidelined more pressing concerns.
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On Memorial Day where the United States honors its wars and its war dead, it seems to me that too many in our country have adopted a new pledge of allegiance:
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As BBC expounds on nukes, low-yield Our hay truck lurches as we leave the field. A disc can launch them from the NATO ring Encircling our competitor. It’s spring.
Ill-omened, like the dread two-headed calf Are infants suckled by Globemaster jets. And Service suicides are up by half! The more we hear, the more macabre it gets.
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Monika McDermott: While there is consistently a majority in favor of restricting gun access a little bit more than the government currently does, usually that’s a slim majority – though that support tends to spike in the short term after events like the recent mass shootings.
We tend to find even gun owners are in support of restrictions like background checks for all gun sales, including at gun shows. So that’s one that everyone gets behind. The other one that gun-owning households get behind is they don’t mind law enforcement taking guns away from people who have been legally judged to be unstable or dangerous. Those are two restrictions on which you can get virtual unanimous support from the American public. But agreement on specific elements isn’t everything.
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And now in the present, skepticism concerning the war in Ukraine is met with similar open hostility. When we point out the decades of clear warnings about the risks of NATO expansion eastward, the diplomatic failures such as the Minsk Accords, and the presence of extreme ethnic nationalists in Ukraine (Russia has them as well) we encounter waves of invective clearly aimed at silencing reasoned discussion. We are labeled Putin lovers, supporters of Russian imperialism, and genocide enablers, just for openers.
So yes, in some ways 2022 feels like 2003 – and not in a good way.
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It happened again.
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It could be make or break time for the Iran nuclear deal.
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The most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has finally named the connections that frontline communities have been pointing out since the inception of the climate justice movement. This report once again warns we’re rapidly running out of time to “secure a livable future,” but for the first time since the IPCC began issuing its global climate assessments in 1988, it goes on to establish a direct relationship between colonization and climate change.
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New outcries for gun control have followed the horrible tragedies of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. “Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died,” President Biden declared over the weekend during a university commencement address. As he has said, a badly needed step is gun control—which, it’s clear from evidence in many countries, would sharply reduce gun-related deaths.
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Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as “collateral damage.”
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Amid reports that the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee plans to mark up a package of eight gun violence prevention bills at an emergency hearing on Thursday, progressives are decrying the absence of an assault weapons ban—a popular and proven way to reduce mass shootings.
The panel’s consideration of the so-called Protecting Our Kids Act comes amid the nation’s ongoing gun violence crisis, which has received renewed attention in the wake of two horrific massacres—at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and at a grocery store in Buffalo—committed by 18-year-olds with AR-15-style rifles.
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Environment
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German police on Tuesday raided Deutsche Bank headquarters and the offices of asset manager DWS—which is 80% owned by Deutsche Bank—as part of an investigation into whether the firms have presented investments and products as more climate-friendly than they really are, a notorious practice known as “greenwashing.”
The Frankfurt public prosecutors’ office said in a statement that the raid—which reportedly involved around 50 law enforcement officials—was “triggered by reports in the international and national media that the asset manager DWS, when marketing so-called ‘green financial products,’ had sold these financial products as ‘greener’ or ‘more sustainable’ than they actually were.”
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Energy
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An analysis published Tuesday revealed that six of Canada’s largest banks are financing the construction of the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, partially fulfilling a promise by the center-left government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to secure private funding for the highly controversial project while calling into question the administration’s pledge to cap oil and gas emissions.
“Our big fossil banks and the federal government have been working in tandem for a long time behind the scenes.”
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Wildlife/Nature
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Wildlife defenders on Tuesday welcomed a California appeals court ruling affirming that a regulatory agency can classify four types of bumblebees as “fish” under the law in order to consider them for candidacy on the state’s endangered species list, a ruling that paves the way for the protection of other insects including the monarch butterfly.
“With one out of every three bites of food we eat coming from a crop pollinated by bees, this court decision is critical to protecting our food supply,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the advocacy group Center for Food Safety, a party to the case.
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Finance
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A running tally updated Tuesday shows that more than 60 members of Congress have recently violated a federal law aimed at preventing insider trading, a finding that comes as proposals to bar federal lawmakers from trading stocks languish in the House and Senate.
“As Congress stalls on a congressional stock trading bill, its members keep breaking the ridiculously weak existing rules.”
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The forum calls itself an “independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world.” WEF attendees are representative of global elites who wield both political and economic power, and, in superhero fashion, seem to have adopted a do-gooder attitude of, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
The last time the group of elites met was in January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, when Professor Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive chairman, said, “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Sydney, Australia—Three months after a “rain bomb” detonated over the city of Brisbane—after the relentless floods had drowned entire suburbs, after 60,000 tons of water-logged trash had been pulled from the wreckage, after a volunteer “mud army” had been deployed to scrape the sludge from the streets, after the actuaries had appraised the total damage at $3.35 billion—a dam finally broke in Australian politics.
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Elections neutered by the right? Now fears of that are mounting. The battle’s changed from who can vote To who can do the counting.
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Portland, Me.—On a cloudy spring morning, Maine’s ex-governor, 73-year-old Paul LePage, journeyed to the heart of his state’s largest, most diverse, and most progressive city to preside over the opening of a new Multicultural Community Center. Wearing a lavender shirt and slacks, LePage wooed liberal Mainers, declaring that he wanted to make Maine “inclusive to all new citizens,” that he loved talking to immigrants about the countries they came from, and that he hoped his state would roll out the welcome mat and tell new arrivals “We love you.”1
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What we need in America today is a giant breakthrough among the American people, … one that entails a great awakening of consciousness and conscience
Gates has it all wrong. The worst mistake the American people have ever made was permitting their federal government to be converted to a national-security state. That mistake not only contributed to the destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people: It also plunged our nation into an orgy of death and destruction in foreign countries as well as monetary and fiscal debauchery here at home.
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Warning that the court-ordered redrawing of New York’s congressional map has already left marginalized communities in the state with less representation, grassroots organizer Rana Abdelhamid on Tuesday announced that she was ending her campaign in the state’s 12th District because the new district boundaries cut her off from the communities she hope to represent.
“Because my community and I were cut out of our district, we were left with no other choice,” Abdelhamid said in a statement. “The new NY-12, which was drawn through an undemocratic process, no longer includes Queens or Brooklyn.”
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The massacre of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last week has pushed the Canadian government to further strengthen firearm regulations in the country, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warning that without strict gun control, Canada could begin seeing frequent mass shootings as the U.S. does.
“We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”
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Tucker Carlson and Fox “News,” rightwing billionaires, a bought-off Supreme Court, polluting industries, and the politicians they all own have screwed up America so bad that Canada—Canada, for G-d’s sake!—is worrying about us.
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More than a dozen House Democrats on Tuesday implored the Biden administration to immediately do everything in its power to prevent Israeli forces from destroying additional Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
“Forced displacement and transfer by Israel of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta… would amount to a war crime.”
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Progressives within and beyond Congress took aim at Sen. Joe Manchin on Tuesday after the West Virginia Democrat infamous for blocking his own party’s priorities took to Twitter to call for lowering prescription drug prices.
“What an amazing display of audacity.”
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Amid heightened calls for stricter U.S. gun laws after a massacre at a Texas elementary school, a video published Tuesday targets Republican political candidates—and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—for using firearms in campaign advertising to appeal to voters.
“If you’re only going to watch one thing today, make it this,” Indivisible tweeted, sharing the two-minute video produced by communications consultant Timothy Burke.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Earlier this month the ACLU argued before the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in defense of a high school student expelled for temporarily posting to Snapchat a picture of his friends dressed in World War II–era clothes at a thrift store with the caption: “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” He took it down shortly thereafter—and apologized for what was a stupid and deeply offensive joke—but the school expelled him nonetheless. We argued that while the anti-Semitic message was deeply offensive, it was also protected by the First Amendment when uttered outside of the school, and could not be the basis for punishment. In doing so, we were only doing what we have always done—defending speech rights for all, even those with whom we disagree.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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In 2015, the Cabinet Office requested that the Law Commission, an organization of individuals in the legal profession who advise the government, review the Official Secrets Acts, which apply to unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
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In October of 2021, Kristyn Smith checked herself out of the hospital in Charleston, W.Va., where she had been denied an abortion. Bleeding and in pain, Smith drove for six hours with her fiancé to Washington, D.C., to have the procedure performed there. On the day of her first appointment at the Dupont Clinic, she was 27 weeks pregnant. “They were the sweetest, most compassionate people that I had ever met,” she said of the clinic staff, who made her feel safe and supported. The seven weeks leading up to her arrival there, however, had been a “nightmare.”
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With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to reverse Roe v. Wade, the Austin City Council is working on a resolution to help protect abortion patients and providers in the Texas city—a potential model for other U.S. communities where ending a pregnancy could be criminalized if the 1973 ruling is overturned.
José “Chito” Vela, an attorney who represents District 4 after winning a special election earlier this year, is leading the council’s plans for the Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone (GRACE) Act, which would effectively decriminalize the procedure by directing the Austin Police Department to make alleged crimes related to abortion its lowest priority and restricting the use of city funds and staff for investigations.
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Ana Ruth Delandaverde has been searching for her son, Ernesto Rafael Valencia, since October 9, 2012. The day he disappeared, Rafael contacted her from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, after setting off from El Salvador to find “the American dream”. Ruth put out the word on social networks and found indications that her son could be in Tijuana, but until now she had no way of making the trip north to look for him.
“I thank God because on my own I couldn’t come looking for my son here, only now that the First International Search Brigade was created have I been able to come search for him,” she says. She pastes posters of his face and personal data on lampposts and walls. Along with dozens of mothers and relatives of disappeared persons, Ruth searched the streets of the two westernmost border states of Mexican territory–Sonora and Baja California.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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But take a peek beyond those platforms and you can still find a thriving internet of millions who are empowered to control their own technology, art, and lives. Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and an EFF board member, says this is where we start reclaiming the internet for individual agency, control, creativity, and connection to culture – especially among society’s most vulnerable and marginalized members.
Dash speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien about building more humane and inclusive technology, and leveraging love of art and culture into grassroots movements for an internet that truly belongs to us all.
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I’m new to Gemini. I made a post to Antenna, the blog aggregator. I was interested to see how many hits it generated over 24 hours. After some data munging, I came up with this…
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Posted in Europe, Fraud at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Context: Elizabeth Holmes Charged With “Massive Fraud” and Team Battistelli Rushes to Distance Itself From Her
Summary: The EPO is enabling corruption and fraud; then again, the EPO is run by people who themselves engage in corruption and fraud, so it’s a miracle that European authorities haven’t done a thing to tackle the problem
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Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When organised, white-collar, corporate crime takes over patent offices and they try to do the same to courts/judges (UPC)
Summary: Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have spent years watering down EPO guidelines, after consultation with litigation profiteers and never with the public or elected representatives, so now it’s considered mandatory for patent examiners to ignore the EPC (hence the examiners started industrial action)
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