06.06.22
Posted in News Roundup at 6:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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This is an amazing achievement, and further goes to show that given enough time, someone will port Linux to it.
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Once upon a time, you couldn’t find a single machine in my home that wasn’t running on Linux.
A handful of laptops and one or two desktops came in and went out, but Linux stayed for more than ten years. If my fridge could run on Linux, I would’ve installed it. And then, Edge entered through Windows, and showed Linux the door (for good?!).
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I will give you my “tier list” for the various text editors that I have used, which includes…
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Wifi is terrible nobody would use wifi unless they absolutely have to luckily you generally don’t and there’s 2 things I’ve done to change fix it, one being powerline ethernet adapters and the other being finally getting a network switch.
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Kernel Space
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A summary of the changes in Linux Kernel 5.19 RC1 which spans processors, networking, storage, graphics and other Kernel modules.
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The next big Linux update could be a big deal, according to foundation founder and head honcho Linus Torvalds.
Tovalds said in the latest update (opens in new tab) on the development of the Linux 5.19 kernel that the “ARM generic kernel work (aka “multiplatform”) is pretty much done after 10+ years.”
He added: “StrongARM platforms remain with their separate kernels, and are expected to stay so, but compared to where things were a decade ago, this is a pretty big step.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Steps to install Uptime Kuma open source monitoring solution on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish without Docker to keep eye on your Server.
Kuma is a very lean monitoring tool for your own environment and many more. ICMP (ping) requests can be sent super easily or simply check whether a website is accessible. Even open TCP ports can be included super easily in the monitoring. It is a self-hosted monitoring tool like “Uptime Robot”.
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UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Microsoft PowerShell on CentOS 9 Stream [Ed: Sounds like a system's act of vandalism; suggests installing proprietary repository of Microsoft, rendering your machine spyware, controlled by the biggest enemy of GNU//Linux]
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Despite having a relatively steep learning curve, Linux distributions are one of the best operating systems you can use compared to their main alternatives, Windows and macOS. Linux is free and open-source.
It is rated as one of the most secure OS today and has thousands of software packages available for installation. It’s also possible to run Windows applications on Linux with the help of apps like Bottles and Wine.
However, like with any piece of software, anything can go wrong with Linux.
With one sudo command, you can permanently delete critical settings and packages on your system or make your OS un-bootable. Sometimes, normal system operations can cause these challenges. Maybe you are trying to install another Desktop environment that re-configures your entire system.
That leaves you wondering if it is possible to reinstate your system to a previous state. Well, that is possible with Timeshift.
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Containerized applications are only going to increase in popularity year by year, which means every developer and admin has to know how to deploy and manage those containers and services. To that end, several GUI tools have been developed and released to make the job considerably easier.
But not all of those tools are created equal. To date, my absolute favorite Docker GUI is Portainer, but there are plenty of other options. One such application is the official Docker Desktop GUI that’s available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Although Docker Desktop doesn’t give you nearly the amount of features and controls found in Portainer, it’s still a great GUI that allows you to manage running containers, pull and manage images, deploy containers from images, create development environments, add Kubernetes support, and even expand the feature set with extensions.
I want to walk you through the installation of Docker Desktop on Pop!_OS Linux and show you how to enable Kubernetes support and even extend it with Portainer.
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Today we are looking at how to install the Brave Browser on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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While they have always been secure, fast, and minimalistic, Chromebooks only supported progressive web apps in the beginning. That changed six years ago when Google announced the arrival of Android apps for Chromebooks, supercharging these small machines with millions of apps available for the mobile Android ecosystem (via Google). The apps can send notifications, work offline, and even allow touch input.
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Linux is a multi-user environment where numerous user accounts can be added and used like most operating systems. However, you might be surprised by how easy it is to create a new user on Linux. To illustrate this, I’m going to walk you through the steps of adding a new user with both a GUI tool and from the command line interface (CLI). Both methods are simple and can be done by anyone with just about any skill level.
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When you install a virtual machine or a guest OS on your machine, it does not exactly perform like the host OS because it has some limitations regarding performance. But VMware presented a solution for this by introducing VMware guest tools that enhance and improve the performance of the guest OS.
VMware tools enable the integration between the host and the guest operating systems. It includes a set of utilities that improves the graphical performance of VM and enables sharing folders, clock synchronization, mouse tracking, and much more. Therefore, whenever you install a virtual machine on VMware, your first priority should be to install VMware tools before doing anything else.
In this article, we will explain how to install VMware tools in Debian using two different methods.
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Routing is the transfer of an IP packet from one point to another across the network. When you send someone an email, you’re actually transmitting a series of IP packets or datagrams from your system to the other person’s computer. The packets sent from your computer pass through several gateways or routers to get to the destination computer system. The same is true for all Internet protocols such as HTTP, IRC, FTP, etc.
In all Linux and UNIX systems, the information about how the IP packets should be routed is stored in a kernel structure. These structures are called routing tables. If you want your system to communicate with other computers, you may want to configure these routing tables. First, it is important to know how to view these routing tables on your Linux system.
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Games
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When testing the language support I noticed, that it has been originally developed by a company in Spain called Alcachofa Soft S.L., so additional to English it also includes speech in Spanish. Subtitles are available in English, German , French, Italian and Spanish. Therefore I decided to try improving my Spanish language skills and began to play this Adventure. And although the game is from 1996 I enjoyed it a lot!
I figured out that if you press SPACE while a character is speaking, the sentence will be interrupted (apart from the voice part). And by pressing SPACE again the game continues. Which was rather useful for me in order to have more time for reading and understanding the subtitles.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Sir Isaac Newton once famously wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
Most organizations recognize the benefits of modernizing application delivery, from accelerated time to value and improved client experience to reduced staff burden and increased talent retention. However, achieving these objectives at scale remains arguably one of the most daunting challenges to IT teams.
Some organizations may find themselves lagging behind, debating where to begin as their environments continue to become more complex and their technical debt increases exponentially. Fortunately, Newton’s words highlight a silver lining: teams behind the curve have an advantage in that they’re able to learn from those who have come before them on the journey toward modernization.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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IT teams that run workloads on Ubuntu Linux have not one but two software package managers to work with: snap and apt.
Although snap and apt both automate software package installation, management and removal, they work in different ways. An organization’s choice between snap vs. apt depends on its IT priorities.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Back in 1980, the video game Battlezone was released, and it marked a major advancement in the world of computer graphics since it was the first game with a 3D first-person perspective. In it, the player must pilot a tank around a battlefield and fire at targets in an attempt to rack up the highest score possible. So as a way to commemorate the groundbreaking game, Mark Wilson created an approximation that runs on an Arduino Uno.
Wilson has previous experience with vector graphics on embedded targets, as evidenced by his work on ElitePetite, an approximation of the loading screens from Acornsoft’s Elite game. Based on prior effort, he started the project by attempting to reverse engineer the original 6502 assembly and replicate its behavior. This process was a challenge owing to the complexity of the code, but after designing a clever sparse pixel encoding algorithm, the game could be completed, albeit with some minor graphical problems that appear when the game is being displayed on the attached 320×240 LCD screen.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Standards/Consortia
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Building Gemipedia has taught me a lot about how to translate the various types of HTML formatting you find in Wikipedia content into Gemtext. Ignore things like italics or emphasis (you often don’t need them). How do you represent math formulas?
[...]
Many of the subscript and superscript letters come from different Unicode blocks, so there isn’t a simple math function you can use to convert a typical letter into the subscript or superscript version, like you can easily compute the ASCII code of a lowercase letter from the ASCII code of the uppercase version. So the code to do the conversion is just a giant switch statement, that substitutes one character for another. You can see that in the “SuperscriptConverter.cs” and SubscriptConverter.cs” files in the Gemipedia source code…
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A few days ago I got my bombadillo fork working with the Spartan protocol. Today I added the “-p” flag. This fetches the URL and prints the output to stdout.
Por que?
Well, I had managed to get Spartan working with a little Racket version I was working on. I found out about the Tinyblog format, and figured that it would be interesting. But I don’t fancy trying to implement Gemini myself. The whole certificate thing looks a pain.
I decided that a better approach would be to use bombadillo as a download agent. The plan is that it would output to a temporary file that Racket could then process. It seems easier.
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Before this, the latest refreshed specification of HTTP/1.1 was done in the RFC 7230 series, published in June 2014. After that, HTTP/2 was done in the spring of 2015 and recently the HTTP/3 spec has been a work in progress.
To better reflect this new world of multiple HTTP versions and an HTTP protocol ecosystem that has some parts that are common for all versions and some other parts that are specific for each particular version, the team behind this refresh has been working on this updated series.
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Leftovers
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Linux Foundation
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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it “suddenly” and without consent it also exists on this server i2.wp.com, the “cool” wordpress CDN, that is supposed to speed up loading time of a blog… well… not this blog eh?
[...]
no – this blog is NOT using jetpack site accelerator.
also the option described is not available on self hosted wordpress.
#wtf?
wordpress – a giant content “sucking up ur content and storing it forever” machine?
time for alternatives.
if the visitor Firefox -> F12 -> network checks where the parts of this blog are coming from, they are all coming from dwaves.de and not some wordpress CDN for “faster loading time”.
the only external content are the smileys: https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f61c.svg
(those evil smileys probably “report back” to wordpress… how much that article was visited… and they (probably) sell it again… to G*** and M$ and whoever is willing to pay for that data)
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Send this to a friend
Posted in Site News at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 468a226b473b704c47a374d6eb6d940a
Linux Foundation on OSS
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Linux Foundation, which has long been run by proprietary software companies, is herding coders and their code into the arms of Microsoft’s proprietary software (such as GitHub), so isn’t it weird that the Foundation claims to be the authority on the subject of “OSS”?
THE Linux Foundation has released a report about "OSS" using only proprietary software, but that’s not the worst part. As I show in the video above, the Foundation promotes a misleading, revisionist history. It moreover promotes proprietary corporations’ interests, including surveillance and openwashing thereof.
“As I show in the video above, the Foundation promotes a misleading, revisionist history. It moreover promotes proprietary corporations’ interests, including surveillance and openwashing thereof.”The main conclusion is that the Linux [sic] Foundation has the potential to actually be about Linux and about “OSS”; but it’s not there. The problem or the rot starts at the top management, not just evasive Jim Zemlin and the Board. The funding structure of the Foundation likely attracted the wrath of the IRS already* and it means that the Foundation is beholden to anti-Linux and anti-”OSS” interests. All they want is openwashing and the occasional greenwashing. █
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* It is June 2022 already, i.e. almost late 2022. The last of the Linux Foundation’s IRS filings online go no further than: “Tax Year 2018 Form 990O” (don’t let political stunts distract from that)
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 2:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Elephant Robotics MechArm Pi 270 is a six-axis robotic arm with a 270mm working radius, support for up to 250 grams payload, and that runs Debian/Ubuntu + ROS on a Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer.
The robotic arm was introduced last year in two separate crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo organized by MechArm, which has now joined Elephant Robotics, and now supports myStudio software to upgrade the software, provide video tutorials on how to use the robot, as well as maintenance and repair information.
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As Linux turns 30, Brian Exelbierd considers the reason for the open source standard-bearer’s success
Last year saw the Linux kernel reach its 30th anniversary. It’s been a crazy three decades for Linux, with it having moved from an enthusiast project to seizing a dominant share of the server and enterprise…
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Server
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Rackspace had the most reliable hosting company site in May 2022, climbing up ten places on the leaderboard this month. Rackspace provides a variety of cloud, data, and security services, with data centres across the globe including in cities such as London, Sydney, Chicago, and Shanghai.
Krystal came in second, whilst New York Internet (NYI) secured third place, resulting in both companies moving up one spot compared to April 2022. UK-based Krystal offers a range of hosting solutions including dedicated servers, managed and application hosting, and Cloud VPS. NYI provides hybrid IT solutions ranging from cloud solutions to colocation services.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.18.2 kernel.
All users of the 5.18 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.18.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.18.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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New and updated drivers account for around 60% of the release
Linus Torvalds has made the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 5.19 kernel series available to the public.
In his 5.19-rc1 mailing list announcement, Torvalds noted that the development process for this version has been made difficult by many late pull requests, although he applauded the fact that most were properly signed.
“So the last two weeks were fairly normal, although I will gripe and moan a bit about how many late pull requests I got. The second week started out very calm, but that was sadly only because a lot of people left their final pull request pretty late,” Torvalds said, with characteristic bluntness, before adding: “But what does make me pretty pleased is that pretty much all of the pull requests were signed tags. I still don’t technically require signatures for pulls from kernel.org, but I’ve been (not very subtly) encouraging people to use them, and we’re getting there. It’s just good hygiene.”
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Graphics Stack
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The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now supports the new Valhall architecture with fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G57, a Valhall GPU. The final Mesa patches are landing today, and the required kernel patches are queued for merge upstream.
Mali-G57 features in new MediaTek Chromebooks with the MT8192 and MT8195 system-on-chips. Collaborans AngeloGioacchino Del Regno and Nícolas F. R. A. Prado are spearheading the mainlining effort for these devices. With Mesa 22.2 and an appropriate kernel, accelerated graphics will work out of the box on Linux on these laptops.
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In recent days I have been testing how modifying the default CPU and GPU frequencies on the rpi4 increases the performance of our reference Vulkan applications. By default Raspbian uses 1500MHz and 500MHz respectively. But with a good heat dissipation (a good fan, rpi400 heat spreader, etc) you can play a little with those values.
One of the tools we usually use to check performance changes are gfxreconstruct. This tools allows you to record all the Vulkan calls during a execution of an aplication, and then you can replay the captured file. So we have traces of several applications, and we use them to test any hypothetical performance improvement, or to verify that some change doesn’t cause a performance drop.
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Applications
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After you’ve downloaded the Speek AppImage, you need to make it executable. To do this, first, open the file manager on your system and navigate to the directory where you’ve downloaded the Speek AppImage.
Right-click on the AppImage and select Properties. In the Properties window, click on the Permissions tab. Here, check off the box beside Allow executing file as a program if you’re using a Nautilus-based file manager.
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In a world that wants to track every move you make, we think it’s important to have alternatives that are free, open and respect your digital rights. Purism is a company dedicated to freedom, privacy, and security. At Purism, we make freedom-respecting hardware, software and online services.
Software is the life-blood of any hardware. If you are looking for programs available from the PureOS store, here is a comprehensive guide to help you choose.
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People who need to download bulk files often look for the best torrent client for Linux. Basically, torrents are an excellent source for downloading large documents like motion pictures, Movies, Games, and TV appearances. They transform your PC into part of a host where information is shared as it’s downloaded, so while you’re downloading something from other individuals, you’re likewise helping other people download the bits you’ve just got.
The outcome is an extremely reliable and frequently quick approach to getting your hands on galactic documents. Here come the questions about the best open source torrent client for Linux, which helps get the job done. This article will only discuss open source torrent clients for Linux, leaving some favorite closed source Torrent clients untouched.
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Though the world of music is dominated by streaming services, it has not discouraged developers from creating music players for desktop computers.
Recently, I came across a beautiful looking new music player for the Linux desktop. It’s called Amberol and I was awestruck by its beauty.
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Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.
However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.
This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products and services offered by Microsoft.
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Today, I’m pleased to announce that I released GTL v1.0.0¹!
GTL you say?
For the people who doesn’t know, GTL (Gemini TinyLogs) is a simple CLI/TUI tool to read tinylogs entries in a “timeline” way.
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Jynx mentioned experimenting with “living” in Emacs. As somebody who made the shift from “using” Emacs (an on/off ~20yr state) to living in emacs a few years ago, I just want to say: welcome! It’s a cozy place to live, and you’re always in complete control of your environment.
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This includes the entire application catalog, SDK, developer information, documentation, and a lot more. Impressive effort, and a great resource for people still using and/or playing with their webOS devices.
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Instructionals/Technical
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While using your cell phone to connect to your Linux system might not seem like much of a priority, it is possible and you might have a good reason to do this from time to time. If you have an Android cell phone, you can install a tool that will allow you to connect, open a terminal session on your Linux box and run commands just like you would if you were sitting in front of the system. Well, almost.
The tool that I recommend is called JuiceSSH. It installs easily and leaves an icon with an image of a lemon with its name below it on your screen. Click on that icon and select Quick Connect to set up your connection.
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In this video, I am going to show how to install AlmaLinux OS 9.0.
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In this brief guide, we will learn how to configure or set static IP address and DNS on a FreeBSD system from commandline. The steps provided below are tested on FreeBSd 12 and FreeBSD 13.1 versions.
First, let us set static IP address in FreeBSD.
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If you owe an old iPod and are running Linux on your computer, you can use Rockbox to breathe life to your old music player. It enables you to use your iPod without iTunes while also improving on the default sound quality of the iPod. Rockbox is also customizable and really easy to install. Here we will show you how to use Rockbox in Linux.
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AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework that assists with running single-page applications. It allows developers to use HTML as their template language and lets them create robust, interactive websites without having to reload the browser for every new page view.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Angular CLI and create an AngularJS application on AlmaLinux OS.
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The Linux Crash Course is a tutorial series that goes over all of the core concepts regarding Linux that you’ll need to know, one video at a time. In this episode, the wget command is covered.
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ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under the AGPLv3 license. It allows working with office documents, spreadsheets,and presentations, as well as with fillable forms, which you can save as PDF files. The suite uses DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX as core formats which guarantees high compatibility with MS Office files.
One of the strong points of ONLYOFFICE Docs is collaborative work on documents. The suite is equipped with real-time and paragraph-locking co-editing modes, review and track changes, comments, and built-in chat. There is also a possibility to add the Jitsi plugin for making audio and video calls inside the editors.
ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with various cloud services such as WordPress, Nextcloud, Strapi, Redmine, Jira, Moodle, etc., and embedded into your solution.
This article explains how to install ONLYOFFICE Docs on Ubuntu 20.04.
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Pentaho is a business intelligence software that provides data integration, OLAP services, reporting, information dashboards, data mining and extract, transform, load capabilities. Next I’ll show how to install Pentaho CE (Community Edition) on Centos 8.
You can get an installation guide for Pentaho CE on Ubuntu here: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/white-paper/pentaho-ce-installation-guide-on-linux-operating-system-whitepaper.pdf . Notice this guide is not for the server, and also a registration is needed.
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Ubuntu 22.04 misses coturn TURN and STUN server package in its system repository. Here’s how to install it via PPA.
Coturn is a free open source implementation of TURN and STUN Server, which can be used as either a VoIP media traffic NAT traversal server and gateway, or general-purpose network traffic TURN server and gateway.
The software package is available in all current Ubuntu releases, exclude Ubuntu 22.04! The reason that the new LTS exclude the package might be a compile issue due to OpenSSL 3.0 does no longer has FIPS 140 mode.
When you try installing the package in terminal, it will output that “E: Package ‘coturn’ has no installation candidate“.
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Accurate timekeeping is one of the most important configurations required for reliable communication between network-based computers. It is also needed to ensure system components, including systemd timers and cronjobs, run at the correct time. Computers can utilize the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their time to an upstream time server or a pool of servers to maintain accurate time.
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Making a set of merged objects in Inkscape can be done easily, but there are many methods to achieve that goal, and in this article, we will explore various methods and techniques to merge objects in Inkscape.
We will list these methods according to the output of them, from an easy-to-edit output (I call it non-destructive), to a hard-to-edit output (destructive), don’t worry you can always press Ctrl+Z or go to Edit>Undo History.
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Consider a painting! It has many characteristics, but you should focus on two things: the big picture and the fine details. Objects are like the big picture; which is often laid out first, and any tweaks to the overall look should happen at this stage, then comes the finer details.
Objects are similar to the big picture, and paths are the finer details, or better said paths open a door to edit finer details within your vector drawing.
In this article, we will learn how to convert objects to paths in Inkscape.
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Best PHP-FPM Configuration – Easy and Simple Calculation. PHP-FPM is a FastCGI Process Manager an alternative for PHP. PHP-FPM is highly configurable by adjusting the pool settings easily for different users using different PHP versions and many more.
In this guide you are going to learn the best PHP-FPM configuration method using some simple calculation to prevent some errors listed below.
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In Linux, links to files are created in the same way that references to files are created in most common programming languages. These links are divided into two categories: hard and soft links.
A hard link is effectively an identical replica of the file, therefore the hard link and the actual file will both have the same inode.
A soft link, also known as a symbolic link, functions similarly to a shortcut or pointer to a file. It is not an exact replica of the file, but rather a pointer to the original.
The inode values of a soft link to a file and the real file will differ. Furthermore, you will not be able to access the contents of the soft link if you remove the actual file. In this article, we will learn more about soft links and hard links.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Also: Multiple Librem 5 usage reports/impressions/reviews, a glimpse at Sailfish OS on the Sony XPERIA 10 III, booting Linux on older iOS devices, and I’m sick with COVID19.
[...]
Six weeks ago, we featured a brief note about public funding for GNOME Shell Mobile. Back then, I thought that this was likely about the ecosystem or Phosh, and did not click the Code link on the funding page – time is scarce, and thus I missed that this actually was about GNOME Shell. As the blog post and Calebccff’s videos (1, 2 show, this is already quite smooth and impressive. Sure, there’s a lot of work to be done, e.g. regarding the virtual keyboard.
Now what does this mean for Phosh? According to Purism Developer Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, it does not change anything in the short term, as e.g. Calls UI for accepting can be reused with Phosh easily, while it would require more work with GNOME Shell, since that does not use GTK, but a custom, Clutter-based toolkit. Sounds like GNOME Shell Mobile is going to be more for tablets or PDAs in the short term – which is great, too! If this saddens you, because you’re longing for gestures or a different app drawer: Phosh is getting some gestures with 0.20, and more might land soon if open Merge Requests can be taken as an indicator.
Having already spoiled that stacks are too different to transfer improvements (beyond design work) from Mutter/Shell to wlroots-based Phosh/Phoc or vice versa, and assuming you’re afraid of duplicate efforts (as a user): Don’t worry about it. Duplicate efforts happen all the time in FOSS land, intentionally or unintentionally. Looking at Qt land and the shells of Plasma Mobile, Maui Shell, CutiePi Shell, Nemo Mobile, Lomiri, CuboCore’s shell and whatever the thing JingOS shipped was called again – duplicated effort does not hurt, as long as the people driving the efforts have enough dedication and continued motivation to make them great. So let’s be supportive and be glad to have yet another great FOSS option on smaller and larger touch screens!
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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There have been lots of little changes and fixes, mostly scripts in /usr/local/sfsget and /usr/local/easy_containers.
I mentioned in a recent post, that Easy Bookworm need not be released as a standalone build. It could be released as an SFS file, able to be run in a container in Easy Dunfell.
Following this train of thought, I have made available Easy Pyro and Easy Buster German and French SFSs, as well as English. Previously, I have only made English SFSs available, though for application SFSs have endeavoured to include all the locale files. New SFSs not yet uploaded.
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Reviews
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I was talking with a friend of mine about Linux distributions, and he asked me if I had ever heard of Titan Linux, to which I replied I had not. He told me he had recently read an article about it, praising it for being a great customized version of Debian Stable…so, I had to try it out for myself!
When I got to the homepage for the site, I found it pleasant to look at and well organized, with the various download options easily noticeable. Getting my hands on the ISO was easy. I also loved the inclusion of their GitHub and GitLab linked right on the front page.
So, in a matter of minutes, I had my handy USB drive ready to go, and I was set to boot into the live environment.
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New Releases
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The SpiralLinux project is pleased to announce the initial 11.220606 release with 7 editions specifically tailored to each of the major Linux desktop environments available in the Debian repositories…
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Another month, another chance to look at the distro stats on ProtonDB. I don’t typically cover them that often, but this time there’s definitely a new trend to focus on: Fedora usage is seriously on the way up.
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Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 9 May at 1300 UTC The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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May was a month full of exciting news, from open-source GPU modules and alternatives to the Jetson to a new Matter-ready hub for smart home appliances.
Before diving straight in, let’s cover noteworthy news not included in the recap below.
A few tech companies announced interesting partnerships this month.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC has a similar design to the Raspberry Pi 400, although Rockchip RK3399 power it.
Shenzhen Xunlong Software CO, the company behind Orange Pi devices, has been developing products that are direct competitors to the popular Raspberry Pi devices for years. This time, in response to the Raspberry Pi 400, a PC fitted inside a compact keyboard, the company will offer consumers its similar product, Orange Pi 800.
Orange Pi 800 is a new product released by Xunlong Software. It fully embeds the Orange Pi motherboard inside the keyboard, so it only has to be paired with a mouse and monitor to function as a computer.
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Orange Pi has been making single-board computers to compete with the Raspberry Pi for years, but now it’s going after the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer.
As Liliputing reports(Opens in a new window), Orange Pi announced the Orange Pi 800(Opens in a new window) keyboard computer, which just like the Raspberry Pi 400, offers a complete personal computer squeezed inside a keyboard housing. All you need to do is add a display and power.
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We’ve just written about the Notkia phone repurposing Nokia 168x phones with a new PCB featuring an Ingenic X1000E MIPS processor running mainline Linux, but it turns out the developer (Reimu NotMoe, CTO of SudoMaker) has also designed the X1501 Pico SoM, a tiny 16×16 system-on-module equipped with Ingenic X1501 MIPS system-in-package (SiP).
The module can be that small because the single-core 1GHz Ingenic 1501 SiP embeds 8MB LPDDR, as well as apparently a 16Mbit NOR flash that stores stripped-down versions of U-boot and the Linux kernel, plus a minimal, busybox-based rootfs.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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For this year’s Embedded Vision Summit, Hackster.io’s Alex Glow created a companion robot successor to her previous Archimedes bot called Nikola. This time, the goal was to embed a privacy-focused camera and microphone system as well as several other components that would increase its adorability.
The vision system uses a Nicla Vision board to read a QR code within the current frame thanks to the OpenMV IDE and the code Glow wrote. After it detects a code containing the correct URL, it activates Nikola’s red LED to signify that it’s taking a photo and storing it automatically.
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This new release of Arduino CLI delivers more than the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements. Today we’re delighted to bring you Build Profiles. These have been long in the works and we kept it a bit hush-hush despite releasing a public RFC a bit shy of a year ago.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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There are some universal truths about open source software (OSS). It has revolutionized our world and become the foundation of our digital society, the backbone of our digital economy, and the basis of our digital existence. Every household and enterprise brand name in technology is built upon it, whether that name is Alexa or Android, Azure, or AWS.
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Daily Pill is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
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Internxt is an open-source encrypted cloud service with a native Linux client. Our older article explaining its cloud storage service can be an interesting read if you did not know about it.
Initially, we focused on their cloud storage offering. And, it seems like we missed out on another product “Photos” that was unveiled by them last month in a tweet.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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The CloudNativePG Community has released a new update for the supported 1.15.x version of the CloudNativePG Operator.
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GNU Projects
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We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.17.0.
GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. Starting from an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic protocol components and applications towards the creation of a GNU internet.
This is a new major release. It breaks protocol compatibility with the 0.15.x versions. Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth (and has been for a while) INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.15.x GNUnet network, and interactions between old and new peers will result in issues. 0.15.x peers will be able to communicate with Git master or 0.17.x peers, but some services – in particular the DHT – will not be compatible.
In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.17.0 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance .
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Programming/Development
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TLGS’[1] crawler has had a crashing issue from the very beginning. The crawler tries to open too many sockets at the same time with the error message “sockets::createNonblockingOrDie: too many open sockets”. The crawl dispatcher already limited how many concurrent craws can happen at any time. First I thought it was because I make the dispatcher lock free and I screwed up, but no edge cases were discovered after days of simulation and testing. So I made a compermise, the crawler would count open sockets periondically and wait for some to close before continuing asynchronously. Just so I can still claim everything is still lock free. That solves the crawler crashing, but in return the crawler hangs after some time. It’s apparent this is due to some sockets not closing, thus it never drop below the threshold to continue crawling. It’s much less often so I took it and just restart the crawler every time it hangs.
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Perl / Raku
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Justin DeVuyst has released the next Rakudo Compiler release: 2022.06, which is in fact a delayed May release. Kudos to Justin for making it happen! Most visible changes are a :real named argument to DateTime.posix, and a .Failure coercer on exceptions and Cool values.
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Rust
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On Friday, June 3rd, the Rust Compiler team had a planning meeting for the June 2022 steering cycle.
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Leftovers
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A long time ago I wrote something about characters. That isn’t important now, but I would like to say something that I have recently learnt about myself. What I do want to talk about is how I consider these things as being categorically different from other things that they are basically permanently described as, and why.
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There are really only two things preventing me from using my Gemini PDA as a daily driver computer. The first is that the Google Earth, the only Google product I enjoy using, has not been ported to the device. The second is that neither CIFS nor NFS modules have been compiled into the kernel, which means I can’t mount my NAS in Debian–a major hangup, as my NAS is where I store essentially all of my files.
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To forgive others, you must first forgive yourself.
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Hardware
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Back in the early 90′s the workings of the Wintel cabal became clear. Intel sells shiny new CPUs that are twice as fast as the last generation; Gates comes up with a new version of Windows that is twice as big and slow as molasses, requiring the new CPU. But the pointer has dropshadows! Woo-hoo!
I tried my best to get off the Windows train, but let me tell you, the Apple train was even more expensive. At one point I was spending tens of thousands of dollars every year on new machines and developer memberships, because, you know, I was a professional coder. Heh.
When Linux became a reality I jumped ship. Amazingly, it worked well on leftover equipment I had neglected to give away; even on ancient boxes it was perfectly tolerable for many applications.
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Security
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This month I accepted 288 and rejected 45 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 290.
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Welcome to the May 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
[...]
The paper (PDF, 3.5MB) uses the Debian mylvmbackup package as an example to show how RepFix can automatically generate patches to make software build reproducibly. As it happens, Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch for the mylvmbackup package which has remained unapplied by the Debian package maintainer for over seven years, thus this paper inadvertently underscores that achieving reproducible builds will require both technical and social solutions.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (clamav, firefox-esr, pidgin, and thunderbird), Fedora (dotnet3.1, firefox, kernel, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (firefox/nss/nspr, gimp, logrotate, mariadb, thunderbird, trojita, webkit2, and webmin), Oracle (thunderbird), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, postgresql:10, postgresql:12, and thunderbird), Slackware (pidgin), and SUSE (openvpn).
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Vulnerability management involves discovering, analyzing, and handling new or reported security vulnerabilities in information systems. The services provided by vulnerability management systems are essential to both computer and network security. This blog posting evaluates the pros and cons of the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), which is a data-driven model designed to estimate the probability that software vulnerabilities will be exploited in practice.
The EPSS model was initiated in 2019 in parallel to our criticisms of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) in 2018. EPSS was developed in parallel to our own attempt at improving CVSSS, the Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC); 2019 also saw version 1 of SSVC. This post will focus on EPSS version 2, released in February 2022, and when it is and not appropriate to use the model. This latest release has created a lot of excitement around EPSS, especially since improvements to CVSS (version 4) are still being developed. Unfortunately, the applicability of EPSS is much narrower than people might expect, so it is not yet a useful tool for most vulnerability managers.
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Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. In fact, they hold Top Secret clearances and work in defense and intelligence. One of these buildings, at an address that is itself a secret, houses the cyberintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency. The facility is surrounded by a high fence and monitored by guards armed with military-grade weapons. When employees enter the building, they must badge in and pass through a full-body turnstile. Inside, on the ninth floor, through another door that requires badge access, is a C.I.A. office with an ostentatiously bland name: the Operations Support Branch. It is the agency’s secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of élite engineers create cyberweapons.
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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two unpatched security vulnerabilities in the open-source U-Boot boot loader.
The issues, which were uncovered in the IP defragmentation algorithm implemented in U-Boot by NCC Group, could be abused to achieve arbitrary out-of-bounds write and denial-of-service (DoS).
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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RightsCon 2022, the 11th edition of the summit on human rights in the digital age is taking place from June 6 to June 12, 2022. It brings together civil society organisations, business leaders, human rights advocates, government representatives, technologists, and journalists from around the world to discuss pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology.
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Nasreddine Benmadi had watched so many TikTok videos of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, between North Africa and Europe’s coast, that he had a good idea what the journey would look like.
At midnight, a small boat would leave from Algiers for the coast of Spain. It would take about six hours for Djamaa El Kebir, the Great Mosque of Algiers, to fade into the distance — a marker that they had crossed the European maritime border. He knew to take some clothes, 100 euros in cash, and flares to shoot into the sky in case they got in trouble at sea.
Nineteen-year-old Benmadi had clicked through countless TikTok videos and Instagram accounts, scrutinizing videos of boats, mostly filled with young men, drifting upon calm, glassy water. On accounts that aggregated these videos, footage of sea journeys would be cut alongside images of the same migrants walking along well-groomed European streets and posing in front of monuments like the Eiffel Tower. The journey was tagged as harka or haraga, a colloquial name in North Africa for the Mediterranean crossing.
Though he was aware of the risks, all Benmadi could think about was getting out of Algeria. Europe was his vision. “I was waking up and going to bed with that in mind,” he told Rest of World.
He departed from the Algerian coast at midnight with 14 others. When he had a strong enough phone signal, Benmadi paused to post on TikTok. The filter-enhanced water and sky were vivid blue; wearing an orange life vest, he smiled into the camera and filmed a video. After two days, the boat would come ashore in Spain, where Benmadi would push on toward Paris.
[...]
However, the company also said it does not want to limit conversations around migration, especially for those fleeing violence and seeking asylum. TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
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Cloudflare offers a range of services to improve the performance and security of your website/web application.
You can protect your networks, secure websites, APIs, applications, or deploy code that runs on the network edge using Cloudflare. Overall, you get access to a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and a Web Application Firewall (WAF) as a part of its offering.
Cloudflare offers a free tier with many essential features, making it one of the most popular choices for webmasters and developers
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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First, a fact that is not obvious to everyone: Images are not necessarily art. I’m not primarily thinking of those images that clearly serve other purposes than being art, including photos in news reporting, scientific diagrams, or the cover of a fashion magazine. No, I refer to images that may have an artistic appeal, that are debatable candidates for being art, those images that depend on the art world’s embrace for being recognised as art.
For the sake of the argument, I’ll take the perspective of the institutional theory of art, according to which something is art only insofar as the art world recognises it as such. Usually, that involves getting your work of art exhibited in a gallery or a museum. There are problems of circularity with the institutional theory, that’s for sure, but it can be useful to remind ourselves of the fact that there is an art world with a certain set of quality criteria, or ways of distinguishing those works that are deemed worthy of circulating in the system from those that are not.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Yes, as usual…
Summary: The Linux Foundation has announced (about 90 minutes ago) this report. “And yet,” it says, “many organizations have not embraced open source at all.” Sounds like the Linux Foundation speaks about itself.
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Last week: In Picture: Updated and Finally Presented About 10 Minutes Ago, Windows Market Share in Turkey Down to 10%
This afternoon:
Android (Linux) + ChromeOS (Gentoo-based OS) + GNU/Linux at around 50% combined
Summary: Even though Android does not mean freedom, it’s noteworthy that Microsoft’s share in operating systems (common carrier) decreases rapidly, weakening the company’s position in the market
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Posted in Deception, Hardware, Marketing at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Recent: Peak AMD
Published minutes ago:
Phoronix is an adult now, but its integrity was sadly lost at the start of this year
The full photograph (each of these processors can cost as much as a car and there are many tiers of these inside the ‘crate’)
Summary: Phoronix became a marketing site. These gifts compromise the integrity and editorial direction [1, 2], even if the FTC is unlikely to punish companies for meddling like this (Michael’s excuse for this, when I asked him about it, was that Windows sites do the same); receiving a unit or at most two for benchmarks is understandable, but this has crossed the line (bribe territories, as I explained in length earlier this year.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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We had an amazing week with lots of great releases, starting with NVIDIA’s first production-ready graphics driver that includes open-source kernel modules, a first look at the GNOME desktop environment for mobile devices, and the availability of the HP Dev One Linux laptop from HP and System76.
We also got major new releases of the Firefox web browser, Ubuntu-based Linux Lite distribution, Debian-based Nitrux distribution, GNOME 42 desktop environment, Ubuntu-based Escuelas Linux distribution, and the ARM-oriented Armbian Linux. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux Weekly Roundup for June 5th, 2022.
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The wildly popular PCQ Linux CDs were accompanied by many implementation stories. These were mostly focused on the desktop or on an individual server. It was the PCQLinux CDs and accompanying articles that popularized Linux in India. With the seven steps to intranet, we moved beyond the desktop into a truly networked world! Issues like these and the many that followed became hand-on guides for enterprises of all shapes and sizes to implement their tech.
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Applications
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Writers are always looking for better ways to put their words and ideas into readable formats to share with their readers. My first experiences with word processing came in my Apple II days when I used AppleWorks and later FrEDWriter, which was a free word processing application created in 1985. It was the standard for my students, many of whom came from households that lacked the money to purchase proprietary software.
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fmedia is a fast asynchronous media player/recorder/converter for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. It provides smooth playback and recording even if devices are very slow. It’s highly customizable and can be easily extended with additional plugins. Its low CPU & memory consumption saves energy when running on a notebook’s battery.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The term search and replace might be a simple phrase to users not inclined to use non-GUI OS environments like the command line.
To a Linux user like one dedicated to programming and software development projects, you need a performant text editor like vim to handle the editing of your script and code files.
Vim text editor might appear non-user-friendly to beginners, but you will blend in like a natural color once you get used to it.
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“This tutorial explains how to manage Snort Intrusion Detection System alert modes in Linux.
Previously in LinuxHint, we published articles showing how to get started with Snort and how to create Snort rules.
This document describes Snort alert modes and how to manage them.
All practical examples in this tutorial include screenshots for users to understand them easily.”
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“This tutorial shows how to install Matlab on Linux. The tutorial was initially written in 2018 and updated in 2022.
As its official website says, Matlab is a very powerful application for analyzing data, developing algorithms, creating mathematical models, running simulations, generating code, and testing and verifying embedded systems, among other features.
We’ll learn how to install MatLab for free using the 30-day trial license in this tutorial. If you are a student, your educational institution probably already provides an unlimited free license; you can check if your institution has a MatLab license here.
All installation steps described in this document include screenshots, making it easy for every Linux user to follow them.”
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Everyone loves to assign fancy names to their files or directory, including special characters, numbers, and spaces. Special characters and numbers are good to have in the name of the files or directories even though they are not recommended.
However, having space in a file or directory name is intriguing. The cd command is usually used to enter inside the directory and does not know what to do with the name containing the spaces and special characters.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Containerization is already a well-established – and fast-moving – trend. Numerous analyst reports and industry surveys ultimately arrive at a common conclusion: Container adoption and usage has soared in recent years.
[...]
“If you’ve yet to get started with containers, you’re not alone – broadly as they’ve already been adopted,” says Gordon Haff, technology evangelist, Red Hat.
It’s true what they say; you have to start somewhere. But running containerized workloads in production isn’t necessarily the kind of undertaking where you’ll want to start just anywhere. Here are five tips for building on a strong foundation.
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Three-quarters of digital transformation initiatives are stuck in “pilot purgatory.” Why are so many projects unable to scale their digital systems at an enterprise level?
While technical boxes may be checked, organizational adoption – if and how employees welcome the change – is often ignored. Achieving genuine buy-in from people is a much more complex challenge than installing hardware or software. Go figure.
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Red Hat recently released version 2.6 of the Red Hat build of Quarkus to support enterprise developers building Kubernetes-native Java applications. The latest release has several great new features and performance improvements, including tools to improve developer productivity.
Let’s take a look at some highlights from this release. For a complete list, check out the release notes.
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This is the 52nd edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, and covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in May 2022.
For last month’s digest, see Kafka Monthly Digest: April 2022.
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Devices/Embedded
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Orange Pi launched a device that comes in a similar form factor as the Raspberry Pi 400. One of the main differences between these products is the integrated processor which is the six-core 64-bit Rockchip RK3399 found in the Orange Pi 800.
The Rockchip RK3399 contains a dual core Arm Cortex-A72 (up to 1.8GHz) and a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 (up to 1.4GHz). The chip can also be found in other Single Board Computers, for example, the Rock Pi 4 and Rock Pi 4 C+ (both products from Radxa). The RK3399 also integrates the Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU which supports OpenGL ES, Vulkan and Open CL.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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What’s more fun than playing video games? Designing your own video game hardware, of course! If you’ve followed these pages long enough you’ll have seen dozens of great examples of homebrew hardware, and perhaps been inspired to try such a project yourself. This often starts with assembling the basic bits onto a solderless breadboard, which is fine for programming but not so great for testing: squeezing pushbuttons into your breadboard works for basic debugging, but is not very user-friendly or reliable. A better solution can be found in [Dimitar]’s GameBug: a set of breadboard-compatible joypad-like controllers.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Programming/Development
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The following article is a companion to my presentation at Drupalcon and Drupalcamp covering Progressive Web Apps implementations.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have support from some of the top tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, with the common goal being “Web apps should be able to do anything iOS, Android, or desktop apps can.” PWAs can add value to businesses at a variety of different stages. All projects have limitations, whether they be development resources, timeline, budget, or technical debt. Even with “unlimited resources,” developing an app from a single codebase, using commonly known web technologies, allows for a more frictionless, sane release cycle.
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Slates is a free, open-source project that helps developers build a stylist, API documentation in no time.
Slate is widely used by dozens of companies and large corporations around the world as NASA, SONY, Coinbase, Parrot Drones, CoinAPI, Travis-CI, and Best Buy.
Slate can be installed either from the source, or using Vagrant, or Docker. It comes with a responsive UI, supports syntax highlighting, RTL, and more.
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Standards/Consortia
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The healthcare industry has come a long way in its ability to share clinical information, especially across geographic regions and with point-to-point connections. A report by CHIME and KLAS Research shows that nearly two-thirds of provider organizations that have invested in interoperability are satisfied with their progress and report that they “often or nearly always” have access to the records they need. The report also said the most valuable methods for accessing patient data are public HIEs (39%), national networks (36%), and direct messaging (31%); those who use large EHR vendors have shown the highest FHIR adoption rates; and, the top use cases for FHIR APIs are patient-facing tools (31%), clinician-enabling tools (27%) and patient-record exchange (24%).
As the industry continues to gain momentum in clinical interoperability, it’s time to expand our view to include the value of another type of interoperability: The fluid and direct exchange of administrative data.
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Leftovers
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Science
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Mosquitoes tend to be seen as an almost universal negative, at least in the lives of humans. While they serve as a food source for plenty of other animals and may even pollinate some plants, they also carry diseases like malaria and Zika, not to mention the itchy bites. Various mosquito deterrents have been invented over the years to solve some of these problems, but one of the more interesting ones is this project by [Ildaron] which attempts to build a mosquito-tracking laser.
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Everyone knows what a chatbot is, but how about a deadbot? A deadbot is a chatbot whose training data — that which shapes how and what it communicates — is data based on a deceased person. Now let’s consider the case of a fellow named Joshua Barbeau, who created a chatbot to simulate conversation with his deceased fiancee. Add to this the fact that OpenAI, providers of the GPT-3 API that ultimately powered the project, had a problem with this as their terms explicitly forbid use of their API for (among other things) “amorous” purposes.
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Hardware
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There are a few ways to access real quantum computers — often for free — over the Internet. However, most of these are previous-generation machines that have limited capabilities. Great for learning, perhaps, but not something you could do anything practical with. Xanadu, however, has announced what they claim to be a computer capable of reaching quantum advantage that is free for anyone to use, within limits. Borealis — the computer in question — uses photonic states and has the capability of working with over 216 squeezed-state qubits.
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[Etienne Sellan] got one of these lovely $5 logic analyzers. As with any shiny new tool, he started looking for things to investigate with it, and his gaze fell on a Sentry Safe (produced by Master Lock). On the surface level, this keypad-equipped safe is designed decently when it comes to privilege separation. You can take the keypad board off and access its backside, but the keypad doesn’t make any decisions, it merely sends the digits to a different board embedded behind the safe’s door. The solenoid-connected board receives the PIN, verifies it, and then controls the solenoid that unlocks the safe.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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How much do I actually remember about last summer, or last Christmas, or the one before that, or pretty much any of the seasonal changes or major holidays of the last two-plus years? It’s not that nothing has happened: Far too much has happened, but for me — and I strongly suspect I’m not alone here — memory and cognition and the passage of time have been fundamentally disordered. I can remember things, but not as part of a consistent temporal narrative, and not attached to any sense of growth or change or development. It’s a bit like a brain-damaged version of the hallucinogenic top-down view of time attributed to God in classical Christian theology, in which past, present and future all occur simultaneously. (No wonder He acts like an asshole so much of the time.)
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The big news this week comes from the world of medicine, where a woman has received a 3D-printed ear transplant. The 20-year-old woman suffered from microtia, a rare congenital deformity that left her without a pinna, the external structure of the ear. Using scans of the normal ear, doctors were able to make a 3D model of what the missing pinna should look like. Raw material for the print was taken from the vestigial ear of the patient in the form of cartilage cells, or chondrocytes. The ear was printed using a bioprinter, which is a bit like an inkjet printer. The newly printed ear was placed into a protective structure and transplanted. The operation was done in March, and the results are pretty dramatic. With a little squinting, it does look a bit like there are some printing artifacts in the ear, but we’d imagine that’s more from the protective cage that was over the ear as it healed.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Steele Dossier was a pack of lies, but the Clinton campaign attorney who promoted it to the FBI didn’t lie.
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Equipping the Ukrainian military with the successor of the well-known Predator drones means three revolutions in warfare with drones at once.
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But reality is always richer than poetic fantasy. I was able to confirm this on the trip of a friend and his wife to Cuba, where they went on their honeymoon. If there it is not the mythological country of Cocanha, believe me, readers, it is better that way. “Cuba was something beyond my imagination,” my friend tells me. “Because of everything. Havana has preserved, historic architecture from the time of Spanish colonization. I saw children in the streets, but in school uniforms, doing physical education in the plazas.” Contrary to what the right wing says, he walked everywhere, free, without a guide and without fear of being robbed. Clean streets, no garbage. And he told me of his love from the moment he landed at the airport. “When the plane landed in Cuba, I felt a great emotion. In Havana, everybody likes Brazilians. He, who knows some European countries, told me: “In the Old World I was discriminated against. In Havana I was loved. They welcomed me as a brother”.
And as good as his words are the images that he sent me. Through his eyes, I came close to the memory of Ernest Hemingway, in the Bodeguita del Medio.
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Mikhail Palinchak is a well-known Ukrainian documentary photographer. In 2014, after documenting the Maidan Revolution, Palinchak became Ukrainian ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s personal photographer, shooting him at diplomatic meetings in various countries for several years. On February 24, Mikhail woke up to the sound of air raid sirens. Since then, he’s remained in the Kyiv region and has dedicated all his time to photographing the effects of war. Palinchak captured the city’s first evacuation efforts, people hiding in shelters, and the territorial defense forces’ preparation; he was one of the first people to enter liberated Bucha. In May, at an exhibit called “The Disasters of War: Goya and the Present” in Vienna, his photos were shown alongside Goya’s anti-war paintings. Meduza is publishing Palinchak’s photos along with his own commentary.
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The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), comprising largely former, mostly Democrat administration foreign policy and defense officials, in a new study — “Risk and Responsibility: Managing Future Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction Threats” — tries to sell the notion that Iran armed with nuclear, biological and chemical offensive weapons will be an acceptable risk. CNAS is a source of staff and “expertise” to the Biden Administration. Unfortunately, their idea is preposterous.
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Once again, this is a near-daily occurrence in Nigeria that is met with international indifference. The media narrative is that Muslims are always and in every circumstances victims, and that Christians are white oppressors. Stories of this kind don’t fit the narrative and are accordingly ignored.
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While warning that lawmakers’ continued inaction on gun control legislation will have “significant consequences” for democracy in the U.S., Sen. Chris Murphy on Sunday also tempered expectations regarding the ongoing bipartisan negotiations that began in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas late last month.
The Connecticut Democrat, a longtime advocate for gun control reform, told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” that lawmakers have been discussing laws that were passed in Florida in 2018 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, after which young survivors of the attack mobilized to demand action from policymakers.
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There is no need to recite the litany from Columbine to Uvalde. Nor do we have to add up the dead and the far larger—uncountable—number of wounded and traumatized children and adults who have been directly affected by the slaughter. Thoughts and prayers, whether offered sincerely or cynically, no longer soothe. In the face of Second Amendment zealots, appeals to common sense falls on deaf ears and Republican intransigence.
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If a Palestinian-American wants to travel to the occupied West Bank to visit their family, they will soon need to apply to the Israeli government for advanced permission, reveal the personal information of the relatives they plan on visiting, along with data of any land they own or stand to inherit in the territory.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday threatened to further escalate the war in Ukraine in light of Western countries’ continued military assistance to the former Soviet state, warning the U.S. and other countries against providing long-range rocket systems capable of hitting targets in Russia.
A shipment of such weapons would prompt Russian forces to target “objects that we haven’t yet struck,” said Putin in a televised interview.
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Environment
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Energy
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It’s a stark reversal from just a handful of years ago, when cryptocurrencies were seen as an unmitigated boon for criminals. Cryptocurrencies allow users to instantaneously send money over the internet without intermediaries like banks. It can be done anonymously because the digital wallets that hold cryptocurrencies don’t have to be tied to people’s identities.
But because the digital ledgers that facilitate cryptocurrencies are public, law enforcement agencies have in recent years begun to gain the expertise necessary to track cryptocurrencies, leading bitcoin and ethereum to play roles in a significant number of criminal cases. During that time, such cases have overwhelmingly been the purview of federal agencies like the FBI, the Secret Service, the Justice Department and the IRS.
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Canada could be a clean electricity powerhouse by 2035—without building more large hydro dams or relying on expensive and sometimes unproven and dangerous technologies like nuclear or fossil gas with carbon capture and storage.
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Greenpeace insisted that by giving the development the green light the Government had “shown no regard” for emissions or the project’s “ultimate climate impact.”
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Finance
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Whenever there are new or proposed changes to tax law, your eyes may glaze over as they skim the headlines. Meanwhile, the wealth defense industry — and its legions of accountants, financial advisors, and lawyers — is quietly mobilizing.
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The largest-ever Medicare premium increase will pad the pockets of insurance executives who donated millions to the president’s election campaign.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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According to the same survey, 12% of Londoners of all ages are Muslim: [...]
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Ahead of the Iranian Foreign Minister’s first-ever trip to New Delhi next week, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned the Indian ambassador to Tehran over what state media called “insult against Prophet of Islam in an Indian TV show”. Apart from Iran, Qatar and Kuwait had also summoned India’s Ambassadors.
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Dear Nick,
Since our meeting at your office in the Fall of 2014, I have tried several times to reach you about a number of civic projects that seem to be right up your alley. As others have noted, it is near impossible to get you to return a telephone call for the necessary two-way conversation.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Minister of the Interior seems to have some need for action here: Austria’s secret service, the newly named “Directorate of State Protection and Intelligence” (DSN), wants the eXXpress to disclose data of a reader because he sharply criticised the Muslim parallel society.
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Claiming that the government had the right to seek VPN records to combat cybercrimes, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued rules that require VPN service providers to maintain logs of users, including their real names, IP addresses, usage patterns, and other identifying data for five years – even after they stopped using the service.
The rules are facing strong resistence from privacy experts and VPN companies such as NordVPN, SurfShark and ExpressVPN. However, CERT-In later clarified that the new rules would not apply to enterprise and corporate virtual private networks.
Non-compliance of the new regulations may lead to VPN companies facing bans and even potentially a year of prison time for executives.
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Nupur Sharma, who was an official spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made the remark on a television debate, while Naveen Jindal, who was media head of the party’s Delhi unit, had posted a tweet on the issue. The comments – especially Ms Sharma’s – angered the country’s minority Muslim community, leading to sporadic protests in some states. The BBC is not repeating Ms Sharma’s remarks as they are offensive in nature.
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The party also suspended Delhi media in-charge Naveen Kumar Jindal, who allegedly posted a tweet about the Prophet but later deleted it.
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Sharma’s controversial remarks on the Prophet also caused backlash from overseas where Twitter users from Gulf countries demanded a boycott of products made in India. There were also reports of supermarkets in many Gulf countries removing products made in India from their shelves.
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Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia have condemned remarks on Prophet Muhammed made by two BJP leaders who have since been suspended. The controversy erupted amid Vice President Venkaiah Naidu’s tour of Qatar.
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The party suspended national spokesperson Nupur Sharma and expelled its Delhi unit media cell head Navin Kumar Jindal after their comments provoked the backlash from West Asia, where governments exerted diplomatic pressure and people called for a boycott of Indian goods. Clashes had broken out in some parts of India on Friday.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Because I was thinking, maybe a bad actor could use this to SWAT me. Suppose the bad actor has an account at R, held by some anonymous tax-shell company in a remote jurisdiction, and they own plenty of domain names, maybe innocuous, maybe horrific, suggesting torture, suffering children, revenge video, death camps… Suppose they posted truly horrific (and violently illegal) stuff at some IP address on a “bullet-proof” overseas server, pointed one of their names at it, transferred the name to me, and then tipped off law enforcement about this horrific abuse being hosted by some guy named Tim. How long till my front door gets broken down?
That evening, I mentioned it to my spouse who is also my business partner and she said “Oh yeah, I wondered what that was about, I got an email from R saying your buddy had transferred a domain name to you.”
I inquired if they’d asked her to do anything to accept the transfer and she said “No, but it did have a number to call if this wasn’t kosher.”
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More than two years into a pandemic that has no clear end, the debate over remote work has only intensified. Working from home isn’t possible in many jobs. But for those who have the option, it’s now evident that it is feasible, even beneficial.
But how beneficial is a point of contention between workers and their bosses. Some bosses are deciding too much is lost when people aren’t in the office and it’s time to come back.
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A group of women were prevented to do yoga by security guards at the Dede Korkut Park in the western province of Eskişehir on May 29.
The security officers initially cited “damage to the grass” as the reason for the ban, but after a while, they told the women that there was a complaint against them filed with Turkey’s Presidential Communications Center (CİMER).
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Monopolies
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Patents
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In certain technological fields, it is necessary to choose a solution and adopt it as a standard. Imagine, for example, if each electronic device came with a different socket-outlet format or if each airport in the world used a different communication system to connect its control tower with airplanes. It would be catastrophic or, at the very least, very expensive to adapt the infrastructure to accommodate so many different technologies that perform the same function. For this reason, technological standardization is relevant.
Thus, economic agents of the most diverse magnitudes come together around organizations to discuss and establish the technological standards of a given sector. These are the so-called Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs), which include, for example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). However, a problem arises in this context. It is common that the technologies that are essential for the adequacy of products and services to the patterns determined by the SSOs are patented.
Patents are rights conferred by the state government as a way of rewarding and encouraging the investments and efforts employed to develop a new technology. If the individual demonstrates to the competent authority that an invention (i) is new, (ii) it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art and (iii) solves an actual technical problem, the inventor/holder will receive a title that guarantees the temporary right to prevent any third party from using, producing, selling, offering or exploiting that technology in any way.
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Back in January 2022, the Federal Court of Justice upheld two IP Bridge LTE patents, EP 21 78 232 and EP 22 94 737. Since 2016, the Japanese patent pool has enforced them against mobile phone manufacturers HTC and TCT, among others.
In mid-January 2022, the court confirmed EP 232 with amendments (case ID: X ZR 4/20). A few days later, it then confirmed EP 737 in full (case ID: X ZR 14/20). The court had already upheld IP Bridge’s third patent-in-suit with amendments in June 2021 (case ID: X ZR 39/19), EP 09 91 054), which is relevant for the UMTS standard.
The three decisions pave the way for another decision by the Federal Court of Justice on SEP claims and FRAND issues.
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Kaufman sued Microsoft–asserting that its Dynamic Data product infringed the claims. A jury agreed, finding the patent claims valid and infringed and awarded $7 million in damages. Both parties appealed.
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Yesterday (Tuesday) was the first courtroom clash between Nokia and OPPO in Mannheim (a FRAND hearing had already taken place in Munich). The patent-in-suit in that first case is EP2981103 on an “allocation of preamble sequences” (originally declared essential to 4G and later also to 5G). Given that the same court had ordered an injunction over this patent against Daimler in 2020 (which never got enforced), and that the Federal Patent Court of Germany had rendered a preliminary opinion according to which it was valid (and the EPO upheld another patent from the same family in an opposition proceeding), I thought the technical merits were going to be clear. But no.
To my surprise, OPPO has developed a more elaborate non-infringement argument than Daimler. To be fair, the smartphone giant had the benefit of being able to learn from what had happened in the Daimler case, but even if all other things were equal, OPPO–which is a major SEP holder itself by now–would almost always outperform any automaker by virtue of a far deeper understanding of the relevant technology and of standard-setting processes.
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Copyrights
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Last month we broke some rather unusual news. Successful judgments against three pirate streaming sites required every ISP in the United States to implement blocking measures, so that no subscriber could access them. However, after winning the Holy Grail of anti-piracy measures, the plaintiffs have now asked the court to suspend enforcement against ISPs.
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Hosting provider LeaseWeb is being sued for copyright infringement at a federal court in California. The lawsuit was filed by photographer Barry Rosen who argues that Leaseweb failed to take action against “infringing” poster sites, despite receiving repeated DMCA notices. The owners of the infringing sites are unknown and listed as Doe defendants.
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