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Links 25/06/2022: Pitivi 2022.06 and PeaZip 8.7.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux LinksLinux Around The World: USA - Pennsylvania - LinuxLinks

      Pennsylvania is a state in the United States spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Appalachian regions. It borders Delaware to the southeast, Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, Lake Erie and the Canadian province of Ontario to the northwest, New York to the north, and New Jersey to the east.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Popular ScienceBest Linux laptops of 2022 | Popular Science

        While Mac and Windows computers tend to dominate the discussions, Linux laptops deserve your consideration. While making the switch may involve a learning curve, Linux machines will reward you with a stable and secure operating system that offers a free, private, open-source platform. Some manufacturers still make it difficult to install Linux products on their laptops, although there are workarounds available to make almost any laptop run the OS. To avoid the potential problems of installing your own software, purchase one of the best Linux laptops that come ready to go right out of the box.

        Buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed also ensures that future software updates from the manufacturer will be supported. You won’t need to tinker with the operating system to ensure good performance. The following Linux laptops can provide solid options for professional machines, school computers, and even personal laptops for tinkering and coding.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • 9to5LinuxPitivi 2022.06 Open-Source Video Editor Released with Object Tracking and Blurring

        Pitivi 2022.06 is here with more new features, including object tracking and blurring, detection of beats and snapping of clips to detected beats, a new Source blending mode, the ability to add border and shadow to the title clip text, as well as a VU meter for sound playback next to the video preview.

        On top of that, the Pitivi 2022.06 release introduces support for maintaining the aspect ratio when resizing clips, makes it easier to fade in and fade out a video clip, and lets you cut video clips to paste them at a different position.

      • Linux LinksBest Free and Open Source Alternatives to Adobe Dimension

         Adobe Dimension (formerly Project Felix and then Adobe Dimension CC) is a 3D rendering and design software. It’s designed to build brand visualizations, illustrations, product mockups and other creative work.

        Adobe Dimension is proprietary software which is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

      • NeowinPeaZip 8.7.0

         PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.

        PeaZip provides fast, high compression ratio multi-format archiving - view file compression and decompression benchmarks for more information.

        PeaZip is localized in 29 languages and is capable of handling all most popular archive formats (180+ file types), supporting a wide array of advanced file and archive management features (search, bookmarks, thumbnail viewer, find duplicate files and compute hash/checksum value, convert archive files...), especially focused on security (strong encryption, two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure file deletion...).

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux.orgLFCS – Network Time Protocol (NTP) | Linux.org

        We covered the Network Time Protocol Daemon a little in the article ‘https://www.linux.org/threads/lfcs-–-kerberos-authentication-centos7.39296/’, as well as in ‘https://www.linux.org/threads/lfcs-–-kerberos-authentication-ubuntu.39733/’.

        This article will go a little deeper and add in another Network Time Protocol other than NTP.

      • UNIX CopHow to install KVM on Ubuntu 22.04 - Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

        KVM is an open-source virtualization technology integrated into Linux. Specifically, with KVM, you can turn Linux into a hypervisor that allows a host machine to run several isolated virtual environments called virtual machines (VMs) or guests.

        KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, with which we can make virtual machines on Linux without too much effort.

        KVM is a solid alternative to the virtualization of other proprietary solutions such as Oracle or VMWare.

        Let’s install it and get it ready to use.

      • ID RootHow To Install Composer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Composer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Composer is an application-oriented package manager for PHP distributed under an open-source MIT license. It functions as some sort of project manager that helps the programmer manage dependencies that will be used on a project to project basis. Composer is also commonly used to bootstrap new projects based on popular PHP frameworks, such as Symfony and Laravel.

        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 Composer 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.

      • Screen RantHow To Set Up Linux On Your Chromebook | Screen Rant

        Modern Chromebooks, particularly those released in 2019 and later, allow users to create a Linux development environment where they can install Linux apps and tools. This feature greatly improves the functionality of Chromebooks by turning them into more productive devices that can be used for writing code or creating apps.

        With Linux support on Chrome OS, Chromebooks can be used by developers to create Android and web apps for various devices, just like a Windows PC or a MacBook. And because Linux runs in a virtual machine on Chrome OS devices, issues with Linux are isolated from the main operating system.

    • Games

      • Boiling Steam3600 Games Now On The Steam Deck with Teardown, a Great Demolition Game as Verified

        Valve has provided more verification in the past few days vs usual for the Steam Deck. We are now more than 3600 games validated (3626 games to be precise at the time of publication) on the Steam Deck – in two categories...

      • Boiling SteamThe Steam Deck’s Super Power: Super Sleep

        The Steam Deck undeniably has some great features, but if it were a superhero its superpower might not be what you expect. No, it’s not the powerful processor or advanced options and software, but seemingly the complete opposite of that: the Steam Deck’s real power is its super sleep.

        First, a superpower needs to be reliable and without any big caveats. The Deck’s sleep ability is just that: every time it works quickly and flawlessly. It is a quick power button press away or in the Steam button’s power menu. In the middle of a game without a pause button (hi, Elden Ring)? No problem. Running low on battery or just need a moment to move the Deck without accidentally hitting the buttons? Or want to resume in that spare minute to get in a quick gaming fix? The Deck delivers every time. You can also set the Deck to go to sleep after some idle time, confident you won’t lose your game progress or battery life.

      • Positech GamesThe impossible task of country simulation in a video game – Cliffski's Blog

        As you may know, I make the ‘Democracy’ series of video games. They are pretty serious, pretty complex, fairly in-depth simulation games where you run a real world country. At one point I experimented with fictional countries, but it turns out everyone hates that, they want to be the president of their own country, and show they can do a better job than the current leader. Fair enough.

        The only problem with this is it means that I need to simulate real world countries accurately enough that people living in them think I have made a proper effort to do so. This is staggeringly difficult to do with a single (albeit flexible and complex) model of politics and economics. What makes it way more difficult, is that it has to be politically, economically and temporally flexible as well.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDE OfficialKDE Apps Mid-Year Update

          The summer sun is here and new apps come with it -- unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case, congratulations! You got past the winter solstice, and it's all longer days and new app releases from here onwards.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Life this last month

      In life, I've begun using XMPP more extensively for communication. This really began as my PinePhone's microphone went caput. With XMPP, I can use multiple clients, so my communication ability is not dependant on the working hardware of the device with my SIM card in it.

    • Web Browsers

      • Chromium

        • Eric Hameleers[Slackware] Chromium 103 (regular and ungoogled) available as Slackware package

          Apologies for the delay, I was out of town, but i have finally uploaded my new chromium 103 packages for Slackware 14.2 and newer. Their un-googled siblings are also available. Thanks as always to Eloston and his friends for updating the patch-set for ungoogled-chromium. Last week saw a Google Chromium update which addresses a series of vulnerabilities, which is nothing new of course, but in particular one security hole that has now been patched would allow remote attackers to take control of your computer and execute arbitrary code. See CVE-2022-2156. An update of your installed browser package seems in order.

    • Programming/Development

      • RlangThe Poisson distribution: From basic probability theory to regression models

        Brief introduction to the Poisson distribution for modeling count data using the distributions3 package. The distribution is illustrated using the number of goals scored at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, suitable for self-study or as a classroom exercise.

      • RlangWebscraping in R with Rvest

        Web scraping has become an incredibly important tool in data science, as an easy way to generate new data. The main advantage is the automation of some pretty repetitive tasks. Web scrapping can also be a good way of keeping up with new data on a website, assuming it doesn’t have a big change in its HTML structure.

      • Frederic CambusClang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver | Frederic Cambus

        Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer As far as static analyzers are concerned, one of the most important point to consider is filtering out false positives as much as possible, in order for the reports to be actionable.

        This is an area on which Coverity did an excellent job, and likely a major reason why they got so popular within the open source community, despite being a closed-source product.

        LLVM has the LLVM_ENABLE_Z3_SOLVER build option, which allows building LLVM against the Z3 constraint solver.

      • Matt RickardLeast Common Denominator APIs

        Often, our instinct is to build for optionality. What if we change databases? What if we change clouds? We target the Least Common Denominator (LCD) interface to avoid vendor lock-in and make sure our software is portable – after all, Optimization is Fragile. LCD interfaces look like targeting the S3 API, a generic PubSub implementation, or vanilla ANSI SQL.

        LCD interfaces are good enough most of the time, but when we need to run a specialized workload, sometimes they don't perform how we'd like. We could solve our problem quickly by narrowing the API – coupling it to a specific cloud or managed service, but that destroys our optionality. Here, you should probably fight your instinct to stick with the pure implementation and weigh the trade-offs – how many developer-hours and pain can you save by narrowing the interface?

        Optimization and optionality are inherent trade-offs. There's a way to architecture services to be efficient and generic but also practical.

      • Quantum computer programming for dummies

        For would-be quantum programmers scratching their heads over how to jump into the game as quantum computers proliferate and become publicly accessible, a new beginner’s guide provides a thorough introduction to quantum algorithms and their implementation on existing hardware.

        “Writing quantum algorithms is radically different from writing classical computing programs and requires some understanding of quantum principles and the mathematics behind them,” said Andrey Y. Lokhov, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the recently published guide in ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing. “Our guide helps quantum programmers get started in the field, which is bound to grow as more and more quantum computers with more and more qubits become commonplace.”

      • RlangCreate new variables from existing variables in R

        Create new variables from existing variables in R?. To create new variables from existing variables, use the case when() function from the dplyr package in R.

      • Geeks For GeeksConstruct a Perfect Binary Tree with given Height

        Given an integer N, the task is to generate a perfect binary tree with height N such that each node has a value that is the same as its depth. Return the inorder traversal of the generated binary tree.

      • Seth Michael LarsonAnnouncing urllib3's bounty program

        We’ve recognized that one of the biggest challenges to shipping v2.0 is not having enough time to devote to contributions. Our bounty program is hoping to spur interest from the community in the urllib3 project and fairly pay contributors for their time and experience.

        The bounty program works by marking issues with bounty amounts we’re willing to pay for anyone to complete an issue. Don't worry if you're not an existing contributor — new contributors are welcome and encouraged!

      • RlangLearning from Failure – Nitinol Fracture Mechanics in R | R-bloggers

        Despite our best efforts, nitinol implants fracture and fail. Sometimes we want them to fail (on the bench, to learn).

      • Matt RickardEvery Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language is Wrong

        Every sufficiently advanced configuration language is the wrong tool for the job.

        [...]

        The logical extreme is becoming more evident – advanced configuration in general-purpose programming languages. You can see this in the emergence of Typescript for Infrastructure-as-Code. For the most basic (and human 0x777) configuration needs, there will always be simple formats – YAML, JSON, INI, etc.).

      • Didier StevensAnother Exercise In Encoding Reversing | Didier Stevens

        In this blog post, I will show how to decode a payload encoded in a variation of hexadecimal encoding, by performing statistical analysis and guessing some of the “plaintext”.

        I do have the decoder too now (a .NET assembly), but here I’m going to show how you can try to decode a payload like this without having the decoder.

      • Didier StevensExamples Of Encoding Reversing | Didier Stevens

        I recently created 2 blog posts with corresponding videos for the reversing of encodings.

        The first one is on the ISC diary: “Decoding Obfuscated BASE64 Statistically“. The payload is encoded with a variation of BASE64, and I show how to analyze the encoded payload to figure out how to decode it.

      • Python

        • The New StackAn Introduction to Python: A Language for the Ages – The New Stack

          For anyone just getting into software programming, one of your best friends will be Python. Why? Python is very simple to learn and easy to implement. Even better, what you can do with this language grows as you learn more. You can start with very simple text-based applications and migrate to GUI applications and much more. And because Python is supported by most major operating systems (Linux, macOS, and Windows), you can begin your journey, regardless of platform.

          Python includes support for features such as lists, tuples, functions, variables, JSON, and ranges. But where did Python come from and why is it still so important today? Let’s dig in and find out. To follow our series of introductory tutorials, start here.

        • How To Write Comments In Python

          The way you think is reflected in programming in order to convey the individual steps that you took to solve an issue utilizing a computer. Commenting your code helps clarify your thinking process, which in turn makes it easier for you and other people to comprehend the purpose of your code in the future. Because of this, you will have an easier time locating bugs, fixing them, enhancing the code at a later time, and reusing it in other applications as well.

          The act of commenting is essential to the completion of any and all tasks, regardless of how little, medium, or fairly enormous they may be. It should be considered standard procedure for software engineers since it is an important component of your workflow. Without comments, things have the potential to get quite complicated very quickly. In this post, we will cover the many techniques of commenting that Python offers, as well as how it may be utilized to automatically produce documentation for your code via the use of the so-called module-level docstrings.

  • Leftovers

    • SICPWhy mock objects aren’t popular this week | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

      The field of software engineering doesn’t change particularly quickly. Tastes in software engineering change all the time: keeping up with them can quickly result in seasickness or even whiplash. For example, at the moment it’s popular to want to do server-side rendering of front end applications, and unpopular to do single-page web apps. Those of us who learned the LAMP stack or WebObjects are back in fashion without having to lift a finger!

      Currently it’s fashionable to restate “don’t mock an interface you don’t own” as the more prescriptive, taste-driven statement “mocks are bad”. Rather than change my practice (I use mocks and I’m happy with that from 2014 is still OK), I’ll ask why has this particular taste arisen.

      Mock objects let you focus on the ma, the interstices between objects. You can say “when my case controller receives this filter query, it asks the case store for cases satisfying this predicate”. You’re designing a conversation between independent programs, making restrictions about the messages they use to communicate.

    • Getting used to consuming and preparing coffee

      Letting the brew steep for 8 to 10 minutes helps with extracting more flavours. It's not that the coffee tastes much better after 10 minutes compared to only 4 minutes, but it certainly doesn't get any more sour. Try to taste your coffee after steeping it for only a minute or two: it will taste sour already, and become more tasty the longer you let it steep.

    • How I became a coffee drinker

      I have never considered myself a coffee drinker for most of my life. At the time of writing this, I am in my mid-thirties and started drinking coffee about a year ago.

      [...]

      One day I got myself a cuppa and some drops of coffee contaminated my chocolate. Or so I thought. But I actually liked how it tasted. So I started experimenting by adding a small Espesso to my hot chocolate, which really enhanced the flavour to my liking. Around that time, my dysthymia really struck me with a double depression (but I didn't know it back then), and I was extremely tired all day long. So I thought, why not try and start drinking coffee right now, since caffeine is said to help against tiredness anyhow, and I have everything right there in front of me. Adding a new recipe to the machine was easy, to let me try different mixtures of coffee and chocolate without getting in the way of the drinking habits of my fellow colleagues. Unfortunately the caffeine didn't help with my tiredness. Much to the contrary, there were times when I thought that it would rather make me dizzy in the evenings. Which turned out to not being the case, though. I had plenty of dizzy evenings, even when not drinking any coffee for several weeks.

    • Science

      • ACMEngineers Create Single-Step 3D Printing Method to Make Robotic Materials

        University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) engineers and colleagues designed a one-step three-dimensional (3D) printing process for manufacturing robots.

        Critical to the all-in-one approach is the design and printing of piezoelectric metamaterials, which can change shape and move in response to an electric field, or generate electricity in response to physical forces.

        The researchers developed the metamaterials to bend, flex, twist, rotate, expand, or contract rapidly.

        They constitute an internal network of sensory, moving, and structural components that can move in response to programmed commands.

        UCLA’s Huachen Cui said the two-way piezoelectric effect permits the robots to “detect obstacles via echoes and ultrasound emissions, as well as respond to external stimuli through a feedback control loop that determines how the robots move, how fast they move, and toward which target they move.”

      • The AtlanticGoogle’s AI Is Something Even Stranger Than Conscious

        Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. That’s a shame. The notion that LaMDA is sentient is nonsense: LaMDA is no more conscious than a pocket calculator. More importantly, the silly fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate the artificial-intelligence conversation when much stranger and richer, and more potentially dangerous and beautiful, developments are under way.

      • DatanamiHow Companies Are Using Bots in Data Management [Ed: When instead of dubbing algorithms "HEY HI" you call them "robots" or "bots"]

        Data has become the lifeblood of most organizations. It provides a wealth of information about your customers, products, finances, sales, competitors and more. But managing all that data can be a challenge without the right tools. Many organizations are turning to artificial intelligence, like bots, to aid them in data management.

      • Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items

        Many recent advances in computer vision and robotics rely on deep learning, but training deep learning models requires a wide variety of data to generalize to new scenarios. Historically, deep learning for computer vision has relied on datasets with millions of items that were gathered by web scraping, examples of which include ImageNet, Open Images, YouTube-8M, and COCO. However, the process of creating these datasets can be labor-intensive, and can still exhibit labeling errors that can distort the perception of progress. Furthermore, this strategy does not readily generalize to arbitrary three-dimensional shapes or real-world robotic data.

      • Fabric that can ‘hear’ your heartbeat developed by MIT scientists

        Fabric that can “hear” one’s heartbeat via high-tech fibers has been developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tech could also be used on clothes worn by pregnant women to help them pick up their baby’s heartbeat.

        This potentially revolutionary tech could give rise to wearable hearing aids and clothes that can speak to each other. It works by first converting sounds into mechanical vibrations before they are converted again into electrical signals, similar to how the ear works. All fabrics vibrate in response to sounds, although these responses are normally far too small to be audible.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • RlangOffload Shiny’s Workload: COVID-19 processing for the WHO/Europe

        At Jumping Rivers, we have a wealth of experience developing and maintaining Shiny applications. Over the past year, we have been maintaining a Shiny application for the World Health Organization Europe (WHO/Europe) that presents data about COVID-19 vaccination uptake across Europe.

        The great strength of Shiny is that it simplifies the production of data-focused web applications, making it relatively easy to present data to users / clients in an interactive way. However data can be big and data-processing can be complex, time-consuming and memory-hungry. So if you bake an entire data pipeline into a Shiny application, you may end up with an application that is costly to host and doesn’t provide the best user experience (slow, frequently crashes).

      • As told to Parliament (November 30, 2021): 5,579 Indian farmers died by suicide in 2020

        Some 5,579 Indian farmers died by suicide in 2020, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar, told the Lok Sabha November 30, 2021.

        The figures are according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), that has published reports on farmer suicides up to 2020. These reports are available on its website.

        Tomar added that the Union government had received no report on farmers, especially in Madhya Pradesh, committing suicide due to unavailability of fertiliser.

    • Security

      • Stacking the deck for computer security | Penn State University

        A new and more reliable method to defend vulnerable data on the stack, a major memory region responsible for storing computer program data for processes, has been developed by an international Penn State-led team. Such data may include local variables, such as return addresses and other objects that bad actors can exploit through memory errors to obtain access to more data.

        The researchers published their solution in the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, which took place at the end of April. The symposium was hosted by the Internet Society, an international nonprofit organization focused on keeping the internet “open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy,” according to their website.

        “Despite vast research on defenses to protect stack objects from the exploitation of memory errors, much stack data remains at risk,” said project lead Trent Jaeger, professor of computer science and engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “There are three types of memory errors through which an adversary may access other objects than what the programmer had in mind. These errors are not specific to the stack, but our solution is.”

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Make Use OfZoom Is Shutting Down Its Chromebook App: What This Means for Users

          Whether you're catching up with family members, friends that stay abroad, or colleagues, Zoom is one of the go-to platforms of choice. It is also used by students on its Chromebook app to touch base on assignments, join lectures, and more. If you use Zoom’s Chromebook app, you'll soon have to make other plans to continue using the platform.

          That’s because Zoom is shutting down its Chromebook app. Here's why and what you can do to keep using the video conferencing app on your Chromebook.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Ruben SchadeRubenerd: Singapore, Ukraine, and some Mahathir irredentism

        Singapore is bigger than I think people realise. For a country a quarter the size of Long Island in New York, its population is higher than that of the Republic of Ireland or any two of the Baltic states combined, and about equivalent to Norway or Finland. Like these counties, it’s understandably concerned about the power imbalance represented by larger states.

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Michael West MediaThey're not shivering in Honkers: Australians' electricity pain is two billionaires' gain - Michael West

          As Australians pay the price for decades of poor energy planning, the two single greatest beneficiaries of high electricity prices are Hong Kong billionaires Michael Kadoorie and Li Ka-Shing. Callum Foote reports on two of the big winners from Australia’s electricity crisis. It’s another big week in the energy crisis. It’s clear who are the losers: Australians. We have been let down by a decade of policy paralysis on the transition to clean energy. The winners are becoming clear too. Not only have energy companies been “gaming” the market operator AEMO by withholding supply to force the operator to pay them more but they also stand to win enormous compensation payments because AEMO has shut down the market.

        • New York TimesYes, Crypto Is Crashing Again. Blockchain Will Survive.

          This week, the crypto market plummeted for the second time in a month, in tandem with a sharp drop in global stock markets. The collapse, not the first of its kind, showed again how the violent swings of a largely unregulated market warp the development of a transformative technology. But crypto is just one aspect of the larger blockchain universe. Its skeptics and fans alike must learn to see it as a technological experiment, instead of just a blatant scam or a speculative path to riches.

          Why has the market fallen apart in such spectacular fashion?

          The first recent crash, when the cryptocurrency market plunged 36 percent in a week in May, offers a clue. The collapse was largely set off by the death spiral of a cryptocurrency system called Terra Luna, made up of the coin Luna and its associated stablecoin, TerraUSD. At its dizzying heights in the spring, it represented roughly 3 percent of the total crypto market. Fear spread throughout the exchanges, and with it came panic selling.

          After the second crash this week, the cryptocurrency market is still worth in total nearly $1 trillion (about one-third of last November’s peak). Only a few of the 19,000 cryptocurrencies that have been created since 2009 are now worth billions. Most have failed. The crypto market is wildly volatile not because of cryptocurrency’s underlying technology, but because of the uneasy and often dangerously unstable junction between emerging technologies and regular money. Viewed from the long perspective of market history, this instability isn’t remotely new.

        • Geeks For GeeksBenefits of Blockchain Technology

          Blockchain is the backbone Technology of Digital CryptoCurrency BitCoin. Blockchain technology is a digital or ledger technology that evaluates the records and makes track of it in a peer-to-peer network. Each transaction is verified by the majority of participants of the system. It contains every single record of each transaction.

        • Trail Of BitsAre blockchains decentralized?

          Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data.

          We believe the risks inherent in blockchains and cryptocurrencies have been poorly described and are often ignored—or even mocked—by those seeking to cash in on this decade’s gold rush.

          In response to recent market turmoil and plummeting prices, proponents of cryptocurrency point to the technology’s fundamentals as sound.

    • Finance

      • Michael West MediaThe great Qantas grift

        While Qantas services sank and 9000 lost their jobs, chief executive Alan Joyce engineered the biggest transfer from the public money to a corporation in Australia’s history.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Patrick BreyerCourt ruling on passenger data: protection against general suspicion and false accusation€  – Patrick Breyer

        Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in its fundamental PNR judgment in the case “Ligue des droits humains v Conseil des ministres (Case C-817/19)” rejected the years-long retention of flight passenger data of all citizens as contrary to fundamental rights. In principle, the data of passengers on non-European flights may not be retained for longer than six months. Passengers on flights within the EU may only be stored if there is an acute risk of a terrorist attack or if special circumstances justify storage. No black box machine-learning algorithms may be used to assign a risk value to travellers.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Stop Using Twitter For Comics

        If you're an artist posting your comics exclusively to Twitter, please, I beg you, stop.

        [...]

        Twitter is designed to only show users the newest things. All your hard word will get buried under newer posts, and you'll be threatened to keep rapidly churning out new content to stay relevant.

        There is no way to look at a user's post archive. The only way to look at older comics is to take the long, slow, arduous crawl of scrolling to the bottom of the page, waiting for it to load older posts, scroll down again, repeat. This is especially bad for a series meant to be read in chronological order. If I have to do that, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to read your comic, no matter how good it looks.

      • Bryan LundukeBrowsing the World Wide Web via E-Mail. 1990's Style.

        Back in the 1990s… browsing “The Web” was a distinctly different experience for many people.

        Some had a limited amount of time which they could be “On-Line”. Others had access to Internet E-Mail, often through a local dial-up BBS… but not the ability to use a graphical Web Browser. (Yes… “E-Mail” has a dash in it… that’s how it was in the beginning — as it is “Electronic Mail” — and that’s how it shall forever stay.)

        [...]

        To my knowledge, no such “WWW via E-Mail” servers (Agora, GetWeb, or WWW4MAIL) are still in operation. In fact, even finding the source code for some of these servers has proven challenging.

        There have been a few attempts at writing a new such server over the years — including “newAgora” written in Python. However, none seem to have any longevity to them (newAgora was last updated 9 years ago).

        This isn’t terribly surprising, as the “WWW” has become increasingly difficult to use via text-mode browsers over the last 20 years. Add on top of this the continually shifting SSL requirements of most servers… and there simply isn’t the interest (or need) to continue supporting such functionality (as people have increasingly reliable Internet connectivity).



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People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 18, 2024
Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/03/2024: A Society That Lost Focus and Abandoning Social Control Media
Links for the day
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
Examples of boasting about the association
Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
"I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
[Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
fake elections
Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
Windows TCO?
Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
Links for the day
Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
[Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
Catspaw With Attitude
The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
Links for the day
Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Our Plans for Spring
Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
This is totally normal, right?
USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
Not joking!
The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
Not About Linux at All!
nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
Links for the day