06.30.22

GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Canada – LinuxLinks

  Canada is a country in North America sharing a land border with the United States in the south and in the northwest. It borders the Atlantic Ocean in the east, the Pacific Ocean in the west and the Arctic Ocean in the North.

• Server

  • Netcraft ☛ June 2022 Web Server Survey [Ed: Microsoft is down even further, as usual]

    In the June 2022 survey we received responses from 1,146,976,964 sites across 273,010,403 unique domains and 12,224,786 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.75 million sites and 583,000 domains, but a gain of 155,000 computers.

    Cloudflare experienced strong growth this month, gaining 2.99 million sites and 85,000 domains, representing a 4.64% growth in its number of sites. Cloudflare experienced a significant outage on 21 June, impacting around half of the total requests made to its network. The outage lasted around an hour and a half and affected a significant number of popular sites. 20.2% of the million most visited sites rely on Cloudflare (up 1,400 sites since last month).

    The three largest vendors by the million most visited sites metric—Apache, nginx, and Cloudflare—all have similar market share, though only Cloudflare gained market share this month. Apache saw the largest loss, dropping 2,190 sites (-0.96%), while nginx lost 280 sites (-0.13%).

    LiteSpeed gained a significant number of sites with an addition of 2.96 million (+5.89%), and gained 171,000 (+2.21%) domains – the second largest increase this month. The number of web-facing computers using LiteSpeed also showed strong growth, increasing by 4,460 (+3.44%) to a total of 134,000.

    nginx and Apache remain the two largest server vendors, though both saw similar losses of 6.52 million (-1.84%) and 6.18 million (-2.33%) sites this month. Despite this, nginx gained 795,000 (+1.06%) domains and saw continued growth in the number of web-facing computers with 158,000 (+3.44%) computers. Conversely, Apache lost 1.07 million domains (-1.71%) and 25,700 (-0.74%) web-facing computers.

  • The Next Platform ☛ So, You Think You Can Design A 20 Exaflops Supercomputer?

    The US Department of Energy has a single 2 exaflops system up and running – well, most of it anyway – and that of course is the “Frontier” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and two more slated for delivery, and that is the “Aurora” system at Argonne National Laboratory supposedly coming sometime this year and the “El Capitan” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is due next year. It took a lot of money and sweat to get these machines into the field – in Intel’s case, the sweat to money ratio has been pretty high given the four-year delay and massive architectural changes involved the latest and final incarnation of Aurora.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Linux Action News 247

    Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve’s increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.

  • Video ☛ KaOS 2022.06 overview | KaOS is an independent distribution focused on Qt and KDE. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of KaOS 2022.06 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Video ☛ Thunderbird’s huge update and Google’s new antitrust issues – Linux and open source news – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Enterprise Linux Security Episode 34 – How one business lost Everything – Invidious

    What would it be like to suffer a cyberattack event, that literally closes down an entire business? That’s exactly what happened to United Structures of America, a steel manufacturing company. In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss what happened, and some of the lessons learned that should cause other organizations to take a hard look at how insecure their own systems are.

  • Video ☛ Why Do I Choose Emacs Over Vim? It Looks Better! – Invidious

    I spent a couple of hours today playing with my Doom Emacs config. In particular, I focused on some font settings which I think help with aesthetics and with readability. In fact, I think one of the biggest reasons that I use Emacs over Vim is how Emacs renders fonts.

  • Video ☛ Biggest Problem With Wayland Desktop Capture – Invidious

    Wayland is continually imporving and one aspect of that is with desktop capture but right now there’s a pretty annoying design flaw with the way this system functions but it can certainly be fixed

• Kernel Space

  • Gradual Explorations of Filesystems, Paging and L4Re « Paul Boddie’s Free Software-related blog

    A surprising three years have passed since my last article about my efforts to make a general-purpose filesystem accessible to programs running in the L4 (or L4Re) Runtime Environment. Some of that delay was due to a lack of enthusiasm about blogging for various reasons, much more was due to having much of my time occupied by full-time employment involving other technologies (Python and Django mostly, since you ask) that limited the amount of time and energy that could be spent focusing on finding my way around the intricacies of L4Re.
    In fact, various other things I looked into in 2019 (or maybe 2018) also went somewhat unreported. I looked into trying to port the “user mode” (UX) variant of the Fiasco.OC microkernel to the MIPS architecture used by the MIPS Creator CI20. This would have allowed me to conveniently develop and test L4Re programs in the GNU/Linux environment on that hardware. I did gain some familiarity with the internals of that software, together with the Linux ptrace mechanism, making some progress but not actually getting to a usable conclusion. Recommendations to use QEMU instead led me to investigate the situation with KVM on MIPS, simply to try and get half-way reasonable performance: emulation is otherwise rather slow.
    You wouldn’t think that running KVM on anything other than Intel/AMD or ARM architectures were possible if you only read the summary on the KVM project page or the Debian Wiki’s KVM page. In fact, KVM is supported on multiple architectures including MIPS, but the latest (and by now very old 3.18) “official” kernel for the CI20 turned out to be too old to support what I needed. Or at least, I tried to get it to work but even with all the necessary configuration to support “trap and emulate” on a CPU without virtualisation support, it seemed to encounter instructions it did not emulate. As the hot summer of 2019 (just like 2018) wound down, I switched back to using my main machine at the time: an ancient Pentium 4 system that I didn’t want heating the apartment; one that could run QEMU rather slowly, albeit faster than the CI20, but which gave me access to Fiasco.OC-UX once again.

• Applications

  • Linuxiac ☛ Vim 9.0 Released, Introduces the New Vim9 Scripting Language

    After two and a half years of development, Vim 9.0 is now available, firmly focused on the new Vim9 scripting language capabilities.

    In its 30-year history, the terminal-based text editor Vim has been one of the most recognizable names in the open-source world, loved by some and disliked by others. Using it has put Unix/Linux users to the test more than once.

    However, Vim sticks to its original path, as evidenced by the recently released version 9.0. With that said, let’s take a look at the highlights of it.

  • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Software – Utilities

    
    Let’s kick off with a collection of detailed reviews highlighting 31 essential utilities. They are small, indispensable tools, useful for anyone running a Linux machine. They cover a wide spectrum of utilities.

    The following articles focus on specific topics.

  • Make Use Of ☛ Vim 9.0 Drops Linux Editing Bombshell With New Scripting Language

    The popular Linux text editor Vim has a new version available, version 9.0. The new version debuts a revamped scripting language, dubbed Vim9 Script.

    Vim 9.0 “Takes a Big Step”

    Vim creator Bram Moolenaar announced the new version in a post on Vim’s official website. “After many years of gradual improvement Vim now takes a big step with a major release,” Moolenaar wrote.

    While Vim already had a scripting language, Vim9 Script makes some changes to how comments, functions, and variable assignments work. While most users will want to wait until their distribution’s package manager updates Vim, Unix/Linux users eager to try the new version can download the source code from the download pageand compile it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ How to Enable Nautilus Typeahead Search in Ubuntu – OMG! Ubuntu!

    In this post I show you how to get the Nautilus typeahead feature back on all supported versions of Ubuntu.

    GNOME developers retired Nautilus’ type ahead functionality back in 2013. Ubuntu devs continued to patch the feature back in until 2017 when they decided to switch to a more ‘vanilla’ GNOME desktop experience.

    Chances are you’ve long-since adapted to life without it.

    However, in the world of open source anything is possible; if you have an itch, you can scratch it yourself — and one fervent fan of Nautilus typeahead search has done just that.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. With Terraform you can manage Cloud Compute, Networking, Load Balancers, DNS, and so on using simple Declarative Programming Language.

    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 Terraform 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.

  • Video ☛ How to install Toontown Rewritten on Pop!_OS 22.04 – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on Pop!_OS 22.04.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install WPS Office 2019 on a Chromebook – June Update

    Today we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on a Chromebook and some core fonts like Arial and New Times Roman. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

  • Citizix ☛ How to create a Kubernetes TLS/SSL Secret

    A Secret is an object that contains a small amount of sensitive data such as a password, a token, or a key. Such information might otherwise be put in a Pod specification or in a container image. Using a Secret means that you don’t need to include confidential data in your application code.

    Because Secrets can be created independently of the Pods that use them, there is less risk of the Secret (and its data) being exposed during the workflow of creating, viewing, and editing Pods. Kubernetes, and applications that run in your cluster, can also take additional precautions with Secrets, such as avoiding writing secret data to nonvolatile storage.

    Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps but are specifically intended to hold confidential data.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ lftp. How to “rsync” with ftp

    I’ve always been in complete control of my own servers¹, this mean they have all the tools I need. Recently they got me in charge of regularly backup a large site. This usually mean that I’m taking filesystem ‘snapshots’. But I’ve only have access to this large site via ftp, and my script needs rsync (and/or ssh). I need a way to do (almost) the same, after a research I’ve found lftp; this article will show you how to “rsync” with ftp.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to add and manage groups in SFTPGo | TechRepublic

    After deploying a platform for the storing and sharing of files and directories, one of the first things you’ll want to do is start adding and managing groups. With groups, you can better control who has access to what without having to take care of it on a user-by-user basis. By employing groups, you can add users who will inherit the permissions found within the group so it’s more efficient.

    But not every platform is the same and some do require a bit of extra attention to get right. One such platform is SFTPGo. Although on the surface, it looks as though it should be very simple to manage users and groups, you do have to go the extra mile to make sure it all works.

    Let me show you what I mean by walking you through the process of adding a group and then adding a user to that group.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to deploy CouchDB as a cluster with Docker | TechRepublic

    Recently, I showed you how to deploy CouchDB as a standalone NoSQL database server, which could serve you well in small instances. This time around, I want to show you a neat trick for deploying CouchDB as a cluster using Docker. Although this method might not be ideal for production usage, it’s a great way for developers to be able to work with CouchDB in a test environment.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Neofetch on CentOS 9 Stream – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Neofetch on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Neofetch is a free and open-source command-line tool that displays system and hardware information in a visually appealing manner. Neofetch displays an ASCII logo of your Linux distribution along with information related to your system in the terminal such as OS type, kernel version, CPU, RAM, and others.

    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 Neofetch command-line tool that displays the system on CentOS 9 Stream.

  • H2S Media ☛ 4 Ways to install GIMP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Install free and open-source GIMP editor on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish Linux for editing, retouching, or optimizing your images.

    The free image editor “GIMP” offers professional tools and retouching functions forIts name is actually an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it is one of the best free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop for private and semi-professional use.

  • H2S Media ☛ 3 Ways to install Pinta image editing tool on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 LTS [Ed: Warning for Microsoft Mono]

    Have Microsoft Paint open-source alternative Pinta on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal Fossa for image drawing and editing images.

    Inspired by Paint.NET, Pinta is another open-source program for Linux users with features similar to Microsoft Paint software. It is not just limited to Linux, instead, Pinta is a cross-platform that can be installed on Windows, FreeBSD, and macOS

    This bitmap image drawing tool is very straightforward and also offers drawing tools, image filters, and color adjustment tools but fewer feartures as compared to GIMP. However, GIMP is a little complicated for new users whereas this one is easy and focuses on usability which can be seen in its offerings. Such as unlimited undo history; Multiple language support; flexible toolbar arrangement, including floating as windows or docking around the image edge; also supports for image layers.

  • Composable tools for disk images | Richard WM Jones

    Over the past 3 or 4 years, my colleagues and I at Red Hat have been making a set of composable command line tools for handling virtual machine disk images. These let you copy, create, manipulate, display and modify disk images using simple tools that can be connected together in pipelines, while at the same time working very efficiently. It’s all based around the very efficient Network Block Device (NBD) protocol and NBD URI specification.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Deluge BitTorrent Client 2.1.0 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu | UbuntuHandbook

    The free cross-platform Deluge BitTorrent client released version 2.1.0 one day ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04.

    Deluge is a fully-featured torrent downloading app with GTK, web UI, and command line interfaces. The app features protocol encryption, DHT, Local Peer Discovery (LSD), Peer Exchange (PEX), UPnP/NAT-PMP, web seeds, stream torrent and more.

    The new 2.1.0 was released with minimum libtorrent requirement increased to v1.2. Python 2 is no longer supported! And, Python 3.6 is the minimum requirement of the programming language.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ New Effect Added to ‘Burn My Windows’ GNOME Extension – OMG! Ubuntu!

      Why settle for merely burning application windows on close when you could totally incinerate them instead?

      Yes, everyone’s1 favourite over-the-top desktop effect extension is back with an update, and it adds yet another epically excessive window closing animation to its pool: Incinerate.

      As you can probably imagine the new Incinerate effect takes your app windows and…

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Condres OS Plasma 1.0

    With great pleasure we announce the release of Condres Plasma 1.0 based on Debian 11.

    This first release will be followed by a full online calamares based installer, we will integrate the Control Center that was previously available in the old releases on the new Debian based version.

    The new implementations will be available (some) in September / October 2022.

  • Second Point Release: Univention Corporate Server 5.0-2

    With the Point Release UCS 5.0-2, another important step has been taken for further developing Univention Corporate Server towards more accessibility, better usability, as well as the integration of services and their central management. In this blog article, I would like to give you an overview of the most important new features and improvements, such as the integration of Self Services into the UCS Portal, the introduction of service-specific passwords or various performance improvements in the use of DNS and LDAP, as well as an overview of the apps made available for UCS 5.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Unity 7.6 Desktop Released as the First Major Update to Ubuntu’s Unity7 in 6 Years

    
    The last release of the Unity7 desktop environment was back in May 2016, when Ubuntu was still using Unity, but the community never let it die. Rudra Saraswat, who is known for many Open Source projects, as well as the maintainer of the unofficial Ubuntu Unity Remix flavor, is also involved in keeping Unity7 alive.

    Since this is the first major release in the last six years, you can imagine that it packs a bunch of new features, starting with a redesigned dash (app launcher) and HUD to look more modern and slick featuring a flat style, improved dash rounded corners, as well as support for accent colors to Unity and Unity Control Center.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Sportskeeda ☛ 5 best Android gaming devices to play single-player games in 2022

  • 5 Best Sticker Apps for Android in [2022] – TechPP

  • Android Police ☛ Android 14: The top features we want to see in 2023

  • Digital Trends ☛ Android 13: Everything we know about Google’s big OS update | Digital Trends

  • Giz China ☛ Beware of this Android banking malware and here’s how to protect yourself

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Tecno Pova 3 Android smartphone unveiled – Geeky Gadgets

  • Google Pixel 7 suddenly looks an even more appealing Android phone | T3

  • PR Newswire ☛ RuggON Rugged Android Tablet, SOL PA501, Earns FirstNet® Certification

  • The Verge ☛ Google’s Android Automotive OS is coming to BMW cars next year – The Verge

  • Android Police ☛ Google Password Manager for Android and Chrome is getting a new, more consistent UI

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Customize the Google Search Widget on Your Android Phone

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Share Your Android Clipboard With All Your Other Devices

  • GO Media ☛ You Should Use These Hidden Chrome ‘Flags’ to Make It a Better Android Browser

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Nightly: These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 119

      The Firefox Profiler can now sort roots in alphabetical order with a flamgraph. This is especially useful when comparing profiles with the JavaScript filter, as this ensures that the order is consistent.

    • SpiderMonkey Newsletter (Firefox 102-103) | SpiderMonkey JavaScript/WebAssembly Engine

      SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 102 and 103 Nightly release cycles.

    • Mozilla ☛ A Pocket collection for your wellness journey, as curated by the team behind ‘The Science of Happiness’ podcast

      Want to live a more fulfilling life? The internet gives plenty of advice. But finding guidance backed by research can get tricky.

      That’s where The Science of Happiness podcast comes in. Co-produced by PRX and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the popular podcast explores science-backed strategies to cultivate a happier life. Its new series, Happiness Break, guides listeners through a practice they can follow for a few minutes during their day.

      Podcast host and psychologist Dacher Keltner is curating Pocket reading lists in hopes of encouraging listeners to go deeper on subjects like fear of failure, gratitude and optimism. We chatted with him about what motivated the Happiness Break, why he thinks wellness audio content have become so popular and how he makes time for his own reading list.

    • Rust Blog ☛ Announcing Rust 1.62.0 | Rust Blog

      The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.62.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

    • LWN ☛ Rust 1.62.0 released

      Version 1.62.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include a new cargo add command, default enum variants, an improved Linux mutex implementation, a number of stabilized APIs, and more.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

    Really pleased to see so much work from the team, and the wider community released as Collabora Online 22.05 – a first cut of our next round of development work around the next-generation Collabora Online – quicker, slicker, better, prettier and more.
    Today Collabora’s app-store experiment with LibreOffice Vanilla was ended. In time we will write up and publish the data more widely, make final donations to TDF and as/when sensible finish up some Mac work in due course. Many thanks to all those who worked hard over the years to get LibreOffice into many app-stores – you rock. Of course – you can still get Collabora Office for your Mac, and help to support FOSS development that way.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ Fresh in the LibrePlanet archives: LibrePlanet 2022 workshop videos

    In the lead-up to LibrePlanet 2022, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) received more workshop submissions than ever before. And because our LibrePlanet schedule is often chock full of splendid talks already, we thought it best to present the workshops in our very first LibrePlanet workshop series, which ran after LibrePlanet so that they would not conflict with any talks.

  • Translators and free software, a practical introduction to OmegaT

    Professional translators are more than often taught to use proprietary tools in universities and professional groups. OmegaT has existed for 20 years as a professional Computer Aided Translation tool (CAT) and is used all around the world. This workshop will introduce participants to the concepts behind CATs and especially how they are practically put into use in OmegaT: translation memories, segmentation, exchange formats, collaborative work, etc.

  • Software localization (translation) of Web-based projects

    Software localization (translation) of Web-based projects could be a nightmare for many developers. However, this time-consuming process can be solved easily thanks to the free software tool Tolgee. Jan Cizmar will guide you through with his workshop named Web Application Localization Without Tears. He will show you how to manage localization texts in simple UI or how to take the advantage of the in-context localization feature, so you can just click & translate the text easily.

    “The more languages your software knows, the more of a satisfied users you have”. However, current software localization in modern JS frameworks and other software is complicated and fairly time-consuming for all involved participants. Thanks to the in-context localization feature of free software project Tolgee, this tool offers easier localization process, more relevant translations delivery and finally less work for developers.

  • Installing Ourselves into LibrePlanet

    Hosted by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha of The Cell for Digital Discomfort

    A workshop session to map out each of our current conditions of connecting and being together, the physical-political, and technological conditions using a diagrammatic methodology.

    The workshop is geared towards installing ourselves into the conference’s infrastructural spectralities by sharing, learning from and attuning to each others’ conditions for connectivity, online participation and basic computer-mediated mundane day-to-day life. We want to pose this affirmation as an initial trigger: installing is about situating — attuning to our network of (inter-)dependencies and attuning to the dependencies with our local and vernacular but also standardized and planetary networks.

Leftovers

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • LWN ☛ Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

    The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has issued a strong call for free software projects to give up GitHub and to move their repositories elsewhere. There are a number of problems that SFC has identified with the GitHub code-hosting service and, in particular, with its Copilot AI-based code-writing tool that was trained on the community’s code stored in the company’s repositories. Moving away from GitHub will not be easy, SFC said, but it is important to do so lest the free-software community repeat the SourceForge mistake.

• Security

  • USCERT ☛ #StopRansomware: MedusaLocker [Ed: Should stop Windows then, as that's by far the biggest ransomware magnet]

    CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: MedusaLocker, to provide information on MedusaLocker ransomware. MedusaLocker actors target vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access victims’ networks. Note: this joint #StopRansomware CSA is part of an ongoing #StopRansomware effort to publish advisories for network defenders that detail various ransomware variants and ransomware threat actors.

  • eSecurity Planet ☛ Nearly a Million Kubernetes Instances Exposed on Internet

    Cybersecurity researchers have found more than 900,000 instances of Kubernetes consoles exposed on the internet.

    [...]

    Kubernetes is a very popular container orchestration system. The name comes from the Greek word for “helmsman.” The term “K8s” or “K-eights” is also used to refer to this technology.

    Many organizations manage their applications with Kubernetes using self-contained units called “pods,” which share common resources with other units without being aware of each other. For example, “npm start” or “go run” processes can be managed in pods and share some CPU and RAM.

    K8s is helpful to deploy, manage, and scale containers, which often consist of micro-services and their configuration files. When the workload increases or decreases, Kubernetes can handle the situation automatically.

    As a result, an important security aspect of Kubernetes is access control. Any misconfiguration can lead to unwanted disclosures and attackers could even use them to escape containers and escalate privileges. Besides, Kubernetes provides APIs, CLI commands, and user interfaces that could be attractive for hackers.

    Cyble explained its scan “does not necessarily imply that all exposed instances are vulnerable to attacks or will lead to the loss of sensitive data,” but “emphasizes the existence of seemingly simple misconfiguration practices that might make companies lucrative targets for TAs in the future.”

  • eSecurity Planet ☛ Hacking Linux is Easy with PwnKit [Ed: This is patched, unlike the dozens of Microsoft actively-exploited vulnerabilities that are not even patched; selective media slant]

    The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added PwnKit as a high-severity Linux vulnerability to its list of actively exploited bugs.

    Recorded as CVE-2021-4034, with a CVSS score of 7.8/10, PwnKit was discovered by Qualys in November 2021 and can be used by hackers to gain full root control over major Linux distributions.

  • Wired ☛ A New, Remarkably Sophisticated Malware Is Attacking Routers | WIRED

    AN UNUSUALLY ADVANCED hacking group has spent almost two years infecting a wide range of routers in North America and Europe with malware that takes full control of connected devices running Windows, macOS, and Linux, researchers reported on June 28.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ ZuoRAT Malware Is Targeting Routers

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • AccessNow ☛ Why Kenyans should say no to biometrics for SIM card registry – Access Now

      “Avoid disconnection, update your SIM registration details.” This is the message that Kenyans have been seeing for months. Kenyan telcos have been threatening to disconnect people from mobile phone and internet services if they do not provide new data, including facial images — part of their personal, unchangeable biometrics. The companies claimed it was required under the Kenya Information and Communications (Registration of SIM-Cards) Regulations, 2015. In fact, that’s a gross misrepresentation of the law. Collecting biometric data for a SIM card puts people at risk of privacy violations, data breaches and abuse, and even identity theft. Kenyans must say no, and oppose any new regulations to authorize it.

      Privacy violations are not new in Kenya. As Access Now has previously highlighted, companies like Safaricom have not only failed to protect subscribers’ personal information, but also refused to take accountability for data breaches. Here’s a look at what’s happened so far in Kenya, details on the push to authorize biometric data collection, and what Kenyans can do now to oppose it.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Public Knowledge ☛ Marking A Win for Free Expression Online, Copyright Office Finds that New Forms of Copyright Would Not Benefit Journalism – Public Knowledge

      Today, the U.S. Copyright Office published its report on “Copyright Protections for Press Publishers,” concluding that the publishing industry already benefits from significant protections under existing law and does not require any new copyright protections, including a new ancillary copyright like the one currently implied in the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.” Public Knowledge applauds the Copyright Office for conducting a robust inquiry into the questions and providing balanced, nuanced insights into the issue.

      The following can be attributed to Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:

      “The Copyright Office’s report today made one thing crystal clear: Copyright law is neither the source of, nor the solution to, the crisis facing journalism in the United States. The Office also helpfully notes that creating an ancillary right (such as a right to prevent outside linking to content) would go far beyond the bounds of existing copyright law, would likely be unable to accommodate basic free speech protections, and would otherwise raise constitutional concerns.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • SpellBinding: GINOYWR Wordo: GRAFT

  • Modern Art

    So the fash are on their “modern art is bad” spree again and I’m seeing a lot of comrades speaking out in defense of modern art and that’s great because I love modern art but two things:

    First, the fascists started out rejecting but ended up coopting modern art (Hartwig comes to mind). Second, let’s be careful so we don’t make aesthetics education a shibboleth for gatekeeping. Uh, that came out a li’l bit jargony but what I mean is I don’t want “lol those grobians don’t get this stuff, we’re so clever” because then people who don’t get modern art will be like “oh ok I guess the left is not for me, bye“.

    [...]

    Like these days when we have Frozen and Doom and Jimi Hendrix and pop rocks and acid and Glass Teeth and Adventure Time and Tetris and the Monkees, now maybe cubism and modernism and neoplasticism don’t look so special but back in the day we were dropping our jaws down to the god damned basement seeing this stuff.

    Haussmann’s boulevards had just obliterated Paris and subjected us to the modern city. It was an era of spirits and aliens and evolution and evil flowers and Little Nemo in Dreamland and our brains were on the god damned floor seeing this stuff.

• Technical

  • On choosing a text editor

    When I was young, I read an excerpt from a book about a child who was becoming a pearl diver. I can’t find its source (it turns out that there are many children’s books about pearl divers), but the scene has stuck with me with a dreamlike combination of haziness and crystal-clarity.

    A child (or young man?) had to choose between donning a hooded suit of cotton or covering himself with hot oil to protect himself (from what?) in the water while diving for pearls (or maybe something else?). This was presented as a momentous decision: you were either a cotton suit diver, or a hot oil diver, and whatever you picked for your first dive decided which it was going to be. I think the protagonist chose oil?

  • Behind The Scenes

    Today we’ll talk about the Gemini server that powers this capsule and runs on an ESP32 development board. (All code is simplified and some uninteresting parts are omitted.)

  • Mobile Musings

    It occurred to me today that as of Monday, I’ve been using my current smartphone–the Samsung Galaxy Note 8–for four and a half years. That is quite a bit longer than I expected to use it; I’d used my previous smartphone for three and a half years, and it was in pretty bad shape by the time I retired it. My Note 8 certainly isn’t in mint condition: its battery life has been reduced to about 24 hours of standby time, its body has many scratches and scuffs, and its screen has noticeable burn-in from the keyboard and on-screen navigation buttons (a featured I always disliked). The software on the phone, however, runs quite well, and the phone shows no apparent slowdown.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Bombo fork cert skipping, and TLS critique

      The host is Sean, and
      I presume he the father of Gemini. This is a worrying development
      in light of the fact that his capsule says:
      I’m no longer involved with the Gemini development, so
      all the tests and tools that were here are have been re-
      moved. Why doesn’t matter. I’ve been told to shut up,
      sit down, and let the adults in the room talk. You have
      been warned.
      Ouch.

  • Programming

    • FBInfer reduced our product crash by 50%

      Just want to share how powerful this tool is. Infer[1], or FBInfer (since it’s written by Facebook), is a static analyzer that can detect cross-function logic errors and potential data race in C, C++ and Objective-C. Which is just amazing.

    • How to host git repos

      In honor of World Give Up GitHub day, here’s a quick guide to how to serve up your own git repos.