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Links 11/07/2022: Nokia Threatens Notkia, Linux 5.19 RC6 is Out



  • GNU/Linux

    • US News And World ReportRussian OS Producer Astra Linux Plans Moscow IPO -Vedomosti

      Russian technology company Astra Linux is planning to hold an initial public offering (IPO) on the Moscow Exchange, the Vedomosti daily reported late on Thursday, quoting CEO Ilya Sivtsev, who declined to disclose a time frame, sums or terms.

      IPO activity gained pace in Russia in 2021 and at least 10 firms had been planning listings in 2022 before Feb. 24 when Moscow sent troops into Ukraine, triggering Western sanctions that have hurt Russia's financial sector.

    • Silicon AngleSUSE posts 18% sales growth amid continued enterprise demand

      Enterprise software maker SUSE SA today reported its second-quarter financial results, disclosing that its adjusted revenue grew 18% year-over-year, to $161.3 million. The company also posted a significant profit increase during the three months ended April 30. Germany-based SUSE provides a Linux distribution known as SUSE Server that is widely used in the enterprise.

    • Linux Made SimpleLinux Weekly Roundup #190

      Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a good week in the world of Linux releases with SparkyLinux 2022.07, Debian 11.4, and Bluestar Linux 5.18.9.

      Darktable 4.0.0 has also been released this week, application wise.

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • GNU World Order (Audio Show)World Order 468

        **kdepim-addons** , **kdepim-runtime** , **kdeplasma-addons** , **kdesdk- kioslaves** , **kdesdk-thumbnailers** , **kdesignerplugin** , **kdesukdepim- addons** , **kdepim-runtime** , **kdeplasma-addons** , **kdesdk-kioslaves** , **kdesdk-thumbnailers** , **kdesignerplugin** , **kdesu** from Slackware set **kde**.

      • Open Source Security (Audio Show)Open Source Security Episode 331 – GPG, but nothing makes sense

        Josh and Kurt talk about their very silly GPG key management from the past. This is sadly a very true story that details how both Kurt and Josh protected their GPG keys. Josh’s setup is like something out of a very bad spy novel. It was very over the top for a key that really didn’t matter.

      • VideoYou Can Run A Full X11 Session In Wayland?!?! - Invidious

        XWayland is such a useful project to make Wayland in 2022 actually usable offering a compatibility layer or better yet a full Xorg server to run apps managed under Wayland but it can do more than I expected.

      • VideoMajor Update Breaks Xmonad On Arch Based Linux Distros - Invidious

        XMonad (and Xmonad-Contrib) released a huge update back in October of last year.

      • The Night of a Thousand Errors | LINUX Unplugged 466

        We were fixing servers all night, but at least we have a great story. A special guest joins us to help make a big show announcement.

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.19-rc6
        Things looking fairly normal for rc6, nothing here really stands out.
        A number of small fixes all over, with the bulk being a collection of
        sound and network driver fixes, along with some arm64 dts file
        updates.
        
        

        The rest is some selftest updates, and various (mostly) one-liners all over the place. The shortlog below gives a good overview, and is short enough to just scroll through to get a flavor of it all.

        Perhaps somewhat unusually, I picked up a few fixes that were pending in trees that haven't actually hit upstream yet. It's already rc6, and I wanted to close out a few of the regression reports and not have to wait for another (possibly last, knock wood) rc to have them in the tree.

        Linus
      • LWNKernel prepatch 5.19-rc6

        The 5.19-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

    • Applications

      • GSoC'22: Making Thunar Bulk Renamer More Advanced.

        Most of you would be aware of bulk renamer, a handy plugin in Thunar to rename many files together. The plugin is already very advanced and can perform many complex tasks. But sometimes, performing those tasks required more user interference than expected. Consider a case where you are renaming two files, and the new name for one file matches the old name of the second file. Now, no issue arises if the second file is renamed first, and the bulk renamer works perfectly. But if the first file is renamed, it throws an error message as the filename already exists. In the case of two files, the user can resolve such errors manually, but it can become a very tedious task for a large number of files. So the job was to make the bulk renamer intelligent enough to identify the best order in which the files should be renamed so that all such errors are resolved entirely. A trivial usage case for it

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Tom's HardwareHow to Use SSH to Connect to Remote Computers Using Windows, Linux or macOS

        SSH is often taken for granted. It provides a simple and secure means to remotely connect to servers and devices enabling users to control a device from great distances.

      • Trend OceansHow to Install Ubuntu 22.04 on VirtualBox on Windows 10 & 11

        Undoubtedly, Ubuntu will be the first Linux distribution for most people who have started Linux for the first time and will certainly be the most familiar distribution.

        For this reason, we will cover the step-by-step process of downloading, installing, and setting up the latest Ubuntu operating system using VirtualBox running on your Windows 10 or 11 64-bit computer.

        This is a very beginner’s guide, so it will be useful for a lot of new starters who want to try Ubuntu for the first time, and once you get familiar with Ubuntu, you can follow the same steps to install it on physical hardware.

      • Geeks For GeeksHow To Install apf-firewall on Ubuntu

        APF, or Advanced Policy Firewall, is a firewall that is occasionally observed on Liquid Web servers. It is essentially an interface to iptables, which is Linux’s standard interface for controlling network ports. Interacting with iptables may be complicated and error-prone, but APF substantially simplifies it. APF, on the other hand, is still only accessible via ssh. Changes to APF cannot be made using WHM or cPanel. All APF configuration files are stored on your server in the /etc/apf subdirectory. They allow hosts.rules file in this folder contains all of the IP addresses that are whitelisted for the server, while the deny hosts.rules file contains all of the IP addresses that are prohibited by the firewall. Each IP address that is prohibited should contain a justification for the block in the denied hosts.rules file (most of them will be blocked by bfd, which blocks IPs attempting to brute force the server).

      • Geeks For GeeksHow To Install zypper on Ubuntu

        Zypper is a software management command-line program. It may add package repositories, search for packages, install, uninstall, or update packages, install patches, and device drivers, and check dependencies, among other things. Zypper can be used interactively or in a non-interactive fashion by the user, scripts, or front-ends. In this article, we will be going through the installation and usage of Zypper on the Ubuntu system.

      • Geeks For GeeksHow to Restore Default Repositories in Ubuntu

        Repositories in Ubuntu are servers that contain software packaged into nice .deb or .rpm files containing the programs and libraries you need to set up of packages. A repository or repo is basically a software archive that makes it easy to install new software in your machine. In Linux, systems software is packaged into nice .deb or .rpm files which contain the programs and libraries needed by you.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install GNU Emacs on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - LinuxCapable

        GNU Emacs is more than just a text editor; it is a powerful tool for programmers and other power users. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This makes Emacs highly extensible; users can add new functionality by writing their own Emacs Lisp code or installing packages that add new features.

        Emacs is also customizable, allowing users to change almost every aspect of how it looks and behaves. As a result, Emacs has something to offer everyone, from novice users who appreciate its simple interface to experienced programmers who can take advantage of its powerful features. No matter how you use it, Emacs is sure to make your life easier.

        The following tutorial will teach you how to install Emacs on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a LaunchPAD APT PPA or Flatpak with the command line terminal.

      • How To Install Wine On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

        At the time of this article writing, Wine 7.0 is the latest stable version that is available for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In this tutorial post, we will show you the method to download Wine on Ubuntu and install wine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install FL Studio 20 on a Chromebook with Crossover 21 in 2022

        Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 20 on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install novelWriter on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - LinuxCapable

        NovelWriter is a simple, open-source plain text editor designed to write novels. It has a minimal markdown syntax for Formatting Text, making it easy to use and learn. NovelWriter is written in Python 3 (3.6+) and Qt 5 (5.3+) for cross-platform support. NovelWriter offers a full-screen mode that hides all menus and toolbar buttons for writers who prefer a more distraction-free environment. In addition, the software automatically saves your work every few minutes, so you can always pick up where you left off. NovelWriter is the perfect tool for writing your next great novel, whether you’re just starting or a seasoned pro.

        For additional information before installation, I recommend visiting the official website’s features page.

        The following tutorial will teach you how to install novelWriter on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.

      • UNIX CopHow to install CMake on CentOS 9 Stream - Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

        CMake is a cross-platform code generation or automation tool. It allows developers to write a platform-independent CMakeList.txt file to customize the whole compilation process and then generate the necessary localized Makefile files.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Reviews

      • Distro WatchReview: NixOS 22.05

        NixOS is an interesting distribution. The operating system largely acts as a method for showcasing the advanced Nix package manager which offers atomic updates, rollbacks to previous generations of packages, and reproducible builds. This makes running a distribution with Nix as the package manager fairly flexible as well as reliable in the face of package upgrade issues.

        The Nix package manager makes up the heart of the NixOS distribution and can also be run on other distributions. Nix's portability gives anyone who installs it access to over 80,000 packages which has increased from 60,000 in the past two years.

        NixOS is available in three editions. There are two graphical editions, one featuring the GNOME desktop which is a 2.0GB download, and the other runs KDE Plasma and is a 1.6GB download. The third edition is a command line only flavour called Minimal which is 824MB in size. One of the big changes in the two graphical editions is the introduction of the Calamares system installer.

        In the past, when I've used previous versions of NixOS the user was expected to manually partition the hard drive. Then we were asked to edit a configuration file in a text editor, inputting changes to software packages, boot loader settings, and enabling user accounts. While this process was fairly well documented, it was not geared toward beginners or even more experienced casual users. The inclusion of Calamares means users can partition the hard drive, tweak settings, and create user accounts from the comfort of a point and click application which has proven successful in many Arch-based distributions.

    • DragonFlyBSD Picks

      • DragonFly BSD DigestA debug difference

        I see it on the machine where I run this Digest, as the caching mechanism adds and deletes files rapidly. Matthew Dillon has placed it behind a sysctl, so your messages log will be a little less noisy by default.

      • DragonFly BSD DigestUnofficial NYCBUG meetup tonight
      • DragonFly BSD DigestBSD Now 462: OpenBSD Sales Pitch

        This week’s BSD Now has several links, though I’d want to point at the Yubikey/ssh/OpenBSD login one as the most interesting to me.

      • DragonFly BSD DigestIn Other BSDs for 2022/07/09
    • Slackware Family

      • Eric HameleersFinally a new batch of Live ISOs for Slackware-current (liveslak-1.5.3) | Alien Pastures

        Time flies. The last batch-release of Slackware Live ISO’s was almost 7 months ago. I was burnt up by the time 2021 turned into 2022 and it took a long time for me to enjoy working on my projects again (and it’s still difficult), but I thought it might be appreciated to at least have a fresh set of ISOs for the Slackware Live Edition to play with during summer holidays.

        It’s of course not entirely correct that there were no new ISOs for seven months… I have an automated process in place which re-creates a Live ISO of Slackware64-current every time there is an update to the ChangeLog.txt. It is meant to test every update and find issues to fix. There’s a European and a USA URL to download this ISO.

        The various small issues that popped as a result software updates in Slackware-current, were fixed in the liveslak sources during these past months, and thanks to the people who reported to me the issues that they encountered! These fixes went into ‘silent’ liveslak releases that were not mentioned in blog posts or other forms of communication: 1.5.1.5 to accompany the release of Slackware 15.0 (I tagged this to create the original Live ISO for Slackware 15.0) and then 1.5.2 was tagged a short while later to fix a few glaring errors in 1.5.1.5. Finally the 1.5.2 tag was meant to release a batch of ISOs in May, but I did not have the energy.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Its FOSS7 Reasons Why Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the Most Secure Release Yet - It's FOSS News

        Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, released back in April, is the most secure Ubuntu release yet.

        Between its extended security updates, new hardware support, and a wide range of other improvements, it far outperforms all previous releases in terms of security.

        But how does it do that? And, what makes this release different from previous ones? Well, there are a few reasons for that, and Canonical has highlighted all the relevant details in a new blog post.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • ViceNokia Asks Open-Source ‘Notkia’ Phone Project to Change Its Name

        A small creator is being threatened with legal action by Nokia after the company claimed their project, known as Notkia, is “confusingly similar” to a long-discontinued phone made 14 years ago.

        The creator, who goes by Reimu NotMoe online, started working on this project in 2019, with the goal of making a portable handheld device with 100 percent free software. It runs Linux, and its components are housed in a Nokia 168x shell—the less popular, but almost as clunky successor to Nokia’s 3310 model.

        They’ve been posting about the project and its progress on Hackaday. “The original reason was because the modern smartphones are becoming increasingly hacker-unfriendly and privacy-unfriendly,” NotMoe wrote on Hackaday. They were also becoming bigger and more unwieldy. NotMoe wrote that they tried several other old phone cases, but none quite worked; they settled on the Nokia 168x for its roominess and overall look.

      • New York TimesSteam Deck Review: A Game Console for the Quintessential Gamer - The New York Times

        There’s a new hard-to-get game console this year that’s not a PlayStation or an Xbox. It’s sold online only. Most casual gamers probably haven’t heard of it.

        It’s the $400 Steam Deck, a console as utilitarian as it sounds. The hand-held device, a slab of bulky black plastic with a built-in game controller, has the guts of a supercomputer and a touch screen. It’s as if a gaming computer and a Nintendo Switch had a child.

        Valve, the company in Bellevue, Wash., known for its Steam online games store, began taking orders for the Steam Deck last year and the consoles arrived recently. The company has not published sales numbers, but estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands have shipped. People who try to order one today won’t receive the device until the autumn.

      • EngadgetGeely buys majority stake in troubled phone maker Meizu [Ed: It was planning to make GNU/Linux phones at one point]
      • Tom's HardwareAlder Lake-Powered Linux Laptop Arrives With 14 Hours of Battery Life | Tom's Hardware

        System76, the Colorado-based Linux laptop, desktop, and server specialist, has announced (opens in new tab) a new highly portable laptop with an Intel Alder Lake processor inside. The new Lemur Pro (opens in new tab) is a "lighter than Air" 14-inch form factor laptop with excellent battery life and attractions such as open firmware (powered by Coreboot) and a 180-degree hinge. In addition, buyers can choose to go with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed.

        The new Lemur Pro has many attractive modern features you might see advertised in many rival mainstream thin and light designs. However, the special sauce here is the "System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot."

        Coreboot, known initially as LinuxBIOS, is significant as it is an open-source BIOS implementation embraced by Linux users. It is lightweight, flexible, and feature-rich. Sadly, not many modern laptops or desktop PCs support Coreboot, but it seems to have gained momentum in recent times. We reported on Coreboot being made available for MSI Z690-A WiFi motherboards in April. More recently, in a demonstration of Coreboot's flexibility for tinkerers, we reported on a port of Doom being released as a Coreboot payload.

      • CNX SoftwareUP 4000 SBC is a Raspberry Pi lookalike with an Intel Apollo Lake processor - CNX Software

        AAEON has unveiled the UP 4000 single board computer with a form factor and ports arrangement similar to Raspberry Pi 2/3, but powered by a choice of x86 processors, namely the Intel Atom E3900 series, Celeron N3350, or Pentium N4200 all parts of the Apollo Lake family.

        The first UP Board was introduced in 2015 as a device offering an x86 alternative to the Raspberry Pi 2 with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300/Z8350 “Cherry Trail” processor, but later “UP bridge the gap” boards from the company used larger “Squared” (85.6 x 90 mm) or “Xtreme” (122 x 120 mm) form factors. The UP 4000 SBC brings us back to the original business card form factor but with a boost in performance and various specifications improvements.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Tom's HardwareCrowPi L Raspberry Pi Laptop Review: A Lean Mean STEM Learning Machine | Tom's Hardware

        The CrowPi L is a powerful Raspberry-Pi powered laptop and effective STEM kit for kids, but you’ll need to pay a premium to take advantage of the available hardware tutorials the system has to offer.

      • Tom's HardwareHow To Build a Raspberry Pi Pico W Web App With Anvil | Tom's Hardware

        The Raspberry Pi Pico W packs a ton of functionality into a very affordable package. For just $6 we get the same dual core Arm Cortex M0+ CPU running at 133 MHz, 264KB of RAM and 2MB of flash memory as the original Raspberry Pi Pico. But we also get a 2.4 GHz capable Wi-Fi chip, all in the same DIP package.

        The inclusion of Wi-Fi is the biggest draw. We have a simple and cheap microcontroller, with enough horsepower to accomplish many projects typically reserved for more powerful and expensive Raspberry Pis, such as the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

      • Tom's HardwareBest Amazon Prime Day Raspberry Pi Deals 2022
      • ArduinoThis IoT weather monitor can track environmental data from almost anywhere

        The need for rapid environmental data collection, processing, and viewing has never been more important, and with the rise of always-connected IoT devices, this goal is now closer than ever. However, most DIY solutions that rely on Bluetooth€® or WiFi simply are not feasible in isolated areas due to their short range. This is what inspired Hackster.io user Pradeep to build his own data logger system utilizing much longer-distance LTE communication instead.

        In order to actually get the current weather conditions, including temperature/humidity, rain, air quality, and light levels, Pradeep connected a wide variety of sensor modules to a single Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board, which acts as the data processor. From here, he connected a Blues Wireless Notecard and Notecarrier assembly to the Arduino via its pair of UART pins that would allow the two board to send data between each other. After configuring Notehub to receive the incoming weather data in the form of a JSON-formatted string, Pradeep added a webhook integration with Qubitro.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

      • Linux LinksBest Free and Open Source Alternatives to Oracle Database - LinuxLinks

        Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.

        In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.

        Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.

        Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.

        The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.

        While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.

    • Programming/Development

      • Geeks For GeeksHow to select a subset of DataFrame in R

        In general, when we were working on larger dataframes, we will be only interested in a small portion of it for analyzing it instead of considering all the rows and columns present in the dataframe.

      • Geeks For GeeksGE Stock Price Analysis Using R Language

        Stock analysis is a technique used by investors and traders to make purchasing and selling choices. Investors and traders strive to obtain an advantage in the markets by making educated judgments by researching and analyzing previous and current data.

      • RlangMulti-state survival modeling of a Jira issues snapshot

        Work items in a formal development process progress through a series of stages, e.g., starting at Open, perhaps moving to Withdrawn or Merged with another item, eventually reaching Development, and finishing at Done (with a few being Reopened, i.e., moving back to the start of the process).

        This process can be modelled as a Markov chain, provided data on each stage of the process is available, for each work item; allowing values such as average time spent in each state and transition probabilities to be calculated.

        The Jira issue/task/bug/etc tracking system has an option to generate a snapshot of the current status of work items in the system. The snapshot information on each item includes: start-date, current-state, time-in-state, date-of-snapshot.

      • Geeks For GeeksTop Programming Languages For Competitive Programming

        Building an application, running a server, or even implementing a game needs a programming language as the foundation. There are almost more than 700 programming languages which are the most popular ones and this number will increase day by day. But, you don’t need to learn all of them. Having a good command of anyone is enough for you to grow your career in it. But before choosing your language, make sure it has amazing career growth and you have an interest in it.

      • Python

        • Geeks For GeeksTitanic Survival Prediction using Tensorflow in Python

          In this article, we will learn to predict the survival chances of the Titanic passengers using the given information about their sex, age, etc. As this is a classification task we will be using random forest.

        • Geeks For GeeksFaceMask Detection using TensorFlow in Python

          In this article, we’ll discuss our two-phase COVID-19 face mask detector, detailing how our computer vision/deep learning pipeline will be implemented.

        • Geeks For GeeksHow to Develop a Random Forest Ensemble in Python

          Random forest is an ensemble supervised machine learning algorithm made up of decision trees. It is used for classification and for regression as well. In Random Forest, the dataset is divided into two parts (training and testing). Based on multiple parameters, the decision is taken and the target data is predicted or classified accordingly.

          Random Forest is a collection of multiple decision trees and the final result is based on the aggregated result of all the decision trees.

          To better understand Random Forest, let’s take an example of the Iris Dataset. Iris dataset is by default present in the scikit-learn library of Python.

        • Geeks For Geeks5 Statistical Functions for Random Sampling in PyTorch

          PyTorch is an open souropen-sourcece machine learning library used for deep learning with more flexibility and feasibility. This is an extension of NumPy.

          For Statistical Functions for Random Sampling, let’s see what they are along with their easy implementations. To run all these the first is to import Pytorch by import torch.

        • Geeks For GeeksGetting Started on Heroku with Python

          Heroku is a cloud platform as a service supporting several programming languages where a user can deploy, manage and scale their applications. It is widely used to deploy server-based web applications, APIs, discord bots, and more. So today in this tutorial, we’ll be deploying a simple flask app to Heroku from start, and learn how it works.

        • Geeks For GeeksHow to Return a Boolean Array True Where the String Array Ends with Suffix Using NumPy?

          In this article, we will discuss how to return a boolean array that is True where the string element in the array ends with a suffix using NumPy in Python.

  • Leftovers

    • Science

      • Omicron LimitedAdvanced 'mini brains' in a dish: Organoids that mimic human brain cortex in development and disease

        "Outer Radial Glia" (oRG) cells are nervous system stem cells that are instrumental for the development of the human cortex and have been challenging to produce in the lab. Now, a team of Max Planck researchers from Berlin succeeded in generating brain organoids that are enriched with these stem cells by refining and standardizing existing protocols for these mini-organs.

        Organoids are advanced three-dimensional cell cultures that form miniature versions of tissues such as the liver, intestine, brain, or certain types of cancers, and hold great promise for science. They enable large-scale research into development, disease and future therapies without the need to rely on a complete organism. But there are still many obstacles to overcome until an organoid is sufficiently similar to a real organ or part of it.

        In an article published in Nature Cell Biology, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) report they succeeded in growing organoids resembling the human cerebral cortex with unprecedented consistency and quality. They primed stem cells with a cocktail of three chemical potions for a short time at a very early stage of their development. This instructed the stem cells to form cellular aggregates during the following weeks that anatomically mimic the layering of the human cortex. Among those layers grew outer radial glia (oRG) cells, specialized stem cells that are essential for the characteristic expansion of brain hemispheres in humans and apes. This is the first time that these cells have been successfully generated, enriched and characterized in a cell culture system.

      • ACMThe Future of Information Work

        COVID-19 caused approximately one-third of U.S. workers to shift abruptly from working in offices to working from their residences.1,6,16 Early evidence suggested short-term output of knowledge workers did not drop and might have increased slightly.10,13 Furthermore, working from home has advantages such as time saved by not commuting and, for some, the flexibility and autonomy to set work schedules around home-life responsibilities such as child-care.9 As a result, many technology companies (for example, Twitter, Facebook, Square, Dropbox, Slack, and Zillow), announced remote-work policies to enable some or all employees to work remotely after the pandemic.4 Employees at other companies have threatened to quit if made to come back to full-time in-office work.11 Few think work will go back to how it was pre-pandemic, but our and related research suggest remote work also presents challenges that should be addressed going forward,11 both by improving remote workers' ability to connect with each other, and by effective use of hybrid workers' in-office time.

        We analyzed data on the work patterns of Microsoft employees before and after Microsoft's firmwide work-from-home mandate in March 2020. For employees who worked from home prior to the pandemic, we assumed any observed change in behavior after the work-from-home mandate was not due to working remotely, but to other factors, perhaps COVID-related. For the many Microsoft employees who worked in the office prior to the work-from-home mandate, we assumed changes in their behavior were due to a combination of working from home and the same outside factors that affected the employees who had worked from home to begin with. As illustrated in Figure 1, if work outcomes for these two groups moved in parallel prior to the pandemic, we could subtract out the differences in behavior changes between the two groups to isolate the causal effects of working from home.16

      • Quanta MagazinePhysicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder

        The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

    • Hardware

      • New York Times3-D Printing Grows Beyond Its Novelty Roots

        The machines stand 20 feet high, weigh 60,000 pounds and represent the technological frontier of 3-D printing.

        Each machine deploys 150 laser beams, projected from a gantry and moving quickly back and forth, making high-tech parts for corporate customers in fields including aerospace, semiconductors, defense and medical implants.

    • Finance

      • CoryDoctorowFinance caused the fall of Rome

        Graeber – a key Occupy activist who helped coin "We are the 99%" – drew heavily on the scholarship of Michael Hudson, an economic historian, who led a team of Harvard assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists in a major project exploring the role of debt in antiquity.

        Core to Hudson and Graeber's work is the recognition that societies can be divided into "debtors" and "creditors," and, depending on which group is favored by policy, different kinds of enduring, intergenerational social roles emerge. If we give primacy to creditors' claims above all, then debtors will inevitably fall deeper and deeper into debt, and eventually become indentured servants to their creditors.

        For example, since Babylonian times, farmers have borrowed – seed, labor and other inputs – against the year's coming crop. This is built into the nature of agriculture – you need stock to sow, which is multiplied by cultivation and then reaped. But farming is also subject to unforseeable strokes of bad luck: blights, droughts, storms, and more. When these occur, the farmer can't make good on their debts.

        Hudson's maxim is "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." A farmer who loses a crop and falls deeper into debt to sow the next year's crop will find themselves even further indebted as interest payments swamp even a bumper crop. The next year, things are worse – and then worse again.

        Everyone who does productive work will eventually run up against bad luck. The mason's stone will shatter, the smith's forge will catch fire, the herder's animals will sicken. If creditors are always protected, then eventually ever debtor will land at the bottom of an inescapable pit of debt, which their children and children's will inherit.

        Thus, if creditors' interests are always protected in law, "creditor" and "debtor" cease to describe economic relations and instead come to describe hereditary castes. The productive economy, organized around making the things a civilization needs to sustain itself, will be subordinated to the whims of creditor-aristocrats, who can order the smith to make decorations rather than agricultural implements and make the farmer grow ornamental flowers instead of staple crops.

      • CoryDoctorowCountervailing power

        It's hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses, predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity.

        [...]

        The rich don't just own all the good stuff, they also own the political process.

        [...]

        How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the one hand, it's obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on lobbying, directed both to the public and to lawmakers. As the leaks in Propublica's IRS Files show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal enforcers, who know you'll be able to hire more lawyers and better than they can afford.

        [...]

        But the secret to oligarchy isn't (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. There is so much solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and even ordinary millionaires, who may jockey with one another for the right to financialize your rent and suppress your wages, but come together with admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • teleSURUS Human Rights Criticism Aimed at Destabilizing Countries

        "Washington deceitfully uses human rights as part of a strategy to perpetuate its hegemony and cut off the independent development paths chosen by different peoples around the world," Moncada said.

        "Human rights are inherent to human beings" and "are written equally for the whole world," but Western powers exploit them to advance their own agenda, he added.

        "They are being used politically to meddle in the internal affairs of countries. They have turned them into a banner to discredit governments and, if possible, overthrow them, replacing them with ones that suit their particular interests, which are different from the interests of the peoples," Moncada said.

      • Deutsche WelleGerman MPs demand release of Julian Assange | Germany | News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 07.07.2022

        More than 70 members of the German parliament from four political parties have called on US President Joe Biden and the British government to stop the impending deportation of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to the US to face espionage charges. "Journalists must not be persecuted or punished for their work anywhere in the world," the Bundestag deputies wrote in an open letter. "In the interest of press freedom as well as for humanitarian reasons in view of his poor state of health, Julian Assange must be released without delay." Assange has been imprisoned in the UK since April 2019, when the government of Ecuador, which had hosted him in its London embassy for seven years, withdrew his political asylum.

      • The Age AUBugged embassy bathrooms and a wedding in prison: life married to Julian Assange

        Three weeks ago, on the day that British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to America – for trial under the US Espionage Act – guards entered Assange’s cell in Belmarsh prison. He was strip-searched, then locked in a bare cell and put on enhanced suicide watch.

        “This is the kind of thing Julian has no control over,” his wife, Stella Assange, tells me. Assange, she says, is usually locked in his cell for more than 20 hours a day. “So he was even more isolated than usual [while] processing that news. And then he was eventually moved back after two or three days and his cell had been searched.”

      • WSWS[Older] Retrial of Joshua Schulte begins for allegedly leaking CIA “Vault 7” documents to WikiLeaks - World Socialist Web Site

        The second federal trial of former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte on espionage charges began on Tuesday in a New York court with opening statements by the prosecution and the defendant telling the jury he was innocent and the victim of a political witch-hunt.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Michael GeistResponding to the Rogers Outage: Time to Get Serious About Competition, Consumer Rights, and Communications Regulation

        Like many Canadians, I spent most of the massive Rogers outage completely offline. With the benefit of hindsight, my family made a big mistake by relying on a single provider for everything: broadband, home phone, cable, and wireless services on a family plan. When everything went down, everything really went down. No dial tone, no channels, no connectivity. Work was challenging and contact with the kids shut off. It was disorienting and a reminder of our reliance on communications networks for virtually every aspect of our daily lives.

        So what comes next? We cannot let this become nothing more than a “what did you do” memory alongside some nominal credit from Rogers for the inconvenience. Canada obviously has a competition problem when it comes to communications services resulting in some of the highest wireless and broadband pricing in the developed world. Purchasing more of those services as a backup – whether an extra broadband or cellphone connection – will be unaffordable to most and only exacerbate the problem. Even distributing the services among providers likely means that consumers take a financial hit as they walk away from the benefits from a market that has incentivized bundling discounts. Consumers always pay the price in these circumstances, but there are policy solutions that could reduce the risk of catastrophic outages and our reliance on a single provider for so many essential services.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Politics

      • corpses
      • It's sad to see the Philippines in the hands of incompetent fools

        The Philippines is in a terrible state (just like any other country). The exchange rate of USD to PHP is getting worse, prices of basic commodities and gasoline are steadily increasing, and millions are still struggling to get by with everyday life. These circumstances made the 2022 elections even more important, as the new president will be the one responsible for solving the problems that the country was facing.

        These elections had the biggest amount of presidential candidates in the country's history, with 10 fighting for the position. The two main contenders were Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos Jr. (or BBM) and Maria Leonor "Leni" G. Robredo

        [...]

        Fake news is also rampant across social media. Attacks on the opposition have become so degraded and disgusting that they use insulting buzzwords like "dilawan" (a term mocking those related to the Aquinos, the main rival of the Marcos family). Just reading the title gives me a headache.

        I wonder what will become of this country. Will the Philippines fall into another age of dictatorship and censorship, under the facade of a democracy? Will we go through what Filipinos have experienced four decades ago? When will we learn?

    • Technical


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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