When you look at a Linux kernel version you might just see the current version but there's a lot of history behind how this structure came about and how the structure slowvely devolved over time
Is the Linux desktop hard to love? A long-time user experience developer argues it is, and we respond to his criticisms.
Linux is an open source and freely available kernel that can be obtained from the internet. Hundreds of distributions have been invented that are inspired by the Linux kernel, such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc. There is an open-source community of Linux to provide rapid runtime support services. Additionally, Linux-based distributions provide an interactive Graphical User Interface which is the primary reason that Linux is used by simple as well as advanced computer users.
In 1969, a group of collaborators and a Non-Profit Organization invented the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. Primarily, UNIX serves the community that uses servers, workstations, or mainframe computers. It was a dedicated CLI operating system. Later, UNIX also started offering GUI support as well.
So here we are, one week late, and 5.19 is tagged and pushed out.
The full shortlog (just from rc8, obviously not all of 5.19) is below, but I can happily report that there is nothing really interesting in there. A lot of random small stuff.
In the diffstat, the loongarch updates stand out, as does another batch of the networking sysctl READ_ONCE() annotations to make some of the data race checker code happy.
Other than that it's really just a mixed bag of various odds and ends.
On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now.
It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development - I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform.
Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too.
Anyway, regardless of all that, this obviously means that the merge window (*) will open tomorrow. But please give this a good test run before you get all excited about a new development kernel.
Linus
 After being in development for more than two months, Linux kernel 5.19 is finally here and introduces support for ZSTD-compressed firmware files, support for AMD’s Secure Nested Paging feature, a new user-space API for managing MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) flows, initial support for Loongson’s “LoongArch” RISC ISA CPU architecture, as well as support for the ARM Scalable Matrix Extension (SME).
The first implementation of kTLS was designed in the good old days of TLS 1.2. When TLS 1.3 came into the picture the interest in kTLS had slightly diminished and the implementation, although functional, was rather simple and did not retain all the benefits. This post covers developments in the Linux 5.20 implementation of TLS which claws back the performance lost moving to TLS 1.3.
Jakub Kicinski provides an overview of some changes to the in-kernel TLS implementation coming in the next development cycle...
An animation is pretty cool. I mean, it’s animated, how can you not like it, right? But did you know that an animation is nothing more than a bunch of pictures put together and played one after the other, super fast? When you see an animation, it’s nothing more than a bunch of pictures that are played fast enough such that your eyes can’t tell that they’re pictures. Your eyes interpret them as a small movie. Now, that we know how an animation is made, let’s get to it and make some.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to animate using the ImageMagick. Please note that ImageMagick is a very thorough package, and you can do a lot. So, we will only cover the basics of animation.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenCart on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenCart is an open-source PHP-based online e-commerce solution. It offers a lot of plugins that help you to extend the platform’s functionality and includes features like user management, multi-store functionality, affiliates, discounts, multiple payment gateways, product reviews, and more.
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 OpenCart free open source ecommerce platform 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.
My daily workflow often involves repeatedly running tasks, whether that be build commands, unit tests, or some other scripts. My ideal workflow is to have a terminal split on the right hand side, and then be able to send tasks to it.
NIS and NIS+ share as many differences as they share their similarities. These programs, commonly known as Network Information Service and Network Information Service Plus, deliver a simple network lookup and check of the processes and databases.
In the world of computers, machines don’t use names as humans do. They go by a string of numbers. Computers, phones, and all these devices can identify and talk with each other using these numbers, also known as IP addresses. In contrast, humans recognize each other by their names, and it’s difficult for us to remember strings of numbers. Thus, architects have developed a naming system known as Domain Name System or DNS to bridge this communication gap between machines and humans.
The objective of DNS is to resolve names to numbers. To be more specific, it resolves URLs to IP addresses. If someone types google.com in the address bar of their browser window and hits enter, the DNS will resolve this URL to “142.250.179.142” by checking within its database and matching the URL with the IP address. Once your machine has this IP address, it can connect with Google and display the website’s contents. To avoid the communication between your computer and the server and minimize the load times, these entries are stored on your computer in a local cache, i.e., DNS cache.
Anyone who uses a Linux system knows that the terminal is at the center of the Linux Ecosystem. Though you can control everything from the terminal, many emulators have been released, providing you with many extra features on top of the basic terminal. This guide will look at Terminator, one such emulator, and how you can install it on Ubuntu 22.04.
As discussed, the terminal itself is pretty powerful. However, Terminator provides extra productivity features that can help you make your time with the terminal more efficient and effective. For instance, it allows you to arrange the terminals in a grid-like setting and gives you tabs to handle multiple commands in a single window. You can also drag and drop the tabs. There are many keyboard shortcuts for you, and you can save the layouts for future uses and add plugins for even more functionality. So, how can you get it installed? Let’s start.
“AnyDesk is a small but powerful application that gives the users facility to establish a connection to access a remote computer, and you can use that system from your system. It became even more famous during the COVID-19 era as it provides a simple and secure work-from-home facility thanks to its military-grade encryption.
It is free for everyone except the commercial users who are required to buy licenses. AnyDesk is available on all the platforms like Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi, and many other operating systems.
It is not available on the official Ubuntu repository, and we will have to manually install it, so we will go through all the steps required to install it on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Discord on Pop!_OS 22.04.
Today we are looking at how to install Vita3K on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In most enterprise systems where software release cycles consist of separate environments like dev, stage, live, having multiple environments that can be dynamically configured is common. An application may have three different sets of database credentials for authentication. Each set of credentials would be respective to an instance for a particular environment. This approach essentially allows software developers to interact with a developer-friendly database when carrying out their day-to-day coding.
If you’re using a macOS, you’ll be aware of the operating system’s ability to do some amazing things. It’s fast, it’s powerful, and it has a plethora of tools built right in to help you work smarter and more efficiently. Many of these tools aren’t available directly on other operating systems such as Ubuntu — however there is still a lot that can be done with the help of other applications inside Ubuntu. So, what are the themes on the operating system and what can you do with them?
As we all know that macOS is the most well organized and aesthetically well looking operating system. So, many of you would prefer to have a similar interface on Ubuntu operating system. Linux is famous because of its limitless customization options it offers. If you have just switched from macOS to Linux and are looking to change your Ubuntu interface like macOS, then you are in the right place. So, how can you change the appearance of Ubuntu look like macOS, let’s find out in the following section:
Back in High School, in the 1990s, I was taking a class on Architectural Drafting. One of my absolute favorite classes — and one of the best perks of the class is that we had PC’s, running MS-DOS, that we could use with AutoCAD (a drafting application).
Now. What happens when you put a bunch of nerdy teenagers in front of a row of DOS PCs?
We bring in floppy disks. With games. Naturally.
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And, what’s more, xscorch seems to be in the repository of nearly every Linux distribution on planet Earth.
sudo apt install xscorch
Try that on a Debian based system (or Ubuntu) and you should be ready to relive your 1990s DOS gaming dreams!
Valve is not just speeding up the production of the Steam Deck – they have just announced that everyone who has pre-ordered until now should get their Steam Deck within this year – but also the number of games validated for the platform. We have passed not long ago the 4000 games milestone, and in just a few days they have added a truckload of games – more than 300.
Game engines offer huge benefits to game developers. The main functionality they provide is the library of core functions used in a computer game. This often includes a realtime rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics engine with collision detection, a character animation system, scene graph, sound, artificial intelligence, threading, networking, input, streaming localization support, debugging tools, integration with languages, and the provision of performance monitoring and optimization tools.
Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games. Game engines are referred to as “game middleware” because they provide a flexible and reusable software platform.
We covered game engines in this article. This article recommends more great game engines.
Let’s explore these additional 10 game engines. For each engine we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the program in action, together with links to relevant resources.
The Skrooge Team announces the release 2.28.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.
Porting a Tiling Window Manager Extenstion to C++ (Bismuth): Part-2 (getting closest relative window)
Hi everyone! In this blog, I will be discussing the algorithm used in Bismuth to find the closest relative window to be focused for focusWindowByDirection event. If you haven’t read the previous blog, make sure to give it a read here.
I've finally released a new small version of glib-gtk-book.
What triggered my motivation for releasing a new version is a contributor showing up. It stirred up my will to dust a bit the project.
An appendix will probably be written, in which case another new version will be released, once ready. So ... be ready!
First a good news, gedit is back on the road. After doing a long break, I feel energized again to develop gedit and related projects.
The next version of gedit will be released when ready, like Debian.
And here comes where you can help! Especially by adopting the development and maintenance of a gedit plugin. Be it part of the main gedit repository, or gedit-plugins, or ... a removed plugin (the small bad news).
First and foremost, nothing is set in stone, a long-term project like gedit grows organically. A removed plugin doesn't mean the end of the world, it can be re-added later, or someone can give it a new life by developing it in its own repository. And, remember, the next version will be released when ready.
This is now the third blog, and this time I will like to keep it a bit different, owing to the suggestions I got :D
Updates
So, as usual, we will start with updates, we are still in the breaking phase, but most big errors are gone, there are some things that need to be sorted out, but we can do that once we can at least open the application.
Due to a problem in the Data Center where most of mageia.org is hosted, most of our website (like forums, wiki and bugzilla) cannot be reached since some hours ago.
We had a good week in the world of Linux distrobution releases with Bluestar Linux 5.18.14 and Linux Mint 21.
We hope you have a wonderful week and enjoy the last month of summer!
Version 21 of the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution is out; it is available in the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors. This is a long-term-support release that will receive updates until 2027.
On the last day of July, the Linux Mint project delighted its fans by announcing the general availability of version 21, “Vanessa.”
Linux Mint is a well-known distribution in the Linux community. It is often associated with what Ubuntu, on which it is based, is supposed to represent.
The distribution includes all the characteristics that the average Linux user seeks, including a beautiful and functional desktop environment, ease of use, and reliability and stability. But unlike Ubuntu, Linux Mint provides predictability, with no unexpected moves or experiments with its userbase.
Today saw the release of Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Cinnamon Edition, a long term support release (supported until 2027).
The pre-installed Firefox browser in Ubuntu 22.04 finally to add back the ability to install Gnome Shell Extensions.
As you may know, Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04 defaults to Snap package that runs in sandbox. It however lacks the feature to exchange messages with native applications. So, you’ll find that the password manager integration (e.g., KeePassXC and 1password) with Firefox does not work. And, there’s no ON/OFF switch when you trying to install extensions from Gnome website.
For those sticking to the default Firefox package in Ubuntu 22.04, the new WebExtensions XDG desktop portal and its Firefox integration is present now to add back the native messaging support, though it’s in Beta stage at the moment for testing!
“Linux has come up with many of its unique functions to perform routine tasks. The dlsym() function is one of them. The dlsym() function goal is to find the address of a defined symbol specified in a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) that has been made accessible via a dlopen() function call. After loading the dynamic shared object (common link library) file indicated by the null-terminated string filename, the function dlopen() outputs an anonymous “connection” for the loaded object. The named symbol is looked up in the dynamic link library (DLL) that has been fetched by the dlopen() method. In this article, we will talk about the use of dlsym().
If the desired symbol is not present in that DLL, the dependent DLLs of that DLL will be searched for it, after by any dependencies of those, and so on in a breadth-first fashion until the desired symbol is found or all the DLLs have been searched for this purpose. Although the sequence in which dependent DLLs at the same level are searched is undetermined, this search order determines how duplication symbols in distinct DLLs will be identified. Be aware that unloaded dependent dynamic libraries won’t be loaded as a consequence of a dlsym() search for dependent DLLs. Only the DLLs that were loaded as a component of the dlopen() call’s dependent DLLs will be scanned.”
“The basic memory structure of a computer may be easily accessed by programmers or users in C or other programming languages. They can interact and perform numerous commands on memory using registers and other tools. Memory management is thus one of the primary functions of the C programming language. Thus, the typical operation applied in many scenarios involved zeroing out the region of computer memory. Dynamic memory should occasionally be filled with zeros to purge garbage entries.
Some structs often need to have their multiple bit-mask values explicitly replaced with zeros before their members are initialized. For this, the C language came up with the bzero 3 functions to be utilized in the program. Thus, we have decided to implement the use of the bzero 3 C function in our C program. Let’s get started.”
Counting sort is best illustrated with the sorting of integers. In C/C++ and Java, the characters are integers and can be sorted in the way the integers are sorted.
The C language is a very vast language when it comes to the use of different technologies or APIs. It is also very usable when we want to use the socket programming. Just like this, it comes up with the epoll 7 functions. Poll(2) and the epoll API both observe the various document descriptors to determine whether I/O is feasible on every one of them. The epoll API extends very well with the great numbers of monitored document descriptors and may be used as being either a level-prompted or edge-prompted gateway.
The epoll entity, an in-kernel information model that may be seen from the user-space as a wrapper for two sets, serves as the foundational idea of the epoll API. Within this guide, we’ll discuss the use of the epoll function in the C language.
A reader (Richard Ebeling) invited me to revisit an older blog post: Parsing floats in C++: benchmarking strtod vs. from_chars. Back then I reported that switching from strtod to from_chars in C++ to parse numbers could lead to a speed increase (by 20%). The code is much the same, we go from…
On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m very happy to announce the July 2022 release of Rakudo #157. Rakudo is an implementation of the Raku1 language.
The input text file for War of the Worlds is about 332 kB in size and the final PDF contains 221 pages. The program generates the output in 7 seconds on a Ryzen 7 3700 using only one core. This problem is fairly easily parallelizable so if one were to use all 16 cores at the same time the whole operation would take less than a second. I did not do exact measurements but the processing speed seems to be within the same order of magnitude as plain LaTeX.
The really surprising thing was that according to Massif the peak memory consumption was 5 MB. I had not tried to save memory when coding and just made copies of strings and other objects without a care in the world and still managed to almost fit the entire workload in the 4 MB L2 cache of the processor. Goes to show that premature optimization really is the root of all evil (or wasted effort at least).
Most CPU cycles are spent inside Pango. This is not due to any perf problems in Pango, but because this algorithm has an atypical work load. It keeps on asking Pango to shape and measure short text segments that are almost but not entirely identical. For each line that does get rendered, Pango had to process ~10 similar blocks of text. The code caches the results so it should only ask for the size of any individual string once, but this is still the bottleneck. On the other hand since you can process a fairly hefty book in 10 seconds or so it is arguable whether further optimizations are even necessary,
“Integrating repetitive tasks is a great idea. Shell scripts are frequently used by programmers and software operators to handle some recurring processes. But, shell scripts could get more difficult to manage because these processes get a little more complicated. However, the Python programming language could be utilized for automated processes rather than terminal commands. The same feature as those terminal commands is available in Python through some functions for executing operating system commands.
We can handle computer operations in a systematic and organized manner by acquiring how to execute the command line in Python. The OS package of a python programming language offers tools for cooperating with any operating system of the computer. OS is included in the basic utility packages for Python. This package includes a compact approach of using additional features that rely on the operating system.
The instruction as a string is implemented by the os.system() function in a terminal. The same restrictions apply to this procedure, which would be accomplished by using the system() method of C Programming language. If an instruction produces any outcome, the standard output source of the programmer receives it. When this function is employed, the corresponding operating system terminal is going to open, and the instructions are run there.”
“In this PyTorch tutorial, we will see how to change the view of a tensor in PyTorch. PyTorch is an open-source framework available with a Python programming language.
A tensor is a multidimensional array that is used to store the data. So for using a Tensor, we have to import the torch module.
To create a tensor, the method used is tensor()”
“In this PyTorch tutorial, we will see how to perform logarithmic functions on a given tensor.
PyTorch is an open-source framework available with a Python programming language.
A tensor is a multidimensional array that is used to store the data. So for using a Tensor, we have to import the torch module.
As most of us might know, a function in Python is a chunk of code that can be reused when required without having to write it repeatedly. Each program has a particular “flow”. Flow refers to the order in which a program gets executed. In a program, we have lines of code where we initialize variables, take inputs and outputs, and often create and call functions.
We can have one or more functions to perform particular tasks or operations. These functions might or might not return some value or result. However, we need to make a function call for these functions to run and execute. This is necessary.
Once the function has run completely, the next step is to exit the function. For this, we have the “return statement”. The return statement is used (implicitly or explicitly) to exit the function.
“In this PyTorch tutorial, we will see how to get the information from the given tensor in PyTorch. PyTorch is an open-source framework available with a Python programming language.
A tensor is a multidimensional array that is used to store the data. So for using a Tensor, we have to import the torch module.
It is possible to check whether the given object is a tensor or not.
torch.is_tensor() is used to check whether the given object is tensor or not.
If the object is a tensor, it will return True otherwise, False.”
“In this PyTorch tutorial, we will see how to perform a logical NOT operation on a tensor using logocal_not(). PyTorch is an open-source framework available with a Python programming language. We can process the data in PyTorch in the form of a Tensor.
A tensor is a multidimensional array that is used to store the data. So for using a Tensor, we have to import the torch module.
To create a tensor, the method used is tensor()”
One way of working with files in Linux is using a scripting language to manage the automation of repeated tasks. An example of a good scripting language is awk which makes the extracting of data and working with patterns easy. The GNU implementation of the awk scripting language is gawk. If you are yet to come to terms with its usage, you are in luck. This post presents the different examples of the use of gawk in Linux, and by the end of this guide, you will have a solid understanding of working with it.
All these tools are used by the developers to create the spring applications.
Since the Spring Initializer is a mostly used tool, we will start with this first and then we will discuss the other tools in our next articles.
We will use the Eclipse for the development/coding. Eclipse is an IDE that is primarily used to create the java-based applications.
If you are not familiar with Eclipse, don’t worry because it’s a simple code editor. We will help you understand it in this article. To get it, visit the official site https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ and install it to your local system.
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were discussed and used and finds that the discussions and usages were about something entirely different.
[...]
This one used to mean “psychologist/neuroscientist developing computer models to understand how intelligence works” and now means “an algorithm pushed to production by a programmer who doesn’t understand it”. But there is a potential for confusion with the minor but common usage “actually a collection of if statements but last I checked AI wasn’t a protected term” which you have to be aware of. Probably OK, in fact you should use it more in your next grant bid.
I want to share a project I’ve been helping out with for the last couple of years; the False Creek Friends Society. I haven’t wanted to write about it before now because it was just big-ideas talk. But there’s some science starting up and if you’re nearby you might want to get involved.
I recently finished reading Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (it’s a good ‘un).
If you haven’t noticed from my recent posts, there were a number of excerpts from the book which spurred some blog posts.
Additionally there are a number of miscellaneous excerpts I want to keep around as notes, so I’m adding this dump of quotes to my collection of #bookNotes posts.
Every so often, I come across a promising new project only to find out it's written in an esoteric language or framework.
You only get a few innovation tokens when you're building something new. Sometimes, an off-the-beaten-path is warranted – e.g., WhatsApp using Erlang to scale chat. Or it becomes a selection mechanism for a particular type of developer (e.g., Jane Street and functional programming)1.
However, for the most part, it will make hiring more difficult and expensive. For open source projects, it can drastically reduce the pool of potential contributors (or users).
I’ve been getting more into personal accounting stuff, and extending how I track income, expenses, and virtual budget envelopes. I love spreadsheets more than I’m probably supposed to, but I’m also working on an sqlite3 system that will let me ingest CSVs and build reports for envelope forecasts and tax.
There are plenty of open source software packages, but I like building a data model for exactly how my mind works. This, coupled with the joy I feel seeing reconciled numbers match up, perhaps says more about how my mind works than I care to admit.
I belabour all of this on account (HAH!) of being insufferable, and because I’ve been looking at number pads again. Turns out, IBM was onto something when PC keyboards came bolted with number pads. Typing strings of numbers vertically is so much easier and faster than using the top row of a regular keyboard.
Infineon is showing off a new chip designed to provide lock/unlock abilities to a lock without requiring a battery. The key to the tech is near-field communication, or NFC, which can transmit small bits of power along with the credentials that unlock the lock.
For a user, the experience is similar to using a phone to pay for something. Hold your phone next to the lock and it pops open. The market for this is lockboxes, safes, lockers at a gym or spa, or even office furniture. I’m excited about it because it takes tech and strips it down to a core function, making it better without adding anything to make it worse.
"It's important to see how your system behaves" under such circumstances, "so you see those minor differences between standard behavior and the unexpected," says Bergstrom.
Specific attacks create lots of chaos. "The main attack space for security chaos is ransomware, even though its goal is to make money," says Shortridge. However, ransomware causes more security failures than encrypting critical data. It locks enterprises out of systems and machines, and leads to downtime until an organization pays the ransom or restores from backups.
RANSOMWARE ATTACKS, INCLUDING those of the massively disruptive and dangerous variety, have proved difficult to combat comprehensively. Hospitals, government agencies, schools, and even critical infrastructure companies continue to face debilitating attacks and large ransom demands from hackers. But as governments around the world and law enforcement in the United States have grown serious about cracking down on ransomware and have started to make some progress, researchers are trying to stay a step ahead of attackers and anticipate where ransomware gangs may turn next if their main hustle becomes impractical.
[...]
“So much attention is being paid to ransomware, and governments all over the world are taking action to disrupt it, so eventually the return on investment is going to be impacted,” says Hassold, who is director of threat intelligence at Abnormal Security and a former digital behavior analyst for the FBI. “And ransomware actors are not going to say, ‘Oh, hey, you got me’ and go away. So it’s possible that you would have this new threat where you have the more sophisticated actors behind ransomware campaigns moving over to the BEC space where all the money is being made.”
The law lets Ring and Google share user footage with police during emergencies without consent and without warrants. Here's everything you should know.
Ring, the Amazon-owned video doorbell and home security company, came under renewed criticism from privacy activists this month after disclosing it gave video footage to police in more than 10 cases without users' consent thus far in 2022 in what it described as "emergency situations." That includes instances where the police didn't have a warrant.
"So far this year, Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times," Amazon vice president of public policy Brian Huseman wrote. "In each instance, Ring made a good-faith determination that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to a person requiring disclosure of information without delay."
Amazon.com yesterday said that it has reached a deal to acquire One Medical, a “technology-powered national primary care organization” that combines in-person, digital and telehealth services to care for patients.
The $3.9 billion all-cash deal, if approved by One Medical’s shareholders and federal regulators, makes clear that Amazon is serious about being a major disruptive force in the consumer healthcare market. One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin will remain in that position should Amazon take control.
“We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” said Neil Lindsay, SVP of Amazon Health Services. “Booking an appointment, waiting weeks or even months to be seen, taking time off work, driving to a clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room then the exam room for what is too often a rushed few minutes with a doctor, then making another trip to a pharmacy — we see lots of opportunity to both improve the quality of the experience and give people back valuable time in their days.”
Throughout history, governments have exploited or collected data on their citizens—from benign data, like salary information and census records, to creepy data, like biometric records for law enforcement activities. With abortion rights under attack in the U.S., privacy experts are warning about the potential for the government to collect and use cell phone data to target and prosecute pregnant people and those seeking abortion. Over the past year the FBI made more than three million warrantless queries on the data of U.S. residents collected by both the government and private companies.
A shrinking share of Americans support such warrantless government surveillance. Yet we have not effectively advocated against the growing surveillance of our personal data. That’s because we aren’t taking a principled view on government surveillance as a whole. Instead, we are starting to see viewpoints devolve into ostracization and hatred of the “other.”
Within eight months, it’s possible that the long-serving governments of Australia’s two biggest states will have been put to the sword. The cause: internal corruption.
A joint investigation by Victoria’s corruption commission IBAC and the ombudsman has revealed nepotism and branch-stacking by some Labor MPs.
Premier Daniel Andrews has accepted all responsibility and pledged to implement all the report’s recommendations. The scandals come on top of a wearisome Covid lockdown that hit hardest among Labor’s natural constituency. Melbourne was among the worst affected cities in the world. The integrity crisis makes some Labor seats vulnerable to the sort of Teal independent challenge that until now has only targeted Coalition MPs.
As a student, I enjoyed singing revolutionary songs and shouting slogans in meetings and demonstrations. But I do not remember being moved by any song as I have been by “Strange Fruit”. The lyrics of this song have haunted me ever since I heard it a few months back. Each word is written with deep pain and sung with anguish rooted in suffering and anger.
I came across the song while idly surfing the net. Immediately, it struck a deep chord in my heart. It would be appropriate to remember the song’s history on 19 June or Juneteenth, the national Independence Day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States of America. It was only last year that America recognised the day as a federal holiday.
Written in the context of the lynching of African Americans, “Strange Fruit” has an iconic status for it is considered the first protest song of the civil liberties movement in the United States. The song was made famous by Billie Holiday, who sang it in 1939. Getting the song on record was difficult because Columbia Records would not touch it.
Years back, being in the top 1 million websites worldwide was one of the gaols for this blog when I saw that on Alexa.com. I am not sure when that milestone was hit, it looks like it was before 2019 as per Web archive.
[...]
As this is primarily a static website (HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript - mostly vanilla), there is no database, no server, no image hosting, or S3 bucket equating to 0 recurring operational costs. On the flip side, this blog is a PWA where you can browse all/most of the content offline.
Yousuf Vawda, Fatima Hassan and Tian Johnson argue that a new deal struck by the World Trade Organisation - which did not include an intellectual-property waiver for vaccines - is a massive setback for the cause of global health equity.
The Supreme Court of Canada’s latest copyright decision – SOCAN v. Entertainment Software Association – affirms yet again that technological neutrality is a foundational element of the law and notably emphasizes that “copyright law does not exist solely for the benefit of authors.” My colleague Jeremy de Beer was an active participant in the case, writing an expert opinion during the Copyright Board phase of the case which reflects the approach that the court ultimately adopted. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the evolution of music distribution online, this latest case and the court’s commitment to copyright balance, as well as what might come next in the seemingly never-ending battle over Canadian copyright law.
Whenever I start thinking that my life sucks (rats ate my car, can't focus, vision deteriorating, etc...), I often come across something so much worse that it knocks me straight, at least for a while.
Schadenfreude: (n): enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others
This is not quite right, because there is little 'enjoyment' to be had with what follows. Just putting things into a different perspective, seeing things from a different point of view.
There is so much horribleness in the world, that you'd have to be incredibly self-centered not to see something. In case you need inspiration, here is some.
yesterday i went for a walk without my phone i felt naked liberated from all the information saturation
Communication can often be exchanged with computation in control systems. A car's computer needing to know the speed can either get the data from the speed sensor over the vehicle's communication network (bus); or it can calculate the speed from the initial speed, the history of throttle commands, using the laws of physics driving the car. In a fully deterministic world with powerful enough computers, communication may be redundant. In the real world, the degree of uncertainty in the physics can say something about the level of communication necessary. Quantifying this communication need can help principled design and allocation of network bandwidth and other resources in vehicles and other control systems.
Uncertainty or lack of information is usually measured by entropy of some flavor. Claude Shannon developed a definition of entropy in the context of engineering telephone networks. That definition uses probability distributions, not coincidentally, capturing noise in telephone channels. In contrast, topological entropy, used in studying evolution of worstcase uncertainty in safety-critical systems, does not use probabilities at all. Instead, it measures the rate of growth of uncertainty in a system's state with time. Topological entropy of a stable system like a pendulum will be smaller than that of an unstable system like an inverted pendulum.
Greetings, geminauts! I go by Sam or my handle 'oaktal'. I've been interested in Gemini since early 2021 and have been lurking around since then. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Joneworlds, listening to Konpeito, and reading logs or essays from all you wonderful people with a similar appreciation for the 'smolnet'.
I also had intentions of participating in the conversation since I first started reading, but got grabbed by what I'll call the Lurker Effect. It's this anxious tendency I have to view anybody whose work I consume as somehow 'other' than me, or somehow on a higher social ring. My best guess is that it's a holdover from my experiences on the regular Web, where it's normal to assume that a big-name blogger or Youtuber might not have time for all their fans.
It took me a little while to grapple with the Lurker Effect, but eventually I managed to convince myself that people use Gemini to form a community and participate in discussion. It's fine to lurk, of course, but if I want to join in then I shouldn't let my regular Web conditioning stop me.
In the long tradition of "How I Rebuilt My Blog" developer posts, here's my humble entry. I did not set out to build a new website, but here I am.
Before we get started let's go over a few questions you might have from the title:
Gemini is a new(ish) protocol for content, a successor to Gopher that is like a stripped down version of the Web.
I recently bought a small single-board computer to set up Pi Hole, only to find that the 256 MB of on-board memory was insufficient to run the admin interface without constant crashes.
The computer does not have any video output, but does have ethernet. Its CPU is weak, but quad-core. Power consumption is very low. I was thinking about how feasible it would be to run a smallweb server on this device, to give it new purpose after a web server proved too expensive.
I started benchmarking the Gemini server I wrote but haven't yet set up in a production environment, egalayxd. The server is highly concurrent and will use all available cores to reach peak efficiency, so I was worried it may use a lot of memory especially when a lot of requests come in at once.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.