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Links 16/08/2022: Proton 7.0-4 Steam Play and Ubuntu Touch on Fairphone 4



  • GNU/Linux

    • Videos

    • Applications

      • Make Use OfThe 6 Best Private Encrypted Chat Apps for Linux Users

        For those who want more control over their privacy while chatting online, your search for a secure Linux chat app has finally come to an end.

        When you switch to Linux, you make your digital life substantially more private. The overwhelming majority of Linux distributions do not track or otherwise log what you do on your computer. But if you install one of the mainstream chat apps onto your Linux machine, you're still giving some company a record of your personal conversations.

        To keep your communications comparably private to what you do on your PC, you need an encrypted chat app. Fortunately, there are many options to choose from with Linux support, all of which have a compatible mobile app as well.

        [...]

        But there are many ways to chat without handing those conversations over to companies. And you can extend that same privacy to email as well.

      • Ubuntu HandbookToggle Conservation Mode for Lenovo IdeaPad in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

        Running Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora 36 on a Lenovo IdeaPad laptop? It’s super easy to turn on/off the conservation mode.

        Conservation Mode is a feature of Lenovo IdeaPad to prolong life of the battery. It’s targeted for those who plug-in ac power. With the mode enabled, the battery will only charge to 55-60%.

        For the GNOME 3.36+ (defaults in Ubuntu 20.04+, Fedora 35/36 and optional in Arch and Manjaro), there’s an extension to add the toggle options into system tray menu.

        As well, it also provides options to turn on/off camera, Fn Lock, Touchpad, and USB Charging.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • MakeTech EasierHow to Install Asahi Linux on Your M1 Mac

        While M1 Macs are great, they can not run any Linux distro natively, until recently. Asahi Linux, an Arch-based distro, is the first ever Linux distro specially made for M1 machines and you can run it natively on Macs with the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips. Moreover, you can dual boot Asahi Linux to use it without replacing your macOS. In this article, I will cover everything including how to download, install, and even uninstall Asahi Linux.

      • VideoHow to Interpret Load Average in Linux (Linux Crash Course Series) - Invidious

        The "Load Average" within our Linux servers and workstations enables administrators to understand how well the system is keeping up with its workload. By reading the values within the Load Average, we can also determine the overall performance of the system over several time periods, which will give us an idea on how the workloads are progressing.

      • H2S MediaHow to install Linux kernal 5.19 on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        Learn the steps to install the Linux kernel 5.19 version on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal fossa or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jelly Fish to change the default one using the command terminal.

        The kernel is the core program of any Linux -based operating system that offers meditation between the software and hardware of the computer system. That implies on any hardware device running with some software. And when we wrap it with a layer of graphical user interface and other applications around the kernel, we have a full-fledged Linux operating system such as Ubuntu. Well, Kernel keeps work in the background and takes care that the operating system works and that hardware and software can be put into operation.

      • TechRepublicHow to install Cockpit on Debian Server | TechRepublic

        Debian Server is an outstanding Linux distribution that is well-known for being one of the most stable operating systems available. I’ve used Debian Server for numerous deployments and have always found it to exceed my needs and expectations. However, there is one area where it could use some improvement, such as the inclusion of a web-based admin interface.

        Fortunately, however, it’s possible to install the Cockpit web-based admin tool on Debian Server. With Cockpit added, you can easily monitor your system, view logs and manage various aspects of your server. The one caveat is that it’s not quite as easy as it is on either an RHEL-based or Ubuntu-based distribution. That doesn’t mean it’s challenging, but rather that it requires a couple of extra steps.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Install and Configure Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04

        Ansible is a very popular configuration management tool designed to streamline the process of controlling a large number of servers. It can automate the process of setting up new servers and installing applications with a single command or file. You can control as many servers and run processes on them simultaneously from a single node. Ansible doesn't require any special software required to be installed on the server nodes and can control them over SSH.

        In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Ansible on an Ubuntu 22.04 server.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Install Ansible on Rocky Linux 8

        Ansible is open-source software that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. The tool is designed to automate cloud provisioning, OS deployments, etc., for multiple Linux or UNIX-like systems. Using the Ansible automation tool, one can automate services in a data center as well as products developed with differing technologies.

        Ansible's main goals include making IT automation simple enough to manage complex enterprise environments without excessive custom scripting or manual drudge work. By not requiring any extra dependencies other than Python itself, it allows users to further automate their system via SSH connections which are enabled by default on most mainstream distributions of Linux today.

      • ID RootHow To Install Vivaldi Browser on Linux Mint 21 - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vivaldi Browser on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Vivaldi is a unique web browser designed specifically for power users. It provides a very high level of control and flexibility to its users and also offers a host of features that are not available in other browsers, including an advanced tab management system, built-in note-taking capabilities, and a customizable interface. Vivaldi is available for all major platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux

        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 a Vivaldi Browser on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

    • WINE or Emulation

    • Games

      • Boiling SteamThymesia Review: A Frustrating Almost-Borne

        The PlayStation exclusive most often asked (begged) for has got to be Bloodborne. I’ve only played a few hours as I don’t own a PlayStation or use their streaming service, but needless to say it is a worthy entry in the Souls series. It certainly has its typical Souls frustrations, but from my experience fits that mold of “Souls-hard” in its difficulty.

        So in the quest for a good PC Bloodborne-like we could boil it down to three main ingredients: Gothic horror, tense and thrilling combat, and (Souls) difficulty/fairness to the player. But I guess there’s some rule that you can only pick two, at best. Enter Thymesia, promoting its “Plague doctor”-like hero, Corvus, with some mysterious disease and a combat system with different temporary weapons, parries, dodges, etc. I think you can see where this is going.

      • Boiling SteamThe R Programming Language Is Now Fast Enough to Run Games on Linux with Nara - Boiling Steam

        You may (or may not) be familiar with the existence of the R programming language. This is one very approachable language used mainly in the data science field and by more traditional statisticians as well. We have been using it extensively on Boiling Steam for numerous articles up until now. There’s a good chance that most of the charts you come across on our pages were made with R. Or even videos.

        Why are we talking about R today? Well, since the release of the new package called Nara (for NAtive RAster, not the ancient japanese city that you should definitely visit if you are in Japan), R is now capable of rendering graphics very fast. Don’t expect it to reach thousands of frames per second, but compared to libraries like ggplot2, used for charting, which take several seconds to generate vector graphics, Nara can easily produce graphics at above 30 fps. The author of the package has released two demos to showcase what it can actually do: a non-interactive version of Pacman, and a port of Another World on R.

        [...]

        One of the strength of the R language is its extraordinary community support. This is language that has by far surpassed all the commercial alternatives like SPSS because of its extreme extensibility and the explosion of packages available to use with R. All of it being under FOSS licenses. This is why this is a big thing in itself: making something possible in R will without doubt lead to more developers around the world to experiment with these new capabilities.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • OMG UbuntuNautilus 43 Beta Arrives in Ubuntu 22.10 Daily Builds - OMG! Ubuntu!

          Nautilus 43 beta has arrived in the latest daily builds of Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”.

          “And?”, you quizzically quip.

          Well, it’s not that big of a deal. However, I was eager to see ‘what the plan was’ for GTK4/libadwaita apps within the context of Ubuntu’s Yaru theme. Ubuntu 22.04, for those who’ve forgotten, intentionally held back on shipping a number of GTK4/libadwaita ports that were part of GNOME 42 — Nautilus among them.

          Well, I’m pleased to see (and say) that the new-look GTK4/libadwaita version of the Nautilus file manager sits proud within Ubuntu’s Yaru-themed desktop. Any custom Yaru accent colour choice is applied to libadwaita apps too — there had been some worry in the community that libadwaita apps wouldn’t be theme-able in this regard.

          [...]

          So if you’ve been wanting to go hands-on with the new features in Nautilus nice and early, now’s your chance!

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Reviews

      • FOSSLinuxElementary OS vs. Linux Mint: Which is right for you? | FOSS Linux

        The Linux operating system is developed by thousands of developers worldwide. It has a vast range of distros that one can choose from. But with many choices available, a user can be caught up in the paralysis of choice to figure out which distro is the best. For a detailed listing of the known distros, Click here.

        This guide will take you through the two most notable Linux distros embraced by the Linux community; the Elementary OS and the Linux Mint. Both OSes are based on Ubuntu, meaning they employ additional packages and updates from the same repositories as Ubuntu. So let’s dive in straight away, compare and contrast, and then give our final verdict. For a quick comparison between the Elementary OS and Linux Mint, scroll down to the significant differences section.

        [...]

        Both operating systems have their pros and cons. The elementary OS has a more modern way of switching between applications with the help of multi-task viewing. Still, if you prefer a more traditional desktop environment, Linux mint is best for you. Linux Mint is an easy-to-use OS as it is easy to install, has more apps, and requires less RAM of 2GB, and the fact that it resembles the Windows OS environment gives a new user an easier time familiarizing with it.

        On the other hand, the elementary OS is a bit more advanced cause of the following reasons it is pretty tricky to install on an Oracle Virtual box, requires a larger RAM of 4GB, has a limited number of apps, it employs the Ephemeral web browser which uses the Duck duck Go as its default search engine. This guide recommends the Linux Mint for a beginner, but if you want a bit of sophistication, you can go for elementary OS.

      • FOSSLinuxMX Linux review: 10 tips and tricks to get started | FOSS Linux

        The MX Linux is not as mainstream as its Debian-based distros. I just heard of it recently and was thrilled to check it out. It’s based on Debian, so at least user-friendly to a beginner. It is only intimidating when installing, but luckily in this article, we are reviewing post installation of the MX. So, relax, and let’s dive right into it.

        You first notice how smooth and welcoming the desktop environment is. Users used to their taskbar positioned at the bottom will feel weird. If you feel funny, I got you; we will change the taskbar and make navigating the file system easier. Later in this article. Otherwise, I find it pretty neat at its default position.

        [...]

        You have learned a few tricks to get you started with the MX Linux distro. My take on it is that it’s straightforward on the eyes once you log in but installing it is a little intimidating. The file manager(thunar file manager) is straightforward to use and navigate the file system. The Create launcher tool makes it easy to have your go-to programs at hand. MX Linux is a warm and attractive distribution to any user.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Fedora Magazaine4 cool new projects to try in Copr for August 2022 - Fedora Magazine



        Copr is a build system for anyone in the Fedora community. It hosts thousands of projects for various purposes and audiences. Some of them should never be installed by anyone, some are already being transitioned to the official Fedora Linux repositories, and the rest are somewhere in between. Copr gives you the opportunity to install third-party software that is not available in Fedora Linux repositories, try nightly versions of your dependencies, use patched builds of your favorite tools to support some non-standard use cases, and just experiment freely.

        If you don’t know how to enable a repository or if you are concerned about whether it is safe to use Copr, please consult the project documentation.

        This article takes a closer look at interesting projects that recently landed in Copr.

        [...]

        The repo currently provides ntfy for Fedora Linux 35, 36, 37, and Fedora Rawhide.

      • Red Hat Extends OpenShift Platform Plus Environment - Container Journal

        Red Hat today furthered its efforts to provide a complete curated Kubernetes environment with an update to its Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus offering that provides a raft of additional management and security capabilities.

        The latest iteration of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is based on version 4.11 of Red Hat OpenShift, a distribution of Kubernetes that is based on version 1.23 of the platform and version 1.23 of CRI-O 1.23 of the now default container runtime for the platform.

        Other capabilities added in this release of Red Hat OpenShift include support for Pod Security Admission integration to better isolate Kubernetes pods and sandboxed Katana containers that can now run on a single OpenShift node or the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. OpenShift can now also install OpenShift directly from major public cloud marketplaces and has been made easier to install via a single click on top of Nutantix virtual machines.

    • Debian Family

      • LinuxiacDebian GNU/Linux Turned 29, Happy Birthday!

        On this day, 29 years ago, Debian GNU/Linux, one of today’s oldest and most popular Linux distributions, began its journey to become a legend.

        The Linux world is diverse. So, of course, each of the hundreds of Linux distributions has its birthday. However, a few deserve to be recognized above all others, and Debian is one of them.

        On August 16th, 1993, the Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock (then an undergraduate at Purdue University). At that time, the concept of a “Linux distribution” was new. So Ian intended Debian to be a distribution that would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.

        Debian was the only distribution open for every developer and user to contribute their work when it began. Furthermore, the creation of Debian was sponsored by the FSF’s GNU project for one year (November 1994 to November 1995).

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • LiliputingUbuntu Touch now available for the Fairphone 4 - Liliputing

        The Fairphone 4 is an Android phone with mid-range specs that stands out for a few reasons. It comes from a company that attempts to source materials from ethically responsible sources, and which also focuses on longevity by offering spare parts, repair guides, and long-term software updates.

        But if Android isn’t your thing, now there’s another option: you can install Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 4.

        [...]

        The Fairphone 4 ships with Android 11, making it the first phone with that operating system to be officially supported by Ubuntu Touch.

      • UbuntuMicrosoft and Canonical announce native .NET availability in Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and containers [Ed: Canonical is working for Microsoft and Microsoft didn't even buy Canonical! Canonical should submit antitrust complaints over Microsoft blocking Linux, not work with the abuser. Paul ThurrottMicrosoft boosters cannot contain their excitement over Microsoft commandeering the competition. This is all about Microsoft, not Ubuntu, just like WSL [Phoronix1, Beta News2, 3, Neowin4, 5]. Canonical isn't formally owned by Microsoft, it just voluntarily acts this way (Novell the Second). Since Canonical is privately owned, we don't really know who the financial holder/s of the company might be...]
      • Linux MagazineThe First Point Release For Ubuntu 22.04 is Now Available

        Canonical has released the first point upgrade for Jammy Jellyfish which includes important new toolchains and fixes.

        Point releases for operating systems tend to not garner much excitement. However, Canonical has pulled off the unthinkable and made a point release not only a must-install, but the first version of the OS to offer a simplified path to upgrading from LTS to LTS. Users still on version 20.04 will eventually be prompted to upgrade to 22.04.1, without having to touch the command line. That’s a huge step forward and will make migrating to the latest LTS release far simpler than having to run a collection of commands.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Unicorn MediaOpen Source RISC-V Is Rolling Towards the Mainstream - FOSS Force

        RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set architecture that’s used for everything from accelerators and microcontrollers to CPUs and GPUs, continues to be on an accelerating roll (no pun intended). When I asked Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, the nonprofit foundation in charge of the project, to put the current state of RISC-V into a single word, she didn’t hesitate.

        “Velocity,” she answered.

        She said that RISC-V’s pace of growth during the last 12 months was already increasing exponentially, when in February the unthinkable happened: the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, got on board and not only signed up as a top tier premier member (and took a seat on the foundation’s board), it gave weight to its commitment by immediately entering into partnerships with five top RISC-V vendors, and pledged to invest $1 billion in the architecture.

        [...]

        Not long after Ventana emerged from stealth, Baktha told me that off-the-shelf RISC-V-driven devices, from servers to cell phones, was at hand.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

      • MakeTech EasierAndroid 13 Rolling Out to Pixels, Others Later This Year

        There have been many iOS releases that Android users pointed to and said, “Big deal. Android already does that.” Now the shoe may be on the other foot. Android 13 started rolling out to pixel devices starting Monday, with other devices expected to see it later this year. Google published a list of its “top 13” features of Android 13, and most are already part of iOS or will be on iOS 16 in its release not month.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers

      • Top 5 Most Secure Browsers for Linux - Linux Stans

        There are five most famous and usable operating systems – Microsoft Windows, Linux, Apple macOS, Android, and Apple’s iOS. However, no matter what OS was chosen, more users started to think about their safety. Safety for everybody includes different parameters such as anonymity, no tracking by Third Parties, no leaking of personal data, no danger of virus/worms catching, no harmful advertisements, and no eavesdropping.

        [...]

        A Secure Browser is a browser with additional safety measures that automatically protect the user from unauthorized action from Third Parties. Safe browsers help with the distribution of cookies containing information about visited websites, passwords, and user login information. Safe browsers also do not provide access to personal data and control the Internet connection during safe operations as bank actions.

        Although other anonymous solutions such as VPN or proxies usually change IP addresses, change geolocation, and sometimes encrypt the transferring information (which for sure are reasonable anonymous measures), safe (secure) browsers obtain more comprehensive protection options. Safe browsers work independently from other software and plugins. All its configurations can be customized, for example, to indicate the websites where the secure browser will be automatically on.

        Some wide used browsers, such as Opera, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, do have in their settings safety protection measures and plugins. Still, secure browsers provide better measures without the need of complicated studying or adjusting of the settings. Check the 5 best secure browsers for Linux below.

        [...]

        It is well-known that Google Chrome collects and stores information about the users’ surfing habits on the Internet.

    • Programming/Development

      • uni TorontoThe C free() API means memory allocation must save some metadata

        Here's something that I hadn't really thought about until I was thinking about the effects of malloc() and free() on C APIs: the API of free() in specific more or less requires a conventional C memory allocator to save some metadata about each allocation. This is because free() isn't passed an explicit size of what to free, which implies that it must get this information from elsewhere. The traditional way the C memory allocator does this is to put information about the size of the allocation in a hidden area either before or after the memory it returns (often before, because it's less likely to get accidentally overwritten there).

        (That C memory allocators store the size of allocations they've handed out is clear to anyone who's read through the small malloc() implementation in K&R.)

      • uni TorontoMy adventure with URLs in a Grafana that's behind a reverse proxy

        I was oblique in yesterday's entry, but today I'm going to talk about the concrete issue I'm seeing because it makes a good illustration of how modern web environments can be rather complicated. We run Grafana behind a reverse proxy as part of a website, with all of Grafana under the /grafana/ path. One of the things you can add to a Grafana dashboard is links, either to other dashboards or to URLs. I want all of our dashboards to have a link to the front page of our overall metrics site. The obvious way to configure this is to tell Grafana that you want a link to '/', which as a raw link in HTML is an absolute path to the root of the current web server in the current scheme.

        When I actually do this, the link is actually rendered (in the resulting HTML) as a link to '/grafana/', which is the root of the Grafana portion of the website. Grafana is partially configured so that it knows what this is, in that on the one hand it knows what the web server's root URL for it is, but on the other hand its own post-proxy root is '/' (in Apache terminology, we do a ProxyPass of '/grafana/' to 'localhost:3000/'). This happens in both Firefox and Chrome, and I've used Firefox's developer tools to verify that the 'href' of the link in the HTML is '/grafana/' (as opposed to, eg, the link getting rewritten by Javascript on the fly when you hover or click on it).

      • InfoQHow to Fight Climate Change as a Software Engineer

        We need to reduce and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop climate change. There is no way around this. But what is the role that software plays here? And what can we - as software engineers - do about this? Let’s take a look under the hood to uncover the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and software, learn about the impact that we can have, and identify concrete ways to reduce those emissions on a day-to-day basis when creating and running software.

      • FOSSLife4 Ways Software Developers Can Fight Climate Change

        Thus, they say, software engineers can contribute to the fight against climate change in seemingly small ways that add up to a larger impact.

      • Perl / Raku

        • raku & rust: Option-Some-None

          Regular visitors to my blog will know that I think raku and rust are both awesome in their chosen niches and are natural companions for the modern programming era just as perl and C were back in the day.

          Coming off an excellent 2nd raku conference over the weekend, I got to thinking about how both languages handle the concept of “nothing” (the absence of a value) and wanted to have some -Ofun.

        • RlangPostboxes & Postal Codes

          The postal code data was acquired from gov.uk as a collection of CSV files. The data were read and consolidated into a single data frame. The coordinates were transformed from CRS 27700 (British National Grid) to CRS 4326 (World Geodetic System).

          The postbox locations were retrieved from https://postboxes.dracos.co.uk/, an awesome interactive map created by Matthew Somerville using data from the Royal Mail. The data were lightly cleaned (there’s still some work to be done though).

    • Standards/Consortia

      • ODF standard and the code - EasyHack - LibreOffice Development Blog

        Open Document Format (ODF) is a standard (ISO/IEC 26300) and native file format that LibreOffice uses. OASIS developed this file format based on the file format of StarOffice, the ancestor of LibreOffice.

        To understand the ODF standard, working with the LibreOffice code and fixing a small bug is enlightening. Here we discuss a related EasyHack.

        [...]

        Basically, LibreOffice handles the Open Document format by opening the zip file using the zip parser and the deflate algorithm, and then parses the XML files inside it using libxml2 library.

  • Leftovers

    • Proprietary

      • FSFUnjust Algorithms

        Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) injustices have rapidly taken a turn for the worse in recent years. Algorithmic decision-making systems are used more than ever by organizations, educational institutions, and governments looking for ways to increase understanding and make predictions. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is working through this issue, and its many scenarios, to be able to say useful things about how this relates to software freedom. Our call for papers on Copilot was a first step in this direction.

        Though complex, we are still talking about proprietary software systems which integrate AI. Often, they are algorithmic systems where only the inputs and outputs can be viewed. It is trained with a selection of base categories of information, after which information goes in and a verdict comes out — but what led to the conclusion is unknown. This makes AI systems less straightforwardly understandable, even by the people who wrote the code.

        These systems (referred to as black box systems) can have the potential or intent to do good, but technology is not objective — and at the FSF, we believe that all software should be free. And when it comes to governments, they have the responsibility to demand for the software they use to be free, and the public has a right to the software. The scale to which the increased use of artificial intelligence is affecting people's lives is immense, making this matter of computational sovereignty all the more urgent.

      • Venture BeatDid data drift in AI models cause the Equifax credit score glitch? | VentureBeat

        Earlier this year, from March 17 to April 6, 2022, credit reporting agency Equifax had an issue with its systems that led to incorrect credit scores for consumers being reported.

        The issue was described by Equifax as a ‘coding issue’ and has led to legal claims and a class action lawsuit against the company. There has been speculation that the issue was somehow related to the company’s AI systems that help to calculate credit scores. Equifax did not respond to a request for comment on the issue from VentureBeat.

    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Tuesday

        Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (kernel), Fedora (webkit2gtk3), Oracle (.NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, kernel, and kernel-container), Slackware (rsync), and SUSE (canna, ceph, chromium, curl, kernel, opera, python-Twisted, and seamonkey).

      • CISAEmerson Proficy Machine Edition [Ed: Very severe flaw]

        The file can transfer through the engineering station onto Windows in a way that executes the malicious code.

      • USCERTThreat Actors Exploiting Multiple Vulnerabilities Against Zimbra Collaboration Suite

        CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) in response to active exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities against Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), an enterprise cloud-hosted collaboration software and email platform.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • TechCrunchAmazon expands palm-scanning payment tech to 65 more Whole Foods locations

          Amazon’s “One” palm scanner payment technology will be launching at over 65 Whole Foods stores in California. This is the biggest rollout to date, with stores in Malibu, Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Santa Cruz receiving the tech that aims to modernize retail shopping.

          When the checkout devices were first announced in 2020, Amazon One was available in Amazon Go stores, with an eventual expansion to Whole Foods stores in Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City. Customers can also try checking out with their hand at the Amazon Style fashion store in Glendale, California, along with select Fresh and Go stores.

        • Old VCRThe dark ages of history, circa 2030

          In our enlightened age, blessed as we are today by the twin mercies of the Panopticon and Eschaton, it is nevertheless necessary to turn our thoughts back to history and how far we have come as a culture, a people and a species.

          For centuries it was printed matter at biological eye-scale that captured the breadth of human knowledge, whether it be cuneiform tablets struck with a stylus, great books hand-scribed in ink on parchment and carefully bound, or mass-printed novels by those masters of high literature, Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling. But it isn't merely elevated fiction with which we concern ourselves: we have also amassed great quantities of administrative information communicated through the ubiquitous paper "memo," the most important means of corporate and governmental communication during the brief yet sorrowful worldwide flirtation with the "office." Not unlike Mycenaean Linear B in its day, otherwise meaningless terms such as "human resources" and "biz cas Friday" might never have been decoded in our time without such a corpus.

          [...]

          For some period of time there was parallel generation of mass media, but, presumably through either some great advantage or what we believe to be corporate shift, the appetite of these ancients moved to purely digital copies that lacked material existence

        • ACMSurveillance Too Cheap to Meter

          During his keynote address, risk management specialist Dan Geer asked the 2014 Black Hat audience a question: "What if surveillance is too cheap to meter?"

          As is the case with electricity from nuclear power, technology has little to do with it: This is a question about economy, specifically the economy of the path of least resistance.

          Surveillance is ridiculously cheap for governments. Many have passed laws that obligate the surveillance industry—most notably, the mobile network operators—to share their take "at cost," and we know law enforcement uses it a lot.

          So why is so much cheap surveillance available for purchase?

          Telephones work because telcos can route calls to and from them. The backbone and its routing tables are trivial compared with the airgap from the mobile base station to the wireless device, where there is no escape from knowing which phones are where. Because bandwidth is limited and everybody and their Internet of Things (IoT) gadget has a SIM card these days, the density of mobile base stations has increased, which has reduced the uncertainty of the position from tens of kilometers in the 1960s to tens of meters today.

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • CNETThe Ethereum Merge Explained

          You may think crypto is the future, or you may regard it as a scam. Regardless of which camp you're in, the upcoming Ethereum Merge is a significant day. The long-delayed upgrade to the ethereum blockchain is currently planned to occur on Sept. 15. If it's successful, the blockchain's massive electricity requirements will fall by over 99%.

          That is of huge consequence. Cryptocurrency critics argue that coins like bitcoin and ether are useless and consume enormous amounts of electricity. The first point is polarizing and subjective, but the second is unequivocally true. In an era when more people than ever view climate change mitigation as society's highest priority, the carbon emissions of bitcoin and ethereum are too conspicuous to ignore.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Jon UdellHow to rewrite a press release: a step-by-step guide

        As a teaching fellow in grad school I helped undergrads improve their expository writing. Some were engineers, and I invited them to think about writing and editing prose in the same ways they thought about writing and editing code. Similar rules apply, with different names. Strunk and White say “omit needless words”; coders say “DRY” (don’t repeat yourself.) Writers edit; coders refactor. I encouraged students to think about writing and editing prose not as a creative act (though it is one, as is coding) but rather as a method governed by rules that are straightforward to learn and mechanical to apply.

        This week I applied those rules to an internal document that announces new software features. It’s been a long time since I’ve explained the method, and thanks to a prompt from Greg Wilson I’ll give it a try using another tech announcement I picked at random. Here is the original version.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • BloombergRobot Arms Replacing Shelf Stockers in Japan's Stores

        FamilyMart Co. will install a fleet of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven robots from Telexistence Inc. at 300 of its convenience stores in Japan. The robots, called TX SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm), operate autonomously 98% of the time and will be used to restock shelves. They can be operated remotely if assistance is needed in accessing an item or there is an issue with the AI technology. Telexistence said each robot arm can replace one to three hours of human work daily per store. Said FamilyMart's Tomohiro Kano, "The newly created time can be reallocated to customer service and shop floor enhancement." The robot arms are equipped with Nvidia's Jetson AI platform and Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure, which enable them to process information, record sales data, and use the data to optimize restocking tasks.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Michael GeistThe Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 139: Florian Martin-Bariteau on the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act - Michael Geist

          Bill C-27, Canada’s privacy reform bill introduced in June by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, was about more than just privacy. The bill also contains the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), the government’s attempt to begin to scope a regulatory environment around the use of AI technologies. Critics argue that regulations are long overdue, but have expressed concern about how much of the substance is left for regulations that are still to be developed. Florian Martin-Bariteau is a friend and colleague at the University of Ottawa, where he holds the University Research Chair in Technology and Society and serves as director of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and he joins the Law Bytes podcast to breakdown the AIDA.

        • OSI BlogEpisode 1: Copyright, Selfie Monkeys and the Hand of God [Ed: And more chaff from OSI to cover up Microsoft GPL violations disguised as "Hey Hi" (while OSI takes bribes from Microsoft and the violators)]

          Did you know that in the United States a copyright can only exist when a work was created by a human author? This explains why a selfie taken by a monkey or texts purportedly created solely by the hand of God don’t qualify for U.S. copyright. The standard for copyright protection also requires originality and creativity on the part of the human or humans seeking copyright, and therefore copyright does not apply to works created primarily by machines, including computers.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Technical

      • Science

        • How to Recruit a Physics Teacher

          Plenty could be done to relieve the Physics teacher shortage, but no-one in power really wants to solve the problem.

          [...]

          A recent open evening at my college produced plenty of potential students to start Physics A Level next year, but there was a distinctive pattern in their origin: very many of them were currently at two schools on the other side of town and these talked enthusiastically about their current Physics teacher. However, there were hardly any from the very large comprehensive just a few hundred metres up the road (or indeed from several other close schools.)

          Without being able to talk to those non-attenders, I cannot be sure, but one likely reason stands out. There is no Physics teacher at the school, and there hasn't been one for years.

        • NISTAI May Come to the Rescue of Future Firefighters [Ed: Calling everything with a computer involved "Hey Hi" (AI)]

          In firefighting, the worst flames are the ones you don’t see coming. Amid the chaos of a burning building, it is difficult to notice the signs of impending flashover — a deadly fire phenomenon wherein nearly all combustible items in a room ignite suddenly. But new research suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) could provide first responders with a much-needed heads-up.

          Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and other institutions have developed a Flashover Prediction Neural Network (FlashNet) model to forecast the lethal events precious seconds before they erupt. In a new study published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, FlashNet boasted an accuracy of up to 92.1% across more than a dozen common residential floorplans in the U.S. and came out on top when going head-to-head with other AI-based flashover predicting programs.

        • Quanta MagazineSelf-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works

          Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
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Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
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Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries
Links 26/03/2024: Inflation Problems, Strikes in Finland
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Losing Children, Carbon Tax Discussed
Links for the day
Mark Shuttleworth resigns from Debian: volunteer suicide and Albania questions unanswered, mass resignations continue
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 26/03/2024: 6,000 Layoffs at Dell, Microsoft “XBox is in Real Trouble as a Hardware Manufacturer”
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Microsofters Still Trying to 'Extend' Gemini Protocol
Links for the day
Look What IBM's Red Hat is Turning CentOS Into
For 17 years our site ran on CentOS. Thankfully we're done with that...
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The decision is out
The Microsoft and Apple Antitrust Issues Have Some But Not Many Commonalities
gist of the comparison to Microsoft
ZDNet, Sponsored by Microsoft for Paid-for Propaganda (in 'Article' Clothing), Has Added Pop-Up or Overlay to All Pages, Saying "813 Partners Will Store and Access Information on Your Device"
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Julian Assange Verdict 3 Hours Away
Their decision is due to be published at 1030 GMT
People Who Cover Suicide Aren't Suicidal
Assange didn't just "deteriorate". This deterioration was involuntary and very much imposed upon him.
Overworking Kills
The body usually (but not always) knows best
Former Red Hat Chief (CEO), Who Decided to Leave the Company Earlier This Month, Talks About "Cloud Company Red Hat" to CNBC
shows a lack of foresight and dependence on buzzwords
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IRC logs for Monday, March 25, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
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a considerable share exists
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Ignore the mindless "AI"-washing
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The scale of IRC