Time flies when you’re having fun. So it’s hard to believe that NGINX is now 18 years old. Looking back, the community and company have accomplished a lot together. We recently hit a huge milestone – as of this writing 55.6% of all websites are powered by NGINX (either by our own software or by products built atop NGINX). We are also the number one web server by market share. We are very proud of that and grateful that you, the NGINX community, have given us this resounding vote of confidence.
We also recognize, more and more, that open source software continues to change the world. A larger and larger percentage of applications are built using open source code. From Bloomberg terminals and news to the Washington Post to Slack to Airbnb to Instagram and Spotify, thousands of the world’s most recognizable brands and properties rely on NGINX Open Source to power their websites. In my own life – between Zoom for work meetings and Netflix at night – I probably spend 80% of my day using applications built atop NGINX.
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To summarize, our dream is to build an ecosystem around NGINX that extends into every facet of application management and deployment. MARA is the first step in building that ecosystem and we want to continue to attract partners. My goal is to see, by the end of 2022, an entire preââ¬âwired app launch and run in minutes in an NGINX environment, instrumented with a full complement of capabilities – distributed tracing, logging, autoscaling, security, CI/CD hooks – that are all ready to do their jobs.
This blog post on the NGINX corporate site describes the plans for this web server project in the coming year.
Peter Kaminski explains to Doc Searls and Shawn Powers on FLOSS Weekly how Massive Wiki is on its way to beng a prominent movment that combines wiki utility with familiar tools and processes for distributed use online by all users.
I've for a long a long time suggested Manjaro Linux if you want to use Arch but don't want to deal with the out of box Arch Linux experience but they've made so many bad decisions I can no longer do so, just use a GUI Arch installer, Endeavour OS, Garuda or another Arch based distro that uses the Arch repos.
Hi!
More than two years have passed since 0.9.14.1 release, and we had some important fixes in git, so time has come for a new release.
Highlights:
- Added support for _GTK_WORKAREAS_Dn and _GNOME_WM_STRUT_AREA. - Fixed build errors with new GCC versions. - Fixed some bugs in blur and opengl plugins on OpenGL ES.
Bugs Fixed:
https://pad.lv/1859778 - pkg-config search path is no longer changed. https://pad.lv/1863561 - Fixed CCSM appearance with dark themes. https://pad.lv/1878545 - Made annotate plugin D-Bus interface working, and cleaned up code. https://pad.lv/1879975 - DbusScreen object was used after destroy. https://pad.lv/1882792 - Added support for CMake Unity (aka Jumbo) builds. https://pad.lv/1923481 - Updated FSF addresses. https://pad.lv/1926046 - Build the compizconfig Python extension using distutils. https://pad.lv/1986681 - Use correct window when deciding if it should appear focused.
Also, new translations have been pulled from Launchpad.
The tarball can be downloaded from https://launchpad.net/compiz.
I would like to thank Alberts Muktupāvels, Daniel Kondor, Sam Spilsbury and Gianfranco Costamagna for their contributions.
-- Dmitry Shachnev
Today are looking at how to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (SRB2Kart) 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 this video, we are looking at how to install WebStorm on Pop!_OS 22.04.
If you have a VDI, VHD, or VMDK formatted drive in VirtualBox and want to use it with QEMU/KVM (Virt Manager, Gnome Boxes, etc.) on Linux, you will need to convert it to QCOW. This guide will show you how to convert various Vbox drive formats to QCOW.
To start, open up VirtualBox. You can open VirtualBox by pressing Win on the keyboard, opening the app menu, and searching for “VirtualBox.” Alternatively, you can launch it through your Linux desktop app menu by searching for the shortcut.
So you build a GitLab project, you created a pipeline and then a scheduler to run every week your pipeline.
And then you realize that you are polluting the internet with deprecated (garbage) things, at some point you have a debug option on, bla bla bla… etc etc.
It is time to clean up your mess!
In this article, I will show you various Flatpak commands that make you a pro Flatpak user.
Flatpak sandboxed technology is the future of Linux app distribution. Almost all significant distributions come with Flatpak pre-installed today since the adoption is easy and maintaining it more straightforward.
If you use Flatpak every day, you probably know these commands. But if you are still considering moving to Flatpak for every app, then you should go through this list to understand how easy to manage Flatpak apps.
Hence, to help you do that, I have listed some easy-to-use Flatpak commands for your reference, filtered from the huge set of command-set from documentation.
If you want to keep your Ubuntu or Debian system updated, you use the combination of sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade commands.
Some older tutorial also mention sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.
Both apt and apt-get commands work pretty much the same except for some minor differences that I’ll discuss later in this later.
Let’s first discuss the difference between update and upgrade. Are not the two the same thing?
An improved user experience for all technical documentation on the Customer Portal was launched in May of 2022. The redesign rolled out several new features, including an all-new reading mode, expanding tables and an overhaul of the navigation and layout. The best part about the redesign? It was driven by customer feedback.
Just about everyone we ask finds Red Hat’s technical documentation to be helpful, well-written and thorough — whether it’s from customers at meet-and-greets or feedback from digital surveys, we have received high marks for documentation. Although our customers were finding our documentation to be valuable, they often noted that the presentation was old-fashioned and "antique." The quality and thoroughness of the writing was let down by the presentation.
Vim is a powerful and highly configurable command line editor that comes installed with most Linux operating systems. It offers many useful features for editing and configuration of files. However, some of its useful features are disabled by default. One of them is line numbering. With Vim line numbering features, you can display line numbering at the beginning of each line which comes helpful when modifying the text. Line numbers are also useful in debugging scripts, code reviews, and configuration files. By default, line numbering is disabled.
On Linux, files have three sets of permissions. One set is for the file’s group. Before you allocate a file to a group, you may want to check who the group members are.
Having a second monitor can be a productivity booster that gives you more screen real estate and a better multitasking experience. Whether you are on the go and can’t carry an actual monitor with you, or you just want to use your mobile device as a monitor, this guide will help you achieve that.
In this article, I will show you three different methods of using your smartphone and tablet as a second monitor for your Linux desktop.
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If you are using an RDP connection on Gnome 42 or VirtScreen, you can interact with your Linux desktop from both of your devices. However, it’s not possible for Deskreen to interact with your desktop from the secondary device as Deskreen only streams a video of your screen.
Tutorial to learn the commands and steps to install SonarQube on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish for analyzing code quality.
If the code is to be analyzed statically and dynamically, several tool decisions have to be made. In the Java world, but also in the C# world, one is tempted to integrate tools such as PMD, Checkstyle, Findbugs, StyleCop, and FxCop, into the build system. This means that you have to be able to configure these tools. The presentation and thus the analysis of the measured metrics and violations of programming guidelines are sometimes difficult in such an ad-hoc operation.
A solution to the dilemma is provided by tools that wrap around analysis tools and offer a holistic view of static and dynamic analysis results. Some open source platforms can be used in heterogeneous environments, such as SISSy, ConQAT, and SonarQube.
Finding applications and installing them on Raspberry Pi is time-consuming, especially when you don’t have information about which application best suits you according to your needs. Further, you cannot install most applications directly onto your system because their repositories are not included in the official Raspberry Pi source list. To keep things simple, the developers introduced a platform called Pi-Apps that allows you to quickly find and download applications for your Raspberry Pi system without needing to perform complex procedures from the terminal. You will also find information about a specific application you want to install.
In this article, we will show you how you can install Pi-Apps on your Raspberry Pi operating system and use it to install applications on your desktop.
Sails.js is a full-stack MVC JavaScript framework for Node.js. It is used for developing real-time web applications. It is inspired by Ruby on Rails, but with support for data-driven APIs and scalable, service-oriented architecture. It uses a powerful Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) called Waterline that allows it to be used with databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install the Sails.js framework to create a test app and deploy it using the Nginx server along with Let's Encrypt SSL on a Ubuntu 22.04 server.
MariaDB is a free, open-source, and fork of the popular MySQL database system. It is a widely used relational database management system made by the original developers of MySQL. It is specially designed for scalability and mission-critical deployments. By default, the MariaDB package is available in the default repository of all major Linux distributions. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of MariaDB is 10.8. Every major release will be maintained at least 5 years. So MariaDB 10.8.0 will be supported until 2027.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB 10.8 on Ubuntu 22.04 server.
The UUID refers to a Universally Unique Identifier that consists of 128-bit numbers that have the probability of having duplicates close enough to zero but not zero in the local system. It was originally used in the Networking Computing System and then, later standardized by the Open Software Foundation.
The UUID is divided into five groups separated by hyphens (-) consisting of 8-4-4-4-12 characters in each group. In total it consists of 36 characters. You can see the UUID string like the string shown below.
This tutorial will explain how you can setup a basic remote desktop between Xubuntu (Xfce desktop) computer and Android phone using TigerVNC technology in a local area network. We will show that you can do this excellently without relying to software that is not free nor third-party service.
CrossOver is one of the best ways to run Windows software on Mac and Linux, as it’s based on the popular Wine project. CodeWeavers has now released CrossOver 22, with significant changes to the interface and software compatibility.
CrossOver is a compatibility layer for Windows applications and games, which can provide a more native experience than running a virtual machine — and you don’t need a copy of Windows. The latest update has a redesigned settings panel on all platforms with a more modern look. CodeWeavers said in its blog post, “before this redesign, the last time we made significant UI changes was in CrossOver 15, and the last time we did a major overhaul of our UI on all platforms was CrossOver 9. Clearly, we were overdue for a CrossOver makeover.”
It has finally happened. Cemu, the Wii U emulator has a big new 2.0 release and it is now officially open source and available for Linux too.
For Linux, most people do need to compile it from source as there's only an Ubuntu package right now but the developer has said in the announcement post that they're looking into AppImage and Flatpak to make it easier. While Cemu should work fine on Linux, they also mentioned there are some lingering issues mostly around the user interface. Part of the reason it was open sourced, was that the main developer had been doing it alone for quite a while and so now it's open source hopefully more people will help develop it further.
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Some more work towards a Stop&Restart emulation feature. Not ready yet but we are getting there
A major new version of the open source video editor Kdenlive is now available to download.
Kdenlive 22.08 comes front-loaded with a variety of interesting new features, UI tweaks, and enhancements to many of its existing capabilities. As a result, Kdenlive 22.08 stands to offer a smoother editing experience than in previous versions.
Let’s take a look at exactly what’s new.
The 22.08 release of Kate hasn’t arrived for many users yet, but we already have new cool stuff for upcoming releases.
As our merge requests page shows, alone in August we got at least 66 new things done. Naturally that are not all new features, but bug fixes, too.
Pablo Rauzy was nice enough to provide some short videos for the enhancements he contributed! Thanks a lot for that, and thanks to all people that helped to work out the merge requests he submitted.
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The Vi mode had this already via Vi commands, now it is available as some UI actions, too, that can be assigned shortcuts.
For the last year and a half, we at Asymptotic have been working with the excellent team at Daily. I’d like to share a little bit about what we’ve learned.
Daily is a real time calling platform as a service. One standard feature that users have come to expect in their calls is the ability to record them, or to stream their conversations to a larger audience. This involves mixing together all the audio/video from each participant and then storing it, or streaming it live via YouTube, Twitch, or any other third-party service.
As you might expect, GStreamer is a good fit for building this kind of functionality, where we consume a bunch of RTP streams, composite/mix them, and then send them out to one or more external services (Amazon’s S3 for recordings and HLS, or a third-party RTMP server).
I’ve written about how we implemented this feature elsewhere, but I’ll summarise briefly.
This is a slightly longer post than usual, so grab a cup of your favourite beverage, or jump straight to the summary section for the tl;dr.
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Hopefully this post has given you a sense of the platform we have built. In the process, we also set the rails for a very exciting custom composition engine.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Neptune 7.5 "Ada" and some of the applications pre-installed.
Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions of the past decade, and there's a lot written about it on the internet. But what is Linux Mint and why is it so well-known among the Linux community?
By the end, you'll have a deep understanding of the specifications, history, editions, and key features that make Linux Mint stand out from the crowd.
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What started as a clone of Kubuntu, Mint quickly set itself apart by offering support for proprietary drivers and codecs.
Around the time of the disastrous update from KDE 3 to KDE 4, the distribution switched to an Ubuntu base. Mint featured a series of out-of-the-box customizations that made GNOME 2 look and behave similarly to Windows XP.
When Ubuntu switched from GNOME 2 to Unity, Mint briefly used GNOME 3, but soon launched Cinnamon and added the MATE edition to its lineup.
The final release of Mint's original KDE edition was in 2018. Today the Plasma desktop is shockingly absent among the distribution's spins, as is GNOME.
StarFive has just unveiled the VisionFive 2 Single Board Computer (SBC) which packs a quad-core JH7110 RISC-V processor. Some notable features include dual GbE ports, one M.2 M key, one HDMI port and many other peripherals. The base model comes with 2GB of RAM and it’s available for US$46 (Early bird special ) on Kickstarter.
As previously mentioned, the VisionFive 2 accommodates quad U74 cores (SiFive) with a frequency up to 1.5GHz. According to the product page, the CPU is also paired with the BXE-4-32 GPU (Imagination Technologies) which supports OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2.
The Inovato Quadra mini Linux PC offers performance comparable to the Raspberry Pi 3 but at a significantly lower price.
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of mini ARM-based Linux computers is the Raspberry Pi. Those little devices dominate this market segment, providing ample computational power and room for experimentation in a small package at a reasonable price.
However, it’s great when new offerings come out comparable to what the Raspberry Pi offers but at a lower price. Meet the Inovato Quadra, a small ARM-based Linux computer priced at just $29.
Hands up if you’ve got six Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 boards lying around doing nothing — don’t all rush at once. For the one person in the back, there: DeskPi has revealed a $200 carrier board that will take your sextet of CM4s and combine them into some sort of machine-learning-Kubernetes cluster, in a Mini-ITX case, called the Super6C Raspberry Pi CM4 Cluster Mini-ITX board.
Wondering what crazy antics cats could get into if they had thumbs is its own ordeal but upping the stakes with the ability to knock on doors is finally within reach thanks to maker and developer Tennis Smith’s Raspberry Pi-powered IoT cat doorbell (opens in new tab) project. It works just like it sounds, allowing his cat to notify him when it wants to go inside the house.
The system involves using a microphone to listen for potential meows. So instead of knocking, all the cat needs to do is what it does best—bellow out in desperate hopes of getting let inside. The Pi is responsible for detecting meows from other sounds using AI. If a meow is determined to have occurred, it sends a text message to Smith’s phone alerting him of the event.
The doorbell operates as an IoT device using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Raspberry Pi can interpret potential meows using Tensorflow Lite, an open-source machine learning tool that you can train with custom models for projects like these. If Tensorflow detects a meow, it notifies AWS to initiate the text message.
Getting your Raspberry Pi project online is now cheaper and easier thanks to the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W. It only takes five lines of code to connect your Raspberry Pi Pico W to the world, but sharing your code can leave you open to a few security concerns.
Your MicroPython code now contains your Wi-Fi password, API keys and bespoke URLs. So how do we mitigate the risk while keeping our data portable?
Creating a MicroPython module is the best way to keep your secrets out of your project code. We can import the module just like any other module, and reference its contents in the same manner.
In this how-to, we will create a secrets module and use it, along with Open Weather to get the current weather details for our home location. The project code can be easily shared with others, without fear of including any personal information.
More often than not, the fun part of putting together a Raspberry Pi project—or any microelectronics project for that matter—is working out the logistics of what interfaces you need and peripherals to include. Sometimes it takes ingenuity to bring everything together and this is demonstrated quite well in this HDMI to I2C project by maker and developer Solaria123.
The idea to connect a device that relies on an I2C interface to the DDC pins found inside an unused video port isn’t new. However, we still appreciate this project as it demonstrates the compatibility and flexibility of the Raspberry Pi. According to Solaria123, this trick is used often with Linux-based machines that don’t have any I2C devices.
In this case, the hack is useful for situations in which I2C pin access has been blocked by either a case or something like a module. As long as the HDMI port is free, DDC is capable of providing a low-speed I2C bus of 80 KHz.
Twitter user Twi_Kingyo doesn’t need a Raspberry Pi Pico W to get network connectivity. Today we’re sharing a clever project they’ve created using a regular Pico wired to an Ethernet adapter via its GPIO. While this is only a partial connection, the testing so far shows promising results.
The connection allows support for 10BASE-T communication on the Pico microcontroller. This designation comes from IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and indicates its ability to carry 10Mbps Ethernet signals using a twisted pair cable.
"Where's Bobby?" A question that comes up when at work. While our Product Documentation Lead, Bobby Chan, is usually at his desk, there are times that he needs to walk away for lunch, take a 15-minute break, head into a meeting, or check inventory. To help notify others of where he may be, he made the Qwiic-enabled digital desk sign using the SAMD51's USB host and a USB keyboard to type short custom messages while he's away!
PureOS on the Librem 5 USA has a long list of default capabilities and a longer list of applications that are available to install and an even longer list of applications that are coming.
The original Apple Macintosh computer, launched in 1984, was fundamental for ushering in GUIs (graphical user interfaces). It wasn’t the first personal computer to feature a GUI operating system and the concurrent Apple II still retained a more traditional command line interface for years, but we largely have the Macintosh to thank for modern GUIs. So it is appropriate that Dave Luna chose to use an Apple Macintosh Classic II to retrofit with a modern ePaper display.
The Macintosh Classic II hit the market in 1991 as a low-cost model, but it retained the design aesthetic of the original Macintosh. It was also the last Macintosh computer with a black-and-white screen. Luna replaced that CRT (cathode-ray tube) with a 9.7” Waveshare ePaper display. He also removed all of the original PCBs and replaced them with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer. Interestingly, Luna added an adapter to feed the output from a Chromecast device to the Raspberry Pi’s camera input in order to show family pictures stored in Google Photos.
After 17 years with SFLC, Legal Director Mishi Choudhary will depart to become General Counsel and Senior Vice-President at Virtru.
Ms. Choudhary began working with SFLC in 2006, held the first SFLC Graduate Fellowship for LLM study at Columbia Law School, and became Legal Director in 2015. She has represented SFLC clients across the entire range of FOSS communities, including the Free Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, Debian, Ethereum, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL. She founded and developed SFLC’s FOSS Code of Conduct practice, assisting FOSS non-profits and unaffiliated projects to develop and administer CoC policies. She has served as the Code of Conduct mediator for the Linux kernel community, among many others.
In previous blog posts there was some talk about implementing a simple system that generates books (both PDF and ebook) from plain text input files. The main question for that is what the input format should be. Currently there are basically two established formats: LaTeX and Markdown. The former is especially good if the book has a lot of figures, cross references, indexes and all that. The latter is commonly used in most modern web systems but it is more suitable to specifying text in the "web page" style as opposed to "split aesthetically over pages".
The obvious solution when faced with this issue is to design your own file format that fits your needs perfectly. I did not do that, but instead I did think about the issue and did some research and thinking. This is the outcome of that. It is not a finished product, you can think of instead as a grouping of unrelated things and design requirements that you'd need to deal with when creating such a file format.
DevSpace is a lightweight, easy-to-use client-only command-line interface (CLI) tool that employs users’ current kube-context, like kubectl or Helm. It does not require installing anything inside a cluster and is versatile with the ability to work with every Kubernetes cluster without modification.
We would posit (see what we did there) that R-{shiny} has been a boon for data science practitioners using the R language over the last decade. We know that in our Python work, we have certainly been clamouring for something of the same ilk. And whilst there are other frameworks that we also like, streamlit and dash to name a couple, neither of them has filled us with the same excitement and confidence that shiny did in R to build both simple and complex bespoke web applications. With RStudio Posit conf in action the big news from July 27th was the alpha release of Py-{shiny} which was a source of great interest for us, so we couldn’t resist installing and starting to build.
Recently, Gwern wrote a story about an AI taking over the world. While well thought-out and amusing it is unrealistic. However, people have been using it to reinforce their fear of “unaligned AGI killing all humans”, so I think it’s dangerous and it might be worth looking at it line-by-line to see why its premise is silly, and why each step in his reasoning, individually, is impossible.
I’ll first go through the critical failure point of this narrative, then I will try to describe the meta-level pattern that might be causing people to glance over these mistakes.
We talk a lot about standards over this way, including what came before the standards were put into place and what came before. Our last issue was about standards, even. But sometimes, de facto standards simply come into place, where a large number of people and organizations agree to do something a certain way, despite no formalized agreement or strategy. And one of the greatest examples of a de facto standard in computing history may be a controller port that remained in constant use on mainstream consoles and computers for two whole decades. I’m, of course, talking about the Atari joystick port, a port with a surprising amount of history behind it. Today’s Tedium talks about why this the Atari joystick port became the USB of its day, in a sense, and where that analogy falls apart.
The Internet as a whole is at the point where you really don’t know who to trust. Malware, spam, and other security and privacy concerns are just so prevalent. That makes this news expected while also surprising. The ex-chief of security at Twitter became a whistleblower on Monday and outed his former company for its lack of security that he describes as “egregious deficiencies.”
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Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, claims Twitter violated a Federal Trade Commission settlement with false claims of its security. He filed this claim with the FTC, Security and Exchange Commission, and the United States Department of Justice.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (vim), SUSE (cosign, dpdk, freeciv, gfbgraph, kernel, nim, p11-kit, perl-HTTP-Daemon, python-lxml, and python-treq), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-5.14, open-vm-tools, and twisted).
Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
Buoyant today updated the open source Linkerd service mesh to add support for route-based authorization policies that enforce zero-trust policies within microsegmented Kubernetes environments.
In addition, the company is adding support for the Kubernetes Gateway application programming interface (API) and access logging to produce Apache-style request logs.
CISA has released CISA Insights: Preparing Critical Infrastructure for Post-Quantum Cryptography, which outlines the actions that critical infrastructure stakeholders should take now to prepare for their future migration to the post-quantum cryptographic standard that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will publish in 2024.
Zatko was fired from Twitter in January this year “for ineffective leadership and poor performance”, in the words of a Twitter spokesperson. CNN’s report is very long, and worth reading in full. If even partially true, what Zatko is alleging is extremely alarming.
The phone numbers and email addresses of anonymous dissidents are very sensitive, but I’d argue that the contents of DMs are the most sensitive information Twitter holds.
We're spooked to learn how one man's life has been turned upside down just because he used Google Photos.
Despite being a powerhouse of technology and innovation, the U.S. lags behind global counterparts when it comes to privacy protections. Everyday, people face the real possibility that their very personal information could fall into the hands of third parties seeking to weaponize it against them.
At Mozilla, we strive to not only empower people with tools to protect their own privacy, but also to influence other companies to adopt better privacy practices. That said, we can’t solve every problem with a technical fix or rely on companies to voluntarily prioritize privacy.
The good news? After decades of failed attempts and false starts, real reform may finally be on the horizon. We’ve recently seen more momentum than ever for policy changes that would provide meaningful protections for consumers and more accountability from companies. It’s time that we tackle the real-world harms that emerge as a result of pervasive data collection online and abusive privacy practices.
Bayat doesn't acknowledge that the fundamental reason for Proof-of-Work is to defend against Sybil attacks; the price floor he describes is a synergistic effect of the Sybil defense. It is hard to believe that Nakamoto regarded the "price floor" as the primary justification for PoW, since the entire system depended upon PoW's Sybil defense for its security.
Millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have yet again been subjected to internet shutdowns during national exams. This summer, authorities in Sudan, Algeria, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq followed the same script played out repeatedly in recent years, where the internet is disrupted to prevent students from cheating or leaking exam questions. Not only is this approach ineffective in curbing cheating, it is disproportionate, draconian, and harmful to all people living in affected areas.
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Algeria has been on a roll: authorities have disrupted the internet every year since the 2016 exam season. Two years ago, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune emphasized publicly that he would “no longer tolerate this practice” and promised Algerians that in the following year’s final exams, there would be “technical solutions that will not affect the internet.” Additionally, on June 6 of this year, when asked by journalists at a press conference if the internet would be shut down during this year’s exams, the Minister of Education, Abdelhakim Belabed, said “no one mentioned anything about internet shutdown(s),” promising that tools had been set in place to prevent cheating.
However, the Algerian government broke their promises and disrupted the internet once again during this year’s Baccalaureate exams from June 12-16. Although they did not implement a total internet shutdown, they blocked specific websites and applications, making 2022 the seventh year in a row they have interfered with the internet during exams.
More than a decade after implementing support for secure HTTPS connections on its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is finally planning to begin redirecting insecure HTTP connections to the more protected spec.
The organization, which gets hundreds of millions of requests per day to its website, had delayed that transition for fear of breaking legacy web applications, many of which rely on resources reached via HTTP. But it now says it's nearly good to go, at some point.
"The primary reason for this is that we wanted to avoid causing issues for software requesting machine-readable resources from www.w3.org such as HTML DTDs, XML Schemas, and namespace documents," explained W3C sysadmin Gerald Oskoboiny in a post on July 25.
"We believe enough time has passed for most such software to have been updated to handle redirects and https, so we are planning to start redirecting all requests received over http to https within a month or two."
That target date, set one month ago, became indeterminate on Monday when Oskoboiny published a follow-up blog post for the W3C outlining learnings from the initial tests of the HTTP-to-HTTPS tests.
The move has been delayed, Clayburn writes, “for fear of breaking legacy web applications, many of which rely on resources reached via HTTP. But it now says it's nearly good to go, at some point.”
Those following spectrum policy often hear that “the future of spectrum is sharing.” Basically, the airwaves are now so crowded that the old model of “clear and auction” federal spectrum (or even phase out/compress existing services like C-band) is unsustainable for a society as connected as ours. Plus, we need lots more spectrum for unlicensed uses. With Wi-Fi 7 coming up, we will need channel sizes of 320 MHz of contiguous spectrum to get the benefits. Wi-Fi 7 will be critical for both the new fiber-connected, multi-device smart homes and the future of virtual reality/augmented reality — technologies that need the enhanced speed and capacity that Wi-Fi 7 will deliver.
While we take for granted things like unlicensed spectrum that make Wi-Fi possible, and ubiquitous high-power mobile networks that deliver these services to consumers, these innovations were fought every inch of the way by incumbents who absolutely hated the idea of any kind of change. That hate stems from a combination of general fear of changing the spectrum environment to fear of competition from potentially new, disruptive services. Despite doomsday predictions from incumbents that any change in existing rules would cause massive destructive interference with valuable existing services, the FCC’s engineers successfully evaluated the evidence and created rules that brought us new wireless services without causing harmful (let alone destructive) interference to existing services. That’s why you can read this blog post on your phone or your tablet in a coffee shop.
Yesterday we had some colleagues from Stockholm visit the local office. It was great fun; there was a lot of socialising and pizza involved. Anecdotally a pizza place owner becomes very very happy if you order 20 pizzas on an otherwise slow Tuesday night.
When I was to go home at around 22:00 I couldn't find my bike. Anywhere within a 500 metre radius. Even though I'd parked it just outside. Oh, well.
Now I'm using an old commuter bike that we had in storage. It's not bad. Definitely a lot slower than the 27 gear hybrid I had, but I do need to practice slowing down in general for my well-being so that's not necessarily a bad thing. I just hope it holds up better than my last commuter bike which eventually just couldn't handle the, uhm, urban terrain...
I use Merriam-Webster's dictionary as a reference for SpellBinding. I've never had a single issue with them until today.
Recently, I've been experiencing a bit of a dip in my mental health. Prolonged ill health (in the form of two successive kidney stone incidents, one of which required an operation) has left me in a rut, while the pandemic hasn't helped.
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Breaking unhealthy patterns can be hard, but I feel like yesterday reminded me that sometimes it's about the small things. So, I decided to do the same thing today. And tomorrow maybe I will again, even if it's just for a moment. Because the word isn't so bad once I put away my phone and start listening.
No more extracting oil, coal, or gas.
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We’ve rationed energy in the past and we need to do it again. This is also an efficient way to cut proof-of-work systems since a ban on it (which I would definitively welcome) is hard to enforce.
Writing long essays is fun. It's enjoyable to be able to express an idea, work on it a bit, mold it, pull out the imperfections, and show it off to the world. It can feel like a timeless accomplishment, rather than a temporal quip on social media.
As I write this, I'm in the midst of removing my blog from my website, reintegrating all the timely content that once ran alongside big internet and turning it into something somewhat timeless.
So it feels weird to be blogging this, to be blogging again. But then if my desire to move away from blogs is a resistance to the commercial pressures and urgings of the modern web, perhaps it's a less disagreeable endeavour on the small internet because those abhorrent forces aren't prevalent in this space?
Anyway, it's good to be here. Hello, smolworld. Thank you for continuing to exist. Thank you for having me.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.