Learning Linux can be a frustrating experience where everything little thing feels like a battle. Avoiding these common mistakes will make your introduction and adoption of Linux much easier and less stressful.
Using Linux is much simpler than it used to be, but it can still confound new users. It has long held a reputation as being difficult to set up and work with, but that’s no longer the case. Gone are the days when you had to struggle to tell your newly-booted installation what keyboard layout you had, using your misidentified and incorrectly-mapped keyboard.
What's up, Linux Community!!! In this video, we check out TrueNAS, a free and Open Source Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system that supports file, block, and object storage.
I have installed many different Ubuntu-based Linux distributions over the years, on not just my own computers but also friends and family member's computers. And today, I'm going to give you what I think are the five best Ubuntu-based distros, especially for new-to-Linux users.
ARM Computing has gone mainstream with Raspberry Pi and Mac M1/M2 chips. Harnessing this in a Linux desktop can be interesting. This is where I started using Ubuntu again.
Why LBRY was never going to win, and how they have just screwed all crypto. And a new feature in the works for our listeners by our listeners.
01:42 Github is being sued on Copilot's alleged violation of copyright 03:36 Google launches a giant language based AI project 05:12 Thunderbird unveils its new UI 06:36 Microsoft is being targeted for anti competitive practices in the cloud space 08:02 Interesting blog post about the advantages of Mastodon over Twitter 10:14 The Firefox Snap can now work with third party password managers 11:29 Big DXVK update, and GamepadUI improvements on Steam
A Quick Overview of Xubuntu 22.10.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Flowblade video editor on Linux Mint 21.
Install apps the easy way on Raspberry Pi OS with Pi-Apps.
Installing software on a Raspberry Pi is a bit of a pain, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the command line. While there is an add/remove programs tool, it’s a little clunky, especially when compared with similar tools on other operating systems.
That’s where Pi-Apps comes in. It’s a handy one-click installer for over 200 Linux apps that are designed to run on the Raspberry Pi.
Android commenced its journey as a Palo Alto-based startup called Android Inc in 2003. The company initially set out to develop an operating system for digital cameras but abandoned those efforts to reach a more expansive and boosted market. This mobile OS is based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, primarily designed for touchscreen mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.
This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products and services offered by Microsoft.
In this tutorial, you will learn how an easy way to integrate TheHive with Cortex.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install pgAdmin on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, pgAdmin is a free and open-source graphical administration tool for PostgreSQL, one of the most advanced open-source databases. It allows one to manage the PostgreSQL database from the web interface by providing all the required features.
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 pgAdmin4 on Rocky Linux. 9.
The journey to speed up running OCI containers took longer than expected, but the effort was worth it.
Nessus is an open-source network vulnerability scanner for vulnerability assessments and penetration testing.
You have probably heard of AppArmor while using Ubuntu, but since it is not an application that shows up in the Application Menu and doesn’t appear in any graphical form, some may not know what it does and why it is essential for your system. In short, AppArmor is a security module that confines individual programs to a set of listed files and capabilities so that they don’t wreak havoc on your system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Nvidia GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have a wide variety of uses, from gaming to 3D rendering, and visualization. If your Computer has NVIDIA Graphic cards, Install Nvidia Graphic Driver to improve Graphics related performance.
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 Nvidia Drivers on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Linux Mint is at the forefront of making Linux accessible to beginners switching from other operating systems. Although Linux Mint tries its best to help newcomers transition to Linux successfully, its installation process is often what catches most people off-guard.
Nginx is a popular Apache web server alternative and open source as well. In this tutorial, we learn the simple commands to install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS Linux using the command terminal.
Apart from using as a Web server, it is also used as a proxy, cache, and load-balancing server. To install it, you just need a Linux server such as Ubuntu 20.04 and sudo user rights along with the Internet connection.
We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in October 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks...
Linux laptops have so far lost out to their Windows counterparts with regard to features such as Nvidia's Advanced Optimus. Now, Nvidia is proposing a new user-space API for the Linux kernel that allows for dynamic multiplexer (MUX) switching beyond the capabilities of the current vga-switcheroo implementation that has several limitations.
I’ve just made a new 5.3.1 release of Grantlee. The 5.3.0 release had some build issues with Qt 6 which should now be resolved with version 5.3.1.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 04 to November 11.
Builder has been absolutely wonderful for a designer to dive in and fix up graphics assets for Application. It allows to easily build and test run patches before submitting a merge/pull request on apps hosted on gitlab or github. Ideally you’d press the run button and voilá.
What has been far from wonderful — doing even one line fixes for the GNOME Shell was very hard to test for anyone not building shell daily. getting the environment ready every release has been a chore. From virtual machines, jhbuild, toolbox, jhbuild in VMs to jhbuild in toolbox there was a dozen of way to fail building the latest shell.
EasyOS Dunfell-series version 4.5 is a milestone release. The last release announced on Distrowatch was version 4.0, on June 9, 2022, over five months ago. There has been a lot of "water under the bridge" since 4.0, and the challenge now is to summarise the huge number of changes down into a short announcement...
Here goes, an announcement blurb: The Dunfell-series of EasyOS is built from packages compiled from source using "meta-quirky", a build system based on OpenEmbedded/Yocto (OE). The binary packages from a complete recompile based on Dunfell 3.1.20 release of OE was used to build EasyOS 4.5.
There has been a major structural change, completely separating the EasyOS installation from the boot-loader, and the rEFInd/Syslinux bootloaders have been replaced with Limine. The latter handles both UEFI and legacy-BIOS computers.
As the packages are cross-compiled from source, the repository is rather small compared to other distributions; however, this is compensated by a much increased collection of SFS files. These are large packages, even complete operating systems, that can run on the main filesystem or in a container. These are downloaded and installed by clicking on the "sfs" icon on the desktop -- a very simple operation. New SFSs include Android Studio, Audacity, Blender, Openshot, QEMU, Shotcut, SmartGit, SuperTuxKart, VSCode and Zoom. It is expected that more will be added. SFSs can be thought of as being like appimages, snaps, or flatpaks, but more light-weight and flexible.
Lots of packages have been updated, including the kernel now at 5.15.78 and Firefox is 106.0.5.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.16.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
The second RC build of the 12.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 12.4-RC2 amd64 GENERIC o 12.4-RC2 i386 GENERIC o 12.4-RC2 powerpc GENERIC o 12.4-RC2 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 12.4-RC2 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 12.4-RC2 sparc64 GENERIC o 12.4-RC2 armv6 RPI-B o 12.4-RC2 armv7 BANANAPI o 12.4-RC2 armv7 CUBIEBOARD o 12.4-RC2 armv7 CUBIEBOARD2 o 12.4-RC2 armv7 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 12.4-RC2 armv7 RPI2 o 12.4-RC2 armv7 WANDBOARD o 12.4-RC2 armv7 GENERICSD o 12.4-RC2 aarch64 GENERIC o 12.4-RC2 aarch64 RPI3 o 12.4-RC2 aarch64 PINE64 o 12.4-RC2 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.4/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/12.4" branch.
A summary of changes since 12.4-RC1 includes:
o if_vxlan(4): Check the size of data available in mbuf before using them
o ofed: allow using IPv6 address in rc_pingpong server
o ssh: correct parse_cert_times case for hex "to" time
o ipfw: Have NAT steal the TH_RES1 bit, instead of the TH_AE bit
A list of changes since 12.3-RELEASE is available in the releng/12.4 release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.4R/relnotes/
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 12.4-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/12.4-RC2/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
af-south-1 region: ami-0bb9241eb5b7ce3d6 ap-south-1 region: ami-0527af8666dda5829 eu-north-1 region: ami-0d6177cd754aa72dc eu-west-3 region: ami-08f680889e53634c2 eu-south-1 region: ami-08ac6171a6fed25fb eu-west-2 region: ami-0fb4469bed6238be9 eu-west-1 region: ami-0e8e36a247c8ed53d ap-northeast-3 region: ami-09c228acdad5d7a79 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0e7721f26bd4de3ec me-south-1 region: ami-0b02ae646b10c6de2 ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0aec441df71470ea8 me-central-1 region: ami-0d6ad0499882dce86 ca-central-1 region: ami-0f2d11db9ea0b1aa4 sa-east-1 region: ami-0b80e81dfe36d4fbb ap-east-1 region: ami-01e42305963671dc2 ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0cd111eb6e15d09ec ap-southeast-2 region: ami-02cec3f2f7642419a eu-central-1 region: ami-04152d204e92e9f99 ap-southeast-3 region: ami-0b73f7e14f7e0012d us-east-1 region: ami-0d6c71982e7c3f9e3 us-east-2 region: ami-0a5c8791ac08ed8e0 us-west-1 region: ami-068dd3ee6d391a9c2 us-west-2 region: ami-02a1825d8f14de513
These AMI IDs can be retrieved from the Systems Manager Parameter Store in each region using the keys:
/aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/12.4/RC2
FreeBSD/aarch64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
af-south-1 region: ami-00c20ae46d8c9cb3e ap-south-1 region: ami-0ae33af93d0bebb0f eu-north-1 region: ami-06b32a5074a82fa79 eu-west-3 region: ami-014bfd8fb0efa0959 eu-south-1 region: ami-013b9ddd5a309a314 eu-west-2 region: ami-041da668b00a5f253 eu-west-1 region: ami-0020336a5d7d4d1cc ap-northeast-3 region: ami-03cd672d518d29d14 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-047ad3d08bb9347f6 me-south-1 region: ami-0f87d9fe1774c8e60 ap-northeast-1 region: ami-08026b5278c3763ae me-central-1 region: ami-0f2e0e6e59eaaa35c ca-central-1 region: ami-01ace02b97682b91c sa-east-1 region: ami-0113afee2306ddb59 ap-east-1 region: ami-09b5a1bcc45575039 ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0538f0f2470e7e8cd ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0fbe1fc1c091462ec eu-central-1 region: ami-0fab18ffda73511e3 ap-southeast-3 region: ami-0df8e3a770e4f6563 us-east-1 region: ami-0c3f9257eff6424df us-east-2 region: ami-092f55aaddf0b33f8 us-west-1 region: ami-0e4b71ec869a264df us-west-2 region: ami-02008ed41fe078a24
These AMI IDs can be retrieved from the Systems Manager Parameter Store in each region using the keys:
/aws/service/freebsd/arm64/base/ufs/12.4/RC2
=== Vagrant Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can be installed by running:
% vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-12.4-RC2 % vagrant up
=== Upgrading ===
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64, i386, and aarch64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 12.4-RC2
During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:
# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 12.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat12x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:
# shutdown -r now
Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:
# freebsd-update install
This week (the last weekend) has been a bit of a challenge for many of our users, due to an ill-prepared sudo config change. It was attempted to closer align how sudo works on other distros (using user’s password instead of root’s) but the configuration was far from complete and made nobody able to sudo anymore (su still worked, luckily). A heartfelt apology if you were hit by that. The change was reverted on Monday (through the update channel) to get you back to the usual config asap. But of course, the week was not defined by that one incident. Tumbleweed has been rolling on steadily with daily snapshots (1104…1110).
Clastix, a leader in Kubernetes multitenancy solutions, is now a SUSE ecosystem partner. Customers can now take advantage of innovative solutions that benefit from SUSE’s decades of engineering excellence and open source leadership coupled with Clastix’s unique solutions for Kubernetes deployments. Clastix has now published their Kamaji solution in the SUSE Rancher Apps and Marketplace catalog and we’ve invited Clastix for a guest blog so you can discover more about their solutions for Kubernetes multitenancy and deploying Kubernetes as a Service.
If you haven't switched over to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 family, and your company lives and dies with RHEL, then chances are you're running RHEL 8.x. If that's you, pay attention because the latest version, RHEL 8.7, has just arrived at a download site near you.
Why make a move at all? It's not like RHEL 8.6 is going to fall apart on you. That's true, but the latest RHEL does come with bigger, better security features. And, unless you've been hiding your head in the sand for the last few years, you know security attacks are happening more than ever.
Red Hat has announced version 8.7 of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL. The new release comes with a number of enhancements that aim to make server administration more manageable.
The CentOS Board held its monthly meeting on Wednesday. The recording and minutes of that meeting are now available.
Despite more than 600 Linux distributions available for download today, Ubuntu stands out among the most popular distributions. That’s mainly because of the intuitive interface that makes it easy to use, even for beginners switching from a platform like Windows. Another reason is the large community support. If you encounter any problem while using Ubuntu, somebody is highly likely to have encountered those issues before and left a solution on Stack Overflow or Ubuntu forums.
Like any other platform, Ubuntu also comes with several fonts installed. However, some users need to install additional fonts for different reasons. If you are one such person, you are lucky. This post will list the 20 best fonts you can install on your Ubuntu system.
Unsure whether to choose Ubuntu Desktop or Ubuntu Server? Here's what you need to know.
Ubuntu ranks as arguably the most popular Linux-based operating system. It's undoubtedly one of the best-known. However, Ubuntu varies quite a bit. Within Ubuntu, there are two distinct flavors: a stable release and long-term support (LTS) iteration.
Further, Ubuntu splits into Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Desktop, and Ubuntu Server. Here, you'll learn all about the differences between Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop.
When buying a smartphone, you have two real choices. You can opt for an iPhone, which runs iOS, or one of the many Android handsets available from the likes of Google, Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus and Sony.
If you value your privacy, then you might want a phone that truly does too. Volla Phone 22, from German firm Hallo Welt Systeme UG, is a good-looking device that is focused on keeping you safe and secure. It runs a choice of operating systems -- Volla OS, Ubuntu Touch, and the recently added Sailfish OS -- that can be selected on start-up. Support for additional mobile operating systems is coming soon.
The Volla Phone 22 is a solid mid-range device that first came to market via crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It is available in White and Elegant Black and features a 6.3-inch FHD+ display. It’s powered by a MediaTek Helio G85 4G processor and comes with a 4500mAh battery (which supports Qi wireless charging). This can be removed and replaced simply by taking the back off the phone, which is something you don’t see so much of these days.
All of the recent changes at Twitter inspired me to take a second look at mastodon. In short, mastodon is a federated social network that feels a bit like someone took Twitter and split it up into a vast network of independent servers. Why mastodon? It feels a lot like Twitter, but better. You can search for people, follow them, and publish messages (called toots). They can also follow you and see the messages you publish. The big difference is that you don’t join a central server with mastodon. There’s a massive network of servers to choose from and you can create accounts on one or more of those servers to get started. You can even run your own! Mastodon reminds me of email for many reasons: There’s no central server. You join a server (from the massive, growing list) and start publishing messages. Everything is on an eventual consistency model. If a mastodon server goes offline for a bit or has network issues, messages and other data will synchronize when it’s back online.
As Twitter users fret over the direction that new owner Elon Musk is taking the company, masses of users have hopped over to Mastodon, an open source Twitter alternative. Since October 27, when the SpaceX and Tesla CEO formalized his Twitter takeover, Mastodon has gained nearly 500,000 new users, effectively doubling its user base. But what is Mastodon, and should we all be getting our accounts set up?
If you’re a Twitter purist who likes to use basic functionality like private DMing, quote-tweeting and user-friendly onboarding, Mastodon might not be for you. But if you’re looking to try something new on the social internet, then why not give Mastodon a whirl? Elon Musk isn’t there!
Mobilizon is the alternative we have been developing since 2019 so that everyone can emancipate their events and groups from Facebook. Except, unlike Facebook, Mobilizon is not a single platform. It is a software that specialists can install on a server to create multiple events and groups platforms (called €« instances €»), which can be linked together within a federation.
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.2.0-preview3. Ruby 3.2 adds many features and performance improvements.
argparse subcommands are great, but they have a quirk in which options are only available right after the subcommand that define them.
Most git commands require you to either write or update a message. Typically, when you resolve a merge conflict or you try to modify a commit it opens up an editor for you to make the change. While this is not particular to Linux, on Linux systems you ussually have the option of using Emacs or Vim. By default git will use Emacs which in some cases can be annoying if you don’t know how to use it.
In this article we are going to learn how to change the default editor to Vim so that any time you need to update a commit message or anything like that you get Vim to open up. Besically using the command below you can change the default editor to Vim
Using Terraform for personal projects, is a good way to create your lab in a reproducible manner. Wherever your lab is, either in the “cloud” aka other’s people computers or in a self-hosted environment, you can run your Infrastructure as code (IaC) instead of performing manual tasks each time.
My preferable way is to use QEMU/KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) on my libvirt (self-hosted) lab. You can quickly build a k8s cluster or test a few virtual machines with different software, without paying extra money to cloud providers.
Terraform uses a state file to store your entire infra in json format. This file will be the source of truth for your infrastructure. Any changes you make in the code, terraform will figure out what needs to add/destroy and run only what have changed.
Assertion Roulette doesn’t mean that multiple assertions are bad.
When I coach teams or individual developers in test-driven development (TDD) or unit testing, I frequently encounter a particular notion: Multiple assertions are bad. A test must have only one assertion.
That idea is rarely helpful.
Every business and organization has unique data requirements that a simple JavaScript timeline chart cannot satisfy. Consequently, a trusted and reliable JavaScript Chart Library is required. Effective data presentation is becoming more and more crucial in this digital age. This aids advancement and competitive analysis for firms and organizations. Continue reading to learn more about some top JavaScript chart libraries.
We're trying out new ways to send out these regular announcements of what we get up to on the Perl Steering Council. This will be a regular posting that gives a brief summary of what we discussed in our weekly (or at least, near-weekly, give or take scheduling clashes) meetings.
Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.
Stuck €· People with mental-health issues can get stuck. For example, when some combination of depression and anxiety means they can’t get out of bed all day, and can’t say why. Or when they really need to get dressed or packed or organized for some imminent un-reschedulable event, and can’t get started.
It would be easy to ââ¬â°—ââ¬â°sorry, it is easy, I know this because I haveââ¬â°—ââ¬â°say something like “Just stand up and look out the window, it’s sunny.” Or “Just grab some random underwear and drop them in the suitcase, then you’ll be started”. Or “Just get the binder out of your knapsack and look at the first page.”
This. Will. Not. Help.
Last week I was on a panel addressing the topic of burnout. It’s a topic that pops up with some frequency, yet the misconception that burnout is a personal problem seems to persist.
Michigan Medicine's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital on Thursday said it has reached capacity and is experiencing a pediatric bed shortage as respiratory virus cases surge in children and flu season begins.
Corewell Health East, previously known as Beaumont Health, treated 571 pediatric RSV cases in the week of Oct. 31 to Nov. 6, up from 72 during the last week in September.
The Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids, operated by Corewell Health West, typically sees 145 kids a day in its Emergency Department but is now averaging over 225 cases a day. The hospital typically operates 24 beds in the intensive care unit but reported having 42 ICU patients on Wednesday. Around 60 children receiving inpatient care at the Hellen DeVos Children's Hospital had RSV as of Wednesday.
"We have never seen a surge in pediatric respiratory viruses like this before. Our hospital is 100% full," Luanne Thomas Ewald, chief operating officer at Mott and Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital, said in a news release. "This is incredibly concerning because we haven’t even seen the full impact of flu season yet."
Other hospitals also are experiencing high levels of RSV cases, but the pediatric intensive care unit occupancy rate in Michigan has dipped. Statewide data indicates an 86% pediatric ICU occupancy as of Thursday, down from 89% last Friday.
Were you aware of it: Microsoft is phoning home the content of your PowerPoint slides.
Don't just take my word for it: open up the network monitor of your choice. Close all of your other applications or perform a fresh restart.
Fire up PowerPoint. Turn off all the cloud options. Make a new slide with a title of your choice. Choose "Designer." Look at your network traffic as you do.
It makes sense: the tool is reading your text and suggesting designs/delivering stock photography. But this means that any data that you might want to keep private is being sent to Microsoft.
Did we consent to this?
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and exiv2), Fedora (curl, device-mapper-multipath, dotnet6.0, mediawiki, mingw-gcc, and php-pear-CAS), Gentoo (lesspipe), Slackware (php), SUSE (git, glibc, kernel, libarchive, python, python-rsa, python3-lxml, rpm, sudo, xen, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (wavpack).
Two long-running surveillance campaigns have been found targeting the Uyghur community in China and elsewhere with Android spyware tools designed to harvest sensitive information and track their whereabouts.
This encompasses a previously undocumented malware strain called BadBazaar and updated variants of an espionage artifact dubbed MOONSHINE by researchers from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab in September 2019.
Welcome to the Reproducible Builds report for October 2022! In these reports we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month.
Both the apps function as a dropper, meaning the apps themselves are harmless and are a conduit to retrieve the actual payload, which, in the case of Todo, is hosted on GitHub.
I have a new book coming out in February. It’s about hacking.
A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back isn’t about hacking computer systems; it’s about hacking more general economic, political, and social systems. It generalizes the term hack as a means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways.
What sorts of system? Any system of rules, really. Take the tax code, for example. It’s not computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms—supposedly deterministic—that take a bunch of inputs about your income and produce an output that’s the amount of money you owe. This code has vulnerabilities; we call them loopholes. It has exploits; those are tax avoidance strategies. And there is an entire industry of black-hat hackers who exploit vulnerabilities in the tax code: we call them accountants and tax attorneys.
In my conception, a “hack” is something a system permits, but is unanticipated and unwanted by its designers. It’s unplanned: a mistake in the system’s design or coding. It’s subversion, or an exploitation. It’s a cheat—but only sort of. Just as a computer vulnerability can be exploited over the Internet because the code permits it, a tax loophole is “allowed” by the system because it follows the rules, even though it might subvert the intent of those rules.
The VENOM vulnerability affects all major CPU vendors, including Intel, AMD, and ARM. VENOM allows malicious actors to read the content of your computer’s memory and potentially execute code remotely.
If you have a vulnerable CPU, your computer may be at risk, so it’s crucial to know how to protect yourself against this exploit!
In early October 2022, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (“ETHI”) released the final report from their study on the “Use and Impact of Facial Recognition Technology”: Facial Recognition Technology and the Growing Power of Artificial Intelligence. The report concluded what prior Citizen Lab research has indicated, which is that “Canada’s current legislative framework does not adequately regulate FRT [facial recognition technology] and AI [artificial intelligence]. Without an appropriate framework, FRT and other AI tools could cause irreparable harm to some individuals.” The report includes nineteen recommendations to the federal government to address this issue.
Many of ETHI’s key findings and recommendations align with research and recommendations provided in previous Citizen Lab reports and submissions concerning algorithmic policing technologies and similar government systems. These include, for example, To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada and Bots at the Gate: A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision Making in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System—both published in collaboration with the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law—and a joint submission with the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) to a public consultation by the Toronto Police Services Board regarding its proposed Use of Artificial Intelligence Technology Policy.
On March 21, 2022, Citizen Lab fellow Cynthia Khoo appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) as a witness in the Committee’s study on the use and impact on facial recognition technology. She was invited to provide testimony on the potential harms and human rights implications of facial recognition, including recommendations for how the Government of Canada should regulate such technology. Below is a written copy of her formal remarks.
Last week, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of the last panel of witnesses on Bill C-18, the Online News Act. For the first time since the start of the pandemic I attended in person, which provided the opportunity to witness a scene that partly occurred off-camera. NDP MP Peter Julian started his questioning by citing with approval a Postmedia editorial, itself based on a Brian Lilley column. The editorial expressed support for Bill C-18, criticized Facebook, and took the Conservatives to task for not being more supportive of the proposed legislation. Seeing an NDP MP rely on a Lilley-inspired Postmedia editorial was strange enough, but adding to the weirdness was Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner scrambling to find the editorial on her phone and showing it around to caucus colleagues. While some might merely chalk this up to a common enemy – Facebook – I believe there is a bigger enemy at work, namely the loss of an independent press.
I’ve written before about how Bill C-18 is bad for press independence, stating:
I know of cases where opinion pieces have been spiked by mainstream media outlets because they criticized the previous Heritage Minister at a time when he was being actively lobbied on a potential media bill. Those decisions come on top of blank front pages and advertorials designed to curry support for the measures. The blurring of editorial and financial may be a fact of life, but it ultimately diminishes the credibility of the media.
Final papers sent in and I'm expecting response early next week. Then all of the practicalities are over. I'll be the singular owner of the flat I live in and... uhm... I think I might sell it.
It's a one bedroom flat, and a two bedroom flat in the next building is out for sale for a decent price. I'm in discussions with a realtor about it and am going to talk to the bank next week.
If you're not aware, RuneScape was an online java game created in 2001. The game was being continually updated with over 400 different versions existing, but the developers didn't implement any full version control until 2012 (aside from a single tape backup they found of 2007).
Therefore we're appealing here to see if anybody has it saved on an old computer, or hard drive. Even if you just played it once for a minute to see what it was then never again, you should have the full game data, because it was automatically downloaded via browser.
In my circle of friends and family, I stand alone when it comes to using or even trying alternatives to proprietary silos and privacy-oriented apps and services. I'm the only one off social media, which isn't surprising. I even deleted WhatsApp! However, it's been nearly impossible to bring people over to any alternative I suggest, even just to try.
Don't even get me started on trying to shift from iOS or Windows. Any time I even bring up Linux I immediately get eye-rolls and dismissals. On top of that I'm sometimes chided for making my life, and somehow there's, more difficult. They get irritated that they can't add me on WhatsApp or that my email isn't a "normal" Gmail. In turn I myself get extremely frustrated and disheartened.
One is expected to use emacs, and let it do whatever it does by way of indentation. If you show code not in emacs style, you'll probably get yelled at, a point mfiano also touches on. A request for a tool that accepts LISP on standard input and emits properly formatted code on the output met with silence. And the default style looks like one of those print jobs where the carriage return never happen and the text helpfully stairsteps right off the page. I lean towards the low end of the optimal line length range, and almost never set my terminals wider than 80 columns.
as of now, the practical guide is still publically available for free on the wordpress site linked above, but ErraticErrata announced a publishing deal with a sketchy-ass mobile app called yonder, where it will be sold on a per-chapter basis as a sequence of microtransactions. the serial would very much benefit from an editor, and i would love it if it were eventually published as either a normal ebook or a traditional paper book, but i really don't like this move as a whole.
Back when I was a young man, I was ready to jump on every new bandwagon. Screw the old stuff, new stuff is better, right?
I got my first CD player early in the 80s, when I was trying to pretend to be a yuppy. I had a portable (roughly twice the size of an average walkman... Although I had a really tiny walkman smaller than a cassette case, that popped up and clamped onto the tape). Anyway, the sound was amazing (I thought), even through shitty foam-padded crapphones of the 80's. No static at all...
I know for a fact that my hearing is not what it was then (my kids hear frequencies I don't). But today I am listening to Steely Dan's Royal Scam on a low-end Audio-Technica turntable and those transparent Harman-Cardon speakers from some years back, and it's freakin' amazing. And digital stuff sounds just so-so.
As a PhD student in robotics I've had the need to use several datasets, some more pleasant to use than others. This is a list of general guidelines, tips and often overlooked aspects than can make a dataset more pleasant to use. By pleasant to use I mean spending as little time as possible in downloading, pre-processing and using a dataset in order to maximize the time spent on actual research. Although the guidelines are mostly focused on robotics and computer vision datasets, most of them should be applicable to other domains as well.
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Distributing uncompressed data results in slower downloads for users and increased storage space requirements for hosting the dataset. The ZIP format is a good candidate since it performs compression by default and can be easily decompressed on virtually any operating system.
If your dataset is larger than 4 GiB it's a good idea to split it into multiple ZIP archives for compatibility with older filesystems and beacause smaller downloads are less likely to be interrupted. If you do split the dataset prefer splitting it into independent ZIP files instead of a so called split or spanned ZIP archive. A split ZIP archive requires all of the individual ZIP files in order to be decompressed forcing users to download the whole dataset even if they're only interested in a small part of it.
There are stillborns. They born to die. We usually learn about them from happy threads on reddit and HN. It doesn't even make sense to list them, there are thousands of them.
There is a long discussion about Twitter on the Internet. As the result, we are observing that many users joined Fediverse. Fediverse is very varied, so it's hard to measure that. But it is said for eg. by [Mastodon Users Bot] that in the last week there were almost 700,000 new users on Mastodon. It's about 10% of the overall user base. It has an impact on every server, and probably on every timeline, there were many introductions and new faces. Of course, in comparison to the 238,000,000 Twitter user base, it isn't a big deal. However, one can risk a statement that these are the users who are closest to the idea of Fediverse. Because they were able to make an effort to change their habits. The rest of the users could change their minds as a snowball effect, the last and biggest group of them will be the least important event. They will do what they will have to do after collapsing Twitter.
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I've realized that, and it isn't good information. The current situation is like a special breeding ground for rare bacteria. The thought of a small network is slowly developing. Information rarely infects a new user. By increasing the surface of the experiment, we only dilute the essences. Despite the larger base, the development will slow down.
The good thing is that there are special instances of Mastodon, like for eg. sdf.org and other Pubnixes. Maybe to reconcile users and their needs there will be introduced features with Local timeline, than Federated ones, in the future. Or maybe we are observing changes, which will be made small-net discussion go somewhere else?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.