Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has failed to keep up with inflation; Early 2011 salaries remained the same (i.e. lower in relative terms) at the end of 2022 and way below market standards for people working unhealthy (or “unsocial”) hours; a person intimately connected to the Support Manager even suggested (on the record) lowering the already-low salaries of technically-skilled people who work 1AM to 9AM
Desk for Sirius? Who owns what?
Summary: The previous part in the Sirius ‘Open Source’ series showed the financial issues at Sirius; to make matters worse, the company does not provide any means for work to its NOC staff (except an ancient Cisco phone, about 20 years old and bought second hand through eBay)
THE articles that we published about the EPO showed that as horrible and autocratic António Campinos has been, at least the Office chipped in and covered expenses for home working, such as ergonomic chairs. At Sirius, however, the company pays for nothing of that sort. Not for desk, chair, computer, and so on. Workers are on their own; technical problems with a work device? That’s your problem. That’s your device. The company won’t cover it. Then they impose bloatware on staff — software that ordinary machines cannot run (yes, staff did complain; it was a common problem) or can barely run. Does the company help procure suitable hardware? No. Was it asked about it? Yes.
Here is an internal report circulated in the company earlier this month (a day prior to departure):
Equipping staff with suitable assets is a basic, very basic, requirement. Roy has covered the legal aspects of that for many years in his Web sites. In Sirius, the company failed to equip home workers (“work-from-home” staff) with any computers or chairs or anything required to do the work. The managers expect staff to pay for purchasing and maintenance of all work equipment at their own expense in their own time. There’s no IT department to help with computer issues or even issue a replacement.
To make matters worse, bloated software which requires very powerful and expensive computers was introduced some years ago. Roy and colleagues also complained about this bloat, but that fell on deaf ears (Roy internally suggested the company can purchase suitable equipment or cover the costs of that). That’s aside from the very low (by market standards) salary, adding further burden. More on financial aspects shall be discussed later.
In recent months workers began observing that Sirius had customers with no way to access their systems. So how are workers supposed to deal with tickets they receive? There was expectation of dealing with queries by using “Google” to throw some answer at a client (as if the client cannot access Google), otherwise find an associate or escalate. It was starting to get hard to even tell apart clients and non-clients, as documentation was scarce and outdated to the point where clients were vaguely described and their status was unclear. Sentences like “Google is your friend” were said inside the company (Google is surveillance, it’s not a friend) and our skillset ought not rely on using search engines, following a textual script (like clerical staff in a call centre), or mere escalation to some other company. As noted before, many associates are at best loosely connected to the company and are in effect third parties.
About a year ago Roy faced disciplinary action over something unjust (to him). Instead of an independent, impartial tribunal acting as arbitrator it was likely the culprits judging the incident, then resorting to cover-up/distortion over the sequence of events to pass to the blame to ‘low-level’ staff. This started to become a typical modus operandi, which dated back several years, as a later section will explain in detail.
These issues turned out to be more widespread as staff managed to communicate with one another. For instance, lots of people were having phone issues. The company did not admit this; individual people reported it, then there was blaming of the people unable to use a defective “service” that keeps changing and breaking things that previously worked. Instead of admitting this migration was a mistake and acknowledging prior warning were given, there was only further entrenchment. More details will be given in the last section. █
He has done this many times in the past, as occasionally documented in our wiki
Shown above is the current headline and the previous headline (that we captured in Daily Links yesterday)
Summary: ZDNet covered a banal Linux release using unnecessary drama from Liam Tung (taking about a future release in an overly sensationalist fashion for FUD’s worth). The original headline was hostile: “Linux 6.1 stable lands as Linus Torvalds frets over a frantic pre-holidays 6.2 merge”; but they’ve since changed the title to “Open source: Linux 6.1 stable lands, here’s what you need to know”; Microsoft’s longterm media mole, Liam Tung, uses a negative twist to cover a Linux release. As usual in his case. ZDNet just cannot help trolling releases of Linux. There has been much coverage about the release, but this one was by far the worst, especially the original headline.
THIS may be difficult to dissect due to a lack of transparency (ZDNet does not publish IRC logs or equivalent/s), but maybe the editor stepped in or someone complained (we did within hours), whereupon they belatedly rectified only the clickbait headline.
Liam Tung’s anti-Linux FUD isn’t unprecedented to say the least; most of his ‘articles’ are/were Microsoft ads. He really should stay out of covering Linux because he works for a company that hates and attacks Linux. █
Anbernic unveiled the ‘RG35XX,’ a compact, pocket-sized gaming console that runs on a custom Linux operating system. The operating system is Anbernic’s fork of Emulation Station, which allows for convenient navigation of retro games, especially when combined with Anbernic’s function button, which acts as a back button and a quit button.
Escape Windows Linux Format style! We guide the first time Linux user through the install maze to escape Microsoft to software freedom. Discover how you can run Linux anywhere, any how and any time with one of the best beginner-friendly options: Elementary OS!
If you’re interested, you can buy the Lenovo Yoga 7i using the links below. It’s one of the best Lenovo laptops you can buy right now and a great option for almost any kind of user, especially since the 14-inch and 16-inch models cater to different people.
When the market for proprietary UNIX workstations collapsed, few vendors survived… and those that did seemed not to learn much from it.
OSnews has an interesting post on “the mass extinction of UNIX workstations,” and makes a some good points. Some of them are interconnected: for instance, while a decade or two back, old UNIX kit was almost worthless and was often being thrown away, now it commands serious prices from collectors – and some things, notably the software to run on the machines, is totally unobtainable these days.
That’s good news if you have the likes of an old SPARCstation in storage: You might be pleasantly surprised at what it’s worth now.
Another big issue, though, is what the knowledge and the skills are worth. There are many people running Linux (and possibly more saliently FreeBSD) servers today who learned and polished their skills on this stuff. There are multiple forms of value in keeping old machines running: educational value, in seeing how things were done. Lessons in performance optimization, resource usage, scalability, and so on. In the 1990s it was not unknown for high end corporate email servers to support tens of thousands of users, in as little memory as a first-gen smartwatch (for instance the first Apple Watch had 512MB). Knowing how to do that is useful knowledge, even now.
Linux Mint 21.1 beta has just been released to look for bugs and issues. This release has a lot of cosmetic updates and some tools to make using the system smoother. It is an LTS, so it will be good to install for a number of years.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Gimp on KDE Neon.
Google likes to just randomly kill projects that are going well and that extends to the Chromium team as well who just ended JPEG XL when it was picking up a lot of steam and had massive industry support.
A Quick Overview of Fedora 37
Here are my top 5 picks for the best Open Source & Native Linux games. You can find these popular games in every Linux store front and nearly every Linux software repository. Linux has a rich history in native & open source gaming dating back into the 90s. Several of the games featured in this video are forks (or continuations) of those games! The games I featured here are based on what I know & have played up to today. I hope to discover more awesome Linux games and show case them next year! — Games Featured in Top 5 5. X
At the weekend, Linus Torvalds hit the button, releasing Linux 6.1 to the world. Among other security features is support for writing parts of the kernel in Rust.
Last month, the NSA pleaded with devs to switch to memory-safe languages—such as Rust. The reason: Most security vulnerabilities are caused by bugs in memory usage.
Linux’s initial focus is to write new device drivers in Rust. In today’s SB Blogwatch, we love to oxidize.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Disney voice actors.
In our v6.0 blog post we mentioned that Rust for Linux support was pending for v6.1: its basic infrastructure is now merged.
Moving on to other exciting news, thanks to Google and community efforts, this release cycle brings the much-awaited Multi-Generational Least-Recently-Used lists (MGLRU) mechanism giving outstanding performance improvements. As presented by the Google ChromeOS team and in the Android mini-conference at this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference, the enhancements provided by MGLRU include an overall app launch time decrease of around 47%, direct reclaiming efficiency improved to a maximum of 43%, kswapd’s CPU usage dropped by an outstanding 92%, and more.
Another remarkable advance is the introduction of the Kernel Memory Sanitizer (KMSAN), helping developers worldwide improve security by adding a code testing mechanism based on compiler instrumentation (for now, Clang only) that will detect various issues including information leaks, uninitialized variables, and more.
In the past, video editing in Linux significantly lagged behind other popular operating system. While there was a good range of software, the vast majority offered limited functionality. However, the situation dramatically improved, in part because of development on multimedia frameworks (such as GStreamer and MLT). Furthermore, the versatility of Linux video editors has improved markedly. Linux now represents an excellent platform for editing video.
You can easily master touch typing on your Linux desktop. All you need is a little bit of persistence and one of these typing tutor apps.
Typing fast and accurately is an essential skill in the 21st century, as dictation software isn’t yet up to the task of ridding your work of superfluous “ums,” “ahs,” repetition, and random punctuation.
Typing tutors can help increase your speed to the level where words flow from your fingertips efficiently and smoothly.
In this video, I am going to show how to install deepin 20.8.
Linux (or its shells) is a powerful tool that can manage to perform all tasks on a workstation or server without a single hitch, giving you complete control over your system.
Like managing the background process, setting up a web server, monitoring the network devices, handling a single or group of users, taking backups, and many more.
All users having complete control over the system can also be damaging to the system. That is why you restrict the normal users by taking sudo permissions.
The Boost C++ libraries are a collection of open-source C++ libraries that provide support for tasks and functionalities commonly used in C++ development. The Boost libraries are highly respected among C++ developers and are widely used in many applications and software projects.
The Boost libraries are designed to be portable, well-documented, and easy to use. They are distributed under the Boost Software License, which allows them to be used for both open-source and commercial projects. The Boost libraries cover a wide range of topics, including utilities, algorithms, data structures, and many others.
The swap file is used when your system is running out of memory (RAM) and will use some portion of your disk to keep the processes running.
Though it’s a good idea to always have some swap on your system. But if you have more than enough system memory and want to save some gigs from your main drive and in that case, you may remove the swap file from Ubuntu.
And in this tutorial, I will show you how to remove the swap file step by step.
The ‘at’ command is most useful for scheduling one-time jobs in Linux.
ClickUp helps your teams and team managers to plan, track and manage any type of work for your project management needs. It’s simple to use, and it offers most of the features your teams require to get things done.
But did you know ClickUp has a desktop application that includes at least one feature your teams could seriously benefit from? The app is available for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it adds native desktop notifications to the experience. That feature alone is worth installing the desktop application.
Think about it: You use ClickUp every day to stay ahead of your project’s demanding schedule. Although you can get notifications in the browser, for that to work, you have to have the ClickUp tab running and your browser configured to allow desktop notifications. If your browser doesn’t allow you to configure per-site notifications, you could easily be inundated with them.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, AnyDesk is my favorite proprietary remote desktop application for connecting to remote Linux and Windows machines. With AnyDesk, users can securely access and control another computer as if they were sitting right in front of it, even over low-bandwidth or unreliable connections. This can be useful for providing remote support, collaborating with team members, or accessing files and applications on a different computer. To use AnyDesk on Linux, you will need to install the AnyDesk software on both the remote and the local computer, and then use the AnyDesk address of the remote computer to establish a connection.
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 AnyDesk remote desktop on a Fedora 37.
In this tutorial, we learn the shortcuts or commands to delete all lines from a file in the VIM or VI text editor on Linux instead of pressing the Del key again and again.
VIM or VI is a popular text editor available in almost all Linux operating systems by default. We can use it to edit files using the command line interface. This text editor is light in weight, however for beginners it is quite complicated. But once you have familiarized yourself with the different operating modes, you can no longer do without the helpful services of the lean, but almost arbitrarily expandable editor.
By default, all PostgreSQL connections are insecure, which can cause security issues when run in high-traffic production environments.
Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible, cross-platform development framework. It implements Microsoft’s .NET legacy for a number of platforms using a single codebase, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Mono can be thought of as a toolkit working much like Microsoft’s .NET Framework does, however it is released as Free and open-source software under the MIT license rather than being proprietary software.
The main goal of Mono is to allow for the creation of .net applications on different platforms without restrictions from other toolsets. This includes the same DLL file format so that no code has to be rewritten for new platforms and the same infrastructure for executing .NET applications so that the same APIs can be used.
BIND or Berkeley Internet Name Domain is free and open-source DNS Server software.
vnStat is a free, open-source, and console-based network traffic monitoring tool for Linux operating system. Lightweight and low CPU usage.
Need to mess with your camera on your Linux desktop? Unfortunately, many webcam manufacturers don’t support Linux. That’s ok, though. Try out Cameractls. It’s an advanced webcam application that allows users to fine-tune their webcam settings with ease.
The history command in Linux is a useful tool that allows users to view a list of previously executed commands. This command is especially useful for users who frequently use the command line interface (CLI) to execute a series of commands, as it allows them to easily access and repeat previous commands without having to remember and type out the full command.
The history command was first introduced in the Unix operating system in the early 1970s, and has been a staple of the Linux CLI ever since. This command is typically used in conjunction with other commands, such as grep, to search for specific commands in the history list.
Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections–how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.
While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.
Your PC has broken down, and you can’t get to the repair shop until the weekend. A deadline is due, and all you have is a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.
What do you do?
Well, you use the Raspberry Pi. But what about all those important office and productivity apps? Incredibly, all the office software you need is available on Raspberry Pi, from word processors and spreadsheets to video conferencing and cloud storage.
System administrators can allow a user to execute any command without any passwords using Sudo rights, also known as superuser do. This command temporarily elevates privileges, allowing users to do crucial tasks without logging in as the root user. As a result, you must authenticate yourself by entering your login credentials into the system, confirming that you have the appropriate rights to perform tasks.
However, providing this information again overtakes time, but there is a way that you can use it to disable the authentication. As a result, this article will show you how to create a password-less sudo on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
Many Linux distributions ship Bash as the default login shell, but if you want to replace it with another shell like ZSH or Fish, then you can use the chsh command to change the existing or specific user login shell.
In this article, you will learn the usage of the chsh command with practical examples.
In UNIX/Linux, the mkdir command is used to create single or multiple directories (also referred to as folders in some operating systems) in the current working directory.
If the specified directory is already present in the current working directory, then the “File exists” error will be thrown unless the “-p” flag is not assigned.
Apart from that, you can also specify the permission in character or numeric while creating the directory, but to perform all this action, you should have proper permissions.
In this article, you will learn all about the mkdir command with practical examples.
Kdenlive 22.12 Release Adds Useful New Features
Kdenlive is an open-source cross-platform video editing software built by the KDE community, which has been around since 2003.Built using Qt and KDE Frameworks, it has been the editor of choice for many users out there.
Recently, the latest upgrade to it i.e Kdenlive 22.12 has been made available, let me take you through the release.
KDE’s Kdenlive video editor released version 22.12 this Monday! See what’s new and how to install guide for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.10.
The new release of the video editor overhauled the whole guide/marker system. The new ‘Guides’ dock is available to seek, search, sort and filter all marker and guide.
Kdenlive 22.12 also improved support for Glaxnimate integration. It now sends the content of the timeline to Glaxnimate (need version >= 0.5.1) which then shows it as background, which makes it much easier to create animations that play together with your videos.
Are you an avid user of Ubuntu’s desktop icons extension but wish it did just a little bit more? If so, there’s an enhanced GTK4 version you need to check out.
The perfunctorily-titled ‘Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG’ extension is a direct fork of the regular Desktop Icons NG extension that Ubuntu has shipped with since Ubuntu 21.04 (trivia: that extension is itself a fork of the original desktop icons extension created by GNOME developers).
So what’s special about it?
Previously on Futures, Work-Stealing, and such.
One thing I admired during the early days of Python Twisted was how it took advantage of the language to write asynchronous code which read as synchronous. Pretty much all the modern languages now have some form of this in stackless or stackfull form.
C has been able to do it for ages but it generally doesn’t play well outside of constrained applications. The primary things you have to worry about are functional tooling like debuggers (thread apply all bt wont show you all your fibers) and features like thread-local-storage.
If you’re careful about when you suspend your fiber, the later isn’t so much of an issue. Where it can become a serious issue is if you do something like call an intermediate function which uses callbacks and the callback suspends. In this case, the intermediate function (out of your control) might have some TLS state cached on the stack, which of course could be modified before resume is called.
But either way, dex (wip title newlib) has support for fibers now which can be spawned using dex_scheduler_spawn(). Fiber stacks are given a guard page so that stack overflows are still guarded. It tries to do a bit of madvise() when it makes sense to.
First and foremost I want to thank GNOME for sponsoring my visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
It was nice meeting the people who have similar interests and also who actually build the GNOME I use and love.All of them absolutely love open source and the work they do. And most of all, they were all excited and happy to showcase their art. Those would be one of the most engaging communications I’ve had in quite a while.
There were people from Singapore, Malaysia, India, Denmark, Hong Kong, Albania, Italy, and USA. I attended all that talks I could and apologize for the ones I missed owing to sleeping late in the morning due to my body clock. Malaysian time is 2h30m ahead of Indian time.
One reason it was bought is to do OpenEmbedded builds, freeing up my main workhorse Lenovo desktop computer. It is doing that right now, and indications are the build will take about three days.
I never timed the build on the Lenovo, as it stopped many times and had to fix recipes. Now it looks like will run right through. This is the new OE Kirkstone build, and compiling a whopping 1,620 packages, including biggies such as Chromium and LibreOffice.
When the build started yesterday, the CPU temperature crept over 80°C, which was a concern. I read somewhere that at 90°C there will be possible CPU damage. EasyOS has Wcpufreq, launched via the “System” menu, and I played with some frequency scaling. Settled on “powersave” mode, running at a constant 1.4GHz. CPU temperature dropped to around 50°C.
openSUSE Leap 15.3 will reach the Еnd-of-Life on December 31. So if you’re still using it, it’s time to upgrade to Leap 15.4. Here’s how to do it.
On December 13, 2022, openSUSE Leap 15.3 will reach the End-of-Life (EOL) and will no longer be supported. Unfortunately, this means there will be no further security updates or bug fixes for the operating system.
In other words, those who continue to use EOL versions will be exposed to vulnerabilities because these discontinued versions no longer receive security and maintenance updates.
So, if you are currently using openSUSE Leap 15.3, it is time to upgrade to a newer version to continue receiving security updates and bug fixes. This article will show you how to upgrade from openSUSE Leap 15.3 to the currently supported Leap 15.4 version.
Creation of an official Fedora Spin shipping the Budgie Desktop environment.
I’ve been spending some of my time off in the last few days pondering replacing my old reliable home server with something new and shiny. I figured this might be a good time to write up some thoughts around this.
On behalf of the Fedora Design Team, I am excited to invite the Fedora community to the Creative Freedom Summit January 17-19th, 2023. This free virtual event focuses on promoting open source creative tools, features, and benefits of use. The Summit is open to anyone interested in learning more about open source tools, how and why to use them, as well as connecting with other creatives working in the open source ecosystem.
To attend the event, join the Creative Freedom Summit Element chat. The Element chat is where you can watch the live stream of the sessions, connect with others, and get updates about the event. The event will also be streamed live to the Creative Freedom Summit LinuxRocks Peertube Channel.
The opportunities and the market for artificial intelligence are growing rapidly, and organizations are increasingly relying on it to improve productivity and profitability. However, AI deployment is not without risks – including customer privacy, bias, and security concerns. As AI becomes more embedded in decision-making, the potential to amplify both the positive and negative impacts of decisions at scale escalates.
To fully realize the transformative potential of AI, we must responsibly harness the technology and establish a framework of trust. Resources and guidance can help organizations avoid potentially harmful situations and look optimistically at how this disruptive technology can benefit humanity.
It’s essential to develop a comprehensive responsible AI framework that includes practices, tools, governance, responsibilities, and more. This framework should enable responsible AI by design, resulting in increased transparency and trust across the AI lifecycle.
There are new iso images of Sparky 2022.12 Special Editions ready to go.
Sparky “GameOver” Edition features a lightweight desktop, a very large number of preinstalled games, useful tools and scripts. Built for gamers.
Sparky “Multimedia” Edition uses a lightweight desktop environment and features a large set of tools for creating and editing graphics, audio, video and HTML pages.
Sparky “Rescue” Edition is an operating system which works in a live DVD/USB mode only (no installation on a hard drive). The Live system contains a large set of tools for scanning and fixing files, partitions and operating systems installed on hard drives.
The December update of Sparky Special Edition iso images features Linux kernel 6.0.12 of the 6.0 line, and other updated packages from Debian and Sparky testing repos as of December 12, 2022.
Dec 13, 2022, RISC-V Summit, San Jose – Canonical joins the RISC-V summit again and showcases the progress achieved in 2022. Followed by the enablement of the first RISC-V board – SiFive Unmatched in 2021, Canonical Ubuntu continues to explore more opportunities with various partners.
- Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced that its SokolTM Flex OS software now supports RISC-V embedded development with the availability of one of the industry’s first commercially supported, extensible, and customizable Linux® platforms for the RISC-V architecture. Based on the popular, open-source Yocto Project industry standard, Siemens‘ Sokol Flex OS helps embedded developers create customized, Linux-based systems for RISC-V architectures with ease, security and confidence.
I assume many of you are watching the Twitter soap, waiting for the moment that the social media platform burns down completely. Its fresh owner Elon Musk is abusing his newfound powers to vent his far-right extremist ideas, firing most of Twitter’s employees, shutting down the content moderation team, and so on.
You should definitively be looking for an alternative if you are interested in socially interacting with other people through online platforms. And especially if you represent a business or an organization and use Twitter as a communication medium, you must absolutely reconsider whether you are using the right platform.
A lot of people have been looking for alternatives to satisfy their Twitter habits. That process already started in February 2022 when Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter. But after completing that deal and essentially taking over daily operations, there has been a massive exodus. The platform which is absorbing most of this exodus as new users seems to be Mastodon. But Mastodon is a different platform than Twitter and a lot of new users struggle with the concepts. There’s a lot of documentation but not everyone reads documentation prior to jumping into the action.
I will share some pointers that may help you make the decision to move to Mastodon and getting all setup there.
I first got involved with LibrePlanet as a volunteer a few years back. By that point, I’d enjoyed participating in the conference via IRC and watching the talks online for a few years, and I was looking for ways to get involved. As I couldn’t make it to Boston to attend LibrePlanet in person, I volunteered online, with tasks such as helping watch over the conference IRC channels and answering questions as best as I could. I seemed to have done a decent job, since the FSF folks later asked if I could do the same for a few non-LibrePlanet online FSF events too, which I gladly accepted.
Having enjoyed both participating and volunteering for LibrePlanet, I thought it would be great if I could give a talk of my own, too. This only became possible for me after 2020 with the possibility of doing remote presentations. Since I sadly cannot attend the event in person currently, this was a welcome side-effect of the conference temporarily switching to an online-only format. So, I submitted a proposal to talk about “Jami and how it empowers users” for LibrePlanet 2021, which was accepted and became my first LibrePlanet talk. Though presenting, or even just submitting a talk at a large conference like LibrePlanet, may sometimes seem like an intimidating task, I had a great time presenting mine, thanks in no small part to the FSF staff and other volunteer organizers, as well as the audience members.
We’re happy to announce that Linux App Summit 2023 will take place in Brno, Czech Republic on April 21–23, 2023. For 2023 Linux App Summit (LAS) will again be held as a hybrid event, allowing attendees and speakers to join virtually or in person at our venue in Brno. Linux App Summit (LAS) is a conference focused on building a Linux application ecosystem. LAS aims to encourage the creation of quality applications, seek opportunities for compensation for FOSS developers, and foster a thriving market for the Linux operating system. Everyone is invited to attend! Companies, journalists, and individuals who are interested in learning more about the Linux desktop application space and growing their user base are especially welcome. The call for papers and registration will be open soon. Please check linuxappsummit.org for more updates in the upcoming weeks.
Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Thunderbird, Firefox ESR, and Firefox. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review Mozilla’s security advisories for Thunderbird 102.6, Firefox ESR 102.6, and Firefox 108 for more information and apply the necessary updates.
Surprise! Bugzilla’s not dead yet.
So I posted a bunch of this a few months ago on the developers mailing list but it’s time to get it in front of a bigger audience.
I am trying to kick-start getting stuff moving again with Bugzilla since most of the core Bugzilla volunteers have had job changes over the last few years that have left them with less time to spend on the project, so things have been very slow going for a while. For those that don’t know, I’ve been more or less of a figurehead of a project leader for a number of years now, not having much time to spend on Bugzilla, but not having anyone in a position to be able to step in to replace me, and only stepping in myself to make decision calls when the other developers were at an impasse. I’ve attempted to hand off control of the project to someone else twice in the last 10 years or so, and both times, the person I was about to hand off to got a new job and didn’t have time for it anymore just before we were about to do the hand-off (on the plus side, that happened before they took over and not after). It takes a while for someone to build the trust needed to know I’m leaving it in good hands, so without a lot of active developers it’s hard to get someone in place to do that. But I’ve had some life changes of my own now, which actually give me more time to spend on Bugzilla finally, so I’m getting back in the saddle and taking direct control again. I’ve probably poked at it more in the last 5 or 6 months than I have in the last 5 or 6 years combined.
Bugzilla project lead Dave Miller has posted a plan for several upcoming releases of the bug-tracking tool. The post starts with: “Surprise! Bugzilla’s not dead yet. :-)”. It is, in effect, an update to his August posting to the Bugzilla developers mailing list. In the new post, he outlines the plan for releases of multiple branches, lists specific areas where help is needed, and describes some project infrastructure improvements.
Before we close the year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect and look back on what we accomplished in 2022. This year continued to be a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, and we know how important it is to have something in life you can rely on. So, here at Firefox, we continued to focus on the features that mattered the most and meet you where you are at. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that Firefox will always deliver the best web experience wherever you are.
Copyleft protects Free Software from becoming proprietary. Free Software chess engine Stockfish filed a lawsuit when ChessBase distributed parts of Stockfish work under a proprietary license, violating GPL-3.0 obligations. Checkmate! Stockfish was victorious. ChessBase must comply fully with GPL-3, hire a Free Software Compliance Officer, and list their Free Software elements online, before they can distribute the Stockfish software or make it publicly available again.
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Registration for Youth Hacking 4 Freedom ends on 31st December. The coding contest welcomes 14-18 year old Europeans who wants to hack a Free Software project of their choice and win cash prizes. As some of the winners from the last edition stated, participating was a lot of fun and a great opportunity. Check our video with the winners presenting their projects in Brussels. Share this opportunity among your friends and community! Moreover, you can send it to schools, teachers, and young people in your region.
The PHP development team has announced the immediate availability of PHP 8.2.0 of the popular general-purpose scripting language.
According to the website, PHP 8.2 is a major update of the PHP language, offering many new features, including read-only classes, new standalone types, performance improvements, and more.
According to the documentation, “as of PHP 8.2.0, a class can be marked with the readonly modifier. Marking a class as readonly will add the readonly modifier to every declared property, and prevent the creation of dynamic properties. Moreover, it is impossible to add support for them by using the AllowDynamicProperties attribute. Attempting to do so will trigger a compile-time error.”
To correctly clone a JavaScript object, you can use the Object.assign() method to create a new object with the properties of the original object.
To detect mouse wheel events in JavaScript, you can use the addEventListener() method to register a function that will be called whenever a “wheel” event is fired.
This blog will give you a brief overview of profiling C and C++ applications. Additionally, it will lay before you all of the tools available, with the purpose of aiding you in choosing the right tools at the right times.
[...]
Before we look at the actual tools, let’s go over the steps to profiling. It’s quite important to have a technique for doing this properly, to avoid the trap of changing something hoping it’s better, committing it, and going home without making sure that you’ve actually improved things. So the way to do that is by, first, assessing what is important in terms of performance in your project. Is it the CPU usage? Is it the off CPU time, when your application is sleeping or waiting for something to happen? Is it memory allocations? Is it the battery usage that is the problem? Do you want to improve the frame rate? It can be many, many different things, not just one. It’s a whole set of measures.
[...]
Another tool you can use to measure performance is perf, which is part of the Linux kernel. That means it supports all of the architectures of the Linux kernel, including x86, ARM, PPC, and so on. Unfortunately, perf has no user interface. It’s a command line tool that is pretty difficult to use. So, we at KDAB wrote a tool called Hotspot, which is a graphical interface for the measurements made by perf.
For the Inkscape project and its users, interoperability with other software packages, both free and commercial, is of high importance. The PLC has decided to hire a developer for the equivalent of 1.5 months (part-time schedule available) to implement importing functionality of a file format for which Inkscape yet lacks proper support. An extension of the project to up to 3 months (with additional compensation) may be granted depending on the success of the first half.
While the Inkscape team consists entirely of volunteers, this will be a paid contractor role.
The work may start between 2023-02-15 and 2023-03-15, and assuming a full-time schedule, will be finished around 2023-05-01. Applications may be submitted until Monday, Jan 9, 2023, 23:59 UTC.
Cryostat is a container-native JVM application that provides a secure API for profiling and monitoring containers with JDK Flight Recorder. In the newest release, Cryostat 2.2, three new and updated views for archived JDK flight recordings managed by Cryostat have been added to the web client, along with new recording filters and enhanced features for recording metadata and custom labels.
[...]
When we first come upon the view, we can see a card that includes three tabs, one titled All Targets, the second titled All Archives, and the last titled Uploads. By default, the All Targets view will be selected. A checkbox on this view includes the option to Hide targets with zero recordings. By unchecking the box, we can see all targets Cryostat has discovered, with or without any associated archived recordings.
What good is a floating point operation embodied in a vector or matrix unit if you can’t get data into fast enough to actually use the compute engine to process it in some fashion in a clock cycle? The answer is obvious to all of us: Not much.
People have been talking about the imbalance between compute and memory bandwidth for decades, and every year the high performance computing industry has been forced to accept less and less memory bandwidth per floating point operation because increasing memory bandwidth is exceedingly difficult in a fashion that doesn’t also end up being very pricey.
According to NordPass’ latest list of top 200 most common passwords in 2022, “password” is the most popular choice, followed by “123456”, “123456789”, “guest” and “qwerty“.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CISA have updated joint Cybersecurity Advisory AA22-335A: #StopRansomware: Cuba Ransomware, originally released on December 01, 2022. The advisory has been updated to include additional indicators of compromise (IOCs).
The following versions of APC Easy UPS Online, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring software, are affected:
APC Easy UPS Online Version 2.5-GA and prior (Windows 7, 10, 11, Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022)
APC Easy UPS Online Version 2.5-GA-01-22261 and prior (Windows 11, Windows Server 2019, 2022)
CISA has released three (3) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on December 13, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
Citrix has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) in Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. This vulnerability has been exploited in the wild.
As Elon Musk has decimated Twitter’s workforce and welcomed back some of the platform’s most polarizing figures, many Twitter users have decided they’ve had enough of his chaos and are migrating to smaller, niche platforms.
This influx of users to platforms such as Mastodon, Hive, and Post, which have a fraction of Twitter’s resources, raises the question whether these social media upstarts can cope with the privacy and security concerns of a rapidly growing user base — ranging from how smaller platforms secure private messages to how they would respond to law enforcement requests for data.
“For any company that is suddenly having this huge blow up in size as a communications outlet, I think it’s a very reasonable question and concern,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project. “Odds are you’re going to start getting more if not a lot more law enforcement demands for private communications. And the question is: Do you have the resources to handle those?”
At a grocery store checkout in the Jordanian refugee camp of Azraq, Sameera Sabbouh stares wide-eyed into a scanner to pay for her shopping – her iris scan unlocking payment from a digital aid account with the help of blockchain technology.
Many of the nearly 40,000 Syrians who live in the camp recognise the convenience of the cashless, card-free payment method, which verifies recipients’ identity by referencing a U.N. database, but few said they like it.
“It’s really tiring. It doesn’t take the eye scan in the first try – it is two or three times before it takes the scan,” said Sabbouh, a mother-of-two from Aleppo who fled the city in 2015. “I would rather have my fingerprint scanned.”
One of our favourite projects and kindred endeavours from this last decade has been The Appendix, a quarterly journal of experimental history published between 2012 and 2015. Among the many innovative features they included in their online offering was an index, pointing to pages on their site instead of those bound in a book. In 2019, Appendix co-founder and publisher Brian Jones joined the PDR team, and we have been dreaming about having an index of our own ever since. We are pleased to announce — thanks to Brian’s wonderful work — that it has finally arrived!
Why index a site like ours? Writing about Conrad Gessner, who believed that the index was second only to the printing press in its importance for knowledge, Dennis Duncan describes the sixteenth-century naturalist’s notion that there are two ways to use an index: “after reading the main text, and before. In other words, as a reminder and as a foretaste.” In compiling an index that spans more than a decade of writing and images on the Public Domain Review, we certainly hope it will serve our readers in both ways — helping to resurface favoured pieces and draw attention to new works, creators, and ideas. It is a third use, however, that excites us most about the PDR Index: its ability to track chance resonances, collect accidental symmetries, and chart themes that only become visible on an indexical scale.
Sometimes these connections are “baked in”, as it were, such as when visualisations of scintillating scotoma mingle with schematics of military architecture under the heading of fortifications — a term Victorian migraine patients used to describe the haloed phenomena’s folds. Other times, unremarkable actions gain surprising properties in retrospect. A simple act like folding, present in the background of various posts, comes to the fore as a creative process, used across centuries to summon faces out of pillow cases, table linens, and spilled ink. Faces leads us to images of anthropomorphic landscapes, also indexed under concealment, a heading which, in turn, opens onto a cluster of fin-de-siècle efforts at hiding messages in plain sight, whether through ciphers or illustrations of insects. It is a quixotic goal (see Quixote, Don), but we hope, at times, our index might offer pleasures analogous to those felt by the codebreaker: a chance to decipher questions, dreams, and anxieties that recur without coordination across period and place.
God gave us a brief space of clear skies, in-between two larger masses of cloud passing west to east (per what I saw on GOES). I had seen on the NWS forecast a prediction of lower cloud cover in the early morning, but was surprised when the skies cleared up around 9pm last night. Part of me wanted to head out that night, but I was just too tired. But I was able to get in a brief morning session from about 4:30-5:30am AKST, using the boat launch area.
I was introduced to free jazz around the age of eighteen, and as an improvising pianist I was struck by the rhythmic sophistication of Cecil Taylor. Occasionally I would find his albums at record stores, or a library cleaning up its archive of LPs nobody listened to. For Olim must have been the first one I bought. The percussive articulation and skewed rhythms certainly had some influence on my own playing. As I found more albums, I also became aware of the stylistic closed-mindedness, or cohesion if you will, of Taylor’s music. There are a number of elements and patterns that recur, such as the rapid arabesques of small clusters, the symmetrical melodic shapes mirrored in left and right hand, and a texture of arpeggiated chords reminiscent of a Chopin C minor study. The rhetoric and formal layout often remain recognisable. At worst, it may appear as a lack of creativity. Although the style is unique, it’s not inimitable, as Marilyn Crispell has demonstrated in a few of her early recordings.
In March of 2021 I added a picture to the “Files” section of my capsule, listing every mobile phone I’ve ever had and when I used them. In that picture, I listed the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 as my current smartphone and the F(x)Tec Pro1 X as my next smartphone.
Today, 21 months later, I’m still using my Galaxy Note 8, and I’m still waiting for my Pro1 X to arrive.
The Pro1 X story has been an absolute disaster, an incessant comedy of errors that would be hilarious if it didn’t cause such a blow to the reputation of F(x)Tec. From the initial revelation of a scam by a dubious chip supplier to a rushed and buddy redesign project to a contractual dispute with the company’s shipping partner, F(x)Tec has had to overcome one crushing defeat after another. I believe the company truly did want to make a top-of-the-line device that appealed to keyboard lovers and tinkerers alike, but the horrible hand they’ve been dealt has left them in a likely unrecoverable position.
I’m not exactly sure how to phrase what I’m talking about so I’ll try my best to elaborate. Essentially, I’m trying to reduce the number of times I pull my phone out to look at the screen. As I dug deeper into my phone use habits, I found I use the clock and alarm functions on my phone a lot. I’ve been a watch-wearer for most of my life, but I am now more inclined to use it more functionally rather than as an accessory.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
WirePlumber, the modular session and policy manager implementation for the PipeWire multimedia server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on Linux systems, has been updated today to version 0.4.13, a release that adds new features, improvements, and bug fixes.
WirePlumber 0.4.13 is here to add new features like Bluetooth SCO (HSP/HFP) hardware offload support, audio passthrough for encoded files like MP3, AAC, and others if both the hardware and software support it, as well as support for allowing newly plugged cameras to be immediately visible to the portal apps.
You can use media queries to style elements based on features of the browser viewport, for example, min-width, max-height, or orientation. With container queries, you can now do the same but with any parent element. Instead of the viewport, you can now listen to properties and features of a containing element.
Killing a process in Linux usually involves using the process ID with the kill command. You can also use the process name with killall command.
This becomes a problem at scale. If you have millions of users on hundreds of different shards of a database, eventually you’ll get a clash of IDs. To that end, Twitter invented Snowflake IDs.
Snowflakes are pretty clever. They are a 64 bit ID. The first part of the ID is a timestamp, and the second part is some information about the server which generated the ID. This means that IDs can be sorted by time, and will globally unique.
By gaming, I’m not gonna limit gaming to Maro’s four traits (goals, restrictions, agency, and a lack of real-world relevance). Instead, I’m gonna use a definition of gaming that’s broad enough to encompass all processes meant to determine the outcome of something. I’m not just talking about player skill games like chess or baduk here, or games with a mix like Uno or Rummy. A game can be 100% stochastic like Bingo, Candy Land or Snakes & Ladders and I’m still going to argue that Fail Forward is bad. Or it can be a 100% story telling activity like Rory’s Story Cubes and I’m still gonna make the same case.
Maybe the one place I’m narrowing the definition is gonna be for the word “bad”. I mean “counterproductive”. If you’re using eighties slang and think bad is good, then this essay isn’t gonna fly with that.
I am rarely this enthusiastic about games, especially retro-styled games because so many miss the mark in numerous ways but thankfully Chained Echoes is just brilliant.
Humble Bundle have announced that throughout this week, they will be sticking up older popular bundles for a very limited time and limited amount of purchases so keep an eye for some fun hits to stock up on.
Tis the season to buy more games to keep warm and all that. The GOG Winter Sale is live, and you can get a free copy of Ghost of a Tale.
Konqueror is a file manager and web browser for the KDE Plasma Desktop. In many ways, Konqueror defined “network transparency,” as it applied to a personal desktop. With Konqueror, you can browse remote network files (including the Internet itself, which really is just a collection of remote files viewed through a fancy lens) just as easily as browsing your local files. Sometimes there was some configuration and setup required, depending on what kind of file share you needed to access. But ultimately, the goal of having instant access to all the data you had permission to view was a reality with Konqueror in ways no other file manager had achieved. And at its peak, the open source web engine it developed (KHTML) was adopted by both Apple and Google, and lives on today as the core library of modern web browsing and, technically, Electron app development.
Today, the KDE Plasma Desktop lists Konqueror as a web browser. Officially, file management has shifted over to Dolphin, but Konqueror is still capable of doing the job. For the full and classic Konqueror experience, you should try the Plasma Desktop 3.x fork TDE, but in this article I use Konqueror in KDE Plasma Desktop version 5.
NixOS is a distro built with a new sort of software build tool. You can install it and it works, but oddly that isn’t really the point.
This is not a conventional Linux distribution, and so this is not a conventional distro review. We know that one of the most irritating types of statement is “if you have to ask, then you won’t understand.” Attempting to understand Nix and NixOS, as an outsider, are a little bit like that: the virtues and benefits that its website and wiki talk about, or even early coverage, for instance here on Linux.com, are rather theoretical. There appears to be little overlap between the sort of things that the Nix community seems to consider important, and things an ordinary desktop OS user might consider important, that it is hard to bridge the gap.
Financial Institutions (FIs) need to respond with agility and business velocity to keep pace with changing economic conditions. Yet, emerging competition from fintechs and challenger banks and increasing customer expectations is making this task difficult, especially as regulatory and compliance requirements increase. Embracing the next phase of digital transformation is an imperative for financial institutions to sustain and grow in a competitive environment of rising cost pressures. To meet these challenges, many FIs are adopting open-source software.
For Raspberry Pi enthusiasts it must seem that Christmas has come a few weeks early this year. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via the official blog that a 100,000 units had been secured for single-unit sales (one unit per customer) and that by the second half of 2023 it is expected that will return to pre-pandemic levels. This is good news for those who have felt the bite of the supply shortage that has dogged the Raspberry Pi for well over a year. The bad news? Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W see a $5 price increase, but the Raspberry Pi Zero will be available for bulk purchase in 2023.
Northwestern University’s Embedded Electronics Class delivered a bumper crop of ESP-32 projects this year. The student teams recorded their progress on hackaday.io with project descriptions, logs, BOMs, diagrams, photos, and videos to share with other makers. While all utilized the web connection that the ESP32 offers some teams chose to use ESP32 Cams to incorporate photos, video, and computer vision. We love the variety of projects the teams created, some customized versions of consumer products and others new types of smart-devices.
In the light of the continuing mayhem on Twitter under Elon Musk, lovingly chronicled by Mike in ever-longer posts, it’s no surprise that many people are looking at alternatives. One of the main options is Mastodon. Although offering similar micro-blogging functionality to Twitter, one of its chief attractions is that it nonetheless does certain things differently.
Young tech creators, get ready: Coolest Projects Global will be back in 2023 and we want to make this the year of your big idea!
This November, teachers across the UK helped 367,023 learners participate in the annual free UK Bebras Challenge of computational thinking.
This site contains the FOIA releases of the CACHE.DATs and associated software of RPMS before 2021, but not the patches. They were originally hosted in the Tech Journal of OSEHRA. When OSEHRA closed in Feb. 2020, they transferred many of their assests to WorldVistA to host. The Indian Health Service has agreed to allow us to host their most recent releases of the RPMS FOIA as did OSEHRA. However, the most recent releases have only included interval patch updates. WorldVistA has requested that they again release CACHE.DATs and they are considering the request.
In this how-to we will learn the basics of the OBS user interface with the end goal being to create our own video that mixes audio and video elements into one recording.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite.
The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let’s take a look at the behavior I saw, and how I finally created a simple test which reproduced the issue.
[PLOS], the pioneering non-profit open-access publisher founded in 2000, said that its new Open Science Indicator project would measure and report three characteristics of published articles: how many appeared in a preprint format, shared their research data, and made available the computer code underlying that data.
The Meta-Object Compiler, moc, handles Qt’s C++ extensions and it is required for signals and slots and properties in Qt. moc reads C++ header files and if the Q_OBJECT macro is used, it generates an extra .cpp file named moc_filename.cpp containing extra (meta-object) code. This post has a bit of background information and a shell script to automatically include moc_*.cpp files in your code whenever Q_OBJECT is used. If you use qmake, this will probably speed up your build and if you use cmake, this will probably speed up incremental builds (when CMAKE_AUTOMOC is on).
A good CI/CD system means developer productivity. What an ideal CI/CD system looks like today.
A few months ago I switched to working in Go. Before that, my main language was Python for many years. The change to Go has been very smooth, without any major surprises or stumbling blocks. This may partly be because in the past I have also worked in both C++ and Java. Even so, Go (the parts I have used so far) is quite straightforward.
Before I started in my new role, I read through The Go Programming Language, which is quite good. Otherwise I have mostly used online resources when I have needed to learn how something works. Both A Tour of Go and Go by Example are good.
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions which allow you to load several values at once, and operate (in one instruction) on all these values. Similarly, they allow you to have vector constants. Thus if you wanted to add some integer (say 10001) to all integers in a large array, you might first load a constant with 8 times the value 10001, then you would load elements from your array, 8 elements by 8 elements, add the vector constant (thus do 8 additions at once), and then store the result. Everything else being equal, this might be 8 times faster.
There’s a neat trick to solve Advent of Code, day 6 in a single pass.
Looking over the solutions mega-thread, it seems like not many people discovered this trick; when I posted about it, people found it to be noteworthy.
This matter of logical versus sequential constraints is at the heart of the distinction between scenario-based techniques — use cases, user stories… — and object-oriented requirements. This article analyzes the distinction. It is largely extracted from my recent textbook, the Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis [1], which contains a more extensive discussion.
2022 twenty four merry days of Perl
Numerous professions utilize simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) to deliver emails to their end users. SMTP also retrieves messages, though that has not been its primary use case. Open source frameworks like Django, a Python-based web framework, allows more control for sending emails using functions and expressions.
This article shows how to configure an SMTP server and send emails in Django using SMTP.
When faced with what to build from the trimmings of the walnut tree in her yard, [Amy Quian] decided to build a headless travel ukulele. [via MAKE:]
When he was a child in his hometown of Rosario, Argentina, Lionel Messi was nicknamed “La Pulga” (the flea) because of his short stature. This didn’t stop him from starting to play soccer since he was five years old. In 2004, when Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball player visited his friend Ronaldinho, considered one of the best soccer players in the world, he told Bryant, “Kobe, I want you to meet the player who is going to be the greatest soccer player who ever lived.” He didn’t know that his words would be prophetic.
The shopping mall has a great many antecedents: the opulent markets of Victorian London, the arcades of Paris, and the department stores in the United States that could swallow an entire city block. But the mall as we know it has only one daddy: the architect Victor Gruen. A Viennese socialist, Gruen had established a tidy practice designing residential projects and shops before the Nazis seized Austria in 1938. Gruen’s forte was making the quotidian a bit lovelier: A typical tweak of retail spaces might have involved relieving the tight, cloying atmosphere of a tiny perfumery by placing mirrors on the ceiling. After fleeing to the United States, Gruen dipped his toe in wage drudgery before deciding to unpack his drafting desk and return to his bread-and-butter work of transforming shops into open and welcoming spaces in a freelance capacity.
Compared with the decades that came directly before and after, the 1990s have often seemed a ho-hum era, the dull Jan caught between its more outrageous siblings. While the ’80s arrived with a burst of big hair and shoulder pads, a synthy MTV soundtrack blasting over the Gipper’s evisceration of the welfare state, and the 2000s appeared like a deranged comet, throwing whole worlds off course, the ’90s bounced and slouched their way forward, a little bit sunny, a little bit ironic, and more or less insignificant. This was the decade so boring it was supposed to be the end of history.
On this week’s episode of the Edge of Sports podcast, we interview radical educator Jesse Hagopian and how a crew of Seattle activists were able to get Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to wear shoes with a bracing political message.
Fair warning: if you ever thought there was nothing particularly interesting with optical viewfinders, prepare to have your misconception corrected by [volzo] with this deep-dive into camera-aiming aids that leads to an interesting hybrid smartphone viewfinder.
Grant Wahl was unique in the business of sports writing. It was not because he was the most widely read and influential soccer writer in the United States. It was also not because, at age 48, he had accomplished so much, writing for 24 years at Sports Illustrated, before parting during a spate of 2020 budget cuts. It was because, first and foremost, he was kind. And secondly, because he never hesitated to speak truth to power. In the soccer world that means talking honestly about FIFA and the politics of World Cup host countries, and those are some powerful enemies to willingly choose. Wahl, of course, died suddenly at the Qatar World Cup last week, sending shock waves sent through the most widely watched sporting event on earth. He had complained about pain while breathing, writing last Monday on his website that he had visited a medical clinic in Qatar. He collapsed on Saturday while watching Argentina advance to the semifinals.
1. Fashionopolis: The Secrets Behind the Clothes We Wear by Dana Thomas (Dial Books, 2022). I learned much from this eyewitness story of the textile and fashion industry worldwide.
2. Who’s Raising the Kids? The Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn (The New Press, 2022) and You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens by Claire Nader (Essential Books, 2022). Both books will encourage you to rescue youngsters from controlling corporate hucksters and the addictive Internet Gulag.
Cernan and Schmitt spent most of their time collecting almost 250 pounds worth of moon rocks and soil samples. But the scientific research didn’t stop them from enjoying themselves: The astronauts at one point belted out a now-famous rendition of “The Fountain in the Park,” a 19th-century vaudeville song, all while skipping along in the moon’s low gravity.
A few days ago I spoke to some of the striking academic workers at the University of California. (You can view my remarks at their rally, below.)
Occasional pieces of furniture serve little purpose other than to fill a space and maybe display a prized ornament or two. Who hasn’t got a relative with one two many small tables or display stands overfilling the available space!
The GXMO 58U is a Mini-PC featuring the Octa-core Ryzen 7 5800U processor along with AMD Radeon Graphics. The device is equipped with 16GB DDR4/512GB SSD, Wi-Fi 6/BT 5.2 and triple 4K display support.
There’s no doubt that the 7-segment display is a gold standard for displaying lighted digits. But what about a throwback to an older system of displaying numbers — Cistercian? With thirty-one 0805 LEDs, [Josue Alejandro] made a simple module displaying a single Cistercian digit (any from 0-9999).
Reining in social media’s role in kid’s lives has been on Patterson’s agenda since at least this August, when he issued a statement condemning social media platforms role in the Robb Elementary School Shooting. Patterson specifically referred to findings from the Robb Elementary Investigative Committee Report, which claimed that users reported the shooter’s behavior to social media platforms prior to the tragedy.
“Social media is the pre-1964 cigarette,” Patterson stated. “It’s a slap in the face of all Texans that these platforms refuse to publicly answer questions from those elected to represent the people. However, as other committee members expressed, if you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu.”
The White House on Monday condemned billionaire Elon Musk’s call for Anthony Fauci, the US infectious disease expert who is a hate figure for many on the right, to be prosecuted over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“These are incredibly dangerous, these personal attacks that we are seeing,” said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, in response to the weekend tweet by Musk that subsequently went viral.
“They are disgusting and they are divorced from reality,” she said.
In a victory for public health advocates, a federal judge in Montana has blocked the state from implementing a law that would make it illegal for hospitals to ask employees if they are vaccinated. The measure, which passed last year, was the country’s most extreme anti-vaccination law.
Health care providers in Montana had sued the state over the law, arguing that it violates constitutional protections for disabled Americans. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy agreed with them. His ruling permanently enjoined the state from implementing its law in any health care facility.
A group of progressive lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal is calling on Biden health officials to immediately launch a fraud probe into the organizations taking part in ACO REACH, a slightly reformed version of a Medicare privatization scheme that the Trump administration set in motion during its final months in power.
In a Thursday letter to Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), 21 members of Congress voiced alarm that the ACO REACH pilot “provides an opportunity for healthcare insurers with a history of defrauding and abusing Medicare and ripping off taxpayers to further encroach on the Medicare system.”
On August 7, National Review published an article lambasting the US Department of Agriculture’s decision, announced in May, to broaden the prohibition of discrimination in federally funded nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The writer’s argument centered on a Christian school in Tampa, Fla., that, he wrote, was being “forced by the government to choose between adherence to the laws of man and those of God.”1This article was produced in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Hive Ransomware Group, a FBI-identified criminal organization, has appeared to claim credit for ongoing “disruptions” to Knox College’s computer systems.
Hive Ransomware Group, a FBI-identified criminal organization, has claimed credit for ongoing “disruptions” to Knox College’s computer systems.
In an email sent to a number of Knox students on Wednesday, a group claiming to be Hive says it has encrypted “critical infrastructure and data,” compromised the college’s backup servers and mined sensitive personal information like medical records and social security numbers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-tar and pngcheck), SUSE (colord, containerd, and tiff), and Ubuntu (containerd, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-oem-5.17, and vim).
Device Authorization enables a second device to bestow access with a user’s active consent. In short, the device can present a one-time passcode (OTP) to the user, and they can transcribe that into an authorization web page or app on their phone or computer. After authorizing the device, it then appears logged in and can perform its functions with the user’s preferences.
One problem: transcribing device codes is phishable, and it trains users to think this is a safe activity. Device auth codes effectively bypass unphishable two-factor security
A new development release of LibreSSL is out, and should be arriving on a mirror near you shortly.
Apple has always been a market leader in user security. Things haven’t changed, no matter how much the FBI wishes/litigates. What’s most important to Apple is that users can trust it to keep their personal info and communications private and secure. What’s most important to federal law enforcement agencies — pretty much just the FBI at this point — is on-demand access to data stored in Apple devices.
The TSA has been working towards this goal for nearly a half-decade. Its parent agency, the DHS, has already deployed facial recognition tech, most of it aimed at foreigners. The CBP uses it all the time. In 2020, the CBP’s facial recognition scanners at US borders captured 50 million facial images and less than 300 “impostors,” including (according to its press release) someone using their sister’s ID because they themselves had not received a COVID vaccination. Millions spent. Millions scanned. Barely anything useful accomplished. Par for the DHS course.
Surveillance has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Public spaces are dotted with CCTV cameras inside and out. Recent years have seen the technology spread to the suburbs with porch cameras spreading the eye of big tech and law enforcement ever further.
Chia Te Bakery, known for its pineapple pastries, said they were required to provide details such as factory specifications, which included questions like how many employees the company had in Taiwan, and the ratio of ingredients in a pineapple pastry, which asked for the amount of sugar and cream used. The company’s owner Lin Yueh-ying (林月英) added, “It feels kind of like they don’t want to let you register… I won’t say they’re picking on us, they just make it troublesome.”
Two of the world’s earliest color photographers separately documented ethnic Armenian inhabitants of Ottoman Turkey just before the religious minority was largely wiped out over a century ago.
When he went to a remote desert village near Somalia’s front lines with Al Shabab, parliament member Malik Abdalla was driven to act by images of jihadist atrocities against civilians. His goal: to mobilize villagers to support the most serious effort to date to take on Al Shabab’s 15-year insurgency.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Islamic studies scholar who was detained in Iran for more than two years, is still figuring out how to move on with her life two years after returning home to Australia. Her experience offers a glimpse of what Brittney Griner and others who have been through similar ordeals could encounter in their transition to post-detention life.
The European border agency observes boats with refugees from the air and lets them be brought back to North Africa. A new report by human rights organisations criticises this as „Airborne Complicity“.
EFF this week filed an amicus brief arguing that when police officers wrongly arrest an independent journalist in violation of the First Amendment, courts must order the officers to pay damages. The brief was written by Covington, and our co-amici are the National Press Photographers Association and the Pelican Institute. The brief explains that damages are necessary both to compensate the independent journalist for their injury, and to deter these officers and others from similar misconduct in the future. The case, Villarreal v. City of Laredo, is before the federal appeals court for the Fifth Circuit. A panel of judges issued a great decision in favor of the journalist earlier this year, but the entire court has agreed to rehear the case.
The issue on appeal is whether a dangerous legal doctrine called “qualified immunity” should protect the officers from paying damages. Fortunately, Congress empowered people to sue state and local officials who violate their constitutional rights. This was during Reconstruction after the Civil War, in direct response to state-sanctioned violence against Black people. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court created a misguided exception: even if a government official violated the Constitution, they don’t have to pay damages, unless the legal right at issue was “clearly established” at the time they violated it. Worse, federal courts can grant qualified immunity without even ruling on whether the right exists, which stunts the development of constitutional law. This is especially problematic for digital rights, because there sometimes will not be clearly established law regarding cutting-edge technologies.
The amicus brief explains the importance of internet-based independent journalism to public discourse. About half of Americans get news from social media. Independent journalists have published important stories on social media about, for example, police violence against Black people. The brief also explains the importance of a damages remedy to protect independent journalists from police violations of their First Amendment rights. Professional journalists often have the backup of their employers, the traditional news media. But independent journalists often must fight alone.
In June, St. Petersburg opposition politician Sergey Troshin publicly came out as gay — a risky decision in a country that has begun vilifying LGBT+ people all the more intensely since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, Russia’s recently expanded law against LGBT “propaganda” has given Troshin’s political opponents a new tool to use against him. And while Troshin told journalists he plans to keep speaking out against Moscow’s discriminatory legislation, he could face thousands of dollars in fines if the Russian Attorney General’s Office decides to act on the denunciations against him.
The Belarusian Defense Ministry announced plans to conduct a snap combat readiness inspection of its armed forces.
We feature excerpts from activists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who were honored Saturday at the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just days earlier vowed that his war in Ukraine would be a “long process” with no clear end in sight. Jan Rachinsky accepted on behalf of the Russian civil rights group Memorial, which was shuttered by the government last year. Oleksandra Matviichuk accepted the award on behalf of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, and Natallia Pinchuk attended the ceremony in place of her husband, the jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski.
And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal,
The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering.
Hundreds of Oath Keepers said they are or were employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a report published Monday found—a revelation that comes about two weeks after two leaders of the far-right militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6 insurrection.
“Extremism within our government is always alarming, but even more so in a department with a law enforcement and national security nexus like DHS.”
In its December 12 evening digest, the Ukrainian General Staff reported the Russian military’s attempts to advance on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Zaporizhzhia directions.
Notes: Phil Wilayto is cofounder of Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality, as well as the Virginia Prison Justice Network. He’s also coordinator of the Odessa Solidarity Campaign , and the author of several books, including Notes from Iran.
Late on December 11, Chechen special forces raided the republic’s Urus-Martan district, looking for eyewitnesses who had failed to intervene in a clash between two law-enforcement officers the day before.
A Russian military court considered the case of the 20-year-old Ukrainian citizen Nikita Shkryabin, imprisoned in Ukraine by the Russian military.
Original story by Andrey Krasno from Kavkaz.Realii. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google.
In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United […]
Jens Stoltenberg warns things can go ‘horribly wrong.’
After launching an urgent appeal for humanitarian aid for children in war-torn Yemen, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund on Monday released a report showing that more than 11,000 young people have been killed or injured in the U.S.-backed conflict, where a Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out attacks since 2015.
The true death toll of children is likely far higher, said the agency, commonly known as UNICEF, as millions face hunger and disease.
Early Tuesday morning, explosions occurred in the town of Klintsy and the nearby village of Klimovo, both of which are in Russia’s Bryansk region.
The amount of emissions from permafrost is directly reliant on how much warmer our atmosphere gets – the higher the degree of warming, the more emissions we can expect.
“It’s like adding another country,” says David Olefeldt, an associate professor at the University of Alberta and co-author of the study.
Once, Mark Benfatti couldn’t imagine living anywhere but St. Bernard Parish, a close-knit, working-class community perched precariously between New Orleans and the wetlands leading to the Gulf of Mexico.
His parents had moved there in 1963, when he was a year old. It’s where he met and married his wife, Donna, and where they raised their three daughters. It’s where he ran four restaurants, serving the same familiar faces every day of the year.
Tom Engelhardt examines who is committing terracide, or the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on.
What does “intermittency” mean? It’s pretty simple: The sun doesn’t shine all the time, so solar panels can’t produce energy 24/7. Wind is even more “intermittent,” or at least less predictable. A windmill or wind turbine may or may not generate energy at any particular time, depending on whether there’s a decent breeze.
“Energy density” gets more complicated, but the simplified version looks something like this: A given volume or area of space and fuel dedicated to one kind of energy production is more efficient than another. An acre dedicated to a nuclear reactor or a fossil fuel power plant (and the nuclear material or, say, coal) produces a LOT more energy than an acre covered with solar panels or wind turbines. In fact, it’s questionable whether there are enough acres on Earth to meet humanity’s energy needs with “renewables,” at least if those acres have to be dedicated entirely to energy generation.
FTX succumbed last month to the cryptocurrency version of a bank run, where rumours of liquidity problems prompted customers to withdraw their funds from the exchange en masse, which revealed that FTX didn’t have those funds stored safely in the first place. The insolvency trustees now running the company’s unwinding have since called the cryptocurrency exchange’s management a “complete failure of corporate controls” and said that Bankman-Fried ran the company like his “personal fiefdom.”
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that Bahamian authorities had made the arrest.
“Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY,” Williams said. “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
He is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in a magistrates’ court in the Caribbean country’s capital, Nassau.
Police said Mr Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested for “financial offences” against laws in the US and The Bahamas.
Last month FTX filed for bankruptcy in the US, leaving many users unable to withdraw their funds.
Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”
The statement added that while U.S. authorities pursue criminal charges, the Bahamas is continuing a regulatory and criminal investigation into the company’s collapse.
The attorney general for the Bahamas said in a statement Monday that the Royal Bahamas Police Force arrested Bankman-Fried after notification from the U.S. of pending criminal charges against the ex-billionaire, noting that the U.S. is “likely” to request extradition.
While there doesn’t seem to be a ceiling on the number of species that might evolve, there may be restraints on how many fundamental forms those species can evolve into. The evolution of crab-like creatures may be one of the best examples of this, since they have evolved not just once but at least five times.
Crabs belong to a group of crustaceans called decapods – literally “ten footed”, since they have five pairs of walking legs. Some decapods, like lobsters and shrimp, have a thick, muscular abdomen, which is the bulk of the animal that we eat. With a quick flick of their abdomen lobsters can shoot off backwards and escape predators.
Crabs, by contrast, have a compressed abdomen, tucked away under a flattened but widened thorax and shell. This allows them to scuttle into rock crevices for protection. Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution because it works well under similar sets of circumstances.
On Friday, the House Oversight Committee released the final report from its year-long investigation into fossil fuel industry disinformation. The result is the most damning indictment yet of the industry’s attempts to “greenwash” its public image while continuing to expand fossil fuel production and lobby against climate action.
According to the findings of the committee, major fossil fuel companies like Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell have no intention of seriously reducing their emission by moving away from oil and gas production. Instead, they’re using false “net zero” commitments and other marketing tactics to mislead and distract the public while they double down on fossil fuel production.
With just one week left at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference for countries to reach a deal to protect Earth’s ecosystems, environmental campaigners on Monday implored negotiators gathered in Montréal to ensure that the elimination of harmful government subsidies is a core component of any agreement.
“Biodiversity offsets are not a substitute for real action to stop destruction of nature, just as carbon offsets are not a substitute for real emissions reductions.”
Cleanup and assessment efforts continued Monday after a Canadian fossil fuel company’s pipeline spilled nearly an Olympic-sized swimming pool’s worth of crude tar sands oil into a northern Kansas creek that feeds a watershed providing drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people.
“The only safe way to transport tar sands oil is not to do it at all.”
After decades of experimentation and billions of dollars in public investment, U.S. government scientists have reportedly achieved a major “breakthrough” in fusion energy technology, a potential game-changer in the critical pursuit of clean, reliable, and low-cost alternatives to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear power.
Citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the results, the Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists at a federal laboratory in California successfully produced “a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time,” a milestone that the Biden administration is expected to announce publicly on Tuesday.
It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth.
This past Labor Day, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation giving more than 500,000 fast-food workers a seat at the table with their employers to set wages and working conditions throughout the industry in California. It was the culmination of a decade-long organizing effort by the workers, most of whom are women and people of color, twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers in the state.
The Fed is doubling down on what appears to be a failed policy, driving the economy to the brink of recession without bringing prices down appreciably. Inflation results from “too much money chasing too few goods,” and the Fed has control over only the money – the “demand” side of the equation. Energy and food are the key inflation drivers, and they are on the supply side. As noted by Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru in the Washington Post in March:
So why is the Fed forging ahead? Some pundits think Chairman Powell has something else up his sleeve.
In a last-ditch bid to revive the expanded Child Tax Credit in some form by year’s end, the White House has reportedly suggested to congressional Democrats that it is willing to accept a compromise deal that adds more stringent work requirements to the anti-poverty program—a reversal of President Joe Biden’s previous opposition to such restrictions and a move that some progressives condemned.
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) boost enacted in 2021 did not contain a work requirement, meaning the poorest families were eligible for the CTC for the first time. But the CTC enhancement, which brought about historic reductions in U.S. child poverty, expired at the end of last year due to the opposition of Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who refused to support a renewal of the expanded CTC unless a “firm work requirement” was added.
As 2022 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on the year behind us, and set goals for the year ahead. As state lawmakers, there’s no shortage of dreams and aspirations we have for the communities we are honored to serve. But there is one New Year’s Resolution that all states and political parties can get behind that would benefit all our constituents: ending corporate tax giveaways.
Humanity faces a grim fate because the global ruling class refuses to depart from the capitalist status quo even as their quest to maximize profits intensifies the climate crisis and the prospects of a nuclear war. But with enough solidarity, progressives around the world can build an egalitarian, democratic, peaceful, and sustainable society.
That’s the message shared Monday by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who outlined his vision for how the left can work together to end the “global empire of capital” and forge a humane future—part of a Progressive International-led effort to chart a path toward a “New International Economic Order for the 21st century.”
While it is undoubtedly true that the savings rate has fallen by any measure, a large part of the decline is due to people paying taxes on capital gains. This can easily be seen in the data. If we look at the third quarter data, people paid $3,244 billion in taxes, or 14.8 percent of personal income.[1] By comparison, in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last pre-pandemic quarter, people paid $2,216 billion, 11.8 percent of their income in taxes.
Since there were no major changes in tax rates over this period, we can assume that most of this increase in tax payments was due to capital gains taxes on stocks that people sold. Capital gains do not count as income in the national income accounts. Let me repeat that for the folks worried we will run out of savings. Capital gains do not count as income in the national income accounts.
Generals appointed because of their wealth and social connections, rather than ability, produced spectacular debacles, such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. The best-known achievement of the Victorian reformers was the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 that intended to produce a Civil Service in which “none but qualified personnel will be appointed”.
The old corruption
Such a change would shift Twitter away from its microblogging format that led to the platform’s rise, allowing users to write tweets more than 14 times longer than the current limit.
Currently, users wishing to write posts longer than the limit of 280 characters must create a thread and write their comments across multiple consecutive tweets.
Alex Holmes, who had been a member of the council, tweeted that the email came after the company canceled a meeting with the council.
“The way this has unfolded and way members have been treated is unfortunate and unacceptable,” said Holmes, a member of the advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the deputy CEO of the nonprofit group The Diana Award.
Cook joined President Joe Biden onsite this week to celebrate its forthcoming contribution to US chip manufacturing. In an announcement first reported by CNBC, Cook shared that Apple would be shifting away from imported chips in favor of Arizona-made chips once the factory was in production. “Now, thanks to the hard work of so many people, these chips can be proudly stamped ‘Made in America,’” Cook said. “This is an incredibly significant moment.”
The Broadband Grant Tax Treatment Act, a bill that would make non-taxable broadband grants from the BEAD program and the American Rescue Plan Act, may yet become law by year’s end, spokespeople for Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Penn., told Broadband Breakfast Monday.
Meta launched its Connectivity division in 2013 and explored multiple ways to provide “free” [Internet] to people, including with the help of Facebook Aquila — an experimental solar-powered drone developed by the company that aimed to beam the [Internet] to remote parts of the world.
The US business magazine Forbes has unveiled its annual list of European people under the age of 30 who are worth keeping an eye on in fields such as culture, science and finance.
The following is an open letter written to Senate Democrats by Bishop William J. Barber II on Monday, December 12, 2022.
With major support from organized labor, including AFL-CIO President George Meany at the signing, Medicare was signed into law in 1965. Before Medicare, only 60% of those over 65 had insurance since it was unavailable or unaffordable via private insurance (seniors were charged 3x the rate of younger people). Not only economically beneficial to the working class, the passage of Medicare was a huge civil rights victory as payments to physicians, hospitals, and health care providers were conditional on desegregation.
While a big victory, Medicare did not provide full coverage for all services, and from its inception, there has been a drive to privatize and hand it over to profiteers. In fact, 2022 marks the 50th anniversary (1972) of Medicare permitting private insurance companies (HMOs) to participate in Medicare.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not hold the year-end press conference that took place annually in December for the past decade, reports the Interfax. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press:
So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they are all just as ridiculous as the first one. They are all written by people who appear to have (1) no idea what they’re looking at (2) no interest in talking to anyone who does understand it and (3) no concern about presenting them in an extremely misleading light in an effort to push a narrative that is not even remotely supported by what they’re sharing.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia asserted over the weekend that former President Donald Trump’s right-wing mob would have pulled off a successful coup had she and erstwhile Trump adviser Steve Bannon organized the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.
“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” Greene said Saturday night at the annual New York Young Republican Club dinner, during which the club’s president instructed a throng of white nationalists and other far-right figures, including Donald Trump Jr., to prepare for “total war.”
If decades have distinct personalities, they also have shadow selves: covert and latent tendencies that are only barely visible at the time but serve as harbingers of change to come.1
I came of age in the ’90s, and my first steady job in journalism was as editor of a small left-wing magazine that subsisted on atrophying subscriptions and crashing arts grants and was, in those years, perpetually on the verge of publishing its last issue. The publication, called This Magazine, was founded in the 1960s, when left ideas were a roaring cultural fire. But by the mid-’90s, the fire was down to its embers, and it felt as if all we could do was blow to keep it from turning to dust. At one of my first story meetings, I suggested we stage a public funeral procession for the left, just to mark and mourn the passing of so many of its core ideas. Instead, we screamed ourselves hoarse insisting that Francis Fukuyama was wrong and history was not over; that Margaret Thatcher had lied to us—there were and always had been alternatives; and that corporate trade deals were not “free” but came at a terrible cost to workers, ways of life, and the natural world.1Naomi Klein’s first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was a defining work of 1990s political analysis.
These types of analyses are now being applied to understanding official Arab attitudes towards Russia, China, global politics and conflicts.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares to lead a large delegation to meet with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia on December 9, Western media conveys a sense of dread.
attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Monday about the fate of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. The event happened to be at the National Press Club, but it was actually sponsored by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University.
Hayden, the notorious former director of both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., who oversaw the C.I.A.’s torture program during part of the George W. Bush administration, was front and center at the event.
So this year, he went a step further by creating a website to publicly share the trending topics he had logged throughout 2022 — all 457 of them.
Many mullahs will have fled. Some will seek protection from the militias they fostered in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The better connected will head to Oman or the United Arab Emirates. The outgoing and visibly ailing Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will flee to Beijing. A council of young Iranians will draft a new constitution and replace the symbol at the heart of the flag—a stylistic rendition of “God [sic] is greatest”—with the revolution’s slogan: “Women, Life, Freedom”.
Iran has hanged a man in public who had been convicted of killing two members of security forces, the second execution linked to anti-government protests in less than a week.
The execution of Majidreza Rahnavard on December 12, reported by the judiciary’s Mizan news agency, came after a revolutionary court in Mashahd convicted him of “waging war against God,” a charge which punishable by death, for allegedly murdering two members of the notorious Basij paramilitary militia with a knife during protests in November.
The development underscores the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations that the government hopes to put down.
Activists warn that at least a dozen people already have been sentenced to death in closed-door hearings. At least 488 people have been killed since the demonstrations began in mid-September, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that’s been monitoring the protests. Another 18,200 people have been detained by authorities.
The public hanging of Majidreza Rahnavard, less than a month after he allegedly carried out the fatal stabbings — purportedly angry about security forces killing protesters — shows the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations the government hopes to put down.
We live in a country where freedom of expression is being questioned on a daily basis. How easy is it to make independent films?
Iran does better than us (laughs). We find ways to express ourselves. I don’t believe in censorship in any form, except self-censorship. I could have done blame-game films and more dynamic ones in my career. But I only choose to say human stories. Even ‘Manto’, which showcased the Partition, could have portrayed violence, war or explicitly the sexual concoctions that underly them. But I am not into sensationalising or glamorizing violence. The purpose is to create empathy. I don’t want to sharpen things and make them preachy even though I come from a social-work background.
The Supreme Court found that the right to protect sources is an important guarantee of journalistic freedom that creates the premise for a relationship of trust between a journalist and their source. This allows journalists to gain information from sources for whom disclosing it is illegal or would result in other sanctions in matters of public interest.
While the Media Services Act usually prohibits journalists and publications from disclosing information that could lead to the identification of sources without the latter’s consent, this ban does not apply to sources who have provided false information.
A hearing begins Monday in a case that will decide if the conviction should be overturned for a Missouri man who has spent nearly three decades in prison for a murder that two other people have since confessed to committing
Last year, lid manufacturer Tecnocap illegally slashed health benefits for workers at its Glen Dale, West Virginia plant.
We look at “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” a remarkable new documentary that shows how a small rural community in Alabama organized during the civil rights movement to challenge white supremacy and systematic disenfranchisement of Black residents, and would become, in some ways, the first iteration of the Black Panther Party. Lowndes County went from having no registered Black voters in 1960 — despite being 80% Black — to being the birthplace in 1965 of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a radical political party that brought together grassroots activists and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Co-directors Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir tell Democracy Now! the Lowndes County story has not gotten the attention it deserves compared to other chapters of the civil rights movement, in part because its lessons are “more threatening” to the political establishment. “It seems like it has been deliberately left out of the narrative of history,” says Gandbhir. We also speak with Reverend Wendell Paris, a former SNCC field secretary featured in the film, who says the organizing in Lowndes County reflected an understanding by residents that “they needed to band together to defend themselves.”
Prison exchanges and swaps are never entirely satisfactory affairs. The appropriate measure in such cases is the degree of dissatisfaction that arises from them. In the instance of the exchange of US basketballer Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the Russian negotiators may well count themselves richer in […]
The owner of one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest industrial plants has agreed to pay a nearly $1 million fine after releasing excessive amounts of toxic air pollution into nearby historic Black neighborhoods, according to a proposed consent decree filed Friday in a Jefferson County court.
If the consent decree is approved by a judge, the Jefferson County Board of Health’s $925,000 penalty against Bluestone Coke would be the largest fine in the agency’s history. But it represents a small fraction of the more than $60 million in fines the company could have faced for its alleged violations. The consent decree would not require Bluestone to admit to wrongdoing.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is urging the State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin to prevent the discrimination of people who don’t want to share their biometric data with the state.
The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) has been overseen by a succession of terrible elected officials. Sheriff Lee Baca presided over a department that filled its ranks with criminals, ignored the proliferation of deputy gangs, and ran a jailhouse informant program so unlawful it resulted in an FBI investigation and the conviction of Sheriff Baca on obstruction charges.
With federal telecom oversight both intentionally gridlocked and crippled courtesy of the Trump era, the closest telecom monopolies get to seeing accountability are often state attorneys general.
Not all Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum and Cox subscribers have activated their accounts, given the number of monthly active accounts, which includes paid subscribers, is lower than the total number of MVPD and broadband subscribers with access.
Yet subscribers with complimentary access do make up a sizable proportion of the total users. With Peacock generating losses — estimated to be $2.4 billion for 2022 — it’s important, especially given Wall Street’s sudden turn on whether streaming is a good bet for media companies, to find ways to boost that.
The FTC voted 3-1 to issue the complaint after a closed-door meeting, with the three Democratic commissioners voting in favour and the sole Republican voting against. A fifth seat on the panel is vacant after another Republican left earlier this year.
The FTC’s complaint points to Microsoft’s previous game acquisitions, especially of well-known developer Bethesda Softworks and its parent company ZeniMax, as an example of where Microsoft made some popular game titles exclusive despite assuring European regulators it had no intention to do so.
The fumbled presale reignited fan frustration toward Ticketmaster, particularly among those who signed up as “verified fans,” which means they are able to enter a lottery to buy tickets for certain shows. Ticketmaster has said doing so helps to “ensure that more tickets go to the fans who will actually attend the event,” by granting them access to tickets before the public sale. After they register as a “verified fan,” Ticketmaster provides them with a code and a link to the purchase site. When tickets go on sale, the link leads fans to a “Smart Queue” that “keeps ticket bots out.” Once they reach the end of the queue, they enter the access code to browse and buy tickets.
It’s beginning to get quite comical watching various rightwing folks and groups bang on constantly about how pro-free-speech they are, often talking about situations that have nothing to do with free speech, only to engage in anti-speech behavior themselves. The new owner of a mountain of debt that is called Twitter has become something of an emblem for this sort of thing, shouting into the void about free speech only to turn on his heel the moment he gets an ounce of criticism.
A federal judge dismissed the case after the two sides agreed to resolve the suit in a settlement, according to court documents filed on Monday in California federal court. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Representatives for Swift didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The filings did not include any reason for, or explanation behind, the agreement to dismiss the case. Lawyers for the defendants — which also included Swift’s co-writers Max Martin and Shellback — did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment, nor did a rep for Swift. Lawyers for the songwriters who brought the suit, Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, also did not return a request for comment.
The United States Attorney for the District of Maryland has confirmed that 55 domain names were seized for allegedly streaming FIFA World Cup games. The crackdown affects millions of visitors and a broad variety of sites. Despite the gravity of the enforcement actions, some sites simply continue doing business from new domains.
The RIAA booked a landmark victory against YouTube ripper Yout.com earlier this year. Soon after, the music group requested compensation for over $250,000 in attorney’s fees. Yout has now asked the court to put this matter on hold while its appeal over the legality of youtube-dl-based software is heard at the appeals court.
Illegal streaming site PrimeWire avoided, dodged, or simply ignored Hollywood’s attempts to bring it down for at least a decade. A copyright lawsuit filed by the studios in 2021 was a clear sign that patience had finally run out and a year later, it’s all over. A California court has just awarded the plaintiffs $20.7m in damages plus $417,600 to cover attorneys’ fees.
Experts have long imagined that blue-collar workers like truckers or factory workers would be the first to lose jobs to artificial intelligence. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested that a possible collapse of trucking industry jobs, caused by the perfecting and popularization of self-driving vehicles, even had the potential to cause civil turmoil as countless workers suddenly found themselves without a paycheck. Still, the idea never got a lot of media attention—perhaps because job loss to AI has largely been considered a working-class problem.
I turned in my badge, took my exit exam. My parents
will be here soon to watch me graduate. The first
time they get to see either of their kids graduate
from anything, mom says.
I led a thorough cleaning of the kitchen & living
room today: all furniture moved, minor repairs made
& floors scrubbed, in anticipation of the advent
of my parents and when they leave, life together
after nursing school.
First, and most importantly, before looking at your old lists, write down what’s most on your mind right now. If it’s among what you’re worrying most about right now, it needs to be front and center in your new system.
Second, from your old system, move everything to “someday/maybe”, or to a sublist in “someday/maybe”. If it’s on digital, just drag it over there without looking at what’s in there yet. If it’s a paper list, relabel it without reading it yet.
It has been ages since I posted to my gemlog, and unfortunately I also have been much distracted from working on my gemcast as well, to the point where I think that I might as well write something for people who are still reading my Gemini capsule. (Hey, someone is bound to see this.)
Granted, the eight line shell script wasn’t much of an engine, nor was the 54 line Perl script to build index.gmi and the RSS, plus a few lines of Makefile to hold it all together. Oh, and git. But at least there are now previous and next links on the blog entries?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
This is a blog looking at a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook running Linux.
In this article we put the ThinkPad T470 through some intensive testing. We’ve run a variety of benchmarks on the laptop and compared the results to a motley assortment of machines.
The tests use the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated. For ease of reference, the system’s specifications are listed on the final page. Together with the ThinkPad T470, we’ve run the benchmarks on two small form factor PCs (HP EliteDesk 800 G2 and Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC), three mini PCs, and an Asus laptop. All of these machines are low-power. To put the results into context, we also benchmarked two more modern PCs hosting a 10th generation and 12th generation Intel processor.
Loads of discoveries including picking the best DNS server for your connection, Telnet on the Amiga, some synth thing, markdown notes, and fixing downloaded Twitter data. Plus your feedback about Red Hat and IBM, containers and firewalls, Signal alternatives, and more.
Less is a perfectly functional linux pager but what if you wanted something a little bit more or you might say moar, this is moar the pager that just does the right thing
In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.8 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard of ChatGPT and all its wonderful and terrifying capabilities.
In this video, we are looking at how to install WebStorm on Linux Mint 21.
The 6.1 LTS version of the Linux kernel, which includes initial support for Rust, has been made available for general usage.
Linus Torvalds finally announced that the latest LTS version of the Linux kernel (version 6.1) includes the initial support for the Rust programming language that has been hyped of late. This, of course, comes on the heels of what Torvalds calls the “merge window from hell,” thanks to the holidays and his pre-holiday travel.
On this, Torvalds announced he would be very strict with the merge window rules, saying “The rules are that the pull requests sent to me during the merge window should have been ready _before_ the merge window and have seen some time in linux-next. No last-minute batch of experimental new development that hasn’t been seen by our test automation.”
Of course, the big news for Linux 6.1 is the inclusion of experimental Rust support. It’s important to know that this is very much still in the early phase of development, so the implications aren’t nearly as game-changing as you might think. This is the very basic implementation of Rust in the kernel, so don’t expect to find new and improved Rust-built drivers functioning within the kernel.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.1, likely to be an LTS kernel, last Sunday:
So here we are, a week late, but last week was nice and slow, and I’m much happier about the state of 6.1 than I was a couple of weeks ago when things didn’t seem to be slowing down.
Time for another status update on libei, the transport layer for bouncing emulated input events between applications and Wayland compositors [1]. And this time it’s all about portals and how we’re about to use them for libei communication. I’ve hinted at this in the last post, but of course you’re forgiven if you forgot about this in the… uhm.. “interesting” year that was 2022. So, let’s recap first:
Our basic premise is that we want to emulate and/or capture input events in the glorious new world that is Wayland (read: where applications can’t do whatever they want, whenever they want). libei is a C library [0] that aims to provide this functionality. libei supports “sender” and “receiver” contexts and that just specifies which way the events will flow. A sender context (e.g. xdotool) will send emulated input events to the compositor, a “receiver” context will – you’ll never guess! – receive events from the compositor. If you have the InputLeap [2] use-case, the server-side will be a receiver context, the client side a sender context. But libei is really just the transport layer and hasn’t had that many changes since the last post – most of the effort was spent on trying to figure out how to exchange the socket between different applications. And for that, we have portals!
The focus in 2022 was on maturing the Wayland driver and keeping up to date with the Wine upstream internal changes. This involved, among other things, splitting the driver into a PE and Unix part, updating it for the latest internal driver APIs, and making preparations to support WoW64.
A significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the “–in-process” command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
This update also brings enhanced support for the linux-dmabuf v4 Wayland protocol (aka dmabuf-feedback), which allows compositors to dynamically send information about optimal formats and modifiers, e.g., depending on the surface presentation mode (fullscreen vs windowed).
It’s been some time since our last Wayland driver update ([1]), and, with the year coming to an end, I wanted to share information about the progress we made this year and discuss future steps.
The end of 2022 is very close so I’m just in time for some self-promotion. As you may know, the ongoing collaboration between Valve and Igalia lets me and some of my colleagues work on improving the open-source Vulkan and OpenGL Conformance Test Suite. This work is essential to ship quality Vulkan drivers and, from the Khronos side, to improve the Vulkan standard further by, among other things, adding new functionality through API extensions. When creating a new extension, apart from reaching consensus among vendors about the scope and shape of the new APIs, CTS tests are developed in order to check the specification text is clear and vendors provide a uniform implementation of the basic functionality, corner cases and, sometimes, interactions with other extensions.
In addition to our CTS work, many times we review the Vulkan specification text from those extensions we develop tests for. We also do the same for other extensions and changes, and we also submit fixes and improvements of our own.
In 2022, our work was important to be able to ship a bunch of extensions you can probably see implemented in Mesa and used by VKD3D-Proton when playing your favorite games on Linux, be it on your PC or perhaps on the fantastic Steam Deck. Or maybe used by Zink when implementing OpenGL on top of your favorite Vulkan driver. Anyway, without further ado, let’s take a look.
A few weeks ago I posed a question about a note-taking app to beat Vim, Markdown and Git. So far, that winner is Joplin.
I’d tried Joplin once or twice but bounced off of it for one reason or another. The UI is a little less compelling than other native apps, I’d like a bit more between-note linking features, but after a couple of weeks of sticking with it, it’s growing on me.
In this short and simple post, you will learn how to install Lighttpd on Ubuntu 22.04. You will also learn how to add PHP support.
For those who don’t know, lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments.
One of the main things that make it so popular is that it is quite lightweight and can revive web servers.
Fedora users usually have a relatively recent Linux Kernel installed on their system. Currently, this is Linux kernel 6.0. However, given Fedora is an upstream release and many users often install upstream distributions with newer hardware, you may want to pre-install the latest Linux kernel 6.1 mainline release for better hardware support. The new Linux Kernel release brings improvements and hardware support along with the initial Rust language support in the mainline Kernel for better security and memory-safe code.
While walking in your Linux journey, you might hit yourself with the term “chroot” (or “chroot jail”), and that’s what you’re about to learn today: what they are and their usage.
LibreWolf is a Firefox fork designed to enhance your privacy and security while browsing the Internet and works well on Ubuntu desktops as an alternative browser. It eliminates telemetry and other tracking techniques that can be intrusive to your personal information, along with a few additional security improvements to give you added peace of mind when browsing. On top of that, LibreWolf also incorporates protection against fingerprinting to ensure that marketers aren’t able to track you online. If your online safety is important, LibreWolf could be an ideal web browser for you to use daily or a secondary browser for certain types of browsing.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install LibreWolf Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS. The tutorial will go over importing the official repository and gpg key with CLI commands and installing the browser, along with some additional commands and tips for keeping the browser up-to-date.
Redis is quickly becoming an industry standard for an in-memory data structure store due to its open-source design, comprehensive list of supported data structures, and scalability through automated partitioning across nodes. High availability can be achieved with minimal configuration using Redis Sentinel software logic. This allows developers to focus on building their applications versus managing and configuring their databases. The ability to use Redis as a database, cache, and message broker with considerable options makes this open-source technology a powerful choice.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Redis on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation or server using the terminal command line and some basic setup instructions to get you started using the command line terminal.
A cheat sheet for determining whether a drive is SSD or HDD is available here for Linux-based distributions so first let’s get started with lsblk command
Ever since the demise of Google Reader I have been looking for a suitable replacement RSS reader. In the past I used to use Liferea but that was when I used a single desktop machine; these days I want to be able to read on my phone and multiple machines. I moved to Feedly and it’s been mostly ok, but I’m hitting the limit of feeds available in the free tier, and $72/year is a bit more than I can justify to myself. Especially when I have machines already available to me where I could self host something.
Docker is a popular tool for deploying and managing applications in containers. Containers allow developers to package an application with all of its dependencies and libraries, so it can be run consistently across different environments.
Today we are looking at how to install AbiWord on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.
Much of my work is driven by my keyboard, and I love finding new ways to do complicated actions in a hurry. That’s why I’m drawn towards tiling window managers like i3 and sway.
My team at work spans the globe and speaks many different languages. Many of these languages have diacritics (such as accents, tildes, or other marks) that completely change the pronunciation (or even the meaning!)_ of the word. Sure, I can type Tomas (TOM-oss) quickly, but it’s not the same as Tomaš (TOM-osh).
In this update, Kdenlive‘s guide/marker system received a major overhaul to help you better organize your projects. The software now organizes all marker (clips) and guide (timeline) features in a new “Guides” dock where displayed content depends on the selection. Due to this change, the “Markers” tab was removed from the clip properties.
Moreover, the new “Guides” dock makes it easier to seek, search, sort, and filter by category or text, and integrates better with keyboard navigation to help you more quickly seek and find a timeline guide. Also, the import and export of markers functionality has been improved.
A new version of Kdenlive is available to download.
Kdenlive 22.12 is said to feature more than 350 commits that add new features, fix issues, and prepare the code base for “exciting changes” planned for the near future (intriguing, huh?).
Chief amongst the changes in this drop is what Kdenlive devs described as a a “major overhaul” to the guide/marker system. Kdenlive (like any good video editor should) already lets users add markers to annotate and pinpoint specific parts of their edit. But in the new release things move up a gear.
A new “Guides” dock is now available in the UI. This supports quickly filtering between different markers and guides, works with keyboard navigation, and supports as many custom categories as a user needs, as this short video from the Kdenlive team demonstrates:
The best free and open-source video editor – Kdenlive 22.12, released with new filters, UI improvements, user-requested features and bug fixes. This release improves Kdenlive on top of its already existing features and gives you a platform to create professional-quality videos.
This is what’s new.
It’s a Plasma widget that visualizes what’s going on on your system, music-wise that is. I’ve started this project years ago but only recently found the motivation to get it to a somewhat acceptable state. It’s pretty amazing to have bars flying across the screen to Daft Punk’s `Touch`.
Linux history is littered with successes and failures, as well as failures that then, once again, became successes. Countless open-source projects are created, of which some of them die. That doesn’t mean, however, the projects remain dead permanently — some of them are given a second chance simply because the project was awesome.
Puppy Linux is a super lightweight distro which runs entirely on RAM and requires a very low memory footprint. It is almost loaded with all the necessary applications for everything you need. It is quite remarkable that the Puppy Linux team managed to package all these applications, which run in low memory and surprisingly within 400 MB of ISO size. There are many variants of Puppy Linux based on Ubuntu and other distros – thanks to the fantastic Puppy Builder Woof-CE.
The recent release of Puppy Linux 22.12 is based on the Slackware 15.0 components, which were released in February 2022. At its core, the JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) provides flexibility and good performance in Puppy Linux because it runs off the RAM.
So, another day, another update. Today I managed to get hibernation working on my Dell XPS13 Plus (9320) running Debian.
So, a quick recap. I’m running Debian testing. I set up the system with Guided – Use entire disk and Setup LVM. This leaves me with an encrypted root partition. What I want to do now, is to put a reasonably sized swap file there, and make the system hibernate to it.
So, first, I created a 35 GB (35840MB) large swapfile as /swapfile. I prefer to create a swapfile slightly larger than RAM, to ensure that everything fits and my machine comes with 32GB of RAM. I used the instructions in the excellent Arch Wiki to set this up. I also edited /etc/fstab, commenting out the swap partition setup by the installer and adding the swapfile.
Ubuntu Snap is an application framework that makes installing and managing software on your system easier. Not only does this provide the easiest way to access your favourite open-source applications, but it also ensures you have the latest version at all times. With Ubuntu Snap, even those new to Linux can rapidly get set up and running with their desired applications without having to search for compatibility issues or downloads every time. This guide looks at what Ubuntu Snap offers a user and how easy it is to get started!
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 765 for the week of December 4 – 10, 2022.
Imagine: The first time people see your desktop…
The Raspberry Pi SBCs have been in short supply for a couple of years, especially for individual buyers since Raspberry Pi Trading prioritizes commercial customers, but Eben Upton has just announced some good news with over 100,000 boards comprised of a mix of Raspberry Pi Zero W, Pi 3A+, and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB variants being made available for single-unit sales through approved resellers.
Eben however notes there’s more to do, and recommends buying from an approved reseller to get the boards at the recommended retail price (RRP), checking rpilocator to check for availability, and potentially considering switching to the Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W if the project allows it as there’s plenty of stock for the MCU boards. Industrial and enterprise customers who still have issues can get in touch with the company by email using business <at> raspberrypi.com. But based on some feedback I received, it does not necessarily help if your product ships in really low volumes (< 100 pieces).
Some teachers and students require editing their PDF to add annotations, and study notes.
Editing a PDF file is not an easy task, sometimes because of lack of a proper software. And it gets worse when you want to edit a badly encoded PDF file.
While there are many commercial apps that help to achieve this goal, they are not open-source and not for everyone. Therefore, we offer you our collection of free open-source PDF editors.
Evan Prodromou has been working on decentralized social media for nearly 15 years now, having created an open source Twitter alternative called Identi.ca in 2008. That service morphed a couple of times and eventually became pump.io — which was the genesis for ActivityPub, the core fediverse protocol of 2022.
In an interview with The New Stack, Prodromou talked about how ActivityPub evolved, the pros and cons of Mastodon, and where he sees opportunities for developers in the fediverse.
As I’ve covered in previous articles, it seems like the time for federated social software has finally arrived, in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s messy takeover of Twitter. So I began by asking Prodromou whether he feels a sense of validation in the current popularity of Mastodon.
In the interview, Prodromou, who credits Mastodon’s current success to its “very pragmatic and user-focused development team,” led by Eugen Rochko, explains the history of the Fediverse and shares his ideas about what it could ultimately become.
The Fintech Open Source Foundation has found banks and other financial organizations are no longer just using open-source software, they’re building and sharing it.
Next in our interview series, we have Jondale Stratton, a long time supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy. Jondale is the IT Manager for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and the Technical Director for his local hackerspace, Knox Makers. In his spare time he enjoys laser cutting, tractors, playing with his bunnies, and replacing people with shell scripts.
A new version of the Firefox web browser is available to download.
Mozilla Firefox 108 is the last release planned for this year. It features a small set of modest improvements designed to improve the usability, security, and stability of the browser when used access all major desktop platforms.
The “headline” new feature is WebMIDI API support. This allows Firefox (more specifically stuff run inside of Firefox) to connect and interact with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) devices attached to a PC. Not all MIDI devices are musical instruments so the feature has non-melodious applications too.
The final Firefox release of this year is here – Firefox 108, closing an eventful year of this free and open-source web browser from Mozilla.
Release highlights of Firefox 108 which brings WebMIDI API, new developer options for CSS and HTML + more updates.
I’m 36 years old, and I was born in the Gansu Province of China. I love in Beijing and I’m working as an Of Counsel in a leading law firm in Beijing. Some people may think that I’m a lawyer. No, I am not a lawyer – I am a professional accountant. My team work as local counsel on behalf of clients defending on Antidumping and Countervailing Duty investigations initiated by authorities (e.g., the U.S. Department of Commerce, the European Union etc) against companies and industries in China, and accountants play an important role in this field.
Although I am very busy at work every day, I love the internet, computers and programming. I can program using Python+Pandas and SAS, and tools such as these have greatly helped me in my daily data analysis work. I’m also a Linuxer. Many years ago I used Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, and even Gentoo, but now I stick to Fedora Workstation. Currently 99.9% of my daily work is done under Linux, including those mission-critical work we submitted to the U.S. DOC and EU authorities.
I also know some HTML, CSS and PHP, and I have a server running at home with a WordPress instance and a Nextcloud instance. The server also servers as a mirror of some of the Libreoffice bibisect repositories (it is very slow to download from the TDF server here in China, so I need to mirror them).
The popular Drupal open source content management system (CMS) reaches a significant milestone when version 10 is released on December 14. Personally, I think Drupal X sounds way cooler, but so far, my calls to name it that haven’t gotten much traction. I enlisted the help of my friend Aaron Judd of Northern Commerce to give us a sense of how cool Drupal X could look…
Drupal is an open source CMS and development framework. While other CMS options focus on simple long-form content (think blogs) or entirely free-form content (like in Wix or Squarespace), Drupal has made a name for itself in handling more complex content architectures, in multiple languages, with robust content governance. Drupal sites (like this site, Opensource.com!) benefit from a strong role-based access control (RBAC) system, unlimited custom roles and workflows, and a powerful and extensible media library.
The latest feature release Git v2.39.0 is now available at the
usual places. It is comprised of 483 non-merge commits since
v2.38.0, contributed by 86 people, 31 of which are new faces [*].
The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.39.0'
tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git
url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git
url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.38.0 are as follows.
Welcome to the Git development community!
Alexander Kanavin, Alexander Meshcheryakov, Andreas Hasenack,
Anh Le, Arthur Chan, Daniel Sonbolian, Debra Obondo, Diomidis
Spinellis, Erik Cervin Edin, Hank Leininger, herr.kaste, John
A. Leuenhagen, Julia Ramer, Kevin Backhouse, Kousik Sanagavarapu,
Lukáš Doktor, Martin Englund, M Hickford, Michael V. Scovetta,
Noah Betzen, Nsengiyumva Wilberforce, orygaw, Oscar Dominguez,
Ronan Pigott, Rubén Justo, Sotir Danailov, srz_zumix, Stefano
Rivera, Tim Jaacks, Vincent Bernat, and Vlad-Stefan Harbuz.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows.
Thanks for your continued support.
정재우, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alejandro R. Sedeño,
Alexander Shopov, Alex Henrie, Bagas Sanjaya, Derrick Stolee,
Đoàn Trần Công Danh, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Emir
SARI, Eric DeCosta, Eric Sunshine, Eric Wong, Fangyi Zhou,
Glen Choo, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Jan Pokorný, Jean-Noël Avila,
Jeff Hostetler, Jeff King, Jerry Zhang, Jiang Xin, Johannes
Altmanninger, Johannes Schindelin, John Cai, Jonathan Tan,
Jordi Mas, Julien Moutinho, Junio C Hamano, Kyle Meyer, Martin
Ågren, Martin von Zweigbergk, Matheus Tavares, Matthew John
Cheetham, Matthias Rüster, Michael J Gruber, Michael McClimon,
Patrick Steinhardt, Paul Smith, Peter Krefting, Philip Oakley,
Philippe Blain, Phillip Wood, Ralf Thielow, Randall S. Becker,
René Scharfe, Sergey Organov, Shaoxuan Yuan, SZEDER Gábor,
Taylor Blau, Torsten Bögershausen, Victoria Dye, Yi-Jyun Pan,
and 依云.
[*] We are counting not just the authorship contribution but issue
reporting, mentoring, helping and reviewing that are recorded in
the commit trailers.
Version 2.39.0 of the Git source-code management system is out.
Looking at this you can find several interesting things. For example the gray box showing the bleed area is composed of C, M and Y inks instead of only K, even though it was originally defined as a pure gray in RGB. This is how LittleCMS chose to convert it and it might or might not be what the original artist had in mind. High quality PDF generation is full of little quirks like this, blindly throwing numbers at color conversion functions is not enough to get good results, end users might need fairly precise control over low level operations.
Another thing to note is how the renderer has left “holes” for the book title in CMYK plates even though all color is in the gold ink plate. This avoids mixing inks but on the other hand requires someone to do proper trapping. That is its own can of worms, but fortunately most people can let the RIP handle it (I think).
Envious? If not, run zef install Envy and let’s start exploring virtual comp unit repositories.
Hold the phone! What are we doing? We’re going to explore using a module allowing us to have virtual module environments in our very favorite raku.
The past week Vadim Belman has worked on bringing the RakuAST branch up-to-date with the master branch, and renaming it to “main”, and making that the default Rakudo branch from now on.
This means that the next Rakudo release will have some form of RakuAST functionality enabled. It may have felt like a small step, but this will allow developers to try out these new features already, especially for those cases where Raku source code is built programmatically to be EVALled at runtime. So in a lot of ways, this is more of a very big step towards the next Raku Programming Language level. And kudos to all who brought the rakuast branch this far!
The 1.66.0 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for December 15. Release notes can be found here.
I explained encoding issues when exchanging files between different countries. But things were even worst since the encodings used by different manufacturers for the same country were not always the same. You can understand what I mean if you had to exchange files between Mac and PC in the 80s.
Is it a coincidence or not, the Unicode project started in 1987, led by people of Xerox and … Apple.
The goal of the project was to define a universal character set allowing to simultaneously use any character used in human writing within the same text. The original Unicode project was limited to 65536 different characters (each character being represented using 16 bits— that is two bytes per character). A number that has proven to be insufficient.
So, in 1996 Unicode has been extended to support up to 1 million different code points. Roughly speaking, a “code point” a number that identifies an entry in the Unicode character table. And one core job of the Unicode project is to make an inventory of all letters, symbols, punctuation marks and other characters that are (or were) used worldwide, and to assign to each of them a code point that will uniquely identify that character.
In Boston, there are reports of people pronouncing the letter “r.” Down in Tennessee, people are noticing a lack of a Southern drawl. And Texans have long worried about losing their distinctive twang.
The built-in H.264/H.265 video encoder and decoder enables quick image recognition and video analytics tasks with various sensors, and software development is done with the Blaize NetDeploy and Picasso software development kit supporting TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe2, and ONNX machine learning frameworks with the application layer relying on C/C++ and OpenVX computer vision API.
AAEON has presented a new entry in the UP Xtreme series. Building on the UP Xtreme i11, the UP Xtreme i12 supports Intel Alder Lake-P processors, LPDDR5 RAM and Windows 10 or Ubuntu 22.04. At present, the UP Xtreme i12 comes with a choice of four Intel Alder Lake processors.
Research on Reolink’s RLC-520A smart motion detection camera has turned up an authenticated command injection vulnerability. Exploiting this vulnerability with an injected system command can render the device useless.
Security-savvy Linux sysadmins understand that it’s best to assume that their systems are breached. Threats targeting Linux systems are becoming increasingly pervasive due to the growing popularity of the open-source OS. Linux malware reached an all-time high in the first half of 2022.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.16.0 and Istio 1.16.1.
This release includes security fixes in Go 1.19.4 (released 2022-12-06) for the os and net/http packages.
Fortinet has released security updates to address a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2022-42475) in FortiOS. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. This vulnerability has been exploited in the wild.
The SAFE Connections Act becomes law.
I’m wondering if anyone in the Pub has had experience with singleplayer tabletop RPGs?
I think Ironsworn is a good starting point for this.
But trying on a GM hat and a player hat at the same time is really hard.
I’ve been reading about the Finger protocol over the weekend, and I’m quite intrigued by it.
For how much I love the small Internet, I don’t know very much about it beyond Gemini and some Gopher. It’s always fascinating to me when I read about some old protocol that’s been repurposed in to a robust communication system and see a simple but vibrant community build around them, especially when the protocol already exists but was simply forgotten. I’m reminded of urban explorers or researchers digging into the archives of an ancient library: the world of possibilities is already there, just waiting to be discovered.
In slightly less angst-riddled but also
sort of rambling thoughts, too loose for
the actual gemlog.
So I’ve been thinking about how, well, I
think most people are getting the
conversation around large machine
learning models (LLMs, CLIP-likes, &c.)
kinda wrong.
Like there’s several pieces that I think
need to get disentangled.
The first thing is that building
for-profit systems by taking things that
people have shared in good faith on the
internet is kind of gross
extractionism.
My recent postings on using HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) for my sites reminded one of my readers, White_Rabbit, to send in a link to Discourse on HTTPS [1]. The language may be salty, but it does align with my feelings towards HTTPS—namely, I don’t really need it. But as I stated, Google will any day now start with the Big Scary Error Messages on non-secure sites, followed by (possibly—I don’t know this for a fact, but a gut feeling) no longer allowing non-secure requests at all. And with Google’s Chrome having a ridiculous market share, that’s something to be concerned about.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Video download link | md5sum 998661b08883fcceda48a018ad44c466
Sirius Treats Some Tech Staff Like Peasants
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Shortchanging technical staff seems like common practice, but some companies push that very far; As noted last night in this meme, Sirius ‘Open Source’ really does not like this series; but it was forewarned for years already about several issues (before trying to witch-hunt the messenger), including the rights of staff and the standards of pay
THE early parts of this series explained how things were in 2011 and prior to that year. Sirius had generously (or for self-promotional purposes) given money to KDE and to the FSF. It also recruited high-calibre staff which certainly received a decent salary.
When it comes to the NOC, things were different. As we shall see and show later, NOC staff was treated as disposable; no wonder staff turnover was very high there (for a position occupied by 4 or 5 people we’ve had about 20 members of staff already). When recruitment went on the official (but internal) wiki of the company compared NOC staff to “monkeys”. For the same number of hours covered I could easily earn 5 times as much in another company, so surely I’m no “monkey”… my solace was, once upon a time we did in fact support Free/libre software. It felt like an ethical job.
“When recruitment went on the official (but internal) wiki of the company compared NOC staff to “monkeys”.”The salary I received in 2011 was higher (per hour) than at the time I left, in spite of being more than 11.5 years apart. How did this happen? How many employers fail or refuse to keep up with inflation (at the very least)? Set aside promotion ladders that typically come with increments in base pay.
Either way, the company really does not want me to talk about this. Last night it sent me a letter after more than 10 days of complete silence. What did the letter say? It is described in the video above, but the impression one gets is that it’s a low-grade censorship attempt. It almost looks like the company “Sirius Open Source” is trying to ‘bribe’ us, basically saying something like (not actual quote), remove all those articles and we’ll pay you for some holidays (that we never took). Well, we’re not sellouts, we won’t stop, and the Sirius ‘UK’ CEO (pretending to be based in two continents) does not seem to grasp what he’s dealing with. Paying (shall we say ‘bribing’?) while making veiled threats is legally bad and makes the company look even worse. Better to just say nothing than send frivolous letters. For sure we’ll return to this at the end of the series, probably some time next month. █
Network Operations Center by Alan Levine the from United States. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
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| CID | Description | Object type |
QmfSqNa6PZfaYMaz7bcfxY1xJ6k86Mt7Hun6oBpihwH4Ce |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmcJ3uM4dLF9Eo1BDekEyAw36e8mgYdz5uasSvWYjnuxNd |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmRZ48Fh3MjGmYZY3XXoAmbuBqXschnn1WFeVPQ5bLpyWt |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmbWsrcm6HPr5hwM1qcF1QhsSymcV6H36bhcDjcADq9CPL |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmfYtT2ro5uJHM9UgbFqJnhWMbTGC5J3BxaD1DAUbX86qq |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmXrMZxzbLDfRc64oNeLPtV7XdHfqkxcL6rc2ikc4M3Kz3 |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmevcYhip6Wanu4WBuPzssyi9aUmbDmWFmTbRRoEmWXuZ2 |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmaCanugR3Hf7TqHswQYL4dMYC1eMEBqSGFFXpbX6Lx4k1 |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmdRJwsbsXgydBbvrvinQ8ybSqJWBJpS39D3VBcY5DSd3G
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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