12.25.22

2022: GNU/Linux Up, Microsoft and the World Wide Web Down

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 9:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

More Microsoft layoffs expected soon

This is the ongoing trend this past year: Web waning
This is the ongoing trend this past year: Web waning

Microsoft does not interest Web developers
Microsoft does not interest Web developers

In fact, sites are moving away from Microsoft

In fact, sites are moving away from Microsoft

In relative terms, Apple loses its appeal among developers

In relative terms, Apple loses its appeal among developers

Polls show a positive trend

Polls show a positive trend

Summary: According to Netcraft and according to Stack Overflow, there are many reasons to be satisfied about this past year

Links 25/12/2022: Kodi 19.5 and Linux 6.2 RC1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Web Pro NewsStack Overflow: Linux Surpasses macOS Among Developers

      Linux has reached a major milestone, surpassing macOS among developers for both personal and professional use.

      Linux has long been the third most popular operating system (OS), after Windows and macOS. Stack Overflow has released its 2022 Developer Survey, and it’s good news for Linux fans.

      According to the Developer Survey, Linux use has passed macOS by a significant margin. Linux is used by 40.23% of developers as their primary OS for personal use, while 39.89% use it as their primary OS for professional use. In contrast, macOS is used as a primary OS for personal use 31.07% of developers and for professional use by 32.97%.

    • SlashdotStack Overflow Survey Finds More Developers Now Use Linux Than MacOS – Slashdot

      Justin Garrison works at Amazon Web Services on the Kubernetes team (and was senior systems engineer on several animated films).

    • Linux Made SimpleLinux Weekly Roundup #215

      We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with Manjaro Linux 22.0, Clear Linux 37860, Bluestar Linux 6.1.1, ArcoLinux 23.01.03, Q4OS 4.11, Linux Mint 21.1, EndeavourOS 22.12, and BunsenLabs Beryllium.

    • Kubernetes

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux mailing listsLinux 6.2-rc1
        So it's Christmas Day here, but it's also Sunday afternoon two weeks
        after the 6.2 merge window opened. So holidays or not, the kernel
        development show must go on.
        
        Thanks to a lot of people sending their pull requests early, I got
        much of the merge window work done before the holidays started in
        earnest, and mostly before my pre-xmas travel. So despite flight
        delays, missed connections, and the resulting airport hotel
        excursions, the merge window mostly went smoothly, and there was no
        reason to delay rc1.
        
        That said, realistically I expect most people to be on vacation for at
        least another week, so I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with a
        delayed final release due to the season. But it's too early to worry
        about that yet, we'll just have to see how it goes.
        
        Also, 6.2 looks like it's a bigger release (certainly bigger than 6.1
        was). The summary below is, as usual, just my merge log: we've got
        about 13.5k commits from ~1800 people in total in this merge window,
        which is actually not that far off the total size of the whole 6.1
        release. But let's hope that despite the size, and despite the likely
        slow start of the post-merge-window calming down period, we'll have a
        smooth release.
        
        And in the meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all
        (replace as appropriate with whatever holiday, if any, you are
        celebrating).
        
                           Linus
        
    • Graphics Stack

      • WCCF TechAMD Focuses On Various Driver Improvements For RDNA 3 GPUs Running In Linux

        AMD left Linux users without great graphics support when they released the new Radeon RX 7900 GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture. The graphics kernel was old and did not prepare users with newer firmware during launch. Now, engineers are beginning to change their focus towards the RDNA 3 support with a newly published firmware update, allowing users to rely on the frame buffer from the firmware when the AMDGPU driver crashes.

    • Applications

      • Make Use OfWhat Are the Best Disc Burning Apps for Linux

        CDs and DVDs might seem to be a relic of the past with most people choosing to stream music and video from remote servers to their entertainment devices, and storing large collections of files on USB flash drives of up to a terabyte.

        But even though few laptops come with an optical drive these days, it’s occasionally useful to burn a CD or DVD for use in your car, or for entertainment in an area where network connectivity is spotty. Here are the best tools for CD burning on Linux.

      • Ubuntu HandbookKodi 19.5 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 | 22.10 | UbuntuHandbook

        Happy Christmas and happy new year to my dear readers! Kodi, the popular home media center software, release 19.5 version to celebrate the holidays.

        It’s the last point release for the 19.x release, while Kodi 20 now is in RC2 stage. And, this release mainly include bug-fixes and improvements backport from dev release.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • VideoHow to install MEGASync on KDE Neon – Invidious
      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install MetaTrader 5 with the Traders Global Group Incorporated Broker on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 5 with the Traders Global Group Incorporated Broker on a Chromebook.

      • AddictiveTipsHow to convert images on a Chromebook

        Do you have some image files you need to convert to your Chromebook? Can’t find any Chrome OS apps that do the job? Good news! Since Chrome OS supports Linux, it is possible to install the Converter tool. An easy-to-use tool for converting image formats. Here’s how to get it working on your system.

      • LinuxOpSysHow to Make Ubuntu Terminal Look like Kali Linux

        Here learn how to make your Ubuntu terminal look like Kali Linux. For this install zsh shell, zshell plugins and some additional tools.

      • Why won’t crusty old host recognize my shiny new terminal emulator?

        Spiffy new terminal emulators seem to come with their own terminfo definitions. Venerable hosts that I ssh into tend not to know about those. kitty comes with a thing to transfer that definition, but it breaks if the remote host is running tcsh (don’t ask). Similary the one liner for alacritty on the arch wiki seems to assume the remote shell is bash. Forthwith, a dumb shell script that works to send the terminfo of the current terminal emulator to the remote host.

      • Make Use OfHow to Find Your MAC Address on Linux

        If you are administering a Linux system, there will likely be times when you need to know your system’s MAC address. You may need this information for several reasons. Perhaps you want DHCP to assign you a fixed IP address. For this, you will need the MAC address so that you can add the IP and MAC address mapping to your DHCP server configurations.

        You may also need this information for MAC address filtering to allow or block certain devices on your network. Or maybe you want to set up Wake-on-LAN. Whatever the reason is, here are a few different ways to find the MAC address on your Linux system.

      • How to Install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu [Ed: This is proprietary Microsoft spyware; better never to install such a thing]
      • Make Use OfReducing Docker Image Sizes With Alpine Linux Images

        The size of a Docker image affects its runtime and the performance of your application. Small containers run faster, are easier to manage, and take up less disk space.

        There are several ways to reduce the size of Docker images. In particular, you can use Alpine Linux images which are much smaller than the rest.

      • UNIX CopInstall Samba Server with Selinux and Firewalld Enabled

        Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to Install Samba Server with Selinux and Firewalld Enabled. For this post, we will use Rocky Linux 9, but actually the algorithm followed should work for other distributions, of course making the necessary modifications.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Perl / Raku

        • Russ AllberyEagle’s Path: podlators 5.01 (2022-12-25)

          podlators is the Perl distribution providing Pod::Man and Pod::Text, along with related modules and supporting scripts.

          The primary change in this release is the addition of configurable guesswork for Pod::Text, paralleling Pod::Man. I had forgotten that Pod::Text also had complex heuristics for whether to quote C<> text that have the same Perl-specific properties as Pod::Man. This is now configurable via a guesswork option, the same as in Pod::Man, although the only type of guesswork supported is quoting. I also updated the default regexes, which include some fixes from Pod::Man.

        • Russ AllberyEagle’s Path: rra-c-util 10.3 (2022-12-25)

          This is a minor feature and bug fix release of my collection of utilities and tests intended for copying into other packages I maintain.

          The new feature is an additional Perl test using Test::Kwalitee to check a few more things about the Perl packaging, and a MANIFEST.SKIP file that is suitable for copying as-is into most Perl packages.

        • RakulangRaku Advent Calendar: The 2022 Raku Advent Posts
      • Python

        • TecAdminHow to Call a function in Python – TecAdmin

          In Python, a function is a block of code that performs a specific task and can be called from other parts of your program. Functions are an essential part of Python programming, and they allow you to write reusable, modular code that is easier to maintain and debug.

          In this tutorial, we will learn how to call a function in Python. We will discuss the different ways you can pass arguments to a function, and we will also look at some common mistakes to avoid when calling functions in Python.

        • TecAdminCurrent Date and Time in Python: In-Depth Tutorial – TecAdmin

          Getting the current date and time is a common task in Python programming. There are several ways to do this, depending on your needs and the libraries you have available. In this article, we will explore some of the most common methods for getting the current date and time in Python, including using the built-in datetime module, the time module, and the dateutil module. We will also discuss how to format the date and time values as strings, and how to convert between timezones. Whether you are working with timestamps, scheduling tasks, or just want to display the current date and time in your Python program, this article will provide you with the tools you need.

      • Rust

        • Amos WengerDay 15 (Advent of Code 2022)

          The day 15 puzzle falls into the “math puzzle” territory more than “let’s learn something new about Rust”, but since several folks asked if I was going to continue… let’s continue.

  • Leftovers

    • Matt RickardChristmas 2022

      Over the next few days, I’ll be reflecting on the predictions I had for 2022 and the process I used to get there (the process is more important to me than the outcome). I’ll reflect on some of the things that I did, and some of the things I wished I had done. And finally, I’ll try to put out some thoughts on what I think 2023 might hold, for both me and the the broader market. And it wouldn’t be an end-of-the-year reflection without thinking about some of my posts that resonated the most (and the ones that resonated the least) and why.

    • Security

      • Help Net SecurityOpen-source tool for security engineers helps automate access reviews – Help Net Security

        ConductorOne open-sourced their identity connectors in a project called Baton, available on GitHub. Each connector gives developers the ability to extract, normalize, and interact with workforce identity data such as user accounts, permissions, roles, groups, resources, and more, so they can audit infrastructure access, start to automate user access reviews, and enforce the principle of least privilege.

      • Linux Kernel Security Bug Allows Remote Code Execution for Authenticated Remote Users – Slashdot [Ed: The severity of 10 is no longer 10 for the "Linux" flaw; it was SMB related and was downgraded later, days after all the drama]

        This new program, which was introduced to the kernel in 2021, was developed by Samsung. Its point was to deliver speedy SMB3 file-serving performance….

        Any distro using the Linux kernel 5.15 or above is potentially vulnerable. This includes Ubuntu 22.04, and its descendants; Deepin Linux 20.3; and Slackware 15.

      • Security AffairsCritical Linux Kernel flaw affects SMB servers with ksmbd enabled [Ed: No, the severity is not 10!]

        Experts warn of a critical Linux Kernel vulnerability (CVSS score of 10) impacting SMB servers that can lead to remote code execution.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • the concept of fragments log, taken from Brandur

        This post might be cross-linked from the gemlog, but it’s not gemlog. Wait nevermind

        It will be the other way now.

      • cleaning

        I’ll be doing some general cleaning by the end of this week and that includes this gemlog. changing the header/footer and maybe adding something other than email for getting in touch.

      • Evolving harn: C + Forth polyglot system

        I presented my project as an interactive linker for a harnessed C compiler. And it true: I’ve implemented the infrastructure for extracting compiled C functions and data out of ELF object files, and interning them into the system, including being able to replace old versions with new ones. I set up a basic way to track ingested code as symbols, which are kept in packages, kind of like Lisp. The whole thing lives as an image which can be saved and restored. Oh, and I made provisions for keeping the sources of everything ingested.

      • Xmas

        • Merry Christmas

          No matter what holiday(s) you celebrate this season, I hope it brings you an opportunity to be with people you care about and share in your joys and gratitude.

        • it’s 25th, how has December been

          One has been in my family and the other I bought because the former had keyboard keys not working. The keyboard issues are something that historically one could sometimes fix by twisting the whole case of the laptop. Dad suggests it may be fixable by remounting the keyboard.
          That other one I bought had the keyboard work well but the Touch Stick in it has issues about going all the way upper-right or all the way lower-left, unless pressed hard in the opposite direction. I had to install the pointing device driver and in it I can disable Touch Stick separately from Touch Pad.
          I expected the former one to have a broken HDD and the other one to lack a HDD. But they turned out to both have HDDs. The former one had Ubuntu 6.XX with the familiar login prompt sound and the other one had an empty installation of Windows 98 that I subsequently reinstalled, also having a sticker for Windows.. 95, which seems a bit odd.


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

When Dishonesty Becomes Mandatory and Cover-up Obligatory

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 6957f7427183bba6699ceab72cb318a0
No Lies Are Acceptable
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Is covering up and lying “a must”? Welcome to the ‘new’ Sirius, where lies become the norm

THE terrible shape that Sirius ‘Open Source’ has found itself in is a downward spiral caused largely by lying management; a bloated company with almost as many “managers” as workers (who actually do the job) is compelling people to not be honest with clients and to make matters worse the CEO starts lying to staff and also about staff. This is the downfall of Sirius; the true story of the company needs to be told and future victims ought to be cautioned upfront.

To be very clear, the company has a history dodging liability and facing litigation. One former employee or a pair of them sued the company. One of them asked me if the company was still “busy”, I can only assume because the two managers (then defendants) claimed to be broke and therefore unable to pay upon losing the case, which was costly (time and money). Generally speaking, here we are again and the company creates more shells, hoping to shuffle people between one shell and the next in order to ‘cancel’ the debt (insolvency) and start afresh. But with what name? And at what point will associates too come to grips with the sort of eel they’re dealing with?

We’ll give more concrete examples next month.

Twitter’s Potential Change on Suicide Prevention Policy Distracts From the Suicide of Twitter Itself

Posted in Deception at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 7f266be34667cd97018bec46386fc4be
People See What Twitter Really Is
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Twitter is being scrutinised by the media but usually for the wrong reasons or weak reasons that help belittle the need to escape Twitter; maybe the media has a conflict of interest because it made itself somewhat reliant on Twitter

THE media seems to be missing the biggest scandals about Twitter, maybe by intention. There’s this misguided idea that only Social Control Media that’s controlled by China can be sinister and there’s almost no discussion about controllers of Twitter; aside from Elon Musk, there’s the political influence of ‘Gulf States’ and Saudi Arabia — a subject that is well documented but seldom explored in the media. It’s not even new! It has gone on for over a decade already.

In our Daily Links we regularly give many examples of people fleeing Twitter, not due to the supposedly controversial policy changes but even worse aspects, such as time-wasting, manipulation, and now even privacy issues. In the video above I explain that, contrary to how media frames it, the main issue should not be “engagement” but more crucial aspects. Maybe the media is just accidentally dodging the real or the biggest problems with Twitter. Or maybe it’s intentional.

[Meme] When Sirius ‘Open Source’ Can No Longer Pay the Staff, So It Starts Fabricating Timelines

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

When the CEO was up all night for several weeks stalking staff instead of doing his real job

Are you once again stalking staff outside work to defame the staff? No, I need to find some false pretext to justify this stalking of mine

Summary: As we've just noted, Sirius ‘Open Source’ management is framing people by stalking them, muck-raking, and then falsely accusing them (lying basically); it’s the classic authoritarian playbook

Short-Term CEO at Sirius ‘Open Source’ Pretending to be Private Investigator, Falsely Accusing People in a Vindictive Fashion

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Not sure if CEO or a cop

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ compared Network Operation Centre (NOC) staff to “monkeys”; the company’s management refuses to talk to staff, resorts to pathological lying, and hopes to somehow maintain the illusion that it is still behaving “professionally”

THE series is getting longer as we go on and on. We’re continuing to accumulate and sometimes receive more explosive revelations, showing that the management of Sirius is not only lying to clients and to staff. It is a lot worse. Sirius makes stuff up. It’s also misrepresenting clients, attributing to them something they never said.

“We’re continuing to accumulate and sometimes receive more explosive revelations, showing that the management of Sirius is not only lying to clients and to staff.”As we shall show next month, the so-called ‘CEO’ (a relatively new arrival) has the audacity to act like a Private Investigator when in fact fabricating and distorting allegations. There may be legal ramifications here, but the company started attacking the staff just two days after it had changed its official registered address to the address of the accountancy, which means it’s hard to serve legal papers to Sirius (i.e. suing the company).

Below we reproduce text from the report sent to the management 4 weeks ago (further context will be provided later as another major scandal unfolds):


Those who accuse Roy, and moreover lump his wife into it (more on that later), conveniently forget all the many positive things Roy wrote about Sirius in Techrights even years before working for the company. This is what’s shown publicly in blog posts, not some assorted chat gossip with a ton of typos.

None of this is about defamation (no falsehoods contained therein), it’s all about ego. It’s about egotistic people, whose names are never even mentioned, not knowing how to cope with constructive and factual criticism. As noted before, the company is deaf to its own staff. Technical people are treated as clueless. This is a recipe for corporate failure.

To be very clear, the company’s clients are never named in relation to the company but in relation to news (they are famous people, public figures). To claims that people with audience of millions cannot be even mentioned in Techrights is outright crazy.

In IRC, the main channel talks about technology, but the company instead cherry-picks some side channel that was deprecated back in 2010. In it, some real issues are discussed, potential misconduct by the company at many levels, even gross misconduct by the company and lies devised to cover up failure to comply with contracts (possible legal breach and actionable). But no person or company gets mentioned, except maybe by accident (very rarely). Roy insists that he did not name people or the companies; the PDFs supplied to Roy support that, as he was always careful. Roy is entitled to an opinion, especially outside work. He used reasonably polite wording.

To be very clear, the job in the overnight Support Team involves about 1 hour of practical work on actual servers (true for NOC colleagues; there’s nothing practical to do aside from response to incidents), the rest of time being devoted to tickets, monitoring, response, and discussion with colleagues. Roy did all of these things very well. Roy never posted to social media while on shift. Ever. That much is very evident.

To be very clear, the company defamed the NOC (Support Team) staff, comparing it to “monkeys” in the official wiki (before hiring those “monkeys”). Staff should not be compared to animals; it’s not fair to animals and it’s not fair to people. This is an example of unprofessional behaviour inside the company. Now the management is running after us “monkeys”. To wit, the company name-called Roy even in company E-mail (calling him “paranoid” in writing and over the telephone). This culture issue isn’t limited to staff. For instance, the company says bad things in Slack, worse than in IRC, and with identifiable names included (e.g. one manager of a client being called “an arse” by the Sirius founder). This is really bad, this is unprofessional, and this gets transmitted to a surveillance company (Salesforce) in another continent, working for clients like ICE. When one’s own chief (and founder) is name-calling the clients by their real name in a privacy-infringing tool, visible to all staff, why are high standards expected from low-paid, exploited, “milked” staff like Roy and Rianne, who already endured unwarranted abuse years prior?

It should be noted that low-quality “gossip” (two-person chat) — with quantity to make up for the low quality — don’t add up to a serious case of disciplinary action, especially against someone who never even spoke in that IRC network, never mind the channel.

Links 25/12/2022: Ruby 3.2.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux LinksSeason’s Greetings from LinuxLinks – LinuxLinks

      Everyone involved at LinuxLinks wishes you all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year. 2022 has been another immensely challenging year for the world (particularly Ukraine). Let’s hope that peace prevails soon.

      We have many exciting projects on the horizon in the new year. For example, we plan to massively ramp up the number of articles about hardware running on Linux. But rest assured, we will continue to focus on recommending the best free and open source software. After all, that’s our raison d’etre.

    • Server

      • IEEEEurope Gets an Exascale Supercomputer – IEEE Spectrum [Ed: It runs GNU/Linux]

        FRONTIER, THE WORLD’S FIRST exascale supercomputer—or at least the first one that’s been made public—is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe’s getting up to speed. Through a €500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in Germany.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • University of TorontoHandling numbers in Vim when they have a dash in front of them

        I wanted to copy and duplicate in order to make ‘machine-2′, ‘machine-3′, and so on entries, so I copied that first line and hit Ctrl-A to increment the machine number, which didn’t work because Vim, by default, saw the ‘-1′ as a negative number and duly incremented it to ’0′. Visually selecting the number before using Ctrl-A isn’t really a great solution for this particular case, because I want to do it repeatedly to create different numbers; at best I’d be repeatedly selecting shorter and shorter columns and incrementing them by one.

      • BSDlyCan Your Spam-eater Manage to Catch Seventy-one Percent Like This Other Service?

        Measuring the effect of what you do is important. Equally important is knowing what is the measure of your actions.

        A question turned up on IRC that had me thinking.

        Do you have a percentage of the spam traffic you catch on your MXes? The reason I ask is I lust learned that fastmail.com claim they catch 71% of all incoming spam. Also a rate of false positives would be nice to have, but that’s likely harder to measure.

      • University of TorontoThe systemd journal is primarily time-based

        However, on deeper examination I realized that this goes deeper than just what ‘journalctl -b-1′ will report is the boot before the current one (or even earlier boots). If your system boots with a bad time in the past and then corrects the time, ‘journalctl -r’ will stop abruptly at a log line where the time began to be stepped to the correct value, like this (in reversed order): [...]

      • EarthlyComprehensive guide to Defining Application Routing in Kubernetes Cluster – Earthly Blog

        When you’re getting started with Kubernetes, setting up the proper routing can be a challenge. There are a lot of moving parts and understanding how IP address get assigned and what they point to can be confusing at first.

        In this article, you will learn what an Ingress is, and its usefulness when routing in Kubernetes. You will also be introduced to Service and how they differ from an Ingress. We’ll start by covering these two essential pieces of Kubernetes before doing a deeper dive into how you can use them to set up effective routing.

        For this article, you will use an NGINX image on Docker Hub. You will learn how to make deployments and create services for the NGINX image and use Ingress to forward requests from a domain name to your application. You will also learn how to use Ingress to configure multiple paths for a particular domain and also run your application on HTTPS.

      • EarthlyHow to Work with YAML in Python – Earthly Blog

        If you’ve ever worked with Docker or Kubernetes, you’ll have likely used YAML files. From configuring an application’s services in Docker to defining Kubernetes objects like pods, services, and more—YAML is used for them all.

        If you’d like to learn how to work with YAML in the Python programming language, then this tutorial is for you. This tutorial will cover creating, writing, reading, and modifying YAML in Python.

    • Games

      • Björn WärmedalTea Tea Deluxe Version 1.2.0

        Last night I published an update to my OpenTTD NewGRF called Tea Tea Deluxe. Version 1.2.0, downloadable from the “Check online content” menu in the game.

        [...]

        I’ve played the game with these changes for a couple of weeks now, and the improvements are very enjoyable. The production rates for the farms is now a little bit higher. Increased from 8 to 12, compared to 15 for coal, which actually makes tea leaves somewhat competitive. They start out at a higher value than coal but drop off radically, whereas coal loses value very slowly. For short distances tea leaves are more valuable, for medium to long distances coal is the winner. For the longest distances, when value of any cargo has dropped to the lowest point at 12% of its maximum, tea leaves are quite superior. I didn’t intend to make it this way, but it’s how it turned out.

      • thibault’s Blog • Lichess – Scala 3 • lichess.org

        Lichess gets a big upgrade. It doesn’t go as planned.
        Lichess is a 100% open-source/free-software chess website, used by millions of players to play billions of games.

      • Boiling SteamBest Steam Deck Games Released in the Past Week – 2022-12-25 Christmas Edition – Boiling Steam

        Merry Christmas! Between 2022-12-18 and 2022-12-25 there were 122 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use many different features to get to that Best Steam Deck Games list, such as popularity, ratings, and more.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Glyn Moodyopen…: Where to find me on Mastodon

      Since Elon Musk is trying to ban any mention of Mastodon on Twitter, I thought I’d just make it as easy as possible to find me on the former. I’m at

      https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody

      I look forward to meeting lots of you there, where we can discuss the continuing and inevitable decline of Twitter under Musk.

    • Xe’s BlogMore counter.social “private account” bypasses – Xe Iaso

      counter.social is a social network built on the open source software Mastodon. For various reasons, counter.social is one of the few Mastodon servers that does not federate to the larger community, and as such has implemented unique account security features that allows it to differentiate itself from other Mastodon instances. It also has an embedded stream of CNN and other news sites.

    • Programming/Development

      • Ruby 3.2.0 Released

        We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.2.0. Ruby 3.2 adds many features and performance improvements.

        WASI based WebAssembly support

        This is an initial port of WASI based WebAssembly support. This enables a CRuby binary to be available on a Web browser, a Serverless Edge environment, or other kinds of WebAssembly/WASI embedders. Currently this port passes basic and bootstrap test suites not using the Thread API.

      • OpenSource.com5 Raspberry Pi tutorials to inspire DIY creativity | Opensource.com

        ‘Tis the season for holiday pies and tasty treats, so why not talk about every open source enthusiast’s favorite hardware delight: the Raspberry Pi. This year, Opensource.com contributors put in work on how to use the Pi for all sorts of cool projects and use cases. (Did you see the one about creating your own holiday light display with ping pong balls?) From business solutions to just-for-fun projects, these articles will show you a brand new way to use the Raspberry Pi in your life.

      • Data Science TutorialsOLS Regression in R – Data Science Tutorials

        OLS Regression in R, OLS Regression is a statistical method used for modeling in the R programming language.

        Additionally, the examination of linear relationships between a response variable is done using it.

        A straight line can be used to represent the relationship between the two variables if it is linear.

      • Designing Accessible Research with R/Shiny – Data For Good, R programming

        R/Shiny is quite versatile from a developer’s perspective, and at Appsilon, we try our best to stretch those limits even further. That is what we did for the Future Forests application. Which, at first glance, doesn’t even appear to be an R/Shiny application.

      • Data Science TutorialsCredit Card Fraud Detection in R – Data Science Tutorials

        Credit Card Fraud Detection in R, We will learn how to perform credit card detection in this R project.

        We’ll go over a variety of methods, including Gradient Boosting Classifiers, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, and Artificial Neural Networks.

        We will use the Card Transactions dataset, which includes both fraudulent and legitimate transactions, to carry out credit card fraud detection.

      • Adafruita rp2040 eInk specialty driver board

        “this board is sorta like a trinkey (https://www.adafruit.com/?q=trinkey&sort=BestMatch) – it’s a dedicated RP2040 board just for driving eInk displays with common 24-pin connectors. could be handy for folks who want to make USB-powered eInk displays without needing a feather + eInk wing (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4224) there’s a STEMMA QT port for expansion in case one wants to add GPIO or sensors. to be honest, i’m mostly designing this for myself to make it easier for me to quickly test and evaluate eInk panel samples in Arduino or CircuitPython!”

      • Matt RickardSoftware Rewrites

        The other day, Elon Musk and George Hotz mentioned that Twitter would probably need a full rewrite to get to the place where it could reliably and quickly ship new features. There was a lot of pushback from the infrastructure side – many developers who either maintain legacy software for a living or were the ones who originally wrote it. Two laws often cited –

        Chesteron’s Fence – Don’t take down a fence until you know why it was put up.

        Gall’s Law – you cannot design a complex system from scratch

      • Jim NielsenNotes from Ryan Dahl on Shop Talk Show

        Deno is trying to alleviate the problem of choice in today’s JavaScript. With features like a standard library, a native test runner, and built-in typescript support, Deno is trying to combat the problem of too much unnecessary choice that runs rampant in the world of Node.

      • Bert HubertAlways use feenableexcept() when doing floating point math

        A small post that documents something that almost no one appears to know. And if you do anything with floating point, you do need to know.

      • SparkFun ElectronicsLoRa: Field Testing Antennas – News – SparkFun Electronics

        It turned out to be quite and adventure (a bear even made an appearance!) to reach the outer limits of testing the range of a LoRa signal. Any of the configurations mentioned in this blog would work with the following tutorial if you’d like to play along.

      • SparkFun ElectronicsSparkFun Vacation – News – SparkFun Electronics

        This is a bit of a different week for us because we are in the middle of Hanukkah and the Christmas Holiday is this Sunday, so we are off spending time with our families and enjoying some us time. We don’t have any new products this Friday, but we’d like to remind you of our closures this weekend and next as well as take a look at some of our more recent new products that you may have missed!

      • EarthlyMonorepo Build Tools – Earthly Blog

        In the software development world, there is a growing trend of using monorepos to manage codebases. A monorepo is a single repository that contains the code of many interrelated but distinct projects. While monorepos have their benefits, they also come with their own set of challenges. And guess what? The challenges are primarily around tooling. In this article, I’ll compare some of the most popular monorepo build tools on the market and see how they stack up against each other.

        [...]

        Things get more complex when code repositories contain multiple partially-independent pieces of software. For example, if a repo has tens or hundreds of services, many services likely depend on each other. Still, changes to one do not necessarily mean all others need to be retested, rebuilt, or redeployed. This is why monorepos build tools, to do a good job, need to track project dependencies.

      • R-Ladies Cologne – Our first year in the books!

        Thank you all for a fantastic year at R-Ladies Cologne!

        We had a series of great events which gave us the chance to meet so many wonderful and kindhearted people across the globe. This is one thing that always makes me so thankful to be part of the community

      • Export in Bananen in Tonnen von 1994-2005 (Banana exports in tonnes from 1994-2005) – Pachá
      • 2022-04 Constructive Solid Geometry and Function Representation in R | Stat Tech

        The HyperFun Project provides a language and interpreter for describing 3D scenes using Function Representation and Constructive Solid Geometry. This document describes the R package ‘hyperfun’, which provides an interface to the HyperFun language and interpreter.

      • {drawCell} – R package and Shiny app for drawing cell structures – R programming

        Are you a life sciences educator looking to engage students with interactivity or a student needing to draw and label cells? Are you a researcher looking to offload the tedium of data visualization? There’s an R solution for you: drawCell! This tool provides a convenient, engaging solution for educators and researchers alike.

      • Barry Kaulergcc problem in Kirkstone-series

        First bootup of EasyOS Kirkstone-series, looking good.

  • Leftovers

    • Science

      • Berkeley LabESnet Launches Next-Generation Network to Enhance Collaborative Science – News Center

        Today, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) formally unveiled ESnet6, the newest generation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) high-performance network dedicated to science. The hybrid in person and virtual event was held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and live-streamed on streaming.lbl.gov.
        “ESnet6 represents a transformational change in the way networks are built for research, with improved capacity, resiliency, and flexibility,” said ESnet Executive Director Inder Monga. “Together, these new capabilities make it faster, easier, and more efficient for scientists around the world to conduct and collaborate on ground-breaking research.”
        For more than 35 years, ESnet – headquartered at Berkeley Lab – has served as the “data circulatory system” for the DOE, connecting all of its national laboratories, tens of thousands of DOE-funded researchers, and DOE’s premier scientific instruments and supercomputing centers. This interconnected system enables data to move quickly between sites and collaborators, accelerating time to discovery.

      • IEEEAmazing Robotic Sculpture Balances Itself on One Corner – IEEE Spectrum

        The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure’s center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard!

        Created by Raffaello D’Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

      • HKU Mechanical Engineering team develops new microscale 3D printer for multi-level anticounterfeiting labels – All News – Media – HKU

        Counterfeiting threatens the global economy and security. According to the report issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2020, the value of global counterfeit and pirated products is estimated between US$ 1.7 and 4.5 trillion a year. Despite enormous efforts, conventional anticounterfeiting approaches such as QR codes can be easily fabricated due to limited data encryption capacity on a planar space. How can we increase the encryption density in a limited space?
        The team led by Dr Ji Tae Kim from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has developed a high-precision 3D printing method that can produce new polarisation-encoded 3D anticounterfeiting labels. This new 3D label can encrypt more digital information than a traditional 2D label. The work has been published in Nano Letters in an article entitled “Three-Dimensional Printing of Dipeptides with Spatioselective Programming of Crystallinity for Multilevel Anticounterfeiting”.

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • HackadayA Hacker’s Christmas Story

        Twas the night before Christmas, and because I decided to make everyone’s presents myself this year, I’m still working like mad to get everything done before the big deadline. Why do I do this to myself? Well, partly because I enjoy the process.

      • HackadaySpotify Player Brings Back Physical Media

        Digital music has made keeping all your tunes with you a lot more convenient, but have we lost something with dematerialization? [Jordi Parra] felt that there was something lacking with the digital music experience and designed a Spotify player with a tactile interface.

      • HackadayDrone Rescue Uses VHS Tape And Careful Planning

        If you regularly fly your drones outdoors, you’ve probably worried about getting your pride and joy stuck in a big tree at some point. But flying indoors doesn’t guarantee you’ll be safe either, as [Scott Williamson] found out. He once got his tiny 65 mm Mobula 6HD quadcopter stuck in a roof beam at an indoor sports complex, and had to set about a daring rescue.

      • HackadayThe Spit-Detecting USB Flash Drive Is Nearly Here

        Regular readers may recall that security researcher and general open source hardware fanatic [Walker] has been planning a rather unusual flash drive for some time — one that will only show its contents if the user makes sure to lick their fingers before plugging it in. We’re pleased to report that theory has recently given way to real hardware, and the Ovrdrive “self-destructing” flash drive is now a step closer to reality.

      • HackadayNon-Replaceable Battery? Not If This Proposed EU Law Passes!

        A disturbing trend in consumer electronics has been a steady disappearance of replaceable batteries on our devices. Finding a mobile phone with a swapable battery is a struggle, and many other devices follow the trend by sealing in a Li-Po cell. The result is an ever-shorter life for electronics, and a greater problem with devices going to recycling or worse still, landfill. Hope is at hand though, thanks to a proposed European Union law that would if passed make batteries in appliances “designed so that consumers can easily remove and replace them themselves“.

      • HackadayA Dungeon Master With A Thermal Printer

        The thermal printer is ubiquitous in today’s world, mostly found whenever we have to get a receipt from somewhere. They’re cheap, fast, and easy to use. Not only that, though, but as [Daniel] found out, they’re also pretty straightforward to re-program and use for other things than a three-foot-long receipt from a drug store. He’s adapted them to serve as a key tool of the dungeon master in his D&D games.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Proprietary

    • Security

      • TechCrunchLastPass says hackers stole customers’ password vaults

        In an updated blog post on its disclosure, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the intruders took a copy of a backup of customer vault data by using cloud storage keys stolen from a LastPass employee. The cache of customer password vaults is stored in a “proprietary binary format” that contains both unencrypted and encrypted vault data, but technical and security details of this proprietary format weren’t specified. The unencrypted data includes vault-stored web addresses. It’s not clear how recent the stolen backups are.

        LastPass said customers’ password vaults are encrypted and can only be unlocked with the customers’ master password, which is only known to the customer. But the company warned that the cybercriminals behind the intrusion “may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took.”

      • John GruberLastPass Admits Hackers Stole Customers’ Password Vaults

        In one sense this is a triumph for secure password managers. Even if we get hacked, the hackers can’t access your passwords. That’s true for LastPass. But they did get hacked, badly, so for LastPass this seems devastating. It’s a second-order disaster for an attacker to steal customer’s encrypted vaults, but it’s still a disaster. Anyone who uses LastPass who hasn’t spent today moving to something else [...] either hasn’t heard about this breach or is an idiot.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • EFFEFF’s Threat Lab Sharpens Its Knives: 2022 in Review

          Here we highlight some of the achievements that made 2022 such an eventful year for Threat Lab.

          Our Atlas of Surveillance project surpassed a major milestone, documenting over 10,000 instances of police tech programs across the US. Shining a light on these programs was bittersweet, reminding us that this transparency also reveals just how expansive and widespread advanced technologies employed by police departments across the country have become. A collaborative effort between EFF and the University of Nevada Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism crowdsourced thousands of distinct mini-research tasks to students to achieve this milestone.

          Cell-site simulators are one such technology employed by law enforcement. Sometimes called “Stingrays,” these devices use a small, mobile transceiver to masquerade as a cellphone tower, tricking phones into connecting to it instead of the legitimate tower, and allowing location tracking and even potentially interception of communications from everyone in a certain area—not just those suspected of a crime. Alongside Threat Lab’s efforts to reveal cell-site simulators (CSSs), dozens of FOIA requests were issued to California police departments in 2018 to reveal the extent of their usage of CSSs. As a result, EFF learned that San Bernardino County law enforcement officials were improperly sealing search warrant records involving the use of CSSs indefinitely. In October, we asked the Supreme Court of California to review the case, arguing that sealing these records in perpetuity violates the public’s right to access court records and effectively prevents the public from raising important questions regarding the scope and overreach of law enforcement use of invasive technologies.

        • EFFPivotal Year for the Metaverse and Extended Reality: 2022 in Review

          Visions for the metaverse include ways for people to work, socialize, and interact using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies (collectively called Extended Reality or XR). While Meta has attempted to claim the term metaverse for its own, this area has also become a research focus for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Tiktok’s parent company ByteDance among others, all of whom have launched or announced plans to launch XR hardware or services in the near future. This next generation of devices will be more sophisticated than today’s gadgets, which means their data collection capabilities will likewise increase along with new and substantial risks to our human rights and fundamental freedoms. 

          There’s no single definitive understanding of what a “Metaverse” or “Metaverse(s)” might be. In its ambiguity, the term has become a placeholder for many things, often reflecting the interests of the person using it. Some, like Apple, have avoided the term entirely for their XR products. The major point of overlap in describing a “metaverse,” however, is the idea of additional virtual environments connected to the internet becoming important parts of our day-to-day lives in the real world.

          One prominent vision of this is the fictional OASIS from Ready Player One, a virtual society where people can play massively multiplayer online games (MMO) using VR gadgets. Another popular conception emphasizes spatial computing and AR devices, creating a shared “annotation” of virtual objects in the real world. Others, however, define the term metaverse as making the internet a reflection of the physical world to facilitate work, socializing, and commerce, perhaps supported by a metaverse “tax”. Visions of the metaverse often interact with another ambiguous term for the future iteration of the internet— Web3. 

        • The Express TribuneFBI ‘doorman to social media censorship, surveillance’, reveal Twitter Files

          Mentioning that FBI did not refute the previous claims about how it benefited from the social media platform, which had basically asserted that the FBI moderates the Twitter, journalist Matt Taibbi said on Twitter that the bureau shared a statement on Wednesday, saying: “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public…”

        • Essel GroupTwitter Files 9.0 reveals a web of ‘social media surveillance, censorship’ by not just FBI, other agencies too

          The latest and the ninth instalment of the ‘Twitter Files’ has uncovered a web of coordination between the tech giant and US government agencies. Releasing the latest instalment on Christmas eve, Substack writer Matt Taibbi claims that it goes beyond the FBI which was acting as the “doorman to a vast programme of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

        • New facial recognition technology scans your ear

          In the post-COVID world of face coverings and heightened hygiene awareness, the need for new authentication methods that don’t require a person’s full face to be visible has arisen.

          New research from the University of Georgia may soon have people using their ears to get into their devices rather than their face or thumbprint.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • The Telegraph UKInside Jihad Rehab, the ‘Islamophobic’ documentary the Left doesn’t want you to see

        “Cancel culture has gone crazy in the US, but my hope is that the Bafta judges and other British people will judge it with an open mind and see it for what it is,” she tells me.

      • Computers Are Badsanta tracking

        As tends to be the case with such popular stories, the version we hear today is arms length from the truth. From contemporaneous reporting, it seems the facts go more like this: The phone number printed in the advertisement was correct, but one particularly child misdialed. Instead of getting Santa Claus, they got the desk phone of Col. Harry Shoup, at what was then called CONAD. Shoup was reportedly gruff and ended the call quickly, only later realizing (due to a joke made by another NORAD employee, placing an image of Santa on a map board) that they could turn the incident into a publicity coup. That they did, and over decades the story has become more and more embellished to the favor of NORAD.

    • Environment

    • Finance

      • ScheerpostThe Perils of Pious Neoliberalism in the Austerity State

        The International Labour Organisation’s Global Wage Report 2022–23 tracks the horrendous collapse of real wages for billions of people around the planet. The gaping distance between the incomes and wealth of 99% of the world’s population from the incomes and wealth of the billionaires and near-trillionaires who make […]

      • ScheerpostTop 10 Inequality Victories of 2022

        Champions of a more egalitarian society made important strides, building the power of workers while reducing the power of wealthy tax dodgers and greedy pharma execs.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Pete WardenShort Links – Pete Warden’s blog

        Years ago I used to write regular “Five Short Links” posts but I gave up as my Twitter account became a better place to share updates, notes, and things I found interesting from around the internet. Now that Twitter is Nazi-positive I’m giving up on it as a platform, so I’m going to try going back to occasional summary posts here instead.

      • Common DreamsWhat Democrats Can Learn From the 2022 Midterms to Beat the GOP in 2024
      • TruthOutAOC Casts House Democrats’ Sole Vote Against Omnibus Spending Bill
      • Counter PunchRight-wing Attempts to Eliminate Constitutional Protections are No Joke

        But is his latest childish tantrum really something to be laughed off? Having skipped the “tragedy” phase and gone straight to “farce,” Trump is facing what is likely to become a politically terminal case of irrelevancy as new contenders for Mussolini’s crown, most notably but not only Ron DeSantis, emerge. The nascent fascist movement that has coalesced around Trump, and the varieties of extreme right menace that shade into it that are now expressed through the Republican Party, are no laughing matter. And while embarrassed silence or a quick change of subject might be Republicans’ default position when asked to comment on Trump’s increasing irrationality due to their fear of the Frankenstein monster they have let loose, eviscerating the Constitution is actually on their agenda.

        To read this article, log in here or subscribe here. If you are logged in but can’t read CP+ articles, check the status of your access hereIn order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent FreakEU: Complex Pirate IPTV Networks Underpin a Parallel Black Market

          For rightsholders seeking to disrupt the pirate IPTV market, the European Commission’s Piracy Watch List is an opportunity to name specific services and focus attention. This year’s report does just that while also highlighting fundamental challenges. Pirate IPTV networks are international, technically complex, and inherently difficult to monitor. This potent mix underpins a “parallel black market.”

  • Gemini* and Gopher


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

IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 24, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:14 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

text logs

text logs

#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

text logs

text logs

#boycottnovell-social log as text

#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now


IPFS Mirrors

CID Description Object type
 QmUJ4eNuECoom8YZmgJGHRLDbRdELNueEJk9DtExoJffoq IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)
HTML5 logs
 Qma8p7QQzZnWKcjeWsncM1CLvDqVPbUv8knAq4qZoSAqrx IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
text logs
 QmVeZ5Byojv8cy7voExzRZkrJcmktT3Rzd7YAi7hx9uNxW IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML)
HTML5 logs
 QmQeErWyt16D3uaz98EpCsfUrCoWzzHny3owaG3jGkmPpY IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
text logs
 QmSiwQ6Ysb3NJAyZfCXtoX5UTgyGi7adR5axWLUihq67KE IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)
HTML5 logs
 QmZb1ipT11nXbS8cuGH3fNs7NtVQRaPwyL31pkYHNmMZct IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
text logs
 Qmdkg366Bf5QFzFHCCHxG5EuBFmVHZsgTk5HwS6TYNgZky IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML)
HTML5 logs
 QmfQT8y1fcqoBS7zFjW6HbbXEuv51HfzxRYfRmtLTRJuf6 IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
text logs

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmcJ2fTtAvxD5pUALCXvrhAptqfYZYBPhYtyH3LP59jAmm

« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts