GNU/Linux

• 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: December 25th, 2022 (Christmas Edition)

  Since it’s the holidays, this week only saw a few releases and Linux news. The EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux folks were kind enough to drop a big release of their Arch Linux-based distros, the privacy-focused Tails OS adopted Wayland, and a new Darktable release brought many goodies for photographers.

  On top of that, Linus Torvalds played Santa and put out for the public testing the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel series. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for December 25th, 2022.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Late Night Linux – Episode 209

    It’s that time of year where we look back at our 2022 predictions, and make some new ones for 2023.

  • Video ☛ Mastodon: Social Media’s Elephant in the Room – Invidious

    Mastodon is a wonderful, nearly utopic experience… but you have to figure out how to join it, first. In this video, we’ll discuss the future of social media and what it will take for Mastodon to realize that future.

  • Video ☛ My NEW Daily Driver Laptop – Invidious

    This is a highly customized laptop that I’ve changed everything on down to the operating system and how it interfaces with the function keys on it.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ Excellent Utilities: Zellij – terminal workspace with batteries included

    This series highlights best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.

    Zellij is billed as “a workspace aimed at developers, ops-oriented people and anyone who loves the terminal”.

    In our Excellent Utilities series we try not to include similar software. Our personal favorite terminal multiplexer is tmux, although opinion is divided even among our merry group of open source enthusiasts. We also highly recommend Tmuxinator and Byobu.

  • Medevel ☛ 10 Open Source Docker Visual Managers

    Docker is a platform for developing, shipping, and running applications, it allows developers to separate their applications’ infrastructure, so they can deliver software in records time.

    Beyond that, it also allows developers to deploy, run and update multiple containers on one server.

    Dockers runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. And it is the favorite app shipping method for many developers to deploy deliver their apps to the end-users.

    However, Docker management is command-line tools, which is not easy for many users. Therefore, in this article, we offer you a collection of Docker Desktop management apps that makes Docker management easier.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Disable Directory Listing From the Command Line in Linux

    When you create a directory and add files to it, any user who has access to your system and knows how to use the ls command may simply list the files in that directory and see what you have added to it.

    You can stop this from happening by taking away the read (r) permission from the directory. This way, you won’t be able to list the directory’s files, but you will still be able to read and write to them.

    If you are working on a web server and you want to prohibit people from accessing certain directories, it makes sense to set this permission to prevent users and bots from crawling the directory content.

    In this article, you will learn how to disable the directory content listing from the command line in Linux.

  • LinuxTuto ☛ How to Install Roundcube on Ubuntu 22.04 – LinuxTuto

    Roundcube is a free open-source web-based multilingual IMAP email client written in PHP. It provides the full functionality you expect from an email client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching, and spell checking.

    This tutorial is going to show you how to install Roundcube webmail on Ubuntu 22.04 with Nginx web server and MySQL database server.

  • Vincent Bernat ☛ Managing infrastructure with Terraform, CDKTF, and NixOS

    A few years ago, I downsized my personal infrastructure. Until 2018, there were a dozen containers running on a single Hetzner server.1 I migrated my emails to Fastmail and my DNS zones to Gandi. It left me with only my blog to self-host. As of today, my low-scale infrastructure is composed of 4 virtual machines running NixOS on Hetzner Cloud and Vultr, a handful of DNS zones on Gandi and Route 53, and a couple of Cloudfront distributions. It is managed by CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), while NixOS deployments are handled by NixOps.

  • OSTechNix ☛ Find WiFi Password Of Connected Networks In Linux – OSTechNix

    As you may already know, when you connect to a wireless network for the first time, the WiFi password is saved in your Linux machine. So you don’t need to enter the password of your wireless network every time. In the subsequent times, the available WiFi network will be automatically connected. Over the time, you might have forgotten the WiFi password. One day you want to add a new device to the same WiFi network, but you don’t remember the password. What are you going to do? No worries! I know a few ways to find WiFi password of connected networks in Linux.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Composer on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Composer on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, A composer is a command-line tool that is used to manage dependencies in PHP projects. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will automatically manage (install/update) them for you. It functions as some sort of project manager that helps the programmer manage dependencies that will be used on a project-to-project basis.

    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 Composer on Rocky Linux. 9.

  • ELinux ☛ How to prevent spamming in a cPanel server | Linux Webhosting blog

  • TecAdmin ☛ How to Check Open (Listening) Ports in Linux – TecAdmin

    In Linux, a port is a logical connection point for transmitting data between a client and a server. To ensure the security and functionality of a system, it is important to know which ports are open and listening for incoming connections. Ports are identified by a number, ranging from 0 to 65535.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to try out Ubuntu 23.04 early

    If you wish to try out Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster before its stable release in April 2023, you can. Each day, Ubuntu generates a “daily image” for 23.04. These images come with updates, fixes, and feature updates.

    In this guide, we’ll show you how you can download, and install Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster to try it out early. However, be warned, this version of Ubuntu is highly unstable. Only download and install it if you are an expert, or if you’re confident you have your data backed up.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to install Linux Mint 21.1

    Linux Mint 21.1 is out, and with it comes a brand new version of the Cinnamon desktop, updated drivers, and much more. This guide will show you how you can get Linux Mint 21.1 working on your PC.

• Games

  • Sportskeeda ☛ Can you play Valorant on Steam Deck?

    That said, some players may wonder about the hero shooter’s compatibility with the Steam Deck. The popular hand-held device has already garnered a massive fan base with its portability and high software flexibility. It runs on SteamOS, a Linux-based system created by Valve for the device.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Linuxiac ☛ Best 7 Linux Distro Releases for Desktop in 2022: Our Ranking

  2022 is at its very end. This is usually a time to reflect on the year that has passed. As an online media covering everything significant in the Linux world and the Open Source software, we presented you with the Linux releases that stood out above the others in the desktop niche in 2022.

  We will consider factors such as predictability, user-friendliness, reliability, and software support. But first, let me go into detail about the criteria we used to determine our final ranking.

• New Releases

  • New release of Haiku OS

    From How-To Geek I learn that Haiku OS R1/beta4 — the open-source continuation of BeOS — has been released.

    Be Inc created BeOS in the mid-1990s as a super-modern operating system, but it failed to catch on. Over 20 years later, the open-source Haiku OS project is picking up where it left off, and there’s a new beta release available.

    The Haiku project has been developing an open-source continuation of BeOS for years, based partially on some BeOS code, but much of it has been built from scratch. Haiku R1 Beta 4 is now available, as the first major release in a year and a half. It might be the most significant upgrade yet, as it makes Haiku much more viable as a typical desktop operating system.

• Arch Family

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Manjaro Linux 22.0 Releases Featuring Xfce 4.18 and Linux Kernel 6.1

    Manjaro Linux is a rolling release distro based on Arch Linux that focuses on providing a user-friendly and accessible experience.

    Since the release of ‘Ruah’ in June, Manjaro’s development has continued and has paved the way for the latest release, which is called ‘Sikaris’.

    This is one of the last distro releases (among the popular options) for 2022; let’s see what it offers.

• Red Hat / IBM

  • Red Hat Official ☛ What sysadmins want to know about OpenShift and Kubernetes in 2022 | Enable Sysadmin

    The Enable Sysadmin community continues to answer key questions about OpenShift and Kubernetes.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Hybrid cloud in 2023: 5 predictions from IT leaders

    Hybrid cloud is a technical and architectural strategy, to be sure. But the term also reflects a philosophical shift and the modern reality for CIOs: Delivering strategic business value requires much more agility and flexibility in your technology stack than ever.

    That principle will be on full display in 2023 as more and more organizations and their IT leaders lean into that reality – and recognize how and why a hybrid cloud strategy enables that agility and flexibility. One-environment-fits-all approaches to running workloads typically don’t.

    [...]

    As Haff notes, hybrid cloud is widely applicable across various industries. Expect those different sectors to gain a ton of momentum in 2023 in terms of identifying the tangible value of the hybrid cloud architecture – and the hybrid-edge pairing – for their specific industries.

    That might be most apparent in the telecommunications space, where Ian Hood, chief strategist for global industries, Red Hat, expects to see accelerating deployment of hybrid edge application clouds – both to pursue their own business goals and to better support their enterprise customers’ cloud and edge strategies.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 11 resources for advancing your edge computing journey in 2023 | The Enterprisers Project

    Taking your business to the edge requires careful planning. Is edge the right answer for your business problem? How will you address security concerns? As organizations increasingly adopt edge computing, related career opportunities are taking off. Check out this year’s top articles from our community of experts if you’re planning an edge strategy in 2023.

  • Red Hat ☛ Manage OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka with AKHQ | Red Hat Developer

    At Red Hat, we are often asked what consoles and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be used with our Kafka products, Red Hat AMQ Streams and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka. Because our products are fully based on the upstream Apache Kafka project, most available consoles and GUIs designed to work with Kafka also work with our Kafka products. This article illustrates the ease of integration through a look at AKHQ, an open source GUI for Apache Kafka.

    [...]

    At a high level, Apache Kafka’s architecture is quite simple. It’s based on a few concepts such as brokers, topics, partitions, producers, and consumers. However—as with any system—when you deploy, operate, manage, and monitor a production Kafka cluster, things can quickly become complex. To use and manage Kafka clusters in both development and production environments, there are numerous tools on the market, both commercial and open source. These tools range from scripts, GUIs, and powerful command-line interfaces (CLIs) to full monitoring, management, and governance platforms. Each type of tool offers value in specific parts of the software development cycle.

    This article shows how to connect AKHQ to a Kafka instance in Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, a managed cloud service. Using our no-cost, 48-hour trial of OpenShift Streams, you can follow along with the steps. By the end of the article, you will be able to use AKHQ to manage your Kafka instance.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Geniatech DS-3566 digital signage board is powered by a Rockchip RK3566 SoC

    Geniatech provides Debian10 and Android 11 operating systems for the board and claims to provide resources and technical datasheets for custom development. Besides digital signage, the Rockchip RK3566 board can also be used for touch-enabled HMIs, conference room monitors, cash registers, self-service terminals, automotive infotainment solutions, and so on.

    Geniatech did not provide pricing information for the DS-3566 SBC. More details may be found on the product page.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Join EPAM at CES to learn more about Automotive Grade Linux | EPAM

    The automotive industry is rapidly transitioning to software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms using open-sourced solutions such as automotive grade Linux and Android automotive OS to give a smart-phone like user experience. It’s an interesting opportunity for automotive OEMs to open new revenue streams after the initial vehicle purchase through app stores and subscriptions.

  • Purism ☛ Purism and Linux 5.19 to 6.1 – Purism

    I know you missed our kernel reports lately but even if you can’t believe it, we haven’t forgotten about them. I just took a break for a few weeks but now the desperate wait is over: Following up on our report for Linux 5.18.

    Summary of the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.19, 6.0 and 6.1 development cycles. This summary is only about code flowing upstream – a never ending stream of changes.

    [...]

    Have a look at our Linux tree to see what is currently being worked on and tested or help if you feel like joining the fun. The ‘debian/README.source’ document describes our workflow.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Linux Phone Apps ☛ Help us achieve self-maintaining App Listings by adding AppStream Metadata! | LinuxPhoneApps

    With the festive season upon us, and the end of 2022 approaching, we have a big ask: Help us keep app listings up to date by working with upstream projects!

    In the past months, not many apps were evaluated or added to LinuxPhoneApps.org. But still, things were done: The technical stack was much improved. While most of this work is not directly user-facing, as it’s about restructuring the underlying .csv files and adding more and more automatic content checkers, we’ve now arrived at a stage where we can update listings without a lot of the time-intense churn this was.

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Contacts for Android adds ‘Highlights’ tab

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite gets treated with Android 13 update – SamMobile

  • Gadget Bridge ☛ Easy Methods to Fix Touchscreen Issues on Android Smartphones

  • Future Publishing Limited ☛ Just got a new Android phone? These are the first apps you need to download | T3

  • Droid Gamer’s Android Game of the Year 2022 – Vampire Survivors – Droid Gamers

  • Indian Express ☛ Apex Legends Mobile to Gwent: The best free Android games of 2022 | Technology News,The Indian Express

  • Giz China ☛ Red Magic 8 Pro / Pro+ Attack The High-End Android Camp Models

  • Android Police ☛ The best Android apps released in 2022 for your new phone, tablet, or Chromebook

  • Android Police ☛ OnePlus 10T vs. Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

  • Google Could Ensure Older Android Devices Can Stay Online With Valid Root Certificates

  • India Times ☛ How to enable ‘Smart Lock’ on your Android smartphone – Times of India

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • The New Stack ☛ C++ 23 Standard Won’t Have a Key Parallelism Feature – The New Stack

    The next version of the C++ standard coming up next year won’t have a key feature that makes it easier to write code for execution in parallel computing environments.

    The C++ 2023 standard won’t have an asynchronous algorithm feature called senders and receivers, which will allow for simultaneous execution of code on a system with multiple chips such as CPUs and GPUs.

    “The goal there is maybe to try to get it into the working draft next year — the [C++ 26] working draft — so once it’s there, then people will take it a lot more seriously,” said Nevin Liber, a computer scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Leadership Facility, and a C++ committee member, during a break-out session at last month’s Supercomputing 2022 conference in Dallas.

  • CNX Software ☛ Achronix Speedster7t AC7t1500 FPGA is now available for high-bandwidth applications – CNX Software

    Achronix Semiconductor has recently announced the general availability of the Speedster7t AC7t1500 FPGA designed for networking, storage, and compute (AI/ML) acceleration applications.

    The 7nm Speedster7t FPGA family offers PCIe Gen5 ports and GDRR6 and DDR5/DDR4 memory interfaces, delivers up to 400 Gbps on the Ethernet ports, and includes a 2D network on chip (2D NoC) that can handle 20 Tbps of total bandwidth.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Automatic Art | lichtkind [blogs.perl.org]

      As always you can install it from CPAN and you will need WxPerl even if I should probably switch to Prima. The usage is a simplified version of the Harmonograph and well documented o let me just present the basic idea: we have just a row of cellular automata – like described by Stephen Wolfram in “A new kind of science”. These are simplest possible function, that take their state (integer between 0 and M [default 1]) and the states of their neighbouring cells (N) as input and produce a new state in the next round. The interaction of functionally independent cells can result in surprising complexity. And that is what fascinated Stephen and that is what we employ here to draw images.

      To get maximal result you can set the number for M and the size of the neighbourhood. (Even size do not include the cell itself). You can defined the starting values and if the cell build a ring (first and last are connected). Another option are the action rules, which are also described in the book. These determine if the is even allowed to change its value this round. This adds another layer complexity on top.

    • Perl ☛ I am jumping my Web pages from 2007 to 2022(now). | kido_mitsuru [blogs.perl.org]

      Hi Everyone, especially Web-Casting Programmers !!

      Naturally I encountered various problems. When I moved from an old computer platform Compaq-Evo with Fedora Core 7 (2007 Red Hat LINUX) to a newer Ubuntu and Rocky 9.1 (2022) as Web-Casting, Web codes encounters various errors and weird displays on the screen. I have to fix all the problems one by one. O.K. let me start one question. Will you help me if you have similar experience. In my case this is a big jump from 2007 -> to 2022.

      Here is my first question . HELP me !

      When I tested PERL script at Rocky 9.1, I needed to have the command “perl” in front of excitable script filename.

    • DEV Community ☛ Elizabeth Mattijsen: The 2022 Raku Advent Blog

  • Python

    • TecAdmin ☛ How to Connect MongoDB Database in Python – TecAdmin

      MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database that is widely used for storing and manipulating large amounts of data. It is known for its flexibility, scalability, and performance, making it a great choice for a variety of applications.

      In this article, we will look at how to connect to a MongoDB database in Python using the `pymongo` library, which is a MongoDB driver for Python. We will also cover some basic operations such as inserting data, querying the database, and updating documents.

    • OSNote ☛ Programming with Python Programming Language – OSNote

      Python is an increasingly popular programming language that offers a high degree of flexibility and power. It’s become a staple language for software developers, data scientists, machine learning experts, and more. But what makes Python such an appealing choice when it comes to developing software?

      In this article, we’ll take a look at why Python programming language is the right choice when it comes to learning to program.

  • Java

    • Red Hat ☛ Where to learn about Java from Red Hat | Red Hat Developer

      You’ve found a great place for Java programming 101 content. In this article, we’ve gathered the highest-performing articles from the past year on this topic on Red Hat Developer. This article introduces you to all things related to Java, from its essential business benefits to the most modern frameworks and tools.

  • Rust

    • InfoWorld ☛ What’s new in the Rust programming language | InfoWorld

      Rust was designed to make it easy to develop fast and safe system-level software. Here’s what’s new.

Leftovers

• Science

  • The Wall Street Journal ☛ U.S. Steel Looks to Forge High-Tech Future at Mills Both New and Old

    A cutting-edge U.S. Steel mill in Arkansas is using AI tools in production, but implementing that tech know-how in century-old plants hasn’t been easy

    [...]

    At a U.S. Steel Corp. mill on the Mississippi River, an automated crane lifts and lowers 1,000-degree hot steel coils into open squares, using a machine-learning algorithm to calculate the optimal spot for each coil to quickly cool down before it is shipped off.

    This automated steel-coil yard, laid out like a giant chess board, is one of many advanced-technology operations at Big River Steel, a six-year-old plant in Osceola, Ark., that was built with the goal of harnessing cutting-edge tech to save energy, time and money.

    When U.S. Steel took full ownership of Big River last year, it also gained the plant’s artificial intelligence know-how and was a signal of the 120-year-old manufacturing giant’s commitment to advancing technology in its mills. But implementing the type of technology in use at Big River in the steelmaker’s other mills, some of which are over 100 years old, has proven a difficult task, according to the company’s chief information officer.

  • Reuters ☛ How daredevil drones find nearly extinct plants hiding in cliffs | Reuters

    Ben Nyberg stood on a knife-edge ridge along Hawaii’s Na Pali Coast, his eyes scouring the leafy recesses of the neighboring red-rock ridges. It was quiet, if not for a faint buzzing of a drone flying among flocks of curious white-tailed tropicbirds.

    Nyberg steered the drone closer toward the opposing ridge, scanning the iPad in his hands, which acted as a viewfinder. Then, he saw it: Wilkesia hobdyi.

  • Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails – Machine Learning Techniques

    Entitled “Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails”, the full version in PDF format is accessible in the “Free Books and Articles” section, here. Also discussed in details with Python code in my book “Synthetic Data”, available here.

    While the technique discussed here is a last resort solution when all else fails, it is actually more powerful than it seems at first glance. First, it also works in standard cases with “nice” functions. However, there are better methods when the function behaves nicely, taking advantage of the differentiability of the function in question, such as the Newton algorithm (itself a fixed-point iteration). It can be generalized to higher dimensions, though I focus on univariate functions here.

• Hardware

  • [Old] Advance brings quantum computing one step closer to implementation | The University of Tokyo

    Quantum computers are powerful computational devices that rely on quantum mechanics, or the science of how particles like electrons and atoms interact with the world around them. These devices could potentially be used to solve certain kinds of computational problems in a much shorter amount of time. Scientists have long hoped that quantum computing could be the next great advance in computing; however, existing limitations have prevented the technology from hitting its true potential. For these computers to work, the basic unit of information integral to their operation, known as quantum bits, or qubits, need to be stable and fast.

    Qubits are represented both by simple binary quantum states and by various physical implementations. One promising candidate is a trapped electron that levitates in a vacuum. However, controlling the quantum states, especially the vibrational motions, of trapped electrons can be difficult.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • NEJM ☛ Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression

    Psilocybin is being studied for use in treatment-resistant depression.

• Linux Foundation

  • EE Times ☛ LF Europe Launches Sylva Project to Cloudify Telecom [Ed: Linux Foundation (LF) Europe is acting as a front for patent trolls, the European patent trolls in particular]

    Linux Foundation (LF) Europe recently announced Project Sylva as a European extension of the global push toward telecom network cloudification. Sylva aims to develop an open-source framework for operating telecom functions in the cloud while adhering to EU regulations and recommendations.

• Security

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ LastPass Breach

    Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse…

  • LastPass: Hackers Stole Customer Vault Data In Cloud Storage Breach – Slashdot

    This follows a previous update issued last month when the company’s CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to “certain elements” of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass’ cloud storage using “cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys” stolen from its developer environment.

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Lastpass: Hackers stole customer vault data in cloud storage breach

    LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident.

    This follows a previous update issued last month when the company’s CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to “certain elements” of customer information.

    Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data.

    The attacker gained access to Lastpass’ cloud storage using “cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys” stolen from its developer environment.

  • Notice of Recent Security Incident – The LastPass Blog [Ed: Notice the timing (date) of this face-saving nonsense)]

    The threat actor may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took. Because of the hashing and encryption methods we use to protect our customers, it would be extremely difficult to attempt to brute force guess master passwords for those customers who follow our password best practices. We routinely test the latest password cracking technologies against our algorithms to keep pace with and improve upon our cryptographic controls.

  • Wladimir Palant ☛ What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained | Almost Secure

    Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face.

    Their statement is also full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. As I know that not everyone can see through all of it, I thought that I would pick out a bunch of sentences from this statement and give some context that LastPass didn’t want to mention.

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libksba, and mbedtls), Fedora (containerd, curl, firefox, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, and xorg-x11-server), and Mageia (chromium-browser-stable).

  • Information Security Media Group, Corporation ☛ Linux Critical Kernel-level Bug Affects SMB Servers [Ed: It's not severity 10. It was a mistake.]

    A critical Linux kernel vulnerability exposed the server message block protocol to remote hacking with highest privileges.

  • LinuxSecurity ☛ How Physical Security Blends With Cybersecurity | LinuxSecurity.com

    Did you know that during 2022, businesses will have experienced an average of 130 cybersecurity attacks? Cybersecurity is an essential investment for any business looking to maintain GDPR compliance and the trust of its clients and stakeholders.

    But, your physical security strategy is essential to your cybersecurity health.

    Want to find out why? Keep reading as we discuss the main methods of blending cyber and physical security, the critical role that open-source intelligence (OSINT) plays in facilitating the convergence of physical security and cybersecurity, and why a cyber-physical security approach is essential in the modern climate.

• Finance

  • Coin Desk ☛ How AI-Powered Trading Bots Are Reshaping Crypto Trading

    Algorithms are being unleashed on the crypto markets.

    [...]

    Algorithmic trading is used across most capital markets. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 78% of market trades were performed by “trading centers [that] depend on automated systems and algorithms.” Other commentators peg the volume of stock trades coming from bots at 60% to 70%.

    Institutional traders rent or create their own bots that activate when the market hits certain conditions. These algorithms constantly search markets for the right trade setups, such as finding oversold stocks or trading a breakout. When they find the right conditions bots run scripts that determine the position size, execute the trade, employ stop-losses and exit automatically.

    The bots are not perfect because they are created using past data, but the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology are already being employed – making them faster and more efficient than ever. Further, bots take the emotion out of trading (helping to stymie some of the emotional burden of investing in volatile markets).

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Changes

    Me, my place, the things I do.
    Plans, the thoughts, those nightmares too.
    Friends, the days, the one who’s boo.
    Games, my dreams, what was true.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Creepy Website Similarity

      This is a write-up about an experiment from a few months ago, in how to find websites that are similar to each other. Website similarity is useful for many things, including discovering new websites to crawl, as well as suggesting similar websites in the Marginalia Search random exploration mode.

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.2 Release Candidate

    Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the development cycle of the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel series by announcing today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC).

    Even if it’s Christmas day, today marks two weeks from the moment the merge window for Linux kernel 6.2 opened, with the release of Linux kernel 6.1 on December 11th. Now, the merge window is officially closed and it’s time to get an early taste of the next major kernel release.

  • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.2-rc1 [LWN.net]

    Linus has released 6.2-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. “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.”

• Applications

  • Neowin ☛ Ventoy 1.0.86

    Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. Both Legacy BIOS and UEFI are supported in the same way. Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/Vmware/Xen…)

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Snowfall on your Linux Desktop this Christmas and New Year

    This year, why not bring a little snow to your desktop? Xsnow allows you to enjoy the sights and sounds of winter, from snowflakes falling gently on your screen to the beautiful, white blanket that covers everything around it.

  • TecMint ☛ 25 Outstanding Backup Utilities for Linux Systems in 2023

    Backup on personal computers or servers is always important to prevent permanent data loss. Therefore getting to know different backup tools is very important, especially for System Administrators who work with large amounts of enterprise-level data and even on personal computers.

    It is always a good practice to keep on backing up data on our computers, this can either be done manually or configured to work automatically. Many backup tools have different features that allow users to configure the type of backup, time of backup, what to backup, logging backup activities, and many more

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ 10 Tips for Improving Your Typing Speed and Accuracy

    In an advanced technology-driven world, pen-paper has taken a back seat which means most of the work is done on computers/laptops that require strong typing skills. Yes, you read that right, typing is a “skill” and today it is one of the important career skills. Most, if not all, careers involve some computer-based work that requires typing skills. Even if you are a Software Developer or a Programmer, you need to be an efficient typist in order to write codes for computers and software programs. Here, accuracy is as important as speed because a single typo may result in a system-wide error.

  • BSDly ☛ The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting … Imaginary Friends?

    Over the years since the piece was originally written, I have added several updates — generally when some of this nonsense reaches a mailbox I read — and while I have seen the messages in several languages, no real development beyond some variations in wording has happened.

  • Rachel ☛ Unintentionally BREAKing a serial console

    Imagine a datacenter with tens of thousands of Linux boxes running. Sometimes, they break and fall off the network. Fortunately, they have a “mini-me” type thing attached which then allows you access to a serial console. It’s not quite the same as being there with a monitor and keyboard plugged into the box, but it’s frequently enough to dig out of a real mess without getting in a car (or worse).

  • IT Tavern ☛ Guide to Wireshark display filters

    This post is a quick reference for using the display filters in Wireshark. The display filter is used to filter a packet capture file or live traffic, and it is essential to know at least the basics if you want to use Wireshark for troubleshooting and other evaluations.

    In this post, I’ll focus on the display filters for IPv4 only. Wireshark offers a wide range of tools that are out of this post’s scope. IPv6 will be added at some point.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OpenShot on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    OpenShot Video Editor is a powerful, easy-to-use video editor. The following tutorial will teach how to install OpenShot on Ubuntu 23.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Linux LTS using two different package manager methods with CLI commands: APT with the OpenShot nightly LaunchPAD PPA or the Flatpak with the Flathub repository.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Avidemux on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    Avidemux is a free, open-source software program designed specifically for non-linear video editing and transcoding. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Avidemux on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish LTS, or Ubuntu 22.04 Focal Fossa LTS Linux using the command line terminal the LaunchPAD PPA by the XtraDEB team.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install KDevelop on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04

    KDevelop is a free and open-source integrated development environment (IDE) that provides editing, navigation, and debugging features for several programming languages. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install KDevelop on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Linux with APT, Snap, or Flatpak method using the command line terminal and instructions on how to update and remove the software in the future if required.

  • ELinux ☛ How to install and configure DNS server in RHEL8 | Linux Webhosting blog

    A Domain Name System (DNS) server is a network service that translates domain names into IP addresses, allowing computers to communicate with one another. In this article, we will cover how to set up a DNS server on CentOS 8.

    Before starting, it is important to note that a DNS server typically consists of two components: a DNS server software, such as BIND, and a database that stores the DNS records. In this article, we will be using BIND as the DNS server software.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Bash Declare Command

    Bash is a weakly-typed programming language that does not require to declare the data type of the variable at the time of declaration like other programming languages, such as C, C++, Java, C#, etc. But this feature can be implemented by using the declare command of the bash script. It is used to declare the shell variable and function. It has many options to declare different types of variables and functions with different attributes. The uses of this command in the bash script have been described in this tutorial.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Bash `set -x` command

    Bash set command is used for many purposes in bash and it has many options to enable or disable different types of features of the shell environment. The -x option is one of the options of the set command that is used to enable the debugging feature of the bash script for troubleshooting. The `set -x` command can be used from the terminal or inside any bash script. Different purposes for using the `set -x` command have been described in this tutorial.

  • Beginners Guide for Vipw and Vigr Commands in Linux

    In Linux, you use the useradd, passwd, usermod, and gpasswd commands to modify users or groups related information, like creating them, deleting them, assigning passwords, etc.

    Note that these commands only provide you an interface to modify the “/etc/passwd“, “/etc/shadow“, “/etc/group“, and “/etc/gshadow” files with safety measures.

    But some Linux users, like me, are total freaks and directly modify these files using a text editor instead of using the aforementioned commands, which keeps us safe from file corruption.

  • Beginners Guide for Rename Command in Linux

    In Linux, the rename command is an amazing utility that allows you to rename single or multiple files at once, based on a set of rules or regular expressions you specify.

    Most of the time, the mv command is used to rename files or folders. However, the rename command has more features, but can be harder for a beginner to use, because it requires knowledge of Perl expressions.

    In this article, you will learn how to use the rename command in real life with practical examples.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Create New File on Ubuntu – Linux Nightly

    Learn how to create new files on Ubuntu from the Linux command line, and by adding a new document option to the right-click context menu GUI.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Check File Content on Linux – Linux Nightly

    Learn how to view the contents of a file using Linux commands cat, grep, less, head, and tail.

  • How to Change History File Location in Linux

    The Linux shell (specifically, “Bash“) records all the commands you run in your terminal and stores them in the “.bash_history” file in your home directory.

    You can use tools like the history command, which provides you many features and functionality to work with this file, including viewing your command’s history.

    Of course, instead of using this, you can directly use the cat command to read the content of this file, as shown.

  • Djalel Oukid ☛ Linux Apps Tour: TUXEDO Control Center, a tool to easily control TUXEDO computers!

    This article is the beginning of a new promising series through which I aim to shed light on Linux applications that offer distinctive and unique additions and features to Linux users. The start will be with the TUXEDO Control Center application (TCC), which provides many control options on TUXEDO computers, one of which we reviewed in the past few weeks. So what is TUXEDO Control Center? What are the options and features that it provides?

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Arch Family

  • DebugPoint ☛ Manjaro Linux 22 “Sikaris” released with Kernel 6.1, GNOME 43 and Xfce 4.18

    Manjaro 22 “Sikaris” major release is coming up after more than a year since Manjaro 21.0 release with all the bug fixes and updates from rolling release packages.

    Major highlights of this release are the three major desktop offerings, i.e. GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce, getting their latest version with core modules and apps.

    Here’s what’s new.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Old VCR ☛ Merry Old VCR Christmas with Dick Smith and his VZ200

    Video Technology designed the VZ200 as their own version of the Tandy TRS-80 Model I, which Dick Smith sold as the System-80 via the EACA Video Genie. While the Video Genie was a more or less straightforward clone of the TRS-80 Model I, the VZ200 uses the basic architecture but with a different memory map, BASIC and video chip (same as the Tandy Color Computer and others). The Z80 runs at 3.58MHz (versus the Model I’s 1.774MHz) and some of the BASIC differences were caused by VTech intentionally crippling the BASIC which some extended BASICs partially reversed. VTech also produced a Laser 100 and 110, differing from the 200 primarily in built-in RAM, but Dick Smith never sold those.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Please forward this to anyone who got a Raspberry Pi for Christmas

    By the way, this is a mirage of a blog and we’re not really here today; this is one we made earlier to make sure you know how to get started with your new Raspberry Pi Christmas presents. In real life, we are watching people cook lots of things that we will put in our faces soon. See you in January!

    Here you will find lots of links to help you get started with your new Raspberry Pi, as well as ideas for what you can do with it.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Overpowered Ornament Contains Tiny Raspberry Pi Cluster

    In a Medium post about the project, Bensen writes, “what’s it do, that’s a good question. Right now it runs the same software I ran on the World’s Largest Raspberry Pi Cluster so watch the video and find out and comment what I should run on it.”

  • Byte Cellar ☛ Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2022 Edition)

    I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

  • Byte Cellar ☛ It’s a MIDI Christmas With the Atari ST for “Holiday Music Week X”

    Without further ado, for Holiday Music Week X I present the 1985 Audio Light holiday slideshow and music presentation, as played by my Atari 520ST and the Radio Shack MD-981 MIDI keyboard (which was likely produced for Radio Shack by Casio).

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Kodi Foundation ☛ Kodi “Matrix” 19.5 Release

  As this is a point release, there are no major changes since the previous version, and you should be fine to install this straight over the top of any existing Kodi 19.x installation – indeed, this will happen automatically on many platforms. However, as for all software installations, back up your userdata beforehand if you’ve any doubts or have anything you can’t afford to lose (and definitely do this if you’re going for a major version upgrade).

• Programming/Development

  • R

    • Redesigning Dashboards with Shiny and Rhino: World Bank’s Carbon Pricing

      The modern revolution of big data has led to a boom in business intelligence. But data is only as valuable as the insights it provides. That means the true value of data is in exposing hidden insights. But if the way you share your data is slow, unscalable, or poorly designed – it might be time to redesign your dashboard.

      Data scientists are insight seekers. They are modern-day explorers sifting through data to find meaningful connections. But their efforts would be in vain if not for sharing their work with those who might benefit.

    • europeanaR: Exploring A Digitized Art Database with Shiny – R programming

      Art provides insight into the experiences and values of a culture. We see parallels between Shiny and art. Both are canvases for sharing insight. They are used to transform information or ideas in a way that connects with people. In this spirit, our developers built EuropeanaR, a Shiny app for exploring Europe’s digitized collection of art and cultural works.

    • Linux Foundation ☛ Learning the Fundamentals of R, Workshop with R-Ladies Gaborone and Botswana R User Group – R Consortium

      Saturday morning on the 29th of October 2022, the Botswana R User Group, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Botswana, and R-ladies Gaborone collaborated to conduct an R workshop focusing on the fundamentals of R programming for R enthusiasts. Both organizations are the only R communities in Botswana and have had online events on R related topics from speakers around the world. The Department of Computer Science provided the venue and technical support. Altogether, the seven attendees were from different institutions around Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana. Half of the attendees had a basic knowledge of R programming and the other half had a background in Java and Python programming. The workshop was instructed by Botswana R User Group founder, Edson Kambeu, and R-Ladies Gaborone co-founder, Simisani Ndaba. Edson Kambeu, who is a Finance Lecturer, traveled all the way from Francistown, a city in the north of the country to help instruct the workshop. The instructors used google docs to share educational data science websites, R resources, communities, conferences, and workshops for the attendees.

    • Finnstats ☛ Check if the Column Contains a String or not – finnstats

      Check if the Column Contains a String or not, The methods listed below can be used to determine whether a column of a data frame in R contains a string.

    • 2022-03 Offsetting Lines and Polygons in ‘grid’ | Stat Tech

      This document describes new functions in the ‘gridGeometry’ package for R that generate offset regions and Minkowski Sums for lines and polygons.

    • Hierarchical clustering, cutting the tree and colouring the tree leaves based on sample classes

    • R packages for visualising spatial data | Nicola Rennie

      Throughout November I took part in the #30DayMapChallenge – a daily mapping, cartography, and data visualization challenge aimed at the spatial community. You can read my recap of the challenge in the blog I wrote last week, if you’re interested in finding out more about it. Throughout the challenge, I created most of my maps using R. This blog post details the R packages that I often find myself using the most often when I’m visualising spatial data – including some new ones I found out about during the #30DayMapChallenge!

  • Python

    • OpenSource.com ☛ 10 resources for Python programmers

      One of my favorite things about Python is that it’s an actual language that’s also useful as a teaching language. As in past years, Opensource.com had great articles demonstrating this in 2022.

    • TecAdmin ☛ How to Define Global Variable in Python – TecAdmin

      In Python, a global variable is a variable that is defined outside of any function or class and can be accessed from anywhere within the code. Global variables are useful for storing values that need to be shared across different parts of the program, such as configuration options or flags.

Leftovers

• Telex (Hungary) ☛ Why do Hungarians hang bonbons on their Christmas tree?

• Counter Punch ☛ Moving Into the Present Moment

  Generally speaking, we do not like a sudden end to a thing but prefer a slower exit that allows us to wallow for awhile in the left-overs of what once was dear or important to us.

  But there are times when a sudden departure from a thing is the only way forward. Sometimes, whether it is ending an addiction that has been plaguing us, a love affair that is tearing at our souls or a system that is killing the spirit that drives us towards free, healthy and meaningful lives, sometimes, as it has been shown by those who have done it, that the sudden finality of the cold-turkey approach to what we are leaving behind is the surest and ultimately less painful and likewise most successful way to go.

• Counter Punch ☛ Christmas Jottings from North Queensland

  Another matter that is equally ridiculous: a desert religion’s celebration in the conifer-covered land masses of northern Europe, where pagan spirits fight with dedicated stubbornness against clerics and monotheistic dogma.  The single god head struggles there, as it does in the heat of northern Australia, where song lines chart themselves across the land in pantheistic richness.

  To have a forested backyard this part of the world is to preside over a merry bazaar of activities.  Not far is an army base that is one of Australia’s largest and bound to be immolated in acts of stupidity bound to be committed by the Commonwealth government.  The country is becoming a garrison state, soon to be occupied by an even greater number of US military personnel.

• TruthOut ☛ Tidings of Discomfort and Joy: Christmas as Resistance

• Hackaday ☛ Encoding NTSC With Your Hands Tied

  Generally, when trying to implement some protocol, you are constrained by your hardware and time. But for someone like [EMMIR], that’s not enough. For example, NTSC-CRT is a video signal encoding/decoding simulator with no hardware acceleration, floating point math, or third-party libraries. Just basic C.

• Hackaday ☛ Virtualizing IPhoneOS 1.0

  Virtualizing computers is nothing new. However, Apple devices always present challenges. Just ask anyone who has built a Hackintosh. At least computer hardware is usually exposed, but on phones, the challenge is even harder due to mysterious devices. [Martijn] managed to reverse engineer the iPod Touch 1G enough to run iPhoneOS 1.0 on it and has several blog posts explaining how he did it.

• Counter Punch ☛ Roaming Charges: Hotrails to Hell, the Year in Climate

  + All it took was a downed powerline, or perhaps a spark from the shed at the compound of a Christian cult, to ignite a wildfire on the Rocky Mountain Front on the afternoon of December 30th, – a fire that race across 6000 acres, burning 1,084 homes and 30 commercial buildings in less than a day. Propelled by hurricane-force winds, the only thing that slowed the fire’s spread was the much-belated arrival of the first major snowfall of the season on the high plains of Colorado. The Marshall fire, one of the most destructive in the state’s history, erupted only a couple of weeks after 80-mph winds powered a 250-mile-long dust storm that swept across the eastern half the state and into Kansas, an event that the National Weather Service labeled a “never-before-seen storm.” Never isn’t what it once was.

  + Iraq’s agricultural production has fallen by 40% in  4 years. Much of the decline is due to drought and heat. Over the next few decades, the UN projects temperatures in Iraq will rise by another 2 degrees. Livestock numbers have crashed.

• TruthOut ☛ As Temperature Drops, Incarcerated People Brace for Dangerously Cold Conditions

• Counter Punch ☛ A Brave New World

  The letter came from a Long Island resident, a member of the generation of baby boomers, who expressed her shock at the appearance of many limousines in her neighborhood at the time of high school spring dances. She wrote that just over a decade earlier, she and her friends arrived at school dances either in their own cars, a rarity then, or were driven by a parent or a friend. She lamented at the glitz those limos represented compared to the more responsible and less well-to-do days of the 1960s, although those years had at its base a solid working class and middle class.

  Over forty years later, I live in a rural area of the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts that is one repository of wealth that was heightened and magnified by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many with economic and social means could either relocate to the area, or purchase a second home here, thus driving up the cost of rents and housing prices through the roof. I could not even have guessed at the level of wealth I see when that Times letter was published during the early epoch of Reaganism.

• Science

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Curse of the Algorithm

    The existence of algorithms might be a sign of civilization, but it might also be a sign of what French philosopher Foucault calls madness. As human decision-making is handed over to machines, these machines can make rather irrational, discriminatory, and outright mad decisions.

    Long gone is the time when algorithms were only used in mathematics, IT, software, and computer science. Historically, the word “algorithm” is an Arabic term meaning a decimal notation of numbers, while in Greek, arithmos is simply a number. Our modern-day arithmos or algorithm came to us via Latin’s algorismus.

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ Sorting out PC chassis power switches for ATX power supplies

    Famously, ATX power supplies are really controlled by the motherboard, not by any front panel case switches (although better PSUs will have a hard power switch so you don’t have to yank the cord). The front panel case power switch is a soft switch that communicates with the BIOS or triggers power on, and your motherboard can have the PSU ‘turn off’ (which still leaves standby power flowing to the motherboard), which is what enabled modern PC Unixes to have commands like ‘poweroff’ and ‘halt -p’. Physically, an ATX chassis power switch (the front panel switch) is normally a momentary-contact switch. It is normally off (no current flowing), but when pushed it connects the circuit for as long as you keep it pressed. Since the circuit is normally open, not having a chassis power switch connected is the same as not pressing it, so your system can still power up in this state under the appropriate conditions.

  • Hackaday ☛ Not Can It Run DOOM, But Can DOOM Run It?

    It’s the standard test for a hardware hack, half serious half in jest, “Can it run DOOM?”. The iconic early-90s shooter from id software has made an appearance on everything from toothbrushes to LEGO bricks, but nobody has yet posed the opposite question: Can DOOM run it?“. It’s one answered by [Danny Spencer], who has proved that it’s possible to perform computational tasks in the game by producing a working adding machine in a DOOM level.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Lenovo reveals Mini PC equipped with Intel’s 13th Gen Intel Core processors

    This week, Lenovo released details about their upcoming consumer products including their newest IdeaCentre Mini PC. The Lenovo’s 01IRH8 will integrate Intel’s latest 13th Gen Processors, support for Gen4 SSD storage, Wi-Fi6 and other peripherals.

  • Hackaday ☛ Self-Propelled Chainsaw Reduces Injuries

    [Advoko] is an expert at milling logs into various sizes of boards. He typically uses nothing but a chainsaw to enable him to mill on-site without needing to bring any large or expensive equipment. The only problem is that sometimes he gets a little carried away running his mill non-stop until he has enough lumber for whatever project he is building, which has led to some repetitive strain injuries. To enable him to continue to run his mill, he’s created this self-propelled chainsaw jig.

  • Hackaday ☛ Reverse Engineering Saves Weller With A Wonky LCD From The Trash Pile

    There’s nothing more satisfying than finding a broken piece of gear in the trash and bringing it back to life. Satisfying, but also potentially more time-consuming — someone tossed it for a reason, after all. Figuring out what that reason is and finding a way to back it better is where the fun — and the peril — are.

  • Hackaday ☛ Laser Cut Clips Save A Lamp From The Trash

    Ikea have been known for years as a purveyor of inexpensive  yet stylish homewares, but it’s fair to say that sometimes their affordability is reflected in their insubstantial construction. Such is the case with the Sjöpenna lamp, whose construction relies on rubber bands. On [Tony]’s lamp these bands degraded with age, causing it to fall apart. The solution? A set of cleverly-designed laser-cut clips to replace them.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Digital Music News ☛ Multiple Universities Begin Banning TikTok After ByteDance Admits Employees Improperly Accessed User Data

    In brief, after years of far-reaching criticism of TikTok in the U.S. and abroad, states including but not limited to South Dakota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia have since late November barred employees from using the service, citing data concerns.

  • New York Times ☛ Young TikTok Users Quickly Encounter Problematic Posts, Researchers Say

    TikTok appears to be pushing videos about eating disorders and self-harm to 13-year-old users at a rapid clip, researchers said on Wednesday, raising new concerns about the service’s influence on young people.

  • Fast Company ☛ For teen girls, TikTok is the ‘social media equivalent of razor blades in candy,’ new report claims

    Researchers set up a duo of standard and vulnerable accounts in four English-speaking countries: the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia. They scrolled each account’s For You feed, which provides an inexhaustible supply of videos when a user opens the app. According to TikTok, For You is “central to the TikTok experience” because it’s “where most of our users spend their time.” Every time a video relating to body image, mental health, eating disorders, or self-harm played, CCDH’s team liked it, then paused for 10 seconds. Everything else got skipped.

  • Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) ☛ Deadly by Design

    For our study, Center for Countering Digital Hate researchers set up new accounts in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia at the minimum age TikTok allows, 13 years old. These accounts paused briefly on videos about body image and mental health, and liked them. What we found was deeply disturbing. Within 2.6 minutes, TikTok recommended suicide content. Within 8 minutes, TikTok served content related to eating disorders. Every 39 seconds, TikTok recommended videos about body image and mental health to teens.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why Christians Should Support Cultivated Meat

    Cultivated meat will allow us to relegate battery cages, gestation crates and livestock trucks to a less compassionate past. Since animals are removed from the process, our pandemic risk will be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, the greenhouse-gas emissions are a fraction of those needed to raise livestock.

    Despite the FDA’s approval, more public funding for cultivated-meat research is necessary for this revolutionary protein to compete with the price of slaughtered meat, once it’s introduced to the American market. I believe Christians should pressure their legislators to support such funding.

• Proprietary

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Global counter-ransomware task force to become active in January [iophk: Windows TCO]

    As first announced during a recent summit in Washington, Australia will lead the International Counter Ransomware Task Force, which includes the U.S. and its allies, in an effort to foster greater international information sharing and exchanging capabilities to battling the global ransomware problem.

  • Data Breaches ☛ Claimant to Maintain Anonymity in English High Court Cyber Attack Case [iophk: Windows TCO]

    On December 20, 2022, the English High Court has granted the victim of a cyber attack a permanent injunction against cyber attackers whilst the victim organization maintains its anonymity. Generally, a claimant’s identity is public in English court proceedings. Injunctions can be made against unknown and unidentifiable defendants enabling them to be granted against individuals who are acting in breach or threatening to commit a breach.

  • Data Breaches ☛ Queensland University of Technology shuts IT systems after being hit by ransomware attack by Royal Team [iophk: Windows TCO]

    A cyber attack at Queensland’s second-largest university has caused campus printers to spit out ransomware notes in bulk.

  • ABC ☛ Queensland University of Technology shuts IT systems after being hit by ransomware attack [iophk: Windows TCO]

    The federal Department of Education has confirmed it is aware of the incident.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Microsoft’s Bot CAPTCHA is Annoying AF

    One of my sons got a tablet for Christmas, and (like most kids) he wanted to play Minecraft on it. Being the fantastic dad that I am, I went to go set him up with a new Microsoft account so he could log into, and enjoy, Minecraft.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Eugene V. Debs on the 1914 Christmas Truce

    Our Christmas present to you: a long-lost Eugene V. Debs article on the famed 1914 Christmas truce, in which German and British soldiers dropped their weapons for a day and played football together — displaying humanity in the face of barbarity.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Democrats Are Making a Devil’s Bargain on Pentagon Funding. It’s Not Paying Off.

    Progressives can’t win unless Pentagon spending is put on the chopping block.By Lindsay Koshgarian

  • Scheerpost ☛ Chris Hedges: The Democrats Are Now the War Party

    The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ Climate Crisis Is Ratcheting Up Pressure on Bee Populations

  • Energy

    • Common Dreams ☛ How Green Banks Are Boosting Clean Energy Projects

• Finance

  • [Old] CNBC ☛ U.S. banks processed roughly $1.2 billion in ransomware payments in 2021, according to federal report

    U.S. banks and financial institutions processed roughly $1.2 billion in likely ransomware payments in 2021, a new record and almost triple the amount of the previous year, according to a federal financial crimes watchdog.

    The total represents payments bank clients have made to possible cybercriminals. U.S. banks report the suspicious transactions to federal authorities under the Bank Secrecy Act.

  • [Old] NBC ☛ Ransomware: Now a Billion Dollar a Year Crime and Growing

    “It’s like some sort of gold rush,” said Limor Kessem, executive security adviser for IBM Security. “Cybercriminals are using ransomware to bring extortion to the masses and more criminals are now doing it because they’re interested in getting a piece of the action.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Tax Policy Is Helping Wall Street Gobble Up Single-Family Homes

  • TruthOut ☛ Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ She Worked for Twitter. Then She Tweeted at Elon Musk.

    With that, Ms. Solomon had become part of a small number of media industry employees who lost their jobs this year after using Twitter to take on the institutions where they worked. In Ms. Solomon’s case, she directly challenged her boss in a series of tweets. She said she is not sure whether those tweets caused her to lose her job, or if she was just one of the roughly 3,700 Twitter employees who got the ax in layoffs that began soon after Mr. Musk took ownership of the company in October.

  • Securepairs ☛ All Eyes on NY Governor as Clock Ticks Down on Right to Repair Legislation – Week in Repair

    The Digital Fair Repair Act, a bill approved in June of this year has reached a critical moment. Kathy Hochul, Governor of the 4th most populous state in the US, is either procrastinating or purposely trying to kill this electronics right to repair bill. Of the 1,000 bills that were voted through in the legislature, 256 have yet to get Hochul’s signature.

    If the bill in question takes effect, it would require electronics manufacturers to make parts available for independent repair shops and keeps manufacturers from using software locks to stop repair. After letting the bill sit for more than six months, the Governor requested that the legislature deliver the bill to her last Friday. Hochul now has 10 days to either sign- or veto it. Failing to do one of those two things will result in the Digital Fair Repair Act becoming law at the end of the day on December 28th.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Software bills of material face long road to adoption

    Despite the groundswell behind SBOMs, key entities within the federal government are moving slowly to require their use. Rather than mandate their inclusion in software purchased by the federal government, the Office of Management and Budget only made it optional as part of a September memo for agencies to require SBOMs in federal IT contracts. And in the rush to pass the end-of-year National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that would have required DHS to mandate the use of SBOMs in its contracts was dropped amid industry opposition.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Israel’s New “Government of Darkness”: the Most Underreported Story in the Middle East

    The explanation for the neglect is domination of the news agenda by the war in Ukraine and, more culpably, fear by part of the media that any criticism of Israel will be attacked as anti-Semitic. This attitude is more common today in Britain than the US, while the reverse used to be the case.

    The latest grim episode in this extremist shift in Israel came this week when prime minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded in forming a governing coalition in which many senior posts will be filled by religious and ethno-nationalist zealots.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Relatives Mourn First Christmas Without Slain Palestinian Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh

  • Common Dreams ☛ Abbott Blasted for ‘Cruel Stunt’ as Migrants Bussed to Kamala Harris’ Home on Christmas Eve

  • Counter Punch ☛ Lions’ Den is Not a Fleeting Phenomenon: On Palestine’s Looming Armed Revolt

    Unlike the group’s first appearance on September 2, the number of fighters who took part in the rally in the Old City of Nablus on December 9 was significantly larger, better equipped, with unified military fatigues and greater security precautions.

    “The Den belongs to all of Palestine and believes in the unity of blood, struggle and rifles”, a reference to the kind of collective Resistance that surpasses factional interests.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Common Dreams ☛ Will Britain’s Migrant Deportation Plan Get Off the Ground?

  • Common Dreams ☛ Azerbaijan Police Detain Dozens of Protesters on Day of Activist’s Trial

  • TruthOut ☛ Local Alabama Police Arrested 82-Year-Old Woman for Overdue Trash Bill

  • Common Dreams ☛ Indigenous Campaigners Want to Make West Papua ‘Earth’s First Green State’

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • uni Duke ☛ January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all!

      On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1  They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream. Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.

      Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2  They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1927, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: 2023′s public domain is a banger (20 Dec 2022)

      40 years ago, giant entertainment companies embarked on a slow-moving act of arson. The fuel for this arson was copyright term extension (making copyrights last longer), including retrospective copyright term extensions that took works out of the public domain and put them back into copyright for decades. Vast swathes of culture became off-limits, pseudo-property with absentee landlords, with much of it crumbling into dust.

      After 55-75 years, only 2% of works have any commercial value. After 75 years, it declines further. No wonder that so much of our cultural heritage is now orphaned, with no known proprietor. Extending copyright on all works – not just those whose proprietors sought out extensions – incinerated whole libraries full of works, permanently.

      But on January 1, 2019, the bonfire was extinguished. That was the day that items created in 1923 entered the US public domain: DeMille’s Ten Commandments, Chaplain’s Pilgrim, Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Golden Lion, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Coward’s “London Calling” and 1,000+ more works: [...]

    • Torrent Freak ☛ An AI’s Christmas Reflection on Piracy’s Role in Today’s Society

      Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly trigger many copyright debates and legal battles in the years to come. Since it can still be used freely today, we took the opportunity to ask for its thoughts on online piracy and its role in today’s society. Merry Christmas.

Gemini* and Gopher

• SpellBinding

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACDINOY Wordo: PHOTO

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • initial post

      welcome to my posts site. it’s where i host my “fluid” content, whereas my main site is where i host my static content. this includes posts, code snippets, images, and more.