01.02.23
Posted in Free/Libre Software at 9:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Staff can be an asset, not a “resource”
Summary: With hardly any staff left at Sirius ‘Open Source’ (mostly absent management and external contractors) it’s not even clear if such a company even exists (there’s no office and it’s registered at the accountants’ address) because most of the technical people left and that's hardly an accomplishment
Of note: Twitter now suspends/bans Twitter accounts of former security staff, preventing them from talking about Twitter. There are serious security incidents.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Security at 9:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
What if ISO knew the truth?
Summary: There are no proper and truly compliance-driven procedures that are being followed, actively used, or even vaguely specified by poor leadership at Sirius ‘Open Source’; it’s all improvised, hugely deficient, not even remotely compliant, and changes are sometimes made retroactively due to lapses and mistakes (compliance or merely appearance thereof, albeit only “after the act”); eventually there are attempts to shoot the messengers — those who have actually cautioned about those concerning things for several years already
THE “Conclusion” part of the report (a document we’ll publish tomorrow as PDF) is included at the bottom of this post. Worry not, it’s not the end of the series, only the end of this report; we have plenty left to show and to explain after that. We’re eager to show to the world what Sirius ‘Open Source’ Inc./Limited/Corporation truly is.
“We’re eager to show to the world what Sirius ‘Open Source’ Inc./Limited/Corporation truly is.”As a teaser of sorts, consider how poorly the company was handling data and information. It was getting worse over time because skilled people were leaving the company, making way for the “Google is your friend” mantra. This aforementioned mantra was something along the lines of, “trust big companies”, you can give them any data we have. Trust them, they’re big! Sure, they also spy for a government.
Data of high-profile clients, both past and present, was naturally left scattered all over the place, sometimes even outside the country. And to give just one example (there are so many; some will be covered later this month and next month), colleagues have cognition reports and incremental/full load reports on local — as in personal and offsite — machines (this is indirectly related to patients’ data) with no protocol or guidelines for removing these. There’s potentially sensitive data on people’s machines at home and we’ve already witnessed mistakes made by the clients themselves (like patients’ names or similar data showing up by mistake/accident).
THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!
“There are serious ramifications for data protection and adherence to law…”In a saner world, everything would be uploaded to a firewalled file server located on the client’s own network, accessible in some secure fashion, without the data ever leaving the network, not even metadata. But when a company like Sirius handles its E-mail via AWS and AWS is also the host of OTRS (ticketing), one is expected to just upload files to AWS and transmit the stuff over E-mail (i.e. open relays). No encryption. I was repeatedly told off for using PGP in my E-mails.
There are serious ramifications for data protection and adherence to law, as there are unpatched old machines and perhaps backups that contain such files — a ticking time bomb. And even way after they’re no longer a client (years later), the example above serves to show that the problem does not go away. Not even when the contract ends (or gets terminated).
“Clients simply come to assume the reputation earned in past decades persists to date.”The sad reality is that the company, Sirius (so-called ‘open source’), is terrified about clients finding out how reckless and incompetent the company gradually became. Clients simply come to assume the reputation earned in past decades persists to date. They’re trusting a company run by a person divorced twice, whose kids refuse to even speak to him. How can deep trust be established with people who (if they get caught) simply pretend nothing bad happened and instead of apologising would rather get aggressive, even combative, to cover up the abuse?
The text below mentions ISO, security incidents, and then the company’s attempts to shoot the messenger (who cautioned about those issues along with many other issues). The in-depth analysis of the witch-hunt will follow after this report is published in full (some time tomorrow).
Conclusion
To summarise, Sirius should simply admit out in the open: “we’ve deviated away from our mission,” and moreover Sirius ignores warnings about security (ISO deserves to know about phonies and posers at security).
Roy internally cautioned about this several times over the years. Later, when some providers suffers security breaches (as Roy predicted) Sirius neither reset the passwords nor left the compromised providers.
To reiterate what was stated at the start, what’s alleged here is factually correct and evidence-backed. No URLs are provided, but URLs can be provided shall they be requested. Brevity still matters and much remains to be told.
In regards to the weak accusations leveraged to avoid paying compensation to Roy and Rianne, here again is the gist of the underlying issue/s:
1. no due process
2. no evidence presented (or claims merely alluded to without context/link)
3. gross accusation inflation
4. guilt by association (identical letter, too)
5. the company has a history doing this to couples, e.g. one blind colleague based in Germany; it was very serious and it went to court (cost the company or its Directors — the founder and his wife — a lot of money, went on for a long time, settled at the end)
The document is far from complete. Roy and Rianne have documents, have screenshots, links to official documents from Companies House etc. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Although, these bad apples do not make a majority of the community surrounding Linux, since many forums are actually friendly towards new users, the negative users create enough noise in the community to turn newcomers away from the platform, thus creating a negative perception of the ecosystem.
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DistroWatch Weekly celebrates its 1000th issue and 20 years of publication.
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A new year, and a brand new issue of the FOSS-focused technology magazine Linux Format is available to buy.
Linux Format 297 includes a comprehensive feature about escaping Microsoft Windows. Aimed at first-time Linux users, the guide looks at using the user-friendly Elementary OS distribution to get started with Linux and related software.
There’s an in-depth guide to open source RAW photography that could (no promises) help you create better looking snaps, with ample tips, advice, software, and tool recommendations provided.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Today we look at Kodachi Linux from a standpoint of what it is and how it is created rather than looking at the distro directly. I identify a few major issues with the distro and why other platforms are better for security and privacy models.
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Comment below which distro you are going to try!
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What’s going on in the world of Steam Deck customization? Bad boot movies. That’s what. From pre-made motion graphic templates with the Deck logo poorly shoehorned in to “Adult Swim” to the OP re-emergence of “Bonzi Buddy”, there’s something for every (poor) taste on SteamDeckRepo.com!
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Hey everyone, and welcome to the Linux User Space! Normally we’d be releasing a new episode today, but we have to pause due to some health issues.
We’ll pick back up with episode 14 of season 3 featuring Gecko Linux in two weeks. So stay tuned and check out our Youtube and TILVids in the mean time.
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss our predictions for 2023 as well as our hopes and dreams for this coming year. Then we discuss the latest release of Xfce with Xfce 4.18. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
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Ultramarine Linux – Perfect Fedora Spin | Now With A Customized KDE Desktop
A video covering the newest release of Ultramarine Linux. The perfect Fedora spin now with the KDE desktop environment. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below.
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Today we are looking at how to install Rosegarden on a Chromebook.
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There are many todo list/todo manager applications out there and today we’re looking at one of the simpler ones, this is terminal tui based solution called dooit which while very simple does everything you might need. This video has been sitting in my backlog since September.
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Video ☛ How to install Visual Studio Code on KDE Neon – Invidious [Ed: Terrible idea as it is proprietary spyware controlled by the company attacking GNU/Linux the most; don't advise people to install this or help them give Microsoft control]
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A Quick Overview of deepin 20.8
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In this video, I am going to show how to install Manjaro 22.0 Gnome Edition.
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Kernel Space
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The new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was announced before Christmas. It will support Intel’s 11th gen integrated graphics and newer, as well as discrete Intel Xe graphics cards.
Though under active development at present, Intel say the new driver will be production-ready this year.
But why build a new Intel graphics driver at all? Isn’t the existing one good enough?
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Applications
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Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
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Happy new year! To get a good start in this new new year, I’m happy to announce that Tokodon 23.01.0 is out! This is a new major release for Tokodon and while it’s been only 2 weeks since the last major release, this release is packed with new features and improvements.
Tokodon is a Mastodon/Pleroma/Nextcloud Social client built with Kirigami that I started back in spring 2021. Tokodon has a great integration with KDE Plasma and Plasma Mobile, but it also work on other desktop environments and even Windows and macOS.
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For those who don’t fancy sudo and find it bloated, there are several sudo alternatives you can try instead.
sudo is probably one of the most used Linux commands. It allows you to gain administrative or elevated privileges on a Linux machine.
You normally need elevated privileges to execute actions such as installing software, managing services, and deleting critical system files. But did you know there are alternatives to the sudo command on Linux?
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this post, you will learn how to install and use vnStat on Debian 11 to monitor the network in a quick and easy way without too much complexity.
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Linux users often rely on the command line, but tedious and time-consuming tasks can make it frustrating. Navigating and moving between directories using cd and ls commands, plus typing long path files to access, copy or list files, can be annoying for even advanced users.
To solve the problem of directory navigation and accessing files from other locations in the system using command lines, the fasd tool has been created exactly for this purpose. fasd is a command line utility written in Shell that serves as an advanced version of the autojump and z command utilities; we can call also: Autojump plus z with support for files.
This Linux tool allows the user to quick access a previously visited directories and files from any location in the system.
Fasd can be described as a faster solution to navigate and access the user’s frequent and recent directories and files. This helpful utility saves the frequently visited directories and files (i.e. History) from the command line into a database in order to render filesystem navigation possible and quite easy just by typing small patterns.
In this article you will learn how to use fasd to easily access files and directories without specifying their full path or executing numerous cd commands.
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In Linux, a port is a numbered network connection that allows a device to communicate with other devices over the internet or a local network. It is important to ensure that the desired ports are open and accessible to ensure the smooth functioning of network services. There are various ways to check if a port is open in Linux, and in this article, we will discuss five of them.
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To organize the data in a precise sequence or sort the file, use the sort command. The file’s data is sorted line by line using the sort command. If a record is in alphabetical order, the file is sorted alphabetically. Otherwise, it is sorted in ascending order if the record contains numeric information. Linux’s sorting feature offers a variety of flags from which we can choose to sort in reverse or by column, etc. We will utilize a few of its flags in this article.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install NoMachine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, NoMachine is a comprehensive remote desktop solution that allows users to access and control a remote computer from a local machine. Interestingly, NoMachine supports an unlimited number of remote servers on a single server. Its support for multiple platforms and features such as audio and video streaming make it a popular choice for many users.
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 NoMachine on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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If you are a sysadmin, then wall command can be your next favorite Linux tool, thinking why? With the help of this tool, you can broadcast messages to all logged-in users on your system, either locally or via SSH.
This tool comes in handy, especially when you intend to start maintenance work (or something else) on your server and want to notify other users in advance.
Stick with this article until the end to learn more about the wall command and its different options (with practical examples).
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Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA). Let’s Encrypt offer free 90-day SSL certificates.
Let’s Encrypt provide two types of certificates. The standard single-domain SSL and the Wildcard SSL, which covers not only a single domain, but all of its subdomains too.
In this tutorial, we will use Certbot a free, open-source software tool for automatically issuing the Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate and verify that your certificate is set up to renew automatically.
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Mermaid is a Javascript-based tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create diagrams. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to start and render your first diagram.
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USB devices not detected in Linux? Try these troubleshooting tips to get things working again.
You’ve hooked up a USB flash drive or a keyboard or mouse to your Linux PC. But nothing is happening.
What’s going on? Why is your pen drive not detected in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or some other distro? Is it a Linux thing, or has your USB device stopped working? Here’s what to do on Linux if your USB drive is not detected or recognized.
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Unlike traditional packages, PPAs aren’t maintained or distributed by Ubuntu or Canonical. So what are they? And should you use them on your PC?
PPAs or Personal Package Archives are a type of repository used in Linux systems to store and distribute software packages.
Let’s learn what a PPA is, how they differ from standard repositories, how to add and remove PPAs, whether PPAs are safe to use, and finally, the advantages of using PPAs.
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Get plugged into the top 10 networking articles of 2022 to learn how to troubleshoot network problems, automate your network, balance traffic, and more.
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If you’ve ever wanted to run commands as a different user without having to log out and log back in again, then the su command is the perfect tool for you! This command not only allows you to switch users seamlessly but also provides a number of other useful features that can supercharge your Linux experience.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some examples of the su command in action, discuss best practices for using it, explore some alternatives, and cover some important security considerations. So let’s get started!
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TCPdump is a powerful command-line tool for analyzing and debugging network traffic. It allows you to capture and examine packets transmitted over a network, providing valuable insights into network performance and security.
If you’re new to TCPdump, don’t worry! In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the basics and provide you with the skills you need to get started.
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As we mentioned in our Manjaro Linux review, it is Arch Linux for Human Beings.
While Arch Linux can be intimidating, Manjaro is much more comforting and easier to use.
But that doesn’t mean that there is no learning curve involved.
If you are new to Manjaro Linux, these tutorials will help you use Manjaro Linux more smoothly and effectively.
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Applying updates regularly should be the top priority in the day-to-day tasks of a System administrator. Running unpatched systems for a long time is quite risky. There are many ways to patch your Linux systems. Today, we will learn how to apply updates automatically with dnf-automatic in RHEL and its clones like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.
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One of the interesting things with Linux desktop notifications is that they are not permanently saved anywhere on your system. Well, with some Google-fu and some minor configuration file edits, we can have our desktop notifications automatically save to a log file that we can read anytime we want.
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The ps and top commands are the most popular and commonly used command-line programs to view the currently running processes on your Linux system.
The pstree is also similar to them, except that it outputs the running process in the form of a tree; if no arguments are passed, then it will list the complete process.
This way of inspecting the running processes in the form of a hierarchy is more convenient and visually appealing, especially for beginners (even if they don’t understand the output).
In this article, you will learn how to use the pstree command and how to use the different available options with it (with practical examples).
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Power-profiles-daemons is a free and open source project designed to handle system power profiles over D-Bus. The two major Linux desktop environment, GNOME and KDE Plasma, are nicely integrated with it, allowing the user to easily manage power profiles from their dedicated power manager interfaces, but it is also possible to switch profiles and retrieve information about them from the command line, using a dedicated utility.
In this tutorial we learn how to install power-profiles-daemon, and how to use it to manage power profiles on Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The December and last issue of my exclusive “Xfce’s Apps Update” monthly roundup for 2022 is here with news about the latest releases of your favorite Xfce applications, plugins, tools, and more.
As you all know, the biggest news for fans of the Xfce desktop environment in December 2022 was the release of Xfce 4.18, which is already available for installation on some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions out there, as well as on some less known distros.
After the release of Xfce 4.18, the rest of December brought us a new release of the Thunar file manager to version 4.18.1, which fixes several thumbnailing issues, addresses a crash with the location bar, fixes an issue to prevent building on the NixOS distro, no longer resets zoom-level for directory specific settings, fixes the ‘replace’ option when copying ‘*.partial~’ files, and preserves the trusted state when copying launchers.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Here are two GNOME extensions you can use to keep an eye on stock prices from your Linux desktop without needing to open a web browser or a dedicated app.
In a fast-paced world folks want quick and easy access to real-time stock market data. While there are websites that let you view stock prices online, it’s often more convenient to get the information through the OS itself.
So the GNOME extensions in this article will satisfy those who spend a lot of time at their computer and want to see the latest stock prices for specific companies/stocks. There’s no need to keep a browser tab open, or fish a smartphone out of your pocket as you can view the latest stock prices hassle-free.
Why not invest in one of these time-savers?
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Pop!_OS 22.04 is a fantastic Linux distribution which has been heavily modified to provide the best experience for power users. It ships with a lot of custom software and tweaks, making it one of the best Ubuntu derivatives out there.
Although mainly developed by System76 for their own hardware that they sell, it can be used like any other normal distribution on any suitable hardware. Additionally, many users report that it was able to revive their older hardware thanks to the CPU tweaks done on it.
It has a fantastic future as one of the best Linux distributions out there for professionals and creators.
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If you’re looking to have a little bit of fun while distro-hopping, consider taking these funny, meme Linux distros for a spin.
Linux distributions are the most versatile and valuable OSes in the market. Given their customizations and flexibility, they inspire developers to create new, improved versions of the operating system, usually to meet specific goals.
Even though most Linux OSes are tailor-made to cater to a specific purpose, a few are bound to make you laugh or wonder about their true meaning.
If you are a fan of Linux and want to review a few unconventional, funny, and weird distros, check out this list of meme Linux distributions.
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New Releases
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You need to re-install Archcraft for this update. After that, you can update to next release with pacman
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We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 2.6.0. This new version combines the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
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Vanilla OS has released its first version. Vanilla OS is an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager.
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Arch Family
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Arch Linux is the first GNU/Linux distribution to kick off 2023 with a new ISO release targeting those who want to deploy Arch Linux on new computers, chroot into an existing one to repair it, or just reinstall their systems.
Arch Linux 2023.01.01 is not only Arch Linux’s first ISO release in 2023, but it’s also Arch Linux’s first ISO release powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.1 kernel series. This means that you’re getting better hardware support out of the box when booting the new Arch Linux ISO on some computers.
Linux kernel 6.1.1 is being used by default on the new Arch Linux ISO release since the latest Linux 6.1.2 kernel release that arrived on New Year’s Eve is still in the Testing repos (you’ll get it as an update after the installation). Linux kernel 6.1 arrived in Arch Linux’s repositories on December 22nd, 2022, for existing users.
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As of January 1, 2023, Arch is the most popular Linux distribution based on the number of members in individual Linux communities on Reddit.
The popularity of individual Linux distributions has always piqued the interest of the Linux community. Every year, new ones emerge, with some gaining popularity at the expense of others losing it for various reasons. In other words, the popularity of different Linux distributions is dynamic and challenging to track metrics.
For many years, Distrowatch has been used as an example in measuring this factor. However, the metric used there, unique page views of a specific Linux distribution, is hard to accept without reservation, even though it provides a good indication of popularity.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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A new release of Ultramarine Linux is here: Ultramarine Linux 37 with new custom repo, KDE Plasma flavour and goodies.
If you are unaware, Ultramarine Linux is a Fedora-based distribution which offers Budgie, Pantheon, GNOME and other desktops. This distro gives you the best Fedora experience with this awesome desktop environment.
Recently, this small project is acquired by FyraLabs, the company behind PhotonBrowser and tauOS. And this enables the Ultramarine project with the necessary manpower and funding for infrastructure to continue building the distro.
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Digital advances offer countless competitive advantages and can be a great equalizer for those they serve. However, organizations must consider the risks involved when generating a tidal wave of data and connections.
As businesses spend millions of dollars on developing strategic, long-term plans to digitize their processes, enhancing IT and cyber risk management functions should be at the forefront. In fact, 14 percent of C-suite executives indicate their organizations have no cyber threat defense plans.
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Upskilling, burnout, containers—oh my! These are the topics swirling within the minds of developers and IT professionals. This year, IT leaders shared both their success stories and failures when it comes to DevOps. Although embracing cloud-native technology like Kubernetes is exciting, honing in on the emotional side of DevOps is just as important and even more challenging. As you enter into the new year, read these articles to reflect on how to strengthen your organization’s culture of DevOps.
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Debian Family
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So… yes, there is a clear downwards trend towards the last few years. And it does make sense, all in all: Not only have I managed to keep myself busier than before, but… Blogging is a social endeavor. And as people have moved over to the different flavors of social networks, there is somewhat less fueling us to share our thoughts and experiences in this fashion.
So this connects me to my first point: Staring at Noodles’ Emptiness, I got to a campaign to Bring Back Blogging. I stand by all of what they suggest: Blogs are a great invention, they allow the sharing of a great insight into a person’s mind, ideas and worldview (and even more so if, like mine, it shows already a window of almost two decades of life! This year my blog will be old enough to vote!), they are completely decentralized, and can be easily grouped according to each readers’ preferences via the RSS format.
Anyway – I do want to write a post summing up 2022, as well as sharing some hopes and projects I have for 2023. But I don’t want to make it too long to read. So… That shall be the blog post for today!
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The 12th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2022:
– Linux kernel updated up to 6.1.2 & 5.15.86-LTS & 4.9.336-LTS49, and the new one 6.2-RC1 as well
– Added to repos: Harmonoid
– the US1 mirror server is back online
– Sparky 2022.12 & 2022.12 Special Editions of the rolling line released
Good news!
In December, You sent a little more than 100% of donations, it’s something we have not been able to do for the past few years.
We also got 100% of the amount for the VPN server for the next year, just a few days before the deadline.
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In December I was assigned 15 hours by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and carried over 9 hours from November. I worked all of those hours.
I merged the latest bullseye point release into the linux-5.10 package, uploaded that, and issued DLA-3244-1.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 768 for the week of December 25 – 31, 2022.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Genio 700 SDK allows designers to customize products using Yocto Linux, Ubuntu, and Android. With this support, customers can easily develop their own products with a minimal amount of effort, regardless of application type.
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The Genio 700 SDK allows designers to customize products using Yocto Linux, Ubuntu, and Android. With this support, customers can easily develop their own products with a minimal amount of effort, regardless of application type.
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The Genio 700 SDK will allows developers to create and customize industrial and smart home products running on Yocto Linux, Ubuntu, and Android.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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As we tend to mention often, cameras are one of the areas where Linux phones are often seen as lacking behind their Android alternatives. This is partly due to extreme fragmentation of sensor drivers, with most mainlined devices not having any kind of Linux camera support, and just partly due to the lack of a software infrastructure for acquisition and post-processing.
The first camera app for Linux phones was Megapixels, developed by Martijn Braam as a Python GTK3 app for the PinePhone, and now the standard choice for Linux mobiles. Megapixels can be easily extended to new phones with a working kernel camera driver through configuration files, which specify sensor drivers to use, colour processing matrices, how previews are to be displayed, and much more.
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Install and configure your private Streaming Server on Raspberry PI and Emby.
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Electronics engineering student Vlad Tomoiagă has come up with a neat way to experiment with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) concepts without having to splash out on an actual FPGA — by simulating one on a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040-based microcontroller board.
“This project aims to simulate Verilog HDL [Hardware Description Language] designs on a Raspberry Pi Pico (or any other RP2040-based board),” Tomoiagă explains of FakePGA. “It achieves this by using Verilator to compile the RTL [Register Transfer Level code] into a cycle-accurate C++ model of your design which can then be executed on the microcontroller. This allows you to access the signals of the simulated design through the GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] pins of the board, which gives a more hands-on experience than simulating on a computer.”
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Since 2017, when I announced that I wanted to “Leave Apple & Google”, the /e/OS project has done tremendous progresses: we have succeeded to design and release a modern and realistically usable operating system and cloud services that protect their users from permanent personal data collection and from surveillance capitalism…
/e/OS can be installed on more than 250 different smartphones, and we have succeeded to bring it to long awaited devices such as the Fairphone 3 and Fairphone 4, among others.
We have introduced unique features, such as the “Advanced Privacy” module, that informs /e/OS’ users about trackers and ads triggered by mobile applications and websites, and cut them in real time. Advanced Privacy can even fake one’s geolocation or… IP address, to stay under the radar.
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As we reach the end of 2022 it’s time to take our usual look back at the year, while also glancing forward to what 2023 has to offer. It’s been an unusual year for Sailfish OS, but still with plenty to celebrate. And the newsletter has something to celebrate too, with this being the 50th issue. With all of the crazy non-Sailfish related news that’s been happening around the world this year, we’re pleased that you’re still taking time to read about your favourite mobile operating system in the newsletter as well.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Mastodon caught my attention at the end of 2022 in the wake of all the Twitter shenanigans. At a high level, Mastodon is an implementation of ActivityPub and you can use it for “micro-blogging” much like you would use Twitter. (This is a really quick, high-level explanation and I skipped over plenty of detail.)
This post covers my journey on Mastodon that led me to self-host my own Mastodon instance in a fairly reliable way.
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Programming/Development
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Here is some udpdate on Niepce work done in December 2022. Mostly changes under the hood, but important ones to move forward with improving the features. The short version: it feels great to remove C++ code.
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We have released Qt 6.2.7 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 6.2.7 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
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In C++, std::list is like a container that stores the elements on the non-contagious memory location. The “std::list” is implemented as a doubly linked list. We can insert or remove any element of the list that is stored in any location, which makes the lists bidirectional and sequential. Bidirectional because we can access the list elements from the front and back of the list (from any location). Sequential because we can access the elements anywhere in the sequence. Lists behave as doubly linked lists. Doubly linked lists can store their elements anywhere in the memory and they can be accessed from any location on the runtime. The list belongs to a standard template library like arrays and vectors but lists do not allow a fast access comparable to other data structures. Let’s discuss “std::list” in this article with the practical implementation of lists with different operations.
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The loss function in optimization is a function that serves as a proxy for the underlying performance measurement. In many cases, it’s one of the most important components of any form of machine learning.
It’s also sometimes referred to as the cost function, objective function, error function, or reward function, depending on what you’re doing. Those terms capture the essence of what I’d like to get out of my 2023 predictions – a measured error and a way to derive a path to improvement (i.e., a metaphorical gradient).
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Perl / Raku
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Rawley Fowler has created a simple web-framework called Humming-Bird, inspired mainly by Opium, Sinatra and Express. And introduced it in a post on /r/rakulang, with quite a few reactions.
[...]
Anton Antonov released a new module called DSL::Bulgarian allowing one to specify computational workflows using natural language commands in Bulgarian, and introduced it in a dedicated blog post.
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Python
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The Python on Microcontrollers newsletter is the place for the latest news involving Python on hardware (microcontrollers AND single board computers like Raspberry Pi).
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How to use Super Nintendo (SNES) controllers in CircuitPython with the keypad library.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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The IFS is an abbreviation for Internal Field Separator which is an environment variable in the shell to determine the separator. The $IFS specifies how the words on the command prompt are delimited. By default, field separators (IFS) are the space, tab, and newline but we can alter this in our script to match the requirements. It is mostly used for loops to manipulate the elements in the specified list. We use the $IFS variable in our Bash script to split the string because Bash does not include a built-in mechanism for string splitting.
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There are two alternative ways to delete a directory, file, or folder in Bash. We can delete the folders or directories using two different commands. The “rmdir” command is used to delete the empty folders or directories. The “rm” command is used to delete the folders or directories that are not empty. However, we will use the “rm” command to delete the folders in this article. Additionally, we delete some files from the Linux desktop.
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The “AWK” function is a Linux utility that is used for text analysis that offers strong data control. To use the Linux computer program and “AWK” function, users can evaluate, modify, and generate the prepared results. The “AWK NF” variable is used to show how many files, elements, or other items are contained in a line of any file.
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Standards/Consortia
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Leftovers
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Let’s talk about big TV and movie studios. About the life and death of CollegeHumor, about what makes Dropout interesting, and how their video platform could be improved!
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Science
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The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years.
An animation from the simulation shows our universe changing from a smooth, cold gas cloud to the lumpy scattering of galaxies and stars that we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolution yet produced, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Medium-range weather forecasts play a crucial role in agriculture, construction, travel and other industries. They also bring practical value to people’s daily lives, enabling us to plan outings and keeping us safe from extreme weather events.
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Hardware
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Axelera M.2 AI accelerator module is said to deliver up to 214 TOPS of AI inference and up to 3200 FPS with ResNet -50 in a compact M.2 2280 form factor.
Few details are available at this time, but the module is based on the company’s Metis AIPU (AI Processing Unit) using in-memory computing based on arrays of SRAM memory devices used to “store a matrix and perform matrix-vector multiplications “in-place” without intermediate movement of data”. This technology is said to “radically” increase the number of operations per computer cycle with without suffering from issues such as noise or lower accuracy.
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German Bionic, the robotic exoskeleton startup behind the Cray X, will be showing off two new posture-protecting products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada this week. The Apogee is the company’s latest and lightest powered exosuit built for commercial and industrial use while the Smart SafetyVest will “bring ergonomic monitoring and protection to every worker,” per a Monday release.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Virtual reality software has become an unlikely tool in the fight against cancer.
In a bid to help doctors better understand how to treat cancer, video game designers and cancer researchers have teamed up at the University of Cambridge, England, to turn spreadsheet data into highly detailed VR imagery of cancer cells, ITV reports.
[...]
Speaking to ITV News, Own Harris, IMAXT Laboratory’s lead video game designer said: “It’s so much easier to notice differences, to notice features, to notice peculiarities when you’re actually in a thing than when you’re looking at a spreadsheet or a photograph.
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Proprietary
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Security
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Hacker News ☛ WordPress Security Alert: New Linux Malware Exploiting Over Two Dozen CMS Flaws [Ed: This is a WordPress plugins issue (not WordPress, not Linux); calling this Linux is like calling an Adobe Photoshop bug a "Windows bug"; WordPress runs not only on Linux]
WordPress sites are being targeted by a previously unknown strain of Linux malware that exploits flaws in over two dozen plugins and themes to compromise vulnerable systems.
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The sixth Reproducible Builds Summit took place exactly two months ago in Venice, Italy. These three days of workshops were filled with a succession of interactive sessions, where everyone attending had the opportunity to present or learn about anything related to Build Reproducibility. This included the status of specific Open Source projects, techniques to locate, analyse, and understand issues, or also how to explain and communicate better around this topic.
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From time to time, I hear people saying that Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) cannot be used to directly encrypt data, and you can only do key agreement and digital signatures with it. This is a common misconception, but it’s not actually true: you can indeed use elliptic curve keys to encrypt arbitrary data. And I’m not talking about hybrid-encryption schemes (like ECIES or HPKE): I’m talking about pure elliptic curve encryption, and I’m going to show an example of it in this article. It’s true however that pure elliptic curve encryption is not widely used or standardized because, as I will explain at the end of the article, key agreement is more convenient for most applications.
[...]
I wrote an in-depth article about elliptic curve cryptography in the past on this blog, and here is a quick recap: points on an elliptic curve from an interesting algebraic structure: a cyclic group. This group lets us do some algebra with the points of the elliptic curve: if we have two points $A$ and $B$, we can add them ($A + B$) or subtract them ($A – B$). We can also multiply a point by an integer, which is the same as doing repeated addition ($n A$ = $A + A + \cdots + A$, $n$ times).
We know some efficient algorithms for doing multiplication, but the reverse of multiplication is believed to be a “hard” problem for certain elliptic curves, in the sense that we know efficient methods for computing $B = n A$ given $n$ and $A$, but we do not know very efficient methods to figure out $n$ given $A$ and $B$. This problem of reversing a multiplication is known as Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP).
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti, emacs, exuberant-ctags, libjettison-java, mplayer, node-loader-utils, node-xmldom, openvswitch, ruby-image-processing, webkit2gtk, wpewebkit, and xorg-server), Fedora (OpenImageIO, systemd, w3m, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (curl, freeradius, libksba, libtar, python-ujson, sogo, thunderbird, and webkit2), Red Hat (bcel), and SUSE (ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, mbedtls, opera, saphanabootstrap-formula, sbd, vlc, and webkit2gtk3).
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If you installed PyTorch-nightly on Linux via pip between December 25, 2022 and December 30, 2022, please uninstall it and torchtriton immediately, and use the latest nightly binaries (newer than Dec 30th 2022).
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Unfortunately, the project was compromised by means of a supply-chain attack during the holiday season at the end of 2022, between Christmas Day [2022-12-25] and the day before New Year’s Eve [2022-12-30].
The attackers malevolently created a Python package called torchtriton on PyPI, the popular Python Package Index repository.
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Anybody who installed a nightly release from the PyTorch machine-learning library between December 25 and 30 will want to uninstall it immediately…
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Environment
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Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and passenger vehicles — the cars most Americans rely on to meet their daily needs — account for more than half of transportation emissions.
Conversations about reducing these emissions typically focus on electric vehicles. But increasingly, government officials across the country are aiming not just to get Americans into different kinds of cars, but to radically reduce the need to drive in the first place.
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Finance
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Ruben Schade ☛ Rejected cards and waking an IT team up [Ed: This never happens when cash is used; there are many other advantages associated with cash]
One of my payment cards has been flaky the last few days, to the point where multiple cafes and shops have timed out or rejected accepting it. The card has plenty of balance and isn’t physically damaged; I suspect it’s an issue at the payment processor.
[...]
The cloud isn’t “just someone else’s computer”, just like commercial aviation isn’t just someone else’s Cessna. It’s also someone else’s rosters, architecture, monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, and fixes, often times with significant complexity and (hopefully) redundancy. But despite the best efforts of certain marketing teams claiming otherwise, there’s no magic behind any of it. It’s people all the way down.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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There is no question that the current internet is plagued, among other things by surveillance, profiling and polarization at all levels. Two years ago, two UK researchers proposed, as one part of a larger solution, “a public sector challenge to the private interests that have colonised the search functions on which we all depend.”
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Hotlinking, in the context I want to discuss here, is the act of using a resource on your website by linking to it on someone else’s website. This might be any resource: a script, an image, anything that is referenced by URL.
It’s a bit of an anti-social practice, to be honest. Essentially, you’re offloading the responsibility for the bandwidth of serving that resource to someone else, but it’s your site and your users who get the benefit of that. That’s not all that nice.
Now, if the “other person’s website” is a CDN — that is, a site deliberately set up in order to serve resources to someone else — then that’s different. There are many CDNs, and using resources served from them is not a bad thing. That’s not what I’m talking about. But if you’re including something direct from someone else’s not-a-CDN site, then… what, if anything, should the owner of that site do about it?
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Last September I started investigating a South Korean application with unusually high user numbers. It took me a while to even figure out what it really did, there being close to zero documentation. I eventually realized that the application is riddled with security issues and, despite being advertised as a security application, makes the issue it is supposed to address far, far worse.
That’s how my journey to the South Korea’s very special security application landscape started. Since then I investigated several other applications and realized that the first one wasn’t an outlier. All of them caused severe security and privacy issues. Yet they were also installed on almost every computer in South Korea, being a prerequisite for using online banking or government websites in the country.
[...]
Originally, these applications used Microsoft’s proprietary ActiveX technology. This only worked in Internet Explorer and severely hindered adoption of other browsers in South Korea.
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Despite all the efforts of fixing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) on the web, it continuously ranks as one of the most dangerous security issues in software.
In particular, DOM-based XSS is gaining increasing relevance: DOM-based XSS is a form of XSS where the vulnerability resides completely in the client-side code (e.g., in JavaScript). Indeed, more and more web applications implement all of their UI code using frontend web technologies: Single Page Applications (SPAs) are more prone to this vulnerability, mainly because they are more JavaScript-heavy than other web applications. An XSS in Electron applications, however, has the potential to cause even more danger due to the system-level APIs available in the Electron framework (e.g., reading local files and executing programs).
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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the new year is a celebration of the recent past and the near future, but i have something a little bit different in mind this year. i am very close to achieving some very big goals – i’m about to become a professional software engineer, i’ll finally be able to move away from my hometown and forget about my less-than-optimal job and i’ll finally have the opportunity to start my life, “for real this time.” this is all on the horizon. after years and years of dreaming of it, i can see it in the distance. i’ve got an article coming soon about this very topic, in fact; i am obsessed with the future and so is the rest of humanity.
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when I was 6 years old I met my best friend for a while (at least until 5th grade). I don’t like complaining much but I think I did not socialize much with other kids because of my parents’ rules on going out. ulises lived in front of the elementary school (the second one I attended) and lived with his mother and two younger siblings. his dad was in an unspecified place in america (I don’t know what kind of job he had). this is very common in guanajuato, but of course at the time I had no idea.
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As I try to get myself back into something that resembles a routine after the holiday break I started to poke around at some things that have been needing attention. It seems that my microblog to gemini renderer has been broken for about a month. A quick fix and it seems to be functioning but that gave me an excuse to tweak the overall layout. Previously I rendered gemtext headings for the years and the months, leaving the individual entries as just simple paragraphs, however it seems more logical to expose individual entries so you can navigate the in-reply-to chain using your user-agent, assuming it has the ability to navigate headings (Lagrange does).
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You enter a small room, with four visible doors and an altar.
Enshrined in the upper part of the altar, you see a jewelled dagger, the symbol of Abbathor, the dwarf god of greed, pointing to the ceiling. Engraved on the vertical part of the altar, an inscription in Dwarvish: “Abbathor rewards those who know the price of things and never pay more than they can gain. What is the price of blood?”.
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I looked at some old prints of photos taken on film the other day. I found it a bit overwelming: things that happened so long ago, many of which I could only barely remember.
“Did we really go on holiday there?”
“I remember that social event, but I have no idea who half the people are.”
I had to stop looking. The weight of the past was too much.
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Technical
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I read lots of books, so I bought an e-reader for myself, the PocketBook Basic 4, also known as the PocketBook 606 in some regions. It was one of the cheapest options available, while not selling your data to Amazon or Kobo. This is a review after 2 months of usage.
It has no touch screen, being navigable using a 4-way touch pad. That was one of the selling points for me, as I didn’t want this to be a glorified phone, and besides, less screen wiping. It’s made out of plastic, which makes it really light at around 140g, perfect for carrying around. The e-ink display is HD, perfect for reading any sorts of books. It supports all popular e-book formats and PDFs. Best of all, it runs Linux! More specifically, the kernel version is 3.0, I don’t think the interface is FOSS though. It doesn’t connect to the Internet whatsoever, which is a huge plus for me, it helps you stay disconnected. The battery is rated at around one month, although personally at my reading-rate, I see it lasts around 2 weeks. If you put an SD card in, then plug it into a computer, it’ll act as an SD card reader which is really awesome! For example, on Linux it adds two new devices, the internal memory which is 8GB, and the SD card. This way you don’t need a converter in order to load your favorite books.
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This is mostly a reminder for myself. I installed Gentoo on a machine, but I reused the same BTRFS filesystem where NixOS is already installed, the trick is the BTRFS filesystem is composed of two partitions (a bit like raid 0) but they are from two different LUKS partitions.
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Internet/Gemini
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ay mates, lelkins here. this might be a pretty short post. i keep remembering memes that used to be the biggest things on the internet. like current ones that just fizzled out fast like ronaldinho soccer 64, megalovania (this one is still kind of popular), so many examples that i can’t put them in (and cause i actually forgot most of them. reason why later). and more common in my head are ones that i used to see as a kid from the era of “fads”, like hotel mario edits where every noun is replaced with a random clip, “the king has a new computer”, one youtube poop where mario and luigi fight eachother in a pokemon battle and mario charges a pinesol bottle and luigi just uses za warudo from jojo. the internet was wild and quality always differed.
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With the release of version 4 of Mastodon [1] there has been a problem of links to profile pages or conversation threads “going dark” within shell based browsers, such as Lynx [2]. In version 3.x you would get a text rendering of each page, but now you only get a terse *”To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript”* message.
I had been following the philosophy of *”do the minimum thing that works”* with Epicyon [3], but after Mastodon 4, just linking directly to Mastodon web content was no longer sufficient to be universally legible. So I have now replaced those direct links with a *conversation view* and a different way of viewing Mastodon profiles in which the html is all rendered by Epicyon itself. This brings back the otherwise Javascript-shrouded fediverse content, and also has the added advantage that it fully supports *authorized fetch*, which in Mastodon is known as “secure mode”. It also makes the user interface more consistent looking in shell browsers.
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Gemlog discussions are frequently happening, which is a good sign for an active community. Due to the simplistic nature of the gemini protocol these discussions happen with much less automation and more handwork than in the world wide web. The usual way is to publish a reply with the link to the original gemlog and inform the original author via email about the reply.
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is it? there isn’t really a built-in mechanism through which you would be made aware whether your work is being noticed or not, and that’s by design. I don’t know how common this is, but I don’t find it to require much effort to keep up with everything that shows up on the main CAPCOM/spacewalk instances so I keep up with it regularly.
there wasn’t any contact information anywhere in your gemini capsule, so I can’t reach out and tell you that I’ve responded to your post, so I guess we’ll see if you notice this. this gemlog doesn’t have a feed of any kind, so if you see it, I guess content *can* be noticed without an atom feed.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 8:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It looks like another Softpedia:
Article full of lies and deliberate distortion of history (like the lies Microsoft paid writers to spread about MINIX and Linux):
Purely provocation (or, as some would say, “trolling” by the same person):
Summary: For a number of years already we’ve noticed that Analytics India Mag was behaving like a Microsoft mouthpiece and thus we’ve mostly ignored it; it now openly admits working with Microsoft and the first two days of 2023 were spent viciously attacking GNU/Linux with low-grade propaganda, so watch out; it tries to discourage people in India, where GNU/Linux gained a lot lately (about 10% on desktops/laptops), from bringing us the next billion users along with millions of skilled programmers
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Linux Magazine
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Applications
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In 2022, we noticed a lot of users preferring to use open-source tools for the sake of transparency.
Whether you are a Linux user or not, there are a lot of open-source solutions.
Open-source options have several benefits. So, if you are wondering the same, let me tell you about some of the most useful open-source tools I’ve encountered that you should use in 2023.
The tools should help improve your online privacy, security, and work productivity and provide you with a better online/computing experience overall.
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Instructionals/Technical
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User ID (UID), is nothing but a numeric value defined by your system to identify the users.
And if your system is running with multiple users, UID can be handy when you want to manage them.
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This article will show you three methods for determining whether your Linux system is using systemd or another init system.
If you are unfamiliar with this term, check the following section; otherwise, skip to the next section.
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The init (short for “initialization”) is the first (or parent) process loaded by your kernel that swamps other (child) processes to make your system work in a systematic manner, and it is assigned with “PID=1” (process identifiers are assigned in sequential order).
As this is the parent of all processes, it has the responsibility to keep running until the user sends a halt signal; otherwise, you might experience the stage called “Kernel Panic”.
When you hear the term “init” in conjunction with it, you will also hear the term “System V init”, which is essentially the first commercial system designed based on init, which many future Linux distributions adopted (until systemd came).
The init is respected for many things, but for now I’ll focus on one major one: “Do one thing and do it well”. This referred to the init behavior of starting one process after the previous one had completed in serial.
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I only recently learned that HTTP methods are case-sensitive. In order to save myself from future debugging headaches, I decided to do a quick search to see what else is case-sensitive.
This is what the RFC says. Real applications may treat things differently!
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SSH tunneling and port forwarding can be used to forward TCP traffic over a secure SSH connection from the SSH client to the SSH server, or vice versa. TCP ports or UNIX sockets can be used, but in this post I’ll focus on TCP ports only.
I won’t go into details, but the following post should show enough examples and options to find use in your day-to-day work.
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Linux being a multi-user system allows multiple users to log in and run various programs at the same time. As a normal Linux user or system admin, you may sometimes need to check which users are currently logged into your system.
This information can be useful for various reasons such as for troubleshooting performance issues, monitoring user activity, or for simply checking who else is using the system.
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In this Ubuntu Tutorial Post, we will help you to make your Ubuntu terminal look like Kali Linux. Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based operating system and is most preferred by beginners while Kali Linux is popular for security purposes.
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Dark mode in websites is an option which the website itself should provide. Most of the time, it’s handled by the website’s CSS and usually comes with a toggle button. However, at debugpoint – we do have a dark mode toggle switch.
But most of the websites don’t have dark mode enabled. Google Chrome and all Chromium-based web browser feature a flag where you can force dark mode for all websites, all the time.
Here’s how to enable it.
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Neofetch, Screenfetch, etc., which display your system information like the Linux OS version, hostname, processor, kernel, memory, desktop environment, resolution, CPU, GPU, and many more.
Despite the fact that this information can be read from a file present in the root directory, you can still use this tool to get clean output.
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You can use the date command to view the current date and time on your Linux system. The command allows you to format the output, view the last modified date on files, set the date and time, and more. It is an incredibly useful command which I highly recommend taking the time to learn.
There are many ways you can utilize this command, but you will likely need it when creating bash scripts that require the current date and time. You can also set the time using the command, but it is unlikely you will ever need to use this functionality.
This tutorial will take you through the syntax, options, and several examples of how you can use the date command.
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If you have a WordPress site, you will know that sometimes some unwanted errors occur that can give us a headache. So, the error in question is “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” on WordPress. Let’s take a look at it.
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Utilizing PowerShell, developers and IT professionals can unlock the power of automation. An open-source CLI tool with code lets users streamline their tasks and quickly configure settings. The following tutorial will teach you how to install PowerShell on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the software securely and adequately.
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A mac address is a unique identifier used by your Ubuntu systems network interfaces to identify itself on your network.
For example, if you have a Wi-Fi network controller and an ethernet one, they will have different mac addresses.
Network routers often use a mac address to identify your device within the network. It allows the router, for example, to assign your Ubuntu device a static IP address.
Please note that you can spoof a mac address, so it isn’t a flawless way of tracking or identifying a device within a network. For example, iPhones by default will fake a mac address for different Wi-Fi networks to improve privacy.
Over the following sections we will show you how to find the mac address on Ubuntu using either the terminal or desktop interface. Both methods are very straightforward to use even if you aren’t the most confident with Ubuntu.
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There are a couple of ways that you can check the disk space on the Ubuntu operating system that we will be exploring.
If you are running a version of Ubuntu that has a graphical interface, this process is made very simple by two inbuilt applications. These applications allow you to get the free disk space of every filesystem in just a few clicks.
There is even a built-in tool to quickly see what files are consuming the disk space on your Ubuntu system.
Regarding the terminal side of things, we can utilize a handy built-in tool that goes by the name “df“. While not as versatile as the desktop tools, it allows you to quickly get the disk space usage of your filesystems.
Hopefully, by the end of the following two sections, you will be able to check the disk space usage of your Ubuntu filesystems quickly.
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A repository is where your Ubuntu system will download and install packages from whenever you use the apt package manager.
While Ubuntu provides numerous packages through its official repositories, it may not include all the packages you need. There is also a chance the packages included are older than what that software is releasing itself.
Luckily the apt package manager that Ubuntu relies on allows you to add your repositories to download packages from.
In the following sections, we will show how you can manually add a package repository to your Ubuntu system and add a PPA repository.
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Games
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Valve started rolling out the Steam Deck in February, and by October it had shipped more than 1 million of these beasts across the western world, with plans to expand into additional regions.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kraft on Windows [Ed: Wasting time on company and platform intolerant of software freedom]
Kraft, which was released as version 1.0 after long time of active development, is targetted to the Linux desktop. My firm conviction is that the Linux desktop is very suitable for the target group of Kraft: In the small office of craftsmen for example, a Linux desktop is a great work horse which is stable, very well adoptable and has a great amount of applications that are stable and maintained.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Accessibility is a critical aspect of computing and operating systems. It includes well-managed settings for vision impairment, color blind and many other health symptoms. Popular Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE Plasma feature accessibility settings to help all those scenarios.
Thanks to the GNOME Extensions ecosystem, a huge number of specialised extensions are available to aid those users. One of the extensions I came across is “Colorblind Filters”.
Here’s how to install and use it.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn’t be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks “Which OS do you want to use today?” upon boot. And yet, even today, after several years of relentless news about how Linux is ready for the general desktop and business customer, one does not find dual-boot Win/Linux machines from large commercial OEMs at any consumer outlet or web shop I know of. Yes, you can get dual-boot machines at some of the smaller shops, but these are the ones that slip under Microsoft’s radar, and there’s no guarantee that Microsoft won’t decide to take action against these vendors at some point. And yes, you can buy Linux-only machines from vendors such as IBM. But think about it: Why would IBM sell Windows machines and Linux machines, but no dual-boot Win/Linux machines? The absence is conspicuous.
A few years ago, Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase “peaceful co-existence with Windows” to describe his company’s intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer’s hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, “I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”
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BSD
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I tripped across an idea recently which I'm not sure if
it is brilliant or evil. But I kinda like it.
Standard unix shell prompt is a $ or # (or a number of
other things, if you like unusual shells). Every operating
system I've used in the last 40 years has some kind of
prompt...but that's not exactly a requirement. And most of
us start cramming other info into the prompt, for example,
my standard prompt has grown to three lines -- a blank line,
username at hostname, then the full path and the $ or #.
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BSDCan 2023 will be held May 19-20 (Fri-Sat) May 2023 in Ottawa,
at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two
days of tutorials on 17-18 May (Wed-Thu).
Also: do not miss out on the Goat BOF on Tuesday 16 May (more
details to follow later).
We are now accepting proposals for talks.
The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias.
Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not
appropriate.
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The year 2022 was a busy and productive one for the FreeBSD Foundation. Continuous Integration (CI) and Quality Assurance (QA) is but one of many successful efforts the Foundation continues to support as a dedicated resource. We spoke with Li-Wen Hsu, one of the Foundation’s Software Engineers, to discuss his work on this project over the past year, and the plans he has for it this coming year.
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We were thrilled to be part of the Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing Conference September 29-30, 2022 here in Boulder, Colorado!
Just a few years ago, we were gaining momentum on showcasing FreeBSD at women in computing conferences and university groups. But, that came to a standstill when Covid hit. We are now kickstarting that effort to attend more of these types of events, from meetups to celebration of women in computer conferences. So, I was thrilled when I saw the local Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing was taking place here in Boulder Colorado in September!
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The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 77th quarterly release
of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available
with more than 27,000 packages, and supports 23 platforms, of which 10
are currently known to be working. More information on pkgsrc itself
is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/
In total, 215 packages were added, 63 packages were removed, and 2326
package updates (to 1687 unique packages) were processed since the
pkgsrc-2022Q3 release. Updates include 56 perl5 packages, 570 Python
packages, 184 Ruby packages, and 39 TeX packages.
This announcement takes a high-level view, grouping related packages
under a single name, and treating multiple versions of an upstream
package as a logical unit. Thus, 'gcc 12', while a new entry
'lang/gcc12', is an update to 'lang/gcc*'.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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In previous installments (Fedora 32, Fedora 35), there was a strong focus on making things work with Docker on Fedora Linux. This article will focus on the final stage of this long journey. It will focus on migrating a cross-platform production set-up from Docker to Podman.
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As a flatpak user, but also someone with a slow [Internet] connection, I was looking for a way to export a flatpak program to install it on another computer. It turns out flatpak supports this, but it’s called “create-usb” for some reasons.
So today, I’ll show how to export a flatpak program from a computer to another.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Specifically, once a company goes public, the focus shifts to ensuring the financial well-being of the shareholders rather than satisfying expectations and listening to the voice of users who are simply consuming the final product offered to them for free – in this case, Ubuntu.
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He stressed that Canonical is not in a situation where it has to raise outside money and that going public for him is not about fundraising. He noted that Canonical’s revenue last year was $175 million and that the company’s biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company’s ability to service it, in large part because there isn’t enough talent on the market for the company to hire.
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Public clouds enabled digital transformation at unprecedented speed. But their operational costs over time can be exacting as compute needs increase. Hybrid clouds emerged as an alternative to gain the benefits of both worlds: private infrastructure that allows for lower operational expenditures and tighter control, and public clouds that can scale with ease.
Organisations looking to adopt a hybrid cloud architecture should carefully consider their options for private cloud vendors, as well as their implications for application design and development, workload orchestration and long-term maintenance.
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Devices/Embedded
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It’s another year, and for me, that means it’s a good time to start with another Battle of the Boards – this time, with the Rock5 included! I’m going to be talking more about these boards in the coming weeks and flushing out some old posts on some older SBCs that I still use on a daily basis. But one could comfortably call this post, “The Rock5B Crushes All Others.”
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The Walter is an upcoming embedded device equipped with the ESP32-S3 microcontroller along with a GM02SP module for NB-IoT, LTE-M and GPS protocols. The board will also be CE and FCC certified to accelerate customers’ product development.
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How many times have you found yourself fumbling about with lighting while trying to get a clear up-close shot of an object? Although smartphones come with pretty nice cameras these days, properly lighting an object and taking impressive macro shots isn’t exactly their strong suit. This is where [MisterHW]’s LEDCard is a very welcome companion. Not only does it provide a credit card sized ring light, it also allows for a molded acrylic lens to be inserted for high-quality macro shots.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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[Old] History Computer ☛ Everything
The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer ever built whose operation was based entirely on silicon integrated circuits.
The drive to create the Apollo Guidance Computer’s software essentially established software engineering as an autonomous field. In fact, Margaret Hamilton, one of the principal software engineers who worked on the project, is credited with coining the term “software engineering.”
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QuickSpot Walter is an ESP32-S3 development board with built-in WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE/Mesh connectivity, as well as NB-IoT, LTE-M, and GNSS support through a Sequans GM02SP 5G IoT modem that appears to be a variant of the Sequans Monarch 2 GM02S with GNSS support.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Time changes and technology is evolving swiftly with every passing day. If you are in the tech industry, you must stay in touch with all these rapid changes and the coming trends to stay up to date.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Why is it that SQLite automatically creates an index for this join and PostgreSQL doesn’t?
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GNU Projects
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Dear CTT team:
Thank you very much for you contribution in 2022. There have been a few new comers joining our team, like Wind. Their work is appreciated.
The whole team have been doing a good job in 2022. Here is official letter from GNU.
Dear GNU translators!
This year was relatively quiet; the total number of new translations
was considerably lower than in 2021, especially in terms of size.
Almost two of every three translations were made in the "Simplified"
Chinese team; the Albanian and Turkish teams significantly reduced
the percentage of their outdated translations.
General Statistics
In November, we reached new maximum values of translations per file
in important directories, 9.44 translations per file (0.12 more
than in 2021) and 8.85 translations weighted with size of articles
(0.46 more than in 2021), 50 Mi in 3300 files total.
Meanwhile, the percent of outdated translations was as high
as at the end of 2021 (about twice as high as the historical
minimum in 2014-2015).
The table below shows the number and size of newly translated
articles in important directories and typical number of outdated
GNUNified translations throughout the year.
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Programming/Development
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To start using R, or almost anything else in Emacs you basically need to know 3 things: 1) How to move in Emacs, meaning understanding what is what and learning a few key commands; 2) What is the configuration file and how to use it and 3) How to use packages to extend Emacs. In the first half of this post I will try to show how easy it is to cover these 3 points even for people who are inexperienced in programming. If you don’t believe me I invite you to read just the first paragraph of the next section to give you an idea of how easy it really is. During the second half I will show how I’m using R in Emacs to give you a starting point of a fully functional environment for R, and will conclude with some topics that can be further explored.
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This was the sort of situation I was finding myself in for the protocol: I wanted to build everything correctly the first time around, but I had no damn idea about how to wire up only one fine half to nothing just to figure out what shape exactly should a whole exchange have. I couldn’t do it right all at once.
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C programming language is one of the famous structured languages that includes many basic components, and arrays are one of them. Arrays are referred to as a collection of similar types of items stored in contiguous memory blocks. These are of two types: static array and dynamic array. In the static array, the size of the array is fixed. But in a dynamic array, memory is allocated dynamically.
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Dear Fellowship, today’s homily is about how to improve persistences based on PHP extensions. In this gospel we will explain a way to keep a PHP extension loaded on the server without it being backed up by a file on disk. Please, take a seat and listen the story.
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Here I share the format applied to tables presenting the results of frequentist models in Bernabeu (2022; the table for Bayesian models is covered in this other post). The sample table presents a mixed-effects model that was fitted using the R package lmerTest (Kuznetsova et al., 2022). The mixed effects were driven by the maximal principle (Brauer & Curtin, 2018). The format of the table resembles one of the examples published by the American Psychological Association. However, there are also deviations from those examples. For instance, in the present table, the effects are grouped under informative labels to facilitate the readers’ comprehension, using the kableExtra package (Zhu, 2022). Furthermore, the random slopes are specified using superscript letters and a footnote. The table can be reproduced using the materials at https://osf.io/gt5uf.
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Here I share the format applied to tables presenting the results of Bayesian models in Bernabeu (2022; the table for frequentist models is covered in this other post). The sample table presents a Bayesian mixed-effects model that was fitted using the R package brms (Bürkner et al., 2022). The mixed effects were driven by the maximal principle (Brauer & Curtin, 2018). The format of the table resembles one of the examples published by the American Psychological Association. However, there are also deviations from those examples. For instance, in the present table, the effects are grouped under informative labels to facilitate the readers’ comprehension, using the kableExtra package (Zhu, 2022). Furthermore, the random slopes are specified using superscript letters and a footnote. The table can be reproduced using the materials at https://osf.io/gt5uf.
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Understanding the Git version control system is foundational for many open source practitioners. Whether you are an advanced user or you want 2023 be the year to get started, Opensource.com has plenty of resources for you. Here are a few recent Git articles that I recommend:
The first in a series by Dwayne McDaniels, Git concepts in less than 10 minutes, assures us that, yes, Git can seem intimidating, but knowing and understanding the basic building blocks can break down the barriers. Six basic commands and concepts are explained so you can move on to more advanced Git tools and commands.
5 Git configurations I make on Linux by Alan Formy-Duval is a straightforward guide to getting started working with Git on Linux. There are so many configuration options, and Alan suggests starting with global configuration to help make set up easier every time.
How to rename a branch, delete a branch, and find the author of a branch in Git is a straightforward article about the most common commands around Git branching.
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Rust
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Knowing how to read and write files can be useful for various purposes. In Rust, this task is done using the file system module (std::fs) in the standard library. In this article, I’ll give you an overview on how to use this module.
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Standards/Consortia
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So what happened at all of those working group meetings, specification documents, and side events in 2022? What are implementers and deployers of the web’s protocol doing? And what’s coming next?
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In USB-C Power Delivery (PD) standard, the PPS (Programmable Power Supply) mode is an optional mode that lets you request a non-standard voltage from a charger, with the ability to set a current limit of your choice, too. Having learned this, [Jason] from [Rip It Apart] decided to investigate — could this feature be used for charging Li-Ion battery packs, which need the voltage and current to vary in a specific way throughout the charging process? Turns out, the answer is a resounding “yes”, and thanks to a USB-C tester that’s programmable using Lua scripts, [Jason] shows us how we can use a PPS-capable USB-C charger for topping up our Li-Ion battery packs, in a project named DingoCharge.
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Leftovers
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The traffic. I couldn’t hear it. Where the hell was it? The cars? The buses? The hundreds of lorries (trucks)? The white vans? Fast ones weaving in and out? Slow ones not giving a damn? Where was that ever-constant urban din of four-stroke combustion cycles, intaking, compressing, combusting, exhausting? This was like our London of old, at the height of the pandemic. Silent. Void. Weirdly placated. (A time I enjoyed.) What has happened to our noisy, clattery, impulsive capital? Oh. Wait a minute. This was not the capital. This was not us by our hectic busy road. This was me rubbing my eyes in relative countryside, barely awake after my first proper night’s sleep in ages. I had entirely forgotten. We four members of the immediate family had decamped together the day before on a long green train from London to celebrate Christmas with the artist’s family. In short, I was waking up in exile.
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2022 sucked. That’s how I usually introduce this annual list of people who miraculously didn’t, and I wouldn’t be totally off base to do so again. 2022 was a year as chock full of horrors as any other year you might expect to survive during this dark age of Cthulhu. After all, this year was decimated on every conceivable front by a grotesque imperial proxy war in Ukraine that seems frighteningly likely to end in a thermonuclear third-world war. On a far more intimate front, gender outlaws like myself have never faced such well-publicized vitriol, with the partisan industrial complex using us as their go-to props for their latest midterm election circus.
I get called groomer six times a day with mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon. For all intents and purposes, it really is the end of the world as I know it. So, why then do I feel strangely fine? Could it be the estrogen finally coursing through my veins after 34 years of testosterone poisoning? Or maybe something that my therapist suggested about rewiring my grim brain in the positive finally clicked. I don’t know. But for whatever reason, 2022 was a heinously apocalyptic year that didn’t quite suck and here are at least ten reasons why.
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Radio has been haunted repeatedly by enquiries about “payola” (potentially illegal payments for radio play) and the power of the major music companies to control the market. Similar questions are being asked of TikTok.
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What if you have a need for liquid nitrogen, but you do not wish to simply order it from a local supplier? In that case you can build your very own pulse tube cryocooler, as [Hyperspace Pirate] is in the process of doing over at YouTube. You can catch part 1 using a linear motor and part 2 using a reciprocating piston-based version also after the break. Although still very much a work-in-progress, the second version of the cryocooler managed to reduce the temperature to a chilly -75°C.
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Hardware
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There seem to be a few major benefits. They’re much smaller, which lets you be more nimble around tiny ICs and other components. Yet advances in technology mean they heat up just as fast, or even faster, than traditional soldering irons and stations. Again, for someone with almost no free space, this seems really compelling.
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The Ham Radio All-in-one cable (AIOC) is a small PCB attachment for a popular series of radio transceivers which adds a USB-attached audio interface and virtual TTY port for programming and the push-to-talk function. The STM32F373 microcontroller (which, sadly is still hard to find in the usual channels) is a perfect fit for this application, with all the needed hardware resources.
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There are few challenges more difficult or dangerous than trying to get around the majority of North American cities by bicycle. Not only is the bicycle infrastructure woefully inadequate for safe travel (if it exists at all), but it’s often not maintained to any reasonable standard, either. This goes double in colder areas, where bike paths can essentially become abandoned in the winter after a snowfall. [Phil] found himself in this situation recently after a snowfall in western Canada and decided to DIY his own bike-powered snowplow to help keep his bike paths cleared.
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It can be surprisingly hard to find decent analogies when you’re teaching electronics basics. The water flow analogy, for instance, is decent for explaining Ohm’s law, but it breaks down pretty soon thereafter.
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[Steven Bennett] is so fond of Dyson’s new Lightcycle lamp that he’s decided to clone his own version in the spirit of the original. Dyson, however, knows what makes their lamp so special — so much that they patented their technique for tucking away the power wiring. Undaunted, [Steven]’s latest challenge has been to create a cable management solution that captures the elegance of the original without making a flat-out duplicate.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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It was another tough year for many parents who sincerely thought they were doing their best—until the busybodies said otherwise. Here are the 10 worst free-range kids moments of 2022 (and one encouraging counterexample).
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Gallagher also called for “reciprocity,” noting that Chinese officials are allowed on apps like Twitter but Chinese citizens are not allowed access to those same apps. He said he would like to see an arrangement under which “if your government doesn’t allow your citizens access to the platform, we’re going to deny your government officials access to that same platform.”
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Each is part of a small but growing movement to bring back an ancient agricultural practice called cover cropping that was once used to rejuvenate soil but now also likely comes with the added benefits of mitigating climate change and protecting against its ravages.
It’s increasingly getting a push from Department of Agriculture programs and even companies that buy commodities. But mostly, farmers say it saves them money and protects their land.
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Proprietary
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Jon Lech Johansen was 15 when he developed and posted his program, called DeCSS, on the Internet in late 1999, enraging the film industry because it feared the software would allow illegal copying of its films.
The three-member Oslo City Court found Johansen, now 19 and a household name as DVD-Jon in Norway, innocent on all counts in a unanimous 25-page ruling in the latest setback for the film industry’s drive to prevent film copying.
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Well, if you are a corporate executive whose compensation is tied to stock prices and earnings statements released every three months, there are strong incentives to address any immediate problem by essentially adding a bit of duct tape and wire to what you already have, rather than spending a large amount of money — updating software is costly and difficult — to address the root problem. Then you can cross your fingers and hope that whatever catastrophe may be in the making, it erupts under someone else’s future tenure. Such bets often pay off since, increasingly, the plight of a company’s customers and employees is divorced from the immediate fortunes of its current top executives.
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The decision, first announced in November, follows several controversies surrounding the ultra-secure chat app, which allowed users to sign up without a phone number or other potentially identifying information, making it a favorite for security-minded groups including hackers, drug dealers and journalists.
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Security
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There are a variety of services listening for connections on DShield honeypots [1]. Different systems scanning the internet can connect to these listening services due to exceptions in the firewall. Any attempted connections blocked by the firewall are logged and can be analyzed later. This can be useful to see TCP port connection attempts, but it’s usefulness is limited. Without the ability to complete the SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK handshake process other protocol data may not be sent.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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“Here’s some free advice for 2023,” Erin Keller writes at the New York Post: “Delete all your personal information — and sexual content — from your electronic devices before donating them to Goodwill.”
The advice may be free, but it’s worth far more than we’re paying for it.
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The agreement orders Google to pay Indiana $2 million within 60 days, and the proceeds may be used for any purpose allowable under Indiana law. Additionally, the agreement mandates that Google have “pop-up” notifications to inform users if their location history is enabled. The agreement also orders Google to maintain a webpage disclosing its practices and policies concerning customer location information. Lastly, Google must provide instructions to users about location-related settings and has to report its compliance with the agreement.
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1. We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Home Office consultation on “Unauthorised access to online accounts and personal data”. Having contributed to the previous call for information regarding the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA),1 we wish to reiterate some of the issues raised in that regard in light of the plans to introduce a Cyber Security Duty to Protect.
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According to a press release by the US Department of Justice, two young men allegedly accessed a dozen Ring cameras through currently-unknown methods and carry out a weeklong spree of next-level attacks.
During the alleged incidents, the schemers were said to have swatted their victims and using the hacked doorbell cameras to livestream the attacks and sometimes issue verbal threats to the responding officers, too. The charges are grisly, but also once again underline the grim privacy implications of allowing connected cameras and microphones into our homes — not to mention underlining the irony that a device designed to be easily be accessed by police is instead being leveraged by criminals to weaponize cops against their victims.
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Defence/Aggression
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Administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program will fund musical curricula focused on conflict resolution and foreign exchange programs for young musicians across the globe. Harvey Mason Jr., a well-known R&B producer who has worked with stars such as Michael Jackson and Beyonce, will assist with the rollout.
The bill was sponsored by House member Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, and had bipartisan support.
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The Russo-Ukrainian War drags on like a bad dream. Admittedly, there are slight glimmers of hope: Russian President Vladimir Putin stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference; but Ukraine must firstrecognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, demilitarize, and also guarantee Russian security. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he, too, is willing to negotiate; but Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. The insincerity on both sides is striking: negotiations are unnecessary when the demands of each have been met in advance.
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In their book, ‘Map of Hope and Sorrow,’ co-authors Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan trace the stories of five refugees trapped in Greece’s brutal refugee camps.
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Seldom in European history has an invading power so exaggerated its own strength, and underestimated that of its enemy to the degree that Russia did when it attacked Ukraine on 24 February. Ten months after President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to conquer Ukraine, the tragic absurdity of his giant blunder remains staggering.
Russia has never recovered politically or militarily from that initial miscalculation about the likely success of an invasion – and it is difficult to see how it can do so in future.
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Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts.
Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.
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Two years ago, Morocco and Israel signed the US-brokered “Joint Declaration”, thus officially recognizing Israel and instating diplomatic ties. Though other Arab countries had already done the same, the Moroccan official recognition of Apartheid Israel was particularly devastating for Palestinians.
Years ago, a close Moroccan friend told me that the ‘first time’ he was arrested was during a solidarity protest for Palestine in Rabat which took place many years ago.
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I am not a total pacifist, but I hate war. Time has shown me that it is always better to talk than to kill. As someone who lives in a nation long considered the greatest purveyor of military violence in the world, I believe one of the most important actions anti-imperialist and anti-militarist people living in the United States can take is to build a movement to challenge and confront the US war machine on the homefront. If this opposition were to happen in a consistent and concerted manner, war would not be Washington’s go-to solution. At this point in time, the possibility of such a movement seems far-fetched and far away. However, one could have said the same thing about the possibility of a movement against the US war on the Vietnamese in 1963.
While I understand that there are times when self-defense requires an armed response, the time for that is over in Ukraine. There’s little to nothing to gain by continuing the military conflict. The war itself has clearly become what it always was–a proxy war between Moscow and Washington. The fact of Russia’s invasion and Kyiv’s reaction to it is overshadowed by the greater possibility of a much wider, even nuclear, war. This is true no matter where one stands regarding who holds the greater blame for the situation in Ukraine prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. It’s one thing to defend one’s nation from military aggression; it’s quite another thing to forcibly reject calls from governments and people around the world to negotiate a cessation of hostilities. Likewise, it is wrong to reject peace talks while sending (or demanding) billions of dollars worth of arms The ongoing escalation in Ukraine, the growing economic suffering of people around the world and the increasing danger of a wider conflict should be telling those in power that the energy put into warfare must be turned towards negotiating peace. Instead, the powerful in capitals of all nations involved continue their bluster while their sponsors in the war business count their coin.
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Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.
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Environment
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Another year over, and the business-as-usual attitudes are breathtaking. As though everything were hunky dory in the Anthropocene. Some people are even pointing at December’s flash freeze to poke fun at climate science. But our industrial-strength impact on the planet is melting ice sheets, researchers at the University of Bristol noted a few years back, weakening the polar gravitational pull. “Wavy” polar vortices are also linked to global heating. Can the cold, chaotic lashings from the poles be kept in check by an increasingly warm and torpid jet stream?
The most recent lashing brought a prodigious snowfall and buried holiday drivers. Four people died in a 46-car pileup on the Ohio Turnpike. In Buffalo, a blizzard raged for 37 hours, leaving at least 39 people dead—some stuck in cars or caught in snowbanks.
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Energy/Transportation
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Regarding 2022, news generated throughout the year showed that from several thousand dollars in cryptocurrencies were scammed from university students, to smaller amounts that victims transferred when scammed by scammers.
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Luckily, the price of those panels went up, and I am currently still ahead of the game on this. Assuming they get taken out of storage on schedule (hopefully April), I wont have actually lost out anything except the transport costs for the panels to the site. (Originally that was included, but they needed to be left at a port warehouse instead.
So what else happened?
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Wildlife/Nature
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Imagine hunting for a fish dinner in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night without flashlight, compass, or iPhone . . . and then to find a way back to land. This is what seals must accomplish on a regular basis to survive. These pinnipeds, so often seen posing with a ball balanced perfectly on a whiskered nose or bowing gracefully for a circus display, have skills that cannot be seen on the stage. In fact, they give our close relatives the chimpanzees something to envy.
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Finance
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Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a New Year’s Day message on Sunday as he gets ready to take over as chair of the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the U.S. Senate when Congress comes back into session later this month.
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One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]
Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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It may feel a bit legalese, and yes, it shouts at you, but I can summarise it pretty easily. If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you.
What it means is that there is no supply chain here. Because there is no supplier. I am not providing you something that you bought for me. There is no relationship. I put something online because I wanted to. The fact you made your product depend on it is your responsibility. Not mine. Not the one of the providers. We provide libraries. We do not supply them. You cannot apply rules to me.
And quite honestly, I am not going to accept them. I barely have time to spend on doing the work on the FOSS libraries I maintain and doing so regularly burns out the people doing it.
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And so it has come to this. I finally quit Twitter… almost exactly a decade ago.
I could spin yarn and claim it was some major feat of clairvoyance, of course. That I foresaw all that happened lately with Twitter and decided to bail early. But it wasn’t that, really. I just felt strongly that centralized services are dangerous and unethical, and I decided to stop using them. Back then, Twitter was the last one on the chopping block for me.
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On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, former Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen said that if Twitter owner Elon Musk is truly interested in transparency and championing free speech that he should make public the algorithms that determine what users see on their timelines. Musk pledged to do that earlier this year, and while he has yet to follow through, Haugen believes that it would be a huge step in fostering safer experiences online.
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Under the new IT Rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms, with more than 5 million users, have to publish monthly compliance reports.
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Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Brazil on Sunday to celebrate the inauguration of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose return to the nation’s highest office also marked the exit of far-right Jair Bolsonaro who left his country and arrived in the U.S. state of Florida ahead of the weekend’s transfer of power.
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The Workers’ Party leader will begin his third term with an official ceremony, artistic performances and representation of 120 countries.
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There’s one rule in comedy so universal that it connects comics of every background, genre, and skill level: never punch down.
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Can someone buy the NYT Internet access? For some reason the paper insists on ignoring data from the Census Bureau when telling readers about the housing market. Last month it repeatedly told readers that young people, minorities, and lower income households were unable to buy homes when the Census Bureau data showed rapid increases in homeownership for these groups since the start of the pandemic.
The paper is doing its misinformation routine again today, telling readers…
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Ten years ago, pesticide and processed food companies spent $45 million — roughly $1 million a day — to defeat a ballot initiative to label genetically modified foods (GMOs) in California. The anti-transparency campaign led by Monsanto, one of the largest producers of GMOs, blitzed the state with misleading messages amplified by a wide range of seemingly independent third parties: from universities, professors, and scientists to many groups that claimed expertise on matters of food, health, nutrition, and science. But investigations would eventually reveal close ties between these so-called neutral groups and the companies fighting transparency.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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From the beginning, Meskis was deeply committed to defending free speech. She would later attribute her interest to a college course that introduced her to Areopagitica, Milton’s classic statement on the danger of censorship.
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On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
[...]
That Berenson espouses nonsense doesn’t make this revelation less disturbing: to accept this precedent is to accept that any future White House can press Twitter or any other social media firm to remove accounts it decides is spreading misinformation.
[...]
Many have been quick to dismiss or ignore all of this because so many of the illustrative examples disclosed so far have been genuinely repugnant people or politically unsympathetic. But this is a classic mistake.
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Principal Garrett allegedly threatened Dodge with punishment for wearing the MAGA hat, and Garrett sued.
[...]
It goes without saying that Dodge disputes this characterization of his political views as evidenced by his testimony explaining why he liked the MAGA message of his hat. Accepting Principal Garrett’s arguments that Dodge’s hat created disruption that warranted restricting his expression would be akin to picking which of their competing political viewpoints is superior.
It would be one thing if Principal Garrett was enforcing a generally applicable policy that banned all political expression. A government employer can categorically prohibit political speech as a valid administrative interest such that the prohibition does not favor or disfavor any particular view. But that is not what happened here….
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The processes too often target students already at risk of not succeeding in school, including students with disabilities, who may then be denied an education, advocates say.
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Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the status quo in baseball and the wider society, none more so than Bouton.
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Media reports about the debate over Drag Story Hour in the United States typically offer two positions to choose from: A liberal embrace of diversity or a conservative articulation of traditional values.
On the left, an endorsement of drag queens reading to children in libraries is presented as celebrating diverse sexualities and challenging the restrictive gender norms of the dominant culture. For many on the right, Drag Story Hour undermines traditional gender norms and validates homosexuality, with the more strident voices suggesting it’s an attempt to recruit children into unhealthy lifestyles. No doubt there are many people who do not have strong feelings either way and find the practice hard to understand, and so stay as far away from the question as possible.
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There was the punk scene, Malcolm McLaren, their racy clothes shop at 430 King’s Road that started out as Let it Rock, the creation of a look, and the gathering of the earth rumbling Sex Pistols. In fact, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood was already a proven stirrer, suggesting that she, not Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, a.k.a Johnny Rotten, came up with the title for the barnstorming “Anarchy in the UK”. Boldly, she claimed that prior to McLaren and herself, there was no punk.
The Westwood look became ubiquitous with enthusiastic teens of the late 1970s, the use of studs, clothes replete with antisocial indignation, and the jarring, spiky hair to match. In the opinion of Dame Zandra Rhodes, “We’d had flower power… then suddenly you had this very-hard hitting punk.”
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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EFF client Internet Archive has created one of those spaces. Through Controlled Digital Lending (“CDL”), the Internet Archive and other nonprofit libraries make and lend digital scans of print books in their collections, at no cost to their patrons. CDL allows people to check out digital copies of books for two weeks or less, and only permits patrons to check out as many copies as the Archive and its partner libraries physically own. That means that if the Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like any other library. Through CDL, the Internet Archive is helping to foster research and learning by helping its patrons access books and by keeping books in circulation when their publishers have lost interest in them.
CDL is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending; it’s just another way of getting a book to the one patron who borrowed it. But four of the biggest publishers in the world want to shut it down. In 2020, they sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. In 2022, both sides filed briefs asking the court to decide the question as a matter of law. Supported by authors, libraries, and scholars, the Internet Archive’s briefs explained that CDL is a lawful fair use that serves copyright’s ultimate purpose: enriching our common culture. The publishers, for their part, claim that the Internet Archive’s CDL program harms their ebook licensing market. But their theory has a fundamental flaw: even with unlimited access to years of sales data, they cannot point to a dime they have lost or are likely to lose because of the Internet Archive’s digital lending.
The outcome of this case is likely to define the future of books in the U.S. CDL makes it easier for patrons who live far from a brick-and-mortar library, or who have print disabilities, to access books. But that’s just the beginning. The Internet Archive’s CDL program also helps fight disinformation by facilitating ongoing easy access to authoritative sources for Wikipedia articles. It helps fight censorship by giving librarians a way to curate and share books banned by local school districts. Like all library lending, it helps the public discover new works that they love enough to purchase their own copies. Digital lending also makes it possible for patrons to access books without having their reading habits tracked by commercial entities, like OverDrive and Amazon, that may not share librarians’ traditional commitment to protecting privacy. Perhaps most importantly, it gives librarians the power to curate their own digital collections, just as they curate their physical collections.
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New York state governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Digital Fair Repair Act into law, months after it had passed both chambers of the state’s legislature with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. The bill had originally passed in June, but it was only formally sent to Hochul’s desk earlier this month; the governor had until midnight on December 28th to sign the bill, veto it, or allow it to pass into law without her signature.
The Digital Fair Repair Act is the country’s first right-to-repair bill that has passed through a state legislature (as opposed to being implemented via executive order), and has been hailed as “precedent-setting” by right-to-repair advocacy groups like iFixit. The law will require companies to provide the same diagnostic tools, repair manuals, and parts to the public that they provide to their own repair technicians.
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Monopolies
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One reason for high rates is that jails and prisons typically develop an exclusive contract with one telecommunications company. That means incarcerated people and their families are stuck with one provider even if the company charges high rates.
Another factor is site commissions — that activists call kickbacks — that county sheriffs or state corrections departments receive. Some local officials argue that site commissions are crucial to fund staff who will monitor inmate phone calls for any threats to the community.
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Patents
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Patent trolls are companies that are focused on suing and threatening over patents, not on offering actual goods or services. Very often, they use software patents to sue over basic business processes, like making picture menus or taking event photographs. It’s all too easy to get patents on things like this because the patent system is just a bad fit for software.
In the first 3 quarters of 2022, 64% of all patent lawsuits were filed by patent trolls—companies whose primary focus is making money from patents, not providing services or goods. In the high-tech space, patent trolls filed 88% of all lawsuits.
Since EFF has started working to improve the patent system, we’ve seen a few big steps forward, like the introduction of inter partes review (IPR), and the 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court ruling.
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Copyrights
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A court in Spain has handed down an order that requires Google to remove popular IPTV app ‘IPTV Smarters Pro’ from the Google Play Store. Filed by top-tier football league LaLiga, the initial complaint received support from UDEV, a police unit tackling specialist and violent crime, including national and international copyright cases.
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Bungie’s $7.7m lawsuit, against a gamer who allegedly sent fraudulent DMCA notices while claiming to represent Bungie, is heading for trial. Bungie alleges that Destiny gamer Nicholas Minor caused substantial damage to its reputation and goodwill. Minor disputes that, and the rest of Bungie’s claims too. The case is now scheduled for a jury trial….in April 2024.
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These attempts were so prominent people thought that stealing [sic] intellectual [sic] property [sic] was just the way you got this stuff if you were smart and didn’t want to pay a fortune for it. But before you could do such things, you still had the convenience of owning the material it was embedded in. If you didn’t duplicate it illegally, you could still give away a vinyl record, or a CD (remember them?) or a book.
You had the right to keep the material forever, to keep it in an old box, or on a bookshelf, always there and ready to pull down and listen to, read, or fire up on your computer. No one but you controlled what you paid good money for. Not anymore. You never owned the copyright, but now you don’t even own the packaging the software or music, or whatever, comes in.
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For Hollywood executives 95 years may feel all too fleeting, but copyright terms used to be much shorter. The first modern copyright law in the English-speaking world, published in 1710, gave rights-holders in England up to 28 years’ ownership of their work. America followed suit with its first federal copyright law in 1790. By 1909 the term was 56 years. This held until the 1970s. Then, just as Hollywood’s treasures were about to become public property, Congress stepped in to lengthen the term to 75 years. In 1998, as Domesday approached once more, Congress passed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”, as it was mockingly known, extending the copyright term to 95 years.
Many expected a further extension. None has materialised. The reason, in a number of ways, is the [Internet]. First, it has turned voters into copyright liberals. In the 1990s the subject of copyright was of interest only to “educators, historians and librarians”, says Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech pressure group. With the advent of the internet, people saw how easily information could be copied, and how copyright rules curtailed their ability to share music or images, or to post on social media.
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This is a company that once forced a Florida day care center to remove an unauthorized Minnie Mouse mural. In 2006, Disney told a stonemason that carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s gravestone would violate its copyright. The company pushed so hard for an extension of copyright protections in 1998 that the result was derisively nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
For the first time, however, one of Disney’s marquee characters — Mickey himself — is set to enter the public domain. “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film that introduced Mickey to the world, will lose copyright protection in the United States and a few other countries at the end of next year, prompting fans, copyright experts and potential Mickey grabbers to wonder: How is the notoriously litigious Disney going to respond?
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What does that mean for Mickey and the Steamboat Willie short? After expiration, anyone will be able to screen the original short without permission from Disney. It can also be sold by third parties, although Disney has already made the film free online, so sales will likely be minimal. The film and its characters can also be used by anyone wishing to feature the characters in original stories or artwork.
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Here is where it gets tricky: Disney also holds trademarks on its characters, including the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse, and trademarks never expire as long as companies keep submitting the proper paperwork. A copyright covers a specific creation (unauthorized copying), but trademarks are designed to protect against consumer confusion — to provide consumers assurance about the source and quality of a creation.
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Today isn’t just the start of a new year, it’s Public Domain Day in the United States. Works from 1927 enter the public domain today, making them free to copy, share and remix.
Some heavy hitters in the mix this year, including Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (music and words) by Irving Berlin. (But the iconic number from Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle is still under copyright.)
Really, it’s less cause to celebrate and more an occasion to note what’s been stolen from the public. Thanks to Congress extending the already too-generous 75 year copyright term to 95 years, works that should’ve been in the public domain 20 years ago are just now seeing copyright expire. The copyright holders, for the most part, had expired long before the copyright did.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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A new year is upon us, and during these days I find myself reflecting on the year that has passed as well as the year to come.
I went through a lot of personal growth in 2022. Much of that growth was scary or painful, but it was necessary. I feel like I’m a very different person than I was at the start of last year, and that change has been for the better. My relationships, for all the turbulence they endured, are now stronger than ever–I value the companionship of my wife and the support of my friends in a very different way than I did twelve months ago.
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I read Malazan: Book of the Fallen for the first time about 3 years ago and fell in love.
The massive scope, the cast, the humour, the action; everything about it was what I wanted in a book, pondourous sections included.
I used to have a review for it on this site and can’t for the life of me remember why I removed it.
In any case, Malazan has cemented itself as one of my favorite book series of all time, and I’ve reread the whole series once and the first 5 books perhaps a half dozen more times.
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*Note: this review is spoiler-free.*
The last few books I’ve read have been a bit more serious in tone or ponderous; The Black Company, WWZ, Gormenghast (still working on this one).
Minus Discworld, I can’t say I’ve read any lighthearted fantasy books, let alone a slice-of-life one.
Legends and Lattes was recommended quite a bit online, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
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It seems like it’ll be difficult for them to rebrand into a kumbaya hug fest (and they make a good point why such a hug fest is needed: to build solidarity vs the politicians) after all the hate points they’ve racked up. It’d be easier for a new group with a new name to fill that role, while at the same time, I still see some merit in their old role and old tactics.
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Technical
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Programming
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My little Linux distro HitchHiker may be getting a pretty dramatic makeover in the form of moving from Glibc to Musl. This is a change that I’ve been considering for a long time and had even done some work towards implementing, but until today had not been able to fully realize compiling the entire base system after swapping out the C library.
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Every year I try to pick up a new programming language to increase the size of my development toolbox. Learning new and different paradigms, trying to pick a language based on the problem. In 20+ years of development I’ve probably got 15 different languages out in production in some shape or form.
Last year my interest was peaked when YouTube started suggesting I watch some presentations on APL. This was my first Array programming language, and first language to use a very esoteric glyph syntax. Its interesting to look at, requires a special keyboard setup or a special IDE. To find all prime numbers up to R…
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 4:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
One might joke that it looks like Sirius Open Source LTD was ‘sold’ to Bill Gates; less than 2 months later bullying by the ‘boss’ started (against both myself and my wife)
Who or where is Sirius Open Source Inc. anyway?
Summary: The company Sirius Open Source LTD (UK) now presents itself as “Sirius Open Source Inc.” and says in Microsoft’s LinkedIn that it is "a company based in Washington." It was founded by totally unknown people around the time all staff was required (under implicit threats; we’ll show evidence later this month) to sign a new and mysterious contract; a month later the company above was incorporated (not by the CEO; he’s not even named!) and months later we were all told that Bill Gates had passed money to the CEO under NDA (when the Gates/Epstein MIT scandals surfaced in the mainstream media and in Techrights); the CEO very clearly said Gates Foundation had become the first US client and it now says “Sirius Open Source is a company based in Washington, USA” (close to Gates); it was incorporated by a person whose name was mentioned in chat/phone only once; the shell game goes a lot further than it seems on the surface and it will be discussed in weeks to come; it’s worth adding that Microsoft had already attacked my job and my livelihood by phoning the CEO in the past, asking for him to take action (he politely declined).
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 3:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ paints a misleading picture in Microsoft’s LinkedIn; for instance, it says that “Sirius Open Source is a company based in Washington, USA” (insiders know that only one or two people are based there; maybe one, at most, is an American)
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