GNU/Linux

• FOSS Weekly ☛ FOSS Weekly #30 – RISC-V in Android, GNOME 44, new releases, and more | FOSS Weekly

  Welcome to this week’s edition of FOSS Weekly! This post includes updates from Android, GNOME, Valve, and more. We also have some good releases this week. Read on for all the updates!

• Flipkart Sale: Amazing deal! Save Rs 6000 on Thomson Alpha Smart Linux TV with powerful processor, we tell you how

• Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #217

  Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with these Robolinux 12.09, Linspire 12 Alpha 1, Bluestar Linux 6.1.2, Pisi Linux 2.3.1, and Q4OS 3.16.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ GNU World Order 494

    **ksystemlog** , **ksystemstats** , **ktextwidgets** , **kteatime** , **ktexteditor** , **ktimer** , **ktimetracker** from the Slackware **kde** package set.

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 357 – Is open source being overexploited? – Open Source Security

    Josh and Kurt talk about how to think about open source in the context of society. Open source is more like a natural resource than a supplier. It’s common to think of open source projects as delivered to us, but it’s more like acquiring raw materials from the forest. The problem is we’re harvesting the raw materials in an unsustainable manner at the moment.

  • Best Vim Videos On YouTube

  • Video ☛ How to install FreeCAD on KDE Neon – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install FreeCAD on KDE Neon.

  • Video ☛ ShowMeTheKey The Better Wayland Screenkey Clone – Invidious

    A while back I did video on wshowkeys which is a really neat application but also is nowhere near complete and isn’t really developed so today we’re taking a look at ShowMeTheKey which takes that screenkey clone concept and does it better.

  • Video ☛ EzeeLinux BASH script Bash 2023 – Invidious

    This is a look at the scripts I have available for you to download

• Kernel Space

  • Linux mailing lists ☛ Linux 6.2-rc3

    Here we are, another week done, and things are starting to look a lot
    more normal after that very quiet holiday week that made rc2 so very
    small.
    
    
    Nothing in particular here stands out: the bulk of this is driver
    fixes (networking, gpu, block, virtio - but also usb, fbdev, rdma etc,
    so a little bit of everything).  That is as should be, and just
    matches where the bulk of the code is.
    
    
    Outside of the various driver fixes, we've got core networking, some
    filesystem fixes (btrfs, cifs, f2fs and nfs), and some perf tooling
    work.
    
    
    With the rest being mostly selftests and documentation.
    
    
    The shortlog is below, plase do give it a good test, and holler if you
    find anything.
    
    
                   Linus
    

  • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.2-rc3 [LWN.net]

    Linus has released 6.2-rc3 for testing. “Here we are, another week done, and things are starting to look a lot more normal after that very quiet holiday week that made rc2 so very small”.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Btrfs vs. XFS: A Brief Comparison

    Various file systems are available in operating systems, including Linux distros and Windows. These file systems can store the data through the data structure systems. Operating systems separate the data into pieces to isolate and identify data from the file systems. File systems like XFS and Brtfs are the most popular among others. However, it is always confusing for the users whether Brtfs or XFS is better. This long guide will explain the brief difference between Brtfs and XFS.

• Applications

  • OMG! Linux ☛ OBS Studio 29 Adds AV1 Encoding, Linux Media Key Support – OMG! Linux

    A new version of open source screencast software OBS Studio is available to download.

    OBS Studio 29.0 introduces support for AMD AV1 encoding on Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, and Intel AV1 encoding on systems Intel Arc graphics on Windows only (no Linux support with this yet). Also Windows-only, Intel HEVC encoder is now available in OBS Studio.

    On the macOS side, OBS Studio 29.0 adds native HEVC and ProRes encoders, including P010 and HDR, and supports macOS Desk View (an over-heard webcam feature requiring an iPhone 11 or later).

    Media key support on Linux features in the latest update, which will please this want to control playback using their keyboard’s next, prev, and player/pause keys.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Use This App to Schedule Restart/Shutdowns on Ubuntu – OMG! Ubuntu!

    Want to schedule a system restart on Ubuntu? There are plenty of ways to do it, with cron probably the most well-known method.

    For a more intuitive, user-friendly way to schedule a reboot on Ubuntu check out Time Switch.

    Time Switch is nimble desktop app built using Python and GTK4/libadwaita. Its purpose is simple: enable a user to reboot, shutdown, or suspend Ubuntu at a time of your choose.

    Additionally, Time Switch can run custom command(s) on schedule, and display a desktop notification (handy if you need a reminder to do something).

  • Linux Links ☛ 10 Best Free Linux Calculators (Updated 2023) – LinuxLinks

    One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

    However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more.

    The calculators also typically support the Reverse Polish notation (RPN). This is a postfix notation wherein every operator follows all of its operands. In other words, instead of pressing 6 + 8 and the enter key, in RPN you type in 6 8 +.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Use Of ☛ How Do You Use Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi?

    Ubuntu is a popular Linux distro that offers stability, multiple flavors with graphical interfaces, and a community of enthusiasts to help support each other. If you strip away the bells and whistles from Ubuntu, what remains is Ubuntu Core.

    This is an OS that even the Raspberry Pi 2 is capable of running, not to mention later models such as the Pi 3 and 4. Pairing these two household names together will provide you with an outcome that is stable, frequently maintained, and well-supported for years to come.

    Let’s dive into the possibilities that Ubuntu Core and Raspberry Pi are capable of together.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Transfer and Share Files Between Windows and Linux

    Copying data from a Windows PC to Linux—or in the other direction—can seem intimidating at first. After all, it’s something that seems like it should be simple but turns out to be difficult.

    In truth, sharing files from Windows to Linux is easy, but only if you know how to do it. Ready to find out? Here’s everything you need to know about how to transfer files from Windows to Linux and back again.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Create a Round Robin Load Balancer in Kubernetes

    Load balancing is an important factor in increasing the efficiency of the network. Load balancing means a method of predefining the tasks in a specific order to manage the network flow in the backend servers. An efficient load balancer ensures that all servers are working fine and reduces the response time. In Kubernetes, the data at the input servers is processed and regulated by the load balancer. The server pool’s network flow can be controlled in a variety of ways. In this article, we will talk about a popular algorithm which is dedicated to loading balancing, the round-robin algorithm.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Oracle Decode

    Oracle Database is one of the most influential SQL Databases. It is used to power the small and enterprise applications with sufficient security and performance.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Get the Filter and Monitor the Kubernetes Events

    The events in Kubernetes cannot be stored, accessed, or forwarded for a long period because there is no in-built support for events in Kubernetes. The occurrences are only kept on file for a brief time before being cleared up. However, they can be accessed or watched directly using the kubectl commands on the cluster or any other resources. In this guide, you will learn about the events in Kubernetes and specifically how to filter and monitor the Kubernetes events.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Access the Kubernetes Events

    The events in the Kubernetes environment are a rich source of information that enables a user to understand what is happening inside their services. It is a kind of object that specifically tells what is happening in a container, node, cluster, or pod. Whatever changes are made to the Kubernetes environment, an event is generated against them in the system. In this guide, we will walk you over what an event is in the Kubernetes system and how to get the events with the help of different tools.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install FL Studio 21 on a Chromebook with Crossover 22

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install MetaTrader 4 with the IG Broker on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the IG Broker on a Chromebook.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Create Kubernetes EndpointSlices

    An endpoint slice allows you to track the endpoint of the network that is connected with the Kubernetes cluster. You may learn more about EndpointSlices in the Kubernetes environment through this article that we created for you. In this tutorial, we will help you learn what an EndpointSlice is in the Kubernetes cluster and how you can create an EndpointSlice in Kubernetes. We will demonstrate some kubectl commands that allow us to create an endpoint in the Kubernetes cluster.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How To Resize the EXT4 Partition

    There are various file systems in Linux that have specific and fixed sizes. Although there are some myths that it is impossible to resize a mounted filesystem, there are some commands to resize them.

    However, many beginners don’t know about these commands and may get errors while resizing EXT4. In this tutorial, we will explain the complete method to resize the EXT4 in Linux.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install VMware Workstation 17 Player on Linux Mint 21

    VMware Workstation 17 Player was released last month. It comes with a lot of new features. If you are using VMware Workstation 16 Player, then it is a must-have upgrade.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How To Install Roblox on Pop!_OS

    Roblox is one of the popular games with a great gaming community. It has cross-platform support, which you can use on macOS, Windows, and Android. Yes, Roblox is not available in Linux, and it takes a lot of effort to install since the game has yet to be ported to Linux.
    However, you can use Wine because it offers the Windows environment in Linux. Hence, you can use Roblox in Linux using Wine. So, in this tutorial, we will explain the brief details on how to install Roblox on Pop!_OS because it is a Ubuntu-based distro.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Create a Webhook in Kubernetes

    Let us talk in detail about webhook in Kubernetes. This tutorial helps you build your webhook from scratch in Kubernetes. We will demonstrate every step with images and examples to help you grasp the foundation of webhooks in Kubernetes. In this article, we will learn about webhooks and the easy tips to make webhooks in Kubernetes. This article provides all the necessary information regarding the topic in detail. Let’s first start with the definition of webhooks.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Create init Containers in Kubernetes

    This tutorial will give you an overview of init containers in Kubernetes. Kubernetes works well with containers which is the reason it has become the top preference of developers. Kubernetes allows you to manage all the containers in one place with just one control panel. In this article, we are going to discuss what containers are in Kubernetes and we will be focusing specifically on init containers in Kubernetes. With the help of examples, we will show you how you can easily create an init container in Kubernetes.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Check Which Process Is Using a Port on Linux

    In computer networking, a port represents a logical entry and exit point for a connection. Ports are based on software and are entirely virtual. These ports on a computer are managed by the operating system.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Configure HPA in Kubernetes

    In this article, we will discuss the configuration of Horizontal Pod Autoscaling in Kubernetes. This topic is very interesting and informative in Kubernetes. There is a lot of confusion about how the containers are scaled horizontally in Kubernetes. In this editorial, we will talk about every step-in detail with relevant screenshots. If you have no idea about Kubernetes, go through our previous articles that are related to Kubernetes. HPA is the auto-scaling of pods, horizontally. Let’s have a look at the following sections for more understanding.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Add the Trusted Sites in Google Chrome

    Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers out there. It has strong and flexible security settings for websites. For example, Google Chrome doesn’t allow any website access to all the hardware or devices (i.e. microphone, camera, sensors) of your computer. Other things like browser notifications, popups, etc. are set by default. You can disable the ddifferent browser features for specific websites in Google Chrome if you want.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Expose Kubernetes Service to an external IP address

    In this guide, we are to learn how to expose Kubernetes service to an external IP address. There are three different ways to expose a Kubernetes service to an external IP address: ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer. In this guide, we will learn how to expose Kubernetes service to an external IP address using the LoadBalancer method.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Configure Pod Security Admission in Kubernetes

    Pod security admission in Kubernetes is a feature that provides security features on pods running in a namespace. The standards allow us to put restrictions on the behavior of the pods simply and consistently. In this guide, we are about to pod security administration. We will learn how to configure pod security on pods running in a namespace with the help of a basic scenario.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Stopmotion 0.8.6 released

      I am pleased to announce Linux-Stopmotion release 0.8.6! The last release was three years ago and this is the first release since Stopmotion became a KDE incubator project.

      [...]

      Technically, it is a C++ / Qt application with optional dependencies to camera capture libraries.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • OMG! Linux ☛ GNOME 44 Release Set for March 22, 2023 – OMG! Linux

      This is the the date pencilled — subject to change, as always — in the GNOME 44 release schedule on the GNOME Wiki. The date isn’t a surprise as new versions of the GNOME desktop environment are released every six months.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Arch Family

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: Arch Linux at the end of 2022

    Arch Linux is an independent Linux distribution and one of the more well known examples of the “keep it simple” (KIS) philosophy. In this case, “keep it simple” refers to simplicity from an engineering point of view. It refers to a technical simplicity rather than an uncluttered or an easy to use system from the user’s point of view.

    Arch is probably the world’s most famous (or infamous) rolling release distribution. Its heavy focus on do-it-yourself computing, lack of a graphical system installer, and buyer beware attitude toward package upgrades has made running this project a rite of passage for many Linux users. People often talk about running Arch the same way they’d discuss earning a merit badge.

    Personally, I have some complex views when it comes to the Arch Linux project. On one hand, I appreciate the concept of a technically clean, minimal distribution on which we can build things. I like having the option of starting light and adding components as needed, at least in theory. However, I often get the impression Arch Linux is trying to make things harder just for the sake of making things harder.

    Arch Linux is intended to be installed via manual commands from a shell, the install media has no graphical interface and no graphical installer. Technically, there is a command line system installer, but, as I’ve pointed out before, it’s buggy and limited. This makes it more effort to try to use the installer than to set up Arch by hand.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Know the eligible devices for Android 13-based ColorOS 13 rollout in India

  • How to fix Android screen recording with no sound – Phandroid

  • Android Police ☛ In emergency, break the Pixel 7′s glass and listen to the Android Police podcast

  • Android Police ☛ Here’s your up-close and personal look at Google’s Android experience at CES

  • Android Police ☛ One of the best PS2 emulators for Android will no longer get updates

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (1/2023): Happy New Year!

    An interesting blog post by Mobian, and little bits here and there. Oh, and, impressive camera improvements coming to the Librem 5!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Using SIP to Replace Mobile and Land Lines | James Bottomley’s random Pages

  If you read more than a few articles in my blog you’ve probably figured out that I’m pretty much a public cloud Luddite: I run my own cloud (including my own email server) and don’t really have much of my data in any public cloud. I still have public cloud logins: everyone wants to share documents with Google nowadays, but Google regards people who don’t use its services “properly” with extreme prejudice and I get my account flagged with a security alert quite often when I try to log in.

  However, this isn’t about my public cloud phobia, it’s about the evolution of a single one of my services: a cloud based PBX. It will probably come as no surprise that the PBX I run is Asterisk on Linux but it may be a surprise that I’ve been running it since the early days (since 1999 to be exact). This is the story of why.

  I should also add that the motivation for this article is that I’m unable to get a discord account: discord apparently has a verification system that requires a phone number and explicitly excludes any VOIP system, which is all I have nowadays. This got me to thinking that my choices must be pretty unusual if they’re so pejoratively excluded by a company whose mission is to “Create Space for Everyone to find Belonging”. I’m sure the suspicion that this is because Discord the company also offers VoIP services and doesn’t like the competition is unworthy.

• Programming/Development

  • LibreBoot ☛ Libreboot – How libreboot.org is hosted

    I’ve recently started a new project, which I call the Federation of Freedom. It is a website that teaches people how to self-host their own servers on the internet, on all libre software. You could actually do it all on Libreboot hardware.

    When I say recently, I mean it; Fedfree launched on 25 December 2022. Today is 8 January 2023. Thus, Fedfree is just about two weeks old, on this day.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Copyright without years | daniel.haxx.se

    Like so many other software projects the curl project has copyright mentions at the top of almost every file in the source code repository.

  • Petter Reinholdtsen ☛ Petter Reinholdtsen: LinuxCNC MQTT publisher component

    I watched a 2015 video from Andreas Schiffler the other day, where he set up LinuxCNC to send status information to the MQTT broker IBM Bluemix. As I also use MQTT for graphing, it occured to me that a generic MQTT LinuxCNC component would be useful and I set out to implement it. Today I got the first draft limping along and submitted as a patch to the LinuxCNC project.

    The simple part was setting up the MQTT publishing code in Python. I already have set up other parts submitting data to my Mosquito MQTT broker, so I could reuse that code. Writing a LinuxCNC component in Python as new to me, but using existing examples in the code repository and the extensive documentation, this was fairly straight forward. The hardest part was creating a automated test for the component to ensure it was working. Testing it in a simulated LinuxCNC machine proved very useful, as I discovered features I needed that I had not thought of yet, and adjusted the code quite a bit to make it easier to test without a operational MQTT broker available.

  • Python

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Connect to MongoDB with Python

      MongoDB is not a rigid database like SQL as it can be connected to many programming environments, especially to object-oriented platforms. You can use the Python language to insert records within MongoDB after creating a secure connection between MongoDB localhost and the Python platform. This guide elaborates on all the necessary steps required for the connection between MongoDB and Python in the simplest way possible. After creating a connection, we will also insert some records into MongoDB using Python’s CLI. But before that, you have to install the MongoDB, Python, and the “PyMongo” driver.

  • Java

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Connect to MongoDB with Java

      While working on large projects, we tend to use the databases along with the development environments in many cases when your standalone environment is not working properly on its own. One of those that work well with each other is the MongoDB and Java environment. In this article, we will cast off a Java environment to connect with MongoDB. Before moving towards the connectivity of MongoDB with Java through some IDE tool, we have to make sure that all prerequisites are installed and configured at our end. This process consists of specific steps that we are going to follow throughout this article. Don’t miss any of the steps for a smooth connection to MongoDB with Java.

Leftovers

• Proprietary

  • Leak Reveals New MacBook Will Have -1 USB Ports

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Chinese researchers’ claimed quantum encryption crack looks unlikely

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Wired ☛ John Deere Just Cost Farmers Their Right to Repair

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 2022 – 2023 Review

    I don’t fancy itemising, but the big trend is that very little of what I wrote down got done, especially when it comes to software. I can fairly reliably blame parenting for that, but my two biggest personal projects – ordoor and purple-plugin-delta – are both stalled on identical issues: the big rust rewrite. I suspect managing to kick-start one will also kick-start the other, it’s just a matter of making it happen.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Building Minesweeper for Gemini

      Over vacation I built a complete Minesweeper game on my capsule. I implemented flags, chording, different difficulties, and even custom games. You can play it here!

    • Offline-first approach

      I’ve taken an offline-first approach to computing. I find it benefits me greatly, by using more resilient utilities, having technological sovereignty, and nonetheless spending less time on the Internet, more offline, even if it’s on a computer.

      I don’t recommend data hoarding, I think each should keep how much data they consider to be useful, if they have the space required for it. Keeping offline wikis, dictionaries, translators, backups, passwords, can always prove to be helpful, relying less on hosted services, and more on yourself (Argos translate comes to mind as an offline translator).

  • Programming

    • Advent of Code 2022

      I finally tried Advent of Code this year; planned it for a few times

      before, but kept forgetting, or changing my mind because it requires

      an account, or because it seemed extremely competitive.

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ New York Slaughters to Right to Repair Bill – Invidious

    This week in the Business News, LG is working on a paper-thin speaker while Android works on satellite-based SMS. Also, Apple tries to destroy the voice actors business and New York governor Hochul slaughtered the bill at the behest of Apple and Microsoft.

  • Open Source Startup Podcast ☛ E69: Train, Deploy, and Ship AI Products with Lightning AI by Open Source Startup Podcast

    Will Falcon is CEO of Lightning AI, the platform to build ML models and create Lightning Apps that “glue” together many leading ML lifecycle tools. The company’s project, also called lightning, has over 21K stars on GitHub. Lightning AI has raised almost $60M from investors including Index Ventures, Coatue, and Bain. In this episode, we discuss the difference between open source traction and company potential, how to hire – especially early on, the importance of learning speed, Will’s personal journey as a CEO, and more!

  • Video ☛ Talking XeroG (XeroLinux GNOME) With DarkXero – Invidious

    Today, I am going to chat with DarkXero, the maintainer of XeroLinux. In this video, we discuss the newly created XeroG, which is XeroLinux with GNOME. What makes the creation of XeroG interesting is that XeroLinux has long been a KDE distro. So why the new GNOME flavor?

  • Video ☛ Nitrux OS – The Future Of Linux | Solid, Stable – Unbreakable – Invidious

    A video covering the newest release of Nitrux OS. Nitrux brings with it several changes that make it one of the most reliable, stable and solid distros out there.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 34 Best Free Linux Backup Software (Updated 2023)

    Backup software is used to perform a complete back up of a file, data, database, system or server. It enables users to make a duplicate of everything contained on the original source. This type of software is also used to perform a recovery of the data or system in the event of a disaster.

    Making file backups is an essential activity for all users, yet many users do not take adequate steps to protect their data. Whether a computer is being used in a corporate environment, or for private use, the machine’s hard disk may fail without any warning signs. Alternatively, some data loss occurs as a result of human error. Without regular backups being made, data will inevitably be lost even if the services of a specialist recovery organisation are used.

    While it has always been possible to use command line tools to backup files in Linux, this can be a daunting task for beginners and end-users. This article explores how making regular backups can be a painless task. We explore backup software with intuitive graphical interfaces, applications that backup systems with snapshots, whilst not forgetting the powerful command-line tools that exist.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • University of Toronto ☛ Some thoughts on Prometheus Alertmanager’s alert reminders

    Translated, this is how often you get a reminder about an alert (or a group of them) that is still active (and otherwise unchanged; if something changes in the group of alerts, that’s a different configuration setting).

    We set our repeat_interval to 24 hours, and we recently came back from a holiday break where an alert triggered on December 28th and stayed on until we returned and fixed it, resulting in reminder email on the 29th, the 30th, and so on, none of which we were dealing with over the break. This has given me an opportunity to think about our setting and about alert reminders in general.

    The first question to ask yourself is whether an alert reminder is ever going to be useful. In some places the answer is probably ‘no’, for example if you have a dashboard of active alerts that people look at all the time. Otherwise, if an alert reminder is useful, you want to ask questions like what is it useful for, to who, and when. The answers for a 24/7 operations team with shift changes every six hours might be quite different than for a small group of university system administrators who only work regular office hours.

  • Earthly ☛ An Introduction to Linux Capabilities – Earthly Blog

    In Linux, capabilities are a way to assign specific privileges to a running process. They allow us to have more fine-grained control over the privileges that processes have on a Linux system.

    In this article, you’ll learn about capabilities in Linux. You’ll also learn how you can use capabilities in the context of Docker containers and Kubernetes.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How Do You Use Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi?

    Ubuntu is a popular Linux distro that offers stability, multiple flavors with graphical interfaces, and a community of enthusiasts to help support each other. If you strip away the bells and whistles from Ubuntu, what remains is Ubuntu Core.

    This is an OS that even the Raspberry Pi 2 is capable of running, not to mention later models such as the Pi 3 and 4. Pairing these two household names together will provide you with an outcome that is stable, frequently maintained, and well-supported for years to come.

    Let’s dive into the possibilities that Ubuntu Core and Raspberry Pi are capable of together.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Use SCP from Windows to Linux

    In the Linux Operating system, we use the SCP command to copy the files or directories from our local machine to a remote server or from a remote server to our local machine. It can also be used to transfer the files between two remote servers using your local machine. It is a very useful command line utility and comes in handy when we need to transfer our files securely. SCP is the short form of Secure Copy Protocol. This command uses SSH keys or Secure Shell keys for the secure transfer of data.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Schedule a Crontab Job for Every Hour

    Sometimes, performing the same task again and again may become tedious. To automate this task instead of involving the assistance of humans, cronjobs are scheduled. Often, in Linux, the user has to run various scripts at the same time which becomes difficult to manage to reduce the workload of the user for executing the same task repeatedly. Cron is a utility that enables us to schedule the tasks according to our needs. Cron is a built-in utility which is provided by Linux. We don’t have to install it; we just simply schedule the tasks using some commands and files. Cronjob saves the time of the user by allowing them to manage their important task instead of repeating the same task again and again.

    If we want to send the emails to our clients or customers every week instead of performing it manually, we can automate this task by creating a cronjob. It is a type of utility that works silently on the backend but does not involve any human interaction with it. It is a simple text file that includes the commands that have to be executed and the time at which it is to be executed.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Use the Cat Command in Bash

    Practical guide on how to schedule a crontab job for every hour to run various scripts at the same time by scheduling the tasks using some commands and files.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Extract and Open a .GZ File in Linux Command Line

    The GZ file extension is a zipped archive that follows the gzip compression method (GNU zip). The “.gz” format is designed to substitute the compressed formats on Unix-like operating systems. GZ compression is used to compress the webpages to reduce the page load time. GZ files can be opened and extracted using both built-in and third-party applications on any system. Here, we use the methods of extracting the “.gz” file on the Linux terminal. The prerequisite that is required to unzip the .gz files is that we just need the command line interface which is the Linux terminal and the graphical user interface access, as well as access to the “.gz” file itself.

  • DebugPoint ☛ Writing Macro in LibreOffice Impress: Getting Started

    This simple tutorial will show how to create your first Impress presentation macro in LibreOffice.

    Macro is used to automate various tasks from simple to complex. Like other macro tutorials for Calc spreadsheets, it is possible to automate Impress using Basic in LibreOffice.

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ LibreOffice Calc: How To Convert Numbers to Text

    This tutorial will show you an example of converting numbers to words with a function in LibreOffice Calc. It works by translating number, say 1234, into English words one thousand two hundred thirty four. The function in question is NUMBERTEXT, that spells numbers, and MONEYTEXT, that spells money currencies, all with translations to multiple languages including Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use the lsblk Command to List Block Devices on Linux

    lsblk is a command-line utility used for listing block devices on a Linux system. Block devices consist of storage devices that hold data in the form of blocks, which are, typically, hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs).

  • LinuxStans ☛ The Linux sleep Command – Tutorial and Examples

    The sleep command is used to delay the execution of scripts or commands in Linux (and other Unix systems). In this beginner-friendly tutorial, we’ll show you how to use the sleep command on Linux and what it does, and we’ll include helpful examples.

    You can use the sleep command on any Linux distro, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, CentOS, and more. You can even use it on a Mac or other Unix-like systems. The command is available on all Linux distros, you don’t need to install it.

    In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use the sleep command in the Terminal/shell/ssh and bash scripts. So you’ll need Terminal access to a Linux distro or SSH access to a Linux server.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Debian: Coming soon! MycroftAI! KDE snaps update. – Scarlett Gately Moore

      I am excited to announce that I have joined the MycroftAI team in Salsa and working hard to get this packaged up and released in Debian. You can track our progress here:

      https://salsa.debian.org/mycroftai-team

      Snaps are on temporary hold while we get everything switched over to core22. This includes the neon-extension, that requires merges and store requests to be honored. Hopefully folks are returning from holidays and things will start moving again. Thank you for your patience!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • 10 Best Linux Mint Themes of 2023 (Download Links) – DekiSoft

    One of the best ways to refresh your experience of Linux desktop is Theming, agree?. These are used to add a new experience, be it an icon or a full-fledged theme. A number of layouts are available for almost all the distros that provide versatility and style to the system. At the end of this article, you will have chosen one of the best Linux Mint themes and learned how to install them via the terminal.

    Before we move ahead keep in mind that in two ways you can customize your system; with suitable wallpapers and modifying the look of the system.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Cellular Function for MicroMod – News – SparkFun Electronics

    Hello, friends! Welcome to 2023 and the First Friday Product post of the new year! This week, we are happy to bring up three new additions to the MicroMod ecosystem, all starting with the Blues Wireless Cellular Function Board! This board brings the NOTE-NBGL-500 Notecarrier and a 10-year subscription of data to your next MicroMod project. Following that, we have two new Main Boards for MicroMod, that you will need to start using the Function Board we just spoke of, with heavy feature changes to each of them that vastly improve on their functionality. We wrap the day with a new Arducam 64MP Camera Module that provides a new imaging sensor option for users.

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Top 20 for 20 Years

    It’s hard to believe, but SparkFun has reached the impressive milestone of 20 years old! To celebrate this achievement, we’ve decided to make it a year-long celebration by offering special content and promotions throughout the year.

    [...]

    Make sure to head over and check out what our Founder had to say about our milestone!

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ SparkFun Turns 20

    I guess I never really realized it, but as I look back at the history of SparkFun, it’s puzzles all the way down. SparkFun turns 20 years old this week, and next year I’ll have worked at SparkFun half of my life. Since SparkFun opened its doors, there was always work to do. The challenge of getting a little faster to market, writing a little cleaner code, open sourcing more technologies, and increasing the production yield rate a few fractions of a percentage more was, and continues to be, thrilling. I get to puzzle for work, and I’ve got a whole team of like minded folks that makes another twenty years of SparkFun sound absolutely delightful.

    [...]

    We’re going to be celebrating SparkFun’s 20th this whole year, stay tuned for more updates and looks back at our history.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Reading Mode on Android to Read Articles and Websites More Comfortably

  • SlashGear ☛ How To Use Any Android Tablet As An Android Auto Car Head Unit

  • Future Publishing Limited ☛ Dear Samsung Galaxy fans, it’s time to try a different Android phone | T3

  • Giz China ☛ Android vs iPhone: Which is the best for 2023? – Gizchina.com

  • Google Pixel 6a: Underdog of the Android World – TechPP

  • 11 Best Lightweight Android Emulators for PC To Use in 2023

    Do you ever wish to use your Android applications on your PC? I do, to say the least; you can do this too; all you need to do is install an emulator. The only downfall is that many of these are heavy therefore older systems might struggle when using them.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • TecAdmin ☛ Git Change Remote URL in Local Repository – TecAdmin

    Git is a distributed version control system that is widely used for tracking changes in source code during software development. It allows developers to collaborate on projects and keep track of their changes without the need for a central repository.

    Sometimes, it may be necessary to change the URL of a remote repository in a local Git repository. This can happen if the remote repository has been moved to a new location, if you want to use a different remote repository for your local project or if you want to change authentication methods like HTTPS to Git or vice versa.

  • Jumping Rivers ☛ End-to-end testing with shinytest2: Part 1

    Automated testing is an essential part of any production-quality software project. Much of the focus in the R world, is on testing the individual components of a project (the functions, classes etc), but for those working with {shiny} applications there are great tools that can test your application as if a user was interacting with it. In this blog series, we focus on {shinytest2}, with which we can write tests from a user’s perspective.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ What’s Next After NextJS

    NextJS is the Ruby on Rails of modern development – fast, easy, and just enough framework to get a full web application up and running without getting in your way too much. The company behind the open-source project, Vercel, has successfully built a managed platform around the library that combines a CDN and edge functions to provide a fast, cheap, and scale-to-zero website that serves dynamic and static content.

  • Parallelizing and running distributed builds with distcc

    Parallelizing the compilation of a large codebase is a breeze with distcc, which allows you to spread the load across multiple nodes and speed up the compilation time.

  • Andre Alves Garzia ☛ Testing new micropub implementation • AndreGarzia.com

    My original Micropub implementation was created with Racket and it served me well for a long time. Recently, I implemented MetaWeblog API using NodeJS and decided that keeping two very similar servers using different languages was not ideal. Instead of moving the MetaWeblog server to Racket, I decided to reimplement Micropub with NodeJS.

  • Henrik Warne ☛ There Is No Software Maintenance | Henrik Warne’s blog

    Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But that is not how software development works today. Software development does not have the two phases development and maintenance – it is a continuous process. Software maintenance is simply software development.

    [...]

    In the project model, you set out to develop a system. So you create a project, gather requirements, develop the software, and deliver the result. Any changes after this delivery are considered maintenance, be it changes to functionality or bug fixes. This is how I was taught software development works when I went to university a long time ago.

    There are two big problems with the project view of software development. The first is that it is almost impossible to decide how the system should work before you try it. As soon as you start using the system, you learn more about how it should work. This inevitably leads to changed requirements. Secondly, once the system works, you start to think of additional uses for it. In other words, the problem you are solving is open-ended (expanding uses), rather than clearly defined. In a sense, you are never finished, because what you want the system to do keeps expanding. This may seem counterintuitive, but for all systems I have worked on, I have been surprised at how we never ran out of features to add. The expansion is also fractal – you add new big features, but you also keep tweaking and expanding the behavior of existing features.

  • Linux Hint ☛ While Loop Sum of Numbers in C++

    Today, we are going to get the sum of numbers in C++ programming language. If we want to add two numbers, we can easily add these numbers but what if we want to add 10 numbers or “n” numbers what can we do? The first method is that we can add numbers one by one and get the desired answer but it is time-consuming work in C++ programing language. To solve this problem, there are loops in C++ programming language that we can get the sum of numbers quickly by writing a few lines of code. We are using one of the loop types which is a while loop to get the sum of numbers in C++ programming language.

Leftovers

• Antipope ☛ New guest blogger: qntm – Charlie’s Diary

  My first new year’s resolution for 2023 is to start inviting guest bloggers to post on my blog again—I slackened off after 2018—so here we are!

• Antipope ☛ Make Up a Guy – Charlie’s Diary

  Or imagine that you were a witch and you could flick your wrist and curse any innocent passing toad with sudden humanity — a human body, a mouth, a name, free will, dreams. For the sake of argument let’s say that they would be an adult, with an intellect appropriate for an adult. Maybe with a language or two; maybe amnesiac, but maybe with a cushion of forged past experiences to draw from. Other than that, what you would get is mostly random. (No, I’m not going to try to define a random variable on the set of all possible humans.)

  [...]

  Without having more information, I’m guessing, probably you would not do it. Because a brand new human being is a big deal. A whole pile of responsibilities, both on your part and on their part, a burden. Maybe technically they’re an adult, but surely you’re on the hook to look after them, at least for a short while. They’re going to need help at first. Somewhere to stay, something to wear, something to eat. A job, a phone, glasses, vaccinations. All of this represents a fairly significant amount of effort on your part: a cost.

  And what’s the benefit? Well, you get to watch the new person go out into the world and do their funny trait. Or traits. It seems to me as if most people show up with more than one. You don’t have control over what those traits are, they’re random, as I said, but it still seems like it would be a potentially rewarding overall transaction.

  This seems like something that a typical witch, having this power in their hand, would maybe never do, or maybe do a few times. But there would be a limit. Assuming that you had unlimited toads to hand, and the toads were totally up for it, would you create a thousand new people, all at once? Given how difficult — how expensive — it is to house, feed and clothe a thousand people, even briefly? Probably not.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Counterfactuals

  Counterfactuals, or statements that describe an alternative reality or outcome that did not occur in the past, are a fundamental part of human cognition. We use counterfactuals in many aspects of our lives, from evaluating the consequences of our actions to making decisions about the future. Counterfactual thinking can be an interesting tool, and even more interesting when we have actual data to contrast.

• Andre Alves Garzia ☛ The Goblin Den • AndreGarzia.com

  Zix got the quest from a notice board in the tavern. Goblins were plaguing the city and of course the city watch didn’t care. It was up to the city watch rejects to go clear that mess.

• Science

  • Idle Words ☛ Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

    The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

    The buildup to Mars would not look like Apollo, but a long series of ISS-like flights to nowhere. If your main complaint about the International Space Station is that it’s too exciting and has a distracting view of Earth out the window, then you’ll love watching ISS Jr. drift around doing bone studies in deep space. But if you think rockets, adventure, exploration, and discovery are more fun than counting tumors in mice, then the slow and timorous Mars program will only break your heart.

    [...]

    Mars is also not the planet we took it for. The first photos Mariner 4 sent back in 1965 were shocking; instead of bucolic canals they showed a waterless, cratered wasteland not much different from the Moon. Ten years later, the Viking landers confirmed that Mars was a frozen, desiccated world bathed in sterilizing radiation, where any Earth creature that arrived unprotected would be dead before it hit the ground.

  • John Gruber ☛ Study Suggests That Hardware Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

    We’re not going back to hardware buttons for everything, but we have a long way to go until touchscreens surpass the usability of familiar hardware buttons.

  • IEEE ☛ Big Trouble in Little Interconnects – IEEE Spectrum

    At the outer edges of Moore’s Law, connecting components is increasingly the game

  • Particles of Light May Create Fluid Flow, Data-Theory Comparison Suggests | BNL Newsroom

    A new computational analysis by theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Wayne State University supports the idea that photons (a.k.a. particles of light) colliding with heavy ions can create a fluid of “strongly interacting” particles. In a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, they show that calculations describing such a system match up with data collected by the ATLAS detector at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

    As the paper explains, the calculations are based on the hydrodynamic particle flow seen in head-on collisions of various types of ions at both the LHC and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at Brookhaven Lab. With only modest changes, these calculations also describe flow patterns seen in near-miss collisions, where photons that form a cloud around the speeding ions collide with the ions in the opposite beam.

  • InfoQ ☛ Google Publishes Technique for AI Language Model Self-Improvement

    Researchers at Google and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have published a technique called Language Model Self-Improved (LMSI), which fine-tunes a large language model (LLM) on a dataset generated by that same model. Using LMSI, the researchers improved the performance of the LLM on six benchmarks and set new state-of-the-art accuracy records on four of them.

    The team began with a pre-trained 540B parameter PaLM model. The model was given as input questions from an unlabeled training dataset, along with chain-of-thought prompts. The model generated answers for these questions, which were then used along with the inputs as a fine-tuning training dataset. The fine-tuned model was then evaluated on a suite of benchmark datasets for three different natural language processing (NLP) tasks: arithmetic reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and natural language inference. On four of the benchmarks—ARC-c, OpenBookQA, ANLI-A2 and ANLI-A3—the model outperformed previous records.

  • The Physics of Us | Omnia

    Physicists are studying how living matter works, and find that it breaks the standard rules and produces fascinating new phenomena.

    The James Webb telescope is showing us our universe in vibrant new detail. Some physicists, though, are looking in another direction: at us and other living matter here on Earth, from the cilia in lungs to the vasculature in leaves to the neurons in brains. What they’re finding is equally marvelous, and it’s challenging some of the current understanding of physics.

    Ultimately, they’re working to discover the rules that govern how matter lives and evolves, and their research may lead to better medicine, robotics based on biology, and an expanded understanding of the physical and biological world.

  • ACM ☛ Computing Divided: How Wide the Chasm?

  • uni MIT ☛ A simpler path to better computer vision

    New research reveals a scalable technique that uses synthetic data to improve the accuracy of AI models that recognize images.

  • ACM ☛ Computers Aid Dentistry

    Americans get fitted with 2.3 million dental crowns a year, according to the American College of Prosthodontists. Anyone who has had one knows the fitting of a dental crown is usually a lengthy, multistep procedure.

    The standard process (once the tooth is prepared) starts with the dentist taking an impression of the tooth using a horseshoe-shaped tray filled with a putty-like substance. The impression is sent off to a laboratory that makes a model of the tooth from the mold, scans the model, and manufactures a crown to fit. It can take two to three weeks for the permanent crown to come back from the lab, and during that time the patient has to wear a temporary version, usually a cruder tooth-sized “cap.” Finally, the patient returns to the office to have the permanent crown placed and reshaped as necessary.

  • Novel 3D Printing Method to Fabricate Complex Metal–Plastic Composite Structures – Waseda University

    Researchers from Japan and Singapore have developed a new 3D printing technique to create precise patterns on the external and internal surfaces of 3D plastic structures

    In recent years, research interest in the 3D printing of metal patterns on plastic parts has grown exponentially, due to its high potential in the manufacturing of next-generation electronics. But fabricating such complex parts through conventional means is not easy. Now, researchers from Japan and Singapore have developed a new 3D printing process for the fabrication of 3D metal–plastic composite structures with complex shapes.

  • uni MIT ☛ Busy GPUs: Sampling and pipelining method speeds up deep learning on large graphs

    New technique significantly reduces training and inference time on extensive datasets to keep pace with fast-moving data in finance, social networks, and fraud detection in cryptocurrency.

  • Scientific American ☛ Einstein’s Greatest Theory Just Passed Its Most Rigorous Test Yet – Scientific American

    Scientists have demonstrated that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is correct to a remarkable degree of accuracy, despite having been around for more than a century.

    The team behind the research wanted to test a component of Einstein’s theory of general relativity called the weak equivalence principle, which states that all objects, regardless of their mass or composition, should free-fall the same way in a particular gravitational field when interference from factors like air pressure is eliminated. To do so, the scientists measured the acceleration of free-falling objects in a French satellite called MICROSCOPE, which launched in 2016.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Stoke Space aims to build rapidly reusable rocket with a completely novel design

    Andy Lapsa went to the best aerospace engineering schools. He then worked very hard to help advance the development of some of the most advanced rocket engines in the world at Blue Origin. But in 2019, after a decade in the industry, he felt like the spaceflight future he was striving toward—rapidly reusable rockets—had not gotten much closer.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Steerable soft robots could enhance medical applications – EPFL

    Over the past decades, catheter-based surgery has transformed medicine, giving doctors a minimally invasive way to do anything from placing stents and targeting tumors to extracting tissue samples and delivering contrast agents for medical imaging. While today’s catheters are highly engineered robotic devices, in most cases, the task of pushing them through the body to the site of intervention continues to be a manual and time-consuming procedure.

    Combining advances in the development of functional fibers with developments in smart robotics, researchers from the Laboratory of Photonic Materials and Fiber Devices in EPFL’s School of Engineering have created multifunctional catheter-shaped soft robots that, when used as catheters, could be remotely guided to their destination or possibly even find their own way through semi-autonomous control. “This is the first time that we can generate soft catheter-like structures at such scalability that can integrate complex functionalities and be steered, potentially, inside the body,” says Fabien Sorin, the study’s principal investigator. Their work was published in the journal Advanced Science.

• Proprietary

  • Barry Hess ☛ Why Does My Apple TV Suck? :: Barry Hess :: bjhess.com

    It has been almost fifteen years since I moved from the Microsoft world to the Mac world. At this point basically all my computing products are Apple. While I would argue that I’m no fanboy, I’m sure I still have friends who would say otherwise.

• Security

  • Mandiant ☛ Even the Battlefield: Know More About Your Attack Surface Than the Adversary [Ed: Don't use Microsoft products. Use a stack you know and can control.]

    Adversaries have a giant attack surface to discover when they target and attack your organization. To defend against these increasingly sophisticated threat actors, organizations must understand their digital footprint better than the adversary. This is easier said than done. It is a big challenge for defenders to know everything going on within the networks they’re charged with defending. Attackers know this and will seek out areas that commonly introduce risk, finding weaknesses to exploit that lead to compromise.

    [...]

    Assessing risk from third-party software includes taking inventory of the technologies leveraged around the organization and evaluating how the software is deployed. Suppose you are following the traditional software deployment model on your own systems. In that case, you need to have a complete understanding of the full number of additional packages and libraries necessary for that software to run. Information technology infrastructure operations (ITIO) often install library dependencies as part of their deployment methodology for the software. However, if your team is actively writing public-facing applications, you now must deal with the Open Source and other third-party libraries introduced as part of said application. This includes database middleware, application plugins, and microservices, web content distribution services, and other items included in the DevOps process. You also need to consider all the network devices themselves sitting out in front of the services you provide. So, you’ll need an accurate understanding of every domain, IP address, and software version exposed to the internet when you think about how an adversary will perform reconnaissance against you.

  • Mandiant ☛ Turla: A Galaxy of Opportunity | Mandiant [Ed: This is about the mess that Microsoft Windows is]

    In September 2022, Mandiant discovered a suspected Turla Team operation, currently tracked as UNC4210, distributing the KOPILUWAK reconnaissance utility and QUIETCANARY backdoor to ANDROMEDA malware victims in Ukraine. Mandiant discovered that UNC4210 re-registered at least three expired ANDROMEDA command and control (C2) domains and began profiling victims to selectively deploy KOPILUWAK and QUIETCANARY in September 2022.

    ANDROMEDA was a common commodity malware that was widespread in the early 2010’s. The particular version whose C2 was hijacked by UNC4210 was first uploaded to VirusTotal in 2013 and spreads from infected USB keys. Mandiant Managed Defense continues to observe ANDROMEDA malware infections across a wide variety of industries, however, Mandiant has only observed suspected Turla payloads delivered in Ukraine.

    [...]

    The version of ANDROMEDA that was installed to C:\Temp\TrustedInstaller.exe (MD5: bc76bd7b332aa8f6aedbb8e11b7ba9b6), was first uploaded on 2013-03-19 to VirusTotal and several of the C2 domains had either expired or been sinkholed by researchers. When executed, the ANDROMEDA binary established persistence by dropping another ANDROMEDA sample to C:\ProgramData\Local Settings\Temp\mskmde.com (MD5: b3657bcfe8240bc0985093a0f8682703) and adding a Run Registry Key to execute it every time the system user logged on. One of its C2 domains, “suckmycocklameavindustry[.]in,” which had expired, was found to be newly re-registered on 2022-01-19 by a privacy protected registrant using Dynadot as the registrar. UNC4210 used this C2 to profile victims before sending the first stage KOPILUWAK dropper if the victim was deemed interesting.

  • Slashdot ☛ New Linux Malware Downloader for Compromised Servers Spotted in the Wild [Ed: Slashdot editors continue to stigmatise Linux as not secure… citing Microsoft sites as “sources”]

    “A new Linux malware downloader created using SHC (Shell Script Compiler) has been spotted in the wild,” reports the site Bleeping Computer, “infecting systems with Monero cryptocurrency miners and DDoS IRC bots…

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Terence Eden ☛ Poorly folded letters lead to exposure of medical data

      As it happens, I’m not particularly concerned about who knows I had a fairly normal medical procedure. I’ve blogged a bit about it and Tweeted about the experience in an attempt to de-stigmatise it.

      [...]

      Thankfully, the letter told me that I didn’t need an additional screening. Which was something of a relief.

      Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find the Data Protection Officer and become a pain in their arse!

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Wall Street Journal ☛ Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring

    Ukraine has achieved a cut-price version of what the Pentagon has spent decades and billions of dollars striving to accomplish: digitally networked fighters, intelligence and weapons.

  • CNN ☛ The Christmas bombings: A US airman recalls the Vietnam War’s Operation Linebacker II, 50 years on | CNN

    It was one of the heaviest bombardments in history. A shock-and-awe campaign of overwhelming air power aimed at bombing into submission a determined opponent that, despite being vastly outgunned, had withstood everything the world’s most formidable war machine could throw at it.

    Operation Linebacker II saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972, in a brutal assault aimed at shaking the Vietnamese “to their core,” in the words of then US national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

    “They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” US President Richard Nixon replied to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission.

  • PC Mag ☛ Dell to Stop Using Chips Made in China Before the End of 2024 [Ed: Stupid nationalism. As if chips made in the US are secure. It's a matter of whose back doors and the US government's spying arguably poses greater risk.]

    As Nikkei Asia reports(Opens in a new window), according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter, the decision is in response to ongoing tensions between the US and China. On top of that, US sanctions limit China’s access to the latest semiconductor manufacturing hardware and create an uncertain future for the technology sector in the country.

    Dell’s aim to no longer source chips from within China extends to its suppliers, who the company is urging to “significantly reduce” the components they source from China, too. If they don’t, they could lose orders from Dell.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Matt Levine’s “The Crypto Story”: Postscript

      Sam Bankman-Fried’s implausible PR strategy since his companies collapsed has been to claim that he “f**ked up”, that it was simply a mistake and no-one had evil intent. Matt Levine has a post-FTX postscript to The Crypto Story entitled How Not to Play the Game providing a somewhat less implausible explanation. Below the fold I explain why Levine is still too generous to SBF.

      [...]

      All of these were published on 22nd December, and they all show that the fraud started in 2019. The cryptocurrency markets peaked in November 2021, so Levine’s idea that SBF and others only started cheating after the market moved against them is wrong.

      Given that unregulated exchanges inevitably exploit their home-field advantage to capture profits that should rightfully accrue to their customers, it appears that the reason SBF set up the FTX exchange was that Alameda was missing out on profits by trading on exchanges such as Binance. By establishing their own exchange and, as the guilty pleas of Ellison and Wang admit, exploiting FTX’s home-field advantage by enabling Alameda to front-run trades, avoid liquidations, and borrow unlimited funds, Alameda could rip off others the way they believed they had previously been being ripped off. The fraud at FTX wasn’t a response to Alameda no longer winning at the game it was playing, it was the whole point of FTX right from the start.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • AAAS ☛ Are these bumble bees playing with toys? | Science | AAAS

      First example of insects seemingly having fun with objects adds to evidence for emotions

      Playtime isn’t just for children. Lab-kept bumble bees roll small wooden balls around for no apparent purpose other than fun, a new study reveals. The finding supports evidence that bees experience pleasure, researchers say, highlighting the importance of protecting them in the wild and treating them well when they’re kept in hives.

• Finance

  • Kids Don’t Want Cash Anymore–They Want ‘Robux’

    Like many parents, Greg and Selena Robleto offered to pay their kids for doing household chores. The couple quickly learned their money was no good.

  • CNBC ☛ Companies can ‘hire’ a virtual person for about $14k a year in China

    Tech company Baidu said the number of virtual people projects it’s worked on for clients has doubled since 2021, with a wide price range of as little as $2,800 to a whopping $14,300 per year.

    [...]

    As the tech improves, costs have dropped by about 80% since last year, he said. It costs about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) a year for a three-dimensional virtual person, and 20,000 yuan for a two-dimensional one.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ACM ☛ Cyberlaw: Where We Are and What’s On the Horizon

    Cyberlaw deals with the legalities of our interactions with technologies and one another in cyberspace. It is an umbrella term that encompasses matters as diverse as cybersecurity, data privacy, social media, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and cryptocurrency.

    New products, platforms, capabilities, and threats are constantly emerging. It is the job of lawmakers to determine how they fit into existing legal frameworks, and to create new legislation when they do n0t. However, establishing agreements has proven challenging at the country level and internationally alike, and it is an area of law that is increasingly impacted by geopolitics.

    Here, we look at some existing and upcoming cyber legislation and lay out what remains up for discussion and debate.

  • Teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in Prison

    There are many disturbing similarities between the brutality imposed on Stalin’s victims and the injustices endured by the incarcerated in federal and state prisons.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Adafruit ☛ Welcoming 1927 to the Public Domain

      Come early January, I’m full on itching to wet-dog shake the piles of last year’s top ten lists from my oversaturated brain. I don’t want to know what was great from last year that I missed! Last year is so over! You know what’s in? And free in the public domain? Boatloads of gems made in 1927. Personally, I will be swan diving into the periodicals section.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Unsettled, work to do

    Ho ve, I feel like I have a lot of stuff to do. I probably don’t actually have that much stuff to do, but whatever — just gotta divide & impera.

  • ulises and gi joe

    the following post is in english

    when I was 6 years old I met my best friend for a while (at least until 5th grade). I don’t like complaining, 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.

  • A mini-setting to start your Halberts campaign

    Halberts is the English translation of Helmbarten, a Fantasy Traveller role-playing game. “Fantasy” means it has magic and no guns, “Traveller” means it uses 2d6, random character creation, and no gaining of levels once play begins. Your attributes and skills are as good as they are ever going to be.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEGRTX Wordo: OUTER

  • Today’s date happens more frequently on Sunday than any other day of the week

    Five years ago [1], I posted that January 8^th is less like to occur on Monday. At the time, I just accepted it, but when I recently came across that post a few days ago, I figured I should actually see if that’s true.

  • New Years Goals

    I haven’t run a 5k (or 10k) race since before the pandemic. Then the world seemed to end! In 2022 the 5k’s, 10k’s etc came back in my area, but I didn’t run in them.

    I’ve been heading to the gym a lot lately, to get my endurance and speed back up. By the time the races are going again, in May/June, I hope to be in good enough shape to run a decent race!

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ My Answer to the “ChatGPT Isn’t Really Creative” Argument

    Human brains are just as much of a black box as GPT.

• Technical

  • Games

    I mentioned here several games and board games important to me. I am playing them occasionally, so I’m a casual player in today’s nomenclature. I don’t have any game console unpacked and set up in a living room or something like that.

    There is also always difficult to find a proper environment to play. For example, Dwarf Fortress has high hardware requirements, especially in the later stages of the game. TTD is the most accessible thanks to its open port.

  • Games

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Getting rid of google: the easy stuff

      Needless to say, Google is the biggest search engine in the world, that’s what it’s known for and what it started as anyways.

    • Changing DNS server

      Happy New Year, Geminauts! Some time in the coming week I am going to move the DNS records for the circumlunar.space domain to a new nameserver. The gemini.circumlunar.space server itself will remain up the whole time and none of its IP addresses are going to change, so in theory nobody should notice this happen, even if it takes some time for the changes to propagate to your ISP’s DNS server. But just in case something unexpected happens and you are not able to access gemini.circumlunar.space, don’t panic! It’s definitely an accident, I am almost certainly aware of it or will be shortly, and it’ll be fixed ASAP.

    • Reading list added

      It was a fun experience to piece this list back together from a combination of memory, notes I’d left in the BOOKS section of the Circumlunar BBS, email receipts from online bookstores, and so on. Surprising, too! Ever since roughly two years ago I gave myself permission to start accumulating physical paper books again, reading has *felt* like it loomed larger in my life than it did before. I could have sworn I was reading a lot more. And I guess I am a bit, and certainly more non-fiction, but honestly, nowhere near as much more as I thought.

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ How I started using Linux!

• Applications

  • 9to5Linux ☛ OBS Studio 29.0 Released with Media Key Support on Linux, New Filters

    OBS Studio 29.0 comes more than four months after OBS Studio 28.0 and introduces support for media keys on Linux, a 3-band equalizer filter, an upward compressor filter, Websockets 5.1.0, as well as support for encryption and authentication for SRT and RIST outputs.

    The new release also improves the NVIDIA Video and Audio filters by adding a Mask Refresh slider and support for temporal processing for better quality masking, adds the ability to mute individual browser docks, as well as the ability to inspect individual browser docks via right-clicking.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ OBS Studio 29.0 is Out! How to Install via PPA in Ubuntu 22.04 | 22.10 | UbuntuHandbook

    OBS Studio, the popular free and open-source video recording and live streaming software, announced a new major 29.0 today.

    The new release came with great improvements for Windows users, including AMD AV1 Encoder for the RX7000 series GPUs, Intel AV1 Encoder for Arc GPUs, and Intel HEVC Encoder.

    It also introduced native HEVC and ProRes encoders, including P010 and HDR and Desk View support for macOS.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Ventoy 1.0.87 has been released, along with a BSD Support Checksum and other changes

    Ventoy 1.0.87 has been rolled out for us, so click the button below to get the most recent version of Ventoy on your machine.

  • H2S Media ☛ 9 Best Open source Video players for Linux such as Ubuntu- 2023

    Are you a new Linux user who is looking for a best video player to play media content? Then here is a list of the top open-source video players to use on distributions such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and more…

    In today’s streaming world when most of us prefer to watch movies and shows online, PC video players’ popularity seems diminishing. Yet, if you are a content creator, for example, a Youtuber then you want to use a local video player either to play a downloaded video or exported one from some editing software.

    Well, most of us would not look for some extra application because Linux distros come with a default media player. Nonetheless, looking for some alternative to the default video player then going though this list is not a bad idea.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • University of Toronto ☛ Our ZFS spares handling system sort of relies on our patterns of disk usage

    This is a question with a subtle answer, which starts with how we use disks and what that implies for available spares. We always use disks in mirrored pairs, and the pairs are fixed; every partition of every disk has a specific partner. The first partition of the first SAS-connected disk is always mirrored with the first partition of the first SATA-connected disk, and so on. This means that in normal operation (when a disk hasn’t failed), all spares also come in pairs; if the last partition of the first ‘SAS’ disk isn’t used, neither will be the last partition of the first ‘SATA’ disk, so both are available as spares. In addition, we spread our partition usage across all disks, using the first partition on all pairs before we start using the second partition on any of them, and so on.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install, Change, Autostart Screensaver in Ubuntu

    This basic guide will help to install, change and autostart screensavers in Ubuntu.

    Screensavers are beautiful for desktops and should be available to everyone as part of their preferred OS. However, if you are an Ubuntu user, you might notice a blank screen for the screensaver. After dropping GNOME 3 (16.04 onwards), Ubuntu shows a blank screen for the screensaver.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Nmap on Fedora Linux – LinuxCapable

    Nmap (short for Network Mapper) is a free and open-source network scanning and security testing tool. Network administrators and security professionals use it to discover and assess the security of networks and devices. The following tutorial will teach you how to install and use Nmap on Fedora Linux with a desktop workstation or headless server using the command line terminal to install and use commands with the network scanner.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Thunderbird on Fedora Linux – LinuxCapable

    Thunderbird Mail is a free and open-source e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and is now maintained by an independent community. It is designed to be fast, reliable, and user-friendly, with many features and tools for managing e-mail and news accounts. Thunderbird allows users to send and receive e-mails and manage multiple e-mail accounts, calendars, and address books. It also includes support for spam filtering, message labeling, tagging, and search functionality.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Thunderbird on a Fedora Linux desktop using one of two installation methods: DNF or Flatpak package manager using the command terminal.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Nomacs on Fedora Linux – LinuxCapable

    Nomacs is a free, open-source image viewer. It is a lightweight, fast, customizable image viewer that allows users to view, edit, and manage their image files on a Fedora desktop. For users who may be thinking of installing Nomacs, it has features such as support for multiple file formats, image manipulation tools, raw images, and a customizable interface. In addition, Nomacs can synchronize images and folders between multiple devices, making it a convenient tool for organizing and viewing images.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Nomacs Image Viewer on Fedora Linux using the Fedora default repository or alternative flatpak installation manager for those who want to use a much-updated version.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Skype on Fedora Linux [Ed: Skype is Microsoft/NSA wiretapping; it's unwise for any GNU/Linux site to offer people advice on installing such spyware/malware, typically involving Microsoft control of the machine (remotely)]

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Configure DHCP Server on Ubuntu 22.04 Step-by-Step

    Hello techies, in this post we will show you how to configure DHCP server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS step-by-step.

    DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, it works on client-server architecture. DHCP server assign IPv4 and IPv6 automatically to clients (computers) on the network. DHCP Server offers a lease of IP address to client, if the clients request IP address and DHCP acknowledge it then client will get IP address for the lease time. If the lease time expires and clients wants to use the same IP address, then it must request IP address to DHCP server again.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How To Install DEB Packages on Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint

    The package files of the Linux distributions Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint have the extension .deb. These package files are also called DEB files. There are many ways to install a DEB package file on Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint.

    In this article, I will show you how to install DEB packages on Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint using different package managers.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install Sayanora Music Player on Ubuntu 22.04

    If you are looking for a lightweight audio player for Ubuntu 22.04, Sayanora is worth checking. Sayanora is a customizable audio player written in C++. Moreover, it is supported by the Qt framework. The audio player is available for Linux and uses Gstreamer as its audio backend.

    This guide covers Sayanora’s features and presents three ways of installing the Sayanora music player on Ubuntu 22.04.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install TeXworks on Fedora Linux

    TeXworks is a free and open-source graphical interface for creating and editing documents in the TeX typesetting system. It is designed to be easy to use, with a simple and intuitive interface that allows users to create professional-quality documents quickly. TeXworks includes syntax highlighting, spell checking, and automatic generation of a table of contents, making it a powerful and convenient tool for authors, publishers, and researchers.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of TeXworks on Fedora Linux using two different methods of Fedora’s repository using the DNF package manager or the natively installed Flatpak third-party manager using the command line terminal. The tutorial will also show quick tips on how to update using the command line terminal and, if need be, remove the software.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Pinta on Fedora Linux [Ed: This helps Microsoft through Mono; better use GIMP or Krita]

    Pinta is a free, open-source image editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, making it an excellent choice for both beginners and experienced users. Pinta includes various features and tools for editing and manipulating images, such as support for layers, customizable brushes, and image effects. It also offers a fully customizable interface, allowing users to tailor the software to their specific needs.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Pinta on Fedora Linux using the command line terminal and alternative methods using the default DNF package manager or for users that favor the most up-to-date version available with the Flatpak alternative method.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to generate random numbers in Bash

    Random numbers have a wide range of applications all across programming. Testing for functionality is a big part of it. Generating unique IDs, passwords, or other random strings of characters is another big use case. There are several ways of generating random numbers in Bash, and today we will check them out.

  • SANS ☛ Its about time: OS Fingerprinting using NTP

    Most current operating systems, including many small systems like IoT devices, use some form of NTP to sync time. NTP is lightweight and reasonably accurate in most use cases to synchronize time across the internet with millisecond accuracy [1]. Some protocols, like PTP, are more accurate but are designed for local networks and may require special hardware on the host [2]. Smaller systems with less stringent accuracy requirements sometimes use SNTP, a variant of NTP.

  • Install fsuae Amiga Emulator via snap package on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions, Xubuntu

    After experiencing issues trying to install the Amiga Emulator fsuae, I decided to install fsuae using the snap package instead.

    I have experienced slow installation and performance issues using other snap packages in the past, but was surprised at how quickly this snap installed and also the performance of emulating the Amiga itself.

  • TechTarget ☛ How to deploy Kubernetes on VMware with vSphere Tanzu [Ed: It would not be secure on top of proprietary software controlled by a close NSA partner]

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to install Discord on Fedora | FOSS Linux

    Discord is a messaging application. It is a social media platform where users communicate through text messages, video calls, and voice calls. Users can also share media and files on private chats and servers. Servers, in this case, refer to Discord’s way of referring to communities. Discord also supports screen sharing, an essential feature to be included in such a platform.

    Another essential feature of this application is that it enables one to organize their server with categories and channels. This makes the server very tidy, making the information accessible. It is similar to Whatsapp and telegram.

    Discord is a timely benefit application to many communities since it enables them to expand their projects, reach out to more people, and maintain a community of fans and followers. It is an all-in-one voice as well as text chat used by gamers. It is free, secure, and works on both desktops and phones. Discord is not open source; however, they provide a Linux client; hence many Linux users rely on it.

    This app is available on various platforms, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. This article has been tailored to walk you through the multiple steps needed when installing Discord on Fedora. Several ways can be used to install Discord in Fedora:

  • ripgrep-all (rga): search text on any file – RS1 Linux Tools

    ripgrep-all is a search tool that wraps ripgrep (a powerful grep alternative) and enables it to search in pdf, odt, docx, movie subtitles, images, etc.

• WINE or Emulation

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental updated and Proton Next (7.0-6) out for Linux and Steam Deck

    The first Proton Experimental update of 2023 from Valve has landed for Linux desktop and Steam Deck, plus Proton Next is live again with the upcoming release of Proton 7.0-6.

  • Beebom ☛ 10 Best Emulators For Chromebook in 2023 | Beebom

    Switching from Windows or macOS to a Chromebook has its own perks, including a lightweight OS experience, fast performance, and great battery life. However, there are times when you miss your regular apps and want to run them on Chrome OS. On Windows and macOS, you can do it with the numerous virtualization software. However, the support for emulation is limited on Chromebooks. Nevertheless, we have found the 10 best emulators for Chromebook that let you use Windows programs, Android apps, and retro arcade games from old consoles. With these Chromebook emulators, you can run any software environment you want. On that note, let us jump to the list and check out the best Chromebook emulators.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Barry Kauler ☛ Automatic translation added to MoManager

  A lot more to do, but already looking really good. Running MoManager, select a script for which there is not yet a .mo file, say /usr/sbin/firewall_ng.sh, there will be a popup asking if want automatic translation…

  [...]

  A note about the future of EasyOS. I have been releasing English, French and German .img files, but this is a very inefficient way of doing it. In future, intend to go back to the Puppy-way with langpack PET packages.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ Under the Hood with FreeBSD and Ampere Altra | FreeBSD Foundation

    The FreeBSD Project has been working with Ampere Computing for several years, making sure that FreeBSD is well supported on Ampere CPUs, and using Ampere servers for building FreeBSD/arm64 package sets. Ampere recently provided the project with a pair of Ampere Altra systems, initially for platform bring-up and later to support performance improvements in FreeBSD.

    [...]

    We first powered it up with a FreeBSD snapshot image. Unfortunately our first experience was a kernel panic! Andrew Turner found the problem and had the fix ready in short order

  • FreeBSD ☛ Nov/Dec 2022 FreeBSD Journal out

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ DragonFly 6.4 released – DragonFly BSD Digest

    DragonFly 6.4 is out – the release page has details or you can look at the tag summary.

  • [talk] upcoming BSDCons and more

    AsiaBSDCon and BSDCan CFPs are online.. both are happening in the first half of the year, and I strongly recommend people looking into them.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Cloud7 Expert Series: Sarwar Raza from Red Hat – Cloud7 News

    Cloud7 is gathering opinions of the important names in the cloud, web hosting, cybersecurity, Linux, and other industries for 2022 in the Cloud7 Expert Series. Alongside their evaluations of 2022, they will share their expectations for the next year, 2023.

    Sarwar Raza, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Services at Red Hat, is currently responsible for the company’s cloud services portfolio and business unit. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics from Clark University and a Master’s in computer science from WPI. He previously worked for Totogi, Amazon Web Services, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat new Benchmark results on AMD EPYC4 (Genoa) processors

    Red Hat has continued to work with our partners to better enable world class performance. Recently, AMD released its EPYC “Genoa” 4th Gen Data Center CPU, known as the AMD EPYC 9004 Series. With a die size of 5nm, AMD increased the core count to 96 cpu and 192 threads / socket with 384 MB L3 cache size. Other significant advances include 128 lanes of Gen5 PCIe and 12 channels of DDR5 RAM, for up to 6TB RAM per socket. Red Hat and AMD Genoa have achieved some leading performance benchmarks results for workloads running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and RHEL 9.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat’s workforce development program to create skilled IT workers in Massachusetts

    Addressing the current technology talent shortage is critical for both organizations and individuals. Forty-six percent of employers plan to increase their open source hiring this year, and they’ll need a steady pipeline of prospects to fill their open positions. For prospective employees, a career in IT means an average annual salary of more than $100,000, opportunities for growth and advancement, and the chance to work in a fast-paced and exciting industry.

    However, not everyone can or wants to go to college for four years or more to receive a degree in Computer Science. That leaves a lot of potential IT workers with skills that are just waiting to be honed.

  • InformationWeek ☛ Security Top IT Investment Priority in 2023

    Chief information security officers must develop a comprehensive security investment strategy that considers human capital, even while qualified IT security professionals are in short supply.

  • The Great Telco Debate: Public cloud dependencies, Telcos and Public Cloud | TelecomTV

    By the time The Great Telco Debate (aka GTD) hit the ‘Softwarisation and the public cloud’ session, motions related to Open RAN and the progress being made by communications service providers (CSPs) to become digital service providers (DSPs) had already been discussed, dissected and voted upon, but there was still plenty of energy left in the debating chamber to discuss one of the hottest trends in the communications networking and services sector.

• Debian Family

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Sexual harassment: Nicolas Dandrimont & Debian Account Managers collective gullibility on Jacob Appelbaum

    I previously wrote a high level overview of how Debian falsified harassment statements against Jacob Appelbaum.

    Now it is time to look at the detail. Here is an exchange between Enrico Zini and Nicolas Dandrimont. They are both members of the Debian Account Managers team.

    The key thing to note here is they are simply cutting and pasting smears about harassment from the Tor Project. The smears they are cutting-and-pasting do not come from real police or a court.

    The Tor Project claims they hired an independent investigator. What qualifies somebody to be an investigator?

    When claims were made about Jeffrey Epstein visiting MIT, the MIT management hired the law firm Goodwin Proctor to conduct the investigation. They told everybody that Goodwin Proctor was doing this work. People could bypass MIT and give reports directly to the lawyers. At the end of this process, MIT published the full report and the names of those who worked on the investigation.

    Every step taken at the Tor Project was the opposite of the process followed by MIT. Their statement does not give any link to the report itself. Their statement does not identify the name of the investigator, the name of their firm or their credentials.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OS News ☛ The future of ZFS on Ubuntu desktop is not looking good – OSnews

    I thought the Linux world had settled on Btrfs as the “ZFS-like” file system for the platform, and had no idea Canonical had even been working on giving users the option to install to ZFS. With Btrfs already being the default on e.g. Fedora for a while now, it seems that is a better route to go for Ubuntu and other distributions than trying to make ZFS work.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ GL.iNet GL-MT3000 pocket-sized Wi-Fi 6 Router review – Part 1: Specs, unboxing, and teardown – CNX Software

    GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) is a pocket-sized Wi-Fi 6 router running OpenWrt on a MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) dual-core processor @ 1.3 GHz and equipped with a 2.5GbE port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a USB 3.0 port.

    [...]

    The router runs OpenWrt 21.02 with Linux 5.4. The firmware, mobile app, and detailed documentation are provided by the company. Note that both the system memory (512MB vs 1GB) and storage (256MB NAND vs 8GB eMMC) have much lower capacities than in the Brume 2, so some of the features may be missing, albeit the company still lists WireGuard, OpenWrt, and AdGuard Home, so we’ll find out when testing the software part. The router also consumes more and is quite heavier than the Brume 2, even than the “A” model with a metal enclosure. We’ll find out why in the teardown section.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Roku Is Branching Out With Its Own Brand of TVs [Ed: Linux-based device]

  • Variety ☛ Roku Ends 2022 With More Than 70 Million Accounts, Streaming Hours Up 19%

    Per Roku, streaming hours reached 23.9 billion in the fourth quarter and 87.4 billion for the entirety of 2022, a 19% increase year-over-year.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Compact ethical hacking device based on RP2040 MCU

    Kickstarter recently featured the HackyPi which is an educational embedded device designed for ethical hacking and compatible with Python and C/C++. The device is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 and it can run scripts automatically by connecting it via USB.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Banana Pi Release New Raspberry Pi Pico Alternative

    Banana Pi release another Raspberry Pi Pico alternative that expands the form factor, physically and technically. Now with onboard Stemma QT and USB-C.

  • Hackaday ☛ Happy New Year, Hackaday!

    [Tom Nardi] and I were talking on the podcast about 2022, and how it went from the hacker’s perspective. As the global chip shortage entered its second full year, we both thought back on the ways that we all had to adapt and work around the fact that we just couldn’t get the parts we were accustomed to picking up with ease.

  • Hackaday ☛ New Part Day: ESP32-P4 Espressif RISC-V Powerhouse

    It seems every day there’s a new microcontroller announcement for which the manufacturer is keen to secure your eyeballs. Today it’s the turn of Espressif, whose new part is the ESP32-P4, which despite being another confusingly named ESP32, is a high-performance addition to their RISC-V line-up.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Obnam ☛ Iteration planning: January

  The goal for version 1.0 is for Obnam to be an utterly boring backup solution for Linux command line users. It should just work, be performant, secure, and well-documented.

  It is not a goal for version 1.0 to have been ported to other operating systems, but if there are volunteers to do that, and to commit to supporting their port, ports will be welcome.

  Other user interfaces is likely to happen only after 1.0.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Old VCR ☛ MacLynx beta 4: now with scrollbars and dialogue boxes

    Yes, MacLynx is a real, honest to goodness port of Lynx 2.7.1 to the classic Mac OS, compatible all the way back to System 7. What makes it particularly interesting as a port is its partial integration with the Mac OS: the home page is set through Internet Config, it supports the Speech Manager, you can drop URLs on it and you can even click on links directly (cooooool!). I used it myself on my first Mac, a Macintosh IIsi, for which it was very well suited. It was released as a beta by its original author and no further releases were made, so a couple years back I decided to dust it off, reconstruct the toolchain and do some upgrades to it just for fun. It’s probably the most practical browser you can run on a compact Mac, does very well on later 68Ks and runs just fine under A/UX. I build it with CodeWarrior Pro 2, CWGUSI 1.8.0 (comes with CW Pro 2) and Internet Config Programmer’s Kit 1.4.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Old] Adolfo Ochagavía ☛ Implementing the MySQL server protocol for fun and profit

    Originally, the idea was to port the msql-srv library from Rust to Java. For context, msql-srv makes it possible to create a fake MySQL/MariaDB server, which accepts MySQL connections and handles them with custom logic (instead of having a real database behind it).

  • [Old] Tech Target Inc ☛ MUMPS – The Most Important Database You (Probably) Never Heard Of

    If you’ve been to your doctor or to a hospital, or used an ATM it’s likely that the data was processed and stored in a MUMPS-based system. Despite the fact that 2016 represents its 50th anniversary the original design basics of MUMPS are still meeting commercial needs today and show little evidence of being displaced in healthcare or large financial institutions by either RDBMS or NoSQL. It would not be inaccurate to say that MUMPS is/was NoSQL long before ever becoming a gleam in the eye of Google researchers.

• Programming/Development

  • Data Science Tutorials ☛ Data Science Applications in Banking – Data Science Tutorials

    Data Science Applications in Banking, Companies require data in order to gain insights and make data-driven decisions.

    Data science is a requirement for providing better services to customers and developing strategies for various banking operations.

    Furthermore, banks require data in order to expand their operations and attract new customers.

  • Devever ☛ Memoirs from the old web: The GateKeeper access control system

    It would have been around 2001. The term “AJAX” would not be invented until 2005. Lots of people had their own Geocities page, the typical instance of which was horrific yet in retrospect somehow wonderful. Dynamic web applications were server driven, with any use of JavaScript being only as a minor seasoning on the client side. Previously these applications had often been via Perl and CGI, but now PHP was rising in popularity. Plenty of Perl and PHP-based web forums abounded, forming the centres of little communities run by enterprising individuals. The phrase “dynamic HTML” (DHTML) was used to describe doing interesting and dynamic things by using JavaScript to manipulate HTML live, like making animated menus — a term which has now been long forgotten. Websites such as dynamicdrive.com (2004 archive copy) provided an archive of such scripts uploaded by various people.

    At the same time, plenty of people didn’t have access to a PHP host and were stuck with static web hosting, which was often free. This kind of free host would usually automatically inject advertising into their user’s web pages. From time to time, a user of such a web host would want to create a password protected area of their website. Since doing this securely ordinarily would require some kind of server validation of the password, occasionally you would see people hack it by checking the password in (possibly mildly obfuscated) client side JavaScript. Of course, this was completely insecure.

  • C/C++

    • Linux Hint ☛ Recv() Function in C Language

      The C language offers several possibilities and the use of different functions for sending and receiving the data over a socket. Each of them provides a different property or constraint. However, the “socket.h” header defines the recv() function which is specifically designed to read the socket files and provides options for receiving the mode, waiting, etc., making it most suitable for use in connections.

      In this Linux Hint article, you will learn how to use the recv() function. One of the two functions are used to send and receive the data over a socket in the C language.

      We will look at the syntax of this function and its theoretical description of how it works, the input and output arguments, and the data type that is accepted by each of them.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Quick Sort in C++

      Arranging things in sequence is a task that we perform in daily life, whether it is arranged in ascending order or descending order. The process of arranging things in a proper sequence is called sorting. Ascending is increasing order and descending is decreasing order. In programming, we also perform the sorting using different algorithms. But one algorithm provides the quickest sorting which is “Quick Sort”. This sorting algorithm sorts the array faster than the other algorithms. It works on the divide and conquers rule, first sets a pivot point, and divides the array into two sub-arrays. Then, set a pivot for sub-arrays and the process goes on until we reach the end and the required array is sorted. This article explains an in-depth working of a quick sort in C++ with a practical coding example in ascending order.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Initialize struct in C++

      In programming, we frequently encounter circumstances where we want to store a collection of data, whether they are of relevant or irrelevant datatypes. In C++, we already know about arrays, which are used to hold collections of information of relevant datatypes in adjacent memory addresses. But in structures, we can store the user-defined datatypes, they can be different datatypes or can be relevant datatypes. Structures carry a group of variables that have different datatypes but under one identifier which is “struct”. The “struct” is the reserved keyword in C++ language and a short form of structures that are used to develop the structures in the program. Let us just examine the syntax of Structures to gain a better understanding of the idea of structures and how we’re going to initialize them inside the C++ programming language.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Integer Division in C++

      Today, we use one of the datatypes of C++ programming language which is the int datatype, also known as integers. Through this, we will do the division operation in C++ language. As we know, the division is one of the basic methods of mathematics. We do division operations in mathematics so that we can partition a large group into smaller subgroups so that each group can get the same amount of items. In this tutorial, let us just explore more in-depth mathematical technique called division and see how we implement it in C++ programming language.

    • Linux Hint ☛ How To Use ASCII in C++

      Today, we’ll talk about ASCII and how to utilize it in the C++ language for programming. ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” and is a standardized information encoding technique that is used for communication between humans and computers electronically. Computers cannot understand the language of humans that is why to work with characters, numbers, punctuation, and other computer-related characters there are already predefined numeric values called ASCII values. Let us just explore how ASCII characters behave and how we may retrieve the value of any computer-related type of character inside the coding language C++ so that we can fully comprehend the notion of ASCII in the field of computer science.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Merge N Sorted Linked Lists Using Min Heap

      Here, the goal is to benefit from the fact that a min-root heap always returns the smallest member. The initial entry of each linked list is the smallest element in its corresponding list since, in this technique, all the linked lists are already sorted. We take advantage of this circumstance by creating a min-heap out of the initial member of each linked list. The smallest element is then obtained by extracting the top element (root) of the min-heap. We get the smallest element across all linked lists by doing this. The next element is then added to the min-heap after we increase the pointer to the list that the freshly extracted element belongs to. A new element is taken from the min-heap, the linked list pointer that contains it is incremented, and the newly pointed element is then added to the min-heap. Until the min-heap is completely empty, this operation is repeated. Keep in mind that we continuously add the elements that we extract from the min-heap to a separate result list that we are keeping.

      The method’s flexibility is a key benefit. With a few minor adjustments, this approach may also be used to combine the N sorted arrays. Some of the other ways fail to do this, but this approach succeeds even when all the linked lists are not the same size.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Char Array to String in C++

      In the C++ programming language, many different types of data types are used to store the data. These data types are built-in datatypes. In the C++ language, one of these basic data types is “char” which is known as the character that has a buffer size of 1 byte. Whereas, “string” is not a built-in data type; it functions in a way that is similar to one when used simply. In simple words, it can store the characters similar to character arrays and allows the users to perform the operations on strings that are not possible with character arrays. Because the user sometimes wants to supply the string as an argument, we first transform the character array into a string. It is simpler to manipulate the strings when they are converted to a string object since we can then use a variety of methods and have overloaded operators such as the += operator method, pushback method, append method, etc.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Argc and Argv in C++

      We learned a lot about how to pass parameters in functions previously. We further discovered why parameters are passed and what we get in return from functions. However, we often did not supply any arguments or parameters to the main() function. In C++ programs, we can also pass the parameters in the main() function. These parameters are called command line arguments or command line parameters. We pass the parameters while running the program on the command prompt window just after the program’s name. These two parameters are “argc” and “argv”. The “argc” stands for argument count and it is used to store the non-negative integer type argument including the program name. The argv stands for argument vector because it is a character pointer of an array that stores the actual parameters.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Execv() Function in C Language

      There are several ways and functions to start the processes from a program. Each of them offers different solutions to the programmer depending on the needs of the particular case.

      The execXX() family is a set of system functions that are defined in the “unistd.h” header to run a process from within a program. This family of functions allows us to send the input arguments to the executable that calls it which is why it is a very useful resource for interaction between processes.

      In this Linux Hint article, you’ll learn all about the execv() function in the C language. We will look at its syntax, the theoretical description of how it works, the input and output arguments, and the type of data that each of them processes. You’ll also learn how to create and use the arrays of strings and pointers that are part of the input arguments of this family of functions and are passed to the calling process.

      Then, we apply what we learned in a practical example that shows the correct implementation and calling of the execv() function.

    • Linux Hint ☛ EOF in C++

      In file handling, we don’t know how much data is stored in the file. Since the extent of data in filing is mostly unknown, how can we read the file in that case? When we don’t know how much data the file contains, we use the eof() method to read a file. The eof() method is “End of File” which reads the file until the control reaches the end of the file. This methodology is very suitable to present the data of files. The things we know about the files are the type of file data and the formatting style of the stored data. The eof() function allows us to determine when the file has reached its end.

      EOF() is a bool-type constant method that returns true when the end of the file is reached and it returns false when there is still data to be read. It is a method of input-output stream class (ios) that reads the data of a file until the end is encountered.

  • Python

    • Security Week ☛ Malware Delivered to PyTorch Users in Supply Chain Attack

      Now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella, PyTorch is based on the Torch library and is used for applications in computer vision and natural language processing fields.

    • Computing UK ☛ PyTorch admins warn of malicious dependency

      Package maintainers for open source framework PyTorch have said a malicious dependency imitating one of its own was available on a prominent code repository during the holiday season.

  • Shell/Bash

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Pass a Filename as Argument in a Shell Script

      The shell programming languages can be used for a variety of tasks like conducting operations and doing repetitive tasks for the automotive industry. We may execute our commands, applications, and shell scripts in a shell environment. You provide input and the program is then executed using that input. A program’s output is shown when it has completed running. How to provide a file name as input to a shell script is addressed in this article. To accomplish this, a script must be created using the “#!/bin/bash” shell. Now, we’ll see how to do this step-by-step.

    • Linux Hint ☛ What Is Cat EOF in Bash Script

      CAT is a command of Bash in the Linux operating system. CAT is the abbreviation of concentrate. In the Linux operating system, the cat command is used to display the file, read a file, or concentrate the content of the file as the name explains. It takes a file, reads its content or data, and then outputs the content of the files. It also helps us with the creation of files. This command comes with many options that help us to perform the actions with the file according to our needs.

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Write the Bash If-Else Statement in One Line

      The open and improved Bourne shell variant that is offered with the Linux and GNU computer systems is called Bash. Identical to the original, Bash also supports the command-line editing as an addition. The if-else statements are essentially statements that are used to make decisions, and they are quite beneficial. If the given condition is true, the provided if statement is printed. If it is false, the else statement is printed. We can utilize an if-else statement in one line in Bash. Before writing the script, we must add the Bash shell on Linux to run the Bash scripts.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Remove a Specific Element from an Array in Bash

      Bash handles only the associative arrays and the one-dimensional numerically indexed arrays. In Bash scripting, arrays do not necessarily consist of a group of associated elements. The array elements can be strings and numbers because Bash does not differentiate between them. In this article, we will perform the deletion operations on the Bash arrays with different approaches. We need to know the index position of the element in the array or key to remove it from the array. The “unset” command is commonly used in Bash to remove an element.

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Use the Bash “Set –X” Option

      The set command of Linux is used to set and unset specific options. These options manage the behavior of a given script and enable the task execution without error. In this article, we use the “x” option with the set command which informs the Bash to display the statements as they are processed. It is immensely useful for debugging when we need to determine which lines were executed and in what sequence. The set -x operation can be employed directly in an open Bash shell or within a Bash script. In the following examples, we use the set command with the “x” option to enable and disable the various functionalities.

    • Linux Hint ☛ What is $0 in a Bash Script?

      Bash is a command interpreter and script. Like other forms of coding, it supports packet forwarding, variables, and functions. A script is a file with commands that the software may view and perform. In Linux, bash gives us positional parameters like “$0,” “$1,” “$2,” “$3,” etc. In this article, one of its positional parameters, “$0,” will be used.

  • Git

    • HowTo Geek ☛ Gogs Is the Easiest Way to Run a Local Git Server (Here’s How to Set It Up)

      Don’t want to push your code to a hosted Git repository? Then run your own Git server in-house. Gogs is the easiest way to do that. Here’s how to set it up.

    • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Rename a Branch in Git

      Branching is a trivial exercise in Git. Unfortunately, trivial tasks rarely get due attention, and mistakes happen. If you’ve misnamed a branch, it’ll have to be renamed. Here’s how to do that.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Hackaday ☛ Put Your Serial Port On The Web

    Today, everything from your computer to your dryer has wireless communications built in, but devices weren’t always so unencumbered by wires. What to do when you have a legacy serial device, but no serial port on the computer you want to connect? [vahidyou] designed a wireless serial dongle to solve this conundrum.

Leftovers

• Cendyne Naga ☛ The year 2023

  2022 flew by fast, as the pandemic years really seem to be going. I wrote plenty this year, even went to a cool place like DEF CON 30 at the end of summer, and wrote about Ed25519 a few times. That got some traction.

  Oh, and my blog has some more technology to it. You won’t see this article until midnight my time! But I will have long since deployed it. Turns out I can do quite a bit of useful postprocessing with Cloudflare workers on a static website.

• Joe Brockmeier ☛ Quick links: Guns ’n Roses “lost” music, subscription fatigue and more : Dissociated Press

  Subscription Fatigue: Caught a discussion on Mastodon today where Tim Bray talked about the problems with Mastodon’s “business model,” via Patreon Subscriptions and donations. I think Bray has a point, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ever-growing list of monthly subscriptions I’ve been accumulating. I’m donating to Mastodon, Metafilter, to a handful of artists on Patreon and Bandcamp, various publications… $10 a month here, $5 there, $10 over here, pretty soon it starts adding up.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Semi-Organic Growth

  There’s a good book on this topic for anyone interested in technology M&A that focuses on Google called Semi-Organic Growth. It follows Google’s M&A strategy up until 2015 (when the book was published). At the end of the book, it makes some predictions about Google’s 2015-era acquisitions, which drifted away from core search and distribution into more “moonshots.” Interesting to read in both retrospective now that Google is pulling back many of these moonshots.

• Terence Eden ☛ Fragile Technologists – Terence Eden’s Blog

  Picture the scene. You’re in a pub and order, say, a cider or a cocktail. The local pub bore pipes up “What are you drinking that for? Real men drink…” and then names a brand of generic, piss-weak lager that is his substitute for a personality.

  He’s the same guy who insists that “real men” watch football, and can’t quite believe that you have no opinion on last night’s cup final.

  This sort of behaviour is sometimes terms “fragile masculinity”. It isn’t that masculinity itself is a weak and feeble proposition – but that some people feel that masculinity needs defending because it is a brittle and narrow concept.

• Manuel Matuzovic ☛ A year in review: 2022 – Manuel Matuzović

  Our daughter was born in 2021, and suddenly she’s 19 months old. It’s killing me how fast time flies. It’s still amazing to watch her grow and learn new things. Looking at photos from early last year baffles me because she looks so different. It’s almost like I’m looking at another or multiple other persons. I’m really glad that I managed to find enough time for her. I still don’t work on weekends and evenings and I try to be home early every day, which allows me to spend a lot of time with her.

  Some of my personal highlights this year were a weekend trip to Italy (Venice and Chioggia), our 4 week trip to Greece (Peloponnese and Athens), our road trip to Germany and The Netherlands (Freiburg, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Amsterdam), and of course moving to Graz.

• Science

  • AAAS ☛ Hot mixing: Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete

    Ancient Roman concretes have survived millennia, but mechanistic insights into their durability remain an enigma. Here, we use a multiscale correlative elemental and chemical mapping approach to investigating relict lime clasts, a ubiquitous and conspicuous mineral component associated with ancient Roman mortars. Together, these analyses provide new insights into mortar preparation methodologies and provide evidence that the Romans employed hot mixing, using quicklime in conjunction with, or instead of, slaked lime, to create an environment where high surface area aggregate-scale lime clasts are retained within the mortar matrix. Inspired by these findings, we propose that these macroscopic inclusions might serve as critical sources of reactive calcium for long-term pore and crack-filling or post-pozzolanic reactivity within the cementitious constructs. The subsequent development and testing of modern lime clast–containing cementitious mixtures demonstrate their self-healing potential, thus paving the way for the development of more durable, resilient, and sustainable concrete formulations.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Classic Video Chip Drives A Modern TFT

    A lot of us have a soft spot for retrocomputers, and there’s nothing quite like running original hardware. Unfortunately if you’re after the truly original touch then that means carrying along the family TV from 1982, and that’s where life becomes annoying. What if there were a way you could easily drive an LCD panel from a classic video controller? Help is at hand for owners of TI TMS9928A video chips, courtesy of [ukmaker], with a clever interface board that drives an SPI or parallel TFT.

  • Hackaday ☛ Gorgeous Sunflower Macropad Will Grow On You

    Once [Hide-key] saw the likes of the banana and corn macro pads, they knew they had to throw their hat in this strange and wonderful ring. Some family members suggested a sunflower, and off they went looking for inspiring images, finally settling on a more iconic and less realistic design which we think is quite beautiful.

  • Hackaday ☛ Wireless CNC Pendant Implemented With ESP-NOW

    As a fervent fan of twiddly and twirly widgets and tactile budgets in a device’s user interface, [Steve M Potter] created a remote control (pendant) for his CNC machine, which he explains in a recent video that’s also linked down below. In addition to all the tactile goodness, what is perhaps most interesting about this controller is that it uses Espressif’s ESP-NOW protocol. This still uses the same 2.4 GHz as WiFi would, but uses a system more akin to the pairing of a wireless mouse or keyboard.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Time spent looking at my phone

    I gave myself a few goals to meet this year, one of which was to be more aware of how I use my phones. Whenever I reach for them, I take deliberate note and have them justify their intrusion, or their flip cases remain closed. I’ve found this reframing useful; I’m not denying myself permission, I’m the gatekeeper. Phones aren’t the boss, I am!

  • NBC ☛ Virginia school district where 6-year-old allegedly shot teacher

    Officials have yet to comment on where the child might have obtained the weapon, which police described as a handgun.

  • The Dissenter ☛ EPA Conceals Text Messages From Allegedly Corrupt Official Who Whistleblowers Exposed

  • TruthOut ☛ Damar Hamlin Nearly Died on the Job. Too Many Workers Face Similar Threats.

  • Hackaday ☛ Tiny Robots That Bring Targeted Drug Delivery And Treatment A Little Bit Closer

    Within the world of medical science fiction they are found everywhere: tiny robots that can zip through blood vessels and intestines, where they can deliver medication, diagnose medical conditions and even directly provide treatment. Although much of this is still firmly in the realm of science-fiction, researchers at Stanford published work last year on an origami-based type of robots, controlled using an external magnetic field. Details can be found in the Nature Communications paper.

• Proprietary

  • India Times ☛ Google Cloud to support Kuwait’s digitisation drive

    Google Cloud did not provide a value for the agreement with the Kuwaiti government, but said it would encompass digitising government services, migrating and storing national data securely on the cloud and setting up a national digital skills programme.

    The company aims to invest in a cloud region in Kuwait, its third announced in the Middle East after Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and said it plans to open an office on the ground without specifying a timeframe.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The F-35 Is Everything Wrong With the Military-Industrial Complex

    The F-35 fighter jet has been plagued by malfunctions and cost overruns for years, yet Congress continues to order up more. The bipartisan consensus to fund tools of war rather than pro-worker programs like affordable housing or childcare is still strong.

  • Declassified UK ☛ Former UN envoy to Yemen linked to MI6, a party to the war

    Martin Griffiths, a Briton who now runs the United Nations’ humanitarian work, co-founded and advises a private conflict resolution company that “works closely” with MI6. He was until recently the UN special envoy to Yemen.

  • Declassified UK ☛ UK loaned military adviser to British UN envoy in Yemen

    The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) secretively seconded a military officer to Yemen in 2019, it can be revealed. The officer was attached to the office of the then UN special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths.

    Declassified has shown that Griffiths’ is a founder of, and adviser to, a private conflict resolution company, Inter Mediate, that works with the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

    The MOD has told Declassified the military officer “works directly with and provides advice to the UN Special Envoy for Yemen regarding security and military issues relevant to the conflict in Yemen.”

    The MOD added: “The military officer is not based in Yemen but has visited with the UN Special Envoy.”

  • Michael West Media ☛ Aussie experts head to Saudi mining forum – Michael West

    Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is wooing Australians to help diversify its economy and lead the next energy revolution.

    The Future Minerals Forum that begins in Riyadh on Tuesday with a ministerial roundtable includes international mining leaders, emerging minerals experts, top technologists, analysts and investors.

    Although Australia’s resources minister Madeleine King is not attending, well-known names on the 200-plus list of speakers include BHP CEO Mike Henry, Rio Tinto chair Dominic Barton and Australian businessman Andrew Liveris.

    BHP says it is participating as a world leader in finding and producing key future-facing minerals needed to meet global decarbonisation goals.

    Mr Henry will do a fireside chat on “mining and owning the energy transition”.

  • TruthOut ☛ Report Reveals US Lied About Afghan Civilians Killed in 2021 Drone Strike

  • Common Dreams ☛ Rejecting Bump Stock Ban, Federal Court Legalizes ‘Instrument of Mass Murder’

    Despite acknowledging “tremendous” public pressure to impose a ban on bump stocks, a firearm attachment used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, a federal appeals court on Friday rejected a 2019 Trump administration rule barring people from owning the instruments.

  • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian Prosecutor General says shelling killed two and wounded 13 during Putin’s Christmas ceasefire — Meduza

    On January 6, a 66-year-old man and a 61-year-old woman were killed as a result of Russian artillery fire on Bakhmut and the surrounding territories in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, says the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office.

  • Meduza ☛ Zelensky imposes sanctions against 119 Russian cultural and sports figures — Meduza

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky approved a decision by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to impose personal economic sanctions against some Russian cultural and sports figures. The list includes three individuals who hold Ukrainian citizenship.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia claims to have broken through Ukrainian defenses at Soledar, Ukraine denies the claims — Meduza

    Since the evening of January 6, Russian Telegram channels have been reporting that Russian troops have made significant progress in Soledar, outside of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, says BBC’s Russian Service. Ukrainian authorities deny Russian claims. 

  • TruthOut ☛ Peace Activists Take on the Pentagon’s Corporate “Merchants of Death”

  • TruthOut ☛ New Documentaries Explore Censorship and Suppression of History in Israel

  • Michael West Media ☛ Dear US Congress, thank you for saving Australia from itself – Michael West

    Is “bad news” out of US Congress about an AUKUS nuclear submarine deal a blessing in disguise? Former submariner and senator Rex Patrick says US politicians, though acting in the interests of the US, may save Australia from itself, and $170 billion too.
    We are concerned that what was initially touted as a ‘do no harm’ opportunity to support Australia and the United Kingdom and build long-term competitive advantages for the US and its Pacific allies, may be turning into a zero-sum game for scarce, highly advanced U. SSNs,” wrote the Democrat and Republican heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
    “Over the past year, we have grown more concerned about the state of the US submarine industrial base as well as its ability to support the desired AUKUS SSN [Nuclear Submarine] end state”.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Robin Schroer ☛ Being a Journalist Within Your Organisation

    Having been a staff+ engineer located in Europe while working at a primarily North-American company last year, one piece of feedback I regularly got was that I seemed to know about many things happening, but many folks in my domain who got less synchronous time with me felt like they could not benefit from that. The teams I was directly working with were split roughly 60-40 between North America (East coast) and Europe, so more than half of the team members only overlapped with me during my already busy afternoons.

• Environment

  • Overpopulation

    • NPR ☛ California is getting drenched. So why can’t it save water for the drought?

      A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power, downing trees, and dumping massive amounts of water.

      Some California residents are watching this precious H20 wash away and wondering, why can’t we save the water for times when we desperately need it?

      The state grapples with drought, but it’s not as simple as putting out a big bucket, says hydrogeologist and professor at UC Santa Cruz, Andrew Fisher.

      Professor Fisher spoke with NPR about the challenges facing the state, but also the opportunities that are already being worked on.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Researchers Warn Great Salt Lake’s ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Retreat Threatens Crucial Ecosystem, Public Health

      Scientists are warning Utah officials that the Great Salt Lake is shrinking far faster than experts previously believed, and calling for a major reduction in water consumption across the American West in order to prevent the lake from disappearing in the next five years.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ House GOP Priorities Include “Born Alive” Measure and Other Anti-Abortion Laws

  • Scheerpost ☛ Trumpism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

    Donald Trump’s political demise is a personal implosion…Yet, the movement he inspired and instigated is very much alive.

  • BBC ☛ Wikipedia owner denies Saudi infiltration claim

    A statement by Smex and Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) accused the Saudi government of using agents to act as independent editors on Wikipedia to “control information about the country”.

  • Michał Woźniak ☛ Chaotic speaker vote two years after attempted coup in oil-rich North American country

    This week in the United States of America, a former British colony on the North American continent, long-brewing political and social problems culminated in a messy speaker election in the lower chamber of the bicameral national parliament.

    The Republican party, by far the more conservative of the two major parties in what effectively is a two-party political oligopoly, gained narrow majority in the chamber in November elections, but was unable to effectively execute on its new-found power. A small far-right splinter group within the party blocked the election of the speaker — a procedural position that has gradually become heavily politicized — demanding political favors in return for their votes. This resulted in four days of heated and often chaotic proceedings, at one point devolving into a brawl.

  • TruthOut ☛ McCarthy Finally Elected Speaker in 15th Vote After Bowing to Far Right Fringe

  • Michael West Media ☛ Musk fears Twitter backlash at trial

    The filing by Musk’s attorneys also notes that Twitter has laid off about 1,000 residents in the San Francisco area since he purchased the company in late October.

    “A substantial portion of the jury pool … is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors — or their friends and relatives — may have been personally impacted,” the filing said.

  • India Times ☛ Jack Ma to give up control of Chinese fintech company Ant Group

    Chinese fintech giant Ant Group on Saturday announced that its founder Jack Ma will no longer control the company. It said that post a series of shareholding adjustments, Ma gave up most of his voting rights.

    Ma previously owned more than 50% of voting rights at Ant but the changes mean that his shareholding has fallen to 6.2%, as per a Reuters report.

    According to Ant’s IPO paper, filed in 2020, Ma owned only 10% stake in Ant, but he exercised control over the company through related entities. Hangzhou Yunbo, an investment vehicle for Ma, controlled over two other entities that own a combined 50.5% stake in Ant, as per the Reuters report.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Will Congressional Progressive Caucus Ever Draw a Red Line?

    What follows is an encore for a column I wrote in 2018 for the new progressive Democrats elected to the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party won control of the House in 2018, and again barely in 2020. There was no response nor adoption of any of these power-enhancing suggestions from any of the novice legislators in those two election cycles.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Right-Wing Media Ramping Up LGBTQ Attacks

    Last summer, while waiting for coffee at a diner in what I’ll just call a small town, I overheard three older men complaining about how schools are forcing children to swap genders. A server responded, “You’re not even allowed to talk about this anymore.” I thought to myself, “A, you’re talking about it right now, and B, where’s my coffee?”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Dozens of New State Bills Show ‘Startling Evolution’ of Anti-Trans Legislation

    Just one week into 2023, state legislatures across the United States are already planning to consider more than two dozen bills aiming to cut off transgender people’s access to healthcare, with adults as well as minors targeted.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Billions in Global South Face Looming Wave of Austerity in 2023

    The world is confronting multiple, compounding crises, from COVID-19, energy, inflation, debt, and climate shocks to unaffordable living costs and political instability. The need for ambitious action cannot be greater. However, the return of failed policies such as austerity, now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation,” and a lack of effective taxation and debt-reduction initiatives threaten to exacerbate the macroeconomic instability and daily hardships that billions of people are facing. Unless policymakers change course, an “austerity pandemic” will make global economic recovery even more difficult.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden’s Title 42 Expansion Misses the Point of Asylum

    Amid a surge of migrants arriving at the United States’ southern border the Biden administration has announced a slate of new enforcement measures, including a new parole program that would permit thirty thousand Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to apply for asylum in the United States per month. But the new measure would also expel any migrants from those countries who attempt to cross the border under the controversial Trump-era policy known as Title 42.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • VOA News ☛ Charlie Hebdo Attack Victims Honored as Iran Rages Over New Cartoons

    French politicians paid tribute Saturday to Charlie Hebdo magazine staff and other victims of the January 2015 Islamist attacks, days after the satirical weekly’s latest edition sparked outrage in Iran.

    French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted the names of all 17 victims of a spate of attacks eight years ago in and around Paris, including the 12 people killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

  • Quillette ☛ A Puritanical Assault on the English Language

    It is inevitable that the principle of freedom of speech should become a casualty when powerful people are obsessed with language and its capacity to shape the world. Revolutionaries of the postmodernist mindset would have us believe that societal change can be actuated through modifications to the language that describes it, which is why Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School maintained that it was not possible to conceive of the liberated world in the language of the existing world. As for the new puritans, they have embraced the belief that language is either a tool of oppression or a means to resist it. This not only accounts for their approval of censorship and “hate speech” legislation, but their inability to grasp how the artistic representation of morally objectionable ideas is not the same as an endorsement.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Inside Kyrgyzstan’s Campaign To Silence Journalist Bolot Temirov

    “This means they’re afraid of our investigations,” Temirov says about the authorities’ methods. “Before, they simply didn’t respond, they tried to explain themselves. But the more we kept doing investigations, the more difficult that became.”

    “This is how they’ve chosen to get rid of something that’s in their way.”

  • BBC ☛ South Sudan: Journalists held over film of president appearing to wet himself

    In December, a video shared on social media appeared to show Mr Kiir urinating on himself as the national anthem played at a function.

    Six staff from the state broadcaster were detained this week.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is now calling for their release.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • [Old] RFERL ☛ The Sinister Side Of Kyrgyzstan’s Online Sex Industry

    The two friends, Meerim alleges, became victims of blackmail by their employers. Within a year, Ajara had taken her life.

    Meerim and Ajara are at the center of an investigation by RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Radio Azattyk, into the webcam industry in Kyrgyzstan, which serves as a regional hub in a multibillion-dollar global industry.

  • The Economist ☛ Women in the Middle East are leading a revolt against prudish men

    Even the act of defiance has to be discreet. On the wall of a private art gallery in Dubai, the raciest city in the United Arab Emirates (uae), is a set of office pigeon holes. They contain photographs of homemade sex toys: mere photographs because if they were real, Dubai’s police might seize them; they are home-made because importing them is banned.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Seller Exasperates Judge, Digs Himself a $1m Hole, Keeps on Digging

      In November 2021, a copyright lawsuit against pirate IPTV service ChitramTV ended in a $31m judgment in favor of plaintiff DISH Network. Almost immediately, however, the court withdrew judgment against the only defendant known to DISH. Since then, he has been conducting his own defense while making a mockery of the legal system. The judge’s words, not ours.