02.12.23
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 11:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Date
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Windows
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OS X
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Unknown
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GNU/Linux
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Other
|
|
2018-02
|
89.33
|
5.67
|
4.35
|
0.63
|
0.02
|
|
2018-03
|
90.12
|
6.56
|
2.8
|
0.5
|
0.02
|
|
2018-04
|
90.59
|
6.57
|
2.34
|
0.48
|
0.01
|
|
2018-05
|
90.06
|
6.17
|
3.08
|
0.67
|
0.02
|
|
2018-06
|
89.4
|
6.06
|
3.57
|
0.92
|
0.05
|
|
2018-07
|
88.84
|
6.51
|
3.75
|
0.84
|
0.06
|
|
2018-08
|
89.55
|
6.55
|
3.08
|
0.77
|
0.06
|
|
2018-09
|
90.35
|
6.91
|
1.98
|
0.72
|
0.04
|
|
2018-10
|
90.66
|
6.37
|
2.23
|
0.72
|
0.02
|
|
2018-11
|
90
|
6.46
|
2.67
|
0.84
|
0.03
|
|
2018-12
|
88.87
|
7.22
|
3.05
|
0.8
|
0.06
|
|
2019-01
|
89.14
|
6.34
|
3.82
|
0.69
|
0.02
|
|
2019-02
|
89.32
|
5.95
|
3.98
|
0.73
|
0.01
|
|
2019-03
|
88.6
|
7.62
|
3.03
|
0.73
|
0.02
|
|
2019-04
|
87.86
|
8.02
|
3.45
|
0.66
|
0.01
|
|
2019-05
|
88.41
|
7.09
|
3.85
|
0.64
|
0.01
|
|
2019-06
|
86.31
|
6.95
|
5.89
|
0.83
|
0.02
|
|
2019-07
|
82.55
|
7
|
9.43
|
0.99
|
0.03
|
|
2019-08
|
88.26
|
7.7
|
3.07
|
0.96
|
0.01
|
|
2019-09
|
89.43
|
6.81
|
2.86
|
0.91
|
0
|
|
2019-10
|
88.9
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7.14
|
3.08
|
0.88
|
0.01
|
|
2019-11
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87.89
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8.22
|
2.99
|
0.89
|
0.01
|
|
2019-12
|
87.59
|
8.64
|
2.96
|
0.81
|
0
|
|
2020-01
|
87.71
|
8.15
|
3.17
|
0.96
|
0.01
|
|
2020-02
|
87.2
|
8.73
|
3.27
|
0.79
|
0.01
|
|
2020-03
|
88.63
|
8.24
|
2.42
|
0.67
|
0.03
|
|
2020-04
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86.67
|
9.94
|
2.8
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0.6
|
0
|
|
2020-05
|
87.67
|
8.2
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3.5
|
0.64
|
0
|
|
2020-06
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87.23
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8.27
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3.81
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0.69
|
0
|
|
2020-07
|
86.03
|
8.48
|
4.39
|
1.09
|
0
|
|
2020-08
|
86.85
|
7.29
|
5
|
0.85
|
0
|
|
2020-09
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87.09
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7.46
|
4.56
|
0.88
|
0.01
|
|
2020-10
|
86.67
|
6.73
|
5.83
|
0.77
|
0.01
|
|
2020-11
|
85.2
|
5.39
|
8.52
|
0.87
|
0.02
|
|
2020-12
|
87.55
|
5.44
|
6.24
|
0.75
|
0.01
|
|
2021-01
|
86.06
|
5.57
|
7.88
|
0.48
|
0
|
|
2021-02
|
84.41
|
5.33
|
9.83
|
0.42
|
0
|
|
2021-03
|
85.08
|
5.41
|
9.04
|
0.47
|
0.01
|
|
2021-04
|
85
|
4.96
|
9.55
|
0.48
|
0.01
|
|
2021-05
|
83.67
|
4.79
|
11.12
|
0.42
|
0.01
|
|
2021-06
|
81.99
|
5.2
|
12.35
|
0.44
|
0.02
|
|
2021-07
|
81.78
|
5.04
|
12.65
|
0.52
|
0
|
|
2021-08
|
84.74
|
5.63
|
9.05
|
0.57
|
0.01
|
|
2021-09
|
86.01
|
5.57
|
7.94
|
0.47
|
0
|
|
2021-10
|
86.51
|
5.37
|
7.63
|
0.49
|
0
|
|
2021-11
|
85.29
|
5.99
|
8.15
|
0.56
|
0
|
|
2021-12
|
84.5
|
5.9
|
9
|
0.6
|
0
|
|
2022-01
|
85.65
|
5.61
|
8.03
|
0.7
|
0
|
|
2022-02
|
85.36
|
5.67
|
8.15
|
0.82
|
0
|
|
2022-03
|
85.82
|
5.89
|
7.6
|
0.69
|
0
|
|
2022-04
|
85.58
|
5.98
|
7.74
|
0.69
|
0.01
|
|
2022-05
|
85.05
|
6.42
|
7.86
|
0.66
|
0
|
|
2022-06
|
84.55
|
6.02
|
8.66
|
0.76
|
0
|
|
2022-07
|
79.82
|
5.87
|
13.54
|
0.77
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0.01
|
|
2022-08
|
84.51
|
5.93
|
8.73
|
0.83
|
0
|
|
2022-09
|
85.32
|
5.91
|
7.65
|
1.12
|
0
|
|
2022-10
|
86.6
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6.02
|
6.7
|
0.68
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0
|
|
2022-11
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86.96
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5.83
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6.46
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0.74
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0
|
|
2022-12
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86.84
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4.88
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7.49
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0.79
|
0
|
|
2023-01
|
86.43
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4.97
|
7.45
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1.14
|
0
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Summary: In a country with almost 1.5 billion people (or even more in India’s case, with ~10% market share for GNU/Linux) each “one percent” in market share can be several millions of users; as of this year, based on new figures from StatCounter, GNU/Linux is detected on 1.14% of laptops/desktops — the highest on record in China (where historically GNU/Linux adoption was among worst in the world)
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates about Chinese people
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft at 11:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series parts:
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVII — Backsliding Into 1990s-Style Digital Slavery by Microsoft
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVIII — The Story of NPM
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIX — The Collapse of Team Mono
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XX — Entering Phase II
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXI — Rumours About How Microsoft Plans to Actually Make Money (Not Losses) From GitHub
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXII — ‘Mr. GitHub Copilot’ Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley Pleads Guilty After Assaulting Women
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIII — CoPlagiarist: Microsoft’s GPL Violations and Plagiarism Tool Created by Serial Plagiarists
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIV — Using Microsoft Money as ‘Get Out of Jail’ Card After Suffocating Women
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXV — Microsoft Employs Serial Strangler as a Manager, Running GitHub Copilot in Spite of Arrest for Assault on Women
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXVI — The Layoffs Era Begins
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXVII — The Future of OpenAI May Depend on the Fate of GitHub’s Copilot in Court ($9 Billion in Damages)
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ GitHub to Shut Down All Offices, Including Its Headquarters
Summary: The headquarters of GitHub and all other offices of GitHub are shutting down; do people really want their projects hosted by a company that lays off many workers and shuts down all of its offices quite so abruptly?
MICROSOFT is a real blessing, isn’t it? Anything it touches turns into dirt; sometimes sooner, sometimes later. Recall what Microsoft did to Yahoo! (many layoffs at the moment) and companies like Novell (remember Novell?), not to mention Nokia. It’s Microsoft's touch of death. When Microsoft ‘joined’ (paid) the Linux Foundation the community representation got eliminated. This organisation is nowadays just cashing in on openwash and other lies. It harms the “Linux” brand or milks it to death (meaninglessness). “OLTP was killed by Microsoft too,” an associate recalls. “That was well documented at the time but those articles are irretrievably in the past now and buried by the search engines and chaff.”
Things are moving fast. The corporate media barely reports on the latest wave of Microsoft layoffs (second in three weeks!), including GitHub layoffs, so of course it won’t quite ‘find time’ to cover this news (or barely; “when searching StartPage for “github layoffs” it recommends correcting the search query to “gitlab layoffs” instead,” an associate said, reaffirming a trend we noticed 2 days ago — Microsoft boosters try to change the focus to Gitlab). Maybe due to the timing of the announcement, internally at first, all we can expect at the moment is to be found in Indian media (active on Sundays too), citing another source. Here we go; Microsoft is “laying off up to 10% of its workforce and closing all of its offices, including its headquarters in San Francisco.”
“The bottom line is, these offices aren’t being shut down due to the pandemic but due to a lack of money.”Consider this is a bit of a wake-up call if you have an account/projects at GitHub. Don’t believe the damage-limiting face-saving statements (spin). At Sirius we had an "Office Manager in Company Without an Office" since 2020. Things deteriorated fast and now it seems like the company is on the verge of bankruptcy. The debt is vast. It is growing over time. There’s no fix in a downturn economy.
GitHub never had a business model. Not before Microsoft took over and certainly not after that. What are they going to do? “Surprise” new charges for GitHub Actions? Shutting down ‘inactive’ projects like some of the competition planned to (for cost-savings)?
The bottom line is, these offices aren’t being shut down due to the pandemic but due to a lack of money. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of New Hampshire. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Desktop/Laptop
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On paper, elementary OS 7 was not a substantial release. The developers didn’t drastically overhaul the desktop or introduce game-changing new features. In many ways, elementary OS 7 was about refinement.
But it’s a refinement that Linux needs. These are the little touches that turn a Linux-based OS from being powerful to being approachable. Despite its flaws, elementary OS is one of the most accessible versions of Linux, and here’s why.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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JoshandKurttalk to Carol Nichols about Rust. Carol is an authority on Rust and helps us understand how Rust works, why it’s different. Why Rust doesn’t have the same problems C and C++ have, and what the future of it all could look like. It’s a really fun show with some great questions from Carol along the way.
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**Okteta** hex editor, the **Oxygen** theme files, and the **palapeli** jigsaw
puzzle emulator from the Slackware **kde** package set.
shasum -a256=8dfc6fb57a3398c05c0e0f21976ea6952e63a87249af8abd922a57b36e701079
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Summary
The latest stable kernel is Linux 6.1.11, released by Greg K-H on February 9th 2023.
The latest mainline (development) kernel is 6.2-rc7, released on February 5th 2023.
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Kernel Space
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The 6.2 series continues to be fairly calm, and the only real reason
for an rc8 is - as now mentioned several times - just to make up for
some time during the holiday season. Not that we seem to really have
needed it, but there was also no real reason to deviate from the plan.
So here we are. And we did have a few late regression fixes, and a
couple still pending that will hopefully make it during next week, so
absolutely no harm done.
Most of the discussion I see seems to have already been about future
stuff, and I also already have one pull request for the next merge
window in my inbox (and I won't mind more if they show up). But in the
meantime we did have a scattering of the usual fixes, with networking,
GPU and sound drivers being the most noticeable. As is usual.
But there's other fixes in there too - both smaller driver subsystems
and to various other code. See the shortlog below for details.
Linus
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The Linux Kernel Organization has released a number of kernel updates. While these releases aren’t particularly groundbreaking, they offer a number of fixes that will make them essential updates for Linux users.
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Applications
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There’s a wide range of free and open source software that lets you listen to internet radio. With so many different possibilities available it’s easy to get lost trying to find the right one for you.
This article recommends our favourite terminal-based internet radio apps. We only include free and open source software.
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This article recommends our favourite terminal-based internet radio apps. Free and open source software only.
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Support for the PipeWire audio stack will be available in the next stable release of the lightweight Audacious music player.
Developers working on the player have issued a beta build of Audacious that ships with optional support for PipeWire via a plugin. Since most Linux distributions, including big-names like Ubuntu and Fedora, default to PipeWire for audio handling this inclusion makes sense.
Other changes in the Audacious 43 beta include a plugin providing Opus audio decoding, support for Qt 6 and GTK3 (though the client still defaults to GTK2 on Linux), and a number of rough edges smoothed out through bug fixes.
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The lightweight audacious music player announced the beta release of the next v4.3 a few days ago. Usually, the final release will be out in next or next few months with mostly no change since beta. So far, this beta release include the following new features.
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Looking for a Linux timer app? Check out this useful GTK-based utility.
It’s called Timer and —shock— it’s a timer app for Linux desktops. You can use it to create a countdown in hours, minutes, and seconds.
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Looking for a user-friendly way to sync Google Drive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud files on the Linux desktop?
Check out Celeste. It’s a promising new file synchronization client for Linux desktops built in Rust and GTK4/libadwaita (meaning it runs fast and looks great).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Golang, also known as Go, is a cutting-edge open-source programming language widely used to develop scalable and highly efficient applications. Its concise syntax and ease of use make it a popular choice among developers.
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For individuals looking to enhance their gaming or graphic design experience, it is crucial to have the fastest drivers possible. By default, most modern Linux distributions come with open-source Nouveau drivers installed.
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There are number of ways to join multiple lines of text and change delimiters if needed. This article shows two of the easier ways to do this and explains the commands.
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The awk, gawk and sed commands on Linux are extremely versatile tools for manipulating text, rearranging columns, generating reports and modifying file content.
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Metasploit is one of the most popular network penetration frameworks in the world and allows both newbies and professionals to easily exploit vulnerabilities in a huge variety of software and firmware.
You can use Metasploit to test your own security, go after bug bounties, or wreak mayhem across the internet. Whatever color hat you’re wearing, it’s easy to install Metasploit on Ubuntu.
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Valve hasn’t locked down the Steam Deck, so you’re free to modify it however you wish. That also means you’re free to break things. What do you do if the situation goes sideways?
You’re in luck—Valve provides a recovery image that makes it easy to get your device back up and running. Here’s how to restore SteamOS to its default settings and leave your Deck good as new.
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Rust is a programming language mainly associated with software development and is widely used on Ubuntu-enabled desktops. Rust draws its roots from C++ and promotes safety, concurrency, and speed. The programming language has made its niche in technology, especially in memory management.
You can safely use the language to develop gaming engines, browsers, and operating systems. If you’re an Ubuntu fan, you’ll probably want to use Rust on your favorite OS. We’ll show you how you can install Rust on Ubuntu.
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There are two Home Assistant versions that you can install on a regular Linux distro. You can either install the supervised version or choose the non-supervised version of Home Assistant, based on your requirements and experience with Linux.
While non-supervised installation is quick and easy, the supervised version requires several additional steps. But if you want to experience the full power of Home Assistant on Ubuntu or Debian, you must go for the supervised version. Let’s see how you can set up a Supervised Home Assistant server on Ubuntu.
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If you’ve just installed Ubuntu Server for the first time, you may want a familiar user interface, perhaps similar to Ubuntu Desktop. Here’s how to set up a graphical user interface and install a desktop environment on your Ubuntu server.
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Google Drive provides 15GB of free storage space, making it a good option for backing up and syncing files. Accessing your Google Drive account on Windows and macOS is easy, but using Google Drive on Ubuntu works a little differently.
It’s not hard to access your Google Drive files in Ubuntu; however, you must know how to do it. Here are a few ways to access the coveted Google Drive on your favorite Ubuntu version.
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Installing an operating system on a Raspberry Pi is straightforward enough, but one element can be frustrating: configuration.
Network settings, username and password, SSH access, etc., must all be configured once the OS is up and running. Once or twice isn’t so bad, but if you have multiple Pis, or regularly reinstall the operating system, things can get repetitive.
Wouldn’t it be easier is you could pre-configure the Raspberry Pi OS and get started as soon as it boots? Here are X ways you can do that.
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Games
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The free and open source game manager Lutris has a fresh Beta release out with version 0.5.13 adding in a whole bunch of new features and service integrations.
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After another short Beta period, Valve recently released another stable Steam Client update for Desktop and Steam Deck and here’s what’s new.
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Getting a job is tough but college graduate Art was lucky enough to catch the eye of the Grim Reaper.
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Just recently the Native Linux port of BioShock Infinite was updated to fix it failing to launch after an update.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.103.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME devs want to make it easier to monitor and control background apps in GNOME Shell.
So to this end, they’re exploring a new ‘Background Apps’ feature in the Quick Settings menu.
Paired with a background app monitoring portal, the effort gives modern Linux apps a graceful way to surface their activity — “hey, I’m doing stuff while you can’t see me” — so users are aware of what’s happening on their system even if all app windows are closed.
This new ‘background apps’ menu also gives users a way quit apps running in the background without needing to re-open the app, and include a shortcut to the App Settings panel where, if needed, permission to run in the background can be removed.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
-
An updated installer for EndeavourOS, the popular Arch-based Linux distro, is available to download.
EndeavourOS Cassini Neo offers a more recent jump-on point for those looking to ride this rolling-release distribution going forward. It arrives two months after the release of EndeavourOS Cassini.
In announcing the release, EndeavourOS devs note that the Cassini Neo revision ships with Linux kernel 6.1 LTS, Mesa 22.3.4, NVIDIA DKMS 525.85.05, and Xorg 21.1.7. Updated versions of Firefox and the Calameres installer also feature.
Bug fixes also feature, ranging from work done to better accommodate 12th-Gen Intel ARC CPUs; improving resume/hibernation support; and adding an encryption option when choosing the ‘replace a partition’ option in the Calameres installer.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) was established in early 2021 to oversee the well-regarded Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone Rocky Linux distribution. But, its ambitions have always been greater than that. As the RESF Charter and Bylaws state, it aims to bring together open-source communities from enterprises, research, academia, individuals, and other groups. RESF’s rules are set to ensure that open-source projects will remain under community control while enabling commercial enterprise use cases.
RESF Board members include Louis Abel, Benjamin (Ben) Agner, Chris DiBona, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Mark Watson, and Gregory M. Kurtzer. Abel, a system engineer and Rocky Linux co-founder, has been involved in the enterprise Linux world for almost a decade and a half. Agner, also a co-founder of Rocky Linux, has over two decades of experience in IT, security, engineering, and governance. DiBona, served as the director of engineering for open source at Google from 2004 to 2023. Kroah-Hartman, a well-known Linux kernel maintainer, is in charge of the stable kernel releases at the Linux Foundation. Watson is a long-term Linux programming expert and former VP and director of the Center for the Advancement of Data and Research in Economics (CADRE). Kurtzer, a 20-plus-year veteran in Linux, open source, and high-performance computing, is the CEO and founder of CIQ.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
-
Events
-
Not Las Vegas, not Barcelona, not Orlando, not San Francisco and not even France’s nice Nice or London’s ‘OMG that’s too far away’ fabulous ExCeL convention centre.
This time its Vancouver.
Pardon? No, no really, the Open Infrastructure Summit (OpenInfra to its friends) is being held June 13-15, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre overlooking Vancouver Harbor.
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Programming/Development
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Ratified in December 2019 by the W3C standards committee, WebAssembly has promised to change the way web applications are built and deployed.
-
Leftovers
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Nearly a week after the deadly earthquake in southern Turkey, foreign students Abdelaziz, Ahmed Ali, Yassir and Mustafa are helping survivors of the quake in the city of Gaziantep. They say they are happy to give back to the country that has given them so much, and that they have fallen in love with.
-
The death toll from the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria has now reached approximately 33,000 reports stated Sunday, with the UN warning that the final number could rise by “double or more”. Also on Sunday, a new UN convoy arrived in Syria to deliver deperately needed international aid. Follow FRANCE 24 for live updates.
-
Another continental dune will be unveiled in Lithuania’s southern region of Dzūkija.
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Turkish justice officials are targeting more than 130 people allegedly involved in shoddy and illegal construction methods after a pair of earthquakes collapsed thousands of buildings in southeast Turkey and northern Syria six days ago. Rescuers extricated more survivors from the rubble on Sunday, including a pregnant woman and two small children, but the death toll from the quakes also surpassed 33,000. Turkey’s justice minister said Sunday that 131 people were being investigated for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes. He said three were arrested pending trial, seven people were detained and seven other were barred from leaving the country.
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Survivors and building experts say poor construction most likely exacerbated the scale of the earthquake’s destruction, as the death toll in Turkey and Syria surpassed 33,000 people.
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Most articles on Swedish office culture gush about the lack of hierarchy, the reasonable working hours, and the absence of dog-eat-dog competition. But most newcomers soon realize it’s not (always) quite as nice as it appears. Here’s how to play Swedish office politics and win.
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A baby began her life surrounded by chaos and devastation this week.
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Science
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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but a Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space Station has sprung a leak. On Saturday morning, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency disclosed onTelegramthat a Progress cargo ship docked with the ISS had lost cabin pressure.
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Creating a visionary science future fund that could generate more than $2 billion a year for Australia’s economy would help offset a mounting social services burden and reverse dangerously low research and development investment, scientists say.
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Hardware
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Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock saw motherboard shipments drop by around 10 million in 2022, claims an IT industry journal.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Lithuania, like other EU countries, has been facing a shortage of antibiotics. Doctors are forced to adjust their treatment plans to what’s available, while drug authorities expect supply to revive in spring.
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We need scientists and public health officials to put older people at the center of their efforts.
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Security
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Following public disclosure of the critical VPN flaw in December, multiple reports show threat actors are exploiting it to target high-profile organizations.
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Prolonged downtimes and insufficient vulnerability management contributed to a high number of unpatched VMware ESXi servers that fell victim to a widespread, ongoing ransomware campaign.
Last week, threat actors targeted vulnerable VMware ESXi servers with a new ransomware variant now known as ESXiArgs. Reports indicate that the attacks exploit two remote code execution vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2021-21974 and CVE-2020-3992 that still affect thousands of organizations worldwide.
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Defence/Aggression
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A US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Canada on Saturday, the second such incident in North American skies since the dramatic downing of a suspected Chinese spy balloon a week ago.
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The leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner said Sunday that his troops had taken an eastern Ukrainian village a few kilometres from the key city of Bakhmut which Moscow has been trying to capture for months. Follow FRANCE 24 for live updates. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).
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From Taiwan to tech trade, thornier problems lurk in bilateral ties.
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Long-serving NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg has no plans to extend his mandate for a fourth time and expects to be replaced in October, the military alliance said on February 12.
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The founder of the private Russian mercenary group Wagner has said that the force has taken Krasna Hora, a village in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region that lies on the edge of Bakhmut, a key objective for Russian forces.
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Germany has authorised the re-export of Leopards, but Finland has yet to decide whether to send some of these battle tanks to Ukraine.
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CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem says US air surveillance has increased after the suspected Chinese balloon was shot down.
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The U.S. and Canada are investigating three unidentified flying objects shot down over North America in the past three days. Militaries have adjusted radars to try to spot more incursions.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) acknowledged it was “wild” the U.S. didn’t know about the Chinese government’s use of balloons “until a few months ago,” during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
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Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) emphasized the importance of maintaining a “thorough and robust” line of communication between the U.S. and China in light of recent events during an interview onFox News Channel‘s “Cavuto Live” Saturday.
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In the Free Russia Legion, soldiers repelled by Vladimir Putin’s invasion have taken arms against their home country, engaged in some of the most heated fighting in the war.
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The Wagner paramilitary group said its fighters had seized a village outside Bakhmut, as Moscow’s forces continue a brutal campaign that has nearly encircled the strategic eastern city.
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A third unidentified object has been shot down in the U.S., Canada’s Defence Minister said Sunday.
Why it matters:The object, which was shot down over Lake Huron, Michigan on Sunday afternoon, is the fourth to be spotted in North America since late January and the third unidentified object to be shot down in the past three days.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Australian miners are receiving enquiries from Chinese buyers eager to strike supply deals, in the latest sign that a two-year import ban is starting to ease.
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Overpopulation
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Yusuke Narita says he is mainly addressing a growing effort to revamp Japan’s age-based hierarchies. Still, he has pushed the country’s hottest button.
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Finance
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Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March.
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By Moisés Ávila With his hat, big belt buckle and cowboy boots, Ly looks the part of a Texan and even speaks with a twang.
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President Joe Biden publicly rolled GOP members of Congress last week by getting them to stand and agree to no changes to Social Security in debt ceiling negotiations — lest there be political consequences.
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Federal and state governments must urgently provide constructive leadership.
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As shoppers’ wallets show signs of stress, many are cutting back on fresh produce, the Finnish news agency reports.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Scrolling past ads has rarely been enjoyable. But in recent months, people say the experience seems so much worse.
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Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the street in several cities across the country Saturday, protesting judicial overhaul plans by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government
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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi will head to China within days for a three-day visit aimed at strengthening economic cooperation, state media reported on February 12.
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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov discussed “priorities,” including air defense and artillery, ahead of upcoming meetings of Kyiv’s allies in Brussels, both sides said late on February 11.
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Trump’s lawyers told DOJ that the reason people they paid to search Trump’s properties found an empty classified folder is because he has an empty classified folder fetish. He does have an empty classified folder fetish. But that cannot explain why it remained in his residence in December, after not being found in August.
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A research firm commissioned by former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign team to prove his electoral fraud claims instead failed to substantiate his theories, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Self-censorship has spread, along with a shrill Hindu nationalism in news reports that echoes the government line.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The UN’s special rapporteur for Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, has called for the immediate and unconditional release of Parisa Mubariz, a women’s rights activist.
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The alleged gang rape of a woman in a park in Pakistan has enraged women’s rights activists who are protesting against what they see as “increasing sexual barbarism” in the country.
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I’m writing this so that hopefully, nobody gets caught in an ambush by the state after reading it. There are two opposing forces in a criminal court proceeding – the government and the defendant. Depending on the situation, you may find yourself in the hot seat.
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Monopolies
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Rights to use a person’s Name-Image-and-Likeness or NIL generally fall within two categories of intellectual property: rights of publicity and rights of privacy.
- Rights of publicity protect commercial value that a person has developed in becoming a celebrity. Rights of publicity can also protect against resulting false impressions created by a seeming endorsement.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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So, it’s been a few months since an update. Partially because I’ve been a little busy in my life, but mostly because I ran out of steam. Going forward, I think I will try to write an entry once a month.
A few things have happened in recent months, some good, some bad. I had a hard time around December particularly. I ran out of medication and, due to a weird mix up, I wasn’t able to get an emergency prescription as promised. I got myself so worked up about it, that my Mum ended up intervening and sending what was probably a very scary message for the doctor, warning that it was potentially dangerous if I went without my medication for this long. It must have worked, as they sorted it pretty quickly after that.
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I want Knives to have family building, and playing multiple generations of characters, like in King Arthur Pendragon. I don’t want rules for it, so I can write an essay, or an example of play, or both. But it’s hard to fit it all on one page. Perhaps I should rename this page from “Family” to “Flirting” and write a second page about playing multiple generations of characters.
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Technical
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Programming
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Sometimes you have a project or even just a single file in a folder where you want to keep track of different versions. You want to make new versions but be able to rewind time to before you made those versions, or you wanna get suggestions for new versions from other people.
If you’ve been blessed enough to not even have to learn what files and folders are yet, you’re not gonna be able to follow along, but the good news is that you don’t need git. Files and folders are primitive beasts and git makes them less bad.
A “repo” (short for “repository”) is the nickname for a folder that git can help you store different versions of. It’s not a good idea to have more than one repo per folder so make separate folders for the separate repos.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel’s general IP environment has a system for marking packets with what is generally called a fwmark, short for ‘firewall mark’. Fwmarks can be set through iptables, using the MARK target (documented in iptables-extensions), or by facilities such as WireGuard, and can then be used by firewall rules or by ‘ip rule’ policy based routing. Fwmarks are how I solved the general recursive routing problem when I set up my WireGuard environment. All of my uses of fwmarks have been simply picking a value, setting it, and checking for it. I was recently working with something that also uses fwmarks, and I saw unusual things in ‘ip rules’ and ‘iptables’ output: [...]
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Instructionals/Technical
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Pacman is a powerful package manager for Arch Linux and its derivatives, like Manjaro Linux. It allows you to install, update, and manage packages easily and efficiently. But what about when you want to remove a package from your system?
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As a Linux user, one of the essential tools you need to know is a package manager. A package manager is a program that helps you manage and install software packages on your operating system. In this article, we will focus on Pacman, the package manager used in Arch Linux. What is Pacman?
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In today’s digital world, software is an essential component of our daily lives. From our smartphones to laptops, software plays a crucial role in enabling us to perform various tasks with ease. Keeping software up-to-date is important for security, functionality, and bug fixes.
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Zypper is a command-line package manager for the openSUSE operating system and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It allows you to install, update, and remove packages from your system, as well as perform a variety of other package-related tasks. This guide will provide an overview of how to use Zypper, including examples of common commands.
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When it comes to network analysis and troubleshooting in Linux, two of the most commonly used commands are ss and netstat. Both of these commands allow you to display information about network connections and sockets, but they differ in terms of their features, speed, and efficiency.
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The ss command is a powerful utility in Linux that allows you to monitor and display information about network sockets. Unlike netstat, ss provides more detailed information and is faster and more efficient. This makes it an essential tool for system administrators and network engineers.
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Fedora Linux is a popular open-source operating system known for its stability, security, and user-friendliness. However, Fedora does not have pre-installed proprietary fonts, such as Microsoft Fonts..
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Nginx is a popular open-source web server that serves dynamic and static web pages. It is known for its high performance and low resource utilization, making it a popular choice for web administrators. Nginx Mainline is the latest version of Nginx, an open-source web server and reverse proxy.
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Google Translate is great, until it’s not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.
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On February 2nd, the base-devel package group has been replaced by a meta package of the same name. If you installed the base-devel package group prior to this date, explicitly re-install it to get the new base-devel package installed on the system:
pacman -Syu base-devel
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In KDE Frameworks 5.103, the KDE developers improved support for Flatpak apps as they addressed a major bug causing your system to hang while installing or updating Flatpaks, especially when using the Btrfs file system.
They also improved the Plasma Wayland session by fixing a bunch of weird and random clipboard issues, as well as Spectacle’s “Copy to clipboard right after taking a screenshot” feature, which now works as expected on Plasma Wayland.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Fast animation speed, more dash icon sizes, and overview spacing size are among the new features in Just Perfection 23.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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EndeavourOS Cassini Neo’s latest bugfix release brings improved stability and bug fixes for Intel & ARM machines. Here’s what’s new!
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Open Hardware/Modding
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StarFive VisionFive 2 should be viewed as a RISC-V development board at this stage, and it’s not suitable for integration into projects/products until further progress is made on the software side. Since since Linux RISC-V is still pretty new, especially from a video/graphics point of view, it should be expected. There are already features that work fine such as Gigabit Ethernet, GPIOs, the audio jack, and USB, but others like HDMI and storage performance still need a lot of work. System stability needs to be improved too since my SSH connection dropped a few times and I was unable to reconnect, nor did the serial console work, requiring a hard reboot. But I can see a decent amount of activity in the forums and the company is working on mainlining the Linux kernel.
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The die photo below shows the 8086 microprocessor under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip’s 40 external pins. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this discussion are darker and will be discussed in detail below. The Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU, lower left) is split in two. The circuitry for the flags is in the middle, giving it access to the ALU’s results for the low byte and the high byte. I’ve marked each flag latch in red in the diagram below. They appear to be randomly scattered, but there are reasons for this layout.
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After several plumbers, exchanges with Geberit’s technical department, and the expensive replacement of the entire mechanism, I was still getting a failure rate of over 50% for the small flush. I finally managed to decrease this rate to 5% by applying two 8 mm silicone bumpers on the back of the plate. Their locations are indicated by red circles on the picture below: [...]
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Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Week highlights: new version of CadQuery, new features in Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, Olive.
For Krita, the merge requests section is probably a little more interesting than what’s going on in the main development branch right now. There’s anode editor for vector layersproposed, as well as variousUX/UI improvements and minor featuresfor the bundle and resource manager. All that coming to version 5.2 later on.
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Events
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We’re in full-on prep mode for our first event in Europe in four years: Hackaday Berlin. And while we’ve got a great slate of speakers lined up, and to be announced soon, I’m personally most excited for the lightning talks.
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Last weekendFOSDEMhappened in person again, for the first time since2020, as fully packed with talks, discussions and people as always.
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Education
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At the recently-concluded FOSDEM 2023 conference, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) presented a talk on Game of Trees. Video and slides of Stefan’s presentation are now available.
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Programming/Development
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Since then, I have syndicated most of my coffee shop recommendations to the wiki and have made a number of improvements. b&c has been the subject of numerous discussions in the IndieWeb community, resulting in new ideas on how to improve the site.
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Hello! We released The Pocket Guide to Debugging back in December, and here’s a final update: the print copies are done printing and they’ve arrived at the warehouse, ready to ship to anyone who wants one.
You can buy the print or PDF version now, and if you preordered it, your copy should already have shipped. Some people have told me that they already received theirs! Email me if you haven’t gotten the shipping confirmation.
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I can not keep track of Github notifications, for too many years. Yesterday, I thought of rewritingretaskfor Python3 only, and noticed aPRwaiting for 7 years only, fromMiro.
Now it is merged. Took some time, but the patch went in. Miro alsonoticed 
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This past weekend I released a new version of InvoicePrinter, my Ruby library for generating PDF invoices. Here’s what’s new.
New features
First of all,InvoicePrinterdependencies got updated forPrawn 2.4and to supportRuby 3.1.
Remember that if you cannot use a particular version on your project, you can run InvoicePrinteras a server.
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Java
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One of the fastest ways to advance in Java programming is using SolarLint’s IDE extension. It helps you avoid common problems and ensures your code is clean. SonarLint is a linting tool for code quality analysis and improvement.
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A common interview question for Java developers is to write some code inside a try / catch / finally statement so that the finally statement is not reached. At first glance, this is not possible. A finally statement in Java is used in conjunction with a try/catch statement.
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A deadlock is a situation in computer programming where two or more processes are blocked, each waiting for the other to release a resource that they need in order to continue executing. As a result, all the processes remain blocked indefinitely and are unable to make further progress.
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Leftovers
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Several fire departments, including the Kent Fire Department, provided aid to the East Palestine community after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed from its tracks.
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Two professors from Kent State recall the moment they found out their families were affected by a deadly earthquake that left thousands dead and displaced in Turkey and Syria.
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A new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art displays how the U.K. changed in the 1970s and ’80s.
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Electronic fraud is on the rise in Greece, due not only to the high penetration of the internet and smartphones, but also to the fact that cybercriminals are constantly discovering new ways of deception.
The figures provided by the Ministry of Citizens’ Protection in response to a parliamentary question, concerning the period 2019-2022, reveal the rapid rise of cybercrime. Considering that these are only the cases of computer fraud under Article 386A of the Criminal Code that are reported to the authorities – often small amounts of money in defrauding are not reported to the police – then the real size of electronic crime is likely much higher.
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Six pregnant Russian citizens, who were detained by Argentina immigration authorities at an airport in Buenos Aires, have been allowed to enter the country, says Christian Rubilar, lawyer to three of the women.
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The phenomenon has become evident in recent weeks. “Only last night in the last Ethiopian [Airlines] flight, 33 Russian citizens entered with pregnancies of approximately 32, 33, 34 weeks,” the national director for migration said.
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Education
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Hardware
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Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are becoming increasingly like set-top computers — equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.
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My toilet is equipped with aGeberit Sigma 70flush plate. The sales pitch
for thishydraulic-assisted devicepraises the
“ingenious mount that acts like a rocker switch.” In practice, the flush is very
capricious and has a very high failure rate.Avoid this type of
mechanism!Prefer a fully mechanical version like theGeberit Sigma 20.
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The Dell T320
Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some cheap DIMMs in the other one and sold it with 48G.
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I’ve retrobrighted my HP Brio desktop,Commodore 128,Commodore 64C, and mentioned I’m in the process of doing it for my newly-arrivedVC-20. Retrobrighting is the process of removing superficial yellowing from old computer plastics using hair developer and sunlight to bleach the surface. It has workedshockinglywell for me.
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We’ve seen a number of people create plasma speakers over the years here at Hackaday, so at first blush, the latest Plasma Channel video from [Jay Bowles] might seem like more of the same. Even his overview of the assembly of the 555 timer circuit at the heart of the setup, as detailed as it may be, is something we’ve seen before.
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Back in 2019, Giant Food Stores announced it would outfit each of its 172 stores in the United States with their own robot — at the time, the largest robotic deployment in retail. The six foot (1.8 meter) tall robot, nicknamed “Marty”, was designed to roam autonomously around the store looking for spills and other potential hazards. In an effort to make these rolling monoliths a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.
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This SLA printer is no taller than a matchstick, but it works and appears to work well.
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Dear lazy web, help me pick the right hardware to make my shiny new laptop work better. I want a new USB-C dock and travel power supply.
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This machine looks nearly identical to an original Commodore 64 but without the legacy ports that were on it. There is no Expansion port, RF modulator, Analog AV out in the DIN connector, IEC port, Tape deck or Userport.
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In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I’ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I’ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Cannabis consumers should have the same commercial leisure spaces that alcohol drinkers do.
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Over 88 percent of opioid overdose deaths now involve either heroin or fentanyl. Targeting prescriptions is not an efficient way to address mortality.
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This staffing strategy has permeated hospitals, and particularly emergency rooms, that seek to reduce their top expense: physician labor. While diagnosing and treating patients was once doctors’ domain, they are increasingly being replaced by nurse practitioners and physician assistants, collectively known as “midlevel practitioners,” who can perform many of the same duties and generate much of the same revenue for less than half the pay.
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That’s what happened during the Trump years, when rail lobbyists secured the repeal of a long-overdue, hard-won safety regulation that would have required rail companies to replace the Civil-War-era brakes on their rolling stock with modern electronically controlled pneumatic brakes (ECPs): [...]
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The recent train derailment in Ohio shows the need for more stringent safety rules for train brakes, especially for trains carrying hazardous materials. Transportation regulators are instead bending to the interests of rail industry lobbyists.
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And the answer may horrify you. It sure did me. The summary is simple enough: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night, which impacts sleep quality. Poor sleep quality has all sorts of nasty effects on human health – but it’s worse. Melatonin is also involved in the suppression of tumors and cancers. If your melatonin levels are low at night (from disruption or from simple night shift work), your risk of various cancers goes up by somewhere in the 30-80% range, depending on the cancer and study. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), back in 2007, considered “shift work” to be a “probable human carcinogen,” and plenty of other studies have demonstrated the link as well. Lighting, especially in the evenings and nights, is quite literally deadly serious. And we’ve gone about utterly screwing it up in the pursuit of “efficiency.”
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Friday announced that there will be “superfund” projects to clean up 22 toxic waste sites across the US. These projects will receive $1 billion from the federal superfund program to help remove the backlog of hazardous sites. Under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill,
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By restricting private health care choices, the NHS and other beloved single-payer systems were doomed from the start.
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Proprietary
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Surveying six million customers spanning nine industries across 12 regions. Nexthink (opens in new tab) looked at over 30 popular software tools and uncovered that 50% of all licenses were not being used.
The cost for the unused licenses alone was said to be putting a $45 million drain on the companies every single month, which each year adds up to almost $537 million worth of wasted software.
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Yahoo has laid off 1,000 workers, or about 12% of its remaining staff, in a move aimed at restructuring the company’s advertising technology business unit and reallocating its finances more efficiently.
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Security
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This ishauntinglysimilar to how I got into a photocopier/print server in my high school library in the mid-2000s. I couldn’t believe the password was delivered to the endpoint for local comparison. It also delightfully dropped every non-alphanumeric character, and translated every letter into lowercase before evaluation, just to remove some more entropy.
(I disclosed the issues, because I’m a square)!
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Silicon Angle ☛ Digging into Google’s point of view on confidential computing [Ed: Well, "confidential computing" is a scam designed to lure companies and governments into being spied on, based on false beliefs about "clown computing"]
Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data and isolating data from apps and other host resources in a fenced off enclave during processing.
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Reddit has acknowledged a recent cyberattack that resulted in the theft of sensitive company information. The company referred to the breach in a security alert as a “sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack”. Reddit stated that it does not believe the breach impacted its users. A spokesperson from Reddit said that the company is “actively investigating and closely monitoring the situation.”
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The Islamic Republic marked the 44th anniversary of the Iranian revolution on Saturday with state-organized rallies, as anti-government hackers briefly interrupted a televised speech by President Ebrahim Raisi.
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In August 2021, DataBreaches noted reports that Electromed had been hacked, and the incident affected employees and customers. Electromed later reported the incident to HHS as impacting 47,200 patients. According to subsequent disclosures, this was a ransomware incident that Electromed had discovered in June. In September 2021, a potential class action lawsuit was filed against the Minnesota firm.
Top Class Actions reports that Electromed settled the lawsuit for $825,000 without admitting wrongdoing or liability. The case is Lutz, et al. v. Electromed Inc., Case No. 0:21-cv-02198-KMM-DTS, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.
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A police sergeant who was suspended from the RCIPS last year and a former employee of a local telecommunications company have both been summoned to appear in court next week in relation to a data breach investigated by the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB), the RCIPS has confirmed. The former telecoms worker is alleged to have unlawfully shared a customer’s phone number with the sergeant, who is accused of using it for personal reasons. The officer has been charged with misconduct in public office and unlawfully obtaining personal data. The telecom worker faces one count of unlawfully disclosing personal data.
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A spokesperson for the institution confirmed the attack to Ynet, who reports that despite the cyber attack, exams at the Technion are taking place today as usual. However, the students were asked to disconnect their personal computers from the network and reduce email traffic until further notice. In email to DataBreaches, however, Dasa reports that all exams have since been canceled for the 13th and 14th.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain.
However many in the Go community object because the plan calls for telemetry by default.
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But Ms Yang wasn’t in a celebratory mood. She had been under heavy surveillance since speaking to the media about losing her daughter to Covid.
She has been protesting on the streets, and has been trying to file a lawsuit against the government. She says she wants “an explanation”.
China is a one party-state which does not tolerate protests that challenge the leadership.
The media and the internet are also heavily censored, with many foreign news outlets being banned in the country. People who talk critically about the country to foreign media often face retribution – from warnings to even detention.
With technology, China has also established an extensive surveillance network that monitors mobile device data and tracks movements.
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A man is on trial in the NSW District Court after his former wife claimed to have found a VHS videotape in a garage showing him allegedly assaulting an unknown woman.
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James Dolan has lately stirred controversy over his use of facial-recognition technology to keep his enemies out of Madison Square Garden — but supermarkets and other retailers say they’ve begun using it for a legitimate purpose: to bust shoplifters. Grocery stores, drug chains and other mass merchants are increasingly using high-tech innovations — including facial-recognition…
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Defence/Aggression
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At least one of the objects downed was believed to be a spy balloon from China, but the other two have not yet been publicly identified.
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The U.S. cannot adequately address its national security challenges related to China, which are increasingly driven by technology, without the help of a potentially surprising partner: the Department of Commerce, reveals Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, now a senior fellow in the geoeconomics program and director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security…
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The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war, writes “The New York Times”.
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In the early hours of February 11, the Russian army launched two air strikes on the Odesa region, according to Ukrainian Armed Forces Operation Command South.
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The FAA issued a notice on Saturday banning flights in an area about 50 by 50 nautical miles around Havre, Montana, close to the Canadian border.
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“The lights are thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613” — a NASA craft, the agency said.
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Thousands of Europe-based Iranians, including relatives of victims of repression in the Islamic republic, lawmakers, and campaigners, have urged the European Union at a rally in Paris to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a “terror” group. Speakers at the rally on February 11 insisted that such a listing for the IRGC was the biggest contribution EU ministers could make to help the protest movement that erupted in September. The rally came as Iran marked 44 years since the Islamic Revolution that ousted the shah, with pro-regime rallies inside the Middle Eastern nation.
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The incident was the latest in a string of similar assaults and legal moves against Christians in the one-party communist state with a mostly Buddhist population despite a national law protecting the free exercise of their faith.
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The terrorist cell was responsible for supplying the ISIS cells with weapons and equipment and planning for terrorist acts that target the safety and stability of the region, according to the SDF statement released on Saturday.
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The war in Ethiopia has largely been ignored by the outside world, and information has been hard to come by. But what we know about the conflict is horrific: at least 500,000 civilians have been killed, and 5 million have been displaced.
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The Ukrainian Security Service has charged Alexander Bastrykin, who is the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, in absentia.
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Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny told Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Russia has used naval surface drones.
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The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—a strident supporter of loosening gun regulations—tried to ban firearms at an election night event in Tampa last year and blame the city for the policy, The Washington Post said in a report published Friday that had critics on both sides of the political aisle calling the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate a hypocrite.
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Just four days into the new year, 20-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant and student Arif Sayed Faisal was shot and killed by police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after appearing to have a mental health crisis. The Cambridge Police Department was quick to call the killing an “officer-involved shooting,” using language that police departments across the US use to shift the blame off of officers who kill or maim civilians. Cambridge police claimed that Faisal advanced towards officers with a knife in hand, implying that the police had no choice but to shoot him dead.
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Destroyed buildings in Russian-occupied Mariupol are being turned into concrete chips, which will in turn be used in road construction, according to Dmitry Khadzhinov, a representative of the occupying forces.
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Thousands of Europe-based Iranians, including relatives of victims of repression in the Islamic republic, lawmakers and campaigners, on Saturday urged the EU at a rally in Paris to list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a “terror” group.
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VERDICT: Mistaken.
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Sudan’s ruling military has concluded a review of an agreement with Russia to build a navy base on the Red Sea, two Sudanese officials said on February 11.
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Two former fighters of the Russian private military company Wagner have told CNN of their horrific experiences on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, and how anyone who faltered was immediately shot by their own commanders.
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Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand shares what she knows about the unidentified object that was shot down by NORAD over Canada. CNN’s Arlette Saez reports.
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Russia’s tourism, both in-bound and out-bound, is severely hit by the war-ravaged crisis that unfolded in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine late February. For more than two years, the tourism industry was badly affected due to the widespread Covid-19 that shattered the world.
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The mortal remains of Sergeant Vusimusi Mabena, killed by a sniper in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), will be received today (Sunday, 12 February) at Air Force Base (AFB) Waterkloof in Centurion.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Polish MEP Radoslaw Sikorski sent an open letter to Dutch newspaper NRC blasting a report it ran about regular payments the lawmaker received from the United Arab Emirates for acting as an adviser and allegedly undeclared paid luxury trips to Dubai.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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[Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.
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A leak discovered in a gas pipeline that runs between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has led to a state of emergency in Nevada as state and local officials rush to stem possible shortages.
Driving the news:The leak, discovered at a pumping station in a city near Los Angeles, has forced several associated fuel lines to shut down. Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, which operates the pipeline, said that the cause for the leak is currently unknown and that an investigation is underway.
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Several fire departments, including the Kent Fire Department, provided aid to the East Palestine community after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed from its tracks. TV2’s Jacob Brooks spoke with Lt. Craig Peeps from the Kent Fire Department to learn more about how they helped in the efforts to contain the fire.
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Overpopulation
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At a news conference Friday, Safe Haven Baby Boxes founder and CEO Monica Kelsey said the child was dropped off within the last seven days at a Bowling Green Fire Department location, declining to be more specific to protect anonymity. She said fire department staff was able to tend to the child in less than 90 seconds.
The child is the 24th in the country to be surrendered at one of more than 130 baby boxes and drawers the organization has established across nine states.
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Finance
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It’s the airline that came back from the dead — and then died again.
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President Biden’s State of the Union speech earlier this week included the president’s observation that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, something that’s been demonstrably true since 1935. That triggered a heated exchange between the president and his Republican hecklers, who insisted it wasn’t true. “So, folks,” said Biden, “as we all apparently agree: Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right? All right, we’ve got unanimity!”
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A group of 33 Democratic lawmakers on Friday implored the U.S. Labor Department “to take immediate action to rid Hyundai’s supply chain of child labor and hold those responsible to the fullest extent of the law” after a Reuters investigation revealed that dozens of kids as young as 12 years old—most of them Central American migrants—were working in Southeastern factories supplying the Korean auto giant.
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Including but not limited to working as a dog-walker and trainer and acting as a public-relations specialist.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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If the United Arab Emirates can take such a dramatic and historic step as entering Holocaust Studies to its school curriculum, why can’t the Palestinians recognize the historical connections between the land of Israel and the Jewish people? Regrettably, if the Palestinian leaders and those who run its institutions dwell on hatred and on the destruction of Israel rather than improving the lives of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, their lot won’t be much better than that of Afghanistan. The Palestinian-Arabs are the most educated people in the Arab world. With the right mental attitude and with a focus on the betterment of life in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestine could become a Middle Eastern Singapore.xs
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The government in Tehran claimed victory over the protests sparked by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini. But Iranians abroad held large protests against the Islamic Republic.
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Under the guise of the regressive legal theory of “originalism,” the United States Supreme Court Republican-appointed majority has issued a series of ultra-right rulings on such vital issues as votingrights, gerrymandering, unionorganizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, guncontrol, abortion, and campaign finance. The end goal appears to be nothing less than the dismantling of the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.
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While Democrats defied historical trends in the 2022 midterm elections by blocking the Republican “red wave” that many pundits predicted would overtake the U.S. Congress, last year’s election resulted in significant GOP gains in Southern state legislatures, bolstering their control of the region’s politics.
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This could be India’s decade if it plays its cards right. The subcontinental state is poised to be the next China, even if its path will likely be less straightforward than that of China and more of a Leninist two steps forward, one step backwards.
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Indonesia is one of the developing countries in Asia with a large number of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). In 2016, the Bureau of Statistics recorded that 99 percent of businesses in Indonesia could be classified as MSMEs and as many as 65 million MSMEs contribute 61 percent of the country’s total Gross Domestic […]
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Gaming outlets and major breweries are making contingency plans to guard their earnings.
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Republicans refuse to worship the false idols of the Woke Democratic Left.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Online, that went down about as well as you might imagine. “I get death threats all the time, because I’m very vocal about a lot of things,” says Moore, without appearing remotely concerned. “I want to live forever, everybody does, but I’m not going to. So, do I want to die in some cheesy fall off a ladder kind of way? Or do I want to die fighting for what I believe?”
Amid the rise of cancel culture, Moore refuses to be cowed by a fear of causing offence. “Just me getting out of bed with a vagina offends some people. So, what am I going to do?” she laughs. “These days, everybody wakes up offended. I’ve been cancelled so many freaking times. Here’s the thing about me: if I say something, it’s because I meant it. And if you don’t like it, that’s going to have to be your problem.”
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India-held Kashmir ranked alongside Russia — where Moscow moved to cut access to social media and news amid its invasion of Ukraine; Iran, where blocks came amid mass protests that started in September; and India, where Surfshark documented cuts in service at times of unrest.
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More than a fifth of all web blackouts took place in Kashmir, according to Surfshark, a virtual private network company headquartered in Lithuania.
Its global report on internet censorship in 2022 — released mid-January — found 32 countries were hit by a total of 112 restrictions. Nearly all came during times of protest or unrest.
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Amid continued media denial of why he was attacked.
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Adelkhah has been in prison since her arrest in 2019 during a visit to Iran. She is one of seven French nationals detained in Iran, a factor that has worsened relations between Paris and Tehran in recent months.
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Iranian authorities on Friday released from prison French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, who was first arrested in June 2019 and was serving a five-year sentence on national security charges vehemently denied by supporters, a source close to her said.
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Mob attacks against people accused of blasphemy occur regularly in Pakistan. Rights groups say such accusations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities or settle personal scores. Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan.
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Activists associated with the Sakharkovskoye Dvizheniye (Sakharov Movement, whose participants are interested in the legacy of Soviet nuclear physicist and peace activist Andrei Sakharov) suggested to members of the European Parliament that they should organize a prisoner exchange, trading Alexey Gorinov for “one or more of the accomplices of the Putin regime who are detained in the West.” Gorinov, a former Moscow city council member who opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is currently serving a seven-year prison term for spreading “false information” about the Russian army.
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On the evening of February 11, at least ten articles discussing the invasion of Ukraine, the treatment in prison of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and other actions by Russian authorities, briefly appeared on the website of pro-Kremlin publication Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP).
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, Lambert was giving a live report for cable network NewsNation about a recent train derailment when at least four law enforcement officers approached and asked him to stop speaking because Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was simultaneously giving a press conference, according to NewsNation and news reports.
Lambert finished his report, and then the officers, some with “Trooper” insignias on their uniforms and others in dark green shirts and khaki pants, surrounded him, pushed him to the ground, and handcuffed him, according to those sources.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Leigh Thelmadatter interviews Mexican-expat pairings who’ve made love work despite language, culture clashes, and opinionated in-laws.
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Edward Curtin “No one knows who will live in this [iron] cage in the future….” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism I would prefer not to relay the following very strange story given to me by a fellow sociologist, but he had done me a number of favors…
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One of the most severe hate crime laws in the world, India’s Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA) seeks to punish and deter violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and Adivasis (tribals). However, worries over its efficacy in tackling historical oppression rule popular discourse in India and the international humanitarian community.
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John whitehead Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness. These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot …
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Sadaf Khadem trains at her boxing club in Royan on the south-west coast of France three nights a week. The Iranian-born boxer hopes one day to go professional.
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The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Radio Free Asia, but Tsering said Pelosi told him during a meeting at the Capitol on Wednesday, which also involved actor and Tibet supporter Richard Gere, that Biden would be open to meeting.
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In recent weeks, numerous reports have been published detailing moves by authorities to seal businesses, restaurants, cafes, and in some cases even pharmacies because of owners and managers failing to observe Islamic laws and mandatory hijab rules.
The wave of closings comes amid the months-long public anger that eru pted after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in September while in custody after being detained by morality police in Tehran for “improperly” wearing a head scarf.
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According to Radio Free Europe, the 37-year-old professor caught the eye of the Taliban and was brutally beaten up by officials on Thursday. He was also subsequently arrested for the dissent. Abdul Haq Hammad, a Taliban official from the Information and Culture Ministry, accused Mashal of “provoking people against the [current political] system.”
Since December last year, the Taliban have carried out beatings and detained several people who have protested against its ban on women from pursuing university education. As a result, Mashal decided to take matters into his own hands and carried dozens of books on a cart named ‘Iqra’, which is Arabic for ‘read’, to distribute the reading material among women of Kabul.
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The death of a young YouTube star at the hands of her father has sparked outrage in Iraq, where so-called “honor killings” continue to take place.
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Her “crime” was that her son was accused of being romantically involved with a Muslim woman. Islam assumes the man is superior, and that non-Muslims must never have authority over Muslims. Non-Muslim men may therefore never court or marry Muslim women, although Muslim men may court and marry non-Muslim women. Why do so many Western women support this unabashed discrimination?
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On February 2, Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC) student organizers occupied a weekly campus “social justice and leadership” forum at the historically Black college Morehouse, per the university paper, The Maroon Tiger, to lobby the university community over Cop City. The organizers read a list of demands, including that Morehouse “denounce and sever their support in building” Cop City and that the college president follow suit.
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That starts by being honest with ourselves about some discomfiting contradictions in the status quo. “We’ve somehow ended up with a justice system that treats kids as adults when it comes to policing and punishment but not when it comes to basic rights,” he writes, noting that each year 76,000 children who aren’t allowed to watch R-rated movies are prosecuted as adults. In some states, they’re deemed fully responsible for rash choices made under peer pressure but not responsible enough to sell a bike or go to the dentist alone. These rules aren’t just wildly inconsistent; they’re also backwards, according to science. Studies show that a teen’s “capacity to understand and reason her way to a decision is comparable to an adult’s ability in situations that allow for coolheaded deliberation,” Benforado explains. In other words, research on the adolescent brain says “yes” to letting them vote and “no” to prison.
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The UK government Thursday rejected a call by the Justice Committee to resentence prisoners facing indeterminate jail terms under the abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) scheme. This poses a major challenge to nearly 3,000 prisoners who were sentenced when the legislation was still in place but remain in prison despite the Committee’s proposal…
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For centuries, cows have been considered sacred by India’s majority Hindu population, a symbol of both the Earth and the divine.
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Monopolies
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This integration will bring new features to Microsoft Edge’s built-in PDF reader, including more accurate colours and graphics, improved text selection, and the ability to read documents aloud for greater accessibility. Additionally, these new capabilities will be available for free to all users. By joining forces, Adobe and Microsoft are taking a significant step forward in their goal of transforming the way people work with digital content and furthering their commitment to making technology accessible to everyone.
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Copyrights
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With a reputation for quality and sporting one of the most recognized brands to ever exist in the pirate IPTV marketplace, a big legal win over PrimeStreams would’ve been a PR coup for any rightsholder. Instead, two PrimeStreams-related lawsuits worth tens of millions in damages were quietly settled this week, despite what appeared to be a mountain of evidence. So what went wrong?
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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you’ll need a shell account on my box already to do this
there’s a suid program named “hijack-gre-over-udp” that will
allow you to point the remote end of a gre over udp tunnel
to wherever it gets a packet from next.
I’m thinking of changing it so that this command runs from
a TCP port, and requires that the next packet it receives is from
the same IP that the TCP connection is made from…
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Politics
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“The long boom” predicted growth that “could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years”.
[...]
So. Question. How is the world economy going to double every 12 years and sustain that? One could quote Professor Al Bartlett who began his one-hour talk with the statement, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” And if one tells only of the boom one might miss the busts and the benefits going mostly to those not less equal than others. How fares the rest of this story?
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Technical
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The other really big topic when it comes to package is how to identify them. This is a lot more complicated because I view packages in a polyglot manner instead of a single foreign ecosystem.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 10:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Phoronix Microsoft content (latest story):
Phoronix content today (Microsoft GitHub):
Summary: Michael Larabel of Phoronix habitually complains that readers of Phoronix block ads; but look what he has turned the site into. The actual content is about 25%* of the page!
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* An associate of ours has another take on this. It might be useful to make a distinction between advertisements and JavaScript (in the above, there’s clearly an overlap between the two things). Malvertising usually rides along in JavaScript, but JavaScript and advertisements are really, in principle, two separate things. It would be disingenuous of Mr. Larabel to try to conflate the two. Many people who are still visiting his site without JavaScript turned on (executed on their PCs) probably have no problem with actual advertisements (per se), but these advertisements get blocked along with the malicious JavaScript. The content of these pages might be substantially less than 25% if one counts the scripts (but not the graphics). His latest post, for example, is about 430kB minus the graphics and minus most scripts. Yet the text itself is about 2kB, which is 0.47%. Of course 0.47% is less than 25% by a lot.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:54 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
| CID |
Description |
Object type |
QmcXkW6yZyEnQar2CtNxt1PCgfStryVaigmbnZchZmYszt |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmWCpKyesnKUHMTAsEbxHopioraoj5ZVaSzdtx2qWf5Nva |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmdCgGvLE4ANnw7dosdjvNJxVvTh8BcaNG6Nzgr2CJZKN3 |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmZ2gQU3S1XyKHJ4g1rHEkQj4Rjj6B3c2rQ3f1xR5NEt4M |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmXzeHJ4VLSqkme5Zcqm9SnsuCjbfE7sdp7MzUjGuuCaQ1 |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmQSY4rnptrktRKMCsRAKUXZQjpMt13e87HrmJqjWuznqZ |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmY5Adu6Aoe5iP8aRxJALeccoNEBnf45XjiKFh1BWrCrxU |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmSTPsbhEns4jGHz4RcRbWSE5UdSzyTamb7dZkLKuZQUy3 |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
|
Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): Qmckkfq1rqb7mTK7w6RbFZJjskRKcnUk8PdtMmcLwUhXgV
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