Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 14/02/2023: Plasma 5.27 and Russia Builds M OS



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Giz ChinaA new operating system has been released in Russia

        The Russian software market has welcomed a new operating system called “M OS,” which is based on the Linux kernel. The operating system is specifically designed for use in educational institutions and is being developed by the Department of Information Technologies of the city of Moscow. The team responsible for the development of electronic services and IT systems in the capital has collaborated with Russian developers to create “M OS.”

        A team of 25 developers has worked on the development of “M OS”. And the distribution kit took six months to develop. The product is already supplied to Moscow schools as part of personal computers, laptops, and interactive panels. The Moscow Electronic School (MES) project team is supporting and developing “M OS.”

    • Server

      • Nicholas Tietz-SokolskyA systems design perspective on why chess.com's servers have been melting | nicholas@web

        January 2023 was a rough month if you wanted to play chess on the most popular chess website, chess.com. Their service has been experiencing an unprecedented amount downtime because of a huge influx of users. There have been days where it's all but unusable. It's frustrating as a user! It's also surely frustrating for the business behind the site.

        Chess has reached an all-time peak in popularity. In January 2023, Google search traffic exceeded the boom from the release of The Queen's Gambit. There's a huge influx of new or returning players, and they flock to the site with the obvious domain. Chess.com's app has hit #1 most downloaded free game on the iOS app store.

        Part of doing good systems design is planning for capacity. A general rule of thumb is that you should design a system for up to a certain amount of growth. Beyond some point, architectural requirements will be dramatically different. Planning for capacity does not mean planning for infinite capacity, but what may realistically happen.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Late Night Linux – Episode 216

        Canonical’s latest Ubuntu PR blunder, Mastodon and the fediverse are doing a lot better than some journalists seem to think, yet another telemetry row, the company behind Mycroft is struggling, KDE Korner, and more. €  News We now have a Discord server (as well as the Telegram group, Matrix room, and IRC channel).

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDEPlasma 5.27 Beta

          Today we are bringing you the preview version of KDE's Plasma 5.27 release. Plasma 5.27 Beta is aimed at testers, developers, and bug-hunters. As well as our lightweight and feature rich Linux Desktop this release adds a Bigscreen version of Plasma for use on televisions.

          To help KDE developers iron out bugs and solve issues, install Plasma 5.27 Beta and test run the features listed below. Please report bugs to our bug tracker.

          The final version of Plasma 5.27 will become available for the general public on the 14th of February.

        • 9to5LinuxKDE Plasma 5.27 LTS Desktop Is Out with New Welcome App, Tiling, and More

          Highlights of KDE Plasma 5.27 include a new Plasma Welcome app that helps newcomers to the KDE Plasma desktop environment easily and quickly configure various aspects like enabling Plasma Vaults, connecting their online accounts or mobile devices, adding more apps, etc.

          Another cool new feature in KDE Plasma 5.27 is tiling support for those with a large monitor. Tiling can be enabled and configured by pressing the Meta(Super)+T keyboard shortcut and there are three layouts to choose from. Windows can be placed in the tiled layout by holding Shift and dragging them to the edge of the screen until they stick.

        • Linux MagazineKDE Plasma 5.27 Slated for a Valentine's Day Release
        • KDEKDE Eco Handbook: "Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software"

          Today is "I ❤ Free Software!" day and KDE Eco is proud to announce the publication of the first edition of the measurement handbook "Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software: A Handbook To Certify Software As Sustainable".

          You can view the handbook at our website, where you can also download the PDF release for offline reading or for sharing with a friend or colleague.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

      • Mozilla

        • Niko Matsakis: Return type notation (send bounds, part 2)

          In theprevious post, I introduced the “send bound” problem, which refers to the need to add aSendbound to the future returned by an async function. I want to start talking about some of the ideas that have been floating around for how to solve this problem. I consider this a bit of an open problem, in that I think we know a lot of the ingredients, but there is a bit of a “delicate balance” to finding the right syntax and so forth. To start with, though, I want to introduce Return Type Notation, which is an idea that Tyler Mandry and I came up with for referring to the type returned by a trait method.

  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • FSF

    • FSFI Love Free Software Day is here: Share your love, software, and a video

      The act of sharing takes effort because sharing anything requires us to take time out of our day to share with another person. It takes compassion because we must think of others and what their wants and/or needs may be. It also takes courage. This is because we must fight against our own doubt, battling against any feelings of failure or rejection. We must also courageously defend the freedom to share, as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) threaten to erode people's ability and opportunities to share, even among those living under the same roof.

  • Programming/Development

    • Jussi PakkanenJussi Pakkanen: Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test

      Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typically many competing requirements such as:

      • API stability
      • ABI stability (if you are into that sort of thing, some are not)
      • Maximize the amount of functionality supported
      • Minimize the number of functions exposed
      • Make the API as easy as possible to use
      • Make the API as difficult as possible to use incorrectly (preferably it should be impossible)
      • Make the API as easy as possible to use from scripting languages
    • Barry KaulerContinuing internationalization integrated into easy.sfs

      I posted about the abandonment of langpacks a couple of days ago:

      https://bkhome.org/news/202302/easysfs-internationalized-langpack-pets-abandoned.html

      The last couple of days there has been intense coding, implementing the details internationalization integrated into easy.sfs, or as a single "nls.sfs".

      Changes to /usr/local/petget/installpkg.sh, major changes to /usr/local/momanager/momanager, and in woofQ changes to 2createpackages and 3buildeasydistro....

    • Anders BorchSvelte Was Made By Vue Fans

      I actually like the declarative feel of Svelte. I just don't like that it reminds me of a product which endorses malware. I don't think that is something to want to emulate.

    • Reilly Tucker SiemensParsing TFTP in Rust

      For those who don't know, TFTP is the Trivial File Transfer Protocol, a simple means of reading and writing files over a network. Initially defined in the early 80s, the protocol was updated by RFC 1350 in 1992. In this post I'll only cover RFC 1350. Extensions like RFC 2347, which adds a 6th packet type, won't be covered.

    • University of TorontoThe case for atomic types in programming languages

      However, I feel that that the lie of atomic types is a genuine improvement in almost all cases, because of the increase in usability and safety. The problem with only having atomic operations is the same as with optional error checking; you have to remember to always use them, even if the types you're operating on can be used with ordinary operations. As we all know, people can forget this, or they can think that they're clever enough to use non-atomic operations in this one special circumstance that is surely harmless.

    • RachelMore than five whys and "layer eight" problems

      Perhaps you've heard of the OSI model of networking, where you have seven layers as a way to talk about what's going on in the "stack". I've seen some brilliantly snarky T-shirts that talk about "layer eight" and sometimes beyond as things like "corporate politics" and "management" and all of that good stuff.

      It turns out that when you start doing this root-cause analysis and really keep after it, the "squishy human realm" is actually the no-longer-hypothetical "layer eight" from those T-shirts.

    • New YorkerChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

      This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

    • Vincent BernatBuilding a SQL-like language to filter flows

      Often, web interfaces expose a query builder to build such filters. I think combining a SQL-like language with an editor supporting completion, syntax highlighting, and linting is a better approach.

      The language parser is built with pigeon (Go) from a parsing expression grammar—or PEG. The editor component is CodeMirror (TypeScript).

    • Jussi PakkanenPlain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test

      Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typically many competing requirements such as: [...]

    • ButtondownMaybe people do care about performance and reliability

      It’s well-established consensus that software is slower and more bloated than it was 20, 40 years ago. One explanation is that software engineers don’t care about their work. Another is that it’s the interplay of a lot of different factors and blaming it on apathetic devs is a convenient way to avoid understanding the actual problems.

    • Python

      • Didier StevensUpdate: xor-kpa.py Version 0.0.7

        I added extra plaintexts for the modulus of Cobalt Strike’s public RSA key. xor-kpa_V0_0_7.zip (http)MD5: FB8155E56234648CC3AFFD890BFE9043SHA256: 069DCA2A1901D448DBF2CF202B5CE49846EFCBAACB73BF35B20AA085AAB31BA9

    • Rust


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
Because proprietary software makes you worse off
"What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
Making More Work Space
I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
Reject demagogues
New Techrights Turns 2
Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights
What Scares Them the Most is Independent News Sites That They Cannot Control and Censor
Wikileaks was a good example of this
If You Don't Control Your Online Platform, Then Someone Else is Controlling You
be (or become) independent
 
Links 23/09/2025: Japan Limits Uses of Skinnerboxes ('Smartphones') With Toxic "Apps", Fentanylware (TikTok) Tapped by "MAGAts"
Links for the day
Brett Wilson LLP Has Just Been Sued (by Their Own Clients!)
Vladimir and Alla Yanpolsky sued Brett Wilson LLP in BL-2025-001167 at the end of last week
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
Links for the day
Code of Censorship
Extortion is peace
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
Will the axe fall again by month's end?
Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
Links for the day
Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
Oracle Started This Year With Slop. Then It Stopped.
Passing fads are like this
Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd
Betas for now
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has a Policy on Racism and Sexism
In then future we'll show the misogyny and racial slurs
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part I - Abusing British Women on Behalf of American Men Who Abuse American Women
Transparency is important to us, so we've decided to make this series
Slopwatch: Google News and the Evident Slopfarm Infestation
This is what people get about Linux when they query Google for Linux
Links 22/09/2025: Murdochs Might Join Fentanylware (TikTok) 'Investors' (Masters), United Kingdom Recognises Palestinian Statehood
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Esperanto Music History and Apps For Android
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: More American 'Censorship' (Retaliation for Journalism), Cheeto "Might Be Losing His Race Against Time"
Links for the day
The Blob Slop
Give me more words, give me some text
The 50-Pound Note Experiment and the "War on Cash"
Britain is actually seeing a rebound in cash payments, and it's not a temporary phenomenon
Slopwatch: Blaming the Victims for Microsoft's Failures and Plagiarising Phoronix
That's what Google has been reduced to: slop and slopfarms
Links 22/09/2025: Breaches, Windows TCO, and Arrests
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Rabbit Hole and DeGoogling Fairphone
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: Russian War Planes Invade NATO Airspace While Dihydroxyacetone Man Escalates Attack on Free Speech Because of Critics
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 21, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 21, 2025
Links 21/09/2025: "Hey Hi" (Hype) Under Fire, Fakes Identified; Tesla Burns Family
Links for the day
Google's Software is Malware and Malware in Mobile Devices
Originally posted by Rob Musial
Links 20/09/2025: Hegemony Coming to a Close, Luigi Mangione Ruled Not Terrorist
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/09/2025: "Charlie Kirk Was a Hateful Piece of Shit" and Slop Code Attempted by Microsofter
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 20, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, September 20, 2025