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

China Says Goodbye to Microsoft
It is hardly surprising that Windows is shedding off userbase all around the world
Evri (HermesUK) is Now Run by Bots and Hallucinating Scammers
Years ago they virtually removed support and tried chatbots instead
 
Laos Leaving GAFAM Behind, Gradually
Yesterday evening it was measured at 10% for GNU/Linux at one point
They Were Wrong All Along
Two women combined won't deliver a healthy baby in just 4.5 months
A "Tech Journalist" Would Not Cover Vote on LLMs as a Sex Issue
For a moment there you have to pause and wonder, is this a "Tech Journalist" or the Daily Stormer?
20,000 by Year's End
The "New Techrights" will have 20,000 pages by year's end
Last Night GNU/Linux Measured at 9% in Africa
Nighttimes in Africa are times when GNU/Linux usage on desktop/laptop devices typically surges, based on Clownflare [...] It changes in favour of GNU/Linux
Gemini Links 18/08/2026: Google Bait and Switch (Getting College People 'Hooked' on 'Cheap' Storage, Then Backups Gone), a "Question of E-mail"
Links for the day
Bluesky is in Trouble
Bluesky is a private company (unlike Bluesky Digital Assets Corp. in Toronto, that one runs a pyramid scheme!), so it's hard to know for sure just how much money it is losing
Links 18/08/2026: US Abandons South Korea, New Legal Disputes Over Slop Plagiarism in the Music Scene
Links for the day
Linux Losing Interest in Users' Freedom, Pursues DRM Instead
"Linux" is (or was, as GNU/Linux) meant to empower - not artificially restrict - the users
GNU/Linux in Ecuador and Colombia: Growing, Still Below International Average
locals turn away from Windows and try GNU/Linux instead
IBM is Dead or Dying. Now It Asks Workers to 'Resign' Voluntarily.
To save face, to pretend no layoffs are happening (as it might alarm shareholders) [...] We keep hearing more and more stories like that
Links 18/08/2026: Sergey Brin Controlling State Policies, "Dario Amodei's (Anthropic) Wife Is Closely Linked to Jeffrey Epstein"
Links for the day
SBS News Interviews Daniel Pocock
The locals say this PR stunt (by the bigot, Farage) was a waste of money
Clownflare Sees One in 7 Web Requests in Libya Originating From GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux has taken a (foot)hold there
Openwashing and Manifestos Composed in Private by Dictators With Deliberately Addictive (and Subsidised, Bundled) 'Tech'
It's long, so make a cuppa first
SLAPP Censorship - Part 153 Out of 200: Decades of Debt, Weaponising Borrowed Money to Try to Put Their Critics in Debt
they've always had a financial report by now
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 17, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, August 17, 2026
Gemini Links 18/08/2026: Solar Power, Kipple and Impermanence, Catastrophe Ethics
Links for the day
Less Technology, More Life
Technology is being associated (sometimes rightly) with physical and mental problems
Google Search Has Gotten Worse (a Lot Worse)
getting worse
Birthday in 80 Days
we'll start decorating and party online with our community
Loans and Massive Debt at Microsoft, This Won't End Well.
Microsoft running out of money to pay salaries (to the point of paying people for 'voluntary' layoffs) is a positive sign?
Gemini Links 17/08/2026: Life in Plain Text, Mimicking KARL, Release of Jugulans, Avoiding Slop
Links for the day
Clown Storage Without Backups
Setting up several reliable copies of the data, plus several off-site backups (this data is nowhere as sensitive as medical data), should only cost a few grand
FreeCAD is Becoming Slop-ware, Use LibreCAD Instead
It has regular releases and "Qt5 is mandatory" now [...] they at least audit what they add
Cuba and Venezuela High in Adoption of GNU/Linux
some of the "communist" nations
Links 17/08/2026: Myanmar’s Cholera Outbreak, China Sends Commercial Vessels Through Arctic
Links for the day
GAFAM Loyalty Has Come to an End, Morale Low, People Whose Future is Uncertain Choose to Become "Lifers"
morale is low and there's no loyalty anymore
SLAPP Censorship - Part 152 Out of 200: Injunctions Do Not Cover Criticism, They Have Scope
self-incriminating communications
Clownflare Sees About Quarter of Web Requests in Ireland Coming From GNU/Linux
Well, in Ireland it seems like many people adopted GNU/Linux
Clownflare: In Australia and New Zealand GNU/Linux Peaks at Over 10% During Working Hours
That right there is interesting in its own right
Slowing Down by Intention
At the moment we have 6 or 7 ongoing series
Gemini Links 17/08/2026: Chamboree, Partial Solar Eclipse, Lady Macbeth
Links for the day
Links 17/08/2026: "Bluesky Is Down Again!" and "Anti-Social Media"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 16, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, August 16, 2026
A Vortex of Beacons (or "Bluetooth Everywhere" Vision)
If someone (or someones) calls you paranoid for taking about "beacon"-like functionality, there will be no lack of authoritative citations (e.g. Web links) they can be provided to prove them wrong
Falkland Islands: GNU/Linux Elevated to 6%
GNU/Linux usage seems to have increased a lot there
Links 16/08/2026: Reading Outside, Going Offline More, and Art of Computer Programming
Links for the day
The Question of Patience
Is there a lesson here somewhere?
IBM May be Sued for Mass Layoffs Via PIPs
Some whole threads (with all the long comments in them) recently got nuked by thelayoff.com
Links 16/08/2026: Ceuta Reports Social Control Media Used as a Weapon
Links for the day
Links 16/08/2026: Europe in Crisis of Droughts While Energy- and Water-Consuming, Pollution-Emitting Chatbots Are Spread by GAFAM (US) to Keep a Ponzi Scheme Going
Links for the day
GNU/Linux is a Platform for Work (Usage Surges in Daytime)
GNU/Linux 15% in daytime
We Need Rain, Not Chatbots
There's no "anti-AI" (it's not even AI), there's opposition to fraud, to plagiarism, and to companies that profit more when there's global warning (caused in part by their business activities)
SLAPP Censorship - Part 151 Out of 200: Dealing With Sleazy People and Companies That Steal (While Employing These Sleazy People)
we offer a quick summary and we're reflecting
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 15, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, August 15, 2026
Gemini Links 16/08/2026: Sterrenkijker Releases, Solar Gemini Server
Links for the day