Recent headlines proclaim the imminent demise of support for the venerable floppy disk drive in the Linux kernel. My stomach churned and my heart gave a flutter or two. I have been in this business quite a few years and my collection of floppy disks goes back to 8-inchers. “Not again!” I thought.
Fortunately, further research indicated that the headlines overstated the situation somewhat. All floppy support isn't going away—just support for drives connected to dedicated floppy controllers. That USB drive you bought to bring diskette read/write capability to newer computers uses a different support mechanism and will continue to be supported—for now. All the same, it seemed like now was a good time to do something with all these diskettes.
[...]
To be sure, many of these old diskettes contain data files of one sort or another and the files could be copied to a directory on my Linux system. Since I use Linux Mint KDE, I don't even have to manually mount the diskettes. Mint will offer to do that for me when the diskette is inserted. Open my file manager and I can simply drag and drop files to their new locations.
Dell have announced that the new XPS 13 developer edition (7390) will soon be available in the US, Canada and Europe, according to Dell’s Barton George update.
For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter.
Google tries to stick close to the upstream kernel as possible to reduce their maintenance burden as well as making it easier to upstream changes. Google engineers pick an LTS kernel on an annual basis that they use for all devices for the given year.
Financial services institutions understand that today’s banking customers expect fast, easy-to-use services they can tap into anytime, anywhere, and are therefore accelerating adoption of digital technologies to enable a variety of new offerings. That often includes real-time payments that let businesses, consumers, and even governments send and accept funds that provide both availability to the recipient and instant confirmation to the sender.
In many ways, the rapid adoption of mobile commerce and mobile banking has whet the appetite for real-time payments among consumers. PwC makes this case in its report, "Financial Services Technology 2020 and Beyond: Embracing disruption," which discusses the evolution of the digital wallet. The report points to the benefits of digital wallets that give consumers "a fast, secure, low-cost method to use, store and send money over the Internet," and notes that banks are pursuing greater control over mobile banking channels so they can "manage the security, user experience, and customer connectivity at the point of purchase."
The cattle rancher relies on a few trusty belongings out on the dusty trail: a good horse, strong coffee and a well-charged iPad with a backup battery. That last pairing of items may seem far astray from the rucksacks of those that herd “dogies,” steer and moo-cows, but in the north western region of Canada, there used to be even stranger things being carried in trail bags by cowherd.
For many years, herds of cattle grazing on provincial government land had to be documented and accounted for by hand. That meant a mountain of paperwork for rangers upon their return to the ranch. Instead of a bag full of beans and rawhide, they were lugging around a phonebooks-worth of paperwork to account for just where their bovines had been.
When Todd Wilson, product director of Enterprise DevOps for the Province of British Columbia, and his team began working with Red Hat OpenShift and Aporeto, they weren’t thinking about the cattle grazing on grasslands 1,000 miles north of them. Instead, they were looking for a way for the software developers inside the government of British Columbian to accelerate their velocity.
What really matters to our users and what do they care about most? Answering these questions are essential first steps to ensure that we’re measuring user experience and improving our products the right way.
Top tasks is a descriptive process that allows us to see which types of tasks are most important to the users and to guide future user research studies and development, ensuring that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can meet the needs of our users. The user research team at Red Hat is currently conducting a study to see what users see as the top tasks in RHEL and your input would be greatly appreciated! Please take a few minutes and complete our "Top tasks" survey.
With Kubernetes becoming a hybrid cloud's foundation, we need a way to manage the network connections between the containerized applications and decentralized services. That's where Red Hat's just-released Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh comes in. With it, you can connect, observe, and simplify Kubernetes applications service-to-service communication on Red Hat OpenShift 4.
A service mesh is the underlying networking architecture for Kubernetes containerized programs and microservices. It's responsible for traffic management, policy enforcement, and service identity and security.
Red Hat's take, OpenShift Service Mesh, is built on the Istio, Kiali, and Jaeger projects and enhanced with Kubernetes Operators. Istio provides the service mesh itself, while Kiali gives Istio an observability console and Jaeger enables you to monitor and troubleshoot transactions in complex distributed systems. Put it all together, and developers get an efficient way to deploy and manage microservices-based application architectures, without the blood, sweat, and tears of implementing networking services from scratch.
A couple of weeks ago, an interesting discussion popped up on the r/sysadmin subreddit:
"Learning SQL - Yay or Nay? I'm looking into which area I should be studying next and I often see SQL mentioned on job listings. I'd love some advice if it is the correct thing for my current skill set, or If I should be focusing on different skills."
Without interjecting too much of my personal opinion, I thought the commentary was interesting and definitely interjected some considerations I hadn't made before.
While of course it's helpful to know more about nearly any technology you might encounter in your day job, what to learn has to be a matter of priority. But I've always found querying and filtering to be critical: Whether you're using SQL, regular expressions at the command line, or just some basic filters in a spreadsheet, it's essential to know how to break down big piles of data into something digestible, or just find that one thing you need.
In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Elizabeth Joseph – Developer Advocate at IBM to talk about Mainframe and why it’s a great platform for Linux developers.
Hello and welcome to the 298th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we take a close look at getting Scouts on the air with the JOTA and JOTI programs. It's a great way to get involved in amateur radio, whether or not you're into Scouting. Also, we address a bunch of feedback that's been queuing up over the last few weeks. Lots of great information there as well. Hope everyone has a great week and, as always, thank you for downloading and listening!
We're back and going crazy about Crystal, a statically typed language that's as fast as C and as slick as ruby.
Plus an update on Rails 6, Intel's growing adoption of Rust, and the challenge of making breaking changes.
More tools to keep your Linux box and cloud servers secure this week, OpenPOWER responds to Risc-V competition, and we ponder the year-long open-source supply chain attacks.
Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.
Linus Torvalds and friends
You can argue about Linux's official birthday. Heck, even Linus Torvalds thinks there are four different dates in 1991 that might deserve the honor. Regardless, Linux turns twenty-eight. Here are some of its highlights and lowlights.
August 25th is taken to be the official birthday of the Linux. What's so special about 28? Well we managed to miss 21 and 25 so we are making sure we mark it this time around,
August 25th 1991 was when Linus Torvalds, first announced that he was working on an operating system based on MINIX. At the time Torvalds, then 21, was studying at Finland's University of Helsinki. He'd learned about MINIX from Andrew Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and at the beginning of 1991 bought a 386-based PC clone, installed a copy of MINIX and started work on his one-man cloned operating system. He graduated in 1996 with a Masters degree having submitted a thesis titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
n 26 August 1991, Linus Torvalds announced hobby project that was supposed to better than Minix operating systems. He said I am doing a free operating system. Just a hobby and won’t be big or professional like GNU. Linux turns 28 years old, and we are going to celebrate Linux’s birthday by sharing comics in pop culture that made it even more popular.
Marketing is as crucial as code to any open source project’s success. Organizations that participate in open source projects play a vital role in developing a sustainable ecosystem around a project by marketing the project through their own networks. Organizations, in turn, benefit from those marketing efforts by growing their visibility in the project community and associating their own brand with the project. The benefits can be seen in a growing project leadership role, attracting developers to your organization, and promoting your open source products and services. The key is to promote the project first and always remain authentic and true to the open source ethos of openness and transparency.
Sway 1.2 brings with it compatibility updates for i3 version 4.17, better XWayland support, new protocol coverage, output toggle support, better layout handling behavior, and a variety of other new features and fixes.
A number of months have passed since having anything new to report on the progress of the LLVMpipe software driver, but David Airlie now has landed a number of improvements to this LLVM-leveraging "soft" OpenGL driver for Mesa 19.3.
Following a number of commits made today, the LLVMpipe driver in Mesa 19.3 Git now exposes ARB_shader_image_load_store and ARB_shader_image_size. Those are extensions for OpenGL 4.2 and 4.3, respectively, as well as being part of OpenGL ES 3.1.
As a possible sign that AMD Navi 14 graphics cards could be coming sooner rather than later, support for Navi 14 is slated to be back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 release due out in a few weeks rather that entered its feature freeze earlier this month rather than waiting for next quarter's Mesa 19.3.
Mesa 19.2 should make it into the likes of Fedora 31, Ubuntu 19.10, and other autumn Linux distribution updates. Prominent AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver Marek Olšák has announced his interest in back-porting Navi 14 to Mesa 19.2 and intends to merge that code today.
Notepad++ is arguably the most popular source code editors among users of the Microsoft Windows systems. It replaced the legacy Notepad editor around 15 years back and since then has been the subject of constant admiration. The software enjoys widespread popularity due to its lightweight footprint, flexible features, and hard to match performance. Thankfully, Linux doesn’t fall short when it comes to code editors and offers some of the most rigorous text editors available right now. There’re quite a lot of worthy Notepad++ alternatives for Linux that you might want to check out.
For GSoC 2019, I worked on improving the effects user experience in Pitivi.
Google Summer of Code 2019 has come to an end. This post is part of my final submission. It summarizes my contribution to Pitivi, providing links to my work.
My proposal consisted on a interval time system with different applications for Pitivi video editor. Originally, one of the applications would be to be able to set up markers at selected positions in the timeline, to store user metada.
[...]
My work in GES is co-authored with my mentor, Mathieu Duponchelle. It includes the new classes GESMarkerList and GESMarker, and tests for them. It is already merged.
GESMarkerList allows to have a list of GESMarker in every class that implements GESMetaContainer. Its API includes methods for create, serialize and deserialize a GESMarkerList, and for add, move, get and remove GESMarker. Also include signals to notify this operations.
The class GESMarker implements GESMetacontainer. It has a position property.
A set of new tests checks that everything works fine.
Pngquant is a free, open source and cross-platform command-line lossy PNG compressor. It is based on a portable libimagequant library and is written in C99. It reduces the file size significantly by converting the PNG image to more efficient 8-bit PNG format and preserves full alpha transparency. As you may already know, 8-bit PNG files are often 60-80% smaller than 24/32-bit PNG files. The images compressed using Pngquant are fully-compatible with all web browsers and operating systems. Pngquant can compress one or multiple images at once.
Rufus 3.7 beta, released yesterday, has finalized the persistent partition support for Debian and Ubuntu, allowing users to create persistent storage live USBs of recent Debian Live ISOs, and Ubuntu Live ISOs created after 1st of August, 2019.
Rufus is a popular free and open source graphical tool to create bootable USB drives from Windows. It can be used to create not only bootable Windows drives from ISO files or disk images, but also create bootable Linux USB drives from Windows.
This application is able to create persistent live drives that work in both UEFI (MBR or GPT) and BIOS mode, with casper-rw being used for the persistent storage partition, so it can have a size of more than 4GB.
Experimental persistent partitions support was first added to this Windows bootable Live USB creation tool with version 3.6, but it didn't seem to work properly, as in my test, any changes made to the Live USB did not persist between reboots. With the latest Rufus 3.7 beta though, the persistent partition feature works (I tested it with the latest daily build of Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine). But it doesn't support every Linux distribution out there.
The Rufus 3.7 beta release notes mention that with this release, the persistent partition support is finalized (so it's not longer experimental) for Debian and Ubuntu. BUT as far as Ubuntu is concerned, the persistence feature only works with ISOs of Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine created later than August 1st, 2019 (e.g. the Ubuntu Eoan Ermine daily ISO from here should work). The reason for this is a bug that caused persistence on casper-rw partitions to break when the mount sequence order was changed, which was only recently fixed.
There is a new tool available for Sparkers: FreeOffice
What subjects are covered in an 'Average' DevOps job interview? What are interviewers are really trying to find out about you? This is a quick overview and roadmap for the devops interview series I'm making.
RetroArch, the official frontend for the libretro API, released version 1.7.8 a day ago with OCR and Text To Speech services.
RetroArch enables you to run classic games on a wide range of computers and consoles through its slick graphical interface.
Valve's Wine-based Proton for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux is seeing more exciting work in their 4.11 branch.
Manage the crew of a small spaceship as you hop between planets in uncharted space, From Orbit has a fun idea. Disclosure: Key provided by the developer to our Steam Curator.
From Orbit is a strategy game of survival and finding your way home against increasingly hostile odds. The basic loop is always the same, with you hopping across planets to mine resources and when you think you're ready you go onto the next. You have no idea what each planet will present you with though of course and some can be pretty challenging.
Linux gamers have had to wait a while but, with the launch of the new director’s cut, The Bard’s Tale IV now has a native port. The new enhanced version also has a lot of new improvements over the original game.
“I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” – Marcel Ducham
One of the oldest skill games and a lesson in history, chess is famously played all over the world. It is a war fought over the board and every war requires strategy, the main playing component of chess. A game of intelligence and intellect, chess is played for no prize other than one’s honor. A defeat in chess, or becoming subject to a checkmate, is such a harrowing and mighty defeat. But even in defeat, there is irreplaceable excitement and learning!
[...]
Learning a game now is as easy as installing a program of only a few Mbs and directly getting started with it! Let us look at a few of the best chess games available for download on Linux systems.
The beta release of Unity 2019.3 is out today for this wildly popular cross-platform game engine.
Unity 2019.3 Beta brings a revamp to its input system, significant improvements to its Universal Render Pipeline (Lightweight Render Pipeline as it was previously called), better physics, and initial ray-tracing support.
The better physics support with Unity 2019.3 comes via moving from NVIDIA's PhysX 3.4 to version 4.1. The ray-tracing support for now is just available with the DirectX DXR API and unfortunately no Vulkan ray-tracing for Linux support at this time.
Some 5 years after the previous release KDE has made a new release of polkit-qt-1, versioned 0.113.0.
Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones. Polkit has an authorization API intended to be used by privileged programs (“MECHANISMS”) offering service to unprivileged programs (“CLIENTS”).
Polkit Qt provides Qt bindings and UI.
Roughly a year ago I made a post titled How I’d improve KDE Plasma – a user’s point of view. I never shared the post publicly, but revisiting the first topic of the post — “my biggest pet peeve” — makes for an interesting story. … You probably guessed it, my biggest pet peeve is what I’ve been trying to solve with this GSoC project. A year go you would find me ricing my Plasma and wondering why SDDM was doing “its own thing” instead. Fast-forward to now and I’m pretty happy to have an option to sync settings between the two, ever more so given that I could have contributed to creating it.
Krita’s undo system, namely kritacommand, was added 8 years ago to Calligra under the name of kundo2, as a fork of Qt’s undo framework. The use of undo commands, however, might have an even longer history. Undo commands provide a way to revert individual actions. Up to now, most (though not all) undo commands do it by providing two sets of code that do and undo the actions, respectively. Drawbacks of this system includes (1) it is not very easy to manage; (2) it may introduce duplicated code; and (3) it makes it hard to access a previous document state without actually going back to that state. What I do is to start getting rid of such situation.
The plan for a new system is to use shallow copies to store documents at different states. Dmitry said “it was something we really want to do and allows us to make historical brushes (fetch content from earlier document states).” And according to him, he spent years to implement copy-on-write on paint layers. He suggested me to start from vector layers which he thought would be easier since it does not need to be very thread-safe.
I completely understood that was a challenge, but did not realize where the difficult part was until I come here. Copy-on-write is not the challenging part. We have QSharedDataPointer and almost all the work is to routinely replace the same code. Porting tools is more difficult. The old flake tools are running under the GUI thread, which makes no requirement on thread-safety. Technically we do not need to run it in a stroke / in image thread but with no multithreading the tools runs too slowly on some computers (read as “my Thinkpad laptop”) so I am not unwilling to take this extra challenge. In previous posts I described how the strokes work and the problems I encountered. Besides that there are still some problems I need to face.
It’s been almost two months since my last day at Endless, and some people keep asking me what am I up to now. The change was nothing top-secret so I told my closest friends and colleagues about what I was doing, but I have been so busy — first with the job change, personal life (whose events I will leave for a later post), then with some vacation time in Portugal, and this past week with my son’s first days in the Kindergarten — that I kept neglecting writing a post about that.
I had met Endless when it was still a small startup, in a shared working space in San Francisco, and joined it a few years after that, because it was all I could think about. Having spent almost 4 years with the company, it is and will always be a special place for me, not only because of its mission, but also because of its people and the experiences we shared, and I will keep rooting for their success.
It has rightly been said - “All good things come to an end”. Google Summer of Code too was one of the good experiences I’ve had, in the sense that I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world. It provided the exact platform that I needed to kickstart my open source contributions and to let me feet as fantastic a community as GNOME.
Conducting usability testing on free software shouldn’t be an afterthought of the development process but rather it should be a deeply integrated component. However, the reality is that the resources of free software projects (including large ones like GNOME) are quite limited, so one of my goals with this post is to empower you to do more usability testing on your own—you don’t have to be an expert—and to help out and contribute to larger software projects to make up for the limits on resources.
Linux is not only the server-side operating system as it is already creating a big impact in desktop and laptop segment too. There are plenty of Linux based operating systems developed for different purposes.
In this post, we are going to write about some of the best Linux distros suitable for the Laptops in 2019.
We're happy to announce the final release of the new Proxmox Mail Gateway 6.0! It's based on the latest stable release of Debian 10.0 (Buster) with a 5.0.21 kernel including the latest security fixes.
We'd like to thank all of you who contributed to the project by testing and providing feedback!
The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 9.0-rc1. It is a preliminary release of LFS-9.0. Major changes include toolchain updates to gcc-9.2.0 and glibc-2.30. In total, 33 packages were updated since the last release. Changes to the text have also been made throughout the book. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 5.2.8.
Note that the major version of LFS has changed to 9. This has been done to keep LFS and BLFS version numbers synchronized. The BLFS System V version has added the elogind package which now allows Gnome to be built in the new environment.
Another day, another Linux distribution. Yeah, it can get a bit tedious reading about so many operating systems based on the open source kernel, so here at BetaNews we typically try to inform you about the better ones. You see, there are many garbage Linux distributions that can simply be ignored -- they are either low-quality or overly redundant. Ultimately, it all becomes noise, harming the Linux community overall. Yes, having too much choice can be a negative.
Today, a wildly popular operating system achieves Beta status, and you should be interested -- it is worth your attention. Called "MX Linux," it has quietly gained a fairly large following, topping the charts at the legendary DistroWatch. MX Linux 19 Beta 1 is based on Debian 10 Buster and features the recently released Xfce 4.14 desktop environment. So, yeah, this is fairly bleeding edge stuff, although the Linux kernel is only at 4.19.5.
MX-19 Beta 1 available for testing
MX-19b1
August 25, 2019
Updated iso images
Linux Kodachi operating system is based on Xubuntu 18.04 it will provide you with a secure, anti-forensic, and anonymous operating system considering all features that a person who is concerned about privacy would need to have in order to be secure.
Kodachi is very easy to use all you have to do is boot it up on your PC via USB drive then you should have a fully running operating system with established VPN connection + Connection established + service running. No setup or knowledge is required from your side we do it all for you. The entire OS is functional from your temporary memory RAM so once you shut it down no trace is left behind all your activities are wiped out.
In this video, we are looking at BigLinux 19.04. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at MX Linux 19 Beta 1. Enjoy!
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Neptune 6.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.
This year’s Flock is inevitably over, so the right thing to do now is to capture its best moments. This time, the conference took place in the unbelievably beautiful city of Budapest, starting from Thursday 8th of August and carried on till the end of the week. I would like to thank all organizers, sponsors, volunteers and the community for putting the effort and resources into hosting such a great conference and also my employer for giving me an opportunity to attend. It was a wild ride!
I’ve just updated Inkscape in f32 to a git snapshot to allow it to move to Python 3. It seems to work well for me, but please test and file bugs.
First day started with "The State of Fedora" session by Matthew Miller where he discussed about Fedora current and future state. Then Cate Huston presented a very interesting talk on how we can make a great and successful team. She shared interesting facts to make failing team functional. It was good to see "Facebook Loves Fedora" and Facebook employees are using it. In this they shared their experience and challenges faced. After lunch I attended "The future of langpacks in Fedora", it was a great discussion on langpacks. In evening I attended Fedora CI by David and Tim Flink and Getting started with Fedora QA by Suprith Gangawar and Geoffrey Marr. Day 1 ended with Slideshow Karaoke organised by Amita and Adam Samalik.
The Netrunner development team has announced the availability of Netrunner 19.08, it’s code named as “Indigo”.
It is based upon Debian 10 “Buster” and comes with a few new updated software versions.
The Netrunner 19.08 ships with a brand new Look with combination of darker blue and lighter blue together with classic white like gray, the Breeze Icon theme.
Kali Linux team has renamed their meta-packages to more meaningful to understand it in a better way.
This implementation will optimize Kali, reduce ISO size, and organize meta-packages in a better way.
Some of you may already know about it, however, i will give you an overview about meta-package before discuss further on this topic.
What’s Meta-package?
Meta-packages are specialized packages, they do not contain any files usually found in packages.
Meta-package is a way to collect and group related software packages, they simply depend on other packages to be installed.
It allows entire sets of software to be installed by selecting only the appropriate meta-package.
Say for example, Each Linux desktop environments comes with a wide range of applications, it can be installed by running a single command because they were already grouped together.
This will reduce download requirements, i mean to say, this will obtain all the Gnome packages in one download.
Debian AH rebranded to the Debian Community Team (CT) after our sprint back in June. We had meetings, both following up on things that happened at the meeting and covering typical business. We created a draft of a new team mission statement, which was premiered, so to speak, at DebConf19.
I recently uploaded libjpeg-turbo 2.0.2-1~exp1 to Debian experimental. This has been the first upload of the 2.0.x release series of libjpeg-turbo.
After 3 further upload iterations (~exp4 that is), the package now builds on nearly all (except 3) architectures supported by Debian.
@all: Please Test
For those architectures that libjpeg-turbo 2.0.2-1~exp* is already available in Debian experimental, please start testing your applications on Debian testing/unstable systems with libjpeg-turbo 2.0.2-1~exp* installed from experimental. If you observe any peculiarities, please file bugs against src:libjpeg-turbo on Debian BTS. Thanks!
Please note: the major 2.x release series does not introduce an SOVERSION bump, so applications don't have to be rebuilt against the newer libjpeg-turbo. Simply drop-in-replace installed libjpeg62-turbo bin:pkg by the version from Debian experimental.
As in previous years we’re going to have an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisions, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 31st in Lyon, France, the day after ELC-E. This will be held at the Lyon Convention Center (the ELC-E venue), generously sponsored by Intel.
As with previous years let’s pull together an agenda through a mailing list discussion – this announcement has been posted to alsa-devel as well, the most convenient thing would be to follow up to it. Of course if we can sort things out more quickly via the mailing list that’s even better!
If you’re planning to attend please fill out the form here.
Long time not blogged about, however, there is a new release of nx-libs: nx-libs 3.5.99.22. What is nx-libs?
The nx-libs team maintains a software originally developed by NoMachine under the name nx-X11 (version 3) or shorter: NXv3. For years now, a small team of volunteers is continually improving, fixing and maintaining the code base (after some major and radical cleanups) of NXv3. NXv3 aka x2goagent has been the only graphical backend in X2Go [0], a remote desktop framework for Linux terminal servers, over the past years.
Canonical announces full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.16, starting with the beta release, with support covering the following installation mechanisms – kubeadm, Charmed Kubernetes, and MicroK8s.
The beta release of Kubernetes offers users an opportunity to test some of the upcoming features and to validate containerised workloads on the latest Kubernetes technology. It also offers the user community a chance to give early feedback on the next release, ensuring new features work as intended, and the existing features you rely upon haven’t regressed.
For quick, secure, and reliable Kubernetes installations in a single step, the MicroK8s beta channel will be updated with Kubernetes 1.16 beta. In addition to supporting the beta, the MicroK8s community has recently added one line installs of Helm and Cilium. With MicroK8s 1.16 beta you can develop and deploy Kubernetes 1.16 on any Linux desktop, server or VM across 42 Linux distros. Mac and Windows are supported with Multipass.
We’re excited to announce the release of MicroK8s 1.16 beta! MicroK8s is a lightweight and reliable Kubernetes cluster delivered as a single snap package – it can be installed on any Linux distribution which supports snaps or Windows and Mac using Multipass. MicroK8s is small and simple to install and is a great way to stand up a cluster quickly for development and testing. Try it on your laptop!
Android is the most popular mobile operating system and is continuing to grow its market share. IDC expects that Android will have 85.5% of the market by 2022, demonstrating that app development on Android will continue to be an in-demand skill.
For developers looking to build Android apps, Ubuntu is the ideal platform in conjunction with Android Studio – the official Android development environment. Ubuntu features a wide variety of software development tools including numerous programming language compilers, integrated development environments (IDEs) and toolchains to enable developers to target multiple hardware platforms.
Sometimes, relationships just don’t work out. At first, it seemed that Xibo and Linux were made for each other. Xibo had a popular open source digital signage and player system, while Linux brought a community of enthusiastic users. Dan Garner of Xibo remembers why they broke up in 2015: “Releasing our player on Linux was too heavy on development resources, we were a small team, and it was difficult to make deployment stable”.
So, Linux releases were shelved, much to the disappointment of users. Xibo’s software remained available as open source and as binaries. However, Linux users had to do the heavy lifting to install it and make it work. Hardcore fans often built their Xibo systems directly from the source code, creating a patchwork of different generations of the software in a universe outside Xibo’s mainstream activities.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to connect to Wi-Fi network from command line on Ubuntu 18.04/19.04 server and desktop using wpa_supplicant. In a modern home wireless network, communications are protected with WPA-PSK (pre-shared key) as opposed to WPA-Enterprise, which is designed for enterprise networks. WPA-PSK is also known as WPA-Personal. wpa_supplicant is an implementation of the WPA supplicant component. A supplicant in wireless LAN is a client software installed on end-user’s computer that needs to be authenticated in order to join a network.
Even though Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” is still currently under development and is due for release on October 17th, 2019. Arne Exton and the RaspEX Project have created the RaspEX Build 190807 release, designed to run on the latest Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC.
Apart from being based on the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” the new RaspEX release also includes packages from the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series and the open-source Linaro software for ARM SoCs, and it’s powered by the Linux 4.19.63 kernel. Arne Exton explains a little more :
“I have upgraded the whole system and replaced the old kernel 4.19.50-exton-v7+ with kernel 4.19.63-raspex-v7l+. RaspEX Build 190807 is a Linux ARM system for Raspberry Pi 4, 3 Model B, 3 Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2. It is based on Debian 10 Buster, Ubuntu 19.10 and Linaro (Open Source software for ARM SoCs),”
Just because your PC is mini doesn’t mean it can’t go big on its looks. If you want your Raspberry Pi 3 to look its absolute best, you can pick up a case for a cheap price. They’re not just for looks, either; they also protect the unit and can sometimes feature ventilation to keep things cool.
SinoVoip has launched the long-awaited Banana Pi BPI-R64, a quad-GbE router board that runs Linux on a dual-core -A53 MediaTek MT7622 and offers 802.11ac, BT 5.0, SATA, 40-pin GPIO, 2x mini-PCIe, and optional 4G and PoE.
SinoVoip’s Banana Pi project announced the Banana Pi BPI-R64 in early August of 2018. After a long gestation, the Linux-driven, quad-GbE Banana Pi BPI-R64 has touched down on AliExpress with a fetching $68 price.
On Kickstarter: a “Pi-oT” Raspberry Pi add-on complete with fan and DIN-rail mountable chassis that expresses the Pi’s GPIO with 26-pin terminal connectors that offer 5x relays, 8x ADCs, and power inputs.
A Cleveland-based startup called Pi-oT Hardware has gone to Kickstarter to launch a $40 and up Pi-oT automation add-on for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi-oT is available through Oct. 2, and if the campaign meets its modest $1,750 goal, it will ship later that month. On today’s launch day only, you can subtract $5 off the $40 (commercial) and $50 (industrial) prices, which will be 15 percent higher once the campaign concludes.
ODROID-N2 is an Amlogic S922X single board computer with 2GB or 4GB RAM that’s fairly popular thanks to its great performance/price ratio, good cooling, and decent support from Hardkernel...
Just announced by Innocomm are the SB30 and the SB50 SoMs carrying the MediaTek i300 and i500 SoC’s, and running either Linux or Android. The rundown on the systems is the MediaTek AIoT processor series has been out for some time, and we reported on the latest SoC in the MediaTek i700 article last July.
Earlier this summer we checked out the Logic Supply Karbon 300 as a well-built and very durable Linux-friendly PC for low-power environments. That Karbon 300 came equipped with a low-power Apollo Lake Atom processor while today the company announced the Karbon 700 with higher-wattage Core and Xeon CPU options for high performance IoT / edge computing.
The Karbon 700 series is built similarly well to the Karbon 300 series and a similar (but slightly larger) form factor while now being able to handle 35 Watt / 65 Watt Core CPUs or up to 80 Watt Xeon E "Coffeelake" processors.
Most phones today are disposable items, and if yours stops working for whatever reason it’s hard to repair it yourself work, and repairing it at the shop may prove to be too expensive. They are not really expandable either, so if you want a new feature, you may have to buy a completely new phone instead of simply adding a module with the functionality. The difficulty in repairing the phone and the lack of modularity leading to electronics waste. Finally, consumer products are cost-optimized, and that’s great for your wallet, but it may come at the cost of being made by slave labor either directly at the factory, or indirectly through the mining of materials. Aren’t you already feeling bad being complicit in destroying the planet and sponsoring human suffering while reading this on your device?
After being placed on a so-called Entity List by the U.S. federal government, severely restricting its access to American technology, Chinese tech giant and world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer Huawei is investigating using the Russian-made Aurora operating system as a replacement for Google’s Android OS on its mobile devices, Reuters reported on Monday.
As Reuters noted, Aurora is “Russia’s only OS and is not currently being used.” The project currently being discussed is installing the OS on hundreds of thousands of tablets slated to be used in Russia’s 2020 population census. However, one source told the news agency the census might be a test for using Aurora more broadly: “This is a pilot project. We see it as the first stage of launching the Russian OS on Huawei devices.”
Sometimes, the simplest questions take you on exciting journies. This was, in fact, the most powerful and motivating force that got me into doing computery things from a very young age. I would ask a question, how do I X? And after some poking around I discover that I can't do X without learning about Y and Some Authoritative Resource says you definitely can't do Y without also knowing the arcane black magic of Z. And so on and so forth until I get myself so buried in tangents that at a certain point, I have no choice but to stop and come up for air. Or a potty break and snack.
In the glamorous tech sector, we call these things rabbit holes. Unless you got into tech solely for the money (you monster), it's stuff like this that we nerds live for. It's how we got our start and crucially, it's how we continue to learn and hone our skillset.
But what, you ask, does a rabbit hole look like? And anyway, don't rabbits live in dens or burrows? First of all, nobody asked you to critique the metaphor. Second, I'll show you. This isn't the deepest or most complex rabbit hole that I've stumbled down but it is recent and that counts for something when I'm itching to write something. Please feel free to follow along on your own instance of Ubuntu 18.04 if you have one handy. When you log into such a host, you are greeted with 27 lines of this here nonsense: [...]
Once more free software activists from Vienna used the opportunity of the local vegan summer festival to inform about the possibility to increase our independence on computers and mobile devices. It was the second such event in Vienna this year. But unlike the first which was directly in the city center with loads of passers by this street festival took place in Viennas big recreation area on the island in the Danube river. It is rather close to the city center also and therefore many local people visit it in their spare time. The organisers estimated 9000 visitors per day.
The FSFE booth was manned there all the time from Saturday between 12:00 and 21:00 and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00. It had a great spot far enough away from the stage with live music in order to allow undisturbed conversations and still close enough to the other 90 stalls with drinks, food, merchantise and a variety of stalls on other subjects like animal welfare, veganism sustainability, shelters and environmental protection.
Since it was an outdoor event on a meadow and because we don’t own a tent we couldn’t hang-up our posters. We just used our umbrella to not be exposed directly to the strong summer sun. And we had huge luck with the weather. Shortly after the festival was closed down on Saturday heavy rain started and it lasted until shortly before the event started again the next day.
Over the years we have collected a few regulars on our information stalls who normally drop by but again mostly totally new people frequented our FSFE information desk. Many of them had no prior knowledge what free software is about. Most of the time we were engaged in conversations with interested people and many explicitly thanked us for being there. We frequently explained why we man an FSFE information stall on a vegan summer festival: If you use the same ethical considerations that lead people to adopt a vegan life style in information technology you end up with free software.
The word “regulation" gets tossed around a lot. And it’s often aimed at the internet’s Big Tech companies. Some worry that the size of these companies and the influence they wield is too much. On the other side, there’s the argument that any regulation is overreach — leave it to the market, and everything will sort itself out. But over the last year, in the midst of this regulation debate, a funny thing happened. Tech companies got regulated. And our right to privacy got a little easier to exercise.
Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna gives us the highlights of Europe’s sweeping GDPR privacy law, and explains how the law netted a huge fine against Spain’s National Football League. Twitter’s Data Protection Officer, Damien Kieran explains how regulation has shaped his new job and is changing how Twitter works with our personal data. Julie Brill at Microsoft says the company wants legislators to go further, and bring a federal privacy law to the U.S. And Manoush chats with Alastair MacTaggart, the California resident whose work led to the passing of the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The new trend among software vendors is to push towards online subscription models, even when the customer would rather stick to desktop software. Users need to keep paying in order to access the software – and therefore their documents. Their very own documents!
As we’ve seen, this can be disastrous for end users. If you can’t make a payment, or the “authentication server” doesn’t work, you lose access to your data. The Document Foundation, started to fight for digital freedoms, rejects this kind of model. We think powerful office tools should be free to use, share and modify.
LibreOffice, which is free, open source and developed by a worldwide community, doesn’t have subscriptions, or registrations, or yearly license fees, or anything like that. You can use it as you please (subject to the Mozilla Public License 2.0). You install LibreOffice on your own computer, and run it whenever and wherever you want. Even offline.
My first impression of SystemD was “why on earth do that?”. Digging a little, it became “What the? That’s not right.”. Now I’ve gone further into it via using it on a couple of platforms and had that sinking feeling when “everything you know is wrong, now” and had some inexplicable bad behaviours from those systems. (Things like a directory in which I was residing being apparently deleted and recreated and “kill -9 PID” not causing that Process ID to die.)
Pulse width modulation (PWM) is a widely-used concept in physics, electronics and telecommunications. It is defined as a form of signal modulation to derive analog waveforms from digital inputs.
In Arduino applications, PWM is useful in varying the intensity of a signal such as the brightness of an LED diode, the ping time of sensors or the power delivery of servomotors.
The other day we reported about GigaDevice GD32V general-purpose 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller, and one of the commenters asked whether it was rv32imac or rv32emac..
At Open Source Technology Summit (OSTS) 2019, Josh Triplett, a Principal Engineer at Intel gave an insight into what Intel is contributing to bring the most loved language, Rust to full parity with C. In his talk titled Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming, he also spoke about the history of systems programming, how C became the “default” systems programming language, what features of Rust gives it an edge over C, and much more.
Until now, OSTS was Intel’s closed event where the company’s business and tech leaders come together to discuss the various trends, technologies, and innovations that will help shape the open-source ecosystem. However, this year was different as the company welcomed non-Intel attendees including media, partners, and developers for the first time.
In past issues of Wing Tips we covered a number of the refactoring operations available in Wing Pro, such as renaming symbols, moving symbols, and introducing functions and methods. To finish our series on refactoring, let's take a look at how to introduce a variable based on existing Python code, using Wing Pro's Introduce Variable refactoring operation. This operation is used to replace selected occurrences of an expression with a new local variable, either to make code more readable or to avoid redundant computation.
Excel spreadsheets are one of those things you might have to deal with at some point. Either it’s because your boss loves them or because marketing needs them, you might have to learn how to work with spreadsheets, and that’s when knowing openpyxl comes in handy!
Spreadsheets are a very intuitive and user-friendly way to manipulate large datasets without any prior technical background. That’s why they’re still so commonly used today.
Shortly after, problems of this kind grew into a challenge of great significance for development of one of today's most popular fields in computer science - artificial intelligence. Some of the greatest accomplishments in artificial intelligence are achieved on the subject of strategic games - world champions in various strategic games have already been beaten by computers, e.g. in Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and most recently (2016) even Go.
Although these programs are very successful, their way of making decisions is a lot different than that of humans. The majority of these programs are based on efficient searching algorithms, and since recently on machine learning as well.
The Minimax algorithm is a relatively simple algorithm used for optimal decision-making in game theory and artificial intelligence. Again, since these algorithms heavily rely on being efficient, the vanilla algorithm's performance can be heavily improved by using alpha-beta pruning - we'll cover both in this article.
n previous posts, we learned how to use Python to detect group differences on a single dependent variable. However, there may be situations in which we are interested in several dependent variables. In these situations, the simple ANOVA model is inadequate.
One way to examine multiple dependent variables using Python would, of course, be to carry out multiple ANOVA. That is, one ANOVA for each of these dependent variables. However, the more tests we conduct on the same data, the more we inflate the family-wise error rate (the greater chance of making a Type I error).
This is where MANOVA comes in handy. MANOVA, or Multivariate Analysis of Variance, is an extension of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). However, when using MANOVA we have two, or more, dependent variables.
This week we welcome Frank Wiles (@fwiles) as our PyDev of the Week! Frank is the President and Founder of Revolution Systems and President of the Django Software Foundation. If you’d like to know about Frank, you should take a moment to check out his website or his Github account. For now, let’s take some time to get to know him better!
[...]
I switched to a new laptop a couple of months ago and am trying to do most everything in Docker containers and fully 12-Factor, which has the side benefit of things I would not normally release publicly can be. So I’m trying to code “in the open” a bit more than I used to.
I’m currently working on improving the docs around some of REVSYS’ open source projects like django-test-plus.
The Python ecosystem is full of strong options to address the first part of the solution. Django, Flask, Pyramid, Bottle, and any other web framework you can think of would handle that with ease.
The second part of the solution is harder. If I’m not careful, then being simple goes out the window, and I’ve destroyed the third objective.
During the interview, I was asked how I would like to have Python runnable in the browser and I couldn’t recall the name of a product that makes this sort of thing possible. The product I was thinking of was Anvil, which while still not quite having Python in the browser, it’s close.
Good software testing strategy is one of the best ways to save developer time and shorten software development delivery cycle time.
Software test suites grow from small quick suites at the beginning of a project to larger suites as we add tests, and the time to run the suites grows with it.
Fortunately, pytest has many tricks up it's sleave to help shorten those test suite times.
Software engineers are frequently faced with problems that have been fixed by other developers in different projects. The challenge is how and when to surface that information in a way that increases their efficiency and avoids wasted effort. DeepCode is an automated code review platform that was built to solve this problem by training a model on a massive array of open sourced code and the history of their bug and security fixes. In this episode their CEO Boris Paskalev explains how the company got started, how they build and maintain the models that provide suggestions for improving your code changes, and how it integrates into your workflow.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to deploy your Python based flask application to AWS Beanstalk.
There could be 2 ways to host your application to AWS beanstalk platform, one is using web interface of AWS beanstalk and another is Command Line Interface (CLI).
This is the 19th article in my series of articles on Python for NLP. From the last few articles, we have been exploring fairly advanced NLP concepts based on deep learning techniques. In the last article, we saw how to create a text classification model trained using multiple inputs of varying data types. We developed a text sentiment predictor using textual inputs plus meta information.
In this article, we will see how to develop a text classification model with multiple outputs. We will be developing a text classification model that analyzes a textual comment and predicts multiple labels associated with the comment. The multi-label classification problem is actually a subset of multiple output model. At the end of this article you will be able to perform multi-label text classification on your data.
The approach explained in this article can be extended to perform general multi-label classification. For instance you can solve a classification problem where you have an image as input and you want to predict the image category and image description.
At this point, it is important to explain the difference between a multi-class classification problem and a multi-label classification. In multi-class classification problem, an instance or a record can belong to one and only one of the multiple output classes. For instance, in the sentiment analysis problem that we studied in the last article, a text review could be either "good", "bad", or "average". It could not be both "good" and "average" at the same time. On the other hand in multi-label classification problems, an instance can have multiple outputs at the same time. For instance, in the text classification problem that we are going to solve in this article, a comment can have multiple tags. These tags include "toxic", "obscene", "insulting", etc., at the same time.
We are happy to announce our newest PSF Fellow Members! This group includes nominated Fellows from Q1 and Q2 of 2019.
For those of you who were not at EuroPython 2019, we’re happy to announce our new board for the next term: Anders Hammarquist (Treasurer) Angel Ramboi Jakub Musko Marc-André Lemburg (Chair) Martin Christen (Vice Chair) Raquel Dou Silvia Uberti Stéphane Wirtel
Python and other languages like Java, C#, and even C++ have had lambda functions added to their syntax, whereas languages like LISP or the ML family of languages, Haskell, OCaml, and F#, use lambdas as a core concept. Python lambdas are little, anonymous functions, subject to a more restrictive but more concise syntax than regular Python functions.
Did I need to read a fifteen hundred page book to learn Python? At the end of fourteen hundred pages, I can safely assure you, I did not.
If you want to just solve your pressing issues or scratch your itch, or just plain get started with programming (and programming in Python specifically), I’d recommend starting with a simple, fast paced book, like Python for you and me, and then doing tons of practice.1
Mark Lutz, as he closes the book, himself laments that Python has gotten too big to hold in your head. And by doing so, has lost some of the simplicity and the joy and fun and the magic, Python held for the early adopters of the language.
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface.1 At a time when most computers filled rooms, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) took up just a cubic foot. This blog post discusses the small but complex switching power supplies that helped make the AGC compact enough to fit onboard the spacecraft.
Some retailers removed BPA-coated receipt paper, but replaced it with nearly identical bisphenol substances, like BPS, according to the groups, which include Environmental Defence, the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, and Breast Cancer Action Quebec. They say these coatings pose a risk to retail workers and consumers.
"The notion that ... by doing one's job that one is being exposed to these toxins would quite naturally concern us," said Derek Johnstone, a spokesman for the UFCW Canada, which represents thousands of cashiers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and xymon), openSUSE (putty and vlc), Red Hat (kernel and ruby), Scientific Linux (advancecomp, bind, binutils, blktrace, compat-libtiff3, curl, dhcp, elfutils, exempi, exiv2, fence-agents, freerdp and vinagre, ghostscript, glibc, gvfs, http-parser, httpd, kde-workspace, keepalived, kernel, keycloak-httpd-client-install, libarchive, libcgroup, libguestfs-winsupport, libjpeg-turbo, libmspack, libreoffice, libsolv, libssh2, libtiff, libvirt, libwpd, linux-firmware, mariadb, mercurial, mod_auth_openidc, nss, nss-softokn, nss-util, and nspr, ntp, opensc, openssh, openssl, ovmf, patch, perl-Archive-Tar, polkit, poppler, procps-ng, python, python-requests, python-urllib3, qemu-kvm, qt5, rsyslog, ruby, samba, sox, spice-gtk, sssd, systemd, tomcat, udisks2, unixODBC, unzip, uriparser, Xorg, zsh, and zziplib), Slackware (kernel), and SUSE (ardana-ansible, ardana-db, ardana-freezer, ardana-glance, ardana-input-model, ardana-nova, ardana-osconfig, ardana-tempest, caasp-openstack-heat-templates, crowbar-core, crowbar-ha, crowbar-openstack, crowbar-ui, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, galera-python-clustercheck, openstack-cinder, openstack-glance, openstack-heat, openstack-horizon-plugin-monasca-ui, openstack-horizon-plugin-neutron-fwaas-ui, openstack-ironic, openstack-keystone, openstack-manila, openstack-monasca-agent, openstack-monasca-api, openstack-monasca-persister, openstack-monasca-persister-java, openstack-murano, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-gbp, openstack-neutron-lbaas, openstack-nova, openstack-octavia, python-Beaver, python-oslo.db, python-osprofiler, python-swiftlm, venv-openstack-magnum, venv-openstack-monasca, venv-openstack-monasca-ceilometer, venv-openstack-murano, venv-openstack-neutron and qemu).
Safely tucked away in the sub-basement server dungeon of Linux Format Towers, were largely unaware of the icecream-melting heat of these summer days, though the walls are left mighty dannk from the river Avon worming its way through the ground towards our self-imposed entombment.
What does worry us though is the creeping threat of ransomware attacks and social engineering of our feeble human brains. So we tasked Jonni – inbetween tea making runs – to write a guide on how to beat ransomware, better protect from social engineering attacks and more! I
This is a little outside of my normal blatherings format but after stumbling upon a video from Red Robbo’s YouTube channel. I wanted to investigate his claims that maybe, just maybe the security mitigations that I have chosen they are a bit excessive for my use case. Recently, openSUSE has added a feature to make this easily user adjustable. Since they made it easy, obviously, someone far smarter than I am has decided that some of the mitigations may be excessive and not worth the performance loss for all use cases. I written about the mitigations some time ago and how it is fun to see all that is being implemented. Maybe it’s time to dial it back.
Rootkits originated in the early days of UNIX-based systems. They can be broadly defined as a collection of malicious software and tools used to exploit security vulnerabilities in any UNIX operating system.
But in modern parlance, since Windows systems dominate the cyber ecosystem, rootkits have a much narrower definition — those that target Windows systems. They are divided into those that restrict themselves to the software space (user) of the OS, and those that delve into the deeper levels with direct firmware access (kernel).
Why nothing is working in cyber security?
Cameron has traced the modification to an incident in April last year involving the Webmin development build server being exploited. The vulnerability was added to one of Webmin's scripts, and the timestamp of the modified script was set back so that the modification was not detected.
The same backdoor is present in versions 1.900 to 1.920 of the tool, but is only exploitable if an administrator had enabled the feature to allow the changing of expired passwords.
Blazing forests cannot dampen climate change, tree loss will worsen it, and poorly nourished trees will make the next century more challenging.
Brazil’s president has destroyed the protection enacted by his predecessors, leaving an Amazon inferno to torch the rainforest.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) will not let 2020 primary candidates share the stage in a debate devoted to the climate crisis, the party voted Saturday during its summer meeting in San Francisco.
The DNC resolutions committee had already voted against holding a party-sanctioned debate on the topic Thursday, but it did approve language that would have allowed candidates to speak face-to-face on the issue at a third-party sponsored event. That compromise was voted down 222-137 Saturday, CNN reported. CNN and MSNBC both plan to hold climate forums in September, but the candidates will have to speak separately and will not be able to engage each other.
"This decision is as baffling as it is alarming," candidate and former Texas Representative Beto O'Rourke tweeted of the decision. "Our planet is burning—the least we can do as a party is debate what to do about it."
Billionaire libertarian activist and oil industry tycoon David Koch died on Friday, leaving a toxic legacy that includes helping birth the climate denial movement, fighting against regulations that protect worker and public health, and — critical to our work here on DeSmog's KochvsClean project — helping fund and coordinate a decades-long attack on clean energy and low carbon energy solutions.
Six years after the oil train derailment and explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec — which claimed 47 lives and destroyed the downtown of this small lakeside town — The New York Times reviewed what progress has been made since the disaster, with a headline that noted “Deadly Cargo Still Rides the Rails.”
However, Railway Age, the leading rail industry publication, attacked The Times' coverage in an incredibly flawed critique. The title of finance editor David Nahass's take-down is “Clickbait Journalism at The New York Times.”
Responding to reports of a possble cut to fuel duty (1), Green peer Jenny Jones has said:
"The UK has declared a climate emergency, there's grave global concern about the Amazon, 'the lungs of the world', being consumed by fire, and yet what we hear from our Prime Minister is the floating of a populist policy that he hopes will win over the votes of Brexit Party backers. "Thus is Boris Johnson boosterism exposed as the nakedly self-interested, short-termist approach that it is. It has not the interests of the British people or the fragile, threatened planet at heart, but the political interests of one man. "This is no way to run a country."
Wildlife advocates got a much-needed win recently when the EPA withdrew its support for M-44 “cyanide bombs” used to kill coyotes and other animals. The devices — which attract animals with tasty bait and then inject a deadly dose of sodium cyanide into their mouths — have been used for decades by a USDA program called Wildlife Services to eliminate animals that are perceived as threats to agricultural interests.
The announcement came just five days after the EPA re-approved the use of M-44s, a move that generated outcry from around the country.
While this success is noteworthy, M-44s are just one of the weapons in Wildlife Service’s arsenal. The program’s staff uses a variety of additional tools and methods to complete their tasks, including several that wildlife advocates consider to be cruel and inhumane.
These methods add up. All told Wildlife Services killed 2.6 million animals in 2018, including 1.1 million invasive species and 1.5 million native animals.
John Meek, curator of animals at the zoo, said: “The birth of this little one is a great effort towards the conservation of this species and towards the captive breeding programme Newquay Zoo is involved in.
“Mum and baby are doing great! Dessi is very protective over her first born and has taken to motherhood extremely well.”
Despite the species’ conservation status of Least Concern, black wildebeest are a rare species as a result of over-hunting and hybridisation with the blue wildebeest.
