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Links 6/11/2019: Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS Torronsuo and WordPress 5.3 RC4



  • GNU/Linux

    • Is Difficult to Switch Operating System From Windows to Linux?

      I got this question on one of the Q&A sites. On the site, I also respond to this question that was asked of me. This time I want to discuss it in this post. So how do I respond to this question?

    • Desktop

      • Chrome OS Virtual Desks, Click-to-Call now available on some Chromebooks

        With the new PixelBook Go, Google is positioning Chromebooks as the ultimate productivity computer, especially on the go. It may not always feel that way considering the missing features and software on Chrome OS. Fortunately, just like the browser on which it is based, Chrome OS is constantly and regularly evolving and the latest update brings new features that promise to take users’ productivity to the next level.

      • Chrome OS 78 Rolls Out to Chromebooks with Improved Linux Support, Virtual Desks

        Google has released today the Chrome OS 78 operating system for Chromebooks, a release that will arrive to users over the next several days and which brings several exciting new features, such as the Virtual Desks functionality we reported the other day, allowing Chromebook users to be more productive.

        "You can now create up to 4 separate work spaces. Virtual Desks are for focusing on a single project or for quickly switching between multiple sets of windows. Create your first desk by opening Overview and tapping New Desk," said Google in the release notes.

    • Server

      • IBM

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1 arrives with live kernel patching

          Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1, the first point release since RHEL 8 launched back in May. While point releases in the Linux world don’t tend to bring big changes, RHEL 8.1 does. One of the key highlights with this update is the availability of live kernel patching, allowing systems to be updated without having to go offline for a reboot.

          Unlike some other operating systems, Linux rarely has to reboot for patches to be applied which is great for businesses that use Linux to run servers that need to be online for as much time as possible. One of the exceptions to this rule is kernel patches, they tend to require a whole system reboot to be applied but live kernel patching resolves this issue without a restart; this will help businesses to keep their services running around the clock.

        • NethServer 7.7 Cockpit Edition Linux OS Arrives with Nextcloud 17, UI Changes

          The Cockpit Edition of NethServer 7.7, which is based on CentOS 7.7, is now complete and available by default on new installations, making server administration easier with a modern, redesigned and user-friendly web UI, as well as improved usability and new features.

          "We're confident that it will be as always a great release and it will achieve our mission: making sysadmin’s life easier. This is thanks to the most vibrant, supportive and friendly community in the Open Source space (and not only Open Source)," said Alessio Fattorini in the release announcement.

        • Reducing service downtimes due to human error

          An important benefit of the Red Hat subscription for customers is the support. As Technical Account Managers (TAMs), we try to understand patterns behind the issues we are investigating together with our customers and partners. One of the recurring questions is: how can I reduce downtimes due to mistakes by the system operators?

        • Red Hat Shares ― Open processes, culture, and technology
        • Red Hat drives future of Java with cloud-native, container-first Quarkus

          Today, Red Hat and the Quarkus community announced Quarkus 1.0. Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java stack that is crafted from best-of-breed Java libraries and standards, and tailored for containers and cloud deployments. The overall goal of Quarkus is to bring Java into a cloud-native application development future and enable it to become a leading platform for serverless, cloud and Kubernetes environments. With Quarkus, we believe Java can be better equipped to scale in the modern application development landscape, while also improving at a faster clip.

          The release, which is scheduled to become available at the end of November, is the culmination of work by Red Hat and the community to add features, bug fixes and performance improvements since the project was introduced in March 2019.

        • Red Hat Is Still Hiring To Work On The Linux Desktop + Open-Source Graphics

          Red Hat continues hiring developers to work on the open-source upstream graphics stack and other Linux desktop innovations.

          Just a few months back they were hiring and that resulted in a long-time ATI/AMD developer to join Red Hat and their already several member Linux graphics team. Now it turns out they are hiring at least one more.

          A new job posting is looking for a senior software engineer to focus on desktop security issues as well as their "desktop and graphics offerings."

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Dell, elementary, Fedora, oh my! | LINUX Unplugged 326

        Dell expands their linux hardware lineup, why elementary OS's Flatpak support sets the bar, and we chat with Christian Schaller of Red Hat about Fedora 31 and what's around the corner.

        Plus an update on Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 4 and a pick that's just for Wes.

      • Episode 86 | This Week in Linux

        On this episode of This Week in Linux, we take a look a few distros that were released with Fedora 31, MX Linux 19, and Tails 4.0. GNOME files a counter-claim against the patent troll that is suing Shotwell and we’ll take a look at the NordVPN hack.

      • mintCast 321 - Celluloid Service

        First up, in our Wanderings, Leo finally gets upgraded to kernel 5.3, Tony Hughes tries out Ubuntu 19.10, Moss fights with Ubuntu Mate 19.10, Joe picks up an HP tablet to fix, and Tony Watts has a new guitar.

        Then, our news Firefox, MX, Tails and Fedora all have new releases, and we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News.

      • Manjaro 18.1.0 KDE Edition – Features KDE Plasma 5.16 and Powered by Linux Kernel 5.2

        Manjaro, the Linux distribution based on Arch has just put out a major new release with Manjaro 18.1.0 with the codename “Juhraya”. This release brings numerous improvements, especially with regard to Office productivity applications and package management.

        Manjaro 18.10 offers Office Suite Freeoffice 2018 by SoftMaker during installation. Also, introduce a new software store named “bauh” (formerly fpakman) the graphical package manager for both Snaps and Flatpak giving you the best of all worlds. So Manjaro now supports Snaps, Flatpaks and the Arch AUR. This means that Manjaro users now have three choices of application installation in the GUI.

      • Nathan Wolf: Noodlings | DLN Xtend, Universal Packages and CAD

        I’d like to say I must be doing something right when I end up on a couple podcasts or perhaps it means a laps in judgment by many others. I want to thank everyone that has taken time out of their busy day to listen to these noodlings.

        [...]

        A few weeks ago, I was asked to be a part of the Destination Linux Network to which, without any though or consideration, seemingly on both sides, I said yes.

        Started this podcast with Eric Adams called DLN Xtend. To be completely fair, he really carries the show, as you can tell by these noodlings of mine, I can barely carry myself.

        I rather enjoy talking to Eric, we both geek out over so many tech topics. He has a different bend to his Linux and technology implementation views.

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.3.9
        I'm announcing the release of the 5.3.9 kernel.
        
        

        All users of the 5.3 kernel series must upgrade.

        The updated 5.3.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.3.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

        thanks,

        greg k-h
      • Linux 4.19.82
      • Linux 4.14.152
      • Linux 4.9.199
      • Linux 4.4.199
      • Does SMT still make sense?

        Whatever machine you’re reading this on, it’s highly likely that not all of the CPUs shown by the OS are actually physical processors. That’s because most modern processors use simultaneous multithreading (SMT) to improve performance by executing tasks in parallel.

        Intel’s implementation of SMT is known as hyperthreading, and it was originally introduced in 2002 as a way to improve the performance of Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs that didn’t require increasing the clock frequency. Most Intel CPUs supported the HyperThread Technology (HTT) apart from the Core line of products until the Nehalem microarchitecture which was introduced in 2008. Recently, Intel have announced that they’re moving away from hyperthreading again with their Core product line.

        AMD too have dabbled with SMT, and the diagram below shows how SMT works in the Zen microarchitecture.

      • Freedreno's MSM DRM Driver Getting Support For Older Adreno Parts On Linux 5.5

        Rob Clark and his gang working on the Freedreno/MSM driver stack have prepared their kernel driver changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

        Besides fixes and other code cleaning to the MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver, Linux 5.5 will see support for some older Qualcomm Adreno parts with this reverse-engineered open-source driver.

      • Short Topix: Kernel Lockdown Feature Coming To Linux

        Coming to the Linux Kernel 5.4 branch, the Linux Security Module (LSM) will prevent "high level" access -- in some cases, even root -- from tampering with kernel functionality, according to an article on ZDnet. The feature will (at least initially) be turned off by default, because of the possibility that it might "break" existing systems.

        Here's an excerpt from the description on the git.kernel.org website:

        This patchset introduces an optional kernel lockdown feature, intended to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel. When enabled, various pieces of kernel functionality are restricted. Applications that rely on low-level access to either hardware or the kernel may cease working as a result - therefore this should not be enabled without appropriate evaluation beforehand.

        The LSM should strengthen security by widening the division between userland and the kernel. The new module should restrict certain kernel functionality, even for the root user. This should make it harder for compromised root accounts to wreak havoc on the rest of the operating system.

        The LSM module has two lockdown modes. "If set to integrity, kernel features that allow userland to modify the running kernel are disabled," said Torvalds. "If set to confidentiality, kernel features that allow userland to extract confidential information from the kernel are also disabled."

        The new lockdown feature got its start in the early 2010s, and was spearheaded by Matthew Garrett, now a Google engineer. The main objections to it came from Linus Torvalds, as evidenced in this 2013 article on ArsTechnica (warning: adult language at link). As a result, some Linux vendors (such as RedHat) created their own security module separate from the kernel, that ran on top of the kernel. A middle ground was reached between the parties in 2018, and work has progressed from there.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Additional Intel "ANV" Vulkan Driver Performance Numbers For Gen11 Ice Lake Graphics

          Complementing the earlier Intel Ice Lake "Gen11" graphics comparison and the Windows vs. Linux Ice Lake graphics driver numbers, here are some additional Vulkan data points in different Linux and Steam Play games.

        • GPU Passthrough For FreeBSD's Bhyve Can Work But Is Fairly Rudimentary

          FreeBSD's Bhyve hypervisor has had a wild ride over the past half-decade of development for advancing BSD virtualization support. Bhyve is mostly used on the server front but can also fill some desktop use-cases now that there is GPU pass-through support working albeit not yet polished.

        • RADV Lands VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control For Exposing Wave32 On Navi/GFX10

          Valve open-source developer Samuel Pitoiset has landed his work enabling the Vulkan VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control extension that for GFX10/Navi is being used to expose Wave32 capabilities.

          Samuel's work has landed for this Vulkan extension that allows for a varying subgroup size and allows for compute shaders to use Wave32 as supported with GFX10 hardware. Another caveat though is the current implementation only works with the AMDGPU LLVM back-end and not yet the ACO shader back-end.

    • Applications

      • Daniel Stenberg: curl 7.67.0

        There has been 56 days since curl 7.66.0 was released. Here comes 7.67.0!

        This might not be a release with any significant bells or whistles that will make us recall this date in the future when looking back, but it is still another steady step along the way and thanks to the new things introduced, we still bump the minor version number. Enjoy!

        As always, download curl from curl.haxx.se.

      • SINIT - The small cousin in the init family

        Sinit is part of the suckless tools, these tools was designed to be as small and efficient as possible. In the effort to make them small, they also do away with many features. It is for this reason, you may want to use them, it is also why you have to use something else. To deploy these, you will need to decide what features you need and compile them in. This is why you can push 'small' to the extremes with the sinit package. The downside is that you must do many things yourself, this includes finding that other system to control daemons.

      • Libcamera Is Becoming An Increasingly Viable Open-Source Camera Support Implementation

        With more cameras moving their image processing operations from micro-controllers to the CPU to save on manufacturing, libcamera was started last year to serve as an open-source camera support library across Linux / Android / ChromeOS for supporting these modern cameras.

        Libcamera is now working with the likes of UVC cameras, the Rockchip RK3399 hardware, the Intel IPU3, and work-in-progress Raspberry Pi support.

      • Zstd 1.4.4 Released With Faster Compression & Decompression Support

        Facebook has released Zstd 1.4.4 today as the newest implementation of their increasingly used Zstanard compression algorithm.

        While just a point release, Zstd 1.4.4 brings with it performance improvements. Zstd 1.4.4 is said to be about 10% faster for decompression performance compared to the earlier v1.4.3 release.

      • Proprietary

        • Microsoft confirms Edge Chromium is finally coming to Linux early next year
        • Microsoft to launch Edge browser for linux
        • Sorry, Microsoft, but your Edge web browser will NEVER be installed on my Linux computer

          As you may know, I am a big proponent of Linux on the desktop. I prefer Fedora to both Windows 10 and macOS, and I use the operating system regularly to get work done. Over the years, I went from being a minority as a desktop Linux user, to... well... OK, fine, we desktop Linux users are still a minority. But hey, we are getting more respect every year, and people are increasingly turning to Chromebooks, which run the Linux-based Chrome OS. More and more developers, including Microsoft, are releasing software for Linux too.

          With all of that said, I probably should be excited that Microsoft is bringing its Chromium-based Edge to Linux. After all, it is another indicator that Linux is gaining mainstream support. Not to mention, who can be mad at having just another web browser option? Me, that's who. You see, Microsoft's Edge browser will NEVER be installed on my Linux computer.

        • Back to windows after twenty years

          See, the whole reason I thought Windows might be a suitable alternative for me was all the enthusiasm around Windows Linux Subsystem (WSL). Basically putting all the *nix tooling at your fingertips, like it is on OSX, in a way that doesn’t require crazy hoops.

          But it’s just not there. The first version of WSL is marred with terrible file-system performance, and I got to feel that right away, when I spent eons checking out a git repository via GitHub for Windows. A 10-second operation on OSX took 5-6 minutes on Windows.

          [...]

          Windows still clearly isn’t for me. And I wouldn’t recommend it to any of our developers at Basecamp. But I kinda do wish that more people actually do make the switch. Apple needs the competition. We need to feel like there are real alternatives that not only are technically possible, but a joy to use. We need Microsoft to keep improving, and having more frustrated Apple users cross over, point out the flaws, and iron out the kinks, well, that’s only going to help.

        • These Machines Can Put You in Jail. Don’t Trust Them.

          The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, and in many cases they haven’t been properly calibrated, yielding results that were at times 40 percent too high. Maintaining machines is up to police departments that sometimes have shoddy standards and lack expertise. In some cities, lab officials have used stale or home-brewed chemical solutions that warped results. In Massachusetts, officers used a machine with rats nesting inside.

          Technical experts have found serious programming mistakes in the machines’ software. States have picked devices that their own experts didn’t trust and have disabled safeguards meant to ensure the tests’ accuracy.

          The Times interviewed more than 100 lawyers, scientists, executives and police officers and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of court records, corporate filings, confidential emails and contracts. Together, they reveal the depth of a nationwide problem that has attracted only sporadic attention.

        • Uber’s Self-Driving Car Didn’t Know Pedestrians Could Jaywalk

          The software inside the Uber self-driving SUV that killed an Arizona woman last year was not designed to detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, according to new documents released as part of a federal investigation into the incident. That’s the most damning revelation offered up in a trove of new documents related to the crash, but other details indicate that, in a variety of ways, Uber’s self-driving car work failed to consider how humans actually operate.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Internet Archive Releases 2,500 More MS-DOS Games

        Most of us here can remember the bunches and bunches of high quality MS-DOS games that were around in the late 80s and into the 90s. I know we all had our favorites. One of the very first games I got inextricably "hooked" on was Wolfenstein 3D, from id Software. I can't even begin to calculate how many hours I sat in front of that computer screen, much to the dismay of my then wife, playing that game.

        Thus began my pseudo love affair with the games from id Software. I graduated from all things Wolfenstein to all things Doom. Then I moved from all things Doom to all things Quake. In between, I also found games like Descent and The Daedalus Encounter to also consume large amounts of my time.

        I was never much good at any of them, but they were still fun to play. To this day, while I'm definitely NOT a gamer, I find them all still fun to play. Especially the Wolfenstein games, which fit nicely with my intense interest in all things related to World War II. Even while writing this article, it was hard to pull myself away from playing Wolfenstein 3D.

      • Looks like Valve could be set to launch something called Steam Cloud Gamin

        We have Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, Xbox Game Streaming and more but what about Valve with Steam? Well, sounds like Steam Cloud Gaming is coming.

        For those who don't remember or perhaps aren't regular readers, I actually wrote an article back in November 2018 describing how I thought Valve would launch such a service. Well, there's more pointing towards me being right in some way about that.

      • The FOSS rendering engine OGRE is being ported to Vulkan

        Some fun news for game developers and the Vulkan ecosystem as another FOSS rendering engine is being ported over to Vulkan.

        It's very early days yet though, to be clear on that. In a blog post written by developer Matias Goldberg, they confirmed "Yes, we’re working on Vulkan support." a

      • Another big SteamVR update is out now, with plenty of Linux fixes for VR enthusiasts

        SteamVR 1.8 is now out of Beta and with it, comes plenty of updates to the whole system with some big audio changes and some good sounding Linux fixes.

        The biggest changes seem to be on the audio side of SteamVR with this release. By default, SteamVR will now select the correct audio input and output devices that actually belong to the active VR HMD. Valve said this works with the Index, Vive, Vive Pro, Rift and Rift S. OpenVR HMD drivers will also "in the near future" be able to tell SteamVR about audio devices too, so that's great. They've updated the settings UI too, to reflect this as you can override the audio input/output. Additionally, if you saw your audio settings vanish after updates, they fixed multiple problems there. There's plenty more, like SteamVR now actually restoring audio settings to their correct prior state, Index HMDs default to 40% audio instead of 100% when run for the first time, so newer users shouldn't get such a shock and so on.

      • Psyonix talk more about the upcoming Blueprint system for Rocket League

        Coming soon to Rocket League is the replacement of loot boxes, part of this is the new previously announced Blueprint system and Psyonix are now ready to talk a little more about it.

        Once the update goes live (next month), you will earn revealed Blueprints from playing online matches. You can use credits to then build whatever it is, trade it or keep it in your inventory. A much clearer system than loot boxes that's for sure. As a reminder, any loot boxes you have left when it goes live will turn into special unrevealed Blueprints.

      • Transport Fever 2 confirmed for release on December 11, Linux support included

        Entering the GOL mailbox today is an announcement about Transport Fever 2 getting a release date! It's arriving on December 11, with Linux support ready for release.

        Developed by Urban Games and publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment, they're saying that Transport Fever 2 gives you more than 150 years of real-world technology and history to design and master your own transportation empire with a vastly improved feature set, user interface and modding capabilities. You will be building vast transport networks across land, sea and air with over 200 "realistically modeled vehicles" from Europe, America and Asia.

      • Wilderness survival game Wayward has a massive feature update

        Seemingly stranded on an unknown island, Wayward is an indie pixel-art game of surviving in the wilderness. No character classes with special skills, here you level up and progress by your interactions with the world. You go at your own pace, do what you want. Just survive.

        After a long wait, the big 2.8 update has landed adding in some huge new features. Three new creatures, one of which has a special secret unique mechanic apparently. Over 30 new items and crafts made it into the game, the ability to refine items to reduce their weight, new tile variations, a big new "Milestone Modifiers" mechanic that grants you specials upon the completion of in-game achievements and more.

      • Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition Released for Linux

        Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is now available on Linux and macOS.

        The third entry in the rebooted Tomb Raider ‘origins’ series, Shadow pits Lara Croft against the “impenetrable jungles of Central America”, sees her explore underwater environments, and take on a rogue paramilitary organisation known as Trinity.

        The Linux and macOS ports of the game, which received fairly decent reviews on its console debut, is handled by Feral Interactive.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Ismael Olea: Congress/Conference organization tasks list draft

          Well, when checking my blog looking for references about resources related with conferences organization I’ve found I had any link to this thing I compiled two years ago (!!??). So this post is fixing it.

          After organizing a couple national and international conferences I compiled a set of tasks useful as an skeleton for you next conference. The list is not absolutely exhaustive neither strictly formal but it’s complete enough to be, I think, accurate and useful. In its current this task list is published at tree.taiga.io as Congress/Conference organization draft: €«a simplified skeleton of a kanban project for the organization of conferences. It’s is specialized in technical and opensource activities based in real experience€».

    • Distributions

      • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

        • Mind Your Step, Part 3

          On September 30th, Forever 21 filed bankruptcy and subsequently, all of its stores closed down. GameStop is predicted to be the next retailer to go.

          GameStop started out as Electronics Boutique back in the 1990s, which was itself spun off from Waldenbooks, of which it, competitor Borders and Builder's Square were purchased by K-Mart Corporation (pre-Sears)...and we all know what happened there. GameStop was spared its demise since it was spun off from Waldenbooks.

          I remember Electronics Boutique well, because not only did it sell video games and gaming consoles, but it also sold PC software. It is there where I purchased copies of Lotus Improv, Turbo Pascal for Windows and Turbo C++ for Windows. (I was running OS/2 at that time.)

          GameStop is still a functioning retailer, but for how long? Last time I was in a GameStop, they sold the major consoles and all the popular games. For a while, they were selling second hand iPhones and Android powered smartphones. Other than that, there is a 50/50 mix of new and used gaming hardware and software, including some PC-based titles that could run on Wine.

          At times, I would find a MS-DOS based title now and then, but even that is becoming a rarity. (A better source for MS-DOS titles would be a thrift store such as Goodwill.)

          What could ultimately kill GameStop would be the next generation of gaming consoles, which would require a high speed internet connection to function as all games would be online games (i.e. no CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs needed). The currently available Sony PlayStation 4 largely depends on the Internet to function.

        • De-Googling Yourself

          Last month, we paused this series of articles to address Richard Stallman's departure from the FSF presidency. Now let's get back to our subject, which is to introduce alternative services to Google's.

        • PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: rolgiati

          Why and when did you start using Linux?

          When: In the days when Slackware became available on the Walnut Creek CDROM (and not a stack of 20-odd 3.5" floppies). It must have been 1993 or 1994, when one had to buy Mosaic to surf the web, because there were no free browsers then

          Why: In four words "Blue Screen Of Death". Got fed up with the inadequacy of MS Windows, read about Linux, got the Slackware CD and was hooked. Later, I moved to Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia, flirted with Debian (then Devuan when the Poettering Plague started spreading), and finally PCLOS where I rejoiced in finding again all the Drak/Drax tools I had been sorely missing in Debian/Devuan.

        • Screenshot Showcase
        • Special Drivers In PCLinuxOS, Part 1
        • Texstar Taking Care Of Business
      • Fedora Family

        • Upgrading syslog-ng PE from version 6 to 7

          Learn the major steps necessary to upgrade your system from syslog-ng Premium Edition version 6 to 7. As you will see, it is no more difficult than any other major software version upgrade, and after the upgrade you can start using all the new and useful features that are available in version 7.

          Version 7 of syslog-ng Premium Edition (PE) brought quite a lot of changes compared version 6. The main reason for this was that syslog-ng PE source code was synchronized with syslog-ng Open Source Edition (OSE), and initially many of the PE specific features were unavailable in version 7. It also meant, that direct upgrade between version 6 and 7 was not possible.

          There are many new features in syslog-ng PE version 7 and most of the old features are available again. Due to this people started to upgrade their old installations and easy upgrade between the two versions became an important topic. Obviously, as with any major software upgrades, there are some limitations, but you do not need start an installation from scratch if you want to migrate from syslog-ng PE version 6 to 7.

          Making upgrades easy needed two major changes in syslog-ng PE 7. One is providing backwards compatibility to the old way of configuring features together with warning messages related to changes. The other is handling the persists file – a file containing internal syslog-ng data, like the position until syslog-ng read a source – from the old syslog-ng version properly. Starting with syslog-ng PE 7.0.17 both are handled properly.

        • The Changes that November Brought

          I realized that Fedora 31 had been released on October 29, so I decided to install it to my laptop three days ago.

          Putting on the Fedora is a touchy operation: generally, installing this distro implies a fresh install keeping my home partition, running DNF commands to install the RPM fusion repo afterwards, and finally configuring my brand new Fedora desktop. Although that sounds pretty standard, the problem lies on the fact that I am dealing with a laptop that has OpenMandriva Lx 4, Mageia 7, PCLinuxOS, Elive 3.0, PicarOS Diego, and Pisi Linux. The changes that Fedora makes to the OpenMandriva-controlled GRUB2 regularly lead to a kernel panic in OpenMandriva and a slow start in Mageia.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Top 10 App Launchers for Ubuntu that You Can Get Used To

          People who have experience working over different operating systems and desktops will know how useful app launchers are when you want a subtle change in your working environment. Application launchers are software whose main goal is to start and locate other computer programs. They are more interactive, include a variety of themes and transform the way your traditional desktop environment looks like.

          For Ubuntu users, there is a default app launcher already installed – called the GNOME Shell Applications Overview. However, if you’re looking to switch to any other app launchers which are more capable than the default one, you’ve got to read this.

        • Ubuntu Touch Q&A 62

          Unity8 from 2017 (plus many patches) and Mir 1.x have arrived in Ubuntu Touch releases on the devel channel. Read more at What's this Edge merge anyway?

          OTA-12 is off to a great start even without these changes, with fixes to private mode coming in this week.

          Ubports Installer 0.4 has been released

          After months of effort to refactor and re-implement parts of the installer, Jan was pleased to announce the release of the UBports Installer 0.4. This release features a new task-based config file format that allows the Installer to act on many types of Android or Android-like devices. It also makes the Installer far more versatile, now able to install custom Android distributions and Ubuntu Touch alike. It can even boot AsteroidOS on a smartwatch.

          The config file format has enabled us to bring support for the Sony Xperia X and Oneplus 3 (and 3T) to the installer as well. Both of these devices have very advanced (but not yet perfect!) hardware support and installing is easy with only a few clicks. For more information, please see the respective threads for the Sony Xperia X and Oneplus 3(T).

        • UBports Begins Offering Ubuntu Touch 64-Bit ARM Images

          While Ubuntu Touch has run on AArch64 hardware, to date their builds have been focused on 32-bit mode support. Fortunately, for select devices, they are now spinning 64-bit images.

          Besides being able to support more than 4GB of RAM with ease, the 64-bit images have resulted in applications launching faster and perform better thans to the ARMv8 architecture.

        • Ubuntu Touch Is Now Finally Available as 64-Bit ARM Images for Ubuntu Phones

          The UBports community has announced today that its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phones is now finally available to download as 64-bit ARM images.

          After announcing last week an updated Ubuntu Touch Installer that adds support for the OnePlus 3, OnePlus 3T, and Sony Xperia X Android smartphones as Ubuntu Phones, UBports has released today 64-bit ARM images of Ubuntu Touch for the Sony Xperia X and OnePlus 3 and 3T phones for a faster and more optimized experience.

        • Yahoo! Japan builds their IaaS environment with Canonical

          Yahoo! Japan, originally formed as a joint venture between Yahoo! and SoftBank, is one of the most popular internet advertising, search engines and e-commerce sites in the country and employs over 6000 people.

          Due to having such scale and volume of users, Yahoo! Japan required outside help to build their IaaS (infrastructure as a service) solution and OSS distributed storage solution. In 2013, Yahoo! Japan turned to Canonical and the two companies have grown the relationship ever since.

        • ROSCon 2019 – Canonical

          What an exhausting, yet intriguing few days. Huge thanks to Open Robotics et. al. for hosting and setting it up. The fantastic community came in full force with far more people than last year, more people than ROSCon JP and more people than I would have ever guessed. Which is to say, there were more friends to make

          This blog won’t cover everything that happened at ROSCon or cover any of the talks presented. This blog is for recap purposes, for anyone who couldn’t make it or for someone unsure whether or not they should come to the next one. If you were there, you know how it all went, and if you weren’t, then a paragraph wouldn’t do the talks justice anyway. If you want information about the talks or presentations head over to the official ROSCon 2019 site or our announcement post and see what you can find. For now though, let’s discuss.

        • ZFS/Zsys Improvements Are Already Underway For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

          While Ubuntu 19.10 just shipped two weeks ago with its initial desktop install support to a root ZFS file-system option, feature work is already happening of ZFS changes destined for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu's Zsys daemon being built around ZFS' advanced feature set.

          With Ubuntu 19.10 in the Ubiquity installer is just the single (experimental) option at install-time for a guided ZFS root file-system setup. For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubiquity is expected to expand upon that and also offer ZFS options through the advanced partitioning area of the desktop installer.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • My first contribution to open source: Make a fork of the repo

        Previously, I explained how I ultimately chose a project for my contributions. Once I finally picked that project and a task to work on, I felt like the hard part was over, and I slid into cruise control. I knew what to do next, no question. Just clone the repository so that I have the code on my computer, make a new branch for my work, and get coding, right?

        It turns out I made a crucial mistake at this step. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I had made a mistake until several hours later when I tried to push my completed code back up to GitHub and got a permission denied error. My third mistake was trying to work directly from a clone of the repo.

      • Getting started with Pimcore: An open source alternative for product information management

        Product information management (PIM) software enables sellers to consolidate product data into a centralized repository that acts as a single source of truth, minimizing errors and redundancies in product data. This, in turn, makes it easier to share high-quality, clear, and accurate product information across customer touchpoints, paving the way for rich, consistent, readily accessible content that's optimized for all the channels customers use, including websites, social platforms, marketplaces, apps, IoT devices, conversational interfaces, and even print catalogs and physical stores. Being able to engage with customers on their favorite platform is essential for increasing sales and expanding into new markets. For years, there have been proprietary products that address some of these needs, like Salsify for data management, Adobe Experience Manager, and SAP Commerce Cloud for experience management, but now there's an open source alternative called Pimcore.

        Pimcore PIM is an open source enterprise PIM, dual-licensed under GPLv3 and Pimcore Enterprise License (PEL) that enables sellers to centralize and harmonize sales, marketing, and technical product information. Pimcore can acquire, manage, and share any digital data and integrate easily into an existing IT system landscape. Its API-driven, service-oriented architecture enables fast and seamless connection to third-party software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and more.

      • Professional Free Software

        At the 2019 Libre Graphics Meeting, illustrator Livio Fania presented a heart-felt plea for more professionalism in libre graphics.

        And that was the moment I began to think a bit. What is it that makes one project professional, and another not? Where, in this case, I’d take “professional” to mean “someone can depend on it so they can earn their daily bread with no more than the problems you always have with any software, because all software sucks, and hardware even more so”.

        As Livio said in his presentation, funding makes a difference. If a project can fund its development, its continuity will be better, it will be better able to implement its vision and deliver what it promises, simply because funding equals time. That’s also what I tried to argue in my previous blog post.

      • This open-source AI tool quickly isolates the vocals in any song

        The software is called Spleeter and was developed by music streaming service Deezer for research purposes. Yesterday the company released it as an open-source package, putting the code up on Github for anyone to download and use. Just feed Spleeter an audio file and it spleets splits it into two, four, or five separate audio tracks known as stems. The results aren?t perfect but they are eminently usable and Spleeter itself is very fast. When running on a dedicated GPU it can split audio files into four stems 100 times faster than real time.

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • This Week in Rust 311

            Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

          • Nolan Lawson shares what he has learned about accessibility

            Over the past year and a half, I have ventured time and again into the federated Mastodon social network. In those ventures, I have contributed bug reports to both the Mastodon client as well as some alternative clients on the web, iOS, and Android.

            One of those clients, a single-page, progressive web app, is Pinafore by Nolan Lawson. He had set out to create a fast, light-weight, and accessible, client from the ground up. When I started to use Pinafore, I immediately noticed that a lot of thought and effort had already gone into the client and I could immediately start using it.

      • Linux Foundation

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • New LibreOffice packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current

          I uploaded the latest releases of LibreOffice for Slackware 14.2 and -current.

          On Slackware 14.2 you can enjoy the stable 6.2.8 version, this is the last release in the 6.2 series. For Slackware-current I went with the latest and greatest ‘fresh’ release of 6.3.3 which became available last week.

          Note that the packages for LibreOffice in my repository, do contain “libreoffice-kde-integration” for Slackware -current, containing Qt5 and KDE5 (aka Plasma5) support. On the other hand, packages for Slackware 14.2 do not contain “libreoffice-kde-integration” any longer. If you run Slackware-current but do not have KDE5 packages installed at all, don’t worry. LibreOffice will work great – the KDE integration package just will not add anything useful for you. On the other hand, if you have Plasma5 installed you will benefit from native file selection dialog windows and other integration features. And even if you do not have Plasma5 but you do have Qt5 installed, then you will be able to run LibreOffice with Qt5 User Interface elements instead of defaulting to GTK3.

      • CMS

        • WordPress 5.3 RC4

          The fourth release candidate for WordPress 5.3 is now available!

          WordPress 5.3 is currently scheduled to be released on November 12 2019, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.3 yet, now is the time!

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

      • BSD

        • Will The Real UNIX Please Stand Up?

          Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was originally developed in 1969 as a lighter weight timesharing system for a DEC minicomputer at Bell Labs has exerted a huge influence over every place that we encounter computing, from our personal and embedded devices to the unseen servers in the cloud. But in a story that has seen countless twists and turns over those five decades just what is UNIX these days?

          The official answer to that question is simple. UNIX€® is any operating system descended from that original Bell Labs software developed by Thompson, Ritchie et al in 1969 and bearing a licence from Bell Labs or its successor organisations in ownership of the UNIX€® name. Thus, for example, HP-UX as shipped on Hewlett Packard’s enterprise machinery is one of several commercially available UNIXes, while the Ubuntu Linux distribution on which this is being written is not.

        • FuryBSD Is A New Attempt At A Desktop Focused BSD

          Joe Maloney of iXsystems has lifted the wraps on FuryBSD, a new desktop BSD focused on tight integration with FreeBSD. FuryBSD joins the likes of MidnightBSD and GhostBSD on providing a sane and easy-to-use desktop experience out-of-the-box along similar lines to the former PC-BSD (TrueOS).

          FuryBSD is being done by a team separate from the former TrueOS desktop (PC-BSD) efforts and is focused on tight integration around upstream FreeBSD for low overhead and better compatibility.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • guile-ncurses v3.0 released

          I am pleased to announce the release of guile-ncurses 3.0

          guile-ncurses is a library for the creation of text user interfaces in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It is a wrapper to the ncurses TUI library. It contains some basic text display and keyboard and mouse input functionality, as well as a menu widget and a form widget. It also has lower level terminfo and termios functionality.

        • GNU cpio Version 2.13

          GNU cpio version 2.13 is available for download. This version fixes the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-1197, CVE-2016-2037, CVE-2019-14866.

        • GNU Mailutils Version 3.8

          Version 3.8 of GNU mailutils is available for download. This version fixes important security flow. The maidag utility has been withdrawn and three new programs have been included to provide its functionality: local mail delivery agent mda, LMTP daemon lmtpd, and user mail delivery tool putmail.

      • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

        • Open Hardware/Modding

          • Daily Crunch: Google announces open-source chip project

            The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in data centers, storage and computer peripherals.

            The project will allow anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors. It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

          • Google Is Helping Design an Open Source, Ultra-Secure Chip

            There are some parts of the OpenTitan design that won't be public, at least for the foreseeable future. These are all related to the actual physical fabrication of chips in a factory, categories like "foundry intellectual property," "chip fabrication," and "Physical Design Kit," among others. They hint at the immense challenges that exist in creating open source hardware—fabrication of which requires massive, specialized factories and proprietary silicon manufacturing processes, not just a laptop and an internet connection. If you don't own a silicon plant or have the leverage to convince existing fabricators to make OpenTitan chips for you, you won't be able to get them. And though device-makers have an incentive to save money on licensing fees with something like OpenTitan, silicon manufacturers who impose these fees may resist dropping them.

          • Google launches OpenTitan, an open-source secure chip design project
      • Programming/Development

        • GCC 7.5 Gearing Up For Release As The Last Compiler Update Of The Series

          With GCC 10 due to be released in just a few months, GCC 7.5 is being prepared for release as what will be the last of the GCC7 stable series.

          SUSE's Richard Biener on Tuesday announced GCC 7.5 RC as the last step before hopefully releasing GCC 7.5 before the end of next week. GCC 7.5 simply carries all of the bug fixes relevant for back-porting for those that haven't yet updated their compiler toolchain to the GCC 8 or GCC 9 stable series.

        • Arm Porting LLVM's Hardware-Assisted Address Sanitizer To GCC

          The latest of LLVM's "sanitizers" being ported for the GCC compiler stack is the hardware-assisted address sanitizer (HWASAN).

          Arm has been working on this port of the LLVM HWASAN sanitizer to GCC, similar to GCC's other ports of sanitizers. With the work being done by Arm, the HWASAN code is only being wired up for AArch64 (64-bit ARM) but at least lays the groundwork for getting it working on other architectures moving forward -- pending capable hardware assistance.

        • AdaCore Introduces Support for C++ Embedded Environments

          High Integrity Software Conference - AdaCore today announced that its GNAT Pro product line now supports the development of embedded software written in C++. Projects using C++, either mixed with Ada or standalone, can now benefit from the same high level of quality and support that GNAT Pro Ada customers receive. GNAT Pro C++ handles versions of the language standard up to and including C++17. It is targeted to VxWorks€® 7 (ARM, PowerPC, and x86), Embedded Linux (ARM, PowerPC and x86), as well as VxWorks 6.9.x (PowerPC 32 bits), and is hosted on x86 GNU Linux. It is available on both the GNAT Pro Enterprise and GNAT Pro Assurance product lines.

        • Top 5 Most Popular Web Programming Languages You Should Learn

          We’re living in the digital era and technology information is developing quickly. In our day and time, the demand for learing programming is increasing rapidly. Learing programming are divided into small specialties including system programming, database programming, game programming, mobile application programming, and web programming.

          If you are looking to learn web programming yourself or you are an employee and want to find a good job opportunity, you should learn the most popular web programming languages today. In fact, there are various programming languages available in use globally. We’re entering 2020, here are the top 5 most popular web programming languages you should learn.

        • Publish/subscribe, Zato services and asynchronous API integrations

          This article introduces features built into Zato that let one take advantage of publish/subscribe topics and message queues in communication between Zato services, API clients and backend systems.

        • Python Application Dependency Management in 2018

          We have more ways to manage dependencies in Python applications than ever. But how do they fare in production? Unfortunately this topic turned out to be quite polarizing and was at the center of a lot of heated debates. This is my attempt at an opinionated review through a DevOps lens.

        • Configuring Zato for high-performance Oracle Database connections

          If you need to configure Zato for Oracle DB connections and you want to ensure the highest performance possible, this is the post which goes through the process step-by-step. Read on for details.

        • Draft 2 of, ^Let's write a unit test!^
        • Python 3.7.5 : About PEP 3107.
        • Casual Python, Part 10
        • Qt Visual Studio Tools 2.4.2 Released

          We are happy to announce the release of the Qt Visual Studio Tools version 2.4.2!

          Installation packages are available at the Visual Studio Marketplace. Please note that, if you installed a previous version of the Qt VS Tools, and if VS extensions are set to update automatically — this is the default setting — chances are your installation is already up-to-date. You can check which version is currently installed by opening the Qt VS Tools menu.

      • Standards/Consortia

        • Stop using ridiculously low DNS TTLs

          Of course, a service can switch to a new cloud provider, a new server, a new network, requiring clients to use up-to-date DNS records. And having reasonably low TTLs helps make the transition friction-free. However, no one moving to a new infrastructure is going to expect clients to use the new DNS records within 1 minute, 5 minutes or 15 minutes. Setting a minimum TTL of 40 minutes instead of 5 minutes is not going to prevent users from accessing the service.

          However, it will drastically reduce latency, and improve privacy and reliability by avoid unneeded queries.

  • Leftovers

    • Health/Nutrition

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availabilitiy)

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • MIA on Assange: 'No one has fought for us the way he has'

        British rapper MIA has condemned the imprisonment of Julian Assange, saying the UK should appreciate the whistleblower as an asset while the US is wrong in its attempt to have him extradited.

        Speaking to Al Jazeera on Wednesday by phone, after a protest event on Tuesday evening held in support of the WikiLeaks founder outside the Home Office, she said: "It's incredibly frustrating.

      • Jeffrey Epstein: ABC stopped report 'amid Palace threats'

        Leaked footage shows a US TV anchor complaining that editors "quashed" a story about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein due to pressure from the Royal Family. ABC's Amy Robach is seen in the clip griping that her interview with an alleged victim of Epstein and Prince Andrew never made it to air. "The Palace found out and threatened us a million different ways," she says. ABC News said there was "zero truth" to the claim, while Buckingham Palace told the BBC "this is a matter for ABC". Epstein, a wealthy and well-connected financier, was found dead in a jail cell in August while awaiting trial for sex crimes. His death was ruled a suicide by investigators.

    • Environment

      • 'People cannot be left to die': India's top court calls out authorities for not doing enough to stop pollution

        Following a hearing Monday, the Supreme Court of India released an order which found that the state government, the government of Delhi and civic bodies had "miserably failed" to perform their duty to the public.

        "This is a shocking state of affairs in which we are put, as on today," the court said. "This is a blatant and grave violation of right to life of the sizeable population by all these actions and the scientific data which has been pointed out indicates that life span of the people is being reduced by this kind of pollution which is being created."

        The court said it was at a "loss to understand" why authorities were not able to create a situation in which this kind of annual event did not take place. "People cannot be left to die or to suffer various ailments," said the court.

      • Roxane Gay and Mary Robinson Explain Why Feminism Is Key to Achieving Climate Justice

        Teen Vogue spoke with two prominent feminists — renowned writer Roxane Gay, author of the best-selling books Bad Feminist and Ayiti, and Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson — on the intersections between feminism and climate justice.

      • Climate threat from inhalers can prove costly

        The climate threat from inhalers used by millions of people to combat asthma and other breathing problems can also waste scarce resources.

      • Crushing Anti-Mining Protest in Australia

        The Prime Minister of Australia is fuming. Having made his mark on Australian politics by being the mining sector’s most avid defender, Scott Morrison was disturbed by the week’s events in Melbourne that saw clashes between police and protesters outside the sixth annual international mining and resources conference.

      • Energy

        • Fossil Fuel Investments Cost California and Colorado Pension Funds Over $19 Billion, Report Finds

          The three public pension funds analyzed are currently worth a combined $663 billion. However, if they’d divested from fossil companies in 2009 while keeping their other investments at the same proportions, they could have amassed a combined additional $19 billion in ten years, the report published by Corporate Knights, a Canadian media, research and financial firm,€ concludes.

        • New Estimates Predict a Lot More Renewable Power Growth in the U.S. Very Soon

          “FERC's latest three-year projections continue to underscore the dramatic changes taking place in the nation's electrical generating mix,” noted Ken Bossong, executive director of the SUN DAY Campaign. “Renewable energy sources are rapidly displacing uneconomic and environmentally dangerous fossil fuels and nuclear power —€ even faster than FERC had anticipated just a half-year€ ago.”

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • 'Free Markets' Will Be the End of the Middle Class

        National industrial policy was once something you might read about in today’s equivalent of a friend’s Facebook post, as hard as that might sound to believe. It was in newspapers; it was on the radio. Taxi drivers had opinions about it. That all changed in the last 35 years, when the rise and fall of the stock market and a shallow conversation about unemployment rates took over. Industrial policy became an inside-baseball conversation, and to the extent that it was discussed, it was through the prism of whether it imperiled the golden gospel and great economic distraction of our time, “the free market.”

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Media Conceal Chile’s State Criminality, Delegitimize Bolivian Democracy

        Chile’s anti-neoliberal rebellion is entering its third week, and the brutal crackdown continues. Hard-right President Sebastian Piñera and his generals have effectively decreed the country’s oligarch-dominated democracy out of existence by sending soldiers into the streets to kill, maim and torture their own people.

      • Cyclist seen flipping off Trump's motorcade wins seat on local county board

        It wasn't until she lost her job, however, that Briskman said she thought about entering politics.

        “We have a right to peacefully protest and criticize and express dissent toward our government,” she had said in an interview with The Washington Post about the decision.

      • FCC Wants to Know if Huawei Gear Is Near U.S. Military Bases

        The FCC also will consider how to finance removing equipment made by the Chinese company considered a security risk by U.S. officials, Ajit Pai said in a meeting in New York with Bloomberg News reporters and editors. Pai has proposed reimbursing carriers for replacing the equipment.

      • Trump Turns U.N. Visas, Travel Restrictions Into Foreign-Policy Cudgel

        The decision to withhold federal protection for a senior Syrian official is just one among a growing number of diplomatic slights experienced by delegates from a handful of countries with poor relations with the United States during their travels to New York City for United Nations meetings. It reflects the punitive nature of U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump, whose administration has sought myriad ways to sanction or penalize individuals and countries that are viewed as hostile to the United States, or that simply refuse to comply with U.S. demands. It reinforces the perception among some diplomats that the United States has contempt for the United Nations.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • FBI's Top Lawyer From The Apple Encryption Fight Says Law Enforcement Needs To Suck It Up And Embrace Encryption

        Jim Baker was the FBI's General Counsel during its well-publicized attempt to use the San Bernardino shootings from 2016 as a wedge to force Apple to build a backdoor into its data encryption scheme. As we noted at the time, this seemed like a very clear, somewhat cynical attempt to use a high profile attack as an excuse to force Apple's hand in building back doors. When that battle happened, then FBI director Jim Comey took to the pages of Lawfare to insist that there were good reasons for the FBI to fight with Apple in court to force it to create a backdoor.

      • GAO Report: TSA Has No Idea How Effective Its Suspicionless Surveillance Program Is

        The TSA's "Quiet Skies" program continues and it doesn't appear to be making flying any safer. The program first exposed last year by the Boston Globe involved the surveillance of travelers for doing things like looking in shop windows or changing direction while walking through airports.

      • RCMP launches review of its social media monitoring operation

        "We assume that what we've put online is understood by the people who receive it, and there's all sorts of situations of social media monitoring, especially cases out of the U.S., where people have had very, very severe and problematic ... consequences for entirely banal, legitimate, innocent tweets," Parsons said.

        He said he wants to see the RCMP set some firm guidelines for social media monitoring.

        "I think generally Canadians should be concerned, because not all Canadians know they're under suspicion," he said.

      • Some African governments using social media to monitor citizens: Freedom House report

        "It started off with the [Internet] shutdown in January for a few days," Bloggo told DW in an interview.

        "Then the method changed to trying to silence different voices online, from activists to even comedians," said Bloggo, who is also project manager officer for Magamba, an urban culture and civil rights organization.

        As a blogger, Bloggo is accustomed to online threats and cyberbullying. But even he admits that the risks keep growing.

      • Turkey releases journalists Ahmet Altan and Nazli Ilicak after terror conviction

        A Turkish court has ordered the release of two prominent journalists, after a previous life sentence for terror-related charges over alleged links to the 2016 failed coup was overturned.

        Ahmet Altan and Nazli Ilicak, both respected intellectuals in Turkey, were previously sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2018 on charges of aiding the network of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and attempting to overthrow the government.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Boston PD Is Helping ICE Track Down The City's Least Dangerous Immigrants

        It's good to see ICE is still working hard to round up all these "bad hombres." Instructed by the President to round up the hordes of undocumented criminals -- each one more dangerous than the last -- ICE and its parent agency (DHS) have struggled a bit to live up to Donald Trump's imagination.

      • New Chairs to Lead Human Rights Watch Board

        Tech entrepreneur and human rights activist€ Amy Rao€ will lead the international board of directors at Human Rights Watch, succeeding co-chairs Hassan Elmasry and Robert Kissane in October 2019. In 2020,€ Neil Rimer, a Human Rights Watch board member since 2009, will join her as co-chair.

      • Israel: Supreme Court Greenlights Deporting Human Rights Watch Official

        The€ Israeli€ Supreme Court on November 5, 2019 upheld the Israeli government’s authority to deport Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch. The decision now shifts back to the Israeli government; if it proceeds with deportation, Shakir will have to leave Israel by November 25.

      • Vietnam: Free Activist Jailed for Facebook Posts

        A Vietnamese court will hear an appeal on November 7, 2019 of a six-year sentence for a Vietnamese environmental activist convicted for criticizing the government on Facebook, Human Rights Watch said today.€ 

      • A Jail Increased Extreme Isolation to Stop Suicides. More People Killed Themselves.

        Shackled at the wrists and ankles, Christine Taylor followed a red line on the basement floor directing her to the elevator at Kern County’s central jail. She heard groans and cries from among the hundred people locked above, a wail echoing through the shaft.

        It was minutes before daybreak on a Monday morning in May 2017 as the elevator lifted her toward the voices. Jail staff had assigned Taylor to something called “suicide watch,” a block of single cells where she’d be alone 24 hours a day. The sound of other people would soon become a luxury.

      • Trump Wants to Allow Discrimination with Billions of Dollars of Federal Funding
      • ‘International Actors in Haiti Have Been Guarantors of the Status Quo’
      • Real (Stupid) ID

        To be fair, the TSA also functions as a jobs program to repurpose out of work mall food court employees, etc.

        Importantly, it serves as training for Americans to be docile as our rights are yanked from us, like the bit in the Constitution about not being subjected to searches without probable cause. (The fact that you are visiting your grandma or your kid's stuffed animal is holding a stuffed gun do not count.)

        Adding to the TSA is the latest in pretend security: "Real ID."

      • Income for poorest Americans fell faster than previously thought: study

        The poorest Americans saw their income decline 7 percent over the past 15 years, while everyone else gained financially, according to a new study.

        Real income for low-income Americans fell more than 7 percent between 2004 and 2018, in part because of rising costs for items and services purchased by those Americans, according to the report published by the Groundwork Collaborative and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) at Columbia University.

      • Olav Vitters: First responder: chest pain, evacuation, medical emergency, strange smell, person stuck in elevator, stuck elevator

        Within Netherlands each company is by law required to have first responders. These handle various situations until the professionals arrive. It’s usually one of (possible) fire, medical or an evacuation. Normally I’d post this at Google+ but as that’s gone I’m putting the details on this blog. I prefer writing it down so later on I still can read the details.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Shocker: ISPs Cut Back 2020 Investment Despite Tax Breaks, Death Of Net Neutrality

        Why it's almost as if you can't take telecom giants (and their lawyers, consultants, and political allies) seriously.

      • What happened in the comments section of the FCC’s net neutrality hearing?

        This week on The Vergecast, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Jeremy Singer-Vine, the data editor for the BuzzFeed News investigative unit, about his story that was published recently regarding the fake comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s online net neutrality debate.

        If you haven’t read the piece, you should. The investigation details where all of the fake comments in the FCC’s net neutrality process came from, including dead people leaving comments and shady political operatives involved in the scam.

        It’s not really a story about net neutrality. Instead, it’s about how systems designed for public participation in the government are so easily scammed and what the challenges are for preventing such scams from happening.

      • A $60 Million Fine Won't Stop AT&T From Throttling ‘Unlimited’ Data Plans

        But as distasteful as the practice of throttling customers with unlimited plans might sound, AT&T got in trouble for failing to disclose it, rather than for doing it in the first place.

    • Monopolies

      • Uber Sinks to Record Low as Food Orders Lag and Lockup End Looms
      • Uber thinks it’s a ‘good thing’ for cities, but cities are having second thoughts

        But cities that were initially caught flat-footed by Uber aren’t sweating it. If anything, it’s the company that may be sweating as cities have become more adept at making Uber pay for its past and present transgressions. A report released this week helps bring into sharp focus how cities around the world are cracking down on Uber, Lyft, and their competitors and what it will mean for the future of the ride-hailing industry.

      • E-Hail Regulation in Global Cities

        In recent years—and with increasing speed—global cities are exercising their authority to regulate e-hail services such as Uber, Ola, Lyft, and Didi. This report, by the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, describes the current and future regulatory strategies of 13 international cities for e-hail services. To craft stronger regulation in the future, cities can learn from each other's regulatory approaches to leverage the power of shared information. To compete in the future, e-hail services can adapt their business models to meet increasing government regulation.

      • Trademarks

        • California Man Gets Sued After Trying To Trademark Bully A Theme Park

          We've seen a great many examples of trademark lawsuits here at Techdirt. In most cases, those lawsuits are levied by individuals and companies that are the trademark bully, but that's not always the case. We also see plenty of suits that are raised in defense of such bullying, in which the entity suing asks the court to simply affirm that its use is not infringing. Trademark bullies, of course, don't like when that sort of thing happens.

      • Copyrights

        • Dutch ISP Does Not Have to Identify Alleged Pirates, Appeals Court Rules

          Internet provider Ziggo is not required to hand over the personal details of 377 alleged pirates, a Dutch Court of Appeal has ruled. The information was requested by movie distributor Dutch Filmworks, which hoped to claim damages from the account holders. The Court pointed out, however, that the company's plans lack transparency, so it can't properly decide whether the privacy rights of alleged pirates weigh stronger than the copyrights of the movie company.

        • How a News Outlet Used CC BY to Help Its Journalist

          We often receive stories from around the world illustrating how Creative Commons (CC)€  licenses have unlocked critical information, giving voice to those who have been silenced or marginalized.

        • How to unblock Spotify

          Have you ever seen either of these messages and wondered how to unblock Spotify?

        • Popcorn Time Domain Registrar Orders DNS Deactivation

          PopcornTime.sh, considered by many to be the 'official' successor to the original Popcorn Time application, has serious domain issues. According to public records, its domain registrar has issued an order to its registry to deactivate its DNS access. Separately, an as-yet unconfirmed report suggests that an arrest in Tunisia may be connected to the current downtime.



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BetaNews: Microsoft Slop is Your "Latest Technology News"
Paid-for garbage disguised as "journalism"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 21, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, December 21, 2024
Links 21/12/2024: EU on Solidarity with Ukraine, Focus on Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court in the EU (UPC)
Links for the day
[Meme] Microsofters at the End of David's Leash
Hand holding the leash. Whose?
Deciphering Matt's Take on WordPress, Which is Under Attack From Microsofters-Funded Aggravator
the money sponsoring the legal attacks on WordPress and on Matt is connected very closely to Microsoft
Gemini Links 21/12/2024: Projections, Dead Web ('Webapps' Replacing Pages), and Presentation of Pi-hole
Links for the day
American Samoa One of the Sovereign States Where Windows Has Fallen Below 1% (and Stays Below It)
the latest data plotted in LibreOffice
[Meme] Brian's Ravioli
An article per minute?
Links 21/12/2024: "Hey Hi" (AI) or LLM Bubble Criticised by Mainstream Media, Oligarchs Try to Control and Shut Down US Government
Links for the day
LLM Slop is Ruining the Media and Ruining the Web, Ignoring the Problem or the Principal Culprits (or the Slop Itself) Is Not Enough
We need to encourage calling out the culprits (till they stop this poor conduct or misconduct)
Christmas FUD From Microsoft, Smearing "SSH" When the Real Issue is Microsoft Windows
And since Microsoft's software contains back doors, only a fool would allow any part of SSH on Microsoft's environments, which should be presumed compromised
Paywalls, Bots, Spam, and Spyware is "Future of the Media" According to UK Press Gazette
"managers want more LLM slop"
Google Has Mass Layoffs (Again), But the Problem is Vastly Larger
started as a rumour about January 2025
On BetaNews Latest Technology News: "We are moderately confident this text was [LLM Chatbot] generated"
The future of newsrooms or another site circling down the drain with spam, slop, or both?
"The Real New Year" is Now
Happy solstice
Microsoft OSI Reads Techrights Closely
Microsoft OSI has also fraudulently attempted to censor Techrights several times over the years
"Warning About IBM's Labor Practices"
IBM is not growing and its revenue is just "borrowed" from companies it is buying; a lot of this revenue gets spent paying the interest on considerable debt
[Meme] The Easier Way to Make Money
With patents...
The Curse (to Microsoft) of the Faroe Islands
The common factor there seems to be Apple
Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Companies That Attack Free Speech Online (Follow the Money)
One might joke that today's EFF has basically adopted the same stance as Donald Trump and has a "warm spot" for BRICS propaganda
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 20, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, December 20, 2024
Gemini Links 21/12/2024: Death of Mike Case, Slow and Sudden End of the Web
Links for the day