Here's this week's DebugPoint.com weekly roundup (ending Feb 7, 2021) series, filtered for you from the Linux and the open-source world on application updates, new releases, distribution updates, major news, and upcoming highlights. Have a look.
This has been yet another great week for Linux news and releases. We saw the release of Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, Solus 4.2, LibreOffice 7.1, and Debian GNU/Linux 10.8 “Buster.” We also saw new kernel releases that improve hardware support, as well as many updated apps for an improved experience.
On top of that, this week I took a first look at the SparkyLinux distro on the Raspberry Pi 4 computer and compiled a report of the best Linux distros for the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop, which is my new workstation and gaming machine in one.
We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with Solus 4.2, EndeavourOS 2021.02.01, Debian 10.8, Ubuntu 20.04.2, Mageia 8 RC, Bluestar Linux 5.10.13, PCLinuxOS 2021.02.
Here are the ten most stable Linux Distros to try in 2021.
For the first time in many years, I wanted to buy an AMD-powered machine since Intel is plagued with so many vulnerabilities these days. I was initially aiming for a full AMD configuration, with a dedicated AMD Radeon GPU, that’s also great for gaming and future-proof, but hey, you can’t have everything in life.
wrote this review/report for others interested in buying the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop and install a GNU/Linux distribution on it, so they won’t have to spend days finding the perfect distro for their new laptop.
With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates.
3MDEB under funding from NLNet is working to bring FWUPD to the BSDs. This is being done since firmware updates are commonly done in the name of security these days, among other factors. 3MDEB is working to see their port of FWUPD work on at least FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The initial focus at least will be handling firmware updates for USB devices and UEFI capsule updates.
There are two main thrusts to the argument, firstly that GNU/Linux has become a bloated kernel with a fragmented operating system, and secondly that the interests of the various big businesses that derive income from Linux-based products have led to the resulting ecosystem being shaped by those businesses and in their interests. The piece points to the huge disconnect between kernel developers and operating system users, and the seeming lack of concern over some of the problems this can create. It’s a jarring read for an open-source software enthusiast because while there is much good in the world of free software even the most devoted of fans should admit that it’s not without problems. We think it’s worth a read not necessarily to agree with but in order to stir discussion and debate. Every community needs to look in the mirror sometimes.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, Ubuntu announced that they are working on a new Desktop Installer. CloudLinux announced the Beta Release for their CentOS Replacement called AlmaLinux. There are some big changes for this year’s Google Summer of Code and it has some people disappointed and even considering about not participating. We’ve also got a lot more Distro News to discuss with a follow up to the iPad-like tablet distro, JingOS, as well as an update for Solus and EndeavourOS. Then we’ll check out some new updates for a new supported devices website for Ubuntu Touch, and in app news we’ve got new releases for KDE’s App Suite and LibreOffice’s new Community edition. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Left is a tiling window manager written in Rust for stability and performance. LeftWM is very minimal by design. Because you probably want more than just a black screen, LeftWM is built around the concept of theming.
The story behind a Microsoft repo shipping in Raspberry Pi OS, Canonical updates a special version of Ubuntu, and a couple of milestones the Linux world hit this week.
Nextcloud is a powerful open-source alternative to proprietary cloud app offerings, and in this video the viewer is walked through the entire setup process. This process has been tested on Debian, Ubuntu, as well as Raspberry Pi OS. By the end of the video, you'll have a Nextcloud installation of your very own!
Thoughts about the new **Gemini** Internet protocol, and a demonstration of some basic **Cython** from the **d** software series of Slackware Linux.
More than a decade ago Intel was very excited about MIDs as "Mobile Internet Devices" with their early Menlow and Moorestown platforms. Intel's MID plays ultimately were unsuccessful in the long-term and the MID functionality ultimately evolved into smartphones and tablets. In 2021, the Intel MID support is being gutted from the Linux kernel.
Last month I wrote about Linux preparing to remove Moorestown and Medfield support with the code no longer being maintained and no apparent major users left still running this roughly decade old hardware with new Linux distributions. What started out as just early spring cleaning on some of the code has evolved into clearing out more of the Intel "MID" platform support.
So it's the biggest sporting day of the year here in the US, when everybody is getting ready to watch the yearly top TV commercials, occasionally interrupted by some odd handegg carrying competition that I still haven't figured out the rules for after twenty-odd years here. It's kind of a more violent and hands-on team-oriented version of the traditional egg-and-spoon race, and involves a lot of standing around, apparently waiting for the next commercial to come on.
Outside the US, everybody scratches their heads about the whole thing, and hopefully life goes on with the weekly celebration involving compiling and testing new kernels instead.
Right?
Anyway, this is hopefully the last rc for this release, unless some surprise comes along and makes a travesty of our carefully laid plans. It happens.
Nothing hugely scary stands out, with the biggest single part of the patch being some new self-tests. In fact, about a quarter of the patch is documentation and selftests.
The rest is just the usual random noise - architecture updates, drivers (gpu and usb stand out a bit), some filesystem fixes, and a few core VM and networking fixes.
Go forth and test. Unless you're glued to the TV, of course.
Linus
For those looking for something more interesting than the Super Bowl today, the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing.
Dropping a conditional (if) statement from the RADV driver in Mesa is helping the performance of discrete Radeon graphics cards with the RADV Vulkan driver for some games.
Hitting Mesa 21.1-devel on Saturday and marked for back-porting to stable series of Mesa is a change to improve spilling on discrete GPUs. Up to now the preferred heap for buffers has only set GTT (RAM) for APUs given that all the memory ends up being system RAM on current platforms with the integrated graphics. But this simple change drops the check over dedicated vRAM or not, thereby having the same behavior for discrete GPUs.
The Shutter screenshot tool released version 0.95 a few days ago as the first update after moving to Github, and the first step getting back into Ubuntu universe repositories.
Shutter is one of the most popular Linux screenshot applications with editing features. Since Ubuntu dropped old Gnome 2 libraries from the main repositories, Shutter is removed too from Ubuntu repository.
You did a fresh Linux installation. It’s fast, snappy, and secure. However, when you decided to use Linux, you decided to use open-source alternatives for most solutions. This means you are no longer interested in MS Office and are looking for MS Office alternatives for Linux.
You are not alone! Also, you are bound by the fact that MS Office is not natively supported by Linux operating system. To install it, you need to use virtualization solutions including CrossOver, Wine, and Virtual Machine.
Even though that’s a possible way to install MS Office, there is much to desire for native support. For instance, you will not get native support, which means that there will be a slow response or action. Moreover, you can also find yourself getting errors, which is not a great thing when working on your important project.
The good thing with Linux is that it offers alternatives that have equal or better feature-set. In the case of MS Office, you will easily get a dozen of options. And, that’s where we come in. To help you find the best MS alternative, we will list five of them for your reference.
After spending a few days playing around with Gemini and creating my own Gemini capsule, I thought I would share a few additional thoughts about it. I also wanted to show you guys a little more about configuring the Amfora terminal gemini client.
Rumours are swirling in Linux circles that some prominent distributions are preparing to remove the Open Source Chromium web browser from their archives.
This appears to have come about because of a change being made by Google, which reduces functionality in third party chromium-based browsers. Chromium (perhaps unsurprisingly) falls into this category. While the proprietary Google Chrome is built on the same technology as the open source Chromium browser, they’re not the same.
On the Chromium blog it was announced a couple of weeks back that some API calls which “are only intended for Google’s use” were indeed used by Chromium. This will be disallowed from March 15th - in a month or so.
I can understand how software packagers around the world who have spent significant effort in making Chromium available to millions of Linux users, would be irritated about this. What I don’t fully fathom is why they’re trying to collectively eject Chromium from the corpus of available software.
Sure, it’s unfortunate that a set of features in an application will go away. Yes, it’s frustrating that the proprietary version of Google Chrome gets to keep those features. I have no idea how many users of Chromium there are, but I’d put a guess it’s not insignificant. So that’s many client machines checking into servers in the Google cloud to stash important user information, and enable features.
Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. Wine is an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. It translates Windows system calls into equivalent POSIX calls used by Unix-based operating systems, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Windows programs into your desktop environment.
Not all Windows applications will run in Wine, and even if they do, they may not behave in the same way they normally would. The Wine AppDB is a database containing a list of applications that have been tested and confirmed to work under Wine. Wine isn’t always the best option to run Windows programs on Linux. You can also use a virtualization tool like VirtualBox or VMware , but they require more system resources and a Windows installation file.
The basename command is another gem provided by the GNU Core Utilities. It has very few options and provides a simple function, to remove the directory components from a path. It also comes in very handy for removing file extensions (SUFFIX) from a filename. In this quick tutorial, we will show you how to use the basename command and it’s options with real world examples.
I was doing a Terraform setup for infrastructure that includes consul, nomad, and a few other types of nodes in AWS. Because I'm passing the instance-configuration code (setup scripts) in as cloud-init scripts, there is a TON of duplication across nodes.
As I mentioned in some other posts, I have a small “server” which I use as a NAS to provide archiving for photos and other files of interest. As it runs in a remarkably small (and quiet) enclosure, I’ve managed to put it in an incospicuous part of the room it is in. For the most part, it runs without a hitch: but in some (rare) occasions it needs to be looked at, and sometimes either logging via SSH is not possible, or it is not enough to diagnose the problem. In other words, I need to check what’s on the display. And the position it is in means that attaching a monitor and a keyboard can be inconvenient at best. In other words, I needed out-of-band management.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LibreOffice on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, LibreOffice is the best alternative for Ms Office. It is a powerful no-cost office suite for creating spreadsheets, slide shows, and databases. It is the open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. LibreOffice available in 115 languages and even used by millions of people all around the world. The latest LibreOffice 8 is available to download and mount on the Linux system.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of LibreOffice on a Debian 10 (Buster).
OpenSUSE is not popular around the general user because it mainly focuses on Enterprise and It sponsored by SUSE Software Solutions.
If you purchase tuxedo computers, you will receive openSUSE preinstalled to use In some of the models you need to upfront ask for openSUSE to get Installed.
Recently OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 support has ended on 2nd Feb 2021. If you want to upgrade, you can follow the instructions from an Official site before that make sure to take a backup of your Systems
R is an open-source programming language mostly used for statistical computing and data analysis and is available across widely used platforms like Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It generally comes with the command-line interface and provides a vast list of packages for performing tasks. R is an interpreted language that supports both procedural programming and object-oriented programming.
In this R tutorial, we will learn about R programming language from basics to advance with a huge dataset of R core concepts, statistics, machine learning, etc explained with proper examples.
A Singleton class is a class of which only one instance exists. There is a need for such a design pattern for loggers, database connections and other scenarios.
The main challenge comes when you want to implement a Singleton in a mutli-threaded environment and ensure that all the threads are synchronised when creating the Singleton instance.
In this article I will explain how to add a bit more security to your OpenBSD system by adding a requirement for user logging into the system, locally or by ssh. I will explain how to setup 2 factor authentication (2FA) using TOTP on OpenBSD
What is TOTP (Time-based One time Password)
When do you want or need this? It adds a burden in term of usability, in addition to your password you will require a device that will be pre-configured to generate the one time passwords, if you don't have it you won't be able to login (that's the whole point). Let's say you activated 2FA for ssh connection on an important server, if you get your private ssh key stolen (and without password, bouh!), the [attacker] will not be able to connect to the SSH server without having access to your TOTP generator.
This quick article will explain how to install pkgsrc packages on an OpenBSD installation. This is something regulary asked on #openbsd freenode irc channel. I am not convinced by the relevant use of pkgsrc under OpenBSD but why not :)
I will cover an unprivileged installation that doesn't require root. I will use packages from 2020Q4 release, I may not update regularly this text so you will have to adapt to your current year.
On Linux, the sudo command (short for "substitute user do" or "superuser do") is designed to allow a user to run a program with access capabilities of another user (most commonly the superuser "root"). sudo is commonly used to give selected users administrative control on a Linux system. Although sudo has built-in mechanisms to prevent misuse (e.g., security policies, input/output logging), the potential impact of any vulnerability in sudo command is still extremely high.
For example, the latest heap buffer overflow vulnerability discovered in sudo (CVE-2021-3156) can trigger privilege escalation and allow any unprivileged user (those not in the sudoers list, or even nobody) to bypass password authentication and gain the root access. This vulnerability can easily be exploited as the second-stage attack once a low-level service account gets breached via brute-force attacks.
In a previous post, we talked about how kernel namespaces and cgroups form the building blocks of containerization in Linux. In this article, we will explore namespaces in more depth by demonstrating some examples of creating namespaces using the unshare command.
So Kotaku broke out recently the story that Google would be changing its plans for Stadia going forward. What kind of change?
[...]
In any case, this is certainly a big setback for Google’s ambitions in that field. I would wager it makes it ripe for divesting/selling it to a different company in case this new business model does not work as expected. After all, there’s quite a lot of competition going on, as nicely summarized by our friend cow_killer not too long ago.
Sliding into first place is Board Game Arena: a fairly simple-looking site with a lot under the surface. Through the efforts of a team of volunteers, the site has ported over many popular (and not so popular) board games – with the permission of the publishers, of course. Many of the games, especially the less popular ones, are free to play, though some publishers opt to make their game “premium,” meaning you’ll have to subscribe to a Board Game Arena account to play.
Today we are looking at how to install Firestorm Second Life on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Today, I'll start with gaming.
I used to think a "gamer" was a very specific kind of creature, carefully cataloged and classified by scientists after years of study and testing. I never classified myself as a gamer because most of the games I played were either on a tabletop (board games and pen-and-paper roleplaying games), NetHack, or Tetris. Now that games are available on everything from mobile devices, consoles, computers, and televisions, it feels like it's a good time to acknowledge that "gamers" come in all different shapes and sizes. If you want to call yourself a gamer, you can! There's no qualification exam. You don't have to know the Konami Code by heart (or even what that reference means); you don't have to buy and play "triple-A" games. If you enjoy a game from time to time, you can rightfully call yourself a gamer. And if you want to be a gamer, there's never been a better time to use Linux.
January has been a great week for users of the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, who received a much-improved window manager with better support for AMD/Radeon machines when using the AMDGPU driver, support for interactive resizing of windows via any keyboard modifier, and the ability to untile windows before entering full-screen mode so that the apps can fill the entire screen.
The Mousepad simple text editor for Xfce appears to be the star of the month with many new features and improvements, including new “Viewer Mode” toggle and “Delete Line” action, the ability to display the current encoding in the status bar, support for selecting the encoding of the file in the “Open” and “Save As” dialogs, file monitoring support, as well as the ability to make the automatic addition of the last EOL character configurable.
I’ve just released the 40.alpha release of yelp-tools, the collection of tools for building and maintaining your documentation in GNOME. This is the first release using the new Meson build system. More importantly, it’s the first release since I ported the tools from shell scripts to Python.
Porting to Python is a pretty big deal, and it comes with more improvements than you might expect. It fixes a number of issues that are just difficult to do right in a shell script, and it’s significantly faster. For some commands, it can be as much as 20 times faster.
But that’s not all. You can now provide a config file with default values for all command-line arguments. This is useful, for example, with the --version option for yelp-check status. Previously, to ensure you weren’t getting stale status information, everybody had to remember to pass --version. Now, you can set the current version in your config file, and it will always do the right thing for everybody.
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM.
The Haiku crew has published their status report concerning their activities for the month of January 2021. Among the Haiku OS developments over the past month have included:
- SD/MMC drivers have been merged to support reading/writing to SD and SDHC cards using SDHCI compliant controllers.
Hello everyone, apparently we made it to 2021! This year we will see the 20th anniversary of Haiku.
This report covers hrev54806-hrev54947.
After learning that the Mageia 8 RC is available, I downloaded the live .iso and gave it a quick run.
I must say that, as a user that has been on the Mageia ship since the release of Mageia 1 back in 2010, one of the features that I appreciate from the project is its consistency and visual stability.
Please do not get me wrong: of course I appreciate innovation! However, non-technical users of Linux tend to get puzzled after becoming familiar with a distro just to find that developers, in subsequent releases, change the UI so much that they feel alienated by the OS.
Most of the changes in Mageia happen under the hood, so the UI has remained pretty stable from the beginning. In fact, upon booting Mageia 8 RC, my untrained eye sees no big difference other than the updated wallpaper: Mageia just feels familiar and keeps the consistent Mandriva PowerPack UI (license, country, language, etc). This is great as I will not feel lost when I decide to install it.
Yesterday, I was saddened by the official announcement of the death of PicarOS, the best distro for children.
Today, I read that the RC of Mageia 8 is ready for testing.
This is good.
In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release, Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8.
The first release candidate of Mageia 8 was issued on Saturday. Mageia 8 RC1 brings brand new artwork for its desktop, is powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, ships with KDE Plasma 5.20.4 / Xfce 4.16 / GNOME 3.38.3 desktop options, and a wealth of other package updates including the recently released PHP 8.0.
Rescuezilla, not to be confused with Rescatux which is based on Debian, "is a specialist Ubuntu-based distribution designed for system rescue tasks, including backups and system restoration."(1) It is a fork of Redo Backup and Recovery after that was abandoned and like its predecessor allows a bare-metal restore after any hardware failure directly from the live image. It works as a live CD/USB image and can be used to work with Linux, OS X and Windows, automatically searches a local area network for drives to backup to or restore from and can recover lost or deleted data files. Rescuezilla uses a basic LXDE as graphical desktop. So far the advertisement.
It exists for the 32-bit i386 and x86_64 architectures. The latest version is based on Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy" which is now the main and only version on the download page and this one only seems to be available for 64-bit. At the end of last year the project also offered a version based on Ubuntu LTS "Focal Fossa". The image rescuezilla-2.1.3-64bit.groovy.iso is 885 MB. The project inherits its use of systemd from Ubuntu.
Basic System Requirements are described as having access to a PC with Intel or AMD CPU, at least 1GB RAM (2GB recommended), USB stick (faster the better, this stick will be completely erased to hold Rescuezilla itself), an external USB hard drive (with enough free space to hold your backup images).Backups created with Rescuezilla v2.0 and newer cannot be restored using prior versions of Rescuezilla. Backups created with older versions of Rescuezilla can still of course be restored with v2.1.3. From this description it appears to be mostly a beefed up version of Clonezilla. Not quite.
"Rescuezilla is an easy-to-use disk imaging application that's fully compatible with Clonezilla", so it isn't actually Clonezilla but compatible. Further reading in the changelogs unearths that "Rescuezilla v2.1 supports restoring images created by Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Redo Backup and Recoverv 0.9.8-v1.0.4" and some older, unofficial Redo Backup updates BUT NOT restoring Redo Rescue 2.x/3.x images. Recently the highly-requested ability to easily extract files from backup images was added.
The first BETA build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 13.0-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC o 13.0-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 13.0-BETA1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE o 13.0-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 GENERIC o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 RPI o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64 o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 PINEBOOK o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 ROCK64 o 13.0-BETA1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64 o 13.0-BETA1 riscv64 GENERIC o 13.0-BETA1 riscv64 GENERICSD
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/13.0" branch.
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-BETA1/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
BASIC-CI images can be found at:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.0-BETA1/
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1.
In this video, we are looking at EndeavourOS 2021.02.03. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at EndeavourOS 2021.02.03 Gnome. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, Gnome 3.38, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling.
Yesterday, I was saddened by the official announcement of the death of PicarOS, the best distro for children.
Today, I read that the RC of Mageia 8 is ready for testing.
This is good.
I am going to download it and give it a test drive.... Perhaps I will use my daughter's new Windows 10 laptop, hehe.
If my ZaReason Strata dies, I guess I will have to buy a laptop with Windows and dual-boot. I need to practice...
PCLinuxOS installation media has been updated so new installations do not require such a large update to get current. This release features Kernel and application updates, bug fixes and security updates, with a focus on speed and stability. PCLinuxOS is officially released in three editions: KDE Plasma, MATE and XFCE desktops. Community editions featuring Trinity, Openbox and LXQT desktops are also available. All the editions can run on the computer alone, or in Virtualbox. PCLinuxOS is an old school rolling release desktop distribution and has been serving the Linux community for 18 years.
Zeek is often used as a network analysis tool but can also be deployed as an IDS known as Intrusion Detection System. The full documentation can be found on this website page.
Let's install this tool on Fedora 33 distro.
Oracle Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are well-known Linux distributions, often used in the business world. Each distro has their own pros and cons, differences, and similarities to the other.
In this guide, we'll be comparing the two distributions across a few key areas and giving a brief review of both distros. Read on to learn more about Oracle Linux and RHEL and how they compare. By the end of this article, you'll be armed with enough information to choose the best distro for your needs.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename buster). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 10 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old buster media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
As a long long time Linux user, I am a bit in trouble now, since everything in Fujitsu requires Windows it seems. I will try hard to improve this situation – including my dream of having Fujitsu machines with pre-installed Debian on it
Canonical is building a new installer for Ubuntu using Google's cross-platform Flutter framework – but is facing questions about use of a non-native toolkit for such a key component.
Martin Wimpress, Canonical's director of engineering, said that "the current Ubuntu Desktop installer, Ubiquity, dates back to 2006," and that it had become a maintenance burden.
There is a newer installer for Ubuntu Server, called Subiquity, that is written in Python and wraps a bare-bones installer called curtin.
Wimpress said the intention was to create a single consolidated installer for both server and desktop, and that the desktop frontend for the new installer will use Google's Flutter framework following work Canonical has already done to give Flutter Linux support. Work has started and can be found on GitHub here.
Raspberry Pi is a little useful computer for learning programming and building projects. It comes with Debian Linux based modified operating system called Raspbian. It is the most widely installed OS on RPi. In a recent update, the Raspberry Pi OS installed a Microsoft apt repository on all machines running Raspberry Pi OS without the person’s or admin’s knowledge. Every time a Raspbian device is updated by having this repo, it will ping a Microsoft server. Microsoft telemetry has a bad reputation in the Linux community. Let us see why and how this matters to Linux users.
ArduCAM is popular for camera-based applications with various boards ranging from Arduino to Raspberry Pi. We also saw the company’s tiny coin-sized Raspberry Pi compatible module 5 years ago. Now, it also supports the newly launched Raspberry Pi Pico for real-time video applications. Raspberry Pi Pico is compatible with the ArduCAM Mini 2MP Plus camera featuring an OV2640 2MP CMOS image sensor that supports automatic image control functions including Automatic Exposure Control (AEC) and Automatic Gain Control(AGC). The camera also comes with an onboard JPEG encoder for image compression.
A few months ago, someone from Argon Forty reached out and asked if I'd like to review the Argon ONE M.2, after they watched my video on booting a Pi 4 from an external SSD, and I accepted.
Unlike most Pi cases, this one actually adds features through it's design, like putting all the ports on the back, and adding a mostly-internal SSD, and so I decided to put it through its paces and see what I liked, and what I didn't like.
There’s a strict eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the Eligibility Criteria section below.
Gmail is billed as an easy-to-use email app that saves you time and keeps your messages safe.
The app lets you receive your messages via push notifications, read and respond online and offline and find any message quickly. It’s remarkably easy to use on Android offering a colourful experience.
We’ve defined an eligibility criteria to guide us when selecting apps for this series. See the bottom of this article for details.
Discord lets friends communicate directly via voice, video, or text, and join servers where larger communities can interact together. It combines the voice chat aspects of services like Skype and Teamspeak with the text chat aspects of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and instant messaging services.
We’ve defined an eligibility criteria to guide us when selecting apps for this series. See the bottom of this article for details. Shazam is an app that identifies multimedia. The program stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database.
We’ve defined an eligibility criteria to guide us when selecting apps for this series. See the bottom of this article for details.
VLC is a highly respected free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as various streaming protocols, and more.
There’s an app for Android. It’s a fairly complete port of VLC media player to the Android platform. The app plays a wide range of video and audio files, network streams and DVD ISOs. There’s also good support for subtitles, teletext and closed captions. And it’s implementation of network support is commendable.
development's collaborative innovation and community ethos have changed the world. In The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst explains that success in open source is found by "thinking of people as members of a community, moving from a transactional mindset to one built on commitment." However, there is still a barrier at the core of the open source development model: Frequently, it lacks human empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person's feelings. In open source communities, face-to-face human interaction and collaboration are rare. Any developer experienced with a GitHub pull request (PR) or issue has received comments from people they may never meet, often halfway across the globe—and the communication can be just as distant. Modern open source development is built upon this type of asynchronous, transactional communication. So, it is no surprise that the same types of cyberbullying and other abuses people experience on social media platforms are also seen in open source communities.
Honor cultures today are often considered primitive and backwards, while Law cultures are considered civilized and advanced. There’s a pretty logical reason for this: real-world Honor cultures have tended to evolve brutal and violent methods of regaining lost honor, including dueling, kidnapping, forced marriage, “honor killings”, and family blood feuds. The ordinariness of brutality in Honor cultures tends to push away the gentle and intellectual when migration opportunities exist, so they are weak and poor in a world where power and wealth come from knowledge. Thus Law cultures are ascendant today, and Honor cultures are on the wane… except in one notable area: the internet.
On the internet, there is no real central authority to punish rule-breakers, and there isn’t even a codified set of rules! Each website is basically someone’s private property, and personal behavior on that virtual property requires adherence to the owner’s rules. It’s up to the owners to police their domains, ensure standards of conduct, personally punish violators, maintain their own community reputation, and so on. Is this sounding familiar yet? The internet has evolved a pseudo Honor culture to maintain a semblance of order!
And FOSS communities, being largely digital in nature, follow suit. Though we do occasionally meet up in person, within the physical boundaries of Law cultures (or at least we will again once the global pandemic is over), most FOSS interactions happen online, where the tenets of Honor culture are more applicable.
Now, there’s one major difference between internet Honor culture and physical Honor culture: you can’t kidnap or murder someone over the internet, so regaining your lost honor or repairing an impugned reputation has to be non-violent! It doesn’t have to be pleasant–a jerk may deploy an invective-filled rant, a troll campaign, or a denial-of-service attack–but it can’t physically harm or kill anyone. This removes the most objectionable aspect of traditional, real-world Honor cultures.
While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction.
Piotr Król and Michaà â à »ygowski of consulting firm 3MDEB presented at this weekend's FOSDEM Online 2021 about the latest happenings as of so far this year on the open-source AMD firmware front.
Expect growth in 2021 for cloud native ecosystem components that will advance containerized workloads across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.
I’ve got a new Apple laptop, so I thought I’d do an Emacs build benchmark. Building Emacs is what people do on computers, right? At least if I extrapolate from myself, which is the only natural thing to do.
It’s called proof by induction. Look it up, nerds.
So here’s the benchmarks: [...]
Mozilla Firefox users will soon be able to display only modified preferences on the browser's advanced configuration page about:config.
All desktop versions of Firefox as well as Firefox Nightly for Android come with options to modify preferences using the browser's advanced configuration page about:config. Firefox Stable and Beta for Android don't support it. Mozilla launched a redesign of the about:config page in Firefox 71.
All it takes is to load the address in the browser's address bar to get started. The list is a treasure trove for advanced users who like to modify browser settings that cannot be changed using the built-in settings.
The about:config feature sets Firefox apart from other browsers who don't provide the same level of customization options.
Up until now, it was difficult to list only modified preferences. Preferences may be modified by the user but also by Mozilla, e.g. as part of an experiment or test. Modified preferences are displayed in bold on the page, and while it is certainly possible to scroll through the entire listing to check all modified preferences, it is time consuming and not the best approach because of that.
While working on ansi_colours crate I’ve learned about colour spaces things I’ve never thought I would. One of those is intricacies of greyscale. Or rather not so much greyscale itself but conversion from sRGB. ‘How hard can it be?’ one might ask, ‘Just sum all components and divide by three!’ one might provide a helpful suggestion.
Taking an arithmetic mean of red, green and blue coordinates of the colour is often mentioned method for conversion to greyscale. Inaccuracy of the method is usually acknowledged but justified by its simplicity and speed. That’s a fair trade-off except that equally simple and fast algorithm which is noticeably more accurate exists. It is built on an observation that green contributes the most to the luminosity and that computers like powers of two.
GitLab users wanting to deploy code on Digital Ocean’s platform as a service offering App Platform can now do so via a new integration.
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Version 5.5 of text editor GNU nano is now available. The release, which has been given the code name Rebecca, includes an option to suppress the title bar and just show some basic editing information at the bottom, as well as a way of changing the prompt bar’s colour. Other changes help highlight search results, and are meant to make toggles more consistent.
Kate (and KDE) is always in need of more contributors.
Over the years we tried to make the development experience more pleasant and move to tools that are more widely adopted by developers around the world.
We traveled from ancient CVS repositories over to Subversion and since years are up and running on Git.
We moved our code hosting to a more beginner friendly GitLab instance in the last year, too.
And I really think this does seem to show effects, at least for Kate & related projects we got a nice influx of contributions over GitLab.
After reading Four books professional developers should read, by Phil Eaton, I was inspired to write my own engineering reading list.
Originally I thought of this as a “staff engineering” reading list, because I probably wouldn’t have appreciated these earlier in my career. When starting out, my reading was mostly about the specifics of using Ruby on Rails, HTML, and CSS. Which was great, and worked well for me.
But while the books in this list have been useful for me as an engineering leader, anybody at any level can get a lot out of them. Here they are: [...]
Getting out of tech debt can feel like a Sisyphean task. It’s not uncommon for organizations to declare code bankruptcy and rewrite working systems from the ground up. As a former enterprise software consultant, I have participated in some of these rewrites. They cost half a million dollars almost automatically. They can cost millions easily.
Something that pricey and frustrating deserves analysis: how do we end up in this situation? How do we measure it? And how do we alleviate, or even better, prevent such a situation?
In the last post, after debunking a few misconceptions about technical debt and where it comes from. I proposed that we measure software maintenance requirements in terms of ongoing development effort. I described how this maintenance load increases faster for some teams than others with two example cases: a “yikes” case and an “average” case. We ended on the topic of technical bankruptcy, when teams take on the exorbitant expense of rewriting their code from scratch because, for a couple of years, it allows them to feel like they’re on top of their maintenance load until it gets out of control again. We ended on a question:
So is maintenance load just destined to get out of control?
In the last post, we talked about the role of code stewardship in avoiding the accrual of maintenance load on your code base. But keeping your maintenance load from growing any further isn’t helpful—and might be impossible—if you’re already at your maintenance limit now. So…
How do we reduce maintenance load?
I recently became aware of a very cool service provided by the Google. The Civic Information API provides contact information for all elected representatives (from head of state down to municipal official) for any US address.
I wrote the Perl client for the API, published as Net::Google::CivicInformation. Get a free API token and you're up and running.
Don't worry you can keep using Yay but the main developer decided to start up a new project called Paru which initially started as just a rust rewrite of yay but since then has had a few nice additions that might a little bit nicer to work with and bit a bit better of an aur helper.
Bogazici University's new rector, Melih Bulu, previously ran as an AKP parliamentary candidate in 2015. University faculty and students have slammed Erdogan's decision to appoint Bulu, because they believe the university's rector should be elected from within the institution. Critics see the move as undemocratic, and an attempt to push conservative values on the left-leaning university. Demonstrators called on Bulu to resign.
Whenever I hear colleagues assert that young people will “pick it up right away”, I wonder how much time they have spent teaching actual digital skills to actual students. People who cover hands-on techniques in a computer lab – as I do – know that students aren’t always as adept as they might pretend to be. Just showing a class how to navigate software menus can be a surprisingly slow process.
The most obvious problem is what media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan has called the “generational myth”, which assumes that “digital natives” are a homogeneous group that can be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, class, race and gender are often important factors in a student’s prior digital experiences and level of comfort.
Furthermore, many campuses serve non-traditional students who are older than the teens and twentysomethings shown in college brochures. For example, my 63-year-old husband just finished his third semester Arabic course on Zoom.
On Jan. 29, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was promoting “marital bliss” at a coronavirus news conference.
Gobbling up nearly 1.6 billion doses of various Covid-19 vaccinations directly conflicts with the administration's so-called equity-based approach.
On Jan. 29, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was promoting “marital bliss” at a coronavirus news conference.
Announcing that indoor dining would reopen at 25% capacity in New York City on Valentine’s Day, and wedding receptions could also resume with up to 150 people a month after, Cuomo suggested: “You propose on Valentine’s Day and then you can have the wedding ceremony March 15, up to 150 people. People will actually come to your wedding because you can tell them, with the testing, it will be safe. … No pressure, but it’s just an idea.”
But when you finally get the jab, resist the urge to post a humblebrag on Instagram or any other social media platform, because identity thieves may be watching. And, you don’t want to be the newly-vaccinated person whose selfie provides scammers with a template to make fake vaccination record cards (because if you think isn’t already happening, you would be mistaken).
Between February and May 2020, 5.4 million Americans lost their health insurance after losing their jobs — the “greatest health insurance losses in American history” in a single year, according to a study by Families USA. For young people like Skipper, losing health care coverage can mean rationing insulin or ending up in a diabetic coma with a massive hospital bill. Aside from employment insecurity, the serious health impacts some patients experience and the far-reaching implications of what’s known as “long COVID” still pose huge, unpredictable health risks.
The massive farmer protests in India are facing down a Modi government that has no qualms about using repression to push through its neoliberal agenda. The farmers’ resolve has been remarkable — and they’re providing a glimmer of hope that Modi’s far-right government may not be as invincible as it seemed just months ago.
These clinical trials were conducted with 20,000 participants, 25 percent of whom received a placebo. The study included 2,144 people over the age of 60. Safety data from 1,369 of them revealed that the most common adverse effects were flu-like symptoms and local reaction.
These were consistent with most of the adverse effects reported in the other age groups. Serious adverse events were rare in both the placebo group (0.4 percent) and the vaccine group (0.2 percent). None of these adverse events were related to vaccination. During the study period, four people died but their deaths were not related to the vaccine.
Firefox 85.0.1 and Firefox ESR 78.7.1 are security updates first and foremost. Mozilla patched a single security issue in both versions of the browser.
The vulnerability, Buffer overflow in depth pitch calculations for compressed textures, has received the severity rating critical, the highest rating available. Mozilla notes that the issue affects Firefox running on Windows machines only, all other supported operating systems are not affected by the issue.
Two state-owned utility companies in Brazil suffered separate ransomware attacks in the past week, forcing them to shut down some operations and services temporarily, In one case, sensitive data was stolen and dumped online, including network access logins and engineering plans.
Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras (Eletrobras) and Companhia Paranaense de Energia (Copel) both reported attacks, the latter of which appears to be the work of Darkside, which flogged data stolen from the attack online, according to a published report.
That this is likely to have a major impact on advertisers is shown by an antitrust complaint filed by French online advertising lobbyists. They claim that their action is not about privacy, but about Apple abusing its market power. But there’s no doubt Apple sees privacy as one of its key differentiators in the online world. According to a report in 9to5Mac, at the EU data protection conference CPDP last month Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said:
In the early 2020, when governments across the globe implemented lockdown to contain the virus, organizations had to migrate to the remote working environment from the usual brick and mortar set-up to ensure business continuity. This rapid shift has resulted in massive demand of the cloud-based services. In a very short span, video conferencing apps have shown triple digit increase in business as compared to last year. All such organizations who have been using cloud were better prepared for the remote working shift compared to others.
Google is exploring an alternative to Apple Inc.’s new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the [Internet] industry is slowly embracing user privacy, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans.
A joint investigation of privacy authorities led by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada came to this conclusion Wednesday, claiming that the New York-based company’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and infringes on the privacy rights of Canadians, according to a release the Office posted online.
Moreover, the investigation found that Clearview had collected highly sensitive biometric information without people’s knowledge or consent, and then used and disclosed this personal information for inappropriate purposes that would not be appropriate even if people had consented.
Technology company Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians, an investigation has found.
The joint investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, concluded that the New-York-based technology company violated federal and provincial privacy laws.
Clearview AI’s technology allowed law enforcement and commercial organizations to match photographs of unknown people against the company’s databank of more than 3 billion images, including of Canadians and children, for investigation purposes. Commissioners found that this creates the risk of significant harm to individuals, the vast majority of whom have never been and will never be implicated in a crime.
The investigation found that Clearview had collected highly sensitive biometric information without the knowledge or consent of individuals. Furthermore, Clearview collected, used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes, which cannot be rendered appropriate via consent.
Facebook will have to decide how to play the delicate balance of protecting the democratic politicians and activists versus cooperating with the new regime to get services restored–an especially acute example of the political dilemmas the company faces worldwide.
In nearby Vietnam, for example, Facebook recently acquiesced to government demands that it censor more political criticism to avoid a blockade.
The service has mostly avoided shutdowns outside of countries such as China, where it has long been blocked, but currently faces pressure in India, Turkey and elsewhere.
Moving forward, said one expert, "the international community needs to stop fueling the conflict, generously fund Yemen's humanitarian response, and prioritize peace."
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden said Friday that he would bar his predecessor, Donald Trump, from receiving intelligence briefings traditionally given to former presidents, saying that Trump could not be trusted because of his “erratic behavior” even before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Richard argues that the US military needs to rethink its approach to mitigating and managing conflict with other powerful countries. After two decades of conflict against groups that don’t have nuclear weapons, Richard wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, the US “has grown accustomed to ignoring the nuclear dimension.”
In other words, he’s saying, there are still thousands of nuclear warheads out there — and their potential for catastrophic destruction remains.
Today, President Biden announced an end to support for “offensive” operations by the Saudis. We will need to see how this is transferred into concrete policy. Does it mean an end to the blockade, which is the most important element in the malnourishment of Yemenis? It continues support for Saudi air defenses against missiles and drones, but does it halt support for air strikes on missile batteries? Time works against the Yemeni people, every 10 minutes a Yemeni child under the age of five dies due to the blockade. An urgent international effort, with a new United Nations Security Council resolution, is necessary, and Biden’s appointment of a special envoy for Yemen with long experience in the region, Tim Lenderking, is a good step. It is time to stop the carnage in Yemen and stop fueling the arms race in the Middle East.
The Swedish parliament approved the deployment of up to 150 soldiers to the so-called Takuba task force in June last year, with reinforcements of up to 100 others. The mandate expires on December 31, 2021.
Backed by three US-made Black Hawk helicopters and a medical unit, the Swedes are being stationed in the Liptako region, a volatile zone close to Mali's border with Niger and Burkina Faso.
Several jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) reputedly operate in the area.
A new law passed by China allows its coastguard to fire at foreign vessels within its waters, potentially setting the stage for armed clashes between China and nations that have competing claims in the South China Sea. Vietnam has condemned the new law, while the Philippines has labelled it a ‘verbal threat of war’. The day after the law passed, the US sent an aircraft carrier group into the South China Sea. The Pentagon later confirmed that America’s mutual defence treaty with the Philippines would apply to any attacks by the Chinese coastguard.
Direct involvement of Turkish military and Syrian mercenaries in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the side of Azerbaijan marked the peak of the pan-Turkism policy aggressively pursued by the Turkish leader Recep Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party to extend Ankara’s influence to the Turkic States of Southern Caucasus and Central Asia regions. “We celebrate this glorious victory here today. But Azerbaijan’s liberation of its lands from occupation does not mean that the struggle is over. The struggle, which is waged in the political and military spheres, will continue on many other fronts,” Erdogan said during the victory parade in Baku last December after the signature of a peace agreement that cemented the end of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh. Thus, he unequivocally confirmed Turkey’s readiness to secure its geostrategic interests by all kinds of means, including military force.
The message was tucked into a bouquet of chrysanthemums left by a mourner at the back of Wuhan Central Hospital to honor a Chinese whistleblower doctor who died from the coronavirus a year ago. It was simply the number of a Bible verse: Matthew 5:10.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," the verse reads.
A year ago Sunday, Dr. Li Wenliang died from the virus first detected in this Chinese city. A small stream of people marked the anniversary with visits to the hospital Saturday, some leaving flowers.
The Krasnoyarsk city court of arbitration on February 5 ruled that almost all of the sum, the largest legal award in Russian history, must go to the Federal Treasury, while around 1.3 billion rubles ($17 million) must go the budget of the city of Norilsk, where more than 21,000 tons of diesel leaked into the environment from a tank at a thermal power plant in May last year.
Russia's environmental watchdog, Rosprirodnadzor, originally sought 148 billion rubles from Norilsk in compensation for the spill, one of the worst ecological disasters to occur in the Arctic.
That there could be complaints is apparently not unlikely. Terrafame had taken over the Talvivaara nickel mine, located in Sotkamo, from the insolvent Talvivaara Mining Company in 2015. There have been various environmental scandals around the mine, including excessive sulfate levels in wastewater or a leak in a wastewater pond that leaked water contaminated with uranium and other toxic materials.
Talvivaara is the largest nickel mine in Finland. Terrafame plans to produce nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate at the battery materials factory with ammonium sulfate as a byproduct. The factory is expected to be able to produce nickel sulfate for one million electric car batteries annually and enough cobalt sulfate for 300,000 batteries, according to the company.
However, a landfill for waste products has apparently been rejected by the relevant administrative authority. Instead, it must be processed and transported elsewhere for further processing or recycling. In addition, noise emissions from the factory have been heavily regulated.
With approximately one million plant and animal species threatened by€ extinction, the loss of our natural habitats is as much of a global crisis as climate change.
Estonian member of the European Parliament Urmas Paet (Reform) has described the visit by the European Union's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to Moscow as a complete failure and said that if not anything else, the visit should result in the cancelation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, which runs counter to the EU's energy policy.
The benefits of a $15 minimum wage are clear. The raise is long overdue.
However, one significant difference is Suu Kyi is the recipient of something Trump wanted more than almost anything else in the world—the Nobel Peace Prize.
The risks of going too-big are trivial. The risks of going too-small are large—letting the unemployment shock from Covid-19 linger for years.
Last night Now Scotland, the new mass membership campaigning organisation intended to embrace the entire Yes Movement, was launched and immediately gained its first 1,000 paid up individuals. This is the website to join up. I am going to repeat here my post on its origin and purpose, then answer a few questions that arose on social media during last night’s launch:
The Trump Organization negotiated on behalf of then-president Donald Trump to make Parler his primary social network, but it had a condition: an ownership stake in return for joining, according to documents and four people familiar with the conversations. The deal was never finalized, but legal experts said the discussions alone, which occurred while Trump was still in office, raise legal concerns with regards to anti-bribery laws.
Talks between members of Trump’s campaign and Parler about Trump’s potential involvement began last summer, and were revisited in November by the Trump Organization after Trump lost the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee and current president, Joe Biden. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40% stake in the company. It is unclear as to what extent the former president was involved with the discussions.
Most Free Software and Open Source Software organizations have now eliminated community representatives, eliminated elections or reduced the possibilities for candidates to nominate. Why?
To understand that, contemplate buying a used car. If you hire an engineer to inspect the car, you don't want him to tell you what is good. The seller can probably tell you what is good about the car. What you really want to know is the worst case scenario, for example, maybe the seller doesn't really own the car or maybe it was written off by insurance.
When we have an engineer inspect a used car or a house, getting the truth might be uncomfortable for the seller.
On Thursday, Dominion’s lawyers reportedly sent letters to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Parler asking them to preserve posts about the voting machine manufacturer from a slew of prominent conservative pundits and news outlets. They argued the posts need to be saved, even if the material has already been removed for violating moderation policies, “because they are relevant to Dominion’s defamation claims relating to false accusations that Dominion rigged the 2020 election,” according to demand letters reviewed by several outlets from Dominion’s law firm Clare Locke.
Ten years ago, the Arab Spring saw huge change across the Middle East and North Africa. FRANCE 24's reporters were there as people power on the streets turned into revolution: from Tunisia to Egypt, to Libya to Yemen. A decade on, we relive the Arab Spring with footage from our teams on the ground.
Not long after it blocked Facebook, Myanmar has now ordered mobile networks and [Internet] service providers to block Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram in the country as well. The southeast Asian country’s military seized power in a coup earlier this week, detaining its civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi along with other government officials.
Facebook users had reportedly been using the social media platform to protest the coup, sharing photos of themselves giving the three-finger salute that’s become associated with resistance in the area.
A near-total [Internet] blackout is in effect with connectivity falling to 16% of ordinary levels, said the monitoring group NetBlocks Internet Observatory.
The ‘Chakka Jam’ was in response to the “ignoring” of the farmers’ demands in the Union Budget 2021 and the [Internet] ban imposed by the central government at various protest sites bordering the national capital. This was the first big event organised by the agitating farmers after the Republic Day tractor rally, which saw chaotic scenes as groups of protesting farmers broke off the planned parade route, entered the centre of the national capital, clashed with the police as well as hoisted a farm union flag and a Sikh religious flag on the ramparts of the iconic Red Fort.
The tightening clampdown on information on day five of the military takeover came as hundreds of government employees from various sectors joined a protest campaign dubbed the "Civil Disobedience Movement" in the capital Naypyidaw. They demanded the release of State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and other detained leaders and calling on the military to respect the results of the country’s November 2020 election, which saw her National League for Democracy (NLD) party win in a landslide.
Russian authorities are escalating pressure on social media companies, forcing them to censor online content deemed illegal by the government, Human Rights Watch said today. Social media platforms have received warnings and face fines and potential blocking for failure to comply with Russia’s rapidly growing oppressive [Internet] legislation.
The authorities’ demands for censorship have followed recent waves of mass protests throughout Russia, expressing outrage over government corruption and the imprisonment of the political opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Law enforcement arbitrarily detained at least 10,000 people, including peaceful protesters, passers-by, and journalists. Local human rights groups reported numerous cases of police brutality.
Government officials, business people and ordinary netizens are split over free speech and the US company’s compliance practices, in a controversy that comes soon after Twitter’s top lobbyist in India resigned.
The showdown, after the firm this week “declined to abide [by] and obey” the order to remove posts and accounts that the government said risked inciting violence, is the latest instance of worsening relationships between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration and US social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.
For Twitter, the stakes are high in a country of 1.3 billion where it has millions of users and is ardently used by Modi, his cabinet ministers and other leaders to communicate with the public.
Even if the right standard for what should or shouldn’t be sayable on the digital commons falls somewhere short of free speech absolutism, it’s a problem that the standards we have are arbitrarily arrived at and opaquely applied by private companies whose primary allegiance is to making money rather than serving the public good, and who provide no basic due process for users to appeal suspensions or even find out what they allegedly did wrong.
In Australia, there’s been a “striking absence of a solid debate on WikiLeaks in the mainstream public discourse”, according to Benedetta Brevini, a journalist and media activist who insists that our concerning “lack of a thorough and sustained debate” is incomprehensible. Loewenstein calls Australia’s lack of journalistic solidarity with Assange “deeply shameful”. He says we have an “anodyne media environment” – perhaps not unsurprising, considering our highly concentrated media market, one of the most severe in the world.
As of February 5, access continued to be restricted on all four of the providers, but the site was accessible via WiFi, fiber optic connections, and when using a VPN, a virtual private network that can disguise the user’s location to bypass censorship, Ogundipe told CPJ. Qurium, a Swedish non-profit that supports news websites facing censorship around the world, said it set up alternative access to Peoples Gazette’s content via a mirror site and a second domain, gazettengr.com.
The appeals also say that censorship is officially banned in Russia, stressing that Roskomnadzor’s orders will "distort the essence of reports [and] change the way they are received by the audience."
According to the lawyers, following Roskomnadzor's requests would create distrust and rejection of the reports and materials of RFE/RL's projects, while many of the requests cannot even be technically executed.
“These fines represent nothing less than a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation, targeting a media company whose editorial independence is protected by law," RFE/RL's Regional Director for Europe and TV Production Kiryl Sukhotski said.
Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation.
It should kick off a bigger process of healing the harms this long-term dehumanization has caused.
Domenica Ghanem is a communications assistant at the Institute for Policy Studies.
An investigation "would not, for sure, bring my kids back to life," said a survivor of an Israeli airstrike. "However, I am certain that I need to continue to try to find some sort of justice."
Their remains had been identified and exhumed from mass graves, and they were laid to rest in the village of Kocho near Mount Sinjar in Ninevah province.
Thousands of men were killed and women and children enslaved and raped when IS overran the Yazidi's homeland.
The UN says IS carried out genocide against the community.
A mom called police saying her 9-year-old daughter was suicidal and threatening her in Rochester, New York. The first officer to respond to the incident, which happened last week, called dispatch for backup, and six cars rushed to the scene. Officers gave the girl little time to calm down, while dragging her in the snow, cuffing her and shoving her in a patrol car. When she refused to put her feet into the vehicle, and continually cried out for her father, officers pepper-sprayed her into submission.
A few minutes into the videotaped altercation, an officer is seen losing his patience. “You’re acting like a child!” he shouted; to which the 9-year-old replied, “I am a child!”
United Nations agencies denounced in a joint statement today that over two million cases could occur in the next decade due to confinement measures taken amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ultimatum presented to workers at DCH1 reflects a broader strategy in the U.S. for Amazon. The company has been quietly transitioning warehouse workers at delivery stations nationwide to the "megacycle" shift in recent months. The megacycle shift collapses shorter shifts into one 10-hour shift that begins around 1 am and ends around lunchtime. It's unclear where the term megacycle originated but it's used by both managers and workers to describe 10-hour graveyard shifts, workers tell Motherboard. An Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard that more than half of its last-mile delivery network has already transitioned to the new model.
About a year ago, the two major app stores decided to bar tens of millions of app developers from publishing COVID-related apps, no matter how useful those might be, unless they enter into public-private partnerships or co-publish their apps with certain types of entities. Both Apple and Google claimed that this was done in the interest of public safety.
A couple of weeks ago I announced my own app development company's antitrust complaints in multiple jurisdictions over those rules and their arbitrary application. While apps that could make (or early on could have made) a positive contribution to the fight against SARS-CoV-2 get rejected (which is why the team that developed an app named Coronavirus Reporter is suing Apple in the District of New Hampshire), apps that let players act as bioterrorists (telling them to "infect the world") or apps and books promoting bogus medicine (Homeopathy for Epidemics) are allowed. Better rules are badly needed.
Today I learned that Google has reached a new level of self-contradiction concerning COVID apps. On the Google Play Store one can download the "official" app of #WirMachenAuf, a group of German small business owners promoting and coordinating the flagrant violation of national and regional coronavirus prevention rules (click on the image to enlarge; this post continues below the screenshot)...
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As I already explained last month, I don't have issues with Apple and Google at this point apart from their COVID app rules (and with Google I've disagreed on API copyrights for more than ten years). I hope the problem can be solved. With respect to Android apps relating to COVID, Google appears to be pretty specific about what YouTubers are not allowed to say (COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy). Both major app stores should improve their COVID app rules, and they should apply them reasonably and consistently, in which case Google would never again approve apps seeking to dissuade small business owners from complying with regional lockdowns.
Pandemics, our unwelcome guests for millennia, are ultimately all about disease and cure. Well, not quite “all”. This Kat will leave the science, pharmacology, and epidemiology of the pandemic to others. But wearing his trademark hat, what intrigues him is the descriptive language that has been adopted in such circumstances. Take, for example, “super-spreader” and “elbow-bump”, both of which have been draped with new meaning in our current moment, here.
But there is nothing new here. The 17th century, for instance, was cursed with its own plagues and medical challenges. Then, as now, terms arose to describe what was taking place. While those events are long past, we still use some of that same language to describe our current situation.
Waiting to be convinced? You need go no further than consider the terms “quack” and “nostrum”. For those Kat readers who regale in the “what” and “how” of such lexical persistence, what follows is especially for you.
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Promoter of bleach nostrum wrote to Trump before his bleach blunder. Mark Grennon, the self-styled ‘archbishop’ of Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a ‘miracle cure’ has announced that he wrote to President Trump last week to advise him that the bleach product ‘Miracle Mineral Solution’ (MMS) is ‘a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body’ and ‘can rid the body of Covid-19’. The Plague of 1665 is long gone. But, making and selling cures, and convincing the public of their efficacy and safety, all with an eye towards distinguishing between the true and the not true, remain, as does the manner by which we describe these remedies, and the people behind them. Quacks and nostrums, then and now--and likely future as well.
National cybersecurity plays a crucial role in protecting our critical infrastructure, such as telecommunication networks, the electricity grid, and even financial transactions. Most discussions about promoting national cybersecurity focus on governance structures, international relations, and political science. In contrast, this Article proposes a different agenda and one that promotes the use of innovation mechanisms for technological advancement. By promoting inducements for technological developments, such innovation mechanisms encourage the advancement of national cybersecurity solutions. In exploring possible solutions, this Article asks whether the government or markets can provide national cybersecurity innovation. This inquiry is a fragment of a much larger literature on various innovation policy options (including patents, prizes, grants, and research and development tax credits). It requires determining whether national cybersecurity is a public good and an examination of market failure and government failure. Along the way, it draws on a property-liability rules theoretical framework to argue that the patent system’s invention secrecy restrictions and government patent use are ineffective for national cybersecurity innovation. On a normative level, the interface between government intervention and markets presents innovation mechanisms for national cybersecurity. Turning to prescriptions, expansion of prizes should rapidly promote national cybersecurity innovation, and reciprocal public–private research and development interactions should gradually multiply knowledge spillovers.
Patent law promotes innovation by giving inventors 20-year-long exclusive rights to their inventions. To be patented, however, an invention must be “enabled,” meaning the inventor can actually describe it in enough detail to teach others how to make and use the invention at the time the patent is filed. When inventions are not enabled, like a perpetual motion machine or a time travel device, they are derided as “mere science fiction”—products of the human mind, or the daydreams of armchair coots, that are not suitable for the patent system.
This Essay argues that, in fact, the literary genre of science fiction has its own unique—albeit far laxer—enablement requirement. Since the genre’s origins, fans have demanded that the inventions depicted in science fiction meet a minimum standard of scientific plausibility. Otherwise, the material is denigrated as lazy hand- waving or, worse, “mere fantasy.”
Taking this insight further, the Essay argues that, just as patents positively affect the progress of science and technology by teaching others how to make and use real inventions, so too can science fiction, by stimulating scientists’ imagination about what sorts of technologies might one day be possible. Thus, like patents, science fiction can have real world impacts for the development of science and technology. Indeed, the Essay reveals that this trajectory—from science fiction to science reality—can be seen in the patent record itself, with several famous patents tracing their origins to works of science fiction.
McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP will be offering a live webinar entitled "New Ways of Understanding the Patent-Eligibility of Software and Business Methods" on February 16, 2021 from 10:00 am to 11:15 am (CT). In this presentation, MBHB attorney and Patent Docs author Michael Borella will discuss the Alice v. CLS Bank test, for which a literal understanding is not possible because the test is too vague and poorly defined. Nonetheless, a careful review of Federal Circuit ۤ 101 case law since 2014 shows that a reasonably accurate way of predicting whether claims will survive an Alice challenge in the USPTO or courts is available. In particular, such a review suggests that there are three factors that when present make claims more likely to be eligible. Conversely, the lack of any of these factors make it less likely that the claim will be found eligible. The webinar will discuss these factors in detail, including how they are derived from the case law, and use them as an analytical framework for determining patenting strategy.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on intellectual property (IP) law undoubtedly ranks as one of the most-discussed topics of 2020 among legal academics and practitioners. On 20 October 2020, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on IP rights for the development of AI technologies. In parallel, on 25 November 2020, the European Commission published a commissioned study on challenges posed by AI to the European IP rights framework. Kluwer Patent Blog reported on this study.
A while back, I digitised a bunch of VHS tapes I had made in the early 90s and uploaded the interesting bits to Youtube. So, of course, the copyright claims started streaming in, but they all kinda made sense? I mean, I don’t own any of this material, and if EMI doesn’t want people to watch Dead Can Dance live (if they live in the US), then that’s up to them.
But today I got a pretty curious one: [...]
The service officially stopped working in December, but users can still transfer their music. After next week, transferring music out of Google Play Music will no longer be possible. Users who haven’t downloaded or transferred their music are encouraged to do so.
The deletion will remove your entire Google Play Music library, including any tracks uploaded to its cloud locker. Play Music data includes purchases, playlists, stations, albums, songs, and any likes/dislikes you accrued over the years.
Google reached a new milestone this week after processing the five-billionth takedown request from copyright holders. The majority of the reported 'pirate links' were removed from search results, but certainly not all. We take a closer look at some of the key statistics and how takedown trends evolved over time.
Former pirate scanlation site Fakku is currently trying to unmask the owner of Hentai.cafe, a site that posts Fakku content without permission. At the same time it appears that Fakku is also targeting the owner of HentaiNexus, a pirate site that claims to be "the largest English hentai publisher in the world."
The legality of video games and esports incorporating them has been traditionally offered legitimacy through copyrights. Essentiality of copyrights however does not outweigh the requirement of trademark protection for the logos, marks, trade secrets etc. and patent protection for the gaming console industry, artificial intelligence, and handheld devices etc. But what makes copyright as the most relevant foundation for rights protection within the virtual industry is the long durable coverage it provides to the expression of creativity, originality and skills without the hassle of registration. This cover is inclusive of not only the literal expression of the ‘video-game’ but also the experience surrounding it. Experience around ‘video games’ has been historically known to include the aesthetics, characters, art-work, music, plot and other similar audio-visual elements like the avatars, skins, alter-egos etc.
One of the biggest dilemmas in the legal evaluation of copyright structures in the age of video games is their functional, material and rule constrained interaction with the consumerist world. This consequential interaction with end-users or players in this context makes it difficult to allocate copyright in a well-defined manner. During the age of the arcade, games were first-generational and therefore devoid of the audio-visual marvels that the current generation of video-games possess, making it easier for arcade titles to avoid user claims over copyrights. With the advent of graphic-heavy age of video games in the ongoing era, it has become increasingly a roadblock for the existing copyright law to account for the rights of the players & third parties, reinforced out of their performance and plays involving the original video game content.
This begs the question before the judicial forums to interpret archaic age-old laws for the convolutions infesting the modern disputes in video gaming and esports. Verdicts on video gaming disputes have come thick and fast in the last few decades but with varied results and are geographically limited to developed jurisdictions like the US and the EU. With the debate on the copyrightability of video games getting settled, the US and EU have moved affront with the newer conflicts involving derivative rights and UCC. However, jurisprudence in developing common law jurisdictions like India is still under shallow waters and waiting for its judgment call.
Today, the French Government presents the second report on content recognition tools on digital sharing platforms commissioned by the Conseil Supérieur de la Propriété Littéraire et Artistique (High Council for literary and artistic property – CSPLA). The new CSPLA report, authored by Jean-Philippe Mochon (who had also authored the previous report on content recognition tools), focuses on “proposals for the implementation of Article 17 of the EU copyright directive” and marks an important and timely contribution to the discussion about the implementation of Article 17. It provides further insights into the positions taken by France throughout the discussion.
The CSPLA report consists of three parts. The first part contains a “review of existing best practices” of the use of content recognition tools. Here, the authors argue that such tools “must be given their rightful place in the implementation of Article 17 of the Directive”. The second part of the report focuses on the “balance between the fundamental rights set out in Article 17”. The third and concluding part of the report contains a number of recommendations for implementing Article 17 in France (and beyond). The central argument that is woven throughout the report is that automated content recognition technologies already play an important role in managing copyright on digital sharing platforms, that Article 17 provides for sufficient fundamental rights protection through the complaint and redress mechanism alone, and that temporary restrictions on freedom of expression are considered acceptable to achieve the goal of stronger protection of intellectual property rights.
The CSPLA report both envisages and argues for an implementation of Article 17 that relies on the use of automated content recognition tools to block unauthorised uploads to online sharing platforms, and that requires legitimate uses to be considered only ex-post. In doing so it rejects the notion put forward by other Member States (Germany, Austria and Finland) and the European Commission that Article 17 requires ex-ante safeguards against the automated blocking of legitimate uses. While there are lots of elements of the report that are worth examining in more detail (the reframing of copyright exceptions as uses “tolerated by rightsholders” (p.35) is a prime candidate here), this post focuses on the issue that is at the core of the discussion about the implementation of Article 17: does the requirement that the collaboration between rightholders and platforms must not lead to the prevention of availability of legitimate uses require Member States to implement ex-ante measures to protect legitimate uses in addition to the ex-post complaint and redress mechanism contained in Article 17(9), or does Article 17(9) in itself provide sufficient safeguards for user rights?
Danielle Bernstein and her brand WeWoreWhat want the copyright infringement and unfair competition case filed against them tossed out of court. According to the motion to dismiss filed on Tuesday, counsel for the heavily-followed influencer and her brand claim that CV Collection, LLC d/b/a the Great Eros “improperly” filed suit against them in the Central District of California in what they say “appears to be an improper attempt at forum-shopping to avoid a pending federal action in New York” after they allegedly knocked off the signature pattern that appears on its product packaging.
Setting the stage in the January 26 motion, counsel for the defendants – i.e., Bernstein, WeWoreWhat (“WWW”), and lifestyle brand (and WWW collaborator) Onia, LLC – alleges that they were prompted to file a declaratory judgment action against the Great Eros this fall after the Brooklyn, New York-based intimates brand accused them of infringing its silhouette-centric print and threatened to file an infringement suit against them.
The relative contribution of a joint author is a factually complicated and difficult matter to assess. The re-trial of Martin and another v Kogan [2021] EWHC 24 (Ch) confirmed this to be the case. We have previously written about this authorship dispute regarding the film Florence Foster Jenkins [here] and [here].
In this post, we consider how Meade J, in his lengthy decision, applied the joint authorship principles that were set out in the Court of Appeal decision that ordered the re-trial. For a summary of the legal principles on joint authorship enunciated by the Court of Appeal, see our post here. After hearing all the evidence and wading through contemporaneous documents the judge found that the screenplay work was jointly authored, however, the contribution of the defendant was 20%.
The outcome has potential implications for when an author seeks or obtains input from a third party and whether that third party could potentially claim to have made an authorial contribution. However, it is important not to take this too far; the reality is it was always the case that if a party provided input that was an expression of their own intellectual creation, then they ought to be a joint author. This case is most interesting in light of the facts that were considered to establish joint authorship and also the fact that the joint authorship was determined not to be equal contributions.
