This has been a great week of Linux news and releases. We saw lots of goodies, including Kali Linux’s first ISO release in 2021 with the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, a new Firefox release, a new Nitrux release, Xfce’s apps update for February, and more good things from the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment.
If you missed this week’s most important Linux news, distro and software releases, you can catch up with what’s new in the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for February 28th below.
We had a full week in the world of Linux Releases with Kali Linux 2021.1, Mageia 8, Linux Lite 5.4 RC1, and Nitrux Linux 2021.02.27.
We hope you have a wonderful week, stay safe, and enjoy Linux!
In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed with the latest developments in the Linux world.
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. Here are four open source tools for turning any device into a Linux server.
Sometimes I detect a certain mystique around the idea of a server. Many people, should they have an image in their mind at all, think servers must be big, heavy, rack-mounted machines, carefully maintained by an overly deliberate sysadmin and a group of magical tinker gnomes. Other people envision servers as vaporous clouds that somehow power the internet.
ImageMagick is a really cool image processing application but it can do so much more than most people realize, one of these things is taking screenshots, even though it's not the most convenient tool to do so it's here to use if you want less stuff taking up space on your linux system.
Musings about community and choice in Linux and open source.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some updates for Red Hat’s CentOS and RHEL topic that is still making waves. We’ve also got a lot of distro releases this week from Mageia, Kali Linux, and one of the smallest distros around, Tiny Core Linux. GNOME has announced the beta release of GNOME 40 so there’s a lot to talk about there. Then we’ll check out a new exciting modular laptop that has been announced. Later in the show, we’re going to check out the latest release of Mozilla’s Firefox and a really cool hardware project from the RetroArch team. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Hello and welcome to the 396th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode we interview Steve Miller, KC1AWV, one of the major contributors to the M17 amateur radio project. In the interview, Steve tells us the history of the M17 project, how to build and use it, the level of current development and what the future holds. We hope you enjoy this in-depth look at M17 and have a great week.
Josh and Kurt talk with Dave Jevans CEO of CipherTrace and chairman of the anti-phishing working group about the challenges of keeping track of cryptocurrency in the modern age.
Red Hat is still in damage control mode, a new hacker laptop called Framework makes bold promises, and what Google is spending money on in the Linux kernel.
Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.
The merge window that opened with the launch of the Linux 5.11 kernel series two weeks ago is now closed and Linus Torvalds published the first Release Candindate in the upcoming Linux kernel 5.12 series, giving us an early taste of the new features and improvements.
The final release of Linux kernel 5.12 is expected to hit Linux distros sometime this Spring in late April 2021, either on the 18th or the 25th, which depends on how many Release Candidate milestones will be published during the entire development cycle.
Linus Torvalds has released 5.12-rc1 (codename now "Frozen wasteland") and closed the merge window despite getting a late start due to bad weather...
Linux Torvalds managed to release Linux 5.12 rc1 on schedule even though he was without power for six days during the critical merge-window. The Linux kernels Makefile was appropriately updated with a new kernel release NAME = Frozen Wasteland.
So two weeks have passed since the 5.11 release, and so - like clockwork - the merge window for 5.12 has closed, and 5.12-rc1 is out there for your perusal.
That said, we have now have two unusual merge windows in a row: first we had the holiday season, and this time around the Portland area had over a quarter million people without electricity because we had a winter ice storm that took down thousands of trees, and lots of electricity lines.
So I was actually without electricity for six days of the merge window, and was seriously considering just extending the merge window to get everything done.
As you can tell, I didn't do that. To a large part because people were actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I got things merged up ok.
But partly this is also because 5.12 is a smaller release than some previous ones - and that wasn't due to the lack of electricity, that showed independently in the statistics in the linux-next tree. Of course, "smaller" is all relative, but instead of the 12-13+k commits we've had the last few releases, linux-next this time only had 10+k commits lined up. So that helped things a bit.
That said, if my delayed merging caused issues for anybody, please holler and explain to me, and I'll be flexible during the rc2 week. But that's _not_ a blanket "I'll take late pulls", that's very much a "if my delayed merge caused problems for some tree, explain why, and I'll work with you".
Anyway, on to the actual changes. Even if it was a slightly smaller merge window than previous ones, it's still big enough that appended is just my usual merge log, not the full list of the 10982 non-merge commits by 1500+ people. So it's more of a flavor of the kinds of things that have happened rather than a deep dive.
The one thing that perhaps stands out is that this release actually did a fair amount of historical cleanup. Yes, overall we still have more new lines than we have removed lines, but we did have some spring cleaning, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the "perf" interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense.
So even if we more than made up for that with all the _new_ drivers and code we added, that kind of cleanup is always nice to see.
Linus
Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel.
“As you can tell, I didn't do that,” he said in his State of The Kernel update that announced release candidate one of the new Kernel cut. “To a large part because people were actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I got things merged up ok.”
It wasn’t just penguinistas behaving well that helped. Torvalds said this version of the kernel has received around 10,000 commits. That’s rather fewer than the 12,000 or 13,000 he usually sees.
Last week we studied window children on X11 and Wayland at a high level. With this general knowledge acquired, we will quickly go through the recent changes to window children in KWinFT's new version.
Flameshot, the popular screenshot software, released version 0.9.0 with great new features!
Flameshot 0.9.0 adds new global shortcut menu in configuration dialog. All actions hotkeys are fully customizable.
The Xfce team has released another version of the extremely plain and simple Mousepad editor. The latest version has a keybinding for resetting the font size and some small fixes. It still lacks absolutely everything beyond the ability to edit text and load and save files.
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Mousepad still lacks all the features other simple text-editors like KWrite have beyond the very basic ability to edit text. There is no syntax high-lighting, there is no spell-checker, you can't select text and make it uppercase or lowercase or much else for that matter. It does have a search-and-replace function, and you can load and save files, and you can even have multiple files open in tabs. It does have those things going for it even though it is severely lacking in all other areas.
Papirus is a popular and eye-catching icon theme. The Papirus icon theme works with various desktop environments, i.e., Cinnamon, GNOME, Unity, etc., and is available in multiple variants. It can be installed on Linux Mint from the PPA repository, installer script, and Debian package.
Synology specializes in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices and software. Synology NAS devices are easy to use and configure. Its built-in DSM (DiskStation Manager) web app allows you to access and configure the NAS from a web browser. Synology’s management web interface, the DSM web app, is one of the best NAS management tools out there. The DSM web app differentiates the Synology NAS from its competitors.
WireGuard is a popular point-to-point open-source communication protocol that is used to create a secure and fast Virtual Private Network tunnel. This VPN was designed for use in the Linux Kernel. WireGuard is a lightweight VPN that provides extremely fast speeds to users.
This article shows you how to install and set up WireGuard on your CentOS 8 system. The installation and setup of WireGuard are much easier than the already-existing VPNs, like OpenVPN, and this is a major reason behind its growing popularity in the Linux community.
Yarn is a JavaScript package and dependency management tool that helps users to automate the tasks of installing, updating, removing, and configuring NPM packages. Yarn is an open-source package manager that saves a lot of time for JavaScript programmers because it creates a cache of downloaded packages. Using Yarn, a programmer can easily access and re-use a package without re-downloading it every time.
This article shows you how to install Yarn on Linux Mint 20.
All the people who belong to the networking background know that an IP address acts as a unique identifier of the devices within a network. Therefore, we must know the IP addresses of the devices within a network to enable smooth network communication. Today’s article will focus on the different methods of listing all the IP addresses on the Interface in Linux Mint 20.
Docker is a containerization platform. Docker is used to running lightweight containers on your computer. Synology NAS has official support for Docker. Docker can be an alternative to virtual machines. If you don’t have enough memory to run virtual machines on your Synology NAS, you can run Docker containers instead. Docker containers require a very little amount of memory and system resources to run.
In this article, I will show you how to install and use Docker on Synology NAS. So, let’s get started.
For Ubuntu’s latest versions, users can enable automatic login for the ease of users. If enabled, then users do not need to type the password whenever they try logging in. If you are the only user of your system, then it is a very useful method for easy access to relevant files. In this article, we will analyze the methods of enabling the automatic login on the Ubuntu 20.04 system.
IP address configuration is one of the normal tasks system administrators do on a System. IP address is used for identifying a device on a network. There are basically two types of IP addresses: 1) Public 2) Private. We can further divide these IP addresses into IPv4 and IPv6.
By default, Fedora uses DHCP-provided IP addresses when it is connected to a DHCP server. We can use the below methods to use static IP addressing and other networking options like vlans, bonds, bridges, teams, etc.
Git is one of the popular Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) among programmers. It lets you manage the incremental changes you make to your code. We can also easily revert to the earlier version of a code. Multiple developers can work simultaneously on the same project. Team members can see the changes to a project, message associated with the changes, their collaborators, project timeline, progress of the work, etc.
The kernel in Linux acts as a bridge to enable communication between software/applications and your machine’s hardware. It acts as the backbone of your operating system upon which the normal processing of all your system functions is based. That is why it is always good to keep it updated and upgraded regularly. In today’s article, we will be exploring the procedure of upgrading our Linux kernel version on Debian 10.
The Socket Statistics, or ‘ss,’ command has replaced the netstat command through its incorporation of the iproute suite of tools. Using the ss command, a user can print all the relevant information about network socket connections more quickly and with more detail than the netstat command. The netstat command approach is also slower because it collects information from reading the /proc files, and it takes a significant amount of time to display several network connections at once. Meanwhile, the ss command directly collects information from kernel space. Even so, the options that are used with ss command are quite similar. So, you can easily use the ss command as an improved alternative for the netstat command. This article covers the usage of the ss command with some straightforward examples. All the commands shown in this article were executed on the Ubuntu 20.04 distribution to check the statistics of socket and network connections.
The WiFi Hotspot allows us to connect the same and heterogeneous devices wirelessly to the Internet. Using the WiFi Hotspot, files can be easily shared with other devices. In this guide, you will learn how to create a WiFi Hotspot in Linux Mint 20.
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Creating the WiFi Hotspot is a very easy and straightforward process on Linux Mint 20. By creating the WiFi Hotspot, we can easily share the files with the other system connected to the same network. This guide explains the WiFi Hotspot creation on Linux Mint 20.
Thanks to the authors because the game is fully open-source and released on Github under the MIT License [2]. It was made with FLOSS tools (GIMP, VS Code, Phaser, Audacity, git, Tiled) for the MiniJam22 contest [3] and congratz to Congusbongus and StarNavigator for reaching the 2nd place with Peppertown!
Today we are looking at how to install Sheep It Render Farm 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.
I've been running the Openbox window manager since 2005. That's longer then I've lived in any one apartment in my entire life!
However, over the years I've been bracing for a change.
It seems clear the Wayland is the future, although when that future is supposed to begin is much more hazy.
Really, I've felt a bit like a ping pong ball, from panicking over whether Xorg is abandoned to anxiously wondering if literally everything will break the moment I switch to Wayland.
In fact, I started this blog post over a year ago when I first decided to switch from the Openbox to Sway.
This is my third major attempt to make the change and I think it will finally stick this time.
In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to first switch from openbox to i3 (which is a huge transition) and then from i3 to sway, but I decided to dive into the deep end with both changes.
I recently got into a discussion with someone who had purchased a second television for their house and, knowing that I have a fondness for open source and do-it-yourself projects, they asked if there was a suitable alternative to Fire TV. For those not familiar with the device, a Fire TV stick is a small device which looks like a large USB thumb drive and attaches to the HDMI port of a television. The device connects wirelessly to local networks and can be used to stream shows and movies from a variety of services like Netflix and Disney+. The device is operated by a small, dedicated remote control.
I was pretty sure a minimal Linux distribution running on a spare, minimal personal computer or a single-board device like a Raspberry Pi would probably be a suitable replacement. I figured a distribution that ran Kodi could probably do the work, connecting to the TV through an HDMI cable. The user could likely use the Kodi mobile app in place of a dedicated remote control.
For the sake of comparison, I looked up information on the Fire TV stick which was $55 USD if i wanted it in two weeks or $60 if I wanted it in one week. The person I was talking with already had one and knew it was a "plug and play" type device, so the total set up time would be under ten minutes.
I did some on-line shopping in my area and the closest open source style equivalent I could come up with was a Raspberry Pi 3B. The Pi was $47 USD. The Pi included a Wi-Fi option, but no microSD card, no HDMI cable, and no power supply. Adding these items to my tally brought my total up to $78, including tax. In other words, even with a free software solution, it looked like the open source route was going to be slightly more expensive with parts available in my region.
Windows 7 and Windows 10 aren't terrible operating systems. In fact, they are both very good. With that said, the newest version of Windows 10 has many bugs. Unfortunately, since Windows 7 is no longer supported, its users are stuck in a conundrum. They have to decide whether to use an unsupported Windows 7 or upgrade to Windows 10 that is full of telemetry and other "spying" that passes their information to Microsoft's servers. That is a very difficult decision.
Thankfully, there is a better option -- just switch to Linux! Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems will be supported (unlike the now-obsolete Windows 7) and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 10). Linux Lite is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.
Manjaro ARM 21.02 comes two months after Manjaro ARM 20.12 and ships with the latest Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environments by default. The previous release shipped with Xfce 4.14 and KDE Plasma 5.20, but after an initial system update you’d get Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.21.
If you’ve read my hands-on article of Manjaro ARM on the Raspberry Pi, you would know that the first thing I did was to update the system. I reviewed the Xfce edition, and Xfce 4.16 is a massive update that offers a huge performance boost compared to Xfce 4.14.
That shows through in a lot of ways. It shows up in the design of the base system and the packaging of addons. It shows up in the partitioning of the mass storage. It shows up in a lot of details of the commands. And it shows up in the attitudes and reflexes and prejudices of the developers, which are reflected in the code and in the users.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. Perhaps that's the only succinct way to describe it, and possibly the most correct.
In the open source world, the word “Linux” is almost synonymous with “Operating System”, but it is not the only open source UNIX€® operating system.
So what is the secret? Why is BSD not better known? This white paper addresses these and other questions.
In a recent blog post, OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne (solene@) offers an over view of the security features offered by a default OpenBSD installation.
In this video, we are looking at Mageia 8, KDE edition.
The Mageia 8 operating systems offers the KDE Plasma, GNOME and Xfce desktop environment, updated system packages including Linux kernel 5.10.16, Mesa 20.3.4 and GCC 10.2, updated applications and an updated, but still somewhat lacking, installer.
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Mageia is a free community-developed Linux-based operating system the systemd init system and the dnf package manager to manage software packages in the RPM package format.
The latest Mageia 8 is available as a "classic installation" variant that lets you install it but not trying it beforehand, "Live Media" editions with a live environment you can use to test it, and optionally install it, and a very small (just 50 MiB) "Network installation" image. The "Live Media" images are available in variants with KDE Plasma, GNOME and Xfce. All the images can be acquired using either HTTPS or the BitTorrent protocol.
At Spearline, we have a number of servers around the world with Sangoma telephony cards, which use the out-of-tree wanpipe and dahdi kernel modules. As we’ve been migrating our servers from CentOS 6 to SpearlineOS, one of the problems we’ve hit has been the out-of-tree modules don’t compile against the EL8 kernels that we use as the base for SpearlineOS.
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If there’s any interest in using the kmod RPMs without the other packages in the COPR, I could look at splitting them into a separate COPR. Please email me if you would like me to do this.
The wonderful world of Linux and open source never fails to surprise me. Even as immersed as I try to be, there’s always some new discovery around the corner. Case in point: I always assumed that Raspberry Pi OS was only intended for, you know, a Raspberry Pi. But recently I learned that the company makes a special version called Raspberry Pi Desktop, and you can install it on any traditional x86-based PC. Even an Apple Mac.
Raspberry Pi devices are built with low-power ARM processors and only 1GB to 4GB of RAM, and so the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s in-house operating system for the Single-Board Computers is lightweight. It’s designed to run smoothly on the entire Raspberry Pi lineup.
Most traditional PCs built within the last 15 years rock x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD. And as we know, most of those x86 computers run Windows while a smaller percentage run macOS.
Now, Windows 10 isn’t exactly lightweight. If you bought or built your PC during the Windows Vista or Windows 7 days, chances are high that it no longer meets the hardware requirements to adequately run Windows 10.
I find the notion of combining a chalk board and a Raspberry Pi Zero into a single unit, can be valuable at so many levels. In this case, using it to present a positive message along with some weather information can be useful in an office, church or perhaps as a message center in your house. Very often the kitchen refrigerator becomes the message center with notes stuck to it, but maybe something like this would be more appropriate and even more efficient.
Arduino hails from Italy, and it’s said that it was named after a bar where the developers usually meet to discuss the board. The first Arduino was developed in 2005 and aimed to provide students at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy with an inexpensive microcontroller board. Its cost and simplicity also piqued the interests of hobbyists and professionals; it wasn’t long until it reached a wider community of makers. Many other varieties of Arduino boards have been created since then. In 2013, around 700,000 Arduino boards were already sold [1].
Raspberry Pi was born seven years after Arduino when Eben Upton invented a low-cost, modular, the single-board computer that will help improve the programming skills of his students. Like Arduino, it soon reached a wider audience due to its cost and versatility. The first Raspberry Pi board cost only $35, far less expensive than the existing computer boards that usually cost five times higher. The small board got even smaller and cheaper after the Raspberry Pi Foundation created the Raspberry Pi Zero, the smallest Raspberry Pi board to date, which costs only $5. Raspberry Pi progressed rapidly that millions of boards were already created from the initial target of just 10,000 boards years after its first release.
If you want to upgrade your soldering setup without spending a lot of money, then be sure to check out Angelo AKA TechBuilder’s DIY Hakko 907 station.
This low-cost device features an Arduino Nano to read the iron temperature via an LM358 op-amp, and regulates power to the handle and tip under PWM control using an IRFZ44N MOSFET. A potentiometer is implemented as a variable temperature knob, with the actual and preset temperature displayed on a 16Ãâ2 LCD screen, while an LED indicates whether the heating element is active.
Sean is a natural choice for me to delegate this task to. He has been involved in the development of the Gemini specification for longer than anybody other than myself - he was the first person to actually implement the protocol in software, transforming it from the largely academic thought experiment that I had created it as into an actual real world project. He is the developer of a Gemini server (GLV-1.12556) and the admin of a server running it (gemini://gemini.conman.org), which means the details of the specification are of direct and practical relevance to him. He has a long-standing presence in Gopherspace, where the Gemini project was born, and therefore understands and appreciates the value of simple-by-design systems with limited scope. Finally, he has an excellent track record of constructively engaging with the mailing list even at its busiest and most frantic, which certainly can no longer be said for me. For all these reasons I trust him to make good decisions on the basis of careful consideration.
I was recently reminded that my most recent entry on what Firefox addons I use is now a bit over a year old. Firefox has had 14 releases since then and it feels the start of January 2020 was an entirely different age, but my Firefox addons have barely changed in the year and a bit since that entry. Since they have updated a very small amount, I'll repeat the whole list just so I have it in one spot for the next time around.
MySQL is an open-source, simple, and relational database that uses SQL (Structured Query Language) to manage and manipulate the data.
MySQL Database System is a highly scalable database service for creating cloud-native applications. Therefore we have to perform different operations while working on it. The ALTER TABLE declaration is being cast-off to add, remove, or alter columns while working on an already existing table in any schema of MySQL. We’ll teach you exactly how to declare a column to an existing table utilizing the MySQL ADD COLUMN expression in this guide.
Data redundancy occurs for a lot of reasons. Several of the complicated duties you should cope with while working with database systems is trying to discover duplicate values. For this purpose, We will be using the COUNT() aggregate method. The COUNT() method returns the sum of rows residing in a specific table. The COUNT() function permits you to sum all rows or only rows matching the condition defined. In this guide, You’ll get to know how to identify duplicate values for one or maybe more MySQL columns using COUNT().
A CSV or comma-separated value document is a delineated text document that distinguishes values from a comma. Every line is its information record. Each data, parted by commas, comprises one or extra fields. The origin of the title for this document layout is the usage of the comma as a field divider. For sharing information between various programs, such documents are used. For instance, Database and contact administrators also endorse CSV files. The theory is that from one program to a CSV document, you may transfer complex information and afterward import the information in that CSV document to some other program. In this tutorial, we will learn how to import data from a CSV file into MySQL workbench. Let’s get started.
The MySQL LIKE operator tests if a particular character string resembles the pattern mentioned. We will match a portion of the overall data present in a segment that doesn’t need to match precisely. We will cup tie our keyword with the sequence of the information available in columns by using wildcard query in various combinations. MySQL Wildcards are symbols that help match difficult criteria with search results and have been used in combination with a compare operator called LIKE or a contrast operator called NOT LIKE.
You eventually hit the stage where data volume greatly increases when we start to deal with DBMS like MySQL. It is difficult for us to manage and use. MySQL has built-in capabilities that make it easy to handle. In MySQL, the LIMIT clause is being used to cut down the number of rows throughout the result set using the SELECT expression. We will discover how to use the MySQL LIMIT clause in this guide to restrict the number of rows that a query returns.
While working with MySQL queries, the results are obtained in the same sequence as the records inserted into the schema utilizing the SELECT command. It’s the standard order for sorting. You would be aiming at how we might arrange our query result. Sorting is re-arranging the outputs of our query in a defined manner. Sorting may be done on one field or more than one field. The ORDER BY statement is being used to arrange the query results in an ascending or descending order in MySQL. The ORDER BY statement organizes data by default in go-up order if ASC or DESC is not specified. The DESC term is being used to organize the data in descending way.
A subquery is a SQL query within a greater query that is recursive, or a subquery is considered an internal query. In contrast, an outer query is termed as the query that includes the subquery. A MySQL subquery can be embedded in the queries, including SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. Furthermore, within another subquery, a subquery may be nestled. The phrase subquery should be closed in brackets wherever it is used. We’ll teach you how and when to use MySQL subquery to compose complicated queries and describe the idea of the associated subquery. Open the command-line shell from your desktop and write your password to start using it. Press Enter and continue.
According to StackOverflow’s 2020 Annual Developer Survey, PostgreSQL is the second most popular database management system available, and this is not without good reason. Since its initial release in 1996, PostgreSQL, or Postgres, has improved considerably, adding several useful features, including user-defined types, table inheritance, multi-version concurrency control, and more. PostgreSQL is also very lightweight, easy to set up, and can be installed on several platforms, such as containers, VMs, or physical systems. Besides its default GUI, pgAdmin, Postgres also supports over 50 other IDEs, a third of which are free to use. This article will cover some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) about PostgreSQL.
You want to try LibreOffice Online for free, right? For your information, it is Writer, Calc, and Impress made accessible on the web browser developed by the infamous Collabora. For a long time, there was barely free service to try but now you and I can try. This article invites you to try it by showing how it looks like. Enjoy!
LibreOffice Online (also called Collabora Office) is the computer office suite program LibreOffice made web based i.e. you access it using web browser without installing anything to your computer. Speaking about the technology, it is integrated with Nextcloud on the server.
At some point, though, your journies will take you to places where things aren’t so clear cut, and you’ll start to gain a sixth sense; a kind of visceral experience that things are not as they have been promised to be.
A few weeks ago, that sixth sense whispered in my ear: “what if, instead of your cruddy bootloader written in a pre-1.0 systems language for a platform you don’t fully understand, it’s the 20 year-old project with 80,000 commits that’s wrong?” And it was right.
A function is a block of code that performs a certain task and provides the output. It is mainly used to eliminate repetitive code. In this tutorial, we will look into the friend function in C++ and explain its concept with working examples.
In my day job I work with images captured by cameras, using those images to infer something about the geometry of the scene being observed. Naturally, to get good results you need to have a good estimate of the behavior of the lens (the "intrinsics"), and of the relative geometry of the cameras (the "extrinsics"; if there's more than one camera).
The usual way to do this is to perform a "calibration" procedure to compute the intrinsics and extrinsics, and then to use the resulting "camera model" to process the subsequent images. Wikipedia has an article. And from experience, the most common current toolkit to do this appears to be OpenCV.
People have been doing this for a while, but for whatever reason the existing tools all suck. They make basic questions like "how much data should I gather for a calibration?" and "how good is this calibration I just computed?" and "how different are these two models?" unanswerable.
On my quest to a custom when-statement I did quite a bit of reading. The study of roast and Actions.nqp can lead to great gain in knowledge.
Pandas group by function is used for grouping DataFrames objects or columns based on particular conditions or rules. Using the groupby function, the dataset management is easier. However, all related records can be arranged into groups. Using the Pandas library, you can implement the Pandas group by function to group the data according to different kinds of variables. Most developers used three basic techniques for the group by function. First, splitting in which data divide into groups based on some particular conditions. Then, apply certain functions to these groups. In the end, combine the output in the form of data structure.
In this article, we will walk through the basic uses of a group by function in panda’s python. All commands are executed on the Pycharm editor.
I want startup scripts and everything that has a #!/bin/sh shebang to use the lightest possible shell by default, but I still want my trusty bash in interactive terminal sessions, and for complex scripts.
Some time ago I wrote a post about creating an embedded dsl for Html in Java. Sadly, it was based on an abuse of lambda name reflection that was later removed from Java.
I thought I should do a followup because a lot of people still visit the old article. While it’s no longer possible to use lambda parameter names in this way, we can still get fairly close.
It was bad enough trying to split up all of those date strings into their constituent parts - year, month, day - all of that stuff. But, then when I tried to consistently turn them back into a time_t, I ran into a bunch of other problems. That lead to the post called time handling is garbage. That then lead into the followup post three months later which talked about making time_t values without using mktime and the TZ variable.
I think it's about time for the next installment in the Excursions series.
One area I was always interested in this a long time back has been transportation-related infrastructure like roads and rail. And a fact that comes up quite naturally along that is the “sidedness” of traffic in different countries. Today a majority makes use of right-hand traffic, but this has changed over the cause of time. It is sometimes said the prevalence of right-hand traffic in Europe (and the Western world in general) is related to Napoleon and him wanted to keep England “at arms length”. This seems to quite disputed though…
But rather that going through various countries handedness here. I thought we should look at something more interesting and quirky. Because as it turns out, it's not always the case that the standard is entirely the same within a single country.
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Next we go east to Hong Kong. Under British influence Hong Kong practiced left-hand trafic. And this has been kept also after 1997. Thus on the borders to mainland China contraptions like these can be seen to facilitate switching sides...
One in three teachers in English universities think live lectures should continue to be online once the pandemic is over, and half think student one-to-ones should stay digital, according to a survey.
The figures come from the sector regulator’s review of digital teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, led by its chair, Sir Michael Barber. The Office for Students surveyed 1,285 students and 567 teaching staff from higher education providers in England.
A 2019 report by National Public Radio in the U.S. highlighted the problems vanilla growers in Papantla, Veracruz, had with theft by criminal gangs as the prices for the crop went up due to poor weather that year in other vanilla-producing countries like Madagascar. At that time, vanilla was fetching 10,000 pesos a kilo but the price is currently about half that.
These days, the price of Mexican vanilla has gone down significantly — 500,000 pesos a tonne, said Hernández. However, he also says that Mexico has incentives to invest in the resurrection of vanilla farming. Countries like France, Japan, Germany and the United States still are interested in buying the Mexican variety, he said.
In reality, South Dakota’s laissez faire approach the pandemic — including Noem’s refusal to enforce a mask mandate — has amounted to “a failed experiment in herd immunity,” as Bloomberg recently put it. The state has one of the 10 highest mortality rates in the United States. More than 1 in 500 residents has died since the pandemic began. And, as Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan noted during the CBS interview, South Dakota’s mortality rate has been the highest in the country since last July.
Noting that the governor is a staunch conservative, Brennan pressed Noem to explain how someone who claims to care about the sanctity of life can “justify making decisions that put the health of your constituents at risk.” Her response was nonsensical whataboutism.
The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, therefore allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
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I also made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 167 and 168 to Debian...
When it comes to VPN services, everyone has their individual preferences, and the same is true of the protocols used to encrypt them.
OpenVPN and IPsec encryption protocols have long ruled the roost, but up-and-coming protocol WireGuard is proving that high levels of encryption can be had for less overhead.
We caught up with Daniel Sagi, COO at Kape Technologies, parent company of Private Internet Access, to find out about the value WireGuard can deliver and the company's approach to protocols going forward.
It’s being called the biggest breach of all time and the mother of all breaches: COMB, or the Compilation of Many Breaches, contains more than 3.2 billion unique pairs of cleartext emails and passwords. While many data breaches and leaks have plagued the internet in the past, this one is exceptional in the sheer size of it. To wit, the entire population of the planet is at roughly 7.8 billion, and this is about 40% of that.
However, when considering that only about 4.7 billion people are online, COMB would include the data of nearly 70% of global internet users (if each record was a unique person). For that reason, users are recommended to immediately check if their data was included in the leak. You can head over to the CyberNews personal data leak checker now.
I use my own Root CA to manage certificates in the homelab environment.
This is a much delayed discussion on the complexity and nuance of the SolarWind hack. The simplistic and wrong messaging from some quarters of the infosec community has resulted in an atrocious misunderstanding of the hack in the public sphere. This has extended into the policy world as these bad takes are treated as cogent analysis.
Comments made by Microsoft president Brad Smith to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which held a hearing on the SolarWinds attacks last week, claiming that there is more security in the cloud than in on-premises servers, have met a tough response from former NSA hacker Jake Williams, who characterised them as having caused more harm to security than the SolarWinds attackers did in the first place.
Williams, a well-known figure in the infosec community who runs his own private security outfit, Rendition Infosec, said in a tweet: "I've been thinking a LOT about Brad Smith's testimony this week about #SolariGate. He repeatedly implies that if organisations 'just' adopt a cloud first model, they won't experience these sorts of attacks. I called that reckless then, I'm doubling down now."
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The SolarWinds attacks were first revealed by the American security firm FireEye on 9 December, when it revealed that its Red Team tools had been stolen. Five days later, FireEye issued a blog post outlining the scale of the attack as known at that stage: a global campaign to compromise public and private sector bodies through corruption of software supply chains, using software that runs on Windows.
FireEye chief Kevin Mandia also gave testimony to the same committee hearing.
Williams said Smith should have offered more nuance and caveats in his statements. "With his statements that lacked appropriate nuance and caveats, I predict that Smith has caused more harm to security than the Russians did with #SolariGate in the first place," he said. "Yes, I know that's a strong statement. Yes, I mean it."
He added: "A lot of leadership who don't know any better heard this testimony and are constructing cloud-first directives as I type this. But they're doing it without understanding the risks and trade-offs. They're doing this without the benefit of creating a strategy first."
Microsoft has made a number of statements since the attack first came to light, initially denying its products were part of the problem, but later admitting that the attackers had accessed its source code.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum and author of the book "COVID19: The Great Reset", has repeatedly warned about the possibility of devastating large-scale cyberattacks. One of his firmest warnings was given in a heartwarming speech at the WEF-sponsored Cyber Polygon event on July 24th, 2020. The World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity expects the total cost of cyberattacks this year to be $6 trillion.
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Running up-to-date free software based solutions such as Linux and *BSD is a good preventative measure against real cyberattacks. It will, sadly, not do much difference if a government decides to cut power or Internet access as part of a global "Great Reset" agenda or because inconvenient mass-demonstrations break out.
For most users, there should be no noticeable change. If you have any packages installed that are no longer provided by Void, or your system has explicit dependencies on LibreSSL, you will of course need to take action to ensure your system continues to function after the switch.
The LibreSSL project has been developing a fork of the OpenSSL package since 2014; it is supported as part of OpenBSD. Adoption of LibreSSL on the Linux side has been slow from the start, though, and it would appear that the situation is about to get worse. LibreSSL is starting to look like an idea whose time may never come in the Linux world.
OpenSSL provides the low-level plumbing for a number of important cryptographic functions; it provides TLS and SSL implementations and a number of utilities for functions like key generation and signing. Most programs that need to communicate securely over the network end up linking to OpenSSL for that functionality. OpenSSL has always had a bit of a strange position in the Linux world due to its special license, which contains an advertising requirement that is deemed to be incompatible with the GNU General Public License. To get around this problem, many GPL-licensed programs include a special exception allowing linking to OpenSSL.
Around a month and a half ago we reported about a serious flaw in Windows 10 that could be exploited to corrupt the contents of an NTFS drive. With Microsoft dawdling in its response, it was down to security researchers from OSR to produce a third-party patch.
But now Microsoft has stepped up to the plate and, finally, come up with an official fix for the flaw. Sadly, it's not all good news as the fix is not currently available for everyone.
Did you catch that? Regarding the Linux Mint update manager, Lefebvre says "it might even insist" that users install some updates. So, yes, Linux Mint may soon be insisting, or forcing, its users install software they may not want. You know what? That may not be a bad thing. Look, Mint users are often acting irresponsibly, and if forced updates make them safer, maybe that is acceptable.
Last month, the Linux Mint team published a post on the organization's official blog about the importance of installing security updates on machines running the Linux distribution.
The essence of the post was that a sizeable number of Linux Mint devices was running outdated applications, packages or even an outdated version of the operating system itself.
A sizeable number of devices run on Linux Mint 17.x, according to the blog post, a version of Linux Mint that reached end of support in April 2019.
A new blog post, published yesterday, provides information on how the team plans to reduce the update reluctance of Linux Mint users.
User tracking technologies are ubiquitous on the web. In recent times web browsers try to fight abuses. This led to an arms race where new tracking and anti-tracking measures are being developed. The use of one of such evasion techniques, the CNAME cloaking technique is recently quickly gaining popularity. Our evidence indicates that the use of the CNAME scheme threatens web security and privacy systematically and in general.
I pointed to some of such risks back in 2014, but I must say that the landscape changed significantly. Our current work is the first systematic, deep security & privacy analysis of the technique. Because the CNAME technique is today increasingly used on the web, the results are worrying. I would actually say that we’re near the worst scenario, with systemic data leaks and security vulnerabilities found in the wild, making the ecosystem more fragile. In this post, I explain the implications, including regulatory-wise.
Hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls were infamously kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram in 2014. Known as the Chibok girls, they were taken from their boarding school. In the seven years since, many of the 276 girls have escaped, been rescued or released, but more than 100 remain missing.
Since then, Nigeria has seen several such kidnappings. As recently as Saturday, 24 students were released after having been abducted February 17 from the neighboring nation of Niger.
The arrival of the sticky bombs in Kashmir - including 15 seized in a February raid - raises concerns that an unnerving tactic attributed to the Taliban insurgents in nearby Afghanistan could be spreading to the India-Pakistan conflict.
Tokyo’s immediate justification for the change is China’s own new law allowing its coast guard to use their weaponry against vessels in territories it claims. Beijing’s legislation took effect on February 1, but was drawn up towards the end of 2020, after four years of increasingly belligerent provocations by the Trump administration in Washington.
Four in-house and private practice lawyers set out why the ITC has become more popular in Q1 of 2021, and why that trend could well continue
This is just my first post on legislative initiatives in multiple states concerning mobile app stores, so I've really just begun to research the topic and have a lot to learn.
A couple of weeks ago, the North Dakota state senate voted against a bill that would have required Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store to allow app developers to use other payment in-app payment systems. The fact that the state legislature decided against it doesn't represent a ringing endorsement of the status quo of mobile app stores. It's possible that many of the lawmakers who voted against the proposal simply didn't want their state, with not even a million inhabitants, to take such a fundamental decision against two of the country's largest and most powerful companies.
There definitely is broadbased political support for the fight against app store monopolies: last fall, the Democratic majority of the United States House of Representatives adopted a report on digital markets that condemns the current situation in pretty strong terms.
All three branches of U.S. government are dealing with the issue in different ways: the judiciary has various antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Google before it (with a case management conference in Epic Games v. Apple taking place tomorrow, Monday); the executive government (the DOJ's Antitrust Division and various state attorneys-general) may bring antitrust cases as well; and as far as lawmakers are concerned, there's the aforementioned House report (which is non-legislative, though it does recommend that measures be taken) as well as activities in multiple states.
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The first state legislature to enact such an app store state law could make history, and would benefit consumers and developers alike. I keep my fingers crossed, but there are so many other things going on that I'm sure it's not a question of if, but when, the app store situation will improve. When I campaigned against the EU software patent directive in 2004 and 2005, I thought it was the most fundamental threat to developers ever. It's how I became a campaigner for the first time in my life, and a little over a year after joining the fray, I received an award that went to Governor Schwarzenegger two years later, and I received more votes than fellow nominee Bono, which shows there were a number of people who thought I had made an impact on a major issue. But this app store cause is more important. I'm not going to be a full-time campaigner again, but I am determined to make my little contribution.
Counsel at three medical device companies say communication and patent eligibility are some of their biggest hurdles
Arbitration is generally the result of a contract between parties, and most often the parties’ contract determines rights and obligations only as between the parties to that contract. Even though the parties’ contract establishes the matters that are subject to arbitration, the jurisdictional law where the arbitration will be held often delineates what subject matter the parties can agree to submit to arbitration. Whether a particular subject matter is arbitrable is often referred to as ‘objective arbitrability.’[2] As used in this chapter, ‘arbitrability’ means the question of whether a particular issue in dispute is capable of resolution by arbitration or whether that issue is reserved for determination by the national courts or another forum under the relevant jurisdictional law.
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The EU is in the process of revamping its patent system with the unitary patent (UP) and the Unified Patent Court (UPC).
On Monday, March 1, 2021, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this important case focusing on administrative power of the USPTO Patent Trial & Appeal Board. PTAB judges have cancelled thousands of issued patents — that judicial role (with little direct control guidance from the USPTO Director) suggests that the PTAB judges are “Officers of the United States” that must be appointed by the President. Although PTAB decisions are not directly reviewable by the USPTO Director, the director has substantial authority in controlling panel selection, rules of practice, and job performance. All those suggest that perhaps the judges are “inferior Officers” that may be appointed by a Head of Department – such as the Secretary of Commerce. If the Principal Officer theory prevails, the potential result is that a substantial number of PTAB Decisions will be rendered void.
The Federal Circuit decision in the case was a bit quirky, to be mild. The appellate court agreed with the patentee that the judges were Principal Officers that should have been appointed by the President. However, the court also purported to “save” the appointments by eliminating some of the statutory rights provided to the Judges under the APA via judicial fiat. That severing, according to the court, was sufficient to reduce the judges once again to Inferior officers.
None of the parties were satisfied with this result, and each petitioned for writ of certiorari. The Supreme Court granted the writ (as to the two questions above) and consolidated the cases.
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At the briefing stage, the US Gov’t presented an additional waiver challenge — arguing that the patentee had not preserved its right to appeal on the appointments challenge. SCOTUS declined to hear that issue in this case. However, the issue is central to a parallel appointments challenge in Carr v. Saul. That case is looking at whether administrative law judges deciding cases under the Social Security Act should have been appointed by the President
Humira (adalimumab) is among the best-selling drugs in the United States and around the world. Even though the core patent for Humira expired in 2016, the manufacturer, AbbVie, has continued to increase the price to consumers year-after-year, so that the 2019 average yearly retail price was $84,454. Another 7.5% price increase is expected in the near future. AbbVie’s conduct to promote the rising price of Humira was recently challenged in In Re: Humira€® (Adalimumab) Antitrust Litigation, No. 19-cv-1873. In March 2019, a group of indirect payers for Humira (labor unions and health and welfare funds) filed a novel lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging antitrust activity on the part of AbbVie in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The antitrust challenge, which was dismissed by the District Court on the basis of the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, is predicated on AbbVie’s patent thicket that surrounds Humira and on legal settlements it has reached with six biosimilar companies to keep them out of the market until 2023. This article examines In Re Humira and provides a legal rationale for the conclusion that the District Court’s dismissal of the case should be overturned on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The case will be heard on February 25, 2021.
This paper examines the association between bank liquidity creation and technological innovation. Using a comprehensive measure of bank output, I find that bank liquidity creation decreases technological innovation, measured by patent-based criteria. This is robust to using the instrumental variable approach, time-varying unobserved factors that may drive the demand for commercial loans, and several other robustness checks. The state-industry-level results show that the observed negative relation between bank liquidity creation and technological innovation is mainly driven by the manufacturing and finance industries. I also find that bank liquidity creation enhances innovation by firms that have above-median asset tangibility. Further analysis reveals that the relationship between bank liquidity creation and technological innovation is asymmetric. Overall, the results in this paper stress the fundamental role played by innovation in the finance-growth nexus.
On Friday in the District of Colorado, Ginegar LLC filed a complaint against defendant Slack Technologies for patent infringement, alleging that the plaintiff’s workplace instant messaging platform infringes upon its intellectual property.
The patents-in-suit are United States Patent Nos. 9,367,521 (the ’521 patent) and 9,760,865 (the ’865 patent). For example, the ’521 patent, entitled, “Content and Context Based Handling of Instant Messages, allegedly “claims a method of processing instant messages.” The plaintiff stated that the “method comprises logging an instant message client into an instant message server, obtaining from the instant message server at least one handling rule that is evaluated in an instant messaging environment where each established handling rule defines a condition based upon at least one of identified content or identified context, and a corresponding event handling action which is performed within the instant message environment.”
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Furthermore, as described in claim 1, Slack “software connects to a messenger server in order to function.” Additionally, “(h)andling rules are stored on a message server and are obtained by downloading to the user device,” according to the plaintiff. The plaintiff noted that Slack also utilizes synchronized apps, so “(w)hatever you do on one device is reflected everywhere.” Moreover, the handling rules are “stored and synced by the Slack server. The content of received messages are evaluated” by message type, such as direct message, mentions, etc. Thus, Slack purportedly “uses each handling rule to define a condition based on at least one of identified content or context,” such as “highlight(ing) content in response to a username or specific keywords.” After which, Slack allegedly “performs a corresponding event handling action within the instant message environment,” while identifying the instant message environment the message is in, the parties involved, and if handling conditions are met. Lastly, the plaintiff added that Slack notifies users with pop-up notifications. As a result, the plaintiff claimed that Slack has utilized the patented method for its instant messaging communication technology.
On Tuesday, plaintiff CPC Patent Technologies Pty Ltd. (CPC), “an investment company focused on biometric technology,” filed a complaint against Apple in the Western District of Texas for patent infringement, alleging that Apple infringed the patents-in-suit.
The patents-in-suit are United States Patent Nos. 9,269,208 (the ’208 patent), 9,665,705 (the ’705 patent), and 8,620,039 (the ’039 patent). According to the complaint, the “products accused of infringing the ’208 Patent and the ’705 Patent include iPhones and iPads equipped with Touch or Face ID (‘the Secure Access Accused Products’)” and the “products accused of infringing the ’039 Patent include the Secure Access Accused Products equipped with Apple Card loaded into the iPhone Wallet (‘the Secure Pay Accused Products’).” Collectively, Apple’s purportedly infringing products are called the Accused Products.
The plaintiff claimed that the ’208 and ’705 patents “provide for enrollment in a biometric security system where the user’s biometric data is stored securely. Once the user’s biometric data is secure in an electronic device (e.g., a smartphone), the biometric data can be used to unlock the electronic device.” Meanwhile, the ’039 patent, according to the plaintiff, is “directed to improved smart card device security provided using biometric data.”
