Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
Last year I replaced my old laptop with a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga, and I wrote a preliminary review of it. This laptop is my only computer, used for both work and play. I’ve had it for a year, gotten used to some of my initial annoyances, and discovered a few new ones. So I thought I’d provide an update with some more long-term impressions.
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While I love the sharpness of the laptop’s 3840Ãâ2160 4K display, this resolution is overkill for its 14ââ¬Â³ screen size. At 200% scaling, things are too small. Currently I am using 200% scale with 11pt Noto Sans font, which takes advantage of a bug in Noto Sans in that 11pt is 22% bigger than 10pt, not 10% bigger like you would expect. The super high resolution also results in excessive power consumption, contributing to poor battery life. And the 16:9 aspect ratio is not ideal.
Later models of this laptop have a 16:10 screen, but with the same excessive 4K resolution. Boo.
A 14ââ¬Â³ laptop screen ideally needs a resolution of 3200Ãâ2000 so that when you scale it to 200%, you get an effective resolution of 1600Ãâ1000. This is still perfectly sufficient to make the individual pixels invisible, but would draw less power and yield un-problematic 200% scaling for perfectly crisp and pixel-aligned visuals.
Another Linux dedicated Laptop is out as TUXEDO Computers launched TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux laptop with massive configurations.
TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 4 is now available for the pre-oder and it will start shipping from May 31, 2021.
Schenker subsidiary Tuxedo is introducing a new Linux-based 14-inch business laptop powered by Intel’s Tiger Lake-U processors. It does not come with a dedicated GPU, unfortunately, but, to compensate, it gets a 3K LTPS display option with 16:10 aspect ratio.
The new Infinity Book Pro 14 from Tuxedo can be equipped with either a Core i5-1135G7 with 80 EU Iris Xe iGPU or an i7-1165G7 processor with 96 EU Iris Xe iGPU. These can be coupled with a maximum of 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and the storage solution supports up to 4 TB capacities through the M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 4.0 X2 slots, plus it also offers Intel Optane memory compatibility.
Linux PC developers Tuxedo unveils its 6th-gen InfinityBook Pro 14, a Ubuntu-based Linux laptop with an impressive 3K display panel to take on Apple's popular MacBook laptops.
The European company's 14-inch laptop is set to start shipping on May 13, and it comes pre-installed with the popular Ubuntu-based OS for Linux laptops. For those interested, pre-orders are now available but it might be worth checking out what's under the hood below.
Chromebooks have had Linux support for such a long time by now, you'd be forgiven if you forgot that Linux has only ever been in beta testing for all these years. At I/O 2021, Google has announced that that's about to change with the next version of Chrome OS, 91. Linux is finally losing its beta moniker.
Chrome OS first introduced support for Linux about three years ago, and it's been a wild ride. While the OS itself is technically build on top of Linux (just like Android), it isn't able to run traditional Linux apps by itself. Even before Google introduced the official Linux container, people were going around this limit with a script (crouton) that added Ubuntu or Debian on top of Chrome OS. After its introduction, Google's official solution quickly gained traction, but it was still pretty limited in the beginning. Only a few select Chromebooks supported it, and things like sound and graphics were broken, severely limiting the utility of the subsystem. But those were the early days, and while it took Google some time, Linux apps almost feel right at home on Chrome OS now.
Google has announced that Chrome OS support for Linux apps will finally exit beta in a few weeks.
Linux apps have been available on Chrome OS for three years, albeit in beta. Google is now ready to drop the beta label and declare the feature stable.
Not wanting to be left out is UK-based computer company Entroware, who have just unveiled their latest Ubuntu laptop — and it’s packs some big tech inside.
Say hello to the Entroware Proteus.
The Entroware Proteus is 15.6-inch laptop packing a whopping 73 Wh battery. Even used at full tilt, this laptop isn’t going to need recharging as often as other 15-inch workstations, meaning users can get more done,with fewer adapter-related interruptions.
If you’re in the market for a new Linux laptop, you should know that Entroware Proteus is now on sale as an ultra-portable and ultra-professional Linux notebook featuring a generous 15.6-inch Full HD (1920Ãâ1080) IPS matte display with an ultra-thin bezel, full backlit keyboard, and an aluminium alloy chassis that’s 2 cm thick.
Under the hood, the Entroware Proteus laptop can be configured with 11th Gen Intel Core processors, either the Intel Core i5-1135G7 with 4 core, 8 threads, 8M cache, and up to 4.20 GHz clock speeds, or the more powerful Intel Core i7-1165G7 with 4 cores, 8 threads, 12M cache, and up to 4.70 GHz clock speeds.
Webmin is a free web-based software platform meant to manage Linux servers and their services. It is distributed under a free license thus, anybody can use it without paying any cost. Here we will find some best alternatives to Webmin for Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and other Server distros.
It is a tool with which you can easily manage, coordinate and control almost all services (server processes, daemons ) in a Unix system. It is module-based and tons of management modules can be easily reloaded.
Thanks to its simple front-end fluent web interface that only requires the Perl interpreter to run, which is installed by default with the operating system in the “/usr/bin/” directory. The work is then done by CGI scripts that are called up with a common web browser.
A couple of streams back someone told me about an interesting project. Sonic Robo Blast 2, a FOSS Sonic fan game based on the DOOM engine, I knew that I had to go and play it because that sounds amazing.
Join us for a chat with Paulus, the founder of Home Assistant, as we look to the project's future, hardware devices, new standards, and more.
Window rules are a feature of many window managers but today I thought it'd be helpful to do a bit of exploring of the ones implemented in Awesome WM, these allow you to control how and where your windows will spawn and be allowed to move. This has been sitting in my upload folder for a month, I could have sworn I had already uploaded this video.
One of the interesting performance-related kernel patch series to come about so far this year has been Google's multi-generational LRU framework that is promising to offer much better performance in addressing the kernel's expensive page reclaimation handling.
The Multigen LRU framework addresses issues with the current kernel design, "the current page reclaim is too expensive in terms of CPU usage and often making poor choices about what to evict. We would like to offer an alternative framework that is performant, versatile and straightforward." This patch series has been touted as leading to ~18% less low-memory kills on Android, code starts reduced by 16%, and Google's testing on Chrome OS led to ~96% fewer low-memory tab discards and 59% less out-of-memory kills thanks to this improved least recently used framework.
ARM server vendor Ampere Computing has been working on an SSIF BMC-side driver for the Aspeed ASTC2500 baseboard management controller that they are looking to upstream in the Linux kernel.
SSIF is short for the SMBus System Interface and allows accessing the baseboard management controller by way of the SMBus host controller.
AMD submitted another set of feature changes to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of this summer's Linux 5.14 cycle.
This latest pull request just comes one week after their initial 5.14 pull last week that included more work on their Adebaran CDNA accelerator, initial HHVM SVM support, DP LTTPR handling improvements, PCI Express ASPM enablement, TMZ for Renoir, support for handling multiple eDP panels, and other enhancements.
A new patch series has been posted implementing Runtime Verification (RV) for the Linux kernel.
By the time the last pull request was acted on and 5.13-rc1 was released, a total of 14,231 non-merge commits had found their way into the mainline. That makes the 5.13 merge window larger than the entire 5.12 development cycle (13,015 commits) and just short of all of 5.11 (14,340). In other words, 5.13 looks like one of the busier development cycles we have seen for a little while. About 6,400 of these commits came in after the first-half summary was written, and they include a number of significant new features.
While it is sometimes possible to perform I/O by moving data through the CPU, the only way to get the required level of performance is usually for devices to move data directly to and from memory. Direct memory access (DMA) I/O has been well supported in the Linux kernel since the early days, but there are always ways in which that support can be improved, especially when hardware adds some challenges of its own. The somewhat confusingly named "non-contiguous" DMA API that was added for 5.13 shows the kinds of things that have to be done to get the best performance on current systems.
DMA, of course, presents a number of interesting race conditions that can arise in the absence of an agreement between the CPU and the device over who controls a range of memory at any given time. But there is another problem that comes up as well. CPUs aggressively cache memory contents to avoid the considerable expense of actually going to memory for every reference. But if a CPU has cached data that is subsequently overwritten by DMA, the CPU could end up reading incorrect data from the cache, resulting in data corruption. Similarly, if the cache contains data written by the CPU that has not yet made it to memory, that data really needs to be flushed out before the device accesses that memory or bad things are likely to happen.
The x86 architecture makes life relatively easy (in this regard, at least) for kernel developers by providing cache snooping; CPU caches will be invalidated if a device is seen to be writing to a range of memory, for example. This "cache-coherent" behavior means that developers need not worry about cache contents corrupting their data. Other architectures are not so forgiving. The Arm architecture, among others, will happily retain cache contents that no longer match the memory they are allegedly caching. On such systems, developers must take care to manage the cache properly as control of a DMA buffer is passed between the device and the CPU.
Among the many changes merged for 5.13 can be found performance improvements throughout the kernel. This work does not always stand out the way that new features do, but it is vitally important for the future of the kernel overall. In the memory-management area, a couple of long-running patch sets have finally made it into the mainline; these provide a bulk page-allocation interface and huge-page mappings in the vmalloc() area. Both of these changes should make things faster, at least for some workloads.
Batch page allocation
The kernel's memory-allocation functions have long been optimized for performance and scalability, but there are situations where that work still has not achieved the desired results. One of those is high-speed networking. Back in 2016, networking developer Jesper Dangaard Brouer described the challenges that come with the fastest network links; when the system is processing tens of millions of packets per second, the time available to deal with any given packet is highly constrained. The kernel may only have a few hundred CPU cycles available to process each packet, and obtaining a page from the memory allocator may, by itself, require more than that. Using the entire CPU-time budget to allocate memory is not the way to get the best network performance.
At the time, Brouer asked for an API that would allow numerous pages to be allocated with a single call, hopefully with a much lower per-page cost. The networking code could then grab a pile of memory, and quickly hand out pages as needed. Nobody objected to the request at the time; it is well understood that batching operations can increase throughput in situations like this. But it took some time for that interface to come around.
Ahead of the 30th anniversary of Linux, coming up in August of 2021, Jeremy Andrews has conducted an two-part, in-depth interview with Linus Torvalds, covering topics such as open source licensing, corporate contributions, Git, project maintenance, and more.
When asked about choosing the GPLv2 license for the Linux kernel, Torvalds says, “I’m 100% convinced that the license has been a big part of the success of Linux (and Git, for that matter). I think everybody involved ends up being much happier when they know that everybody has equal rights, and nobody is special with regards to licensing.”
Earlier this week when posting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / 20.10 / 21.04 benchmarks on the new Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors, one of the first questions that came up was about how well these new 10nm server CPUs perform with Intel's own Clear Linux distribution. While Clear Linux releases have become much less frequent and far less to communicate these days on new improvements/optimizations among other ongoing shifts with that Intel open-source project, it is still performing very strongly with 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable hardware. CentOS in these tests also had a strong showing with the increasing performance focus on that front.
Sublime Text 4 brings refreshed UI and some new major features. Packages and package repositories are provided for most of the major Linux distributions.
Sublime Text is certainly one of the most popular code editors out there and for good reason. Above all, it is lightning fast. Sublime Text is a cross-platform text editor developed for individuals who are looking for an effective yet minimalist tool for shuffling code around.
While being a lightweight text editor, it provides powerful IDE-like features, and the ability to customize every aspect of the editor itself, letting users code and refactor with speed and efficiency.
Sublime Text 4 was officially released a day ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 20.04 via apt repository.
Sublime Text 4 (Build 4107) feature multi-select tabs. Press and hold Ctrl (or Shift), then you can select tabs to view them side by side.
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The syntax highlighting engine has been significantly improved, with new features like handling non-deterministic grammars, multi-line constructs, lazy embeds and syntax inheritance. Memory usage has been reduced, and load times are faster than ever.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to remove symbolic links on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, A symbolic link (also known as a symlink) is a term or special type of file in Linux that points to another file or directory. In general Symbolic links are used to link libraries. Also, used to link log files and folders on mounted NFS (Network File System) shares.
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 the step-by-step to remove symbolic links on Linux.
Docker is an open-source containerization technology that is designed to create, deploy and run container-based applications in Linux system.
Xfce is a modern, open-source, and lightweight desktop environment for Linux operating systems, meant to be fast and easy to use and configure.
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install Odoo 14 on a CentOS 8 server using Docker.
After we published our How to Install Odoo on Ubuntu tutorial, there were many requests to do one for CentOS too, so here we go.
These instructions are similar for other CentOS versions too.
use ps command to find out all running process on my Linux and Unix system. The ps command shows information about a selection of the active processes on the shell. You may also pipe out ps command output through grep command to pick up desired output. Let us see how to exclude grep from ps outputs.
When you think about corporate networks, the most widely used Linux-based operating system that comes to mind is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), used mostly on servers, but also as workstations. Fedora Linux is also a very good choice for a workstation, and comes packed with lots of features to work in the corporate environment and makes management an easy task.
When you work with many machines in your network you need a way to manage users and machines in a centralized way. That’s why FreeIPA and Active Directory are the technologies of choice for this task. They allow a sysadmin to manage a huge amount of machines using a directory of all the entities in their network.
Learn here how to check the installed disk is SSD or HDD in a Linux system. Best to way identify disk type can be done by checking disks rotational feature.
The full meaning of NFS is Network File Service. It is a protocol for accessing remote filesystems.
You can use the NFS protocol to access your Synology NAS shared folders from Linux. In this article, I will show you how to do that. So, let’s get started.
The Internet Protocol (IP) address is an identifier between the Internet and network. It is the assigned unique number to every device and allows them to communicate with other networks. Your network can be accessed using the IP address.
The ability to view and understand network socket connections as they happen in your Linux system can be valuable when troubleshooting and getting your system status. This tutorial will take you on an in-depth look at the ss command-line utility that allows us to view network connections and other detailed information. Using what you’ll learn from this guide, you should understand and use the ss utility for maximum information and productivity.
Let us get started.
Today we are looking at how to install Funkin' VS. Kapi 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.
A loop consists of one or more commands that execute repeatedly until a condition is met. In order for this to happen, the commands have to be in a construct. The construct and its commands form a compound command. A Bash command exits with zero if there was no problem. On the other hand, it exits with a number greater than zero if there was an issue or a problem. The exit status of a compound command is that of its last command.
After my Raspberry PI died, I decided not to get a new one immediately. Instead, I turned the older laptop into a FreeBSD server. I use this server for Git, backup via ZFS snapshots, running Debian/RHEL VM using bhyve, side project web server and jails with ZFS. It works perfectly, but during monsoon season, the electric supply at home goes for hours, and my battery backup UPS only works for 15 minutes. Hence, when my FreeBSD laptop starts to run out of battery juicy, I want to shut it down automatically to avoid sudden filesystem and other corruption issues.
Linux and Unix like operating systems comes with z* commands. These commands allow you to read gzip compressed text files using zless, zcat, zmore, and friends commands. The gzip command reduces the size of the files using Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77). Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the extension .gz while keeping the same ownership modes, access, and modification times. z* commands have some cool usage too, such as display the current time in different zonename.
There are many ways to install ubuntu on your PC or laptop. You can either have a clean install on your system or dual boot with any other operating system (OS). But in this article, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu in Windows 10 using VirtualBox in 2021. But before that here’s the few things you should know.
cURL is one of the most used, safe, and reliable command tools to download and transfer files over a network, FTP, HTTP, SMTP, and other repositories. cURL can be used on both Mac and Linux. It shows and encodes the download data on the console. As a professional Linux user, I have run more than thousands of cURL commands on my Linux shell to download an application, files, GitHub repositories without facing any major issues. If you’re a programmer or software developer, I’m sure you are already a fan of the curl command tool.
You might have heard that a shell script runs in its own shell. Learn more on the concept of subshell in Linux.
Originally PlayStation exclusive and later ported to the Game Boy Advanced, Driver 2 lives on again with the REDRIVER2 game engine reimplementation project.
We did cover this somewhat recently but it was still a bit rough. Now though, there's a brand new release up that should be quite a lot smoother! REDRIVER2 Beta 1 adds in quite a lot of new features and some great sounding bug fixes to make the experience more enjoyable. There's also been a number of optimizations, the fullscreen map should look prettier, Flatpak support on Linux, ALT+Enter will toggle Fullscreen, controller configuration and much more.
Mighty Goose from Blastmode, MP2 Games and PLAYISM was announced recently ready for release on June 5. It looks incredible and it will be supported on Linux.
A fast paced run & gun shooter starring a bounty hunter Goose. Use epic weapons and devastating war machines to battle against screen filling bosses and hordes of enemies. At the core Mighty Goose is a tight side scrolling run & gun shooter that will test your skill, timing, reflexes. Building upon that solid arcade base, the game adds a ton of crazy weapons, warmachines, upgrades and secrets.
It's hard to find a game that combines the difficulty of, say, Dark Souls with the elegance of Conway's Game of Life. In a 1962 paper, Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó came up with just such a game, which he called the Busy Beaver Game (BBG).
To play BBG is to create a program that writes 1s on a machine's tape whose cells initially hold 0s; the 1s need not be consecutive, but the program must halt for the 1s to count. The winning program has the most 1s on its tape after halting.
I'll start with an overview of the machine, its programming language, and the game's constraints.
Viscerafest from Acid Man Games, Fire Plant Games and 1C Entertainment is a nostalgic trip through fast-paced FPS goodness that you don't want to miss out on.
You are Caroline, a "bloodthirsty, psychopathic mercenary" who wants to get married. Money is tight so you set off to claim a rather hefty bounty so you can finally put a ring on it. With the Early Access release out, it's showing another impressive experience from a small team. It currently has an introductory prelude level, the game's main and chapter 1 hubs, and the entirety of the first chapter with 7 levels to play through. It also features 8 of the enemies, and 6 (out of total 9) of the game's weapons.
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You can buy Viscerafest on Steam and GOG.com yet. The GOG store page doesn't mention it, but the Linux build is there.
Looking like it's from the early 2000s, Beyond Mankind might be an interesting sci-fi action adventure coming from the team behind the Viking Conquest DLC for Mount & Blade.
Not trying to be mean about the style of it, but games back in the early 2000s had a certain look and feel about them, one that a lot of modern games do genuinely lack. Beyond Mankind: The Awakening aims to revive these games with us being told to think of it like "Fallout meets Spec Ops: The Line", set in a "post-apocalyptic world sporting a mature and deep narrative, rich exploration, tense combat and immersive RPG mechanics".
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It's releasing on August 31 with Linux support on Steam.
After a village building game that really does try to be a bit different? You may want to keep an eye on the upcoming Kainga: Seeds of Civilization.
Kainga is an ancient fantasy village builder where your environment affects your culture, technology and strategy. Advance and adapt to the pressures of the climate, beasts and other tribes. It’s unique because the runs in it are quite short, especially for a game where you’re building up a village but each run gives you more for the next.
Paradox are running another PDXCON from today for the weekend, where we expect a new strategy game to be announced. To get things going Stellaris is free to play for the weekend and a big sale is on.
For the new announcement, we don't have a clue what it will be - but since it's an internal Paradox title (they're not just publishing it), hopefully it will continue the tradition of Linux support. When we know, you will know!
For a long time now, KDE's about dialogues (the ones you find in the help menus in many of our apps) have supported the ability to fetch a bunch of information about the authors of our applications from the KDE Store through the Open Collaboration Services API. It does this by sending a request to the store for each of the authors who have an ocs username defined, to get the information on user avatars, profile links, and a few other potentially interesting details.
If you are paying attention, you are now squinting at the screen and going "wait, I saw that title up there, and it clearly says not phoning home, and this is phoning home". You are, of course, entirely correct, and while it certainly was never done with ill intent, it is hard to dispute the fact that it is, in fact, phoning home. As a result, we have been poking about with ways of fixing this, without dropping overly much of the functionality.
The minimum requirement for Garuda Linux is 30 GB storage space with 4 GB RAM and a 64-bit system. The recommended requirements, however, provide much better performance. These are 40 GB storage space with 8 GB RAM running a video card with OpenGL 3.3 or better.
The Garuda distro is optimized for performance on real hardware. Installing Garuda in virtual machines might result in a bad experience.
Oftentimes, there are two parts to evaluating Linux distros. One is the design and feature sets that make a particular Linux distribution unique from other offerings. The other is how the desktop environment contributes to or weakens the user's computing experience.
Rest assured that Garuda Linux covers both of those factors. Not every desktop flavor will be a winning choice. But Garuda's overall performance and design along with its wide range of environments can eliminate distro-hopping to find your best fit.
My only real disappointment with this latest Garuda Linux release is that most of the background images are dark and moody. But each flavor still has the Garuda uniqueness that performs solidly.
One caution to consider is that some of the less commonly used window manager options will take getting used to using. But computing is always about learning curves and adjusting to new processes.
It is time to test the upcoming release: IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 157. This is the largest release in size we have ever had and updates various parts of the operating system and brings an updated kernel.
Since IPFire is built from source and not based on any distribution, we get to select the best versions of open source software to be a part of it. This release is the second part of our "spring clean" release which updates various software packages and we have also dropped software that we no longer need. The vast amount of this work has been done by Adolf Belka who has been spending many nights in front of a compiler trying to make it all work. If you want to support him and the entire development team, please help us with your donation.
It works just as well as GDC on OpenBSD/amd64. I want to walk through how I made it happen so that others can replicate if they so choose. And so I can replicate for other archs, like armv7.
In this video, we are looking at KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta.
Today we are looking at KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta. As usual, we just do a run-through of the Beta release of the new KDE Plasma desktop environment and when the stable release is out we look at some of the new features that stand out for us, so keep your eyes out for it! However, in this run through you can have a look at some of the new features added and check out the release notes, link below for more info about the changes, and more!
It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo. We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that such a move will be an inconvenience to them.
At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.
Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released so far this week.
The snapshots updated KDE Gear 21.04.1, GTK 4, Btrfs, postgresql, sudo and more.
Snapshot 20210519 updated the postgresql 13.3 package and addressed three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; one of those included the mishandling of a target list and another prevented integer overflows in array calculations. Text editor vim 8.2.2850 fixed a few crashes and the 0.15.0 update of the open remote computing solution SPICE provided some behavior changes and compatibility with OpenSSL. Improved rendering and a font settings fallback for Wayland were made with the gtk4 4.2.1 update. GNOME’s Tetris like game quadrapassel has the 40.1 major version, which updated translations and pressing return now restarts a game. Another major version to update in the snapshot was python-incremental 21.3.0, which is PEP 440-compliant.
Multiple fixes were made in the update of KDE Gear 21.04.1 in snapshot 20210517. The KDE Gear 21.04.1 packages updated video editor Kdenlive, which fixed rendering presets; text editor Kate fixed a possible leak; and diagram program umbrello made some cosmetic and error detection improvements. The update also restored compatibility with ffmpeg 3 for ffmpegthumbs. Other packages to update in the snapshot were rubygem-rubocop 1.14.0, urlscan 0.9.6 and re2c 2.1.1, which added GitHub Actions Continuous Integration for Linux, macOS and Windows.
Voting in the Fedora Linux 34 elections is now open. Go to the Elections app to cast your vote. Voting closes at 23:59 UTC on Thursday 3 June. Don’t forget to claim your “I Voted” badge when you cast your ballot. Links to candidate interviews are below.
PipeWire is already being used by default with Fedora 34 in place of PulseAudio and is overall in good shape. Out this week is PipeWire 0.3.28 that implements yet more functionality -- namely, many more PulseAudio modules being implemented. PipeWire now implements the PulseAudio modules of module-ladspa-sink, module-ladspa-source, module-pipe-sink, module-tunnel-sink, module-tunnel-source, and module-zeroconf-discover.
Dino, packaged as dino-im in Debian, is an XMPP chat client. Thanks to the hard work of its developers, Dino has been making progress on supporting video and audio calls.
Building on the work of my co-maintainer, I've packaged the latest commits to dino-im in Debian experimental. Adapting to the changes in how Dino is built since the last release took a bit of effort, but I'm glad to say that experimental now has support for video calls in dino-im, and that they work quite well! I was able to test video calling for multiple hours, and while there were clearly still a few issues, the entire experience felt quite... comfortable. I'm confident that video calling will be in great shape for bookworm!
There is a new application available for Sparkers: LibreWolf
There’s a lot of debate among Linux users when it comes to choosing the best distribution. Any beginner user looking for the appropriate distribution can find many videos, posts, articles, and comparisons between all distributions. Linux distro reviews can sometimes leave you lost without knowing the best distro for you. Irrespective of all the debate from various Linux distribution enthusiasts, there are some clear winners. But, before getting there, we better understand Linux first.
Linux is not an OS; it’s the core of the OS that is a kernel. The kernel is supplied with the GNU/Linux software with other additions to make it a specific Linux distribution. Another strength of Linux OS is that it offers customization and performance. Hence, the reason behind many Linux distributions is that they are purpose and user-specific.
Those who love Ubuntu will be pleased to know that it’s now safe to upgrade to the latest version. The latest iteration of Ubuntu came out towards the close of last month. Code named Hirsuit Hippo, Ubuntu 21.04 is mostly about tweaks, bug fixes and invisible improvements. Its biggest calling card is the fact that its GUI interface is powered by Wayland instead of the traditional Xorg.
Although it was released last month, the Ubuntu team discovered a severe bug which prompted them to write code to stop the usual upgrade button from showing to those who were using Ubuntu 20.10.
System76 Launch high-end customizable keyboard for PC’s that we covered earlier this week, and ANAVI Macro Pad 2 2-key mechanical USB keypad should not have anything in common, but they do to some extent.
Both happen to feature backlit mechanical keys, are open-source hardware, and run the same Quantum Mechanical Keyboard Firmware (QKM) open-source firmware.
Qualcomm unveiled a “315 5G IoT Modem-RF” chipset designed for industrial IoT. The tiny chipset runs Linux on a 7nm Cortex-A7 core and offers global 5G NR sub-6GHz stand-alone support along with 4G LTE.
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced its first cellular modem chipset designed specifically for Internet of Things applications. The industrial-focused Qualcomm 315 5G IoT Modem-RF System supports global 5G NR (New Radio) sub-6GHz bands, as well as 4G LTE. The chipset is sampling now and will be commercially available in the second half of the year. Qualcomm had some other 5G announcements this week, including the high-end, AI-enabled Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G Mobile Platform and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 and X62 5G M.2 Reference Designs.
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Qualcomm later confirmed to us that the chipset runs Linux.
Seeed Studio has launched another Raspberry Pi RP2040 WiFi board with the compact Wio RP2040 mini development board that provides a cheaper and more compact alternative to ESP32 based Pico Wireless carrier board and Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, albeit at the cost of providing fewer I/O pins, and lacking Bluetooth LE.
Jeremy Cook recently constructed a workbench out of wood and plastic supports, and after several iterations, he’s enhanced it with LEDs to selectively shine light where he’s working. Initially, this meant a simple strip of 12V non-addressable lighting that turned on and off. He then augmented it further using an Arduino Nano, with a pair of buttons for PWM brightness control and a PIR sensor to activate the lights when presence is detected.
So yes, it’s most certainly built from a MacBook Air looking frame. But it’s not the same build materials, which of course is to be expected as these are far cheaper. Unlike the other ARM book I have, this one doesn’t have a GPRS modem, and as of this moment doesn’t natively run Windows. Which with it’s paltry 4GB of RAM and 64GB of disk space is just as well.
Nemo Mobile is a community-based project designed to bring Linux to smartphones and other mobile devices. That could describe a lot of Linux distributions these days, but Nemo has been around longer than most, having been in development as far back as 2012.
Recently developers have begun porting Nemo’s open source Glacier UX (user interface) to work with modern smartphone Linux distributions including Manjaro and postmarketOS.
Today, people have many ways to keep up with their favorite websites, including subscribing to mailing lists, notifications and RSS. It’s a lot for any one person to manage, so we’re exploring how to simplify the experience of getting the latest and greatest from your favorite sites directly in Chrome, building on the open RSS web standard. [...]
A new Firefox is coming your way on June 1 with a fresh look designed for today’s modern life online. We pored over the browser’s user interface pixel by pixel, measured the value users were getting from our massive library of features, and ultimately streamlined the Firefox experience to be clean, inviting and easier to use on every device.
MongoDB is one of the most popular NoSQL databases. Support for MongoDB was added to syslog-ng almost a decade ago. It was the first syslog-ng destination where you could store arbitrary name-value pairs. The performance of MongoDB has improved considerably over the years, but syslog-ng was not keeping up. Version 3.32 of syslog-ng is a huge step in the right direction. It is not only performance that was improved, but flexibility as well: you can now use templates in collection names.
This guide explains why you need to use an environment variable to connect to a database and how to configure database connection using environment variable in Rails application in Linux.
GROUP _CONCAT function is a GROUP BY aggregate function that allows you to concatenate column values from multiple rows into a single field. It returns a string if the set group contains one or no-null column value and returns a NULL value if none can be found.
This tutorial will teach you how to use MySQL GROUP_CONCAT() function to combine strings from a group with several options.
We are all familiar with the basic MySQL INSERT INTO clause that allows us to insert values into a table.
In this tutorial, we will defer from that and look at the INSERT INTO — SELECT statement that we can use to insert values in a table where the values are from the result of a SELECT statement.
MySQL aggregate functions refer to a set of functions that perform calculations on a set of values and return a single value. Aggregate functions include the maximum and minimum value, average, standard deviation, count, sum, etc.
In this tutorial, we shall learn about one of the popular choices of the aggregate functions: SUM.
MySQL alias is a feature that allows us to give a temporary alternative name for a database table or column. These alternative names allow for easier readability and provide extra functionality when working with MySQL JOINS.
This guide will look at how to implement both the column and table aliases in MySQL.
Before we dive into the tutorial, ensure you have a MySQL server installed and accessible on your system. To maximize the learning experience, we recommend you download the MySQL Sakila sample database.
By default, MySQL does not offer a native Boolean Data Type. However, it provides us with the TINYINT data type, allowing us to store Boolean values—like values with the TINYINT type.
This guide will focus on how to use the MySQL TINYINT data type to store Boolean Values.
In the latest versions of MySQL, you can perform a cross-table update, also known as a correlation table update where you can join two or more tables. Using MySQL JOIN (INNER and LEFT) and UPDATE query, we can perform a cross-table update in very simple steps.
This tutorial will walk you through in how to perform MySQL cross-table updates using native MySQL commands.
The LibreOffice Documentation community announces the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 7.1, with additions based on the the improvements in LibreOffice Calc 7.1, which was released in February this year.
The Guide is the volunteer effort of many members of the documentation community. Revisions and enhancements on the contents are the work of Rafael Lima from Brazilian community, Martin Van Zijl and Kees Kriek from the Dutch community, Celia Palacios from the Hispanic language community. A special mention to Yusuf Keten from the Google Summer of Code program on new extensions and templates dialogs, to Steve Fanning for his editorial review and to Jean Hollis Weber for her improvements and organization of the text. The LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.1 update activities was coordinated by Felipe Viggiano from Brazil.
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 8.0.7RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-php80-test repository for Fedora 32-34 and Enterprise Linux.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.20RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 32-34 or remi-php74-test repository for Enterprise Linux.
Appwrite 0.8 comes packed with a ton of cool new features like JWT support, ARM support, Anonymous Login, and more.
Appwrite is an open-source, end to end backend server for Web, Mobile, Native, or Backend packaged as a set of Docker microservices. It goal is to abstract and simplify common development tasks behind REST APIs and tools, to help developers build advanced apps way faster.
Using Appwrite, you can easily integrate your app with user authentication & multiple sign-in methods, a database for storing and querying users and team data, storage and file management, image manipulation, Cloud Functions, and more services.
A deployment usually involves multiple steps that can be tricky. These days, we have a wide variety of tools to help us create reproducible deployments. In this article, I will show you how easy it is to build a basic RPM package.
We have had package managers for a while. RPM and YUM simplify installing, updating, or removing a piece of software. However, many companies use package managers only to install software from the operating system vendor and don’t use them for deployments. Creating a package can be daunting at first, but usually, it’s a rewarding exercise that can simplify your pipeline. As a test case, I will show you how to package a simple program written in Go.
Intel's open-source team maintaining their graphics compiler (IGC) have issued a big update this week.
While the open-source Intel Graphics Compiler sees new tagged releases every week or two, they are usually accompanied by just a handful of listed changes. When it comes to the officially listed changes of this week's IGC 1.0.7423 release, there are more than 100 listed changes! There hasn't been such a large release in recent time, especially with coming two weeks after the prior compiler release.
massCode is a nifty open-source solution for developers that helps them organize their code snippets in multiple languages in a stylish organized way.
Developers have to use web services like GitHub Gist, which is hard to use offline, or often buy a commercial software to keep all snippets. Not anymore with massCode.
It is originally developed by "Anton Reshetov" a web and deskop app developer, who released it under AGPL V3.0.
The recent article Use Vim macros to automate frequent tasks by Ricardo Gerardi explored what a macro is and the benefits of using macros to automate repetitive tasks. In this article, you will take a step further and explore what recursive macros are some examples where they might be useful, and some pitfalls that you might run into.
The basic macros workflow consist of record, replay, and profit. When recording, select in which register it will do so. There are registers from a to z available.
C has the useful feature of adjacent allowing literal strings to be automatically concatenated. This is described in K&R "The C programming language" 2nd edition, page 194, section A2.6 "String Literals":
"Adjacent string literals are concatenated into a single string."
Time is a great moderator. When I look back on this now, I realize that the US minimum wage in 1982 was under $4/hour. That $100 would have been 25 hours of filling in pot holes with the highway department, even more when you consider I was paid under the table for this venture, in classic Jim style. And it led to my first job, that worked out to something like $20/hour or more, because I only worked about 20 hours a week, to make $400. Doing something that still to this day doesn’t really feel like ‘work’, in the sense my father would define it, anyway. In short, a pretty sweet deal.
Jim definitely made out as well, he was getting discount programming talent, and would later perfect the formula by hiring other college students to work on his system. I don’t really look at it as a matter of who was taking advantage of who any more though. In the end, the situation was mutually beneficial.
This is the tenth in a series of articles about features that first appeared in a version of Python 3.x. Some of these versions have been out for a while. Python 3.9 was first released in 2020 with cool new features that are still underused. Here are three of them.
Adding dictionaries
Say you have a dictionary with "defaults," and you want to update it with parameters. Before Python 3.9, the best option was to copy the defaults dictionary and then use the .update() method.
This article will cover a list of useful Python frameworks that can be used to develop apps and games for mobile devices. Some of these frameworks also support desktop apps or work as standalone build tools for compiling builds for both desktop and mobile devices. You can use the same code base with minor modifications to deploy apps and games to both desktop and mobile devices.
Recently, I was working on an edge computing demo that uses machine learning (ML) to detect anomalies at a manufacturing site. This demo is part of the AI/ML Industrial Edge Solution Blueprint announced last year. As stated in the documentation on GitHub, the blueprint enables declarative specifications that can be organized in layers and that define all the components used within an edge reference architecture, such as hardware, software, management tools, and tooling.
At the beginning of the project, I had only a general understanding of machine learning and lacked the practitioner's knowledge to do something useful with it. Similarly, I’d heard of Jupyter notebooks but didn’t really know what they were or how to use one.
This article is geared toward developers who want to understand machine learning and how to carry it out with a Jupyter notebook. You'll learn about Jupyter notebooks by building a machine learning model to detect anomalies in the vibration data for pumps used in a factory. An example notebook will be used to explain the notebook concepts and workflow. There are plenty of great resources available if you want to learn how to build ML models.
Python in the browser has long been an item on the wish list of many in the Python community. At this point, though, JavaScript has well-cemented its role as the language embedded into the web and its browsers. The Pyodide project provides a way to run Python in the browser by compiling the existing CPython interpreter to WebAssembly and running that binary within the browser's JavaScript environment. Pyodide came about as part of Mozilla's Iodide project, which has fallen by the wayside, but Pyodide is now being spun out as a community-driven project.
WebSocket is an application layer protocol that allows two-way communication between a client and a server. WebSocket protocol works first by creating a handshake and then a message framing implemented over TCP rather than basic HTTP.
WebSockets and other similar technologies such as SSE (Server-Sent Events) and WebRTC are helpful in applications where the server needs to keep an open connection to the connected clients. An excellent example of WebSockets used in applications is a chat application, online multiplayer games, and real-time tools such as analytics and collaboration tools.
WebSockets provides us with a full-duplex, bidirectional connection between the server and the connected clients over the Web. That means both the server and the client can push data once there is an established connection.
In this tutorial, I will not dive deep into how WebSockets work. Instead, I will show you how you can use Python to implement a simple application using WebSocket.
If you wish to learn more about HTTP, WebSocket, and SSEs, check out the other tutorials on this site explaining their differences.
NOTE: Before we begin, we assume you are familiar with basic networking concepts such as HTTP and HTTP requests. To implement the concepts in this tutorial with a degree of ease, you need to have basic Python and JavaScript Programming knowledge.
Freenode developers are abandoning the project after Andrew Lee, the Crown Prince of Korea, unilaterally took control of the network. Developers familiar with the project call it a "hostile takeover," with many considering the substantial ramifications this move will have on the open-source community.
I’m sure that some of you don’t know what Freenode is. Let me explain. Freenode started at an IRC channel named #LinPeople in the 1990s.(IRC or Internet Relay Chat is a chat protocol that has been around since the late 1980s and was widely used by open-source groups.) Over time, the channel became Open Projects Network and because a separate IRC network. The name was later changed to Freenode. At it’s height, Freenode was one of the largest IRC networks on the web.
Amid all the news about the third wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the politics behind the vaccination roll out, you might have missed the Ministerial Declaration from the G7 Digital and Technology Ministers’ meeting. As per tradition, the G7 Digital Ministerial provides the opportunity for the seven richest countries of the world to declare their commitments and vision on the type of digital future they would like to see. The document is non-binding but it has the tendency to provide some useful insights on the way the G7 countries view digital issues and their future positions in multilateral fora; it is also informative of other, more formal, multilateral processes. On 28 April 2021, a statement was made addressing key technology issues and opportunities including security in ICT supply chains, Internet safety, free data flows, electronic transferable records, digital competition and technical standards.
When we develop products at Snowflake, we evaluate where open standards, open formats, and open source can create the best outcome for our customers. We believe strongly in the positive impact of open and we are grateful for the open source community’s efforts, which have propelled the big data revolution and much more. But open is not the answer in every instance, and by sharing our thinking on this topic we hope to provide a useful perspective to others creating innovative technologies.
Open is often understood to describe two broad elements: open standards and open source. We’ll look at them each in more detail here.
According to Zigbee Alliance CEO Tobin Richardson, Zigbee is the ideal wireless protocol to transfer telemetry data between NASA’s Perseverance rover and the semi-autonomous flying drone. “Looking at really extreme environments, like Mars, it’s good to have a very lightweight purpose-built standard,” said Richardson, “where it’s essential to get the basic information across and makes it possible for extended battery usage.”
On May 1, the Minami Precinct of the Aichi Prefectural Police, which serves and protects the city of Nagoya’s Minami Ward, launched a new aspect of Operation Pretend to Be Fooled. This new crime-fighting program asks people who’ve been contacted by someone claiming to be a loved one in need of cash to notify the police, then work with them to draw the scammer out. For each case in which their cooperation leads to the identification of scammers, the original target of the scam will be paid 10,000 yen (US$97).
Why are journal rankings such poor proxies for quality? The JCR’s impact factors are computed as the average number of citations received by each paper in the journal over a given period of time. This is easily manipulated. Publishers and editors ask authors of accepted papers to cite additional papers published in the same journal. They also artificially boost the number of papers published per issue to increase the opportunities for such citation farming, while authors cut one paper into several or collaborate in larger groups to increase their output of mutually citing publications.
Iran announced this week that its new supercomputer, Simorgh, has debuted with a peak performance of 0.56 petaflops and plans to reach 1 petaflop in two months.
Al Jazeera reported that Simorgh was "said to be wholly designed and built by a team of Iranian engineers, who developed the country’s first supercomputer a decade ago, but some of its hardware has been imported." (The original source is the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, but we can't find the report on its English website.)
It's not clear from where the Amirkabir University of Technology, which developed Simorgh, would have been able to import the parts required to build the system. The U.S. government has imposed harsh restrictions on the sale of American tech—or products created using those technologies, like the processors and GPUs most commonly used in supercomputers—to companies operating in Iran.
In the states that have not expanded Medicaid, residents have to weigh the costs of health insurance and medical care against other essential needs, such as housing, food, and transportation to work.
Gates had been singing a different tune just a few weeks earlier, expressing opposition to vaccine patent waivers when he said in an interview, “The thing that’s holding things back in this case is not intellectual property. There’s not like some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines.”
Gates’ initial opposition echoes the pharmaceutical industry’s staunch resistance to waiving the intellectual property rights to COVID-19 vaccine technology. In a letter to the Biden administration, members of an industry group called Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) wrote, “Eliminating those protections would undermine the global response to the pandemic, including ongoing effort to tackle new variants, create confusion that could potentially undermine public confidence in vaccine safety, and create a barrier to information sharing.” The signatories added, “Most importantly, eliminating protections would not speed up production.”
An SSH CA is a key pair used to sign, or certify, other SSH keys. Such a signed key is called a certificate. An SSH client can be configured to implicitly trust host certificates created using specific CA keys. This makes it easier and more secure to log into new hosts.
Apple Inc. injected a new level of intrigue in its bitter court fight with Epic Games Inc., suggesting the Fortnite maker was acting as a stalking horse for Microsoft Corp. and withholding evidence.
The iPhone maker made the accusations Wednesday night in a filing asking a judge to make an adverse credibility finding against Lori Wright, an Xbox executive who testified in the trial on behalf of Epic. That would mean the judge could ignore her testimony.
One month ago the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel when it was revealed the university researchers were trying to intentionally submit bugs into the kernel via new patches as "hypocrite commits" as part of a questionable research paper. Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
Sent in on Thursday by Greg Kroah-Hartman was char/misc fixes for 5.13-rc3. While char/misc fixes at this mid-stage of the kernel cycle tend to not be too exciting, this pull request has the changes for addressing the patches from University of Minnesota researchers.
Recently, the University of Minnesota got banned from contributing to the Linux kernel, and this opens up quite a few talking points about validating open-source code, the strengths and weaknesses of open-source, as well as how UMN got it so wrong.
From the SolarWinds hack to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, cybersecurity has entered into public consciousness like never before.
How can you avoid falling victim to a cyber attack? Start with the assumption that perfect cybersecurity doesn't exist, and then make your network and data so hard to hack that cybercriminals give up and look elsewhere.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (ceph, chromium, firefox, gitlab, hedgedoc, keycloak, libx11, mariadb, opendmarc, prosody, python-babel, python-flask-security-too, redmine, squid, and vivaldi), Debian (lz4), Fedora (ceph and python-pydantic), and openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine).
The discoverer of the KRACK attacks against WPA2 encryption in WiFi is back with a new set of flaws in the wireless-networking protocols. FragAttacks is a sizable group of WiFi vulnerabilities that (ab)use the fragmentation and aggregation (thus "Frag") features of the standard. The fixes have been coordinated over a nine-month period, which has allowed security researcher Mathy Vanhoef time to create multiple papers, some slide decks, a demo video, patches, and, of course, a web site and logo for the vulnerabilities.
Three of the vulnerabilities are design flaws in the WiFi standards, so they are likely present in all implementations, while the other nine are various implementation-specific problems. The design flaws may be more widespread, but they are much harder to exploit "because doing so requires user interaction or is only possible when using uncommon network settings". That means the real danger from FragAttacks lies in the programming errors in various WiFi implementations. "Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities."
The title of the Protocol analysis is “China could soon have stronger privacy laws than the U.S.”; in some respects, the proposed Personal Information Protection Law, likely to pass by the end of the year, even surpasses the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), often regarded as the benchmark in this area. A good example of how the second draft has strengthened privacy protection for users is the new Article 57, which reads as follows in a translation by the Stanford DigiChina Cyber Policy Center:
Joseph Cox broke the news for Motherboard late last year: the US military was also making use of location data purchased from data brokers, joining a host of other federal agencies that seemed to feel buying from brokers was an acceptable alternative to respecting the Fourth Amendment.
Proposed EU rules targeting Facebook, Google and other large online platforms should include privacy rights for users as well as their right to anonymity, a key EU lawmaker steering the debate at the European Parliament said on Wednesday.
The Digital Services Act, announced by the European Commission in December last year, requires the tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content such as hate speech and child sexual abuse material.
Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.
Internal Apple documents reviewed by The New York Times, interviews with 17 current and former Apple employees and four security experts, and new filings made in a court case in the United States last week provide rare insight into the compromises Mr. Cook has made to do business in China. They offer an extensive inside look — many aspects of which have never been reported before — at how Apple has given in to escalating demands from the Chinese authorities.
For example, in a recent video3 published on ICTA’s website, at 2m3s, they say that ICTA won’t get user password, log in, email, private messages, bank details etc.
In this report, I explain how a proof-of-concept proxy was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the technical framework proposed in Section 11.2 of the consultation paper.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar is back with a bill to protect consumer data privacy when collected by large tech platforms like Facebook and Google.
Klobuchar (D-MN) has teamed up with a bipartisan group of senators, including Sens. John Kennedy (R-LA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Richard Burr (R-NC), to reintroduce the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act. The privacy legislation would force websites to grant users greater control over their data and allow them to opt out of data tracking and collection.
Amazon is beefing up its network of connected devices to take on technologies like Apple's new AirTags.
Amazon announced Friday that it is partnering with Tile, a company that makes trackers for lost items, and Level, which makes smart locks, to use those devices to enhance its tracking network based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.
Lawyers for a cop accused of beating an undercover cop during a 2017 protest are pretty angry prosecutors have let the public know just what kind of bigoted dirtbag the indicted officer is.
This is the mainstream definition of self-defense: provoking the nobodies, then pounding them back into submission.
The late Village Voice journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff loved telling the story about how three rabbis, gathered in a Massachusetts motel in 1982, officially excommunicated him from the Jewish people for the crime of signing a New York Times advertisement protesting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. That their clerical authority to extinguish Hentoff’s Judaism was recognized by no one but themselves is a source of both comedy and anger. In matters political, even the smallest of factions can pretend that their extremism matters, but at the heart of that absurdity is the dark human desire to censor and to silence anyone deviating from the party line.
St. Petersburg’s Oktyabrsky Court has ordered the investigative outlet Bellingcat to pay GRU veteran and former separatist leader Igor Bezler 340,000 rubles (about $4,600) in compensation for moral damages, reports the unified press service for St. Petersburg’s courts.€
The United States’ regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy, has funded at least half of the groups involved in the media offensive. Other groups involved are otherwise tied to the national security state.
Is President Biden afflicted with the political equivalent of a split personality? His first several months in office suggest just that possibility. On the home front, the president’s inclination is clearly to Go Big. When it comes to America’s role in the world, however, Biden largely hews to pre-Trumpian precedent. So far at least, the administration’s overarching foreign-policy theme is Take It Slow.
"The United States government has been an agonizing party to the killing, disappearances, sexual violence, and other torture and horrendous repression of dozens of mostly peaceful demonstrations."
As the turmoil and demonstrations continue, we’ve put together some useful resources from EFF and allies we hope can help those attending protests and using technology and the Internet to speak up, report, and organize. Please note that the authors of this post come from primarily U.S.- and Brazil-based experiences. The post is by no means comprehensive. We urge readers to be aware that protest circumstances change quickly; digital security risks, and their mitigation, can vary depending on your location and other contexts.€
This post has two sections covering resources for navigating protests and resources for navigating networks.
Resources for Navigating Protests
Reps. Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley refused to vote for "more money for a broken system that has long upheld and protected the white supremacist violence we saw on display that day."
Joya Stuckman returned home late at night after visiting her friend. It was Labor Day weekend but there was little to celebrate. She felt exhausted after spending the entire day loading a moving truck in order to escape what had become an untenable living situation. Her landlord and his sister had spent the better part of two years harassing Stuckman, who is a Black mother of three boys.€ €
She walked up to her house, which is nestled in the working class First Street neighborhood of Rome, New York, and glanced over at her U-Haul truck. The tires were slashed and the truck was completely covered in racist and neo-Nazi graffiti: thinly veiled death threats, racist slurs, an SS symbol, and swastikas. The numbers “1488,” which is a popular neo-Nazi code, were sprayed on the sides of the truck. Stuckman was terrified.€
In the background of the uprising in Colombia is the question of land. A multi-decade civil war has led to millions of peasants being thrown off of their land, which ended up in the hands of large landowners or was used for corporate megaprojects. In the ongoing corporate land grab that has been taking place in Colombia for the last few years, there is a new and frightening weapon: the militarization of environmental conservation. In a countrywide series of military operations beginning in February, involving a large number of soldiers and police, the army captured 40 people, whom the attorney general accused of deforestation and illegal mining, in six different locations in the country. In an earlier operation, the army captured four people for crimes against the environment, who have been labeled as “dissidents of the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)” by Colombia’s President Iván Duque, according to an article in Mongabay. In another operation in March 2020, soldiers trying to capture illegal ranchers in national parks picked up 20 people, 16 of whom turned out to be peasants who did not own land or cattle, according to Mongabay. According to the Colombian military, eight operations were carried out in 2020, through which it had “recovered more than 9,000 hectares of forest,” while capturing 68 people, 20 of whom were minors, stated the article in Mongabay.
What the military calls “recovered” forest is a territory emptied of its people. The overall initiative, which began in 2019, is labeled “Operation Artemis.” It deploys what one article in the City Paper (Bogotá) calls “Colombia’s full-metal eco-warriors” in an effort to reduce deforestation by 50 percent, as President Duque told Reuters.
They came in their hundreds, swimming around the border fence that protects the Spanish city of Ceuta, or walking across the beach at low tide under the permissive eyes of Moroccan border guards, who would normally stop them. In 36 hours this week, 8,000 would-be migrants descended on Ceuta, an enclave of 85,000 people (see map). For the Spanish authorities, coping with this influx was an immediate humanitarian headache. And Morocco’s weaponisation of migration also puts the government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, in a longer-term bind.
Clearly rattled and caught by surprise, Spain deployed 3,000 troops with armoured cars from the garrison in Ceuta and sent 200 police reinforcements. Mr Sánchez himself flew to the city, vowing to defend its “territorial integrity”. Spanish officials recall the “Green March” of 1975, when Hassan II, then Morocco’s king, mobilised 350,000 civilians to occupy Western Sahara, to the south, as Spain gave up its colony.
After offering a defense of Christianity at the debate using the Bible and the Koran and leading the people to receive Christ, angry Muslims began shouting the jihadist slogan, “Allah Akbar,” or “Allah is greater,” compelling him to rush away from the venue with his son, relatives said.
Where is the revolt of the bienpensants, Schuster asks? “Do they only light up when right-wing extremists march in front of Jewish places of worship? Raised on canned food of hatred of Jews, most Middle Eastern immigrants to this country believe they can transfer their miserable image of society to Germany. Fleeing here to work and be free, they use this freedom to revolt against the open society."
"Furthermore, there is a leftist environment that looks at Muslim and immigrant Arabs with postcolonial caution and forgives many things that the Germans would never let pass. Hamas terrorists are suddenly 'activists'; the methods of their struggle may not be beautiful, but are understandable ”.
Big Tech offers forums to extremists and genocidal leaders, fueling radicalization and inciting violence. But it’s likely that Big Tech has also been selling hardware that’s been used by our sworn enemies for death and destruction.
The Jewish population experiences the hostility of Muslims first-hand. In a 2017 study by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence in Bielefeld, 81 per cent of the Jews surveyed in Germany said they had already been attacked by Muslims, and 61 per cent had suffered verbal insults or harassment.
Although he can’t prove the reason why, he’s been booted from half a dozen other apps with similar prohibitions tucked into their terms of service: People with felonies — anything from a $10 drug conviction to capital murder — are banned for life. These policies aren’t new, but their enforcement has been haphazard.
That could change. Match Group, which owns Tinder and a host of other dating sites, plans to launch a feature allowing daters to run background checks on potential matches. The company says its efforts are aimed at keeping users safe. But civil rights advocates say the record checks extend an unfair practice of imposing “collateral consequences” long after people have finished their sentences, and will disproportionately affect people of color without actually improving safety.
Just look around – you are inseparably surrounded by material objects €– whether they are needed in your life or not. For every bit of this material we use, there is a growing web of global actions that is slowly stripping human's emotional health, depleting Earth's resources and degrading our planet's habitats. If left unchecked, is there a risk that human consumption may finally turn the Earth into an uninhabitable world? Do we have it in us to stop before it is too late?
A team of researchers from Weizmann Institute of Sciences, Israel, recently published a study that compared human-made mass – aka anthropogenic mass – with all the living mass, or biomass, on the globe. They revealed that for the first time in human history the former has either surpassed the latter or is close to doing so in coming years.
There is no silver bullet for climate change, no one answer. To save civilisation, nations must co-operate on five fronts.
Culled from a stretch of New Jersey’s Pinelands, an area destroyed by saltwater from rising sea levels and other manifestations of catastrophic climate change (like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy), Ghost Forest is a solemn affair. Considering its subject, this does make sense. After all, these cedars, and the forms of life they supported, once covered hundreds of thousands of acres of this region. And now, like so many other species disappearing amidst the mass extinction event we’re living through, they’re fading away. Like so many other victims of modern capitalist history, these trees weren’t merely destroyed; their value was violently concentrated into immense wealth and power for a very few, and a concomitant impoverished wasteland for everyone else. So, solemnity is in order. However, Ghost Forest may be too solemn, or perhaps it’s just too sedate.
Solemnity, of course, worked profoundly for Lin’s most famous piece, her iconic Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. € Not to be too blunt about it, though, that work honors the already dead. Ghost Forest, we’re told, is supposed to warn the not-dead-yet about our rapidly approaching fates (fates caused by our capitalist world system, of which Ghost Forest is silent). With all of this in mind, Lin’s installation could benefit from a bit less silence and a dash of alarmism. Although audio will soon be introduced to the installation, adding the sounds of birds already lost to our all-devouring political-economy, I’d personally like to see, and hear, little ringing alarms on each tree. Such, of course, is not Lin’s aesthetic. In Ghost Forest, however, her aesthetic, sedate as it is, verges on the anesthetic — arguably preparing us more for a comfortable sleep, after a disposable mass-produced picnic on the grass, than waking us up.
"No one on Earth is immune to Arctic warming."
"Plans to make plans in no way matches the urgency of the climate crisis; we need action from regulators now to stop the money pipeline to climate chaos."€
The U.S. needs a reform as sweeping as the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated racist immigration quotas, allowing millions of talented people to find a home here and build new lives.
"We are failing to protect the world's most vulnerable people from conflict and disasters," said the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Just as the Catholic Church tried to prevent stepping into modernity by fighting the Reformation, Poison Ivy fought modernity by combatting those who disliked capital. He fought an ideological public relations battle for Rockefeller but also advised Adolf Hitler.
Not only after the unsavoury beginnings of public relations, the true mastermind of PR, Bernays, had even bigger goals. With his help, propaganda became the art of creating consent among the governed. German philosopher Adorno called this the process of mass deception. Decades later, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky named virtually the same thing:manufacturing consent.
Lithium, cobalt, and rare earths.
Fracking sand company Fairmount Santrol had a very clever corporate slogan for being in the business of selling products for oil and gas wells: “Do Good, Do Well.”€
The company sold its engineered sand to the fracking industry on the premise that oil and gas wells would “do good” when its “game changing” sand was used in the mixture€ to frack oil wells — hydraulic fracturing involves blasting a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into wells to fracture shale and release the oil and gas trapped within.€
It demonstrates the adage, endless pressure, endlessly applied, can sometimes result in a positive outcome.
The 90,000-acre Antelope Grazing Allotment is located near Chemult, Oregon. The allotment contains unique fens and geological hydrology that has created extensive wetlands. Since the uplands are mainly dry lodgepole pine forests growing on volcanic ash from the Mount Mazama eruption (which created Crater Lake), almost all the forage available on the allotment exists in the wetlands and riparian areas.
A very endangered great crested newt that lives in a forest pond near Joensuu is the latest burgeoning Finnish YouTube star in nature livestreams set up by preservation group WWF Finland.
The newt is the rarest amphibian in Finland, and with few exceptions only lives on Ãâ¦land and in North Karelia. In the cold winter months, newts live in damp forest areas and during spawning season thrive in forest ponds.
"The emergency funding provided in this legislation is a desperately needed first step towards stemming the global extinction crisis."
In letters sent today to federal lawmakers and the Biden administration, numerous conservation organizations are calling for urgent executive and legislative action to bolster grizzly bear recovery, even as western lawmakers and officials seek to remove Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the threatened species.
According to a€ new report by Dr. David Mattson, removal of ESA protections would undermine grizzly bear recovery, demonstrating the need to increase current populations and detailing Idaho’s importance for the long-term viability of the species.
For weeks now, employers and their lobbies have been unified in their lament that a scarcity of workers is the result of overly generous federal unemployment benefits. People would rather stay home and get rich off the public purse, they say, and the stories run everywhere with the help of the Chamber of Commerce.
As a result, Republican governors in state after state are cutting off the federal aid. They’d rather turn away free money than relieve pressure on the poor.
When the news first broke that Bill and Melinda French Gates were getting divorced, it punctured the public image many of us had of the glossy magazine-cover power couple, seemingly as committed to each other as they were to saving the world.
"These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had his first face-to-face meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Reykjavik on May 19. During the talks, which lasted two hours, Blinken raised concerns about Russia’s recent military deployments near Ukraine, the repression of opposition groups, and the health of jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny. In conversation with journalists, Lavrov described the talks as “constructive,” but underscored the “numerous roadblocks” in bilateral relations between Russia and the United States. Here’s what the two top diplomats said to each other.
“Joe Biden Is Electrifying America Like F.D.R.”€ So proclaimed the headline of a recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times.€ Even allowing for a smidgen of hyperbole, the comparison is not without merit.€ Much like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his famous First Hundred Days in office in the midst of the Great Depression, Biden has launched a flurry of impressively ambitious domestic initiatives in the midst of the Great Pandemic — an American Rescue Plan, an American Jobs Plan, an American Families Plan, and most recently an environmental restoration program marketed as America the Beautiful.
Biden’s Build Back Better domestic campaign qualifies as a first cousin once removed of Roosevelt’s famed New Deal.€ To fix an ailing nation, FDR promoted unprecedented federal intervention in the economy combined with a willingness to spend lots of money.€ As then, so today, details and specifics took a back seat to action, vigorous and sustained, not sooner or later but right now.
Freenode had been my home on the internet for over half of my life. All things IRC must come to an end, but it felt like Freenode was eternal. The staff had not always made decisions that I agreed with, but I have run IRC networks before. I know how it is. Precedent can drown you.
It's just sad to see it end like this. The communities that I have joined there have been catalytic in my life. I have irreparably changed the life of others on Freenode. I met people on Freenode that I talk with daily. I'm sure that I wouldn't have the career that I have without Freenode.
But it's been taken over by a narcissistic Trumpian wannabe Korean royalty bitcoin millionaire, and I just cannot support that.
The OFTC (Open and Free Technology Community) has been around since 2001 and is associated with the 501(c)(3)-registered non-profit organization “Software in the Public Interest, Inc.", which is based in New York. OFTC hosts discussion rooms for hundreds of popular and widely known open-source projects, such as Debian, QEMU, and LLVM.
Last month we noted that Apple told Congress that it was allowing Parler's iOS app to return to its app store, after the company (apparently) implemented a content moderation system. This was despite Parler's then interim CEO (who has since been replaced by another CEO) insisting that Parler would not remove "content that attacks someone based on race, sex, sexual orientation or religion." According to a deep dive by the Washington Post, the compromise solution is that such content will be default blocked only on iOS devices, but will be available via the web or the sideloaded Google app, though they will be "labeled" as hate by Parler's new content moderation partner, Hive.
Last month’s publication of the fully restored version of Richard Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground is big news. And for good reason. Against the background of Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd—and widespread protests against racist police brutality—Wright’s gripping tale resonates. It’s impossible to read these opening pages and not draw connections between Wright’s protagonist Fred Daniels—an innocent black man fingered by police for a crime he did not commit—and too many real-life cases today.
Earlier this month, it was revealed the DOJ -- while headed by Bill Barr and an extraordinarily leaky White House -- decided it would be cool and constitutional to demand journalists' phone and email records while supposedly investigating leaks pertaining to Trump's first impeachment.
The Russian Justice Ministry added Meduza to its “foreign agent media” list on the basis of a complaint from Alexander Ionov, a former member of Moscow’s Public Monitoring Commission (the ONK, which monitors the observance of prisoners’ rights).
More than 16,000 journalists and editors were laid off last year, a tally that excludes broader media jobs and freelancers. While COVID certainly played a role (read: advertisers not wanting the brands to appear in ads next to stories telling people the truth about a pandemic), the layoffs were part of a broader trend in which the unprofitable business of delivering the factual reality (usually) continues to wither on the vine.
After the Russian Justice Ministry added Meduza to its “foreign agent” list on April 23, we decided to challenge this designation in court. During pre-trial preparations on May 20, human rights lawyers Anastasia Burakova and Sergey Badamshin — who are representing Meduza’s interests in the case — gained access to documents that a shed bit of light on why Russia ended up recognizing Meduza as a “foreign agent.” Formally, the initiator of this decision was Alexander Ionov — the founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, who has been a leading character in Meduza investigations on more than one occasion. One of our reports offended Ionov so deeply that he decided to write a complaint about Meduza to Russia’s censorship agency, Roskomnadzor. Meduza shares the fascinating biography of Alexander Ionov, who, as it turns out, actually considers himself a “human rights defender.”
Alexey Navalny is recovering his health after coming off a 24-day prison hunger strike last month. The opposition politician currently weighs 82 kilograms (180 pounds) and is eating normally, Federal Penitentiary Service Director Alexander Kalashnikov told journalists on May 20.€
Janine Jackson interviewed the LA Times Michael Hiltzik on the “nobody wants to work” trope for the May 14, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
A doctor who examined Ronald Greene's body after the deadly May 2019 encounter said the Louisiana State Police claim that he died in a car crash "doesn't add up."€
After George Floyd’s death last May, protests brought to light the bloody past of Graham, North Carolina, as people chanted the name of Wyatt Outlaw, the city’s first Black elected official who was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870.
Disciplinary technologies are often marketed for benign purposes: monitoring performance, confirming compliance with policy and expectations, or ensuring safety. But in practice, these technologies are non-consensual violations of a subject’s autonomy and privacy, usually with only a vague connection to their stated goals (and with no evidence they could ever actually achieve them). Together, they capture different aspects of the same broader trend: the appearance of off-the-shelf technology that makes it easier than ever for regular people to track, control, and punish others without their consent.
The application of disciplinary technologies does not meet standards for informed, voluntary, meaningful consent. In workplaces and schools, subjects might face firing, suspension, or other severe punishment if they refuse to use or install certain software—and a choice between invasive monitoring and losing one’s job or education is not a choice at all. Whether the surveillance is happening on a workplace- or school-owned device versus a personal one is immaterial to how we think of disciplinary technology: privacy is a human right, and egregious surveillance violates it regardless of whose device or network it’s happening on.
And even when its victims might have enough power to say no, disciplinary technology seeks a way to bypass consent. Too often, monitoring software is deliberately designed to fool the end-user into thinking they are not being watched, and to thwart them if they take steps to remove it. Nowhere is this more true than with stalkerware and kidware—which, more often than not, are the exact same apps used in different ways.
"The announcement signals a major win for people who've been detained at the facility and bravely spoken out against its abuses and for local organizations who have long fought to shut it down."€
Rose Brady walked alone between bus stops on a busy street in Baltimore County one evening in April 1987. She was 28, with long, curly brown hair and blue eyes — perfect prey for the predator local police had named the “Sunglass Rapist.”
She hoped so, anyway.
And she’s right! If what you built isn’t accessible, it’s not complete.
There’s no such thing as a website or web app that doesn’t need to be accessible. If you’re a web developer, accessibility is literally your job. If you ignore it, you’re just a hobbyist.
However, the solution may not be as straightforward as it seems. In practice, it may actually be near impossible to combine the ability to log off with the freedom to work remotely, especially if that means creating timetables different to other colleagues. And, in a worse case scenario, some experts are also warning that mismanagement of these initiatives could compromise some of the flexibility workers have only recently been able to negotiate.
So, is it possible to enshrine the right to disconnect in a new, remote-work world? Or are we still heading for the overburden and burnout we’re trying to avoid, no matter what laws are in the works?
In Sweden on Tuesday, several hostile Palestinian demonstrations were held throughout the country. Riots broke out in Stockholm as protesters marched towards the Israeli embassy chanting “Allahu akbar” and “crush Zionism.” In stark contrast to the resolute action police took towards corona-critical demonstrations, they kept a low profile and watched from the sidelines.
Former London-based Iranian film director Babak Khorramdin has been murdered in an alleged honour killing by his parents, according to police, with his remains found in rubbish bags.
The body of Babak Khorramdin was found chopped up in bins and in a suitcase in Ekbatan, a planned neighborhood in West Tehran, on Sunday.
An argument had broken out between the father and son over Babak's unmarried status, Iran Wire reported.
Babak Khorramdin, who spent time working in London, was the victim of a so-called “honor killing” after an argument with his father over his unmarried status.
Mohammad Shahriari, head of the Tehran Criminal Court, said Khorramdin’s father confessed to drugging and murdering his son, before cutting up his body and leaving it in the trash.
"The high cost of high-quality internet service has posed a persistent barrier that keeps lower-income families from the resources they need to work, live, and learn."
A-2020-00498 Heritage c10 D… by michaelgeist
Nintendo really can't help itself. With the company's storied reputation for valuing strict control of all things intellectual property over literally everything else, we have detailed plenty of occasions where this restrictive attitude seems to work directly against the company actually selling things. From DMCAing fan-made ports of Nintendo's games to antiquated game systems, to getting fan-made expressions of Nintendo fandom taken down from 3rd party creation games like Dreams, to just DMCA carpet-bombing a wide range of fan-made games that serve as homages to Nintendo properties, the company has made it very clear that it will choose strict control over being good to its fans at every opportunity. Even, as is so often the case, when that means getting content taken down that essentially serves as an advertisement for Nintendo products.
In order to identify smart home-related patents, the IPlytics platform database was used to perform an extensive keyword search of patents filed worldwide in the smart home technology field. The search was based on the patent’s content (ie, title, abstracts, description and claims), making use of state-of-the-art stemming and semantic indexing methods. As the granting process of patents may take several years, we looked at pending patent applications as well as granted patents. Figure 1 illustrates the number of patents per year of application between 2006 and mid-2020. The numbers overall illustrate increasing filings since 2006.
Patent was a third thing altogether, and its history is in things like the Patents Royal, where monarchs would hand out exclusive rights and monopolies as a form of patronage (everyone who wants to make silver ribbon, for example, has to get a license).
When they were reformed in market economies, patents became a quid pro quo where you had inventors who were wasting a lot of energy trying to make the machines hard to understand and make them fall apart if you tried to take them apart but wanted to recoup their investment. And so, we said, “All right, if you’ll just tell us how your machine works and give us a model and publish the schematics, we’ll give you a fourteen-year exclusive right over your invention.”
Over the years, all of these have changed in different ways, and they’ve all expanded monotonically, but it was rare that we had to refer to them all one breath.
In the same way that we don’t have a name for tuna fish, cuckoo clocks, and D&D miniatures that encompasses them as a single category, we didn’t really have a category that was patents, trademarks, and copyrights. They were all things that businesses might use, but they weren’t the same thing. If we had to talk about them as a category, we would call them monopolies or creators’ monopolies.
According to research commissioned by the Australian government, 59% of people faced with a blocked pirate site are more likely to simply give up than try other means to get content. However, VPN knowledge is already entrenched in Australian society, with almost half of Internet users aware of what they can do and what advantages they can bring to the table.
One of the key members of Scene piracy group SPARKS has been sentenced to 27 months supervised release. Jonatan Correa, who previously admitted being part of the notorious Scene group, received a relatively mild sentence due to his limited involvement and cooperative stance. In addition to serving jail time, Correa was also ordered to pay $54,000 in damages to the Motion Picture Association.
Techdirt has just written about belated news that the FBI gained access two years ago to the Apple account of Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub. This is part of a continuing attempt to stop the widespread sharing of academic papers, mostly paid for by the public, and currently trapped behind expensive paywalls. You might think somebody helping scholars spread their work to a wider audience would be rewarded with prizes and grants, not pursued by the FBI and DOJ. But of course not, because, well, copyright. It's easy to feel angry but helpless when confronted with this kind of bullying by publishing giants like Elsevier, but a group of publicly spirited Redditors aim to do something about it:
