The System76 Launch keyboard arrived in the studio, and in this video, I give it a full review! I'll show an unboxing, the Configurator software that System76 created for this keyboard, and my overall thoughts.
Slimbook ONE is one of the best Linux-based mini PCs out there. The earlier iterations were quite successful, which offered Intel i5/i7 processors.
Now, with a new offering, the Slimbook ONE mini-PC seems to be going all AMD by ditching Intel.
Let me briefly highlight what the new Slimbook ONE hast to offer.
This week we’ve been fixing phones and relearning trigonometry. We round up the news and events from the Ubuntu community and discuss news from the wider tech scene.
It’s Season 14 Episode 13 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
NetBSD 9.2 released, DragonFly 6.0 is out, Home Network Monitoring using Prometheus, Preventing FreeBSD to kill PostgreSQL, Customizing Emacs for Git Commit Messages, Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments, Always be quitting, and more
upgrading, okta, sso, wso2, games
With this Docker-based environment on my 2019 Intel i9 16" MacBook Pro, I can compile the kernel from scratch in about 12 minutes.
The Intel laptop cost over $3000 when I bought it, and the thing is basically a frying pan on my legs and has two obnoxiously-loud fans running full blast whenever you even look at it sideways.
I bought both an M1 10 Gbps Mac mini and a M1 MacBook Air to replace the 16" Pro—for the same total price—and I ran the same compile on it, using the exact same configuration.
Total time for the test was 9 minutes on the mini (which has a fan to keep the CPU cool under load) and 10 minutes on the Air (which doesn't have a fan, so it starts to throttle after a while).
Earlier this year, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, was enraged to find that University of Minnesota (UMN) security “researchers” had tried to poison the Linux kernel with deliberately corrupt patches. Later, the UMN graduate students claimed their patches were good, based on their new static analyzer. Kroah-Hartman didn’t buy it.
In response, he banned the entire university from submitting kernel patches.
[The patches] obviously were _NOT_ created by a static analysis tool that is of any intelligence, as they all are the result of totally different patterns and all of which are obviously not even fixing anything at all. So what am I supposed to think here, other than that you and your group are continuing to experiment on the kernel community developers by sending such nonsense patches?
I'm announcing the release of the 5.12.9 kernel.
All users of the 5.12 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.12.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
AMD is seemingly continuing to prepare the ground for its SmartShift tech to debut on Linux laptops, and hopefully this should be realized in time for the launch of the next batch of all-AMD notebooks.
This is according to Linux enthusiast site Phoronix.com, which flagged up a couple of recent patches adding elements of support for SmartShift under Linux – which follows a bunch of previous work – and theoretically we could be looking at full support making the cut for the Linux 5.14 kernel later this year.
The RISC-V CPU architecture has been gaining prominence for some years; its relatively open nature makes it an attractive platform on which a number of companies have built products. Linux supports RISC-V well, but there is one gaping hole: there is no support for virtualization with KVM, despite the fact that a high-quality implementation exists. A recent attempt to add that support is shining some light on a part of the ecosystem that, it seems, does not work quite as well as one would like.
Linux supports a number of virtualization mechanisms, but KVM is generally seen as the native solution. It provides a standard interface across systems, but much of KVM is necessarily architecture-specific, since the mechanisms for supporting virtualization vary from one processor to the next. Thus, architectures that support KVM generally have a kvm directory nestled in with the rest of the architecture-specific code.
Given that, some eyebrows were raised when Anup Patel's patch series adding RISC-V KVM support deposited the architecture-specific code into the staging directory instead. Staging is normally used for device drivers that do not meet the kernel's standards for code quality; if all goes well they are improved and eventually "graduate" out of the staging directory. It is not usually a place for architecture support. So staging maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman was quick to ask why things were being done that way.
Among the many changes merged for the 5.13 kernel is support for the LLVM control-flow integrity (CFI) mechanism. CFI defends against exploits by ensuring that indirect function calls have not been redirected by an attacker. Quite a bit of work was needed to make this feature work well for the kernel, but the result appears to be production-ready and able to defend Linux systems from a range of attacks.
The multi-generational LRU patch set is a significant reworking of the kernel's memory-management subsystem that promises better performance for a number of workloads; it was covered here in April. Since then, two new versions of that work have been released by developer Yu Zhao, with version 3 being posted on May 20. Some significant changes have been made since the original post, so another look is in order.
As a quick refresher: current kernels maintain two least-recently-used (LRU) lists to track pages of memory, called the "active" and "inactive" lists. The former contains pages thought to be in active use, while the latter holds pages that are thought to be unused and available to be reclaimed for other uses; a fair amount of effort goes into deciding when to move pages between the two lists. The multi-generational LRU generalizes that concept into multiple generations, allowing pages to be in a state between "likely to be active" and "likely to be unused". Pages move from older to newer generations when they are accessed; when memory is needed pages are reclaimed from the oldest generation. Generations age over time, with new generations being created as the oldest ones are fully reclaimed.
Dbus-Broker 29 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this high-performance Linux message broker that retains compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation.
With BUS1 still appearing not any closer to being mainlined for in-kernel IPC following the failed KDBUS work, Dbus-Broker remains the most performant D-Bus solution available for now.
AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver developers have sent out their initial support for the yet-to-be-released "Yellow Carp" RDNA graphics card.
Yellow Carp is a new GFX10/RDNA2 GPU that is yet to be released by AMD. The enablement comes in at another 215k lines of new AMDGPU kernel driver code but as usual the vast majority of that new code is auto-generated header files.
A new release is now available of DXVK-NVAPI, the currently separate portion from DXVK that provides an experimental implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI for Direct3D 11 games using this public NVIDIA driver API.
NVAPI is NVIDIA's API for offering publicly accessible SDK interfaces around NVIDIA GPU topology, driver management, frame rendering control, GPU overclocking, and a variety of other interfaces not available under other industry standard APIs or for other NVIDIA-specific feature controls. Some Direct3D games make use of NVAPI for NVIDIA features and thus DXVK-NVAPI is about supporting the API with DXVK to properly handle those games and features running within Valve's Steam Play.
Hello everyone,
The second bugfix release for the 21.1 branch is now available, containing mostly AMD and Intel changes as usual, but also a decent amount of ARM fixes and more.
The next bugfix release is schedules for two weeks from now, on June 16nd.
Cheers, Eric
Mesa 21.1.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release for the latest stable Mesa 3D series.
As usual, the new Mesa point release is made up primarily of open-source Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver fixes but also random other fixes collected over the past two weeks.
AMD has submitted their latest batch of feature work on the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next of new material queuing for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle.
Already for Linux 5.14 they previously queued GPU hot unplug support, Beige Goby GPU support, HMM SVM and other feature work.
With this week's updates there are more Beige Goby bring-up updates, clean-ups to eliminate code/compiler warnings, fixes for the Aldebaran accelerator work, a rework to ACPI ATCS/ATIF handling, SR-IOV and RAS fixes, a new information query for additional video BIOS information, and other fixes.
NVIDIA has now published the 460.84 Linux driver as the latest in their long-lived 460 driver series.
The only listed change with the NVIDIA 460.84 driver release today is support for the newly released GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. See our GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Linux review for benchmarks of this new Ampere graphics card.
Are you an budding open-source music producer, a standout content streamer, or a fanatical follower of System76? If you are then this week’s Linux Release Roundup is sure to be of interest.
As always, the aim of these recaps is to group together some recent app and distro releases that I wouldn’t have otherwise written about (usually because I’m late to noticing they were released at all).
If a software project you’re passionate about doesn’t get featured on omg! as much as you’d like it’s probably because no-one has told me about it — don’t assume I know about it. I rely on readers like you to let me know what’s happening. Indeed, some of this roundup come courtesy of other readers keeping me in the loop.
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OBS is a hugely popular open source content streaming and recording program for Windows, macOS and Linux. This week it received a sizeable update.
OBS Studio 27.0’s headline change is support for Wayland on Linux. This, notably, also includes support for PipeWire capture source when using Wayland. While neither Wayland or Pipewire is in use everywhere (on Ubuntu you need 21.04 to take advantage of the latter) OBS adding support for both is a big deal.
OBS Studio, the free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming, released version 27.0.0 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04 via PPA.
OBS Studio 27.0.0 features native Wayland support, includes new PipeWire capture source for Ubuntu 21.04+. Also, it adds undo/redo support either from ‘Edit’ menu or via Ctrl+Z /Ctrl+Shift+Z keyboard shortcuts.
Blender 2.93 LTS paving the way for the next generation open source 3D creation pipeline. Development now focusing on Blender 3.0, due out this August.
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, motion graphics, and computer games. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
The Blender Foundation has shipped Blender 2.93, the latest update to this widely popular open-source 3D software.
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Through it's open architecture, Blender provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility, an incredibly small footprint, and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics application in the world.
This tutorial is going to show you how to install LOMP stack (OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB, and PHP8.0) on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04. A software stack is a set of software tools bundled together. LOMP stands for Linux, OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP, which can power dynamic websites and web applications. Linux is the operating system; OpenLiteSpeed is the web server; MariaDB/MySQL is the database server and PHP is the server-side scripting language responsible for generating dynamic web pages.
GNOME Desktop: This article explains how to automatically disable the laptop touchpad when an external mouse is plugged in and how to disable the touchpad while typing.
The GNOME Settings app has various options for mice and touchpads, including setting the speed, natural scrolling, and more. You can even disable the touchpad permanently from there. But there's no option to disable the laptop touchpad while using an external mouse, or to disable the touchpad while typing, directly in Settings.
But there are settings for enabling these 2 very useful options, though they are not exposed in the Settings app. For the instructions below to work, you'll need to be using the GNOME Shell desktop and libinput.
You should first read about the article Chrome experiment to let you Follow websites before you keep reading this one. This article goes deeper into the technical details of how Chrome WebFeed works.
Chrome detects all Atom and RSS feeds on webpages using the feed auto-discovery mechanism.
Google is experimenting with a new way to undercut the value of its fiercest “attention competitors” (Twitter and Facebook.) It’s also helping web publishers and the open web ecosystem at the same time. Here’s a brief history of the technology behind Chrome’s new Follow feature, and how it’s better than earlier attempts at building feeds into web browsers.
Google has announced it’s experimenting with integrating syndication feeds ("RSS") into its Chrome web browser. The experiments are currently restricted to early-preview releases of Chrome on Android devices configured for U.S. English. The technology media jumped on the news and many called it a Google Reader reboot. Google Reader was a powerful news aggregation tool beloved by power-users; who’ll never forgive Google for discontinuing it in 2013. Chrome’s latest experiment is nothing like Reader; it’s something else entirely. —and it’s much more likely to succeed!
I recently came across an excellent tool called KeyCombiner that helps you practice keyboard shortcuts (3 sets for free, $29/6 months for more sets). I spent some time to create a set for Amazing Marvin, my current todo manager of choice.
Kubernetes, the de facto standard for container orchestration, has quickly grown to dominate the container environment both in terms of infrastructure management and application development. As an open source platform with a huge community of enthusiasts and professionals, and being a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes has become not only a powerful and impressive orchestration system itself but it has fostered a huge ecosystem of related tools and services to make it easier to use and extend its functionality with ever more powerful and sophisticated components.
In this new eBook, A guide to Kubernetes for SREs and sysadmins, Jess Cherry (with contribution by Ben Finkel) covers a slew of these related tools and services, for management of and integration with Kubernetes. Cherry and Finkel provide some helpful getting started guides, both for Kubernetes and some of the tools. They even share interview questions to help prepare readers for jobs within this quick-growing, massive ecosystem.
Preparing to run a new (or convert an existing) application in Kubernetes takes work. Working with Kubernetes requires defining and creating multiple "manifests" for the different types of objects in your application. Even a simple microservice is likely to have a deployment.yaml, service.yaml, configmap.yaml, and other files. These declarative YAML files for Kubernetes are usually known as "manifests." You might also have to set up secrets, ingresses, persistent volumes, and other supporting pieces.
Once those are created, you're done with managing your manifests, right? Well, it depends. What happens if someone else needs to work with your manifest but needs a slightly (or significantly) different version? Or what happens if someone wants to leverage your manifests for different stages or environments? You need to handle reuse and updates for the different use cases without losing track of your original version.
Have you wanted to cause chaos to test your systems but prefer to use visual tools rather than the terminal? Well, this article is for you, my friend. In the first article in this series, I explained what chaos engineering is; in the second article, I demonstrated how to get your system's steady state so that you can compare it against a chaos state; and in the third, I showed how to use Litmus to test arbitrary failures and experiments in your Kubernetes cluster.
Keeping an eye on your system’s performance is one of the essential tasks that any Linux user should undertake from time to time.This helps in diagnosing any bottlenecks that are likely to impact performance.
Webmin is a free and open-source front-end monitoring and administration tool that helps Linux users have a glance at various system metrics and perform administration tasks without the need of running commands on the terminal.
Pacman version 6 is shipped with parallel downloads support. Here is how to enable parallel downloading in Pacman in Arch Linux and its variants like EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Drupal is one of the most popular open-source CMS platforms worldwide. It is written in PHP, Drupal is an open-source and free CMS that is used for creating stunning blogs and websites. It provides a wide variety of tools, templates, and plugins to create powerful and elegant websites with excellent security and reliability. It’s both a backend and front-end platform, with the backend riding on MySQL database and the front-end powered by PHP and Javascript.
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 installation of Drupal content management systems on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana) server.
Docker is a tool that is used to run software in a container. It's a great way for developers and users to worry less about compatibility with an operating system and dependencies because the contained software should run identically on any system.
Docker is available for download and installation on Fedora as well as most other distributions of Linux. However, installing it on Fedora can be a bit tricky because Red Hat doesn't offer native support for Docker on its distributions. Instead, Red Hat pushes support for Podman, an alternative to Docker. This makes Docker a bit harder to install, but it's still possible on Fedora.
In this guide, we'll show you how to install Docker on Fedora and get started with installing containerized software. After Docker is installed, you can use it to install software packages much the same way you would use your distro's package manager to download an app. The difference of using Docker is that everything is more automated, with compatibility and dependencies no longer being potential issues.
MariaDB is a popular SQL database forked from MySQL. This was developed after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. MariaDB is mostly compatible with MySQL and can mostly replace MySQL without problems (API compatible). The processor architectures x86 and AMD64 are supported.
MariaDB uses the “storage engine” XtraDB as a replacement for InnoDB. Alphanumeric fields in heap tables can exceed 256 characters. Support of Pool of Threads to guarantee high speed even with 200,000+ connections.
Here in this tutorial, we will learn how to install and secure MariaDB on AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux 8.
Recently, I covered how to connect Ubuntu Desktop to an Active Directory domain. The domain controller I connected to was set up using Ubuntu Server and Samba. As you might expect, Fedora Linux is not to be left out of the mix, as you can join this particular distribution to that AD as well.
OpenBSD's standard Let's Encrypt client is acme-client, which has to be configured through /etc/acme-client.conf and then invoked (for example) as 'acme-client -v yourhost' to start the process of getting your TLS certificate. As the OpenBSD documentation tells you, a sample acme-client.conf is in /etc/examples and is easy to edit into shape to list the names you want Let's Encrypt certificates for. I opted to add the optional contact option to the 'letsencrypt' authority in my acme-client.conf, although in retrospect it's pointless for a test server where I don't care if the certificate expires after I'm done.
In the OpenBSD tradition, acme-client is very minimal. Unlike more all encompassing Let's Encrypt clients like Certbot, acme-client doesn't do either post-renewal actions or answering the HTTP challenges.
Getting application logging right is crucial for every software project. When done correctly it makes the maintainers work a lot simpler. There’s no worst feeling than getting an error report and searching for logs to try to understand what happened and not finding a single entry. This is especially bad with difficult to reproduce production errors.
Like everything else, having good logs requires a little bit of thought and consistency. But is not that hard.
I’m not an expert on this subject. This post contains my notes on what has worked for me in the past in the context of backend web applications.
The Blender team today are making quite the super-effective splash about the Blender 2.93 LTS release mentioning how it's been "20 years in the making".
Why the big splash then? What's going on? Well they say they're "paving the way for the next generation open source 3D creation pipeline". Not only is this a long-term support release, meaning it has at least a 2 year life-span of fixes so it can be used for big projects, they're also ramping up work officially on Blender 3.0. Back in April 2021, it also marked 10 years since the Cycles rendering engine was announced. Lots of big milestones have been hit for Blender lately. Some of their plans you can see in their previous roadmap.
Today we are looking at how to install Albion Online 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.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
To install some third-party applications or packages, we add their repository on our Linux operating system. However, in case any of them is interfering or we don’t want to update some particular package available in some particular repository then we can disable the same but without removing it. Here in this tutorial, we will show how to disable or enable some repository on Almalinux 8 or Rocky Linux.
Nagios Core formally known as Nagios is an open source infrastructure monitoring system. The Nagios application periodically checks on critical parameters of the application, server and network resources. For example, Nagios server can monitor CPU load, disk space, memory usage, the number of currently running processes on a remote server. Also sends warning, critical or recovery notifications to the responsible persons over email, sms etc.
Nagios core is freely freely available from the official sites to deploy on your servers. In this tutorial, we will describe you the steps to install and configure Nagios server on a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PowerShell on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PowerShell Core is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation and configuration tool/framework that works well with your existing tools and is optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. It includes a command-line shell, an associated scripting language, and a framework for processing cmdlets.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the PowerShell on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Jupyter Notebook is an open-source and web-based development tool that allows you to create and share live codes and equations. It is flexible, extensible, and supports many programming languages including, Python, Julia, Haskell, Ruby, and more. Generally, it is used for data and machine learning. It comes with the IPython kernel that allows you to write your programs in Python.
In this post, we will show you how to install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 20.04.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram Desktop on Deepin 20.2. Enjoy!
If you've tried FreeDOS, you might have been stymied by the command line. The DOS commands are slightly different from how you might use the Linux command line, so getting around on the command line requires learning a few new commands.
But it doesn't have to be an "all new" experience for Linux users. We've always included some standard Unix commands in FreeDOS, in addition to the DOS commands that are already similar to Linux.
For iterative operations, the bash shell uses three types of loops: for, while, and until. Using the for looping command, we can execute a set of commands for a finite number of times for every item in a list. In the for loop command, the user-defined variable is specified. After the in command, the keyword list of values can be specified. The user-defined variable will get the value from that list, and all statements between do and done get executed until it reaches the end of the list.
With the Bash shell, it is possible to create simple menus with the help of the built-in select command.
Celeste was tough, incredible and beautiful but controller-throwing annoying and Sunblaze sits along nicely beside it now as one of my new favourites. Note: key provided by the developer.
Developed by Games From Earth with Bonus Stage Publishing, Sunblaze tells the story of Josie as you go wall-jumping and dashing through her retired superhero dad's training simulator. This is a platformer that won't hold your hand, in fact it'll take it and then use it to throw you over the edge and expect you to figure it out. It's damn good though, sweat-inducing challenging and it looks seriously pretty too.
[...]
It seems like a really nice set of features there as they said "we want as many people to be able to enjoy Sunblaze as possible" which is why they also support Linux with it too!
After the crowdfunding campaign with lots of delays, more delays, a lawsuit and so on the Atari VCS will finally be released into stores (at least in the US) on June 15.
What Atari call a "console/PC hybrid" it runs a Linux-based operating system by default, with the option to use the PC Mode feature to run whatever other operating system you want. So you could turn it into a more traditional desktop-Linux based system if you wanted to.
After being something of a mega indie hit when it launched Loop Hero quietened down quite a lot but it back with a fresh Beta upgrade and it's a big one. If you missed it, do check out our original release article. It's a wonderful mixture of a deck-building rogue-lite idle RPG, it's terribly hard to accurately pin to genres.
The developer announced 500,000 sales shortly after launch, managed to have over 50,000 players online and seemed to just do amazingly well overall. It's since dropped-off to a more expected ~1,000 players online each day.
Thousand Lives is a fresh take on a text-adventure styled RPG rogue-lite adventure, and from the little we've seen it's easily worth keeping an eye on.
In development from emfinite studio, which includes Mario "ehmprah" Kaiser who previously released the successful Tower Defense game Core Defense (which we enjoyed!), which managed to make nearly $20K in the first week after release. emfinite studio as a whole is a German-French-Canadian blending of Kaiser being joined by Mathias Tournier and Michael Champion.
[...]
The release is due sometime in "Q2 2022" with Linux fully supported.
Foundry VTT (Foundry Virtual Tabletop) is probably one of the absolute best there is for playing virtual table-top games on Linux and there's a huge new release out with a new video to explain the whole thing.
Getting into these can be a little daunting, with so many options within options and lots of different game packs to consider trying out with your friends. Foundry VTT makes it a bit easier though, with a one-time purchase that allows all players to join you free when you host the game as the GM (Game Master). Even better, it's built on Linux — for Linux, as the developer noted before.
Through the magic of Steam Proton software (Steam Play), which allows Linux-based gamers to play Microsoft Windows games without a hassle, Linux gamers will soon be able to get in on the Deep Learning Super Sampling love.
It would be a mistake to marginalise Linux-based gamers from this fancy new tech, it's what they live for. Much like it would be a crime to keep an artificially intelligent image quality enhancer as a Windows exclusive feature.
Support will be rolling out soon, though there's no official games list available yet.
Steam Play and DLSS supported games will hopefully get the same boost as Windows users once the partnership reaches fruition. And it won't be long according to Nvidia. DLSS Steam Play support for Vulkan titles is coming later this month, which shouldn't be too much trouble to get working, and DirectX support will also hit the Linux gaming crowd by autumn this year.
There has been quite an uptick recently when it comes to the conversation around video game preservation. There are probably several reasons for this. First and most notably, the confluence of the trend toward the gaming public primarily purchasing digital games rather than shiny disks, and the emergence of the latest generation of video game consoles has brought the question of what happens to older games into stark relief for many in the gaming public. Second, America has been in something of a love affair over the last decade or so with all things "retro". And, finally, the concept of video games as works of creative art, rather than wastes of time to be sneered at, has found firm purchase within our society. All of this has combined to make the public much, much more interested in preserving antiquated video games. And, frankly, very disappointed at how often the gaming industry doesn't take preservation at all seriously.
Today gaming icon Atari has announced that their new hybrid console the Atari VCS will be releasing later this month on June 15. This console is able to both function as a traditional home gaming console and switch into a fully functioning PC capable of supporting Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Chrome OS...
Some of what this patch addresses includes: multiple crash bugs fixed, localization issues solved, male units playing female audio (woops...), subsurface scattering effects to unit skin to address skin tone issues, some descriptions not appearing, diplomacy tooltips were improved and more.
Now that this first patch out of the way, they've confirmed more is coming and some bigger sounding changes too. For the next patch they said they're investigating to "improve areas of the game including AI, pathfinding and modding functionality". Hopefully that will satisfy some of the more brutal user reviews as it's sat on a Mostly Positive rating right now.
Valve and CodeWeavers have released another fresh Proton Experimental build for testing upcoming features of the Proton compatibility layer for Linux gaming with Steam Play.
As the headline says, DLSS is coming to Proton! This was announced by NVIDIA only recently, which is quite exciting! Nice to see Proton itself already preparing everything needed, with a new NVIDIA driver (470) coming sometime soon.
Nvidia today announced at Computex 2021 that it's partnered with Valve to bring its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) graphics tech to Linux via Steam Proton. Now people who game on Linux systems should be able to put their Nvidia graphics cards—including the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti—to even better use.
DLSS is Nvidia's solution to the problem of improving a game's performance without having to compromise too much on presentation. The first version of the technology debuted in September 2018; the second version was released in March 2020. Both versions were limited to RTX graphics cards used to play games on Windows.
That's about to change. Nvidia said in a press release that it, Valve, and "the Linux gaming community are collaborating to bring NVIDIA DLSS to Proton - Linux gamers will be able to use the dedicated AI cores on GeForce RTX GPUs to boost frame rates for their favorite Windows Games running on the Linux operating system."
Power/session actions in the lock screen: AT RISK
No new work done. May not happen this year.
Production-ready Plasma Wayland session: ON TRACK
In part due to it being an official KDE goal, a truly enormous, herculean amount of work has gone into making the Plasma Wayland session usable, to the point where the Fedora KDE spin has decided to enable it by default in Fedora 34, which ships Plasma 5.21. This is quite a vote of confidence! I fully expect that by Plasma 5.23, it will be broadly usable for day-to-day use. I find that it’s almost there for me.
Fingerprint support throughout the stack: AT RISK
No new work done. May not happen this year. We are kind of blocked by the necessary SDDM pieces not being done yet. Assistance needed.
Finish up Breeze Evolution: ON TRACK
Work is proceeding and the new widget style will land in Plasma 5.23. After that, most of the remaining work requires changes to apps themselves, particularly to make them less framey. Adopting KHamburgerMenu in more of our apps will help too, and it’s already been done for Dolphin and Gwenview, with more on the way.
So, you’re out there on the web searching for the best Arch-based distro to escape Arch’s complex installation process but don’t know where to start? Manjaro Linux, one of the best non-Ubuntu distros, and EndeavourOS are the two most popular Arch-based distros. The former is a very old player, and the latter is relatively new in the Linux distro market.
In this article, let’s have a look at Manjaro Vs EndeavourOS to determine which one would be the best pick for you. We’ll be comparing the Xfce variants since they’re the most popular, and everything from the installation process to the features and how they differ.
There is a bug in the runit editions of antiX-19.4 (full and base) after installation via the gui installer. Fix: As root user, remove all /etc/sv/* folders EXCEPT /etc/sv/getty-*
Kali Linux 2021.2 is now available for download with numerous changes and the addition of new features. Let’s have a look into the changes and the new features in this edition of Kali Linux 2021.2
One of the good news for the Raspberry users in this edition is support for the RPi 400. You will also see the new app called Kali-Tweaks v1.0 that lets you customize Kali to your own personal taste. Along with the Kali-Tweaks, you will also see the much anticipated Kaboxer v1.0 in the Kali Linux 2021.2. Along with this, Kali Linux is now fully supported for Apple M1 users who have Parallel.
Thunderbird is a free email application for Linux that’s easy to set up and customize – and it’s loaded with great features!
The new openSUSE Leap 15.3 is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 and it is supported until December 2022.
After almost a year of development, the openSUSE project has presented a new version of its stable Linux distribution openSUSE Leap 15.3. The newest minor version is the most recent, rock-solid addition to the openSUSE 15.x series that carries all the positive attributes of its predecessors.
There is one huge change from the previous Leap versions. openSUSE Leap 15.3 is built not just from SUSE Linux Enterprise source code like in previous versions, but built with the exact same binary packages, which strengthens the flow between Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Put simply, openSUSE Leap will become a free counterpart to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and the server variant (SLED) without commercial support.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3, the most recent addition to the openSUSE 15.x series built using the same exact binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise, is now officially available.
There is one huge change from the previous Leap versions. openSUSE Leap 15.3 is built not just from SUSE Linux Enterprise source code like in previous versions, but built with the exact same binary packages, which strengthens the flow between Leap and SLE like a yin yang.
This release is hugely beneficial for migration projects and user acceptance testing. Large development teams gain added value by using openSUSE Leap 15.3 to optimally run and test workloads that can be lifted and shifted to SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 15 SP3 for long-term maintenance.
Few days ago, I installed AlmaLinux Workstation and here I would love to share what I found to you all Ubuntu Buzz readers. AlmaLinux, formerly named Lenix, is a continuation of the world class computer OS for servers, CentOS, created by CloudLinux Inc and promised to be forever-free and completely compatible to both CentOS and RHEL. Here I would love to present you an overview that covers it from the download place, installation, desktop, wallpaper and login screen, to the software installation. For Ubuntu users, I suggest you to try Alma in virtual machine.
A few weeks ago, Red Hat announced the fourth point version of its latest stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 series. It arrived with tons of new features, updates, and enhancements for developers, hybrid cloud, and edge computing.
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Being an enterprise OS, the ISO image of RHEL is not available to download at free of costs like any other popular Linux-based OS like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. You have to buy an RHEL subscription to download and use Red Hat Linux.
However, if you still want it without paying money, a free version of RHEL 8 is also available through the Red Hat Developer Program. The developer program provides a no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for an individual to access Red Hat products like RHEL OS.
Open Neuroscience is heavily dependent on the availability of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) tools that support the modern scientific process. While more and more tools are now being developed using FOSS driven methods to ensure free (free to use, study, modify, and share---and so also free of cost) access to all, the complexity of these domain specific tools makes their uptake by the multi-disciplinary neuroscience target audience non-trivial.
The NeuroFedora community initiative aims to make it easier for all to use neuroscience software tools. Using the resources of the FOSS Fedora community, NeuroFedora volunteers identify, package, test, document, and disseminate neuroscience software for easy usage on the general purpose FOSS Fedora Linux Operating System (OS). As a result, users can easily install a myriad of software tools in only two steps: install any flavour of the Fedora OS; install the required tools using the in-built package manager.
The latest versions of Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset are now generally available. Red Hat Software Collections 3.7 delivers the latest stable versions of many popular open source runtime languages, web servers, and databases natively to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. These components are supported for up to five years for a more consistent, efficient, and reliable developer experience.
As more of our lives inch closer to pre-pandemic normalcy and signs point toward economic recovery, your employees will begin to explore new opportunities. As many as a quarter to one-half of employees are itching to spread their job-hunting wings, recent data shows. The Achievers Workforce Institute’s Employee Engagement & Retention Report says that 52 percent of North American workers plan to look for a new position in 2021. Prudential Financial’s Pulse of the American Worker survey reports that 26 percent of workers plan to leave their employers after the pandemic.
"This suggests that people think the grass is greener," says Dan Roberts, CEO of Ouellette & Associates and author of Confessions of a Successful CIO, "and not because it's spring!"
Many Fortune 500 companies - perhaps as many as 20 percent of them - may not survive this year, Forrester Research has predicted. As companies transition to a post-pandemic recovery, savvy CIOs understand that their organizations must continue to accelerate intelligent automation initiatives to thrive in the new digital-first era.
Most are looking to remain digital-first even as the crisis dissipates. According to a recent Statista report, spending on the technologies and services that enable digital transformation worldwide is expected to amount to $2.3 trillion.
Unfortunately for IBM, it is simply unable to attract the same caliber of talent as these peers given their superior reputations and more innovative cultures. While IBM may be racking up patents, few of these innovations prove to be truly groundbreaking and their competitors continue to out-recruit, out-grow, and, ultimately, out-perform them.
Recent versions of Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O have started to take advantage of a new kernel feature, volatile overlay mounts. This feature allows you to mount an overlay file system with a flag that tells it not to sync to the disk.
If you need a reminder about the use and benefits of overlay mounts, check out my article from last summer.
Hybrid cloud has come to mean different things over time. One early canonical document from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) focused on quickly and transparently moving workloads between a private cloud and a public one. This turned out to be both too narrow a definition and often not feasible because of the difficulty and cost of moving around large volumes of data. In fact, the recent interest in edge computing, in part, reflects the need to move computing closer to data and users. In this post, we’ll cover some key considerations to keep in mind as you start digitally transforming your organization.
Sysadmins, as you know, wear a lot of different hats--meaning that sysadmins do a lot of different jobs and typically have ultimate power in all of them. The all-powerful root user account and its highly-protected password are good examples of that ultimate power. For those of you who perform work that falls under certain regulations, like those of Department of Defense (DoD) project, you may have to comply with guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-171, which includes the separation of duties (Control 3.1.4).
A new IDC white paper sponsored by Red Hat...
Red Hat Internship Round 2 for Summer 2021 is officially under way! Last summer it was a new and fairly wild time especially with covid being fully remote and starting at Red Hat. But this first week actually included a four day weekend, as well as a lot of new hire intern orientation meetings. Some open source, kubernetes, and red hat products bootcamps also sprinkled in there.
In between meetings and bootcamps I’ve been going over how much of the coloring book to get done so I can finish as much as possible by the end of June- and I’ve attached below one of the pages I completed this week.
Earlier this year Linux PC company System76 announced plans to develop a new desktop environment for the company’s Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS operating system.
The COSMIC desktop environment is designed to be easy-to-use, but also highly customizable. And now you can take it for a spin by trying out Pop!_OS 21.04 Beta, which was released this week.
In mid-April 2021, System76 unveiled COSMIC as their take on the new design of the GNOME 40 desktop environment for Pop!_OS Linux, but they didn’t provide us with many details, except for the fact that their COSMIC desktop will offer a “totally different” desktop experience with an always visible dock, as well as separate Workspaces and Applications views.
The COSMIC desktop will be part of the upcoming Pop!_OS Linux 21.04 distribution release, which is derived from Canonical’s Ubuntu 21.04 (Hiruste Hippo) and expected later this summer. But, today, System76 released the beta version Pop!_OS Linux 21.04 to give us an early taste of the COSMIC desktop, so I downloaded the ISO and gave it a try on my Lenovo laptop.
Get your hands-on with the Cosmic Desktop (Pop OS 21.04) from the Pop OS team as part of the beta copy. Here's a recap of the feature highlights and beta download details.
Pop!_OS 21.04 is one of the most anticipated distros of this year and the public beta has finally arrived.
While we do not have an official list of changes that follows with this release, but it comes packed with its brand new COSMIC Desktop Environment.
Let me highlight a few things about the desktop, how you can download it, and my initial thoughts on it.
System76 have recently released the first Beta of their Linux distribution Pop!_OS 21.04, which comes with their brand new COSMIC desktop environment.
To be clear, this is not some full desktop like GNOME itself or KDE. Instead, it's pretty much an enhancement to GNOME 3.38 with lots of new tweaks. The layout is quite different, with it being suitable for people who heavily rely on either mouse or keyboard for interactions. As a reminder from when COSMIC was announced, System76 said the "new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release".
ROS Kinetic has come to EOL. We have discussed the impact of EOL in the past, but with its final sync out on May 12th, ROS Kinetic is no longer supported. Together with Ubuntu Xenial, both distributions will no longer receive security updates or bug fixes.
ROS second LTS release became the largest rosdistro with 1,233 repositories over the last 5 years. We want to join our partner, Open Robotics, in thanking all of you who contributed to making ROS Kinetic a milestone in robotics history.
But for all of us still working with Kinetic, in our deployed robots, labs or universities, two questions arise: where do I migrate to and what are the challenges?
To answer these questions, we asked our community what they think. So throughout April, we conducted 2 small polls on LinkedIn and Twitter. Two main questions were asked.
Did you know Foxconn makes processors now? Well, they do, or at least can pretend they do to as we’ll see below. Foxconn FXN3102 24-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor is found in Vecow VAC-1000, a compact Edge AI computing system, that also features either an Hailo-8 AI accelerator or Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801S NPU.
The Ubuntu 18.04 server system also comes with up to 16GB DDR4-2133 memory, optional NX Witness VMS (Video Management System) supported, and targets intelligent surveillance applications such as public surveillance or traffic monitoring, as well as smart retail, factory automation, and any other AIoT/Industry 4.0 applications.
Nexcom’s signage oriented “NDiS B360” embedded computer runs Linux or Win 10 on an 11th Gen Core CPU and offers dual 4K displays, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 2x M.2, and -20 to 60€°C support.
The next time you are sitting in your car trying to read the calorie count for the Naked Chicken Chalupa while the driver behind you gives you a courtesy honk, you might welcome a nice, crisp 4K display such as enabled by Nexcom’s NDiS B360. The Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake UP3 based signage system measures only 36mm high, making it easier to fit into slim digital displays for EV charging systems, ticketing, tourist and museum venues, parking lots, reception counters, and advertising. With its -20 to 60€°C operating range and 10 to 90% (non-condensing) humidity tolerance, the fanless system supports outdoor deployment.
QNAP launched the high-performance 6-bay TVS-672X and 8-bay TVS-872X 10 GbE NAS with Intel Core i3 processors. With expandable storage capacity and feature-rich apps, both models support M.2 NVMe SSD cache acceleration, PCIe expansion, multi-cloud backup, 4K@60Hz HDMI output, real-time transcoding.
The TVS-x72X series features an Intel Core i3-8100T quad-core 3.1 GHz processor with dual-channel DDR4 memory (upgradable to 64 GB). It provides two Gigabit and one 10GBASE-T RJ45 (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M) port to increase virtual machine performance, intensive file access, high-speed backup/restore, and media file transfer. Four USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports also allow compatibility with newer, faster USB drives/expansion enclosures for transferring large media files. The TVS-x72X series is perfectly suited for use with QNAP's budget-friendly managed and unmanaged 10 GbE switches for high-speed, secure, and scalable network environments.
Servo Motors are common electronics and diy components able to perform rotations (usually in a range between 0 and 180 degrees). You can use SG90 with Raspberry Pi Pico with easy MicroPython code as only PWM is required
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use an SG90 servo motor with Raspberry PI pico and Micropython.
Elegoo SG90 Servo Motor Servo motor is a compact kind of DC motor equipped also with a set of reduction gears. Usually, it can rotate only in a range between 0 and 180 degrees with its “horn”, even if this accessory can be replaced with the 2 additional inserts available from its standard packaging.
Having a disability can severely impact one’s ability to perform tasks that others do regularly, such as eating, walking, or even speaking. One maker by the name of ‘gtentacle‘ has a son who needs to use a ventilator constantly in order to breathe as he suffers from a myotubular myopathy, a disease that greatly impacts the strength of his muscles. Due to his condition, he is unable to talk; however, that that didn’t stop his father from coming up with a solution. This project involves five Logitech Adaptive Buttons and an Arduino Micro to type in letters for a text-to-speech (TTS) system to read.
Up to 20 letters can be entered in total, and each one can be accessed with a grid-type system. For instance, the letter ‘T’ can be typed by pressing the 3 button followed by the 2 button. The ‘Enter’ command is sent whenever button 5 is the first key pressed. Thanks to the ATmega32u4, the system works with any device that supports a USB keyboard and has TTS software. The project’s creator even used it with Android Talkback.
But apparently, not all components are, and Arm has now announced the Open-CMSIS-Pack project that will move part of CMSIS into the open project in collaboration with the Linaro IoT and Embedded Group.
Students and teachers can now sync Google Drive with their Arduino Science Journal experiments. This means you can access experiments from any device using your Arduino account. The brand new Google Drive integration is available through the latest app update.
In the age of COVID-19, being able to know when someone’s sick is vital, especially in countries where the disease is currently surging. It’s for this reason that Open Green Energy decided to build a battery-powered portable thermometer that not only takes a person’s temperature but also alerts other if it’s too high.
At the heart of the device is an Arduino Nano that takes in temperature data from a GY-906 module and displays it on a 0.96” OLED screen. Additionally, there’s an IR emitter/receiver that detects when a person is in front of the thermometer so their temperature can be read. If the value falls within the acceptable range, a green LED lights up, but if the value is too high, such as in the case of a fever, a buzzer begins to sound, and the red LED turns on.
Huawei plans for an Android alternative called HongMeng (鸿èââ¢) OS were leaked in 2019 following tensions with the US government that prevented them from working with American and other companies around the world. The operating system was later called HarmonyOS for the overseas markets, and Huawei released HarmonyOS 2.0 beta in September of last year, where we learned it was heavily inspired by Android, replacing Google GMS with Huawei’s own HMS, but using the same development tools.
We also got a roadmap at the time with the company planning to launch HarmonyOS devices in 2021. Developers first got the HiSpark WiFi IoT RISC-V development board to play with the new OS in October 2020, but now the company has finally announced HarmonyOS consumer devices with three Huawei MatePad tablets, and two Huawei 3 watches.
Since being frozen out of dealings with US companies, Huawei phones and other gadgets have been unable to run the full-fat version of Android, complete with Google apps and the Play Store. Now it's launched its own competitor: HarmonyOS.
Huawei Technologies has now released its self-developed operating system (OS) software in an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance in smartphone OS. The move comes after the US imposed sanctions on the Chinese tech behemoth, barring it from using Google’s Android.
During a fully virtual launch event on Wednesday, the company introduced its new software, known as HarmonyOS (also called HongmengOS in China), for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other Huawei products.
LG Electronics Inc. on Thursday said its open source software management tool is now available to outside developers as the South Korean tech giant eyes to bolster its presence in the software community.
LG said the FOSSLight (Free and Open Source Software Light) system, which it has been using since 2014, can now be downloaded for free at its website.
Open source software is distributed with its original source code and allows programmers to freely use or modify work. But at the same time, programmers must follow license regulations for each open source.
LG's FOSSLight is a system than can check the open source compliance process. It can analyze a developer's software to verify whether it has followed license conditions and meets security requirements.
A new survey by Tidelift, the premier provider of solutions for managing the open source software behind modern applications, found that most open source maintainers are not paid enough, if at all, for often stressful and thankless work. Yet, making a positive impact is what motivates these maintainers to continue their work despite the challenges.
Besides Cloud-Hypervisor, another open-source virtualization hypervisor that continues to be developed by Intel is HAXM as the Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager.
If you are responsible for the marketing for your business nowadays, it is usually quite demanding; the budget is always stretched and it is really important to get a decent return on the money that you are investing in marketing.
there are so many different ways to carry out your marketing with a whole host of activities. All of these claiming to offer the best return for your budget now with such a wide choice is tough to know whether to look at traditional methods such as newspaper advert Flyers trade publications printed mail-outs trade shows or modern mediums such as social media and email marketing so what do you do all of them some of them or none of the above well it's worth trying all of them are various times to see which works best for your business out of all of the different types of marketing that we've listed though there is one that stands out and that his email marketing so what is email marketing?
Email marketing is known for delivering a great return on investment now in this article we are going to look at.
Signal is a cross-platform messaging app with a deep focus on privacy and security. It’s free-to-use and is run by the non-profit Signal Technology Foundation. Moreover, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so all your chats and calls are inaccessible to everyone barring you and the intended recipient.
Thanks to its privacy protections, Signal has gained prominence in recent years, especially after the Black Lives Matter protests in the US and the WhatsApp privacy policy snafu. It has also been championed by the likes of Elon Musk. According to some estimates, the app had 40 million monthly active users as of January 2021.
Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.
Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.
A glance at a statistics site like W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.
Tor Browser 10.0.17 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version updates Firefox to 78.11esr. In addition, Tor Browser 10.0.17 updates NoScript to 11.2.8, HTTPS Everywhere to 2021.4.15, and Tor to 0.4.5.8. This version includes important security updates to Firefox for Desktop.
Initial MenuButton and Popover support under GTK4 now working
Discover the best cPanel alternatives available today
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If you’re on a tight budget and looking to save money by using a free cPanel alternative, Webmin could be your best option. It’s an open-source web platform that’s available for Unix, and it comes with a great selection of hosting management tools.
All tools are available via an attractive management interface. It is a little simple, but everything is intuitive and easy to find. Configure your site via the built-in tools, or hire a developer to code custom tools where required.
There are a few downsides to using Webmin. As an open-source community project, security fixes can take some time to be developed. Customer service is limited to forums and other online chat sites, and it can be difficult to make advanced changes without a high level of technical knowledge.
Matt Mullenweg’s words in “The Commons of Images” episode of the WP Briefing podcast exemplify the core philosophy of the WordPress project, especially as we inch closer to the next major release (version 5.8). This post covers exciting updates from the month of May.
The GCC Steering Committee has decided to relax the requirement to assign copyright for all changes to the Free Software Foundation. GCC will continue to be developed, distributed, and licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. GCC will now accept contributions with or without an FSF copyright assignment. This change is consistent with the practices of many other major Free Software projects, such as the Linux kernel.
Since Richard M. Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Steering Committee has taken steps to distance itself from the FSF, reports Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
Developers who want to contribute to the GNU Compiler Collection but don’t feel like signing over copyright to the Free Software Foundation can get busy committing now. GCC Steering Committee member David Edelsohn informed contributors via the mailing list that the committee “decided to relax the requirement to assign copyright for all changes” to the FSF.
Speaking for the committee, he wrote that the GCC project “will now accept contributions with or without an FSF copyright assignment”, a practice thought of as consistent with that “of many other major Free Software projects, such as the Linux kernel”.
GCC is widely used, not least as the primary compiler toolchain for Linux. Although contributing code under the GPL 3.0 license is sufficient for it to be open source, assigning copyright gives more flexibility to the owners for such things as publishing the code under a different license – anything that would otherwise require asking the original contributors (who may no longer be available for any number of reasons) for further permission.
The reason for the change is not stated, but there was a long thread in April on the matter of GCC's association with the FSF.
The FSF has been entangled in controversy since restoring its founder Richard Stallman to the board.
Red Hat pulled funding for the FSF; the Debian community is divided on the subject.
The GRUB bootloader saw some fresh feature work merged this week.
First up, grub-install now has backup and restore functionality. Rather than just nuking all existing files on grub-install right away, the files will be backed up so that if an error occurs those original bootloader files can be ideally restored. If an error occurs prior to the point of no return, grub-install will restore those backed up files. The goal here is to ensure GRUB providers safer upgrades of the MBR and modules and not accidentally clobbering your system. This grub-install backup/restore functionality comes thanks to Canonical's Dimitri John Ledkov.
One of the most challenging tasks for Date and time libraries is the parsing of International Dates and Times. They come in such a wide array of formats that it’s all but impossible to accommodate all of them. Different Date libraries approach this problem using a variety of solutions, some better than others. The Moment.js and Luxon Date libraries utilize a similar approach to date parsing using Date format strings. In today’s blog, we’ll learn how to create Luxon Date objects from Datetime strings.
On March 24, version 1.6.0 of the Julia programming language was released. This is the first feature release since 1.0 came out in 2018. The new release significantly reduces the "time to first plot", which is a common source of dissatisfaction for newcomers to the language, by parallelizing pre-compilation, downloading packages more efficiently, and reducing the frequency of just-in-time re-compilations at run time.
The detailed list of new features, added functions, improvements to existing functions, and so on can be found in the release notes. The focus of this article will be the changes that affect all users of Julia, rather than those that only apply to certain packages or usage patterns.
WASM3 v0.5 has been released for this project that calls itself the fastest WebAssembly interpreter as well as the most universal WebAssembly run-time. WASM3 runs across all major operating systems and can also run on WebAssembly itself / self-hosting, run on MCUs, and run in other environments.
Yesterday's WASM3 v0.5 release adds multi-value support, native support for the Apple Silicon / Apple M1, various WASI system interface improvements, API additions, and various other enhancements.
Hack is a programming language for HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) that interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.
Hack provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the filesystem. It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds, making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.
Hack is built specifically for HHVM, a high performance runtime for your Hack applications, and reconciles the fast development cycle of a dynamically typed language with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.
The Qbs build tool version 1.19.0 is available.
On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301003.
As you all know, I joined Oleeo last month, it was busy getting my head around the code base and infrastructure. I had to slow down my activities with regard to the routine Perl Weekly Challenge tasks.
I would like to talk about two happy interactions last month. Ever since I started the Perl Weekly Challenge project, I hardly find time to contribute to CPAN whether it is my personal distributions or others. The only time I contribute to others work is when I get my monthly assignment from Pull Request Club. Lets get back to the subject, last month, I received RT #136670 from James Wright with regard to my distribution App::Search::BackPAN. He pointed out the code is broken and doesn't return expected result. He even proposed the fix, which is always handy. The very same day, I had the patch uploaded to CPAN. It feels nice that someone is using my distribution and on top of that cares to raise an issue they encounter. It brought back the good old memories when I used to upload patches to CPAN every day. I did that 1027 days nonstop in the past.
Apart from simple branches with if, it is also possible to process multiple decision-making operations using the case command. In a case statement, the expression contained in a variable is compared with a number of expressions, and for each expression matched, a command is executed.
It is possible to have multiple branches using the if/elif/else commands. But if more than two or three elif commands are used, then code becomes very complex. When all the different conditions are depending on a single variable, in such cases, the esac statement is used. The interpreter checks the value of the case variable against value1, value2, value3, and so on, till the match is found. If the value is matched, then all the statements after that case value are executed till the double semicolon is reached. If nothing is matched, then statements after esac are executed. Wildcard characters and pipes (vertical bar for ORing two values) are allowed in the case statement.
The shell has one environment variable, which is named the Internal Field Separator (IFS). This variable indicates how the words are separated on the command line. The IFS variable is, normally or by default, a whitespace (”). The IFS variable is used as a word separator (token) for the for command. In many documents, IFS can be any one of the white spaces, :, |, :, or any other desired character. This will be useful while using commands such as read, set, and for. If we are going to change the default IFS, then it is a good practice to store the original IFS in a variable.
If we need to redirect the output of a loop to any other Linux command such as sort, we can even redirect the loop output to be stored in the file:
The until command is similar to the while command. The given statements in the loop are executed as long as they evaluate the condition as true. As soon as the condition becomes false, then the loop is exited.
Similar to the for command, while is also the command for loop operations. The command next to while is evaluated. If it is successful or 0, then the commands inside do and done are executed.
In the previous tutorial, we discussed about how continue can be used to exit from the current iteration of a loop. The break command is another way to introduce a new condition within a loop. Unlike continue, however, it causes the loop to be terminated altogether if the condition is met.
Using the continue command, it is possible to exit from the current iteration of the loop and resume the next iteration of the loop. We use the for, while, or until commands for loop iterations.
Aiolos feasted and took care of Odysseus and his sailors for close to a month. When he saw the men had recovered, he gave Odysseus a gift that only a god could give: an ox-skin bag holding all the winds, save the westerly for blowing his ship straight to Ithaca. Aiolos warned Odysseus not to open the wind bag.
Odysseus thanked Aiolos and left full of hope for returning, finally, home. On his turn, he warned his companions not to touch the bag from Aiolos.
The Masked Singer presents its viewers with a paradox. On one level, the show is easy to grasp. “Here’s how the game works,” announces host Niecy Nash in the fifth-season premiere. “We’ve got famous people wearing crazy costumes.” The contestants perform a song, and the panelists—Ken Jeong, Robin Thicke, Jenny McCarthy, and Nicole Scherzinger—attempt to guess who they are. Then they and the fans vote, and the lowest-scoring performer is eliminated and removes their mask, revealing their identity. Since its 2019 debut, it has been a huge success, with high ratings and a recent spin-off (The Masked Dancer). Clearly, something about it works.
If we modern humans are, in effect, addicted to power, perhaps we need something like a collective twelve-step program.
In 1971, Sun Ra took his Arkestra to Cairo for a series of concerts, broadcasts, and recording sessions. It was a necessary pilgrimage for the experimental pianist and his equally eccentric band. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., he had been fascinated with Egypt for decades, and the trip was a chance to commune with hallowed ground. A pioneering Afrofuturist, he wore garments that mixed Egyptian finery with intergalactic touches and composed progressive blends of jazz that imagined space travel as a means of Black liberation. As he saw it, Black people would never find freedom on Earth; true emancipation resided on Saturn. He had become infatuated with the planet in college after an out-of-body experience that, he said, beamed him into the cosmos. “My whole body was changed into something else,” the artist reported, according to John Szwed’s biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him: “They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.”
At the heart of both secular and religiously affiliated Jews in the US are the beliefs in the worth of the ordinary human being, the ordinary man, woman, and child, and his/her right to live a full life. Behind all of this is Rabbi Hillel’s admonition: “What you yourself hate, don’t do to your neighbor.”
Growing up in a small town in Rhode Island in the 1950s and 1960s, I knew that I was different, but that I was also an accepted member of my community. Anti-Semitism did not affect our community in any way and it was a multiethnic community. During World War II, the synagogue that my family belonged to had a committee that in a small way resettled Jews escaping Europe as Naziism took hold.
Athletes around the globe are voicing support for tennis superstar Naomi Osaka, who withdrew from the French Open after being fined and threatened with disqualification for declining to take part in press conferences due to their effect on her mental health. Prominent athletes, from Stephen Curry to Serena Williams, have come forward to support 23-year-old Osaka, who is a four-time Grand Slam tournament winner. The escalating fines and criticism Osaka faced from tennis officials were “a disproportionate response” to her actions, says Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor of history and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State and co-host of the sports podcast “Burn It All Down.” She adds that Black women athletes are often subjected to insensitive questioning from the media that can perpetuate racist and sexist narratives. “The media is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly older, overwhelmingly male,” Davis says.
There’s a backlash brewing in the world of sports. Many pro athletes spent much of 2020 raising their voices for justice: as workers, citizens, and, most pointedly, as Black and brown athletes who have to suffer racism no matter the size of their paychecks.
This is terrible. You think it's going to help, but it's not. At best, it will have no effect on things, but at worst, it will tell the people in the trenches that "opening a SEV (outage, ...) is baaaaaad", and they will shy away from doing it. Worse still, they may not even realize this avoidance behavior as a conscious thing. It just might not occur to them to hit the [create] button when it's time.
If they know that someone in management will ask "why were there more SEVs in October than September", they might be more willing to go "ehhh, it's not important" and just work the problem without tracking it properly.
The Riigikogu passed a bill of amendments to the Animal Protection Act and Nature Conservation Act, which prohibits the breeding and keeping of animals in Estonia solely or mainly for the purpose of obtaining fur
The ban does not threaten breeders of animals such as sheep or rabbits. The proposed ban only covers fur farming where fur production is the sole or main purpose.
It seems appropriate that the 2020–21 school year in Portland, Ore., began amid toxic smoke from the catastrophic wildfires that blanketed many parts of the state for almost two weeks. The night before the first day of school, the smoke alarm in my bedroom went off. Looking back, I see it as a clarion call, a shrieking, beeping warning of all the threats, real and existential, we’d face in the year to come.
I’ve been putting the reMarkable 2 through its paces since I got it a few days ago. In this post I’m going to jot down some thoughts about its overall usability whether it might replace my trusty paper notebooks. Spoiler alert: quite possibly!
Hetzner is one of Europe’s large hosting companies, and they have several options of interest.
Their Storage Box competes directly with the rsync.net service. Their per-GB storage cost is lower than rsync.net, and although they do include a certain amount of free bandwidth with each account, bandwidth is not unlimited and could result in charges. Still, if you don’t drive 2x or more your storage usage in bandwidth each month, it would be cheaper than rsync. The Storage Box also uses ZFS with some kind of redundancy, though they don’t specifcy details.
What differentiates them from rsync.net is the protocol support. They support sftp, scp, Borg, ssh, rsync, etc. just as rsync.net does. But then they also through in Samba/CIFS, FTPS, HTTPS, and WebDAV – all optionally enabled or disabled by you. Although things like sshfs exist, they aren’t particularly optimal for some use cases, and CIFS support may just be what you need in some situations.
"It turns out, relieving a lot of everyday hardship can be done very simply and directly by giving poor people money and support. Who knew?"
New York City—Out of one dream, another dream is born.
Regular readers know that I’ve long documented the misappropriation of the Holocaust and Holocaust imagery by antivaxxers in order to spread fear, uncertainty, doubt, and, yes, loathing about vaccines. This tactic predates the COVID-19 pandemic by many years. As I started writing this, out of curiosity, I searched this blog and its predecessor on Blogger for references to the Holocaust by antivaxxers. I found that my first post first about this vile phenomenon dated back nearly 16 years, all the way back to 2005, when Mark Blaxill likened “vaccine-induced autism” to a “silent Holocaust” in a letter to TIME Magazine. It was a sentiment that über-quack Joe Mercola had echoed in a post whose URL has since been excluded from the almighty Wayback Machine at Archive.org and now redirects to a more recent post without Holocaust analogies. In that very same post, I noted a post in the antivaccine Evidence of Harm mailing list by Lenny Schafer, who runs the Schafer Autism Report, a propaganda site promoting the vaccine-autism link.
Cook said that most employees will be asked to come in to the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, with the option of working remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays. Teams that need to work in-person will return four to five days a week.
If you’re allergic to shellfish, it’s entirely possible that you’ll have a reaction to eating certain insects. After all, what are shrimps and lobsters but bugs of the sea? Seriously, in the colonial era lobsters were only food for poor and incarcerated people, because they were seen as bottom-dwelling roaches rather than a delicacy.
First detected by security researchers at Sophos plc and revealed Friday, the ransomware was found targeting [sic] a U.S.-based business in the hospitality industry. Delivered as the final executable payload in a hand-controlled attack, the ransomware demanded a payment of 4.29 bitcoin, valued at the time at about $210,000.
The FBI has identified a Russia-linked group as the entity behind the cyberattack on the meat producing group JBS USA.
“We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice,” the FBI wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
REvil, the Russian-linked [cracking] group the FBI said is responsible for the cyberattack on JBS SA, the largest meat producer in the world, has emerged as one of the most prolific -- and public -- ransomware groups in recent years.
The [crackers], also known as Sodinokibi, have been at the forefront of the ransomware-as-a-service model of cyberattacks since the group first came to prominence as a security threat in 2019. In this model, [cracking] groups provide malware for others to use in an attack in exchange for a cut of the ransom payments. In order to recruit talent, REvil deposited $1 million in Bitcoin as a way to give potential affiliates peace of mind that they would get paid.
The FBI has said that cybercriminal group REvil (also known as Sodinokibi) was behind the recent attack on meat supplier JBS (via The Record). This follows a statement from White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, which indicated that the attack likely came from a Russian-based organization.
Smilyanets said there hasn’t been any signs of public postings from REvil related to the incident—the group often pressures organizations into paying a demand by exposing some information. “That can indicate that negotiations are underway,” he said.
Linkerd developer points to hidden overhead costs in Istio, suggesting that the most popular service mesh isn't right for everyone.
The Zephyrâ⢠Project,an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices, continues to gain momentum with its 5th anniversary this year. To celebrate the milestone, the Zephyr Project is hosting its inaugural Zephyr Developer Summit on June 8-10. The virtual event, which is free to attend, features several Zephyr leaders presenting real-world use cases, best practices, tutorials and more.
Jason Perlow, Director of Project Insights and Editorial Content at the Linux Foundation, spoke with Daniel Scales about the importance of protecting trademarks in open source projects.
JP: It’s great to have you here today, and also, welcome to the Linux Foundation. First, can you tell me a bit about yourself, where you are from, and your interests outside work?
DS: Thanks, Jason! It is great to be here. I grew up in Upstate New York, lived in Washington and London for a few years after college, and have been in Boston for the last 20+ years. Outside of work, I coach my daughter’s soccer team, I like to cook and play my bass guitar, and I am really looking forward to getting back to some live music and sporting events.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, curl, dhclient, dhcp, firefox, keycloak, lib32-curl, lib32-libcurl-compat, lib32-libcurl-gnutls, libcurl-compat, libcurl-gnutls, opera, packagekit, pam-u2f, postgresql, rabbitmq, redis, ruby-bundler, and zint), Debian (caribou, firefox-esr, imagemagick, and isc-dhcp), Fedora (mapserver, mingw-python-pillow, and python-pillow), openSUSE (chromium), Red Hat (firefox, glib2, pki-core:10.6, polkit, rh-ruby26-ruby, and rh-ruby27-ruby), SUSE (ceph, dhcp, libwebp, nginx, qemu, squid, and xstream), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, and policykit-1).
In these reports we try to the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
This blog post provides an overview of a vulnerability discovered in Akamai's Enterprise Application Access (EAA) product which has been patched. This vulnerability could have allowed an actor to impersonate an authorized user when interacting with an application that used Security Assertion Markup Language Version 2 (SAMLv2, referred to as SAML in this document) to authenticate users.
Following the initial notification from a third party, Akamai engineers identified that the vulnerability was in Lasso, a third-party, open source library which implements the SAML v2.0 authentication protocol. Lasso is the library that Akamai EAA uses to verify SAML assertions for applications when a customer configures SAML authentication with third-party identity provider(s) (IdPs). Further investigation of the Lasso library determined that the weakness had a wider impact on other software which has Lasso as a dependency.
A comprehensive fix was deployed to the EAA network as of March 4th, 2021. No updates were required for the EAA connector appliances or the EAA Client. Akamai has determined that the SOGo and PacketFence packages maintained by Inverse, a company recently acquired by Akamai, also depend on Lasso for deployments using SAML for authentication. The SOGo package was also subject to another independent but related vulnerability, CVE-2021-33054. Information about the impact on SOGo and PacketFence may be found here. We have verified that all other external facing applications provided by Akamai, including Akamai Control Center, are not vulnerable to this attack vector.
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what's going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what's going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
Another court case prompted by the Snowden leaks has reached its conclusion. And the findings are that Snowden's revelations were accurate: the NSA's Five Eyes partners were breaking laws and ignoring people's rights when engaging in mass surveillance. That's just a natural side effect of grabbing communications and data in bulk and pretending it's lawful if you sort through it after you've already acquired it.
To celebrate 30 years of defending online freedom, EFF was€ proud to welcome€ NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a chat about surveillance, privacy, and the concrete ways we can improve our digital world, as part of our EFF30 Fireside Chat series. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, EFF Director of Engineering for Certbot Alexis Hancock, and EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia weighed in on the way the internet (and surveillance) actually function, the impact that has on modern culture and activism, and how we’re grappling with the cracks this pandemic has revealed—and widened—in our digital world.€
You can watch the full conversation here€ or read the transcript.
On€ June 3, we’ll be holding€ our€ fourth€ EFF30 Fireside Chat, on€ how to free the internet, with net neutrality pioneer Gigi Sohn.€ EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow once wrote, "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."€ This year marked the 25th anniversary of this audacious essay denouncing centralized authority on the blossoming internet. But modern tech has strayed far from the utopia of individual freedom that 90s netizens envisioned. We'll be discussing corporatization, activism, and the fate of the internet, framed by Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,"€ with Gigi, along with€ EFF Senior Legislative Counsel€ Ernesto Falcon€ and EFF Associate Director of Policy and Activism€ Katharine Trendacosta.
The documents show that Google deliberately engineered its products so that you couldn't get your own location, or share it with an app, without also giving your location data to Google, too.
The Internet Society therefore commissioned a team of independent researchers to assess the economic impact of TOLA. This team, Law & Economics Consulting Associates (LECA), has today published its final report – The Economic Impact of Laws that Weaken Encryption.
Pentagon analysts’ dire warnings about the ‘risks of radicalization’ in our least developed continent are being echoed in Europe. Yet the fight in Africa against ‘insurgents’ who happen to be Muslim is the wrong fight. They’re merely rebelling against a system that has left them behind.
Why do all these young people sign up to Boko Haram, Islamic State in West African Province, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb?
The conviction that the U.S. could win a nuclear war was key to the nuclear policy early in the Reagan administration. Not only could such a war be survived, it would present a potential opportunity for the victor. With the deployment of Pershing II and other tactical nuclear weapons, the U.S. and the Soviets might even conduct a nuclear exchange confined to Europe, entirely outside their borders. “I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical (nuclear) weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button,” Reagan suggested in 1981.
While the best hopes around Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s Reykjavik summit of October 1986 for the elimination of nuclear weapons were never realized, the more modest areas of agreement defined there may have at least given us extra time. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” was hardly fiction at all, we now know and it is astonishing that humanity survived the cold war.
Such a contradiction means that one side must abandon its aims if a disastrous conflict is not to ensue.€ Which country should step back?€ Is there a moral, ethical or common-sense basis for making that call, a basis on which humankind can readily agree?
What are these contradictory goals?
With the Afghanistan War finally ending, we shouldn't squander our "peace dividend" on costly weapons or military bloat.
"The new Cold War with China currently being pushed in Washington does not serve the millions of people demanding change across this country nor the billions of people affected by U.S. foreign policy abroad."
On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia. Contento was a peasant, communist and member of the Patriotic Union (UP), a newly-formed experimental political party born out of the 1985 peace negotiations between the conservative President Belansio Betancourt and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The men seized Contento, tied him up and dragged him away. The next day, his corpse was found in a nearby village.
With the U.S. marking at least 242 mass shootings so far in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive, we speak with policy expert Julia Weber about the link between gun violence and domestic violence. “We know that this is a massive crisis that we need to address much more effectively,” says Weber, the implementation director at the Giffords Law Center. A 2020 Bloomberg analysis looking at nearly 750 mass shootings over a six-year span found about 60% of the shootings were either domestic violence attacks or committed by men with histories of domestic violence.
"Victims, their families, and the American public deserve far better than this."
Adel Khaloufah, a Yemeni fisherman from Zabid city on Yemen’s western coastal plain, had a fishing boat he shared with three fishermen, but always preferred to stay home hungry rather than venture out on a fishing trip with known and dreaded consequences. Since 2015, when the Saudi war in Yemen began, the warships of the Saudi-led Coalition and their allies have been roaming the length and breadth of the Yemeni coasts. One day in May 2020, the fishermen got a chance for what seemed a safe and profitable trip. They had been hired by an international company, working in the field of maritime security and services, dubbed “Golden Star.” The mission was to return five company employees who had accompanied an Emirati merchant ship from al-Mahrah to the Suez Canal.
President Biden traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the single greatest acts of racist terrorism in U.S. history. Over a span of 18 hours, a white mob burned down what was known as “Black Wall Street,” the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, and killed an estimated 300 African Americans. Duke University professor William Darity says it’s “very impressive” that a sitting U.S. president highlighted the Tulsa race massacre and its lingering effects, but he says he’s skeptical that Biden’s economic proposals do enough to close the racial wealth gap. “We need something much more potent and much more substantial,” Darity says. “If we were going to bring the share of Black wealth into consistency with the share of the Black population, it would require an expenditure of at least $11 trillion.”
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has€ announced€ an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
Our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
"The work of dismantling all oppression is OUR collective work.€ We will not be pitted against each other."
The Swedish Government has commissioned BrÃÂ¥ to study levels and trends for different types of homicide, with a particular focus on gun homicides. This kind of descriptive study cannot answer questions about why there has been increase specifically in Sweden. However, the research points to a number of risk factors that can lead to a surge in homicide rates.
It all began in 2016 with an email from a survivor. I was in the newsroom on the second floor of The Baltimore Sun, where I was working as an investigative reporter. My colleague Alison Knezevich and I received an email from a woman saying she had just learned that the Baltimore County Police Department had destroyed her rape kit.
How could that be, I wondered? I knew about the world of untested kits and fudged rape clearance numbers, but not about destroyed DNA.
"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time."
The Singapore-registered X-Press Pearl had been on fire for almost two weeks before the blaze was put out this week.
Hundreds of tonnes of oil from fuel tanks could leak into the sea, devastating nearby marine life.
The Sri Lankan and Indian navies had worked jointly over the past days in an attempt to put out the fire and prevent the ship from breaking up and sinking.
The organizations charge that exempting the institution from a key federal transparency law is illegal.
The bill undermines Kerry's negotiated agreement with China, sabotaging an opportunity for the U.S. and China—countries responsible for releasing half of the world's fossil fuel emissions—to partner on curbing emissions and sharing strategies for greening the Earth.
"The recovery policies of some G7 nations threw major lifelines to the oil and gas industry, risking an increase in the production and lock-in of these energy systems for decades."
A south Los Angeles oil producer has been ordered by California’s top oil regulator to pay almost $1.5 million in fines for nearly 600 violations of state regulations, including continuing to operate aging, dangerous wells for nearly a year after losing approvals.
The actions against Nasco Petroleum come two months after The Desert Sun and ProPublica reported on lax enforcement and worsening transparency by the California Geologic Energy Management Division, including at a Nasco drilling site that sits next to low-income housing. Residents of the housing site have worried for years about potential explosions, fires and health impacts from leaks and fumes.
An unexamined assumption is that thinning/logging work significantly reduces the pejoratively named “catastrophic” fires.
Despite assertions from the Forest Service and others who will gain financially from inflated budgets to log our forests, one needs to ask if “fuel reductions” work to halt wildfires when burning under extreme fire weather conditions. That qualifier is important. All large blazes, like those that charred the western Cascades last Labor Day, burn swiftly through logged sites and other “fuel reductions.”
Already struggling to survive in warming Arctic seas, the polar cod are now at risk from rising oil pollution.
The film has been making several successful United States festival showings in 2021, among them Sundance in January, where it won the Alfred P. Sloan 2021 feature film prize; the Seattle International Film Festival in April, where it won the grand jury prize for new American cinema and at the Atlanta Film Festival and Milwaukee Film Festival in May.
To avoid this, some farmers work with hunters or may call an organisation such as 'Save Bambi', for which Katty Leclere works. The easiest way to find the fawns is with the help of a drone equipped with a thermal camera.
Leclere explains that it the animals are "much easier to detect" that way. In fact, they fly the drone very early in the morning in order to have a clear temperature difference between the ground and the animal. This allows them to detect an animal very quickly, saving time and enabling them to cover as much ground as possible.
Under optimal conditions, it is possible to cover almost a hectare per minute. If the thermal camera detects a difference in temperature, it is displayed on the monitor and the location is pinpointed. Leclere and other volunteers then go to the field itself and either attempt to move the fawn or catch and release it after mowing.
Wildlife ranging from bluebells and bumblebees to snow leopards and emperor penguins is under threat from climate change, according to a new report.
Even the coffee plants that produce one of the world’s favourite brews are at risk from rising temperatures, conservation charity WWF has warned.
The charity is calling on world leaders meeting for COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in November to take action to restrict global temperature rises to 1.5€°C and limit the damage to nature and people.
The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated preexisting inequalities and undermined progress on poverty reduction, gender equality, and battling child and forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization.
Veronica had been on hunger strike for nearly three weeks when ÃÂngeles Solis, the lead organizer of Make The Road NY, told her that the New York State Legislature and Governor Andrew Cuomo had approved a $2.1 billion fund for workers excluded from unemployment benefits, federal stimulus checks, and rent relief. She and 20 other strikers, mostly women, had been sleeping in Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and when they heard the news, she said, “We hugged and cried out of joy.”
Consumer spending has been rising rapidly, with the March and April levels both above where they were before the pandemic. Even restaurant sales have largely recovered. Adjusted for inflation, the April levels were just 2.7 percent below where they were in February, 2020.
The housing market continues to be very strong, especially in lower priced areas. The increase in the Federal Housing Finance Administration’s house price index from the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 was 16.0 percent in Wichita, KS, 15.8 percent in Buffalo, NY, 15.6 percent in Dayton, OH, 14.6 percent in Nashville, TN, and 13.8 percent in Gary, IN. By contrast, prices are up just 9.7 percent in the New York metro area and 6.5 percent in San Francisco.
It's time to let the agency's trusted, decentralized, well-trained workforce provide even more services for our communities.
"You cannot begin to address the racial wealth gap without addressing the student loan debt crisis."
Wozniak argued in his lawsuit that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shouldn’t apply because YouTube not only failed to remove the fraudulent videos, but “materially contributed” to the scam by selling targeted ads driving traffic to the videos and falsely verifying the YouTube channels that carried the videos.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Sunil R. Kulkarnia said those factors weren’t enough to overcome the immunity provided by Section 230. The judge gave Wozniak 30 days to try to revise his complaint.
[...]
The case is Wozniak v. YouTube LLC, 20CV370338, California Superior Court, Santa Clara (San Jose).
One newspaper described his testimony as “incendiary” and “explosive”.
Cummings had masterminded the Brexit campaign and BoJo’s election as prime minister, but they fell out when the ratty adviser got himself into a rivalry with BoJo’s current concubine, Carrie Symonds, and was given the boot when he referred to her as “Lady Nut Nuts”. At the time of writing there are rumours indicating BoJo and Lady Nut Nuts got married “in secret”.
The meeting between UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Orbán on May 28 did more than raise eyebrows and prompt head scratching.€ The statement released by No 10 was anodyne enough, filling space and not much else.€ “The leaders discussed the importance of the UK and Hungary working together bilaterally to increase security and prosperity in our countries and to address global challenges such as climate change.”
Johnson is also said to have “raised his significant concerns about human rights in Hungary, including gender equality, LGBT rights and media freedom.”€ In terms of foreign policy, Johnson saw his Hungarian counterpart as a man of influence.€ “The Prime Minister encouraged Hungary to use their influence to promote democracy and stability.”
Very seldom do we get a chance to walk away or reinvent ourselves. Whatever our crime is against society it is a permanent scarlet letter that we’ll wear forever. It€ becomes the parenthetical that describes us until we die.
For a second time, it was announced that former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is being tapped to join President Joe€ Biden’s administration–this time to serve as Japan’s next U.S. ambassador. The double standard is incredulous. Nearly€ everyone I talked to thought it was a done deal. As one report put it, “In selecting Emanuel to serve as his chief envoy to€ Japan, Biden will reward an informal adviser to his campaign and a significant force in Democratic Party politics for much€ of the last three decades with one of the highest-profile ambassadorial roles.”
On May 2, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) declared victory in the West Bengal legislative assembly elections. Three days later, the first-term TMC member of Parliament Mahua Moitra published an op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Know How to Defeat Narendra Modi.”
"It's simple," said Rep. Barbara Lee. "It's either uphold the filibuster or uphold our democracy."
Whether the subject of the day is the latest bloodletting of Palestine, with US-made weapons on a key frontier of the US empire, or the colorful corporate propaganda on your own home town, the limitations on what may be thinkable among liberals, Democrats and the corporate media wear us down, confusing, distracting and sometimes even temporarily defeating truth and common sense. The seeming paradox painfully expressed by Brecht’s epigram, in Writing the Truth; 5 Difficulties: “These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist … even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.” Why do similar violent class and ethnic contradictions plague both so-called democracies and dictatorships?
In 1971 a powerful American corporate lawyer for the US Chamber of Commerce issued his urgent memorandum calling for responding to an “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”. Lewis Powell would later ascend to become a Supreme Court Justice under Nixon. His memo set the course for a multi-generational counter revolution. That 50-year hurricane of deregulation, tax cuts, privatization and exploding socioeconomic inequality built up the power system we face today, driving our galloping planetary catastrophe over the cliff. Right wing “think” tanks where no actual thinking gets done, but billions of dollars fund racist, patriarchal, archaic, dark age neofascist attacks on People. Federal and state courts conquered by corporate shysters in black robes declaring “original intent” of law as if there ever had been any such thing. Yet another spasm in our long, perverse constitutional history, framing and harnessing the power of conjoined state/religious zeal, capitalist dogmas, sexual anxieties, whiteness as property rights, and a bloody fetish for guns, to redefine in exclusionary terms who gets to be a “real American”. MAGA, in short.
"It's time to go alone—and get this done," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
It's been quite a month for the former President, Donald Trump, and his attempts to speak out. Almost a month ago, Trump launced a Twitter-like blog, with very limited interactive features, a silly terms of service (which said they could moderate whatever they wanted, like every other site). As we noted, lots of people mocked it for being just a standard old blog, but it did make the point that despite what other social media platforms might do, Trump was not being "censored." He had lots of ways to speak up. Of course, after a couple of weeks, reports noted that the site wasn't getting very much traffic, we highlighted that this showed what the issue really was: Trump wasn't upset about a lack of ability to speak. He was upset about the lack of a free audience.
We are already seeing evidence of this. In the United States, employers are reporting that they cannot find workers as pandemic lockdown rules are lifted. What they really mean is that they cannot find workers who will work for the pittance on offer. The Biden administration’s extension of a $300 weekly supplementary payment to the unemployed has meant that the combined benefits workers receive are more than twice the federal minimum wage—which Congress refused to lift. In short, employers are experiencing something akin to what happened to Peel soon after he arrived in Swan River.
If I am right, Biden is now facing an impossible task. Because of the way financial markets decoupled after 2008 from actual capitalist production, every level of fiscal stimulus that he chooses will be both too little and too much. It will be too little because it will fail to generate good jobs in sufficient numbers. And it will be too much, because, given many corporations’ low profitability and high debt, even the slightest increase in interest rates will cause a cascade of corporate bankruptcies and financial-market tantrums.
Look, I get that the Opinion sections of major newspapers want to run a variety of opinions, and thus might do less fact checking than the news parts of the paper, but it still seems just bizarre that they let any ignorant fool post absolute nonsense with no attempt at providing facts or the reasons why the underlying assumptions the opinion piece is based on are just wrong. Henry Olsen is apparently a "conservative" columnist for the Post while also being involved in some think tank that has been whining about big tech and, bizarrely, apparently suggesting that God believes Republicans should stop Twitter from having rights or something. Anyway, Olsen's column claims that critics of Florida's social media bill "are wrong" and that's it's perfectly legit for a state government to tell a company how to handle speech on their websites.
Summary: Twitter users who made the mistake of tweeting out an innocuous word -- 'Memphis -- found themselves suspended from the service for 12 hours for apparently violating the terms of use.
A police chief in Pennsylvania who threatened a private citizen with felony charges in retaliation for critical Facebook comments has agreed to plead guilty to a charge of deprivation of civil rights, federal prosecutors said.
Social media platforms that have automated moderation policies have been wittingly or unwittingly censoring legitimate speech, according to activists, with those corporate tools coming into focus following last month’s violence in the Middle East.
Platforms like Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, as well as others, have moderation systems that automatically flag and remove posts that may encourage hate speech or violence.
But those systems has been taking down, blocking and censoring content from Palestinians, made evident as violence erupted between Israelis and Palestinians last month and continues today, according to a panel hosted by the Middle East Institute Wednesday.
Google has contended that the Delhi High Court has "mischaracterised" its search engine as a 'social media intermediary'...
One critic said that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is "intentionally subjecting these children to being crammed in detention facilities."
In 1993, Stephen Breyer, then the chief justice for the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered a few broken ribs and a punctured lung. Despite the accident, Breyer left his hospital bed just a few days later and traveled to the White House to interview with President Bill Clinton about an opening on the US Supreme Court.1
"I refuse to give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights," said Paxton Smith.€
For decades, police unions have shielded officers from accountability, bullied cities into doing their bidding, and attacked lawmakers who took them on. It’s past time to ensure they can no longer block accountability under the guise of collective bargaining.
There is a broad array of personal and business applications for these avatars as well- from digital influencers, celebrities, customer service representatives, to your digital persona in the virtual workplace. Virtual reality and augmented reality promise to take avatars to the next level, allowing the avatar’s movement to mirror the user’s gestures, expressions, and physicality.€
The ability to customize how you want to be perceived in a virtual world can be incredibly empowering. It enables embodying rich personas to fit the environment and the circumstances or adopting a mask to shield your privacy and personal self from what you wish to make public. You might use one persona for gaming, another for in a professional setting, a third for a private space with your friends.
An avatar can help someone remove constraints imposed on them by wider societal biases. For example trans and gender non-conforming individuals can more accurately reflect their true self, relieving the effects of gender dysphoria and transphobia, which has shown therapeutic benefits. For people with disabilities, avatars can allow participants to pursue unique activities through which they can meet and interact with others. In some cases, avatars can help avoid harassment. For example, researchers found some women choose male avatars to avoid misogyny in World of Warcraft.€
"It is time for U.S. policymakers to pass the Global HER Act and end the global gag rule for good. Women's health and lives are at stake."
Thanks to the efforts of transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), residents of Chicago are learning more about the activities of their sworn protectors, the Chicago Police Department. Stuff the PD never wanted the public to see is now in the public's hands. The Chicago Sun Times has started digging into the stash provided by DDoS and has revealed the PD's secret drone program, paid for with off-the-books funds.
The traceability provision—Rule 4(2) in the “Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code” rules (English version starts at page 19)—was adopted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology earlier this year. The rules require€ any large social media intermediary that provides messaging “shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource” in response to a court order or a decryption request issued under the 2009 Decryption Rules. (The Decryption Rules allow authorities to request the interception or monitoring of decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received, or stored in any computer resource.)
The minister has claimed that the rules will “[not] impact the normal functioning of WhatsApp” and said that “the entire debate on whether encryption would be maintained or not is misplaced” because technology companies can still decide to use encryption—so long as they accept the “responsibility to find a technical solution, whether through encryption or otherwise” that permits traceability. WhatsApp strongly disagrees, writing that "traceability breaks end-to-end encryption and would severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally."€
The Indian government's assertion is bizarre because the rules compel intermediaries to know information about the content of users’ messages that they currently don’t and which is currently protected by encryption. This legal mandate seeks to change WhatsApp’s security model and technology, and the assumptions somehow seem to imply that such matter needn’t matter to users and needn’t bother companies.
Brandt first discovered his PayPal account was restricted in March of 2021. Brandt reported to EFF: “I tried to make a payment to the hosting company for my server lease in Finland.€ My account wouldn't work. I went to my PayPal info page which displayed a large vertical banner announcing my permanent ban. They didn't attempt to inform me via email or phone—just the banner.”
Brandt was unable to get the issue resolved directly through PayPal, and so he then reached out to EFF.
When the data doesn't go its way, the US broadband industry has a tendency to just make up data that does. That was certainly the case during the Trump tax cuts, when the industry claimed tax relief would create thousands of new, high paying jobs and boost broadband investment (that never happened). It was also the case during the net neutrality repeal, when the industry claimed that being freed from "burdensome regulation" (read: bare minimum levels of FCC oversight) would also result in job growth and a major spike in broadband investment (that never happened either.
The past year saw the Internet become a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2020 also saw increased scrutiny of online content moderation, regulation of platforms and their effects on society. While recent headlines have focused heavily on social media platforms, the conversation is much more complex: the future of the Internet as we know it depends on discussions and policies regarding intermediary liability -- the legal rule that platforms should not be liable for the content posted by their users.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a longstanding protocol—or series of protocols—for creating online, text-based chat rooms. While many of the "channels" (as chat rooms are usually called) are highly useful to a wide variety of projects and organizations, including much of the free-software world, IRC seems to have a community that suffers from more than its fair share of disagreements, hostile forks, vitriol, and other types of divisiveness. It is perhaps no huge surprise, then, that the IRC world is currently undergoing another of its periodic upheavals. The largest IRC network, freenode, is embroiled in a messy dispute that has led to the mass resignation of many of its volunteer staff, the founding of a competitor network (run by the former staff), and its abandonment by multiple high-profile projects.
As one digs into the details, though, they will find a number of conflicting accounts of what happened, "The freenode resignation FAQ" gathers a bunch of information in one place and makes for a good starting point. It was written by Sven Slootweg ("joepie91"), who is not directly involved: "I am not a Freenode staffer, and this document only contains information from public channels." He does, however, note that his sympathies lie with the freenode staff. This Ars Technica article provides a somewhat more balanced view of the mess perhaps.
As the Court of Justice of the EU prepares to battle the question of platform liability yet again, brands ask whether alternative dispute resolution measures could ease their troubles
According to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration,€ Amazon warehouse workers sustained nearly double the rate of serious injury incidents last year as did workers in non-Amazon warehouses.€
According to i4talk, BMW has filed a patent with the European Patent Office (EPO) for a virtual mirror ( HUD mirror). The drawings reveal that BMW proposes a solution with a semi-transparent mirror on the actual window itself. The same filing states that the video from external cameras is shown on a display that is reflected onto the window mirror to the driver’s eye. The image would appear where a conventional mirror would be.
The referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) in G1/21 relates to the legality of conducting Board of Appeal oral proceedings by Video Conferencing without the consent of all parties. The rapidly scheduled public hearing will take place via Zoom next week. The EPO has now opened registration to watch the live stream. Rose Hughes reported on the EPO’s response to accusations of perceived bias in G1/21.
"Every day of delay on the TRIPS waiver means more needless death, more families pushed into poverty, and greater chances of a viral mutation that can evade current vaccines."
A court in the United Kingdom sided with Nike on Thursday in an ongoing trademark squabble with Puma that centers on the Beaverton-based sportswear titan’s quest to register the word “Footware” as a trademark for use in connection with computer hardware modules, electronic devices, and computer software. Following an unfavorable outcome before the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office in September 2020, in which a Hearing Officer rejected Puma’s bid to block the registration of Nike’s “Footware” mark, Puma lodged an appeal with the High Court of Justice in London, arguing that Nike’s registration should be barred because it is a deceptive term, not an indicator of source of the proposed goods and services listed in its application.
In a decision dated May 27, Mr. Justice Zacaroli of the High Court of Justice in London dismissed Puma’s appeal, paving the way for Nike’s application for the “Footware” mark – which it filed with the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (“UKIPO”) in March 2019 – to proceed in the registration process. In his decision, Justice Zacaroli first addressed Puma’s primary point of contention: that the UKIPO’s Hearing Officer failed to consider the use of the “footware” trademark “across the whole range of goods and services” for which Nike is seeking registration. Specifically, Puma argued that the UKIPO did not take into account the “notional and fair use” of the “sub-set of goods and services consisting of use in relation to footwear with embedded technology” when determining whether the “footware” mark is “descriptive of the goods and services in question” (i.e., whether the mark “will actually be recognized by the relevant class of persons as a descriptive.”)
Giro Travel Company filed an application for a declaration of invalidity against this mark. The Board of Appeal (BOA) declared the mark invalid because its representation was not clear and precise enough. This was more or less expected given that the CJEU in Red Bull had held that if the description of a trademark, composed of a juxtaposition of colours designated in the abstract, gives rise to a multitude of combinations of the colours, such for example by describing only the proportions of the colours concerned, the registration is not sufficiently clear and precise.
Andreas Stihl AG&Co KG filed an action with the General Court (GC) that, somewhat surprisingly, reversed the BOA’s decision.
[...]
So how did the GC reach this remarkable result? Well, for the GC “the description of the mark at issue makes it clear that the combination of colours which is the subject of the protection in question does not take just any form of chainsaw housing, but rather the shape of a housing which is visibly divided into two parts, one upper and the other lower. That clarification, contained in the description of the mark at issue, places a greater limit on the shapes which the chainsaw housing may take” at €§37.
Maybe so, but the EUTM registration does not designate “chainsaw housing” but “chainsaws”.
Something does not compute…
So even taking into account the significant differences between the chainsaw and the energy drink markets, it does appear that this case was looked upon with rather more benevolence than the case of the blue-and-silver colour combination of Red Bull.
Despite the turbulent times Italian politics have experienced in the past year – which led to a change of government in the midst of the pandemic emergency – the ball of the transposition of the CDSM Directive (CDSMD) into Italian law is still rolling. As of today, it is difficult to predict whether the deadline of June 7 will be met. There are legitimate expectations on the Government’s ability to deliver the official implementation decree by June; however, much will depend on the Parliament’s agenda and reactions to it.
Showcasing the current lively phase of this process are two recent developments. To start with, on April 20, 2021, the Italian Parliament approved the European Delegation Law (Act Nr.53 of 22 April 2021), officially enabling the Government to transpose several EU Directives into national law. Its Article 9 dictates the guiding principles to be followed in the specific case of the CDSMD. Among them, the Government has committed to embrace a broad definition of “cultural heritage institutions”, ensure adequate levels of security in text and data mining, exclude some uses or works from the scope of the digital teaching exception, set specific requirements for a work to be considered out-of-commerce, indicate which rules apply in the case of an out-of-commerce orphan work, safeguard the rights of press publishers and authors without hindering the free flow of press information, set the rates of payment due to authors ex Art.15(5) CDSMD and publishers ex Art.16 CDSMD as well as the modalities of application of the mechanisms of contractual adjustment and rights revocation, and – last but not least – define the level of diligence required by the obligation to implement “best efforts” to obtain authorization as set in Art.17 CDSMD.
Ahead of the 7 June transposition deadline, the Kluwer Copyright Blog assessed Italy's ongoing efforts to implement the CDSM Directive.
This post is part of a series of evidence summaries for the 21 for 2021 project. The 21 for 2021 project uses empirical evidence catalogued on the Copyright Evidence Portal to answer 21 topical copyright questions for the 21st century. In this post, Amy Thomas (RTA, PhD Candidate, University of Glasgow) identifies empirical research surrounding the relationship between copyright and T&Cs, revealing a complex area where law, contract and technology work (often at odds with each other) to regulate user creativity.
Yasemin Aktas reports on an interesting opposition decision in Turkey.
In Turkish trademark practice, it is agreed that well-known marks need broader protection than ordinary marks. Turkey has various statutes extending the scope of protection of well-known marks to different goods/services where certain conditions exist.
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The former operator of Mangamura, a now-defunct site blamed for causing billions of dollars in losses to the Japanese manga industry, has been sentenced in Japan. Romi Hoshino, 29, was sentenced by the Fukuoka District Court to three years in prison and fines in excess of US$650,000.
The database of DDoS-Guard, a bulletproof hosting service utilized by many pirate sites, is reportedly up for sale on a hacking forum. DDoS-Guard was previously reported to the USTR as a 'notorious market' by the MPA for allegedly playing host to file-sharing giants BS.to, S.to, and file-hosting site GoUnlimited. According to the sale, the leak includes the details of whoever operates major Russian torrent site RuTracker.
