It’s June already, and it has been a really great first week with new distro releases, including for Arch Linux, Tails, Clonezilla Live, Kali Linux, NixOS, openSUSE Leap, and Rescuezilla, as well as new app releases, including for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Cinnamon desktop environment, NeoChat Matrix chat client, OBS Studio screen recording software, Blender 3D creation suite, and many of Xfce’s default apps.
On top of all that, I take a first look at the new COSMIC desktop environment developed by Linux hardware vendor System76 for its upcoming Pop!_OS Linux 21.04 distribution. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 6th, 2021, below!
Linux's RAW driver (RAW_DRIVER) for providing direct I/O access to block devices is finally set to be removed with the Linux 5.14 kernel this summer since its deprecation all the way back in the mid 2000s and its use has been discouraged even longer.
The RAW driver has allowed for direct unbuffered I/O to block devices for the Linux kernel but it hasn't been relevant in well over a decade since using the O_DIRECT flag when opening a block device can achieve the same behavior. The block devices in the raw mode were exposed through /dev/raw/. While O_DIRECT has been the preferred approach, some legacy workloads weren't maintained/unable to just use the O_DIRECT approach that led to the RAW driver being obsolete for all this time.
Google has a firm grip with their products and services ubiquitous on the desktop. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there can be questions about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
Strimio (formerly Odio) is a beautiful Radio Streaming application. It has an intuitive UI and radio stations filtered by countries, languages, and tags. With the free account, you can play/browse thousands of global live streams. You also get a private library for up to 10 stations with streams automatically synced across your favorite devices.
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Strimio has moved past the “Odio” beta stage and become a full-fledged streaming app. Adapt the theme to your mood using the Light and Dark themes. Play streams on Android TV, Chromecast€®, and Sonos€® with a single click.
This one is free but it’s not open source. That notwithstanding, it’s available in the snap store so installation is easy.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GLPI on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GLPI is a free, open-source ITSM platform built with PHP designed to help you plan and easily manage your IT operations.
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 GLPI on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Even if you haven't used DOS before, you are probably aware of its command-line shell, named simply COMMAND.COM. The COMMAND.COM shell has become synonymous with DOS, and so it's no surprise that FreeDOS also implements a similar shell called "FreeCOM"—but named COMMAND.COM just as on other DOS systems.
But the FreeCOM shell can do more than just provide a command-line prompt where you run commands. If you need to automate tasks on FreeDOS, you can do that using batch files, also called "BAT files" because these scripts use the .BAT extension.
Compiling source code produces a binary. During compilation, you can provide flags to the compiler to enable or disable certain properties on the binary. Some of these properties are relevant to security.
Checksec is a nifty little tool (and shell script) that, among other functions, identifies the security properties that were built into a binary when it was compiled. A compiler might enable some of these properties by default, and you might have to provide specific flags to enable others.
Recently we highlighted another upgrade of Proton Experimental, the special testing area of Steam Play Proton that pulls in new and advanced features - well it needs a lot more testing. If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page.
After some time since the original reveal back in 2020, developer Cyomo has formally re-revealed StoryArcana with a fresh new trailer and some design changes.
The developer said that while the core story hasn't changed, large portions of the visual design has been based on "a ton of feedback and first impressions". One of the reasons was to change it so it's further apart from a certain other wizard world (Harry Potter).
After being in Beta since February, Team Cherry have released a free upgrade to Hollow Knight so it should continue running nicely for years to come.
They've supported it amazingly well since the original release, with it gaining multiple entirely free big expansions including Godmaster, Lifeblood, The Grimm Troupe and Hidden Dreams. Together they added in new characters, new quests, new boss fights, new music and much more. The game is pretty huge now.
Kali Linux 2021.2 is the latest Kali rolling release that arrived a few days ago with Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS, default Xfce 4.16.2 desktop, new important tools, and tons of other enhancements.
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Packaging programs becomes very difficult when a program has complex dependencies or legacy libraries that are no longer available in the host system. Here comes Kaboxer, a Linux application that aims to help you package up programs properly using container technology.
Kali has also shipped three new applications packaged using Kaboxer tools such as Covenant framework, Firefox (Developer Edition) web browser, and Zenmap official graphical user interface (GUI) for the Nmap Security Scanner.
If you want to know more about Kaboxer, read its introduction blog post or documentation to learn packaging applications with Kaboxer.
Chromium ungoogled is the Chromium Web Browser with Google hooks disabled or removed. If replacing your existing Chromium browser then please delete .config/chromium folder to start with a clean profile.
Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+, aiming to be useful for system administrators and travelers, who need to work with lots of remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks.
IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system.
I have covered multiple chaos engineering tools in this series. The first article in this series explained what chaos engineering is; the second demonstrated how to get your system's steady state so that you can compare it against a chaos state; the third showed how to use Litmus to test arbitrary failures and experiments in your Kubernetes cluster; and the fourth article got into Chaos Mesh, an open source chaos orchestrator with a web user interface.
In this fifth article, I want to talk about arbitrary pod failure. Kube-monkey offers an easy way to stress-test your systems by scheduling random termination pods in your cluster. This aims to encourage and validate the development of failure-resilient services. As in the previous walkthroughs, I'll use Pop!_OS 20.04, Helm 3, Minikube 1.14.2, and Kubernetes 1.19.
The Firebird 4 engine presents no radical changes in architecture or operation. Binary kits for Linux, Windows, and Android platforms (both 32-bit and 64-bit) are immediately available for download.
Firebird is an open-source cross-platform SQL RDBMS (relational database management system) which supports Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS and a variety of Unix platforms. The database forked from Borland’s open source edition of InterBase in 2000, but since Firebird 1.5 the code has been largely rewritten.
The new Firebird 4 offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers.
GNU/EDMA 0.19.1 has been released as an Alpha Version. This version tries to fix the long standing issue with 64bits platforms.
In order to fix that problem this version adds a dependency on `libffi`.
Almost all POSIX-compliant operating system comes with decades-old GNU bc utility by default. GNU bc (Basic Calculator) is an arbitrary precision mathematical scripting language.
Bc has syntax similar to the C programming language. Not just syntax, Bc also provides features that you find in every other programming language.
The Norwegian national museum exhibits art, architecture, and design under different types of licenses. About 25% are under copyright, the rest is published under CC-BY licens. This means that everyone is free to copy, share, modify, and add on to – under the condition that when sharing, it should say the name of the artist, year, name of the art piece, year, photographer and "the National Museum".
In the chance to CC-BY licenses, Karin writes in her blogpost: ”The museum began to understand that fulfilling its mission to “provide meaningful encounters between people and art” did not necessarily mean getting people to visit the building or the website.”
It would be much more useful, I believe, for funders to count actual working hours as they occur and are spread over the week. That would allow them to draw up much more realistic calls for grant proposals, based on the real time spent on similar projects. At the moment, a large part of science appears to operate with strict budgets and working hours, while still expecting researchers to use innovative methods to produce innovative solutions. Isn’t there a fundamental logical error in hoping for groundbreaking discoveries, while standardising researchers’ journey to get there?
Time sheets have now spread like a disease and are widely accepted as normal by researchers in both national and EU-funded scientific projects. Yet they are inherently absurd and become even more ridiculous when people are working on several projects and have to ensure that hours don’t overlap. Although I have never come across anyone else using the term “excelogratia” – managing people through Excel – I decided to introduce it into my personal lexicon as soon as I discovered that my actual working hours did not fit into the Excel worksheet. It seemed essential to find a way of labelling this illogical way of doing things, which urgently needs to change.
Kirsty (not her real name) led a small professional services team and reported that a process being followed was not consistent with her university’s legal obligations. But the university did not welcome her intervention and dragged her through a process designed to destabilise her.
Finally, she accepted defeat, signed a non-disclosure agreement, took the cash, left the institution and tried to pick up the pieces of her life. But not only did the NDA prevent her from discussing what happened, its very existence was confidential. Trying to find employment of equal worth when you are unemployed and unable to explain why is not an enviable proposition.
But it was worse than that for Kirsty because the mental toll that the previous year had taken was such that she didn’t even want a similar job. Her university career was over. She is now earning a fraction of what she did before, while those responsible remain comfortable in their jobs. And the irony is that since it is not possible to use an NDA to silence an ongoing breach of law, the university had to make right the failures in process that Kirsty had been forced out for flagging. She lost her job for nothing.
A Roskilde University report highlights how important it is to continue with the current restrictions – for another five weeks at least.
Viggo Andreasen, who has been one of the most cited disease experts during the pandemic, and his colleague Lone Simonsen have produced a model that suggests the infection rate would grow ten-fold and hospital admissions five-fold were the restrictions ended today.
But by mid-July, at which point most people over the age of 50 would be fully vaccinated, the tide would start to turn, and the projected Reproduction Rate (R Rate) of 1.4 would start to fall.
The study lists several reasons why talking on Zoom is so tiring. It claims that the dominant speakers who appear full screen on Zoom are overpowering (literally “in your face”) and recommends that you change the setting to put the speaker back in their little box along with everyone else. Nor do we like the sight of our own face; if we appear on screen, we’re drawn to look at ourselves, so, if you can, find the button that can hide your face from the chat.
Stanford also blames a lack of mobility, because participants are rooted to the spot to make sure their head and shoulders are shown to the best advantage. This trap is easily avoided by switching off your camera, as you’re then free to wander round, do a bit of doodling and complete The Daily Telegraph crossword.
Zoomers also suffer because speakers on screen don’t display the explanatory gestures that accompany a live appearance. The academics’ cure for this problem is to switch off the video, thus returning to an old style conference call.
Last week, Microsoft announced it is teaming up with Github, Accenture and Thoughtworks, a software consultancy, to inspire emissions reductions using a little-considered tool: software. The new nonprofit organization, Green Software Foundation, aims to change the culture of software development to prioritize sustainability.
What Jones didn’t realize at the time was that his son had been identified as a target by the Pasco Sheriff’s Office's “intelligence-led” policing program. Police had gathered records of Bobby’s previous interactions with law enforcement and were using his history to predict that he would be a troublemaker in Pasco County.
After Bobby was released, a monthslong ordeal followed, which Jones described as a “horror story” of police showing up at the family home, sometimes multiple times a day or in the middle of the night, to inquire about Bobby or ask to enter the home. Any time there was a crime in the neighborhood, such as a burglary, Bobby was a suspect. On some occasions, described in a lawsuit filed in March by Jones and others targeted bythe Pasco Sheriff’s Office, as many as 18 officers would show up at the home, “banging on windows and yelling at his young daughters while they were hiding under the bed.”
Jones, who had studied to be a paralegal, said he tried to stand his ground and refused to allow officers to conduct any more warrantless searches of his property. But police interpreted this behavior, the lawsuit states, as uncooperative and he was repeatedly cited — and eventually arrested — for property code violations such as having overly long grass, missing numbers on his mailbox and a Jet Ski trailer on the property.
From October 2015 through April 2016, Jones, who had no previous criminal history, was arrested five times. None of the arrests resulted in a conviction. His home was ransacked, laptops and phones seized, and he ultimately fled their home in the middle of the night to avoid further harassment by police, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit seeks to prove Brooks' role in inciting the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 to stop Congress from certifying the election victory for current President Joe Biden. The Alabama congressman gave an incendiary speech at a rally in Washington on the day of the attack, just minutes before Trump.
In addition to Brooks, Swalwell also named Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani as defendants in the lawsuit.
Ms Patel’s letter, sent on Saturday, follows a viral video posted on TikTok which the Home Office said appeared to show a group of men crossing the Channel in a dinghy.
Similar posts have appeared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and are used by people smugglers to promote crossings to desperate migrants, the Home Office added.
Ms Patel said: “Posts which promote and even glamourise these lethal crossings are totally unacceptable. They encourage others to leave a safe European country and put theirs and their family’s life at risk and are even used by people smugglers to promote their deadly business.
Adams, while condemning the gruesome murder of innocent residents of the town, warned Fulani herdsmen and bandits to stay away from the southwest or be ready to face stiff resistance.
The killings in the early hours of Sunday brought the entire Igangan town and its environs to its knees with over 50 people dead, cars burnt and over 20 houses razed.
After news of the killings and destruction filtered in, with gory videos of the massacre, Adams said the North had waged war against the Southwest.
The International Committee for the Red Cross, noting that local hospitals are overwhelmed, said it responded Sunday morning to a request for medical supplies in Dori, a town in northern Burkina Faso.
Sea birds are known as ecosystem sentinels, warning of marine loss. As their numbers fall, so could the riches of the ocean.
Engineers and scientists have, on the other hand, called for fresh studies on water availability in the system, as climate change and rapid population growth over the last three decades are believed to have reduced its flows. “We need to update water data on the basis of historic flows and employ telemetry to monitor flows at different points in order to fairly distribute water among the provinces,” said one water researcher.
My name is Nadira Murray, wife of Craig Murray. On the 7th of June Craig will be sent to prison per your decision under the law of contempt of court.
This is a direct in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly-veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa.€
There it is, plain and raw, the abiding essence of the American elite’s foreign policy laid bare: maintaining their dominance over the world, for their own power and profit. (They certainly aren’t doing it for the sake of the nation, which they’ve turned into a rotting husk.)
In their mind, any perceived threat to this morally vacant domination is “evil;” any perceived ally in maintaining it is good. It doesn’t matter what other nations actually do; their role in supporting US elites is the determining factor in how they’re treated by the US government – and how they’re portrayed in the US media, including popular culture.
Apparently incensed by defiance of the ban, Nigeria’s attorney general, Abubakar Malami, ordered prompt prosecutions of anyone found flouting it. A spokesman for Mr. Malami, Umar Jibrilu Gwandu, said Saturday in a statement reported by Nigerian news media that prosecutors had been directed to “swing into action” and “ensure the speedy prosecution of offenders without any further delay.”
The statement did not specify how Twitter users would be identified for prosecution. Nor did it specify the punishment.
The ban comes after the Nigerian president posted a now-deleted tweet where he compared the attacks from gunmen on national electoral commission offices to the Nigeria Civil War, according to The New York Times.
“Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War,” Buhari said, adding that those “who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.”
Some took the tweet as a call to genocide for the Igbo ethnic group, the majority in the southeast region of the country where most of the attacks have been occurring, The Times reported.
But now tech companies are wading into trickier waters. In 2020 Google’s internal style guide was updated, encouraging developers to eschew “unnecessarily gendered language” in their documentation. Rather than referring to “man hours”, for example, a coder might discuss the “person hours” involved in a project. “All of mankind” could be replaced with “all of humanity”, the guide’s authors suggested.
On May 18th the company announced that it was going further in its promotion of inclusive language. Google Docs, its popular free word-processing software, would soon be nudging people away from potentially sexist language, such as the generic use of “chairman”. Instead it will offer gender-neutral suggestions including “chairperson”.
The photos were taken down globally from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, on Friday — the 32nd anniversary of the event. A Microsoft spokesman said they were taken offline by mistake, attributing the removal to “human error.”
The images reappeared around the world — outside of China — on Saturday.
Bing, unlike its major competitors including Google, operates within mainland China. That means Microsoft is forced to censor search results for Chinese users, according to Chinese law — particularly images and information about the Tiananmen Square protests and the killings that ensued.
The company didn’t elaborate on what the human error was and how it happened. It also doesn’t mention how many of the company’s Bing development teams are based in China. The company’s largest R & D center outside the United States is located in China, and a senior software engineer based in China announced a job in January to lead a team that develops technology to enhance Bing’s image search.
Chinese authorities are calling on domestically operated search engines, websites and social media platforms to censor keywords and results that appear to be politically sensitive or critical of the Chinese government.
References to the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square are blocked in China, as are images related to events such as “Tank Man.”
Microsoft’s Bing is one of the few international search engines operating in China, which complies with local censorship laws and competes with larger Chinese search engines such as Baidu and Sogou.
The reversal follows a pledge last month by President Joe Biden, who had said it was "simply, simply wrong" to seize journalists' records and that he would not permit the Justice Department to continue the practice. Though Biden's comments in an interview were not immediately accompanied by any change in policy, a pair of statements from the White House and Justice Department on Saturday signaled an official turnabout from an investigative tactic that has persisted for years.
Democratic and Republican administrations alike have used subpoenas and court orders to obtain journalists' records in an effort to identify sources who have revealed classified information. But the practice had received renewed scrutiny over the past month as Justice Department officials had alerted reporters at three news organizations — The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times — that their phone records had been obtained in the final year of the Trump administration.
At the same time, extremist elements in these marches should not be given free rein to incite hatred against people. And those on the left who claim such bans are stifling frees speech need to root out the vile hatred and racism within their own ranks and understand how extremists use the Palestinian cause as a cloak to conceal anti-Jew-hate.
The British communities secretary Robert Jenrick has warned that incidents of anti-Jewish hate were a “sign of something more pernicious”, and reaffirmed that the Government will redouble its efforts to deal with extremism. But these mere condemnations are worth nothing if they are not turned into effective actions, and authorities are always reluctant to stand by the people who dare to challenge the fanatics in our midst.
Counsel say that while it’s good to see the state taking on a 'predatory patent troll', the outcome of the case won’t change their own litigation strategies
Chapter VI, Licensing and the Transfer of Rights, of the Industrial Property Law (IPL) of Mexico, establishes the legal basis for compulsory licenses. Articles 70 to 77, under Chapter VI, discuss in more detail the issuance of compulsory licenses.
Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") recently filed its reply to Junior Party The University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") opposition to its motion for priority in Interference No. 106,115.
CVC's opposition raised two grounds for the PTAB to base a decision that CVC should prevail in the priority phase of the interference. The first is that Broad inventor Zhang derived the invention claimed in the patents-in-interference from disclosure of CVC's conception from Dr. Marraffini. Dr. Marraffini was in possession of CVC's invention because he was a confidential reviewer of the manuscript later published in Science as Jinek et al. (2012, "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity," Science 337: 816–21). Dr. Marraffini also attended a CRISPR conference at Berkley on June 26, 2012 where the Doudna lab disclosed its CRISPR findings. Indeed, CVC's opposition brief contained a comparison between what was disclosed at the meeting, what Dr. Marraffini disclosed to Dr. Zhang, and what Dr. Zhang communicated to his colleague Dr. Cong, first author on the paper published in the January 2013 issue of Science and containing Broad's disclosure of CRISPR practiced in eukaryotic cells:
A Danish court has convicted a man who streamed TV series and movies via Facebook Live. The owner of the 'Facebio' group was sentenced to 20-days probation and must pay $9,000 in piracy damages. The local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, which referred the man to the authorities, is calling for stronger enforcement on legitimate social media platforms.
