Welcome to this week's Linux Roundup, we had another full week in this world of Linux Releases with Voyager Live 11, Ubuntu 20.04.3, Robolinux 12.10, and something I just found today is Makulu Linux Droid, which makes you run Android Apps directly on your Linux desktop, I haven't looked at it yet but sounds interesting.
We have just newly released PGSpider extension(pgspider_ext).
This is an extension to construct High-Performance SQL Cluster Engine for distributed big data. PGSpider enables PostgreSQL to access a number of data sources using Foreign Data Wrapper(FDW) and retrieves the distributed data source vertically.
The pgmoneta community is happy to announce version 0.5.0.
Kong, Inc. revealed it has allied with Red Hat to drive adoption of the Kong Konnect connectivity platform for managing application programming interfaces (APIs) on top of the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes.
Reza Shafii, vice president of product at Kong Inc., says the company has achieved Red Hat Operator Certification for Kong Konnect on Red Hat OpenShift, which makes its API management platform the first third-party offering to achieve that goal. Kong Konnect will also be made available via the Red Hat Marketplace.
Kubernetes, or K8s, the popular container orchestration platform, has profoundly transformed the way development teams deploy software, and for good reason.
It’s rapidly becoming the source of truth for many organisations due to its centralised platform structure and has numerous benefits, including increased deployment agility, cost savings and scalability.
Kubernetes v1.22, released earlier this month, introduced a redesigned approach for volume populators. Originally implemented in v1.18, the API suffered from backwards compatibility issues. Kubernetes v1.22 includes a new API field called dataSourceRef that fixes these problems.
Josh and Kurt talk to Dan Lorenc from Google about supply chain security. What’s currently going on in this space and what sort of new thing scan we look forward to? We discuss Google’s open source use, Project Sigstore, the SLSA framework and more.
So I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne. That ball gown or tailcoat isn't the most comfortable thing, either. The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them.
And when that happens, I have just the thing for you - a new kernel release to test and enjoy. Because 5.14 is out there, just waiting for you to kick the tires and remind yourself what all the festivities are about.
Of course, the poor tireless kernel maintainers won't have time for the festivities, because for them, this just means that the merge window will start tomorrow. We have another 30 years to look forward to, after all. But for the rest of you, take a breather, build a kernel, test it out, and then you can go back to the seemingly endless party that I'm sure you just crawled out of.
Linus
Headline features in 5.14 include: core scheduling (at last), the burstable CFS bandwidth controller, some initial infrastructure for BPF program loaders, the rq_qos I/O priority policy, some improvements to the SO_REUSEPORT networking option, the control-group "kill" button, the memfd_secret() system call, the quotactl_fd() system call, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more details.
As expected Linus Torvalds promoted Linux 5.14 to stable in providing the latest features, hardware support, and other improvements ahead of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution releases.
See the Linux 5.14 feature list for a comprehensive list of the changes in this new kernel version. Some of the Linux 5.14 highlights include core scheduling support, secret memory areas support with MEMFD_SECRET, continued enablement around Intel Alder Lake, Yellow Carp and Beige Goby AMD graphics support, AMD SmartShift laptop support, Raspberry Pi 400 support, and more. Linux 5.14 has the usual mix of new hardware support, improving existing features, and adding in other new kernel innovations.
Linux Kernel 5.4 is now officially available. As usual Linus Torvalds just announced the general availability of the Linux 5.14.You can download Linux kernel 5.14 right now from the kernel.org website. Linux 5.14 kernel release comes just days after the 30th anniversary of Linux operating system.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 5.14. In this post, we recap the updates and provide you the download/installation instructions.
Less than two months in development, the Linux 5.14 kernel brings cool new features to the table, such as the merge of the core scheduling functionality to better protect our Linux computers against some Spectre vulnerabilities, the burstable CFS bandwidth controller, or the new mechanism for better controlling resource limits within user namespaces.
Also new is an I/O priority controller for control groups designed for managing the priority of block-I/O requests generated by the members of each group, a new rate limiter for the split-lock detection feature on the x86 architecture for sleeping processes that create a split lock, as well as a new PCI-over-virtio driver for supporting PCI drivers in user-mode.
An interesting look at what the Debian project is doing to make it easier for upstream code to be packaged as proper .deb packages.
It supports the Linux Debian 10 OS and ViewIT software framework from IMAGO. ViewIT handles image acquisition and I/O handling among other tasks. Python, C++ based tools, and Halcon plugins are easy to integrate with the software framework.
Over on element14, Katie had been wanting to go for a short bike ride after finally getting it fixed. But she encountered a problem: the previously mounted speedometer had lost its display unit, meaning the entire thing was now useless. Rather than simply buying a new one, she had the idea to put together a DIY version that relies on GPS instead of counting wheel rotations to keep track of the current speed.
Component-wise, only a few modules were required to build this device. First was an Arduino Nano 33 IoT that handled communication and power between the screen and GPS module. Next was a GPS3 Click Board, which contains one of Quectel’s L80 GPS modules that provides accurate tracking information in a small form factor. Finally, a small 1.3” circular LCD was chosen due to its pixel density, integrated touch controller, and ease-of-use. Everything was assembled into a custom-designed and 3D-printed housing that fits neatly over the bike’s handlebars and features an area to store a USB battery bank.
LibreOffice 7.2, a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, has been published by the Document Foundation (TDF).
TDF published LibreOffice 7.1 six months ago, with a message asking enterprise customers to upgrade from the free Community edition to the paid-for LibreOffice Enterprise version, which includes more support choices from partners.
TDF, which advertises LibreOffice as “free and open-source software” (FOSS), maintains its position that enterprise organizations should stop free-riding on the community-made version and that LibreOffice can stagnate like OpenOffice, the open-source office productivity series that Oracle has offloaded to The Apache Foundation in 2011.
The Cloud has many features of a large, distributed, and very hard to use computer. The Cloud indeed offers to manage storage and compute resources for us. Great! But these gems are hidden behind a mess of APIs and YAML. The Cloud is sadly quite unlike the beautiful simplicity of UNIX.
What would a “UNIX way” be for such a Cloud computer? UNIX pipelines are a proven way to handle large amounts of data. After all, this approach of streaming through data with simple and composable utilities was designed precisely for the situation where input size greatly exceeds available local memory. Sounds familiar!
Now I’ll use this to do something useful: count the occurrence of each of the $O(10^7)$ features in the training file. I’ll use a map-reduce pattern. In the map phase I’ll run “feature_count.awk” with the following contents.
A command-line interface is a program that processes commands to a computer program in the form of lines of text. In this awesome article, I will introduce 100+ command-line tools used popularly in Data Science.
Not all socialists get expelled from Labour, but most people expelled from Labour are socialists. This is a strange thing for a party that claims the heritage of democratic socialism. And yet it is the mark of Keir Starmer’s leadership.
The expulsion of socialist filmmaker Ken Loach from the Labour Party is a testament to the decay that has set in since Jeremy Corbyn stepped down. Starmer has changed the course of the party, but it has nothing to do with winning elections.
Astronomers have discovered the Sun's fastest-orbiting asteroid yet, a one-kilometre-wide rock that completes a lap of our star every 113 Earth days.
That's "the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System," according to the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab.
The space boulder, known as 2021 PH27, was clocked on August 13 by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US. He noticed the object in images taken by Ian Dell’antonio and Shenming Fu, of Brown University, using the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile.
Scholarly knowledge relies on citations. Discovering and acknowledging prior work is fundamental to knowing what has been done before, synthesising the state of the field, and identifying spaces for new research.
What do we want for these young people? At least three things.
The school board in Waukesha, Wisconsin, recently made a strange decision. They opted the school district out of a federal program “that would give free meals to all students regardless of family income,” the Washington€ Post€ reports. The reason? According to one school-board member, children could “become spoiled.” The school district’s assistant superintendent for business services worried that there would be a “slow addiction” to the free meals. This is a fascinating way to talk about children and their families, who do possess a biological need for food. Whether that need amounts to a “slow addiction” is a matter of opinion. And opinion in this country has become badly skewed.
Drawing is a visual mode of communication. Teaching drawing requires one-to-one personal interaction among the tutor and the learner. The technical drawing is no exception, and it requires a considerable amount of imagination skills. On-line mode of pedagogy shall be occupying a substantial portion of the mode of delivery in teaching and learning during, as well as, after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic era. This work focuses on the training and knowledge sharing of machine drawing skills through online mode, which is the requirement of the present era. A knowledge management perspective for machine drawing pedagogy is involved in this work. Challenges in the online pedagogy of machine drawing are deliberated through Ishikawa diagram and service Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. A maker education perspective of online machine drawing pedagogy is delineated. An approach toward knowledge workforce, knowledge transfer, and tacit knowledge is adopted for online teaching of machine drawing. Finally, conclusions are drawn in context of online pedagogy for a spatial visualization–based course like machine drawing.
WebAssembly Pioneer Cosmonic today announces that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted its universal application runtime for building cloud native applications with WebAssembly that can run anywhere -- as its latest Sandbox project.
Kythera AI has begun publicly distributing its AI middleware as a Gem with the Linux Foundation’s new Open3D game engine (O3DE).
A computer system’s cybersecurity can be jeopardized by its own software as much as the questionable decisions made by computer users.
Adding holes to the company security stance, contract and freelance workers often bring their own devices to the job, logging in remotely via services such as Microsoft Inc.’s SharePoint or accessing company resources via links to Dropbox or Google Drive. Employees also increasingly choose to use unsecured personal computers, laptops, tablets and phones for work. This trend led to company policies such as BYOD (bring your own device), where employees can legitimately use their personal devices for work under certain restrictions.
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated rise of remote work signaled the final death knell to the illusion of a secure perimeter. Scrambling to adjust to the rapid changes demanded by the pandemic market, implementing new security measures was down on the list of priorities. A February 2021 survey of remote workers by anti-malware developer PC Matic Inc. found that 49% didn’t receive any kind of IT support services from their employer, 61.5% were working on personal devices and 91% hadn’t been provided with any kind of anti-virus software.
Airtel, Jio, ACT and others insist on bundling their free routers with their fiber connection. Users are not given any choice, and that is now sparking privacy and digital rights issues, with some believing that these free routers allow Airtel, Jio, and others to snoop on users.
The Australian report recommended the government be given the power to designate tech companies as payment providers, clarifying the regulatory status of digital wallets.
It also recommended the government and industry together establish a strategic plan for the wider payments ecosystem and that a single, integrated licensing framework for payment systems be developed.
Written in English in black block letters, the sign posted on the banks of the Jakobselva river that separates Norway from Russia reads: "No Peeing Towards Russia".
It is placed next to an official signpost informing people that the area is under video surveillance by Norwegian border guards.
Even the people who helped develop scanning technology similar to what Apple's using say it's too easily misused.
"We're not concerned because we misunderstand how Apple's system works. The problem is, we understand exactly how it works," Princeton assistant professor Jonathan Mayer and graduate researcher Anunay Kulshrestha wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece. "Apple is making a bet that it can limit its system to certain content in certain countries, despite immense government pressures. We hope it succeeds in both protecting children and affirming incentives for broader adoption of encryption. But make no mistake that Apple is gambling with security, privacy and free speech worldwide."
Richard N. Ojeda, an Army vet and former West Virginia state representative tweeted out an observation that I would like to reinforce:
"The truth takes long to spread, while the lies spread fast here.”
Officially, the paper under discussion is the€ Sixth Assessment Report€ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarizing the knowledge of the world’s climate scientists. The technical summary of the report spans 150 pages, and that is what we’ll be quoting from. The report is intended “to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options.” To read this article, log in or or Subscribe. In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.
This is a developing story and may€ be updated.€
Weather experts on Sunday said their worst-case-scenario predictions about Hurricane Ida, which damaged homes and knocked down trees in Cuba on Friday, appeared to€ be coming true as the tropical cyclone made its way towards New Orleans with winds rushing at 150 miles per hour.
That warm water, which provides energy to hurricanes, also ran unexpectedly deep. Typically the water Hurricane Ida would churn up would be colder and limit the storm’s intensity. Since the hurricane only pushed up further warm water, the storm continued to strengthen as it neared the coast.
“The thing that really keeps forecasters awake at night is the prospect of going to bed one night with a tropical storm somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico and waking up the next morning with a Category 4 storm,” Emanuel said. “By the time they realize it, there’s not enough time to evacuate people and unfortunately we expect that to become more common as a byproduct of global warming.”
I spent my summers here for 20 years and lived here for a decade. We raised both of our kids here. And since moving to Oregon in 1990, we’ve come back every year or so. For most of that time nothing much about the landscape, the people or the towns changed. They were much as they were in 1982 or 1972. To the north, the suburbs of Indianapolis gnawed up more and more farmland and woodlots, including the 40-acre farm of my mother’s family, which dated back to the 1820s. The fields are now covered by a super-drugstore, a Kroger, a Chick-Fil-A, a furniture store, and a church with a vast parking lot, where carloads come in search of salvation. The place is Jesus mad, though few could tell you more than a couple garbled lines of his teachings. I can’t bear to go back without wanting to blow something up.
For years, the hill country seemed immune to this kind of cultural entropy billed as progress. But in the last five years, the economic decay has accelerated. Familiar stores are boarded up. Houses have been abandoned. Cars left to rust in fields and yards where they stopped running months ago. Handmade for sale signs are tacked to telephone poles. It’s a yard sale economy. Even churches have padlocks on their doors, especially the denominational churches of my youth–Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and Catholic–replaced by evangelical and Four Square churches in trailers, barns and pre-fab buildings, their devotional services announced on yard signs like advertisements for the Second Coming.
The collective wealth of the seven wealthiest Americans, all white men, has now just about reached $1 trillion. These seven pay virtually nothing in income tax.
OnlyFans denied most of the BBC’s allegations and would not tell Recode if the BBC report influenced its initial decision to ban pornography. It did point Recode to its Terms of Service that details the verification process for creators, including submitting photos of two forms of ID and a photo of the creator holding those IDs, and it said it has a “zero tolerance policy” on banned content. OnlyFans also said that it uses certain technologies to identify child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including Microsoft’s PhotoDNA. OnlyFans also shared its transparency report, which includes select details on CSAM found on its platform (15 OnlyFans accounts were deactivated for possible CSAM in July 2021, for instance).
The debate over regulating cryptocurrency is set to heat up when lawmakers reconvene in Washington, as industry leaders and members of both parties double down on their objections to the current language in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
And beyond revising the infrastructure provision after failed efforts, further attempts to regulate cryptocurrency may bring together unlikely allies in Congress — and draw battle lines within parties.
On August€ 12, the military contractor CACI International Inc. told its investors that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is hurting its profits. The same contractor is also funding a€ think tank that is concurrently arguing against the withdrawal. This case is worth examining both because it is routine, and because it highlights the venality of our€ “expert”-military contractor feedback loop, in which private companies use think tanks to rally support for wars they’ll profit€ from.
Officially, what we might call the establishment press in the United States — your cable news networks, long-running legacy press outlets, and the newer, largely digital publications that rely on close relationships with the powerful for their reporting — aren’t meant to have editorial lines and political viewpoints. But every now and then, whether they realize it or not, they accidentally reveal their political priorities.
If you’re in doubt, just examine the news since Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan began, where you’ll get to see this phenomenon in action firsthand. As images of the Taliban’s stunning conquest of the country melded into images of US forces and their allies’ chaotic evacuation, Biden has gotten a hammering from a US media that has centered Taliban human rights violations in its coverage of the pullout, and united across partisan and ideological lines to push a single, pro-war narrative.
Environmental justice campaigners expressed solidarity over the weekend with nearly 70 people who were arrested Saturday€ by Minnesota law enforcement as they assembled outside Democratic Gov. Tim Walz's home, demanding the governor take action to stop the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
The suits apparently stem from a collaboration between the BACP and the City of Chicago Law Department, and they assert claims based on the Chicago Municipal Code. But they echo incidents cited in other lawsuits and public controversies. Grubhub’s lawsuit, for instance, claims the company’s harshly criticized “Supper for Support” discount “was so deceptive that it was forced to issue corrective statements nationally.” Among many other issues, it also singles out Grubhub’s practice of publicizing phone numbers that direct callers to restaurants but quietly add their own fees, as well as making “imposter” versions of restaurant websites.
Perhaps most telling is a mention that popular subscription services like Spotify, Netflix, and Tinder have tried to find ways around Google Play Billing and that 30 percent cut. This is no secret, as the direct collection of credit card info by Netflix and Spotify reportedly resulted in Google posting a “clarification” explaining that Play Store apps must use Google’s billing system and giving them a year to change. In this filing, the lawyers accuse Google of offering Netflix a “significantly reduced revenue share” with the apparent intention of squashing its desire to use an alternative payments system.
UK ISP Sky Broadband is monitoring the IP addresses of servers suspected of streaming pirated content to subscribers and supplying that data to an anti-piracy company working with the Premier League. That inside knowledge is then processed and used to create blocklists used by the country's leading ISPs, to prevent subscribers from watching pirated events.
