I've been using Windows 10 in production for about two years now - testing it since even before the official release. Early on, my impression was that it was comparable to Windows 7. Okay. Nothing too special, new or revolutionary. Over time, this impression has changed. With subsequent semi-annual releases, I encountered issues I've never had in Windows before, mostly various system errors and bugs that speak of low quality and bad design. Then, Windows 10 would occasionally undo some of my tweaks and options, wasting my time, and forcing me to tighten the screws ever more. All in all, my outlook isn't bright or happy. Bored and exhausted by the nonsense would be the best word.
Now, Windows 11 is coming. As I've done many times in the past, I logged into my Insiders account and started testing, to see what awaits me. Right away, I found the experience quite dejecting. My early impression of Windows 11 Dev Build was mediocre at best, and it progressively got worse with each update. Different from Windows 10, though. What happened was, I found myself reliving 2011, when I tested Windows 8 and came to pretty much the same conclusions. To wit, this is what I think will unfold.
Just as the Linux desktop is making serious headway, we've got a new shiny OS from Redmond. What can Windows 11 learn from desktop Linux - and what are the alternatives to Windows 11. Also, what are the main shortfalls still facing Linux on the desktop?
One of the most common things people say about Linux is that "Linux is a success on servers but a failure on the dekstop." But if you really think about it, the success of Linux on servers, in enterprise and on mobile; it actually means that Linux is a success on the desktop as well. Let me explain...
Chip giant AMD has shared details about a new driver that promises to improve the performance of its Zen-based processors on Linux.
According to reports, the new driver is the result of a joint collaboration between AMD and Valve, with the two companies toiling to enhance performance and power efficiency reportedly in preparation for the launch of the Steam Deck, Valve’s Zen 2-based take on portable gaming.
The release of the Steam Deck is only a few months away, and AMD is working to ensure the portable’s Ryzen CPU shines bright. In light of this, an AMD developer has revealed that these efforts include replacing the processor’s ageing ACPI Linux driver to solve Proton related issues.
During the recent X.Org Developers Conference, AMD’s software engineer, Ray Huang shared the company’s plans to replace its Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver used on all Intel and AMD processors. The developer also disclosed that the driver isn’t currently playing nice with games using Valve’s Proton compatibility layer, which could prove detrimental to the Steam Deck’s stability. Naturally, this is something that AMD and Valve want to avoid, as it could hamper the Steam Deck’s ability to provide a seamless portable gaming PC experience.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.7 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.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
Google's Android had been notorious for all of its downstream patches carried by the mobile operating system as well as various vendor/device kernel trees while in recent years more of that code has been upstreamed. Google has also been shifting to the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI) as the basis for all their product kernels to further reduce the fragmentation. Looking ahead, Google is now talking of an "upstream first" approach for pushing new kernel features.
Google's Todd Kjos talked today during Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC2021) around their Generic Kernel Image initiative. With Android 12 and their Linux 5.10 based GKI image they have further cut down the fragmentation to the extent that it's "nearly eliminated". With the Android 12 GKI, most of the vendor/OEM kernel features have now either been upstreamed into the Linux kernel, isolated to vendor modules/hooks, or merged into the Android Common Kernel.
At the moment there is no tool that would allow to format patches in Xen. The idea of Xen-checker is to use the clang-format approach as a base for Xen ‘checkpatch’ process. The new tool consists of modified .clang-format configuration file to automate Xen patches format checking and reformatting. The tool can be used as a pre-commit hook to check and format every patch automatically. Some features are missing in the clang configurator, so new clang-format options have been proposed for more flexible code formatting. Also, the purpose of the topic is to start the discussion about the existing rules for Xen code formatting to eliminate possible inaccuracies in the work of the Xen checker. This will make it easier to adhere to the unanimous decision.
More than three years after X.Org Server 1.20, released in May 2018, a release candidate for 21.1.0 has been posted.
The Linux display server remains widely used despite the introduction of Wayland, first released in 2012 and intended to replace X.
The future of the software, in terms of significant new releases, was in doubt when project owner Adam Jackson declared the project "abandoned" last year, but Lithuanian developer Povilas Kanapickas (who formerly worked on the Unity game engine) stepped up and said:
"There are new features in the Xorg DDX that I would like to see released, so I'm volunteering to do the releasing work."
Merged yesterday for Mesa 21.3 was open-source Vulkan ray-tracing for AMD RDNA2 / RX 6000 series GPUs with the RADV driver. Opened today now is a merge request that would provide Vulkan ray-tracing with RADV to pre-RDNA2 GPUs on this driver going back to the likes of Polaris, granted the performance is another story.
Joshua Ashton known for his work on DXVK and other Direct3D-on-Vulkan efforts for Valve has opened the merge request to enable RADV Vulkan ray-tracing for older generations of AMD GPUs.
Glances System Monitor is free, an open-source command-line tool for process monitoring, system resources such as CPU, Disk I/O, File System, Load Average, Memory, Network Interfaces and processes. Glances are built with Python language. Glances support cross-platform monitoring, which can be used in conjunction with a web-based interface.
One of the excellent features Glances supports is the ability to set thresholds in the program. You can set careful, warning, and critical in the configuration file, which will then relay information in colors that can show alerts to systems resources bottlenecks, system resources issues, and much more. Glances, by default, comes with a pre-set list of colors, but you can modify and add additional configs.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenLDAP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenLDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) provides user authentication and enables you to set up user accounts that provide the user access to each computer in your network without having to set up a local user account on each computer. OpenLDAP is the free and open-source implementation of LDAP.
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 the OpenLDAP 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.
Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows for a layer of abstraction between the operating system and the hardware. Normally, your OS looks for disks (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and so on) and partitions within those disks (/dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, and so on).
In LVM, a virtual layer is created between the operating system and the disks. Instead of one drive holding some number of partitions, LVM creates a unified storage pool (called a Volume Group) that spans any number of physical drives (called Physical Volumes). Using the storage available in a Volume Group, LVM provides what appear to be disks and partitions to your OS.
And the operating system is completely unaware that it's being "tricked."
Got some older computer equipment lying around? Don’t throw away those old PCs just yet. Whether you’re cleaning out or upgrading the computers in the office or at home, you should be able to find something to do with them.
As we’ll discuss, you can use them for experimentation, routing, security, file or Internet serving, and more. Use these five suggestions to make one of the projects your late-night endeavor on the weekend or your new project at work.
If you've made the jump and installed Linux support on your Chromebook, you've probably already started installing apps and working with files and data. That being the case, you might be curious as to how you back up those apps and data. In some cases, you'll be saving data within the Linux filesystem hierarchy (and not on either your local or cloud storage, via Chrome OS.
Fortunately, the Chrome OS developers thought of this, so you don't have to bother with locating that data and running commands to back it all up.
The very promising Early Access fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx has expanded in multiple ways in the latest update and you're going to need to prepare for a lot more people.
With major new systems appearing including reproduction, so your people will now pair up with a procreation room and do the deed. After which you're left with a bunch of children running around, eating food and taking up your time. Thankfully there's also now an education system to give them something to do until they grow up and get to work. A new happiness system was also introduced so you need to keep people happy or they will riot and ruin everything. That plus a whole lot more.
Become El Presidente for cheaps as the latest Humble Bundle has arrived with the Tropico 20th Anniversary Bundle letting you build up your collection.
As usual the amount of games you get depends on how much you pay, with this one split across three different tiers. Here's our usual breakdown of how they work on Linux.
Maui 2 was released a month ago, and since then new features, bug fixes, and improvements have been made to the Maui set of apps and frameworks; the following blog post will cover some of the changes and highlights from the last or so months of development.
What’s new?
Among many bug fixes that will be listed below for each individual app, some of the highlights include better support for client-side decorations aka CSD. Clip, the video player, is now working again on Android; MauiKit Controls now provide improved contextual menu actions and a lighter tab bar styling. Index, the file manager, can now also preview PDF documents, adding up to support for previews of text, video, audio and fonts file types; and translucency support is now embedded into MauiKit itself.
There are many great desktop environments for Linux, such as Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, and MATE to name a few. With that said, only one can be the best, and that is obviously GNOME. I mean, look, there's a reason Canonical chose it as the default DE for Ubuntu -- it is just that good.
If you are a GNOME fan, I have some extremely exciting news. You see, as of today, GNOME 41 is officially here! There are many new changes, such as enhanced multitasking settings and the inclusion of a new remote desktop client called "Connections." Most importantly, however, the developers promise GNOME 41 includes noticeable performance improvements, particularly for those using Wayland.
GNOME 41 has just been released. While it doesn't bring as many visual changes as GNOME 40 did, there are still loads of stuff to talk about, especially if you consider that GNOME is now taking steps to become a platform, not just a desktop, so stick around till the end to hear my thoughts on this.
Linux distros are usually more secure than their Windows and Mac counterparts. Linux Operating Systems being open-source leaves very less scope of unauthorized access to its core. However, with the advancement of technologies, incidents of attacks are not rare.
Are you in a fix with the coming reports of Linux systems targeted malware attacks? Worried about your online presence? Then maybe it’s time to go for a secure, privacy-focused Linux distro. This article presents a guide to 3 privacy-oriented Linux distributions that respect your privacy online.
Over the past 20 or so years, there always seems to be that one distribution everyone claims is the best to help Windows users transition to Linux. Most often those distributions are nothing more than Linux with a desktop that looks like Windows. Sometimes they do a decent job of mimicking Windows and sometimes not.
But every so often something special pops up, a distribution that goes well beyond that extra mile to make Windows users feel right at home with Linux. Such is the case with Windowsfx. This Linux distribution is far from just a UI tweak to resemble another OS, it's perfectly tuned for Windows users. It looks like Windows 11, and it behaves like Windows 11... only it's Linux. For certain users, Windowsfx will be the absolute best of both worlds.
Mandriva Linux has been discontinued for a long time now. Check out these three alternatives to relive the pure Mandriva experience.
Mandriva Linux is a fusion of Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux and French distribution Mandrake Linux. It is developed by Mandriva S.A.; however, the company has not released any new version since 2011.
Although the distro has not been updated for a long time and considering the features it offered, it’s a little difficult to undermine its existence. Mandriva might not exist any longer, but its memories are still functional in the form of different Linux distros, discussed below.
After months of working at SUSE, my Jungle Green t-shirt was finally recognized at a store. “SUSE?” the gentleman asked, pointing at the large white letters. “Yes, I work there!” I responded, thrilled that I had the opportunity to engage in our mutual love of the chameleon, Geeko, “But I don’t work on the technology, I’m in Program Management.” “Well, let me ask you this – what is the operating system on your computer at home?” he asked, inquiring to my level of SUSE-ness. “Just the basic… Microsoft,” I responded. He continued, “I have a virtual machine with Slackware 1.0 I’m running, and I’ve been trying to get my hands on something old, openSUSE older than 5.3.” I breathed a sigh of relief when our conversation was cut short and he ran off to help another customer. Slackware? Virtual Machine? All terms I had just enough exposure to know what category they belonged in, yet not enough to carry a conversation. Despite the embarrassment, I knew I wasn’t alone. A 2020 study by the AnitaB.org Institute found that women make up 28.8% of the tech workforce. When considering open source technology, this number further shrinks down to the single digits. Nonetheless, the number of women becoming cloud native practitioners is growing. Recently, Lynne Chamberlain, CEO of SUSE Rancher Government Solutions, and Denise Schannon, Director of Engineering, joined special host Katie Gamanji for a special feature of OCTOpod in which they discussed their contributions to Linux, challenges they have faced and shared inspiring stories on how they’ve overcome those challenges to get to where they are today.
Access to functioning hardware and – if possible free – operating system is often not a matter of course for socially disadvantaged people. The French Emmbuntüs collective from the Emmaus movement wants to help those in need to digitally participate – with a Linux distribution that also runs stably on older, donated computers. The most recent result of these efforts has been available since yesterday, Monday.
EmmaDE4 1.00 (“Emmabuntüs Debian Edition”) is based on Debian 11, which was released last month, and deliberately relies even more on free software than the previous versions. Designers from the Debian community have contributed a new theme and a revised logo. The documentation for the installation and presentation of EmmaDE has been extensively updated; the latter also includes one Overview of the goals of the Emmabuntüs project.
I posted a couple of days ago about another attempt to compile Chromium. Learnt a lot from that. One thing, is that need the 'nodejs' package in the host OS.
This post is about some changes recently made to Rust's ErrorKind, which aims to categorise OS errors in a portable way.
[...]
The Rust programming language tries to make it straightforward to write portable code. Portable error handling is always a bit tricky. One of Rust's facilities in this area is std::io::ErrorKind which is an enum which tries to categorise (and, sometimes, enumerate) OS errors. The idea is that a program can check the error kind, and handle the error accordingly.
That these ErrorKinds are part of the Rust standard library means that to get this right, you don't need to delve down and get the actual underlying operating system error number, and write separate code for each platform you want to support. You can check whether the error is ErrorKind::NotFound (or whatever).
Because ErrorKind is so important in many Rust APIs, some code which isn't really doing an OS call can still have to provide an ErrorKind. For this purpose, Rust provides a special category ErrorKind::Other, which doesn't correspond to any particular OS error.
The release of TeX Live 2021 is already half a year away, but due to the delay of waiting for Debian/Bullseye release, we haven’t updated TeX Live in Debian for quite some time. But the waiting is over, today I uploaded the first packages of TeX Live 2021 to unstable.
Ubuntu Touch was Canonical's attempt at a mobile version of its OS, subsequently ditched by the Linux outfit and now maintained by UBports, which has just released the latest update, OTA-19.
OTA-18 dropped in July and the company warned that 19 would arrive before Ubuntu Touch was dragged to the 20.04 version of the operating system on which it is based. For now, Ubuntu Touch remains based on 16.04 and, like the previous update, 19 remains relatively light on features even as the device list grows.
While 28 devices were supported by OTA-18, 39 are on the list for OTA-19 (including some extra OnePlus and Xiaomi kit) although the PinePhone and PineTab remain missing in action.
New features include the blessed relief of the keyboard not automatically popping up in the messaging app while a critical media-hub bug, which stopped devices sleeping when two pieces of audio were played in rapid succession, thus resulting in a swiftly drained battery, was among the fixes.
Canonical, the publisher of the Linux Ubuntu operating system, announced Tuesday that it's extending the end-of-life dates for its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr and 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus OSes from eight to 10 years. The company said the extension will allow organizations to balance infrastructure upgrade costs by giving them additional time to implement their plans. The extended security maintenance of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS provides customers security updates and kernel patches from Canonical.
The Spotify Box is a small DIY device based on an Allwinner V3s single-core Cortex-A7 camera SoC and a wooden enclosure designed to play Spotify songs, and not much else…
The device serves as a bridge between the official Spotify app and your home audio system connected through the RCA jacks of the box. and allowing you to connect your smartphone to your audio setup and stream music throughout your house.
Housed inside a tidy little wooden enclosure of his own creation, the Spotify Box can turn any amplifier into a remote-controlled Spotify player via Spotify Connect. Pick the songs on your smartphone, and they’ll play from the Spotify Box as simple as that.
The project is based on the Allwinner V3S, a system-on-chip with a 1.2GHz ARM-Cortex-A7 core, 64MB of DDR2 RAM, and an Ethernet transceiver for good measure. There’s also a high-quality audio codec built in, making it perfect for this application. It’s thrown onto a four-layer PCB of [Evan’s] own design, and paired with a Wi-Fi and BlueTooth transceiver, RJ-45 and RCA jacks, a push-button and some LEDs. There’s also an SD card for storage.
With a custom Linux install brewed up using Buildroot, [Evan] was able to get a barebones system running Spotifyd while communicating with the network. With that done, it was as simple as hooking up the Spotify Box to an amp and grooving out to some tunes.
SolidRun’s $221-and-up “SolidSense N8 IoT Compact” mini-PC runs Linux on an i.MX8M Nano Solo with GbE, WiFi/BT, USB, and a choice of LTE or PoE. You also get a choice of RS485 with CAN or BLE 5.0 with Wirepas Massive.
The SolidSense N8 IoT Compact embedded system follows SolidRun’s i.MX6-based SolidSense N6 Edge Gateway, which similarly offers a bundle of the Wirepas wireless mesh software from Tampere, Finland based Wirepas. The wireless mesh software, which is now called Wirepas Massive, is pre-installed along with software defined radios (SDRs) on two of the four i.MX8M Nano based SolidSense N8 models. Applications include IoT tasks such as automation, asset tracking, security, and smart buildings.
While Izzy and Ed are still going strong, the ESA has decided it’s about time these veteran Raspberries finally get the retirement they’re due. Set to make the journey to the ISS in December aboard a SpaceX Cargo Dragon, the new Astro Pi MK II hardware looks quite similar to the original 2015 version at first glance. But a peek inside its 6063-grade aluminium flight case reveals plenty of new and improved gear, including a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8 GB RAM.
The beefier hardware will no doubt be appreciated by students looking to push the envelope. While the majority of Python programs submitted to the Astro Pi program did little more than poll the current reading from the unit’s temperature or humidity sensors and scroll messages for the astronauts on the Astro Pi’s LED matrix, some of the more advanced projects were aimed at performing legitimate space research. From using the onboard camera to image the Earth and make weather predictions to attempting to map the planet’s magnetic field, code submitted from teams of older students will certainly benefit from the improved computational performance and expanded RAM of the newest Pi.
As with the original Astro Pi, the ESA and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have shared plenty of technical details about these space-rated Linux boxes. After all, students are expected to develop and test their code on essentially the same hardware down here on Earth before it gets beamed up to the orbiting computers. So let’s take a quick look at the new hardware inside Astro Pi MK II, and what sort of research it should enable for students in 2022 and beyond.
The OLKB-Terminal designed by [Jeff Eberl] doesn’t have a battery, can’t fold up (even if it seems like it could), and is only portable in the sense that you can literally pick it up and move it somewhere else. So arguably it’s not really a cyberdeck per se, but it certainly does look the part. If you need to be furiously typing out lines of code in a dimly lit near-future hacker’s den, this should do you nicely.
[Jeff] has provided everything you’d need to recreate this slick little machine on your own, though he does warn that some of the hardware decisions were based simply on what he had on-hand at the time, and that better or cheaper options may exist. So for example if you don’t want to use the Raspberry Pi 4, you can easily swap it out for some other single-board computer. Though if you want to change something better integrated, like the LCD panel, it will probably require modifications to the 3D printed components.
Linux is the operating system of choice for Internet of Things device manufacturers looking to fit their resource-constrained embedded devices with lightweight software systems. As an open-source project, Linux offers a stable, low-cost, secure, and up-to-date platform that can be run on a variety of microprocessor architectures, powering a range of devices from IoT sensors at the low end to powerful supercomputers.
Nvidia has linked up with Open Robotics to drive new artificial intelligence capabilities in the Robot Operating System (ROS).
The non-exclusive agreement will see Open Robotics extending ROS 2, the latest version of the open-source robotics framework, to better support Nvidia hardware – and in particular its Jetson range, low-power parts which combine Arm cores with the company's own GPU and deep-learning accelerator cores to drive edge and embedded artificial intelligence applications.
"Our users have been building and simulating robots with Nvidia hardware for years, and we want to make sure that ROS 2 and Ignition work well on those platforms," Brian Gerkey, Open Robotics' chief exec, told The Register.
The computer is compatible with Microsoft Windows 10 full version, Yocto project 3.0/3.1 using Linux 5.4, and Ubuntu 20.04 with Linux 5.8, as well as Intel OpenVINO toolkit 2021 R1 with support for TensorFlow and Caffe AI frameworks. Ubuntu and OpenVINO are also part of the Intel Software Foundation Kit that may be installed on the device upon request, and also includes MRAA and UPM I/O and sensor libraries, Docker, k3s Kubernetes, AWS Greengrass, and more.
Mixing up perfect, custom cocktails often requires months or even years of training, in addition to having to know a plethora of recipes. But Jithin Sanal wanted to pour his favorite drinks without spending the extra time and effort, so he concocted a robotic cocktail mixer to perform this task for him. It operates by using a series of ingredient reservoirs, pumps, an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, and a few relays to dispense a precise quantity of the desired ingredient into a container. Sanal also designed and fabricated his own circuit board to connect each component together in a circuit.
Rather than having a bunch of physical buttons on the front of the robotic cocktail mixer, Sanal instead opted to use the Arduino Cloud with five virtual ones that each correspond to a single drink. When a button is pressed, a function is executed on the Nano RP2040 Connect that activates the correct pumps in the specified order for a certain duration. By utilizing this method, users can be confident their drink is perfectly made every single time. More drinks can be added to the system simply by adding another button within the IoT Cloud and creating the associated function in the RP2040’s code.
The Google security blog provides an overview of what is being done to address memory-safety problems in the Chrome browser.
Chrome 94 stable update has been released by Google for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows operating systems. The update will be rolled out over the coming weeks and it brings new security features, new functionality, and bug fixes. Google Chrome 94 stable is the first version of Chrome of the new four-week release cycle. Previously, Chrome update was released every six weeks. Its features include HTTPS-First mode that makes users browsing more secure. Also, Google said that 19 different security issues were fixed in the Chrome 94 version.
The update for Google Chrome was announced through a blog post on September 21. Chrome 94 introduces HTTPS-First mode. It is available in Chrome for desktop systems and for Android. HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP and many websites support it. With the latest update, the browser will also show a full-page warning when the user loads a site that doesn't support HTTPS. This ensures privacy when using public Wi-Fi. Google says this was previously planned for Chrome 92.
Google has released Chrome 94 for desktop and Android, complete with an "Idle Detection" API to detect user inactivity, despite privacy concerns expressed by Mozilla and Apple.
New and changed features in Chrome 94 are listed here and include the removal of the AppCache feature, described as a "security and stability liability", and something which has "imposed a tax on all of Chrome's significant architectural efforts."
There is also a new VirtualKeyboard API with more control over its shape and an event fired when it covers page content; more efficient low-level access to media encoders and decoders; and a new JavaScript Self Profiling API which enables developers to collect JavaScript performance profiles from end users.
YouTube wants you to experience YouTube in very prescribed ways. But with the right browser extension, you’re free to alter YouTube to taste. Change the way the site looks, behaves, and delivers your favorite videos.
[...]
Though its primary function is to automatically play all YouTube videos in their highest possible resolution, YouTube High Definition has a few other fine features to offer.
In real estate, the age old mantra is “location, location, location,” meaning that location drives value. That’s true even when it comes to data collection in the online world, too — your location history is valuable, authentic information. In all likelihood, you’re leaving a breadcrumb trail of location data every day, but there are a few things you can do to clean that up and keep more of your goings-on to yourself.
[...]
For some apps, location helps them function better, like navigating with a GPS or following a map. Location history can also be useful for retracing your steps to past places, like finding your way back to that tiny shop in Florence where you picked up beautiful stationery two years ago.
On the other hand, marketing companies use location data for marketing and advertising purposes. They can also use location to conduct “geomarketing,” which is targeting you with promotions based on where you are. Near a certain restaurant while you’re out doing errands at midday? You might see an ad for it on your phone just as you’re thinking about lunch.
Location can also be used to grant or deny access to certain content. In some parts of the world, content on the internet is “geo-blocked” or geographically-restricted based on your IP address, which is kind of like a mailing address, associated with your online activity. Geo-blocking can happen due to things like copyright restrictions, limited licensing rights or even government control.
With our 12th episode of the Software Freedom Podcast we dig into the history and the beginning of enforcing Free Software licences, especially the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL). Together with Till Jaeger, who has been working alongside Harald Welte for enforcing the GNU GPL in the first court cases in Germany, we talk about the long way we have come since those early days.
Our guest, Till Jaeger, discusses with our host, Matthias Kirschner, how the decision to go to court and stand up for the rights of copyleft licences came about. Till and Matthias tell an exciting story about those first steps on this new legal ground. They also highlight the short term and long term impacts of the first court decision in favour of Free Software. For example, how more and more information about licensing and especially using a Free Software licence became available and publicly known. But also how workshops, like the FSFE's yearly Legal and Licensing Workshop were created for those interested in using and being compliant to Free Software licences.
Discover together with us the changes that have come from those first steps to the acceptance of Free Software in companies. Till has been involved with Free Software licensing for a long time and provides a deep and well rounded insight into the history of enforcing the GNU GPL. To give this episode a perfect ending, Matthias and Till also talk about some of the most common misunderstandings of Free Software licensing. This is the perfect episode for everyone to get an insight into one of the most important events in the history of enforcing Free Software licences.
Are you a Fedora packager and consider Tito to be a valuable asset in your toolbox? Do you know it can be used for maintaining RHEL packages as well? Or any downstream packaging? I didn’t. This article explains how it can be done.
Following news of the GRUB2 Secure Boot Bypass 2021 and as a result of Google's security changes on Google Drive together with the first daily build's from Canonical of Ubuntu 21.10 (impish) and point releases for 20.04.3 and 18.04.6 I've updated my ‘isorespin.sh‘ script and respun some ISOs suitable for Intel Atom and Intel Apollo Lake devices.
The venerable web programming language PHP is a source of frequent complaints and frustration, but according to a report W3Techs released today, it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
W3Techs' web server survey looks for technologies in use by sites in Alexa's top 10 million list; today's report includes a year-on-year chart beginning with January 2010, running all the way through 2021. The survey only includes top sites not out of elitism, but as one part of its effort to avoid data-skewing returns from domain-parking services and spammers, which would otherwise dominate legitimate websites through sheer volume.
Within that dataset, the story told is clear. Apart from PHP—which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today—only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share. That one competitor is ASP.NET, which held an impressive 24.4 percent share in 2010 but was down to 9.3 percent in January and 8.3 percent this month.
Amongst the small fry, the only truly impressive growth to be seen is in Ruby—which at 5.2 percent this month is still seeing continued uninterrupted growth in W3Techs' survey. This might come as a shock if you're mostly familiar with Ruby on Rails, which itself remains viable but seems to be on the decline in popularity.
This share constitutes an enormous lead over PHP’s rivals, with only one other server-side language ever reaching a 10 percent share. As Jim Salter reports, ASP.NET held a 24 percent share in 2010 but usage has now declined to 8.3 percent.
Coding is part of every developer’s life and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) makes this job easier for them. IDEs come with tons of handy features and support programming of various languages within the same environment.
Furthermore, IDEs provide users with plug-ins for adding the extra capability to the program and auto-complete tags and classes to make programming faster. Users can also utilize the pre-provided piece of code in their programs. IDEs make coding faster and easier and hence today we’re here to discuss the 10 best Code Editors (IDEs) available for Linux.
[lexie] is a librarian, and librarians live in the real world. They’re not concerned with vague digital notions about the size of data, but practical notions of space. Thus, she created a tool to answer an important question: how long do your shelves need to be if you’re storing all your information on 3.5ââ¬Â³ floppy disks?
It’s a great question, and one we find ourselves asking, well, pretty much never. [lexie]’s tool is also built using modern web technologies, and 3.5ââ¬Â³ floppy disks were never really used for bulk storage, either. It just makes the whole thing all the more frivolous, and that makes it more fun.
A very-literally-mobile museum boasting over 2,000 exhibits is to go online and on the streets this year to show off the evolution of the mobile phone from 1984 to the present day - and its founders are looking for donations to fill a few gaps in the collection.
"I've been collecting phones for more than 25 years. Over the last three decades the mobile phone has become part of the fabric of society and the design diversity, from early transportable phones to the latest smartphones with flexible displays, is something to behold," museum founder Ben Wood explained in a prepared statement.
"When the online museum launches later this year, we want it to be a rich learning resource and a way to inspire young people to go on to create incredible mobile innovations of their own in the future."
The Linux Foundation has adopted the PaSh Project, which offers a Linux-based compiler for automatically parallelizing POSIX shell scripts to optimize programs and speed execution, especially on multiprocessor systems.
The PaSh compiler, which is designed for parallelizing and thereby speeding up POSIX shell scripts, has a new home with the Linux Foundation. PaSh appears to be a major advance for a shell script language that has been around for almost a quarter century and is used across the technology spectrum in utility programs such as Bash.
PaSh is designed to “improve upon and accelerate the execution of shell scripts in the face of new web crawling, indexing and natural language processing changes,” stated Nikos Vasilakis, Technical Steering Committee chair and MIT researcher.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-hosts LF Edge, LF Networking, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), today announced additional programming for ONE Summit contributed by the United States government. New programming includes a keynote address by Dr. Dan Massey, Project Leader, Operate through DoD 5G to NextG Initiative, as well as a US GOV OPS Mini Summit.
“We are honored to have such a broad and distinguished swath of experts participating in ONE Summit,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “The latest additions to our program bring an even more diverse perspective on the future of 5G, and how initiatives like the 5G Super Blue Print can be consumed by both governments and enterprises.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (grilo), Fedora (curl, firefox, mingw-python-pillow, python-pillow, python2-pillow, and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (chromium, grafana-piechart-panel, kernel, libcroco, php-composer, and xen), Oracle (curl, kernel, and nss and nspr), Red Hat (nodejs:12), Slackware (alpine), SUSE (ghostscript, grafana-piechart-panel, kernel, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.11, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and linux-raspi2).
The FBI refrained for almost three weeks from helping to unlock the computers of hundreds of businesses and institutions hobbled by a major ransomware attack this summer, even though the bureau had secretly obtained the digital key needed to do so, according to several current and former U.S. officials.
After the Kaseya attack, the feds somehow came into possession of a decryption key but waited nearly a month before delivering it into the hands of businesses.
Fighting ransomware is filled with security trade-offs. This is one I had not previously considered.
Positive Technologies on Wednesday released a report that indicates ransomware attacks have reached “stratospheric levels.”
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) alerting organizations of increased Conti ransomware attacks. Malicious cyber actors use Conti ransomware to steal sensitive files from domestic and international organizations, encrypt the targeted organizations’ servers and workstations, and demand a ransom payment from the victims.
Google has released Chrome version 94.0.4606.54 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.
A flaw in Microsoft's Autodiscover protocol, used to configure Exchange clients like Outlook, can cause user credentials to leak to miscreants in certain circumstances.
The upshot is that your Exchange-connected email client may give away your username and password to a stranger, if the flaw is successfully exploited. In a report scheduled to be published on Wednesday, security firm Guardicore said it has identified a design blunder that leaks web requests to Autodiscover domains that are outside the user's domain but within the same top-level domain (TLD).
Exchange's Autodiscover protocol, specifically the version based on POX XML, provides a way for client applications to obtain the configuration data necessary to communicate with the Exchange server. It gets invoked, for example, when adding a new Exchange account to Outlook. After a user supplies a name, email address, and password, Outlook tries to use Autodiscover to set up the client.
Learning to fix your position without GPS is one thing. Actively jamming it to induce a deliberate system failure aboard your own ship is quite something else, as we found on Monday.
The Register is currently embedded aboard HMS Severn, the Royal Navy's navigation training ship. Yesterday afternoon we witnessed the practical effects of jamming GPS.
These were much less than the apocalyptic effects some excitable parts of the media would have you believe. A couple of alarms went off, Severn's bridge crew cancelled them, and everyone continued as normal.
"If you lose GPS," said Commander Philip Harper, "it's not like you lose your position straightaway. It's likely to inject some velocities as it goes."
UK spending watchdog the National Audit Office has found that a 34-year-old computer system was one of the causes of a scandal which led to more than €£1bn of state pensions not being paid.
In a report published today, the NAO said that contributing to systematic errors were processes which relied on systems with "limited automation" and required "the use of multiple systems and interpretation of complex rules."
"Where caseworkers identify that future action may be needed on a claim they must manually set a prompt on the IT system," the report said.
Citizen Lab founder and director, Ronald Deibert, has won the prestigious 2021 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book RESET: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press). Established in honour of the late MP from Windsor, Ontario, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing is delivered annually for an “exceptional book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers.” Delivered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the award was announced at the digital edition of Politics and the Pen gala on September 22, 2021.
“It was a great honour to be invited to deliver the 2020 CBC Massey lectures, for which I wrote RESET. To receive the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize from the Writer’s Trust is a wonderful surprise and truly humbling. I extend my heartfelt congratulations to all of the other shortlisted authors. I hope this award helps underscore how important it is for all of us to reclaim the Internet for civil society and work collectively towards a sustainable, secure, and mutually-beneficial public sphere.” – Ronald Deibert
To their credit, at least reMarkable is being upfront by admitting a subscription model is being considered. It also sounds like existing users will be grandfathered in when it goes live, which should come as some comfort to current owners. But for prospective buyers, this could literally change everything. It’s bad enough that cloud synchronization of documents would potentially be time-limited, though we’ll admit there’s some justification in that the company is obviously incurring costs by hosting these files. Limiting features based on subscription tier on the other hand is simply a step too far, especially on a device that the user purchased outright.
We’ve already seen the first tentative steps towards developing a free and open source operating system for the reMarkable tablet, and this news is only going to redouble the efforts of those who wish to liberate this very promising piece of hardware from the overbearing software it ships with. What worries us is how the company is likely to respond to such projects if they’ve found themselves in a situation where recurring charges have become necessary to balance the books. We’ve already seen a motorcycle airbag that will only deploy if the wearer has paid up for the year, so is a tablet that won’t let you install additional applications unless you’ve sprung for the premium membership really that far fetched? Sadly, we all know the answer.
