facebook down, lets encrypt root cert expiration, more support woes, and happier times
Can social media be decentralized? James Vasile of Open Tech Strategies and DSNP is working on several projects at once toward that goal. Vasile touches on these goals and much more including the fediverse, palgorithms (personal algorithms), advantages and limits of clouds and blockchains. It's a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion with Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett of FLOSS Weekly.
So I went to the office today with the intention of making a proper video, but once I sat down at the computer, I started playing my favorite free and open source game 0 A.D. I quickly realized that I wasn't going to make any real content today.
Introducing the new Linux For Everyone show! Jason's making room for a couple new co-hosts. In this first trailer, meet Jason's friend and musical partner-in-crime Jerry Morrison.
A Quick overview of Archcraft 2021.09.25
We've talked about Enterprise Linux Security from the worldview of the system administrator, but what's it like on the other side? In this episode, Jay and Joao are joined by Atalay Kelestemur, an Ethical Hacker, as we discuss the mindset of the attacker.
Our virtual LUG of experts had a lot to say about the Linus Tech Tips Switch to Linux challenge. We recap what is going on, how it could go wrong, and what we hope happens.
This release is an excerpt from our LINUX Unplugged live stream on Tuesday, October 5th, 2021.
It's final push time on a big project for Mike, but Chris is the one who is exhausted. Still we've got some new insights into testing and thoughts on an emerging category of developer.
Plus, why the hermit developer is alive and well, some important feedback, and a Python tip.
A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
In Linux 5.14 Intel introduced initial Alder Lake P enablement driver support including around the new "XeLPD" display block. With Linux 5.15 there was the initial enablement around DG2/Alchemist graphics. Now for Linux 5.16 is a significant amount of new driver code for actually getting the display support into shape for both DG2 and ADL-P.
It’s been a busy month! We’ve had a lot of movement in kernel land, as well as some tooling improvements and reverse engineering sessions. At this point, Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)! The ground had been shifting until now, but we’re seeing drivers settle down. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on.
The Asahi Linux project has a progress report on its goal of running Linux on Mac M1 hardware.
The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report.
With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
There are many new Apple M1 driver submissions under review for mainline inclusion on Linux, including around pinctrl, I2C driver, ASC mailbox, IOMMU 4K handling, and device power management. CPU core frequency scaling support meanwhile is currently undergoing a clean-up before being posted as a "request for comments" series. There is also development work happening on the RTKit layer, NVMe + SART, and DCP code.
Bringing up the Apple M1 graphics with a kernel DRM driver and the necessary OpenGL/Vulkan Mesa driver code remains the big elephant in the room but progress continues to be made there too.
We spotlighted Slimbook Battery optimiser a couple of years ago, describing it as an essential tool for those looking to get longer battery life on Linux.
Today, a major update to the battery tuning tool was released. It is said to extend compatibility to a ‘greater number of laptop brands’ (and Ubuntu-based distros) and offer improved power-saving prowess — yup: even if your laptop isn’t made by Slimbook!
Slimbook Battery 4 also works with the Spanish PC company’s custom AMD and Intel controller apps. Paired together they unlock additional performance enhancing or power-saving possibilities.
The team finally released the first update to Inkscape v1.1. It comes mainly with bug fixes — a lot of them, in fact — so you’d do yourself a big favor by upgrading.
And yes, I know I’m preaching to the choir with this, but the excitement is still strong witrh Martin’s ongoing work on pages support.
There is no shortage of graphic design software for Linux users. While it is possible to create stunning graphics and make professional edits with several online software, today’s focus is on the most effective, memory-friendly software for Linux.
Please note that these applications are listed randomly and not in order of their popularity, complexity, functionality, or price.
FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware.
MongoDB doesn’t need an introduction, the one who is system administrating and developing would already know about it. It is a NoSQL database available to install on popular operating systems to provide a database without a fixed structure, hence easily scalable. Here in this article, we will learn the steps to easily install or create a MongoDB Database server container on the Docker Engine platform.
SMB is a client-server, file-sharing protocol that stands for Server Message Block which was invented by IBM in 1984 for the purpose of allowing computers to access files for reading or writing on a remote host using the LAN (Local area network). The SMB protocol that makes available the files or directories that are accessed on the remote host are called shares. This means that we can mount a shared file or directory to our system using the local area network.
SMB was previously known as CIFS and is the old version or dialect of SMB which stands for Common Internet File System which was created by Microsoft and is a particular implementation of the Server Message Block protocol.
In this article, we will provide you with each and every little step on how to mount SMB shares on Ubuntu using the Samba file server. Samba uses the SMB protocol and has the same function as SMB i-e enabling file sharing on Local area networks with other systems. But before going forward let me highlight a point that this article assumes that you have already shared a directory on a remote system and you will access that directory in this article.
Cassandra or Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL database initially developed by Facebook but later moved on to Apache license; therefore, it is now known as Apache Cassandra as well. The NoSQL databases are primarily used to compete in the current technology era by providing support to process graphical content, videos. As Cassandra belongs to the NoSQL category, it stores data in the form of key value pairs and uses its own query retrieving language known as CQL (Cassandra Query Language). The outermost shell of Cassandra is known as Cluster and it consists of several nodes, nodes are just the instance of Cassandra running on a machine.
A USB drive, also known as a USB flash drive or a pen drive, is a widely used external storage device that can be utilized to back up or transfer data from one system to another. As the file system is supported in a GUI Operating System such as Windows and GNOME Desktop in CentOS, which helps you to immediately mount a USB and access its data. However, most CentOS users prefer to mount the USB drive using the command-line method as they are used to working around the terminal. If you are one of them, you have to manually mount the USB drive in your CentOS terminal to access the USB data.
This post will demonstrate to you how to mount a USB drive in CentOS. So, let’s start!
Docker Compose is a tool that is utilized for defining and running several containers as a single service. It is used in staging, development, and testing environments. Docker Compose works by defining a stack in its “.yml” file and then executing it by utilizing docker-compose command. Docker Compose permits you to link multiple containers together and deploy an application with only one command. It also assists in maintaining the continuity of the Integration workflow.
Using Docker Compose, you can create multiple containers and add local or official images such as “Nginx”. Inside a Docker Container, you can install packages, add or remove various settings of that specific container. In this post, we will talk about how to use Nginx with Docker Compose.
To use Nginx with Docker Compose, you need to install and enable Docker and Docker Compose on your system. Follow the post to proceed with the installation procedure.
You may require more than one operating system at once while keeping your device on a single parent OS. You can do so by using a third-party tool to install the other operating system virtually and can be used: for example, VirtualBox is being widely used to get the Linux-based OS on your host operating system. Most of the users keep Windows as their primary OS and install the other operating system on virtual machines. Contrary to these virtual machines access, you can make a live USB of the secondary OS that helps to use that operating system without affecting the functionality of the primary OS.
The apt-get command is a common and useful Linux command. Linux OS users have definitely used the “apt-get” command. If you are new to Linux, then you must know the usage of this command. The “apt-get” command is the Advanced Package Tool (APT) that handles software installation and removing. In this Article, several uses of apt-get commands on Debian 11(Linux OS) will be discussed in detail which will be very helpful for both beginners and users of the Debian system.
The apt and apt-get commands are used for management of packages, the difference is that all the functions performed by apt-get, apt-cache and apt-config commands are solely performed by apt command so this is also the reason that apt command is now getting popular day by day.
Not many Linux editors can match the processing power of Okteta in terms of handling the complexities of raw data files. Okteta meets its functional objectives through the implementation of simplified algorithmic raw data display mechanisms.
PHP 8.0 is a significant update of the PHP language released on November 26, 2020, a giant leap forward from the existing PHP 7.4 release. The new PHP contains many new features and optimizations, including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operators, JIT and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 8.0 on openSUSE 15 Leap.
NGINX is an open-source, free HTTP server software. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for e-mail (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers. The goal behind NGINX was to create the fastest web server around, and maintaining that excellence is still a central goal of the Nginx project. NGINX consistently beats Apache and other servers in benchmarks measuring web server performance and is now the most popular used web server according to W3Tech.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using the default Ubuntu repository or the alternative PPA by Ondà â¢ej Surý with a free TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
According to the su man page, the su command is used to either become another user during a login session or switch to the superuser.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Logwatch on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Logwatch is a customizable, pluggable log-monitoring system. It will go through your logs for a given period of time and generate a report and then mail the details to your email.
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 Logwatch monitoring log file 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.
No, it is no Duff beer if that rings a bell. Today, we are talking about Duf disk utility, an open-source, free “Disk Usage Free Utility” written in Goland and released under MIT license. The disk utility supports multi-platforms such as BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Duf is a command-line utility to find disk usage in Linux and Unix-like systems terminals. One of the excellent features of Duf is its ability to display the disk usage details in a beautiful, user-friendly layout in tab form. Some extra features with Duf include disk usage out in JSON output.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Duf on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Today we are looking at how to install Shotcut video editor on a Chromebook Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this video, we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on Linux Lite 5.4.
This guide will show you how to use “find” and “locate” commands to find files and directories on your Linux file systems.
There are times when you want to access a specific file but can’t find it on your Linux system. While there are many ways with which we can search and locate files and directories on Linux, the easiest and quickest is probably through the terminal.
The new stable Steam Client update is packed with lots of goodies for Linux users, starting with the availability of the PipeWire desktop capture feature, which can be enabled if you launch the Steam Client with the -pipewire command-line option.
It also reduces the size of Vulkan pre-caching datasets by splitting and versioning them according to the capabilities of your graphics driver, as well as of Proton versions available in your system. Due to this change, the Vulkan pre-caching datasets will start from scratch after updating to the new Steam Client version.
The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). This beta 6 build provides additional features and fixes to bugs reported against previous builds.
If you already reviewed the changelog for the previous beta, you can skip right to the differences between beta 5 and beta 6.
As usual, you can try it live with the online version of the Godot editor updated for this release.
Gaming phones have been around for years at this point, but in many ways, they’re just beginning to hit their stride. Early models played it safe, while newer models are much bolder about being gaming-first devices. The RedMagic 6S Pro is a perfect example of this. Not only does it pack some serious punch in the chipset and hardware, but it’s full of gaming features, not to mention style. Let’s take a further look in this review.
Want to see inside a Steam Deck? Valve has delivered in the latest video although they're keen to remind people not to do any of this yourself.
Valve say it's both a "How to" video and a "Why you shouldn't do any of this". Although they mention once you have it you have a right to do so, it's not recommended. With everything packed so tightly together they're giving a warning about damage to batteries, something that could cause a fire so there's a threat to your life kind of warning involved if you do it wrong. The warranty also doesn't cover any damage done by you if you really choose to do this.
Valve’s Steam Deck is a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display, built-in game controllers, a custom AMD processor with RDNA 2 graphics, and a starting price of $399, which makes the Steam Deck one of the most affordable devices in its category.
But the entry-level model has just 64GB of eMMC storage, which means you have to pay $529 or more to get a version with a faster, higher-capacity PCIe NVMe solid state drive. The good news is a new video from Valve shows exactly how to open up the Steam Deck and add or upgrade an SSD. The bad news is Valve highly recommends you don’t actually do that, since there’s a high risk that you’ll damage your device.
Gaming on linux has always been fairly niche but it's slowly over time gaining more traction, and for the past 3 months Linux gamers have made up 1% of the market share, that might now sound like a lot but let's put that into perspective.
But over the years, GNOME packed on the pounds until my laptop, with its Sempron 3000+ and 1 GB of RAM just could not run it anymore. At least not if you wanted to do anything with the laptop.
[...]
GNOME is the only desktop that actually supports them properly out of the box, and that’s why I got so used to GNOME on Fedora and carried over using GNOME on this PC.
Much of the work on proper scaling support was Canonical, because hey, open source. Everyone has an itch to scratch and at the end of the day, hopefully problems get solved.
I doubt Red Hat ever would have looked into this. How many corporate laptops, or headless servers, are going to benefit from HiDPI displays that basically Macs and a few PCs have in them?
In closing, Bunsenlabs is just not a distribution I can say I recommend.
It’s not enough of a RAM savings that anything remotely modern will benefit too much from, and if you’re under that much memory pressure, you should probably look into setting up a KDE distribution with ZSwap in play.
I can’t see the reason to recommend a desktop with less features, or one with a higher learning curve, or one that they’re just shoving all of GNOME into anyway to a person when they ask what can be done for an older system.
I do think the fact that nobody is worried about doing better than KDE is, is a little concerning, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the situation on Windows. Since Microsoft considers a 3 year old PC ancient trash, and your RAM modules are soldered in, good luck trying to upgrade that. But moving over to a nice efficient GNU/Linux distribution is one way to buck the trend in software bloat.
Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming has been updated to 27.1.2.
The Mozilla Thunderbird email client has been updated to 91.2.0 and shipped to the software repository for PCLinuxOS.
The Signal Desktop messaging client with privacy in mind has been updated to 5.19.0 and shipped to the software repository.
Apart from the object to build arch minimal base without systemd and its libraries, the idea or question that came to mind was whether you can build all your packages from the Arch recipes. Since Artix now is autonomous and relies on its own software base, not Arch, the same question applies, and I suppose the same applies to Manjaro. Most of the core pkgbuilds in Artix are just copies of Arch. Systemd may not be there but many of its libraries or pieces are still there. But let’s say you just want to build Arch, authentic and 100% true arch.
The short answer is NO! The long answer is explained here:
The minimal base/chroot of a system you must have to build Arch packages is base + base-devel – linux or boot loader. This is a chroot that Arch describes. Any additional dependencies are listed in the PKGBUILD as (dependencies, makedepends, checkdepends, …). So by adding the prescribed added dependencies you must have all that you need to build the “prescribed package”, right?
Less than five months after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, Red Hat today released the beta version of it flagship server operating system, RHEL 8.5. Along with improvements and new features that are an expected part of any Red Hat release, this beta release is also easier for users to access and take for a test drive that previous betas have been.
It also continues the 6-month release cadence that Red Hat announced at Red Hat Summit 2019, when it first introduced the RHEL 8 family. Assuming that things stay on schedule, the ready-for-prime-time version of RHEL 8.5 should drop in November.
Red Hat today made available the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 (RHEL 8.5) beta, incorporating a half-year of improvements to this flagship enterprise Linux distribution.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 beta brings a number of evolutionary improvements to RHEL8. Among the RHEL 8.5 Beta highlights are:
- New system roles for Microsoft SQL Server, VPN configuration, Postfix (this role now fully supported), NTS timesync, and LVM VDO storage volume handling.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 is the fifth maintenance update to the latest and greatest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system series and brings various new features to RHEL’s web console, such as live kernel patching without using the command line tooling and enhanced performance metrics to help you identify and prevent performance issues.
Also new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 are several new system roles for configuring, automating, and managing services on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations. These include RHEL system role for VPN, RHEL system role for Postfix, RHEL system role for timesync, RHEL system role for Storage, and RHEL system role for Microsoft SQL Server.
Stratasys has unveiled a data security platform for additive manufacturing to help meet the cybersecurity requirements of U.S. government and defense agencies as they increase adoption of 3D printing.
The company said Thursday its ProtectAM offering uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, which provides continuous data security in compliance with the requirements outlined in the Defense Information System Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide.
David Egts, chief technologist for North America public sector at Red Hat, said the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps users meet software security requirements for sensitive computing without compromising scalability, innovation and flexibility.
On the surface, it’s easy to see IT hiring difficulties as a symptom of the pandemic. 2020 alone was an exercise in roller-coaster talent economics, and some recent reports indicate that hiring is slowing as fears of rising case numbers swell.
But to place the blame solely at the feet of the pandemic belies the fact that there’s been a consistent widespread need for exceptional IT talent for years. As recently as 2019 organizations struggled to find the right people for their IT positions.
At issue is the hiring process itself. Understandably, many recruitment efforts have emphasized technical experience over soft skills, which are harder to measure but by no means less important. By narrowing their focus, potential employers have limited their talent pool and left no room for less traditional, more diverse applicants. What’s missing, it seems, is a focus on aptitude – the unstated skillset that breeds innovation and drives new ways of thinking.
DevSecOps is in many ways another level of DevOps maturity for an enterprise. Executive management and other stakeholders understand the concept of a maturity model, making it a helpful way to explain the value of this shift. Following a maturity model also helps you tell a story that includes the people, process, and technology changes that come with a DevOps-to-DevSecOps transformation.
The open source world provides numerous libraries for building applications. Finding the most appropriate one can be difficult. There are multiple criteria to consider when selecting a library for an application: Is the project well maintained by a healthy community? Does the library fit into the application stack? Will it work well on the target platform? The list of potential questions is large, and a negative response to any of them might lead you to reject a project and look for another one that provides similar functionality.
Project Thoth, a set of tools for building robust Python applications, is creating a database of information about available projects. This article is a progress report and an invitation to join project2vec, which is currently a proof of concept. The ideas behind this project can be applied to other language ecosystems, as well.
Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora Linux before, this is a perfect way to get started.
When it comes to adopting DevSecOps, organizations sometimes focus on overarching goals like improving business agility or digital transformation. Such a broad scope can make DevSecOps adoption difficult. Instead, companies might find more success by breaking down their focus into three areas: increasing team collaboration, incorporating a new mindset with tools, and measuring progress.
Davie Street Enterprises (DSE), our fictional case study company with real-world problems, has made significant progress in its modernization efforts in this past year. The company has automated a large part of its IT infrastructure and has completely revamped its development processes using DevSecOps.
It has also rebuilt the Parts and Supply (PAS) system to allow for more efficient supply chain management. With these successes behind it, DSE is feeling a little more confident in its plans to transform the company.
Canonical has released “Ubuntu Frame,” a Wayland based fullscreen graphics shell for Ubuntu Core and other snaps-enabled distros for designing secure, easily deployable interactive kiosk, signage, and IoT applications.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Frame is not a GUI application, but rather a fullscreen graphics shell for third-party graphics applications. The shell software is based on the widely adopted Wayland display server, which was fully embraced in Ubuntu 21.04 after a long transition from Canonical’s homegrown Mir. Ubuntu Frame is designed to run under Ubuntu Core, although it can run on standard Ubuntu variants and any distro that supports Canonical’s containerized snaps package mechanism (see farther below).
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame. The new product seeks to give developers a way to easily build and deploy applications on embedded displays such as interactive kiosks and digital signage solutions.
According to the company, the availability of Ubuntu Frame now means that developers do not need to integrate and maintain partial solutions such as DRM, KMS, input protocols or security policies. This will free up more time for developers to focus on content that’ll be shown on the display and reduce the number of bugs and vulnerabilities in code that is no longer necessary.
Canonical has announced and released the Ubuntu Frame display server for embedded systems such as interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other embedded devices with a graphical output. The solution aims to allow developers to build and deploy graphical applications more easily and quickly, as Ubuntu Frame requires less code since, as Canonical explains, there’s no need to integrate and maintain partial solutions such as DRM, KMS, input protocols, or security policies.
Ubuntu Frame fullscreen shell is based on Wayland, requires snaps support, and offers compatibility with existing graphical toolkits such as Flutter, Qt5/6, GTK3/4, Electron, and SDL2, as well as support for web-based graphical applications written with HTML5 and/or Java.
In this project, we’re going to be taking my previous Raspberry Pi Desktop Case design and adapting it to accommodate an SSD underneath the Pi.
The case uses the same Raspberry Pi and Ice Tower combination that I used on the last version, but this time I’m going to add a Geekworm mSata SSD shield and a 128gb SSD. I’ve chosen an mSata shield and drive as these are typically quite a bit cheaper than NVME drives, and you don’t get that much benefit from using an NVME drive as you’re limited by the maximum speed of the USB 3 port in any case. You only really benefit from an NVME drive if it is connected through a PCIe port.
You can buy a premade kit to assemble your own Pi SSD Case from my Etsy store.
The total circuit is incredibly compact for a complete CPU, using just 33 chips. This includes 64 KB of flash to store programs as well as a 555 timer to generate a clock signal. I/Os are limited to simple eight-bit input and output buses, but a sixteen-bit address bus gives it plenty of space to add ROM, RAM or fancier interfaces.
An Arduino Uno board controls Duco through a motor shield. It has two stepper motors, a servo motor, a linear actuator, and a UV light. It is capable of switching between two different pens — normally the conductive and dielectric ink. The UV light cures the ink after Duco applies it to a wall. Most of Duco’s frame parts were 3D-printed.
Museums allow people to explore topics in history, science, and much more through the use of exhibits that are often comprised of screens or some other interactive medium. Staff are given the role of visiting each one periodically and checking to see if they still work correctly as well as guide visitors around the area, thus taking them away from other tasks. To solve this problem, a pair from EDM Studio in Vancouver (Will Donaldson and Darran Edmundson) wanted to build an autonomous telepresence robotic platform, called “OMNi,” which could do both on its own.
Arduino has launched another Arduino Pro board! Well, sort of. Let’s not get too excited. The Portenta H7 Lite Connected is based on last month’s Portenta H7 Lite that itself was a cost-optimized version of Portenta H7 board without a wireless module, USB-C video output, and only fitted with the lower cost Microchip ATECC608 secure element.
Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox and Firefox ESR . An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Mozilla security advisories for Firefox 93, Firefox ESR 78.15, and Firefox ESR 91.2.
In the previous “dyn async traits” posts, I talked about how we can think about the compiler as synthesizing an impl that performed the dynamic dispatch. In this post, I wanted to start explore a theoretical future in which this impl was written manually by the Rust programmer. This is in part a thought exercise, but it’s also a possible ingredient for a future design: if we could give programmers more control over the “impl Trait for dyn Trait” impl, then we could enable a lot of use cases.
Let’s face it, if you have ever used the internet or signed up for an online account, or even read a blog post like this one, chances are that your data has left a permanent mark on the interwebs and online services have exploited your data without your awareness for a very long time.
The Fight for Privacy
The fight for privacy is compounded by the rise in misinformation and platforms like Facebook willingly sharing information that is untrustworthy, shutting down platforms like Crowdtangle and recently terminating the accounts of New York University researchers that built Ad Observer, an extension dedicated to bringing greater transparency to political advertising. We think a better internet is one where people have more control over their data.
It’s with great pleasure that I introduce Abby Parise, who is the latest addition to the Customer Experience team. Abby is taking the role of Support Content Manager, so you’ll definitely see more of her in SUMO. If you were with us or have watched September’s community call, you might’ve seen her there.
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more!
As far as we could remember, organizations from all over the world have supported the GNU Image Manipulation Program by mirroring 🪞 our file downloads. This is important as we may have to sustain dozens of thousands downloads a day.
JavaScript provides users with various methods and properties for string manipulation, to transform those strings or to search useful information from those strings. Sometimes we have various lines of code in which we need to make changes, search for a character or replace a character or remove a character from a string.
All these tasks become difficult to do and hence methods are provided by JavaScript that makes the job easier. Users can easily use these methods to manipulate a string and transform it. In this article we’ll discuss how to remove characters from strings in JavaScript, various ways and methods provided by JavaScript along with examples for your better understanding.
Manipulating string is a useful task while programming as it helps us in finding words, replacing words and especially for removing white spaces from string. JavaScript provides various built-in methods to users for manipulating with strings.
Removing whitespaces from a string can be complex when it comes to tabs and line breaks and while you’re working with various lines of codes but JavaScript provides users with methods through which it becomes easier to manipulate strings and remove whitespaces from them and that’s why in this article we’ll discuss different methods and ways to remove whitespaces from a string in JavaScript, their explanation and how they’re used along with examples.
Git helps to control the version of your projects. Git is a well-known software used by programmers to work in a collaborative manner to achieve specific goals. The Git repositories are hosted by GitHub that helps to work online and assist the programmers to share their project or code files there. Moreover, Git is backed up by several operations or commands also like Git stash, Git stash apply, Git stash pop, Git stash drop. Inspired by the importance of Git, today’s guide will provide fundamental information about Git stash and Git stash pop; and use of both commands/operations in Ubuntu.
Git is an open-source software with version control support that allows the users to store, edit and track the changes of projects.
There are various benefits in using Git that include: fast and efficient processing on shared projects as well as monitoring the security of the projects. However, one of the major reasons for the emergence of Git is the remote repository access; the Git remote repository is available on the server and multiple contributors can make changes to it. Users can clone the remote repository to their machines and can retrieve required information from Git repository locally or it can help to do experimental analysis on the files of the repository without affecting its originality on the server. This cloning phenomenon allows to establish the connection between git remote repository and local repository; moreover, it also supports creating several clones of a single git repository so that multiple stakeholders can get access to the same project and can-do changes parallelly. The terminal support of Ubuntu can be used to add or remove the remote repositories as your local one.
Git support of managing local and remote repositories has contributed to making computing a better experience. The remote repositories are managed on the server, whereas local repos are maintained on the machine and can be accessed without internet availability. Git offers two streaming supports: one is upstream, and the other is downstream; the upstream refers to where you clone your rep, and downstream allows you to integrate your work with other works.
As Git is distributed version control software, working in a parallel manner may acquire the confusion state as there are several contributors making changes on a single project. Thus, it is recommended that the remote and local repositories must be synchronized to avoid any mishaps like you may require to fall back to some previous versions, which can be budget and time-consuming.
While working in an environment where sometimes you have to make changes on remote, and you want that same changes must be present on your local repository as well. Keeping in view the importance of synchronization, we have prepared this guide to demonstrate the steps of keeping the local repository the same as remote...
Git is one of the well-known repositories for version control systems and used widely among programmers to keep an eye on the changes being performed regularly. Sometimes, it is observed that fetching the history does not fulfill the purpose of it; so, you need to filter the content accordingly. Git provides this facility with its git log command; git log is used to display the content from history by filtering it according to the options provided.
If you have a long list of commits and you want just basic information about commits; then the git log command provides a one line display of every commit. We have prepared this post to demonstrate the usage of git log command to get the output of commit in one line only: Let’s start this guide from general usage of git log followed by our targeted area:
In Qt 5.10, we added support for recursive filtering in QSortFilterProxyModel, which means keeping all parents of items matching the filter.
One of the comments in the blog post about that feature was “Sometimes, you do not only want to show parents for a match (so the match is visible), you may (also) want to show children for a match”. This is indeed something I saw a need for, more than once. For instance, you filter a large tree for a project name but then you want to see all sub-tasks of that project as well, rather than see only those that contain the project name while those that do not are hidden.
With a MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo merge (at 922 commits and 335 files changed by 16 contributors), the work on the new-disp branch that started about 18 months ago, was finally made mainstream. Special kudos to everybody who was involved in what was the biggest internal change since the MoarVM backend was initially conceived. Jonathan Worthington reports about in The new MoarVM dispatch mechanism is here! (/r/rakulang, Twitter comments).
After several alpha, beta and rc tests, the Python programming language finally released version 3.10 today!
Python 3.10 will receive bug-fix updates in next 18 months. After that, it’s supported with 5-year security updates until October 2026.
Python is an interpreted language; it has different libraries to perform various functions. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is actually a web address to open a specific site. Sometimes while working in python we need to fetch data from a website, for this we have to open the url of a specific website. So, to open a URL in python we need to import the specified module and perform some steps to open that URL. In this article we will discuss how to open a URL in Python using “urllib.request” and “webbrowser” modules on Ubuntu (Linux OS) through a defined procedure.
There are many useful methods of Python which we can use in our programs. One of the handy methods is python readline() method, it reads one complete line from a specified file at a time by default. You can also read more than one line or complete file using readline() method using different conditions like using size argument. The readline() method inserts a new line (\n) at the end of returned String.
In this Article we discussed the usage of the readline() method in python and how to run it on a Linux system.
We can rename files in Linux terminal using different approaches, one of the approaches is using Python which is discussed in this article. We cannot write Python code directly on the terminal, we create a separate file in a text editor. The “rename” is one of the operating system functions so we will use a Python OS module for this purpose.
Sed command is a Linux utility that can be used to perform lot of operations that includes insert and delete operations, find/search and replace operations. The sed command allows Linux users to edit and apply several functions on files without opening them directly. The sed command support editing functionalities that vary from beginners’ level to advanced level: For instance, inside a text file these operations can be performed on several datatypes: characters, numeric, special characters, alphanumeric et.,
Keeping in view the importance of sed command; our today’s guide will explore several ways to remove special characters using sed command in Ubuntu.
Stream Editor (sed) is known as a powerful editor because of its wide range of supported functionalities like substituting, editing, deleting and many more. While Stream Editor has the long list of characters that provide assistance to manage the files automatically: these characters are enclosed in a set of similar characters known as Character Classes; these classes contain the characters of alike families.
For instance, the digits while using sed are accessed through [[:digit:]] class and the alphanumeric characters are stored in the class named as [[:alnum:]]. Similarly, all the characters belong to some specific character class; knowing the importance of these classes, our today’s guide is focused to provide a deep insight into character classes in sed.
This is the second article as part of bash arrays. In the previous article, we have discussed how to work with Indexed arrays in Bash. In this guide, we will discuss about Bash Associative Array in detail with examples in Linux.
Associative arrays work based on key-value pairs. In some languages, it is also called dictionaries or hash maps. The main difference between Indexed and Associative arrays is, Indexed arrays works based on index value, and each element in the array is mapped to a particular index position of the array. An associative array uses a "key" to map the value instead of index positions.
On Linux, there are commands to view processes running on your system. A process is any ongoing event being managed by the kernel. A process is spawned when you launch an application, but there are also many other processes running in the background of your computer, including programs to keep your system time accurate, to monitor for new filesystems, to index files, and more. The utilities, such as those included in the procps-ng package, that monitor these processes tend to be intentionally generic. They look at all processes on your computer so you can filter the list based on what you need to know.
On Linux, you can view processes with the ps command. It is the simplest way to view the running processes on your system.
Qwant is a European search engine that respects your privacy. I learned about it from a Twitter thread. The European Processor Initiative announced last week that their first RiscV test chip samples were delivered and booted successfully. I tweeted that I would be happy to see not just European CPUs but also European software services, alternatives to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.
I wanted to make a historical list of phones that I’ve owned over the years and the reasons why I purchased them in particular. I generally buy phones on the ‘S’ year (tick-tock cycle) when the small improvements have been made to it over time versus the major redesign years!
“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke”. That’s what we guess [Frans Bos] has been thinking for the past few decades, as he kept using his Atari ST to run a booking system for the family campground. (Video, embedded below.)
Although its case has yellowed a bit, the trusty old machine is still running 24/7 from April to October, as it has done every year since 1985. In the video [Frans] demonstrates the computer and its custom campground booking system to [Victor Bart].
Challenging the scepticism and resistance in the public response to the COVID-19 vaccine is deeply important to the state of public health. This is a critical conversation because people are protesting the COVID-19 vaccines not just in South Africa, but globally too.
As a teacher of political philosophy, I think it’s important to dispel the notion that the call to vaccinate is an infringement on acceptable liberal freedoms.
Based on a significant number of years of studying, reading and teaching the works of the world’s most important philosophies, I am of the view that the anti-vaxxer position that being “forced to take the vaccine is an infringement on their liberal rights” is a misinformed stance.
Ampere is committed to supporting open-source firmware on its platforms. Open-source firmware is critical to the datacenter ecosystem and future innovation. Our customers require these solutions to work seamlessly on their platforms. In this whitepaper, we discuss how Ampere meets this need through our support for TianoCore/EDK, LinuxBoot, OpenBMC and OpenOCD.
We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware.
Ampere has already proven themselves as the most capable AArch64 server vendor to date and with their new Ampere Altra Max at 128 cores per socket showing they can compete with the latest offerings from AMD and Intel for highly scalable workloads. They are also now making inroads on their open-source firmware strategy.
At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions.
Hiroyuki Fukuchi and Kazumi Sato of Sony had an interesting presentation about how they have utilized open-source/Linux over the past two decades in their consumer electronics and how their relationship with open-source has evolved over that time. It also covered their work on establishing an open-source program office at the company and how their contributions have most recently changed.
LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, today announced its 5G Super Blueprint initiative will host use case demonstrations across 5G, edge, IoT, and cloud native during Open Networking & Edge (ONE) Summit + Kubernetes on Edge Day, October 11-12, 2021.
The 5G Super Blueprint is a community-driven integration of multiple open source initiatives that, collaboratively, demonstrate end-to-end use cases of end user implementation architectures. LFN creates a framework based on these integrated initiatives and projects to then develop blueprints, defined by a community-driven process that allows end-to-end solution use cases across vertical markets.
Well, that's different. Most of the time when a business realizes a process helps them they embrace it. But, despite 69% of financial technology leaders saying open-source software and methodology increases productivity, they're not so keen on implementing governance programs. This insight came from the Fintech Open Source Foundation's (FINOS) 2021 State of Open Source in Financial Services Survey.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cryptopp), Mageia (apache), Slackware (httpd), and Ubuntu (squid, squid3).
Reproducible Builds
There have been 3 releases of rebuilderd this month, 0.14.0, and two minor bugfix releases, 0.14.1 and 0.14.2.
The 0.14.0 release introduced experimental support to rebuild Tails images in #66. Tails is a portable operating system that’s known for it’s strong focus on privacy and security, and commonly used by activists, journalists and various human-rights NGOs. It already had reproducible images for a long time (since around 2017), but you had to reproduce the images manually. Starting with this release you can setup rebuilderd to monitor Tails for new releases and automatically attempt to recreate the release from source, on your own independent build system
The goal behind “reproducible builds” is to ensure that no deliberate flaws have been introduced during compilation processes via promising or mandating that identical results are always generated from a given source. This allowing multiple third-parties to come to an agreement on whether a build was compromised or not by a system of distributed consensus.
In these reports we outline the most important things that have been happening in the world of reproducible builds in the past month:
-TuxCare announced today the availability of DatabaseCare, its live patching service for the most common open-source enterprise-grade databases, MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL -- which is a first in the industry.
A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide.
No details about the hack. It could be nothing. It could be a national intelligence service looking for information.
The Apache Software Foundation has released Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.50 to address two vulnerabilities. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. One vulnerability, CVE-2021-41773, has been exploited in the wild.
Another breach of the year 2021 is the Twitch Data Leak, which comprises 125GB of company data as well as the platform’s source code. An anonymous member on 4chan leaked the data on October 6, 2021.
Twitch confirmed the incident on Twitter yesterday, following the release of the data. Twitch has not revealed any information about the incident, such as how such sensitive information was stolen by the hacker.
There is still no sufficient outcome to Access Now’s request for an investigation into the potential role data disclosure between the EU and Belarus played in the grounding of Ryanair flight FR4978, and kidnapping of Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich, and partner, Sofia Sapega.
On September 27, European Commissioner Ylva Johansson partially answered some questions raised in the letter sent on August 25, and indicated that “based on information gathered […] neither have the Belarusian authorities requested [Lithuania and Greece] to provide [PNR] information, nor have these Member States provided any data”.
Access Now welcomes the initial reply, and will continue to follow up with the Commission to understand how this investigation was conducted, and to request answers to the original additional questions regarding the potential sharing of PNR data via other data sharing agreements, including Interpol.
No to internet shutdowns in Iraq these elections — Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition demand an open, accessible, and secure internet for all.
“Iraq’s long history of shutting down the internet during times of national importance must not repeat during this upcoming election,” said Hayder Hamzoz, Founder of INSM Network for Digital Rights in Iraq. “People in Iraq have the right to access information, express opinion, and communicate with each other — all vital elements of the democratic process.”
Scheduled for October 10, Iraq’s twice postponed general elections are a target for authorities seeking to censor and disconnect the population. The country’s record of shutting down the internet is long and deliberate, and includes a near-total shutdown and blocking of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social and messaging apps throughout large-scale protests in 2019, and shutdowns during unrest in Basra in 2018.
Global outage is the company’s latest headache, as whistleblower accuses it of putting profits above safety and privacy.
Counsel from India discuss the changing role of in-house lawyers and steps they can take for a sustainable future
On September 28, Unilin Technologies successfully defended an opposition against its European Patent EP 3294969 B1 (“the '969 Patent”). The European Patent Office dismissed all arguments regarding novelty and inventive step of the opponent in a nine-hour oral hearing and decided that the ‘969 Patent was valid.
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Unilin and the Mohawk group have been for many years practicing one of the embodiments of the technology through its Hydroseal, WetProtect and Revwood products. More recently, Unilin Technologies added the technology to its worldwide
With regard to patents, the legislation intends to introduce a preliminary patent application. However, the information available does not outline what this procedure would look like. There is also a plan to incorporate all provisions concerning patents contained in other acts, which would lead to the repeal of the Act on the Filing of European Patent Applications and the Effects of European Patent in the Republic of Poland (14 March 2003).
If we want to reach the climate goals set for 2030 and 2050, we are going to have to do our utmost to continue developing sustainable energy technologies. In order to make appropriate government policy, it is important whether a technology builds primarily on earlier technology or depends on scientific research. This is the contention of doctoral candidate Peter Persoon.
Hundreds of thousands of patents relating to energy technology are registered with the European Patent Office. By referring in turn to other patents, each of these documents forms part of a huge technological knowledge network, in some way comparable to academic publications within a specialty. "Not every technology is patented and many patents will never be used," explains Peter Persoon. "But the great thing is that every patent offers a detailed description and has been put through a quality check."
And so patents can shed light on the knowledge structure underpinning sustainable energy technologies such as wind turbines and solar cells, Persoon points out. For his doctoral studies at Technology, Innovation & Society (TIS), the physicist delved into this mountain of patents. "What does a technology like this need in order to be taken further? What kind of parties are involved in this development, and where can they be found?"
As it awaits a decision from the Federal Trade Commission on its vaping partnership with Juul Labs Inc., Altria Group Inc. has been ordered to stop importing and marketing iQos tobacco-heating products in the United States.
Last week, the International Trade Commission issued a final determination that Altria and Philip Morris International Inc. infringed upon two patents owned by British American Tobacco’s Reynolds American Inc. subsidiary.
Patent filing can seem complex. If you’re thinking of filing a patent, but aren’t sure where to start, you’re in the right place. Here, we cut through the jargon to identify eight key things to know about the pre-filing, filing and post-filing process.
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In Europe, it’s possible to file a patent application at the European Patent Office (EPO) from which you can centrally prosecute an application. Granted ‘EP’ patents can be validated in a number of countries post-grant. Note that the EPO isn’t related to the EU. Patents granted by the EPO can be validated in the UK.
After Amazon settled a case against two influencers who encouraged the sale of counterfeits on its site, some brands question its desire to go after the big guns
