OK. So you installed a "free as in freedom" operating system like GNU/Linux, but are we ever completely free from Microsoft Windows?
I've been wanting to go through Linux from Scratch for quite a while and we recently started doing so on stream and I've got to say the experience has certainly been interesting.
IBM engineer Pratik Sampat published an early prototype of a CPU namespace interface for the Linux kernel. This CPU namespace was devised to address coherency issues with current means of viewing available CPU resources as well as addressing possible security issues stemming from understanding resource access/positioning on the system.
Capa is an open source project from Mandiant (a cybersecurity company). In the project's own words, capa detects capabilities in executable files. Although the primary target of Capa is unknown and possibly malicious executables, the examples in this article run Capa on day-to-day Linux utilities to see how the tool works.
Given that most malware is Windows-based, earlier Capa versions only supported the PE file format, a dominant Windows executable format. However, starting with v3.0.0, support for ELF files has been added (thanks to Intezer).
With a growing number of cloud-native applications going to production through Kubernetes adoption, security is an important checkpoint that you must consider early in the process. When designing a cloud-native application, it is very important to embed a security strategy up front. Failure to do so leads to lingering security issues that can cause project delays and ultimately cost you unnecessary stress and money.
For years, people left security at the end—until their deployment was about to go into production. That practice causes delays on deliverables because each organization has security standards to adhere to, which are either bypassed or not followed with a lot of accepted risks to make the deliverables.
Understanding Kubernetes NetworkPolicy can be daunting for people just starting to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes implementation. But this is one of the fundamental requirements that you must learn before deploying an application to your Kubernetes cluster. When learning Kubernetes and cloud-native application patterns, make your slogan "Don't leave security behind!"
I have a confession to make. This may be an unpopular opinion. I actually enjoy reading documents on a piece of paper as opposed to digitally. When I want to try a new recipe, I print it out to follow it so I don't have to continually swipe my mobile device to keep up with the steps. I store all my favorite recipes in sheet protectors in a binder. I also like to print out coloring pages or activity sheets for my kids. There are a ton of options online or we create our own!
Though I have a fond appreciation for printed documents, I have also had my fair share of printing nightmares. Paper jams, low ink, printer not found, the list of frustrating errors goes on and on.
Thankfully, it is possible to print frustration-free on Linux. Below are three tutorials you need to get started printing on Linux. The first article walks through how to connect your printer to your Linux computer. Then, learn how to print from anywhere in your house using your home network. The last article teaches you how to print from your Linux terminal so you can live out all your productivity dreams. If you are in the market for a new printer, check out this article about choosing a printer for Linux.
I like logical commands; commands that are simple, straightforward, and just make sense. When I delivered Linux sysadmin training, I found Linux user management commands to be easy to explain.
I recently had to renew the SSL certificate for my web server, nothing exciting about that but Certbot created a new directory for the key because I had removed some domains (moved to a different web server). This normally isn’t a big deal, change the Apache configuration to the new file names and run the “reload” command. My monitoring system initially said that the SSL certificate wasn’t going to expire in the near future so it looked fine. Then an hour later my monitoring system told me that the certificate was about to expire, apparently the old certificate came back!
I viewed my site with my web browser and the new certificate was being used, it seemed strange. Then I did more tests with gnutls-cli which revealed that exactly half the connections got the new certificate and half got the old one. Because my web server isn’t doing anything particularly demanding the mpm_event configuration only starts 2 servers, and even that may be excessive for what it does. So it seems that the Apache reload command had reloaded the configuration on one mpm_event server but not the other!
Data Integration ensures that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems. Although it is still frequently referred as Extract-Transform-Load (ETL), data integration was initially considered as the architecture used for loading Enterprise Data Warehouse systems.
Data integration now includes data movement, data synchronization, data quality, data management, and data services. Oracle Data Integrator s built on several components all working together around a centralized metadata repository.
Also these components – graphical modules, runtime agents and web based interfaces – in conjunction with other advanced features make ODI a lightweight, state of the art data integration platform.
With its superior performance and flexible architecture, Oracle Data Integrator can_be used in various types of projects such as Data Warehousing, SOA, Business Intelligence or Application Integration.
Modern business environment demands Web and e-commerce applications that accelerate your entry into new markets like a boom ! help you find new ways to reach and retain customers, and allow you to introduce new products and services quickly. To build and deploy these new solutions, you need a proven, reliable e-commerce platform that can connect and empower all types of users while integrating your corporate data.
Oracle WebLogic Server is a unified and extensible platform for developing, deploying and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and in the cloud.
Hi Guys ! Today, we will discuss about Oracle WebLogic server. We have got through some intro & now will have a glimpse of some architectural overview of this Oracle Middle ware product, Then we will go the how to’s. Don’t get bored till then !
WebLogic Server operates in the middle tier of a multi tier (or n-tier) architecture. A multi tier architecture determines where the software components that make up a computing system are executed in relation to each other and to the hardware, network, and users. Choosing the best location for each software component lets you develop applications faster; eases deployment and administration; and provides greater control over performance, utilization, security, scalability, and reliability.
It is always not possible to remember all the secret keys, passphrases, and tokens. Sometimes managing and maintaining secrets might be challenging tasks. We may need to store such secrets somewhere which we can use when needed. Hashicorp Vault is a solution that can be used to store secrets. It protects all the secrets stored on it and keeps secured. In this article, we will learn how to install Hashicorp vault on ubuntu 20.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Netdata on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Netdata is an open-source tool designed for the real-time system performance monitoring solution. It monitors processes such as memory, CPU utilization, disk input/output, network bandwidth, system applications, MySQL database among other system real-time metrics. The metrics are visualized on stunning interactive dashboards in form of graphical charts.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Netdata Monitoring tool on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In Linux, we can do many things and one of them is to create our own VPN. To do this, we will use well-known tools like OpenVPN and our beloved Debian 11. So, in this post, you will learn how to install OpenVPN Server on Debian 11.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tasksel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Tasksel is a Ubuntu tool that allows you to install multiple related packages as coordinated “tasks” onto your server. So instead of installing packages one by one, say for a LAMP stack, you can install a LAMP stack on one go as Tasksel groups packages together.
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 Tasksel 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.
This guide will show you how to install Apache Maven on Ubuntu. You will also see how to verify the install and set up a basic project for testing purposes.
Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java servlet and Java Server Page container. Developers build and deploy dynamic java-based applications using Apache Tomcat. Java servlets are small java programs defining how a server handles requests and responses. Developers write the servlets while Tomcat handles all the backend and routing. As it is an opensource tool, Apache Tomcat is contributed by developers all over the world.
Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java HTTP web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat helps to deploy the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages and serves them like an HTTP web server.
File compression and decompression is an important milestone for any Linux user. It saves you some significant storage space when dealing with sizable data. Also, we cannot overlook the data security implementations successfully contributed by reputable file compression tools.
Compressed files are safer from data corruption and compromise than uncompressed files. The success of file compression and decompression depends on the tool you use for the task.
Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project initially developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous Linux operating system kernel creator. Git is designed for developers that need a pretty straightforward version control system. Most software is collaborative efforts and sometimes can have hundreds of people with commits working on software development projects. It is essential to track these commits customarily done in branches in most projects before being merged into the master for release. It is easy to review and track down any incorrect commits and revert, leading to a much easier development if anything goes wrong.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Ubuntu come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, a PPA repository, or manually using the beta drivers for an example, thus giving you the latest in software available.
Installing themes on Xubuntu is similar to Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. You put the theme files in the ~/.themes folder and then use a tool to change it.
However, some options or the user interface will look different considering Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment. This is why I created this specific tutorial to show the steps with proper screenshots.
A virtual CAN interface is the perfect solution when developing CAN nodes, without needing an actual physical CAN bus. Think of a virtual CAN interface as a software CAN adapter, through which you can access an emulated CAN bus. The SocketCAN subsystem of the Linux kernel comes with build-in support for virtual CAN interfaces. This tutorial explains in detail how to create and use a virtual CAN interface on your Linux system.
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems (which is now the subsidiary of Oracle) in the year 1995. James Gosling is known as the father of Java.
Java and the JVM (Java’s virtual machine) are required for many kinds of software, including Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, Cassandra and Jenkins.
In this guide we are going to explore how to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java Developer Kit (JDK) in Debian 11.
Today we are looking at how to install Tiled Map 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.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Vivaldi on Linux Lite 5.4.
Webmin is an administration web UI for managing UNIX-like operating systems. For example, if you have an Ubuntu server and want an easier way to create Samba shares on your system, Webmin is an excellent tool.
With Webmin, you can create Samba shares on Ubuntu Server through your web browser, easily manage permissions, etc. In this guide, we’ll show you how to use Webmin to configure Samba shares in Ubuntu Server the easy way.
Do you want to set up an FTP server on your Ubuntu Server system but don’t want to deal with configuration files? If so, Webmin is for you! Webmin is an excellent tool that allows users to manage UNIX-like servers with an easy-to-use web interface. Here’s how to use Webmin to set up an FTP server on Ubuntu.
NFS (AKA Network File System) is a handy networking tool that makes transferring files on Linux super fast. However, setting it up is tedious if you do not know what you are doing.
That’s where Webmin comes in. It’s a web UI manager for UNIX-like operating systems that makes setting up complex things like NFS easy. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can set up an NFS share with it.
It’s been a few weeks since the release of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (NASB). While some media outlets have criticized the game for lacking voice-overs, extra character skins, having a generic soundtrack, and a “cheap budget” feeling, a lot of these issues can be mitigated, thanks to the modding community. Players don’t have to wait for an official update to come out to enjoy quality-of-life upgrades to the game. If you want to make Nigel Thornberry look like Wario, you can do that. If you desire Reptar to look like Bowser or Yoshi, you can do that. If you hunger for more life to the game by adding voice-overs for the characters, you can do that. If you crave victory themes, you can do that. If you’re tired of the bland soundtrack for a particular stage and yearn for something better, you can do that. If you desire PlayStation-style buttons, you can do that.
A Jenkins node agent is essentially a worker node that performs operations requested by Jenkins. Jenkins will manage the node agent as well as the required tools. This guide will show you how to create an agent node in Jenkins.
A fix is being worked on, but might take a bit, sorry about that.
Up to now, text support in librsvg has been fairly limited. The text chapter in the SVG spec is pretty big and it contains features that are very much outside of my experience (right-to-left languages, vertical text). But now I think I have a plan for how to improve the text features.
[...]
All those fixes will appear in librsvg 2.52.3, due in a few days.
I want to add more tests for right-to-left and bidi text; they can be affected by many properties for which there are no tests right now.
After bidi text works reasonably well, I want to add support for positioning individual glyphs with the x/y/dx/dy properties. People from Wikimedia Commons really want this, to be able to lay out equations and such.
Once individual glyphs can be positioned independently, maybe textPath support, which cartographers really like for curved labels.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 08 to October 15.
MX Linux is a Debian-based Linux/GNU distribution aiming at elegance, stability, and performance.
We previously covered its new Fluxbox edition in the beta phase, but now the stable release is out. Let us explore what’s new with MX Linux 21 “Wildflower”.
MontaVista€® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux€® products and services, today announced that several Tier1 customers across the enterprise markets serviced by MontaVista, have selected MVShield because of its capabilities to offer Long-Term Support for CentOS with telecom grade features such as redundancy, high availability and high throughput with low latency.
Red Hat today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference unfurled a bevy of updates that promise to both make it easier to build and deploy applications on fleets of clusters based on its distribution of Kubernetes and manage the overall environment.
In this regard, Red Hat is providing ways for cloud-native deployments to be executed more quickly and accurately. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.4 provides ‘policy templating’ (a policy being the prescripted way data is managed in any given system) and zero-touch provisioning. Of particular use in edge i.e. Internet of Things (IoT) computing environments, Red Hat also here combines what the company calls ‘validated patterns for edge’ to reduce deployment complexity, save time and improve the accuracy of the cloud-native systems being developed.
Building a dream car doesn’t just revolve around factors like horsepower and interior finishes anymore. The automotive industry is going through some big changes as the electric vehicle market revs up and edge computing extends new capabilities for vehicle connectivity.
At Red Hat, we are working to enable a number of edge use cases—from telecommunications use cases with core network infrastructure for radio access networks to distributed computing for retail environments and manufacturing environments.
During the "Automotive transformation to software-defined vehicles" Ask the Expert session at Red Hat Summit this year, we discussed the car as the ultimate edge server and the role of Red Hat and other open source contributors in this fast-evolving industry. This post will cover some of the highlights from the session.
Onboarding new team members has been a struggle for many companies that rapidly switched to remote work or hybrid work. As an IT leader, you know that business success depends on having reliable and talented colleagues working together, whether virtually or in person. So how do you overcome the remote onboarding challenge?
Answering this question can be particularly difficult if yours is a "traditional" industry with a baked-in corporate culture. A company that’s been in the financial services industry for 100 years, for instance, is likely to have a tougher time revamping its onboarding processes than, say, a start-up that specializes in cloud services.
That’s not corporate ageism; it’s a trend that's been seen time and time again – and it will, unfortunately, inhibit your ability to onboard talented developers and other technologists with a diversity of backgrounds and experience.
The good news? Any organization, in any industry, can successfully “virtualize” its onboarding practices. In doing so, they invigorate their IT teams and add collaborative, innovative people.
Last week, we celebrated the Ubuntu 21.10 release on the Ubuntu On Air channel, where a wide range of guests discussed their Impish Indri highlights as well as some thoughts for the future. Today we thought we would share ours!
For Linux desktop users, Impish Indri contains a number of new features plus a preview or two for you to try out ahead of our LTS release next year with 22.04.
So here are our top 5 must try for Ubuntu Desktop 21.10...
In September, Canonical announced that it would be extending the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) of both Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by a further two years so that their total life reaches 10 years instead of eight. Canonical touts ESM as a paid product which it relies on for revenues, however, it’s actually possible to use ESM on three personal computers for free. Additionally, if you enable it, you get Livepatch on your system so you don’t have to restart for kernel updates.
Eben Upton posted on the official Raspberry Pi blog regarding the price increase, and while it’s rather unfortunate for buyers, it sounds necessary. The post cited, “the upsurge of demand for electronic products for home working and entertainment during the pandemic has descended into panic buying, as companies try to secure the components that they need to build their products.”
The company says it’s “expecting our supply chain challenges to continue through much of 2022.” Because of this, the price of some Raspberry Pi models is going to increase. Specifically, the older ones built on 40nm silicon will see a price increase.
The 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 will move to $45, which Raspberry Pi says happened because “cost increases caused by the current shortage mean that this product is not currently economically viable at this reduced price point. We are therefore moving it back to $45 on a temporary basis.”
“The integrated development environment Codesys for programmable logic controllers according to the IEC 61131-3 standards is hardware-independent software for application development in industrial automation,” according to Kontron. “Thanks to its open interfaces and security features, Codesys has distinguished itself as an industry 4.0 platform and facilitates data exchange between IIoT networks.”
Prior to this, Codesys has been available for Kontron’s PiXtend – a similar product that takes a standard Pi rather than a Compute Module.
Of this, the company said: Codesys V3 lets you memory-program controls. An integrated web visualisation tool is available for displaying your control elements, diagrams and graphics on your smartphone, tablet or PC.”
It was only last month that M5Stack launched the M5Stamp Pico module based on an ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP and heat-resistant plastic shell, but M5Stamp C3 board is already out with most of the same specifications and features but an ESP32-C3 RISC-V SoC replaces the ESP32 dual-core Xtensa processor.
M5Stamp C3 offers WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 with high bitrate and long-range connectivity and comes with the same heat-resistant plastic shell, but the company also highlights the RSA-3072-based secure boot and the AES-128-XTS-based flash encryption as a more secure way to address Bluetooth security concerns.
Alibaba introduces a range of RISC-V processors in the last few years with the Xuantie family ranging from the E902 micro-controller class core to the C910 core for servers in data centers. This also includes the XuanTie C906 core found in the Allwinner D1 single-core RISC-V processor.
While RISC-V is an open standard and there’s a fair share of open-source RISC-V cores available, many commercial RISC-V cores are closed source, but Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence speaking at the 2021 Apsara Conference, announced that T-Head had open-sourced four RISC-V-based Xuantie series processor cores, namely Xuantie E902, E906, C906, and C910, as well as related software and tools.
SiFive just shared word that at today's Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will "set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available."
Getting in your daily exercise is vital to living a healthy life and having proper form when squatting can go a long way towards achieving that goal without causing joint pain from doing them incorrectly. The Squats Counter is a device worn around the thigh that utilizes machine learning and TensorFlow Lite to automatically track the user’s form and count how many squats have been performed.
Creator Manas Pange started his project by flashing the tf4micro-moition-kit code to a Nano 33 BLE Sense, which features an onboard three-axis accelerometer. From there, he opened the Tiny Motion Trainer Experiment by Google that connects to the Arduino over Bluetooth and captures many successive samples of motion. After gathering enough proper and improper form samples, Manas trained, tested, and deployed the resulting model to the board.
Deskreen in action (src. Deskreen) Many computer users require extending their workspace with other monitors, like developers, software engineers, news reporters, and business analysts.
[...]
The project is a community-based product, which was released under the AGPL-3.0 License and maintained by a team of professionals.
The Jalopnik automotive site has posted an article on a (relatively) new set of open-source tools that can extract log data from Tesla cars.
The Netherlands Forensic Institute has reverse-engineered Tesla's file format and released the tools to interpret data...
The Payment Request API is a soon-to-be-recommended web standard that aims to make building low-friction and secure payment flows easier for developers. The browser facilitates the flow between a merchant website and "payment handlers". A payment handler can be built-in to the browser, a native app installed on user’s mobile device, or a Progressive Web App. Today, developers can use the Payment Request API to access several payment methods, including “basic-card” and Google Pay in Chrome on most platforms, Apple Pay in Safari, Digital Goods API on Google Play, and Secure Payment Confirmation in Chrome.
The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 95 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
Chrome 95.0.4638.54 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 95.
Chrome 95 has rolled out as stable today as the latest version of Google's web browser.
With Chrome 95 the previously-deprecated FTP support has been completely removed. There are also many new developer features available in Chrome 95 along with a number of mobile-focused additions.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 96 is beta as of October 21, 2021.
Following this week's release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status.
Next year Chrome will see version 100 and for ensuring a smooth transition, Chrome 96 Beta is adding a new flag to force the major version to already be advertised as version 100. The new developer-minded option will set the Chrome HTTP user-agent string to Chrome 100, for helping developers test their web sites / web applications against that three digit version number. As some particularly older scripts may be just checking for the two major digits, Google developers added this option early to help catch any areas that may not be correctly handling a three digit major version number.
The Brave browser will now default to the company's own search engine, claimed to preserve privacy, while a new Web Discovery Project aims to collect search data again with privacy protection.
The Brave web browser is based on the Google-sponsored Chromium engine but with features designed to prevent tracking, as well as an unusual reward system using its own cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT). Brave search will now be the default on new installs for desktop, Android, and iOS. Existing Brave users will keep their current default unless they choose to change it.
Gecko profiler Rust marker API has landed. It’s possible to add a profiler marker from the Rust to annotate a part of the code now. See the gecko-profiler crate for more information. Documentation is also coming soon.
Neos.io is a free open-source modern CMS solution for developers and designers. It is the ideal solution for enterprise and developers.
Neos.io is packed with dozens of features aiming to be easy to use for content creators and editors, effortlessly customized by designers, and extensible for developers.
Developers can easily build custom themes, custom content models, plugins to add new features and functions and integrate 3rd party services and solutions.
Neos.io offers long-term support for its releases, which means every production release goes through extensive testing and quality check before production.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a full-featured bitmap image editor with a long history, the first public release being January 1996. Version 1.0 came in June 1998.
It is appreciated for its extensive features (and free price) but development is slow. The current production version is 2.10, the first version of which came out in April 2010, built using Gtk 2.x. That said, GIMP 2.10 is regularly updated, most recently with 2.10.28 last month, featuring many bug fixes especially on Windows.
Trump's Group has 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminated
In 2002, we used phrases like “Web 2.0” and “AJAX” to describe the revolution that was happening in web technology for average consumers. This was just before names like Twitter and Facebook became famous worldwide. Web 2.0 was the groundwork infrastructure of the “social media” to come.
As software policy folks, my colleagues and I knew that these technologies were catalysts for change. Software applications, traditionally purchased on media and installed explicitly, were now implicitly installed through web browsers — delivered automatically, or even sometimes run on the user's behalf on someone else's computer. As copyleft activists specifically, we knew that copyleft licensing would have to adjust, too.
When Python3 was updated from 3.9 to 3.10 in Slackware-current two weeks ago, lots of 3rd-party packages (i.e. software packages that are not part of the Slackware distro itself) containing python modules were suddenly broken.
To make things more complex, not all Python software is currently compatible with Python 3.10. Patrick Volkerding opened a poll on LinuxQuestions.org to get feedback from the community about this intrusive update after we already have a Slackware 15.0 Release Candidate since mid-august. After all, when you tag a Release Candidate, that usually sends a signal that the software set is frozen and only usability issues and software bugs will be addressed.
After giving this some time to sink in and hoping that this update would be reverted because of its impact, I now think we are stuck with Python 3.10 in Slackware. Which means I had to start looking at which of my own packages are now broken.
The Rust language project has announced the release of stable version 1.56.0 and the Rust 2021 edition.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.56.0. This stabilizes the 2021 edition as well. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Amlogic A311D2 octa-core processor is the successor to Amlogic A311D hexa-core SoC with four Cortex-A73 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, a more powerful Mali-G52 MP8 (8EE) GPU, support for eDP and LVDS video interface, 8Kp24 AV1 video decoding, and support for a whopping 16GB LPDDR4/X memory.
But it’s not all! The chip also includes supports for three HDMI 2.1 inputs up to 4Kp60, a 16MP ISP, 4K video encoding, and the more powerful GPU and higher memory bandwidth enable 4K user interfaces which were not feasible on most other Arm hardware barring the NVIDIA Shield.
BCM Advanced Research is now sample MX6412J thin mini-ITX motherboard equipped with an Intel Celeron J6412 quad-core Elkhart Lake processor, up to 32 GB RAM via two SODIMM DDR4 memory slots, SATA and NVMe storage, as well as found Ethernet ports with namely two 2.5GbE and two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports.
Designed for fanless operation with a large yet thin heatsink, the industrial motherboard also sports two HDMI 4K video outputs, nine USB 3.0/2.0 ports, variable 12-24 DC input, as well as several serial ports, and more.
t’s usual for a Hackaday scribe to read hundreds of web pages over a typical week as we traverse the world in search of the good stuff to bring you. Sometimes they’re obvious Hackaday stories but as you’ll all no doubt understand we often end up on wild tangents learning about stuff we never expected to be excited about. Thus it was last week that I happened upon a GQ piece charting the dwindling remains of the communes set up in rural California by hippies during the counterculture years.
With only a few ageing residents who truly embraced the back-to-the-land dream remaining, these adventurously-designed home-made houses are gently decaying into the forest. It’s a disappearing world, but it’s also close to home for me as someone who crew up on a self-sufficiency smallholding in the 1970s. My parents may not have been hippies in the way those of everyone else in that scene at the time seemed to be, but I learned all my curiosity and hacking skills in the many opportunities presented to a small child by an unruly combination of small farm and metalworking business. There’s part of me that would build a hippy home in a Californian forest in a heartbeat, and throw myself with gusto into subsistence vegetable growing to get me through each winter.
The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted VP who let the attackers in. It turns out that the VP had approved over 10 different push-based messages for logins that he was not involved in. When the VP was asked why he approved logins for logins he was not actually doing, his response was, “They (IT) told me that I needed to click on Approve when the message appeared!”
And there you have it in a nutshell. The VP did not understand the importance (“the WHY”) of why it was so important to ONLY approve logins that they were participating in. Perhaps they were told this. But there is a good chance that IT, when implementinthe new push-based MFA, instructed them as to what they needed to do to successfully log in, but failed to mention what they needed to do when they were not logging in if the same message arrived. Most likely, IT assumed that anyone would naturally understand that it also meant not approving unexpected, unexplained logins. Did the end user get trained as to what to do when an unexpected login arrived? Were they told to click on “Deny” and to contact IT Help Desk to report the active intrusion?
Or was the person told the correct instructions for both approving and denying and it just did not take? We all have busy lives. We all have too much to do. Perhaps the importance of the last part of the instructions just did not sink in. We can think we hear and not really hear. We can hear and still not care.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are engaged in addressing a spearphishing campaign targeting government organizations, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A sophisticated cyber threat actor leveraged a compromised end-user account from Constant Contact, a legitimate email marketing software company, to spoof a U.S.-based government organization and distribute links to malicious URLs.[1] CISA and FBI have not determined that any individual accounts have been specifically targeted by this campaign.
Three JavaScript libraries uploaded to the official NPM package repository have been unmasked as crypto-mining malware, once again demonstrating how open-source software package repositories are becoming a lucrative target for executing an array of attacks on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems.
Critical Infrastructure (CI) owners and operators, and other users who obtain Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) from Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, should be aware of a GPS Daemon (GPSD) bug in GPSD versions 3.20 (released December 31, 2019) through 3.22 (released January 8, 2021).
Researchers dubbed it a “straightforward Linux kernel locking bug” that they exploited against Debian Buster’s 4.19.0.13-amd64 kernel.
Today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a damning report on internet service providers’ (ISP) invasive data practices that violate the right to privacy and nondiscrimination. The companies analyzed include AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Charter, Comcast, Google Fiber, and T-Mobile.
This event will discuss how states, facilitated by private companies, are unlawfully deploying targeted surveillance technologies against civil society around the world. The biennial General Assembly resolution on human rights defenders that will be considered at its 76th session offers is an opportunity to discuss the effects of digital surveillance on the activities and safety of human rights defenders and their rights to privacy and freedom of expression, and to adopt measures that would allow defenders to continue exercise their human rights unhindered.
It’s a story that has caused consternation and mirth in equal measure amongst Brits, that the owners of a car in Surrey received a fine for driving in a bus lane miles away in Bath, when in fact the camera had been confused by the text on a sweater worn by a pedestrian. It seems the word “knitter” had been interpreted by the reader as “KN19 TER”, which as Brits will tell you follows the standard format for modern UK licence plate.
If it is controlled, everything that a human can control remotely with digital technology, another human can hack, sooner or later. Before selling this to SWAT teams, please make sure they would be happy if their opponents got control of the robodogs remotes.
The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) is the cornerstone of India’s policy framework for regulating the internet. However, in the two decades since the IT Act was originally enacted, significant technological, policy, and legal developments have taken place that subsequent amendments have not been able to completely account for. Digitisation has grown tremendously and, today, integrates strongly with a wide range of individual and social behaviours across demographics in India. For context, only 0.5% of the population (around 55 lakh people at that time) actually used the internet in 2000. BSNL was also incorporated 4 months after the passing of the Act.
As a result, amending the IT Act is an issue that has come up multiple times over the last couple of years. In January this year, multiple media reports (see here and here) emerged stating that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) had begun a ‘revamp’ of the IT Act. These reports stated that discussions over updating the Act to better deal with modern technologies and challenges. These changes would also involve harmonising the Act with the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019.
On February 3rd, 2021, an answer to a Lok Sabha question stated that “MeitY has initiated work on amendment to the Information Technology Act, 2000 which, inter alia, includes strengthening the provisions for intermediaries for making them more responsive and accountable to Indian users.” Furthermore, an RTI request we had filed received an answer on February 4th, 2021 that revealed that the Ministry had begun to interact with stakeholder ministries over potential amendments to the Act. In response to all these happenings, we had written to MEITY, pointing out the issues and lacunae with the IT Act and asking the Ministry to hold a full public consultation with regards to the proposed amendments.
Then, in July this year, before the Monsoon session of Parliament, we wrote to the Standing Committee on Information Technology, explaining how the IT Act’s original purpose was to govern e-commerce in India and how there was a need to update the Act in line with technological, policy, and legal developments. Recent media reports have once again indicated that MEITY is working on amendments. These reports suggest that MEITY is looking to introduce a more stringent intermediary liability regime that would subsume the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules) and give the government more control over social media platforms. Some reports even indicate that a new Act may be introduced to deal specifically with intermediary liability. The reports also indicate that terms such as ‘online bullying and harassment’ may be defined under the IT Act, while technologies such as blockchain and bitcoin may also be regulated under the Act.
In the fourth part of the Lumen Researcher Interview Series, we spoke with Professor Eugene Volokh, professor of law at UCLA law school, who specializes in First Amendment law.
Prof. Volokh’s research has used the Lumen Database to identify and investigate fraudulent or falsified court orders and ‘anti-libelous’ overbroad injunctions that were being used to remove legitimate content on the Internet. Most recently, his article about the abuse of Google’s de-indexing policy through forgeries and fraudulent court orders, titled ‘Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition)’, was published in the Utah Law Revie
But if you pass it to a popular image recognition app, blessed with “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), it will tell you the image is “more than 95% ice cream and a dessert”.
As you should already know if you follow me, that failure is basically due to the fact that the image collections used to “train” software like that “have been informed by mostly male developers from primarily western backgrounds”.
But the problem is not algorithms, of course.
Bias and discrimination by algorithms is not new anymore, sadly. But it is always useful to find and share detailed evidence of where and how it happens. This time, I signal some more of such evidence, about Mortgage-Approval Algorithms.
So today, my replacement Nokia Trash Can Modem arrived for my T-Mobile Home Internet, which has been getting increasingly unreliable.
I took it out of the box, made note of the fact that there was no power cord and no SIM card in it, and proceeded to put the SIM card from the old unit into the new one. The replacement Trash Can’s sticker says it is “hardware revision 2”, whereas the one that I have that was being replaced was “hardware revision 3”.
When I powered it on, it let me connect over WiFi for about 5 minutes and all seemed good until it dropped the WiFi connection and went into an endless reboot loop.
When I called to complain, T-Mobile’s Home Internet tech support didn’t know what a “boot loop” was, so I had to describe what I meant.
