Usually when we get to talk about laptops from Linux hardware vendors their thick and pricey but Star Labs are serving the underserved here with the new StarLite Mk IV. Coming with a sleek 11-inch ARC display with fancy anti-reflective matte coating for work and play in all environments.
Star Labs was formed back in 2016 by "a bunch of geeks" and they offer something not many vendors do with Linux support out of the box, open source firmware support that allows you to switch between American Megatrends (AMI) Aptio V or coreboot any time you feel like it. They even have their own open source coreboot configuration UI, that allows you to tweak all sorts of hardware settings.
Linux laptop maker Star Labs is updating its entry-level StarLite laptop with a new Mk IV model that packs an 11.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, an Intel Pentium Silver N5030 processor, and 8GB of RAM.
The new StarLite Mk IV is available for order from Star Labs with prices starting under $500, but you’ll probably have to wait until January for the laptop to be delivered because it’s still in production.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Feren OS 2021.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Local self-hosted video capture with AI object detection just got easy. Morgan joins us to detail his Frigate setup and its optional tight integration with Home Assistant.
Plus, our new favorite up time monitoring tool and an easy way to add Tailscale and other apps to OPNsense with community plugins.
Hackaday editors Mike and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. It turns out there are several strange radio bands that don’t require a license, and we discuss this weekend’s broadcast where you can listen in. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen the website check-box abused quite like this: it’s the display for playing Doom! Just when you thought you’d seen all the ESP32’s tricks it gets turned into a clock styled after Out Run. Mike geeks out over how pianos work, we’re both excited to have Jeremy Fielding giving a Keynote talk at Remoticon, and we wrap things up with a chat about traffic rules in space.
Setting up a separate network for your virtual machines is a great idea, especially since that allows you to segregate your management network.
Intro: Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix
Sound bites by Mike Tanner
The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge
Jay’s Site
https://www.learnlinux.tv/
Jay’s Bash Prompt https://pastebin.com/kzPjE8y4
Show Notes We took a break and we are back.
The Purism team is continuously working on improving the hardware and software support for the Librem 5. These innovations contribute directly to the mainline, upstream kernel so that the hardware can be supported as part of the development community in the future.
Following up on our report for Linux 5.13 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.14 and 5.15 development cycles. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. Both Legacy BIOS and UEFI are supported in the same way. Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/Vmware/Xen...)
Inkscape, the most used and loved tool of Fedora’s Design Team is not just a program for doing nice vector graphics. With vector graphics (in our case SVG) a lot more can be done. Many programs can import this format. Also, Inkscape can do a lot more than just graphics. The last article of this series showed how to use Stroke or Hershey Fonts for engraving and other such methods with Inkscape. This article will look at several Inkscape extensions for making Papercraft or that otherwise help to flatten out three-dimensional (3D) objects.
Rapid Prototyping is an oft-mentioned word (even more so since the advent of 3D-Printing). Sure, you can easily 3D-print computer designed objects. But the downsides are the cost and the amount of extra work you have to put into the 3D printed objects to get a clean surface.
This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table in the Summary section.
Even though the cost of storage per GB continues to fall, it’s common for users to need to find and remove duplicates files. The process of finding and removing duplicates is time-consuming. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that are designed to remove the laborious nature of finding duplicates. We recommend fdupes, an excellent command-line tool. We know that many users prefer software with a graphical user interface.
Czkawka is an app that finds duplicate files, big files, empty files, similar images, and much more. Czkawka is free and open source software.
The PDF file format is the conventional document format for sharing text files over the internet. Whether it's for professional, school, or informal use, PDF files are a convenient way of sharing information.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Icinga 2 on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Icinga 2 is an open-source monitoring solution that is used to monitor the availability of various network resources including host metrics such as system uptime, load, memory, disk space, running processes, network, and many more. Icinga 2 has a user-friendly web interface, but it also comes with a command-line interface that can be used to monitor networks, servers, and services with specific commands.
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 Icinga open-source network monitoring on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Latte Dock is one of the most popular and versatile panel and menu replacements for the KDE Plasma desktop. When you install it from source code, you get the very latest features and functions that are unavailable in most distro package repositories.
No matter which Linux distribution you use, you probably install most if not all of your software through your distro’s package management system. Since the package manager generally handles all of the necessary dependencies and updates for whatever program you want, it’s usually the safest and most efficient choice.
Sometimes, though, even if a program is available in your distro’s software repositories, you’ll end up with a much better final product if you download, compile, and install the program from source code. This is the case with Latte Dock.
The LAMP stack is a collection of open-source software products that are frequently used in conjunction. The acronym LAMP is used to describe a computer system that has the following components: Linux, Apache HTTP Server (or just server), MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python.
A user can install all of these components separately on a single computer or, more commonly, on separate computers connected by a network; however, some components are dependent upon other components – for instance, it is not possible to install Apache without first installing Linux – hence the standard installation practice is to install all components on a single computer system.
The LAMP stack is the combination of open-source software to form a server environment most commonly used in web development.
Open source refers to something, especially an application or operating system, whose source code is made available for free use or distribution, although certain user restrictions may apply. This allows users to create copies of any product and make whatever changes they like.
Installing the LAMP stack on Debian 11 will be shown in this article. Once complete, you’ll have a web server that serves your sites and applications with ease. Here we show how to install them manually from the terminal if you want full control over your system settings like editing config files yourself.
Google’s Chromium browser is a Google project. It is an open-source web browser whose major objective is to make online browsing safer and quicker for all users. This browser is not designed for end-users, but rather for developers or programmers, because Google makes changes to its source code practically every day. As a result, it is critical to obtain the most recent version of this web program. The Chromium browser is available for nearly every Linux distribution, including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and Fedora, as well as Windows, Android, and macOS.
In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to install the Chromium browser on the Debian 11 bullseye distribution. The instructions for installing the Chromium browser will also work for other Linux distributions such as Debian 10 buster, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and others.
In this guide we are going to explore how to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java Developer Kit (JDK) in Ubuntu 20.04.
Java and the JVM (Java’s virtual machine) are required for many kinds of software, including Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, Cassandra and Jenkins.
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.
ONLYOFFICE desktop app is an open-source office suite pack that comprises editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Along with offline work, it’s possible to connect the application to the cloud (ONLYOFFICE, Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile) for online document collaboration. The source code of the suite is available on GitHub under the AGPL v.3.0 license.
Do you want to install third-party modules in your Webmin installation? Don’t know how to set them up? We can help! Follow along as we go over how to install Webmin third-party modules.
If you’ve ever wanted to record your Linux desktop but don’t like how the existing screen recorder apps on Linux are ugly and confusing to use, you’ll like Kooha. It is an elegant screen recorder app that is designed around user-friendliness and ease of use. Here’s how to use it to record your desktop on Linux.
Valve has a stand-alone Steam Link game streaming client for Linux, Mac OS, Windows, and mobile. With it, you can stream games running on a gaming PC via Steam to the Steam Link app. It’s an excellent option for Linux gamers looking to play desktop PC games on their laptops. Here’s how to set it up.
Note: you must have a Linux gaming PC running Steam, along with another computer running the Steam Link application on Linux for remote play to work.
Do you want to switch to the old Ambiance app theme on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa? Then via this article, we let you know how to do that in a very easy way.
Well, earlier in the old versions of Ubuntu we were getting Ambiance or Radiance as the default theme. However, this got changed with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 because since then we have had Yaru as the default one. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we cannot switch back to the old days (themes) on the newer versions of Ubuntu. After all, it is just a theme but may give some a familiar feeling.
And the best thing is the package to install the Ambiance theme is available in the default official repo of Ubuntu, hence just follow the given steps.
Sails.js is a Javascript framework for Node.js. It is used for developing real-time applications very quickly. It allows you to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails. It comes with blueprints that help jumpstart your app's backend without writing any code. It is compatible with other front-end including, Angular, React, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, custom hardware, or something else entirely.
In this post, we will show you how to install Sails.js with Nginx on CentOS 8
Security Groups (SGs) and Network Access Control Lists(NACLs) are the features that come with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in Amazon Web Services(AWS).
SG acts as a firewall for our instance to control or restrict inbound and outbound traffic. When we launch an instance in a VPC, we can assign up to five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level and not the subnet level. If we don't specify a particular group at launch time, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group of the VPC.
We can add rules in the SG that control the inbound traffic to instances, and a separate set of rules that control the outbound traffic.
This guide will show you how to set up your first freestyle job in Jenkins. You will use Jenkins to download Java source code from GitHub, compile the code using Maven, and view the build output.
If you already have MX Linux 21 ISO file, then here are the steps to create a bootable USB Drive using it, for its installation on a PC or laptop.
MX Linux 21 is the latest Linux operating system from its developer based on Debian 11 while writing this article. To boost speed and productivity, new features and customization have been done. Hence, users who have 32-bit or 64-bit PC or laptops can easily start with this.
Macchanger is an amazing Linux utility that can be used to view as well as to change the MAC address of any desired networking device. This utility can be conveniently installed on any Linux distribution and then you can use it just the way you like. In this article, we will begin with the installation of this utility on a Ubuntu 20.04 or Linux Mint 20 system and then we will teach you how you can change the MAC address with the help of this utility.
Xpra (X Persistent Remote Applications) or commonly known as “Screen for X”, is a utility that allows users to run X11 programs on the remote hosts and direct their display on the local machine. Xpra enables you to connect and disconnect these programs on your device or another PC without losing the current state.
That is the main difference between Xpra and X-Forwarding. With the latter, when you disconnect from a particular program, you lose the current state.
Additionally, Xpra is rootless. That means any applications forwarded from the remote hosts to the local machine appear as normal windows managed by the window manager and not confined in a box.
To better understand the rootless feature, let’s look at how Xpra differs from other remote access/control applications.
The KDE team announced the stable release of KDE Plasma 5.23 with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here, in this quick guide, we give you the steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.23 from 5.22.
This release is the 25th-anniversary edition of KDE. Hence, it is a significant and emotional release for the team. Hence, you can expect several new features and updates. You get a brand new Breeze Ocean Theme, new wallpaper, desktop-wide tweaks, and productivity boost across KWin, Plasma desktop, Wayland improvements.
You can check out the feature highlights of KDE Plasma 5.22 here.
DSM is also known as Disk Station Manager. It is a web-based management interface software for the Synology NAS devices. You can use the DSM software to manage your Synology NAS devices from a web browser. Synology recently released DSM 7 – a new version of the Disk Station Manager software for the Synology NAS devices.
In this article, I am going to show you how to upgrade the DSM software of your Synology NAS from DSM 6 to DSM 7. So, let’s get started.
Transferring files between computers is a relatively straightforward act if you have the right tool. While most file transfer tools work the same and share a similar feature set, a few stand out with their distinctive features.
Croc is one such tool. It works via the command line and lets you transfer files and folders between computers quickly and securely.
Follow along as we discuss croc and list down the instructions to use it for transferring files between Linux and any other device.
ZIkula means “plus” in Swahili language, so it translates as “more than” or “something more”. The name embodies what this project provides – an extension beyond common web technologies with tools like templates that help you create simple one-page websites all the way up to complex applications powered by Node JS modules & MVC architecture. You can create anything from basic one-page websites to sophisticated and powerful online apps with Zikula’s user-friendly interface. It is very simple to set up, so you will have no trouble making your vision come alive.
The Z shell is one of the most powerful shells ever developed, and it’s also one of the fastest. It includes features that you won’t find anywhere else like built-in spell checking, syntax highlighting for code, and more. You can even configure your prompt to show useful information about your system status without typing anything.
Virtualmin is a web hosting control panel that allows you to manage your virtual private servers through an easy-to-use interface. You can use this software to create and delete websites, install and update server applications, and monitor resource usage.
Virtualmin features a number of scripts that can simplify the process of installing and maintaining software on your servers. It comes with a script installer for popular applications like Drupal, Joomla, bbPress, Django… and many others. Virtualmin also provides an updater tool to help you update all aspects of your server software in a single operation. It even allows you to check for security updates and clone your entire Virtualmin installation with one click of a button.
Virtualmin provides extensive configuration options, which can be accessed through its web interface or by using command-line tools. For example, you can use this software to set up a blacklist that prevents certain websites from being accessed. You can also create an access control list and store it in your database as custom variables. Virtualmin offers support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and other databases through their respective command-line tools or web interfaces.
If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to install PostgreSQL and pgAdmin4 in Ubuntu 20.04, this post is for you! We’ll walk you through the whole process step-by-step, so it’s easy for anyone to do.
Postgres is an open-source, powerful relational database system that lets users create, edit, share, and store data quickly and flexibly. It supports all of SQL:2003 standards, which makes it great for storing any type of data. pgAdmin4 is a graphical user interface tool that allows users to manage their PostgreSQL databases from one place without having to use complicated command-line instructions or terminal commands like many other similar tools on the market offer.
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a compiler software package with a collection of compilers for several languages. It is free and open-source software, which means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute or modify the application according to their own needs. GCC supports various programming languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java and Ada. It also provides libraries such as libstdc++ for C++ and libgcj for Java.
GCC uses a technology called “Recursive Descent Parsing”, which is very effective at finding errors in the code. GCC also provides a rich set of warnings that can be used to spot possible problems or bugs that may not have been detectable by the compiler itself. GCC performs some optimizations on both the intermediate code and the final machine code, but it does not perform as many optimizations as a commercial compiler would.
Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true! GNOME now has an extension to add Apple iPhone & MacBook look like but USELESS notch in your screen.
I’m not an Apple fan and don’t know why to add an ugly notch on laptop screen. Though an extension “iNotch” is available to add it in GNOME 40. It does nothing buts add a blank area in top-center, with a camera lens icon as well as tally light.
As Apple’s hardware notch does, it however covers the clock and the cursor disappears when it enters the notch. Though, the drop down calendar menu still works when you click on the area in top-bar.
ConcernedApe’s Haunted Chocolatier is the brand new announcement from the creator of Stardew Valley and it looks quite familiar in style with a new setting.
After 10 years of working on Stardew Valley, it was clearly time for something new. In this game, you will play as a chocolatier living in a haunted castle. In order to thrive in your new role, you will have to gather rare ingredients, make delicious chocolates, and sell them in a chocolate shop. It's a little more than that though, with a bit of a fantasy flavour being sprinkled on top.
Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements.
This summer DXVK-Native saw its first release for this adaptation of DXVK intended to be used by native Windows/Linux games for running their Direct3D renderer path over Vulkan.
DXVK Native is the fork of the original translation layer DXVK, the part of Proton that translates Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan but this is meant for Linux native builds and a new release is out now. Developed by Joshua Ashton who has been involved in DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, updating a few Valve games and more. Be sure to check out our previous interview!
A new Steam client beta is out with a few Linux enhancements worth noting.
For many months now Valve has been working to improve its shader (pre-)caching support to speed-up game load times and providing a smoother gaming experience for games otherwise compiling shaders on-demand. With the Steam Deck public release quickly approaching, they continue to better that Steam pre-caching support.
Valve have a fresh Steam Client Beta with some pretty big back-end improvements, likely readying up as much as possible for the upcoming Steam Deck.
There's a few general fixes for connections to the Steam servers, a rare black screen when loading Library pages and announcements plus an update of the embedded Chromium build. It gets a lot more interesting than that though.
Ice Water Games (Tenderfoot Tactics) have announced Wildflower: From the Embers, a new story-driven RPG that focuses on a young witch and her life in a new town.
Sounds like quite a varied game too, taking elements from their previous games blended with something new. It has the magical combat from Tenderfoot Tactics with a bigger map and a focus on scale with some units being massive plus you're dealing with emotional attributes and abilities, visibility and stealth. Then there's also the gardening that builds off their earlier title Viridi and cooking inspired by Breath of the Wild.
[...]
The release is planned for 2022 with Linux native support. Once we get more details and a trailer we will post it up in a new article as we'll be following this with great interest - it looks gorgeous.
Seems like something is brewing between the developers of Don't Starve Together (Klei) and Terraria (Re-Logic) with some sort of cross-over planned for both games.
Soul Tolerance is the next game from ENCODYA developer Chaosmonger Studio, planned for once they're finished with the upcoming Clunky Hero that releases in November.
The first PC release from Mousetrap Games is JARS, a blending of a Tower Defense game with puzzles to solve and a pretty great looking gothic style.
It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s almost time for an Alpine release, and all hands are on deck to make sure the process goes smoothly. But what goes into making an Alpine release? What are all the moving parts? Since we are in the process of cutting a new release series, I figured I would write about how it is actually done.
the beginning of the development cycle
The development cycle for an Alpine release is 6 months long: it begins immediately once the release is branched in aports.git: at that point, there is no longer a development freeze, and minor changes start flowing in.
Prior to the beginning of the development cycle, larger changes are proposed as system change proposals, an example of which being the change proposal introducing Rust to main for the Alpine 3.16 development cycle. The largest, most invasive proposals are coordinated by the Technical Steering Committee, while others may be coordinated by smaller teams, and individual maintainers. Anybody may create a system change proposal and drive it in Alpine, regardless of whether or not they have developer rights in the project.
As these system change proposals are accepted (possibly after a few rounds of revision), the underlying steps needed to implement the change are sequenced into the overall development schedule if needed. Otherwise, they are implemented at the discretion of the contributor driving the change proposal.
The brand new release of MX Linux 21 codenamed “Wildflower“ has hit the download mirrors. Let’s check out what’s new!
MX Linux has gained a lot of traction in the last few years. It is a distro based on Debian’s stable branch. And that is one of the cool things about MX Linux, because it’s not just another Ubuntu-based distro. They completely skip that step and go straight basing on Debian.
Now MX Linux 21 finally becomes available, and it is based on Debian 11 “Bullseye”. The Linux kernel was updated to version 5.10.
MX Linux 21 is the new major version of a small large distribution that has made a rebound hole, but also on its own merits among the most recommended for very different types of users, and is that not all those derived from Debian can boast of offering an alternative to your base with arguments to consider like this one does.
Among these arguments, MX Linux 21 stands out for making the leap to Debian 11 with all the new features that this entails, including updates to the entire package arch that makes up the system within, but also outside of Debian’s own repositories. Thus, MX Linux 21 arrives with the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel , but not only.
As part of the “advanced hardware support” introduced last year and available for upgrade once the system is installed, MX Linux 21 also offers its users more modern components including the Linux 5.14 kernel and one of the latest versions. from Mesa, with the Vulkan drivers installed by default.
The past week produced two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and both included a lot of updates for users of KDE.
Plasma, Gear and Frameworks weren’t the only packages to update in the snapshots.
Snapshot 20211019 offered quite a bit of updated packages. Remote access package remmina 1.4.21 provided updates for the GNOME 40 runtime and made some backward compatibility with WebKit versions under 2.32.0. The refreshable braille display package brltty updated to version 6.4 and made sysusers.d a new package while also removing some old SUSE RPM constructs. The PDF rendering library poppler 21.10.0 fixed the rendering of some odd splash patterns and added support for setting custom stamp annotations. Mesa 21.2.4 had several fixes and rolled out patches for both PowerPC and LLVM i386 compiling. A package to get a major update in the snapshot was rdma-core 37.1, which focuses on userspace components for the Linux Kernel’s drivers/infiniband subsystem; this new major version fixed cmake flags to correct paths for pkg-config. KDE’s 5.87.0 Frameworks version had an enormous amount of updated packages in the snapshot. Among the updates was the removal of defunct Python and Ruby script engines with Plasma Framework. The 5.87.0 Breeze Icons package added 22px variants of the preferences icons and the same version of the UI framework package Kirigami fixed Breadcrumb Control on mobile when using layers.
This week has been overshadowed a lot with Snapshots that did not pass openQA – in total, we have had 6 snapshots in QA – of which only 2 made it through and have been published. Of course, all the issues identified have resulted in relevant bug reports which the maintainers will be working on, fixing, resubmitting the packages that needed to be reverted, and then we move forward. After all, openQA does exactly what we want it to do: it protects you, the users, from getting broken snapshots.
Following the trend, Ubuntu 21.10 is code named “impish indri” as we are at “I” based names. The “Indri” refers to “babakoto, is one of the largest living lemurs, with a head-and-body length of about 64–72 cm and a weight of between 6 to 9.5 kg. It has a black and white coat and maintains an upright posture when climbing or clinging” (from Wikipedia).
This release brings a new GNOME 40 desktop experience, the latest Linux Kernel, improved desktop and new applications. Here’s a summary of what’s new.
Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” is finally here. Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and all flavours have been released on October 14.
The list of improvements is extensive. Users of both Ubuntu and any of the official flavours will have some nice surprises, such as Kernel 5.13 , updated versions of LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, and more. Let’s have a look at what’s new.
Whatever you might think about Google's data mining, the official Google Chrome browser sure does run nice. So much so, that I might make it my regular daily browser. I have created an SFS for EasyOS 3.x. This can be installed in a container or on the main desktop. In the latter case, it runs as user 'chrome', with home folder /home/chrome -- and in there you will see /home/chrome/Downloads, which is the default path for downloading. Chrome can be run from the menu, in category "Internet", or click on /home/chrome/chrome, or even run "chrome" in a terminal. To run on the main desktop requires EasyOS version 3.0 or later. I have tested on the pre-release of 3.1, and it runs real great. Chrome can also be installed in a container, and that also works great, except that it runs with "--no-sandbox" commandline option, which causes a warning message to popup at startup. That is just an annoyance. In theory, Chrome can run in a container in any version of EasyOS, as it will download it's dependency 'easy-3.*.sfs' from the Internet and use that in a layered filesystem.
Brave is one of the best web browsers available for Linux. The browser uses Google as the default search engine for most of the regions.
However, that is about to change with the recent announcement of Brave abandoning Google to favor its privacy-respecting search engine Brave Search.
I’ve just recently started my sixth year working at Mozilla on data and data-adjacent things. In those years I’ve started to notice some patterns in how data is approached, so I thought I’d set them down in a TWiG because Glean’s got a role to play in them.
Have you ever edited a document in LibreOffice in more than one window? Right, neither have I. Who'd think about LibreOffice and more than one user at the same time, right? Except ... somebody did and that's how collaborative editing based on LibreOffice works. For whatever strange reason, somewhen in the past somebody thought that implementing multiple views for one document in OpenOffice (StarOffice?) was a good idea. Just select Window->New Window in the menu and you can edit your favourite document in 50 views that each show a different part of the document and update in real time. And that, in fact, is how collaborative editing such as with Collabora Online works - open a document, create a new view for every user, and there you go.
But, given that this has never really been used that much, how well did the original relevant code perform and scale for more users? Well, not much, it turns out. Not a big surprise, considering that presumably back when that code was written nobody thought the same document could be edited by numerous users at the same time. But I've been looking exactly into this recently as part of optimizing Collabora Online performance, and boy, are there were gems in there. You thought that showing the same document in more views would just mean more painting also in those views? Nah, think again, this is OpenOffice code, the land of programming wonders.
It doesn’t start out too well TRUTH Social, the new social network of Donald trump, still in the development phase and that, as we already told you yesterday, leaked after its official announcement, allowing some people to access the service (whose first beta phase is scheduled for November), creating parodic accounts. However, the joke did not last long (calling it a hacking, as I have seen in other media, seems like an excess to me), since its managers blocked the accounts created by said users and disabled access through the web address that had been leaked.
However, and although what has captured the headlines has been precisely that, the accounts created impersonating the users that the network is expected to have once operational, the most interesting thing about the provisional access url being filtered is that as many users were able to dedicate themselves to analyzing TRUTH Social in depth. And when I say in-depth, I mean to go beyond checking its enormous resemblance to Twitter, only with fewer features.
While I am at this, I also have to say that the idea of one driver simultaneously falling asleep “at the wheel” of multiple trucks simultaneously, or being overruled by cybercriminals, does not make me sleep well. I also hope that anyone paid to drive e.g. four trucks simultaneously will be paid four times more than a drivers of single trucks. Of course, none of these issues is specific of Einride. They affect any kind of remotely driven vehicle, or even really autonomous ones.
Once launched, most spacecraft are out of reach of any upgrades or repairs. Mission critical problems must be solved with whatever’s still working on board, and sometimes there’s very little time. Recently ESA’s INTEGRAL team was confronted with a ruthlessly ticking three hour deadline to save the mission.
European Space Agency INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory is one of many space telescopes currently in orbit. Launched in 2002, it has long surpassed its original designed lifespan of two or three years, but nothing lasts forever. A failed reaction wheel caused the spacecraft to tumble out of control and its automatic emergency recovery procedures didn’t work. Later it was determined those procedures were dependent on the thrusters, which themselves failed in the summer of 2020. (Another mission-saving hack which the team had shared earlier.)
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (apache, chromium, nodejs, nodejs-lts-erbium, nodejs-lts-fermium, and virtualbox), Fedora (vsftpd and watchdog), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and redis:6), and Ubuntu (libcaca, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-azure-5.8, and mailman).
The government of Argentina has a national ID card system, and as a result maintains a database containing data on every citizen in the country. What could possibly go wrong? Predictably, an attacker has managed to gain access to the database, and is offering the entire dataset for sale. The Argentinian government has claimed that this wasn’t a mass breach, and only a handful of credentials were accessed. This seems to be incorrect, as the seller was able to provide the details of an arbitrary citizen to the journalists investigating the story.
LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures.
The Government of Eswatini’s website, www.gov.sz, is running a cryptojacker. Cryptojackers use website visitors' CPU power to mine cryptocurrency, most often without their knowledge or permission. Data from archive.org suggests the JavaScript snippet was added to the site’s HTML source between 28th September and 6th October.
I don’t particularly find myself to be a fan of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel, simply for being outside of Destin’s target audience most of the time. I understand that Destin, the channel’s host, is a friendly person and a great asset to his peers, and that he generally strives to do good. When I saw that he was involved in a Kickstarter to develop a privacy product, it piqued my interest. As a privacy advocate and jaded software engineer, I set out to find out what it’s all about.
You can watch the YouTube video here, and a short follow-up here.
There are several things to praise here. I honestly thought that Destin’s coverage of the topic of privacy for the layman was really well presented, and took some notes to use the next time I’m explaining privacy issues to my friends. The coverage of the history of wiretapping and the pivotal role played by 9/11, complete with an empathetic view of the mindset of American adults contemporary to it that many find hard to express, along with great drone shots of Big Tech’s mysterious datacenters, this is all great stuff. For the right project, Destin is a valuable asset with a large audience and a lot of experience in making complex issues digestible for the every-person, and 4privacy is lucky to have access to him.
A lot of the buzzwords and things found on their technology page are promising as well. The focus on end-to-end encryption and zero-knowledge principles, and the commitment to open source, are absolutely necessary and are great to see here. A lot of the tech described, although briefly, seems like it’s on the right track. The ability to use your own service provider, and the focus on decentralization and federation, is very good.
A United Nations Climate Change Conference is scheduled for October 31 to November 12 in Glasgow, Scotland.
We have to go to the T-Mobile store today to return the modem that died on me after five minutes that I blogged about yesterday.
The T-Mobile store employees are incompetent to the highest order and they basically don’t give a damn about anything other than selling you a phone every time you’re in there. Once they realize that you’re not there to buy a phone, they hem and haw and make up excuses about why you need to go elsewhere.
So I’m already cringing.
Former T-Mobile employees have said they aren’t customer service people and nobody wants to open your account unless they’re selling a phone because it counts as doing something else, they don’t get their commission money, and then you can rate them and it may be a low rating and they are taking a risk for nothing from their perspective. Meanwhile, someone else may get the money for signing up another victim. It’s like Mary Kay cosmetics or Amway.
Ten folktales, translated from Swahili by George W. Bateman, showcasing the rich tradition of storytelling in Zanzibar.
