System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment.
Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers they are working on their "own desktop".
Google has stable release of the platform announced a Knative 1.0 , designed to create a infrastructure serverless computing deployed on top of a container isolation system based on the Kubernetes platform. In addition to Google, companies such as IBM, Red Hat, SAP and VMware are also involved in the development of Knative. The release of Knative 1.0 marked the stabilization of the API for application development, which from now on will not change and will remain backward compatible. The project code is written in the Go language and is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
The Knative platform launches prepared containers as needed (the application is not tied to any specific container), organizes management and provides scaling of environments required to perform functions and applications. The platform can be deployed at its own facilities without being tied to external cloud services. Only Kubernetes is required to run. Tools are provided to support a variety of common frameworks, including Django, Ruby on Rails, and Spring. The can be used to control the operation of the platform command line interface .
I think everyone that has ever used Microsoft Windows has eventually discovered things that they just were not allowed to do in Windows. Why would an operating system restrict the user? Linux doesn't do that!
There's a bunch of kernels available in the standard repos and the AUR for arch linux but what do they all do and which one should you use.
How to deliver Python packages with **setuptools**.
The "char/misc" changes have landed in Linux 5.16 as the catch-all area for code not fitting more appropriately within another subsystem or being a portion of the kernel that's too small for submitting pull requests directly to Linus Torvalds. For Linux 5.16, the IIO code has moved from being part of the staging area also maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman to now being under the char/misc umbrella. Additionally, another big item is the Intel Habana Labs driver updates.
The Habana Labs kernel driver for supporting their Goya and Gaudi AI hardware continues to be part of the char/misc area with not yet having a formal "accelerator" subsystem short of the GPU/DRM area for the growing number of AI inference/training accelerators coming to market.
The terminal is a ubiquitous platform that has been fairly stable for many years. There are plenty of resources out there for understanding its inner workings, but most of them are either fairly arcane or offer deep knowledge about a very specific area. This post aims to bridge this gap by offering a gentle and broad introduction to the terminal emulator as a platform for development.
We’ll talk about the different parts of the terminal and how they interact, build a small program to read input from the shell and understand how it’s interpreted, discuss how to create a user interface in the terminal and finally see how we can use all of this to cause some mischief.
I’ve used Rust for code examples, but tried to make them as simple and short as possible so that they’ll also be comprehensible to non-Rust programmers. I also provided explanations of the relevant parts of the code. We refer to the workings of terminal emulators in a unix or unix-like system (eg. Linux and macOS). Some parts might also be relevant to other operating systems.
While this is aimed at those new to developing terminal applications, I tried to go into enough depth in certain areas to keep things interesting for old terminal hounds as well. If you found a mistake in this post, or feel something has been over-simplified or hand-waved away, feel free to hit me up on Twitter.
KDE Connect is an open-source platform to integrate some feature of your phone directly into your PC. In simple words, it is a Linux application that is also available for Windows and macOS (not officially) to connect smartphones with PC or laptops. Currently, it is available for Android only, well iOS version does not officially exist.
Well, KDE Connect is implemented with a server service that runs on the desktop device and a client application on the mobile device, which interact with each other via a secure network protocol. So, that the user can easily transfer data using a local network.
Elasticsearch is a free and open-source, highly available search and analytics engine built on the Apache Lucene project. Elasticsearch stores its data in JSON format, making it very easy to use.
It provides a simple and powerful REST API for performing a collection of tasks from creating documents, monitoring cluster health, and more.
Python is one of the most popular programming languages, and it tends to complement Elasticsearch very well.
In this guide, we will look at how to go about using the Elasticsearch Python client to interact with the Elasticsearch cluster.
Elasticsearch curator, or simply curator, is a tool that allows you to manage your Elasticsearch cluster easily. Written in Python, the curator comes in handy when you need to manage your ELK indices and snapshots.
This guide will show you how to set up and configure the Elasticsearch curator for your ELK cluster.
This article will cover a guide on installing and using OpenSnitch Firewall in Linux. OpenSnitch is a free and open source port of a proprietary firewall solution called LittleSnitch and implements most of its functionality. It can apply firewall rules system wide and can be used to block hosts as well as individual applications.
SQLite is a serverless RDBMS, which is used to manage data in the database in the form of tables. These tables are created in the database to store data in columns and rows, for this purpose, tables can either be created using the “CREATE TABLE” or the “CREATE TABLE if not exists” statement in SQLite.The “CREATE TABLE if not exists” statement is very useful in creating a table because it will not create the table if the table of the same name already exists in the database. In this writeup, we will explain how the “CREATE TABLE if not exists” works, and what happens if we try to create a table without using the “CREATE TABLE if not exists”.
The “CREATE TABLE if not exists” statement is very useful in creating a table because it will not create the table if the table of the same name already exists in the database. This article explains how to create a table using the “if not exists” clause in SQLite. A general syntax on how to create a table using “if not exists” and an example is also provided in this tutorial.
SQLite is used to manage the data of a database, in which the website’s or application’s data is stored in the form of tables. Like MySQL, SQLite also supports a lot of built-in functions like max(), min(), but many functions that are supported by MySQL, not supported by SQLite.
SQLite is a database management system, which is available free of cost, and also its architecture is much simpler as compared to other database management systems. The main feature of SQLite, it is serverless, which means it uses the server of a machine or Operating System on which it is being operated, instead of using its own server.
This write-up is focussing on how to concatenate strings in SQLite. Does concatenate function work in SQLite? Let’s find out.
There are many database management systems that are being used to manage the data of a website or an application like MySQL and SQLite. SQLite, like other RDMS, contains many built-in functions which make managing databases easier, like aggregate functions. In this article, we will learn about the aggregate functions in SQLite by implementing those functions in some examples.
The Ubuntu Livepatch service takes care of keeping your Ubuntu systems up to date with essential kernel updates, saving you time and effort. It is a tool that enables companies to patch Ubuntu Linux kernel vulnerabilities immediately. The live patch utility lets you directly patch the running kernel, eliminating the need to reboot your system. This feature was first added in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, generally designed for servers expected to operate continuously without rebooting for months and years. This article will explain in detail how you can apply the live patch on Ubuntu OS.
This article will cover a guide on installing and using the EasyOCR command line tool and Python module. Available as a free and open source application, It can be used to identify and extract text from images. It uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and a variety of different algorithms and language models to detect the text.
“KVM”, the abbreviation for “Kernel Virtual Machine” is the hypervisor of the Linux kernel. It is quite popular and used in enterprises for easily performing the virtualization of operating systems. Here in this tutorial, we learn the steps and commands to install and enable KVM Hypervisor on Debian 10 or 11 Bullseye Server or Desktop Linux.
Since 2007, KVM is an official kernel component, however, as compared to Xen, the other open-source hypervisor, the history of KVM is less changeful and has only been steeply upward from the start. KVM is also the preferred hypervisor in OpenStack and is therefore widely used in the cloud.
Oracle VirtualBox is a hypervisor for x86 virtualization application that allows users to create and manage Virtualization on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. It is an open-source project and here we learn the commands to install the VirtualBox software platform on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux.
Virtualization is a software technique that simulates hardware. In this way it is possible, for example, to operate several virtual computers under Windows, on which other operating systems can then be installed. Virtualization uses a shift model, because at the end of the day, of course, the actual installed hardware is also used in a virtual computer, but the trick is that the virtual guests can be used like programs on a normal system. So it is possible to operate several Linux systems in parallel with VirtualBox under Windows. The other way around, you can also set up a virtual Windows with VirtualBox on a Linux system.
Welcome to out tutorial on how to configure Bind DNS server using Webmin on Debian 11. Webmin is a web-based control panel that allows system administrators to administer system administration tasks from web user interface.
You can follow the link below to install Webmin on Debian 11.
This guide will show you how to enable video previews on NextCloud hosted on Debian/Ubuntu. You can apply the same steps if running the Docker version of NextCloud or different distribution.
Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.
A container is software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, secure, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings.
Git Lab provides a mechanism to run workloads triggered by a git commit. We try to let the automation do as much work as possible before interrupting a human code reviewer. We want to know if the code is right in as objective a manner as possible before we take the expensive context switch to perform a code review.
We can think of the set of tasks in a three step process. The first step is fast up front checks. The second is long programmatic correctness checks. The final is regression tests. There is a natural ordering between these, and they also progress in an increasing order of time and resource commitments.
The Linux Kernel is a C program, and the long, programmatic correctness check is the compile and link processes. It is worthwhile to think in terms of the third level tests, though, and package up the result of the compilation for later install on a wide array of systems based on a binary packaging format, either RPM or .DEB. We’re testing on Fedora, so we need an rpm.
scp -3 can copy files between two remote hosts through localhost. This comes in handy when the two servers cannot communicate directly or if they are unable to authenticate one to the other.1 Unfortunately, rsync does not support such a feature. Here is a trick to emulate the behavior of scp -3 with SSH tunnels.
When syncing with a remote host, rsync invokes ssh to spawn a remote rsync --server process. It interacts with it through its standard input and output. The idea is to recreate the same setup using SSH tunnels and socat, a versatile tool to establish bidirectional data transfers.
The first step is to connect to the source server and ask rsync the command-line to spawn the remote rsync --server process. The -e flag overrides the command to use to get a remote shell: instead of ssh, we use echo.
OpenFaaS ( Function as a Service) is a popular serverless framework. It provides an easy way to create portable functions, microservices, and APIs using Kubernetes and Docker. This tutorial guide will serve as your OpenFaaS introduction to get you up and running quickly.
OpenSUSE is yet another outstanding Linux distribution that has plenty to offer. Many believe openSUSE is one of the best flavors of Linux for business desktop use cases. One of the many reasons for that is the built-in snapshot tool made possible by a combination of the btrfs file system and the YaST2 snapper plugin.
Jenkins is an open source automation server. It helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Jenkins is based on Java and helps with every part of the software development process.
Jenkins is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat. It supports version control tools, including AccuRev, CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase and RTC, and can execute Apache Ant, Apache Maven and sbt based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish is due to release on April 21, 2022. However, users of Ubuntu 21.10 are able to upgrade to the latest release right now.
In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to upgrade your Ubuntu system to version 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, which is the latest long term support release.
An experimental branch of the open implementation of WinAPI – Wine 6.21 has been released . Since the release of version 6.20, 26 bug reports have been closed and 415 changes have been made.
[...]
The new release provides synchronization with the Wine 6.21 codebase. 5 patches related to the implementation of the uiautomationcore DLL, handling mouse movement in winex11.drv, adding critsection.c to ntdll and a test suite for ntdll have been transferred to the main Wine composition. Updated patches user32-rawinput-mouse . A patch has been added that attaches the “.exe” string to the mask in case of an unsuccessful search in the registry.
Probably the most exciting free and open source game engine around, Godot Engine has a brand new release available.
Comprising of thousands of improvements across what looks like all areas, they said it themselves that listing everything would be pretty much impossible.
A lot of work is currently going into Godot 4.0, which is the release that will bring Vulkan support and massive improvements to the rendering system. Even so, Godot 3.x remains popular and supported so they're keeping up with these releases for now to give game developers a nicer experience. Godot 3.4 is also compatible with previous Godot 3.3.x projects and it'
For fans of LXQt or those still looking for a lightweight Qt5 desktop, LXQt 1.0.0 is out as the latest version of this desktop environment.
LXQt is a free, open source, lightweight, and user-friendly desktop environment built using the Qt libraries. It consists of many small individual components like a panel program, session manager, hotkey daemon and a few more. LXQt was formed as a merger between the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktop environments. Here’s the project’s website.
Often LXQt has been seen as the fastest desktop today, beating KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Xfce in terms of performance, responsiveness, and storage footprint. It is used by operating systems that aren’t looking for a lot of customization or productivity options, but instead are focused on performance. Just under seven months after the earlier version, the LXQt development team have released LXQt 1.0.0. That said, let’s quickly take a look at what’s new.
I’ve used every release of KDE extensively, and its developers have every right to be damn proud of the amazing collection of frameworks and applications they’ve built. As with everything, KDE is not for everyone, but there’s no denying it’s a versatile, attractive, extensible, and fun to use environment.
For different tasks, we need a computer and for operating a computer, we need some operating system like Windows, macOS, and Linux. Where Linux further contains a list of distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Kali Linux. In this article, we will make a comparison between Arch and Ubuntu, but before making any comparison, let us discuss some overview of Ubuntu and Arch.
This project is still very early in its development, but it’s an interesting premise. It’s developed by Daniel Kolesa, who also contributes a lot to Void Linux, most notably the excellent POWER/PowerPC port of that excellent distribution. Over on Twitter, Kolesa regularly posts updates on the status of Chimera, and even though some of the stuff definitely is above my pay grade, it’s quite interesting to follow along.
SUSE a provider of enterprise-grade open source solutions, has announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro 5.1, a lightweight and secure operating system built for containerised and virtualised workloads. SLE Micro 5.1 adds edge-focused security features such as secure device onboarding and live patching, and it enables the modernising of workloads with support for IBM Z and LinuxONE.
openSUSE is a very popular Linux distros, especially in the enterprise world. SUSE has been around in one form or another since 1996. During most of that time, they have only had one version.
Then, in 2015, they changed things up and decided to offer two versions: Leap and Tumbleweed.
If you are new to openSUSE, it is easy to get confused between Tumbleweed and Leap. A reader recently asked us to explain the similarities and difference between the two, that’s just what we’ll do today.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish is now available for download! This is a Long Term Support version, which is due to release on April 21, 2022.
In this tutorial, we will provide you with the download links for Ubuntu 22.04. If you are already running an older version of Ubuntu, it’s possible to upgrade Ubuntu to 22.04. Otherwise, follow the links below to download Ubuntu 22.04.
In this article you will learn about some Ubuntu 22.04 features of the upcoming Ubuntu stable release. Canonical’s latest iteration to the Ubuntu operating system is Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, scheduled for release on April 21, 2022. This is an LTS (long term support) release – the type of release that Canonical only publishes every two years, and continues to support for the next five.
In this article, we’re going to go over some of the features we’re most excited about, and cover a lot of the differences between Jammy Jellyfish and Ubuntu’s previous LTS release, Focal Fossa. Read on as we take you through some of the upcoming changes.
Radxa CM3 is a system-on-module that offers an alternative to the Raspberry Pi CM4, with the same form factor allowing it to become a drop-in replacement, but switching from a Broadcom BCM2711 processor to a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC.
Radxa CM3 will work with existing carrier boards for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, albeit some features such as dual HDMI are not available, instead, providing a single HDMI, but the module also offers extra features through an additional 100-pin board-to-board with interfaces such as SATA III and USB 3.0.
There are still 50-ish days to go until Christmas, but we thought we would give you an early surprise.
Priced at $15, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is about five times faster than the OG Raspberry Pi Zero, with the same tiny form factor. We’ve loved seeing how many of you have already upgraded your projects with our newest board.
Touchscreens are great, but they’re not always the perfect solution. Trying to operate one with gloves on (even alleged “touchscreen-friendly” ones) can be cumbersome at best, and if the screen is on a publicly-shared device, such as a checkout kiosk it can easily become a home for bacteria, viruses and all sorts of other nasty stuff.
That’s what [Norbert Zare] was thinking when he built his gesture-controlled MP3 player. It uses a PAJ7620U2 gesture sensor to register a few intuitive hand motions including finger twirls to control the volume, hand swipes to skip forward and backwards, and a flat hand to play and pause the song. It even has a motorized knob and cute cutout music notes that move to provide some visual feedback for the gestures, which you can see in-action in the video below. If this seems familiar, it’s because on Tuesday we took a look at the camera-based, glance-to-skip-tracks controller he built.
MongoDB is a database management system to store and retrieve a bulk amount of data in an effective manner. Like other databases, MongoDB also has several data manipulation commands and operators that can be used to store as well as retrieve data from a collection of documents. Several commonly used operators in MongoDB include $eq, $lt, $and, $or etc. These commands and operators relate to other databases as well; for instance, the $eq operators perform the same operation as where clause in SQL databases.
In this article, a Comparison Query Operator operator $eq will be explained in the context of MongoDB:
MongoDB is a NoSQL database that provides extensive support of operator classes to help in retrieving data. The $all operator falls under the category of an array operator class. As the name of $all (all operators in MongoDB) indicates, it is used to get the document from a database collection if it matches all the values in an array field. Moreover, the $all operator also provides support to match nested arrays if present in any field. In this article, a brief insight into usage of $all operator in the context in MongoDB is provided.
MongoDB belongs to the NoSQL category of databases and thus it stores data in JSON format. In database management systems, the sorting phenomenon is used to retrieve documents in a sequential manner. The sort by date support of MongoDB helps to get the documents that are arranged according to the date field.
As, sorting can be performed either in ascending or descending manner; similarly, the sort by date also allows retrieving documents in both orders. After getting through this post, you’ll be able to apply the sort by date functionality in MongoBD.
MongoDB is a widely used non-relational database management system. The data storing mechanism of MongoDB (or any other database) strongly relies on the data types supported by that database management system. MongoDB stores data in the form of BSON, which is a binary-encoded format of JSON as its name is also derived from “Binary” and “JSON”. The data types that BSON supports are considered valid for MongoDB.
This article of the MongoDB series will provide detailed information about the data types used in MongoDB. But before that, let’s have a comparison of JSON format and its binary extension BSON.
MongoDB provides a strong querying system supported by several commands and operators. There exists a long list of operators (like $size, $where, $gt, $regex, and many more) that have extended the MongoDB use to fulfill the basic functionality of any database. The $where operator belongs to the evaluation query operators class and can be exercised to pass a JavaScript-based string or JavaScript function. The $where operator is used in MongoDB to get only those documents that match JavaScript expressions.
In this descriptive post, we have provided an insight into the usage of $where operator in context of MongoDB.
MongoDB supports multiple functions that are used to process data in databases. In any database, the data updating process is inevitable and is performed frequently. The findOneAndUpdate method is used to update a single document that matches the condition, and this method is an extension of the core update method of MongoDB.
The findOneAndUpdate() method returns the document after the update, whereas the updateOne() method of MongoDB also updates one document but it does not return any document.
In this article, you will learn to understand and apply the findOneAndUpdate() method of MongoDB to match and update a single document.
Eid, who was with software solutions provider Splunk for six years, has 25-plus years of sales and business management experience, having held leading positions at a variety of enterprise technology organisations including Dell EMC and Symantec.
GNU's aim was to write a complete "free" version of Unix - the kernel and all the associated elements - that is, one that gives users the freedom to share and change software but not add restrictions and impose them on others. With the Linux kernel, Stallman says, "the available free software added up to a complete system."
Rather than wait for someone to write applications designed specifically for his operating system, Linus tweaked Linux to perfectly fit GNU's pre existing apps. "I never ported programs," Linus says. "I ported the kernel to work with the programs. Linux was never the primary reason for anything - user programs have always been the reason."
OSINT or Open source intelligence refers to information about businesses or people that can be collected from online sources. However, it requires tools to do so, and here are the 10 best OSINT Tools for 2020.
It’s only natural that we feel the need to weed out what’s most valuable in the age of information digitalization. Organizations use a variety of paid and unpaid methods and services to accomplish this. The latter group is part of the open-source intelligence (OSINT) area, and it can be extremely useful.
Sam Oyeyele is one of the key figures for Wikipedia in Nigeria. Over the years, he has firmly positioned his status as a poster child for the Wikimedia movement, not just in Nigeria, but the African continent as a whole.
We covered Malamud’s General Index this week, and Mike and I were talking about it on the podcast as well. It’s the boldest attempt we’ve seen so far to open up scientific knowledge for everyone, and not just the wealthiest companies and institutions. The trick is how to do that without running afoul of copyright law, because the results of research are locked inside their literary manifestations — the journal articles.
The Index itself is composed of one-to-five-word snippets of 107,233,728 scientific articles. So if you’re looking for everything the world knows about “tincture of iodine”, you can find all the papers that mention it, and then important keywords from the corpus and metadata like the ISBN of the article. It’s like the searchable card catalog of, well, everything. And it’s freely downloadable if you’ve got a couple terabytes of storage to spare. That alone is incredible.
If you've written code, you know it takes practice to get good at it. Whether it takes months or years, there's inevitably a moment of epiphany.
We wanted to hear about that time, so we asked our community to share about that time they sat down and wrote code that truly made them proud.
We are pleased to announce the launch of the new erlang.org website!
The design and content are roughly the same as the old website. The most notable changes are: [...]
Software tools are an essential part of the HPC ecosystem, for both scientists and all potential HPC users. While there are a huge number of different categories of tools available to the HPC community, the exascale projects in the US and Europe are focused on the development of open source software, or software that can facilitate the use of a wide range of resources.
The shift from building applications in a monolithic architecture hosted on a server you could go and touch, to breaking them down into multiple microservices, packaged up into containers, orchestrated with Kubernetes, and hosted in a distributed cloud environment, marks a clear jump in the level of complexity of our software. Add to that expectations of feature-rich, consumer-grade experiences, which are secure and resilient by design, and never has more been asked of developers.
When it comes to storing related and non-complex information in a program, arrays always come up. Arrays are a collection of an ordered list of items. Using arrays, you can store related values in a single variable, making your code efficient and easy to manage. In Ruby, arrays contain lots of built-in methods, making working with list data much more effortless.
This article describes various methods you can use to add items to an array in Ruby.
The UNIX timestamp value is calculated from 1st January 1970. The strtotime() is a built-in PHP function to convert human-readable date and time values into UNIX timestamp values. The way to use this function in PHP for different purposes has shown in this tutorial with examples.
The sprint() function of PHP works like the printf() function. Both functions generate the formatted output, but one difference between these functions is that the output of the sprinf() function is stored into a variable, and the output of the printf() function is displayed in the browser. How sprint() function works and the uses of this function is shown in this tutorial.
Sometimes we need to divide the string data based on the particular separator for programming purposes. Many ways exist in PHP to do this task. Three built-in functions of PHP that can be used to split string data are explode(), str_split(), and preg_split(). These functions create an array by dividing the string value based on the particular delimiter or pattern. How these functions work and the uses of these functions to split PHP strings have shown in this tutorial.
The conditional statement is used to execute the block of statements based on the particular condition. The ‘If..else’ statement is one type of condition statement that works with the particular condition(s). Different types of ‘if..else’ statements can be used in PHP for implementing conditional statements. These are mentioned below.
Mainly two types of the array can be created in any programming language. One is a numeric array and another is an associative array. Each value of an array is accessible by the index of that value. The index value is not required to define for numeric array and the sorted numeric index is generated automatically for this array if no index is defined. If it is required to create a particular string value for each index of the array, then the associative array is used to do the task.
PHP associative array can contain a number or both number and string in the index value. The user-defined index is used in an associative array. The ‘=>’ is used to assign the key-value pair of the associative array in PHP. The way to define and use associative array in PHP was shown in this tutorial.
In this blog, we will see how we can use the python csv writer to write the list data to csv.
So I couldn't sleep the other night, and my brain wanted to think about odd problems…
Ever had a script that's compatible with both, Python 2 and 3, but you didn't want to bother the user to know which interpreter to call? Maybe because the script is often used in environments where only one Python is available and users just expect things to work? And it's only that one script file, no package, no additional wrapper script, nothing.
Yes, this is a rather odd scenario. And yes, using Python doesn't make it easier, but trust me, you wouldn't want to implement the same in bash.
Nothing that you will read from here on should ever be actually implemented, it will summon dragons and kill kittens. But it was a fun midnight thought, and I like to share nightmares!
The nice thing about Python is it supports docstrings, essentially strings you can put inside your code which are kind of comments, but without being hidden inside commnent blocks. These are often used for documentation that you can reach using Python's help() function. (Did I mention I love help()?)
Millions of people in Asia are dependent on rice as a food source. Believed to have been domesticated as early as 6000 BCE, rice is an important source of calories globally. In a new study, researchers compared domesticated rice to its wild counterparts to understand the differences in their photosynthetic capabilities. The results can help improve future rice productivity.
Wild rice species Oryza rufipogon and Oryza nivara are typically weed-like and are taller than cultivated rice Oryza sativa. While these features are helpful in the wild, since they can shade out competitors, they are unfavorable in an agricultural setting and can lead to lower yields. Through domestication and breeding, many rice varieties have been selected to be short with erect leaves that have steep angles, which allows better light distribution through the canopy. Despite these improvements, the distribution is uneven and is affected by changes in wind and cloud cover.
As part of their third quarter earnings release, VIA Technologies has announced this morning that the company is entering into an unusual agreement with Intel to offload parts of VIA’s x86 R&D subsidiary, Centaur Technology. Under the terms of the murky deal, Intel will be paying Centaur $125 million to pick up part of the engineering staff – or, as the announcement from VIA more peculiarly puts it “recruit some of Centaur's employees to join Intel,” Despite the hefty 9-digit price tag, the deal makes no mention of Centaur’s business, designs, or patents, nor has an expected closing date been announced.
A subsidiary of VIA since 1999, the Austin-based Centaur is responsible for developing x86 core designs for other parts of VIA, as well as developing their own ancillary IP such as deep learning accelerators. Via Centaur, VIA Technologies is the largely aloof third member of the x86 triumvirate, joining Intel and AMD as the three x86 license holders. Centaur’s designs have never seen widescale adoption to the extent that AMD or Intel’s have, but the company has remained a presence in the x86 market since the 90s, spending the vast majority of that time under VIA.
Most readers of Hackaday will be well aware of the current shortages of semiconductors and especially GPUs. Whether you’re planning to build a state-of-the art gaming PC, a mining rig to convert your kilowatt-hours into cryptocoins, or are simply experimenting with machine-learning AI, you should be prepared to shell out quite a bit more money for a proper GPU than in the good old days.
Bargains are still to be had in the second-hand market though. [Devon Bray] chanced upon a pair of Nvidia Tesla K80 cards, which are not suitable for gaming and no longer cost-effective for mining crypto, but ideal for [Devon]’s machine-learning calculations. However, he had to make a modification to enable proper thermal management, as these cards were not designed to be used in regular desktop PCs.
Let’s face it — waking up is rough no matter what time of year it is. But the darkness of fall and winter makes it so much worse. In the past, [Maarten] has used music with increasing volume, but depending on the setup, it can be dodgy if you want to hear a different song each day and don’t have all your files volume-leveled.
Wake Up Bright is the latest in a line of wake-up widgets [Maarten] has made to help rouse them in the morning. Their write-up covers all ideas they’ve had on the subject over the years, as well as the electronics, firmware, debugging, and all the upgrades made after using it for awhile.
As any musician, podcaster, or youtuber will be quick to tell you, there’s no substitute for a good microphone. They’ll also be quick to tell you all about their favorite microphone, why it’s better than all the others, and how much it cost (oh, and how round it sounds, whatever that means). But what if you could build your own that sounds as good, if not better, and do it for only $30?
That’s what [Matt] from DIY Perks set out to discover when he built his DIY USB-C Microphone. He was able to source the same microphone capsule that can be found in his high-end, $600 CAD E100S, and built a simple pre-amplifier that bumps its quiet output up to line-level. He even connected it to the mic module with some custom cable made from two tiny enameled wires that won’t transmit bumps and vibrations, wrapped inside desoldering braiding which acts as a shield. He fed the output from the pre-amp into a cheap USB audio interface and viola! — top-notch sound for next to nothing. Make sure you check out the video below to hear a comparison between the mic and its professional counterparts.
Here at Hackaday we love projects that are so well-documented that you can spend days reading up on what the designer has achieved. [John Lonergan] didn’t disappoint when he designed the SPAM-1, an 8-bit CPU built from discrete logic gates. His detailed log contains a wealth of information on such things as designing opcodes, optimizing program counter logic, running a digital simulation, as well as his thoughts on microcode design. The sheer volume of it may be a bit off-putting to beginners, so it might be best to start with the video series that describes the architecture and goes into detail on several sub-blocks.
The design has changed a bit since [John] first started on the project, as he decided to add more and more features, but the final result is a well-thought out architecture that keeps the simplicity needed for discrete hardware but still has enough features to keep it interesting for seasoned CPU aficionados. The instruction size is rather large (48 bits) to simplify the instruction decoding at the expense of larger code size. Conditional jump instructions are not present; instead, all instructions have an optional control flag to make them conditional, a feature inspired by the ARM instruction set.
The tactics in question are likely familiar to anyone who's used a web browser or a smartphone: the extra hoops to jump through to cancel a subscription, a poorly worded question that leads to an avalanche of unwanted emails or a sign-up process that requires extra work to turn on privacy features.
"They're trying to use emotional blackmail or coercive techniques to try to get you to do something," said Harry Brignull, a London-based expert in designing online user experiences who coined the term "dark patterns" in 2010.
Emails show that NIH officials allowed EcoHealth Alliance to craft oversight language governing its own gain-of-function research.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the passage of Measure 110—the groundbreaking ballot initiative that allowed Oregon to become the first state in the nation to decriminalize possession of all drugs and greatly increase access to supportive health services. The campaign was spearheaded by Drug Policy Action, the c4 political arm of the Drug Policy Alliance, and passed overwhelmingly by Oregon voters with a 17-point margin.
Then, one part of the article caught my eye:
I assume each and every message could itself be malicious. I treat inspecting the log files with care. If any system was compromised, an attacker could theoretically pivot to other systems via carefully crafted malicious syslog messages. Would anyone do this? I doubt it.
Brace yourselves, for what follows is a recount of a case I've helped solve where the initial attack was performed via a carefully crafted syslog message and a tiny bit of social engineering.
Before I go into details, I have to mention that I am not at liberty to disclose the exact details, I cannot go into deeper specifics. So read what follows with that in mind. If something isn't clear, that's probably because I cannot clear it up without breaching confidentiality.
With that out of the way, lets set the stage!
The Linux Foundation has enhanced its free LFX Security vulnerability detection toolkit so open-source projects can secure their code and reduce non-inclusive language.
On Tuesday, the foundation said the LFX Security module now includes automatic scanning for secrets-in-code and non-inclusive language, adding to its existing comprehensive automated vulnerability detection capabilities.
U.S. officials believe that a DJI Mavic 2, a small quadcopter-type drone, with a thick copper wire attached underneath it via nylon cords was likely at the center of an attempted attack on a power substation in Pennsylvania last year. An internal U.S. government report issued last month says this is the first time such an incident has been officially assessed as a possible drone attack on energy infrastructure in the United States, but that this is likely to become more commonplace as time goes on. This is a reality The War Zone has sounded the alarm about in the past, including when we were first to report on a still-unexplained series of drone flights near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona in 2019.
A new release of the compact cryptographic library is wolfSSL 5.0.0 now available IoT , optimized for use on embedded devices with limited processor and memory resources, such as devices, smart home systems, automotive information systems, routers and mobile phones. The code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
The library provides high-performance implementations of modern cryptoalgorithms, including ChaCha20, Curve25519, NTRU, RSA, Blake2b, TLS 1.0-1.3 and DTLS 1.2, which, according to the developers, are 20 times smaller than the OpenSSL implementations. Both its simplified API and a layer for compatibility with the OpenSSL API are provided. There is support for OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) and CRL (Certificate Revocation List) for checking certificate revocation.
This whole process is called “keyless” signature or ambient credentials via workload identities. The word keyless can be a little bit misleading. It does and does not refer to the existence of a cryptographic key. Implementation-wise, there is a key. Otherwise, the whole private/public procedure would not work. But, on the same time you do not have to provide a secret for generating this key. The process is secretless; at least on the first look. On the second look you will realize that your Identity has become the secret.
[...]
Next, we will use the public sigstore instance to generate a new signature via our OpenID and upload it to a public rekor instance. This feature is still experimental. I hope they will release it soon. During the process your browser will pop-up, forward you to the public sigstore instance and ask you for a login. If you login, cosign will use your OpenID to sign the file.
Around 10 years ago, the 7th of June 2011, the first commit of MAT, the metadata anonymisation toolkit, was published. This was done as part as my Google Summer of Code, for the Tails project, under the umbrella of Tor and the EFF. My mentor was Mike Perry, but since he was super-duper-busy, intrigeri was my de facto mentor. I fondly remember writing the design proposal in completely broken English.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it would be shutting down its facial recognition systems. But now, the social network's parent company Meta said that it would be using the same system for its metaverse products.
Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, [Internet]-based simulation where people can interact as avatars, reports Recode.
Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In a Monday blog post, Meta, the social network’s new parent company, announced that the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and shut off its facial recognition software, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos they upload to Facebook. This decision represents a major step for the movement against facial recognition, which experts and activists have warned is plagued with bias and privacy problems.
But Meta’s announcement comes with a couple of big caveats. While Meta says that facial recognition isn’t a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company’s new commitment doesn’t apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. In fact, Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, [Internet]-based simulation where people can interact as avatars. Meta is also keeping DeepFace, the sophisticated algorithm that powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.
“Facebook should not be allowed to create a dystopian metaverse,” Roger McNamee, a former investor and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, said Thursday about the company’s plans, following the company’s change of name to Meta. McNamee has emerged as a regular critic of Facebook after he started to see more misinformation on the platform, the BBC reports.
“There’s no way that a regulator or policymaker should be allowing Facebook to operate there [in the metaverse] or get into cryptocurrencies,” he said. “Facebook should have lost the right to make its own choices. A regulator should be there giving pre-approval for everything they do. The amount of harm they’ve done is incalculable.”
Mr McNamee became a critic of Facebook as he began to see more misinformation on the platform. He said he was not convinced the metaverse would be safe in chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's hands.
if big data about every keystroke every step we make (the police: every step you make) algorithms determine how mankind will live
[...]
‘”You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” he said. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”
“It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” Hunt said. After that mark is reached, Hunt said, the agency would also like to be able to save and analyze all of the digital breadcrumbs people don’t even know they are creating.
“You’re already a walking sensor platform,” he said, nothing that mobiles, smartphones and iPads come with cameras, accelerometers, light detectors and geolocation capabilities.’
“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” he said. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”
I'm embarrassed for my friends when they make mistakes, not that I haven't made a few myself. Recently when the Pentagon issued its terrorizing annual report on China warning that by 2030 China's People's Liberation Army could have 1,000 nuclear warheads, a valued colleague commented that at this rate China will then have as many nuclear warheads as Albuquerque, New Mexico.
David Morris has spent almost 17 years in prison for a murder that he didn't commit.
On Wednesday, a judge threw out his conviction following a review of evidence that determined Morris was wrongfully charged and found guilty in 2005, according to the Office of the State's Attorney for Baltimore City.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles Peters granted prosecutors' request to throw out Morris' old conviction after the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) brought the case to the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). The unit began a re-investigation in 2018, ultimately finding Morris should not have been convicted, according to the state's attorney's office.
As diplomats from wealthy countries continue to say "blah, blah, blah" at COP26, over 100,000 people growing increasingly impatient with empty promises and inaction marched through Glasgow on Saturday, with thousands more hitting the streets in cities around the world during€ roughly 300 simultaneous demonstrations on a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.
"Many thousands of people took to the streets today on every continent demanding that governments move from climate inaction to climate justice," Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, said in a statement. "We won't tolerate warm words and long-term targets anymore, we want action now."
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — Thousands of protestors marched through Glasgow today to demand action from world leaders and polluting companies, as the COP26 UN climate summit moves into its second week.
Indigenous groups were front and centre of the demonstration, with one protestor calling them the “first true climate leaders”.
International negotiators are meeting in Glasgow, Scotland to develop solutions to the climate change threat. But one major obstacle to global sustainability will be largely absent from the discussions: the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system.
A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will "open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world." So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled "Wall Street's Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class":
But in the long run deeper change seems likely. If temperatures rise unabated, farmers in northern Europe may find they can grow southern staples; polenta may invade Germany. And southern locavores may have to adapt. If tropical fruit continue to thrive in Sicily, could ham and pineapple pizza one day be considered authentically Italian?
In the public conversation about climate change, methane has gotten too little attention for too long. Many people may be unaware that humans have been spewing a greenhouse gas that’s even more potent than carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate not seen in at least 800,000 years. It harms air quality and comes from sources as varied as oil and gas pipelines to landfills and cows. But methane and other greenhouse gases, including hydrofluorocarbons, ozone, nitrous oxides, and sulfur oxides, are finally getting the attention they deserve — thanks largely to advances in the science.
In this scenario, hundreds of laws could be weakened or even deactivated. Many of them would be gone for good, and reenacting any of these laws would require passing legislation through a bitterly divided Congress.
So West Virginia is a monster of a case — potentially the culmination of a conservative vision incubated at the Federalist Society for years, and long championed by conservative activists such as Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Indeed, a majority of the Court has already expressed sympathy toward Gorsuch’s plans to shrink the power of federal agencies, which is a strong sign that the West Virginia petitioners are likely to prevail on at least some of their claims.
A company named Leap Photovoltaic claims they have a technology to create solar panels without silicon wafers which would cut production costs in half. According to [FastCompany] the cells are still silicon-based, but do not require creating wafers as a separate step or — as is more common — acquiring them as a raw material.
The process is likened to 3D printing as silicon powder is deposited on a substrate. The design claims to use only a tenth of the silicon in a conventional cell and requires fewer resources to produce, too.
The U.S. House on Friday night passed a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill but didn't bring the Build Back Better Act to the floor—sending just one half of President Joe Biden's two-pronged economic agenda to the White House, with only a pledge that conservative House Democrats will vote for the party's broader social infrastructure and climate package at a later date.
"Passing BIF gives up our leverage to get Build Back Better through the House and Senate, and I fear that we are missing our once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the American people."
The credulous press reports make it look like the cryptocurrency market is much bigger and much more successful that it really is, further inflating the bubble. Below the fold, I provide a set of examples of the techniques that are used to fuel the mania.
Research group Eviction Lab counted more than 532,000 evictions since March 2020 in the six states and 31 cities where it collects data from state, nonprofit and commercial sources. The expiration of the eviction moratorium has left many renters months behind on rent, and landlords hungry for payment. Sometimes negotiation is possible, but many tenants don’t know where to start.
Using tech tools can help put a bit more power in the hands of tenants as they navigate a complicated legal process during a very stressful time. According to data compiled by the National Coalition for the Civil Right to Counsel, most tenants don’t have legal representation to help them if they’re faced with eviction: Nationally, about three percent of tenants have attorneys during eviction proceedings – but 81 percent of landlords do.
Balancing critical analysis with optimistic vision, State of the Free Press 2022 advances remedies for a more robust free press and provides inspiring models for grassroots engagement. In the foreword, journalist Danielle McLean writes, “We need more of the kind of journalism you’ll find in this book.”
China on Friday criticized a press freedom survey from the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club that found nearly half of its members were considering leaving the city.
The survey said the members were concerned about a decline in press freedoms under a sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing following massive anti-government protests in 2019.
Eighty-three of the 99 journalists polled said that the working environment had "changed for the worse" since the law was introduced last June. The law outlaws subversion, secession, terrorism and foreign collusion to intervene in the city's affairs, and has since been used to arrest more than 120 people in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.
A citizen journalist jailed for her coverage of China's initial response to Covid in Wuhan is close to death after going on hunger strike, her family said, prompting renewed calls from rights groups for her immediate release.
When I heard about that discussion, I thought of a woman at my children’s school who said the disintegration of her family began the day her husband bought a TV for every kid’s bedroom. That was a while back. Today, millions of parents are unwittingly putting TVs in their children’s bedrooms, in the form of smartphones and laptops. And uneasiness about weakening family ties is widespread.
For the Amish, technology in the workplace has long been more accepted than technology in homes, especially as the group has had to expand beyond farming to make a living. A recent issue of the Fabricator trade journal reported on advanced manufacturing processes in an Amish factory in Dalton, Ohio. A robot welds wheels. Programmed lasers cut metal. Engineers use three-dimensional computer-aided design, known as 3-D CAD, to devise products. And yet the plant is not connected to the electrical grid: A generator powered by natural gas provides electricity. At day’s end, the workers ride home on bicycles. High and low tech successfully live side by side because the focus stays on human connections.
Making new friends or business partners online is easy, but it can also be dangerous too. You can’t always tell if a contact or offer is legitimate, for example. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to protect yourself from such threats that often gets overlooked: email lookup tools.
These services are easy to use, and some even free. However, the number of options around and their complex technology can seem overwhelming. Here are a few reasons why you should consider using them, specifically related to your security while networking online.
Industry observers agreed that the next generation of BIOS, as well as the digital rights management (DRM) technology that accompanies it, could improve reliability, usability, manageability and security — just as Microsoft and Phoenix claim it will. However, there are concerns that Microsoft is strengthening its grip on PC production and private information.
“There is a risk that the relationship [between Microsoft and Phoenix] will further Microsoft lock-in,” Electronic Privacy Information Center deputy counsel Chris Hoofnagle told TechNewsWorld. “With a monopolistic software company, it can be impossible for the market to create products that are consumer friendly.”
The Linux community has recently posted a number of leaked memos that Microsoft admits are internal MS documents. These papers are Microsoft analyses designed to summarize the Linux phenomenon and help Microsoft focus on how to attack this alternative platform and prevent the public from enjoying it. Prominent Linux people have also commented on these memos and how they reveal Microsoft's internal culture and world-view.
But interest in understanding the Microsoft ethos is not limited to Linux supporters. OS/2 users and advocates can learn a great deal about Microsoft's inner workings and how to take advantage of their smug neglect of the OS/2 community. For example, the articles show a pervasive amnesia about OS/2 as an available option for computer users. These memos also confirm that such tactics as FUD, the threat of lawsuits, and the corruption of open standards are all normal, everyday tactics in the Microsoft repertoire. Let us analyze the memos and see what we can learn about "The Microsoft Way" and how to overcome its intentional obstacles to progress.
TV piracy is on the rise. New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to TV piracy sites has increased by 30% compared to last year. While copyright holders are working hard to address the problem, subscription fatigue and hit shows such as Squid Game continue to push demand higher.
