The **f** and **k** software series of Slackware: Linux FAQ and the Linux kernel.
When we think of a Linux distro fork it's easy to group them all together but not all Linux distro forks are made the same and there's a very important distinction that commonly gets overlooked and that's the repo structure.
Tomorrow should see the release of Linux 5.16, the newest and most stable kernel, delivering massive improvements to start off 2022 on a strong foothold. Linux users and enthusiasts are showing a lot of excitement for this new update, and are even more excited to see 5.17, the predecessor to tomorrow's kernel, which is to show some exciting enhancements.
The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17.
After the Linux 5.16 kernel debuts, the Linux 5.17 merge window opens like clockwork. With my constant monitoring of Linux mailing lists and Git repositories, here is a look at some of the features on trajectory for landing over the next two weeks for Linux 5.17. The Linux 5.17 kernel in turn will debut as stable around the end of March. Linux 5.17 has a lot of work as usual on new AMD and Intel hardware support, new Arm improvements including the ongoing Apple M1 bring-up, new I/O and network optimizations in particular are exciting on the performance front, and a ton of other exciting hardware driver fun.
What may end up being one of the greatest Linux kernel features of 2022 is the recently published "Fast Kernel Headers" effort for cleaning up the kernel headers and dramatically speeding up Linux kernel builds both for absolute/clean and incremental builds. Fast Kernel Headers can cut the Linux kernel build time in half or greater and out this weekend are the v2 patches.
Last week Ingo Molnar sent out the initial Fast Kernel Headers work to cut the Linux kernel build time by 50~80%. The roughly 2,300 patches clean up the kernel's "dependency hell" and completely rework the header file hierarchy. Ingo was working on this patch series for more than one year and likely the single ever biggest "feature" to the Linux kernel.
The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to €µtorrent. qBittorrent is an advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible. qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it.
NetBSD is a UNIX-like operating system with a focus on security, simplicity, elegance and clean source code, it is highly portable and robust.
MariaDB is a RDBMS created from MySQL 5.1 source code by the original MySQL developers and designed as a direct and improved MySQL replacement. MariaDB is fast, scalable, and robust, with a rich ecosystem of storage engines, plugins, and other tools that make it versatile and flexible in different scenarios.
MariaDB is available on the official NetBSD repositories then we can install it using the pkgin package manager.
Whether it’s the versatile development potential or its multifaceted portability, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It has many development-friendly features that make it stand out from its competition. For starters, the ability to run compiled Java code on any supported platform without having to recompile it is one of the defining functions that Java boasts.
In this article, we will learn how to install Java (OpenJDK) on Linux Mint version 20. OpenJDK is a free and open-source distribution of Java. There is also another Java distribution called Oracle JDK, but that comes commercially packaged and is not required unless you have specific requirements.
We will be using the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 20.2, which is most widely used among the operating system’s three different versions. However, the installation method used here should work on the other two, MATE and Xfce. Let’s get right into the installation now.
SQLite is a free, lightweight relational database management system (RDBMS) in a C library. SQLite is not a client-server database engine. Instead, it is embedded into the end program. Primarily all programming languages support SQLite, which how languages embed the program is with a file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.DB extension. The software is a popular choice for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, and much more. The list is quite extensive.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SQLite 3 with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
In this tutorial, we will see how to install and check the PHP extensions loaded on Linux using a command terminal or GUI web interface.
PHP is a popular computer language used by thousands of web servers to run various web applications. It is open source distributed under the PHP license. The abbreviation PHP originally stands for Personal Home Page Tools also popularly known as Hypertext Preprocessor. The PHP infrastructure is installed on an estimated 82% of all web servers on the Internet. More than 200 million apps and websites developed with PHP are online. Over 5 million software developers use the programming language.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Rust on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Rust is an open-source programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, and simulation engines for virtual reality. Although it is sponsored by Mozilla and Samsung, it is a community project. Its focus is primarily on large programs that run on the client and server-side.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Rust Programming Language on a Fedora 35.
Wget command is one of the most used and handy tools for downloading files, packages, and directories from the web server in Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Usually, you can download any big or small-sized files through the wget tool; the wget does not limit the file size. Originally the Wget command was abbreviated to the combination of the terms World Wide Web and Get. This handy tool was built under the GNU project.
It can access both FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and other local servers for downloading files on Linux. Even with proper configuration, the wget command can access firewall-protected servers. As we will be talking about the wget, so for making diversity we will often use the term ‘World Wide Web and Get’ instead of the wget.
In this article, we will show you how to fix sudo command not found in Debian 10 VPS.
Sudo is a program for Unix-like computer operating systems that enables users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, by default the superuser.It can stand for “superuser do”, as originally that is all it did however, now it might stand for “substitute user, do”, because sudo can run a command as other users as well.
After a fresh Debian 10 installation, you could not execute the privileges tasks by running the sudo command. You will get the error ‘sudo command not found in Debian 10ââ¬Â².
In the first 60 seconds of this video I benchmark Virtualbox vs QEMU.
Learn the commands to install and use PHP package manager Composer on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal fossa. Composer can be used to manage your packages, download new packages, and update existing ones.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VLC Media Player on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, VLC is a free and open-source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files. VLC can play almost any multimedia file, as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
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 VLC Media Player on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
If you’re looking for a true self-hosted file share and sync platform, then Nextcloud is a good place to start. Here I will show you how to install Nextcloud on Ubuntu in a few easy-to-follow steps.
Nextcloud is a self-hosted file sharing application server that allows you to store your files, documents, and contacts from a centralized location. It is a true open source platform similar to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and other proprietary online storage services.
The problem with the big players is that you don’t know where your data is exactly and whether it is really safe from access by others. When it comes to some classified data that you don’t want to store on some third-party servers then it is good to go for something that you can control completely.
With Nextcloud you can synchronize everything between your devices and share files with others as well. Furthermore, you can create multiple accounts for friends/family. They will then be able to log into the server and store data, very similar to Dropbox, etc.
The server-side program of Nextcloud is meant to work on Linux operating systems, therefore any Linux user even the beginner one can easily install it. So without further ado, let’s get down to installation.
Zoom is a communications technology platform that provides videotelephony and real-time online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform and is used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education, and much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Zoom Cloud Meetings client on Linux Mint 20 using three various methods.
An accidentally executed sequence of command and system files is in danger now. Any time they will wipe out, What should I do now?
The situation is familiar; most Linux beginners face this situation and do something unintentionally which risks their files.
TermPair is a web service that allows anyone to view and control their Terminal sessions in real time from a web browser. Simply put, it lets people collaborate, view, share, all in real time.
You can quickly and securely share your Terminal to the Web and access as well as control it.
TermPair is good for those who wants to collaborate in real-time. It also has some security loopholes. If you’re not careful, it could be a catastrophic mistake.
How to check memory usage on linux using commands such as top and free and how to query /proc/meminfo to get detailed memory usage stats
The Legend of Tianding is a Taiwanese game. Asia is comprised of many small countries but very few are actually powerhouses when it comes to video game development. Japan more or less created the video games industry in the first place (Nintendo created the worldwide mass market with the NES and everything derived from there), then Korea created the online PC gaming market before anyone else, and… that’s about it. China has its owned closed market that nobody knows (or cares) about, so it’s kind of irrelevant. Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan have a few devs here and there but by far and large nothing major. So I had very low expectations to begin with. Well, virtually anyone with half a brain can make a 2D platformer, but doing it well requires talent and experience. In that context, The Legend of Tianding is an excellent surprise.
Those effects were amazing, and not for their time. It was able to minimize your windows using a Mac OS X-like genie effect, dissolve them, rotate your desktop on a cube, and even burn your windows alive! It even inspired StarDock’s WindowFX. Many of the more practical effects like genie minimization, have been available in Kwin (the venerable KDE’s window manager) all along, but they’ve completely disappeared on the contemporary, GTK powered side of the Linux desktop.
No longer. Open-source developer Simon Scheegans is working on a project called Burn My Windows that restores classic desktop effects like burning windows to Gnome 3x and Gnome 40x, respectively. The project debuted only 3 weeks ago and is hilariously already on version 7. Version 5, which introduced the compelling if not somewhat terrifying T-Rex-Attack effect, was released only two days ago. At this rate, it may be at version 2005 sometime next year.
Libadwaita is quite controversial, as aside from dark mode and a (promised) colour API, applications that use Libadwaita cannot be themed. It’s all the result of developers being unhappy us pesky users get to decide what our computers look like, so they decided to prevent users from theming their systems at all. GNOME’s own applications will surely transition to it, and it remains to be seen if the wider Gtk developer community will opt for it as well.
In a market dominated by premium-grade OSes with dedicated COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software, Linux users must make do with open-source variants of such premium applications.
And a distro-agnostic way to distribute such software on Linux is Flatpak. This is why flatpak packages are rapidly becoming the buzz-phrase amongst users with a Linux-based stack.
But what is Flatpak and which Linux distros have transitioned to Flatpak? Let's find out.
Strapped for hard disk space? Install one of these small and lightweight Linux distros to make your PC usable again.
Do you have an old PC lying around gathering dust? Would you like to make use of the old small-capacity USB flash drive sitting in your draw? You can reuse your old computer and a USB flash drive by installing a super small Linux distribution on them.
Here are eight of the smallest Linux distros that need almost no space!
Clonezilla Live 2.8.1 is here one and a half months after Clonezilla Live 2.8 and it’s the first release of the live Linux system to be powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series. The previous release was powered by Linux kernel 5.14, which reached end of life in November 2021.
Linux kernel 5.15.5 LTS is included by default in the Clonezilla Live 2.8.1 release, which also improves support for detecting hd1, hd2, etc. disks, adds a new functionality to no longer split the image file of a partition when saving an image by the ocs-sr script.
EasyOS 3.1 was released on October 25, 2021, see announcement at Distrowatch. Since then, we have been steadily working toward 3.2 ...and, oh man, so many changes, where to start... Alright, an announcement blurb, doesn't cover everything, just some highlights:
Since version 3.1, EasyOS has undergone major structural changes and many new applications added. Some of the structural changes include a move from ALSA-only to Pulseaudio, applications running as their own user, improved hardware-profiling for audio, fixes for samba, audio and video, more video drivers, new /files top-level folder. Software changes include a recompile of all packages in OpenEmbedded (OE) and the addition of major multimedia applications such as LiVES video editor, VLC video player, OBS Studio video recorder/streamer and Scribus desktop publisher -- all cross-compiled in OE. Qt5 packages are now compiled in OE. More development packages in the 'devx' SFS, including Mercurial source-control and Nemiver debugger. Numerous bug-fixes and improvements.
What’s next for Makulu Shift ? Well, They say a Picture Speaks a Thousand Words, So …
A new mini PC equipped with 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports has been recently launched powered by an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor and offering support for open source router, VPN, and firewall software. Enabling you to add a firewall or upgrade your existing network with a number of extra options depending on your preference.
Available in a variety of different configurations the barebones model is priced at $417 and is now available to purchase from online retailers such as Amazon or AliExpress. Powered by an Intel Celeron 6305 processor or Core i5-1135G7 the mini PC is available with also available with 32GB of RAM and 512GB of solid state storage if you would prefer a system that works straight out-of-the-box. The mini PC router also features a configuration with an optional 4G LTE and SIM card slot. The Fanless Tech website explains a little more :
It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components.
Fedora 36 continues its feature development for this next Fedora Linux release that should be out by the end of April. One of the latest change proposals is for shipping Fedora 36 with GCC 12, which itself will be released in March or April as usual. This isn't surprising with Fedora always shipping the bleeding-edge compiler even if it means initially shipping with a near-final pre-release package.
The third point release of Linux Mint 20 is out! Unlike Ubuntu, it has different code names for each point releases. And, Linux Mint 20.3 codenamed ‘Una’.
The release still has Kernel 5.4 though user may install updated Ubuntu patched Kernels using ‘Update Manager’. And, it features Cinnamon 5.2, MATE 1.26, and XFCE 4.16 for each desktop editions.
In the last few days, I get hands on an interesting Raspberry PI touchscreen display. I was wishing to use it to test some projects like a retro gaming console and/or a home control display, but using it I thought that it is enough interesting for being worth a dedicated post.
The display is the 10.1 inches version of RPI All-In-One product, from Uperfect. Please note that the Raspberry PI board is not included in the standard package and you have to buy your one apart from it:
The best part about the Vivaldi-Astro Slide 5G combo is that those who love the hardware/software combination but are not Google fans (at all) can run an alternative operating system. Astro Slide accepts Linux in a multi-boot setup with Android and Planet Computers, its creators, decided to use a Debian-based OS with the KDE desktop on top. Obviously, Vivaldi is no stranger to the Linux world, since it has been available for this operating system from the beginning and was also chosen as the default browser on the Manjaro Cinnamon edition distro back in early September 2021.
If you’ve got a nostalgic spot for smartphones with slide-out keyboards then Planet Computers might catch your interest with its Astro Slide 5G. The device was announced at CES 2022 and brings a backlit keyboard that swivels from underneath the phone’s display thanks to its neat hinge mechanism. The phone boots Android 11 but it can also be booted with Linux distributions and Planet Computers is also working on bringing support for Sailfish OS.
Astro Slide 5G brings a 6.39" AMOLED panel with FHD+ resolution and Gorilla Glass 3 protection with uniform bezels and a 13MP front-facing cam. The phone is powered by the Dimensity 800 5G chipset paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage which is expandable via microSD. Apart from having a QWERTY keyboard you also get programmable keyboard keys that let you open an app or toggle between system functions.
Vivaldi Technologies just announced that they have teamed up with Planet Computers. Planet Computers, the maker of the Astro Slide 5G, will ship their device with the Vivaldi browser pre-installed.
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Both Vivaldi and Planet Computers show their love for Linux with pride. You can multi-boot Linux as well as Android on the Astro Slide. The Vivaldi browser just became the default browser on Arch-based Manjaro’s Cinnamon edition.
[Zekfoo] decided to honor the Game Boy Advance’s 20th birthday by redesigning it at the circuit level to give it a more modern twist.
The first step is to get your bitmap, whether you create it yourself, or download it, and trace it into a set of vectors using the Inkscape ‘trace bitmap’ tool. If you started with an SVG or similar vector shape, then you can skip that stage.
Next simply create a PCB outline shape by deleting all the details that aren’t part of the outline. A little scaling here and there to get the dimensions correct and you’re done with the first part. [Stuart] has an earlier video showing that process.
The usability improvements in KiCAD 6.0 are many, but one greatly demanded feature is the ability to group objects, just like you do in Inkscape and any other vector graphics tool for that matter. That means you can simply import that SVG outline into the Edge.Cuts PCB layer and all the curves will be nicely tied together. Next you select the details you want for the silkscreen layer, solder mask removal layers and any non-circuit copper. In Inkscape it would be wise to use the layers feature to assign the different material types to a uniquely named layer, so they can be hidden for exporting. This allows you to handle silk, mask and copper PNG exports from a single master file, in addition to any vector details for outline, slots and holes.
We’re not sure what the assignment was, but the results of [Garret Carter]’s homework for his Digital System Design class at Tennessee Tech couldn’t help but capture our attention. Below the break you can see what [Garrett] describes as a “simplified stylized version” of the 1981 arcade hit “Defender”.
With the goal of keeping the price low but keeping performance as high as possible, [Garrett] set forth to program the DE10-Lite FPGA development board in VHDL. The results are convincing, and while not perfect, came in under budget.
CarbonData stores and archives all sorts of complex data and enables these to be accessed quickly. It has features like multiple indexes to quickly access the data, intelligent scanning, and most importantly, it enables easy scaling. “The biggest problem with most data warehouses is that the storage and compute functions are clustered together. We separated these two to work and scale independently of each other. In case of a system failure, there should be no loss of data.” It took seven months to build the project before it began the incubation phase at Apache where it was assigned a mentor. It took another year to mature the project. It was finally declared as one of the top-level projects, and became a mainstream Apache project. “When I was a student, we didn’t have access to software technologies because companies kept them private. But it’s very different now, with open source code available for free,” Raghunandan says. He urges students and enthusiasts to contribute to open source projects. A good way to begin, he says, is by adding documentation to existing projects. Enthusiasts can find something they are interested in and improve it, build it, or maintain it. Beginning with something you’re familiar with helps you get started with the process.
LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.
While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.
There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.
Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
As has become the custom, the team behind Ruby has used the end-of-year holiday break to push out a feature update for the programming language. Version 3.1 is now available and mostly bestows performance and debugging improvements upon developers.
Amongst the highlights of version 3.1 is a new debugger that replaces lib/debug.rb. According to Ruby committer Yui Naruse, lib/debug.rb wasn’t well maintained and showed some performance and feature issues.
Build processes can be quite sophisticated for enterprise applications, but even simple and early-stage projects can benefit from automated build pipelines. This article describes a quick-to-deploy system for running an automated build, test, and deploy pipeline with Node.js, Jenkins, and Git.
You’ll need Git and Node/NPM installed on your system to follow along. You’ll also need a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account. (Google offers a generous free trial account.)
Before looking into portable software, let's first examine portability from a hardware perspective. When you ask most people what they consider a "portable computer", they'll probably think of laptops or possibly even a modern smartphone.
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Some years ago I ported a sizable fraction of LibreOffice to build with Meson. It worked only on Linux as it used system dependencies. I rebased it to current trunk and tried to see if it could be built using nothing but Visual Studio by getting dependencies via the WrapDB. This repo contains the code, which now actually does build some code including dependencies like libxml, zlib and icu.
The code that is there is portable in the laptop sense. You only need to do a git checkout and start the build in a VS x64 dev tools prompt. It does cheat in some points, such as using pregenerated flex + bison sources, but it's not meant to be production quality, just an experiment.
This is not exactly news, given that it dates from early 2018, but I hadn’t heard of this before, so I still find it worth disseminating.
Hi all! Welcome to 2022! Towards the end of last year, Tyler Mandry and I were doing a lot of iteration around supporting “dyn async trait” – i.e., making traits that use async fn dyn safe – and we’re starting to feel pretty good about our design. This is the start of several blog posts talking about where we’re at. In this first post, I’m going to reiterate our goals and give a high-level outline of the design. The next few posts will dive more into the details and the next steps.
Simone Bordet, Cay Horstmann discuss Java’s new release cadence which brings exciting new features at a more consistent pace, what have been the strongest points of Java, what are we missing?
Smug Linux types have it built in, on pretty much every Linux desktop. All you have to do is enable it, for instance with GNOME Tweaks, KDE System Settings or Xfce's Settings editor.
Are animals' innate navigational abilities universal or are they restricted to their home environments? Researchers designed a set of wheels under a goldfish tank with a camera system to record and translate the fish's movements into forward and back and side to side directions to the wheels. By doing so, they discovered that a goldfish's navigational ability supersedes its watery environs.
To fight infections and heal injuries, immune cells need to enter tissue. They also need to invade tumors to fight them from within. Scientists have now discovered how immune cells protect their sensitive insides as they squeeze between tissue cells. The team lays the foundation for identifying new targets in cancer treatment.
Nationally, hospital admissions due to COVID-19 are rising for children, the CDC reported.
When the last slice of pizza had disappeared, the 30 students at the NAMI on Campus meeting quieted and turned their attention to their vice president, psychology junior Alexis McDonald. The agenda for this meeting in October 2018 included a talk about depressive disorders, followed by a National Alliance on Mental Illness tradition: McDonald would share her own story.
“In high school, I experienced a lot of depression and anxiety, but I had never seen a therapist or had a diagnosis,” she began. “I thought things would improve in college, but my freshman year was the most lonely, isolating experience of my life. I was so anxious I couldn’t go into social spaces and introduce myself. When I walked around, I felt no connection to anyone.”
In 2020, there were 408 publicly-disclosed cyber incidents impacting K-12 school districts. Of those 408 incidents, roughly 50 consisted of ransomware. These incidents often resulted in school closures and prevented districts from accessing sensitive data and critical systems because they were encrypted by cybercriminals.
During an attack, school district IT teams scramble to find all the ransomware symptoms to see which systems have been impacted and assess the severity. Another threat emerging is the exfiltration of data by attackers to try and force school districts to pay the ransom. This makes data loss prevention for districts more critical to have in place as part of their cloud application security checklist.
Folks at Technische Universität Wien in Austria have devised a formal security framework called WebSpec to analyze browser security.
And they've used it to identify multiple logical flaws affecting web browsers, revealing a new cookie-based attack and an unresolved Content Security Policy contradiction.
These logical flaws are not necessarily security vulnerabilities, but they can be. They're inconsistencies between Web platform specifications and the way these specs actually get implemented within web browsers.
WebSpec was developed by Lorenzo Veronese, Benjamin Farinier, Mauro Tempesta, Marco Squarcina, Matteo Maffei in an effort to bring rigor to web security through automated, verifiable rule checking rather than manual evaluation.
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what's going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what's going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
The attackers breached the Broward Health network by compromising a third-party provider on Oct. 15, according to the organization’s disclosure, accessing: patient names; dates of birth; addresses; phone numbers; financial or bank information; Social-Security numbers; insurance information and account numbers; medical information including history, treatment and diagnosis; driver’s license numbers; and email addresses.
After our recent end-of-year retrospectives, it’s time to look back again – this time at some of the most compelling open source hacking tools released during the final quarter of 2021.
The arsenals of pen testers, researchers, and bug hunters have been bolstered for 2022 by new tools for detecting dependency confusion attacks, finding novel HTTP request smuggling techniques, and uncovering leaked, paired private and public keys that are potentially dangerous.
On December 16, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released mandate letters tasking his ministers of national defense, foreign affairs, public safety, and industry to develop a new “National Cyber Security Strategy.” He specifically highlighted the need for the strategy to “articulate Canada’s long-term strategy to protect our national security and economy, deter cyber threat actors, and promote norms-based international behavior in cyberspace,” as quoted by Global News.
The first British who came to rule India were men of the Enlightenment with an intense curiosity
It has become fashionable in India to condemn British who came to India during the Raj as nothing but freebooters, racists and british administrators. The portrayal is entirely negative: British rule is generally considered to be an unmitigated disaster that led to impoverishment, subjugation and dishonour. This, however, is not the complete picture.
Authors and amateur historians, Rupa and Gautam Gupta, have unveiled an entirely different aspect of British rule in India, one that is far from negative. Their focus is on British men long dead who helped revive the forgotten glory of the Indian civilisation.
On 24 December, the United Kingdom embassy in Tripoli, Libya, issued a statement on its Twitter and Facebook accounts that, at first, looked like a routine statement on developments in the country—something major countries' embassies, including the United States, used to do. Not this time. A few moments later, Libyans in their thousands, were flocking to social media platforms to call for the ambassador to be expelled.
The statement reiterated the UK's support for elections but what enraged people is a sentence that says that the UK will continue to recognise the current Government of National Unity (GNU) as "the authority tasked with leading Libya to elections and does not endorse the establishment of parallel" authority. The current caretaker GNU government and its Prime Minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, have been accused of corruption, waste of resources and, above all, Mr. Dbeibah is accused of using public finances for his own presidential bid. There has been a debate among politicians if GNU should stay or not.
Much has been written about the economic crisis staring at Sri Lanka and most of it ends up blaming the incumbent government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and excludes the role of the previous regimes since the country’s Independence in 1948. Question is should India bail out the strategically located southern neighbour, why and how.
Sri Lanka’s economy was designed to implode from time to time, and that has happened without fail at every turn. Unlike on previous occasions, this time round, the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the forex-centric economy so hard that it will continue to reel under its effect for years and decades to come, even if it overcomes the current crisis.
Images of a gosling in the Falklands and some Gentoo penguins taken by a youngster from Pembrokeshire have all won top prizes in the prestigious RSPCA Young Photographer Awards 2021.
Northern Ireland's Land and Property Services, part of the Department of Finance, is planning an IT procurement worth up to €£125m to replace an ageing BT system running since 1999.
Costs on the BT contract to build and run LandWeb, a land registry system, more than doubled since it was first signed more than two decades ago leading to investigations by government auditors.
The Land and Property Services is now looking for a "Land Registration Delivery Partner" to help build a "modern digitally-enabled ICT solution that will support the transformation of Land Registration Services," according to a tender document published before Christmas.
Every device on the Internet, at one time, had its own globally-unique IP address. This number was its identifier to the world; with an IP address, you can connect to any machine anywhere. Even now, when you connect to a computer to download a webpage or send a message, under the hood, your computer is talking to the other one by IP address.
Only, now it’s hard to get one. The Internet protocol we all grew up with, version 4 (IPv4), didn’t have enough addresses for the explosive growth we’ve seen. Internet providers and IT departments had to use a trick called NAT (Network Address Translation) to give you a sort of fake IP address, so they could put hundreds or thousands of devices behind a single public one. That, plus the mobility of devices — changing IPs whenever they change locations — has meant that a fundamental rule of the old Internet is now broken:
Every participant is an equal peer. (Well, not any more.)
Nowadays, you can’t you host your own website from your phone. Or share files from your house. (Without, that is, the use of some third-party service that locks you down and acts as an intermediary.)
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Or, I can join the global Yggdrasil network. Each device, in addition to accepting peers it finds on the LAN, can also be configured to establish outbound peering connections or accept inbound ones over the Internet. Put a public peer or two in your configuration and you’ve joined the global network. Most people will probably want to do that on every device (because why not?), but you could also do that from just one device on your LAN. Again, there’s no need to explicitly build routes via it; your other machines on the LAN will discover the route’s existence and use it.
This is one of many projects that are working to democratize and decentralize the Internet. So far, it has been quite successful, growing to over 2000 nodes. It is the direct successor to the earlier cjdns/Hyperboria and BATMAN networks, and aims to be a proof of concept and a viable tool for global expansion.
Finally, think about how much easier development is when you don’t have to necessarily worry about TLS complexity in every single application. When you don’t have to worry about port forwarding and firewall penetration. It’s what the Internet should be.
Talking over the year in review on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were brainstorming what we thought was the single overarching trend in 2021, and we came up with many different topics: victories in the right to repair, increasingly dystopian service contracts, a flourishing of cyberdecks, and even greater prevalence of reverse engineering style hacks. And then we realized: they are all different faces of the same beast — people just want to own the devices that they own.
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, our modern Internet-connected-everythings have two sides. On one side, we get so much additional functionality from having everything on the net. But on the other, if your car is always connected, it gives Toyota a means to make you pay a monthly fee to use a car fob, and if you have to use Cricut’s free online service to upload designs to the cutter, they can suddenly decide to start charging you. It allows Samsung to not only spy on whatever you’re currently watching on your smart TV, but to also brick it if they want to. More and more, we don’t actually own (in the sense of control) the devices that we own (in the sense of having purchased).
In recent years, there has been a trend in cyberspace ethics towards the emergence of intra-net mechanisms and self-regulatory systems. In particular, in many European countries, information service providers have started to introduce voluntary self-limitation. For instance, in the UK, there is an independent Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), whose representatives develop rating systems for Internet resources, by maintaining constant monitoring to collect information that infringes moral and legal standards on websites, and – where necessary – block access to them.
A solution to the problem of the quality of information provided on the Internet can probably come from traditional media, which in recent years have been increasingly committed to acquiring an electronic version of their print or radio and television editions. Moreover, exclusively online newspapers and magazines have already emerged which, thanks to their serious and cautious approach, have won the online public’s trust. These publications can play an extremely important role through widely applied survey protocols; evaluation of electronic publications; maintenance of the virtual media’s reputation; and supervision of the implementation of the basic rules and principles of professional journalistic ethics on the Internet.
