I was a Windows user for many years, but after buying a new computer I decided to use Ubuntu as the main OS.
As a painter who also likes software development, I first came across Krita when I was looking for digital painting applications on Windows. Later on, I learned about open source and decided to start contributing as a way to build my development skills while working on something that I myself use. I spent the last few months of 2020 building Krita, first in Windows (a nightmare :P), then in Linux, and started learning Qt since I was already familiar with some basic C++ from school.
Last year Blender 3.0 added AMD HIP acceleration to its Cycles X render code with OpenCL having been removed. That AMD HIP support for Blender 3.0 was limited to Windows with plans to then enable Linux support for Blender 3.1. Sadly due to AMD driver delays, that HIP Linux support is postponed to Blender 3.2.
Blender 3.1 is due to be released in March and sadly will be lacking AMD HIP support on Linux.
A change currently being evaluated for Intel's "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver would make it easier for building driver support for their forthcoming discrete graphics products for targeting other non-x86 CPU architectures like Arm
Sent out today as a "request for comments" were patches that change the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver to allow it to optionally build without support for integrated graphics -- leaving the driver just capable of discrete graphics support. While Intel graphics have traditionally been about their integrated graphics on their processors, Intel is moving hard and fast on bringing up their discrete graphics support under Linux with DG2/Alchemist for Intel Arc graphics cards coming together as well as their Xe HPC accelerator.
While it was just yesterday NVIDIA released the 470.103.01 Linux driver, today they have made public the 510.47.03 Linux driver as their first stable version in the NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series.
This is the stabilized version from their prior NVIDIA 510 Linux beta that brought Vulkan dynamic rendering, AV1 VDPAU decode support, and a variety of other updates predominantly driven by Vulkan API improvements. There is also improved GBM API support for what was originally introduced in the 495 driver series.
 With NVIDIA's newly-introduced 510 Linux driver series paired with the latest XWayland and a modern Wayland compositor like the newest GNOME/Mutter packages, the NVIDIA (X)Wayland experience is in great shape and delivering comparable performance to a traditional X.Org session. The NVIDIA Wayland support with GBM usage has stabilized and appears to be in good shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are some benchmarks of the NVIDIA 510 driver on the current state of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
In the past we've looked at the Radeon Linux gaming performance for X.Org vs. Wayland. Modern Wayland support in the likes of KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell have worked out well with that open-source Radeon driver stack. Now with the latest NVIDIA drivers, their Wayland support is in good shape too.
Some time ago, I wrote an article on how to install OmniOS CE on VirtualBox. OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, which is based on (now discontinued) OpenSolaris, which was based on Oracle Solaris.
For this article I’m going back to the “source” to show how to install Oracle Solaris 11.4, screen by screen. Last year I’ve switched from VirtualBox (also from Oracle) to gnome-boxes, but the general procedure should be pretty similar to any VM system. Anyway, to use in production, a real server would do better.
In this modern era, everything is digitized. The E-Books have became mainstream. EBooks are available in various formats such as PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 and IBA Etc. Most e-Book readers does support almost all formats. However, some e-Book reader may not support a specific format. For example, ASW3 files will only be viewed by Amazon Kindle. In such cases, we need to convert the e-Books from one format to another supported format. In this quick tutorial, we will see how to easily convert EBooks from PDF to EPUB format (and vice versa) in Linux.
There are many online and offline applications exists to convert an EBook from one format to another. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using Calibre e-book suite, which let us to convert ebooks from both CLI and via GUI.
RethinkDB is an open-source NoSQL database for production use, it is meant to simplify the creation and scaling of real-time applications. This distributed NoSQL database intended for storing schemaless JSON documents
Although MongoDB is already quite popular in the field of NoSQL databases, however, MongoDB lags behind Cassandra, CouchDB, or Riak in terms of scalability. Well, this means RethinDB has to compete with all of them, well it already trying to provide ease of usage like MongoDB with good scalability.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Terraform on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files. Terraform is built by Hashicorp and released under Mozilla Public License. It supports public, private as well as hybrid cloud, as of now Terraform supports 145 providers, which includes popular providers like AWS, Azure cloud, GCP, Oracle cloud, and many others.
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 Terraform on a Fedora 35.
There was a time when KDE was considered as a resource binger Desktop UI but not anymore, it is similar to Gnome in terms of performance but with a much beautiful interface and wide range of applications. It comes already comes as a default GUI in many Linux systems such as OpenSUSE, MX Linux, Kubuntu among others. The main focus here is on the many customization options.
Although the KDE desktop is beautiful, a bit more confusing at first glance, however as you start using the same, it is very reminiscent of Windows with its taskbar. This also contains the “Activity Manager” with which different desktop versions can be displayed, for example, to access a photo collection directly. The display of windows or the positioning of widgets – almost every element of the user interface can be customized in KDE. However, the variety of options can quickly overwhelm inexperienced users. You should therefore invest some time in your very own KDE experience.
Also, the applications from the KDE community are a lot more extensive and, like the KDE desktop, with a wide range of setting options. Great for power users, unfortunately often too overloaded for newcomers.
Hello flocks, today we are going to learn some DNS stuffs. We all know about what’s a DNS, how DNS works, its types, etc. So, wrap things up and let’s dive into our today’s topic about DNS Response Policy Zone (RPZ).
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DNS Response Policy Zone (RPZ) is a DNS zone which enables DNS administrators to customize policy in DNS servers, so that the server returns modified answers to Client’s DNS queries. In other words, RPZ provides a way to alter a DNS response in real time. It can be used to modify potentially unsafe DNS Data to block communication or provide local data to redirect to a “walled garden”. As we can alter query response or block any domain using RPZ it is also known as DNS firewall.
Grep is a powerful UNIX command that lets you search inside the file contents on a variety of parameters. It's specially helpful when you are troubleshooting or debugging.
The grep command has a huge number of options and use cases. You probably will never need or use all of them. However, you'll end up using a handful of grep commands most of the time.
This article lists the most common grep commands with quick examples. Linux Handbook already has a detailed article on grep, so I won't go in depth here. I'll just the common options and their explanation here.
A variable is a placeholder that is used to store any numerical or text value so that it can be used during the execution of a computer program. It is normally used in computer programming languages, but you can also use it in Bash scripts.
In this tutorial, you will learn about increment and decrement variables and different ways of incrementing and decrementing variables in Bash scripts.
In traditional programming languages, there is a proper syntax to define a variable. Also, you have to specify the well-known data type (integer, float, char, etc.) that defines the type of value the variable would contain and allocates memory for it accordingly.
Looking for a job in the Linux space? Now is your chance! CodeWeavers, the company that sponsors development on the Wine compatibility layer and works with Valve on Steam Play Proton are hiring again.
Similar to one they offered before is a "General Wine Developer". This position needs a programmer to hack away on open source to improve Wine's ability to run games and all sorts of other software. CodeWeavers say there's multiple positions available here between working on their own CrossOver UI, Proton for Valve and various other CodeWeavers' stuff. One of the key points though is you cannot have had exposure to Microsoft code or reverse-engineering of Microsoft software, as everything Wine related has to be totally clean-room.
Wadjet Eye Games and Technocrat Games have returned with a fresh upgrade of Technobabylon, a 2015 cyberpunk adventure. This follows on from updates / new Linux ports of Unavowed, Gemini Rue and The Blackwell Bundle.
For developers, the time they have to wait between running sales has been decreased. Instead of having to wait six weeks between sales, they now only have to wait four (28 days). Although, this rule does not apply to the four most major site-wide sales being the Lunar New Year, Summer, Autumn, and Winter sales. Valve are also provided developers with a new tool to manage participating in sale events, where developers get a centralized area to see all the events their games qualify to be included in. Sounds pretty useful.
We don't yet know the exact date of the Linux version, with it coming "as close to launch day as possible" with the main release date being February 17.
Quick tip - GOG and Amazon Prime Gaming have teamed up to give subscribers an offer they can't refuse - another free game! Get a copy of Stellaris from Paradox Interactive / Paradox Development Studios.
How to get it? Easy. Just head over to Prime Gaming and click the Games header, then you will see that you can redeem Stellaris on GOG. The offer is open until March 1 and the deal is open to any region that is available with GOG, so you should be good to go. Always nice to get another free game and Stellaris is one where you can happily sink 100s of hours into even without any DLC.
Valheim, absolutely one of the best games available natively for Linux is going to get some upgrades for the Steam Deck.
Today marks the first time where the Steam Deck Verified and Playable games are listed at a much faster rate – nothing like what we have seen in the past week. Just in the past 24 hours since our last refresh, 56 titles have been added in total, bringing the current status to...
If you’re a KDE fan, you must have certainly come across or even used Falkon. So, you must be pleasantly surprised to find out that KDE has managed to release a new major upgrade of their web browser.
Unlike other mainstream web browsers, Falkon does not receive frequent updates. And, the latest release is an exciting update, after a gap of almost three years!
For those unaware, Falkon is a simple open-source web browser built upon the QtWebEngine. It was initially known as QupZilla, later rebranded to Falkon under KDE.
Trisquel 10.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest major release of this operating system that is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. While it has the blessing of the FSF, it's a bit behind on the software feature front.
Trisquel 10.0 is the FSF-endorsed distribution's rebase to... Ubuntu 20.04 lTS. Two years after the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and two months ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Trisquel 10.0 is now onto this Ubuntu long-term support release. Trisquel 10.0 for meeting the free software requirements defaults to using the GNU Linux-Libre 5.4 kernel by default, which is also a bit unfortunate for a 2022+ distribution considering all of the improvements since in recent kernels. There is though 5.8 and 5.13 based GNU Linux-libre builds available within Trisquel 10.0 as alternatives but surprisingly not any option based on Linux 5.15 LTS.
Besides migrating to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, Trisquel 10.0 adds initial support for ARM devices. However, that's an "armhf" target. Next the project will be working towards 64-bit Arm and POWER architecture support. They did drop 32-bit x86 support though with Trisquel 10.
The Trisquel team released Trisquel GNU/Linux 10.0 “Nabia” and we’re going to take a look at it today.
Very few Linux distros have the privilege of being endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). One of those distros is Trisquel GNU/Linux.
You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Trisquel. It is an Ubuntu-based desktop oriented distro which features free and open source software exclusively. This means that there is no closed source proprietary software of any kind included in this distro. That includes the kernel, all the apps, all the libraries, drivers, everything.
Keep in mind that if you wanted to go out and get proprietary drivers, Trisquel doesn’t provide any easy tools for you to use to get those proprietary drivers. Certainly, you’re not gonna like spending a ton of money on that high-end Nvidia graphics card and then having to run the nouveau drivers.
EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure. Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs. EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64. The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021. The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021. Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent. The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications. The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.
The upcoming Easy 3.3 will be a 616MB download, compressed .img.gz file.
However, if I was to build it with a 4MB second partition, and not compress the file, the .img file will be 1 + 639 + 4 +1 equals 645MB. Those 1MB at start and end are padding.
Then there will be no need to uncompress the file, just one click to open it. But, I don't know if this is really such a big issue, might put it on the back burner. Reconsider sometime later.
This topic is somewhat esoteric, of interest to developers only. The OpenEmbedded cross-compile environment can cause some unexpected side-effects when the executables are run in the target system.
If your technology organization is like most, the volume of requests you receive can outpace your ability to keep up with the architecture you need to support innovation and growth. Over time, this situation can cause technical debt, hindering responsiveness and speed to market.
Like many organizations, our company faced challenges during the pandemic that left us with the burden of technical debt. Here’s how we responded to come out ahead.
In our previous post we shared the names of the winners of Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards across three categories: Open Transformation, Cloud Native, and Hybrid Cloud.
The awards were launched in July 2021 in collaboration with Intel and IDC with the goal of identifying innovative and transformative digital leaders using Red Hat technologies and services. The awards shine a spotlight on the innovations of our customers, while focusing on the business value and impact of their projects.
Philip Carter, group vice president, European chief analyst and WW C-Suite tech research lead at IDC said: "With close to 120 applications, we were able to capture and showcase unique use cases of technology and share some of the best practices for making projects a success.
We had the pleasure of reviewing many successful practices across industries in EMEA, from large blue chip organisations to local heroes, all of whom provided incredible insights into their projects and operations."
In the first post of our three-part series, we discussed enhancements made to several Red Hat products and product documentation based on customer feedback in the past year. In this post, we’ll look at some additional areas where we have been working to improve the experience we deliver to customers and partners.
Other areas that we have made improvements to based on what we’ve heard from our customers. Let’s take a look at some of the enhancements we made to the areas of support delivery and subscription management.
When working on public Git repositories, you need to pay close attention so that you don't accidentally push secret information such as tokens, private server addresses, personal email addresses, and the like. One of the tools that can help you is Git's clean/smudge filter.
In financial terms, edge has already arrived: IDC predicts that companies will spend $176 billion on edge computing worldwide this year, roughly a 15% increase from 2021.
Ultimately, that’s just a (big) number. There may be more qualitative signs of edge computing’s maturation in terms of architectural approaches, technical capabilities, enterprise use cases, security tactics, and more.
“Even if we see echoes of older architectures in certain edge computing deployments, we also see developing edge trends that are genuinely new, or at least quite different from what existed previously,” Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at Red Hat, wrote recently in his analysis of edge trends to watch in 2022. “And they’re helping IT and business leaders solve problems in industries ranging from telco to automotive, for example, as both sensor data and machine learning (ML) data proliferates.”
IT leaders don’t often tackle business problems without a plan, which is why edge strategies – and related categories like IoT and machine learning – figure prominently on their roadmaps. In Red Hat’s 2022 Global Tech Outlook report, for example, 61% of respondents reported plans to run IoT or edge workloads (or both) in the next 12 months.
Envoy is an L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service-oriented architecture. The project was born out of the belief that the network should be transparent to applications. When network and applications problems occur, it should be easy to determine the source of the problem.
Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. Let’s dive in and learn how to install Envoy on Debian 11.
Starting just after Christmas, I have been working on CI for all the kernel team's packages on Salsa. The salsa-ci-team has done great work on producing a common pipeline that is usable for most packages with minimal configuration. However, for some packages a lot more work was required.
In January I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked 16 hours, and will carry over the remaining time to February.
I sent various backported security fixes for Linux to the stable mailing list, and they have been included in subsequent stable releases. I rebased the linux package on the latest 4.9-stable release, but did not yet upload it.
Among the many Linux distributions that we can get our hands on today, Debian is one of the most loved and used for different reasons. Many users install it not only for its functionality, but also for its interface and external appearance.
For many, this is an alternative that is not suitable for users with little experience in Linux environments, but it is also true that it has improved a lot in recent years. Little by little it has been adapting to all types of users and devices, hence its growth and acceptance by the majority. Debian is an open source operating system valid for both corporate environments and end users. Of course, depending on the capabilities of our computer, we can customize the behavior of the software .
Although in most cases these Linux distributions are prepared to work smoothly on somewhat more limited computers, we must also take some precautions. Generally, the most modern versions of Windows have higher demands than Linux systems, hence precisely one of its attractions. This is something that refers directly to the consumption that the system makes of both the CPU and the RAM memory of the computer.
Precisely because of all this that we are telling you and if you have made the decision to download and install Debian on your PC, we are going to focus on the resource consumption section. More specifically, we are going to talk about the version of this Linux that consumes less RAM . It is evident that all this will be useful in the event that you have an old PC or a somewhat limited one in terms of internal specifications.
Sometimes reverse engineering embedded systems can be a right old faff, with you needing to resort to all kinds of tricks such as power glitching in order to poke a tiny hole in the armour, giving you an way in. And, sometimes the door is just plain wide open. This detailed exploration of an off-the-shelf retro arcade machine, is definitely in that second camp, for an unknown reason. [Matthew Alt] of VoidStar Security, took a detailed look into how this unit works, which reads as a great introduction to how embedded Linux is constructed on these minimal systems.
If you’ve been following my projects for a while then you’re probably aware that I like to do unnecessary things, like building a water-cooled Raspberry Pi cluster, or this desktop version of a water-cooled Pi. As cool as these may look, they’re not all that practical, so today we’re going to build something that is a little more practical, although is still a bit unnecessary.
We’re going to build the ultimate water-cooled Raspberry Pi desktop computer and try to give it all of the bells and whistles, including front-facing USB ports, a power button, an OLED stats display and an NVME SSD.
I’m going to be using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, or CM4 for short, for this build so that I can use the CM4 IO Board for a number of features which we’ll get into in a bit.
When you think of mobile phone operating systems, Android and iOS probably come to mind. Beyond these two, very few other OSes enter the public discourse. However, the Indian government is considering changing this by creating a rival to these two industry juggernauts.
But is this a good idea or another fool’s errand that many companies have fallen foul of? Well, we asked our readers this in a recent poll. Here are the results.
I had two talks at OLF in December. I just noticed that videos are up on YouTube for both of them.
We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 11.1.
Are you looking for an open source cloud platform and you don’t know where to start? Are you getting lost in all the independent rankings and cloud platform comparison pages?
Try OpenStack and get your open source cloud platform up and running today. OpenStack works at any scale: from a single workstation to thousands of nodes and installs in minutes.
Sounds impossible? Give it a try or continue reading to explore where is it coming from.
A division of the government of India went with the open source Apache CloudStack instead of a public cloud provider to bring services to millions of citizens.
Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community.
LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites.
This release sees a score of improvements aimed at making it easier for users to migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, as well as those who regularly swap documents between the two office suites.
To this end, LibreOffice devs have spent time developing new features to handle change tracking in tables and text within documents. This, The Document Foundation say will have a “positive impact” on interoperability throughout all Microsoft Office formats.
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.3 as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.
LibreOffice 7.3 is introducing support in Writer for hyperlinks attached to shapes, Writer better tracks and indicates changes to text, various performance improvements, Bash-like auto-completion for Calc spreadsheets, a new bullet mode editing feature, and much more. As usual, LibreOffice 7.3 has many import/export improvements to its Microsoft Office DOC, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX file format handling. The Document Foundation is particularly promoting LibreOffice 7.3's improved interoperability with Microsoft Office files as one of the key pillars of this release.
After building the basics of LO on Windows and macOS the obvious next step is to build all of it. This is just grunt work and quite boring at that actually. I almost got it done apart from the fact that at the end I got lazy and skipped those bits that require weird dependencies (of which more later).
The end result has approximately 7800 individual compilation and linking steps. It takes about 30 minutes on a 16 core Ryzen 3700X CPU using Windows and Visual Studio. On a 7 year old 4 core Macbook it takes around 3 hours.
Quite a bit, actually. The most pertinent would be all the configuration files that get installed. There are a lot of them and they need to be exactly right, otherwise the end result fails to start with cryptic error messages, if any. Unlike code compilation there is no easy way to know in advance what should be done or how things should behave. Ideally you'd get help with people who know the innards of the program and all the configgen bits.
Version 7.3 of the LibreOffice "Community" edition is out. "In addition to the majority of code commits being focused on interoperability with Microsoft's proprietary file formats, there is a wealth of new features targeted at users migrating from Office, to simplify the transition".
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install LibreOffice 7.3 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, AlamLinux 8, and Fedora 35.
LibreOffice is open-source software and it is based on OpenOffice.org also an alternative for Microsoft office, unlike others LibreOffice supports lots of tools.
LibreOffice suite contains the following Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Math
The Document Foundation today (02-02-2022) has released the newer version of LibreOffice 7.3 and this is the newest half-year update.
The FSFE is eager to support its community with diverse Free Software communication channels. We are happy to announce that we have recently added Matrix to this list. After successful beta tests, every FSFE supporter and volunteer can now create their own Matrix account. We will also use our instance for the FSFE’s virtual booth during FOSDEM!
For over a decade now, the FSFE has been offering an XMPP (also known as Jabber) server as well as a traditional IRC channel for our community to quickly exchange messages. Today we officially open the gates to our new Matrix server, which has been successfully tested for a few months and has a few advantages over XMPP.
As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM this week-end, February 5th and 6th. Due to the pandemic, FOSDEM takes place on-line for the second year, but we’re confident the wires will be able carry enthusiasm to the homes of the thousands of attendees.
Writing mobile apps can be a lot of fun, especially with Qt and QML. But if your background is all about C++ and Qt, writing the entire required stack for a mobile app can be challenging. Adding push notifications, storing information, and having to write that with another language and framework might make you give up. But we got you covered!
LLVM release manager Tom Stellard has branched the LLVM 14.0 code and that of its sub-projects like Clang within the mono repository. As such, LLVM 14.0 feature development is now over with the main Git branch working towards what will become LLVM 15.0 later this calendar year.
LLVM 14.0 will now undergo weeks of bug fixing and testing before being released as stable likely in March. A first release candidate is expected later this week while a second release candidate in early March. If all goes well, LLVM 14.0 stable could be out in mid-March at the earliest.
A basic example of the git alias function syntax looks like this.
The average home kettle is set up to switch off automatically when water reaches its boiling point. But would a kettle filled with alcohol, which has a significantly lower boiling point, actually turn off? [Steve Mould] set out to find out.
The prediction was that a kettle full of 40% strength vodka would boil dry, as the vodka would evaporate before it actually got to a hot enough temperature to cause the kettle’s cutout mechanism to kick in. The experiment was done outside to minimise the dangers from the ethanol vapor. As it turns out, the vapor from the boiling vodka is about 80% ethanol and just 20% water, so eventually the mixture left in the kettle is mostly water and it boils hot enough to trigger the cutout mechanism.
However, the experiment doesn’t end there. Trying again with 99% ethanol, when the fluid started boiling, the kettle switched off even more quickly. So what’s going on?
The book is about how and why everyone is losing their capacity for concentration. As one of many examples, Hari describes a couple a couple he met, in front of a tourist attraction, looking at a picture of that attraction on a tablet screen, instead of enjoying the real thing they had around them.
It’s amazing to which lenghts people will go to work for free for the already extremely rich stockholders of social media companies. Yes, the mere act of having and using a social media account today is equivalent to sending money to them. But this is another level.
A few years ago, I wrote a tweet, which I imagine is shocking to many of you, but this tweet was quite the tweet. It was just five words, attached to an image that highlighted the risks of misleading packaging, and yet, somehow I apparently captured the zeitgeist of clickbait on the internet in 2018. It was, honestly, weird, and it pulled some crazy numbers (while making my phone totally useless for a while). But now that the dust has long settled on that tweet, I got to thinking about the central theme of it: Why do we put up with misleading packaging? And who decides that something is misleading, anyway? Today’s Tedium looks on the other side of the personal pan pizza that is product design.
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In a lot of ways, the definition of misleading can be in the eye of the beholder, especially if that beholder knows how to contact a lawyer.
Let me give you a fairly recent example. Last year, a woman filed a lawsuit, seeking class action status, over branding on a common product that had been sold for decades that she felt was inaccurate? The product? Morningstar Farms veggie burgers. What was her problem? Simply put, she felt that the term “veggie” implied more vegetables than the burgers actually contained. The patties were largely made of wheat and corn syrup.
Kellogg’s, the makers of these popular patties (which have a history that goes back more than a century), defended itself in court, and won a quick dismissal of the case just last week, after a judge agreed with the cereal-maker that “veggie” was a common way to refer to vegetarian products.
With ever-changing compliance requirements and shrinking timelines to apply security updates, enterprises find themselves in a constant, multipronged race to remain compliant, competitive, and fortified against increasingly sophisticated threat vectors. Live-patching is one way engineering teams can stay ahead of system vulnerabilities without the downtime.
Vulnerabilities in SureMDM could have been chained to compromise every device running the popular mobile device management (MDM) platform within a targeted enterprise, security researchers have revealed.
The vendor, Indian tech firm 42 Gears, has patched the bugs, which led to remote code execution (RCE) via the web console, along with RCE, command injection, hardcoded password, local privilege escalation, and information disclosure flaws affecting the Linux agent.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (samba), Debian (apache2 and python-django), Fedora (kernel and phpMyAdmin), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (samba), Oracle (nginx:1.20 and samba), Red Hat (cryptsetup, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, nodejs:14, rpm, and vim), SUSE (kernel, python-Django, python-Django1, and samba), and Ubuntu (cron).
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-44142) in Samba, a widely used open source implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) networking protocol, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code as root on affected Samba installations.
Several updated versions of Samba have been released on Monday, fixing CVE-2021-44142 and two other flaws (1, 2), but since the software is included in most Linux and Unix-like operating systems (including Apple’s macOS and macOS Server), users of those are advised to keep an eye out for specific updates by those developer teams.
Tripwire’s January 2022 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities for Apache, Open Source Policy Kit, Adobe, and Microsoft.
A security advisory has been created for the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. The driver provides the facility to instantiate plugin instances based on class names provided via authenticationPluginClassName, sslhostnameverifier, socketFactory, sslfactory, sslpasswordcallback connection properties.
However, the driver did not verify if the class implements the expected interface before instantiating the class.
One of our key areas of work is ensuring that public authorities respect data privacy and engage in practices that will ensure that the right to privacy is protected. We filed 9 RTI requests and 1 first appeal with various authorities this month to ask for information pertaining to newly introduced projects which affect the data privacy of Indian citizens.
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Another focus of our work is to ensure that freedom of speech and expression on the internet is protected and that unnecessary censorship does not lead to a chilling effect on people’s fundamental rights. For this, we routinely file RTI requests to demand accountability for instances that may hamper free speech on the internet such as website blocking or internet shutdowns.
In the last month, we have filed 1 RTI request to demand accountability for violations of free speech on the internet with the National Internet Exchange of India on the notice to seek written approval of NIXI CEO on .in domain registrations.
We also filed one first appeal with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for their incomplete reply dated 14/01/2022 to our original reply requesting information on the list of publishers to whom communications were sent by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
