In this video, I am going to show an overview of Peppermint OS 2022-02-02 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Having a dashboard installed on your Linux server can be a great way of enhancing remote management capabilities, as well as getting an overview of its resource usage. In this video, I'll show you Cockpit which is an awesome management system you can install very easily.
The other day stackoverflow went what was supposed to be a brief 1 hour maintenance which ultimately lasted for 5 hours and there were some people who absolutely lost there minds.
The final version of Linux Mint 20 lineup is out with major improvements, impressive new features, and one of the best desktop Linux experiences yet. I installed Linux Mint 20.3 immediately after release as this version brings a new and even more attractive Cinnamon desktop, A more powerful Linux kernel, and many improvements throughout the system. Every release of Linux Mint is a big deal and this new version is the culmination of Linux Mint 20 series so I'm really excited to share the long term review with you. Let's jump right in and see what's new, what's improved. and in this video, we'll also try to explore where exactly Linux Mint stands in 2022.
So LTT got their hands on the Steam Deck early and I thought we should review what we've learned from their video.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.16 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.16.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.16.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The latest version of the popular mail transfer agent, Postfix 3.7, makes maillog_file feature even more useful.
Postfix is a free and open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that routes and delivers electronic mail. Designed by Wietse Venema, Postfix is a mail server built with security in mind and specifically designed to replace Sendmail.
Because of its modular pipeline-based architecture, Postfix is versatile and integrates easily with many other services, such as spam and antivirus processing, as well as with message store software, such as the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.
In addition, Postfix is also quite resource efficient. Nowadays, many ISPs are using it to handle millions of messages a day.
Highlights: Inkscape 1.2 goes alpha, Weston gets essential color management support, Blender Studio announces new open movie project, new releases of Blender, BlenderBIM, Ossia Score, Mixxx, Shotcut, PipeWire.
[...]
This is great news. The updated stable release brings a ton of bug fixes and the 1.2 alpha brings pretty much every new feature I shared with you here and on Twitter, and then some.
Nyxt Browser is a fully hackable web browser - all its source code can be introspected, modified and tweaked to your exact specification.
Doom Emacs is a distribution that aims to create an easy and approachable way to get started with Emacs. Due to hundreds of pages of documentation detailing its various functions. Emacs, by itself, can be daunting.
This is helpful for the already acquainted user and the bookworm. However, this hands-off approach does not help someone that is just interested in trying it out.
Audacious audio player announced the first beta for the next major 4.2 release few days ago.
The new release improved the user experience for those running the player in Qt interface, including the dark mode theme and new Flat icon set.
The Qt dark mode will be default in Windows. For other systems as well as the new icon set, there are toggle options in the settings dialog.
VirtualBox is a free and open-source virtualization tool and typically used at desktop level for building the test environment. It is developed and managed by Oracle corporation, that’s why it is known as Oracle VM VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 and AMD64/Intel64 systems.
Jellyfin is a free and open-source media streaming solution that allows you to host your own media server. It can be installed on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can manage your media such as movies, TV shows, music, and photos, and share them across multiple devices using Jellyfin. It also provides applications for Android, Android TV, and Amazon Fire TV. It offers several features including, Supports DLNA, No playback limit, Fetch metadata automatically from TheTVDB, TheMovieDB, and Rotten Tomatoes, Automatic recordings, Supports hardware acceleration, and many more.
PHP Composer is the most used dependency manager for PHP. It lets you declare the dependencies your project needs, and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
Downloading, installing, and updating dependencies can be a pain and might distract you from actually writing code. A dependency manager will make your life as a developer easier by handling that for you.
Before there was Composer, there were a few different options to manage project dependencies, such as PEAR and PHP Package Manager. Nowadays, Composer has become the de facto standard for dependency management in PHP.
SQLite is a lightweight cross-platform relational database engine. It is widely known for its efficiency and its ability to be connected with various programming languages. SQLite is released under an OpenSource license, so it’s free to use. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install and use SQLite on Ubuntu 20.04, the same procedure will work on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 version too. Let’s start.
Docker container is one of the most emerging technologies now a days. Docker containers are generally used in CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) platform. Containers are the light weight VMs (Virtual Machines) which make use of underlying hypervisors resources like (RAM,CPU,HDD and Kernel).
Docker command is used to manage containers and images from command line. In this article we will cover 20 useful docker command examples in Linux. I am assuming docker is already installed on your Linux system and your regular user is added to docker group.
Rawhide is the name given to Fedora’s latest development version, which consists of a package repository and contains all packages updated daily. Each day it creates an incomplete set for installers that are finished after testing with other builds to produce final deliverables like images or so forth; if successful, these become included into RawHides tree on their release date (Raw Hide).
Almalinux users may notice that the DNF download speed can be slow compared to other distributions, and this can be frustrating when you need to download and install many packages.
Most users do not realize that a few minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to configure and increase your DNF update/upgrade package manager speed on Almalinux 8 Workstation or Server.
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices.
For more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.
Ubuntu is a multi-user operating system by design. Multiple users would have access to the same system in an enterprise system. However, individuals who share file access run the risk of disclosing sensitive information or losing data if other users get access to their files or directories. This is a significant security issue.
To solve this, Unix introduced file permissions in its built-in security features, which allows users to designate how much control they have over a particular file or directory. This assures that only authorized users may access, modify, or execute a file or directory.
A Linux user's understanding of file ownership and permission is critical. This tutorial goes over multiple ways to view and change the file permissions, owners, and groups.
InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It is used for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operation monitoring, operations metrics, internet of things sensor data, and real-time analytics. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 20.04.
By default, InfluxDB uses the following network ports for communication. If you need to change any port configuration head over to /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf.
VzLinux is a bit of a chameleon, which can help you in ways you never imagined. Jack Wallen shows you how.
Several features of the Android platform can be accessed only through paths and methods that are hidden away from the average user. These have generally been done with the help of some command line Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands, a tool that Google offers for developers to debug various parts of their applications or the system, but which we can use for all kinds of neat and hidden tricks. A prerequisite to these tricks is installing ADB on your computer. So, in this guide, we will show you how to install ADB on Windows, macOS, and Linux in quick and easy-to-follow steps.
Learn the steps to install MySQL Workbench software on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 using the terminal to manage MySQL database via the graphical user interface. MySQL Workbench is a graphical modeling tool and development system for MySQL databases.
Managing and modeling multiple databases is complicated using the command line interface of MySQL. Therefore, to make things easy Oracle also offers a GUI software platform called – MySQL Workbench. It offers a graphical user interface and a set of tools for working with MySQL databases. It provides extensive functions for daily work with the databases and can be used to design, create, edit, administrate and display databases. The software is able to extract structures from already existing databases and reproduce them clearly.
MySQL Workbench is available in a free and a commercial edition. Developers can visually design databases offline and host them on a MySQL server. For advanced users who need additional functions, extensions with scripting languages ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹can be integrated into the tool.
Keeping your images current is standard procedure for operating and managing a containerized environment. Here's how to do it.
SSH or known by its full name Secure Shell Protocol, is a cryptographic network communication protocol that enables two computers to communicate securely over an unsecured network. SSH is highly used for remote login applications and command-line executables such as terminal applications.
For users wishing to connect to servers or other computers with SSH, the client and the remote connection need to both have SSH installed and enabled for this to be possible.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and enable SSH on Debian 11 Bullseye Desktop or Server and connect to a remote PC.
7-Zip is a free, open-source file archiver software used to compress files into archive containers or, in more popular terms, zip files into archive containers that can beat most other forms of compression by 2 to 10% and strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats.
7-Zip isn’t as famous as some of the other archives, but it is capable of having multi archive format support across most known software. Another benefit is that it supports all cross-platforms, making it efficient to use amongst different operating systems.
CentOS 8 Stream, as many know, is a downstream version of RHEL, which often means it is incredibly stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of features and not security updates. CentOS 8 Stream currently features kernel 4.18, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, amongst many other things.
ELREPO has both Linux Kernel Mainline LTS versions. The mainline version is the most recent stable release of the Linux Kernel, and the current LTS Kernel they are supporting is 5.4.
The following tutorial will show you how to import the ELRepo kernel repository and install both 5.16/5.4 kernels on CentOS 8 Stream Workstation or Server.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and setup OCS NG Inventory Server on CentOS 7. OCS (Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation) is an opensource assets inventory management solution. It is used to inventor hardware and software details of IT assets either using the OCS Inventory Agent or SNMP polling for assets that the agent cannot be deployed (e.g routers, switches, printers. Inventoried results can be visualized through a web interface.
The KDE team announced the KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS edition, which is available to download and install. If you are planning to upgrade from the prior version - here we give you quick steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.24 from 5.23.
Were you hoping to easily play Fortnite on the upcoming Steam Deck? Well, Tim Sweeney the Epic Games CEO has made it clear that it's not going to happen officially. The thing to remember right now is that both Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye do support Linux. Both for native Linux builds and for Windows games run through Steam Play Proton. However, it's all user-space with no Kernel modules.
Epic Games doesn’t plan to update Fortnite so that it runs on SteamOS, according to CEO Tim Sweeney, meaning owners of the upcoming Valve Steam Deck will likely have to install Windows to play the popular battle-royale game.
In a series of tweets, Sweeney said that the company doesn’t feel confident about its ability to combat cheating in Fortnite when running on custom kernel configurations. Fortnite isn’t on the Steam store in any case, but Sweeney’s comments rule out a Linux version that could run on the Steam Deck.
fheroes2 is a constantly improving game engine reimplementation of Heroes of Might and Magic II. A new version was just released recently and it's become the absolute best way to play this classic.
A multi-platform project, one that was written from scratch so there's never any worry about a rights holder appearing to take it down. It's very much like OpenMW for Morrowind and OpenXcom for the original X-Com. It's not a basic remake though, as the developers are also trying to improve old issues in the original.
Time to go back to Earth and retake it. Beyond Mankind: The Awakening from developer Brytenwalda recently released a native Linux version, built with the Unity game engine. The developer previously worked on the Viking Conquest DLC for Mount & Blade.
Beyond Mankind: The Awakening takes place in a future destroyed by some sort of genetic mutation. This caused certain types of people to go a bit wild, and eventually it led to war and almost a total annihilation of planet Earth. Mankind survived in space - and now you're part of the rag-tag group trying to bring it all back to life.
As we’re getting closer to the shipment of the Steam Deck to the general public’s hands, and as Valve gradually lifts the various embargoes attached to the device, today we’ve learned even more about it, thanks to the explosion of new videos that have come out.
Between 2022-02-01 and 2022-02-08 there were 23 new native Linux Steam games released. For reference, during the same time, there were 136 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 16.9 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones...
Fedora 35 is an impressive Linux distribution that debuted with GNOME 41 and introduced a new KDE variant.
You can read our original coverage to know more about it.
While Fedora Linux has constantly been improving the desktop experience, it may not be an ideal desktop distribution for every user. Moreover, even if it includes open-source tools and utilities out of the box, it is not geared to provide an effortless gaming experience.
You need to install a few dependencies and configure the distro to play a game without hassle.
Nobara Project by Thomas Crider (Red Hat Engineer) a.k.a. Glorious Eggroll aims to change that and offer an unofficial Fedora 35 Workstation spin built for gaming.
The real-time strategy game of ancient warfare, 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant, is a Free Software game created by an international group of volunteer game developers. Programmers, artists, and historians combined their skills to create this imaginary ancient world. In a new episode, the host of the Software Freedom Podcast, Bonnie Mehring, discusses the growing popularity of the game with the game's project lead. Stanislas Dolcini says that the decision to make the game Free Software made it last for so many years, as many people could contribute - and still can.
KDE has today released the Plasma 5.24 desktop, filled with goodies across the whole thing and this is an LTS release (long-term support) that will continue seeing updates until a final Plasma 5 release after which Plasma 6 succeeds it. The environment that will be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck, it's a very exciting time to be a KDE user and no doubt the developers are excited too.
In this post I run through the most notable and noticeable changes shipping in KDE Plasma 5.24, plus tell you how you can try the release out first hand.
While we on the subject: if you’re a fan of KDE Plasma and you want to see more coverage of the DE on omg! do let me know in the comments. While Plasma is not a desktop environment I’m super familiar with (thus I don’t know my way around it very well) its ballooning popularity —even the Steam Deck uses it, well kinda— has me intrigued!
Okay, on to what’s new.
Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates until Plasma 6 succeeds it.
After four months of development, KDE Plasma 5.24 still adds a lot of quality of life improvements and small changes. This new release is powered by Qt 5.15.3 and KDE Frameworks version 5.91. Along with the improvements found in those software stacks, there’s plenty of goodness to go around within KDE itself.
So let’s take a look at what’s in there.
Kdenlive 21.12.2 is out with faster performance when opening projects, added stock LUTs, improved monitor zoom (more zoom steps, higher zoom levels and usage of current monitor center as reference for zooming). This version also fixes time remapping issues and alpha rendering among others.
Discovered that thumbnails generation in Nautilus (GNOME “Files”) is extremely slow compared to other file and image managers, and reported the performance issue with my initial observations. There have been some community patches proposed there to alleviate the problem by making use of multiple CPU threads instead of a single one, but they have not yet been reviewed as of early 2022. I hope they will be considered eventually, along with further possible performance enhancements.
It is time to release another Core Update for IPFire. It comes with an improved Quality of Service based on CAKE and various bug fixes and a lot of package updates.
Before we talk about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.
Volderding says his focus for this release was to modernize Slackware without alienating fans at a time when Linux development is moving away from its Unix-like structure.
"The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern," he says in the announcement.
Prior to releasing the stable release, Slackware's maintainers built over 400 different Linux kernel versions before settling on kernel version 5.15.19, which has long-term support until at least October 2023. It tested just 34 kernel versions while working on Slackware 14.2, according to Volderding.
There's a new desktop experience thanks to Slackware 15.0's inclusion of KDE Plasma 5, version 5.23.5, and Xfce 4.16. KDE also supports running under Wayland or X11. As Linux news site Phoronix notes, Zenwalk has also released a new version of its desktop environment built on top of Slackware 15 and based on Xfce 4.16.
On the packages front, version 15 also brought on programming languages Rust and Python version 3 while dropping Qt4 for Qt5.
You can use any Linux distro you want to build a server, including Arch Linux. But is Arch a suitable candidate for installation as a server?
While Linux distributions tend to make great servers, you may be wondering if Arch Linux would be a good choice for a server, given its rolling-release nature. It could be if you wanted to, with some caveats.
Hi All,
Most of you are aware that our toolchain is currently outdated. We always had very few people working on it through the years and I took over once Barth left, because it was needed.
However, I have been having very little time to work on Arch related stuff lately and the toolchain is the most noticeable victim, given it is one of the most time consuming. In this meantime, a few things also happened that compounded to the issue, among them, we enabled LTO.
Right now I'm working on bringing new glibc 2.35 and also waiting on binutils release so we can bring the toolchain up to date. I'm aware we also have a GCC release coming out soon, and the toolchain will need a new rebuild then.
For the future, we are trying to bring more people to work with the whole toolchain, so it is not too much of a bus factor. We should have at least two toolchain maintainers, not just one.
I hope this serves to assuage the concerns over the current status of our toolchain, both present and going future.
Regards, Giancarlo Razzolini
Generally, you consider it a good thing when people want to use your application. However, when the application runs on a server, there's a cost for popularity. With users come increased demands on resources, and at some point, you may find that you need to scale your app. One option is to throw more servers at the problem, establish a load balancer like Nginx, and let the demand sort itself out. That option can be expensive, though, because there are no savings when demand is low, and you're running instances of your app on servers devoid of traffic. Containers have the advantage of being ephemeral, launching when new instances are available and fading away with decreased demand. If that sounds like a feature you need, then it may be time to migrate your app to containers.
Migrating an app to a container can quickly become disorienting. While the environment within a container may feel familiar, many container images are minimal, and they are designed to be stateless. In a way, though, this is one of the strengths of containers. Like a Python virtual environment, it's a blank slate that lets you build (or rebuild) your application without the invisible defaults that many other environments provide.
Ever started using a new computer, by choice or because the old one let the magic smoke out, and got frustrated at how long it took to get everything just right? Even worse, ever spent some time reconfiguring your shell prompt, then realizing you liked it better before?
This problem, for me, became acute when I decided I wanted to do development in containers. Containers are ephemeral. The development tooling is easy to solve: A container image with the tooling works. The source code is easy to solve: Source control maintains it, and development happens on branches. But if every time I create a container, I need to configure it carefully—that's going to be a pain.
Fedora Linux 36 branches from Rawhide today. While there’s still a lot of work before the Fedora Linux 36 release in April, this marks the beginning of the Fedora Linux 37 development cycle. The work you do in Rawhide will be in the Fedora Linux 37 release in October.
This post was inspired by a Compiler episode on the same topic. Compiler is a Red Hat podcast about all the things you’ve always wanted to know about what moves tech forward, straight from the people who know it best. Check it out!
Let’s say you’re playing your favorite online multiplayer game when—all of a sudden—things start getting choppy. Your character isn’t moving, other players start freezing up, maybe the in-game music isn’t even coming through.
In my series introducing WildFly server configuration with Ansible collection for JCliff, I described how developers can use Ansible to manage a standalone Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) instance. I've also written about using Ansible to automate Apache Tomcat and Red Hat JBoss Web Server deployments. In this article, we'll go a bit deeper and use Ansible to deploy a fully operational cluster of JBoss EAP instances. I'll show you how to automate the setup of each JBoss EAP instance and how to configure the network requirements—notably, fault tolerance and high availability—using features provided by the WildFly Ansible collection.
Veteran IT leaders have long understood the impact technical debt has on an organization’s digital transformation and ability to respond rapidly to changing demands. The global pandemic underscored that understanding. Technical debt can create talent, speed, reliability, and scalability issues for organizations in the best of times – and the worst.
Beyond confirming the burden of technical debt, the impact of the pandemic has been mixed. In some cases, IT organizations may have gotten the go-ahead to address some technical debt that may have hindered the enterprise’s ability to pivot. In others, IT functions had to make short-term decisions to enable remote work, new digital commerce solutions, or supply chain fixes that increased their technical debt.
Update the Linux kernel to 5.10.92. This should improve the support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.
Topic’s “UAV & Robotics Platform” controller board runs Linux, ROS, and PX4 on a Zynq UltraScale+ and supplies WiFi/BT, GPS, multiple sensors, 4x motor I/Os, and 2x MIPI-CSI. A dev kit adds cameras, PS, debug, and more.
Last week, Netherlands-based Topic Embedded Systems announced that it had renewed its Xilinx Partnership status for 2022. The announcement linked to its latest Xilinx collaboration, a UAV & Robotics Platform (URP) drone controller based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, which Topic used on last year’s Miami MPSoC Plus module and Florida Plus dev kit.
Intel has just announced a $1 billion fund to support companies bringing innovations and new technologies to the foundry ecosystem. The company says the fund will prioritize investments in “capabilities that accelerate foundry customers’ time to market – spanning intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.”
What’s interesting is that it does not only cover x86 architecture but also Arm and RISC-V, with a focus on the latter, as Intel has just become a Premier member of RISC-V International, and partnered with several companies offering RISC-V solutions including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems.
RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization, has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute.
Intel, which has made billions from its closed-source, complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 processors, is joining forces with RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU group. What next? Dogs and cats living together!?
Lex Pan Law is a full-service technology and intellectual property law firm based in Portland, Oregon. With a deep background in patent law also provides specialized advice to engineering teams and engineering management about the complex intersection between technology and the law. Having a long-standing interest in the intersection of copyright law and technology, the firm has extensive experience and community contacts in the free and open source licensing world (including software, hardware, and content).
Desktop users can't help but agree that modern browsers are rather resource-heavy. The confluence of various technologies and file types causes browsers to consume extensive system resources, thereby marring your web experience.
But what if you had a list of browsers that not only offer feature-rich performance on Linux systems but also have generously lightweight requirements?
If you are struggling to keep your browser afloat, and would happily switch to a lighter browser version, then here's a list of the best lightweight web browsers for Linux.
There aren’t many “big” changes in this release (well, unless you count support for Windows 11 scrollbars) but there is, as always, a healthy chunk of under-the-hood enhancements aimed at improving the performance, security, and privacy. Those loving Firefox’s ongoing obsession with “colour ways” will be delighted to hear six new colour way themes are present in this update, once again for a limited time only.
Firefox will likely tell you about the new schemes after you install the update, but you can access them at any time from the “Manage Themes” section.
Advertising provides critical support for the Web. We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy.
Attribution is how advertisers know if their advertising campaigns are working. Attribution generates metrics that allow advertisers to understand how their advertising campaigns are performing. Related measurement techniques also help publishers understand how they are helping advertisers. Though attribution is crucial to advertising, current attribution practices have terrible privacy properties.
For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install firefox 97.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, Almalinux 8, and Fedora 35.
Firefox or Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.
Firefox Profiler is a tool for analyzing the performance of both websites and Firefox itself. You can visit profiler.firefox.com to learn more about and enable it.
Inside the Firefox codebase, we have different profiler APIs to instrument the source code. With these APIs, threads can be registered with the profiler, different parts of the code can be annotated, and even more information (payload) can be included to a specific event inside the codebase, like a render or reflow event.
Inside the mozilla-central codebase, we have various programming languages like C++, JavaScript, Java and Rust. Since the profiler is implemented in C++, we have the most advanced API for that in C++. You can check its documentation out. Also, we’ve already had APIs for JavaScript, and Java for some time. But we didn’t have any canonical API for the Rust codebases. We had some hacks around bigger Rust projects like Servo or Webrender to register threads and add annotations, but they weren’t shared across different projects. Therefore we had a lot of code duplications in the different parts of the Firefox codebase. Also, it was pretty tiring work if you wanted to instrument your own Rust code with the profiler API because you had to write things from scratch.
To solve this issue, we wanted to work on a new Rust API that every Rust project inside mozilla-central can use without the need of implementing everything from scratch and having to maintain that code. Instead, the Firefox Profiler team would own the API crate and maintain it, so other people wouldn’t need to worry about it and they would simply import the API crate to their projects to use it. And this work has been completed in the last quarter! In this blog post, I will be talking about this API and some of the implementation details. You can also see the documentation of this API here. So let’s get into the details of this API and how to use it first.
Before we roll out State Partitioning for all Firefox users, we intend to make a few privacy and ergonomic improvements to the Storage Access API. In this blog post, we’ll detail a few of the new changes we made.
With State Partitioning, third parties can’t access the same cookie jar when they’re embedded in different sites. Instead, they get a fresh cookie jar for each site they’re embedded in. This isn’t just limited to cookies either—all storage is partitioned in this way.
In an ideal world, this would stop trackers from keeping tabs on you wherever they’re embedded because they can’t keep a unique identifier for you across all of these sites. Unfortunately, the world isn’t so simple—trackers aren’t the only third parties that use storage. If you’ve ever used an authentication provider that requires an embedded resource, you know how important third-party storage can be.
Enter the Storage Access API. This API lets third parties request storage access as if they were a first party. This is called “unpartitioning” and it gives browsers and users control over which third parties can maintain state across first-party origins as well as determine which origins they can access that state from. This is the preferred way for third parties to keep sharing storage across sites.
Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox and Firefox ESR. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
While LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a shared past, LibreOffice outstrips OpenOffice in contributors, code commits, and features.
A search for comparisons of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice returns over 8.3 million results. That number comes as no surprise, given that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the best-known open source office suites and share a common past. However, what is surprising is how shallow many of those comparisons are. Many offer only a superficial glimpse at either office suite from the viewpoint of an unsophisticated and undemanding user. Often, the comparisons are obsolete. Even more importantly, many comparisons strive for a false sense of objectivity by declaring that any differences are minor. However, by every possible standard, LibreOffice outshines OpenOffice and shows OpenOffice to be outdated. To pretend otherwise is a distortion of the truth.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (log4j), Debian (chromium, xterm, and zabbix), Fedora (kate, lua, and podman), Oracle (aide and log4j), and SUSE (xen).
In one of the most impactful changes made in recent years, Microsoft has announced today that it will block by default the execution of VBA macro scripts inside five Office applications.
Starting with early April 2022, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word users will not be able to enable macro scripts inside untrusted documents that they downloaded from the internet.
If you’re looking for a penetration testing platform that has everything you need, Kali Linux is your best option. With over 600 tools included, Kali has everything you need to assess your IT security posture and find vulnerabilities.
Please read on to learn which are the fifteen best tools that are included in Kali Linux. We’ll also discuss why Kali Linux is such a great choice for penetration testing.
The UK government recently started an open-source GitHub repository to help organizations scan networks for vulnerabilities.
The idea behind the Scanning Made Easy project from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and its i100 industry partnership is to provide a collection of Nmap scripts to users, such as sysadmins, for detecting system vulnerabilities.
The scripts should provide more accessible detection and remediation. Defense is often harder than offense, as there are likely more proofs of concept to exploit than there are secure networks.
The NCSC is open to contributions and is providing detailed guidelines for the approval of a script.
Here we’ll discuss how to get started with Nmap, how attackers use it, and how you can use the UK efforts to improve your cybersecurity.
In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. The intelligence playing field is leveling€ — and not in a good way. Intelligence collectors are everywhere, and government spy agencies are drowning in data. This is a radical new world and intelligence agencies are struggling to adapt to it. While secrets once conferred a huge advantage, today open source information increasingly does. Intelligence used to be a race for insight where great powers were the only ones with the capabilities to access secrets. Now everyone is racing for insight and the internet gives them tools to do it. Secrets still matter, but whoever can harness all this data better and faster will win.
Spotify’s decision to host and produce The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, replete with harmful and misleading COVID-19-related content, is a risk to human rights and public health. The company has a responsibility to exercise editorial discretion and intervene.
“COVID-19 is dangerous enough without the most popular podcast in the world fanning false rhetoric, undermining people’s ability to make safe, informed decisions about their health,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Since Spotify produces the content, they are operating like journalists. This means Spotify is responsible for publishing truthful information.”
Through an open letter to Daniel Ek, Co-Founder and CEO at Spotify, Access Now is once again shining a spotlight on the human rights implications of the company’s decisions, asking: “Is Spotify willing to allow harmful content on its platform to spread, prioritizing the companyüs bottom line over public health?” As The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is produced exclusively by Spotify, the company has control over the distribution of the content, and the ability to exercise editorial discretion over what host Joe Rogan and guests say.
Last week marked one year since the military besieged Myanmar and pilfered control of the nation through a violent coup — one full year of brutal crackdowns, serious human rights violations, and escalating digital control over the nation. The international community and technology companies must stand with the people of Myanmar and resist the coup — both physical and digital.
“The military junta is systematically ambushing civic space in Myanmar,” said Wai Phyo Mint, Asia Pacific Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Increment by increment, the despotic military is making online spaces inaccessible for the people of Myanmar, and eliminating all means of safe communication and information-sharing when they need them most. Silence and inaction from the international community bury their struggle, shielding grave human rights violations.”
For as long as women have been wearing decorative jewelry, donning designer clothing, and delighting in female companionship, we have been accused of a proclivity for the fanciful. Stereotypes abound about the feminine urge to tell stories: the secretly slanderous best friend; the garrulous old woman tirelessly engaged with spreading gossip. In her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) sardonically examines these misogynistic stereotypes, turning them upside down. She argues that the vicissitudes of female fashion are evidence of artistry, and the story-telling a natural symptom of untapped creativity. Those characteristics, which are so often cast in a negative light, could actually be the result of incredible imagination. In Sargent’s understanding, the only difference between gossip and ground-breaking scientific invention is a lack of access to education.
In the year 1779, Sargent wrote an essay entitled “The Sexes” and proceeded to circulate it amongst friends for over a decade. That piece’s revised counterpart, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, was published in 1790, in the March and April issues of Massachusetts Magazine (a “Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment”). Although Sargent published under the pseudonym “Constantia” — occasionally going by “The Reaper”, “Honora Martesia”, “Mr. Vigilius”, or “The Gleaner” — her identity as the author of “Equality” was fairly well-known.
