Have you ever wondered why the command line is such an important part of the Linux ecosystem? Here's the answer.
When you start using Linux, you'll find that the system relies on the command line much more than other operating systems despite the presence of numerous desktop environments. Why is this?
There are a lot of reasons for the command line being an essential part of the Linux ecosystem.
This article gives you a step-by-step installation guide for the xmonad setup in Arch Linux with a custom pre-configured script.
In this Friday Night Funkin Chromebook guide, we will explain what the game is, where you can play it online in your web browser, and finally how to install Friday night Funkin on your Chromebook device if you wish to play it offline.
Friday Night Funkin is not available in the Google Playstore, so the method to install it on your Chromebook requires downloading the Linux version of the game and a bit of tinkering in the Crosh Shell terminal to be able to run it, but worry not – as long as you follow the steps of this guide exactly the process is not difficult. You might also learn a thing or two about your Chromebook device along the way! Read on to find out more.
For systems lacking TPM 2.0 and those simply not interested in moving to Windows 11, the new Chrome OS Flex offers an alternative for now, and perhaps past Oct. 14th, 2025 when Windows 10 hits it’s EOL; at least that’s the date as of now. This is not an OS for the technically inclined, such as those reading this, for a Linux distro will be more powerful and adroit at running the various emulators and applications we use. Instead Chrome OS Flex is a watered down Linux OS designed for the non-technically inclined that just want a computer that works.
The hardware requirements are light, you need is a computer which can boot from USB and has a 64bit x86 processor, as well as 4GB of RAM and 16GB of local storage; sorry no ARM support at this time. The interface is similar to Chrome OS’s Gentoo heritage using the Aura Shell, but taking advantage of Google’s purchase of NeverWare. Prior to being absorbed into Google, NeverWare streamlined the arcane process of installing Chrome OS on a non-Chromebook with their CloudReady product and that is where Chrome OS Flex came from.
Viewed from early 2022, that date is still comfortably far off. Many Windows 10 PCs will break over the next three and a half years, and plenty of people who want to upgrade to nicer or faster hardware will have opportunities to do so. But those who enjoy repairing, maintaining, and upgrading older hardware to keep it useful will be peering over the edge of that Windows 10 update cliff before they know it.
So what happens to that hardware when Windows 10 goes away? Running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware is one possible solution, but we have no idea how long Microsoft will allow users to install, run, and update Windows 11 on older PCs. The company could cut off these computers' security updates tomorrow, or it could allow them to run the new OS indefinitely. That uncertainty is hard to plan around.
Switching to a Linux distribution—particularly the more user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, or Elementary OS—is another option. But "user-friendly" is relative, and any Linux distribution can have parts that are obtuse and difficult for newcomers to learn. And let's face it, if a Linux distribution was going to truly compete with and succeed against Windows on consumer desktops and laptops, it probably would have by now.
Google has announced early access to a new version of Chrome OS called Flex, which runs on ordinary x86 hardware, offering the chance to revive older PCs or even out-of-support Macs.
The year of Linux on the desktop actually arrived a few years back, but the world didn't notice. Chromebook sales did great early last year, although they did tail off later. Sure, the numbers are dropping this year – but some 50 million customers now have quite new ones.
Chrome OS is a specialised Linux distro, originally based on Gentoo, with the Aura Shell ("ash"). It has a fancy partitioning system with duplicate root partitions which update one another, allowing rollback of unsuccessful updates.
Chrome OS is much more like a normal Linux distro than Android, but Chromebooks have their own special firmware based on coreboot. Both Chrome and Chrome OS have open-source upstreams called Chromium, meaning there is a free ChromiumOS, but despite multiple different efforts, it wasn't easy to install on an ordinary PC.
Before its acquisition, NeverWare turned this arcane process into a freemium product called CloudReady. Google acquired NeverWare in 2020, and Chrome OS Flex is the result.
If you thought Chrome OS Flex was going to be the official method to get additional software support on an old Chromebook, think again. According to a Google support page, it’s not recommended to install Chrome OS Flex on your Chrome OS device. For now, Chrome OS Flex isn’t the solution for Chromebooks past their software support date.
One of our writers is working on an article about hosting your own (project) website on your own iron, instead of doing it the modern, cloudy-servicey way. Already, this has caused quite a bit of hubbub in the Hackaday Headquarters. Who would run their own server in 2022, and why?
[...]
If you just want a service, you can be served. But if you want to be a server, a first-class Internet citizen, with your own cloud in the sky, nothing’s stopping you either. And in contrast to using someone else’s computers, running your own is an invitation to play. It’s a big, Internet-connected sandbox. There are an infinity of funny ideas out there that you can implement on your own box, and a lot to learn. If you hack on someone else’s box, it’s a crime. If you hack on your own, it’s a pleasure.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has warned the nation's finance sector that outsourcing information technology jobs could "expose them to significant financial, operational and reputational risks."
The RBI offered that opinion last week in a Statement on Developmental and Regulatory Policies that, after considering issues such as emergency lending for healthcare infrastructure and reform of default credit swaps, wends its way to a "Master Direction on IT Outsourcing and Master Direction on Information Technology Governance, Risk, Controls and Assurance Practices."
That section opens with the observation: "The financial system is seeing extensive leveraging and outsourcing of critical IT services by Regulated Entities to get easier access to newer technologies through financial technology players to improve efficiencies."
Default terminals are good enough but if you're looking for something a bit better than all 3 of these linux terminals will offer you a better or more interesting experience in there own ways.
This week, Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fawn over a beautiful Italian split-flap clock that doesn’t come cheap, and another clock made of floppies that could be re-created for next to nothing. We’ll also sing the praises of solderless circuitry for prototyping and marvel over a filament dry box with enough sensors to control an entire house. The finer points of the ooh, sparkly-ness of diffraction gratings will be discussed, and by the end of the show, you’ll know what we each like in a microscope.
Important notice for package maintainers: This is the first stable release that has been made available on GitLab. Make sure to update your scripts to point to the new URLs [1].
This is what's new:
- High-resolution scroll is more reliable thanks to the inclusion of new heuristics - Better handling of BTN_TOOL_PEN on top of BTN_TOOL_RUBBER on graphics tablets that trigger a kernel bug - libinput doesn't handle joysticks and gamepads. The detection algorithm has been improved to avoid tagging some of those devices as keyboards - Improved clickpad detection - New quirks and bug fixing
The list of changes included since 1.20.rc1 [2] are included below. A big thank you to all contributors!
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/releases [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/releases/1.19.901
---
Alberto Fanjul (1): pad: load libwacom device by path, not by usbid
José Expósito (2): doc/user: clarify fork visibility libinput 1.20.0
Markus Wall (2): Add quirks for Lenovo Legion Y740 quirks: add lenovo legion slim 7
Peter Hutterer (1): doc: correct the documentation for reporting trackpoint bugs
The AMD open-source team has recently published an update to the Family 19h / Zen 3 CPU microcode to the Linux firmware tree on the git.kernel.org site, which is the "repository of firmware blobs for use with the Linux kernel." The firmware update is under the linux-firmware.git tree. The new update is for AMD Zen 3 CPU users operating in Linux.
Some applications just need to be big and have to offer an extensive array of functionality to be of the right value for specific use cases, like LibreOffice, Krita. darktable and GIMP. But there are many situations that only require the right amount of functionality and nothing more. In Swedish they have a word for that, “Lagom”, which means “not too little and not too much”. There are many very powerful mini apps available for Linux that only focus on a specific task and do that perfectly well. In this article you find a mini review for the application Frog, a simple but powerful text extraction tool for Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HandBrake on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, HandBrake is a open-source tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. HandBrake easy-to-use tool for converting DVDs and other videos into H.264, XViD, or Ogg formatted media.
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 a HandBrake open-source multiplatform video transcoder on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
In this article, I will install the de facto OS for this device: Raspberry OS. Since I will be following the official instructions, and because the official documentation is very good, I will only be giving an overview of the process and highlighting salient points from the documentation. The Raspberry OS comes with many useful tools, and APT can be used to install additional packages and tools if needed or desired. Installing an OS on Raspberry Pi is a little bit different then on other systems being that you install it directly onto an SD card and then insert the SD card into the RPi.
Learn the easy possible way to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jelly Fish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Linux using command terminal.
Whenever it comes to having a web server for commercial purposes, the first name that comes forward is Apache. It is one of the best open-source web servers, easily available to install on any Linux system. However, there are many web applications that require few other things apart from the Apache web servers to work properly such as WordPress – it is a PHP-based CMS. Hence, to use it on our Linux, we need a bunch of server applications. For example to serve dynamic web pages – PHP language; for storing data MySQL/MariaDB. So, the stack of all these platforms is known as the LAMP server.
The software components are usually installed on physical or virtual servers. Static or dynamic web content can be provided with a LAMP system. Typical areas of application for LAMP-based servers are websites or online shops created with the help of content management systems (CMS).
The software components are freely available and minimize costs for the realization of the server environment. Since the software’s code is open-source, programmers can develop their own extensions or make changes. LAMP servers offer a high degree of flexibility.
AngularJS is a framework for development, here we learn the commands to install AngularJS on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using Terminal.
Development environments are very personal in that every developer and every project has its own specific tools they either require or prefer. Once you get the perfect environment built, you’ll want to be able to make it such that it can be easily repeatable.
Can not navigate in Activities overview and app grid screen using Tab or arrow keys? Here’s how to re-enable the feature via extension in GNOME 40 & 41.
In GNOME 3.x, user may press Tab or down arrow and then left/right keys to navigate between app windows in the overview screen. Also, the keys can be used to navigate in ‘Show Applications’ app grid.
HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder that can be downloaded for free and supports Mac, Windows, or Linux to convert videos in many different formats into more commonly used ones like MP4 with minimal file size reduction – making it efficient at reducing the amount of data consumed on your hard drive while also helping save time!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Handbrake on Linux Mint 20 LTS.
Joplin is a free and open-source note-taking application that can be used on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. It’s been designed with both professionals in mind and consumers looking for an easy way to capture ideas anytime, anywhere without having to worry about running out of space again!
The product has many features similar to those found within Evernote. Still, it offers more flexibility when editing your data – everything from font style choices down to color schemes is at the user’s disposal, meaning there isn’t one “perfect” option amongst them, which makes finding exactly what you’re after easier than ever before.
You’ve probably seen it everywhere, in all the Linux groups, communities, forums, even in real life on shirts. If you’re a beginner and wondering what “sudo rm -rf /” does and why you shouldn’t run it, read this post.
In short, the sudo rm -rf / command deletes everything in the root directory, which basically breaks your whole system. We’ll explain the command in detail below. If you don’t know what it means or what it does – you should not run it.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap was originally released for cloud applications but was later ported to work for Internet of Things devices and desktop applications too.
The VirtualBox is a powerful tool for virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. It is a widely used commercial by large enterprises as well as home users. VirtualBox 6.1 is the latest major release by the Oracle team. This version is released with various performance improvements over the previous major releases.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Joplin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Joplin is an open-source application popularly considered as an Evernote alternative. Its interface is intuitive that allows users to create notes and to-do lists with just a few clicks and organize them in different notebooks. Joplin supports a cross-platform application available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS.
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 Joplin Note-taking app on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa or Server and connect to a remote PC.
Qoobar is a free and open-source tag editor for Linux, Windows, or macOS. It can create/edit music tags in files using the following features: Batch edit any tag; copy & paste between groups of files with auto-completion that Remembers everything you type (even while typing another word); add Cover Art Pictures from Discogs as well as GnuDB GD3 Integration, so they are easily accessible through one interface – this also includes ReplayGain info if applicable! Finally, there’s Import functionality allowing users to bring their own cover images into designated spots on each page.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Qoobar Tag Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
The Debian repositories contain thousands of deb packages that can be installed from the Software Center or by using the apt command line. Deb is an installation package format used in all Debian-based distributions, but some aren’t available through these methods; alternative sources such as existing RPM repositories may contain these.
RPM package format is used by Red Hat and its forks such as Almalinux, CentOS Stream, and Rocky Linux, to name a few. For Debian users, an application called alien allows you to install RPM packages on Debian or convert an RPM package into a Debian (.deb) file.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install RPM packages and convert a Debian package into an RPM package on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop or server.
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MariaDB 10.8 on Rocky Linux 8.
Do you want to install the Cinnamon Desktop environment on Rocky Linux 8 CLI server or desktop? Then here are the commands to follow.
Cinnamon Desktop environment is one of the popular UIs because of its mid-weight and familiar Windows-like User Interface. Cinnamon is visually more complex than Mate. There are more effects and animations at the expense of performance. But as long as you have a moderately up-to-date computer, it will run smoothly. Cinnamon offers a much more modern look while remaining subtle and simple.
It is a further development of Gnome 3. Therefore newer and more extensive features can be supported. This includes entire themes that you can activate in Cinnamon.
Applets in the taskbar of Cinnamon are also made more efficient. In principle, you can even integrate your own extensions into the taskbar. However, this requires advanced programming knowledge.
By default, this desktop GUI with Linux Mint as desktop environment however, we can install it on Rocky Linux 8 as well.
PuTTy is an open-source, lightweight program that you can use to login into your remote machine with a terminal emulator that has been around since 2002. It supports protocols such as SSH and SCP for secure communication over networks or even from one device directly onto another without account restrictions!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the PuTTY SSH Client on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Cinnamon Desktop Environment is a free, open-source desktop environment based on X Window System created from GNOME 3 by the Linux Community that was frustrated and disappointed with GNOME 3. Cinnamon offers a bright, clean look that is less bloated than alternative desktop environments and focuses on speed and flexibility.
Cinnamon is the default desktop environment choice for Linux Mint, as many veteran Linux distro hoppers would know and are actively maintained by them.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install this alternative desktop environment on Rocky Linux 8 Workstation as an option choice to switch from GNOME.
Budgie is a desktop environment that is free and open-source that uses GNOME technologies such as GTK (> 3.x) and is developed by the Solus project, which also contributes to its design through contributors from numerous communities, including Arch Linux; Manjaro; openSUSE Tumbleweed – among others.
For users seeking an alternative to GNOME that is lightweight and sleek with a simple UI instead of focusing on eye candy, then Budgie is worth checking out.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Budgie Desktop Environment on Rocky Linux 8 Workstation.
For those not familiar with MATE Desktop Environment, it is the continuation of GNOME 2. It is famous for being lightweight, fast, and stable that runs on Linux and most BSD operating systems. MATE is also an excellent choice for a lower-end system or those looking to remain efficient on system resources.
In the following tutorial, you learn how to install the MATE Desktop environment on Rocky Linux 8 Workstation.
pdfcpu is a command-line tool to perform actions on PDF files. It allows to perform all the standard operations, such as merge, split, and rotate pages. It also allows less common operations such as changing the user and owner passwords, encrypting/decrypting, optimizing, etc.
The project started back in 2017, but I discovered it only last year. I like pdfcpu due to the high focus on allowing and making it easy to perform those kinds of operations in batch.
Until now, I’ve used pre-compiled versions of pdfcpu, but I would have preferred it to be shipped directly in the distro, and that’s why I’ve packaged it for Fedora!
Since CentOS kind of went off the rails over a year ago, some admins and companies have been searching for a replacement. Many hopped onto the AlmaLinux train, while others opted to go with Rocky Linux. Both are absolutely outstanding distributions that should be worth your attention and time.
But there are other alternatives, one of which has actually been around for some time. That alternative is Virtuozzo Linux (also known as VzLinux), which is free to download and use. It’s 1:1 binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and offers three different versions that are optimized for running containers, virtual environments or bare metal. VzLinux behaves very much like the CentOS you’ve known and loved (only without the GUI).
But VzLinux also includes a handy trick that could possibly make the lives of admins and companies a bit easier. This trick makes VzLinux a sort of chameleon.
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of having a backup. Natural disasters, cyberattacks, or other devastating events can happen when you least expect them. To be on the safe side, it is always recommended to have round-the-clock system backups to ensure business continuity in case of service interruption.
SSH doesn’t need any introduction, its abbreviation stands for Secure Shell. With the help of Secure Shell, the users can secure network connections to access remote devices. It is a protocol that uses port 22 by default, which allows access to a remote computer in the IP network via an encrypted connection. It can be used as a secure alternative to unencrypted protocols such as Telnet or Rlogin. For example- you want to access your web server running on Amazon Cloud, to do this securely we can use an SSH server on the remote system. After that using a local SSH client the secure connection is possible. SSH enables mutual authentication and encrypted data transmission so that sensitive data such as passwords or user names cannot be spied out by unauthorized persons. Secure Shell offers a high level of security.
Well, SSH is not just limited to Linux systems, even Microsoft has implemented OpenSSH server in Windows 10 carried in Windows 11 as well. Hence, we can connect Windows over this protocol without installing any extra software. SSH works in server-client architecture.
Secure Shell works on the application layer (according to the ISO/OSI layer model on layers 5 to layer 7 ) and is based on TCP in the transport layer.
A good photo can be a powerful thing. It expresses what you saw in a very literal sense, but it also speaks to what you experienced. Little things say a lot: the angle you choose when taking the photo, how large something looms in the frame, and by contrast the absence of those conscious choices.
Photos are often not meant as documentation of what really happened, and instead they become insights into how you, the photographer, perceived what happened.
This is one of the reasons photo editing is so commonplace. When you're posting pictures to your online image gallery or social network, you shouldn't have to post a photo that doesn't accurately represent the feelings the photo encapsulates. But by the same token, you also shouldn't have to become a professional photo compositer just to crop out the random photo bomber who poked their head into your family snapshot at the last moment. If you're using KDE, you have a casual photo editor available in the form of Gwenview.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DBeaver on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, DBeaver is a free and open-source universal database tool for developers and database administrators. DBeaver supports any database that uses JDBC driver for relational databases i.e PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, Oracle, BigQuery, Google, Exasol, SQLite, DB2, Teradata, LUW, Firebird, Vertica, Informix, Netezza, H2, and many more.
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 DBeaver free universal database tool on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
I want to remove all the files from a directory except one or more files. We usually use rm -rf command to remove all the files, but the problem is that it will remove all the files, which we don’t want to do.
You may say it’s simple just move the file to a specific location or make a zip of a particular file and delete the rest of the file. Yes, we can do it, but we have to run multiple commands, which I don’t want, and it is not optimal.
So, how do I remove all the files from a directory except one? Well, in this article, you will see multiple ways to remove all files while protecting the important files.
When I installed Xubuntu 22.04 I was shocked to see that Bluetooth wasn’t working. I’ve got a pretty standard and well-supported Bluetooth chipset, Intel Wireless-AC 3168 Bluetooth, so this threw me for a loop.
After blaming and then apologizing to Blueman, I found a hint on the Arch Linux forum. The kernel version on 22.04, 5.15.0.18.18, is currently broken with several Intel Bluetooth chipsets. There were reports in that same thread that the issue was resolved in 5.15.4, so I set out to upgrade my kernel… something I haven’t had to do in a really long time.
Fully free and open source, Veloren continues to expand their inspiration from Cube World and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with version 0.12 out now.
It's still very far from a properly released game but it's coming together, with new content available in this release. Some of what's new includes: a sailing bot, sneaking with weapons drawn, a system for spawning smaller tree-like plants into the world, the ability to toggle always showing health and energy bars, waterfalls, wearable headgear (hood, crown, bandanas), you can mount and ride pets now, arthropods added in, wallrunning and much more.
Ahead of CDPR’s stream later today, Reddit user ‘Blarzek’ stumbled upon a new Spanish Cyberpunk 2077 advert on the sidebar of a website, with the text roughly translating to “Free Trial version available now” – which redirects to CDPR’s official website (though the site itself does not acknowledge a trial.)
It has been heavily speculated and rumoured that today’s stream will focus on the new-gen releases of Cyberpunk 2077 – versions which have taken over a year to arrive – as well as a patch 1.5. With how long it has taken, there is hope that this update is significant.
A Dolphin Emulator Steam Deck release has been teased by the developers of the popular emulation software for Nintendo Wii and GameCube.
Valve's Steam Deck is an upcoming handheld gaming PC that is looking more interesting by the day. First revealed in July 2021, the Steam Deck will work with a wide library of games on Steam thanks to Valve's custom implementation of Proton as the foundation of Steam OS; one of the most recent compatibility announcements was No Man's Sky.
There will be more than just games on the Steam Deck, though. A number of third-party software devs are aiming to make their programs compatible with the Steam Deck and it looks like the Dolphin Emulator is one of them. That should come as no surprise to longtime fans of the emulator -- heck, someone even managed to get it working on a Honda. As in the car.
Valve has clarified that when it comes to which version of a game to run on the Steam Deck, the native Linux incarnation will be used – rather than the Windows game via Proton – if it makes sense to do so. In other words, if the native Linux port runs fine.
There was some confusion around this because some eagle-eyed folks had spotted that Portal 2, one of Valve’s own games that has been ported to Linux, was down in SteamDB as being recommended to run on the Steam Deck via Proton (meaning the Windows version, facilitated by the compatibility layer, Proton, to run on SteamOS which is, of course, a Linux-based operating system).
As Gaming on Linux pointed out, though, in fact this was only the case because of the way Valve implemented the testing of these different versions in the early days of working on software compatibility for the Steam Deck.
Ubuntu can make for a very nice gaming system if you have all the apps to run the games you want. What if you could install a lot of the apps all at once?
Gamebuntu is a script that installs a lot of different apps to give you a very nice gaming system. As I’ve mentioned in other apps, there is a shortage of gaming systems. I can tell you from experience that nearly all retailers are out of gaming consoles. People must rely on their computers to provide for their gaming needs.
XFCE and KDE are neck and neck in terms of customizability, resource consumption, and user experience. So which Linux desktop should you go for?
Being an open-source community-driven OS, Linux offers numerous desktops that appeal to your various computing tastes and priorities. Through this guide, the idea is to compare the two famous desktop environments: XFCE and KDE.
Both KDE and XFCE come loaded with features that distinguish them from the rest of the desktops within the Linux gamut. Nonetheless, you will notice some stark similarities and dissimilarities between the two desktops, as well.
The GNOME Project has announced that it's retiring the Clutter library, the tool that bought OpenGL-based hardware rendering to Linux in 2006.
Clutter was originally written by now-Intel subsidiary OpenedHand and in its day was a widely used library, enabling GObject-based C code to draw user interfaces using OpenGL.
It brought hardware-accelerated 3D to a lot of Linux programs, including the Mutter window manager (Metacity + Clutter) used by GNOME Shell, System76's COSMIC desktop and Raspberry Pi's PIXEL. The Cinnamon desktop uses a fork of Mutter called Muffin.
These days GNOME's version of Mutter "uses a fork of Cogl, a hardware acceleration abstraction library used to simplify usage of OpenGL pipelines, as well as a fork of Clutter, a scene graph and user interface toolkit."
Clutter is indirectly the reason that lots of people found that GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity ran poorly under VirtualBox.
New chromium and chromium-ungoogled packages for Slackware! The recent Google Chromium update aims to plug a security hole which is already exploited out there, allowing attackers to take control of your computer.
The 1.12.0 version of TigerVNC which is present in Slackware 15.0, is quite different from earlier versions such as the 1.6.0 version in Slackware 14.2 and even the previous iterations of this software in Slackware-current ( up to 1.11). It has ‘evolved‘ in a way that it has become dependent on systemd, or so the developers claim.
And indeed, the most prominent change is that the old ‘vncserver‘ script has been rewritten and should not be run directly any longer. In previous versions, as a user you could run ‘vncserver :1‘ to start a VNC server on port “5900 + 1” aka TCP Port 5901, and if needed you could kill that VNC server session with ‘vncserver -kill :1‘. Fast forward to current-day. You are now expected to start the VNC server via the new command ‘vncsession‘ which will look in a couple of places to find out who you are and what desktop session you want to start. No longer will it install a “${HOME}/.vnc/xstartup” script for you to customize, instead it will look first in ‘/usr/share/xsessions‘ for *.desktop files like graphical login managers also do (SDDM, LightDM). Slackware applied a patch here for convenience, so that the names of sessions to look for also include "/etc/X11/xinit/Xsession", "/etc/X11/Xsession", "${HOME}/.vnc/xstartup", "${HOME}/.xinitrc", "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc" in that order.
Below is an evolving list of my hardware, it’s problems with various releases of Fedora, and my attempts to fix and/or workaround.
After 24 years of Linux on the desktop, 15 of them with Fedora, I recently had a bit of a mid-life crisis that led to a brief and unfortunate indiscretion.
The cracks in my relationship with Fedora have been developing for some time. I work from home and have for a very long time. I have room for one desk in my house, and I need to work with a very finely tuned ergonomic desk setup. Red Hat provides me with Lenovo hardware and a docking station which typically runs Linux pretty good. My solution then was to get myself a Lenovo laptop that would work well with that thunderbolt dock so I can easily switch between work and personal and still use my same setup.
This docking and suspend/resume has been the bane of my existence. Every new Fedora release seems to break suspend/resume/dock/sound in some combination, over and over and over, year after year. At times it’s been rock solid, but it feels like that was quite some time ago and now every day when I sit down to get to work, it’s a gamble as to whether or not I can pick up with where I left off, or I’m rebooting and getting everything decrypted and opened again.
Nebulon has continued its efforts to evolve to being a wider provider of infrastructure by announcing a Red Hat Ansible collection that builds its capabilities into the provisioning software supplier’s frameworks.
That capability will allow IT departments to roll out and reconfigure Nebulon storage and server capacity via an Ansible collection, which provides configuration settings for so-called playbooks that automate provisioning across IT estates.
Nebulon will also launch support for Terraform, another widely deployed infrastructure management product, later in 2022.
Former IBM and Home Office tech supremo Joanna Davinson is set to stand down as the UK government's chief digital officer, leaving the Cabinet Office with no one to wrangle its unmanaged legacy estate.
Departing after an 18-month term to set up Whitehall's tech team, Davinson was responsible for leading the government's 20,000-strong Digital, data and technology (DDaT) community after her appointment in January last year.
An ad for her replacement confirms the Cabinet Office is now looking for an individual to lead a "transformation" which includes "digitising end to end services, overhauling Government's legacy IT systems, establishing cross-government enterprise architecture, updating our approach to data and analytics, strengthening our cyber security, and upgrading our [Digital Data and Technology] talent and skills."
The Web team develops and maintains most of Canonical’s sites like ubuntu.com, canonical.com and more.
This iteration we have continued our work on the new ubuntu.com site navigation. We have completed a design and mapped out an architecture ready to be built. We further explored how we can best represent all of our product offerings to give visitors to canonical.com a quick overview of what we produce and how it can fit together.
We also added more Engage pages to ubuntu.com, and did some early exploratory work on improving the search functionality on the CVE status page.
[...]
The Commercial team maintains and develops all commercial service User Interfaces (UI) provided by Canonical. Including the Ubuntu Advantage Store.
This iteration we’ve been working on a new “tip” feature to let our customers know about features like “Account users” – the ability to add Technical or Billing contacts to Ubuntu Advantage, this feature is still in the wireframe stage...
For that, Intel will license its most important asset, the x86 architecture, to those who want to make custom silicon. Depending on the application, customers will be able to mix up x86, Arm and RISC-V CPU cores as well as hardware acceleration units in a custom-designed chip that Intel fabricates.
On the one hand, it's all positive on the RISC-V front, with its open-source ethos driving folks around the world, from the US and Europe to China and Russia, to collaborate on improving and boosting the specification.
On the other hand, the borderless nature of the emerging instruction set architecture – which is royalty-free to implement – could open another front in the chip arms race between the nations. Countries want to create homegrown processors and accelerators amid sanctions, shortages, and other barriers obstructing the free trade of semiconductor technology. These nations are thus turning to RISC-V for its global, open nature.
That could place RISC-V – which is developed in the US as well as the rest of the world – in the center of the next struggle over exported tech.
The US is threatening to cut off microchip supplies to Russia if the country invades Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian companies that include Yadro and Elbrus are developing capable RISC-V cores as an alternative to x86 and Arm-based parts.
LXI, or LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation is a modern control standard for connecting electronics instrumentation which supports ethernet. It replaces the older GPIB standard, giving much better performance and lower cost of implementation. This is a good thing. [Martin Lund] has created the open source lxi-tools project which enables us to detach ourselves from the often bloated vendor tools usually required for talking LXI to your bench equipment. This is a partial rewrite of an earlier version of the tool, and now sports some rather nice features such as mDNS for instrument discovery, support for screen grabbing, and a LUA-based scripting backend. (API Link)
The developers say that Cardinal exists as a way to have VCV Rack as a proper “open-source audio plugin.” By this they mean one that works with multiple platforms and operates more efficiently than the current VCV Rack V2. They claim that as it’s a self-contained plugin it suffers from none of the conflicts or crashes that people have experienced with v2 of VCV Rack Pro running inside a DAW. There’s also talk of jitter issues and MIDI problems that Cardinal has gotten around.
Say what you will about illusions, [Create Inc] has some 3D prints that appear to change shape when viewed in a mirror. For example, circles transform into stars and vice versa. A similar trick was performed by [Kokichi Sugihara] in 2016, where he showed circles that appear as squares in the mirror. For the trick to work, the camera’s position (or your eye) is important as the shapes look different from different angles. The illusion comes in when your brain ignores any extra information and concludes that a much more complex shape is a simpler one. [Create Inc] walks you through the process of how the illusion works and how it was created in Blender.
This February Google put out Chrome 98, closely followed by Mozilla releasing Firefox 97. Soon both will hit version 100.
The memory of the web industry is short. This has happened before: when Opera reached version 10 in 2009, it caused problems, and just three years later, Firefox 10 faced similar issues.
And it will happen again. Google is planning to release Chrome 100 at the beginning of April, and Firefox 100 should follow in May.
Google anticipates that there will be some issues, so ever since Chrome 96 it has offered a facility to force the version number to 100: just go to chrome://flags and set #force-major-version-to-100.
The free open source web browser Otter – which uses the Chromium browser engine at the heart of Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Edge – is being ported to OS/2.
For the uninitiated, OS/2 was an operating system that was created by IBM and Microsoft in the mid to late 1980s. The OS was compatible with some Windows drivers, but Windows 3.x did so well that the IBM/Microsoft partnership dissolved in unhappy circumstances in 1992. IBM kept OS/2 alive, and its fourth release was widely regarded as superior to Windows 95 and Windows NT. By the time Big Blue brought it to market, though, Microsoft's dominance had been entrenched.
I have downloaded the latest Firefox, version 97.0.1, which will be in the upcoming EasyOS 3.4.1.
Almost exactly a year after we last covered it, an experimental version of LibreOffice compiled to WebAssembly (nicknamed LOWA) has appeared.
Be warned, it's about 300MB, so it takes a while to load, but you can try it here in your browser.
It's based on the still-prototype LibreOffice 7.4 codebase and is not yet ready for production use. Given that LibreOffice is a large codebase, parts of which are decades old, this is a significant vindication of WebAssembly. There's more info on the port here, from a presentation by Thorsten Behrens at FOSDEM 2022, which took place this month.
The Register has covered WASM since it was new, including examining how it works. Although it's not without some criticism, it has ambitious goals and an increasing number of supporters. The LOWA developers use Emscripten to compile LibreOffice's predominantly C++ code into WASM. Emscripten originally targeted Asm.js, which was one of WASM's ancestors, alongside Google Native Client or NaCl.
[...]
Inferno is still around, and is now free and open source. It runs on native hardware, including smartphones, and can be embedded inside other apps. Its Limbo programming language is one of the ancestors of Go.
We're definitely not saying that WASM is doomed to failure. It's already doing great, and will surely thrive. All we're saying is that there's still much to be learned, especially from Inferno, notably in terms of compactness, speed, and integration into the OS – just not commercial success.
Your office software needs to do more than just keep up with your schoolwork. It needs to see you through your post-graduate career, as well. If you use a free trial like the student version of Microsoft Office, you will get cut off when you graduate.
When that happens, you face a choice. Start learning new software while looking for work, or start paying a subscription at the same time as your student loans enter repayment. Wouldn't it be nicer if you could keep using familiar software for free?
LibreOffice is free office software that meets all your student needs. Check out five ways to use LibreOffice in school.
In my previous blog, I described my activity (left and right click training) for contributing it to GCompris and its implementation details.
Over Since past 4 weeks, I’ve finalized the layout and of the activity, added the animation for animal cards to move to their houses, and improved communication with my mentors.
The factorial of hundred is 9.3326215443944E+157
Factorial in mathematics is defined as the product of all the positive numbers less than or equal to that number. Factorial is also denoted by the word bang or shriek. If you want to calculate the factorial of 6 then the result will be the product of 6x5x4x3x2x1.
Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941, in Bronx-ville, New York. He was born to Alistair Ritchie, a switching systems engineer for Bell Laboratories, and Jean McGee Ritchie, a homemaker. Ritchie grew up in New Jersey, and after a childhood in which he did very well academically, he went on to attend Harvard University. There he studied science and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics. While he was still going to school, Ritchie happened to go to a lecture about how Harvard’s computer system, a Univac I, worked. He was fascinated by what he heard and wanted to find out more. Outside of his Harvard studies, Ritchie began to explore computers more thoroughly and was especially interested in how they were programmed.
While still at Harvard, Ritchie got a job working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At that time computer programming was not a degree, and computer labs were looking for anyone with the potential to help on their computers. Ritchie, with his unflagging curiosity, seemed perfect for the job. Ritchie worked at MIT for many years helping develop, alongside other scientists, more advanced computer systems and software.
It would be hard to find many people in the world of technology who don’t appreciate the power of a standard. We live amongst diverse systems, following different design decisions, being used in endless different ways – often even within an organization, never mind across organizations. Standards, in this context, are what enables technology to do almost everything we expect it to do, whether that’s accurately pass a message from one machine to another or be comprehensible to a newly hired engineer.
The real story here starts about a week before Christmas, when [SparksAndCode]’s son was enthralled by a similar device at a science museum. At his wife’s suggestion, [SparksAndCode] got to work designing a and building a wind tunnel with hardware-store parts, his deadline looming ahead. The basic structure of the tunnel is three rods which support plywood collars. The walls are formed by plastic sheets rolled inside the collars to make a tube. Underneath, a Harbor Freight fan supplies a nice, steady stream of air for endless entertainment.
With all the futuristic technology currently at our disposal, it seems a little bizarre that most passenger vehicles are essentially the same thing that they were a century ago. Four wheels, a motor, and some seats would appear to be a difficult formula to beat. But in the 3D printing world where rapid prototyping is the name of the game, some unique vehicle designs have been pushed out especially in the RC world. One of the latest comes to us from [RCLifeOn] in the form of a single-wheeled RC snowmobile.
Scientists have achieved a remarkable breakthrough in the conceptual design of twisty stellarators, experimental magnetic facilities that could reproduce on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. The breakthrough shows how to more precisely shape the enclosing magnetic fields in stellarators to create an unprecedented ability to hold the fusion fuel together.
“The key thing was developing a piece of software that allows you to rapidly try out new design methods,” said Elizabeth Paul, a Princeton University Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and co-author of a paper that details the finding in Physical Review Letters. The results produced by Paul and lead author Matt Landreman of the University of Maryland could boost the capability of stellarators to harvest fusion to generate safe and carbon-free electrical power for mankind.
All the essential info is there: engine temperature, tachometer, speed, battery voltage, and even odometer. You might have noticed that there isn’t a clock. The justification that [nixiebunny] gives is that he’s always wearing his Nixie watch, so a clock in his car seems redundant. There is also a gap in the panel to allow an oil pressure display. Corvairs are known for throwing belts next to the oil sender, so any attached sensor needs to be designed well and thought through. A Teensy receives engine telemetry data (no OBDII port to hook into — GM didn’t come out with the first OBD port until the 80s) from the engine bay. The data is transformed into SPI data sent to the 74HC595 shift register chain via a CAT5 cable. Details are a little sparse, but we can see a custom PCB to fit the shape of the hole in the dash with the different Nixie tube footprints silkscreened on.
It’s no secret that we really like circuit sculptures around here, and we never tire of seeing what creative ways people come up with to celebrate the components used to make a project, rather than locking them away in an enclosure. And a circuit sculpture that incorporates sound and light in its design is always a real treat to discover.
Called “cwymriad” by its designer, [Eirik Brandal], this sound sculpture incorporates all kinds of beautiful elements. The framework is made from thick pieces of acrylic, set at interesting angles to each other and in contrasting colors. The sound-generating circuit, which uses square wave outputs from an ESP32 to provide carrier and modulation signals for a dual ring modulator, is built on a framework of tinned wires. The sounds the sculpture makes have a lovely resonance to them, like random bells and chimes that fade and mix together. There’s also a matrix of white LEDs that form a sort of digital oscilloscope that displays shifting waveforms in time with the music.
If Nvidia is a little glum about its failed Arm merger, it has nearly 10 billion reasons to be cheerful: the GPU giant's profit from the past 12 months reached $9.75bn, up 125 per cent on the year-before period.
The chip goliath also disclosed in its fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday that it will write off $1.36bn as a result walking away from the acquisition. This operating expense will be accounted for in the first quarter of Nvidia's fiscal 2023, which began on February 1.
America's Federal Trade Commission has taken a victory lap of sorts, welcoming Nvidia's termination of its proposed $66bn acquisition of chip design house Arm.
In a Monday statement, the watchdog opined that combining the companies would result in the largest semiconductor chip merger to date – before claiming its demise would "preserve competition for key technologies and safeguard future innovation."
The FTC then gloated a little.
"This result is particularly significant because it represents the first abandonment of a litigated vertical merger in many years," the regulator added, before praising global efforts by fellow competition watchdogs who also probed the proposed, and ultimately doomed, deal.
The agencies listed as providing cooperation included those in the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea – suggesting that opposition to the deal was widespread and significant.
Apple Mac users running the Zoom meetings app are reporting that it's seemingly keeping their computer's microphone on when they aren't using it.
The issue appears to affect the native app running on the latest macOS release, Monterey, in which Apple has implemented a visual cue to alert users that an application or device is accessing their microphone or camera — via an orange or green dot in the Menu Bar, respectively.
Users began complaining that the mic seems to be left active after Monterey was released late last year, and on December 27, Zoom put out an update that was meant to address the bug, stating that version 5.9.1 (3506) "resolved an issue regarding the microphone light indicator being triggered when not in a meeting."
Azure DevOps services in Europe have slowed and in some cases are unavailable, resulting in a number of the platform's offerings being broken for local users.
Microsoft Teams was updated last week to version 1.5.00.2164 and its most notable feature, for at least some users, is not being able to send or receive calls.
This is perhaps less than ideal given that Teams is intended as a collaboration and meetings tool.
The Teams desktop app, according to several users, has been reporting a vague "Something went wrong" error after update installation. And thereafter it cannot access device speakers or microphone.
"Oshchadbank also suffered a DDoS attack. Work is currently underway to restore the system. It is already working in stable mode. There is only a slow entry to the Oshchad24/7 system due to an additional load on the communication channels."
The attackers prioritized efforts to target Microsoft 365 – the Windows giant's suite of productivity apps and complementary cloud services, we're told.
"The BlackByte executable leaves a ransom note in all directories where encryption occurs," continued the Feds' advisory [PDF ]. "The ransom note includes the .onion site that contains instructions for paying the ransom and receiving a decryption key. Some victims reported the actors used a known Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerability as a means of gaining access to their networks."
SonicWall's annual cyber-threat report shows ransomware-spreading miscreants are making hay and getting quicker at doing so.
"I think we're in an arms race," CEO Bill Conner told The Register. "It's the good guys versus the bad guys. And as good as the good guys are, over the last two years, every good vendor ... has been hit."
Conner would know – just last month exploitation notes were published for a critical (9.8) remote-code-execution vulnerability in its own SMA 100 series VPN appliances. Multiple other vulnerabilities, including the low-privileges bug, were patched in the appliances in December, although none of them appeared to have been exploited in the wild.
SonicWall's report makes for grim reading. The company's researchers noted 623.3 million ransomware attacks globally last year, up 105 per cent on 2020 and more than triple 2019's figure. Cryptojacking in 2021 rose 19 per cent to 97.1 million globally and while malware might have dropped by 4 per cent in 2021 (a paltry 5.4 billion hits, according to SonicWall Capture Labs threat data), it looked very much like things picked up in the latter part of the year, indicating an upward trend on the cards for 2022.
Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.
The third-party service provider in question is the end-user’s bank.
What the actual fuck!
Plaid has weighed on my mind for a while, though I might have just ignored them if they hadn’t been enjoying a sharp rise in adoption across the industry. For decades, we have stressed the importance of double-checking the domain name and the little TLS “lock” icon before entering your account details for anything. It is perhaps the single most important piece of advice the digital security community has tried to bring into the public conciousness. Plaid wants to throw out all of those years of hard work and ask users to enter their freaking bank credentials into a third-party form.
Adobe has released an out-of-band security update for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source to address active exploitation of a known vulnerability, and Google has an emergency issue, too.
Security Bulletin APSB22-12 fixes CVE-2022-24086, rated 9.8 (critical) out of 10 on the CVSS scale. Adobe has not released details about the issue beyond noting that it involves improper input validation (CWE-20). The software maker says exploitation does not require any special privileges and allows arbitrary code execution.
A former school IT technician who wiped his ex-employer's network but also the devices of children connected to it at the time has been sentenced – after telling a judge he was seeking a new career in cybersecurity.
Adam Georgeson, 29, went on the digital rampage after being dismissed by Welland Park Academy in Leicestershire, England, last January. He wiped 125 devices "including those belonging to 39 families", according to the Leicester Mercury.
The IT professional, of Robin Lane, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, pleaded guilty to two crimes under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 last year.
Sentencing him to 21 months in prison late last week, His Honour Judge Mark Watson said: "You made deliberate efforts to sabotage the networks of your victims. Your actions, towards both sets of victims, were committed out of spite and revenge."
VMware on Tuesday patched several high-severity vulnerabilities impacting ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and NSX Data Center for vSphere that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
Though there is no exploit or proof-of-concept out there, the information surrounding this vulnerability is, and it is quite likely a threat actor is working on it. As such, it is recommended that security teams and end-users running Linux distros with snap-confine apply patches for these vulnerabilities as soon as possible. However, it should be noted that as long as a threat actor cannot get onto your system as a low-privileged user, there is nothing to worry about. In any event, it is always good to stay up to date with operating systems, as you never know what could be lurking out there in older unpatched versions.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has kicked off its first coordinated enforcement action, taking a long, hard look at the use of cloud-based services by the public sector.
It's going to be a big one, involving the launch of investigations by 22 national authorities across the European Economic Area (EEA) and encompass more than 75 public bodies including EU institutions. A wide range of services are to be examined including health, finance, tax, and central buyers or providers of IT services.
As for how it will work, at national level a questionnaire will be handed out. A formal investigation might then begin depending on the answers.
The action comes amid expansion by the cloud giants over the last few years and the jump in cloud uptake by both the private and public sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. The outbreak, according to the EDPB, "has sparked a digital transformation of organisations, with many public sector organisations turning to cloud technology."
Multiple Chrome browser extensions make use of a session token for Meta's Facebook that grants access to signed-in users' social network data in a way that violates the company's policies and leaves users open to potential privacy violations.
Security researcher Zach Edwards last week noted that Brave had blocked a Chrome extension called L.O.C. out of concern it exposed the user's Facebook data to a third-party server without any notice or permission prompt.
L.O.C. utilized an access token that can be easily obtained from Facebook's Creator Studio web app. After extracting this token – a text string composed of 192 letters and numbers – from the app, the browser extension is able to use it with Facebook's Graph API without being an approved third-party Facebook app to fetch data about the signed-in user.
In 2014, Google made a remarkable offer: anyone with a Google Apps for Education account in the US got unlimited storage for free. The logic was sound at the time.
Three years earlier, the tech giant had launched the Chromebook – cheap, robust and secure, the web-browser-based kit was a natural fit for education. The cloud was its primary storage, so what could be better than making that bigger than any hard disk in a Mac or Windows PC could ever swallow?
The idea was that if you catch users when they are young, they're yours for life. The axiom had already been tested by both Apple and Microsoft, with creative types and workers in jobs with sensible shoes respectively. Google played on its own strengths as the first cloud-native platform for everyone. And lo, it was good.
Seven years later, Google has killed the deal. The tech giant announced the end of infinity in a blog post named, with magnificent chutzpah:, "More options for learning with Google Workspace for Education."
Apple said on Thursday that it would make improvements to its AirTag devices to make it more difficult for people to use them to track others without their knowledge.
AirTags, tiny discs that Apple started selling for $29 last year to help people keep track of items like keys, wallets and phones, have become a headache for the company. People have said on social media and in interviews that they have found the devices hidden on their cars and belongings, leading them to fear they were being stalked.
Google is following Apple in stopping cross-app tracking on Android phones, the company said Wednesday. The change potentially creates another challenge for platforms that rely on app-tracking to understand consumer behavior and bolster their ads businesses.
“We don’t think there should be a forced choice between privacy and developers building their business,” Anthony Chavez, VP of product management for Android security and privacy, told the Wall Street Journal.
Starting at the end of 2019, I was the creative director, writer and producer on a project called Privy To, with the help of producers Julia Scott-Stevenson and Liz Steininger.
We called ourselves the Assembly of Privacy Doxographers — Doxographers from the Greek word meaning “those who are concerned with the assembling of histories.” Our project was an attempt to get people thinking about privacy as a living concept with a human history and evolution. We planned three prongs for our project, each exploring different ways in which privacy has been defined in law since the middle ages. These laws were not called “privacy rights’’ at the time they came into being, but they established the conceptual foundations that ultimately led to our modern definitions of privacy and privacy rights. The concept of privacy includes the right to be let alone, the right to the integrity of private communications, the right to be forgotten, among others. There are many associated rights and perceived freedoms that can be swept up into the concept of privacy — freedom of inquiry and copyright, for example.
Ava Majury downloaded TikTok when she was 13, and at the height of the pandemic lockdowns a year later had more than a million followers. Her fans, nearly three-quarters of them male, watched her lip-sync and dance to trending music on an account with the profile message, “Hey, I love you!!”
In early 2020 Ava noticed that one fan, EricJustin111, was trying to get her attention in comments on TikTok. He messaged her in Snapchat and on Instagram, and turned up in online games she played with her brothers. Ava responded to him a few times at first, she said, “because I used to reply to my fans, like ‘Hey, how was your day?’’’
Vodafone is to begin retirement of its 3G network next year, saying this will free up frequencies to improve 4G and 5G services.
The move follows proposals by the UK government late last year to see 2G and 3G networks phased out by 2033. Other networks have already confirmed plans to start early, with BT phasing out 3G services for EE, Plusnet and BT Mobile subscribers from 2023.
Vodafone said it will begin retiring its 3G network in 2023 as part of a network modernisation programme.
The Canadians who have disrupted travel and trade with the U.S. and occupied downtown Ottawa for nearly three weeks have been cheered and funded by conservative American activists and politicians who also oppose vaccine mandates and the country's liberal leader.
The Indian Government's Income Tax Department has raided the local offices of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei as part of an investigation into whether or not the controversial company has met its local taxation obligations.
Huawei's Indian outpost has acknowledged the visit from tax authorities and verified Indian media reports that stated several local staff were interviewed. It also asserted that it does its very best to comply with Indian laws.
In India, Huawei sells consumer electronics and Wi-Fi routers, and tries to sell telecoms gear – but was last year excluded from 5G rollouts.
Prompted by the cryptocurrency wallet forfeiture possibility opened by the Canadian government's Emergencies Act against the so-called Freedom Convoy financing, a U.S. congressman is introducing a new "Keep Your Coins" bill. It aims to prevent digital asset forfeitures by the government without a court order and stop unsanctioned crypto transactions monitoring.
A key witness in the bribery and money-laundering trial of a former Goldman Sachs executive said the scheme to loot billions of dollars from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund was laid out a decade ago inside the apartment of a flamboyant Asian businessman who remains on the run.
Tim Leissner, a former Goldman partner who has pleaded guilty in the scheme, testified in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday that the businessman, Jho Low, had told him and the defendant, his former colleague Roger Ng, about the plan to pay up to $1 billion in bribes to foreign officials.
Opening arguments in a case tied to the 1MDB bribery scandal will begin today.
[...]
Today, the onetime banker Roger Ng is set to stand trial in a Brooklyn courtroom over allegations that he abetted the looting of the huge Malaysian state fund known as 1MDB. The legal proceedings will resurrect a scandal that saw $4 billion stolen from the Malaysian government and tarnished the reputation of Ng’s former employer, Goldman Sachs.
Ng is said to have introduced Goldman colleagues to Jho Low, the businessman accused of masterminding what Ng’s own lawyers called “perhaps the single largest heist in the history of the world.” According to prosecutors, Low, Ng and the onetime star banker Tim Leissner conspired to pay $1 billion in bribes to government officials, in order to win Goldman mandates for $6.5 billion in bond offerings for 1MDB. Money meant for the fund was then spent on a Beverly Hills hotel, a mega-yacht, a transparent grand piano, financing for “The Wolf of Wall Street” and more.
His former Goldman colleague is expected to be a key witness. Testimony from Leissner, who pleaded guilty in 2018 and agreed to forfeit up to $43.7 million in assets, is seen as crucial for the prosecution. He could begin testifying as soon as this week. (Low is still at large and denies wrongdoing.)
The global scandal over the looting of a big Malaysian infrastructure fund nearly a decade ago — a crime that tarnished the reputation of one of Wall Street’s premier banks — is about to play out once again in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn.
The criminal money laundering and bribery trial of Roger Ng, a former Goldman Sachs banker, will begin Monday, with opening arguments and federal prosecutors calling their first witnesses.
The trial comes nearly four years after Mr. Ng, 49, a Malaysian resident, was indicted by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. And it comes 16 months after Goldman pleaded guilty to a criminal charge and paid $5 billion in fines for its role in the far-reaching foreign corruption bribery scheme.
Internet garment slinger Fashion Nova will cough up $4.2m to shut down accusations that it censored negative reviews left by customers on its website.
The flash clobber biz allegedly used third-party software to screen product reviews before they appeared on its site. Product ratings of four and five stars were automatically published on the e-tailer's website, while lower-starred, negative reviews were withheld, according to the US Federal Trade Commission [PDF]. Hundreds of thousands of bad reviews were concealed between 2015 and 2019, it was claimed.
As part of its settlement with the FTC, Fashion Nova will cough up millions of dollars, and must allow all customer reviews to be posted online unless they contain obscene or unlawful content. It's the first time the American watchdog has extracted dosh from a company for suppressing online negative product reviews.
Mr. Zinke, who left the department in 2019 amid multiple inquiries, misused his office and lied to investigators about his involvement in a Montana land deal, a government watchdog found.
A reporter who faced potential hacking charges for viewing website source code in his browser can rest easier now that Missouri officials have decided not to prosecute him.
This month, Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson announced no charges would be filed in conjunction with the revelation that Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's (DESE) website exposed the Social Security details of educators.
Sarah Palin’s loss of her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times has reaffirmed, for now, more than a half-century of legal precedent that protects journalists when they make inadvertent — even sloppy — mistakes.
But her case still may have achieved another aim that she and her lawyers said they had all along: to shine an unflattering light on the process of producing daily journalism, and to nudge the courts to reconsider why the law sets an extremely high bar to prove defamation cases against media outlets.
Whitney discusses the ulterior motives and background of the individuals behind the push for “neurorights” at the national and international level and why it’s more about making new markets than protecting our rights.
After the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected Hungary and Poland’s complaint that the EU may cut funds to member states that violate the rule of law, Justice Minister Judit Varga called the decision “politically motivated,” while Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party reacted by saying Hungary was being “stigmatized” over its child protection law.
After months of hearings and debates, Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn have introduced their long-promised legislation to require tech platforms to implement new controls for minors and their parents and make changes to mitigate harms to kids online.
The Kids Online Safety Act applies to any app or online service that could be used by kids 16 and younger. Under the bill, those platforms would have a duty to prevent the promotion of certain harmful behaviors, including suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse and more. They would also have to give parents and users under 16 the ability to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, prevent third parties from viewing a minor's data and limit the time kids spend on the platform, among other things. Those controls would have to be turned on by default. The bill also includes provisions regarding platforms' disclosure policies and advertising systems.
"Big Tech has brazenly failed children and betrayed its trust, putting profits above safety. Seared in my memory — and motivating my passion — are countless harrowing stories from Connecticut and across the country about heartbreaking loss, destructive emotional rabbit holes, and addictive dark places rampant on social media," Blumenthal said in a statement. "The Kids Online Safety Act would finally give kids and their parents the tools and safeguards they need to protect against toxic content — and hold Big Tech accountable for deeply dangerous algorithms. Algorithms driven by eyeballs and dollars will no longer hold sway."
Momentum for this kind of legislation has been growing since whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward with internal research on Instagram's impact on teens' mental health. Congress has since called Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Facebook head of Safety Antigone Davis to testify on those findings. Leaders from TikTok, Snap and YouTube have also testified about the well-being of kids on their apps.
In 1996, Manuel Miranda, a second-generation Filipino American from Kent, Wash., graduated from Evergreen State College. He had majored in literature and got a job in Seattle, taking care of people with cerebral palsy for $9 an hour. The city was “post-grunge” but being transformed by tech, Miranda told me. There was a lot of excitement about Amazon, the online bookseller.
Miranda applied to work there and started out in the warehouse, packing books and CDs. He then went into customer service, where he responded to questions and complaints. Some people saw the call-center job as a way to fund arty outside ambitions, Miranda said; others wanted an inroad into tech. Miranda earned just a dollar more per hour than he had in caregiving but got stock options, health insurance and the pride of working for a cool, homegrown company.
Election legislation in Missouri and across the nation should be reviewed with healthy skepticism, with two key questions asked: 1) Are there credible issues to address? and 2) Does the legislation create obstacles to certain groups of people?
As the former Missouri Ethics Commission executive director and Missouri elections director in the secretary of state’s office — both nonpartisan positions — I know how our elections work and I understand the necessary components to maintain and improve them. I’m not writing from the viewpoint of one party or ideology. I’ve worked for Republicans and Democrats and have seen both parties’ positions on elections and voting.
It used to be that having technical skills meant that fixing the computer problems of elderly relatives was a regular occurrence. Over the last few years this has been joined by another request on our time; friends with teenage children requesting help configuring their routers such that Internet access is curtailed when the kids should sleeping. In France a desperate parent took more extreme measures, buying a wideband frequency jammer to ensure les petits anges can’t waste the night away on social media sites through their cellular connections. It had the intended effect, but sadly it also interrupted cellular coverage over a wide area The French spectrum regulator ANFR sent in their investigators (French, Google Translate link), and now the unfortunate parent faces the prospect of up to 6 months imprisonment and €30,000 fine for owning and using a device that’s illegal in France.
The world's top manufacturer of lithography equipment, Dutch company Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASML), has warned that it believes a Chinese company may be selling chipmaking equipment that infringes its intellectual property rights.
Intel Corporation no longer has to pay a €1.06bn ($1.2bn, €£890m) fine imposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2009 for abusing its dominance of the chip market.
On Wednesday, the General Court of the European Union annulled the EC antitrust penalty [PDF] after previously upholding it in 2014 [PDF].
After rival AMD complained in 2000 and again in 2003 that Intel was engaging in anti-competitive conduct by offering its hardware partners rebates for using Intel's x86 chips, an EC antitrust investigation that got underway in 2004 and concluded in 2009 with a €1.06 billion penalty against Chipzilla.
The dispute between AWS and Elastic looks to be over, with Elastic saying the trademark infringement lawsuit is "resolved."
"Now the only Elasticsearch service on AWS and the AWS Marketplace is Elastic Cloud," said Elastic.
For its part, Amazon Web Services has begun stripping the term "Elasticsearch" from its website, services, and project names.
"We view this as a significant step in removing the confusion in the marketplace because there is only one Elasticsearch, and it's only from Elastic," said Shay Banon, founder and chief technology officer of Elastic.
The OpenJS Foundation, providing vendor-neutral support for sustained growth within the open source JavaScript community, is announcing acquisition of ownership of the Node.js logo trademarks.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group of law professors and others on Wednesday urged the Eleventh Circuit to reject Apple's appeal of a lower court's decision that Corellium LLC's "virtual" version of the iPhone to detect potential bugs was protected by copyright's fair use doctrine.
After Nintendo announced it plans shut down the eShop for Wii U and 3DS consoles, the Video Game History Foundation made its objections known, accusing Nintendo of being “actively destructive” to video game history.
In a tweet posted by the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), the association accuses Nintendo of funding lobbyists that prevent anyone from providing access to older games. The association understands that blocking commercial access is understandable, but stopping institutions like libraries from preserving antique titles is an act of destruction of video game history.
Google last month announced plans to prevent customer files stored in Google Drive from being shared when the web giant's automated scanning system finds files that violate its abuse prevention rules.
"When [a file is] restricted, you may see a flag next to the filename, you won't be able to share it, and your file will no longer be publicly accessible, even to people who have the link," Google explained at the time.
That system is now up and running, just not very well: Google Drive's scanning system has been finding copyright violations where they do not exist and flagging innocuous files.
