One of the most important and successful products provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation is Toolforge, a hosting service commonly known in the industry as Platform as a Service (PaaS). In particular, it is a platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications with the ultimate goal of helping the Wikimedia mission from the technical side.
Toolforge is powered by two different backend engines, Kubernetes and Grid Engine. The two backends have traditionally offered different features for tool developers. But as time moves forward we’ve learnt that Kubernetes is the future. Explaining why is the purpose of this blog post: we want to share more information and reasoning behind this mindset.
Java Operator SDK (JOSDK) is an open source project that aims to simplify the task of creating Kubernetes Operators using Java. The project was started by Container Solutions and Red Hat is now a major contributor.
The first article in this series introduced JOSDK and gave reasons for creating Operators in Java. The second article showed how the quarkus-operator-sdk extension for JOSDK, together with the Quarkus framework, facilitates the development experience by managing the custom resource definition automatically. This article focuses on adding the reconciliation logic.
I recorded a little asciinema cast of using my terminal based PDA thingy. Just opening and briefly using some of the "apps" to show how they work. For reference, when an app opens what I'm doing in real life is tapping one of those buttons on the Pinephone's touchscreen. Shout out to ew0k and the gemi.dev for providing the gemini cli tool and gemini weather service that comprises the weather app :-).
Browser finger printing will always be a problem but one of the simplest actions you can take is spoofing your browser profile in a way that looks real and Chameleon will help you do that.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Beta.
Today we are looking at Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Beta. It comes with MATE 1.26, Linux kernel 5.15, and uses about 800 MB of ram when idling.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 Beta.
Today we are looking at Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 Beta. It comes with Kylin Linux Desktop V10, Linux kernel 5.15, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
A Quick overview of XeroLinux 2022.03.06.
In the twenty-eighth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses returning to in-person WordPress events.
Version 4.1.0 of the Claws Mail email client is out. New features include text zooming in the message view, improvements to a number of preferences, a "keyword warner" plugin to give a warning before sending a message containing any (user-defined) keywords, and more.
Claws Mail is a GTK+ based, user-friendly, lightweight, and fast email client.
Someone sends you a file, how do you verify that it’s the original one meant for you? How can you be certain that it hasn’t been tampered with?
Moreover, how can you verify that the file comes from an original source?
That’s where cryptographic hash functions come in. A hash function (such as SHA-1) is a checksum if it is used to verify a file. This helps you confirm whether the file has been modified or not.
This year’s TeX Live release was one of the most unspectacular I can remember. No big problems, not last minute code changes, no panic updates in the last second.
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Most of the above features have been available already either via tlpretest or via regular updates, but are now fully released on the DVD version.
Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release!
In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
Chromebooks have come a long way and, in certain circumstances, they are now competent productivity machines out of the box. However, sometimes you need a more full-featured operating system than Chrome OS – Linux, for example – to do your work and run offline software.
In the past, there were many hacks to run Linux on your Chromebook, Crostini is an early example of such. But now Chrome OS has a built-in means to run Linux virtual machines with little configuration needed by the end user. Best of all, we can even run Linux GUI apps such as GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice.
But when working on a Chromebook, what can you do? Sure, Google has created Tab Groups for Chrome, but that doesn’t really solve tab management in a way that makes it easy to work with a large number of tabs. However, there is another way to better manage your tabs, one that involves the virtual desks feature found in ChromeOS. It was Firefox’s poor tab management that led me to adopt this method. On Linux, I can easily create virtual desktops and then move Firefox windows for specific tasks (such as productivity, social networking, etc.) to different virtual desks. This way, instead of having so many tabs open in a window, I can spread them across windows and desktops for more effective tab management.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Firefox 99 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.
It is a Cross-platform web browser available for Android, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Linux systems.
Firefox 99.0 is scheduled to be released on APRIL 5, 2022 but the source file is available for users to download ahead of tomorrow’s official launch.
The lsof is an acronym for List of open files that displays detailed info on which files are held open on a Linux system and which processes have opened them. It was developed and supported by Victor A. Abell.
This article will help you to understand the lsof command usage along with 12 practical examples.
Has the frustration of using the Windows operating system reached a tipping point for you? You've probably had to deal with random reboots to upgrade, failed upgrades, unsupported hardware, crashes, and a never-ending inflexibility and general unreliability.
If that sounds like your experience with Windows, I'd like to introduce you to something better, more reliable, and free. Said something is Linux and it's been my operating system of choice since 1997. Now, back in those early days, Linux was a significant challenge to use and an even greater headache to install.
RawTherapee is a non-destructive RAW image editor available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is designed for developing raw files from a broad range of digital cameras and is targeted at users ranging from enthusiast newcomers who wish to broaden their understanding of how digital imaging works to professional photographers. RawTherapee supports JPEG, PNG, and TIFF as output formats for processed photos.
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 RawTherapee photo processing application 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.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' - Yoshi Engine on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Elasticsearch on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source analytics engine and full-text search. The software supports RESTful operations that allow you to store, search, and analyze significant volumes of data quickly and in near real-time.
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 Elasticsearch on a Fedora 35.
In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install CyberPanel with OpenLiteSpeed as a web server on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.
CyberPanel is a control panel powered by OpenLiteSpeed designed with a user-friendly GUI, to make work easier for developers and system administrators. CyberPanel is a control panel that offers some great features such as CSF Firewall, installations scripts for CMSes and it can work on multiple operative systems like Linux, Windows, Mac OS and etc. Openlite speed is an open-source web server that offers security high performance, used for handling huge traffic for the website. CyberPanel with OpenLiteSpeed combination is providing very powerful website performance.
Installing CyberPanel with OpenLiteSpeed is a very easy and straightforward process. Let’s get started!
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Ubuntu come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, lacking the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. The tutorial will cover both options.
Chromebooks have come a long way and, in certain circumstances, they are now competent productivity machines out of the box. However, sometimes you need a more full-featured operating system than Chrome OS – Linux, for example – to do your work and run offline software.
In the past, there were many hacks to run Linux on your Chromebook, Crostini is an early example of such. But now Chrome OS has a built-in means to run Linux virtual machines with little configuration needed by the end user. Best of all, we can even run Linux GUI apps such as GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice.
It was pointed out recently that there's been plenty of confusion on exactly what Developer Mode for the Steam Deck does. Even I've gotten it wrong in the past, so it's time to set the record straight. My friend and YouTube star Gardiner recently pointed it out on Twitter, and it's worth repeating.
Developer Mode enables access to numerous extra options and tweaks on the Steam Deck, as the name suggests it's primarily meant for developers and there's a few bits and pieces in there that might help modders. It does not, however, turn off the read-only filesystem.
Love monster catching and want a bit of a Pokemon-like game for the Steam Deck (or any Linux desktop too)? Check out the newly released Coromon. Developed by TRAGsoft, it released on March 31 and thanks to Steam Play Proton, it's working great out of the box.
"The sun begins to dawn on Velua, a new day for the world and a new day for you, a freshly minted Battle Researcher of the global research society known as Lux Solis. It’s your first day and everything goes smoothly until a mysterious force attacks your latest workplace. Build up a squad of Coromon, track down the invaders, and grapple with a rising threat that endangers everyone on Velua!"
Keep an even closer eye on your inbox, as Valve has announced that we might see reservation emails for the Steam Deck go out twice a week sometimes now.
Each Monday is the usual day for new emails to go out, so people sitting waiting can finally put their Steam Deck order through. That might change some weeks, as Valve explained on Twitter today...
GE-Proton, the unofficial community-built version of the Proton compatibility layer has a new version out (and some hotfixes). Quick primer: Proton is a compatibility layer from Valve (who work with CodeWeavers), that runs Windows games on Linux and Steam Deck. Need more info on Steam Play and Proton? Check out our page.
This version of Proton, named GE-Proton (formerly Proton-GE), pulls in fixes faster but it comes without the quality assurance the official version has. It also has a fix a lot of people enjoy to enable videos in some games to work properly, where they don't with the official Proton.
You know now that the Steam Deck is formidable gaming device (with more than 2000 games validated now), but since it’s designed to be open, it can be turned into a “steam deck laptop” as well, with the desktop mode and the fact that you can add flatpaks for pretty much any kind of application. Of course, a 800p screen is going to be of very limited use, but should be on the go and need something to do some ssh into a remote machine, or typing some kind of document or piece of code, the Steam Deck could fit the bill… as long as you have a proper keyboard attached to it.
Since the advent of Linux’s grand entrance into the PC space back in 1993, has been an insurgency of operating systems and that time also happened to be the wake of a technological-oriented generation adopting computers at a much faster pace than ever before.
In the light of this fact, Debian took off grandly (two years after Linux was born) and through it, a staggering 200 independent distributions have poured out – thanks to Ian Murdock.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of new stable releases to address busybox CVE-2022-28391
3.12.12 3.13.10 3.14.6 3.15.4
After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The 4.7 GB download, suitable for DVD burning or an USB stick, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools.
Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the coolest and most beautiful Linux live image ever. We’re calling for submissions of artwork, themes, actually anything from a desktop background to a boot manager animation, on the topic of Gentoo! The winning entry will be added as default setting to the official LiveGUI images, and also be available for download and installation.
YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is an open-source, widely used command-line and graphical-based package management tool for RPM (RedHat Package Manager) based Linux systems, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL), Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, which is used to install, update, remove or search software packages on a system.
The DNF command (Dandified yum) is the next-generation version of the traditional YUM package manager for RedHat-based systems.
To install software packages that are not included in the default base and update repositories, as well as additional repositories, you need to install and enable other third-party repositories on your system.
If your PostgresSQL database is running slowly, you might be wondering how you can tune your Red Hat Enterprise Linux server for a PostgreSQL database workload. In this post, I’ll walk you through how a customer tuned PostgreSQL for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
First, let me give you the scenario: A physical server which has 160 logical CPUs and 3TB RAM (yes, you read that right) was having difficulty handling a load of 1,200+ running applications, all of which used PostgreSQL 9.6 as a database.
All those applications run on a very big Red Hat OpenShift cluster, and in some situations the active connections scaled up to the maximum configured in PostgreSQL, making applications unable to access the database. When applications start to crash, a chain reaction occurs, caused by the OpenShift Liveness and Readiness probes, which worsens the problem.
Find out what's stopping you from accessing a server, printer, or another network resource with these four Linux troubleshooting commands.
March 2022 was another excellent month for Enable Sysadmin. During the month, we published 24 new articles and received more than 836,000 reads from nearly 568,000 readers across the site.
Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles of March to give you a chance to catch up on any of the great content you might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
According to a November 2021 Statista report, digital transformation spending in the U.S. is expected to reach $1.8 trillion in 2022 and $2.8 trillion by 2025. These statistics underscore why digital transformation has become a priority for every organization.
This report covers work that happened between January 1st and April 4th. For previous work, see the 2021Q4 report.
A Common Criteria Certification is intended to provide a level of assurance that a product meets a certain security criteria for specific computing environments. A component of the validation is rigorous, standardized and repeatable testing by any independent third party and provides common ground for sensitive computing operations at an international level.
For Common Criteria, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 was certified by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), with testing and validation completed by Acumen Security, a U.S. government-accredited laboratory. The platform was tested and validated against the Common Criteria Standard for Information Security Evaluation (ISO/IEC 15408) against version 4.2.1 of the NIAP General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile including Extended Package for Secure Shell (SSH), version 1.0 and is the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux version to appear on the NIAP Product Compliant List.
In March I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 8 hours from February. I worked 16 hours, and will carry over the remaining time to April.
As a one-man army that creates SparkyLinux, I would like you to write down a wish list of applications you would like to see in Sparky and what it would be used for. Of course, assuming Sparky is going to be light and fast, so applications cannot be heavy and must be open source.
Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) beta and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This new version of OpenStack (the 25th release) sets a foundation for next-generation, highly performant infrastructure using SmartNIC cards and integrating them with the Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver. With OpenStack network components running on SmartNICs, users benefit from lower latency, higher throughput, and better quality of services.
Kubernetes is well-known as an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications. As such, it uses concepts such as Pods and Deployments to abstract away details regarding the underlying compute, networking and storage infrastructure.
Storage is abstracted as PersistentVolumes (a volume that is provisioned in the underlying infrastructure) and PersistentVolumeClaims (a claim for a pod that uses a persistent volume) resources. Typically, running a Kubernetes cluster also involves running a CSI provisioner, which watches for PersistentVolumeClaims and automatically provisions the requested volumes.
There are a large number of CSI drivers available. For example, if running Kubernetes on top of AWS, one would most likely use the aws-ebs-csi-driver. If running Kubernetes on-premises or in an OpenStack cloud, cinder-csi-driver would be more appropriate. If running on-premises and a Ceph cluster is available, ceph-csi could also be used.
While this solves the storage problems for Kubernetes users, it moves the hurdle of managing everything to the administrators of the Kubernetes cluster, as well as the Kubernetes distribution.
This is my last LinuxGizmos story after nine years as Editor and Chief Writer. But LG lives on.
I started at LinuxGizmos shortly after Rick Lehrbaum launched the site in early 2013. In 2018, he sold LinuxGizmos to KCK Media Corp., which has done an admirable job supporting Rick’s tradition of reporting news on embedded Linux in a straightforward and impartial style. (Sometimes snore-inducing, but that’s all on me.)
Minska is released under MIT license.
Airtable is a cloud low-code collaboration service for teams to create, and manage data-oriented projects.
Rowy is an open-source Airtable-like UI for your database and to build serverless cloud functions visually in the context of your data.
Rowy can be installed in Google Cloud Platform in matter of secs. Soon as it is deployed, it does not require any learning curve to start building apps and managing your data.
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Rowy is released and distributed under Apache-2.0 License.
ArchiveBox is a web-based self-hosted web archiving system that you can use to record and archive online links, web pages, and media pages in a single database.
With ArchiveBox you can have your collection saved, share them or keep them private for your own use.
Moreover, It is an open-source, easy to setup, install, configure and use. Anyone can install it and start using it directly from their servers.
ArchiveBox comes with a command-line app that works directly from your terminal, a web application that works seamlessly in all modern browsers, and a new released desktop app (in Alpha stage) that works for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
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ArchiveBox is released as an open-source project under MIT license.
Welcome, April --we're opening the month with another great week.
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Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 352 Apache Committers changed 26,605,053 lines of code over 3,949 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Brent Bovenzi, Jarek Potiuk, Gary Gregory, and Andrea Cosentino.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) welcomes the following new Members who were elected during the annual ASF Members' Meeting on 1 and 3 March 2022...
Writer now supports what we call clearing breaks: a new property on line breaks which controls where to put the next line in case the line break is at the end of a line which intersects with an anchored object. This feature improves compatibility with the DOCX and HTML formats.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect computer user freedom, seeks a motivated and talented Boston-based individual to be our full-time program manager.
Reporting to the executive director, the program manager co-leads our campaigns team. This position develops and promotes longer-term resources and advocacy programs related to increasing the use of free software and expanding and advancing the free software movement. The program manager plays a key role in external communications, fundraising, member engagement, and special events.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect computer user freedom, seeks a motivated and talented Boston-based individual to provide bookkeeping and financial operations support. This is a temporary, part-time contract opportunity with potential for additional hours and/or extension.
Wilderness Labs releases Meadow.Linux, enabling 10MM+ .NET developers to rapidly build secure, enterprise-grade IoT solutions on millions of in-market Embedded-Linux hardware devices using Meadow.Foundation and .NET languages such as C#.
There are only two kinds of programming languages out there. The ones people complain about and the ones no one uses.
It seems likely that we will raise the toolchain version requirements later this week or beginning of next one. This message is a heads up for the buildbot owners and other people that build LLVM directly from main to make preparations for this migration.
Oleksandr Kyriukhin announced a new version of Comma Complete, the IDE for the Raku Programming Language. With detection of possible hangs in grammars and direct support for the new Raku ecosystems (zef and REA). Check it out, especially if you’re into using Integrated Development Environments and you haven’t checked out Comma yet!
Looking for a way to create and array of strings in Python? You came to the right place. This hands-on article explains several ways of how to create an array of strings in Python. It includes example code snippets to demonstrate how to loop over the array elements as well.
The 1.60.0 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for this Thursday, April 7th. Release notes can be found here.
In traditional monolithic architecture, applications already knew where the backend services existed through static hostnames, IP addresses, and ports. The IT operation team maintained the static configurations for service reliability and system stability. This Day 2 operation has significantly changed since microservices began running in distributed networking systems. The change happened because microservices need to communicate with multiple backend services to improve the load balancing and service resiliency.
I sorta disagree with the characterization of “[computers] have just a processor, RAM and other_devices[]” as being incorrect. If you're a language that is intended to be used outside of the standard desktop computer, you'll likely encounter setups with any combination (including none) of the following devices: * TTY input * TTY output * Display * Audio-out * USB and other IO ports * Networking * Block devices—how many and how big? what kind are they—punch cards, magnetic tape (high-speed LTO or old 9-tracks?), HDDs, SSDs? Are they read-only or R/W or even write-only? Are they buffered? Are they random-access?
The reason why I wrote this thing is that I was genuinely surprised that the display can do a whole lot more than just a number with a colour on it. It's in fact an entire computer behind the display, just to display a number.
Amongst the most expensive activities in a modern society is education. Yet while teaching professionals like to think they are objective in the way they approach their sensitive task, there are always shiny distractions that attract the attentional of educators away from the basics of managing complex social interactions. With a relentless focus on 'academic success', managers in schools are always on the lookout for the next drop of fairy dust to sprinkle onto their school's teachers. A nice, clean, top-down management intervention is an attractive way to appear effective in their role, but without a decent grasp of the changes required it is easy to make lessons less effective than before the intervention.
Before introducing new structures to guide and constrain teachers, it is important then to survey what it is that teachers are doing in the classrooms already and work out where the easy wins are. Teachers are time constrained, and anything that takes up attention or time will push out other tasks. There is an opportunity cost of imposing interventions beyond the training needs: unintended consequences can hinder effective approaches as easily as poor ones.
“Here’s a question from the new guy”. I have been using this a lot the past few weeks after starting here at the Linux Foundation as the lead editor and content manager. How long can I pull that off?
The reality is that I am new to working professionally in open source software – and really the software/technology industry. But, it has been a long time passion of mine. I spent my formative years in the 1980s and had a drive to learn to program computers. When I was 12, I asked my mom for a computer. Her response, “you have to learn to type first”.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, qemu, and zlib), Fedora (389-ds-base, ghc-cmark-gfm, ghc-hakyll, gitit, libkiwix, openssl, pandoc, pandoc-citeproc, patat, phoronix-test-suite, seamonkey, and skopeo), Mageia (libtiff, openjpeg2, and php-smarty), openSUSE (python), Oracle (httpd), Red Hat (httpd), and SUSE (libreoffice, python, and python36).
Google has recently reported that Chromium has a security issue - Type confusion in the V8 JavaScript engine - which is reported in a bit more detail here: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2022/03/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_25.html. This has been assigned the CVE id CVE-2022-1096.
The situation surrounding Lapsus$ is becoming more and more interesting, and in this episode of Enterprise Linux Security Jay and Joao discuss the latest developments regarding the group that has caused quite a ruckus recently.
Wyze ignored a vulnerability in its home security cameras for three years. Bitdefender, who discovered the vulnerability, let the company get away with it.
I just threw my Wyze home security cameras in the trash. I’m done with this company.
I just learned that for the past three years, Wyze has been fully aware of a vulnerability in its home security cameras that could have theoretically let hackers access your video feeds over the internet — but chose to sweep it under the rug. And the security firm that found the vulnerability largely let them do it.
OffGuardian and Unlimited Hangout teamed up for a panel discussion/debate regarding Russia and its relationship to the Great Reset Agenda. Are they complicit or resisting the technocratic designs of Davos?
I *did* get sponsored to promote VoxVM, but that is related to my Youtube channel. My sponsorship will not influence what is being said here, since I find it unethical to spread misinformation.
Apr 4, 2022: Social media algorithms are dictating what people can and cannot see in and from Russia and Ukraine
Evidence of atrocities committed in Bucha and Irpen has shaken the international community. Terrifying photos and videos from these Kyiv suburb cities freed from Russian occupation were shared across various media outlets and social networks. Documented killings of civilians, traces of torture, pillaging of civilian property and possessions, and other war crimes flooded Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram, shining the international spotlight on the horrors unfolding. But then, Instagram began blocking content.
The people of Sri Lanka are facing an attack by President Rajapaksa’s administration on their freedom of expression amid a state of emergency, curfews, and worsening economic crises. On Sunday, 3 April, correlating with widespread public demonstrations against the president’s declaration of a state of emergency, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission on the orders of the Ministry of Defence shut down social media services, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp in Sri Lanka. The ban on social media services was lifted after 15 hours, but this is not enough — the government must commit to open, accessible internet for all.
“There is no justification for blocking access to social media in Sri Lanka,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel at Access Now. “It is not enough to merely lift the ban after depriving people of an avenue to exercise their right to free speech during a critical period. President Rajapaksa’s administration and the independent telecom regulator must provide strong reassurance to the people, and commit to refraining from taking any action to hinder people’s right to access the internet. You cannot silence a nation simply because you don’t like their criticism.”
Imagine a corner of the internet, free to all, where you could search, browse, and download from an archive of more than 5 million illustrations extracted from public domain books? And more than that, improve metadata by tagging and commenting, and contribute to findability by favouriting and saving images to your own publicly-accessible galleries? This very special space was the Internet Archive Book Images account on Flickr: The Commons.
