On this episode of This Week in Linux: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS & Ubuntu Flavours, AlmaLinux 9 Beta, Framework Laptop, TUXEDO Stellaris 15, Shuttleworth on Flatpaks in Ubuntu, KDE Gear 22.04, SDL2 Reverts Its Wayland Preference, QEMU 7.0. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
We all heard the year of the linux desktop meme but what if we take it a little bit too seriously what would it actually take to get Linux into mainstream acceptance, into mainstream daily usage.
Security is paramount. Security involves defence in depth. Approaching security one step at a time, with consistency and rigour, you can mitigate threats, and keep intruders at bay.
Intruders use a variety of different techniques in an attempt to compromise a system. For example, systems can be attacked by denial of service, cracking, intrusion, snooping (intercepting the data of another user), or viruses/worms/Trojan horses. To have a secure box, a system therefore needs a variety of defences.
Vulnerability scanning is an essential activity for enterprise security.
Any competent enterprise will have a backbone of security measures including, but not limited to, a firewall, vulnerability scanner, asset-mapping, as well as a dedicated team that performs regular pentesting, an authorized simulated cyberattack on a computer system, performed to evaluate the security of the system.
Recognizing, categorizing and characterizing security holes (known as vulnerabilities) among the network infrastructure, computers, hardware system, and software, etc. is known as Vulnerability Analysis.
Most systems, based on RHEL, were not able to upgrade without reinstallation, or best said, not supported. The new version, that was released at around 18 months later contained so many changes that it was hard to test the upgrades themselves until leapp was introduced.
The universe sent you here so I can help you. You’re welcome.
Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster. So, this app is basically used for creating, testing, and managing the APIs(Application Programming Interface).
GitLab is an open source git based platform. It is used for software development and collaboration and also used as a repository manager. GitLab has features like CI/CD, Auto devops and kubernetes integration which makes it a go to platform for Code management and DevOps purposes. It can also integrates with other open source platforms like Jenkins. In this tutorial we will learn how to Install GitLab on CentOS 8 Stream.
One thing I love about FreeBSD is the feeling of completeness I get when using it. On FreeBSD, the kernel and the core utilities that come installed as base are all maintained by the FreeBSD team. Consequently, if the kernel requires or deprecates certain features, then the base utilities can adjust accordingly. For this reason, the sysadmins don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues.
On Linux, it was almost a standard to use ifconfig for managing network interfaces. Nevertheless, development of the Linux kernel continued. And, ifconfig couldn’t provide enough features and flexibility. Predictably, this made a new utility called ip to replace the old ifconfig command. Now, the system admins have to learn yet another tool (as if we hadn’t learned enough).
Racktables is a robust and a nifty solution for datacenter and server room asset management. It is a helpful tool that can be used to manage document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, network configuration. It has a simple WebGUI and it’s very easy to install. It uses MySQL/MariaDB as database backend and its based on PHP. It can also run on older versions of distributions :
There are several alternatives to the ls command, some of them you can find in this article .
And today we are going to get to know a new alternative that is written in Golang and its differential in relation to GNU Coreutils ls is that in addition to listing the files, it also displays the icons according to the mime-type .
The GPU-Viewer is a free, open-source project to create an easy-to-use interface for glxinfo, vulkaninfo, and clinfo. The program will be developed using Python 3 with GTK3 to display all the crucial details extracted from these programs on one page alongside other valuable tools like grep or AWK.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest GPU-Viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish with a third-party PPA from LaunchPAD using the command line terminal.
Pluma is an application that supports editing multiple text files in one window (tabs or MDI). It fully utilizes the Unicode UTF-8 encoding for international characters, making it easy to work with diverse languages. As a general-purpose editor focused on simplicity and ease of use, plumes support most standard features you would find within other programs, such as Highlands’ advanced word processing tools, which are available through their simple user interface.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Pluma Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal for an alternative text editor or those familiar with MATE desktop applications.
OpenRGB is free and open-source software used to control RGB lighting control that does not require manufacturer software. The software allows for RGB amber lighting, game integrations, music visualization, etc. OpenRGB also comes with a plugin interface that can extend the software’s functionality even further.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install OpenRGB on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by importing a third-party LaunchPAD PPA with the command line terminal and maintaining and removing the package if required in the future.
Neovim is an extendable Vim-based text editor that is free and open-source. It’s a hyperextensible platform that seeks to maximize usability with extensibility in mind; it also simplifies maintenance by encouraging contributions from others who work on this project! Neovim also is extended using APIs and plugins, among a few features.
Monitorix is a free and Open-source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor services, system resources, and servers. It is similar to Zabbix, Nagios, and Cacti.
This tutorial will be helpful for the users to install Monitorix 3.14.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Fedora 35, and Rocky Linux 8.
PHP 8.0 is major released from PHP 7 series with improvements and changes to the language, including many long-awaited additions by developers everywhere! This includes named arguments; union types. It also boasts improved JIT compilation tools which will help optimize your application code even further than before while increasing performance.
More information about the release and full changelog which gets updated on every new minor version release can be found here.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 8.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by importing the Ondà â¢ej Surý repository, the maintainer for PHP on Debian, and installing, upgrading, or removing howto instructions.
Python is one of the most popular high-level languages, focusing on high-level and object-oriented applications from simple scrips to complex machine learning algorithms. Python is famous for its simple, easy-to-learn syntax, emphasizes readability, and reduces program maintenance costs and more straightforward conversion to newer releases. Python supports modules and packages, and one of the many is the popular PIP package manager.
Deluge is a free, open-source BitTorrent client for those looking for more features than traditional BitTorrent clients. It has comprehensive Protocol Encryption, DHT, Local Peer Discovery (LSD), Peer Exchange (PEX), UPnP, NAT-PMP, Proxy support, Web seeds, global and per-torrent speed limits. If you are looking for a more customizable BitTorrent experience or want to torrent anonymously, then Deluge is a good option.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Deluge BitTorrent Client desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using various methods such as Ubuntu’s default repository, the Deluge team LaunchPAD PPA, or third party managers such as Snapcraft or Flatpak using the command line terminal.
In this article I will show how to create a Multipass virtual machine that has an additional user which can connect to the virtual machine authenticating using a private key. To accomplish this I will use cloud-init when creating the virtual machine. The cause for this is to allow creation and provisioning of Multipass virtual machines using tools like Ansible.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nagios on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Nagios a.k.a Nagios Core is an enterprise-class Open Source IT monitoring, network monitoring, server, and applications monitoring solution. Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and much 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 the step-by-step installation of Nagios core on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 20.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
The most notable change you’ll notice in Ubuntu 22.04 is that the Firefox browser is no longer installed on the system as a traditional DEB package. Instead, it is now being installed as a Snap package.
From developer’s point of view, the eases the update process and ensures that all Ubuntu users are using the latest Firefox version for their security.
This is guide, howto upgrade Fedora 35 to Fedora 36 using DNF. This method works on desktop and server machines. You can also upgrade older Fedora installations (example Fedora 34/33/32) directly to Fedora 36.
I have tested this method on several machines, but if you have problems, please let me know. Always remember backup, before upgrade!
Wine is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux (plus also macOS and BSD). A new biweekly development release is out now with Wine 7.7.
It's a major part of what makes up Steam Play Proton and enables a ton of games to work on the Steam Deck. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
The main reason was to include information about kernel commandline parameters as an alternative to editing the BOOT_SPECS file in the initrd file.
The videos are published on Peertube, but you are free to reupload them on YouTube if you want to, the licence permits it. I won't publish on YouTube because I don't want to feed this platform.
The English video has Italian subtitles that have been provided by a fellow reader.
When reaching a website, most web browsers will send a header (some metadata about the requestion) informing the web server that you supported compressed content. In OpenBSD 7.1, the httpd web server received a new feature allowing it to serves a pre-compressed file of a requested file if the web browser supports compression. The benefits are a bandwidth usage reduced by 2x to 10x depending on the file content, this is particularly interesting for people who self-host and for high traffic websites.
Ubuntu, the one-time-king of Linux distributions, is facing a massive decline in marketshare. In response to this, the Ubuntu team has decided to double down on supporting Ubuntu’s most hated feature — the very same feature that many blame for the steady loss of users… the Snap application packaging system.
Ubuntu is not only doubling down on their most hated feature… the Linux distribution is making a specific point of not supporting the competing (and potentially more popular) packaging system: Flatpak.
The T700 motherboard had a busy few months of testing and prototyping. The main problems right now are the BIOS and the embedded controller (EC), which are both unable to initialise Thunderbolt 4. The original prototype had it’s EC damaged and a new prototype was built at the start of the month (pictured below). At current rates, production should start between May to June. The estimated timeline has also been revised. Stay tuned for more updates!
Let's go for another shooter, but this time a top-down one. Essentially a murderous Super Sprint, Finnish developer Remedy's first game was the exuberantly zippy Death Rally, a decidedly socially hostile top-down racer with machine guns, bombs, spikes, sabotage, splattable spectators and cold hard cash. You can pick up missions for extra money (assassinations, drug running, the usual) or just exterminate your competition for a big bonus and plow the proceeds into a better chassis, a faster engine and better tires and armour. Apogee picked it up and added Duke Nukem for extra competition along with Remedy's cadre of obviously named parody racers (just try to guess who Bogus Bill is).
Besides its quad-core CPU (ARM Cortex-A7), the POP32 also features an ARM Mali 400MP2 GPU. It has display support for common interfaces as MIPI DSI, LVDS and RGB/LCD with a maximum resolution of 1280Ãâ800. USB interfaces are also supported (OTG, Host, and HSIC). Other features include a camera interface (5MP), a Crypto Engine and Arm TrustZone support.
A trio of vulnerabilities discovered in Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets were finally patched late last year, but not before two-thirds of Android handsets were at the risk of having an attacker gain access to media and audio conversations. Both Qualcomm and MediaTek employ the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) which allows for lossless data compression of digital music streams.
While Apple regularly updates the proprietary version of the ALAC format in its software and operating systems, the open-source code has not been tracked as thoroughly. In fact, it hasn’t had a patch since… 2011. And that’s a serious problem, since these libraries are found in many devices and applications on platforms other than Apple’s.
Qualcomm and MediaTek, two of the largest vendors of mobile chips for Android smartphones, integrate the open-source version of ALAC into their audio decoders, which are used in more than half of phones worldwide. This concerns devices running Android 8.1, 9.0, 10.0 and 11.0.
We are pleased to announce a new release of the Octopus, an alternative OpenPGP backend for Thunderbird. This release notably fixes a bug that could lead to a loss of secret key material. It also includes fixes that make the Octopus compatible with Thunderbird 91.8.0.
The Octopus is an alternative OpenPGP backend for Thunderbird. By default, Thunderbird uses rnp. The Octopus is a drop-in replacement for rnp. It implements the same interface, but includes a number of enhancements.
I have always dabbled with programming languages, even as a kid. But I never made anything with them until I was in my 20s. Most extensive things I did before my 20s was simple modifications to some files or dumb tiny javascript files.
The thing is, people always told me programming is very difficult (which is true!) and I am the kind of person that always downplays their abilites. So I wanted to make programs and games, but I never wanted to do the actual programming because how people treated it. I always looked for non-programming game engines and such.
I fixed the infinite redirections from Hell bug [1]. And again, like most bugs, it was an easy fix—just don't redirect if you come from `http://flummux.org/`. It feels weird to think of having to test a text-only website, but there is a form of programming involved, so it shouldn't be as much of a surprise as it is.
Writing system tests can be sometimes tricky because we want to assert a reality that’s not yet rendered. Ad-hoc sleeping is something that can mostly address the problem, but it’s not the most elegant solution and should be avoided if possible.
So I’m not providing the entire spec I wrote, because that would be too confusing for the reader. But it’ll still be more interesting.
Techwise I’m pushing hard on using semantic text for writing documentation. All my earlier TLA+ material was in Markdown, which I’ve had many, many problems with. I tried semantic text for the Alloydocs and it really helped; this is now my most serious attempt. And so far, it’s paying off! It makes maintaining the content easier, and I also hope it’ll present better content.
In practice, computer code is constantly being transformed. At the beginning of a project, the computer code often takes the form of sketches that are gradually refined. Later, the code can be optimized or corrected, sometimes for many years.
Soon enough, programmers realized that they needed to not only to store files, but also to keep track of the different versions of a given file. It is no accident that we are all familiar with the fact that software is often associated with versions. It is necessary to distinguish the different versions of the computer code in order to keep track of updates.
At one point a few years into my GTD journey, I actually managed to do it all, to reach zero, and nothing happened. No fanfare, no oboe. So that’s no longer my goal. My goal is to select the right things to work on out of these ideas the lists so dutifully catalogue.
A few months ago I was planning on learning lua as a first language, but got sidetracked with other stuff in life, but now I'm picking up where I left off. Before and now I've decided that a fantasy console was the way I wanted to get start making games, and chose the 2nd most popular, open source TIC-80. But now that I take a look at it, there really isn't a whole lot of tutorials/courses for the console. The only quality (in my opinion) beginner series is the one from Bytes N Bits where you follow along creating space invaders.
These clickbaiting titles are so horrible, I couldn’t stand mocking them! But at least mine speaks truth.
My recent tasks are spinning around concurrency in one way or another. And where the concurrency is there are locks. Basically, introducing a lock is the most popular and the most straightforward solution for most race conditions one could encounter in their code. Like, whenever an investigation results in a resolution that data is being update in one thread while used in another then just wrap both blocks into a lock and be done with it! Right? Are you sure?
They used to say about Perl that “if a problem is solved with regex then you got two problems”. By changing ‘regex’ to ‘lock’ we shift into another domain. I wouldn’t discuss interlocks here because it’s rather a subject for a big CS article. But I would mention an issue that is possible to stumble upon in a heavily multi-threaded application. Did you know that Lock, Raku’s most used type for locking, actually blocks its thread? Did you also know that threads are a limited resource? That the default ThreadPoolScheduler has a limit, which depends on the number of CPU cores available to your system? Worse, it used to be a hard-coded limit of 64 threads a while ago.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has just been released and is on our minds, because we have a lot of Ubuntu 18.04 machines to upgrade to 22.04 in the next year. Since both we and our users use Python, I've been looking into the state of it on 22.04 and it's time for an entry on it, with various bits of news.
A shell is software that allows people to interact with their operating system. Before graphical displays with windows and mice existed, early shells were created where computer operators would type simple commands at the keyboard to launch applications.
Although some see the shell as “primitive,” this manner of interacting with a computer is extremely flexible and expressive. The command-line shell thus lives on as a quintessential element that defines Unix systems. There are many shells to choose from, but they have many things in common—these commonalities reflect features that go back to the early design of Unix and the fact that the shell has always been deeply embedded.
There are two shells included in the FreeBSD base system – sh and csh – corresponding to evolutions of the Bourne and C shells. Early on, the consensus was generally that the Bourne shell was the better shell for scripts and programming while the C shell was a better interactive shell. These strengths also influenced subsequent developments. Many innovations for interactive shell use were added first in tcsh, a fork of csh that can be considered its natural successor. Similarly, the Korn shell is built on the foundations of the Bourne shell, primarily adding features more commonly associated with programming languages.
nablet has released itsJPEG XS SDK, making it easy to implement the powerful JPEG XS format, co-authored by Fraunhofer IIS. The SDK is available now, for Linux and Windows, and nablet will release additional technologies powered by JPEG XS.
My niece’s two favorite classes in high school this year are “Intro to AI” and “Ethical Hacking”. (She goes to a much cooler high school than I did!) In “Hacking”, she had an assignment to figure out some bug in some body of code. She was staring and staring, figuring and figuring. She went to her teacher and said she couldn’t figure it out, and he asked her if she’d tried to search for the right keywords on the Internet.
In everyday life, the largest moving object most people are likely to encounter is probably a train. Watching a train rolling along a track, it’s hard not to be impressed with the vast amount of power needed to put what might be a mile-long string of hopper cars carrying megatons of freight into motion.
Anyone who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey will easily remember HAL 9000, the sentient computer that turned against its human companions aboard Spacecraft Discovery One. [Ben Brooks] decided to recreate the foreboding digital being, and put it to work as a smart home assistant.
One may think that when it comes to 3D printing, slicing software is pretty much a solved problem. Take a 3D model, slice it into flat layers equal to layer height, and make a toolpath so the nozzle can create those layers one at a time. However, as 3D printing becomes more complex and capable, this “flat planar slicing” approach will eventually become a limitation because a series of flat slices won’t necessarily the best way to treat all objects (nor all materials or toolheads, for that matter.)
That became the moment that Hollywood begrudgingly had to acknowledge that cord-cutting was a real threat. Will Netflix’s big miss become enshrined eventually as the moment the content bubble burst? Only time and content spend disclosures will tell.
The sense of relief in the AT&T CEO’s voice came in crystal clear even through the tinny webcast audio. The telco giant is glad to be seeing WarnerMedia in the rear-view mirror after closing the spinoff transaction with Discovery on April 8.
Instead of looking up how to spell a word, I always look up the Etymology. I don't know Latin or Greek, or any other languages, but a lot of the time, I'll find a link to some other English word, which the spelling make sense.
Listening to smj playing with telephone systems on OpenVOIP, aNONradio.
So it has been a year of being a member of SDF. Both since I joined and got validated. I found SDF after catching an article on gopher and it answered many of the things I have been looking for. It provides a remote shell to access key files and to run programs while out and about without carrying a laptop. This is something I achieved through a colocated Raspberry Pi for a while and using VCS'. SDF is much simpler than those options. I first explored using SDF-EU but found it very quiet. I decided to have a look at the main instance and I discovered a wonderful community.
Before saying anything about end-to-end testing, I have to talk about annotations. I dislike them. Let me explain. In Java you can label classes and methods with annotations that may mean something to the compiler (those ones aren't a problem), or they may just hang around at runtime so that random magic can happen. For example, if you add @Component to a class it means something like "At startup, create a single instance of this, injecting any necessary dependencies, and then inject this in turn into anything that needs it as a depenency." That always felt to me like too much magic for what is really just a label. It only works if you have a load of Spring dependencies loaded, and there's no reason why some other code couldn't use the same annotation for something completely different - identifying things that should be displayed in a GUI, for example. Different magic, same name! I'd prefer less magic and more explicitness.
These days, archaeologists have used modern technology to see what may have been preserved of the burial grounds – underground. The research takes place within the project “Archeology on new roads,” which is managed by the National Heritage Board and Nye Veier AS. The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) has been responsible for the study, which is part of the preparatory work for the new E39 through Kvinesdal, the Viking Herald writes.
By using geo-radar technology, researchers identified the southernmost part of the large burial ground, along with the remains of several burial mounds. The most interesting find?
A ship grave from the Viking Age.
At first glance, you might think the Omnibot v3 wasn’t anything more than a basic 3D printed robotics platform, but you’d be wrong on both counts. There’s actually no 3D printed parts on the build, and while you could describe the platform as simplistic, calling it basic certainly doesn’t do the clever design justice. In the video after the break, creator [Michal] takes us through the process of designing and building this high quality bot.
Docker sits proudly atop its niche, with an estimated 83 percent of the container software market. Development teams use it to make deploying software faster and securer. Its easy-to-use containerization means you can get deployments up and running without stressing over configuration or dependencies.
The price for this model in this configuration is 3,500 US dollars, and those who pay extra, up to $ 4,099, receive extras and premium technical support. In addition to Linux, the laptop comes pre-installed with PyTorch, Tensorflow, CUDA and DNN, applications used in AI research. They use the Tensor cores on the graphics card to speed up such tasks.
A 3D printer that uses lasers to build up an object in any order, rather than layer by layer, could produce more advanced designs than is currently possible.
Existing 3D printers work by depositing layers of a plastic filament from a nozzle or by curing layers of resin with UV light. In both cases objects are built up one layer at a time, meaning that overhanging parts of a structure – the outstretched arms of a model human, say – must be propped up by temporary supports until printing is complete. These supports must then be carefully removed manually.
To get around this, Dan Congreve at Stanford University in California and his colleagues created a 3D-printing system that involves focusing a red laser at a particular point in a pool of resin. The resin is impregnated with particles 80 nanometres wide that convert red light into blue once the light hits a certain energy threshold, which only occurs at the point where the red laser is precisely focused.
When this happens, the surrounding resin reacts to the blue light, hardening. This means that individual points within the material can be fixed without curing the resin along the entire beam of light.
My favorite internet service provider, init7, is rolling out faster speeds with their infrastructure upgrade. Last week, the point of presence (POP) that my apartment’s fiber connection terminates in was upgraded, so now I am enjoying a 25 Gbit/s fiber internet connection!
Leave aside whether you like the result—ending the mask requirement on planes, trains, and other modes of mass transit—no one should support how the federal mandate came to be struck down this week.
Audiences and exhibitors may have been cheering the Spider-Man movie for months, but 2022’s most emotional theatrical experience so far is watching Greg Laemmle struggle with the fate of his family’s eponymous arthouse business in the documentary “Only in Theaters.”
Premiered at the Santa Barbara Intl. Film Festival in March, “Only” inevitably focuses on the 84-year-old Southern California theater chain’s struggle to survive — first during the 2019 downturn in specialty film attendance and then through a yearlong, COVID pandemic shutdown. The wear on the company’s third generation president is palpable and poignant.
The U.S. government on Friday dropped its appeals of a Hawaii order requiring it to remove fuel from a massive military fuel storage facility that leaked petroleum into the Navy's water system at Pearl Harbor last year.
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Defense notified the state and federal courts of its decision. The move comes more than a month after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the military would permanently shut down the tanks and drain all of their fuel.
I've been learning a lot about the effects of ADHD on adults and it's been helping me put a lot of my personal experiences into perspective. My impulsiveness, inattentiveness, and dopamine-seeking are the result of emotional disregulation, and I need to start coming up with solutions that take this angle into account.
Interesting implementation mistake: [...]
I started the entire path to Linux due to a single Windows Error message. My little netbook couldn't handle the massive book I was writing (pictures every two pages, tables and formatting galore, et c.). I needed a real PC.
A friend kindly gifted me her old computer parts. She handed me a plastic bad full of plastic and silicone parts. I hated computers, but knew I had to get this thing working to complete the book.
Ihor Smilianskyi, the director general of Ukraine’s postal service, apologized on Facebook to customers, explaining that disruption of service was due to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. Smilianskyi did not identify the perpetrators behind the attack.
Ihor Smilianskyi, Ukrposhta's director general, issued an apology to customers for what he said was a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack but did not say who might be behind it.
Over the last couple of years, ransomware has taken center stage in data protection, but very few people realize it is only the tip of the iceberg. Everybody wants to protect their data against this new threat, but most solutions available in the market focus just on relatively quick recovery (RTO) instead of detection, protection, and recovery. In fact, recovery should be your last resort.
Protection and detection are much more difficult measures to implement than air gaps, immutable backup snapshots, and rapid restore procedures. But when well-executed these two stages of ransomware defense open up a world of new opportunities. Over time, they will help defend your data against cybersecurity threats that now are less common, or better said, less visible in the news—such as data exfiltration or manipulation. And again, when I say less visible, it is not only because the incidents are not reported, it is because often nobody knows they happened until it’s too late!
So, to recap, in an effort to take a slide show that had been plainly visible in the front of the classroom and place it on each student’s iPad, the teacher ensured that none of the students were looking at her as she taught; that all the students were a click away from infinite temptation; that time was lost to technical difficulties; and that the teachers themselves were distracted by the need to command two devices at once. And this was one of the more successful apps that most teachers settled on as their preferred method for meeting the iPad requirement.
Uniswap Labs, creator of one of the most-used applications on top of Ethereum, is starting to block certain wallet addresses from its frontend. Other decentralized applications, like Tornado Cash, have done the same. Fully centralized solutions like Infura/Metamask have also done the same.
The sanctions come mostly from governments – like the U.S. government, which are cracking down on illegal activity.
The question: will users care?
I’m working on merging the X230 FHD patch (finally) into coreboot master. More info can be found on my X230 BIOS repo. As an FOSS (free and open-source) enthusiast and an amateur developer, I’m looking to merge the patch into Heads, osboot and Skulls. These are super cool FOSS projects that is missing on the X330.
As a side note, the gigabit ethernet firmware can actually be generated for the X230, with a user definable MAC address. This means that the only blobs needed for coreboot is the Intel Firmware Descriptor (IFD) and the Management Engine (ME). Both are exactly the same across all X230, meaning that there are now no unique portions of the BIOS that needs to be dumped and extracted from your machine, bringing the X230 one step closer to being truly libre.
The French Presidency of the Council is seeking EU-wide comparisons of every DNA profile held by police forces against all those held by other national police forces, as well as EU policing agency Europol, as part of plans to upgrade the ‘Prüm’ network of police databases. It also hopes to automate the police exchange of facial images by eliminating requirements for human review.
Nina Shapiro reports at Forbes this week in an article titled "The Leading Cause Of Death In Children And Youths Is Now Guns"...
He explained that Muslims don’t want to terrorize people but convert them to Islam. He said that if non-Muslims do not accept Islam and refuse to pay the jizya poll tax “in humiliation,” then they will fight them until they attain martyrdom or victory.
At least 40 people were hurt -- 26 of them police officers -- and as many arrested after days of rioting over the Easter weekend in Norrkoping, Linkoping, Landskrona, Orebro, Malmo and the capital Stockholm.
A school was also set alight with 20 police vehicles either damaged or destroyed.
“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” Raskin said. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup.”
“This was not a coup directed at the president,” he added. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”
Hanson also allegedly wrote a message on the "Contact us" page stating the company's headquarters should be "shot up and bombed," federal prosecutors said.
Ever since the crisis over Ukraine began last year, a minority of commentators, including the present author, have cautioned about the dangers of inundating the country with weapons, and the risk of fueling extremist groups that could destabilize the country and create blowback for the West, as the United States’ anti-Soviet policy in Afghanistan did in the 1980s. A new CNN report suggests US officials are well aware of these risks.
A suite of anonymous sources told the network that Washington has no way of tracking the weapons they send or knowing where they end up when they enter Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest arms trafficking markets even before the war. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time,” one source told CNN.
Europe is known for its true liberal values which allow freedom of expression and speech which is increasingly coming under threat from all political sides and Sweden is no different.
Swedish society, which has stood up for multiculturalism and stood against racism, have also now become aware that there is a certain section of migrants in Sweden who are not interested in assimilation and threaten to impose their values on Swedish society.
Islamic insurgents have increasingly attacked northern Mozambique as Christianity increases there, the international evangelistic ministry Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) said in its latest special report.
Radical Islamists have killed nearly 3,000 and displaced more than 800,000 Christians and moderate Muslims “in recent years” who refused to recite certain creeds, VOM said in its report. A focal point includes Cabo Delgado where the Christian population has grown to 40 percent Christian since 2017. VOM cites an influx of Christians working in Cabo Delgado and growing conversions among Muslims.
This has brought renewed scrutiny to the lack of green space in many poor urban areas. Research shows that historically redlined communities, which are Black and brown communities that recieved little investment due to discriminatory practices, face more extreme heat threats largely due to the lack of tree canopy.
One solution may seem simple: plant more trees.
Tree canopy coverage can significantly decrease temperatures, sometimes by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which can help in Westlake where the average temperature is close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime. A recent study from the International Journal of Biometeorology found that 1 in 4 lives in Los Angeles could be saved during extreme heat events when there is more tree canopy, as well as other cooling methods in place.
But planting trees in cities is not as easy as it seems.
Indonesia, the world’s top producer and exporter of palm oil, blocked exports from April 28 to tackle rising domestic prices.
Scores of people in communities around the United States took to the streets on Saturday to demand swift and bold legislative and executive action to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis as well as skyrocketing inequality.
"We simply cannot afford inaction: It's time to make a real investment in making our nation safer, cleaner, healthier, and also more equitable and resilient."
People generate lots of waste heat. It makes sense that there is a desire to convert that heat into usable energy. The problem is one of efficiency. Researchers from MIT and the National Renewable Energy Lab have announced a new heat converter that they claim has 40% efficiency. Of course, there’s a catch. The temperature range for the devices starts at 1,900 €°C .
Users who receive [cryptocurrency] payments can hold their earnings in [cryptocurrency] wallets on the Polygon network, a [cryptocurrency] infrastructure firm on the ethereum blockchain, and can then exchange them into other currencies.
But it is precisely the latter, Bitcoin’s hunger for energy, that is becoming a global problem. Instead of ordinary computers, crypto miners are using specialized high-performance devices, so-called ASICs. These are necessary to solve the complicated cryptographic problems that Bitcoin uses to protect itself against manipulation.
Critics consider this the currency’s Achilles‘ heel. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that Bitcoin is ââ¬Å¾extremely inefficient“ and consumes ââ¬Å¾staggering“ amounts of electricity.
Instead of championing solar, wind and conservation energy, the GOP (Greedy Old Party) is championing the skyrocketing profits and prices for the omnicidal fossil fuel and atomic power companies.
As climate change makes the West hotter and drier, cities and states will intensify efforts to find and secure water, and Nebraska's pre-emptive move could be a precursor to how Western states react as competition for the natural resource grows, experts said.
The Nebraska law gives the state authority to draw water from the Platte in a move state officials said would secure its portion of the river’s water supply and help protect communities, businesses, agriculture and the environment across the state of 2 million people.
Both states have the right to draw from the river under a 1923 compact. Nebraska officials said they decided to exercise their right to build the canal to circumvent any big water projects Colorado may have planned for the river.
Simple social decency, most all of us understand, requires a floor under income, a minimum wage. Does simple social decency also demand an income ceiling, a "maximum wage"?
Rising prices directly impact virtually the entire population, so it's not surprising that there has been a constant drumbeat of reports in the corporate media laying out the factors contributing to inflation as well as its economic and political consequences. But while the media cite many legitimate factors, including pandemic-induced effects on supply and demand, their choices of which causes to emphasize can have political and economic consequences of their own.
Whether France is voting, commemorating D-day, or debating French identity in terms of Republic Values, Algeria is always present in some way. It is almost impossible to discuss anything of substance in France in which Algeria does not feature and, sometimes, dominate the debate. After all, Algeria was not just another€ d'outre-mer€ colony in North Africa whose independence in the 1960s failed to end all the emotional ties to its former colonizer, France. It is one of the few history cases in which the relationship between the former colony and its former colonizer has not been settled once and for all. It just lingers under the surface.
The Digital Services Act, one half of an overhaul for the 27-nation bloc’s digital rulebook, helps cement Europe’s reputation as the global leader in reining in the power of social media companies and other digital platforms.
“With the DSA, the time of big online platforms behaving like they are ‘too big to care’ is coming to an end,” said EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton.
The European Union on Saturday passed a landmark law that seeks to reduce social media's harmful effects by requiring Big Tech corporations to quash disinformation and illicit content on their platforms or else face multibillion-dollar fines.
"The time of big online platforms behaving like they are 'too big to care' is coming to an end."
The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world.
Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance.
“The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. “It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms.”
“Exhibit 5,” in question, is a CNN article published on Jan. 26, 2021 titled “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress.” The article draws from posts Greene made before she was elected to office, in which she posted far-right conspiracy theories and seeded resentment against Democratic officials such as Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.
She denied posting these herself, saying that she’s “had teams of people manage my pages” in a tweet just before the article was published.
Fein, shortly after, pressed her on a key linchpin of the story — Greene liked a comment about assassinating Pelosi.
Greene was confronted with several of her social media posts on the issue while on the stand, but she was hesitant to take ownership of the views she’s pushed in the past. The conspiracy theorist from Georgia has long engaged with some of the most extreme corners of conservative media, pushing lies about Democratic colleagues, hate speech, and calls for violence, and on Friday she seemed well aware of how bad her record looks when it’s removed from the cesspool of right-wing demagoguery on the internet and laid bare in a court of law.
Greene's seeming about-face came under oath this week when questioned about her rhetoric and actions leading up to the Capitol riot. The trial stems from a recent lawsuit brought by a group of Georgia voters who argued that the Georgia freshman does not qualify for re-election over her apparent violation of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone who supported an insurrection from running for Congress.
And yet, she had. She said it in an old video that has circulated widely in the run-up to her testimony. When Celli called up the exhibit showing that, Greene quickly sought a mulligan.
Paludan is hoping that the Swedish people will wake up and understand that the government is importing people into the country who want to murder and use force if Swedes do or say something that they do not like or challenge Islamic primacy. “More than 1 million people in Sweden do not believe in freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, freedom of democracy. And the very concept of democracy is not liked by these people,” explains Paludan.
The digital transformation of democracy has created new threats to maintaining the integrity of elections and free democratic processes. For example, some of these problems include manipulation, fragmentation of the public debate, and disinformation. In the European Parliament, we aim at improving the Commission’s text.
The “GPDR” is a typo—the author actually meant the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) [2]. And it pains me to see something like this happen. Here's someone from Europe who was interested in reading a story about a person in a small US (United States) town [3] and yet, they couldn't because the owners of the news website (which isn't owned locally, but instead by a larger company in another state [4]) probably doesn't care about European readers.
Spotify doesn’t publicly release its JRE subscriber numbers. But sources clarified the show has been consistently growing since the podcaster joined the streamer and hasn’t spiked due to any particular event. By one recent estimate, Rogan typically averages 11 million listeners per episode.
It didn’t take long before the original, cocaine-less clip resurfaced — BBC disinformation journalist Shayan Sardarizeh noted the original video was from March — but by then hundreds of pro-Russian, English-speaking Twitter accounts had spread the shallow fake video.
Disinformation investigative group Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins also shared a side-by-side comparison of the digitally altered video and the original: [...]
Among the key sources spreading false claims about Tania was an account called War on Fakes, whose "debunk" of her video has so far been viewed more than 400,000 times on Telegram.
Promoted by the Russian Foreign Ministry and embassies on social media, it is a multilingual "fact-checking" project that claims to provide "unbiased information about what is happening in Ukraine".
While some of its fact-checks are genuine, it includes false information such as the allegations against Tania. And its content repeats Moscow's talking points on the war: claims that Ukraine is the aggressor, that Ukrainians are committing widespread war crimes, and that any evidence of Russian wrongdoing is fabricated.
Democracy is being eroded by an overwhelming information ecosystem buoyed by major tech platforms, former President Barack Obama said Thursday.
Why it matters: Obama's comments reflect a shift in his feelings toward technology, in contrast to his embrace of Silicon Valley and social media as a force for good as president.
Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site who deny the scientific consensus on climate change, echoing a policy already in place at Google.
“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post today.
The premise that disinformation is among the biggest threats to democracy is now ubiquitous. The conference where Obama was interviewed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” was co-hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which is led by David Axelrod. Various other official events, initiatives, and reports addressing this issue are sponsored by the European Union, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the Brookings Institution, New America, the Center for American Progress, the Clinton Foundation, the Aspen Institute, The New York Times, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and more.
Former President Barack Obama on Thursday warned that the spread of misinformation on social media represents a threat to democracy and urged regulation of the tech platforms.
"The very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction," Obama said during a speech at a Stanford Cyber Policy Center event, adding that social media is "turbocharging some of humanity's worst impulses."
After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU governments have just made deal on a new EU Digital Services Act. Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises: [...]
A journalist in Myanmar who contributes to news outlets including Voice of America and Frontier Myanmar was formally indicted Thursday by a court in Yangon.
Sithu Aung Myint, who was arrested in August 2021 along with freelance journalist Htet Htet Khine, is facing two charges related to content that authorities say was critical of the military.
Once upon a time, Canada had a thriving network of real community stations. In the 1980s and 1990s, over 300 studios across the country supported volunteer-driven broadcasting.
They taught a generation about media production, developing Canadian talent from Dan Ackroyd to Mutsumi Takahashi to Guy Maddin. They were the user-generated content platforms of their day, moderated by professionals under the oversight of Canada’s regulator, the CRTC.
Their coverage of local news, events and protest would never have seen the light of day in the corporate media. That included gavel-to-gavel coverage of city council meetings crucial to municipal democracy. A generation of civic leaders were nurtured by community TV’s coverage of these issues and debates.
Smart home company Insteon has shut off its servers, lost its management team, and on Thursday sent an email to customers explaining how it plans to sell any remaining assets to help pay off creditors as part of a formal dissolution of the business. It has been the most drama-filled end of a consumer IoT company to date — and also represents one of the biggest opportunities left for the Matter smart home standard going forward.
2009: A big year for 3D printing. The FDM patent expires, which causes a major price drop for FDM printers from $10,000 to $1,000. Platforms like Kickstarter swell in popularity and remain to this day the largest funding platform for 3D printing, like Micro. Meanwhile, Makerbot offers DIY kits for anyone who wants to build their own 3D printers, bringing 3D printers into the mainstream. Stratasys would later acquire Makerbot for $400 million in 2013.
Additive manufacturing (AM, or 3D printing) began in earnest when stereolithography (SLA) was invented in Japan in the early 1980s. Things moved up a gear when Fused Deposition Molding (FDM), was invented by Stratasys founder Scott Crump in 1989, and then really took off just ten years ago when the first FDM patents expired. The world was flooded by low- and medium-cost equipment – 3D printers using very similar technologies, also known as Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) – that inspired the imaginations of thousands of hobbyists around the world.
Building off foundational work by Hull and others in the late 1980s, AM’s innovation trajectory accelerated. For example, the Institute for Defense Analyses found that between 1975 and 2011, over 3,000 AM-related patents were awarded.43 Commercialization further increased in the 2010s after initial patents began to expire and the cost of AM machines decreased.44 For instance, a new, service-based business model (i.e., “do-it-yourself” 3D printing) emerged, allowing customers to print personal items such as jewelry.45 The public’s familiarity with AM further increased when former president Barack Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union speech in 2013 and when a 3D printer was launched to the International Space Station in 2014.46 In 2019, the annual sale of AM materials and services increased to $11.87 billion, a 20 percent increase over the previous year.47 Notably, this sizable figure excludes government and private-industry investments in AM development, which fuel continued innovation.48
I have written several times about the $2.2 billion verdict in the VLSI v. Intel case. The case is extraordinary not just because of the size of the verdict, but because Intel was blocked from challenging the patents by the Fintiv policy—and the patents are clearly invalid.
The specification for the main patent discloses the insight that in an integrated circuit “the processor may be able to operate at a lower voltage than is possible for the memory.” That is, “in many embodiments, the memory has a higher minimum operating voltage than the processor.”
Armed with this insight, the patent claims the invention of giving the processor a lower “regulated voltage” if it can operate at a lower voltage than the memory. In other words, give each component only the power that it needs.
As I wrote last September,
Integrated circuits have been around since the early 1960s. They were used heavily in the space program in the build up to the moon landings. The VLSI patent’s filing date is 2006. You might think that in the intervening 40 years, electrical engineers had come to appreciate that the different parts of an integrated circuit sometimes have different voltage needs. It is hard to imagine that a judge with an engineering degree and a knowledge of patent law would not have agreed that the claims were obvious.
The European Patent Office (EPO) received 188 600 applications in 2021, up 4.5% on the previous year and the highest number to date, according to the EPO’s Patent Index 2021. Patent filings rebounded after a slight dip in 2020.
EP 1 679 291 B1, granted in 2019, protects a low-reflection coating. This renders glass covers for photovoltaic systems non-reflective, which significantly increases the efficiency of the systems. Meanwhile, EP 3 137 430 B1 was granted in 2018 and protects a special coating that is particularly resistant to temperature. As a result, this reduces heat loss. Such technology can, for example, be used for windows in buildings.
Against the backdrop of the current discussion about a rapid turnaround in energy policy, both property rights are of significant economic importance.
Saint-Gobain filed an opposition to both patents a few months after they were granted. However, the EPO’s Opposition Division has now rejected the oppositions and upheld both property rights in their entirety. It is not yet clear whether Saint-Gobain will appeal the decision.
On February 8, 2022, all of the original claims of EP 3 113 493 B1, owned by Velos Media, LLC, were found unpatentable. The ‘493 patent is generally related to decoding image data to generate quantized transform coefficients using certain sized matrices. This was one of Unified’s first filings in the EPO and was a part of its ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone.
MKV is supported by a non-profit organization called association loi 1901 and the specifications are open to everyone. MKV is a royalty-free open standard under GNU L-GPL license for personal use and also has free parsing and playback libraries under BSD license available for commercial companies. MP4 (ISO/IEC 14496-14 standard) is patent protected format making use of DRM to restrict copying.
The models’ removal isn’t just disappointing from a hobby perspective—it also carries financial implications. As Stumpf pointed out, some of the Honda parts previously modeled on Printables aren’t available for purchase in the US at all, making them unreasonably expensive to obtain by traditional methods. For some, being able to print the parts at home was far quicker and cheaper than attempting to import the parts directly from Honda.
Automotive manufacturer Honda has issued 3D printer manufacturer Prusa with a takedown notice for all Honda-related 3D printable files from its Printables 3D printing repository.
All models referencing the word “Honda” posted prior to 30th March 2022 have been removed from Printables with immediate effect, after the company was delivered a “huge legal document” covering every model Honda wished to have deleted.
All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle—a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.
"I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents."
According to a story first published by TheDrive, “all models referencing the word Honda posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle—a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. According to the author of the article, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.
This response, posted on the Prusa forums confirms the situation, and apologizes for the hastily deleted files. On the bright side, you can see that the files may still be retrievable if Honda comes to their senses.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says it has reached cash settlement and abstention agreements with a pirate IPTV seller and a person linked to a pirate comic uploading community. BREIN also reached an agreement with a large-scale Usenet release 'spotter' who made no money from his hobby but has ended up paying 10,000 euros for his trouble.
