Lenovo's laptops caused a disturbance last week after a security engineer found himself unable to boot up a copy of Linux due to restrictions that are apparently insisted upon by Microsoft.
Matthew Garrett, an information security architect, was keen to check out Lenovo's latest Pluton-equipped wares but found himself unable to boot Linux from a USB stick "for no obvious reason."
Pluton is Microsoft's latest effort to secure PCs and can act as both a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or as a non-TPM security co-processor. It emerged in 2020, with Microsoft saying Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm were all onboard. While Acer launched tech with the kit in May, Dell is not keen and Lenovo started the year saying it wouldn't be turned on by default.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register in January that using the tech with Linux was "an unsupported scenario."
Garrett was keen to examine a functional implementation of the co-processor, but upon unboxing a new Z13 found himself unable to boot into anything but the pre-installed Windows.
Historically, many Linux distributions have worked with Secure Boot to ensure that the boot loader and kernel have not been tampered with.
Find a few good Ubuntu-based Linux distros as alternatives to Windows 11, so that you can still use your old hardware without loosing security updates…
With Windows 11 Microsoft has put some restrictions that make old hardware configuration system users unable to use it. Trust Platform Module 2 and Secure boot are some of the core requirements our system needs to full fill to install Win 11. Apart from that with Windows 11 22H2, Microsoft is also putting Pro editions users mandatory to use a Microsoft account to log in. Taking all these things into consideration, users who are worried about their privacy and at the same time want their old system to have a new life can go for Linux.
In the world of Linux – Ubuntu is a name that is quite popular among Desktop users because of software availability and ease of usage. Although the users can customize the Ubuntu Desktop to give it a familiar look, however, there are many Linux distros out of the box that mimics the Windows look. Here we discuss what are those…
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Nitrux 2.2.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.
In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss a recent report that identifies the "Top 25 most dangerous software weaknesses." This list includes the usual suspects, as well as some very interesting findings as well. In addition, the descriptions of the common weaknesses serves as a good jumping in point if you're new to this podcast.
Version 6.0 of the calibre ebook management system is out.
Welcome back, calibre users. It has been a year and a half since calibre 5.0. The headline feature is Full text search, calibre can now optionally index all the books in your library so you can search your entire library for a word or phrase.
To use the new Full text search upgrade to calibre 6.0 and simply click the FT button to the left of the search bar in calibre. This will allow you to index the calibre library and once indexing is complete, search it.
 Organizing photos is a big deal for individuals and researchers. Managing a large photo collection is not easy, whether it is just for a passion project or professional work.
What if you want photos for research or a detailed archive?
Tropy can help you out with that.
Tropy is an impressive open-source software that lets you organize all your research photos, add essential details to them, and have them ready for research purposes as well.
Primarily, it is built for researchers, where you get the superpower to add several properties of metadata to describe the content of your photo.
When many users access and use the Linux system there is a chance for accidental deletion of files or directories. So it's important for administrators to keep the required files in an undeletable state. There comes chattr command to help in this situation.
In this guide, we learn about chattr command with some practical examples.
Organizing photos is a big deal for individuals and researchers. Managing a large photo collection is not easy, whether it is just for a passion project or professional work.
What if you want photos for research or a detailed archive?
Tropy can help you out with that.
This short tutorial shows how to list and change the current working directory using Python. Python can be used to perform many actions on a file system, for example you can rename a file in Python, copy a file or delete a file and more. To do so, it’s first useful to understand how to get the current working directory and change to a different directory – essentially the Python equivalent of using the pwd command and the cd command.
Emacs is a wonderful tool that can do just about anything. While it is a text editor, It can function as an email client, RSS reader and even music player too. If you are an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) user, it is also possible to use IRC from inside Emacs. This can be useful if you want to chat with others through IRC but do not want to leave your Emacs buffer.
This guide explains what is Quickemu and how to create and run Linux, macOS and Windows desktop virtual machines with Quickemu in Linux.
OpenCart is a popular open-source and free to use content management system (CMS) designed for building online stores.
It offers a lot of plugins that help you to extend the platform’s functionality and includes features like user management, multi-store functionality, affiliates, discounts, multiple payment gateways, product reviews, and more.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to install and configure the OpenCart e-commerce platform on Ubuntu 22.04.
It’s time for another GNOME Crosswords release! This time we had a focus on I18N support. I also got patches from another new contributor – Philip – who added some nice improvements, dutch-language support, and a downloader.
The suspension of active development on the Cutefish OS has led to concerns among Linux users that the project no longer exists.
Cutefish OS, a new Linux distro, broke onto the scene in September 2021, seeking its place among the Linux distributions with the best user-friendly desktop experience. There are already proven names like elementary OS, Zorin OS, Deepin, etc.
However, the distribution found a way to stand out from the rest by providing its developed desktop environment, CutefishDE, based on the QT framework.
In the Limine menu, you can have an entry to chainload to a drive with an MBR (MSDOS partition table).
Installed Debian, Manjaro, Mint, openSUSE and EndeavourOS. The installers all had some quirks, such as how they setup Grub.
This afternoon, decided to add Fedora to the collection. I was astounded how unintuitive the installer is. The so-called advance partitioning tool is painfully slow. In fact, the whole desktop user interface, running it from iso on a usb-stick, PC has 16GB RAM, was slow.
I am Yorkshire bred and born, which was a very long time ago. Left home at 16 to join the Royal Air Force. Served for almost 19 years as an Aircraft Technician, which is where my engineering knowledge started.
Became interested in Technical Writing in the early 80s and became qualified as a Technical Writer in 1985. This has enabled me to work in aviation, defence, mining, plant machinery, construction, electronics, telecommunications, computer peripherals and software. This did involve working in several countries, which has given me a very broad outlook on life.
Now official retired from paid work and have settled down in Poland with my lovely Polish wife.
Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today's Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.
Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, July 1st, 2022 meeting, where we didn't see any new programs added, but we had a few great conversations and several entries updated.
Congratulations! The GCC Steering Committee has voted to accept the contribution of the Rust Frontend (aka GCC Rust) to GCC. Please work with the GCC Global Reviewers and GCC Release Managers for technical review and technical approval of the patches. We look forward to including a preliminary, beta version of GCC Rust in GCC 13 as a non-default language.
Thanks, David
The GCC steering committee has approved the contribution of the Rust frontend to the compiler suite. "We look forward to including a preliminary, beta version of GCC Rust in GCC 13 as a non-default language".
Experiencing a chemical and/or gas leak can be potentially life-threatening to both people and the surrounding environment, which is why detecting them as quickly as possible is vital. But instead of relying on simple thresholds, Roni Bandini was able to come up with a system that can spot custom leaks by recognizing subtle changes in gas level values through machine learning.
To accomplish this, Bandini took a single MiCS-4514 and connected it to an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, along with an OLED screen, fan, and buzzer for sending out alerts. The MiCS-4514 is a multi-gas sensor that is able to detect methane, ethanol, hydrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide. This capability means that explosive and/or poisonous gas can be identified well before it builds up to a critical level indoors.
Statamic is the flat-first, Laravel + Git powered CMS designed for building beautiful, easy to manage websites.
It may look like WordPress in away, but it comes with dozens of unique custom features that allow developers to build large scale websites.
The announcements of presentations of the second Raku Conference on 13-14 August 2022, keep coming in.
After assembling this puzzle once the main issue became apparent quite immediately. The curve needs to have a smooth linear gradient from black to white. Since this is a 256 piece puzzle it would require 256 discrete gray levels. Unfortunately the engraver can't achieve this level of precision. There are maybe 64 different achievable levels in practice and different parts of the plywood board react differently to the laser. Thus it is actually fairly difficult to judge where any given piece should go and assembling the final puzzle was not really fun. Back to the old drawing board, then.
The only other way of doing this seems to be to print the artwork to a separate sheet of paper, glue it to a plywood board and then cut the end result with a laser cutter. The problem with this is that you need to be very precise with registration. Even if you get the alignment perfect in one corner, it can be completely off in the opposite corner if the printed artwork gets glued down at an angle. Individual pieces are about two centimeters on each side so if the pattern is off by more than a few millimeters the end result looks bad.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.4), Fedora (gerbv, kernel, openssl, and podman-tui), Oracle (squid:4), Slackware (wavpack), and SUSE (apache2, chafa, containerd, docker and runc, fwupd, fwupdate, libqt5-qtwebengine, oracleasm, and python).
On his blog, Armin Ronacher comments about a recent security key giveaway by the Python Package Index (PyPI) to provide two-factor authentication (2FA) tokens to the maintainers of the "critical" projects on the index. While (eventually) requiring maintainers to use 2FA before being able to update PyPI packages is reasonable, Ronacher worries about where the idea might lead...
Android security has come a long way in recent years. The fostering of monthly security patches has kept hundreds of threats at bay, while Google Play Protect is there to bar malware from the Play Store. However, there are still instances where rogue actors can exploit vulnerabilities hidden within in Android’s code for nefarious purposes. Zhenpeng Lin, a security researcher and Northwestern University PhD student, recently discovered such a vulnerability on the Google Pixel 6, and you may be at risk even after installing the latest July 2022 security update.
The vulnerability in question affects the kernel portion of Android, allowing the attacker to gain arbitrary read and write access, root privilege, and the authority to disable SELinux. With this kind of privilege escalation, a malicious actor could tamper with the operating system, manipulate built-in security routines, and do a lot more harm.
What good is a keylogger (or any such tool, for that matter), that is reversed using a debugger within minutes? Let's level up just a little bit, and try to make malware analyst's job slightly more involved.
A letter published about Keystone XL Pipeline was way off. There were 2 erroneous errors in that argument. 1. All that oil was going to export anyway. Response, that's not how modern gas pricing works. Gas prices are mostly determined by the overall prices of crude oil.
In Rocky IV, all-American underdog Rocky Balboa faces his stiffest challenge yet—Soviet colossus Ivan Drago. Drago’s training consists of high-tech scientific workout machinery and a hefty dose of anabolic steroids. Does Rocky try to beat Drago by simply copying the Russian’s training regimen? Nope. Instead, he goes to the Siberian wilderness to train via trudging through the snow, Good Samaritan sled rescue, and lifting heavy rocks around a remote farm (a truly epic training montage). Rocky’s eventual victory is won not through playing Drago’s game, but playing his own. American tech companies could stand to learn a few things from the Italian Stallion if they want to win their bouts with the Russian and Chinese corporate Dragos. Don’t expect America to retain and grow its technological edge through coddling of monopolies, but through good, old-fashioned, American-as-apple-pie competition.
Enter the debate around two landmark tech competition bills—The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO)and the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) concerning their potential effects on American global competitiveness. Led by the all-American bipartisan and bicameral tag teams of Reps. David Cicilline and Ken Buck along with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley, these bills would level the competitive playing field and return fair competition to tech platform markets. These bills represent an essential step in the preservation of an industry dominated by a handful of unaccountable companies. Yet their beneficial impacts won’t just be limited domestically. They can be a key component in making America the place for the next generation of technological innovation.
These bills should increase America’s technological edge by introducing the American secret sauce to the equation: competition. American antitrust law is all about competition. Congress should be looking to protect it, cherish it, and promote it at every turn. When companies have to duke it out every day, they’re forced to innovate and be better. Competition also gives technology users greater choice in the digital platform they use and less beholden to one walled garden whose features, practices, and standards they may not prefer. Under competitive threat, companies are marathon runners finding that extra burst of speed to fend off an encroaching rival. Freed from competition, they grow sluggish, lazy, and complacent.
If you want someone to defend something, simply teach him a lot of terms about various small details about the thing. If it is worth defending for anyone at all, you will have no trouble making up fine divisions for it.
This is a phenomenon that I have noticed in various cases, principally myself. I don't know why it works, but I do know that it works pretty well, and I want to use this short article to propose some reasons to why this works, and additionally some situations where it made it out.
Before we continue, I want to note that none of this is substantiated truth. I will not claim any of this to be backed by anything other than anecdote and conjecture. Please be aware of this as you read this through.
Recently I've moved the index of my posts from "posts.gmi" to my main index file and I wanted to clarify why I'm doing so and why I encourage others to do so too.
When I first started out my Gemini capsule, I've used "gemlog.gmi." After a while, I've switched to putting my posts list in my index file, then I went to "posts.gmi" and now back to the index file. I liked to separate my posts in a distinct file because of aesthetic mostly, keeping my index page "clean."
I've switched back to the "one page principle", all of your posts are in your index file, the top of the page featuring other pages, the ones that are less important compared to your posts. This way it's more accessible for people in regions with bad network speed, such as those living remote. Gemini, of course, is much lighter than the HTTP, although for those living in the aforementioned areas that don't have the network infrastructure that developed, loading additional pages can be a time consuming and costly task. Every kilobyte counts.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.