Linux is a family of free and open-source software operating systems built around the Linux kernel.
Linux is packaged in a form known as a Linux distribution for both desktop and server use.
Some popular mainstream Linux distributions include Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, and SUSE.
Distributions often come bundled with a large selection of free and open-source software.
It is a popular choice for many applications, such as web servers, databases, programming languages, and more.
The Linux kernel was first released to the public in 1991 by Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds.
The kernel is the core of a Linux operating system and provides basic services such as memory management, process management, device drivers, and system call handling.
The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which means that anyone can modify it and redistribute the source code.
Linux runs in a variety of hardware, from embedded devices to mainframes.
It is widely used in servers, as it is very stable and offers a high degree of security.
Linux is also popular with developers, as it provides a wide variety of programming languages and tools.
It is also used extensively in scientific computing, as many scientific software packages are available for Linux.
Linux is a great choice for many people. It is also very secure and stable, making it a good choice for mission-critical applications.
You’ve probably heard about Google Chromebooks. Like Android, Chrome OS is based on some variant of Linux, but it is targeted at the “cloud first” strategy so Chromebooks typically don’t have a huge amount of storage or compute power. If you have a real Chromebook, you can also use it to run certain other kinds of programs via virtualization. However, Google has recently pushed out Chrome OS Flex which is meant to install on a spare laptop you might happen to have hanging around. Seems attractive to take that only Windows 7 laptop and repurpose it to run Chrome OS, especially if you can run Linux apps on it. Unfortunately, Chrome OS Flex has a very different use case and I would only recommend installing it if you meet the exact use case it addresses.
The other option, of course, is to just install Linux on that old hardware. There are several distributions that are made for that purpose and, honestly, even most of the major distributions will work fine on older hardware with a little tweaking to turn off some of the more resource-costly features. That assumes you know how to install, tweak, and maintain Linux.
I've been preaching the gospel of the Linux desktop for more years than some of you have been alive. However, unless you argue that the Linux desktop includes Android smartphones and ChromeOS laptops, there will be no year of the Linux desktop.
But there should be. For example, as GitLab recently revealed in its onboarding document for employees, staffers can run macOS, and they can run Linux on their desktops. But Windows? Forget about it!
Why? GitLab explained: "Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targeted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware."
In this guide, we’ll go through the best Linux laptops, review them, compare them, and write more information about Linux laptops in general.
Before we begin with anything, just a note: this guide will focus on laptops with a Linux distro pre-installed, not laptops that you can install your own distro on, which are most laptops. Most of the companies featured in this article are dedicated to Linux devices only.
You can customize most of these laptops – you can get a better CPU, more RAM, more storage, and more while ordering your laptop.
The Southern California Linux Expo is an annual conference in Las Angeles California, that brings the community together and celebrates Linux. In this video, SCaLE 19x coverage continues. This time, the focus is on the community! Also, Jay has a chat with Evan from the Linux Professional Institute.
This is my new phone and I'm sticking with it for a while. No more smartphone... the dumbphone revolution has begun!
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” MATE and some of the applications pre-installed.
Why we think Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about remote work, and the complicated answer to a simple question.
This is the alpha release for Weston 11.0.0.
Linux has a myriad of multimedia playback software available with a truly impressive range of dedicated music players, dedicated video players, as well as tools that do both competently. The field is exceptionally fierce.
We are always on the look out for new projects. With frameworks that provide a lot of the multimedia grunt functionality, the barriers of entry for newcomers isn’t that steep. That’s one of the many virtues of open source software; there’s a superb base of libraries and frameworks for any budding developer to tap into.
HBud is billed as a simple music/video/karaoke app. It’s written in Python, uses GTK4 for its GUI framework, and GStreamer for its multimedia backend. HBud is published under an open source license.
GStreamer is a superb multimedia framework that offers great support for a wide range of container formats and codecs.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is according to the Wikipedia description: “a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.”. It works a little like bittorrent and you typically access content on it using a very long hash in an ipfs:// URL.
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This approach has its biggest benefit of course when you can actually use a remote IPFS gateway. I presume most random ordinary users who want to access IPFS does not actually want to download, install and run an IPFS gateway on their machine to use this new power. They might very well appreciate the idea and convenience of accessing a remote IPFS gateway.
FFmpeg (opens new window) is the leading media framework that allows you to watch videos in almost any format. This framework is at the very core of many applications (think, for example, of OBS Studio (opens new window), KODI (opens new window), VLC (opens new window), and even some game engines rely on it). Allowing FFmpeg to handle the IPFS protocol enables IPFS usage in many more applications than previously possible.
This post will explain how native IPFS support in FFmpeg came to be, how it can be used, how it might affect you and what the future could potentially hold!
How to record audio in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions?
If you want to record a voice over through the microphone of your computer, you can use GNOME Sound recorder or Audacity.
Using GNOME Sound Recorder is easy but it lacks features. Audacity could be overwhelming initially but it has plenty of features for professional level recording. However, I am not going into that detail in this tutorial.
GNOME Sound Recorder works with the microphone. There is another tool called Audio recorder and you can use it to record streaming music (from Sptify, YouTube, internet radio, Skype and most other sources) apart from microphone input.
I keep a pen & notebook on my desk, which I make liberal use of to jot down my thoughts. It works pretty well: ad-hoc todo lists, notes on problems I’m working on, tables, flowcharts, etc. It has some limitations, though. Sharing anything out of my notebook online is an awful pain in the ass. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, so tables and flowcharts are a challenge. No edits, either, so lots of crossed-out words and redrawn or rewritten pages. And of course, my handwriting sucks and I can type much more efficiently than I can write. I wish this was a digital medium, but there are not any applications available which can support the note-taking paradigm that I wish I could have. What would that look like?
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Other objects would include flowcharts, tables, images, hand-written text and drawings, and so on. These objects can be placed free form on the grid, or embedded in a page, or moved between each mode.
The user input paradigm should embrace as many modes of input as the user wants to provide. Mouse and keyboard: middle click to pan, scroll to zoom in or out, left click and drag to move objects around, shift+click to select objects, etc. A multi-point trackpad should support pinch to zoom, two finger pan, etc. Touch support is fairly obvious. Drawing tablet support is also important: the user should be able to use one to draw and write free-form. I’d love to be able to make flowcharts by drawing boxes and arrows and having the software recognize them and align them to the grid as first-class vector objects. Some drawing tablets support trackpad and touch-screen-like features as well — so all of those interaction options should just werk.
Here at Opensource.com, we thought it would be interesting to survey some of our authors to get a feel for what tools they feel are antiquated (but perhaps still useful!) and what they think of the replacement utilities. What follows is a series of responses and a bit of fun, too.
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Clearly, both the fun of open source and the strong opinions are still present, as is the variety of tools and the freedom to choose what works best for you. Perhaps these tools and others like them are old—even antiquated—but they may still serve a purpose. Some of these older utilities inspired more modern solutions without losing their own inherent value. Finally, there's something to be said for user comfort and familiarity. With open source, all those hours spent developing your foo need not be lost just because some vendor decided it was time for a new release.
We asked our community of contributors what open source tools they are using in place of those that feel outdated or antiquated.
At times, you wish you could explain what you are seeing on the screen of your Linux system to someone else. Although you could exchange screenshots, being able to interact would be so much better; thus, the basis for Linux terminal sharing.
Several tools let you share a screen, including tmate, tmux, screen, teleconsole, tty-share, ttyd, named pipe/FIFO, WebTTY, and byobu, to name a few.
In this article, I cover what are generally considered the most common tools: screen and tmux.
The latest version of Linux Mint—21 "Vanessa"—has been finally released. Here's how to upgrade your Linux Mint system to the newest version.
A major new version of Linux Mint is now available! Based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Linux Mint 21 brings a modest amount of changes and improvements to an already fantastic Linux distribution.
While you can always do a clean install, what if you want to avoid backing up all your files and re-installing all your applications?
Thankfully, the Linux Mint team released a handy tool to upgrade from version 20.3 "Una" to version 21 "Vanessa". Here's how to use it.
Apache Cassandra is a distributed, wide-column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. We already have some articles of Cassandra installation on CentOS and Debian; now I will show you how to install Cassandra on the (so far)latest Ubuntu LTS 22.04.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you in step-by-step detail how to install Drupal on Ubuntu 22.04 OS.
Drupal is a free and open-source CMS(Content Management System) written in PHP. Drupal allows us to customize the webpage easily according to our needs. Drupal is used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites. In this installation, we will install Drupal and make the website up and running with the LAMP stack.
Docker container images are delivered and stored by an application called Docker Registry. Registries consolidate container images and speed up developer build times. Virtualization provides the same runtime environment, but creating an image might require effort. Container orchestration is successful when employing containers. This tutorial teaches how to set up a private Docker registry and configure it for public access.
For Live streaming, OBS Studio is so far the gold standard. It’s a free open source versatile live streaming software you can use for most common live streaming applications. OBS is widely supported across different operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux
I frequently share files on my LAN. Back and forth and back and forth — the sharing fun never ends. To that end, it’s a good thing I can manage those shares with the help of Samba. Once a directory has been made available, I can reach it from any operating system within my network.
With some distributions, setting up a Samba share means installing the software and then manually configuring those shares via the /etc/samba/smb.conf file. There are some distributions that make the process considerably easier.
In this article, we're going to take a look at the System Activity Reporter, also known as the sar command. This command will help us with seeing a historical view of the performance of our server. You'll see examples of installing it, running it manually, and more. Let's get started!
Learn the way to edit text and other files on Ubuntu as a root user using Nautilus GUI File Manager without the help of the Command Terminal. The tutorial is valid for all Ubuntu versions such as 22.04, 20.04, and 18.04…
Discord is an app for instant messaging, chats as well as voice and video conferences that can be used on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets as well as on the computer. This free communication software was originally designed for gamers to talk to while playing online together or for like-minded people can have group chats on a specific topic. In the meantime, the software is much more than that. On Discord, the focus is on the server: Every user can open their own server and invite friends, acquaintances, family, and colleagues to join. Even if you don’t own a Discord server, still using its client can be a very useful medium to perform calls or write to people from your friend’s list or start group calls.
Google Chrome is one of the most widely used web browsers today, with over 1 billion users across the world. While it is available for Windows and macOS – as well as Linux – natively, it can also be installed on OS X using third-party utilities. Installing Google Chrome directly from the official website will only get you so far. Instead, to get the most out of it on a Mac, you need to install it directly from its standalone installer file. Installing Google Chrome on your Mac is not very difficult either.
There are several ways in which you can install Google Chrome on macOS. In this blog post, we will discuss installing Google Chrome on macOS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache is an open-source web server and is available for free. Apache is popular as part of the LAMP setup, being the A in the Acronym. The apache server functionality can be extended with the many available modules.
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 Apache web server on Rocky Linux. 9.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Rocket.Chat on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Rocket.Chat is an open-source self-hosted chat platform that can be used as an alternative to Slack. It comes with many features that you would like to have in your self-hosted environment e.g. video conferencing, group chats, and integration with other platforms. So if you have a small business, team, or some organization where you need to contact multiple people on your team, Rocket.Chat might be the go-to software to try today.
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 Rocket.Chat on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Like in previous years, Godot is participating again in the Google Summer of Code program for its 2022 edition.
This year we selected 3 projects, and the 3 students and their mentors have now been working on their projects for two months. We asked them to write a progress report to present what they're working on and the current status.
Between 2022-08-03 and 2022-08-10 there were 33 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 263 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 12.5 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones...
Cutefish OS restarts it's development, new website, new flavour and a list of objectives that is planned in near future.
I spent a week at GUADEC 2022 in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was an excellent conference, with some good talks, good people, and a delightful hallway track. I think everyone was excited to see each other in person after so long, and for many attendees, this was closer to home than GUADEC has ever been.
For this event, I was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, so many thanks to them as well as my employer the Endless OS Foundation for both encouraging me to submit a talk and for giving me the opportunity to take off and drink tequila for the week.
For me, the big themes this GUADEC were information resilience, scaling our community, and how these topics fit together.
In my previous blog post, I explained why we use a dialog box and its advantages over the GtkPopoverMenu for the templates submenu.
Since the last update, I'm glad to announce that the dialog box implementation is finally complete :D The visuals are improved, we can now search for templates and new templates can be created with ease!
 Linux is a far cry from the esoteric bundles of code it once was, and the number of polished distros out there, offering variants for Windows, OS X and Ubuntu, is testament to that.
If you’re new to Linux or are looking for a change, these distributions are easily among the best options in 2022. This list was designed to cover different experience levels and use cases. So whether you’re a system admin, developer, or a desktop user, you’ll find something to interest you.
 I’ve been using Linux since 1997, which (for me) is a badge of honor. Then, using Linux was a serious challenge, and the options were limited. A few years into my journey, those limitations were removed, and all of a sudden, I was staring at more choices than I ever imagined possible. If you didn’t like the desktop interface, change it. If you didn’t like the default software, change them. There was practically no limit to what you could change.
Although that still holds true, most Linux distributions have curtailed such widespread options — at least on the surface. Unlike those distributions of old, where you could select from any number of desktops during installation, now you’re lucky if your distribution of choice includes more than one desktop option. Of course, you could always download a respin of your favorite distribution, such as Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu or any -buntu available, but that’s not the same.
From the creators of the most popular penetration testing distributions on the planet, comes a new release with some new tools and a community, real-time chat option.
Kali Linux has been one of the most widely-used penetration testing Linux distributions on the market. With a vast number of pre-installed tools available, security experts and pen testers can use the platform to uncover just about any vulnerability or weakness on your network.
The 2022.3 release, has a few new tricks up its sleeve, including a new VirtualBox image format, weekly images, and build scripts (so you can roll your own); new NetHunter updates; and five new tools, which are BruteShark (a network analysis tool), DefectDojo (an open-source application vulnerability correlation and security orchestration tool), phpsploit (a post-exploitation framework), shellfire (a tool for exploiting LFI/RFI and command injection vulnerabilities), and SprayingToolkit (a tool for testing password spraying attacks).
An article containing release highlights, snapshots of Kali Linux 2022.3 release for Q3 which brings Discord Server and Test Lab.
Digital transformation within organizations has been a strategic move to uplift businesses in many enterprises. In this era of constant change, transformation can come in all shapes and sizes. It could be a cultural/structural change that could have a larger impact or could be infrastructure expansion transforming business models.
This article is the first in a two-part series. Here we take a step back and look at the evolving IT security risk landscape and how it is impacting organizations, after which we'll look at a suggested automated compliance architecture. In part two, we will demonstrate what the automated compliance architecture can look like in action when using Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Anyone who has owned or been in a car has probably seen at least one or more symbols appear on a car’s dashboard. The dashboard indicates when an issue has arisen that requires attention. You'll often find that when an issue is not addressed, it ends up consuming more of the car owner’s time and energy, and increases their levels of stress. Are those consequences worth the risk of not quickly dealing with warnings and advisories when they appear, before they have the chance to become a problem in the first place?
“Despite being around for two decades and being one of the most popular Linux server distributions, the pricing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), sometimes called Red Hat Linux, is still a common source of confusion, both among its existing users and those who are just thinking about making the switch.”
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RHEL uses a much more conservative release cycle than Fedora. New features are typically first made available to Fedora users and don’t make it to RHEL until they are polished. While both RHEL and Fedora can be used for commercial purposes, only RHEL receives commercial support.
“Developers and Linux enthusiasts flock to Fedora for the latest features and the opportunity to directly collaborate with Red Hat engineering,” explains Red Hat on its website. “Banks, stock exchanges, hospitals, and businesses that run the world’s leading websites choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the platform’s performance, stability, and security, which lets them implement mature and well-organized IT infrastructures across the enterprise.”
Numerous impactful tech companies' success leans heavily on a concept almost half a century old. OKRs – objectives and key results – have enabled large organizations to focus their teams and stay ahead of competition and expectations.
OKRs are still a bit under the radar – a survey of 1,500 Americans found that only 29 percent of adults in the workforce were familiar with OKRs – but for those using them, they’ve been transformative. The real magic of OKRs is how they help improve efficiencies and awareness by creating a playbook for achieving primary company goals.
But OKRs are a major driver of growth only when they’re properly attuned to your priorities. A playbook is no good if it’s unclear or sets everyone running in the wrong direction. Several common OKR pitfalls are easy to avoid with the right planning.
Soft skills, like emotional intelligence, empathy, and communication, often set great leaders apart from the rest. These traits may come naturally to a lucky few, but most people need to be intentional in building and continually improving these skills.
We recently asked CIOs how they have worked to develop their soft skills throughout their career – and which ones have been the most beneficial in their role. Here’s what they had to say.
In February 2014, Bdale Garbee used his casting vote in the Debian Technical Committee to endorse the systemd init system for future releases of Debian.
The Devuan developers began forking the Debian operating system on 3 May 2016 to maintain ongoing support for Init-style init systems. Devuan is not exactly a fork though: the Devuan developers are simply modifying certain packages to ensure that traditional init systems continue to work.
In 2022, Lennart Poettering, the leader of the systemd development, migrated from employment with Red Hat to Microsoft.
Personally, I try to make sure my applications work with and without systemd. I don't wish to make any comment for or against systemd, Poettering or Microsoft in this context. Nonetheless, I suspect that Debian's original founders would struggle to get their heads around this situation.
Having recently acquired the Debian trademark, I want to make a very strong statement in support of the work that Devuan developers are doing.
 The new kernel version (linux-image 5.15.0.46.46) is available now for both Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users, fixing CVE-2022-2585, a flaw found in Linux kernel’s POSIX timers implementation, CVE-2022-2586, a use-after-free vulnerability discovered in the netfilter subsystem, and CVE-2022-2588, a security issue found by Zhenpeng Lin in the network packet scheduler implementation. All these flaws could allow a local attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash) or execute arbitrary code
This is part one of a two part blog series on open source based private cloud for financial services. This blog describes the need for a cost-effective private cloud to execute a successful hybrid cloud strategy. It also shares a comparison between proprietary and open source based private cloud platforms. In the second part, we will elaborate on the key considerations that financial institutions need to think about when planning to migrate to open source based private cloud platforms, along with the operational benefits of Charmed OpenStack for financial institutions.
To drive business agility, financial institutions are on a journey to fundamentally reshape their IT infrastructure. As their IT estates grow and become more complex, financial institutions are increasingly facing the challenge to optimise their infrastructure spend. Many financial institutions are adopting scalable and agile cloud infrastructure guided by a hybrid multi-cloud strategy.
Ready to see what’s new in Ubuntu 22.04? In this article, you will learn about all of the main differences between Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and its predecessor, Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa. We will also list some of the more subtle changes which may not be as noticeable at first, but serve to modify the new operating system under the hood.
The last couple of times I’ve done a project involving a laser-cut Pi case, people have asked me to put together an in-depth tutorial on how to design them. So I’ve prepared this tutorial using an open-sourced software package called Inkscape to do just that.
Inkscape is a free vector-based graphics editor that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so you can even run it on your Raspberry Pi. If you don’t have it installed already, visit their downloads page to download it for your device.
This tutorial is going to focus mainly on the design of the case, so I’m not going to go into much detail on how to use the basic functions of Inkscape. There are loads of guides and tutorials for this already, so it’ll be good to be somewhat familiar with the package to start.
Once you’ve got Inkscape installed on your device, grab your Raspberry Pi and a vernier or ruler to take measurements from it and you’re ready to start.
Thunderbird and K-9 Mail are both open-source software projects. That means anyone can contribute to them, improve them, and make them better products. But how does one contribute? You must need some programming skills, right? No! Do you want to learn how to help make a big difference in the global Thunderbird community, without knowing a single line of code? We have a few ideas to share.
I first started working with digitalization and the internet when I became CEO of Scandinavia
Online in 1998. It was the leading online service in the Nordics and we were pioneers and
idealists. I learnt a lot from that experience: the endless opportunities, the tricky business models and the extreme ups and downs in hypes and busts of evaluation. I also remember Mozilla during that time as a beacon of competence and idealism, as well as a champion for the open internet as a force for good.
PremiumSoft CyberTech Ltd. today announced an upgraded version of Navicat 16.1. In this version,
LibreOffice 7.3.5 was announced on July 21
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos improved the layout of many dialogs
Rafael Lima expanded the help for ScriptForge with many new features
Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated the help for Fontwork and CSV import
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, August 05, 2022 meeting, where we saw a new program added, and we had several good discussions.
What do Docker, GitLab, and Red Hat have in common? Aside from various levels of participation in open source, they’ve all been punching bags over the past few years for non-paying users angry that they’ve taken some freebies off the table.
When Docker had the temerity to introduce limits for free users pulling containers from DockerHub, or requiring a subscription for large business users, lots of people started complaining and/or looking for a free alternative.
Version 4.0 of syslog-ng is right around the corner. It hasn’tyet been released; however, you can already try some of its features. The largest and most interesting change is type support. Right now, name-value pairs within syslog-ng are represented as text, even if the PatternDB or JSON parsers could see the actual type of the incoming data. This does not change, but starting with 4.0, syslog-ng will keep the type information, and use it correctly on the destination side. This makes your life easier, for example when you store numbers to Elasticsearch or to other type-aware storage.
From this blog, you can learn how type support makes your life easier and helps you to give it a testdrive on your own hosts.
What framework do you prefer to use when you need to prepare single-page applications?
Angular JS is the ideal JavaScript framework offering quick page loading speed, quick navigation, smooth usability, and adds value to the websites.
Do you know that there are 610,756 live websites using AngularJS? Let us know about AngularJS and its associated frameworks for seamless web application development.
Please welcome Dan Gohman to the Library Contributors group!
You might know Dan from his work on Wasmtime, WASI, the recent I/O Safety RFC, cap-std, rustix, or one of his many (often WASI or I/O related) contributions to the Rust standard library.
Some might say that peak newsletter came and went already, but in some ways, it just means the newsletter space is starting to right-size itself again. A recent piece on Vox’s Recode makes the case that newsletters are not the gold mine a lot of people once thought. “The scaled-down, sobered-up reality of newsletters is also sinking into media and tech companies that became newly interested in them over the last couple years,” the site’s Peter Kafka wrote. If that’s the case, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the newsletter emerged and receded into view. This is a cycle that has happened repeatedly over the last 100 years or so, even before newsletters became purely digital endeavors. And with all of that in mind and a new book on my shelf, I’d like to spend today’s Tedium looking back at some pre-digital newsletter efforts, and the parallels they might carry. Maybe it might offer a good refresher for my fellow newsletter authors out there.
Renesas RZ/N2L is an Arm Cortex-R52 microprocessor (MPU) family for industrial Ethernet communication equipped with an integrated TSN-compliant 3-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and an EtherCAT slave controller.
The new processors also support other major industrial network communication protocols such as EtherCAT, PROFINET RT, EtherNet/IP, and OPC UA, as well as the new PROFINET IRT (Isochronous real-time) that allows deterministic communication with cycle times down to 31.25 €µs and one €µs of jitter.
Microsoft is telling staff across the entire business to cast a more watchful eye over expenses in the face of economic uncertainty.
Some business travel, external training sessions, and company get-togethers are all falling under the gaze of Redmond's accountants.
In one recent instance recounted by a loquacious yet unidentified source, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft managers personally paid the bill to feed and water staff at a company picnic, something the multibillion-dollar-profit business would have covered itself before.
Last month during an earnings call to discuss Microsoft's financials for its Q4 ended 30 June, chief financial officer Amy Hood said: "We will continue to invest in future growth while maintaining intense focus on operational excellence and execution discipline."
I am starting an article series explaining the basics of browser extension security. It’s meant to provide you with some understanding of the field and serve as a reference for my more specific articles. You can browse the extension-security-basics category to see other published articles in this series.
Before we go for a deeper dive, let’s get a better understanding of what a browser extension actually is. We’ll take a look at a simple example extension and the different contexts in which its code runs.
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So our example extension is going to be a Chrome-compatible one. I’ll discuss the files one by one but you can download the entire source code to play around with here. Unpack this ZIP file to some directory.
All browsers support trying out extensions by loading them from a directory. In Chromium-based browsers you go to chrome://extensions/, enable developer mode and use “Load unpacked” button. In Firefox you go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox and click “Load Temporary Add-on” button.
This extension uses questionable approaches on purpose. It has several potential security issues, none of these are currently exploitable however. Small changes to the extension functionality will change that however, I’ll introduce these in future articles.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has issued a warning about a security issue with the UnRAR tool for Linux-based systems.
The vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2022-30333, and if successfully exploited, the flaw could allow an attacker to use the process of unpacking an archive to write data to an area of storage.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-good1.0), Fedora (firefox and ghostscript), Gentoo (consul, firefox, libass, libraw, lxml, mdbtools, pam_u2f, spice, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and vim), Red Hat (galera, mariadb, and mysql-selinux, kernel, and kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (bind, java-11-openjdk, kernel, mokutil, ncurses, and u-boot), and Ubuntu (epiphany-browser, libcdio, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, and linux-hwe, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oracle).
The enterprise-grade Titan M security chip was custom built to help protect data. Derived from the same chip Google uses to protect its cloud data centers, it handles processes and information, such as passcode protection, encryption, and secure transactions in apps.
In this Help Net Security video, Damiano Melotti, Security Researcher, Quarkslab, talks about the vulnerability research challenges encountered while exploring Google’s Titan M chip.
Palo Alto Networks has released a security update to address a vulnerability in PAN-OS firewall configurations. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to conduct a reflected denial-of service.
CISA—through the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC)—has released a toolkit of free cybersecurity resources for the election community. The toolkit aims to help state and local government officials, election officials, and vendors enhance the cybersecurity and cyber resilience of U.S. election infrastructure. The toolkit resources, which come from CISA, JCDC members, and others across the cybersecurity community, focus on assessing risk and protecting election infrastructure assets commonly targeted by phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
adopt Sigstore may already sign published artifacts. Signers may have existing procedures to securely store and use signing keys. Sigstore can be used to sign artifacts with existing self-managed, long-lived signing keys. Sigstore provides a simple user experience for signing, verification, and generating structured signature metadata for artifacts and container signatures. Sigstore also offers a community-operated, free-to-use transparency log for auditing signature generation.
Sigstore additionally has the ability to use code signing certificates with short-lived signing keys bound to OpenID Connect identities. This signing approach offers simplicity due to the lack of key management; however, this may be too drastic of a change for enterprises that have existing infrastructure for signing. This blog post outlines strategies to ease adoption of Sigstore while still using existing signing approaches.
At the Black Hat USA 2022 conference, Sysdig today revealed it is adding machine learning algorithms capable of detecting cryptojacking attacks to its cloud service for securing container applications. The algorithms are offered at no additional charge, Sysdig says.
Deepfence CEO Sandeep Lahane says as the economy continues to stagnate, the rate at which organizations are embracing open source cybersecurity tools is only going to accelerate.
New privacy bill strips consumer protections from voice communications. We can fix this without jettisoning the bill.
On July 20, something really big happened for consumers: The House Energy and Commerce Committee successfully brought forward bipartisan consumer privacy legislation – the American Data Privacy Protection Act (ADPPA). As Public Knowledge said after passage out of the Committee, “This sweeping bill provides individuals with broad privacy protections across all sectors of the economy,” restricting what and how businesses collect, use, and share consumer data and giving individuals the right to access, correct, and delete the data companies have collected about them, placing them in greater control over its collection and use. These are big wins for consumers and we will be working to try to secure passage of this legislation in this Congress.
So I've noticed something about how I use adverbs in Esperanto, namely that I'll use them in place of prepositional phrases. For example, I'll think to myself
Essential, foundational ideas of physics are being presented to children by teachers who know nothing about them themselves. Able children are being undermined by the belief that there is nothing in the compulsory science curriculum that cannot be taught by any science teacher and that physics teachers, bringing only enthusiasm to an inherently dull subject, are therefore not required for physics lessons.
Having just finished a unit on forces and motion with 16- and 17-year-olds, we started on work and energy. After some introductory discussions and activities, the students were given a task to research and describe how wind turbines worked, in preparation for a study of the work done by the wind. Prompted to describe how the wind makes the generator turn, each student wrote that the wind's energy did it. When pressed, one offered that the wind's kinetic energy spun the blades and the blades' kinetic energy was turned into electricity. How does kinetic energy do that then? Well, the generator turns kinetic into electricity, they said, something to do with magnets.
ew0k wrote about annoyances with handling software updates on your server in a world where programming languages have their own dependency management schemes and how this requires sysadmins to jump through extra hoops to keep things up-to-date.
With Web3 on the headlines all the day. I want to shift my view onto more traditional technologies. Blockchain is a great. Really, especially for transactions. Once I had to wire some money to an overseas bank. It literally took a week from sending to confirmed receiving. The fees are high too. With XMR or Eitherium. I can send Crypto to the destination in like 15 minutes. With sane fees. But I think that's where blockchain's advitange ends that, I don't think there's applications that blockchain can do better than traditional client server architectures.
Back to Web3. A decentralized web is very attractive. We can solve the most annoying part of internet in one go - dead links. As long as enough machines are hosting the content. A decentralized web will always serve up the content even if the original hoster vanished into the ether. IPFS is probably the 1st thing people think of for this. However, there's a more old-fashioned system doing the same thing. With much less Cryptocurrency and tech fluff. GNUNet[1]
I'm not sure what anyone else out on geminispace is using to build their capsules- whether it be manual static sites or a pile of CGI scripts- but I'm quite pleased with the solution I found for myself, and would like to share it.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.