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Links 12/08/2022: Kubuntu 22.04.1 LTS



  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • EarthlyContainer Image Build Tools: Docker vs.€ Buildah vs.€ kaniko - Earthly Blog

        When you first start learning about containerization, you’re probably going to use Docker. Docker wasn’t the first tool to introduce the world to containerization; however, it’s definitely the most popular. As you familiarize yourself with Docker and containerization in general, you may begin to run into use cases where Docker isn’t the ideal tool.

        For instance, when you need to build your images based on Dockerfiles, you may have cases where Docker isn’t the right choice or where it can’t be used. Moreover, one of the most common ways to build container images inside Kubernetes was to use what’s known as Docker-in-Docker. Put simply, you spin up a container, and that container is bound to the Docker socket that’s on the host. This allows you to use Docker inside the container.

        With the removal of the Dockershim in Kubernetes, this is no longer possible, and engineers are looking to find other tools to help them build their container images.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Liam Provenliam_on_linux | Very brief (promise!) ramblings on application bloat

        My #1 annoyance these days, because it is so egregious, is Electron apps.

        I guess because the only language some programmers know is Javascript, of which I know little but what little I know places it marginally above PHP in intrinsic horror.

        So people write standalone apps in a language intended for tweaking web pages, meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app.

        And entire popular businesses, for example Slack, do not as far as I can tell have an actual native client. The only way to access the service is via a glorified web page, running inside an embedded browser. Despite which, it can't actually authenticate on its own and needs ANOTHER web browser to be available to do that.

        Electron apps make Java ones look lean and mean and efficient.

        Apparently, expecting a language that can compile to native machine code that executes directly on a CPU, and which makes API calls to the host OS in order to display a UI, is quaint and retro now.

      • Daniel StenbergThe dream of auto-detecting proxies

        curl, along with every other Internet tool with aspirations, supports proxies. A proxy is a (usually known) middle-man in a network operation; instead of going directly to the remote end server, the client goes via a proxy.

        curl has supported proxies since the day it was born.

        [...]

        Almost six years later, in June 2022, Jan Brummer revived David’s previous work and submitted a fresh pull request to add libproxy support in curl. Another try.

        The proxy library dream is clearly still very much alive. There are also a fair amount of applications and systems today that are built to use libproxy to figure out the proxy and then tell curl about it.

        What is unfortunately also still present, is the unsatisfying state of libproxy. It seems to have changed and improved somewhat since the last time I looked at it (6 years ago), but there several warning signs remaining that make me hesitate.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • ByteXDInstall and Use Rsync on Ubuntu - ByteXD

        The rsync command is one of the most reliable backup tools. It syncs new changes while caching data.

        For that reason, it resumes file transfer (from where it halted it before it got interrupted) when it encounters a disruption. Repeating the command neither creates a duplicate nor prints an error.

        This tutorial teaches you how to install and use the rsync command to sync files locally or remotely. Let’s start by installing and uninstalling the tool.

      • ByteXDInstall Powerlevel10k Zsh Theme with Oh My Zsh - ByteXD

        Powerlevel10k is a fast yet flexible Zsh theme that comes with a plethora of configuration options.

        It’s one of the most popular themes for Oh My Zsh. The theme has various customization options for prompt customization, which includes options for changing theme colors and adding, removing, or rearranging the prompt elements. The theme also offers a mode for users who are new to Zsh and Oh My Zsh, which makes it easier to get started with the theme.

        In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install Powerlevel10k with Oh My Zsh and configure it on your system.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install qBittorrent on Linux Mint 21 LTS

        qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent. Some key features include an integrated search engine, web interface for remote control, UPnP/LSD support, priority queuing, select downloads by file extension, IP filtering, and many more. qBittorrent is entirely free and doesn’t contain any ads. It also offers advanced features such as control over every aspect of the client through an integrated graphical user interface, RSS feed support with advanced download filters, bandwidth scheduler, IP blocking, and more. If you’re looking for a feature-rich and lightweight BitTorrent client, qBittorrent should be your go-to.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series desktop GUI and install qBittorrent-nox, which can be installed on a desktop or headless server using the command line terminal to access the WEB UI.

      • LinuxTechiHow to Upgrade to Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa) from Linux Mint 20.3

        n this guide, you will learn how to Upgrade to Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa from Linux Mint 20.3 (Ulyana).

        Linux Mint 21 is a long-term release (LTS) version that will enjoy support up to 2027. It is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and packs with numerous improvements and enhancements such as

      • ID RootHow To Install OwnCloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OwnCloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OwnCloud is free and open-source software written in PHP that’s used for data synchronization and file sharing. As an alternative to the web browser, ownCloud offers desktop clients for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions. ownCloud is available in different additions as highlighted on their pricing pages.

        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 OwnCloud cloud storage services 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.

      • ByteXDHow to Install & Use Zsh Auto-Suggestions Plugin - ByteXD

        Zsh (or Z shell) is a Unix-based shell that significantly improves your scripting experience. Because of plugin support, it is way more customizable than other shell tools. Zsh offers a more dynamic display that makes it easier to go through the script and find the information you’re looking for. In terms of time to run a script, Zsh proved to be faster than Bash.

        Using the community-supported framework Oh My Zsh, users can install various plugins and themes to further enhance the tool and modify it according to their needs.

        One of these plugins is the Zsh Auto-Suggestions plugin. As you type in the Zsh shell, this plugin will suggest commands based on your history and command execution. Seasoned coders are familiar with how hectic it can get to type repeating commands again and again. This plugin will save ample time by suggesting commands based on the execution history. By just tapping a single key you will be able to enter your desired command if you’ve executed it before.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • BSD

      • uni TorontoThe odd return value of the original 4.2 BSD gethostbyname()

        In my entry on the history of looking up host addresses in Unix, I touched on how from the beginning gethostbyname() had an issue in its API, one that the BSD Unix people specifically called out in its manual page's BUGS section...

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • New Kernel, HarfBuzz Versions update in Tumbleweed - openSUSE News

        Consecutive openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been rolling out to users each day this week.

        Among the few major version releases this week are the 5.19 Linux Kernel and the 5.1 HarfBuzz version, which both arrived in snapshot 20220810.

        Snapshot 20220810 also brought tons of other packages. Highlights being discussed about the release of kernel 5.19 point to increased arm support, TCP improvements related to larger IPv6 package sizes, and graphical improvements for Intel and AMD GPUs. The text shaping engine harfbuzz 5.1 fixed regressions in bitmap font rendering, improved support for some Arabic and Hebrew fonts and improved the handling of command line options. The hplip 3.22.6 package added support for several new printers and added support for new distros that were recently released. There were Italian and Serbian translation changes in the gnome-software 42.4 update, which also fixed detail text when it contains markup. An update of webkit2gtk3 2.36.6 fixed the handling of touchpad scrolling on GTK4 builds as well as several crashes and rendering issues. Other packages to update in the snapshot were postfix 3.7.2, ModemManager 1.18.10, mutt 2.2.7 and more.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/32 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        We reach the end of a week crowded with snapshots. We published 7 snapshots in total since my last review (0804…0810). The number of failed packages is quite high currently in Factory, so I’d like to ask everybody to help out on that front (https://tinyurl.com/ysy4nnnz)

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red Hat OfficialConvert2RHEL: Extended Update Support (EUS) Conversions

        Until now, Convert2RHEL only supported conversions of systems that were in their most recent minor release versions, meaning your system always has to be up to date to make the conversion to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). So, if you had your CentOS Linux or Oracle Linux stuck at version 8.4, you had to upgrade them to their latest version (CentOS Linux 8.5 and Oracle Linux 8.6, respectively) before you could do a conversion.

        With the Convert2RHEL 0.26 release, however, you can now convert from some specific older minor versions, starting with 8.4 as the minimum requirement. Below, a list of RHEL-like versions that you can convert using the latest version of Convert2RHEL.

      • Fedora ProjectCPE Weekly Update – Week 32 2022

        Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.).

    • Debian Family

      • Colors of Noise: On a road to Prizren with a Free Software Phone

        Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren't and there shouldn't be.

        After two online versions Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren.

        When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation, and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can't we have that information on the Phone Shell's lockscreen?

      • Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, July 2022

        In July I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked 3 hours and will carry over the rest to August.

        In July, no Debian release was in LTS status. However, I spent some time finishing the DLA text for my upload of linux at the end of June. I also attended the LTS BoF at DebConf and the regular team meeting.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Released

        The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

        As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. 22.04.1 also brings new RISC-V platform support, providing fresh images for the Allwinner Nezha and VisionFive StarFive boards.

      • Kubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Update Available | Kubuntu

        The first point release update to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) is out now. This contains all the bug-fixes added to 22.04 since its first release in April 2022. Users of 22.04 can run the normal update procedure to get these bug-fixes.

        The first point release is also significant because it is the default upgrade version for users of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX SoftwareLattePanda 3 Delta SBC combines Jasper Lake processor and Arduino compatible microcontroller

        The LattePanda 3 Delta single board computer with an Intel Celeron N5105 Jasper Lake processor and an Arduino ATmega32U4 Leonardo compatible MCU that initially launched through a Kickstarter campaign in November 2021.

        The team behind the board has now announced the global availability of the Intel + Arduino SBC on DFRobot starting at $279 plus shipping, which we can compare to the $229 pledge asked during the crowdfunding campaign for reference.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • TorNew Alpha Release: Tor Browser 12.0a1 (Windows, macOS, Linux) | The Tor Project

      Tor Browser 12.0a1 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

      Tor Browser 12.0a1 updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.12.0esr.

    • OSI BlogWe’re exploring the role of Open Source in AI [Ed: Buzzwords worship. While OSI continues taking Microsoft bribes to cover up for serial stranglers who call GPL violations "HEY HI" (AI).]

      AI has officially started! It’s an exciting milestone for the whole OSI team. This online event with its innovative format will keep OSI busy until the end of 2022. The podcast is live and you should subscribe now so you don’t miss any of the five episodes of this first series.

      The five episodes cover issues of copyright, how independent hackers are creating powerful AI models, what’s the status of regulations of AI in Europe, what are the ethical challenges posed by uncontrolled AI software and what components are important for AI, with an eye on hardware and drivers.

    • Programming/Development

      • GeshanHow to wait 1 second in JavaScript (using setTimeout, Promise, and Delay)

        Call it a wait, sleep, or delay in executing code in JavaScript. It can be done in multiple ways in JavaScript on the browser and Node.js. In this post, you will learn how to wait for 1 (or x) second in Javascript using setTimeout, promise, and Delay NPM package with a working code example. Let’s get started!

      • Barry KaulerThe V language

        Hmmm, will give it a miss. Back onto Nim. Oh, and please don't send me a message recommending Rust! Or Go.

      • R

        • RlangLinux Packages for R

          Getting R set up on Linux can be somewhat frustrating. Many of the fundamental packages (like {devtools} or {remotes}) have implicit system dependencies. So installing these packages can involve numerous iterations back and forth between R and the shell while you figure out what those dependencies are and get them all installed.

          I’ve been through this process many times now and finally just created a quick script that will get most of it done quickly and easily.

        • RlangDiffify – 3 months on | R-bloggers

          We’re now three months on from the initial release of Diffify, and what a few months it’s been! We thought now seemed like a good time to give you an overview of the big updates that Diffify has been through since it’s launch.

        • RlangFour announcements from rstudio::conf(2022) | R-bloggers

          Survival analysis is a statistical procedure for data analysis where the outcome variable of interest is time until an event occurs. Hannah Frick showcased the censored package, a parsnip extension that provides support for survival analysis in tidymodels. The package offers several models, engines, and prediction types for users.

        • RlangImage Annotation | R-bloggers

          This week, I uploaded a newer version of the R package recogito to CRAN.

        • RlangRObservations # 36: Opinions on RStudio’s name change. A Bayesian approach with Stan | R-bloggers

          Recently, RStudio announced its name change to Posit. For many this name change was accepted with open arms, but for some-not so. Being the statistician that I am I decided to post a poll on LinkedIn to see the sentiment of my network.

  • Leftovers

    • Science

      • TechXploreA bartending robot that can engage in personalized interactions with humans

        A widely discussed application of social robots that has so far been rarely tested in real-world settings is their use as bartenders in cafés, cocktail bars and restaurants. While many roboticists have been trying to develop systems that can effectively prepare drinks and serve them, so far very few have focused on artificially reproducing the social aspect of bartending.

        Researchers at University of Naples Federico II in Italy have recently developed a new interactive robotic system called BRILLO, which is specifically designed for bartending. In a recent paper published in UMAP '22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, they introduced a new approach that could allow their robot to have personalized interactions with regular customers.

      • AI will never give you driverless cars

        Unlike computers, the brain has not enough capacity to store accurate models of the world. Besides, even it did have the capacity, the brain would be too slow anyway to process and update those models in real time, if anything in the real world moved.

        Therefore, unlike deep learning, the human brain does not create internal representations of objects in the world. It must, instead, continually sense the world in real time in order to interact with it.

        Whenever it meets a new pattern, the brain instantly accommodates existing perceptual structures to see the new pattern. No new structures are learned.

      • New ScientistFlexible robot hand with precise grip lifts 1000 times its own weight

        Tiny actuators – devices that convert energy and signals into movement – that operate as artificial muscles could lift up to 1000 times their own weight, according to research that may one day lead to robots with human-like grips.

        Corrado De Pascali and his colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology have developed 3D-printed artificial muscles, created from actuators that convert energy into movement by inflating the artificial muscles. “We started from the traditional artificial muscle and developed a new class of artificial muscles made of a single monolithic component,” says De Pascali.

    • Hardware

      • The Humble Hub

        Over the weekend I organized some old computing equipment. I found this beauty in one of my boxes. It's a Netgear EN104TP hub. I've mentioned this device before, in this blog and my books. This sort of device was the last of the true hubs. In an age where cables seem reserved for data centers or industrial facilities, and wireless rules the home and office, this hub is a relic of days gone past.

      • HaikuOS[GSoC 2022] ARM port and device tree support Phase 1

        It’s been a rough month, I’m having issues with the ARM port and it’s holding me back.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Michael West MediaTime for Labor to bulk up and save our cherished Medicare - Michael West

        Another day, another day of Australians being warned about the crisis in Medicare.

        On Thursday the ABC reported that yet more regional communities would lose their bulk-billing doctor because of the collapse of health provider Tristar, which owned 29 regional practices, now in voluntary administration. Ten clinics will close because Tristar failed to find a buyer. They include thsoe at Ararat, Dandenong, Avoca (Victoria), Kempsey (NSW) and Palmerston (NT).

        Such places are representative of an Australia that is already in danger of being left behind as political alliances cohere more and more around the wealth, social standing and self-regard of voters.

      • ACMAm I Getting Sick?

        The future of "at-home" medical diagnostics went viral recently when the government started giving out free Covid tests.

        People have been familiar with at-home medical testing for more than 50 years; the first patent for an in-home pregnancy test was filed in 1969.

        Experts like Boston University professor Kenneth Burch say that what people really want from such in-home tests is not to just know what they already suspect (such as whether they are pregnant after missing a menstrual cycle), but to know the root cause of ambiguous symptoms. Are your sniffles just the result of a high pollen-count day and nothing worth worrying about, or are they an early sign of something more serious, ranging from a common cold to influenza to a weaponized laboratory-born virus?

        For that reason, experts like Burch believe the future of over-the-counter at-home medical tests is trending toward multiple-malady detection—the first of which will likely be debuting as soon as next year (from Johnson and Johnson).

        "I suspect a wider range of single-malady tests are unlikely. More likely are devices that are multiplexed—in other words, which can detect multiple targets—for example, the eight most common causes of your symptoms," said Burch.

    • Proprietary

    • Security

      • Bruce SchneierA Taxonomy of Access Control

        My personal definition of a brilliant idea is one that is immediately obvious once it’s explained, but no one has thought of it before. I can’t believe that no one has described this taxonomy of access control before Eyal Ittay laid it out in this paper.

      • LWNSecurity updates for Friday

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (gnutls28, libtirpc, postgresql-11, and samba), Fedora (microcode_ctl, wpebackend-fdo, and xen), Oracle (.NET 6.0, galera, mariadb, and mysql-selinux, and kernel), SUSE (dbus-1 and python-numpy), and Ubuntu (booth).

      • Bruce SchneierTwitter Exposes Personal Information for 5.4 Million Accounts

        Twitter accidentally exposed the personal information—including phone numbers and email addresses—for 5.4 million accounts. And someone was trying to sell this information.

      • A Wide Reduction Trick

        Elliptic curve cryptography implementations all roughly share the following structure: there's a base field implementation, the group logic, a scalar field implementation, and a higher level protocol (key exchange, signatures, ...) over the group.

        The base field is the set of numbers modulo a large prime number (such as 2^255-19, from which Curve25519 takes its name). The implementation provides arithmetic operations in the field, such as modular addition, subtraction, multiplication, and inversion, as well as encoding and decoding of field elements to/from bytes.

      • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

        • Help Net SecurityMalicious PyPI packages drop ransomware, fileless malware [Ed: Malware? So don't install it. Windows back doors? Then don't use Windows.]

          In this Help Net Security video, Ax Sharma, Senior Security Researcher at Sonatype, discusses newly found PyPI packages that pack ransomware, and another package that appears to be safe but silently drops fileless malware to mine cryptocurrency (Monero) on the infected system – all while evading detection.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Certain biometric troubles in India...

          The indian state of Bihar has been the first to use biometric systems to verify voters identity. Predictably, there were problems.

        • Public KnowledgeIn The News

          Corporate lobbying could imperil sweeping data privacy bill...

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Cal PatersonThere aren't that many uses for blockchains

          A common saying among those who are into their crypto is that "the real innovation isn't Bitcoin, but the Blockchain". Blockchains are increasingly popular. At some point using a blockchain stopped being called just 'blockchain technology' and started to be called "web3". The implication being that blockchains have such wide applicability that they will come to displace the existing web as we know it now.

          But blockchains aren't a general purpose technology: they have very limited and specific use-cases. And instead of decentralised currencies being just the first use-case of many they might be one of only a few.

    • Finance

      • Michael West MediaWe told you so: Coalition pinged again over regional grants - Michael West

        The Coalition has departed the government benches, but its malfeasance and corruption is still being revealed, writes Jommy Tee.

        The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) last week published another manifest of maladministration by the former Morrison government. In its own understated way the Auditor-General applied the blow torch to, and excoriated, the $1.4 billion Building Better Regions Fund (BBRF).

        Stripping away auditor-speak and replacing it with punter-speak – the BBRF was found to be a heap of steaming cow dung.

      • Jon UdellThe Velvet Bandit’s COVID series – Jon Udell

        The Velvet Bandit is a local street artist whose work I’ve admired for several years. Her 15 minutes of fame happened last year when, as reported by the Press Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a gown with a “Tax the Rich” message that closely resembled a VB design.

      • RetailWireNew stores are opening in malls, inflation or no

        Some say a recession is on the way; others say it is already here, but according to the biggest owner of U.S. shopping malls, the threat of an economic downturn is not deterring retailers from opening new mall locations.

        Simon Property Group (SPG) said on a conference call that they have not seen retailers backing out of deals to open up stores, according to CNBC. Its tenant occupancy rate is even up year-over-year, currently at 93.9 percent over 2021’s 91.8 percent.

      • CoryDoctorowUber's still not profitable

        Uber just released its Q2 numbers for 2022 and trumpeted that it had finally achieved cash-flow positivity – and it only took 13 years and $32 billion in losses! So has Uber finally turned a corner? Will the company finally attain profitability and repay those billions?

        Nope.

        The best analyst of Uber's financial disclosures – as always – is Hubert Horan, a transport analyst who has made a second career out of debullshitifying Uber's balance-sheet deceptions, proving that the company is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it").

        [...]

        Last quarter, Uber trumpeted its first profitable quarter.

        They lied.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Is this the end of social networking?

        Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine. Like other Meta products are. There aren’t really about “technologies that bring the world closer together”, as the Meta homepage has it. At least not primarily.

        This advertising machine has been amazingly successful, leading to a recent quarterly revenue of over $50 per user in North America (source). And Meta certainly has driven this hard, otherwise it would not have been in the news for overstepping the consent of its users year after year, scandal after scandal.

        But now a better advertising machine is in town: TikTok. This new advertising machine is powered not by friends and family, but by an addiction algorithm. This addiction algorithm figures out your points of least resistance, and pours down one advertisement after another down your throat. And as soon as you have swalled one more, you scroll a bit more, and by doing so, you are asking for more advertisements, because of the addiction. This addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat. An amazing work of art, as an engineer I have to admire it. (Of course that admiration quickly changes into some other emotion of the disgusting sort, if you have any kind of morals.)

      • Michael West MediaDutton shuns summit; blames Chalmers' cunning stunt - Michael West

        Despite an invitation from Treasurer Jim Chalmers, he has dismissed the gathering as a stunt. And while some readers might fancy Rupert’s newspaper titles as Coalition chat rooms, it is apparently the fault of Murdoch’s national daily.

      • One Nation Under Blackmail

        In this episode, Whitney gives an overview of her upcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail, discussing in general terms what the book covers, its thesis, and what it hopes to accomplish. Also addressed are some frequently asked questions about shipping, an audiobook version, etc.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Michael GeistThe Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 138: John Lawford on the Legal, Regulatory and Policy Responses to the Rogers Outage - Michael Geist

          Rogers has provided some answers to the many questions about its massive outage last month that affected millions of Canadians. Yet there is still considerable uncertainty about what the government and CRTC are prepared to do to address ongoing concerns in the telecom sector. John Lawford is the Executive Director and General Counsel of PIAC, the Public Industry Advocacy Centre, which has been a leading consumer voice for decades in Canada. PIAC was the first to file a request with the CRTC seeking an inquiry into the outage. John and I were both participants at the Industry committee hearing into the outage and he joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss what we learned and what more can be done from a regulatory, legal, and policy perspective.

        • New music is dying, killed by its own defenders

          Part of the answer to “What’s killing new music” is new forms of entertainment, that are not intrinsically bad: “More people pay attention to streams of video games on Twitch (which now gets 30 million daily visitors).”

          But the main, real culprits for the death of new music are easy to guess: they are none other than the self-appointed, self-professed unique defenders of creativity.

          They are the same people, and ideas, that are killing movies in the same way, by looting basements and calling it “creativity”, or leaving just one authorized source of fairy tales.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Technical

      • Nine months almost without JavaScript

        I have now been living about nine months almost without JavaScript, and I must say that turning off this technology, and also additionally cookies, improved my experience on the web by a lot.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Capsule update

          Recently I finally got around to update how this site is built and updated. The whole process was a disorganized pain!

          Basically, this site exists in two variants - a Gemini capsule and a HTTP-copy which is generated from the gmi-files. I have written my own static generator called June. I have the contents of my capsule (in gemini format) in a git-repository. June reads these contents and rebuilds the ~/public_gemini and ~/public_html directories on the server, from where the sites are served. The HTTP site is equipped with a custom CSS style, but bottom line it's just direct gmi->html translation.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Rain Music, ClockworkPi DevTerm, and More
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 18, 2024
Links 18/11/2024: Science News and War Escalations in Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/11/2024: Degrowth and OpenBSD Fatigue
Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part VII
By Dr. Andy Farnell
BetaNews is Still 'Shitposting' About Trump and Porn (Two Analysers Say This 'Shitposting' Comes From LLMs)
Probably some SEO garbage, prompted with words like "porn" and "trump" to stitch together other people's words
Market Share of Vista 11 Said to be Going Down in Europe
one plausible explanation is that gs.statcounter.com is actually misreporting the share of Vista 11, claiming that it's higher than it really is
Fourth Estate or Missing Fourth Pillar
"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in explicit capacity of reporting the News" -Wikipedia on Fourth Estate
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, November 17, 2024
LLMs Are Not a Form of Intelligence (They Never Will Be)
Butterflies are smarter than "chatGPT"
Business Software Alliance (BSA), Microsoft, and AstroTurfing Online (Also in the Trump Administration Groomed by BSA and Microsoft)
Has Washington become openWashington? Where the emphasis is openwashing rather than Open(Source)Washington?
Windows at 1%
Quit throwing taxpayers' money at Microsoft, especially when it fails to fulfil basic needs and instead facilitates espionage by foreign and very hostile nations
Links 17/11/2024: Pakistan Broke, Tyson 'Crashes' or Knocks Over Netflix
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Nachtigall Planned, Exodus at Twitter
Links for the day
Links 17/11/2024: China's Diplomacy and Gazprom Setback
Links for the day
Sudan Has Reached a State of Android Domination (93% Market Share, All-Time High According to statCounter)
countries at war buy fewer laptops?
[Meme] Just Do It?
'FSF' Europe (Microsoft) and FSF
Microsoft Front Groups Against the FSF, Home of GPL, GNU, and Free Software
Much of the money (not all of it) comes from the criminals at Redmond
Centralisation is Dooming the Web, RSS is One Workaround (But Not "Planets")
At least Gemini Protocol rejects centralisation
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, November 16, 2024
Links 17/11/2024: Wars, Bailouts, and Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Changing Interests and HamsterCMS
Links for the day