Red Hat has released betas of RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 while its parent company IBM is offering Linux mainframe instances in the cloud, although only in some regions.
If you're looking for some particularly resilient home in the cloud to run Linux workloads, Red Hat's parent company IBM has a new mainframe-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service product out under the LinuxONE umbrella, which it has dubbed "bare metal servers."
As we described a few years ago, IBM offers a whole range of different hypervisors on mainframes, including PR/SM (akin to a hypervisor in the firmware) and the native Linux in-kernel hypervisor KVM. One of the company's flagship mainframe OSes, z/VM, is perhaps more commonly used to manage VMs on Z series, but it's cheaper to rent LinuxONE mainframes because they've been tweaked to only run Linux, excluding any native IBM mainframe OSes.
It's noticeable that the announcement specifically mentions Red Hat's container management platform OpenShift – maybe not unrelated to Red Hat's new CEO Matt Hicks, who was one of the original OpenShift team.
In the past couple of months members of the CentOS Hyperscale SIG attended several conferences where they were able to share the work the SIG is doing and meet up in person, in some cases for the first time.
We have a page tracking conference presentations around Hyperscale-related topics. You can find references there to all talks mentioned below, including video recordings where available.
Conferences aren’t just about presentations though. The “hallway track” provides a great opportunity for serendipidous connection, and the various social events are often a great venue for folks to mingle and get to know each other in an informal setting.
If you’d like to meet us in person at a future event please reach out. We also generally cover conferences we plan to attend in our quarterly reports.
Immutable fields can be found in a few places in the built-in Kubernetes types. For example, you can't change the .metadata.name of an object. Specific objects have fields where changes to existing objects are constrained; for example, the .spec.selector of a Deployment.
Aside from simple immutability, there are other common design patterns such as lists which are append-only, or a map with mutable values and immutable keys.
Until recently the best way to restrict field mutability for CustomResourceDefinitions has been to create a validating admission webhook: this means a lot of complexity for the common case of making a field immutable.
Beta since Kubernetes 1.25, CEL Validation Rules allow CRD authors to express validation constraints on their fields using a rich expression language, CEL. This article explores how you can use validation rules to implement a few common immutability patterns directly in the manifest for a CRD.
As part of the effort to simplify application development processes, many developers are leveraging containerization. It is one way of grouping the infrastructure of applications, making it easier for developers to interact with and manage. It’s not a new method and has been evolving for several years now, allowing developers to become more confident in using it. Containerization also has many benefits for developers.
This Fedora video codec situation is a complete mess, Fedora removed h264, h265 and vc1 support from their mesa build basically breaking GPU acceleration for these codecs on AMD based systems and I hope that it doesn't have a knock on effect in other distros.
In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss how much of a target Linux is, as well as some myths surrounding Linux and security. Also, there will be some news updates as well.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of SpiralLinux 11.220925 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The controversial change for the GNU Toolchain, critical vulnerabilities in popular Matrix clients, and the significant milestone for the Ingenuity LinuxCopter this week.
After a two-year hiatus, the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit returned to an in-person format in Dublin, Ireland on September 15. Around 30 kernel developers discussed a number of process-related issues relating to the kernel community. LWN had the privilege of being there and is able, once again, to report from the event.
The first scheduled session at the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit was a half hour dedicated to regression tracking led by Thorsten Leemhuis. The actual discussion took rather longer than that and covered a number of aspects of the problem of delivering a kernel to users that does not break their applications. Leemhuis started by saying that, after a break of a few years, he has managed to obtain funding to work as the kernel's regression tracker and is back at the job. He has created a new bot intended to minimize the amount of work required and to, he hopes, enable effective regression tracking while not creating additional overhead for developers. In an ideal world, bug reporters will put bot-related directives into their reports, after which the bot will track replies. When it sees a patch with a Link tag pointing back to the report, it will mark the bug as resolved.
This application (called "regzbot") is still young, he said, and it has its share of warts and deficiencies. It has reached a point of being useful for Linus Torvalds, but it is not yet as useful for subsystem maintainers. It is, in any case, far better than trying to track bugs manually. Regzbot has already caught regressions that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks. He thanked Meta for providing the funding that makes this work possible.
The Rust for Linux project, which is working to make it possible to write kernel code in the Rust programming language, has been underway for a few years, and there is a growing number of developers who feel that it is time to merge this work into the mainline. At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
There was little suspense on that front; Linus Torvalds spoke up at the beginning of the session to say that he plans to accept the Rust patches for the 6.1 kernel (likely to be released in mid-December) unless he hears strong objections. Ojeda indicated that he would like to see that happen and asked how the patches should be routed into the mainline. Torvalds said that he would rather not accept them directly, so it seems likely that Kees Cook will be routing this work upstream.
The BPF subsystem has come a long way in recent years; what started as a mechanism for implementing packet filters has become a way to load code into the kernel for a wide variety of tasks. At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Jiri Kosina kicked off a session by asking how far the transition to BPF should go. The actual scope of the session turned out to be rather more limited than that, and no fundamental changes were considered.
Kosina started by saying that BPF has been highly successful and it is increasingly being used by user programs. But the kernel community has no policies about out-of-tree BPF code and, in particular, how to deal with associated bug reports. What happens when a kernel change breaks somebody's BPF program? Ted Ts'o added that future applications are increasingly likely to include BPF scripts, and users may not be aware that they are running something that is more like a kernel module than an ordinary program. That can lead to confusion and complaints to kernel developers when things break.
The final part of the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit included a number of relatively short discussions on a variety of topics. These included testing of stable updates, compiler versions, test suites, and the traditional session where Linus Torvalds talks about his happiness (or lack thereof) with the way the development process is going.
The traditional mechanism for launching a program in a new process on Unix systems—forking and execing—has been with us for decades, but it is not really the most efficient of operations. Various alternatives have been tried along the way but have not supplanted the traditional approach. A new mechanism created by Josh Triplett adds process creation to the io_uring asynchronous I/O API and shows great promise; he came to the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) to introduce io_uring_spawn.
Triplett works in a variety of areas these days, much of it using the Rust language, though he has also been working on the kernel some of late. He is currently working on build systems as well. Build systems are notorious for spawning lots of processes as part of their job, "so I care about launching processes quickly". As with others at this year's LPC, Triplett said that he was happy to see a return to in-person conferences.
Nobody should need more memory than a 64-bit pointer can address — or so developers tend to think. The range covered by a pointer of that size seems to be nearly infinite. During the Kernel Summit track at the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference, Matthew Wilcox took the stage to make the point that 64 bits may turn out to be too few — and sooner than we think. It is not too early to start planning for 128-bit Linux systems, which he termed "ZettaLinux", and we don't want to find ourselves wishing we'd started sooner.
The old-timers in the audience, he said, are likely to have painful memories of the 32-bit to 64-bit transition, which happened in the mid-1990s. The driving factor at the time was file sizes, which were growing beyond the 2GB that could be represented with signed, 32-bit numbers. The Large File Summit in 1995 worked out the mechanisms ("lots of dreadful things") for handling larger files. Developers had to add the new lloff_t size for 64-bit file sizes and the llseek() system call to move around in large files. Wilcox said that he would really prefer not to see an lllseek() for 128-bit offsets.
Among those changes, this new version brings in some optimization being done in the DRM-backend that refactors and simplifies the handling of buffers that can be scanned out by hardware planes, as well as some changes to include preliminary work towards having support for multiple GPUs.
Color management infrastructure code has landed that allows HDR characteristics to be delivered to an HDR-capable monitor by setting-up HDR metadata in a weston.ini configuration file and delivering that to KMS. Once Weston gains the ability to produce HDR content in a future version, it will come naturally supported.
This new version brings in multiple RDP improvements, like clipboard pasting, various keyboard language support, bumped support for a newer version of FreeRDP library, and many more other improvements and fixes.
With refactoring of the weston_buffer infrastructure, support for wp_single_pixel_buffer_v1 protocol has landed, allowing for instance more optimal media playback.
Finally, as part of our re-architecture effort to support multiple inputs, outputs, and back-ends being active at the same time, the initial groundwork has been laid to support multiple back-ends with more incoming changes still in-flight.
Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad writes about the recent Weston 11.0.0 release. Weston is the reference compositor for the Wayland display server protocol. Vlad looks at features of the release, including some things that are being deprecated and removed, as well as features coming in Weston 12.
Avidemux video editor released version 2.8.1 a few days ago. Here’s the new features and how to install instruction for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.
The new release improved HiDPI displays support by updating the icon set, and using OpenGL for rendering on-the-fly preview in video filter dialog.
Avidemux 2.8.1 also introduced new filters: 3D LUT, Decimate, and Arbitrary Rotate, as well as new video encoder: VideoToolbox HEVC for macOS users.
It also added support for decoding 8-bit VP9 on Windows using DXVA2 and Linux using VDPAU with graphics card that features a VP9 decoder.
Pithos, native Linux client for Pandora Radio, got a new release update few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 & Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA.
A website’s domain must have SSL/TLS encryption if it intends to get visitors. SSL/TLS certificates provide a strong connection among web servers and browsers. Earlier, security wasn’t a major concern. It was relatively common for websites to deliver data via the established HTTP protocol. Nowadays, the channel used to communicate with the server must be secured, though, because cybercrimes including identity theft, credit card fraud, and espionage are on the rise.
A Certificate Authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt offers free SSL/TLS certificates, enabling HTTPS encryption on web servers. It is domain verified, so a dedicated IP Address is not necessary. It is usually advised to have an SSL certificate enabled on your website to improve your SEO ranking, particularly on Google.
Thunderbird is one of the best desktop email clients for Linux. It's fast, easy to use, and provides a range of features to simplify email management on your desktop. In addition, Mozilla also includes a few additional functionalities in the Thunderbird Mail client: chat, newsgroups, and syndication, which extend its scope of use further.
If you already use Mozilla Thunderbird for email management on your machine, you can now also access your latest news feeds and blogs within the same program. Here's how to use Thunderbird Mail as an RSS feed reader on Linux.
People who make YouTube videos or produce web content often set up dedicated displays to monitor performance statistics live, such as YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics. The live analytics data can give an insight of trending content, while the statistics can be used to quickly tweak and optimize related content.
In an ideal world, live monitoring should start at the flip of a power switch or the push of a power button on the television remote. A Raspberry Pi connected to a television or a monitor is ideal for this.
Jekyll is a free and open-source static file generator written in Ruby.
Graylog is a free and open-source log monitoring tool used for capturing, storing, and enabling real-time analysis of terabytes of machine data.
Flatpak offers newer versions of apps than what you find by default on Chromebooks. Here's how to run the latest Linux software.
On most Chromebooks, you can install a complete version of Debian Stable under the Linux development environment. If you want access to newer apps, many popular Linux apps are available as Flatpak packages. It can be tricky to get such apps running on a Chromebook, but the process is easy when you know how.
A symbolic link (also known as soft link) is a kind of shortcut to another file. It's heavily used in Linux for shared libraries.
But how do you know to which original file the link points to?
If you are compelled to use CentOS 8 or have any other reason to have it still running on your system, Then I hope you know that CentOS 8 has died and reached its End Of Life (EOL) on December 31st, 2021.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SonarQube on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SonarQube or formerly Sonar is an open-source platform for static code analysis and code security. It can find the security vulnerabilities in more than 20 programming languages along with auto-analyzing code quality to detect code bugs and smells. SonarQube also provides reports such as duplicate code, coding standards, code complexity, and security recommendation.
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 SonarQube 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.
ZapZap is a beautiful, powerful Whatsapp client for Linux. It is an unofficial app with improved features like support for multiple users, integrated spellcheck, notifications, etc. Here’s how to chat on Whatsapp on Linux with ZapZap.
Docker Desktop is one of the more popular GUI tools for developing and managing Docker containers. However, it’s not alone in the world of Docker GUIs. Although many Docker GUIs have come and gone, some have stood the test of time. One such GUI tool is Rancher Desktop.
For some, Docker is second nature. The commands used are ingrained in their psyche. For others, however, it can be a chore to have to remember all those command line options. Is it docker image, docker images, or docker import? Given how complicated container deployment and management can be, the last thing you want is to have to remember every single command option available.
We released Godot 4.0 beta 1 two weeks ago! That was a big milestone on our journey to finalize our next major release – be sure to check out that blog post if you haven't yet, for an overview of some of the main highlight of Godot 4.0.
But the "1" in beta 1 means that it's only the first step of the journey, and like for the alpha phase, we're going to release new beta snapshots roughly every other week. So here's beta 2!
The reception of beta 1 was surprisingly good – we're happy to see the community tinker with the beta, report bugs and provide feedback on the new features. Many bugs have been fixed in just two weeks, with close to 250 PRs merged, many of which fixed bugs reported by beta testers.
As you know Valve and Komodo have partnered to have a huge booth at the Tokyo Games Show 2022 (TGS2022), and while the show was much smaller than usual, because of the post-COVID19 era, there were still quite a few journalists covering the event, almost as much as usual. But has the event managed to increase the interest in the device locally?
As expected for some time now, Google has decided to call it quits on their cloud gaming service Stadia. This was announced in a blog post today.
Written up by Phil Harrison, the Vice President and General Manager at Stadia, the post mentions how "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service".
The wildest part about this, is that they're going to be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the main Google Store and they will also be refunding all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Harrison said they expect to have finished up the majority of refunds by Mid-January, 2023. They will not be refunding any Stadia Pro subscriptions though, only the full purchases. More info on the process here but it seems like it's not ready yet.
For many years, Google has invested across multiple aspects of the gaming industry. We help developers build and distribute gaming apps on Google Play and Google Play Games. Gaming creators are reaching audiences around the world on YouTube through videos, live streaming and Shorts. And our cloud streaming technology delivers immersive gameplay at massive scale.
A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.
An early Christmas gift for Xfce desktop fans. Per the new Xfce 4.18 announcement, the new release is planned for later this year.
Xfce is one of the oldest desktop environments (DE) available for Linux, but it is still going strong as a top contender for modern users.
In the previous entry in this series, we explained the role of DEs in the Linux world. Among those, Xfce is a unique offering that threads the line between functionality, stability, and performance, making it a popular choice in the Linux and Unix world.
Gnome is the most popular desktop environment (DE) available for Linux, but it is easily the most controversial and the hardest to rate.
In the previous entry in this series, we explained the role of DEs in the Linux world. Among those, Gnome is a study in contradictions, simultaneously delighting and angering its user base.
Parrot 5.1 is here six months after Parrot 5.0 and it’s powered by Linux kernel 5.18, which, unfortunately, reached end of life in August. However, the new kernel comes as a significant update from Linux kernel 5.16 used in the previous release, so you should expect better hardware support.
Parrot 5.1 also ships with the in-house built AnonSurf 4 anonymity tool that provides users with a solution to automatically route all the system traffic through the anonymous Tor network.
The developers of the ExTiX Linux Distribution have released a new version that includes added support to make installing and using Android apps on the desktop a breeze.
ExTiX is a KDE Plasma-based Linux distribution that has recently enjoyed a new release, 22.9, which adds something special into the mix…the ability to easily install Android apps.
The ExTiX developers have added Anbox into the mix with support for Google Play Services pre-installed. Because this take on Anbox comes complete with Google Play Store integration, not only is the installation of Android apps simplified on Linux, but the apps should run more dependably and predictably.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.11.3 is generally available as of September 29, 2022.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
On September 13, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced its intent to form the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) at its Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin. The OWF aims to develop open source software, key building blocks, and best practices that anyone can use as a starting point to build multi-platform, highly secure, privacy-protecting digital wallets. In addition, the OWF will advocate for the wide adoption of open source wallets that can be used to support a wide variety of applications, from payments to digital identities.
The LF was originally founded in 2000 as the Open Source Development Labs to help set the standards for the Linux operating system and support its continued development and commercial adoption. It grew over the years and assumed its current name, Linux Foundation, in 2007. Over the past decade, the LF has undergone a major expansion beyond its original Linux mission. It now has over 1,260 company members and supports hundreds of open source projects. Some of the projects are focused on technology horizontals, - e.g., AI, blockchain, security, cloud, - and others on industry verticals, including energy, automative, government, and health care.
Let me attempt to explain the importance of this announcement by addressing three key questions: what is a digital wallet?; what are digital identities?; and why do we need standard-based, open source digital wallets?
Public hosting systems for free software have come and gone over the years but one of them, Sourceware, has been supporting the development of most of the GNU toolchain for nearly 25 years. Recently, an application was made to bring Sourceware under the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), at least for fundraising purposes. It turns out that there is a separate initiative, developed in secret until now, with a different vision for the future of Sourceware. The 2022 GNU Tools Cauldron was the site of an intense discussion on how this important community resource should be managed in the coming years.
The session in question was initially set up as a birds-of-feather gathering where Sourceware "overseer" Mark Wielaard would describe some of the new services that are being developed for that site. He did not get far before being interrupted by David Edelsohn, who questioned whether it was correct to describe Sourceware as a "software project". Wielaard tried to push on, noting that there are currently two Red Hat employees, helped by a number of volunteers, looking after the site. Carlos O'Donell repeatedly broke in to describe Sourceware as specifically a Red Hat system. The site's mission statement, he said, describes it as "a Red Hat system providing services for open-source projects for Red Hat" (which isn't quite the wording on the actual statement). The purpose of these interjections was evidently (at a minimum) to dispute the notion that Sourceware is a community resource.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) web console provides a web-based graphical interface for managing and monitoring systems. The web console can be used to complete a wide variety of tasks, such as managing storage, users, the firewall, monitoring performance metrics, reviewing log files, installing system updates and many others. See the Managing systems using the RHEL 9 web console documentation for more information.
Ubuntu MATE 22.10 is a modest update by recent standards and focused on “quality of life improvements”. And there is good reason why this release of Ubuntu MATE doesn’t feature the usual bucket 🪣 list of changes you’d typically expect, and that’s because I’ve been helping bring the full Ubuntu MATE experience to Debian MATE ðŸ§â°
A Golden image is a base image that is used as a template for your organization’s various virtual machines either on-prem or in the public cloud. It streamlines software development processes since mission-critical applications are dependent on a certified environment. Using Golden Images saves numerous hours and resources as they create consistent environments for your developers and operation teams. Golden Images not only help prevent human errors but also standardize VM configurations.
Until today Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktop solution simply offered the option of either Windows or Amazon Linux machines. Now though Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu WorkSpaces on AWS.
This is a fully managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on the public cloud and the first third-party Linux OS to be available on the platform. It gives developers access to a wide choice of open source tools and libraries in cutting-edge fields like data science, artificial intelligence/machine learning, cloud and internet-of-things.
Canonical is proud to announce the availability of Ubuntu WorkSpaces on AWS, a fully managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on the public cloud and the first third-party Linux OS available on the platform. Ubuntu Desktop’s availability on Amazon WorkSpaces was announced today at the AWS End User Computing Innovation Day in Seattle, WA.
Amazon WorkSpaces offers a fully managed and highly secure cloud desktop solution across a broad hardware spectrum, without the upfront costs of deployment and configuration. They enable remote developers to access high-performance desktops from any location, preserving security.
We often write about business card or credit card-sized boards, but it’s only true for 2D dimensions, as most boards are over a centimeter thick, with possibly the thinnest we’ve covered being the Khadas Edge2 SBC that’s just 7mm thick.
Sharing photos used to be a difficult task. Even after paying for someone to develop your photos and waiting to get them back, you’d end up with small prints that your friends would have to huddle around. One common alternative was 35mm slide projection. Photographers could snap images and then have them developed as 35mm slides. They could then pop those into a slide projector that would blow up the image on a screen or wall where everyone could see the photo. If your family has a large collection of 35mm slides, this Instructables tutorial will help you digitize them.
As great as 35mm slides were, they don’t have much of a place in our modern world. Not many people have working slide projectors these days and most would prefer digital photos that they can share on social media, store on their computer, or display on a TV. There are 35mm slide digitizing services, but those can cost more than 50 cents (USD) per slide. That becomes very expensive if your slide collection is large. If you have a slide projector, even if its projection bulb is burnt out, this tutorial will help you digitize the slides by snapping photos with a modern DSLR camera.
Some modern cars, trucks, and SUVs have smart active suspension systems that can adjust to different terrain conditions. They adjust in real-time to maintain safety or performance. But they tend to only come on high-end vehicles because they’re expensive, complicated, and add weight. That’s why it is so impressive that Jallson Suryo was able to add a similar smart suspension adjustment system to his bicycle.
This system will only work on specific bicycles that have suspension forks that the user can adjust with a knob. A servo-driven mechanism mounts onto the fork and turns the knob to tweak the firmness and rebound of the front suspension. Normally the rider would need to stop and turn that knob by hand when necessary, but this system can perform that adjustment automatically in response to the current conditions. It can recognize and accommodate five different conditions: idle, medium, rough, smooth, and sprint.
The Pro1X is an unmitigated disaster that starkly highlights the risks of backing electronics projects on crowdfunding sites. If you’re looking for a mobile phone with a physical keyboard built-in, look instead for something more accomplished, like the Planet Computers Cosmo Communicator or even a second-hand Blackberry.
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I wanted to be able to demonstrate the Ubuntu Touch or PostmarketOS experience on the F(x)tec Pro1X. Indeed, a key reason for backing the project was to have a working, flexible Linux phone. Unfortunately, there is no version of either (or any other Linux-based phone OS) that will run on the F(x)tec Pro1X without missing the most basic of features (e.g. telephony, networking, camera).
Given how long the phone has been in development, and the availability of the Pro1 and early releases of the Pro1X, this seems like an unforgivable oversight.
This year's X. Org Developer's Conference (XDC) is teaming up with WineConf and FOSS XR for a jam-packed three day event in Minneapolis at the University of St. Thomas' Opus Hall. From October 4 to 6, XDC + WineConf + FOSS XR attendees will be able to learn about the latest developments in open sources graphics and XR, and attend the annual technical meeting for the Wine Project. The cherry on top - admission for this in-person event is free!
Modern software development typically follows a very iterative approach known as continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD). The promise of CI/CD is better software that is released quicker and it’s a promise that ClearML now intends to bring to the world of machine learning (ML).
ClearML today announced the general availability of its enterprise MLops platform that extends the capabilities of the company’s open-source edition. The ClearML Enterprise platform provides organizations with security controls and additional capabilities for rapidly iterating and deploying ML workflows.
We’ve just wrapped up the first day of the LibreOffice Conference 2022. You can check out the video streams from room 1 and room 2 – and after the conference, we’ll edit and upload individual videos of the talks.
The LibreOffice Conference 2022 is go!
GDScript is Godot’s built-in language for scripting and interacting with nodes. It evolved as a custom scripting language to be used with the Godot computer (and mobile device) Game engine, and it also supports Virtual Reality.
GDScript is easy to learn with a syntax similar to Python where the code is indented rather than using lots of brackets and semicolons.
Unlike Python, GDScript is optimized for Godot’s scene-based architecture and can specify strict typing of variables.
The Qt Quick Dialogs module has undergone a lot of changes in the last two years. Its purpose has always been to make it simple for developers to add dialogs to their applications. Native dialogs should be used by default on platforms that have a native dialog for a specific dialog type, and if the system can't provide one, then the module should fall back to a suitable dialog that's implemented in Qt.
Ready to try out Qt’s Android toolchain and leverage some of those fresh Qt 6 modules in your Android app? Or perhaps you’re already using the Qt API but want to see what Qt Creator can do?
Today we have released Qt 6.4! The latest version of Qt introduces support for a new platform, brings lots of new functionality - some as technology previews (TP) - and plenty of improvements under the hood. Let's start with the biggest highlight.
Parts of the Rust language may look familiar to C programmers, but the two languages differ in fundamental ways. One difference that turns out to be problematic for kernel programming is the stability of data in memory — or the lack thereof. A challenging session at the 2022 Kangrejos conference wrestled with ways to deal with objects that should not be moved behind the programmer's back.
C programmers take full responsibility for the allocation of memory and the placement of data structures in that memory. Rust, instead, takes most of that work — and the associated control — out of the programmer's hands. There are a number of interesting behaviors that result from this control, one of which being that the Rust compiler will happily move objects in memory whenever that seems like the thing to do. Since the compiler knows where the references to an object are, it can move that object safely — most of the time.
One of the primary issues preventing the last few holdouts from migrating away from SMB1 is a lack of Posix/UNIX extensions in SMB2+. SMB1 is definitely going away though in the near future.
To compensate, the community has been hard at work creating a new UNIX extension standard for SMB3. These have been in the works since as early as 2010, but have recently seen some renewed interest in completion. The Linux ksmbd server and cifs client both support SMB3 UNIX extensions. Several third party servers also offer support. Support from Samba server is nearing completion.
How to get started with syslog-ng? There are two main resources: the syslog-ng documentation and the syslog-ng blogs. You should learn the concepts and basics from the documentation. The blogs document use cases and you can use the docs as a reference.
Already when the first version of curl shipped in 1998, I had plans and ideas in the back of my head to turn it to a library at some point. I had already before worked on providing libraries with APIs for applications and I appreciated their powers.
During the summer of 2000 I refactored the curl internals so that it would become a library with an exposed API that we could provide to the world and then let applications get the same file transfer capabilities that the curl command line tool has.
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It took four years to double the amount of options and ten years alter the official count was at 180.
Today, in September 2022, we recently merged code that made the setopt counter reach 300 and this is the number of options that will ship in the pending 7.86.0 release. After 22 years we’ve added 241 new options, almost 11 new options per year on average.
Every new option comes with a cost: more code, more tests, more documentation and an even larger forest in which users can get lost when they try to figure out how to tell libcurl to behave the way the want it. The benefit of course being that libcurl gets one more capability and new chances to fulfill users’ wishes. New options certainly are both a blessing and a curse.
Rust has a standardized style, and an implementation of that style in the rustfmt tool. The standardized style helps Rust developers feel comfortable and at home in many different projects, and the tooling support from rustfmt makes it easy to maintain and to incorporate in continuous integration. rustfmt also provides many options to customize the style, but the style guide defines the defaults, and most projects use those defaults.
The standard Rust style resulted from development and discussion within the Rust style team, between 2016 and 2018. After publishing the style guide, the Rust style team concluded its active work, by design.
There will be an increase in new Covid cases across Finland as winter approaches, according to a forecast from the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).
The health authority presented an assessment of the coronavirus situation at a joint press briefing with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, on Thursday morning.
The experts said vaccinations are not effective in significantly reducing the spread of the virus at this point. The best protection from severe Covid symptoms comes from hybrid immunity, which people gain from a combination of vaccinations and a recent infection.
Finland is monitoring two Omicron subvariants of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — BA.2 and BA.4 — particularly closely.
Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the laws governing security have not kept pace with technology, adding that the government would work to update legislation to make it fit for purpose.
He told Channel 7's Sunrise program on Thursday: "We need everybody who has Australians' data to take care of it.
"We need to make sure that when there is a hack or data breach, that they immediately notify people that have been affected and notify financial institutions and banks and government so that we can take action and that banks and financial institutions can take action to keep people safe from the effects of the hack.
"So the laws haven't kept pace. The prime minister talked about this yesterday in the Parliament. We're going to make sure that our laws are brought up to date and work to protect Australians."
{loadposition sam08}Optus revealed on 22 September it had suffered a massive data breach. The data that has been stolen includes Medicare details, drivers' licence data and also passport data. The government is insisting that the telco pay for replacement of these forms of ID where it is needed.
Regarding the Medicare data, the company said in a statement on Wednesday: "Of the 9.8 million customer records exposed, we have identified 14,900 valid Medicare ID numbers that have not expired.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, lighttpd, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (firefox, gajim, libofx, and python-nbxmpp), Gentoo (bluez, chromium, expat, firefox, go, graphicsmagick, kitty, php, poppler, redis, thunderbird, and zutty), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (xorg), SUSE (expat, libostree, lighttpd, python3-lxml, rust1.62, slurm, slurm_18_08, and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (libxi, linux-gcp, postgresql-9.5, and sqlite3).
It’s time to make a collective commitment to human rights, and stop the dangerous, unchecked, and proliferating use of spyware technology. Access Now, the Government of Catalonia, the private sector, and civil society from across the globe are demanding concerted global change to this uncontrolled industry through the Geneva Declaration on Targeted Surveillance and Human Rights.
“Digital technologies have the power to advance human rights. Surveillance technology does the opposite — it robs people and communities of privacy, agency, and freedom,” said Laura O’Brien, Senior UN Advocacy Officer at Access Now. “We must put an end to the deployment of these treacherous tools, and demand the immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing of, and use of digital surveillance tech. Collectively, we must uphold the Geneva Declaration on Targeted Surveillance and Human Rights.”
Members of the international community are calling for an end to the proliferation of surveillance technologies used to target individuals and communities engaging in protected activities, such as exercising their right to protest. They are also pressuring governments, in coordination with civil society and the private sector, to implement a moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing, and use of targeted digital surveillance technologies, until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place to regulate such practices.
In 2018, Jenna McLaughlin and Zach Dorfman of Yahoo News reported that a system used by the CIA to covertly communicate with its assets around the world had been compromised by Iran and China around 2011. The compromise reportedly led to the death of “more than two dozen sources” in China in 2011 and 2012, and also reportedly led Iran to execute some CIA assets and imprison others.
Because the network was used by CIA assets around the world, the compromise also reportedly enabled Iran and China to track espionage activities outside of their borders, related to other countries.
While relevant oversight bodies reportedly performed an investigation into the as-yet-unreported compromise in 2013, Yahoo News reported that those responsible for the intelligence failures were never held accountable: “One of the central concerns among those familiar with the scope of the breakdown is the institutions responsible for it were never held accountable.”
A modified level of trust is not enough for the ESXi system to accept it by default but the attacker also used the '--force' flag to install the malicious VIBs.
Depending on where you are when you download your Android apps, it might collect more or less data about you.
Google and Apple have removed hundreds of apps from their app stores at the request of governments around the world, creating regional disparities in access to mobile apps at a time when many economies are becoming increasingly dependent on them.
The mobile phone giants have removed over 200 Chinese apps, including widely downloaded apps like TikTok, at the Indian government’s request in recent years. Similarly, the companies removed LinkedIn, an essential app for professional networking, from Russian app stores at the Russian government’s request.
C++ first appeared in commercial form in 1985, the year the Nintendo Entertainment System hit the US. A generation of systems programmers have gone from hip young codeslingers to senior management, and they can say truthfully that the fundamental underpinning of IT has been successfully built in the older way. Everything Rust can do, the current C++ can do too; it's even insulting to suggest that programmers need the extra help.
Managed by the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), TLP is a system of markings that communicates information sharing permissions. According to FIRST, the purpose of TLP is "to facilitate greater sharing of potentially sensitive information and more effective collaboration." Note: Unlike formal classification systems, TLP is not legally binding.
CISA has released six (6) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on September 29, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
A threat actor possibly based in China is deploying a new multiplatform piece of malware named Chaos that is infecting SOHO routers, brute-forcing SSH password, ising known vulnerabilities to propagate, and launching DDoS attacks against a variety of targets.
Additionally, he notes, the recent shift to remote work has made home routers and other devices outside corporate networks particularly attractive targets for attackers.
Human and digital rights advocates have welcomed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ recent recognition that spyware has become a significant threat to the UN's human rights work.
But they say now is the time for member states to finally enforce a global moratorium on the sale and use of surveillance technologies until regulations catch up with technology.
“Digital surveillance is one of the biggest threats facing activists and human rights movements today,” said Marwa Fatafta, Middle East policy manager at Access Now which defends digital rights.
“We’ve reached the tipping point with the proliferation of malicious spyware. No one, no where is safe.”
The Geneva Declaration on Targeted Surveillance and Human Rights (the Declaration) is a collective commitment to human rights in the digital age. While recognizing that digital technologies can strengthen democracy and human rights, the Declaration specifically condemns the proliferating use of surveillance technologies to target communities engaging in protected activities, and calls on governments, in coordination with civil society and the private sector, to implement a moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing and use of targeted digital surveillance technologies developed by the private industry, until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place to regulate such practices.
Led by civil society organisation Access Now and the Government of Catalonia, the Declaration is set to officially launch on 29 September 2022 at the UN Human Rights Council’s 51st session side event Spyware: A Threat to Human Rights and Democracy organised by Access Now and the Government of Catalonia, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Saeed Souzangar, who runs a technology company in Tehran, is adept at navigating frequent internet disruptions to ensure his business can keep operating, but even he has been thrown by nationwide communications outages this month.
The death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being arrested by the country’s morality police, has triggered the biggest street protests in years, prompting a sweeping security crackdown and curbs on internet and phones.
She had just been crowned world champion, but Ethiopian marathon runner Gotytom Gebreslase broke down in tears when asked if her family was celebrating her win back home in war-torn Tigray.
“I haven’t spoken to my parents in months,” she said, wiping her eyes as she spoke at a news conference during the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, in the northwestern U.S. state of Oregon, in July.
Independent media in Cambodia continue to come under attack, with journalists harassed and retaliated against, a new report found.
In its September report assessing the civic space of Cambodia, the international nonprofit CIVICUS rated the country as "repressed."
For editors at The Kashmir Walla, fact-checking a story used to involve a flurry of googling before press time. So when an 18-month internet and phone shutdown began in the Indian Himalayan region in 2019, they had to improvise.
“We used to leave blank spaces in news stories when we couldn’t verify certain facts. Every week, a team member would fly to Delhi and fill in the blanks,” said Yash Raj Sharma, an editor with the weekly magazine.
It was one of numerous headaches for the region’s journalists. Unable to use his mobile, Sharma, 25, recalled driving to a telephone booth at Srinagar airport to dictate an 800-word news story to a friend in Delhi.
“That incident will remain with me forever as a memory of working during the longest communication and internet shutdown,” said Sharma, who also used to call friends in Delhi to ask them to read out and respond to his emails.
For Zaw Myint Thein, a farmer in northwestern Myanmar, having no internet in the area for more than a year causes many inconveniences - his son is unable to study, he can no longer sell his watermelon crops online, and he feels cut off.
“It’s like my eyes and ears are closed,” the 45-year-old said by phone from the Sagaing region.
But in this stronghold of resistance to the military junta that seized power in a coup early last year, the army-ordered internet shutdown - and sporadic cuts to mobile phone communications - puts lives on the line, Zaw Myint Thein said.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to improve access to communications for incarcerated people with disabilities and to reduce the financial burdens created by certain calling service charges and practices.
Today, the U.S. House voted to pass the “Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act,” a package of bills introduced by Representatives Joe Neguse (D-CO) and Ken Buck (R-CO) to increase funding for federal antitrust enforcement agencies and support state attorney general antitrust enforcement through more favorable venue rules. The bill passed on a bipartisan vote of 242-184.
Public Knowledge led a letter signed by more than 35 public interest, consumer advocacy, unions, and civil society groups urging Congress to pass the bill to enable these agencies to “properly fulfill their role safeguarding the economy and consumers from anticompetitive conduct and harmful mergers.”
I bought some Celestron EclipSmart binoculars, which are basically just 10x42mm binoculars with built-in continuum (a.k.a. white-light) filters, so that they can be safely used for viewing the Sun. Obviously, they are targetting people who want to view eclipses, but they work just as well any other time that you want to view the solar disc.
I gave them a quick test this morning and as expected, I was able to see the solar disc, and I saw one sunspot clearly. I compared what I saw with the Intensitygram image from NASA, and the sunspot was in the same location, though the NASA image showed three additional small sunspots.
I was actually hesitsting in sharing a Polyphia track but then this new track came and I think I'd just commit to it.
I'm not a guitar nerd, I'm not a music nerd, but I like music, and that alone doesn't stop me from listening to whatever prog rock instrumentals that they're presenting.
What I like about this track is that there's basically no breathing room through the entire almost 6 minutes of the track, and that I think different parts of the piece added up together makes it so that there's always something new on the table, while being rhythmetically and melodically pleasing, without being out of place.
Since I switched my server from OpenBSD to NixOS, I was missing a feature. The previous server was using iblock, a program I made to block IPs connecting on a list of ports, I don't like people knocking randomly on ports.
iblock is simple, if you connect to any port on which it's listening, you get banned in the firewall.
For the last little bit I’ve been wanting to get away from games where problems are solved through acts of violence. They’ve been getting a bit tiresome of late, so I’m exploring other avenues in the medium at the moment. Lately, I’ve been playing some Legend of Homebody. This is a game where you stay in your apartment all day trying to make it in one of four professions: visual artist, writer, musician, or programmer.
There are a number of different game modes to choose from that mostly effect how long you play. There’s normal mode where the closest thing to a story happens, followed by increasingly difficult modes where the gameplay is similar but story becomes less of a thing. There are also increasingly long modes for people who want extended sessions. Core activities stay the same in each mode, but they add a bit more color to each playthrough.
I crudely avoided the issue of how one would implement what I tried to describe in my previous post: a Forth in which decompiled source looks like original source. Someone called me on it, and I should clarify.
The problem is that we are trying to linearize the unlinearizable. Code, especially Forth code, is more of a tree. We read and write code linearly - a function consists of a bunch of tokens, and think of it as an ordered sequence. But the threaded code is executed as a depth-first tree walk, down into definitions until the bottom CODE, then up and down again, until the entire tree is walked. It's kind of awe-inspiring to visualize execution.
So, whether IF jumps over some code or jumps sideways to some code somewhere else makes little difference. This opens the door for if's clauses to be elsewhere as anonymous subroutines, os as Slava of Factor calls them, quotations.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.