Maps fuel the imagination, inspire flights of fancy, and create a yearning to travel—whether to the farthest corners of the globe or the nearest White Castle for a smorgasbord of sliders.
While it's perhaps more satisfying to pull that dusty old atlas from the top shelf of your bookcase, and it's more useful to hit up Google Maps in a browser, it's infinitely cooler to pore over cartographic excellence from the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator.
Here's how you can use MapSCII to view maps in your Linux terminal.
Don’t worry. You don’t need therapy. Whenever this happens to me—and it does happen to me—I remember that I wrote a little tool called httm. Using httm helps me find my lost files much more quickly, whichmakes the associated I’m a moron feeling pass more quickly as well.
httm does lots of other cool things too, a few of which I hope I will have time to touch upon, but let’s consider The Case of The Infamous Fat Fingered Sysadmin first.
We all have data that we need to store, and then find. Regardless of type, data tends to build up. Eventually, we need some system for organizing it into sensible categories.
It turns out, this problem is harder than it seems.
In this article, I'm going to be talking about organizing digital files. However, most of the problems (and some of the solutions) also apply to paper files, spreadsheet tables, databases — and even physical objects.
Let's dig in.
In some circles, it's popular to denigrate file extensions as a Windows-ism that's only necessary because of (historical) limitations of that platform. However, we have a fair amount of evidence that people like file extensions even on platforms where they aren't necessary, and adopt them by choice in various circumstances even without technical need.
In the past 5 years, people have searched for React a lot on Google compared to Vue.js or Angular. In addition to that, the state of JS survey result of 2021 puts React as the most used JavaScript framework for the past 6 years. It is also the one with the most awareness among software engineers for 3 years in a row since 2019.
That’s the top thing about our Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller: it comes with a fully certified module on board featuring 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless LAN, making it the perfect solution for projects requiring wireless communication, like this one.
Seems that both options for Variable Refresh Rate and Allow Tearing are coming to the Steam Deck in a future update (thanks Reddit), here's what that means.
Sony and Sumo Digital recently put out another port, this time it's Sackboy: A Big Adventure an offshoot of the LittleBigPlanet series.
Getting DOOM to run on a computer it was never meant to run on is a fun trope in the world of esoteric retro computers. By now we’ve seen it run on everything from old NES systems to microwaves, treadmills, and basically anything with a computer inside of it. What we don’t often see are the displays themselves being set up specifically to run the classic shooter. This build might run the game itself on ordinary hardware, but the impressive part is that it’s able to be displayed on this seven-segment display.
We take a look at “Accessible-Coconut”, – a friendly Linux for Visually Impaired Users. We covered the features, utilities, download details, and a brief review of this distro.
There are few free and open-source Linux distributions out there that are designed for visually impaired or challenged people. They often wonder – which free Linux distribution is suitable for me? There are very few of them, really. Although the mainstream Ubuntu and Fedora can be configured with additional applications such as screen reader, etc., they require more time and effort to make them suitable for Visually Impaired people.
But the dedicated distros are pre-loaded with applications for visually impaired persons and settings to tweak them.
As usual, approaching 19 hours for the build. I didn't time it exactly, as there was one error; which was easy to fix, and sent it off again, compiled successfully to completion, 947 packages.
This blog post is divided in two parts: in the first part I’ll show you how to create a Linux Live USB with persistent storage that can be used as development environment, and in the second part I’ll show you the easiest way to set up RStudio and R in Ubuntu.
So, I was searching around for a ready-to-use Arch Linux with only Window Manager options and found this Archcraft OS. Here’s a quick review of Archcraft OS, in case if you are planning to try it out.
Once again, I ran into another Arch-based Linux distribution – named Hefftor Linux. And I got surprised by how much customization it provides ‘out of the box’ for Xfce, KDE Plasma, and other environments. Allow me to give you a tour.
Until 1 December, I’ll be taking preorders for print copies of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. You can even buy two books if you want, because I can cram a second book into a Priority Mail envelope. Just let me know the title of the second one in an order comment.
Tails, based on Debian GNU/Linux, is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship, and version 5.5 is now available for download.
Elektrobit and Canonical have partnered to bring the benefits of Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system to automotive software.
As the industry transitions towards software-defined vehicles, the new partnership will make it easier than ever before for car makers, suppliers, and developers to create the next generation of vehicle applications, while meeting stringent automotive standards.
Here at Hackaday, we love to see projects re-visited and updated after we’ve covered them on the site. It’s always exciting to see what the creators come up with next, and this Pi-Based Spectrometer project is a great example of that.
[...] Hugo provides a detailed technical discussion on how they are accessed and stored, plus sample code (spoiler alert: the tag set instruction is 0x7c0103e6).
Thus for many years the possibility of getting memory tagging working on these systems was an interesting possibility, but there was no idea of whether it was actually feasible or whether IBM fused off this functionality in the CPUs it sells to third parties. The POWER CPUs IBM sells to third parties are fused slightly differently to those it uses in most of its own servers, being fused for 4-way multithreading (SMT4) rather than 8-way multithreading (SMT8); it would be entirely plausible that the tagging functionality is fused off in the SMT4 parts, being that IBM i was only ever intended to run on SMT8 systems. While the ISA extension is undocumented, fairly complete knowledge about it has already been pieced together from bits and pieces, so this was not actually the major obstacle. However, there was no idea as to whether use of the memory tagging functionality might require some kind of appropriate initialization of the CPU. In theory, one need simply set a single undocumented bit (“Tags Active”) in the Power Machine State Register (MSR). However, simple attempts to enable Tags Active mode on OpenPOWER systems such as the Talos II did not succeed.
Amongst the dazzle and display, it is easy to overlook the technical requirements of this build. The pole itself needs to be “structurally strong” explains Spencer, to withstand the dynamic moves of acrobats, “while protecting and displaying an array of thousands of integrated pixels.”
Our goal for this project is to create a holiday themed decoration which uses NeoPixels. How we control it is via the Cheerlights API. Cheerlights is a global network of synchronized lights. Sending a tweet to @cheerlights containing one of the supported colors will trigger our project to change color, but better than that, it changes the color of every Cheerlight across the globe.
I think there should be ample clues in the first picture to guess the ware, but I included a couple of close-ups of the circuits because I love it when circuit boards document their functions so clearly. [...]
At first glance, renaming entities in a database seems like it should be easy. The SQL is a dead simple one-liner of ALTER ... RENAME TO ..., so what could go wrong?
Well, it turns out a lot actually. Anyone who’s run a production database before will recognize that outside of an academic context, it’s actually kind of hard. The problem isn’t in the database itself, but in database clients. Anything that was still running against the old name when a rename takes place will immediately break, causing downtime and major user impact.
The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible. Once a record’s been hit by a hard DELETE, it may technically still be recoverable by digging down into the storage layer, but suffice it to say that it’s really hard to get back. Theoretically with soft deletion, you just set deleted_at back to NULL and you’re done: [...]
The Handbook introduces a comprehensive view of requirements including four elements or PEGS: Project, Environment, Goals and System. One of its principal contributions is the definition of a standard plan for requirements documents, consisting of the four corresponding books and replacing the obsolete IEEE 1998 structure.
The pioneering computer scientist was instrumental in founding Birkbeck’s Department of Computer Science and her legacy lives on in the College today. We were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Kathleen Booth (née Britten) on Thursday 29 September 2022.
Li Huang (PhD student at SIT) will be presenting at an ISSRE workshop the paper Improving Counterexample Quality from Failed Program Verification, written with Manuel Oriol and me. One can find the text on arXiv here. (I will update this reference with the official publication link when I have it.)
The longer the time between when code has been merged and when it is released increases the chance of an oversight.
Production will break. Then, it’s a matter of how quickly you can push a fix. Deploying often means deploying fast.
Our most important goal is ensuring the long term success of the project. Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. This is of course within the scope of the license, however prevents others from the community from also benefitting.
The eighteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now sixteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
A minor routine update 0.0.5 of gettz arrived on CRAN overnight.
gettz provides a possible fallback in situations where Sys.timezone() fails to determine the system timezone. That happened when e.g. the file /etc/localtime somehow is not a link into the corresponding file with zoneinfo data in, say, /usr/share/zoneinfo. Since the package was written (in the fall of 2016), R added a similar extended heuristic approach itself.
Next.js is an open-source web framework for React. It offers an easy workflow to build reactive scalable enterprise-grade apps.
Next.js can also be used to to build desktop apps with Electron and Tauri (Rust), as well as mobile apps with Electron.
Because Next.js has a vast wide community of developers, it has no shortage of starter, templates, and boilerplate to speed up the production.
In this article, we offer you a collection of Next.js starters projects which are free to use and open-source, to be used in your next project.
This collection includes starters for eCommerce packages, dashboard control systems, social and community projects, content management systems, and enterprise landing pages.
We list the five best Python code editors for Ubuntu/Linux and Windows in 2022.
Python is everywhere today, and it is arguably the C programming language of the modern era. You can find Python everywhere, from websites, apps, data science projects, and AI to IoT devices. So being a popular programming language of this decade, it is essential to know the development environment of Python, where developers create applications, especially if you are starting afresh.
Many Python development environments are available with features and utilities catering to your need. Some of them are useful for beginners learning Python by setting up the environment and other users for heavy Python development and complex setups. Here, in this post, I will touch upon the five best of them that would help you to pick one for your own need and use case.
Python ships with built-in modules such as os and sys that provide some functionality to interact with the underlying operating system. However, it may sometimes be more convenient to run system programs from within a Python script. Python’s subprocess module provides ready-to-use functionality to run external commands, capture and process outputs, redirect output to files and I/O streams, and much more!
This summer I read the book “Entreprenerd” by Bruno Lowagie. It tells the story of how he started with the iText PDF Java library and turned that into a company together with his wife, and eventually sold it with all problems related to most sales and acquisitions trajects… In “Entreprenerd”, he also describes the process of writing two books about the iText library itself, as there were no good manuals available and he wanted to liberate himself from the ever-returning same questions. When I received this book about FXGL, I immediately had to think back to the story of Bruno. Who better to write a book about a library than Almas, the creator himself?
The first time I heard of longtermism I thought it was about terms of agreement that get longer and longer. But no. Longtermism is the philosophical idea that the long-term future of humanity is way more important than the present and that those alive today, so you, presumably, should make sacrifices for the good of all the generations to come.
Longtermism has its roots in the effective altruism movement, whose followers try to be smart about donating money so that it has the biggest impact, for example by telling everyone how smart they are about donating money. Longtermists are concerned with how our future will look like in some billion years or longer. Their goal is to make sure that we don’t go extinct. So stop being selfish, put away that junk food and make babies.
The key argument of longtermists is that our planet will remain habitable for a few billion years, which means that most people who’ll ever be alive are yet to be born.
“Here’s how it was actually made: The negative was enlarged in the darkroom onto another piece of film in such a way that just Dylan’s head was on it. This would normally result in a positive image on the film which, if you printed it onto a piece of photo paper, would give you a negative print. However, I solarized this piece of film (that is, re-exposed it to light) as it was being developed. This partially reversed the image and also gave it the distinctive line between what was dark to start with and what has made dark by the solarization. Technically, this technique is actually called “the Sabbatier effect”, and the lines are called “Mackie lines”. This resulted in a quite dark and low-contrast piece of film to make a print from. I had to use the very high-contrast grade 6 Agfa Brovira paper to get a print with enough contrast.”
Steve Martin had a bit that was like a fake infomercial where he says, “You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!” The instructions were, “First, get a million dollars. Then,…” [Brandon’s] instructions for how to convert your MIG welder to do aluminum for under $25 is not quite like that, but you do need the right kind of MIG welder to make it work. In particular, you need an actual MIG welder that has a provision to connect external gas. The instructions show a Hobart Handler 140 that meets the criteria and has sufficient power to handle aluminum.
Epoxy resins have been used to make some pretty cool furniture, but since it’s still a relatively new material, makers are still discovering new techniques to work with resin. [Cam] from Blacktail Studio may be the first person to bend fully cured epoxy using nothing but a form and the power of the sun.
Every philosopher in existence had something to say about causality, so there are many different definitions, but luckily today we’ll need only need two. The first one is space-time causality. Suppose you have two events that are causally related, then each must be inside the other’s light cone, and the one in the past is the cause. It’s as simple as that. This is the notion of causality that’s used in General Relativity. One direction is forward, that’s the future, one direction is backward, that’s the past.
But it turns out that not all space-times allow you to tell apart past from future. This is much like on a Moebius strip you can’t tell the front from the back because they’re the same! In some space-times you can’t tell the past from the future because they’re the same.
It is no secret that the way you build things in your garage is rarely how big companies build things at scale. But sometimes new techniques on the production floor leak over to the hobby builder and vice versa, so it pays to keep an eye on what the other side is doing. Maybe that was the idea behind [Carolyn Schwaar’s] post on All3DP entitled “Beyond Cura Slicer: 3D Printing Build Prep Software for Pros.” In it, she looks at a few programs that commercial-grade 3D printers use for slicing.
Russia will suspend its participation in the “grain deal,” an agreement which allows Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported.
The Glocks with auto sears have also become a status symbol on the streets. Chicago rapper PGF Nuk titled his latest album Switch Music.
The firearm homicide rate in the United States increased nearly 35% from 2019 to 2020, coinciding with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic (1). This increase affected all ages and most population groups, but not equally: existing disparities, including racial and ethnic disparities, widened. The firearm suicide rate was higher than the firearm homicide rate in 2020 and remained consistent with recent years overall; however, increases were observed in some groups (1). To assess potential increases from 2020 to 2021, final 2020 and provisional 2021, National Vital Statistics System mortality data and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates were used to examine all-cause homicide and suicide rates; firearm homicide and suicide rates overall and by sex, age,* race and ethnicity; and the percentage of homicides and suicides from firearm injuries.ââ¬Â This activity was reviewed by CDC and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.€§
If a malicious actor created an account using the previous account name of another user, they were able to link the old repository URL to their account, gaining access to code and other content in the process.
In addition, and compounding the problem, the default redirect was disabled, so if an attack was successful then all existing traffic was immediately routed to the attackers malicious GitHub repository.
One of the most common UDP services in these multi-vector attacks is the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP). With a high Bandwidth Amplification Factor (BAF) of 56 to 70x and common deployment onto systems provisioned with healthy bandwidth, CLDAP reflectors reliably add traffic volume to the DDoS recipe. Hopefully, the internet community can eventually clean up these exposed services. In the meantime, we can analyze and report on the span of open CLDAP reflectors on the internet today, as well as some of our findings related to the strategy and tactics behind their use in DDoS attacks.
The state of Victoria will go to the polls on 26 November. Given that, it is easy to understand why the state's transport authority, VicRoads, has jumped ahead of the pack in saying it will new licences to those whose documents were compromised in the disastrous Singtel Optus data breach.
This argument is bolstered by the fact that Optus, in a manner that even Ebenezer Scrooge would struggle to emulate, has made no statement about when and how it will pay for credentials which have been compromised due to the company's errors.
A VicRoads statement says the state government will seek reimbursement from Optus. Good luck with that!
The degree of care that Optus has shown towards victims of this breach can be gauged by the fact that its last statement about the disaster was on 17 October. Two weeks on, the company is keeping its head low, in the hope that it can kick the can down the road in the best Google style.
Victorian transport authority VicRoads says it will issue new driving licences to 342,000 people in the state who were affected by the massive data breach at telco Singtel Optus.
However, it does not appear that Optus has yet given a formal guarantee to pay for these licences. The company has also not paid a single cent towards replacement of passports that were compromised in the attack.
VicRoads said in a statement "The Victorian Government will continue to seek reimbursement of costs from Optus for the replacement of more than one million licences of Victorians impacted by the largest data breach in Australian history."
The statement said 942,000 Victorian licence holders had their details compromised due to the breach.
On October 25 The OpenSSL Project Team announced the forthcoming release of OpenSSL version 3.0.7. The team hasn't shared many details but does mention that the update comes on November 1 and will include a patch for a new critical CVE.
This is one of the important and critical updates as the OpenSSL Project announced a “critical” vulnerability in versions 3.0 and above of the vastly-popular cryptographic library for encrypting communications on the Internet.
Google pushed out a bunch of security fixes for the Chrome and Chromium browser code earlier this week…
…only to receive a vulnerability report from researchers at cybersecurity company Avast on the very same day.
All you have to do is look at their stock price.
It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
Some Islamists even regard the “far right” as allies. In February, the leading Islamist Daniel Haqiqatjou invited onto his YouTube channel Mark Collett, a prominent British neo-Nazi. The two bonded over shared fears of liberalism, secularism and the perceived threat of the left.
At the same time, elements in the Republican Party are making common cause with Islamic extremists. Republican Party officials recently joined radical Islamists in demanding that “LGBTQ” books promoting “pornography and homosexuality” be removed from school libraries in Dearborn, Michigan.
The report—entitled Stop the Steal 2.0: How Meta and TikTok Are Promoting a Coup—was published by the San Francisco-based activist group SumOfUs and asserts that "on the eve of the second vote in Brazil's most important election in decades, Meta and TikTok continue to put the integrity of the election on the line through their disastrous recommendation systems."
After a surprisingly tight result, Brazil's election is going into a second round in which far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro will face left-winger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva after the latter received 48.4 percent of the votes cast, and the incumbent obtained 43.23 percent. Twenty years on from his first presidential victory – from 2003-2010 – which is remembered by many in the country as an era of economic growth and declining inequality, Lula da Silva could be days away from one of the most remarkable moments in political history.
How JFK and Robert Kennedy hid the quid pro quo that saved the world from nuclear war.
Denis Pushilin, Russian-appointed head of the annexed “DNR,” announced that Russia and Ukraine have completed the latest round of prisoner exchanges:
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported an attack by unmanned aircraft on the Port of Sevastopol. In the morning of October 29, nine flying unmanned craft and seven “autonomous marine unmanned devices” attacked Black Sea Fleet ships at anchor in the city. Seven of the 16 drones were shot down. The defense ministry reports that the marine minesweeper Ivan Golubets and a floating barrier sustained “minor damage.”
Colonel General Alexander Lapin has been removed from his post as commander of the Army Group “Center,” according to sources of the Moscow Times and the RBK media group.
In mid-September, the nation's railway carriers were locked in tense negotiations with several rail labor unions, and a rail strike—a potential economic catastrophe for the country and global supply chains—loomed on the horizon.€
The rally united tens of thousands, from the left and right, against their government’s support for sanctions on Russia and the war in Ukraine.
I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
The layoffs at Twitter would take place before a Nov. 1 date when employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation. Such grants typically represent a significant portion of employees’ pay. By laying off workers before that date, Mr. Musk may avoid paying the grants, though he is supposed to pay the employees cash in place of their stock under the terms of the merger agreement.
The 2022 midterm election represents a unique and historic opportunity to protect our democracy and our right to equality before the law against an unrelenting offensive being waged by the reactionary right.
I entered the CNN website today. Fine, make fun of me, sometimes I like seeing what the higher levels of the simulation look like. You do it too sometimes even if you don’t admit it, it’s like pron.
I mindlessly scrolled through an article and got to see the ads at the end, upon which I was greeted with the following piece of misinformation: [...]
And when clients become fixated on a particular diagnosis, providers say they must walk the fine line between offering a reality check and finding a way to support their clients, who are often deeply concerned.
“It’s almost as though me, as a professional — with a master’s degree, a clinical license and years of experience — is competing with these TikTokers,” Ms. Barsch said.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censorship agency, at the request of the Prosecutor General’s office, has started blocking the domain t.me, which is used to create shortened links in the Telegram messenger app. A service on the Roskomnadzor website for checking access restrictions for Internet pages confirms this information.
Protests were reported on October 29 at several universities across the country where students chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and, “Woman, life, freedom.”
Lots of students shout "fuck you" at a small number of persons, one of whom maces our cameraman.
We analyzed datasets of articles and websites containing false claims to determine what proportion of them made money using Google’s ad platforms. We obtained these datasets from organizations that track online disinformation around the world and wrote software to determine whether a web address was currently earning money from Google ads. Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 13, 2022, we ran the datasets through this software system to calculate the proportion of web addresses monetizing with Google ads for each dataset. We include our detailed findings in Appendix A.
The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.
There’s a piece of news floating around the open IP and allied communities at the moment which appears to have caused some consternation. It comes from Adobe, who have announced that due to an end of their licensing deal with Pantone LLC, PSD images loaded into Photoshop will have pixels containing unlicensed Pantone colours replaced with black. What, Pantone own colours now, are we expected to pay a royalty every time we take a picture of a blue sky? It’s natural to react with suspicion when hearing a piece of news like this, but for once we think this might not be the unreasonable intellectual property land grab it may first appear. To illustrate this, it’s necessary to explain what Pantone does, and what they don’t do.
Fedora and openSUSE have taken a step backward in usability, disabling GPU-accelerated decoding for H.264, H.265, and VC1 codecs.
Video codecs often rely on the GPU for encoding and decoding, as it is faster and less resource-intensive than relying on the CPU. After Red Hat’s lawyers raised concerns about the drivers, and associated patents, for the Mesa VA-API, specific to AMD GPUs. In response, Red Hat opted to drop support for the video acceleration feature, impacting H.264, H.265, and VC1 codecs, some of the most common video codecs.
In short order, openSUSE followed suit, announcing VA-API would be disabled in that distro moving forward.
In short, some video codecs, such as H.264, are patent-protected by MPEG LA, a US company based in Denver, Colorado. Therefore, their use implies the payment of patent fees.
By chance, Red Hat’s lawyers discovered that the codecs used by Fedora via the Mesa library violated patent rules. So naturally, they immediately raised concerns about initiating patent infringement lawsuits against the corporation.
As a result, the decision has been made to remove their use in the Red Hat-sponsored distribution, Fedora.
Primarily, it will affect AMD GPU users using open-source drivers, preventing them using GPU acceleration to play video content that requires using these codecs.
Additionally, it also affects any user who uses open-source graphics drivers, even if they run iGPUs on Intel chips. Fedora developers have not yet provided any clarity on this, but you can test it out for yourself.
[...]
The patents for H.264 and H.265 are with a company called MPEG LA, which specializes in holding patents in the video codecs and display standards sector.
Whereas the patent for VC-1 is under SMPTE, which is a group run by professionals from the media and entertainment sector.
All is not lost yet; Linux users have other codecs available to them. Users who are willing to take the extra step of installing OpenH264 will still have the ability to play back media in that format without infringement worries. Airlie also suggested that having OpenH264 installed might be sufficient to allow the re-enabling of other H.264 codecs on the same system — but it is not clear that any lawyers have signed off on that idea. Some of the disabled functionality may yet show up in third-parties like RPM Fusion as well. Meanwhile, though, this episode is just another reminder of the threats posed by software patents. We are free to write any software we like — but we may not be free to run it.
In Hunley v. Instagram, several photographers are suing Instagram for copyright infringement, that is, when someone copies content without a license or fair use defense in the United States. Hunley, as the plaintiffs—the ones doing the suing—claim that Instagram is guilty of copyright infringement by allowing others to embed photos on other websites.
They are saying that in addition to grabbing the “embed code”—a short snippet of web code that allows embedding content into another page—website designers and users should also have to negotiate a copyright license to display the embedded content. This would drastically change how we build and use services online.
While this specific case is about embedding images around the web, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could easily make it more difficult to embed anything in other contexts around the Internet, not just the web.
Subscription-based pirate IPTV services continue to thrive but according to major rightsholders desperate to protect their investments, platforms offering free IPTV streams are also a problem. Services in both categories have now been submitted to the US government for action. Here's an overview of the services and why they're causing disruption.
Despite previous forecasts to the contrary, God opened the skies up in the evening, and I had clear skies to work with from 8pm AKDT onward. So I was unexpectedly given a great opportunity for stargazing late in the evening, and I was not disappointed. I got to do some work with my 60mm refractor, drawing some star fields near Cassiopia and Perseus, which was good. But the highlight of the evening was an awesome, dynamic display of green aurora, which started sometime around 9pm and was very energetic around 10pm-10:30pm. The display was still ongoing when I quit for the evening at about 10:30pm.
Coming out of the pandemic, October's been my first big month of travel in years. I always fly carry-on only, but almost had to check a bag when I realized my favorite shaving foam no longer comes in TSA-approved sizes. I tried other brands and various gels and all left me with cuts and burns. On my last trip I ended up buying a full size can of foam and leaving it in the hotel. What a waste!
Gonna take down my Gemini capsule for a few days. It’ll back up soon.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.